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In my youth I was fiercely competitive.  I used to do the best I could to be the best.  As a target shooter I can recall in searing detail pulling in a really good score one day, better than most people in the team could normally get in a competition event, and I thought, “Yes!  This time it’ll be me who gets the sliver spoon!”  A spoon was traditionally the reward for the highest score of the day.  I was really looking forward to using it to stir my tea, to showing off.

At the end of the event I discovered that I was not the only one who’d had a good day.  Rod Murphy, a comparative newcomer to the team, got the spoon. I remember almost nothing else about Rod except that he got the spoon.

As years went by I noticed this would happen a lot.  Just when I got close to excellence in something someone else would come along and do better.  For example, I struggled to produce my first articles in academic journals and -bang- someone else I knew produced one a week later in a better journal. Was there no way I could get ahead?  So I cursed my luck.

Then, I’m not really sure how, I realized what was going on.  Quality in anything breeds more quality.  Rather than seeing life as a scramble in which I had to be at the top of the heap, I could, if I so wished, see it as a rising tide of excellence that carried me and all others forward.  If I did well, that was nice.  But better yet was the sense that there were lots of others doing good things also, and that the overall standard was rising all the time.  Now that was something to be grateful for.

I stopped envying others their successes quite so much around that time.  And since then I’ve noticed that whenever I manage to do something relatively well that others are all around me, also working effectively, right in step. 

And that is why we must always try our best, because somehow, through the alchemy of life, it means that others are enabled to produce their best too, whether we know them or not. 

Robbie Burns did have a knack of asking the right questions.  Auld Lang Syne will be chanted and bellowed by millions over the next few days in various different global time zones - and most people will have no idea what it means. 

Christmas and the New Year is a time when we mark the letting go of the old and the coming of the new, whether it be just the idea of the ‘year’, or the marking of the winter solstice when the days cease to grow shorter and oh-so-slowly start to lengthen out again. The birth of Jesus is commemorated in the dead of winter only because Christians grafted their religious calender directly onto the pagan fertility calenders that centered upon the cycles of the seasons. In Christian orthodoxy Jesus came to save the world, just as the midwinter solstice reminds us that winter won’t go on forever, and that there is some hope for us in the future. It was a good idea at the time, since it brought both belief systems into a kind of harmony.  Actually, though, no one has any clear idea what day Jesus was born.

Which brings us back to Burns.  Burns’ poem was grafted onto an ancient Scottish folk tune (The Burns Society has some hauntingly beautiful recordings done with ancient instruments, by the way) and in it he registers not just the movement of the seasons but the shifting nature of our own lives’ phases.  He asks us to recall that some friends are not present, and some friends have been left behind such that they are hardly missed any more.  This is simply what happens.  Yet they were all loved, once. So “we’ll take a cup of kindness yet” he says.  We’ll raise a glass, kindly, to those we once loved who are now no longer at the center of our lives, and we’ll do that with our present friends, knowing that all friendships change, and some fade.  Remember, he says, with kindness those we were once close to: ex-spouses, former lovers, former colleagues, estranged relatives, the whole lot.  Kind, for Burns, had the twin meaning of spiritually generous and as if they were kin. Think of them lovingly, he urges us, think of them as if they were brothers and sisters.

In our fast-moving world we may have many friends on facebook but no time for most of them, and we may lose sight of those we do actually know and care about in the general rush of living. Burns reminds us: Friendships may change, but the love that created them is always there.  We just have to be awake to that.

Perhaps I’m just sensitive to this since, as I prepare mailing lists for my new book I’m aware of all those people I think of fondly to whom I rarely write anything, let alone a Christmas card.  Yet I still think of them, and if they rang the doorbell I’d be delighted to see them.

Happy New Year (a shade early).

Today’s news brought some sadness with it again.  Benazir Bhutto, sometime president of Pakistan with hopes to be so in the future, had been assassinated in some sort of bombing attack. We become innured to such things, except that in this case the face was all too human for me.  Benazir, when I first met her, was all of 22.  Known by her friends and those who envied her as ‘Pinkie’ (at least in my group at Oxford) she was a charming, exasperating, wildly attractive, funny lady with a smile that took my breath away.  One could never really get close to her for long - she seemed to shy away from expressing her deepest feelings, and was a truly gifted evader of any questions of that sort, however kindly meant.  And given what her family had been through already, who could blame her?

In later years I’d read the papers to see if I could find any traces of the person I’d known so slightly, and yet who was so utterly memorable.  Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse in a photograph of what I thought might be the real Benazir, but increasingly she became so much part of the business of political posturing that I knew only what she stood for, not who she was.  I’d had the great good fortune to see something fragile and undefended in her, all those years ago, and it had been assiduously covered up from then on.

And what had I seen?  I can’t yet spell it out.  I can recall though, how she told tales of cowering in her father’s house as it was being shelled during the coup that put him out of power, and how she been afraid for the safety of her german shepherd, while her father stormed at her for feeling that way during a war situation. The way she told it turned it into a wry hilarious joke.  We all laughed. How could we not? She’d come from studying in the US, dressed and spoke in the American way, and was more than a little exotic in sleepy Oxford.

Something went underground in her as she became the practised politician of later years, winning her elections, gaining power, being ousted, going into exile, then venturing back into the situation that cost her her life.  I think it was the Innocent in her, which I was once lucky enough to see, and delight in.  That’s who I mourn today.

I don’t suppose the obituaries tomorrow will mention anything similar.

The advance copies of the new book Stories We Need to Know reached me today, and of course holding the book in my hands brought up a series of emotions.  At first it was relief - that sense of not truly believing it would appear in print, ever, and now the proof was here.  I’m familiar with that.  I’ve felt that with every book I’ve produced.  This time I was awake enough to give a brief prayer of thanks.

Then I felt something else; there was the sense of distance, as though one were watching a relative or sibling do something on a public stage, knowing that I was connected to the actions but also knowing that they had a life of their own, now. The book is on its own in the same way.

Following that was another feeling.  It was that strange sense of having worked hard, having put one’s heart and soul into it, of having spent months in front of the keyboard translating the schema in my head into prose that was recognizable, and the resultant volume is so small!

In all this the Ego (my ego) was trying terribly hard to get a foothold of some sort so it could stir me up to anxieties about…   Well, luckily I saw that one coming, and headed it off.  Instead I saw that it was all just perfect as it was.  The ideas would now be able to get out into the world and perhaps change a whole series of minds, and that would probably be a very good thing.  I’m grateful to have been chosen by the muses to relay these ideas, and I’m delighted to have been able to do their bidding, however imperfectly.  Gratitude is the big one, here.

This seems to me to be the center of it.  As I now move into preparing the next volume for publication (for Fall 2008) I’ll also have to take the time to serve these ideas that have been placed in my hands.  That means readings, signings, workshops. I’ll have to arrange them and make it all happen, and I’m not all that familiar with the terrain.  Yet.

The adventure is about to begin.

I was just shoveling some snow, again, and rather enjoying it.  When one has to do it first thing of a freeeeeezing morning in order to free the car from the icy clutches of accumulated ice, already late for work, it’s not a lot of laughs.  But today I can take it gently.  The teaching semester is over.  And suddenly I feel I have a whole lot more energy than before.

And that is why, gentle readers, the blog has been a bit under groomed of late.  But this will change.

Just as well I do have the energy though, since I tend to go and shovel out the 82 year old lady downhill of me, and she has two long paths to her doors, plus a driveway.

So I shoveled.  The mailman came by looking harrassed.  The garbage guys came by, icicles hanging off the fronts of their baseball hats, and they looked kind of peeved too.  The snow plough man trundled past, and he looked positively ravaged with gloom.

But I had a different story to tell myself about the day, and I was happy.

Whenever I think of Christmas, which is, on and off, from about September til February  - - because I have to decide whether I’ll go to England to see my relatives, and that requires planning ahead, and then, if I don’t go actually at Christmas this means I tend to go in the New Year, and then return to work jet lagged, causing me to feel exhausted until Valentine’s Day — as I said, whenever I think about Christmas I’m tempted to recall one of the finer ones.

 When I was about 16 I spent Christmas with my parents in Majunga, Madagascar.

At the time the British Air Force had a base there, and flew patrols over the Mozambique Channel to monitor whether or not Ian Smith’s Rhodesia was getting oil shipped in.  My father commanded this patrolling operation. Presumably if the large, lumbering aircraft that clambered into the sky every other dawn had ever found such a ship, it would have done suitably menacing things and called up the Navy frigate to intercept.  As things turned out British governmental policy was being subverted by a certain British oil company, which illegally sent millions of barrels via an overland pipeline, thus making a mockery of sanctions and reinforcing segregation in the process.  But we didn’t know that then.

So there we were, placed on a steamy tropical paradise with almost nothing Christmas like to see, and nothing available in the shops (what shops?  There was an open market, a bakery, a fish market… but no shops).  What we had were 80 miscellaneous airmen; two, count them TWO, large obsolete aircraft called Shackletons from which we could usually get one flying aircraft three times a week if we moved important bits like radar to whichever plane was in better condition, and a large population of friendly polynesian-type folks who were fascinated by our ‘white’ ways.

Miles from home, miles from anything ‘traditional’, we had a wondrous Christmas.  If you’ve ever heard 17 slightly drunk airmen singing ‘Silent Night’, the rich harmonies echoing over the tin rooftops of shanty town, waking the dogs, and spurring the bullfrogs on to greater belches of sound, you may get a ghost of a sense of what I mean.

Did we miss our relatives?  I supose we might have. I think for most of us it was just so good to be able to be present in the moment, look around, and say - by God, this is a beautiful place and I am so grateful to be alive.  In its own way it was a holy day. That was what I felt, anyhow.

Merry Christmas.

It’s been a busy week or so - much of it filled with ‘busy-work’, alas, alas; and this exhausting scramble to do what was required gave me the exquisite and needful lesson of letting go.

To give an example: a colleague at work is being unpleasant, destructive, combatative, and so on.  This is not aimed directly at me, but occurs within a department I am part of, thus causing meetings that had always been cordial and productive to become, bewilderingly, tight-lipped with suppressions of rage.  We all suffer, and in the end my students suffer because I’m not able to be fully present for them when things like this are on my mind. I walk from a meeting such as this and into a classroom and I struggle to not be annoyed by everything.

It’s busy work that drains the joy out of everything, if we let it.

And that’s why this is an important lesson.  I was reminded yet again that garbage happens, and I have to be able to stand beyond its villainous whiff, deal with it in a way that is reasonably sane, and let it go.  ‘Reasonably sane’, of course, is the test.  Getting angry and reactive with those who are disturbed and destructive doesn’t make things any better for anyone.  All one can do is extend compassion and hope that the person concerned will be able to see beyond his or her ego.  And then one has to let go of outcomes.

My mantra has become, in this case, a vital way of reminding myself that I have other fish to fry.  My work-colleague will not let anyone close enough to help, and the ego-madness that has crept into that sad soul can therefore only remain where it is currently festering, continuing to hurt the person who so dearly loves to nurse the pain. When a person is in love with pain and anger and misery - as this particular individual is - I have to remind myself that we are all free to choose misery whenever we wish to.  This person is choosing again and again to embrace conflict and misery.

I respect that choice.  And I’m taking a different road, thanks.

I was just reading an essay by Joan Didion, cryptically titled ‘Insider Baseball’ and even though it was written at a time when she was following the Dukakis-Bush election its points are worth considering.  Perhaps that’s the point about really good writing.  It stays relevent.   

It is a piece in which Didion shows us how (during elections especially) the media tend to develop their own language of hype, which they certainly don’t believe themselves, as they try to sell us on their stories.  In fact it shows the media acting just like any other bunch of dishonest used car salespeople (and that’s an insult to my friends in the motor trade, I realize, many of whom are decidedly honest). In the end their journalistic desire to make a ’situation’ out of a non-situation does sell papers, but at the cost of misleading the public shamelessly. And that’s what I can’t forgive.

If you can find it, give it a good look. The version I read was in “Ten on Ten” (Bedford St. Martin’s) edited by my friend Bob Atwan.  If he hadn’t collected that essay I’d probably never have bothered to look at it.  But he did, and so I read it, and became wiser.

Which brings me to my second point:  In a world of way too much print, so much of which is misleading, corrosive garbage, we need those who can sort out what is good for us to consider, and who do so with intelligence, integrity, and good humor.  Hats off to Bob, says I.

Oh, and the ‘Insider Baseball’ of the title? It refers to the time that Dukakis was filmed throwing a baseball to various members of his staff after his campaign jet had landed in Texas.  For twenty minutes in heat way above the 100 degree mark he threw a baseball around.  This had been specifically requested by the press, who wanted to be able to show him as ‘a regular guy’, and who then proceeded to take their manufactured incident and turn it into ‘news’ about the former Governor’s character, showing ‘the real man’ behind the supposedly spontaneous incident.

If that’s not dishonest, then what is?

A free press is one thing.  This is something else.  And just for the record, yes, I did vote for Dukakis.