Nudges from Nature

Imagine walking through a door into a largely empty room. Maybe it's a room under construction in a tall office building.  Plywood floors, unpainted sheet rock, dangling wires, and high ceilings. In the middle of the room is the tallest commercially available stepladder.  It rises to a height of 20 feet. Above the ladder is a hole in the ceiling, perfectly centered above the top step. Let's put the ceiling at 25 feet. Sixty inches above the top set of the ladder are two inviting-looking handles made of rebar. They are perfectly positioned inside the hole, which coincidentally looks just large enough for your body to slip through.  You don't know exactly what's on the floor above, but whatever it is it's filled with fascination, adventure, and yet-to-be-discovered and untold riches. As an aside, and for the sake of clarity, let's agree that the average length of an outstretched two year old is also 60 inches, maxing out at 62 inches when up on their toes. As you ...

A friend of mine is superhuman. He's up every day at God knows what time. But whatever time that is, he is able to run through his morning routine of meditating, reading, and writing before driving to the next town over to run a fitness class. Not just a fitness class, but a high-intensity workout class. The kind that leaves you feeling like you've got nothing left in the tank. So, he's depleted his body of all of its available glycogen and carbohydrates before the sun has come up. Then, he goes to his job (I believe he teleports) teaching things like grammar and math and history to middle schoolers. He doesn't just teach them about equations, verbs, and the Ottoman Empire -- he teaches them life skills and how to show up in the world. This is not a teacher that phones it in. He's into it.  He's athletic director of the sports program and oversees every single sport the school has to offer. Boys and girls, on-field and on-court, on campus and off. He coaches his...

Well, it finally happened and with all the confidence in the world, I casually walked into the local brewery and ordered a beer. It was non-consequential. I had a pilsner and enjoyed it.  In fact, over the past couple months, I've had several beer days. Not a lot. Maybe seven beer days out of the past sixty-five.   I can't say I'm necessary glad that I did, but I do think in the larger scheme of things, they were helpful. It's broken logic to say that because of them, I think I'll drink less. But, somehow it seems like accurate and truthful. Here's what I learned: I don't like drinking as much as I used to. A preference for non-alcoholic beer can develop quickly. Hangovers are coy and have retractable claws. First beer day, no hangover. Seventh beer day...just enough to feel the hankering for a "hair of the dog." The temptation was strong to turn one beer day into two. Alcohol is seductive, at least for me. I didn't immediately fall into a mont...

I'm 73 days sober when.... I sit at a table with powerful people. It is a privilege to be here and will undoubtedly be good for my business. We are celebrating. Bottles of wine are being opened. A *really* nice bottle is opened first. I don't know how much it costs, but somewhere above the buzz of vibrant conversation, the phrase "a thousand dollars" stands out. Glasses are poured, celebratory cheers offered all around. Before I know it, a glass is in my hand. My sister throws me a surprise party. Friends are there that I haven't seen in a long time. Colleagues I worked with years ago are here. Friendly, familiar faces of the long past. I don't know how my sister even knew to invite them. I'm guided to my seat at the table. An ice cold beer in a tall glass is poured for me. Everyone makes eye contact and smiles at me. I'm known for my love of beer.  A good family friend has just passed. I attend her wake. It is all a fog. I hate funerals. I don't w...

I nearly started drinking again this past weekend. It was almost by chance, and showed me how much socializing is tied to alcohol.  Or rather, how it doesn't have to be. I'm two months into an  experiment with sobriety . I'm quite lax about the whole thing. I'm not so much quitting alcohol as following my curiosity to know what a year without alcohol would be like. But I realized this past weekend, it's actually becoming quite important to me.  Saturday was an absolute gorgeous coastal California day.  Clear blue skies. 70 degrees. A respite from the generally cloudy and rainy winter season we've been having. It was the perfect day to get out. Take the kid to baseball practice. And...maybe...hang out with my wife and chance running into some other parents at the brewery nearby. My dilemma is this: I don't want to confine myself to the house and drop my social life because I'm not drinking. My social life is light as it is. Without alcohol, it's been ...

Somewhere toward the end of the 1980s and on the heels of a surprise rise up the Billboard charts, a hippie band from the '60s was finding a new generation of fans. I attended my first concert of theirs at an open air ampitheatre apparently designed just for them -- a time capsule back to the days of peace, love, and rock and roll. Intermingled with the requisite psychedelic-inspired tie-dyes and flower-power daisies was pervasive and instantly recognizable skull-and-roses symbolism that had become synonymous with the band. As a recently former English major, I had brushed upon the intertwined symbols before, but never in such concentrated numbers on blatant display.  The band held quite a bit of mystique for me that resulted in an expectation for a certain level of complexity in unraveling and interpreting the ever-present contradiction between the skulls and bones, roses and ribbons. There was none.  It was all right there on the surface. Skulls and roses. Death and mortalit...

I managed the first temptation to abandon my experiment with sobriety by opting out of the situation all together. I was invited to a live concert at a favorite nearby music venue, and though the draw was considerable, I simply chose not to go and instead spend a quiet night at home. The second temptation afforded me no such option. The 49ers were facing the Chiefs in the Super Bowl and we had a small family gathering planned. Opportunities to get together with my mom and my sister, brother-in-law, and nieces are harder and harder to come by, and the passings of my dad and older sister in the past few years bring an increased appreciation and humility for their genuine rarity. I was committed to going. I was looking forward to it.  However, beer and football tend to go hand-in-hand, of course, and that wasn't lost on me.  But, I was surprisingly unencumbered by the thought of it. The absence of even the mildest of after-effects from alcohol have been overwhelmingly relieving ...

There's something sharper to my daily experiences since giving up alcohol a few weeks ago. Alcohol was a warm blanket. And now it's gone. The comfort of habit. The lure of the familiar faces at the wooden tables of the local brewery. The split-second "aw fuck it" decision to have another round, and another, and turn away from the compounding responsibilities of life. That's gone. Like Ebenezer standing in the snow, peering in envy through the window at the warm scene inside the meager home of the Cratchit family, sobriety has me standing in the cold. The effect is stark. The truth is the crisp chill is the reality. Alcohol just put a comforting layer between us. Over the years, the layer got thicker. It went from a thin throw to a down blanket with high fill power.  At some point, the whole thing got a bit wet. I was forced to abandon it. It's not unpleasant to be standing here, though adapting has me in a mild state of discomfort.  I seek new and more reliabl...

Overall the experience of not drinking for the past six weeks has been overwhelmingly positive. Is the honeymoon period over? One thing is clear, I don't miss drinking. I don't miss the negative physical effects post-drinking, and even the warm buzz of a few beers -- there are other ways to enjoy the passage of time. But those things are all about the absence of alcohol -- the removal of drinking from the routine. What's left underneath?  This week my frustrations are running hot.  I'm less patient than usual. Irritability seems to be at a constant.  Enough time has passed where I suspect this is not due to any withdrawal symptoms. It's not due to the lagging effects of stopping alcohol consumption. I'm past that.  It's a "now what?" feeling.  I think it has something to do with a sharper, clearer picture of my own limitations.  Yes, the effects of stopping alcohol are overwhelmingly positive. The removal of those negative effects -- the hangovers,...

I have been and continue to be motivated by this suspicion that giving up alcohol will prove to be a silver bullet for many, most, or even all my problems. It occupies a space in my mind like a skeleton key: Problem with work? Not drinking will solve it. Problem with a relationship? Not drinking will solve it. Problem with motivation? Not drinking will solve it. I know this is incredibly naive. Yet, I willingly relish in it. The social media algorithms have kicked in and my feeds are now flooded with testimonials from celebrities and influencers about the topic of giving up drinking. The soundbites are compelling.  "My life has changed."  "There's me before I stopped drinking, and there's me after." "My career was good. I stopped drinking and my career was great. Beyond my wildest dreams." The soundbites don't tell the whole story. Theyare statements that over-simplify the journey. Selective reminiscences.  One of the initial draws of my accide...

In the decades that I've been calling myself a writer, I noticed a peculiar thing: the stories I told out loud would often not get written down. The more I talked about an idea, the less likely it would turn into words on a page. Even calling myself a “writer”, which seems to be rule #1 in all the writing advice books and columns, did not make me a better writer. It did not help me produce more work, better work, sell anything, or increase any real measure of success. Sobriety has been a parallel experience. The less I talk about it, the easier it seems to be to stay the course.  NOTE: As I mentioned in my first article about this , I’m not an alcoholic, so this perspective may be completely irrelevant to you if you are. Sharing seems to be a crucial component of the AA program. I’m explicitly and only sharing my personal experience at the moment in time. I've told precisely one person about my experiment, about my curiosity that 2024 might be a year without alcohol for me. And...

Although I hadn’t been drinking for about three weeks, I consider that third weekend the true start of my experiment with a year of sobriety. It's when I faced my first test. The invitation was appealing and strong. A long-time friend was coming into town. He rented a cabin up in the mountains a short drive away. He had tickets to a local concert venue, one of my favorite places to see live music. From the outside looking in, it was in many ways an ideal invitation. Close by. Music in the redwoods. A cabin to crash at.  I was ambivalent. This was a drinking buddy. We didn’t do things together sober. Backyard BBQ, live music, dinner out, golf. It always centered around alcohol. The ambivalence was another signal that my relationship to alcohol is changing. I was listening to some celebrity testimonial about his struggles with alcohol and he countered a stereotype about the challenges of staying sober. He commented that it wasn’t the bad times - the quintessential idea of looking for...

I didn’t consciously set out to stop drinking. There were no New Year’s Resolutions, no proclamations, no explicit commitments to sobriety. There was just a slow gurgling up of fatigue, nausea, and distaste that emerged as the 2023 Holiday Season came to an end. Not explicitly to the idea of alcohol, but to life in general. It started by accident. It was the day after Christmas and I had been managing a mostly terrible mood since Thanksgiving. Family obligations, financial stresses, waning client interest. It all came to a head on December 26th. I didn’t want to drink that day. I wanted to stay home and rest and watch my three kids play with their Christmas presents. Play some board games. Try out the new video gaming console. But we have a tradition – a fairly new tradition that is a compromise in and of itself – that this year felt particularly like just another obligation to meet. So, we all put on some nicer clothes, loaded into the car, and headed about an hour away to spend the ...

I'm not sure what exactly led me to create my own sourdough starter. It was on an ideal Spring day -- one of those first days in Spring that is noticeably warmer than the ones preceding it and clearly indicates Winter is now definitely behind us. I opened the window above the sink in the kitchen and I saw dandelion, cottonwood, and various grass seedlings floating on the gentle breeze finding its way through the field behind my home. I was immediately taken back to a memory of years earlier where I learned that sourdough was a product of the wild yeasts and airborne microorganisms that occurred everywhere. The combination of those invisible fauna near the San Francisco Bay were particularly unique, the legend goes, and contributed to the region's world famous sourdough bread. All you needed to do, was combine some water and flour, and sit it near an open window. Give it a few days and when bubbles formed, a whole world of potential combinations and artistry would open up to you...

"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. " - Kahlil Gibran I wrote recently about the feeling of emptiness . By the end of the blog post I acknowledged an understanding that this state of being would be temporary.  And here I am just a week or so later feeling filled, or more accurately, flowing. One thing that a meditation practice can make you intimately aware of is that things are always changing. Everything rises and falls away. One of the healthiest and helpful insights to be gained is that this is true of thoughts and feelings. Knowing this liberates you from their apparent stranglehold on you as you go about your daily life. It occurs to me that being empty or being filled is, in a way, impossible. They imply a steady state. A destination. A place of arrival. This is an illusion. A false perception that is perhaps not easy to shake. Yet, as I emerged from the feeling of emptiness, and felt a feeling of being filled -- filled with sa...

Will I always feel this way? So empty, so estranged? -Ray LaMontagne, "Empty" I went to a big surprise party last week and the room was filled with family and friends I've known all my life. I hadn't seen many of them in quite a long time.  My favorite people were in the room. All of my immediate family. It should have been a joyous occasion for me. For all. I think, and hope, that for some it was. But my experience was nothing that the warm room might imply. I was very much felt wanting. I felt disconnected. I wasn't sure what to talk about. I didn't feel as if I had anything to share. I wasn't curious about what everyone else had been up to. There was lots of good food and plenty of beer and wine. I wanted none of it. I also couldn't shake the notion that there were people missing from the room. Friends I used to call family that I've fallen out of touch with. And, of course, relatives that have passed. I don't know exactly how to remedy this...

A while back my daughter came home from school announcing that she had joined the high school water polo team. Not wanted to join, or intending to try out, but joined. She was on the team. My other daughter came home some days later with an iced coffee for me that she carried home while riding her bike. My son came home last week and announced at 3:30 pm that he was going to try out for the basketball team. Tryouts were at 5 pm. In each of these instances, I was surprised. And delighted. If you're in marketing, especially high tech marketing, you're familiar with the concept, which rose to prominence in the early 2000s as consumer tech companies, especially perhaps Apple, increasingly focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences to differentiate themselves from the competition. But the concept has been in place commercially since at least medieval times with the "baker's dozen" practice of including a 13th item. It generated trust and loyalty. Creole and...

It rained last night for the first time in a while. It's November. The rain is welcome. Beyond our backyard is a small green space nestled within the surrounding neighborhoods. A breeding pair of hawks often screech overhead during the day, while a pair of owls coo to each other at night (which has to be one of the most calming and comforting sounds on earth.) With the overnight rain, we woke up early this morning to a soft cacophony of frogs. Rain means water. Water means frog eggs. And croaking is how frogs attract mates. The conditions were right last night for frogs to be frogs. And croak they did. The immediacy of the change is remarkable. It's been quiet all summer. The frogs must be out there, but they are not seen nor heard. One decent rain, and it's as if they appear instantly and out of nowhere by the thousands.  With the rains, their environment becomes right for them to perform, and perform at their best. Of course they don't shriek, or coo. They croak.  Env...

My first introduction to meditation was through the Headspace app. I chose it because it was the only app I could find that allowed for a two minute duration of sitting. That's about all I could handle at the time. The first few lessons introduced me to the concept of Noting. Noting is becoming aware of a thought or emotion, and naming it as such.  Noting is a fantastic and accessible way to start a meditation practice. It's highly effective. If you're interested in starting a meditation practice, or struggle with getting started, I highly recommend looking into it. A few weeks ago, seemingly out of nowhere, I developed a quite severe pain in my left elbow. I'm not even sure how it came on. I had spent four months working on a decently strenuous home improvement project, but had completed it a few weeks earlier. This didn't seem like an injury. It was just a persistent and dull pain. I figured it would go away. Two weeks later, it was as strong as ever. I let it go....

I've loved to cook since I was a kid. I think it was the first thing I was able to do that "only adults" could. I felt grown up.  Last weekend, I made another attempt at making my mom's spaghetti and meatballs.  That's just what we call it, but when we say spaghetti and meatballs, it's really about the sauce, or as my Mom insists on calling since The Sopranos aired, "gravy". Even if we use another pasta, it's still spaghetti and meatballs to me.  It's also a day-long process to make.  The thing is, there is no recipe.  Recipes are fantastic. They're invaluable. Of course, I use them all the time. But the meals with the best reputations in my family, the most memorable ones, like my mom's spaghetti and meatballs, my dad's linguine and clams, and my wife's fried pork chops, they don't have recipes. If you really want to blossom as a cook, treat recipes as guidelines, not bible. Go off script. Like my mom, my wife is a fantas...