Nat

Last night was one of those nights in a hotel room when I couldn’t get comfortable. I was congested and, alternately, too hot and too cold and kept my wife awake by tossing around all night. So I got up and now have the early morning to myself in the hotel lobby.

The one thing I really like about winter is being awake in the early morning darkness. Somehow it feels like you are living a secret life, with only a few other earlybirds. It reminds me of winter mornings in my childhood during ski trips. We would get up early, complaining and grumpy, but then there was a hot breakfast and the promise of a full day on the slopes.

I don’t ski much at all any more, and it’s one of the things I have given up that I would like to return to. That is the best part of New Year’s for me, imagining what I will do this year to improve on last year.

I’m feeling optimistic about this year, confident that there will be lots of fun things to do. I’ve learned in the last year to look forward to the good things that are ahead of me most of the time, even when I’m struggling a little bit. It has really helped me be grateful for all the wonderful people in my life, who make me feel happy and appreciated at work, at home, and around town.

Happy New Year. (I intend to think this for at least two months.)

I woke up this morning feeling angry and tired. I made the problem worse by staying in bed till I was going to be late for work. For some reason, and maybe it is withdrawal from caffeine, I couldn’t get myself to feel any sense of vigor. I haven’t been exercising regularly for 3 months, maybe 4. I stayed up too late 4 nights last week and drank coffee the next day, which I never do. I haven’t been a regular caffeine user for years.

So maybe today I was feeling disappointed in myself for not eating and exercising well. It doesn’t really matter, because I have been doing a lot of things I’m proud of. The way I am working through writing Christmas cards this year still makes me feel each night at bedtime that I know how to set a goal and work toward it.

I’m thinking that a day like today is a good test of how well I respond to the negative voice some of us carry around in our heads, the one that says, “You aren’t making any progress.” One good sign is that I recognize these bad moods for what they are. I realize they are not a permanent sign of a problem. In fact, a colleague at work told me this afternoon that I hadn’t seemed like myself all day. Naturally I felt good to think that my true self is more upbeat and friendly.

I am trying to learn lessons from days like today: that you can make things better by asking yourself at each moment of the day, “How can I feel better? What can I do?” Today I decided to try to solve a problem for a friend of mine. It was a small problem involving a computer, and it required me to run up and down the stairs to our computer support department. Up and down I ran, and on the third trip, I bumped into a work friend who has been out of the country for three months. We are having lunch next week. He looked great.

By 4:00 p.m., I felt fine, almost back to normal. And normal is good. It felt great to turn around a bad mood by helping a friend with something small. Maybe I’m learning.

Tonight I had dinner with a friend of many years, whom I haven’t seen for about four years. We worked together on a very intense project in Taiwan, and she is one of those people for whom I have equal measures of admiration and affection.

We left for dinner early, so we had plenty of time to catch up, about her grown, twin sons, their wives, and the grandson who belongs to one of them. With this friend, our conversation jumps easily from work to family to politics. Although we haven’t spoken in years, we had plenty to say. I guess the point is that she is someone with whom I have the sort of connection that picks up right where it left off.

On the drive home, I was thinking how grateful I am to be at the life stage where I appreciate the power of friendship, especially ones where you don’t see much of one another. When I was young, I used to think that it hardly counted as friendship unless you could see the person every week and keep abreast of all the ups and downs of one anothers’ lives. Now I realize that a dinner with someone I have known well long ago is a chance to savor the simple gift of affection and mutual understanding.

I enjoyed every minute of dinner and completely forgot that there were other things waiting for me at home. What a joy.

More and more often, I’m finding that a good day includes successes in more than one area of my life. Today there are four areas to feel great about.

1. Job. I had to pull together a group of 7 people on very short notice to take a meeting with some people who had traveled half way across the country to meet with our company. Many of my colleagues pushed back their own priorities to accommodate the visit. I was grateful, and the company that traveled to meet us was grateful. There is nothing like a spirit of cooperation to make a group of people feel great.

2. Writing. Michael and I spent the late afternoon and evening working on a writing project that we have underway. Michael is great at organizing us, and he put together a chapter schedule for us a few weeks ago. Tonight we realized that we are a few weeks ahead of schedule. So far so good. Both of us have a sense of progress, and I have the satisfaction of not being a source of frustration over lateness. Another double win. I like getting the project done, and I like living up to Michael’s expectations.

3. Christmas cards. I may write an entire blog post on Christmas card writing. It’s often a two-month-long ordeal for me to get all of my cards written. In fact, it’s been 3 years since I finished an entire set. Last year I didn’t write any, though I did leave the stack of cards I received sitting on the floor of my study for 11 months, in case I was inspired to answer them. The great news is that I finally realized I could answer them by starting early on this year’s cards. So starting November 30, I’ve been writing two cards per night, before bedtime, and mailing them in the morning. Tonight I’ll write two more. At this rate, I will have made a good bite out of them by Christmas. Not only will I feel good about reaching out; I will also feel good about cleaning the pile off my floor for the first time since January.

4. Finances. Thanks to my wife, we had some good financial news today. She works hard and is very clever with money. She is always taking the pressure off us with her hard work. So often, I find myself thinking, my wife makes my life so easy and so pleasant.

Oh, and there was actually a 5th great thing. Last night, an old, dear friend of my found me on Facebook. I had been trying to think for a couple of years how to track her down and catch up with her. Last night, lo and behold, there she was in the Friend Requests. I was thrilled and have already swapped notes back and forth with her.

The good news snowballs. I love that any time, and especially this time of year when the days are short, and we’re starting to gear up for winter.

I used to dread heading home from vacation. The pressures of daily life just seemed far too heavy to enjoy. But I’m ready to go home today, and not only because we will be back in Palm Desert in February for a week. We just packed in so many great experiences to the last 6 days that it will be fun to head home and share them with our family and friends.

My stepdaughter’s hockey team played really well and nearly won their tournament pool. More importantly, though, they worked well together and treated each other and the parents on the trip really well. They were friendly and upbeat and sociable.

Thanksgiving dinner for 1,000 hockey players and their families, in the massive ballroom at the J. W. Marriott was a highlight. All of the girls dressed up, and for those of us used to being home with families, it made the even seem special.

The parents were terrific too. They appreciated the planning that went into selecting a hotel. All helped drive girls to meals, and the conversation was friendly and easy.

In all, it was great fun to spend the holiday with a group of determined young people and the parents who love them. More things for which to be grateful.

I’m at the airport, waiting for a delayed flight home from Chicago. It snowed here, today, very light flurries, and it made me wonder why I always love the first snow of winter with a full, childlike heart and then come to hate it by mid-winter. This year, I will try to love it for its beauty and take the inconvenience as only a temporary nuisance.

I’m exhausted. True to form, I stayed up past midnight last night working on PowerPoint slides for a customer meeting this morning. Then I got up early to finish them before a planning breakfast with colleagues. Less than an hour before we needed to take a taxi to the client’s headquarters, I had a file mishap and lost quite a bit of my work.

We looked at one another in horror, wondered out loud for three minutes what had happened, and then spread out to fix the problem as quickly as we could. It sounds like a small thing, but when we had regrouped and replaced 4 hours of work in 50 minutes, we all felt a little giddy. Effective collaboration has a way of doing that for me. It is just thrilling to be reminded whom you can count on when you hit a major setback.

The meeting went well, we had lunch and completed our meeting debrief, and then everyone scattered, leaving me alone to catch up on email and some projects I owed to people before heading to the airport.

To my surprise and delight, I finished quickly enough that I had time to swim in the hotel pool. If any of you are ever looking for a great place to stay in Chicago, the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue has the most beautiful indoor pool I’ve ever seen at a city hotel. The pool itself is tiled with tiny, mosaic squares. The deep end is nearly 15-feet deep, the room in which it sits is decorated like a modern-day roman bath, and the pool itself is 25-yards long, large enough that a workout feels like a workout.

I swam a little more than half a mile and sat in the sauna for a few minutes before dressing and heading to Midway airport. To make matters even better, Midway’s Southwest terminal has Harry Cary’s restaurant where I ate pork chops, steamed broccoli, and a side of pasta with a basil-fragrant tomato sauce. Absolutely delicious.

So I have to say that the day rewarded me for my patience and hopefulness. My work friends were wonderful this morning, bringing me coffee, offering encouragement, and doing everything they could to help. It was an inspiring way to start the day, and the swim was a refreshing way to end it.

I feel blessed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last night my mother and aunt hosted a dinner party to honor my grandmother, in lieu of a memorial service. In addition to my mother and aunt, we had two families who had been friends of my grandmother’s for decades, friendships that had started with the parents and grandparents of those present.

It was a really nice occasion on every level and especially entertaining because my grandmother’s lawyer, Pete, told a handful of amusing stories about my grandmother’s sense of what was proper and improper about his business attire when he visited her. Pete was the third generation of lawyers in his family who had served my grandmother, and he drew the hardest duty in being the last. Not only did he manage all of her finances for the last 3 years, but he also managed her health care appointments because all of us in the family live 3,000 miles away.

The man is a saint, patient, good natured, philosophical about the extent of his duties, right down to waiting with the body while the funeral home came to the apartment. We were all extremely fortunate that he was willing to shoulder the responsibility.

My grandmother was demanding and particular, but she was also grateful and gracious towards those who assisted her. She lived long enough to appreciate those on whom she had to depend.

The other family included the surviving son of my grandmother’s best friend and his wife. They are very busy people, with substantial business and philanthropic responsibilities, and they are leaving tomorrow for a Hawaiian vacation. In some sense, this dinner was a duty, but they all performed it with lighthearted grace and kindness.

It was a wonderful tribute to my grandmother, to her indomitability and character that these friends have remained faithful for 50-70 years. It was also a tribute to their constancy to her and to us, the kind of support that we can’t ever repay.

Today I did some work cleaning up my grandmother’s apartment. She passed away in January. She had an amazing life, living almost to 100 and remaining in her own apartment to the very end. It was a good life for her, I think.

Cleaning up the apartment was bittersweet. Because she kept such an orderly home and because she kept to a tight routine in her later years, her apartment looked as if she had just stepped out to run an errand, except only for the plants, which hadn’t been watered in three weeks. I tried my best to revive the seven African violets, which lined the window in her study.

Mainly I looked for keys, threw away dead plants and food from the freezer, and visited with my memories as I dusted and opened drawers. As hard as it is to visit a loved one’s home after the owner is gone, there is a ready barrage of reminders of what we shared.

What really struck me, though, were the conversations I had with the manager and superintendent of my grandmother’s apartment building. When I thanked them for all they had done to help my grandmother continue to live in their building at the end of her life, they both told me how much they loved her and how difficult it was to have her gone.

That is the great lesson from today, and the abiding joy: there are kind people in this world, and they will go out of their way to help you do what you couldn’t do on your own. Love is quite a legacy.