Tag Archives: values

So, This Is 40? Huh…

Musings, , , ,

Last year, I turned 40. I write that with some trepidation even after several months. Strangely, though I’ve never really tried to hide my age on this blog – my references to Police Academy and A Country Practice kind of give it away – I do feel a little vulnerable putting it out there. Turning 40 sounds like, and I guess it was, a big deal.

Unlike my 30th where I had a rather extravagant party, I decided to keep it low-key and host some smaller events with various friends. Bob surprised me with a weekend away in the Adelaide Hills on an organic farm in what’s called a tiny house. We arrived late when the sun had gone down, and after fumbling around for the light switches in the pitch black, the house revealed itself to be charming, not so tiny, and well-equipped. Bob heated dinner, I opened the chardonnay, and we settled in to watch the Eurovision semi-finals. We did pretty much the same thing on our first trip away over 10 years ago! The next day we had a leisurely start before meeting friends who had driven up to meet us for lunch at a winery. An evening of cheese and (more) wine on the deck followed. Best of all the paddocks surrounding the house had cows! Such fun!

Going away made my birthday feel a little gentler. It’s strange that when I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to be older. I loved the idea of having what I saw as stylish (early-2000s) “adult” clothes, renting an apartment with beautiful floorboards and an impressive view, and hosting dinner parties where the conversations would be meaningful, stimulating and, most important, sparkling. I wanted to be old enough to say things like, “We’ve known each other for three decades!” or “I did that 20 years ago”, when referring to friends, colleagues, and experiences. I never really felt like a teenager at the time, although in some ways, compared to my friends, I had the most growing up to do. Have you watched the animated TV-series BoJack Horseman about an anthropomorphic actor horse? There’s a character, Vincent Adultman, who is catfishing (I wrote that without realising, I swear) BoJack’s Hollywood agent, Persian cat Princess Caroline. In reality, Vincent is three children hiding under a trench coat standing on each other’s shoulders. Substitute a trench with suede jacket and corduroy pants and you kind of having me in my late teens, trying to play grown up.

In the weeks leading up to my birthday, I surprised myself by how anxious I was to be turning 40.

Turning 40 really brought into sharp focus that there isn’t infinite time. I know that’s not a particularly groundbreaking reflection, but when you’re younger, it seems like you have nothing but time. Remember those summers off school when the clock moved ever so slowly? We’d lie on the couch or the cool tiled floor (this is Australia) watching the summer cricket and reruns of TV shows on hiatus. Later at university, it didn’t feel indulgent to pass weeks doing very little of anything other than partying and drinking nights away. There would be enough time to figure out what you wanted to do with your life. There was oh so much time to explore options and people, even if, for me, that meant bouncing from bad relationship to bad relationship until, not a moment too soon, I experienced some insight into my patterns. Up until I was in my 30s, it felt as if life could be a series of vignettes, rather than putting together something that in the cold light of day would look and feel rounded and whole.

The year I turned 30, I wrote an email to my mentor and friend, Professor Rosalind Cartwright, about how it seemed time was drifting. Her response was very impactful. She wrote back to me advising, “Spend your young adulthood wisely so that in the following decades you will have something valuable to do that lasts”, ending with “I saw promise in you that needs to be a focus so that time does not continue to slip away”.

Professor Cartwright’s advice spurred me to action, and I got busy. I started meeting certain goals that are deemed appropriate in the area in which I was working, such as publishing a certain number of papers and winning grants. However, I don’t know if I quite got her advice then. I felt a dissonance between what I was supposedly accomplishing and what I really felt. I saw little meaning in what I was doing, was dissatisfied, and believed that after so much supposed promise, I was treading water. At that time, I unconsciously kept doggedly pursuing my goals, but didn’t understand why I was frustrated or felt trapped.

It was several years before I truly started to understand, in part thanks to a good therapist, that fulfilment – be it in work, home life, or in relationship with oneself or others – comes from living life in line with one’s values. Goals should be underpinned by values, rather than goals being seen as a proxy for knowing one’s values; or as an end in themselves. “Something valuable”, as Professor Cartwright put it, is something that allows you to live authentically, from which you derive satisfaction, and that helps you get out of bed in the morning. Something valuable, as I’ve come to define it, is also something that is an important, but not disproportionate, part of one’s overall life satisfaction.

I do need to say that I am now somewhere where I enjoy working and find the work fulfilling. But I have to admit that I feel those late-20s, early 30s years could have been spent better. Turning 40, I couldn’t stave off the feeling that there were some wasted and lost years in the wilderness that I could never get back.

My therapist once told me that they thought I derived a lot of my identity from work, rather than it being a proportionate part of who I thought I was. Eckhart Tolle wrote in A New Earth about how rather than seeing a job or even being a parent as something we “do” or a function we fulfill, we can confuse these roles with our identity. Unease comes when the role ends, changes or, in my case, isn’t fulfilling. We can start to question, “Who am I?”, or “Who am I now?” I am consciously working on not identifying so much with my work role, and feel I’ve made a bit of a breakthrough.

If I reflect on it, my disquiet had a lot to do with realising time is finite and overidentifying with an unfulfilling work identity, but there was another role or identity that I was struggling to let go of as I turned 40.

When I started working, so much of my identity and attitude towards myself came from how I thought others saw me. This is what Charles H. Cooley referred to in 1902 as the looking-glass self. I started my PhD at 21, and I was the youngest in the department by quite a few years. Submitting my thesis five years later and then starting a job as a postdoctoral researcher, I was still by a long shot the youngest person in the room. Sometimes I resented that because even though I worked hard over those years, I didn’t feel I was listened to or that others thought I had enough gravitas. I’d be lying, though, if I said there weren’t times when I did relish it. Colleagues were surprised or impressed with what I had done or the work I had produced “at your age”. That felt good.

While I haven’t been the youngest person in the room for a while, turning 40 did represent a more objective changing of the guard.

A weekend away and a new friend.

Over the past few months, I’ve started to look at turning 40 a bit differently. I’m reluctant to present to you a ‘Things I Know Now that I’m 40’ list. It’s seems a little indulgent and presumptuously generative. When reflecting on her legacy and waxing a bit nostalgic, Bette Midler caught herself and said something along the lines of, “But I’ve thought of my legacy since I was 21”. I feel the same, but that’s Bette Midler! Nonetheless, I will share with you some thoughts I’ve had over the last few months, and years. If nothing else, it will be an improvement on my ‘Things I Know Now that I’m 20’, which, if it exists, is most probably on a 3½-inch floppy disk and due to outdated technology, mercifully lost to time.

So, what’s it all about? First, there isn’t infinite time. That’s a good thing. Perhaps that means we need to make sure that we do as much as we can today, rather than think we’ll do it tomorrow. It’s not about quantity, but about understanding and doing what is meaningful to oneself. For me, to take Dr Russ Harris’ terms, it is contribution, creativity, and connection. I truly do believe that if we’re striving to live life in line with values, that’s not lost time. I didn’t know that I was striving, but during a lot of those unfulfilling years, I knew it didn’t feel ‘right’ and did what I could to try to figure out what I wanted.

People often tell me how busy I am – how much, as one friend puts it, I never “stop home”. Maybe that’s true, but if I can be as honest with you as I can, I feel that for so many experiences I have not really been in the moment because of the anxiety and other issues that have at times been a significant part of my life. They say to “Live, Laugh, Love”. I’m more of a “Ruminate, Rinse, and Repeat” kind of lad. There’s a definite feeling of not being present, but being on the outside looking in. I was very busy in my 20s and a good part of my 30s, and from the outside that might have looked fulfilling. But, even if others weren’t, I was aware that I could have been doing more. That’s not perfectionism talking, so much as a reflection on how many days have been spent on the couch, exhausted from thoughts. So much dissatisfaction from work came from it not being a good environment; other dissatisfaction was much more complex. Regardless, I can choose to see all this as lost time. Or I can see it as being a painful but necessary part of becoming more aware of what I want and value.

I don’t think our underlying or core values necessarily change as we get older, but their relative importance and how they are expressed might. Connection with others has always been so important to me. One thing that has changed over the last few years is the realisation that, while I want to accomplish and contribute something to the wider world, for me, true cherished memories are experiences shared with friends and family. Mindfulness during those times is challenging, but worth it. What has given me that sense of meaning of late? It’s dinner parties, lazy days on the beach spent with friends, cultivating a hydrangea, or baking a cake. Watching Police Academy with Bob and insightfully telling him, “Captain Harris really isn’t a villain. He just demands excellence of his recruits”. Now, that’s an insight I couldn’t have had in 1989. But guess what – I can now say about a friend, “I’ve known them for three decades”. Fortunately, I can also say, “So good to make a new friend”.

On the topic of friends. I think respect for others requires self-respect. I’m trying to be more respectful of people, and myself. I don’t want to make excuses, but at times when my head has not been in its best place, I haven’t always been so respectful of people’s time. I would cancel close to an event. Beyond feeling depleted, this action also comes from a lack of self-esteem. The voice inside my head was, I’m not feeling well. Why would they want to hang with me anyway? My company’s not that important, so what if I cancel? For that, I’m sorry.

I still think time does drift…in a way. In my early 20s, I fell out with a couple of people who were at that time important to me, and I let time drift because it seemed there’d be time. Then you look back and realise it was 20 years ago. As I approached 40, I reached out to a couple of them to say, “I’m sorry”. It wasn’t about wanting to shirk responsibility or an exercise in reciprocity, getting them to acknowledge in turn the role they had played. I didn’t even expect a response. It was because I truly felt sorry and wanted to unequivocally tell them that. I wasn’t the best person I could have been. The Vodka Cruisers didn’t help, either.

Understanding what makes us tick. I think the best work I’ve done on myself it to try to figure out who I am. Besides being and perhaps looking young, I think that a lot of those times that I wasn’t listened to in a meeting were because I didn’t know what I stood for or what I wanted. As my friend Donna has said on our podcast, others often don’t trust us when we don’t trust ourselves. I also deferred to others because I am a people pleaser. The people pleasing ran so deep that it wasn’t just hiding what I thought. Often it was not even knowing what I thought. Maybe they would have paid attention if I had had the courage of my convictions. Of course, it’s also possible that wouldn’t have made a difference because some of them struck me as the kind of people who don’t listen to women, people from a background that isn’t theirs, or the gay kid who wasn’t trying to run everyone down to derive his own identity. If that’s the case, more’s the pity. Listening and empathy can go a long way.

Ah, empathy! Empathy is what I research, and I love it. It’s messy, sometimes biased, but fundamental to who we are. Sometimes it’s the closest we can come to really knowing someone else. There’s another concept from psychology that I’ve always liked. It’s called openness to experience.

I feel so much more open to others’ experiences. From a young age, I was so focused on getting good grades and being academic that I didn’t realise the diversity of others’ experiences and perspectives that could so enrich my own life. I’m so fascinated by people telling me about their early years, their work, hobbies, and travels. I’m endlessly in awe of the baker who knocks my socks off with a delicious cake, the gardeners who have helped replenish my backyard, friends who are creative. Learning should be an end and not a by-product of striving for a good grade. Frankly, so much of academia is about convincing everyone else how great you are. I never really bought into that, but now I just want to listen to others and soak it all in.

I’ve often written about the relationship between empathy for others and our own self-understanding. It’s something I’d love to research in more depth, but have had difficulty finding collaborators; and what’s stopped me is taking to heart their thinking that it’s too hard to investigate. So, I’m planning to do it on my own. Regardless, turning 40 put into focus an experience I had a few years ago.

I had written a piece about a psychological concept called the spotlight effect, where adolescents become self-conscious and believe that everyone is watching them. I wrote about my experiences with the effect when I was younger. The idea for the piece was that in the age of social media, who’s to say this next wave of teenagers are incorrect? But what the piece became was an admonishing of younger people who focus more on cultivating an image than achieving something. I was quite pleased with the piece, thought it was funny, and even included references to people from the era in which I grew up. These were people I aspired to be like in charm, looks, or popularity. People like Dieter Brummer from the Australian serial Home and Away.

Quite pleased with myself, I showed the piece to a friend who has read a lot of my work for their feedback. A bit uncharacteristically, he was less than enthused, telling me gently but directly, “I’m not quite sure what the purpose of this is”. I kept working on the piece for some time before finally abandoning it.

I believe the reason the piece didn’t work was not because I was saying anything that wasn’t untrue about social media and some young people. It didn’t work because I was a man in his late 30s with an inner child that was raging at those younger than him who seemed to have so much attention thrown at them without even having to do anything.

As an adolescent, adulation from others never felt easy. People were not always kind about my weight – in either direction of the scale – or the mannerisms that they thought represented a particular identity that scared them. Compassion from others then was much needed. Now, I wasn’t being compassionate to those grappling for identity and taking a bite of a very tempting apple in the way of socially mediated love. In wanting to be more caring towards young people, I need to be more nurturing to my young, suede jacketed, corduroyed self. And to remind myself all is not always what it seems. The people I adored like Dieter had private experiences and feelings that I never could know.

I’ve realised that life doesn’t go the way you imagined it at 21. Career goals can go unfulfilled; priorities change; supposedly random events can change life in an instant. You lose people whose loss you feel so acutely sometimes you can’t breathe. This leaves you appreciating life even with an awareness of its fragility, but you are never quite the same. Longing for what cannot be is very real and very painful. There are days when you give into that pain and there are days when it’s with you, but you’re OK.

What will all our legacies be? That’s not for us to decide. All we can do is keep striving to accomplish what we want and what’s important to us. Time will take care of the rest.

Life, indeed, is different to what we imagine, and it can be splendid. I never did get that apartment in my 20s, but I have a house with lovely floorboards and a view of a park across the road where I have made memories with my new community of neighbours who have become very good friends. I do host dinner parties and I love how things I’ve collected over the years that are old – because I adore mid-century – get to be vibrant again and to be a part of new memories. How wonderful, too, that I can buy new things for my dinner parties that will have the mark of our history on them just by us enjoying them. So, go forth and proclaim on my behalf, “Bob, Adam needs more vases!” I also have a Bob…and a Lucy. How lucky am I?

Life does and doesn’t look like how I imagined it all those years ago. And I think that’s great.

Plutarch and Chill

Musings, , ,
At seventeen before school formal.

Back in April, I went to my 20-year high school reunion. It was a combined event of the last four decades of the graduating classes of years ending in 9. Since my cohort falls at the relatively more recent end, we were younger than two of the other groups, but staggeringly (for me) no longer the youngest at such an event. I’ve noticed this has been happening increasingly more of late. I still get a little winded when I cross over into a new age range on a survey. It seems like yesterday that I was in the final year of high school, rushing home to eat dinner before settling in to do my homework all evening while burning some lavender oil using a burner my friend Carlo had bought me. I did push myself hard in Year 12. Turns out he thought I needed to chill the fuck out…imagine that.

It was a fairly small turnout from all the graduating classes at the reunion. I imagine the school had twenty-plus year-old outdated addresses for many of my classmates. For others, they may have felt little nostalgia for revisiting high school. I’m still best friends with six of my classmates and we decided to go and make an afternoon and then, once the school portion wrapped up, evening of it at my friend Darren’s pub. We were probably the largest “group” there. The nerds shall finally inherit the earth! Or, at the very least, based on where the school sits, the valley. I don’t think we were actually the nerds in our year level, but I’m not sure where we fit. In the final year of high school, each clique had a table in the common area. We sat smack bang in the middle between the sportos (jocks in North American slang) and the boarders (the country kids who lived on site) and mingled with them and everyone else on either side of us. Then again, perhaps we might not have thought we fit a “type”, but it’s usually others who decide what type we are in high school, isn’t it?

We were taken on a tour of some of the school and I was surprised by how little it had changed. Even the small physical education changing rooms (the place where high school homoerotic dreams were made) in the auditorium looked – and, shudder, smelled – the same. I was taken aback that the library had moved to an undisclosed location somewhere else on the grounds. During Year 12, I’d start my day by reading the newspaper there and then booking in a lunch session to use one of the few computers in the school with Internet access (remember, I said we weren’t the youngest cohort at the reunion). I’d send emails from my Hotmail address (who the hell was I sending them to?) or play Hollywood Stock Exchange with Carlo. I just looked this up, and it still exists. I wonder if I still have my stocks in Mackenzie Astin.

After our night on the town, I hadn’t given the reunion much thought. But this past weekend, I was moving around some boxes and found a copy of a collection of student writing put out annually by the school. The volume was from my final year of high school. It wasn’t the first time I’d come across this small volume in recent years (see here). I was runner-up in the year-level writing competition. The winner was at the reunion – a delightful poet named Thom Sullivan. It’s probably better that I didn’t remember this humiliating (not really) defeat until after the reunion. My base instincts and a couple of beers may have led me to break his quill-holding hand and right a wrong I hadn’t ruminated on in two decades.

Over a cup of coffee, I reread my piece. Looking back from the vantage point of time, I can tell that I was very consciously trying to use every word in the dictionary. Why else would I use “gossamer” or “nadir”? My story was about a woman named Genevieve, who was named for actress Geneviève Bujold, whom I think I’d just seen in a movie. The fictional Genevieve had a life, friends, a job, and an apartment I called a “tenement”. I so obviously didn’t know what that word meant as I also gave her dwelling a mahogany door. However, for all that Genevieve had done, she had never really made her mark. The story was called “Deliquesce”, which essentially means to dissolve away. There was also something in the story about water and a seashell with the voices of the past and present, and I threw in the word “soubrette” to get my Shakespeare on. I left it open as to whether Genevieve died in the end. I can’t remember if I wanted to kill her off, but as Bette Midler said in opening her Divine Madness concert, “After many a summer dies the swan. But not when she’s stuck in a turkey the size of this one!”

When I reread the story, I smiled – if the execution was inelegant, it still isn’t half-bad. Plus, 17-year old Adam was hard enough on himself, and so he doesn’t need my help with that. My ideas were influenced in no small way by some of the giants we were reading at the time in English class – mainly, Death of a Salemsan by Arthur Miller and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Miller and Fitzgerald’s works dealt with the feats of two men who bought into a dream that did them no good. I had also fallen in love with the historians of Ancient Greece and Rome – Herodotus, Suetonius, Thucydides and, particularly, Plutarch. These historians of antiquity tended to focus on noble and ignoble men, alike – but men (unfortunately, so many of the women’s stories are lost to time) who had gone down in history.

Just as there’s no coincidence that these books are chosen for final year high school – a time when you’re figuring out who you are and who you want to be out in the world – my homing in on these themes wasn’t just because I had no other inspiration. Essentially, I remember how much I grappled with the question of “what is a life well lived?”. I imagine this to still be a pertinent question for a kid going out into the world today, although I probably wouldn’t have phrased it like that back then. For my 17-year old self, I thought a life well lived meant a life where I achieved something and was known. Wanting to “be known” was not restricted to the wider world, but I was very conscious of building a circle of friends and acquaintances, perhaps at a bar where everybody knew my name. Indeed, one day after school I went to a lunch bar/café in the city, ordered a cappuccino and Berliner bun with pink icing, and people watched. Though I spoke to not a one, I left that café determined to get to know these people, whom I imagined were regulars, in the coming months.

What struck me about this story, though, is how little my values have changed in 20 years as reflected in the story and what I remember from Year 12. Much more recently, I’ve been delving into the principles of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), particularly what the approach has to say about values. As my teacher in the techniques of ACT has shown me, the commitment comes from wanting to commit to actions that move us towards living life in line with our values, even when negative experiences, emotions and thoughts abound (that’s the acceptance part). As ACT expert Russ Harris succinctly puts it, “The goal of ACT is to create a rich and meaningful life, while accepting the pain that inevitably goes with it”. I didn’t realise how much ACT is reflected in many spiritual traditions until I read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose on the recommendation of my friend Donna Loren. She often seems to know exactly what I need, even before I do. Donna’s worked to understand her experiences, and, in the process, her insight has helped me and others to look more deeply.

Utilising the work of Dr. Harris (p. 23), it turns out three Cs are most important to me:

  • Contribution – to contribute, help, assist, or make a positive difference to myself or others.
  • Creativity – to be creative or innovative.
  • Connection – to engage fully in whatever I am doing, and be fully present with others.

It seems that while my more nebulous “being known” goal at 17 has evolved, it still has at its core a want to be known for doing and contributing something of importance. I think the need to be creative is a part of that overarching contribution value. The importance placed on connection has moved beyond wanting to know the patrons of a café to paying mind to the relationships I do have and being in the moment when I’m with those people. When anxiety takes over my brain and turns it into scrambled eggs, as it is apt to do, I find being present and in the moment with people terribly difficult.

Where does one get the most chance to contribute or be creative? Lots of places, but it’s often at work. And here’s the kicker. If I’m totally honest with myself, I spent a good part of the last decade in a job where, by and large, I don’t feel like I made that positive difference. While there were certainly exceptions of which I am proud, I stayed too long, even when I knew early on that this wasn’t the right fit for me. Yes, I had to pay the bills, I had just met my partner, moving away from family and friends for work wasn’t something I wanted to do, and so on. But I felt controlled and, in response to that, chose the path of least resistance and went with it. The genesis of this blog was my chance to be creative at a time when I didn’t feel I could find creativity anywhere else. As a result, I now feel at a stage where people who started their careers at the same time as me are really hitting their strides in an area in which they chose to research. More than that, they look like they are really enjoying the chance to be innovative and creative.

I’m now somewhere where I do think I can make that contribution and do more engaging work. At first, I was very anxious that I must hurry to catch up to everyone. Now with help from ACT principles, I’m realising it’s more about being conscious of the goals I want to achieve and to what end am I striving towards these things (that is, what are my values?). So long as I’m working towards them, that’s a good start. Again, I need to chill. Maybe I should get out that oil burner.

Being fully present with others is still sometimes hard. I’ve had to find mindfulness activities that work for me in all sort of circumstances as I wrote about a little while ago. I tried the raisin meditation once, where you essentially focus on the sensations associated with putting a raisin in your mouth and – here’s the important part – eventually swallow it. I put it in my mouth and down it went. Worrying that the person leading me through this would think less of me, or at least not have another raisin to give me, I pretended it was still in my mouth for a few minutes and swished around this imaginary withered old grape. Best imaginary raisin I’ve ever tasted!

Oh, you might be wondering what ever happened to that café. It barely lasted the year and folded before the close of the millennium. But I do now have another place to get a drink where a few people know my name. It’s all good.