Heartcrossings

Difficult times can get us to think creatively. In the case of my family, it has been about spending a little time together even if remotely before bed-time - a time with can be quite variable and fluid for the mix of people involved. We decided to designate the earliest bed-time as the "common" time. The next order of business was to find something to do in that time that would be relatively peaceful. We settled on the idea of watching a short film together. I am the one tasked with the job of finding something to watch.  Apparently, my choices fall right around the consensus line so there is the least amount of resistance and conflict. Most recently we watched this beautiful rendition of The Old Man and the Sea . A story that everyone had read at some point in their life but the movie was still quite a spectacular experience and left each of us thinking about relevance of what we saw to our own life, the times that we all find ourselves in. 

A solitary dinner is not usually associated with a good time but in the right conditions, it may be a reasonable option. There is certainly some novelty associated with the idea of a restaurant serving only one diner at a time.  This reminded me of a young lady I saw a couple of days in a row during my evening walks. The first afternoon, she was seated on a bench under a tree in the school-yard in her college sweatshirt reading a book unencumbered by electronics. I did my turns around the yard until I had clocked the steps I do before I head back home.  The young lady was still seated there reading. As I left, I noticed someone come up in their car to pick her up. The following day, she was alone again shooting hoops this time. Slow and deliberate, she put thought into her position and posture before she aimed. She seems to have a strong preference for alone time and yet her demeanor was such that it would draw the attention of a passer-by.  I could see her loving to b...

Somewhere in the middle of this article is the question about whether you should greet passers by on your walk in a time of social distancing. In my own experience, I find this to be an uncommon occurrence. I leap left, they leap right. Sometimes, when possible we take a turn to the side to avoid each other. Such actions don't promote the idea of saying Hi to each other as had been the norm pre-covid.  ",,here is “no data to suggest that opening the mouth to say ‘Hi’ is going to expose you,” if you’re the requisite six-plus feet away, despite the fear that it could lead to an accidental exchange of fluids. And eye contact — even a crinkle of a smile above a masked nose and mouth — is entirely non-threatening."  While we all understand that smiling at someone is unlikely to kill us, it does appear that these days we don't want to deal with that. We want to keep moving while maintaining our distance. We are all getting to experience introversion whether or not i...

Many of us parents have harassed our kids to make their beds each morning with various degrees of success. Yet none may have come close to this Navy Seal Admiral in articulating why it actually matters . When a person accomplishes things in their life that the average person cannot even begin to fathom, they are somehow also able to distill lessons they learned along the way, into truly simple pieces of wisdom that have impact. Listening to this, I was thinking about my reasons to J when she was young why making your bed each morning is important.  First off, I did not have nearly as cohesive an argument. Second, my delivery fell far short and finally I changed tactics frequently to see what would stick. In the end the job got done, but it was not because J was transformed at a fundamental level - able to tie the action of making her bed each morning to her life's larger purpose. That is the value of a solid, good argument delivered by someone who speaks from lived experience. ...

I never thought I would enjoy a book about a surgeon's work and ruminations nearly as much as I did Better by Atul Gawande. The book has been my companion during the evening walks for several days and it has been an amazing experience. He takes on many difficult subjects including malpractice law -which I found particularly insightful. Gawande looks at the malpractice from the perspective of all involved parties - the doctor, the patient, the legal system and the families impacted. No clear winners emerge in his analysis as is true with any area of life where we seek resolution and restitution for irreparable wrong.  Over and over through the book, Gawande shows that    being a doctor is a complicated business. They too are human, and prone to mistakes, negligence, poor judgement and imperfections of character. The participation of doctors in the execution of criminals in death row was deeply thought-provoking. Gawande interviews several doctors and nurses who hav...

Particularly loved the last few lines of this poem by Lindsey Royce Now, I long for one of those shirts,   his scent of sweat and paint,   to cover the dent on his side of the bed,  so, when I roll over, I          don’t fall into the future. To me this spoke about the role of steady habits and routines we create with those we love; the void that is left behind when they move on. With a former lover it may be that dent in their side of the bed. With a child in college it could be that messy bedroom that you nagged them about all the time. Now there is only sweet with nostalgia when you see it immaculate - the order you create is here to stay. When you step into that "perfect" room you "fall into the future" you are beginning to learn about.

As someone who has worked from home for over a decade, I was not the hardest hit by the quarantine. Over the years, I learned to make peace with the isolation that comes with working from home most of the time.  You learn to create small routines that keep it from wearing you out. Understandably, not everyone has the experience of being this mode all the time. Forced and not opting in as a matter of choice or convenience is not conducive to adopting it as a way of life either. Interesting to see how the hotel business is trying to make the most of the situation and trying to give people a break, a change of scenery.  "What we  are  doing is trying to be of service by helping with a great rate for the people we're seeing coming through the door, people who need to leave a family member at home to self-isolate; people who want a balcony door that opens and a view for the next 14 days – maybe their apartment is too small – and guests who just need some peace and qu...

Since we got quarantined, I have found myself tunneling hard into work. Start on Monday and and go on till Friday like the week was an extended day with breaks for meals, sleep and exercise. At first, I attributed it to the newness of the overall experience and not having any demarcation between work and life. Reading about how others are coping with their mandatory work from home status made me wonder if we are all afraid to fall off some allegorical cliff we paused from being "productive". We seem to have the need to prove our usefulness first to ourselves and then to anyone who cares to observe or judge.  Advisories abound on how to cope with the "new normal" a phrase that I have a deep problem with because I cannot gauge th e sentiment behind it. It is an exhortation to get with the program or it is mark of resignation and accepting that life changes from here on out in a final, permanent sort of way. Either way, I don't think I can get on board. I want t...

J and I have started watching The Discovery of India . So glad to find a version with sub-titles even though it lags the audio at times and has gaps. The poetry of the language is mostly lost in translation but its still wonderful to be able to share the experience with J. A very different feeling watching with her after so many years - it reminds me why it was such a big deal back then. Was the telling of India's story complete or accurate? Most likely not. It is one of the many ways a story so vast and complex can be told. It is upto the viewer to decide what they want to take away from it. I realize now that was structured to have mass appeal. It lacks the sophistication of Benegal's feature films and is also no Peter Brook production. As a kid, I loved how Bharat Ek Khoj turned history from the dull pages of my text book into a performance art on television. It made me feel like I knew a lot more about the forces that shaped the country, helped me connect dots that the...

Interesting interview with a volunteer who signed up to test a covid vaccine. In speaking of the praise she has been receiving for doing this, she says:  And I talked to a trusted advisor, a spiritual leader, that I've turned to in the past. She said, ‘If somebody criticizes you or is mean to you, it's because they're projecting or they have something else going on in their life. So you don't take that personally.’ And she helped me understand that this is just the flip side of that. That praise is also not to be taken personally, and it's not about me. It's about people looking for hope and some kind of positive future. And so that really helped me release and pass on the positive messages I was receiving. That is true for everyone I suppose - struggling to make sense of praise that feels unwarranted and even undeserved. We try to be as gracious as well can about it, some will be self-deprecating to turn attention away from themselves, yet others will acce...

The damage this school district did in a day will take years to recover from if they ever can. This is an opened Pandora's box - demonstrably throwing in the towel when they could not manage what came at them from the students. There is no way to undo the event or pretend like the adults are still in control here. If anything this is an invitation to kids to get more out of hand, indulge in more unruly behavior, see how far they can push the boundaries and how they can expose the stupidity of the adults who are responsible for their education.  We have all been teens once - surely none of this should come as a surprise to an adult of sane mind. This is the Lord of the Flies replayed online in over-drive mode. Things will not magically improve once everyone returns to school because that day is far away and this situation can well turn out to be a death by thousand cuts.  As always such disasters of technology deployment, begs the question why no one thought to test this t...

This past Friday, I had some late afternoon calls both internal and with customers. Each time as we got ready to wrap up, people chatted about their plans for the weekend. Going out for a walk, to the grocery store or just sitting outside in the yard were the only things anyone had planned. There was something humbling and unifying about that. Used to be that this time of year, people took a week off to go on a fun and exciting vacation, they planned what they would be doing in summer when school was out. Economic disparity became evident in these casual conversations. These were people we worked with all the time, and so we assumed some common ground with them. But when people described their weekend plans, the stark divergences between our lives and families became evident.  Back then, the young lady in the office who had been through a bruising divorce recently talked about going home to be with her parents for the weekend - we felt sorry for her because she was such a bright ...

When I interact with people in their seventies and older, I often think about what is the most attractive quality about age. For me, it is the mellowness some people achieve. They are able to translate their life experience to words of wisdom without being overbearing and only in the spirit of sharing.  They do not hold strong opinions about most things and are still willing and able to learn. Overall being in their presence is like sitting under the shade of a tree with a big canopy on a hot day. You understand what it means to have lived and learned well, what you can aspire to be some day.  There is also benefit to seeing the counter-example to this which exists in abundance. People who fail to grow up and act like a teenager trapped in the body of an eighty year old man. They have lost the hustle of youth needed to survive in the world and replaced it with an overwhelming insipidity. They are no longer willing to learn or unlearn. A conversation with them could range fro...

In his book Enlightenment Now , Steven Pinker writes of the founding fathers of America: Criminal punishment, they argued, is not a mandate to implement cosmic justice but part of an incentive structure that discourages antisocial acts without causing more suffering than it deters.deters. The reason the punishment should fit the crime, for example, is not to balance some mystical scale of justice but to ensure that a wrongdoer stops at a minor crime rather than escalating to a more harmful one. Cruel punishments, whether or not they are in some sense “deserved,” are no more effective at deterring harm than moderate but surer punishments, and they desensitize spectators and brutalize the society that implements them. Reading this made me wonder if this framework leaves the victims feeling they were never vindicated or received closure. In order to keep the balance that Pinker describes, the process must necessarily feel burdensome and often unfair to the victim. Justice is never...

There is a library book box in the school yard I often walk in these days. One evening, I noticed that the door had come off its hinge and fallen to the ground. The following day it was back in place. Someone had noticed and come back with the tools to fix it which was nice to see such signs if normalcy. And I heard a story form the life of an undocumented American as I walked back home. I had mixed feelings about the narrative for a variety of reasons, but these lines resonated with me:   A few years ago, my father experienced heart failure. This was the moment I had been preparing for my entire life. Everything that had happened to me since I took that New York-bound flight 24 years ago had been preparing me for this moment. Learning English, getting bangs, gaining weight, losing weight, getting the sick puppy from the pet shop-- all of that happened to prepare me to this point.  Documented or not, this is likely true for many immigrants whose parents had to make s...

Being shut-in at home for weeks promotes introspection. The workday is longer and less interrupted. It is hard to notice the passage of time- before I realize it its the end of a week. While our lives ground to a halt, the trees went from bare to green outside. The school-yard remains ominously empty. I miss seeing the full parking lots and the school buses rolling in and out, the traffic - the mundane flow of ordinary days that has now become a dream we all waiting to come true. Used to be that you smiled at the passersby while running or walking. Now we just move as far apart as we can and don't make eye contact. The norms of distancing have gone beyond physical.  I find myself counting every blessing I have had - being thankful I am able to stay at home, having all my friends and family be safe and well. I listen much more intently to others when the speak - suddenly we all have something in common. Our days and weeks are almost the same. We all hope for things to return to ...

The idea of having kids repeat a school year to get them back on rails after this crisis is a confusing one. This event will create clear winners and losers across the digital divide line. Some parents will have the luxury of being able to turn this adversity into opportunity for their kids.  Two income households where both parents are able to work from home and be available for kids will come out ahead - to the point that the kids can even skip a grade or two. On the other hand there are those whose kids will be lucky if they can count on meals being available when they are hungry. The parents cannot realistically do much more as they struggle to keep the lights on.  So clearly there is not a one size fits all. It seems like the more equitable solution would be to redouble the effort in school to shore up the kids who fell behind. Schools can start to create a volunteer network of educators who are willing to do this work because the teachers cannot be over-extended. And...

Sleeping in is not an option these days, the birds in the yard are chirping very loud and there seems to a greater diversity in sounds that I have ever heard before. Trills and songs that I cannot recognize. I am guessing they are nesting nearby as well so it maybe possible to see them too. Used to be that the bird sounds died down by afternoon but these days they can be heard into sunset.  This is part of the larger trend reported in this Atlantic article.  Not sure why the author cites these changes we are able to experience in the natural world as "jarring". Just about anyone would prefer birdsong and quiet to man made noise. I like the quote and the end of the article  “Nature is taking a breath when the rest of us are holding ours.” It seems like this was long overdue. Once our lives return to "normal" and we will be back causing stress to nature as we have done for the longest time. 

My friend S wanted to talk about life recently and her situation is very telling of the implications of the pandemic on our personal lives.  It was an ordinary Tuesday. They had just returned from their post-dinner walk. Something about his kid's demeanor set her off as soon as they walked in the door. In days prior, school and colleges had closed for an indefinite period of time and people were beginning to panic about what would come next. In hindsight, nothing remarkable had happened that Tuesday. To be fair the kid had not offended her in any way - and she admits to this herself. Yet, that evening citing intolerable attitude on the part of this kid, she packed a few clothes and left immediately leaving her man dazed, sad and confused. That was the first event. It lasted a week in which time she lived alone and fairly miserable.  By the end of the week she returned but not yet in peace. This time she wanted to leave for a longer time until something about the kid's de...

At my local grocery store the toilet paper aisle is absolutely bare and has been that way for over five weeks now. I am not in a hotspot - not yet atleast. My Amazon order for toilet paper is in limbo after the seller from China was de-listed from the Amazon Marketplace. I may or may not get the shipment - need to wait and watch. They were the only available option at the time - four weeks ago. Even now, there are no local options on Amazon. So when I read news about how this whole crisis is not based on real shortage and there is no reason to fear the end of times if this stuff cannot be imported, I am not sure it all computes. To the average consumer like me the signs are  quite unsettling - the aisles are empty in the local stores and there are very slim pickings online.  The situation has not changed in about a month. There is no reason to believe that will magically change in the next two or three days. There is no run on produce or meats because those shelves are alwa...

Sobering read, this essay by a New Yorker about coping with the virus while managing two young children. What the author describes of her family's situation is being replayed with various degrees of intensity everywhere: The overwhelming feeling of New York City in the pandemic is, for me, the fact of our aloneness. There is no doctor to see, no tests to confirm what we already know. We have nothing but a few screens, the walls of our apartment, our bodily fluids seeping onto fabrics of all kinds. New Yorkers can feel the curtains falling. We are at the mercy of an idiot president and choked hospitals, watching a governor we used to hate like he’s the son of Zeus. For a lot of the city, none of this is news. Authority’s failures have been reality the whole time. But this virus offers a special dark symmetry: It asks us to practice “social distancing” and then forces people to die in isolation. It divides, and conquers. The variables are about same no matter which part of the w...

Generally good idea to protect kids from the being manipulated and marketed to on social media. The "new bill to limit manipulative marketing, dark patterns, and harmful content being pushed to younger users". Seems like the same standards should apply to seniors as well. Not all of them need to be protected but some can be vulnerable . They can be bullied and manipulated much the same as kids and yet be hesitant to come forward and ask for help.  My parents are being inundated with misinformation on social media generated by people who are much younger. But the messages come through channels they trust - their peer-age friends and relatives who are blithely passing around what they are being sent. It creates an atmosphere of confusion and uncertainty about the world they are no longer activity engaging with every day as they did in their pre-retirement lives.  When I hear their new found beliefs, it takes effort to make them see issues more critically. They would much r...

After a month of staying home unless for groceries and occasionally gas, decided to drive out to the city just to see what was going on in the world. The roads are pretty deserted. Most parking lots are empty except outside grocery stores and some restaurants offering take-out. Passed by the hair salon I usually go to and thought about the young lady C that does my hair. She is only a few years older than J and very hard-working. I have been reading about house calls barbers are making these days and wondered if C is doing that as well. It maybe a long time before I see her next. It was hard to even imagine that time and in our current situation frivolous too.  We will suffer loss in one of many forms - some more than the others. I read somewhere that there is a 95% probability that each of us will lose someone we know to this pandemic. Many among us are forced to stay apart from our loved ones - much longer than we expected. We may experience drift in ways that are new. You may...

At Thanksgiving dinner last year, one of the guests, M had just returned from his business trip to China. He brought us baijiu and warned that it was strong and to proceed with caution. That turned out to be an understatement but it was experience to remember. It seems only like the other day, but so much has changed since November. M was there to select a supplier for his company and was expecting to travel back several times this year.  Reading this story about baijiu reminded me of that evening, having dinner with people when life was normal. If we even get back together this Thanksgiving, which would be a miracle in itself, a lot would have changed for everyone. Our host got laid off recently, our mutual friend a small business owner has their livelihood upended. In months to come there will likely be more casualties. That was the last time M was in China. He may still have some of the baijiu left. 

Nice NYT piece on how putting an idiot in charge will have us all dead soon, but the person in question is symptomatic of much that ails America. He just reached the pinnacle of power where others like him could not complete their ascent and therefore cannot cause as much harm.  But the very existence of such a path starts with the ability to buy a place at colleges like Harvard. That makes it possible for one too many unqualified people to be in places they have no business being, bring the confederacy of dunces from their dorm rooms and frat-houses along for the ride, magnificently compounding the suffering of the society that is forced to endure them. The average folks who had to earn their rights to be where they are in life get shafted. On an ordinary day, this manifests itself in diminished career opportunities, lack of social mobility, not being able to make ends meet, not being able to attain even middle class status despite being an educated two income family, not bei...

Reading about Robotic Process Automation use cases for the pandemic made me think about increased adoption of RPA as a business continuity plan once this crisis is over. This crossed my mind while getting a glass of water to drink from my kitchen faucet. The personnel who run the water filtration plant are absolutely essential and continue to go to work as all of us who depend on them stay at home. If they were no longer able to come into work, society would fall apart instantly. It would make sense to automate just about everything possible with ability to operate remotely for this kind of service - to protect against such disaster. Yet, in doing so we would eliminate livelihood for those whose work has real and tangible value.  For one thing this crisis had made clear who is essential in society and who is not. Truckers who keep the shelves of our grocery stores stocked are essential - there is no dispute there. A marketer trying to push customers to buy more of what they don...

J craved Cheetos for a few days after she returned from college recently, stressed over many things not to mention the logistics of flying home amid so much uncertainty. I got her a bag and we had some together. The texture of Cheetos breaking in my mouth reminded me of the first time I had them. I was newly wed then. J's father was showing me around America and introducing to things he had discovered the couple of years he had been around here before me. One of them was Cheetos. The other was a tuna melt croissant at Dunkin Donuts.  The first couple of times were fun and novel with both but soon I wanted to eat healthier. Wanted to pack meals and snacks if went on a road-trip, stop at a grocery store for bread and cheese rather than eat fast-food. This divergence in goals and taste proved to be the first of many to follow until the marriage disintegrated. Yet when I recalled the times we stopped by to grab the tuna melt in the dead of the night in the middle of nowhere, I thoug...

I have a college freshman at home feeling rather lost about what lies ahead for her. The predictable flow of collegiate life is over and when it resumes things may have changed forever. It must be that much worse for kids who were set to graduate this year and enter the real world after that. Reality as they knew it seems to be on infinite hiatus. The new normal that everyone talks about is not an easy one to come to terms with. So it makes sense that Minecraft can help . Though isolation has infringed upon their ability to access the dopamine that comes from seeing a crush across campus or a stimulating classroom discussion, the visuals of being on campus are virtually the same. As this article points out the effects on the rough start into the workforce could have impacts that run years  Research on Canadian students suggests the effects  may be long-lasting  – those who graduated in recession years had initial income 9% below students who graduated in bette...

This story oddly resonates with the current state of the world. People lost in space crying for help, no one hears and the news is likely buried so it's like it never happened. Sounds a lot like the fate of people who succumbed to the virus - properly counted or not depends on who you are asking. If old, sick and sequestered they were not around their loved ones in their last moments. I heard the story of such a woman on the radio the other day, told by her daughter who watched from across the street the window of the room where her mother lived and awaited death.  A coworker has a family friend who is in critical condition. We don't want to ask how this person is doing because we fear the news maybe bad. Instead we wait for the miracle, for the situation to turn around and B reporting that all is well so we can be happy for him - feel collective relief. In reality that friend of B's may die one of these days, we would likely not know because B would not want to cast glo...

These days, each time I step out to buy groceries, I feel in touch with my own mortality. No amount of Vitamin C, hand-washing and disinfecting stuff will likely save me from the people who are carrying on like nothing has changed in the world. Social distancing is not a concept they appear to agree with or are willing to accept as a lifestyle choice it seems. I am the one making haste to get the hell out of everyone's way, skipping entire aisles or going all the way around to come from the other side if my need for pasta is that dire. No one even notices that I am jumpy and really trying hard to keep distance. It's not relevant to them - people to weird, random shit. This woman is just odd. Often I just cross items out from the list because the acrobatics of arriving at the shelf where I can find the thing I need is too risky. I have to get close to people within a feet of me multiple times.  The way I see it, after those many encounters with people who are possibly asympt...