In a recent segment on the PBS News Hour Paul Solman reported, “For those 55 and older, it takes at least a year on average to find work, longer than any other age group.”

He then sat down to talk with a group of bright, skilled, articulate older men and women who been unsuccessful at finding work.

Although each of them had tried to appear younger using such tactics as truncating the work history on their resumes, their attempts had ultimately backfired.

“I was coming in for a face-to-face interview,” one person said, “and the HR recruiter saw me, assumed who I was, and his face—I could just see his face almost fall when he saw me and how old I was. After that, I pretty much got pushed through two of the people I was supposed to talk to. The other three got busy and I couldn’t see them.”

The others nodded and related their own experiences of losing an interviewer’s attention or being given a perfunctory half hour before being shown the door.

Every time you do not give your consent, every time you leave an encounter with ageism with your dignity intact, you win what you need most in the struggle against long odds—the capacity to keep going.

Ageism is a prejudice, like any other. It occurs when a judgment is made about a person based on age classification rather than who he or she is as an individual.

It is perpetuated by generalizations that are false, e.g., when people who are experienced and well qualified get lumped in with those who have not kept their skills up-to-date.

It is being compounded by the current climate of unrest. A combination of changes in the basic nature of work and the economic downturn has stirred up a hornet’s nest of “concerns” about hiring older workers, such as: their supposed limited capacity to learn new things (undocumented); a lack of physical stamina (not really a barrier for knowledge workers); uncertainty about how long they’ll be around (shorter-term jobs are now the norm anyway); and a perceived risk that they might sue for age discrimination if let go (proactive discrimination!).

I will not be so bold as to offer a solution to so complex and pervasive a problem here. Nor do I take much comfort in the one older worker who’d managed to find a job whom Solman interviewed to provide balance to an otherwise grim report.

Instead I will take to heart the words of Joe Carbone, President of The WorkPlace, a program designed to support older workers, when he says there is a “new population” of workers now deemed unemployable because of age and length of unemployment that is caught up in a “process that’s declaring them hopeless.”

I’d like to offer these people some unsolicited coaching.

• When you encounter ageism, call it what it is while it is going on. For example, if someone does a double take when they see you’re twenty years older than they expected, shake their hand vigorously and say, “Yes, I’m Jeff—you look surprised (or disappointed).”

 

• If the interview schedule is unexpectedly altered, let them think you had to postpone other things of great importance to be there. Say something like, “It was my understanding I’d be meeting with the Manager and Vice-President and I arranged my schedule so I could do so. What’s changed? Why have those meetings been canceled?” Don’t make it easy for a gatekeeper to dismiss you.

 

• If you feel you’re talking to a let’s-get-this-over-with interviewer, offset the flatness in the room by stating your qualifications with more, not less, energy. Address the lackluster nature of the meeting with an inquiry such as, “Have you already chosen a candidate?”

Actions like these are more than emergency tourniquets to stop the bleeding of your self-esteem.

When practiced regularly over time they have the potential to break the cycle of your own participation in this unfairness as a victim. Eleanor Roosevelt, who spent the last half of her life fighting both injustice and her own sense of inadequacy said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Every time you do not give your consent, every time you leave an encounter with ageism with your dignity intact, you win what you need most in the struggle against long odds—the capacity to keep going.

It’s taken me a long time to accept that the signs of spring—green grass, purple crocuses, yellow forsythia—can’t always be counted on to appear on schedule where I live on Cape Cod. More often than not, the dominant color of April is brown and you have to bundle up to take a walk just as you did in February.

But I’m a daily walker and the other day I donned my wool coat and hat to go out right after reading an article in the Boston Globe that said nearly four million people have been out of work for a year or more. Before the recession, 10% of the total unemployment number represented the long-term unemployed. Now it’s almost 30%. There’s no spring for these work-seekers either.

According to the article, long-term unemployment is the “most intractable” consequence of the last recession and because of a lack of political will, despite all the talk about creating jobs in the last election, few resources are being directed toward it. The problem, the Globe said, is “chronic.” They make it sound like an illness.

We no longer live in a world where going through the motions of work-search will produce results. To have any chance of success, people need keep their heads and their hearts in the game.

The thought of four million people being regarded as if they were suffering from a disease distresses me as much as the statistics. Yes, some do get disheartened and give up hope, but these are the only ones we seem to hear about. Those who stay employable by finding ways to keep themselves vital and engaged go unnoticed.

Regardless of how long someone has been out of work, his primary responsibility as an unemployed person is not sending out resumes, preparing for interviews, building networks, etc. It is self-renewal.

Being at home erodes confidence. The energy needed to step up to the plate, again and again, when you know the odds against you, can’t be sustained without actively seeking out alternative ways to feed your self-esteem and sense of professional identity. Just like a business, an individual experiences a kind of “bankruptcy” when he loses his capacity to generate new ideas.

We no longer live in a world where going through the motions of work-search will produce results. To have any chance of success, people need keep their heads and their hearts in the game. In a competitive marketplace, only a genuine belief in yourself will allow you to convincingly articulate the value of what you have to offer.

In other words, when the employment landscape seems cold, dark and barren, you’ll have to find your own source of spring, even if it means looking for substitutes.

Here are some of the ways my unemployed clients have put sources of renewal into their work-search:

• To keep himself energized for staying in touch with recruiters, supporters and contacts, a corporate executive schedules time in a pottery studio and contributes his marketing skills to the artisan community he is now a part of.

 

• To restart a consulting practice which felt isolating and flat, a communications expert started writing stories about family reunions to help her to reclaim her talent for orchestrating events and direct her writing skills toward the development of branding materials for herself, just as she would for a client.

 

• An engineer whose business management experience has allowed him to excel in both the manufacturing and financial sectors has started on a journey of self-discovery to gain clarity about the exact nature of the work he is meant to do. He is also organizing strategic planning events for the non-profit organization whose board he serves on to keep his skills fresh.

In a 2000 essay, “The Coming of the Entrepreneurial Society,” Peter Drucker says, “Individuals will increasingly have to take responsibility for their own continual learning and relearning, for their own self-development and for their own careers.” In the dozen years since he made this prediction, changes in the workplace have proved him right, and yet many people, employed and unemployed, are still not taking his advice.

For everyone in my home state, April 8th, the day of the first Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park always marks the beginning of a new season of hope. And there are now enough long-term unemployed people in Massachusetts to fill the stadium twice. If I could somehow speak to all of them, I’d ask them to believe in themselves as much as they do in the Sox, and then go out and find ways to sustain that Opening Day devotion to make their work-search a success.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever spent a lot of money on a textbook for a class you really didn’t want to take.

I have a vivid memory of waiting in line in a college bookstore to buy an 800-page statistics manual for a quantitative methods course in an MBA program. I was recently divorced, in my mid-forties, re-entering the work world, and this was the prescribed credential.

But as I inched closer to the checkout area, I happened to pass the Art History section and my heart beat faster as book cover images of Gothic cathedrals, Old Masters and Impressionist landscapes caught my eye. A powerful urge to abandon multivariate data analysis for Degas’ ballerinas came over me, but I dutifully held on to the textbook, even as it grew heavier in my arms.

Aging is also sharpening my awareness of having less time and strengthening the pull of things I want to do, e.g., meditate, take walks in the open space of sea and sky, study the spiritual wisdom of great teachers and leaders.

I now look back on this with regret, not because I think pursuing the MBA was the wrong thing to do, but because it never occurred to me that there could be room in my life for both the practical and the beautiful, the linear and the creative, the compulsory and the exciting.

I only knew how to be a good student and assimilate what I was given, not how to name my dreams and take ownership of my desires by honoring them with small, deliberate actions.

Seeing Janson’s History of Art on the shelf, I longed to sit on the floor of the crowded bookstore and thumb through it, and though I ignored this prompting of my heart, it did help me see for the first time the struggle in me between what I felt I should do and what I wanted to do.

In the twenty-plus years since, I’ve gained a better understanding of why it’s so difficult to give myself what I most want. I can see plainly that as a woman from long line of self-sacrificing females, I am predisposed toward getting all my work done before I can allow myself to play. And though this awareness doesn’t always translate into actually making the best choices, it’s a good starting point.

For those who are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, my MBTI profile contains a J, which means I’m a Judging rather than a Perceiving type. For those who are not, this simply means that in dealing with the world around me, I have a clear preference for planning and decision-making over being open to possibilities and making free-form use of my time.

I once watched my husband do an MBTI exercise with a group of educators who worked for the State of Connecticut. He tore two sheets of paper from a flip chart and taped them to opposite walls of the room. On one of the sheets he wrote in large letters, “I have to get my work done before I can play,” and on the other, “I can play any time.” He then asked the participants to place themselves where they fit along the imaginary line between the two poles.

The women, including me, congregated at or near the work-done side. The men, including my husband, placed themselves close to the play-any-time side, and we women were envious. I don’t remember anyone being in the middle.

I can see how this plays out around our house on a Saturday morning. Right after breakfast I start the laundry, spend several hours in the kitchen cooking for the coming week, tackle a cleaning project, etc.

My husband spends his morning playing music, reading or writing, and then, just about the time I’m ready to quit, he starts his chores.

In other words, he does what is most important to him first while he has the energy to be fully engaged. I, on the other hand, tend to start out with a small list of to-dos, get diverted by others that come up along the way, and can wind up doing housework until mid-afternoon. By the time I’m done and ready for the “for-me” activities, I’m too tired to fully enjoy them.

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to pull my husband over into the let’s-get-all-the-work-done-first camp instead of focusing on my own choices and figuring out how to amend my behaviors so that I can become more joyful in my work and more purposeful in my play.

I’ve also noticed that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly curious about the other end of the spectrum and more eager to try it out than I used to be. I’m less confined by all-or-nothing thinking and satisfied with small victories over old patterns.

Aging is also sharpening my awareness of having less time and strengthening the pull of things I want to do, e.g., meditate, take walks in the open space of sea and sky, study the spiritual wisdom of great teachers and leaders.

My decision to give these things priority is as practical as the one I made in the book store, for as my physical stamina and mental acuity flicker, if I want to keep doing the work that’s important to me, helping others, I will have to know how to make new choices.

Harper Reed, Chief Technology Officer for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, was used to receiving thousands of emails a day, but when the election was over, he chose to put distance between the campaign and what was coming next in his life by giving himself a week away from the Internet and 140-character tweets to read a 1,000 page history of the Stalingrad Campaign.

I like these examples of creating a healthier balance between time spent on- and offline because they represent conscious choices that are far removed from all the hype we’re hearing these days about “digital detox.”

Ultimately if we want technology to enhance and not devour our lives, we will have to know the difference between more and enough.

The overuse of electronic devices is being touted as addiction by the same media sources that are invested in keeping us tethered to them and news reports on the problem use the language of the very technology people are being asked to withdraw from.

People need “time away to reformat their own personal hard drives.” Areas where gadgets are prohibited are “coldspots.” Twenty-something girls report becoming better friends (“sort of, giggle, giggle”) after going “cold-palmed” for two weeks. “Device-free” parties feature “analog distractions” such as board games, crafts, even a typewriter!

Like a vibrating cell phone, language such as this directs our attention toward rather away from the technology being abused. It sends mixed messages that minimize the seriousness and the pervasiveness of the problem.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, whenever someone continually talks about when, where and what they used to drink, they call it a “drunk-a-log” and see it as a sign of potential relapse.

For me, hearing someone talk about needing to take a break from tweets, emails, phone calls, RSS, SMS, IM, etc. has the same ring.

Couldn’t we call it time away for rest, reflection and renewal? Couldn’t we use our “device hand” to making physical contact with the person standing in front of us? Is it really necessary to think of the outdoors, the stars in the sky or nature, as a coldspot?

I think a better approach is to simply ask the question, “Is this working for you?” and we’re more likely to arrive at an honest answer if we avoid technical jargon.

Technology is pervasive, and we can’t totally abstain from using it. As Levi Felix, a self-proclaimed recovering techie and creator of the “Digital Detox Retreat” observes, “I love that technology connects us and is taking our civilization to the next level, but we have to learn how to use it, and not have it use us.”

Taking an evening or even a week off from your devices, going on an unplugged retreat, temporarily disabling the phone, is only the beginning. The real test comes as you face the decision, moment-to-moment, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, whether you really need to boot up, check in, or log on.

The best definition of addiction I know sums up the condition in a single word—more. Addiction, to booze, drugs, money, shoes, chocolate, anything, simply means always wanting more, never feeling you have enough.

If you want more technology there’s no lack of it. But if you want other things in your life—solitude, face-to-face conversation, uninterrupted space—you have to make room for them.

Ultimately if we want technology to enhance and not devour our lives, we will have to know the difference between more and enough.

And so now, whenever we settle into our seats, we look at each other and one of us will say, “We’re on the train!”

This Christmas our little joke took on new meaning. When we arrived in New Haven, our usual point of departure, the long-term parking lot in the station was full and so were all the others in the surrounding area. This had never happened before. It was beginning to look doubtful that we would be able to get on that train.

As the minutes ticked away, my husband drove around like a maniac, hopping from red light to red light, looking in vain for a lot that didn’t have a sign that said FULL in front, while I kept saying we needed to pull over, get information and pause to consider our options.

On our third circuit of Union Station, he finally heard me. He pulled into the passenger drop-off area in front where just it so happened that Santa Claus was waiting to give us what we most needed for Christmas—a parking space.

Slowing down requires disengagement, but this is more and more being seen as something we are only willing to allow ourselves to indulge in during special times, a long weekend or a vacation or even retirement.

A man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Kris Kringle, but in a florescent yellow vest with SECURITY in large black letters instead of a red suit, asked how he could help and when we told him our problem he took out a cell phone and called a friend in the garage who said that there was one spot left on the roof. We made the train, literally with seconds to spare.

One of the things I’d wanted to use the time on the train for was to write a New Year’s column about the benefits of slowing down. I hadn’t expected my idea to be given a jump start by a real time experience.

When I told my daughter I’d be traveling by rail to make my Christmas visits, she said wistfully, “The train is like writing a letter instead of sending an email.”

How many people do you know who write real letters? Or even notes on their Christmas card?

Like most of those in the younger-than-I-am generations, my daughter is well-versed in all forms of electronic communication, yet she still looks for ways of slowing down. She takes her son on the train to Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes, and occasionally writes me a real hold-in-your-hand letter.

What’s interesting is that she has to give herself permission to do these things. Instant-response, fast-paced sorts of activities, like her morning run, are a more natural part of her daily rhythm. But she’s not alone in her desire for alternatives to a fast-forward way of life.

In earlier columns I’ve talked about taking a “time out,” but it’s gotten to the point where suggesting that someone not text back immediately or unplug altogether seems pretty radical.

A photo from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy showing a jumble of cords and cell phones being recharged at a shrine of the Virgin Mary recently brought this home to me.

In an emergency, devices like these become lifelines, but on ordinary days they allow us to make trivial details of our lives seem urgent.

Over time, the spaces in our daily lives we set apart for quiet reflection are, like the shrine, overcome by the electronic devices we use to connect with others and we risk losing touch with what’s going on inside of us.

Slowing down requires disengagement, but this is more and more being seen as something we are only willing to allow ourselves to indulge in during special times, a long weekend or a vacation or even retirement.

The alternate to living life without rest stops has become like a piece of jewelry worn on rare occasions and kept in a box the rest of the time where it neither gives us as much pleasure nor adds as much luster to our daily life as it could if we made regular use of it.

If we don’t practice slowing down on a day-to-day basis and continually push back against the frenetic pace induced by technology and a culture of instant gratification, we will drain ourselves dry.

Only by regularly exercising the capacity to pull back, pause and regroup will we be able to deal effectively with both the immediate and long-term challenges in our lives.

Like most people who live on the outer hook of Cape Cod, where the land juts thirty miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, I’ve long accepted my vulnerability to howling winds and rising seas, but I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit to thinking a great deal more about it since Hurricane Sandy. When the images of devastation on television look a lot like the beach houses, marinas, and sand dunes you see every day, it’s a powerful reminder that it could be your turn next.

So how do you get ready—not physically, but psychologically and spiritually? Whether it’s a superstorm, a professional crisis, or a personal loss, how do you prepare yourself to move beyond your own fears so that you can be a calm and supportive presence to others? What can you do to make it more likely that in a disaster you will be able to offer the best of who you are?

Surely our potential for getting through natural disasters like hurricanes, or man-made ones like the “fiscal cliff,” would be enhanced by having real conversations, seeking common ground, and sharing responsibility when difficulties arise, through acts of kindness and courtesy, and adopting the attitude that other people are doing the best they can.

I remember reading a story about a man who was walking his dog on 9/11 when he came around a corner and saw the second of the Twin Towers burst into flame. His first thought was about survival—he needed find a store and get water. As he pushed a cart full of bottled water out onto the sidewalk, however, he saw ghost-like people covered in grey dust running up the street toward him and suddenly felt ashamed that he had thought only of himself. I don’t know what he did next, but I’d like to think he started passing out bottles. And I hope I’d do the same.

Being in it together, in community with others, is the answer to whatever crisis life brings our way, be it a natural disaster, or joblessness after unemployment benefits have ended, or caring for a loved one with a terminal illness. And what frightens me, even more than climate change or economic uncertainty, are the forces of division, ethnic, economic, and political, I see at work in our society. Widespread anger, blame and a sense of individual entitlement keep us from using everyday interactions as opportunities to practice fellowship with one another.

A few years ago I was at the grocery store when I heard a voice over the PA system announce that a technical malfunction in the card readers was preventing customers from paying electronically. If you wanted to pay using a credit or debit card you’d have to do it the old fashioned way and fill out a slip.

I finished my shopping and got in a long line leading up to the service desk where a frazzled young woman was operating one of those manual slide credit card machines as fast as she could. I noticed that there were a number of grocery-filled carts pulled over to the side near her, one of them dripping ice cream on the floor, and I asked a clerk what was going on. “People got so angry they just left their carts and walked out,” he explained.

All I could think of on the way home was, what if this had been a real emergency?

Surely our potential for getting through natural disasters like hurricanes, or man-made ones like the “fiscal cliff,” would be enhanced by having real conversations, seeking common ground, and sharing responsibility when difficulties arise, through acts of kindness and courtesy, and adopting the attitude that other people are doing the best they can.

Shortly after arriving at my retreat destination on Skaneateles Lake, I took a walk on Glen Haven Road, a narrow lane cut into the steep hill above the western shoreline.

Just beyond the bend in the road where crimson Virginia Creeper had wrapped itself like a shawl around the arms of a golden maples, I saw a woman jogging up the hill toward me, and then a car approaching from behind her. A moment later I heard I car coming up behind me as well.

Suddenly my walking route, which was normally deserted on an off-season weekday, had turned into a crowded thoroughfare. There was no shoulder, and I thought I might have to leap down a ladder to a boathouse to get out of the way, but both cars stopped, and the driver coming toward me pulled over as far as he could to let the driver coming from behind me pass, and then he carefully proceeded. We all waved at each other and went on our way.

These acts of courtesy felt very special to me. Why? Because they were in sharp contrast to the stories of rudeness I routinely hear about from my clients who are looking for work.

Individually we may be powerless to change the employment situation, but we can change how we handle ourselves within it. And we can start by claiming our right to be treated with respect.

Someone reaches the final round of interviews, spends a full day talking to a prospective employer, and then there’s dead silence for a month. Phone calls to referrals go ignored. A man who has managed his own business for 25 years is told by an insensitive gatekeeper that he has nothing tangible to offer.

I wonder, would it really take that much for employers to update potential candidates periodically? Or to call someone who has been referred to them back to let them know they can’t be of help? Or to point someone whose skills are out-of-date in a direction where he might be able to get the training that would allow him to be considered?

Would it make a big difference to the people on the receiving end? I say yes. We are human beings first and work-seekers second.

A short debrief session with a contender who has come in second or third in a search could help him to make meaning out of the experience and get going again faster. It’s better to know up front that someone is unavailable than to waste time and energy in pursuit. And having somewhere to turn to bridge a gap in credentials is a completely different experience from being told you’re useless.

We all know there are fewer jobs and more competition, and that no matter who won the election, the picture is not going to improve overnight, just as we all know—even though we’d like it be true—there’s no quick way to lose weight. That’s why a photo of a placard at a political rally showing the word JOBS with the J and the O crossed out leaving only BS recently went viral. While the downward trend in the unemployment rate may be encouraging, it doesn’t mean that there will be enough jobs to go around any time soon.

So I’m on a campaign for work-search courtesy and I invite anyone who has experienced it (or the lack of it) to jump on the bandwagon and leave a comment.

Individually we may be powerless to change the employment situation, but we can change how we handle ourselves within it. And we can start by claiming our right to be treated with respect.

There’s a very famous scene in the movie Midnight Cowboy where a down-and-out, homeless character named Ratso Rizzo (played by Dustin Hoffman) is almost run over by a cab driver who disregards him. Ratso immediately starts pounding on the hood of the car with his fists and shouts, “I’m walking here, I’m walking here!” **

People who are looking for work are walking here, too, and they have the right to be treated with courtesy.

** Interesting sidelight: this scene was actually not in the script. They were filming in a cordoned-off area of New York, and a cab driver ignored a barricade and burst onto the set, and Hoffman responded brilliantly in character.

My time at the lake this year was about being in the here and now. I try to do this at home, but being away frames it differently.

There’s the packing and the unpacking, the seven hour trip there and back, the joy of arriving and the sadness of leaving. Going to the same place every year has sharpened my awareness of these dichotomies, and I know the alternating rhythm well enough that sway with it immediately.

I’ve come to understand that a prerequisite to any creative endeavor is being able to let go of the to-do list.

This rhythm came the clearest to me on my first walk after we got there, when I gave thanks for the time away, and my last walk before we left, when I reminded myself that that the day would inevitably come when I won’t be here.

In between, there was time in the early morning to watch the sky brighten slowly as the sun made it’s way over the steep slope on the eastern side of the lake, time to flip through the tourist magazines and travel guides looking at places not to visit, time to read a history of the United States which would have taken me months to finish at home. And time to do what I came for, to write.

The best thing about this blessed space was that what made its way onto the page was not what I’d expected to be working on. It did not appear on any of the scribbled lists of ideas or concepts to be developed I had brought with me. It made itself known because I put myself in a physical location and a state of mind that nurtured openness.

I’ve come to understand that a prerequisite to any creative endeavor is letting go of the to-do list. What it yielded for me this time was a letter of about 2000 words to my oldest grandson who is considering going into the military after he graduates from high school next year.

In sharing my thoughts with him, I was able to utilize my education in history, my experiences with leadership, and my skills as a communicator. It gave me a deep sense of purpose as the matriarch of my family, and as a writer, which I found richly satisfying.

INTEGRATION
As I developed my ideas about war, peace, service, duty, and love on paper, the various parts of myself came together like a picture in a child’s activity book where you draw a line from dot 1 to dot 2, then from 2 to 3 and so forth, until you get to the end and you see it’s a duck!

I was able to connect profiles of civil war leaders I admired to anecdotes about family members who had served in World War II, which in turn linked to a phrase I remembered from Tim O’Brien’s novel about the Vietnam War called The Things They Carried, "There are no war stories, only love stories," and to a line from the end of the musical Les Misérables: "To love another person is to see the face of God." Each reference point was a step closer to a more complete picture of who I am and what I to hold most dear.

I don’t yet know what my grandson thought when he finished reading the letter, and I may not be around to know what he sees in it later in life, but I do know that what I found when I connected the dots was a whole person and amazing grandmother!

I know this feeling of being fully connected to myself and another person will not last. Feeling good about my place in the world is something that comes and goes.

But the process that resulted in this letter has provided a model for creating space to allow feelings, thoughts and ideas to bubble up into my consciousness and come together in a new form.

Even more significantly, I have demonstrated to myself that I have the capacity to take action when a new shape appears.

Within the confines of my regular schedule, this very long letter to my grandson would not have happened, and, knowing how important writing is to me, I am motivated to create more such spaces.

RE-ENTRY
In Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes about collecting a pocket full shells to bring home to serve as a tangible reminder of the openness she experienced during unscheduled time alone by the sea.

I, too, treasure leaves, rocks, dried flowers I collect during time away, but I also know that a good re-entry requires action steps as well as symbols. So on the way home I made a list of follow-up activities:

1. Catch up my journal to include the trip home.
    
2. Make a collage of images to capture in visual form the openness and freedom of my time away, and place it where I can see it often to keep me aware of how open space feels.
    
3. Set aside days at home to live the way I did at the lake—writing in the morning, going out at midday for a walk and lunch, coming back to a few hours of quiet time before dinner.
    

My mother, who enjoyed traveling, had among her repertoire of sayings one about being on vacation. She observed that no matter how good a time you’re having there always comes a point when, "Your trip leaves you," and you want to be home.

I thought about this as we pulled out of the driveway of the house on Skaneateles Lake for the last time, and I realized that when you take a retreat vacation (instead of one with lots of going and doing) your trip doesn’t leave you, you leave your trip.

I found this insight comforting because it meant that it just might be possible for me to sustain myself, in small but significant ways, in the open space of new possibilities when I got home!

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting at a Board of Health hearing, listening to a detailed description of the advanced septic system proposed for the house being built across the street.

The technicalities were way beyond my grasp, but I got the gist of it—waste would be collected, aerated and filtered through a series of membranes and holding tanks until what was left was potable.

I found the idea of being able to transform discarded matter into something useful intriguing and tried to think of a way I could use it as an analogy in my own area of expertise.

Then I remembered what I learned about feedback from Charlie and Edie Seashore.

Feedback is simply information, and in spite of what we may sometimes think, it’s neither negative nor positive.

Like input to the system discussed by the Board of Health, it can be processed through a series of mental “membranes” to eliminate the garbage and refine what has potential for use.

So the next time you have a 360 evaluation or annual review, or a coworker or spouse lobs an uninvited observation, suggestion or assessment of your character your way, remember these two principles: one, it’s not all about you, and two, you can choose what to do with it.

But if we don’t take the time to treat it, and especially if we make value judgments about it, good or bad, we give up our power to choose how we’re going to utilize it.

Principle One: Feedback Always Reveals Information About the Giver

Like most wives, I give my husband a lot of feedback, like when he comes back from the grocery store and I say things such as, “Broccoli wasn’t on the list,” or “Why’d you buy tomatoes?  We already have six cans in the pantry?”

It has become increasingly obvious to me that this feedback says very little about my husband’s grocery shopping abilities and speak volumes about my need to micromanage the contents of our refrigerator, food costs, daily menus and dietary intake.

And to think I ask him to do the shopping to take something off my plate!

If I stop to think about what my comments are saying about me, the giver of feedback, new possibilities emerge—I could keep my mouth shut and change the menu, or I could hold up the broccoli and say, “Mmm—looks nice and fresh.”

It’s helpful when we’re on the receiving end of feedback to remember that what is being said always tells us something about the source, and if we do nothing more that make space to consider that it isn’t all about us, it can change our lives.

Even a little chink in our armor of automatic defensiveness can offer the chance to discover more about the person we perceive in that moment as “coming at us.”

When I’m helping clients prepare for performance reviews, I suggest they “play reporter.” Be curious, I tell them—when someone offers feedback that feels critical, say something neutral, like “How interesting,” or “Tell me more.” Seize the opportunity to learn more about your boss and what he or she cares about.

Yet even as I say this, I know that it is not easy to do. Often I have kicked myself afterward for missing an opportunity for a deeper level of communication and connection.

Principle Two: Feedback Is Ultimately Controlled by the Receiver

Many years ago I was enthusiastically telling a new client how he could revitalize his professional life, and I got so caught up in my plan that all of a sudden he looked at me with panic in his eyes and exclaimed, “Wow, you’re intense!”

It took me several days to realize that if I had used his comment as an opportunity to explore how he was feeling I would have seen that he was overwhelmed and could have slowed things down and reassured him that we’d take it a step at time.

I now credit this incident with helping me be more attuned to where my clients are than where I want to take them.

Notice how, as the receiver of feedback, I was in complete charge of what I did with it, both in the beginning when I turned it on myself and took the blame for being a flawed counselor, and later when I put it to productive use for my own professional development.

Applying the Seashores’ teaching to situations like this allows us to mull over the value of the feedback we give or receive at our own pace and respond from a wider range of choices.

In other words, to run it through an internal “information treatment plant” until we get to what’s clean, pure and useful for our own growth.

So the next time you have a 360 evaluation or annual review, or a coworker or spouse lobs an uninvited observation, suggestion or assessment of your character your way, remember these two principles: one, it’s not all about you, and two, you can choose what to do with it.

During July and August the bayside beaches of Cape Cod are prime destinations at sunset. It’s the best show in town and tourists and locals alike flock to it.

The other day, as sunset was approaching, I decided I would go to Sunken Meadow, the bay beach closest to my house. As I pulled into the packed parking lot and saw groups of visitors socializing, wine glasses in hand, my inner negativity was stirred up and I said to myself “What are all these people doing on my beach?” I had come to view a natural wonder, not watch them party.

I decided to go further up the road to the Wellfleet Bay Audubon Sanctuary and walk one of the trails out to the bay. To my delight, there was only one other car in the parking lot, and I didn’t see another soul as I passed Try Island and followed the boardwalk out to the tidal flats. I was able to watch the crimson sun slip into the glimmering teal water in perfect solitude.

But when an encounter with someone causes you to slide into self-deprecation, try to remember you’re comparing your inside to their outside, and that they may very well be doing the same thing with you!

A few days later, I was talking to another year-round resident about the trials and tribulations of living in a place where people love to vacation. This woman had worked for many years at the Audubon, and she startled me by saying, “When I was there, the summers were absolutely crazy—so many people, barely time to catch your breath.”

Clearly, what for me is a sanctuary has been for her a source of stress.

As I reflected on the difference in our views, it struck me that she was looking at the situation as an insider, someone who had worked at the Audubon from 9 to 5 every day, while I was an outsider, an after hours visitor, in a sense, a “tourist.”

It reminded me of how we do the same thing in looking at other people. Because we tend to evaluate them against the ever-present (and often relentless) measurements we take of ourselves based on parental messages, past mistakes or fear of failure, we often see them as brighter, more capable and secure than we are. Unconsciously we tip the scale in their favor.

Just yesterday a client, who runs a respected nonprofit agency almost singlehandedly, told me about going to meet with the head of a community agency to ask for help. She said she felt inferior the moment she stepped into the building because it was so much ritzier than her own, and she went on to say that she felt she had blown the opportunity. I could see that what she was doing was measuring herself against externals and minimizing her own accomplishments. I said it sounded to me as if she had made a good beginning, and I made some suggestions about how she might build on it.

I once visited a very affluent woman who lived in an elegant apartment in mid-town Manhattan. When I gave her a compliment on the artwork on her walls, she brushed it aside and told me about going to give a private yoga lesson at a Fifth Avenue penthouse. She stepped off the elevator and came face-to-face with Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse—the penthouse belonged to William S Paley, CEO of CBS.

A few years later, I had the opportunity to go to another swanky New York address to help a Vice-President of a Fortune 500 company with his work-search. I was so intimidated that I went out and bought a whole new outfit to give me confidence.

Yet even in my new clothes, I felt my awkwardness from the beginning. I was sure that even the doorman saw right through me and knew that I didn’t belong there.

The elevator operator asked me what floor I wanted and, as I’d practiced, I said casually, “Forty-four, please.” On the way up I reminded myself that I was there because the executive needed something I was good at, and that our project would be a collaboration. We arrived and as I stepped out of the elevator, the operator observed, “The penthouse—you must be important.”

I turned to him with a smile and said, “We all are.”

Awe, respect, even a good dose of humility, are all appropriate when you stand before someone else with great talent, character, attractiveness, or wealth.

But when an encounter with someone causes you to slide into self-deprecation, try to remember you’re comparing your inside to their outside, and that they may very well be doing the same thing with you!

“Or is it?” Edie replied, to much laughter.

It was a reminder of how easily we fall back into seeing our circumstances in habitual ways that don’t serve us well.

I didn’t realize just how much I needed it until the course ended and the very next day the full weight of summer descended upon me—tourist gridlock in the grocery store, a calendar complicated by trying to juggle family visits and client sessions, my own competing desires to get things done and still have enough time and energy left over to enjoy summer.

By taking the time to learn more about another form of life instead of immediately rejecting it, I have tried, as the Dalai Lama suggests to “walk all the way around a problem.”

And if all that wasn’t enough, there was slime mold. It was the last straw!

I’d stepped out into the cool night air to get my thinking to a better place. Seeing my Martha Washington germaniums blooming in a pot on the front stoop brought some relief, but as I paused to enjoy them I was confronted by a pizza sized, florescent yellow mass in the mulch next to the steps. There, shining in the moonlight, was a disgusting glob of what is commonly referred to as the dog vomit variety of slime mold, physarum polycephalum.

Not surprisingly, given my do-what-you-have-to-do-to-get-through-it state of mind, I decided to make war on the yucky stuff. I hit it with the hose and a chocolate brown powder burst into the air like smoke from a factory chimney.

I enlisted my husband to do some research on the Internet and find out how to get rid of it, and he reported back to me that you can’t. It’s been around for a billion years and has reached a state of what scientists call, “evolutionary perfection.”

And that powder I saw when I used the hose on it—it was countless tiny spores that have now burrowed into the mulch and are awaiting the right conditions to become active.

“It is what it is,” I said.

Or is it?

As it turns out, slime mold is not mold at all but a single-celled amoeba-like creature with millions of tiny nuclei. And it has some remarkable abilities.

For example, when presented with a number of nutritional choices, it touches upon all of them and, based on its needs, either “decides” to move toward one or splits itself among many. In one experiment, slime mold was provided with food particles arranged in a pattern similar to Tokyo and its surrounding cities and the creature fed itself by constructing a pattern of tubes strikingly similar to the Japanese railway system.

Slime mold has the amazing capacity to “flow toward things it likes … and away from things it doesn’t … without a single conscious thought.”

When I stop to consider that I’m trying, with mixed success, to use my superior cognitive functions to achieve the same results—growth through feeding on nourishing thoughts and actions—I have much to learn from this brainless blob, especially when the spores of negativity that reside in me are activated by fatigue, stress and vulnerability, and heightened by economic concerns, political controversies, here and throughout the world, and the extreme weather that is increasingly a part of all our lives.

My summer lament is minor compared to what so many people are experiencing, but the choice of what to feed on is the same.

When a woman in a fire-ravaged part of Colorado, standing among the piles of ash which represent all that is left of her home, can speak about the tree that survived in the yard she is bearing witness to this power of choice.

I have no idea what we’ll do about the unwelcome invader in front of our house, but I do know that, by taking the time to learn more about another form of life instead of immediately rejecting it, I have tried, as the Dalai Lama suggests to “walk all the way around a problem.” Doing so has made me feel lighter and that’s a much better way to start the summer.