Month: February 2022

When the cell phone industry announced 3G some years ago, I had to look up what “G” meant. “Oh, right”, I recall saying aloud, after reading online that G stood for generation. “I knew that.” Of course I had no idea what constituted arrival at the 3rd G and the next level of technical telecommunication capability. It could have been part marketing and part improved information technology. But it was something new, a layer above. It was another generation.

It is odd how much faith we place in generational change, either through time or via knowledge breakthroughs. Our stories read like an arc drawn over human history in some celestial blueprint, always pressing forward, ahead, surging, sometimes in spurts, towards improvement instead of deterioration. While not everyone feels that today is better than the proverbial yesterday, most of us believe that it should be, that, in principle, each generation should build on the lessons from the previous one, that every age should learn from its predecessors, that progress should define the human enterprise rather than stagnation or, worse yet, deterioration and regression. In the face of the occasional ‘one step back’, there should always be two steps forward – or at least a step and a half.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Penned in 1905 by philosopher George Santayana, this exhortation to remain conscious of time and things past was paraphrased four decades later by Winston Churchill when he famously replaced “remember the past” with “learn from history”. The alteration may seem minor; it has, however, fairly massive significance. Because to learn implies something very different from to remember. Indeed, a study of experience through the lens of impact can bring valuable insight into lessons learned from such experience. Even if imperfectly gained, sharpened understanding of yesteryear can bring benefits for both the present and then future, helping us individually and collectively from repeating prior missteps and mistakes, guiding us, haltingly yet gradually, to something better.

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.” Clutching the skull of the dead court jester, Hamlet gives voice to the frailty of life, the vanity of human experience, and our difficulty seeing beyond the moments of our individual lives to the grander sweep and scope of our history. There is a certain sad resignation in this scene, a surrendering acceptance that what we do seems to be of little consequence, that as we are all destined for the soil following our final breath then the things of this life, of this world, of this time, well, all of it is, perhaps, inconsequential, that we and the silly meanderings of our lives do not matter.

How untrue.

It matters, what you and I do. We need not understand how or why our choices matter to believe, as a fundamental value, that they do, to hold in our hearts an ethic of virtue that manifests in our words, our actions, our desire to rise above ourselves, and our previous actions, and do better.

A month ago, a memory device came to mind while I was hiking in the high desert, a way to remind myself each day of the power of perspective in my own life: generosity and gratitude. Just two words. Yet within each lies a range of ability, humility, and reference. And it helps that they begin with the same letter. I decided I could remember to think of both values by recalling “two g’s” when I took my daily walk. It has worked. Every day, I remind myself that as long as I am fortunate to feel the effects of earthly attraction, I can remember to extend generosity, even in small doses, to the world and to be grateful for the opportunity to do so. Last week, the perhaps obvious extension of the memory device occurred to me: what other g’s might I consider? Was there an equivalent, evolutionary “5G” in my values to the generational stack in wireless telecommunication capability?

Consultation with a dictionary was not required. Nor did it take much time for me to settle on additions to my mnemonic. Gentleness jumped into place as my 3rd G, followed by grace, and then, grandeur. “Wait!” an internal voice called. “You should take your time with this. There are many other possibilities.” True, I am sure there are many worthy candidates for a place in my 5G framework. But I like the ones that my unrestricted consciousness served me. They seem to move in some sequence and order that feels, strangely, generational.

And there is room to grow, should I decide to add to my own 5G standard before the telecommunications industry adds to its. That is the beauty of having references and structures in our learning: we can evolve them, refine and improve them. But to do so we must remember them, just as we must recall, through clear eyes and unvarnished viewpoints, the lessons of our past lest, or even when, we find ourselves relearning those lessons, sometimes painfully, often unnecessarily.

What is a 5G history equivalent for the contemporary world? Europe is again at war. Our climate slides further into worrisome waters. Those who would divide us from a common cause hold noisy megaphones. In the face of such challenges, we must give historical reflection its due, past experience its present potential, so that our children do not, like Hamlet, find themselves contemplating the graveyards of their ancestors with the same resigned remorse. We can learn. We can embrace our inadequacies. We can embody what is good and what our past has taught us is the best in ourselves. We can accept that the force binding us – a force we might call the Creator, the prime mover, Allah, Buddha, the great spirit, God – is more powerful than any oppositional influence which might shatter or splinter us.

We should all feel the same gravity. 1G should be a mighty motivator.

Small divisions of continuity, the minutes of the clock. Our lives are filled with them. They are how we measure our movements through space, through aging. Sixty seconds make a minute, sixty minutes make an hour, 1440 minutes make a day, and over 10,000 minutes make a week. There are over half a million minutes in a year. A human being who lives for seventy-five years lives through almost 40 million units of sixty-second time. A person who lives to be one hundred gets over 52 million of them. Those are big numbers. They remind me that, for most of us, we have plenty of minutes in our lives. Although many of those minutes may be of limited quality, they are not, for an average person, of limited quantity. We seem to have plenty to spare.

So suppose we took one of those minutes, just one, and devoted it, just once a year, to a common goal. Suppose an entire state, or country, or even the planet identified just one minute per year to stop, pause, and reflect, pray, or breathe together at the same time. What might that experience be like?

You might be thinking that we already do this, on New Years Eve. Not really. Yes, we often count together each December 31st at 11:59pm but we do it in different time zones and we do it with different purpose. We are counting towards the next minute, a new year, when we count down, mechanically, mostly mindlessly, the terminal minute of last year, a final allotment of seconds as we transition, thankfully, often longingly, from one number on a calendar to the next. The concluding minute of most years is something to get through, something to be done with, rather than something to savor, something to embrace, something to be experienced – as one.

“Let’s take a moment of silence to … (you fill in the blank)”. Many of us have been asked to do this, at funerals and memorials, or in prayer services, or perhaps in civic and community meetings. We dutifully respond to such requests, often standing, relaxing our hands and minds, closing our eyes, bowing our heads, or maybe even turning our faces to the sky and our sun and the aspirations of our spirits. The silence that follows is often saturated with life. We hear the shuffling of feet, the sighing of breath, coughing, the cries of infants, the spaces between the noise of being and the desire of the human heart to be heard. I used to be uncomfortable when asked to do this at the beginning of large meetings or conferences. Was I being asked to pray? Why should I be asked to do that? Only when I learned to acknowledge the importance of intentional pause did I come to appreciate the power in the request to collectively listen, to be quiet with others purposefully, to sometimes remember or consider something together without any one human voice speaking. It is a very grounding experience. We can be loud, us humans. We shout too much. We tell each other what is wrong too much. We think we know so much that sometimes we talk, and we talk, and we talk without thinking, without listening, without remembering to simply and softly be.

Last summer, I attended a training for health leaders on professional fulfillment and wellbeing. It was during the June lull in the coronavirus pandemic, a window of weeks when we believed, mistakenly, that much of the COVID virus and its tragedy was behind us. Most of us in the room had not been physically present in such a setting with other health professionals in quite some time. There was a buzz associated with the return. There was a verbal acknowledgement of the buzz from the speaker’s podium when the meeting began. But there was not a opportunity for the depth of feeling beneath that palpable hum for us to take a shared breath. We were not offered the comforting cloak of a mutual moment of silence. The tragedy, the loss, the frustration, the grief so pervasive in the communities we respectively served was not mentioned. It was disorienting for me, even a bit destabilizing. I felt a distinct desire for a temporary standstill, a longing for connection to others through an opportunity to simply think, internally, about the preceding sixteenth months of life and history and to do so, externally, purposefully, with others.

Might we schedule such a time still?

Imagine that we are all given an opportunity, later this month or next, to stop, for just one minute, and be. Together. Pick a day and time, say next Saturday at noon. The time zone doesn’t matter. What does is the sense of collective intent, identity. Think of the sadness that others have felt, we might offer as guidance. Or think of the sadness you personally have felt. Try to pause from your busy lives and think that millions, perhaps even billions, of other people are doing the same. You only know a sliver of the people presently living on the face of our earth. Individually, you have encountered, loved, and lost an infinitesimal percent of the total number of people on this planet. But together, all of us, we have known and we still know all of these people. Everyone knows someone. The chain of knowing links us all. So let’s pause, be still, and be silent. Think about people or whatever power you want to think about. Think about people you love, miss, or want to honor and do so silently, without speaking, and with humility, open hearts, and whatever feelings that arise. For just one minute – only sixty seconds – think about someone or some power who represents or has represented goodness in your life. And know that, while you are doing this, everyone else you know, and everyone else you don’t know, is doing this also.

What common strength might we find in a single minute of shared silence?