New year 2022 and old year 2021 on sandy beach with waves
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. ~ Alan Watts
I always start my annual New Year’s Eve post with the same sentiment, happy amateur night! My neighbor Jack Wrigley originated this line, at least in my experience and I’ve always thought it perfectly encapsulates the evening. I’ve haven’t gone out to a party for New Year’s Eve in over 30 years. In my early twenties I made the scene a number of times and it always seemed to go the same way. People, overly dressed, drinking at a level they were not accustomed to (amateurs) and getting more loaded than they normally do. This always led to far too many sloppy drunks, somebody puking on my or my date’s shoes. Even worse, far too many drunk dudes with bad manners or chip on their shoulders. I don’t suffer idiots, even drunk idiots, so it seemed every New Year’s Eve I would end up escorting some idiot out of the party, or have to walk away from a ridiculous potential fight. So I packed it in some time ago in terms of New Year’s Eve celebrations. By far the best New Year’s Eve (NYE) celebrations I’ve been part of have involved a few friends and a fire pit. So happy amateur night however you celebrate.
Every year teaches us something and 2021 was no exception. But I want to start with NYE a year ago, I remember the sentiments twelve months ago very well. We were excited and ready for the pandemic to be over, we had fond wishes that 2021. Fairly quickly that optimism faded as we all watched in horror as rioters stormed the capitol on January 6th. We all got re-acquainted with COVID via the Delta variant and found out how vulnerable our global supply chain truly was. We’ve seen even something as wonderful as a COVID vaccine become the subject of further political polarization. Hell, Betty White even died today a few days short of her 100th birthday. A universally loved star whose death sort of contained the feeling of the whole year.
So what are the lessons that 2021 taught us that we need to take into 2022? The first is to temper your expectations. I’m not big on this one, I without a doubt have always been a dreamer and believe that you should dream and dream big. I’ve taken on big adventures in my life and done things in ways people didn’t think could be done. I’ve been able to do this by not ignoring reality and thoroughly planning those adventures. So dream, but don’t ignore reality, keep your expectations within the realm of the realistic. Which 2021 taught us meant that you can’t ignore COVID, find ways to achieve and do the things you want to do but be realistic about what doing them in a COVID world will mean and do them safely.
We were also reminded by 2021 of that universal idea that the only thing that is constant is change. And 2022 will bring loads of it of course, as any other year does. I hear the term the new normal, stop looking looking for normal, embrace the idea that things will change and adapt to make the best of the new world that we are in, we are never returning to the old normal. I know you’re tired, I know you’re stressed, but it’s time to accept the changes in our world, embrace them, do the best you can and find new ways to provide a happy life for you and your family.
So Happy 2022, a year where you will learn to adapt and make the most out of our new reality and find a happier you. ~ Rev Kane
Acceptance has never been an idea I’ve been very comfortable with. I think it comes from the fact that I had some tough times as a kid and the idea that I couldn’t change things was too horrible of an idea to believe in. And of course, there are many, many things in your life that you can, and should change if you want to be happier. The Serenity prayer that I first got introduced to in Alcoholics Anonymous says it incredibly well.
Although I learned this prayer in the early 80’s, the idea of acceptance is really something that didn’t settle in until I was hiking on the Appalachian Trail in 2015. It was on the AT that I really learned acceptance, the trail taught me all about it. You see on the AT, one of the most important things every day is the weather. The temperature, whether it’s rainy or snowing, or how hard the wind is blowing all have a massive impact on your day. In my first two weeks on the trail there was precipitation almost every single day. It started with snow and freezing rain and transitioned to cold rain for days and days and days. Being cold and wet, day after day is a miserable state of affairs. But you can’t change the weather, what is going to come, is going to come. I started out on the trail fighting that idea and I was miserable, it culminated in me almost quitting the trail in Helen, GA. Happily a couple of nights in a hotel to dry out and some surprisingly good food got my mood sorted and allowed me to go back out onto the trail.
I’m so thankful it worked out that way, because it was the beginning of my journey to understanding the importance of accepting things you can’t change. As I adapted my attitude on the trail to paying attention, preparing for, but generally not caring so much about the weather, everything got better. By the time, three months later, that I finished my AT journey the weather had become almost a non-factor. It had to in order for me to effectively keep my mood up and keep going on the trail day in and day out.
The same reality exists with the pandemic. I think some of the frustration that all of us have felt has been our denial of the reality of COVID. The 1918 flu pandemic effectively lasted for three years. We all believed with better medical knowledge, medicine and vaccine development that we’d get out of this quickly. I remember the optimism in March of 2020 that this would over in months, then surely within a year and now as we enter the third calendar year of the pandemic, with a new variant raging across the United States, it’s time for acceptance and action.
Let’s talk about acceptance first. While there is an argument to be made that we, as in humanity, could change the pandemic. I’m talking about people wearing masks, social distancing when appropriate, and people getting vaccinated and boosted. This doesn’t seem to be what we as a society have chosen to embrace. As such, we all need to accept the reality that COVID is with us for some time. If for no other reason than the vaccine inequality that exists globally. As long as we have countries that still have vaccine rates in single digit percentages the virus will have plenty of bodies to infect. And the more infection that occurs, the more mutations will occur and sooner or later new variants and subsequent infection waves will follow.
So this means that COVID is with us for some time and that likely means at least some of the time being masked up in public settings, needing proof of your vaccination status for travel and likely at least annual booster shots. It means keeping our social circles smaller and making better decisions about who and how we spend our time. It means that safety will have to be a more conscious part of our decision making process. This is what acceptance looks like with COVID.
But as I said, it’s about acceptance and action. Taking a deadly disease seriously is not weakness, living in a safe and prepared way and making smart, safety related decisions is not living in fear, but living smartly, prudently. We do this with all sorts of things. We wear seat belts and strap babies into carriers when driving. We’ve learned over time that drinking and driving is a bad idea, we don’t burn brush in the middle of a windy, dry summer day. We take these sensible precautions to keep ourselves and our family safe. And we must do that with COVID as well.
We of course have to live our lives, we can’t just shelter in place forever. So the action part of this is a two part type of thing. First, we stay safe and prepare and second we carefully choose the things we want to do. This will mean changing things in our life, we all will need to decide what level of risk is acceptable. Will you have a family gathering at your house without making people take a fast COVID test that day or the day before? Will you continue to socialize with unvaccinated people? When traveling how careful will you be? Will you continue to pick less crowd related vacation opportunities. Camping, renting AirBnB properties and other less crowd intensive vacations have continued to become more popular during the pandemic. Likely these type of vacations will remain popular.
For example, I’m taking my first international vacation since the pandemic began. While it will include a couple of days in a resort, most of the trip will be in a beach camp. The main activity will be going out on boats to get up close to grey whales. So except at night sleeping in my tent, the majority of the trip will be spent outdoors. While I’m a bit concerned about flying, I broke the flight into two shorter legs instead of one long leg. I will be double masked on the plane, a K95 and cotton mask over top. I don’t plan to eat or drink on the plane. Given that I’ll be in Mexico I’ll have a required COVID test before returning and plan to take an at home test two days after returning, and not going back to the office until I’ve done that. We all need to do a better job of not just being worried about our own health but considerate of our impact on others as well.
Once we accept our new reality and take the appropriate actions, we can feel safer, more comfortable and happier in our COVID times. ~ Rev Kane
Tonight a joint post on two of my blogs the Ministry of Happiness and Higher Ed Mentor. It’s been a crazy year in education and as we wrap up the fall semester and I’m seeing what some of my faculty are doing to help students, and helping some students get their teachers to do what they should, I started thinking back on my own teachers.
Teachers are such an incredible part of everyone’s life, it’s rare that someone doesn’t have some teacher along the way that did something amazing and impactful in their life. For those of us who have decided to work in education, this is especially so. Tonight I wanted to just reach back and thank some of the most impactful teachers in my life.
First of all thank you to all of my teachers and teachers in general, it’s a much tougher job than people realize and an incredibly important job in our society. I think the first teacher I have to thank is my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Garno. She showed up at my house one night to express her concerns about me to my mother, and officially was the first teacher to call me on my shit. You see, I was a street kid from the wrong side of the tracks and ran with some serious juvenile delinquents. I pulled a lot of shit in school but I had learned early on, if you were a white kid with straight A’s, you could almost always get away with pointing the finger at someone else. But somehow, Mrs. Garno saw through that and actually prevented me from participating in something extremely stupid, thank you.
I have to thank my third grade teacher Mrs. Nicholson for making me feel special. That woman loved me, she believed in me, she saw potential in me no else had seen and she wasn’t shy in telling me about it. And she kept up with my life until the day she died. She was one of the few people in my early life who made me feel like I could be someone special.
In eighth grade I got put into an advanced math class, doing high school work in junior high. Ms. Spinelli, in addition to being smoking hot, (that was impactful to a 14 year-old boy), she was also a great teacher. It was in her class that she brought out the best in me academically and made me realize that my path to success in life would certainly start with academics.
In high school I had two teachers who were married to each other, one in Biology and one in Calculus who taught me how to be rigorous academically, whatever academic success I had in college is in some part to the skills imparted on me by Ma and Pa Russell.
The greatest teacher I ever had was my 4 year, high school English teacher Frank Sullivan at Hudson High School in New York. He has been the best teacher I’ve ever seen in action. When I became a teacher I emulated him more than anyone else I’d ever seen teach. He was crazy, active, dramatic and he hit us with what was really important in life and he did so while expanding my cultural experience on a massive scale.
As an undergrad at SUNY Plattsburgh I had one truly unique teacher, Larry Schaffer. I took his elective Biopsychology class because I had gotten to know him a bit and because of what everyone said about his class. Of course the semester I took the class he completed revamped it and we spent time working through in a discussion format, books by Stephen Jay Gould. What Larry showed me was that it was a ok to be a personality as a college teacher and the importance of being willing to shake up what you do, even if it was already successful. He also emulated what a student centered caring professor looked like.
As an undergraduate I had student teaching assignments and as a student teacher at Plattsburgh Junior High School I worked with Maynard Jubert. They called him Mr. Science and he was a master at active learning. He taught me so much about integrating hands-on activities into the classroom setting and how to do so in such a way that it enhanced the flow of the classroom.
The last teacher I’ll talk about is Professor Philpott at UTK. I took his graduate level multi-variate statistic class as an audit because I needed one technique within the class. But the class was so good I attended every class and even took the exams. What made his class so good was that as an education major I had always been taught that the best thing you could do is to teach every concept three ways. Talk through it, show it visually and then have students experience it with their hands. Philpott said he would do this in multi-variate stats, and he did. He had this crazy board with coat hangars set into it that he would bend around and then stretch a knit cap across it to allow you to hold an actual three dimensional model of every function we discussed, a true master class in teaching and statistics.
So thank you to all of them and all of you who teach, you do so much and have impacts you’ll never know about but are so important, to so many people.
Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock. ~ Alvin Toffler
Ok, sure, we are living through a global pandemic, social media and the internet have us on future shock overload, global climate change is an existential crisis come to life. But within all of that we live in incredible times. I often think about the life my grandfather led, he was born in 1919 and died in the year 2000.
Grandpa Kane
He never had a driver’s license and the only time in his life he drove a vehicle was in Europe during WWII. As a kid, telephones and radios were just becoming a normal thing in homes. He lived through the depression, as I mentioned fought in WWII and was in his 50’s when the first man walked on the moon. He lived through the 60’s, the 70’s and even through the beginning of the computer age in the 80’s. Imagine how different his life was as a 10 year-old child, telephones and radios just appearing in his life to living in the 90’s in the age of the internet.
Amazing technology is ubiquitous these days and surrounds us at every waking hour, to the point we see the absolutely amazing as mundane. As a kid I always loved when there were video phones in science fiction movies, where there were computer systems that would set an alarm and wake you with the current weather and the day’s major news. Of course, these were always huge screens, often accompanied by a virtual assistant. Sounds like Siri set my alarm and show me the news. The Jetsons with their flying cars, robots and moving walkways was set in the way, way out future. So sometimes, like I did this week, I encounter something amazing and new and it hits me how utterly amazing this world is that we live in.
While not zipping around the skies we do have flying cars, moving walkways are in every airport, not in the US so much, but in Japan robots are becoming more and more common place. Because of the internet and the process speeds available in something as small as a phone, we have video calls with our friends, can download a full Hollywood movie to our phone in minutes. We have satellite phones to such an amazing degree I once made a call on a 16,000 foot mountain in the Himalayas, one of the most remote spaces on earth. We have self-driving trucks shuttling goods on American roads and self-driving cars that within in a few years will not be uncommon. We have laser eye surgery and because of CRISPR are doing things with gene modification that were in the realm of science fiction a year ago. And rich people can buy a ticket and fly, albeit briefly, into space.
Then of course we can talk about Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence, AI, is doing incredible things and is already ubiquitous in our lives. It is behind all of the algorithms that drive the social media that we all use. It handles many of the automated call trees for customer service, it allows me to make calls while driving by saying, call Rooney. It’s increasingly being used in math and science, AI has solved math problems that seemed unsolvable and has even begun to detect mathematical patterns that humans have been incapable of comprehending. There are predictions that AI, by 2050, will be able to do anything a human mind is capable of doing.
One last note, first a term synesthesia. Synesthesia refers to a condition where someone’s senses effectively get cross wired. So for instance a color could have a taste, or a sound could cause a visual experience. So while scrolling on Twitter yesterday I saw something, there is an AI at wombo.art that will draw and image of your username or anything really, sort of like an AI with synesthesia. Below is what it drew for The Ministry of Happiness, the image at the top is how it drew Rev Kane.
These are absolutely amazing times and given that the rate of technological change is ever increasing, it will be amazing to see what’s still to come in my life time. Happy days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The holidays are here, Thanksgiving is over and the shopping season is fully under way, I can tell by the fact that driving in any commercial parking lot feels like I’ve been dropped into Death Race 2000. So this time of year people are pretty feverishly shopping and planning for vacations, visitors and holiday dinners. And of course we’re all doing it in an pandemic environment that makes everything harder. We’re also all still very much on edge as you can see by the ubiquitous freak out going on over the Omicron variant.
The fact is that holiday travel, the colder weather keeping people inside and flu season likely means we’re in for a fairly predictable COVID winter season spike. If Omicron is truly what it’s been billed to be so far, more transmissible and less virulent, it’s likely to be an economic issue and frankly a pain in the ass without being the life threatening issue COVID has been so far. I can say this for two reasons, first it’s being reported as such initially, and secondly, unlike the Delta spike, we have a much higher level of vaccination, at least in the United States. Of course, higher infections rates, even if the death rate doesn’t spike, will mean more closures and quarantine notifications. And likely more restrictions related to mask mandates and social distancing.
All of this will add an additional spike of stress to, what for most people, is the most stressful time of the year. So while I often talk about work/life balance from the perspective of keeping the work side of the equation in balance with life, this time of year it often bounces the other way. At this time of year, for a lot of businesses, things drop into a bit of a lull. In some countries other than the US, this time of year worklife almost completely comes to a halt. For those of us working in education we face a unique type of reality. First, everything accelerates to a fever pitch for a short period of time and then everything pretty much stops until early January.
So how do we keep our lives in balance during the holiday? I offer tonight three very specific suggestions and the first is something I talk about quite a lot, planning. You have to plan your time more, not less during the holidays. This will help you make decisions, perhaps you have invitations to multiple holiday gatherings. Making a plan will help make sure you don’t get overwhelmed or let people down. If you wing it, you may think you’ll make all three but without thorough planning you might end up getting locked into one and miss one or even the other two. So while it doesn’t seem very festive, setting and plan and letting the people you will be visiting know what it is, you can make multiple gatherings and not let anyone down. Also, by doing this, you might discover things. If you tell someone you’re not coming til later, you might find out that gathering is focused around dinner or that someone you particularly want to see will only be there early. Planning, although it may seem work-like, is very much your friend. It also may help you make the hard decisions like what events you truly can’t make it to, by making that decision early you can save harder conversations closer to the event when hosts are likely to be more stressed and emotional and reduce hurt feelings and guilt.
Self-care cannot disappear during the holidays and exercise in particular is even more important. During a time when we are likely eating more and less healthy than any other part of the year and we’re more stressed, it’s important to make sure we continue to exercise. You want to at least put a small dent in the extra calories you’re consuming and far more importantly work off the stress of the season. Since we often exercise alone, it’s also time to yourself to get away from the holiday madness for a bit. If you have little kids or a family you just can’t get away from, well then make exercise a group/family event. Walks in nature or even walking around holiday events, sledding or skating if you live some place with winter or similar activities can help you get the exercise you need to knock off the stressful edges. One particular thing I like, particular in places with winter snow on the ground, are night walks. Even a small night walk on trails or parks you know well, take on a completely amazing and adventurous quality at night.
The last one I’ve taken from a piece on a site called house of dragon, is called choose gratitude over guilt and it’s really fantastic advice. What this means is that we need to change our perspective during the holidays. Often when we decline an invitation we feel guilty, instead, you need to be grateful that someone wanted to spend time with you. You need to be grateful for your life and what you have, and make you and your closest family (selected or otherwise) the priority. You’re not required to make every party or family gathering, you’re not required to make any in fact. Remember to make you and yours the priority, express gratitude for what you can do and be thankful for your own peace of mind, peace in life and what happiness you have. You are not responsible for other people’s happiness, so do what keeps you and yours happiest during the holidays.
Also a suggestion on gift giving, for those who are close to you, take the time to think what will actually make them happy. Don’t forget the power of nostalgia, reminding people of their childhood or things they did with you when you were a child. Some of those simple reminders are the most powerful gifts. For those outside of that circle of those closest to you, don’t stress over those gifts, really at that level it is the thought that counts. So make the gift affordable and useful, it’s one of the reasons I am very fond of giving good food and wines as gifts. They show you care, and are things people can enjoy without costing you a lot of money.
Finally tonight, a note to my fellow introverts. You’re not responsible for the happiness of others, you don’t have to say yes to any invitation, there is no required time for attendance at an event. I know this time of year is tough, for those of us who really don’t like crowds or parties, we suffer this time of year in a paradoxical sort of way. First, we get hurt, because we keep fewer social connections we get so few invitations this time of year, and that reminds us we’re different, that we have a tendency to be a bit more lonely than other people. Secondly, we get committed to do work holiday parties and family events that we are incredibly uncomfortable attending. While also hurting people’s feelings by turning down invitations to gatherings because they often don’t understand why we do that. Forgive yourself for saying no, it’s ok to do what keeps you happiest and feeling safe this time of year. Also, if you are absolutely committed, there are sometimes work or family functions you can’t avoid, remember you do have some control. That’s right, you may have to attend, but it’s still your life and you are responsible for you, so show up, do your hellos and to quote Paul Simon, slip out the back Jack. While there may be 50 ways to leave your lover, there’s also 50 ways to leave a party. You have no obligation to say goodbye to the hosts or anyone else, so leave when it’s most comfortable for you, quietly, without explanation and without guilt.
I’m hoping you all have a wonderful holiday season and remember to take care of you first, celebrate second. ~ Rev Kane
I love food, I love to cook and I especially love to eat. As I relayed in last week’s post one of the several reasons that I love Thanksgiving so much, it is very much a cooking and eating holiday for me. So this week there were a number of meals on the menu. The night before Thanksgiving I made a traditional holiday dish for the Italian side of my family, a meatball lasagna, the last piece will serve as my lunch tomorrow. For Thanksgiving, I made roasted Cornish Game Hens, mashed potatoes and stuffing and something a lot of people don’t like, but is Thanksgiving to me, a can of jellied cranberry sauce. My traditional Thanksgiving desert is a homemade banana and chocolate pudding pie. My next foray was a traditional Mexican meal, tamales and re-fried beans, I’d meant to do roasted chilies as well but I forgot them while shopping. Today for breakfast I made traditional Southern Biscuits and Gravy. For dinner I made nachos and yes, accompanying much of this were cokes.
Using the game hen skeletons I made a lovely bone broth that I supplemented with some traditional chicken stock and made a really lovely chicken soup that I’ll be dining on this whole week. This bit of an eating orgy is also a last carb related foray. I need to get my blood sugar back under control, I need to lose the final 12 pounds to reach my goal of 175. So I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this weekend and honestly for the first time in almost a year and a half, I’m really starting to feel like myself again. And that means jump starting my writing projects, getting my sugar in line as I mentioned and finalizing my plans for my next step in life. I finally feel like I have the mental space to make all that happen.
Over the next couple of days I’ll finish the only part of Christmas that I like, wrapping and shipping out the presents I’ve bought for my nieces and nephews. I think I’ve done a really good job this year and I’m excited to hear their reactions.
I hope you all have a wonderful break for Thanksgiving and Happy Hanukkah to those who celebrate.
I pray you heal from things no one ever apologized for ~ Unknown
It’s the holiday season, how do I know? Well today the parking lot at the supermarket was completely madness. People just walking in the driving lanes like it was a crosswalk. People backing into parking spaces, combined with the crazy walkers creating levels of gridlock that rival Manhattan on a Friday night.
I’ve made no secret of this on the blog, but the holiday season and particularly Christmas is my least favorite time of the year. This time of year people in public get harried, rude and just plain act crazy. With the time change the days seem even shorter than they are, it gets dark way too early. The next couple of months are just composed of far too many cold and dark nights.
But of course it’s not just that, emotionally this is a hard part of the year for those of us who haven’t or don’t had the type of typical family that most people have. Even worse, this is the time of year where everything in the media is the typical Norman Rockwell image of family. Every commercial, every TV show, every movie it seems centers around these large family gatherings. So for those who look around and don’t see anything like that, it can be really hard.
My dislike of this time of year goes way back, I can’t ever remember liking the Christmas season. The irony of it all, I have written about before how Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. So I do get a little boomeranged this time of year. I go from what will happen next week, a week of getting out in nature and eating really well, to things getting dark and cold in my world. And I know that I’m not alone this, which is why shortly after Thanksgiving I start posting additional posts entitled Holiday Happiness posts. I do these to give folks an opportunity to have access to pieces that they can access to hopefully help them through a hard time of year.
To those of you who don’t feel this way, who have Norman Rockwell holidays, or at least large groups of close family and friends to celebrate with, happy holidays and enjoy. ~ Rev Kane
True wealth is not of the pocket, but of the heart and of the mind. ~ Kevin Gates
What makes a person rich? Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffet by the standard definition of having a lot of money, they are all very rich. Of course we can go the other way and be purely philosophical and rely on the old standard, and consider anyone who has their health to be rich. But honestly, I don’t think either of those are a good measure of a person’s wealth.
Let’s be clear, having your health, a job, a place to live, enough money to take care of the things you need are the basics we all strive for, and without them it’s hard to consider yourself rich or wealthy by any definition. But happily for most of us, we have these basics.
I truly believe that many of us are richer than we realize, because for me, what makes us wealthy are the collection of amazing and precious moments that we accumulate in life. The birth of a child, their first words, their first steps, the first time they ride a bike without training wheels. That amazing gift you got that you always wanted, that first kiss with that special person. That crazy night in high school or college when you and friends did that crazy thing that turned into an adventure and worked out, likely because you didn’t get caught. These moments are always experiences, sometimes there are mementos a picture or some small item, but the real currency are the memories and feelings of those times.
I consider myself wealthy for this reason, I have spent my adult life seeking out experiences that would create special moments and memories for me. Some people call this pursuit checking off items on a bucket list, but I call it living a full life. And I’m really fond of how someone labeled me at one point due to this attitude, they called me a sampler of life. I consider that to mean someone who makes an effort to experience as many things as they possibly can. This fits me incredibly well and is a characteristic that I’m quite proud of.
We can all do this, it will take different forms and shapes depending on our lives. For some of us it will be achieved by spending a lot of money, for some of us it will occur in exotic places all over the world. For some of us it will be done inexpensively and for others close to home. As I’ve traveled through my life I’ve done a little bit of both. The key issue is desire, desire to make these things happen. That means when you have the spark of a thought, to put yourself in position to potentially have one of these moments, you have to go for it. Life is short, and at the end of it we regret the things we didn’t do. These moments can pass you by if you’re not careful and you only get so many chances at them, don’t miss them.
This idea has been on my mind a lot lately, as someone who seeks out these types of opportunities the pandemic has really put a damper on these types of moments in my life. I seek out a lot of these opportunities through travel, whether it’s to visit family across the country or to find adventure. So this week, particular after having, due to COVID, miss out on flying to New York and trick or treat with my little nieces and nephews I needed to plan an opportunity. So I reached down into my bucket list and planned a trip to Mexico to hang out with grey whales in February in San Ignacio Lagoon. I hope to recreate the picture below with me in it.
I desperately need this trip, it is my hope that it is my first step in a true return to some kind of post-COVID normality, whatever that looks like.I hope you’re finding similar opportunities my friends and making the time to do them. ~ Rev Kane
Acceptance of one’s life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices. ~ Paul Tournier
I love long distance hiking, being out in nature for weeks or months at a time means you’re surrounded by natural beauty all of the time. The friendships you make doing something like that can quickly and surprisingly become lifelong in a short period of time. There’s satisfaction in the physical challenge, setting new personal bests of physical accomplishments sometimes daily. But it’s the mental aspects of long distance hiking that are the most amazing to me. You learn so much doing long hikes. You learn a lot about hiking, you learn a lot about the country and surroundings, you learn a lot about yourself. And you learn about a lot about life, on the Appalachian Trail, more than anything else, I learned about acceptance. I was thinking a lot about my time on the trail over the last week.
You see probably the biggest impact on me from our pandemic times has been curtailing both my ability and willingness to travel. Lot’s of places have been and still are shut from access. Some make me too nervous to attempt. The two big adventures I had planned over the last two years were to be a cruise to Antarctica and hiking the Overland Track in Tasmania, Australia. Well right now Australia is still shutdown and taking a cruise just seems like a really bad idea. Both also involve long air flights and right now the idea of a really long plane flight is for me, an uncomfortable proposition.
Travel is my happy place, being able to travel to new countries and encounter new wild places and cultures are what brings me some of my greatest joy in life. So naturally, as my worklife has devolved into a bit of a shitshow, my mind turns to travel and the lessons I learned long-distance hiking. This week I really kept thinking about a phrase you hear a lot on trails, “never quit on a bad day.” This is great advice on a trail. You see long distance hiking is hard, sometimes incredibly so. So you don’t want to quit on a tough day because often it’s an emotional decision based on the reaction to what you’ve faced that day. I can give an actual example from my time on the Appalachian Trail. My first 14 days on the trail included 12 days of either snow or rain. Being cold and wet everyday wears you down. I faced a particular long, hard, soaking wet cold day at one point. It was a day I was able to get off trail and get in to town. But it was off schedule, I had planned to hike another day and go into a completely different town, but honestly I was ready quit. It had all just felt like too much and I was miserable. When I got to my hotel room I turned on the TV and heard the weatherman say rain, rain, more rain, cold shitty weather forever. Ok, reality was it was just a really bad forecast for the next day. So I went down to the desk and booked a second night. I was really close to quitting the trail. But I got a hot shower, had a really great meal and got a good night’s sleep in a warm hotel room. I woke up the next morning and had a tasty, hot, southern breakfast. The sun came out and my mood shifted, the storm came through and right after, the sun came back out and the weather forecast showed a warming trend. So I spent that afternoon doing a resupply and the next morning, after listening to the storm all night from the comfort of a warm, dry bed, I headed back out.
This past week at work very much felt like that night in Georgia when I left the trail soaked, cold and demoralized. That’s where my mood has been at work recently and last week I wrote about the idea that I’m at a crossroad, but using a phrase I like better, a nexus point. I heard, “never quit on a bad day” ringing in my head a lot this week. There is no chance that I’ll be quitting, I’m locked in to July 1, 2022. I need that date to reset my salary according to the conditions of our pension system and guarantee the pension level I set as a minimum for myself. And honestly the emotional reaction is to quit July 1st, my job has begun to feel untenable.
But I’ve always joked I’m half-Vulcan and tend to make decisions based less on emotion and more on logic. Never quit on a bad day. So this weekend has been all about how to best deal with the situation I’m facing. I’m blessed, I have options, I’m very good at what I do and have enough flexibility in my life that I can get a new job, probably fairly quickly. But I’m ready to make a pretty significant change in my life. I’m really tired of managing people, it’s a truly thankless task, particularly in higher education. So just shifting jobs means more of the same thing, likely for less money, (I’m really well paid) and of course a new job means a new three year commitment and I’m not willing to make that if it’s doing the same thing. So what’s the answer? I decided this weekend upon two things, the first, how do I immediately get some stress relief and second, what are the criteria for a move?
The immediate stress relief has come in the form of telling the world via Linkedin and this post that as of July 1st I’m open to new opportunities, including short-term. Who knows, maybe something I haven’t thought about may present itself and it’s time to be open to new perspectives. Second, I have to plan some travel, some real travel and I’m actively engaging around what I can do that will be comfortable, safe and get me out of my life for a bit.
The longer term answer is to develop criteria for when it’s time to make a move. So I’ve set those criteria and they include becoming debt free, I’m very close and can easily get there before July 1st. It includes have a set amount of money in my savings, and that’s likely to be the biggest snag. It is something that I’ll monitor over the next couple of months but I will likely take more than six months to meet that criteria. So this means that I’m likely in my current situation til either January, 2023 or July 2023.
The thing about setting criteria is that it takes the worrying and thinking off of the table for me. The mental wheels don’t have to spin, the answer always comes by answering the question, are we there yet? Do I still have debt, have I met the savings goal? If either answer is no we keep working. It does also allow me to plan, I’ll likely know by this June, based on my rate of savings and debt payoff when I’ll hit those goals, January or June of 2023. It also gets my mind set around the fact that I’m definitely gutting it out for the next year.
There are wildcards, most of my debt is student loan debt, will the Biden Administration provide any student loan debt relief? Will I hit a minor lottery payout? Either of these could get me to my goals a bit to a lot quicker.
The only thing that bothers me in this situation is a promise I made to myself in 1990. I grew up watching almost every adult around me work jobs that didn’t make them happy, some we’re downright miserable. But I understood why they did it, they did it because it was the best option available to support their family. You see almost none of them had a college education or any kind of specialized training that would give them options. I worked a lot of shit jobs while growing up, while attending college and I did them because I had to. Perhaps the most embarrassing time of my life, (I had avoided working fast food in high school), was having to grab a job at Burger King one summer while in graduate school in Kentucky. I purposefully took a job twenty miles away from campus in Lexington so I wouldn’t see anyone I knew, I was ashamed, but I needed the money, and frankly the free food. When I graduated with my masters degree in 1990 I made myself a promise. I now had a graduate degree, I had skills, I’m smart and I’m a hard worker so I knew I’d never have to work a shit job again and I promised myself I wouldn’t. I’ve left three professional positions that I liked once they become bad jobs, typically because of new and bad supervisors. Once because the faculty I worked with made the job untenable and I’m in that situation again. So it’s upsetting to me to gut out my current gig for maybe eighteen more months in violation of that promise. But like those adults I grew up around, I’m doing it because it’s what’s best for me and my family long-term.
So what this means is to shut up about it, suck it up and count the days while doing whatever I can to make the job more tolerable and finding ways to get my travel in. I can tolerate anything for a time and honestly if it gets worse, I can always honor my promise from 1990, and my criteria will keep me on track, working for the promise of happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The whole point is to live life and be – to use all the colors in the crayon box. ~ RuPaul
I have always liked the term nexus point. It’s a point of importance, intersection and change, if you want to be more artistic and spiritual, you could say it’s a point where destiny and opportunity intersect. I’m quickly coming upon one of these points in my life. In the retirement system I’m in you earn 2.0% for each year of service if you retire at 60 or later. The other piece of the equation is that the percentage is taken against, the average of your highest, consecutive three years of earnings. My new reset date, a new highest three year average comes in June of 2022. So at the end of this June I will have 16.5 years (33%) and a new set point. While this won’t make me rich in retirement it’s a pretty solid monthly check, particularly since I’ll be debt free when I retire. This past week was a pretty big week on the debt front, as I paid off the bigger or my remaining two student loans.
My original plan had been to work in my current job and retirement system until I turned sixty and then retire. My thinking was that I could access Medicare at 62, so I figured I could afford private insurance for a couple of years before Medicare. Unfortunately, that was an error, the age for Medicare to kick in is 65 and I will likely need heart surgery at some point in the next five to ten years. So I need to be well covered. So this change put my plans into a bit of chaos. This information coincided with the COVID pandemic and my job, which has always been a hard, stressful and thankless job, turned into a really difficult haul. I spent six months working 70 – 80 hour weeks. We had to redesign everything we do in the online environment, additionally, given that a majority of my job is personnel management, I had to spend a lot of time taking care of them. Of course all of them were going through the hardest period of their career and people’s reaction ranged from acceptance, to nearly mental breakdown and all were expecting me to have all of the answers, many times answers that were being created completely on the fly.
We all have gone through tragedies during COVID, and in my job for a time it really felt like tragedy management. As this fall semester came into view I thought that perhaps things would get better, but unfortunately that has not been the case. The additional pressure of the pandemic and large amounts of change, has amped people up. Our enrollments have crashed, so budgets will be tightening and people are stressed. With the entitlement that exists in our system, particularly around faculty and with faculty holding a general belief that all administrators are evil, folks at my level have become the recipients of a lot of negativity. We are routinely called names by the faculty on public comment at board meetings, we take one on one grief over every decision and faculty do not seem to understand that we are not operating in a business as usual environment. There has been massive faculty angst over our full return to campus in January and the District and executive leadership continue to march forward with new initiatives. Personally for me, I’m also having to cover an additional full-time 40 hour per week management position.
While I’ve been told I’m doing a good job, the survey tied to my evaluation had a rating level of superior, and from the evidence it’s obvious I’m doing a better job than anyone has done in my position in the last ten years, it continually doesn’t feel like enough. We’re constantly told we have to do more, we’re constantly receiving negativity from faculty, what has always been a hard job is quite frankly untenable. I’m someone who has always prided myself on focusing on getting things done. But right now, at the most complicated time in the history of higher education, it’s almost impossible to feel like you are being successful, that you’re doing anything but checking boxes and treading water. At this moment, the only reason I’m still in this job is that I’m paid very well and I need to reset my salary for retirement purposes. Spending every day at work, overworked and beyond unappreciated for what I do is demoralizing and dehumanizing, and quite frankly realizing the people you supervise and work on behalf of don’t care about you at all makes it incredibly hard to stay motivated. So at the moment, the joke is I’m nothing but a money grubbing whore doing what I have to do to make that money. This has never been who I am and being in this space has thrown me into a months long low-level depression.
So a change has to come. And the nexus point starts to form around June 15, 2022, the first real date I could make a change. But I have criteria for making that change. They include a certain minimum retirement level which I am very close to next June. I need to be debt free and as I mentioned I’m closing in on that milestone. I have a certain dollar figure of savings I need to have and I’m not sure if I can get there by next June. The better answer would be to end my time here in June of 2023, it bumps my retirement higher, it helps me make my savings goal. But right now seven months seems like a long time, nineteen months an eternity. But I do know that time goes by fast, of course if I hit my criteria in January of 2023 that could be a compromise position.
I’m somewhere from a half, to a year and a half away from massive change. My plan, driven by the horrible financial situation related to health care and insurance in this country, is to continue working after I leave my current position. The primary reason is to have health insurance. So my forming plan is to work at something fun with health benefits that I enjoy and is significantly lower stress than my current gig. I’ll need to work until sixty-five until medicare kicks in and from sixty on I’ll have that salary and my retirement from my current gig. Since I’ll likely be in some system for over five years I may even vet into a second retirement which would be great.
I have a geographic preference as well, the dearest people in the world to me are my nieces and nephews and my littlest ones are all in or around New York. So I want to be within a few hours of them so that I can be a bigger part of their lives. I want to be rural, as I have a deep interest in both natural foraging, hiking, camping and developing survival skills. I want to own a property where I can be involved in all of this. This puts me in a several hundred mile circle around New York City. This of course is a pretty broad area encompassing southwestern New York, the Adirondacks, Eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Vermont, New Hampshire, Western Massachusetts, and Southern Maine. The nice thing about the broad region is that it open up a lot of possibilities in employment. Particularly in terms of staying in higher education as a program director or academic advisor there are literally hundreds of colleges in that range. And of course remote work only requires an internet connection and airport access.
So right now all of this is swirling in my mind and the depression I’ve been dealing with and the stress I’m under are all ganging up on my psyche. I’m distracted and forgetful, I’ve been having a really hard time focusing, I’ve missed two meetings this year, a first for me in my career, I’m very short-tempered right now and I’ve even made the classic reply all error that I’ve never done before.
But I’m not unhappy friends, you see I’m an incredibly resilient person. I’ve been in much worse spots in my life. I know that once I get more focus on the decisions around the next move and solidify when I will make it, I’ll become more energized. Now that I’m fully vaccinated and boosterized, now that travel opportunities are opening up, I will get on the road again for real. Travel is the true food for my soul and my little road trips over the last year have been good, but not what I need. So once I figure out my next trip and really start planning that will happen as well. Unfortunately the solution at work is to stop caring about how well I do my job by drawing hard lines around my time, this will disappoint people, but I have to take care of me first.
If there is any lesson in this rambling diatribe tonight it’s to take care of you and yours first. We must always do what’s best for our life and I do mean our life as in personal life. While we all have to work, our work life is secondary, I’ve preached this for over a decade now and every day I’m more and more convince of how truly important this is and is what will lead to happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane
The Ministry of Happiness 