Nat

It’s eight days since the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Usually I won’t blog on politics here, because I want to encourage a wide audience, but I am thrilled by the number of Republican observers who seem as awestruck as I by the historical significance of our finally looking past race in the election of a President.

It too me several months to recognize how inspiring Obama is as a leader, and when I did, I wondered that I didn’t see it all along. Maybe I have finally put down my skepticism of professional politicians and campaigns long enough to appreciate that hope has triumphed. I know that millions of people hoped for President Bush to win election, twice. What is different is that President-elect Obama somehow knew all along, for two years, that there were millions of Americans who wanted to believe in a brighter future, one in which large challenges can be tackled with large ideas.

Mostly, though, I have spent this past week gobbling up every scrap I could find about people who look at Obama and see the answer to their hopes: finally, an African-American; finally, a Hawaiian; finally, a man who grew up abroad; finally, a great orator; finally, a son of a single mother. He carries himself well, with dignity and sensitivity and intelligence.

And also with purpose. Much has been said about the high expectations for his presidency. We need so much right now. I am not troubled by the high expectations. One of President-elect Obama’s gifts is to inspire people to ask what they can do to help. It feels to me, at last, as if we are in this together. That is what I have wanted to believe.

I keep waking up happy.

Yesterday was a great day at work. A team of us had been asked two weeks ago to meet with a potential customer on a project they were interested in doing. We had only a partial understanding of their goals and preferences, and we were somewhat limited by time.

The most satisfying kind of work for me is when a group of people is thrown together with an objective, and we have to use our best judgment and each of our strengths to get to a quick solution. The less time there is to deliberate, the greater the group focus on what seems like it could work. It keeps me from over-thinking, which I often do given the time.

Our group of six people pulled together some ideas and talked out the pros and cons for four days. By yesterday morning we all had agreed on what the presenters would say. The lead presenter and one other team member helped us pull together the message points, and they talked effortlessly through some recommendations.

I’m not certain yet how it will turn out, but seeing the first stage come together better than our expectations was a lot of fun. I always appreciate being reminded that having faith in our colleagues and the expectation of a positive outcome often ensures that we are moving in the right direction.

The entire rest of the evening was wonderful.

Ok, so it’s a favorite topic of mine, dealing with clutter. I took a big step today dealing with my email inbox. First there was a great article on reducing email inbox clutter in the July 2008 print edition of Macworld. That article further referred to this series of posts at the 43folders.com personal productivity website. This series addresses the psychological reasons for keeping too many emails (the writing is hysterical), and then it offers simple solutions.

Some are practical, including a great sample schedule for how to tackle email in a typical work day so that you aren’t becoming a slave to the new email message notification beep. But my favorite comment is when the author says, Wouldn’t it be great to suck a little less?

That could be a motto for me as I strive to be easier on myself. A lot of my friends are like me in wanting to become more superhuman by trying to do everything. Naturally, none of us can do everything. Those who thrive take stock of themselves, their energy, their time and priorities, and they put their effort where it will make the biggest impact.

So applying these simple guidelines today for scanning and deleting email, I cut the volume of stored messages in my inbox by 800 items. The article calls this getting the piano off your foot. Call it that, or call it sucking a little less. Either way it’s liberating.

I read an article today in which the author wrote that joy is an inherent component of our character, not just the potential to experience joy, but joy itself. We are born with it. It is a divine gift. He went on to say that when we feel less than joyful, we don’t need to work to find some external element to bring us joy (a new job, money, a vacation). We just need to look inside ourselves and remember the joy that is already there.

He went on to discuss working at a job in particular, repeating the idea that to find satisfaction in our work, we don’t need to “do what we like,” we can just learn to “like what we do.” It has the advantage of bringing us quicker relief.

There is nothing new in this, of course. Michael and I read and comment on writers and teachers who, over the course of centuries advised that our answers lie within our minds. We must work to master them. I was just struck today by the idea that our shift in attitude starts by acknowledging what is already there, what is already true.

I came to my office to clean up some of the piles on my desk. I never feel I have time for this on a workday, but today, without the commotion of meetings and emails, I can work at the pace I like best: slowly.

So there’s a trick to liking what I do: find a way to do it slowly. It’s very relaxing. Now if only I can remember that on Monday morning.

Any ideas?

Two of my friends spoke to me yesterday about taking a risk. They are facing some financial uncertainties and decided to spend some money on themselves anyway. For one it was to have an organizer come in and help her arrange files in her office. She knew this would give her peace of mind that she could find important records if someone asks to see them.

For another, it was to rent an office so he would have a place to work away from his house. Neither of them had to spend the money, and the thriftier choice would have been not to spend. Still, they have both been practicing how to expect abundance. They each felt that spending the money was going to take them closer to what they wanted to achieve. My friend with the organizer was smiling so broadly I could feel it over the phone.

Each of them told me that I could learn a lesson about how to have faith. When we stay on the lookout for what will move us toward joy, we will be rewarded with greater courage. It is not the risk itself but the motive to move towards one’s dreams despite the risk that gives us a greater sense of power and freedom. Faith will do that for them. It can do it for you and me.

My friends Flo and Connie have commiserated with me about the challenge of too much paper. Flo’s advice to take it one piece at a time is the only advice that solves the problem of mess, whether it is small or large.

The real problem comes when the mess grows so big that the sheer volume of it overwhelms me. At a certain point, I start to tell myself it is so bad that I wouldn’t know where to start. Flo reminds me: it doesn’t matter where I start, only that I start by picking something up and putting it away.

Tonight Connie told me that something told her to start cleaning up her mess, her paper. Then she hired someone to get her started, and they worked for 11 hours over three days. The most important piles had drifted to the top, she said. I found that encouraging because I have a sense of keeping the most important things where I can get to them, at the top of my piles.

My instincts aren’t completely dead. They are helping me even when I am weary. I feel the same about what I need to do to feel better about things: start with some small action. This week, Connie and I decided to call and coach one another twice a week until both of us are more un-stuck. She sounded full of purpose tonight, after what she would call a “rampage of appreciation.” There are far worse places to start.

I can start by being grateful that she and I have reached out to one another.

It’s an important milestone in American movies and television shows, the high school reunion. My wife and I, who were high school classmates, went to our 25th reunion on Saturday. We had a great time. One of the funny things about our being married is that we had almost no friends in common back then, and we never really knew one another. So now that we are married, our classmates have a hard time connecting the dots. We don’t naturally fit together in the experience of most of them.

Still, it’s really nice to go back with someone who knows the school and the class as well as knowing you. We met some other very nice spouses, who brave the nostalgia, the in jokes, the reminiscences. They were all really good sports.

Contrary to what movies lead you to expect about reunions, ours was very low key. There are some very high-powered successes in the class, accomplished business people, artists, television personalities, but this group continues to treat the rest of us, mere mortals, as valued friends. Our class was never much about money–we were at a boarding school with small dorm rooms and no dress code,–so it was actually kind of hard to tell who was wealthy then. Now you can tell from the size of gifts to the annual fund, but people don’t throw it in your face.

Mainly it was a treat to be in the company of people who were my friends during an important stage of my life. We were the witnesses to one another’s dreams and ambitions and achievements. In an era at the school marked by very little faculty involvement outside the classroom, we raised ourselves and applauded one another.

The most meaningful part of our graduation ceremony 25 years ago was the actual handing out of diplomas. By school tradition, the Head of School stood at the top of a circle, which consisted only of the class. The dean handed him diplomas, he read the name, and the circle of students passed it around until it reached its recipient. We all stood witness to one another.

It was lovely to do so again, even for a day. To see the new children, the old smiles behind slightly wrinkled faces, to hear what our old friends think about, are proud of, worry about.

To remember who they were and who we were in their presence.

Since my father died a year ago, I have become messier than ever before. The disorder I create around me reflects my inability to place everything where it belongs. Looking at the piles of papers, books, and clothes strewn around my desk, I realize that, for the moment, I know how to start things but not how to finish them. I could analyze this tendency, analyze myself, and conclude that I am shying away from endings. Maybe it is that simple.

I don’t really want to turn the page. Dropping items wherever I am lets me avoid finality of any kind.

But it’s also a nuisance. When I was very young, I looked around my bedroom one day and decided that I didn’t want to live in the middle of a mess. From that point until I married twenty-two years later, I carefully put everything away: clothes, papers, pens, books. I’ve lost that habit, lost it long before I lost my father. It’s just that I am more likely to look around at the mess I’ve made now and think, “I will never be able to clean this up.”

At the same time, there does come a point at which you say to yourself, “Enough.” There are other people who are bearing up under much more tormenting circumstances. Who am I really to let everything go?

My wife always tells me that the way you clean up a mess is to pick up one thing at a time. I have always known she was right about that. The trick is to go ahead and start.

It amazes me when the right book comes to me just when I need it. Last week a friend recommended Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat. Pray. Love. I had read the reviews and walked by it in bookstores for months, thinking that I would probably like it, but when I received the recommendation last week, I was particularly desperate for advice about reaching out to God.

For those of you who haven’t read it–and I strongly recommend that you do–Gilbert opens the book sobbing on the floor of her bathroom, desperate for guidance about whether to leave her marriage. She asks God for help, and receives a clear answer back. The answer is, “Go to bed, Elizabeth,” and what she writes about this is that she recognizes it as wisdom. “True wisdom,” Gilbert writes, “gives the only possible answer at any given moment” (p. 16).

It’s a great definition. Typically I expect that real insight will allow me to solve all of my problems at once. I know this is ridiculous when I am being rational, but suffering has a way of making me want to know everything all at once. Gilbert’s reminder that we only need to know the best next step strikes me as great advice, both because we can only take one step at a time, and also because it reminds us to narrow our focus on a problem to the tiny portion of it that we can handle right away.

Brilliant. (Plus, the rest of the book is funny and charming.)

The Academy of American Poets, at poets.org, sponsors National Poetry Month every April. If you go to their web site, you can subscribe to receive a poem each day this month by email.

I have it sent to my work email account, and I’m finding, just two days in, that the arrival of the day’s poem reconnects me with my love of language and my appreciation for a life outside of work. Another of the benefits of the subscription is the additional links that each mail message includes.

Yesterday’s took me to a list of past Poets Laureate of the US Library of Congress. Louise Gluck, one of my absolute favorite poets, was listed, and it linked to one of her poem’s from last year’s book “Averno.” The poem “A Myth of Devotion” reminded me that I love the way Gluck navigates longing and the imperfection of desire throughout this entire book.

Poetry is perfect for me in April. The pleasure of language is more reliable than spring in New England. I never used to read poetry, but this web site, and the great work of the Academy of American Poets really brought it back into my life.