The Importance of Belonging

 

 

I have written often about being a "see both sides" moderate in a sea of divisiveness. But it doesn't take being in the middle to be perplexed or enraged at people seeming to ignore, pervert, or otherwise not accept what we consider to be the plain facts staring them in the face. Whether presidential elections, global health crises, or conflict in the Middle East, many of us are collectively exasperated at what appears to be willful denial by those who do not share our beliefs.

At the risk of sounding too cynical, I would argue that, for as frustrating and unproductive as this is, it is to be expected. Because as humans, as important as truth and progress and peace are, more centrally vital to us is a sense of belonging.

"Tribal" is a loaded word that I probably shouldn't use in this context. But it is telling to me that the long-running reality show "Survivor" uses the word "tribes" when talking about the teams that are pitted against each other for comfort, immunity, and ultimately a million dollars. And it is "Survivor" that underscored for me that "belonging" trumps all when it comes to how humans communicate, interact, and compete.

Survival is in the name of the show, and when it first aired that was what was emphasized, was "who can survive these trying elements" of isolation and cold and insufficient food. But from the beginning, it became clear that winning in this convoluted contest had little to do with who was strongest, most cunning, or even who had the strongest will to just tough it out. Rather, it was about alliances: forming them, breaking them, securing them, and scrambling them. When it comes to survival, it's not what you do, it's who you ally with.

And why would this not surprise us? Because we humans value belonging above all else. We value many other things, to be sure. We pursue truth. We seek comfort. We fight for justice. We want to be happy. But our basest impulses are to belong. To say it another way, our greatest fear is to be cast out.

Filter all we're arguing about from that lens. The people that produce the news and the people that consume the news are seeking many things, but most of all they are acting "tribally." And they are doing so not because they don't love truth or justice or money or comfort, but rather because they value something even greater than those things. 

Is this right or wrong? If wrong, how do I as an individual change that system? How do I even survive in that system and have integrity? These are questions for another time. I'm just trying to get you to see things in a different light. We may still be frustrated that people are being ignorant or deceptive or just plain malicious. But we may no longer be taken by surprise by it.

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Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "This Is Your Time," by Ruby Bridges.

It was a difficult decision for both of my parents to agree to let me go to school along with the marshals, especially for my dad, but they knew it was necessary. My father, like most dads, wanted nothing more than to protect his little girl. But as a young black man, it was not safe for him to walk me to school

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir," by Matthew Perry.

Matthew is the reason we are all laughing in that fountain in the opening titles. (Lisa Kudrow)

Not having a parent on that flight is one of the many things that led to a lifelong feeling of abandonment.… If I’d been enough, they wouldn’t have left me unaccompanied, right? Isn’t that how all this was supposed to work? The other kids had parents with them. I had a sign and a magazine.

I came out screaming, and I didn’t stop screaming. For weeks. I was a colicky kid—my stomach was a problem from the very start. My parents were being driven crazy by the amount I was crying. Crazy? Concerned, so they hauled me off to a doctor. This is 1969, a prehistoric time compared to now. That said, I don’t know how advanced civilization has to be to understand that giving phenobarbital to a baby who just entered his second month of breathing God’s air is, at best, an interesting approach to pediatric medicine. But it wasn’t that rare in the 1960s to slip the parents of a colicky child a major barbiturate. Some older doctors swore by it—and by it, I mean, “prescribing a major barbiturate for a child that’s barely born who won’t stop crying.” 

I want to be very clear on this point. I do NOT blame my parents for this. Your child is crying all the time, clearly something is wrong, the doctor prescribes a drug, he’s not the only doctor who thinks it’s a good idea, you give the drug to the child, the child stops crying. It was a different time. 

There I was, on the knee of my stressed mother, screaming over her twenty-one-year-old shoulder as some dinosaur in a white coat, barely looking up from his wide oak desk, tutted under his bad breath at “parents these days,” and wrote a script for a major addictive barbiturate. 

I was noisy and needy, and it was answered with a pill.

My dad, who later in life became a wonderful father, was leaving his baby alone with a twenty-one-year-old woman who he knew was way too young to parent a child on her own. My mother is wonderful, and emotional, and she was just too young. She, like me, had been abandoned, too, right there in the parking lot of the border crossing between the United States and Canada. My mother had gotten pregnant with me when she was twenty years old, and by the time she was twenty-one, and a new mother, she was single. If I’d had a baby at twenty-one, I would have tried to drink it. She did her best, and that says a lot about her, but still, she simply wasn’t ready for the responsibility, and I wasn’t ready to deal with anything, being just born n’all. 

Mom and I were both abandoned, in fact, before we’d even gotten to know each other. 

With Dad gone, I quickly understood that I had a role to play at home. My job was to entertain, to cajole, to delight, to make others laugh, to soothe, to please, to be the Fool to the entire court.

But soon I had a beautiful sister! Caitlin was as cute as could be, and I loved her instantly. But there was now a family growing up around me, a family I didn’t really feel a part of. It was around this time that I made the conscious choice to say, Fuck it—it’s every man for himself. That’s when the bad behavior started—I got shitty grades, I started smoking, I beat up Pierre’s son (an eventual prime minister himself) Justin Trudeau. (I decided to end my argument with him when he was put in charge of an entire army.) I made the choice to live in my head and not in my heart. It was safer in my head—you couldn’t be broken there, not yet anyway.

I felt physically completely ruined … but the detox was going well. At least that’s what my dad and the sober companion thought. What they didn’t know was that I had hidden a bottle of Xanax in my bedroom. This is what it’s like to be an addict: you do things you never dreamed you would do. My wonderful father had dropped everything to move in, to love and support me through one more self-created disaster, and I paid him back by hiding drugs in my nightstand.

I thought about the first day of season four, after the summer that I had very publicly gone to rehab. At the first table read obviously all eyes were on me. My pal Kevin Bright, one of the shows executive producers, had opened the proceedings by saying, “Anyone want to talk about their summer vacations?” and I took the opportunity to break the ice, saying rather loudly and soberly, “OK! I’ll start!” thus releasing all the tension in the room. Everyone erupted in laughter and applause for me for turning my life around and showing up looking good and ready to work. Probably to this day, it was the smartest joke I have ever made.

Despite how it may appear, I was never suicidal, thank God—I never actually wanted to die. In fact, in the back of my mind I always had some semblance of hope. But, if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept. That’s how skewed my thinking had become—I was able to hold those two things in my mind at the same time: I don’t want to die, but if I have to in order to get sufficient drugs on board, then amen to oblivion. I can distinctively remember holding pills in my hand and thinking, This could kill me, and taking them anyway.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America," by Nicole Eustace.

The mayor and the members of the Philadelphia City Council are not even sure whether any roads exist at all west of the Schuylkill. Planners hope that someday Philadelphia will be an expansive city that spans the distance between two rivers, from the Delaware to the Schuylkill. But as of 1722, Philadelphia’s buildings have spread only a few blocks west from the Delaware. Despite the grand backwoods designs of a few would-be estate owners like William Keith, most Philadelphians have never so much as ventured over the Schuylkill. More and more traders and travelers from the west are crossing the Schuylkill at the point of High Street, then walking down its two-mile length to reach the city’s market. Yet few city dwellers travel in the reverse direction.

Mineral dreams fire the ambitions of many a European setting out for North America. The Spanish empire has reaped unimaginable wealth in gold and silver in its territories to the south, leaving the late-arriving English and French in desperate hopes of reproducing Spanish success. Books about the Americas routinely promise readers that the lands practically burst with bullion. A guidebook called the Atlas Geographicus, published in London in 1711, insists that, in Pennsylvania in particular, “the soil abounds with Mines, Samples of most sorts of Oar have been taken up here almost everywhere.” If this book does not explicitly promise precious metal, it certainly implies that colonial Pennsylvanians have the right to hope for mineral riches. Indeed, in this age of alchemy, many educated men believe that, in the right conditions, the skillful can transform even iron pyrite into gold.

But Peter Bezaillion, like all colonists dazzled by their own imaginations, stumbled over an inconvenient fact. Only extensive knowledge of the local land could yield clues about where to search for precious soil. And so, as they set out “in search of some Mineral or Ore,” Bezaillion and his French associates “pretended that in the Governor’s name they . . . required the Indians of Conestoga to send some of their People with them to assist them, and be serviceable to them, for which the Governor would pay them.” In the eyes of the members of the Provincial Council, Bezaillion practiced a double deception here, prospecting on land that belonged to the proprietors while trying to trick Indians into aiding him—all on the pretext that his efforts came at the behest of English authorities.

When Pennsylvania colonists continue to grumble about Native demands for “presents,” sometimes going so far as to mistake wampum simply as a Native form of money, they entirely miss the central importance of presence in the Native world. Wampum holds memories and messages more effectively than paper and parchment for the simple reason that it acquires full meaning only when held aloft in the hands of knowledgeable speakers. So much of colonial life relies on anonymous exchanges, from printed texts that circulate without authors ever meeting readers to manufactured products bought by consumers who never meet the producers. Knowledge grows and markets multiply in the colonists’ mobile transatlantic world, but personal relationships and communal responsibilities are being lost along the way. For Captain Smith, who has devoted himself to learning the languages that allow him to draw people together, plotting a journey without planning words of condolence and preparing belts of wampum would be obvious folly. Yet Governor Keith has hardly a glimmer of true understanding of Native ways.

Magic and science, wonder and terror, hope and fear. Settler colonists can never decide if they are on the verge of finding a new Eden—a place where wealth comes almost without toil and all the lush country is theirs for the taking—or if they have ventured to the very gates of hell, to a land where labor is forced by lash and land is seized by musket, where each person has a price and the cost of success is the surrender of every Christian ideal.

For all the fine talk you hear over cups and tankards at coffeeshops and tavern counters—gossip about fortunes in golden wheat or in mineral ore—much of the wealth being built by colonists in this new country comes from keeping iron control over flesh and bone.

Recommended Reads, 48th in a Quarterly Series

Books I've read lately that I would recommend:

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (Aviv). As much as we've progressed in mainstreaming conversations about mental health issues, it's still critically important to know the stories of those who suffer from them.

 

Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America (Fallows). What a fun way to "visit" places all over this vast country of ours, and understand the things that make them tick economically and socially.

 

Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (Bono). I don't listen to a lot of U2, but this pairing of song lyrics and life stories was compelling throughout.

 

The Anomaly (Le Tellier). I'm surprised they haven't made this into a movie, or better yet a Netflix thriller.

 

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (Hämäläinen). Really cool to get a dive deep into Native American history on this continent.

 

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir (Perry). A searingly honest account of addiction.

 

 

 

Lazy Linking, 241st in an Occasional Series (Feel-Good Music Version)

 

Stuff I liked lately on the Internets:

241.1 The boppiest track from #DearEvanHansen? Rendered in acapella? On 20 screens? On repeat please https://bit.ly/3S7Qs7G

 

241.2 She may have the prettiest voice I've ever heard, and it's matched perfectly to this timeless classic https://bit.ly/3Q3ltHj 

 

241.3 Bach Cello Suite No. 1? Played by Yo Yo Ma? In Great Smoky Mountains? W/the sounds of babbling brooks in the background? So joyfully relaxing! https://youtu.be/Rx_IibJH4rA

 

241.4 I didn't know I needed wholesome acapella Muslim covers of pop songs, but I do and you do too https://www.youtube.com/@RhamzanDays/videos

 

241.5 This song is so dreamy, fun, and catchy, so I have it on heavy rotation around here https://bit.ly/3Fn0hHz

 

241.6 2 80's pop icons looking and sounding great 40 yrs later and I am here for it https://bit.ly/470ATTO

 

241.7 Been following this multi-talented musician for years and I find this video his most creative and audacious because it's filmed in reverse! https://bit.ly/3QeoGUO 

Admirable Traits of Successful College Sports Coaches

 

My university and hospital work at work has connected me more closely to college sports, something I followed pretty closely as a fan in my younger days but have recently had little to no time for. The football season is the biggest deal and it's been quite an entertaining year no matter where you look. Maybe it's always this wild, but everywhere I turn there seems to be an amazing highlight or plot twist that leaves me slack-jawed in response.

In parallel, I feel like I've gravitated to the habits of the most successful coaches in the college sports space. Not that I ever aspire to the same role. But it's not a bad parallel to what I do as president of a consulting firm.

I've had two jobs in my 27+ year career. But I know that's not the norm. Especially right out of college, most people are at a position for two to four years tops, before changing jobs or going back to school or moving to a new city. I would love to keep every one of my co-workers for as long as possible, and I work hard so that they're happy and motivated and supported, so that they feel like there is room to mature and grow and thrive within the firm. But I know that we work for people for a stage in their career and that they will have many other stages in their career. It is a truth, and it is something to be celebrated.

Just like college coaches know that their players, the ones that actually achieve success and secure wins on the field, are not with them forever. So they must recruit, instruct, activate, and motivate...only to have those players move on to the rest of their lives.

Perhaps this frustrates coaches, particularly in basketball where "one and done" cases (players coming for a single season only to move on to the pros) are common. But, as with many firms like the one I am at, it is a characteristic of the business, and in fact it is something to be cherished. 

Indeed, the best coaches work hard to not only coach their players towards success on the field but also to create value for their next chapter at the professional level. They coach their players towards greater excellence in the sport, not only because that translates into wins for the team but also because it sets that player up for future success as a pro.

To be sure, there are coaches that are rigid and egotistical, who bend players to their system without regard to whether that helps players to maximize their personal upsides. But most successful coaches know that the path to sustained success is to be seen as a place that wins on the field by letting their players shine. That's what attracts future players to want to play for that team and coach, after all.

You can see a lot of parallels to a professional services firm that is perpetually saying hello to new hires while saying goodbye to others who are moving on to something new. I hope that those who I've had the privilege of working with would tell you that even as I was trying my best to maximize the success of the firm, I never lost sight of wanting individual people to thrive and grow in the process. I think that's what makes successful college coaches successful. I think that's what I want to emulate too.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America," by Pekka Hämäläinen.

By 1776, various European colonial powers together claimed nearly all of the continent for themselves, but Indigenous peoples and powers controlled it. The maps in modern textbooks that paint much of early North America with neat, color-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial claims for actual holdings. The history of the overwhelming and persisting Indigenous power recounted here remains largely unknown, and it is the biggest blind spot in common understandings of the American past.

This book is first and foremost a history of Indigenous peoples, but it is also a history of colonialism. The history of North America that emerges is of a place and an era shaped by warfare above all. The contest for the continent was, in essence, a four-centuries-long war that saw almost every Native nation fight encroaching colonial powers—sometimes in alliances, sometimes alone. Although the Indian wars in North America have been written about many times before, this book offers a broad Indigenous view of the conflict. For Native nations, war was often a last resort. In many cases, if not most, they attempted to bring Europeans into their fold, making them useful. These were not the actions of supplicants; the Europeans were the supplicants—their lives, movements, and ambitions determined by Native nations that drew the newcomers into their settlements and kinship networks, seeking trade and allies. Indian men and women alike were sophisticated diplomats, shrewd traders, and forceful leaders. The haughty Europeans assumed that the Indians were weak and uncivilized, only to find themselves forced to agree to humiliating terms—an inversion of common assumptions about White dominance and Indian dispossession that have survived to the present.

Kinship—an all-pervasive sense of relatedness and mutual obligations—became the central organizing principle for human life. Kinship was the crucial adhesive that kept people and nations linked together. It would be a mistake to see this adaptation as some kind of a failure or aberration of civilization, as European newcomers almost invariably did. North American Indians had experimented with ranked societies and all-powerful spiritual leaders and had found them deficient and dangerous. They had opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world—a communal ethos available to everyone who was capable of proper thoughts and deeds and willing to share their possessions. Their ideal society was a boundless commonwealth that could be—at least in theory—extended to outsiders, infinitely.

Unknowingly, Columbus had brought together two parts of humankind that had been separated by oceans for several millennia. The Indigenous inhabitants may have appeared utterly alien and inferior to the Spanish, but the two sapiens contingents were genetically identical. All of their meaningful differences were cultural. Columbus may have been disillusioned, but he knew what he, a good European, should do. He came from a society where one’s position was determined largely by birth. One found purpose in preaching, fighting, or serving others. For Columbus and his contemporaries, there was little doubt where the Taínos belonged in that order. To Spanish eyes, they were primitive heathens living on an isolated island, and thus familiar: Spanish soldier-mariners had subdued similar people in the Canary Islands only a few decades earlier. The conquest of the Canaries had served as a laboratory of overseas imperialism, educating the Spanish in how to make strangers subjects, even slaves. Obsessed with gold, Columbus spent weeks in the West Indies hunting for it, and along the way he began to distinguish between good Indians and bad Indians. Good Indians were meek and made docile servants; bad Indians resisted Spanish demands and fought back. Good Indians could be converted; bad Indians should be enslaved. Columbus had given Spain a blueprint for a New World empire. After sailing back to Spain to secure royal support, he returned to America a year later with fifteen caravels, two smaller vessels, and fifteen hundred men. He had identified a new resource, and the Spanish promptly enslaved sixteen hundred Indians.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge facing the Indians was gauging how much success they could safely enjoy. The colonists wanted the Indians to accept their god, customs, and values, but too much adaptive acuity could be dangerous, provoking the English to see the Indians as competitors. If Indians managed to register their landholdings, they faced the threat of being labeled “Blacks” and having their claims abolished; if they thrived as farmers or livestock breeders, they risked incurring the wrath of their less capable English neighbors. For each Indian who managed to carve out a niche among the English, there were many more who were reduced to bound servitude or outright slavery.

Horses also overturned the power dynamics between the nomadic Indigenous nations and European colonists in the West. At its most basic level, this shift was a matter of harnessing energy. Dogs, Native Americans’ only domesticates before horses, were omnivorous and could use the West’s greatest resource—grass—only indirectly. They relied on their masters to provide them with the flesh of herbivorous animals, whereas horses, with their large and finely tuned intestines, could process vast quantities of cellulose-rich grass. The horse was a bigger and stronger dog, but, more profoundly, it was an energy converter. By transforming inaccessible plant energy into tangible and immediately available muscle power, horses opened up an astonishing shortcut to the sun, the source of all energy on Earth. For the Comanches the sun was “the primary cause of all living things,” and horses brought them closer to it, redefining what was possible: the biomass of the continental grasslands may have been a thousand times greater than that of the region’s animals. The Comanches plugged themselves into a seemingly inexhaustible energy stream of grass, flesh, and sunlight.5

The Lakotas had exposed the fiction at the center of the Corps of Discovery. Lewis and Clark tried to hold on to their conqueror narrative, in which they were asserting U.S. authority over the Missouri Valley, but in reality, the Lakotas were consolidating their supremacy over the valley in the expedition’s wake. Instead of extending the American empire into the deep interior of the continent, Lewis and Clark had provoked an awe-inspiring imperial Indigenous response that foiled the Jeffersonian vision for the continent.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Anomaly: A Novel," by Hervé Le Tellier.

Strapped into his seat, Markle pushes both General Electric throttles to the maximum, because damn, what is this bastard! I mean, you might expect doldrums like that on a Rio–Madrid, near the equator, but what the hell’s it doing right up in the North Atlantic? Fuck, this is crazy, we have the most powerful engines around and fantastically supple wings, we can’t just snap in two like some scale model, it’s not possible. We got out of fixes dozens of times on the simulators, with engine failures, depressurizations, onboard computers dying on us…shit, we can’t screw it up in real life. Markle doesn’t think about his kids, or his wife, not yet, it may even be that pilots always die before they have time to watch their life flash before their eyes, and Markle is definitely not thinking of the passengers; right now, he’s just trying to save this big, very heavy, and very clumsy Boeing, so he goes through procedures he’s learned by heart and repeated over and over; he puts his faith in reflexes and his twenty years of experience. But it’s still a hell of a thing.

“Do you think you felt the exact moment of what some people are calling ‘divergence,’ or more recently the ‘anomaly’?” 

“Of course, like everyone else on the plane. The turbulence stopped and the sun came streaming into the cabin. That last sentence is also the definition of Prozac.”