To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer. (Paul R. Erlich, biologist/author)

On a wintry day, temperature hovering just above freezing, leaden skies overhead, I found myself sitting with about 150 other people in my regional Social Security Admin office. Waiting. And waiting. The little slip of paper with my customer service number growing damp and creased in my palm.

In setting up access to an SSA online account the week before, I had encountered a disconcerting roadblock: We have no records that match this information. Try again. So I did. Again and again.To make a long, extremely frustrating story short, every which way I tried—former hyphenated surname (marriage #1), current unhyphenated surname, birth date with zero preceding a digit, birth date without the zero —failed. We have no records that match this information.

Oh yeah? Then explain to me, please, why I’m sitting here with the annual notice you sent in 2018, reporting every year’s social security deductions from my earnings for decades!!!      

Ah, modern life.

This Facelessness We Face

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. (Albert Einstein)

Thirty-five years ago, the movie Brazil, brainchild ofMonty Python’s Terry Gilliam, painted a Munch-ian (think The Scream) portrait of near-future life that is as terrifying today as it was then. A well-oiled featureless orb of a bureaucracy with no edges, nothing one can grasp. An impervious, slippery thing that eludes our efforts to interact with the institutions that shape our lives.

We’re pretty much there:  

Phone bots demand we “say or enter” our answers to pre-determined questions, which often fail to address the reason we called. When we attempt to respond, these bots rap out a snappy “I didn’t quite get that. Can you try again?” And then hang up on us.  

Emails direct us to links that don’t work. When Microsoft took over Skype, I had a $10 phone credit—not a lot, but I need the dough more than Bill Gates, so I clicked on the link the Microsoft message assured me would allow for the transfer of my money to their new Skype system. Another long story short: the link made no mention of transfers or phone credit. No further link to customer service, no phone number. Bye-bye ten dollars.

Online support systems launch our requests for help into deep cyberspace (we used to call this the “circular file”). Three years ago, when my email account was behaving erratically, I left Google a message on their “support” page, you know the one that invites you to “Describe your issue or share your ideas.” Never heard back from them.   

The utter facelessness of modern life often renders us voiceless. As the Ghostbusters theme song asks: “Who you gonna call?”  

How Did We Get Here?

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. (Lewis Mumford, historian and sociologist)

By the time I was born, the post-war (that’s WWII for the Gen Z crowd) economy of labor-saving gadgets was in full swing. Dishwashers. Automatic clothes driers. Frost-free refrigerators.

On a larger scale, technological advances made commercial air travel not only possible but relatively affordable, paved the Interstate highway system, and boosted healthcare for the entire planet with the mass production of antibiotics and the development of the polio vaccine.

Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, the march of progress continued on. Color TVs. Touch-tone phones. Copier machines. Heart transplants.

And on… Word processors. Flip phones. Affordable PCs.

Innovation. It’s a beautiful thing. Up to a point.  

If you can recall life before Facebook. Before bots supplanted flesh-and-blood customer service reps. Before every transaction of life—except possibly a trip to the loo—could be accomplished by a text, a tweet, or an app. If your memory stretches back that far, then you probably recall chatting regularly with your neighbors (all of whom you knew by name), exchanging pleasantries with the (real people!) tellers behind the counter at your bank, the butcher at your local supermarket, salesclerks, your postal carrier.     

In that misty, distant past, virtually all our interactions took place face to face with other humans, or at the most remote, with a real live service rep over the phone, not an algorithm designed to address the most common problems, but almost never your specific issue.

My headbanging experience with the Social Security Administration website illustrates this slippery slide into the faceless technological abyss, which was resolved only when I trooped down to my local SSA office and after half a day’s wait, spoke to a real human being. Ten minutes later, problem solved.

Humans avoid the computer error.

Cyberspace: Not-Your-Mother’s Neighborhood

Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone. (Dan Brown)

Several months ago, a person I’m connected with on Twitter created an informal poll asking how much time people spent daily on social media. I was amazed—and let’s be honest, somewhat appalled—to learn that 6-8 hours a day was “typical” for many respondents. We’re not talking teens here. This group of several dozen Tweeters has a median age of about 45-50. Most hold full time jobs and many have families still at home.

How do they do it? Since the day drives a hard bargain—24 hours, not a minute more!—something must be sacrificed to get that 6-8 hours of social media. That something, I suspect, is face-time with other people—neighbors, friends.

According to a Pew Center Research poll, 29% of American adults know only some of their neighbors by name, and another 28% know none, whereas the average number of friends someone has on Facebook (2019) is 338. And the average number of followers a Tweeter has is 707 (2016), a number that’s up 340% from 2012.

While these FB friends and fellow Tweeters are real people (with the exception of the occasional bot), it’s likely most of them don’t live in our community. We probably didn’t go to school with them, or raise our kids in their neighborhood. They’re not likely to come to our 50^th birthday celebration. We’re not likely to attend their wedding. We click on a heart emoji to respond to their post about their child’s cute photo, then go about our day—our RL (real life)—without giving it or them another thought.      

Even family—perhaps especially family—suffers from members orbiting cyberspace. Couples dine out in total silence, both partners texting through the meal. Parents take kids to the park, to the store, to a café, where no one speaks while Mom or Dad check their notifications. Sometimes they bring a screen to keep the kid busy/quiet.

Ian Bogost, writing in The Atlantic, describes his experience with the social network service Nextdoor, an app (oh irony of ironies!) designed to counter the effect of all those other social networks that take us into cyberspace and away from our neighborhoods.

So, what do neighbors chat about on Nextdoor? Do they discuss their day at work? The kids’ experience at the local school? Who’s looking like a winner for the Yankees? The funny joke they heard on Colbert last night? According to Bogost, his Nextdoor neighbors have reported a fallen tree blocking a major road, someone seeking belly-dancing classes, lost cats and dogs. They also complain about a variety of things, especially the sending of “urgent” alerts by other neighbors in the wee hours.

Nextdoor’s VP of policy, Steve Wymer, told Bogost that pretty much the same topics arise everywhere: Service requests/recommendations and real estate discussions make up about 50% of the buzz. Noise complaints are another hot topic, and more disturbingly, the sightings of “suspicious” people, i.e., people of color in white neighborhoods.

Though one may learn the actual names of their neighbors on Nextdoor, it seems a poor substitute for a personal relationship. Regular face to face contact. The shared laugh. The visible smile. The sympathetic hug or pat on the shoulder. A neighborhood barbecue. The annual block party.

The Impact of Technology on Our Humanity

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it. (Max Frisch, playwright and novelist)

In my first “real” post-college job as an editor, the industry journals I read were white-hot about the coming thing, the revolution in the wings that would render us one happy globally-connected world: The Internet! How exciting to think we in the States would soon be able to “talk” to people in India, in China. What no one envisaged back then was how much we would stop talking to the people around us—the people we pass on the streets of our neighborhood, in our local park, the town beach. That while “chatting” to thousands of strangers on FB, we would avert our eyes and zip our lips when passing the actual people in our neighborhood, our community, avoiding all contact as if we were all continually riding a crowded subway car in Manhattan.      

Much has been inked about the spike in our stress levels and its possible sources: threats of gun violence, environmental poisons, climate change, racial and social/political divides. All this is very real, but I believe the biggest single stressor of all may be the social isolation we experience in Real Life.                   

Ask yourself: How much energy is consumed in NOT looking at or speaking to people we pass in our daily life?

Of course, technology is just a tool, and like all tools it can be used for good or bad. A hammer, for instance, can repair a broken fence. Or it can bash in your skull.

James Surowiecki, writing in the MIT Technology Review stresses that contemporary criticism of technology is not so much about specific technologies but about the impact of technology on our humanity. That “technology is central to the increasing privatization of experience [my italics], which in turn is creating a fragmented, chaotic society, in which traditional relationships are harder to sustain, community is increasingly an illusion, and people’s relationships to each other, mediated as they often are by machines, grow increasingly tenuous.”

Increasing privatization of experience. Our hectic skeds (would they be so hectic if we weren’t spending gobs of hours online?) create a ready market for convenience services. Daily Harvest, one of many such services, brings food right to your door: “No shopping, chopping, or prepping.” Similarly, supermarket chain Stop & Shop offers two “convenience” options: Food ordered online is either delivered to your door or ready for drive-by pick-up at one of their “click-and-collect” locations. But no shopping means you won’t run into old friends and acquaintances: your child’s former teacher or the woman who coached your daughter’s softball team.    

In his book To Save Everything Click Here, Evgeny Morozov argues that we must take control of technology—make decisions and set limits as a society—rather than allowing it to control us. It’s a valid and important argument, but in the seven years since Morozov published his book, our society, our world has splintered further still. While demanding (and voting for) some kind of accountability from Big Tech, we need to start talking to one another again. Go out into our neighborhoods, parks, and town centers to rediscover and reconnect with the people behind the faces we pass by every day.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

We get so wrapped up in numbers in our society. The most important thing is that we are able to be one-to-one, you and I with each other at the moment. If we can be present to the moment with the person that we happen to be with, that’s what’s important. (Fred Rogers)

Growing up, during my family’s annual pilgrimage to visit relatives in Ohio, my Aunt Marg often took me to the park, a short bus ride away. Each time we boarded that bus, she greeted the driver. “Hey, Oscar, how’s the family?” or “Oscar, did you catch the Reds’ game yesterday?” I liked that she knew his name, knew he had a family, knew he enjoyed baseball. It made me feel like we were part of something larger than two people on a bus, that we were part of a community with everyone on that bus.

At age 5, I was not a stranger to this kind of bonhomie. In my small Michigan town, neighbors chatted with each other while mowing the lawn or raking the leaves or taking a walk. They also banded together in emergencies. During one terrible winter storm—snow drifts to the top of our back door, impossible impassable roads—my dad and our neighbor, Wally, took my Flexible Flyer sled and headed into the sleet for the store a mile away where a helicopter was delivering emergency basics like bread and milk.  

It was neighbors I sold nickel subscriptions to for my first “newspaper”—a weekly two-page rag full of local “scoops”: Who’d just had a baby, who was painting their house a new color. When my best friend Mimi and I put together an acrobatic show (all the latest gymnastics we’d learned at school), it was neighbors who bought tickets. As Mimi and I tumbled rather gracelessly about our yard, I remember the women sitting in lawn chairs, chatting happily, pausing only to applaud our efforts. I later babysat for many of these families. They knew me, knew my parents, knew that in an emergency my parents would be available.     

This was my model growing up. You interact with your neighbors. You talk to people. And even if you don’t know someone, you nod and smile as you pass each other in the coming and going of daily life. It was a model that extended seamlessly into my early adult life. Our family was part of a neighborhood babysitting co-op who swapped childcare favors, held neighborhood potlucks, barbecues, and New Year’s Eve parties. My kids attended the family daycare of our neighbor, Judy, across the street. On a sub-zero Saturday night in January, when our furnace broke down, her husband Bob came over and helped me get that cranky old heatbox re-lit. The night severe gastroenteritis necessitated an ambulance ride to the ER at 1 a.m., it was another neighbor, Paul, who came over to stay with my one-year-old son. When Nina, one street over, traveled, we fed her cats.

In recent years, it has been disheartening to see how fewer and fewer people respond to a smile or a “hello” in passing, but the ones who don’t respond seem more puzzled or startled than annoyed. So I keep smiling, I keep saying hello. Because I don’t want to live in a faceless world. And sometimes the human beings behind those glazed-over “masks” respond in delightful ways: The day after Christmas, I was taking a walk on the bike path with my daughter, her partner, and my son. We encountered a cyclist and when I commended him for braving the ice-encrusted pavement, he laughed: “So far, so good.”  He later caught up with us at the cross-light. “It’s an amazing day, isn’t it,” he said. “More like late-March than December.”

We just feel better when we talk to one another, when we acknowledge each other. Even in that cattle pen of the social security office, once I started talking to the folks next to me, several more people joined the conversation and suddenly everything felt better, the time went faster. It returned our humanity to us. And when my number was called, I was grateful to explain my problem to the real person at the service window. After we got it straightened out, I thanked her. “You do your job very well,” I said. She smiled. A short ten minutes in which we shared a bit of human helpfulness, human kindness, human gratitude.

A small exchange. And a vital one.

If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond…   (Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed over 600 musical works. Symphonies, operas, concertos, string quartets—whatever the form of music, he nailed it, starting at the tender age of five.  

Not a Mozart fan? Don’t tune out just yet. This post is not about the mighty Wolfgang or Shakespeare or Isaac Newton, though they will all be mentioned. This post is about something much bigger, much more profound, and when I say something is more profound than Will Shakespeare, you know IT MATTERS.

But back to the five-year-old Mozart, composing his first works. His sister, Marianne, remembered her baby brother standing rapt at her side as their father, Leopold, taught his daughter the keyboard. So attentive was the young Mozart, that Leopold began to teach him minuets. Marianne recalled the child picking out tunes on his own.

By age six, Mozart was performing for European royalty on a series of world stages. A three-year concert tour took him to Vienna, Munich, Mannheim, Paris, London, and The Hague. On the road, he was introduced to many musicians and composed his first symphony. Joseph Haydn said of his musical contemporary: “Posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years.”

That Mozart’s music endures and his influence has been profound is, of course, a product of his genius. It is also a result of the access he enjoyed to develop and mature that genius.

This was possible because he was already competent at both the keyboard and violin. He was competent on these instruments because his father, Leopold, was a minor composer and music teacher. Music was in the house. Instruments were readily available.

This was possible because his father played violin in the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg’s orchestra and so had the necessary introductions to various courts.

This was possible because the family was able to travel for extended tours and made it a priority to do so.

That the 8-year-old Mozart could compose a symphony was possible because his father was able to transcribe what the child played.   

Shakespeare

Will Shakespeare wrote at least 38 plays and 154 sonnets, many of which have set the standard for excellence in literature. He also penned several narrative poems that achieved great popularity during his life (Venus and Adonis was reprinted 15 times before 1640; The Rape of Lucrece enjoyed eight reprints in the same period). His works have been translated into every major language and quite a few not-so-major languages—more than 100 in all, including Esperanto and Interlingua.  Four-hundred years after his death, his plays live on.  

Much has been made of Shakespeare’s lack of a university education (Marlowe, for example, studied at Cambridge) to discredit his authorship, but class and status—like the variable spelling of his day—were both more and less fluid than they are now, and differently assessed. By any measure of the time, Shakespeare’s family was comfortable. His father was a landowner and a glover with his own shop, a respected citizen who enjoyed a string of appointments to various offices in Stratford, including High Bailiff—or mayor, in modern-speak. His mother’s family was even more illustrious, prominent citizens of Warwickshire dating back before the Norman Conquest. John Arden had served in the court of King Henry VII, and the Ardens had connections to the Stanleys, a family with some claims to the throne. It was in Ferdinando Stanley’s theatrical troupe, Lord Strange’s Men, that Will Shakespeare made his debut on the London stage.

Even without an Oxbridge degree, Shakespeare’s education at the Stratford grammar school would have introduced him to Latin and its renowned authors: Seneca, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. His plays and the sources he used for them display a thorough familiarity with these writers. Perhaps most significantly, he grew up within easy distance of Coventry where he saw the popular mystery and morality plays that traveled the country. That his imagination was sparked by these theatrical productions is clear in his own use of language, themes, and characters.

But, what if Shakespeare had been born a girl in a time when only daughters of noble birth enjoyed an education, and then only under the direction of a tutor in the “safety” of home? What if he’d been the son of a poor laborer instead of a middle-class official, and thus apprenticed as a child to a tanner or feltmaker? Perhaps most significant of all, what if he’d lived too far from a major town to witness the traveling mystery plays, or had no adult to take him, or no free time to spend in leisure?  

Newton

Isaac Newton was born just months after Galileo died, the man whose ideas about motion Newton would expand on to form the foundation of modern physics. Newton also laid the groundwork for modern physical optics with his discovery that white light is composed of seven visible colors. Hoping to improve the refractive telescopes of his day, Newton developed a reflecting telescope that impressed the hell out of the Royal Society (the UK’s national academy of sciences) and made possible much larger telescopes without chromatic aberration. There’s a lot more one can attribute to Newton, but suffice it to note that his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687) remains one of the most important works in the history of modern science.  

Newton’s early life is far sketchier than Mozart’s or Shakespeare’s. His father, a prosperous but uneducated farmer, died three months before his birth, and his mother remarried two years later, leaving her young son with his grandmother while she moved to another village to raise a new family. For almost a decade, until the death of her second husband, Newton’s mother had little to do with him. His anger over her abandonment is succinctly noted in a list of his sins the young Newton recorded: Threatening my [step]father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.

When his stepfather died, the 10-year-old Newton found himself living with his mother and half-siblings, but the reunion was brief. He was sent to lodge with a pharmacist and his family in Grantham, five miles down the road, where he was enrolled in a grammar school. Having shipped him off, his mother soon recalled him to home to manage her estate, a job Newton hated and had no talent for. It had none of the interest or excitement of the Grantham pharmacist’s chemical library and laboratory where Newton had built mechanical devices to entertain the family’s children.

Whether or not Newton’s clumsy managing of the estate was a brilliant strategy of sabotage, an uncle persuaded his mother that Newton should return to school and prepare for university. When he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, his mother refused to pay, so Newton took a gig as a servant to cover his tuition. There, he studied Aristotle and Descartes before enrolling for a master’s degree.

When an outbreak of plague interrupted his studies, he continued to pursue his own ideas in math, physics, optics, and astronomy, developing what would become his three laws of motion. (The story that a falling apple suggested the idea of gravity to him appears to be true.)

When the university reopened, Newton quickly finished his master’s degree. Impressed by his student’s amazing abilities, his mathematics professor recommended Newton replace him when he took another job, a post Newton served in for a quarter century.

Isaac Newton enjoyed access to an excellent education because he had an uncle who intervened to get him back in school, and because it was possible to pay for that education by working part-time as a servant. Without that possibility, without that uncle and that education, Newton might have tossed aside the apple that bonked him on the head, never giving it a second thought. 

Access, as it turns out, is everything.

The Accidents of Life

The accidents of life—what we cannot control—can be divided into two camps: the advantageous and the not-so-advantageous. Some of these “accidents” are straightforward. Being born healthy, for instance. Or the relative position/class of one’s family. One doesn’t have to be born into great wealth to pursue one’s talents—Shakespeare’s family was solidly middle class with rising aspirations, as was Newton’s—but a certain financial and social stability offer advantages to developing children.

Though money was more of an issue for Mozart’s family, what the family lacked in bankable assets was made up for by Leopold Mozart’s connections to royal courts throughout Europe—connections he pressed to the max to launch his son. Connections that paid off because the young Mozart’s talent quickly gained wide fame, and the money the boy earned on the road helped sustain the entire family.

More variable, but equally if not more powerful in determining one’s odds in life, are where and when one is born. What are the prevailing attitudes about gender, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack of it), and education at the time of and in the place of one’s birth? What is the political situation—stability and general prosperity or social mayhem and war?

Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton—they were all men. In the Europe of their birth, women did not have access to opportunities that would help them discover/develop their true talents.

Mozart’s sister, Marianna, the one at whose knee Mozart gleaned his first understandings of music, was a talented child. She received the same musical and academic education as her brother in childhood, and played for royalty on that first European tour. She often enjoyed top billing. So, what happened?

According to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, “from 1769 onwards, Marianna was no longer permitted to show her artistic talent on travels with her brother, as she had reached a marriageable age.” (She was fifteen.) While her brother continued touring the world, composing new works and meeting the great musicians of the day, Marianna stayed home, married the man of her father’s choice, and had children.

Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton—they were all native-born and white. In the Europe of their birth, people of color largely existed at the margins of society. And though some black men practiced trades or were musicians at court in 16^th century England, Queen Elizabeth I issued proclamations complaining of their numbers, writing in 1596 to the lord mayors of the larger cities that there were “of late divers blackmoores brought into this realm, of which kind of people there are already here to manie…” She ordered that such people “should be sente forth of the land.”

Ethnicity mattered, too. Animosity toward immigrants didn’t begin with TheRUMP.

“Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth … What would you think to be thus used? This is the strangers’ case, and this your mountainish inhumanity.”

With these words (from The Book of Sir Thomas More), Shakespeare spoke out against the hostility toward the French and Dutch Calvinist refugees who immigrated to England in the late 16^th century to escape religious persecution from Catholic home governments. Denounced by English locals as “aliens” and “strangers”, these newcomers were suspected of immigrating to steal their jobs.

Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton—they were all educated. Though neither John Shakespeare nor the senior Isaac Newton could write their names, their sons grew up in an England which was becoming keenly interested in educating its young (the boys, anyway) to compete in a world of increasing technical invention and colonial bent. Without education for the middle classes, Hamlet would never have been written. Newton could not have conceived his three laws of motion.

Where we are born, when we are born, and the prevailing attitudes about the worth of people “like us” matter. They determine whether or not we have access. Whether or not we have a shot at developing our natural talents, the opportunity to fulfill our potential.

Or whether we are doomed to remain an unopened gift.

Nothing Happens in a Vacuum: Human Intervention   

Many of us, perhaps most of us, would not achieve the brilliance of a Mozart or Shakespeare or Newton whatever our family circumstances, education, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or favorite ice cream flavor. But then again, who knows? So much of the world’s population has never had the opportunity to even try. Despite Donald Rumsfeld’s claim that “stuff  happens,” it doesn’t. At least not when it comes to encouraging human potential. It’s up to us to engineer access for all children in the world. Those of us who enjoy access must extend it to others. We must oppose laws/actions/candidates that deny or repeal access to anyone.

But what does that mean exactly? What is it all children need to explore their potential? A short list of the essentials includes:

1) Healthcare. This means not only access to doctors, hospitals, and medicine, but also clean water, nourishing food, and healthy living conditions both in the home and in the larger environment. I’m putting this up top because without good health, it’s difficult to survive let alone thrive.     

2) Education.  Globally, more than half of all school-age children cannot read, write, or do simple mathematics. Those children—617 million in all—face a daunting future. Many, if not most, doors will be closed to them. What is open to them is often unsavory in the extreme, both dangerous and deadly: Sex-trafficking. Slave labor in factories, mines, and workshops. Unpaid servitude in the private homes of the rich. Cannon fodder in this war or that. Many of these children are kidnapped. Some are sold by their parents for the price of a couple of movie tickets and a bucket of popcorn. If this sounds atrocious, it is, but desperate people do desperate things

Almost 50 years ago, the UNCF, (United Negro College Fund) rolled out one of the most famous slogans of any campaign: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” It is as true today as it was then. To prevent that terrible waste, all children must have access to high-quality education from pre-K through university or trade school as they choose. To quote today’s UNCF home page: “We can’t simply believe in equality in education. We have to create it.”

3) Materials. You do not become a Mozart without access to instruments. You can’t be a Van Gogh if paints and brushes aren’t available. The scientists and inventors of tomorrow need access to tools, computers, equipment. And everyone—not just the Shakespeares—needs books. On the shelves at home or from a well-stocked library or downloaded onto a digital device. Through books, a world of knowledge literally comes into a child’s grasp.   

4) Enriching Experiences. The more we see of the world, the richer our points of reference become, the more profound our insights. Travel, music festivals, art galleries, museums, exposure to other cultures, different views of the human experience—they feed our imagination, expand our sense of what’s possible, increase our understanding of the world as it is, and as it could be.

5) A Safe Environment. I hesitated to add this to the list, as the conflicts—wars and genocide—of other countries are often outside our control unless our government is directly aiding and abetting the violence (as the U.S. is now doing in Turkey and Yemen). But we can try. I’m from a generation that stopped the war in Vietnam. We can try.     

This post grew out of a question I’ve been asking myself for some years now: What about all the Mozarts in the world who will never see a piano?

Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton—none of them were born rich or of the ruling class, but they had the access they needed in their times, in their societies to explore, develop, achieve.        

We must provide that access to all children. We must nurture the scientists and teachers and doctors and artists and farmers and bridge builders of tomorrow. They are the architects of our future. The child who will find a cure for diabetes or Alzheimer’s. The child who will discover a method to regenerate Australia’s Great Barrier Reef , thus decreasing the risk of widespread ecological collapse. The child who will write the books/paint the pictures/compose the songs that reach deep into our frightened, hopeful hearts to reveal what we’re so scared of exposing—that we are all human and therefore terribly vulnerable.

These children. That child. She/he/they could save us all.

Access. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

NOTE: Quick update on human rights activist Scott Warren, who I wrote about in last month’s post “The Gift of Hope.” On November 21, an Arizona jury found Warren not guilty on all counts of “harboring undocumented migrants” levied against him by federal prosecutors after the geography teacher provided food, water, and shelter to two men traveling through the desert in 2018. Click here for details of the story. Happy holidays, Scott, and to all people of conscience and good will.

 

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope. (Winston Churchill)

During the Yankees/Twins Game 2 of the AL Division Series, a pitch ricocheted off a Twin’s bat and came up hard under the home plate umpire’s chin. I mean it had the kind of force that threatens concussion and breaks jaws. In the space of a nanosecond, Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez jumped up to check on the ump, holding the man steady until help arrived from the dugout. It was a beautiful moment—an utterly reflexive move on Sanchez’s part: Someone is hurt/I must help them.

It gave me hope.

Hope, the “thing with feathers.” The last and only positive item in Pandora’s box of horrors (a misogynistic tale in Hesiod’s original, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water). The tiny ripple Robert Kennedy spoke of, a ripple sent out with every act of kindness. I search always and everywhere for hope. At a time when much of the world and its fate rests in the hands of despots who make the Allstate “Mayhem” guy look benign, hope is much more than a nicety. It’s a necessity. This Turkey Day, I’d like to mention a few people who give me hope. I’m grateful for them.

José Andrés and World Central Kitchen

While TheRUMP was tossing out paper towel rolls to the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico—to people without shelter, food, or potable water—one man was packing his suitcase and heading for the storm-ravaged island. Renowned chef José Andrés is no stranger to jumping into adversity and flying by the seat of his pants to help those in need. In the wake of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, he organized World Central Kitchen, a non-profit devoted to providing healthy meals when natural disasters strike.

While FEMA was fumbling for excuses about why they didn’t have enough generators and how it was impossible to acquire more (Seriously? You’re the U.S. agency in charge of disaster relief and you can’t get your hands on more generators?!), Andrés and his team of volunteer chefs established a communications network, brought in food supplies, commandeered every available space with electricity and water, including the Coliseo de Puerto Rico in San Juan, and started serving nutritious hot meals. In four short weeks, they served over one million meals, more than the American Red Cross. 

Fast forward to 2019 and the total destruction of the Bahamas by Hurricane Dorian. While Florida governor Ron DeSantis was making excuses, claiming no shelters existed in his state for Dorian victims—that was a federal concern, not his problem—and TheRUMP was sounding off on the need to be wary of allowing Bahamians into the country—they could be “very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very very bad drug dealers,” Andrés and his WCK team were on the ground in Nassau, setting up their kitchens and rolling out the meals for the 70,000 newly-homeless Bahamians. 

Under Andrés’s amazing energy and devotion, World Central Kitchen has grown from a small organization, with total assets of $119,000 in 2016, to one with total assets of $16.3 million. Along with other humanitarian orgs, WCK is now helping small farmers, ranchers, fish co-ops and other food-related businesses to rebuild Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy. Andrés wants to make the island more food secure and help it recover faster when disaster strikes.

Hope is not about everything going your way, but tenacity in the face of adversity . “WCKitchen has kitchens ready to go and shelters mapped out,” Andrés  tweeted as he prepared to feed Bahamians in the first hours after Dorian hit. “If kitchens are destroyed, we build one and cook in big paella pans!”

Greta Thunberg and School Strike for Climate

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words… People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing,” Greta Thunberg told world leaders at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in New York. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

The 16-year-old Swedish climate activist doesn’t mince words when it comes to speaking truth to power: “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.”

Hard to believe now, but Thunberg came to world attention just over a year ago, after she started spending her days outside Sweden’s Riksdag (national legislature), demanding stronger action on global warming in the wake of widespread wildfires during Sweden’s hottest summer in over 260 years.  

Inspired by the student activists from Parkland, Florida who organized March for Our Lives in support of stricter gun laws (after a mass shooting at their school), Thunberg tried to convince the kids she knew to join her climate protest. Her initial efforts failed, but “nevertheless, she persisted” as the saying goes, passing out leaflets demanding the government reduce carbon emissions, explaining that “I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.”

The leaflets and the sign she carried “School strike for climate” began to attract other kids who took the protest to their own communities. With Thunberg, they also organized a school climate strike movement in Sweden, “Fridays for Future.”  In December, Thunberg traveled to Poland to address the 2018 UN Climate Change Conference, after which student strikes began occurring every Friday in locations across the globe.

Thunberg still spends Fridays on strike for her cause. On two of those Fridays, September 20 and 27 of this year, she was joined by some seven million people in more than 160 countries. La Repubblica reported that a million activists hit the streets in Italy alone, a claim I can believe because the 27^th was the day Ed and I struggled to roll our suitcases through wall-to-wall throngs of protesters in Florence to reach the Santa Maria Novella train station. It was tough. And inspiring.

Hope is not a substitute for action. You can’t just keep tossing tons of plastic cups and bottles into the ocean while saying, “I sure hope climate change doesn’t end life on earth.” Hope must be an active verb. As the title of Thunberg’s recently-published climate action speeches stresses, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (Penguin Books, 2019). Unlike some self-aggrandizing characters on the global stage, the profits from Thunberg’s book are being donated to charity.

Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse, Zaachila Orozco-McCormick, Natalie Hoffman, and Scott Warren

If you were to ask me what is the highest moral principle, I would say it’s this: You don’t throw another human being under the bus. You don’t turn a deaf ear to cries for help or a blind eye to the suffering of others. If you can do anything, you do it, and if you’re not sure you can, you still try.

That is what the five aid workers named above, all members of an Arizona relief organization No More Deaths, were charged with—putting humanity above the politics of TheRUMP’s war on immigrants—and four of them received sentences of up to six months in prison for leaving water jugs, food, and blankets in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge shares a 50-mile border with Mexico, and No More Deaths says that at least 155 migrants have died there in the past 17 years.

The four women were also charged with failing to get permits for “expanded access” and going off the designated travel routes. In the judge’s view, they were guilty of violating “the national decision to maintain the refuge in its pristine nature.”

Seriously? “The national decision to maintain the refuge in its pristine nature”??? I sign a gazillion petitions every week to prevent our government from selling off pristine federal lands and national parks to their buddies for drilling and fracking. TheRUMP announced plans just this past month to gut protections against logging and road-building in the Tongass National Forest that will enable logging companies to bulldoze roads and clear-cut this old-growth temperate rainforest in Southeastern Alaska. Next to that, how much “damage” can a few jugs of water and a can of beans do??? 

The issue is bigger than one wildlife refuge. Increased numbers of armed border agents and more walls have forced migrants away from relatively safer crossings like El Paso and Nogales, into the vast, hard-to-navigate desert lands. It takes six days to walk through the Arizona desert, anthropologist Jason De León says. “There’s no way you can carry enough water.” Many who try die of dehydration and exposure.    

The fifth aid worker, Scott Warren, a college geography instructor, is facing up to 20 years in prison for providing medical assistance (as well as food and water) to migrants crossing that desert. United Nations human rights experts and humanitarian orgs around the globe have railed against this inhumane prosecution. At this writing, Warren’s fate is up in the air. His June 2019 trial ended with a hung jury. A new trial is scheduled for November 12.

In its complaint, the government notes that Warren was seen talking to two migrants near Ajo.

Such a crime.

The Unknown Train Passenger

Hope doesn’t just come from acts played out on a world stage. Often, it can be found in the people we pass every day—standing in line at the supermarket or sitting next to us at a café. Or, in this case, a fellow passenger on a train.

In prepping for our recent trip to London and Florence, Ed bought two round-trip train tix from the official Gatwick Express website. The train runs every fifteen minutes between Gatwick Airport and London’s Victoria station. On the way out, we had no problems. Using the barcode from the e-mail, we retrieved our tickets—both out and return—from the machine at the station. A Gatwick Express employee on the tracks, visibly annoyed at my question, “Is this the right train?”, nodded. “Yes, yes. Just get on.” Fine. We got to the airport without incident.

BUT, the return trip, three weeks later, definitely featured incident. About ten minutes into the half-hour ride, a ticket collector entered the car. When we handed him our tickets, he said, “Oh, you can’t use these on this train. This is for another train. A different company. That company doesn’t do Express trains. You’ll have to buy new tickets for this train.” (Note: The company on our ticket is listed as one of the three companies running the GE trains.)

What can you do at such a moment? We showed him our receipt. We argued our case. I believe I mentioned that things were a lot better before Thatcher privatized the railroads. We were not alone here. An Italian family with three children, and very little English, was getting the same treatment.

Ed was digging out a credit card for the new tix ($65), when a man two seats down stood up and addressed the ticket collector. “You do this all the time on this line,” he said. “Charge people twice. Look, your train’s more than half empty. These people have tickets. They’re choosing to come here and spend pounds in this country on their holiday and you’re harassing them.”

He and the ticket collector argued back and forth for several minutes, the man repeating that he’s witnessed this scam act regularly on the Express, and pointing out the many empty seats. Of course, we still had to pay, but I was deeply moved. This passenger, a British citizen, did not have to speak out. That he did, and so vehemently, gives me hope. I thanked him then and I thank him now.

 Hope is not a calculation of gain vs. cost. Not a person weighing up the situation, asking “What’s in it for me?” or “I’ve got mine Jack, so everything’s alright.” It’s about standing up for each other. It’s about standing together.

The Humane Society International and All Who Rescue and Protect Animals

As hard as climate change, industrial pollution, deforestation, and wars have been on human populations, I would argue animals have fared worse, and they lack any power to change the conditions under which they are being poached, starved, slaughtered, and brutally abused. I won’t go into the gory details of violence against animals that daily fills my Inbox, but the constant, senseless abuse of helpless creatures is both enraging and distressing. So I am especially grateful for the organizations and individuals who both rescue and give sanctuary to non-human creatures.

If you follow me on Facebook, you know I often post videos of animal rescue efforts. I figure we need to be reminded, in the midst of worldwide mayhem, that all is not indifference out there. That good people go into difficult situations daily to rescue and heal those without voice, without choice. I’ll share one of those videos here at the end of this post, a recent successful rescue carried out by the Humane Society International. It’s short, so be sure to watch to the end. I guarantee it will boost your spirits.

Hope is believing we can all do something to improve the lives of others and steer the world in a better, kinder, more just direction. Hope is being inspired by others and then passing that inspiration along.

Cast Ripples On the Water

In June 2013, Barack Obama spoke at the University of Cape Town. He reminded his audience that he was standing in the same spot where then-Senator Robert Kennedy had delivered his famous “ripples of hope” speech in 1966, speaking of the struggle against Apartheid (the speech I alluded to at the top of this post).

“[I came to believe that] I could be part of something bigger than myself,” Obama said, talking about his youth. “That my own salvation was bound up with those of others.

“That’s what Bobby Kennedy expressed, far better than I ever could, when he spoke here… He said, ‘Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.’”

With stress levels soaring, the Amazon burning, families being torn apart, and insulin users dying for Big Pharma’s greed, we all need hope. We need to create hope. We need to share hope. It is the gift of life.

The biggest problem in life is the image in our heads of how it should be. (Unknown)

Last December, anticipating an easy hour’s daylight drive to pick up my son from the airport, I was startled to get an e-mail from the ticketing agency saying: He had either missed his flight OR his flight had been cancelled.

Before I launch into anything else here, I would like to point out that one-contingency-fits-all, or more accurately, all-contingencies-fit-one emails are a bad idea. They leave far too much to the imagination and no clear thing the brain can seize on. Had the airlines cancelled the flight? Why? Would there be another? When? Had my son missed his flight? If so, had he been in an accident traveling to the airport? Slept through his alarm? Was he ill?  

Now, you are probably saying to yourself, “Why didn’t she just call him?” Well, my son conducts his life not on a smartphone but on a Nook tablet. Don’t ask why. He’s all grown up now, so I just smile and nod. To each his own.  

I did, of course, pen him an e-mail. Just as I hit send, an e-mail popped up from him. His flight had been cancelled and his new flight—whenever it left—wouldn’t get in to North Carolina in time to make the original connection to Hartford.

I was still reading this when I got an update from the ticketing agency saying not to worry, his new flight would arrive in time to make another connection. I could pick him up at 12:30 a.m! Yes, thirty minutes past midnight on wintry roads that had thawed during the day and were now rapidly re-freezing. By this time, my son was apparently on the boarding line with his Nook in airplane mode. Silence.

During this entire circus, I doubtless appeared very focused and busy with cyber-correspondence. Inwardly, though, my head danced with images of slick roads and onslaughts of freezing rain, as we risked life and limb to drive to an airport in the middle of the night to meet a flight that my son might or might not be on. And then, either way, drove back home in the wee hours.

To calm myself, I repeated, in mantra mode, two of Thomas Jefferson’s Ten Rules—the two I always invoke:

1. How much pain the evils have cost us that have never happened.

2. Take things always by the smooth handle.

 Effect: negligible.

Around 11:15 p.m., just as Ed and I were about to suit-and-boot-up for the mission, I received yet another update from the ticketing agency. My son’s new flight had missed the promised new connection. He was stranded overnight in the airport, waiting for the first flight out, and would arrive in Hartford at nine the next morning.

I was relieved. Laughed loud and hearty. Reminded myself that old Jefferson had nailed it. Paused to reflect that when I was 20, none of this would have ruffled me. We’d have hopped in the car at midnight—what’s a little ice and snow?—cranked up the radio, and gone, probably stopping for pizza slices on the way. Everything was an adventure then, scheduled or not.

In those days, I had few, if any, expectations.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Our Need to Control Outcomes

Several years ago, I wrote about the expectations we have for ourselves—how they tend to be stringent and unforgiving, so that even when we succeed in many areas, we have trouble forgiving ourselves for all the ways we perceive we fall short.

But what about the billions of everyday expectations we have for how things will go? That people or stuff will arrive as scheduled? That a vacation or holiday gathering will go as planned? That we’ll get ten pages done on our book today? That we’ll find the perfect present for our spouse/partner in time for their birthday (don’t worry, Ed, I’m still on the case!)?  

The greatest moment on the marvelous TV series House occurred when, after some fiasco or other, Dr. Cameron wailed “But that’s not how life’s supposed to work!” and Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House piped up, “Life’s supposed to work?” Ed and I couldn’t stop laughing, and we still toss that line back and forth. But at some level, we also still believe it. I think most of us do. And it zaps our happiness. We’ve got enough bad actors in office all across the globe doing that. We don’t need to do it to ourselves.    

Let’s be honest. Life is uncertain. Worse, it’s unfair, meaning we crave certainty to ward off the unfairness. If I cross myself three times, kiss an owl, and turn to the full moon at midnight, everything will be okay. That will be $100 please, and you’ve been suckered.

We control very little: What we do and how we react. That’s it. And sometimes, things just go wrong. But what if we changed one word in that sentence? Sometimes, things just go differently.

The Grand Master Plan

Okay, let’s follow the strands of one classic set of expectations. I call it The Grand Master Plan. It goes something like this:

If I go to college, I’ll get a good-paying job in the field of my studies;

In the course of this job, I’ll receive periodic bump-ups in title and salary;

With a salary that keeps rising, I’ll buy a series of successively bigger houses, drive late model cars, and take exotic vacations, with ample savings left over for a comfy retirement.

Whew! Not expecting too much, are we?

I recently came across an interesting little stat. A survey of some 7,000 college students revealed that they expect to earn $60,000 in their first job after graduation. The reality, however, was a median salary of $48,000 for those with 0-5 years experience. Oops!

And what about that starter home, the first in a line that leads to the 5,000 square-foot mansion with a home theater, built-in pool, and tennis court? Well, millennials are discovering there’s one teensy little problem, or more accurately three BIG ones, with that expectation: Affordability, high student debt, and less loan availability. Oh dear.

I cite these here to illustrate how, when it comes to this or any other Major Life Plan, we may get:

1. The whole shebang.

2. Some of the shebang.

3. None of the shebang. Personally, I wouldn’t put my money on #1. However it goes, life’s highly unlikely to follow the neat script of our expectations, which rarely takes into account impossible bosses, downsizing and layoffs, serious illnesses, nasty accidents, messy expensive divorces, unexpected children, or just plain realizing we HATE our line of work. All sorts of things happen on the bumpy road of life.

It Can’t Happen to Me and Other Hilarious Notions

Even if the whole shebang does seem to be going according to plan, we may be surprised by some of the “hidden costs” our expectations exact. A Bankrate poll found that 63 percent of millennial homebuyers (ages 23 to 38) have regrets about the house/condo they purchased. The biggest reason? They had no idea that owning a home would involve so much money (insurance, property taxes, repairs) or consume so much time (maintenance). All this in addition to the down payment and monthly mortgage which, incidentally, many of them took on a second job to afford. How to cope? Take on a third job? Rob a bank?

Sometimes, things just go differently.

We know this. We see it happen to other people all the time. But there’s something in our Homo sapien genes that just digs in and says It won’t happen to me. Call it denial. Call it stupidity. But it’s there. Googling stuff for my August post, I came across an arresting report about the number of Americans (a clear majority) who now believe climate change is real and will hurt their neighbors and family. Weirdly—and I had to read this twice—these same people don’t believe it will hurt them.  

It’s a short hop from expectations to a sense of entitlement. 

Life’s supposed to work…

And when, inevitably, it doesn’t, we hyperventilate, suffer disappointment, stress out, and feel we’ve been cheated. All of these are unhealthy happiness zappers. Even at the granular everyday level, and maybe especially there, we get knocked upside the head by the zillions of little things that happen differently from what we expected. Our weekend at the shore gets rained out. Our car breaks down during the morning rush on our way to a job interview.

But if you can keep your cool in the car breakdown scenario, and remind yourself this was a much stickier wicket in the days before cellphones, you could call that employer and suggest conducting the interview via Skype over the phone (while you wait for Triple A). If I was hiring, I’d give extra points for your calm and your spur-of-the-moment problem-solving skills.

For our sanity and happiness, we need to stomp out this “life’s supposed to work” myth. To be rocked by every little deviation from the expected, it’s like death by a thousand cuts. So, take a deep breath and pledge to ask yourself one simple question when things take a different turn: Would I be so unhappy about X if I wasn’t expecting Y? Short of life-threatening catastrophes, this question is powerfully effective at putting things in perspective.

He Traded in His Suit for a Truck: One Man’s Road to a Happier Life

Some years back, my first husband and I bought a house with an enormous garage—a good thing overall, but that garage was filled with a ton of junk, and part of the deal with the seller was that if we wanted the junk removed, we had to arrange it ourselves. So I combed the newspaper ads and called a kid with a truck. He was a pleasant kid in his mid-twenties, and as we packed and hauled several loads of stuff to the dump/recycling center, he talked about how he got into the moving business. Growing up, he had always wanted to work in a bank. He imagined himself as some sort of bigtime financier, maybe ending up on Wall Street. In preparation, he ticked all the boxes: Went to a good school, got the degree in finance, and was hired by a bank for a management position with solid future prospects.

He hated it. Hated the attitudes, the work, the whole banking ethos. Whatever it was he’d been expecting all his young life from the bank world, reality proved quite different. The upshot? He quit. Bought himself a used truck and started moving stuff for people. He expressed no embarrassment or distress at confessing that reality had not met his expectations. He did not apply the word “failure” either to the outcome or himself. In fact, he seemed very relaxed and happy that he had escaped that life and found something better suited to his temperament.  

That kind of flexibility is what we all need. And like this kid, we seem to come by it effortlessly when we’re young. As I said up top, everything feels like an adventure in our early twenties, but it doesn’t stay that way for most of us.

Hey Man, What Happened to the Joy?

So, where does all that joie de vivre, live-in-the-moment feeling go? Why do we seem to grow less tolerant of the unexpected (surprise!) as we age, and more insistent on everything going according to plan?

I tried googling this topic to see what insights the wizards of psychology might offer, but not much popped up, so I will give you my own ponderings

I think when we’re young and our independence is shiny and new, we focus more on the journey than the destination, a thing we may have only the vaguest of notions about at 20. We’re generally open to experimentation—what happens if …? After all, isn’t the journey—the side roads and the unbeaten paths—where all the truly great stuff happens, the stuff that inspires, that feels like living? Why do grown-ups, the kind with 401Ks and 30-year mortgages, tend to frown on going with the flow?

To be fair to, with all the stuff many of us are balancing at 30 or 40 or 50—spinning plates!—job, kids, house, it can feel like we NEED everything to go according to plan or it will all blow sky high.

But it can still blow sky high. Ask the USDA scientists who were told this past July that they had one week to move family and household to Kansas City, Missouri or resign. On top of the logistical challenge this order posed for many of the families, the scientists had to cope with what the American Federation of Government Employees has called an apparent “attempt to hollow out and dismantle USDA science that helps farmers and protects our food supply.”

Being told you have one week to transplant your household across country or resign is a HUGE surprise. Fortunately, most of our “unexpecteds” are much less life boggling.

How Do We Live Without Expectations?

The short answer to that question is probably “much more joyfully.” More freely, more creatively. We could recognize and seize opportunities as they arise if we stopped insisting that something work exactly this way!

Say, you’re serving a sit-down dinner for eight——but then the stove dies, and you blow a gasket. Rant against the injustice of life, break down weeping, take a sledgehammer to the stove. All of the above.

You dreamed of dazzling your guests with your award-winning Beef Bourguignon Well, the reality is it ain’t gonna happen, so are you going to have a meltdown and cancel, or are you going to chill and order take-out pizzas OR run to the store for something you can throw on the grill OR take everyone out for a curry? And laugh with your guests about best-laid plans.

When I became pregnant with my first child, I bought a book What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Great title. The authors knew they would corral about a zillion pregnant women with that one. But only now, many years later, can I give you the true answer to that question: Expect anything because anything may happen.  

I repeat: We control very little: What we do and how we react. That’s it. But within that, we wield enormous power. It’s not that everything “happens for the best.” It’s that things happen and we can make the best of them, or not.

As my pal Jefferson said: Take things always by the smooth handle.

You’ll avoid the splinters.

“As long as you can laugh at yourself, you will never cease to be amused.”  (Anonymous)

[Note: Even hard-working writers have to jump ship and go AWOL now and again, so I’m leaving you a lighthearted post to get you through the psychotic times in which we find ourselves. Never mind that you’ve seen it before. It will do you good to see it again. As for my own rejuvenation, I intend to visit every pub and bookstore in London. Cheers! See you with an all-new post in October.]

Some months ago, a friend shared a story at a party. The NGO she works for is part of a global project involving a half dozen other NGOs. Right in the middle of a networking weekend, no one could get access to the project’s shared online folder. People from Amsterdam to San Francisco were frantically e-mailing each other: Where’s our data?! When the dust settled, it transpired that one of the participants had moved on to another job and wiped the old files from his computer to gain usable space. Unfortunately, he was listed with Google as the administrator on the folder. When he erased his copy, he unwittingly erased all the members’ copies.

Everyone at the party had a good laugh over this little tale of digital mayhem. Probably because: 1) we could all imagine ourselves doing something equally stupid, and 2) we were relieved we hadn’t been the one to do so in this instance.

Since then, I’ve often found myself chuckling over this incident and wondering if its innocent perpetrator saw its humorous side—after all, no one was hurt and though it was a nuisance, the remaining NGO members were able to reconstruct the folder from their individual notes. I hope he can laugh as we at the party laughed, but I’m doubtful. We tend to suffer the embarrassment of our mistakes for a long time. Sometimes to the grave.

There’s a lot of pressure to perform to perfection out there. Mistakes are anathema—heads will roll, et cetera—yet who among us doesn’t make them?

To compound the problem, we are vulnerable to something psychologists call the “Spotlight Effect.” When we think we’ve screwed up—called a prospective employer by the wrong name, tripped over a cord as we made our way to the podium to give a speech, sent the wrong manuscript to an editor—we tend to freak out, imagining that everyone saw, that everyone now thinks we’re awkward, stupid, incapable. This magnification of our own mistakes has two negative effects: 1) To avoid any risk of humiliation or rejection, we become much more guarded in what we say and do; 2) As a consequence, we drain a lot of the joy from our lives.

Tragedy + Time = Comedy

My husband once set his hair on fire while trying out an expensive cigarette lighter in a posh department store. My friend Pete swallowed a piece of ham tied to a string while doing an experiment on peristalsis. I hauled around my three-week-old son at the bottom of a Snugli, like a sack of potatoes, until a woman in the supermarket told me there was a little button-in cloth seat for newborns. Embarrassing? Well, in the case of the peristalsis experiment gone awry, maybe more frightening than humiliating. The point, though, is that these anecdotes, told and retold over the years, have become the source of much hilarity and bonhomie. As comedian and writer Steve Allen said: Tragedy + Time = Comedy. Our most embarrassing missteps become our funniest stories, the ones everyone asks us to repeat.

But what if we just cut to the chase and start laughing at our foibles the moment we spill the lasagna all over our lap, drop our cell phone down a restaurant toilet, forget to attach the CV to our job application? Life should come with a beeper, warning us when we’re about to screw up, but it doesn’t, so we need to adopt the ability to laugh at ourself.

My dad could be ornery, and he was not much with the compliments, but he could always laugh at himself. It’s probably the most important thing I learned from him. I remember one time in a restaurant, he was fixing his coffee. “Geezus, this cream is thick,” he remarked as it fell in chunks from the little pitcher into his cup. “Oh no,” my mom cried, “that’s my blue cheese dressing. I asked for it on the side.” Now, my dad could have blamed his mistake on the low lighting or the waitress’s failure to set the blue cheese next to my mom’s plate or the stupidity of a restaurant that would put both cream and blue cheese in identical pitchers. But he just laughed. Because it was funny. Because there’s no point in pretending you didn’t do what you did. Because no one is perfect. And then he ordered a fresh cup of coffee.

Mistakes—we all make ‘em. So, laugh it up. And if the people around you can’t cope with this very human reality, maybe you just need different people.