Life is Not Fair

Life is not fair.

If you haven't noticed that by now, either you haven't been paying attention or you don't have enough birthdays under your belt.

Life was never fair, and never meant to be.

While whole religions have erupted from the minds of men to address this one issue, the fact remains, there is no divine justice wrought here upon the Earth.

I learned this lesson while I was very young, but had it reinforced by a decade as a newspaper reporter.  I saw cold-blooded killers set free, saw liars triumph and the honest punished for their honesty. Mendacity rules at all levels of power. Inhumanity and incompetence are promoted. Debased actions and bullying are rewarded. Being a reporter is to strive for truth in the face of lies. Journalists comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

In journalism, fairness is a watchword and justice is what every young wide-eyed new reporter seeks. Yet, the pay is barely minimum wage and you are disposable to your employer and community. After seven years at one paper -- winning awards and working 60 hour weeks, I was told to move on because the corporation didn't want to start paying reporters more than $18,000 a year.

"You've had too many raises," the executive told me from the hollow of his tailored suit. "You've reached the pay ceiling."

Everyone hates you when you tell them the truth anyway.

I had few illusions when I went into nursing.

Sure, there are golden moments when all is right. When your patients are healed by your actions and grateful for your kindness. Those moments must carry your for six months to a year before you might encounter them again. In the interim, the kind nurses will be cursed at and shat upon, denigrated and abused. They will work long hours and then be mandatoried over to work more -- punished for showing up to work.

They will cast themselves upon the rocks of the suffering and pestilent, the addicted and debauched, to be broken, yet to stand again.

At least the pay is better.

Moreover, as emergency room nurses we see the inequality of life's whims on full display. Children suffer, criminals get out of jail by malingering. The drunk driver murders children, then staggers away without a scratch. The kind die in pain and suffering while the cruel survive again and again. Sickness is not tied to sin.  The good die and suffer for no good reason. The gift of survival falls heedless of whether the recipient deserves another breath.

It is a hard lesson for a nurse to learn. The zen of nursing is learning to heal without judging, without a care about justice. Your job is to make the sick better, not to make the world fair.

No, there is no fairness in this business nor in life.

Yet in our larger lives, we must still strive for justice -- for justice is a thing wholly created by humanity. It is our humane reaction to the unfairness of life. Justice is the perfection we seek but may never attain. Striving for justice, fairness and equality are the only tools we have to battle back against the empire of fates that seek to pound us into submission.

The world is not fair.

It never will be.

Unless by our hands we make it so.

-30-

When Should I Start My Midlife Crisis?

I'm not dead yet.

In fact, I'm half 90 this week -- better known as 45 years old.

I think I'm doing pretty good, all things considered.

I have a home, a wife, great kids, a job and motorcycle.

Yet, I'm starting to worry that I'm getting a late start on my mid-life crisis.

Not that I'm planning a whole lot. I already have a motorcycle. I don't drink, smoke or fool around. I got my big career change out of the way a decade ago and I am pretty happy with it.

Maybe I already had it, and just didn't notice.

This birthday has got me wondering what we should consider mid-life these days.

While overall US life expectancy is 78 in this country I am in a position to know that how we live is a major variable. Previous generations have embraced smoking, drugs and alcohol in such a way as to skew the curve such that I often see 90 year olds healthier and stronger than 65 year olds.

That said, according to this calculator from the University of Penn- I'm predicted to live 85 years -- 95 if I'm really, really good and 76 if I take up the habit of driving drunk while not wearing a condom.

However, there is more to life expectancy than risk factors. The Death Clock, which uses a lot fewer factors figures I'll live to 95, but Amy will live to 103! That's the gender penalty. On the other hand, the Social Security Administration is only planning on me living to 81. While another calculator says I'll live to 95.

Or we could all be hit by a bus tomorrow (not all of us by the same bus, of course), making these actuary tables moot - at least on an individual level.

Moreover, we are always underestimating human ingenuity. We are on the verge of some major medical breakthroughs in terms of life expectancy. As aging baby boomers and Google founders pour their riches into ways of living and functioning longer, my guess is that we are going to see a continued increase in the lives of people with few risk factors who take care to lead active, growing lives.

Which brings up the question of the crisis itself. What is a midlife crisis? More than anything it seems to me to be a crisis of expectations - where we come to terms with the fact that we are unlikely to become pro football players or rock stars now that we've reached our 40s.

It is similar to the bad birth experience some mothers find themselves facing after they create elaborate birth plans for the delivery of their baby -- only to discover that baby had different plans about where and how he or she was going to enter the world.

In mid-life, as in birth, it seems we are overwhelmed by what could have, or should have been rather than what we have.

Many of us create ambitious fantasies about our dream life or dream career tangentially tethered -- if at all -- to our real abilities. That "what do you want to be when you grow up" game sticks with us.

Sometimes it becomes the "what do you want to do when you retire" game after a while.

My guess is retirement is likely to be a thing of the past in another 20 years -- so I don't even play that game much anymore.

As Moltke the elder once almost said, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy." If you want to make God laugh, make long range plans. Life intervenes.

Rarely does life go according to our childhood aspirations. Yet these aspirations get integrated into our identity, our dreams - however unrealized - are woven into the fabric of how we think of ourselves. It is that dissonance that causes the crisis in our identity.

I have, at various times had serious plans on being:

• an astronaut
• a music producer
• an engineer/inventor
• an airline pilot
• a novelist 
• a professional football player
• an Olympic athlete 

Obviously, a couple of those dreams have fallen off the list.

On the other hand, I never had any aspiration to become a journalist - yet I did that for more than a dozen years with mild success. It is a career that I fell into, and it would not let me go.  Nursing was more of a calling than a career choice and the first 10 years dedicated to helping others heal has flown by.

Of course, looking at what we have accomplished and what we have seems to be the psychological salve to sooth this crisis of expectations. We are what we do. When bad things happen, looking at what we learned, or how we grew changes our perception of those events. 

The fact that we have reached the midway point of our existence -- without being hit by a bus -- should be an opportunity to take stock of what we have done, as well as what we have the gumption, ambition and means to still achieve with whatever time is left. 

Unlike our 12 year old selves, we understand now that hard work, dedication, money, talent and dumb luck are all ingredients to achieving anything we set our minds to.

Mostly, dumb luck.

That life hasn't turned out like we planned is often due to the absence of one or multiple ingredients -- or that you were planning on silly things in the first place.

Looking back at my list, I would have missed out on many of the most wonderful things of my life if I had pursued some other course. In his book 59 Seconds, Richard Wiseman talks about creating an attitude of gratitude for what we have -- but ignore -- in our everyday lives. (see the video above)

This exercise is a great for when you are mourning the death of your rock and roll dreams.

Or, whenever you have a birthday.

National Institute on Aging
Calico, Google's Anti-Aging Initiative
Wharton School at University of Penn
59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute by Richard Wiseman

Mango in the Melba Toast

I just woke up from a weird dream.

I was working in my mom's old restaurant, The Pancake House. I'm not sure if I was just waiting tables or running the place, when Diedrich Bader came to me with a pained expression on his face. He was obviously some middle manager of some sort and he had a bottle in his hand.

DB: "Did you just talk to a customer about our Melba toast?"

ME "Yeah, somebody asked me about that earlier today."

DB: Did you tell him that we have mango in our melba toast?

ME: I certainly did not. We have mango in the melba toast?

DB:Well, it is mango flavoring and it is what makes our melba toast special and you failed to point this out when the customer asked about it.

ME: I certainly did. I had no idea that there was mango in the melba toast. I've worked here 22 years and this is the first time anyone has even come close to ordering it. In fact, i wonder if that bottle of mango flavoring is 22 years old, I doubt we've ever needed it. Of course, no one put Mango in anything 22 years ago, so it can't possibly be that old.

DB:This is why we are not selling more melba toast.

ME: That and the fact that everything else on the menu tastes an order of magnitude better.

DB:You don't seem to be taking this seriously.

ME: No, I can't possibly take this seriously. But you are for some strange reason. That's kind of troubling to me. You've also taken up an large amount of my time on this discussion. Therefore, I shall have to tender my resignation. Let's consider this my two weeks.

DB:Your resignation?

ME: Yes, clearly I am failing in the melba toast department. By the way, when you call down to payroll for my check, be sure to tell them that I have 16 weeks of vacation piled up, and I'll need to cash that out too. By the end of the day should be fine.

This was a strange dream, but I woke up from it bemused at strangely satisfied. For the record, mom's restaurant never did serve Melba toast -- and we never had middle managers. Moreover, we got along just fine without mango melba toast or middle managers.

The Landing

For the past 22 years, there has always been a room in our house where junk goes to live.

This is an after photo, obviously

It started with our first apartment. The second bedroom holding wedding presents that were far more generous than our poverty-wage accommodations.

When we moved into Dun Elsie, the house was so big, it appeared empty. There were rooms we hardly ever used. But as our family grew and we grew together we expanded to fit the house. Our stuff accumulated and it needed a place to go when it was not being used.

Think of it as a purgatory for items that aren't quite ready for the garage sale, thrift store, basement or dump. 

Many of the rooms in the house have taken their turn - particularly in the early remodeling days when we would move everything out of one room to refinish it. After all that remodeling work, not all the clutter would return, some inevitably would get left behind in one of the out-of-sight rooms.

Over the years, we have come to live in the more of the house, so there are fewer out-of-sight rooms.

Lately, the room in question has been the landing - a square room between the three bedrooms upstairs. The heirloom settee got put up there at Christmas to make room for the Christmas tree and never came back down. We decided we liked having our chairs next to each other by the fire, Amy and I, so we can rock and read books on rainy days. 

Grace's old dresser got put out on the landing there when it was no longer needed. It had been filled with dress-up clothes and princess crowns. She has out-grown these things, it seems. 

Hidden in a corner was our old bed. Bought before the girls came along from guy in Oregon who used to run around England buying up antiques at estate sales, shipping family heirlooms to the states for young childless couples to furnish their homes with. We'd replaced it with a new bed long ago, but its carved legs and hand carved trim was too nice to put down in the basement. 

Yet it was the books that needed the most work. There were three bookshelves overflowing with books. Books sent to me by publishers for review when I was editing Tidepool.org. Books brought home from church. Handyman and how-to books that I culled from thrift stores. I used these old books to teach myself home repair and remodeling. These books marked both our ambitions and our achievements, our dreams and mythology. Gardening books, remodeling books; books purchased at the local library book sale and books lent and given by friends and family. So many books that still want for reading. 

Then there are the other books, well worn and piled in stacks on the corner shelves. These books, kids books, learn to read books. Books, alas, the girls have grown out of. 

Lindsay will be a teenager next week. How is that possible? Here is the Bernstein Bears "Spooky Old Tree" the book we had to read to keep her on the toilet long enough to toilet train her. Here is Danny the Dinosaur -- a book that I read so many times to Grace that I have it memorized. It was the childhood book of my friend Kevin, with his name still in the front. 

WE found my clip books with articles and columns from my years in the newspaper business, as well as a business card from when Amy worked writing for the Cascade Cattleman down in Klamath Falls. 

There were scrapbooks stowed away on a corner shelf. Most are only partly filled with pictures. 

We found old photos of the run-down house we encountered 22 years ago, cold rooms with apartment furniture and broken windows. There were pictures of where I lived and worked in Carlingford, Ireland, and a picture of Amy and I - still just college sweethearts the day before graduation. 

Lindsay has three baby books started, Grace had only a page or two filled out in hers -- not much time for scrapbooking when you have a three year old to chase. I was full time in nursing school when Grace came along, I was gone more often than home back then and Amy had to manage both girls on her own. 

We are sentimental about the books that will never again be read. We sort a pile of Christmas books and save them, for those we turn to year after year. We set aside the ancient books - the children's books passed down from Amy's dad and aunt. Children's books from the 1940s that our children now have grown to love. Tuffy the Tugboat, Uncle Wiggily and my favorite, the surreal masterpiece Mister Dog. There are the books from Amy's childhood - Amy's Long Night and the Little House on the Prairie books. She loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books so much that she read them aloud to me when we were first married. 

So too, do we set aside those special children's books of our generation that we can't bear to let go. In each of these, between the pages, lies a memory of a moment in Lindsay and Grace's life - a memory we hope they will pass along to their children.  

WE are making a pile for the library book sale, and I have a few nursing textbooks to give away. I've found a friend who wants the old bed that we just don't any place to put. 

Our house was empty once, now it is filled and cozy. The settee, which has been handed down from Amy's grandma, is now cleaned and has a prime position on the landing next to a full -- but neatly organized -- bookshelf.

It is the perfect place to sit, and read a book.