Quote of the Day -- Diane Ackerman

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

--Diane Ackerman

Quote of the Day -- Eleanor Roosevelt

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

Balancing Input and Output

Ever since my early days as a "working mother," I've thought a lot about balance. Work-life balance, as we called it then. Work-life integration as it's more commonly called today (recognizing that for working mothers the notion of real balance is a pipe dream).

As our children grew older and the demands of parenting lessened, I began to think of balance more broadly. I realized that I had, by necessity, become basically two-dimensional -- a mother first and foremost, following closely by "career woman." I'd neglected everything else. I turned my attention to trying to achieve balance between mind, body, and spirit and to balancing my typical inward-focus with nurturing relationships. 

Balance comes in many flavors. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the balance between input and output. In these last several years, I've shifted dramatically to the "input" side, leaving me feeling very unbalanced and even selfish. It is true, as Joubert says, that some of us are better suited to observing and admiring, rather than producing. Still, a woeful lack of output can feel very unsatisfying. I'm reading voraciously, but to what purpose?

At certain phases of our lives, the scales tend to tip heavily in one direction. Childhood, for example, is all about INPUT.  Like Johnny5, the robot who "came alive" in the iconic movie Short Circuit, children are faced with a big, complex, often overwhelming world and need vast amounts of input to make sense of it. But even for children, the balance is starting to tip toward more output. Educators understand that mastering a set of facts or skills and regurgitating them on a test does not guarantee that the input has been properly assimilated. Even very young children are being encouraged to consume input selectively and analytically, and to produce quality output.

Our work lives, on the other hand, focus primarily on producing output. Despite the orders-of-magnitude increase in the amount of information available on any topic, workers often feel pressured to produce output without adequate opportunity to select and analyze input. For almost everyone, your value and success is measured by what you produce. You might need input to produce output, but really, with few exceptions, no one cares about the input side. No one is checking the quality of your income as long as they are satisfied with the output.

Which brings me to retirement. Our formative years are focused primarily on input. Our career-building years are focused primarily on output. And then? In retirement, we have the opportunity -- the luxury -- to tip the scales back toward input. Reading, going to lectures, attending theater and concerts, even travel. All input. And there isn't anything inherently wrong with any of that. But, as E.L. Konigsburg wisely observed, sometimes all that input just needs to come out:

I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow.  

And that's why I'm writing again. The luxury of reading voraciously has started to feel like an indulgence. And it feels ineffective because I'm not taking the time to analyze and internalize it. Output doesn't have to mean producing content for the world. People have used journals for eons to record their thoughts and process the day's "input." Perhaps a silver lining of sheltering at home during this COVID-19 crisis is that I'll achieve a better input-output balance.

Quote of the Day -- Daniel Kahneman

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

– Daniel Kahneman

Quote of the Day -- Journal of the American Geriatrics Society

A fall is an unintentional loss of balance causing one to make unexpected contact with the ground or floor.  

-- Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 

(via Susan Moon, this is getting old)

Quote of the Day -- John Gardner

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account. 

-- John Gardner

Quote of the Day -- George Santayana

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. 

-- George Santayana

Quote of the Day -- Anne Frank

At such moments I don't think about all the misery, but about the beauty that still remains. This is where Mother and I differ greatly. Her advice in the face of melancholy is: 'Think about all the suffering in the world and be thankful you're not part of it.' My advice is: 'Go outside, to the country, enjoy the sun and all nature has to offer. Go outside and try to recapture the happiness within yourself; think of all the beauty in yourself and in everything around you and be happy.' 

I don't think Mother's advice can be right, because what are you supposed to do if you become part of the suffering? You'd be completely lost. On the contrary, beauty remains, even in misfortune. If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance. A person who's happy will make others happy; a person who has courage and faith will never die in misery! 

-- Anne Frank

Quote of the Day -- Albert Einstein

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

-- Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day -- Plutarch

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

-- Plutarch

Quote of the Day -- Thomas Merton

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.

-- Thomas Merton

Quote of the Day -- Jessi Craige

No matter what we try, work-life balance always seems like a destination that we have yet to reach. It’s around the corner, out of our grasp.
Maybe, we think, we could get there if we rearranged a little, woke up earlier, or just tried harder.

But maybe the problem isn’t what we’re doing, but rather the concept of work-life balance itself. Perhaps it’s time for a new standard: work-life blend.

-- Jessi Craige

Retirement Balancing Act -- Part II

"No matter how much money you have, you can't buy more time." Bill Gates wrote that in a recent article (Three Things I Learned from Warren Buffett). If anyone should know what money can't buy, I guess it would be Bill Gates.

As someone who has always tried very hard to be constantly efficient and vigilant about time wasters, retirement poses a mental challenge. I've reached a stage in my life where it should be OK to have a more leisurely pace and even to waste a little time. But even three years into this retirement project, I'm still racked by guilt if I don't feel like my day has been productive enough.

But what does a "productive day" look like when you're retired? I want to have a full life, but I don't want to exchange the work treadmill for some other self-created treadmill. It seems obvious that I need to mentally redefine productivity in terms of quality more than quantity, but of course that is easier said than done. I have important volunteer obligations which certainly make me feel valuable and productive. But I need to take care that volunteerism doesn't become a "job" that makes me feel guilty when I'm not fully devoted to it. I didn't work so hard to earn a pension just to substitute unpaid work that carries the same baggage.

For me in retirement, the assessment of productivity at the end of the day needs to be selfish. Did I do something today to nurture my body? Did I do something today to nurture my spirit? Did I do something today to expand my mind? When I can answer "yes" to each of those questions every day, or better yet, when those things are so automatic that I no longer need to interrogate myself, then I have succeeded at the Retirement Balancing Act.

By the way, the young woman in that stunning photo is our daughter Cindy on a South Africa trip with her friends. So far, her balance (both physical and metaphorical) is much better than mine.

Reflections on a "Do It Now" Retirement

Do it now! -- Duane Comport (1923-2012) Many other people have no doubt said this, but my dad made the biggest impression on me with these words.

Three years ago, I made the decision to retire. Although I'd been debating with myself for several years, in the end, deciding to retire was easy. We'd done the spreadsheets to know I could retire. Then my mom got sick, which meant I should retire. And her illness also revealed to me how much I wanted to retire. I no longer loved my job. And I had no stomach for walking the tightrope between personal and professional life that I had accomplished so successfully (most of the time) when raising my kids. I didn't feel I had the energy to do that with an ailing mom and a no longer "do it now" dad. So, retire I did. For such a momentous decision, it was ultimately made in "Do it now!" style.

Fortunately, my mom's illness proved to be symptom-free for quite a long time. It got her in the end, in February of 2012, but until the last two months, she was relatively healthy and mentally as sharp as ever. So I had the luxury of learning to be retired and doing all the things I wanted to do, more or less, while still spending time with my parents.

That's where the "do it now" dilemma of retirement comes in. I've discovered in my almost three years of "leisure" that retirement is its own kind of balancing act -- teetering between "I should" and "why should I?"

Without the daily grind and monster to-do list, life becomes a wonderful and scary blank slate. A retiree's to-do list becomes mostly a list of your own making, with your own idiosyncratic priorities. And things that you thought you would do, such as writing regular blog posts, somehow keep getting shuffled to the bottom of the list.

I recently took a fun class -- at least fun for a "writing nerd" like me. The class reminded me of how much I love to write, which I know is hard to believe because most people hate to write. I also started reading the wonderfully funny book Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I found myself saying over and over "I wish I'd written that." So I'm determined to give it a whirl. I'm not completely sure what my "voice" will be. But here I am... Just Jelan.