Category: Living

Driving around the countryside of Co Donegal, occasionally I will pass a temporary sign that says, Wake in Progress.  The quiet, winding lanes will be full of parked cars and vans, as the local community come to pay their respects at the former home of the departed.  The tradition of holding a wake – the time between death and burial, when friends and relatives sit and wait beside the corpse of the deceased, a period of reflection, a remembrance but also a celebration – has declined across much of Western Europe but remains commonplace in Ireland.  I imagine that today most wakes are decorous, but that has not always been the case.  There is a famous Irish song from the mid-nineteenth century about Tim Finnegan, who fell off a ladder when drunk, breaking his skull.  During the wake held at his house, an argument broke out, which turned into a fight, during which a bottle of whiskey was thrown, broke and spilled over his prostrate body, at which point he sprang back to life, saying: Thunderin’ blazes! You think I’m dead?   Excess whiskey was the cause of Tim’s apparent death and so too his return to life.

This paradox was, no doubt, why the song lyric appealed to James Joyce, who borrowed the revenant’s name for his final masterpiece: Finnegans Wake.  In this book, for some time known as Work in Progress, which takes the form of an extended series of philosophical reflections blended with multiple digressions, wordplay and jokes, there is repeated suggestion that what begins must end and what ends must begin again, that what rises will fall and that what falls will rise again, and that all of life is repetition and recycling.  Joyce spoke several languages and enjoyed inventing words that were combinations of elements from different tongues.  The name Finnegan can be decomposed into fin, the French for end, and egan a homonym for again in English: Finnegans means, therefore, to end again and again.  The word Wake might suggest the noun that means the ceremony of remembrance for the dead, or it might suggest the command that means wake up!  His title, therefore, combines ideas of both death and life.  These themes of circularity and continuity are emphasised throughout the text of the book, which starts and ends mid-sentence – the same sentence, Joyce claimed – and which is promiscuous with grammar as well as language, spelling, and narrative structure.  

Continue reading “Awake”

We were twelve in number – six executives and six non-executives – and we had spent the last five hours in a spacious conference room in Vauxhall, on a hot and humid June afternoon, discussing aspects of the company’s strategy for the next three years.  As the meeting came to an end, and the prospect of dinner together at a nearby Eritrean restaurant came into view, as Chair of the meeting, I brought the formal proceedings to a close.  “Let’s take a few minutes”, I said, “before we leave for our meal, to decompose”.   My words provoked some amusement among my colleagues: “Do you mean decompress?”  “Do you want us to turn to compost?”  On the contrary, I had meant exactly what I had said.  At the start of a Board meeting, each attendee should compose themselves, making ready to come together as a group to do the difficult work of governance; at the end of the meeting, each should feel free to decompose, to return to their constituent self, and allow time for individual relaxation and rest. 

“What do you do at Board meetings,” one of my friends asked me recently, “apart from eating sandwiches?”  In the boardroom, as elsewhere, there is no such thing as a free lunch.  Governance is a specialised form of work, and to do it well takes lengthy preparation time, high levels of concentration, the employment of good listening and discursive skills, and the ability and willingness to develop collective recommendations in a constructive and collegiate manner.  This is not easy work and should be undertaken with the serious and responsible mindset that the task demands.  The Board is ultimately responsible – legally and morally – for the oversight of the company, the effective deployment of the resources at its disposal, and for securing the interests of various groups of stakeholders, including investors, staff, customers, suppliers, and the wider community.  Good Board meetings require all participants to come to the table primed and prepared to do this work. 

Continue reading “Decomposed”

As I have grown older, I notice that I am reading more biographies.  I do not wholly understand why this is so.  In some recent cases, for example a biography of Goethe, it is because I am now more familiar with his prodigious literary output and his influence on his contemporaries than when I was younger, and therefore am now better able to understand his importance.  In other cases, for example a biography of Charles V, it is because the years when he was the Habsburg emperor encompassed several historical events about which I already knew a little and with which he was centrally involved – the German Reformation, Henry of England’s divorce, the Spanish invasion of Central America, the growth of Turkish power in the Eastern Mediterranean.  In the case of Goethe, reading about the life helps make sense of the work, in the case of Charles, knowing about the combination of momentous events helps make sense of his life. 

There is perhaps another reason, which has to do with the widespread human predisposition to tell stories as a means of explanation.  I am a little suspicious of arguments based primarily on narrative examples, as if hard facts were not relevant to the process of persuasion.  Contrariwise, I recognise the value of stories in bringing the facts, once established, to life.  The plural of anecdote is not data, but evidence in aggregate does not move us in the same was as narrated particularities do.  To understand the world in the fullest sense we need numbers and words, graphs and pictures, and data and stories.  Biographies are ideal vehicles for story telling because they are framed around the familiar human pattern of birth, life, and death.  As I have become older, the importance of this frame has become more intelligible, hence biographies more interesting.

Continue reading “Three lives”

I have, more or less, a day off today. I got up slightly after the sun at 6am or so, had my morning “check email check Financial Times” routine to reassure myself that the world had not, in fact, imploded over night, did the normal morning ablutions, and took the dog for a walk. I prepared the boy’s lunch and, as the hour of departure approached, gave him the morning weather report (quite chilly this morning, almost freezing: shorts are fine because you’re a boy and this is Maine and it’s May, but wear a fleece jacket please) and then, come 7:54, pushed him out the door and down the street to get on the bus.

My day, though, was blessedly free. I had managed to apply a scheduling flamethrower to the day after a couple of past weeks of non-stop activity, travel to Texas last week, 8am to 6pm nonstop calls this week, and I wanted a day off.

It has been lovely. But I’ve also realised that I’m happily, permanently done with the notion of ever having a day off again. It’s not that I have so much to do: I had to swing by the grocery store for some supplies, sure, and I’ve been working at a low level on a few long term projects, but really, the successful construction of a human life consists of having a series of things that require your attention. They may feel trivial to an outside observer – living up to my erstwhile “duties” as a library trustee, or making sure my son’s mother is on the same page as me for upcoming doctor appointments, or even just making sure my water bill is paid, which was the subconscious reason for my waking up substantially earlier than I really had to today. But it strikes me that the slim and fragile interconnectedness we have with others is, in a real way, the high point of being human.

As the boy gets older, I keep marvelling at how he seems to be settling into self-sufficiency with surprisingly little effort on my part. I cook, clean, and do dishes, and this spring, I’ve started giving him more substantial household chores (he’s mowing the front lawn this year, his first big landscaping task; he’s getting schooled in replacing light switches and changing the oil in the MG in coming weeks as well). But all in all, he’s showing all the good signs of realising without explicit education the basic “activities of daily living” which, in coming decades, my future incompetence in which will eventually relegate me to a skilled nursing facility: making tea for himself, cleaning up after himself in the bathroom after a shower, finding clean clothes in the laundry instead of asking me to bring them up. Separating lights from darks, and knowing to aggregate the various hampers upstairs before bringing dirty clothes to the mud room. Keeping his boots off the rugs. I may or may not have told him to do this, don’t do that, but I don’t remember it: he’s just picking up on the simple civil activities that keep my house – will keep his house, already keeps his house – clean and easy to live in.

Similarly, I’m pretty sure I’m not lecturing him or even occasionally sitting him down for Parental Conversations (note the capital lettering, indicating severe significance) on how he should treat other people or how he should react to uncomfortable situations. Instead, I try to demonstrate good behaviour – always treat strangers kindly, and listen to them; once someone is known, however, if they are a jerk, treat the with reciprocal respect and avoid them and redirect others away from them whenever possible. The boy is doing a fine job at that too, albeit sometimes he’s too willing to reveal explicitly who he deems to be deserving of respect and, vice versa, to reveal who he deems to be disreputable. But discretion is a second – or maybe even third-order task. I’m just thrilled that, at age 11, his direct discernment and his polite behaviour is now so routine.

The lesson that puzzles me, right now, as he starts to hit puberty and as my rhetorical and pedagogical skills begin to reach their natural limit, is how to show him what it is to love. I associate love with surrender – not a milquetoast kind of hangdog panting, mind you, but an acceptance of love as an absolute, with me as a fixed, finite, variable being. Embracing love – of a partner most especially, of one individual to another; but even in the way we fall down and embrace our parents, or our children – is an act of surrendering in all of our capable-of-fault individual human selves in front of a concept of absolute love. I want to show the boy that I love him no matter what, even though I’ll continue to monitor and enforce limits on his screen time and will demand that he stay open to trying new things at dinner. I want to show him that he is free and open to explore what love is knowing that I will never, ever stop loving him, no matter what he does to me or doesn’t do to me.

Demonstrating that is an odd trick, especially when I have no one, day to day, in my adult life, who fills that role for me. So I’m caught in an interesting bind, where I wish to reveal to my son the possibility of love for another adult – in all of its messiness, in all of its power, in all of the powerlessness we inevitably feel in the presence of such force – without actually having a subjective magnet in front of me who absorbs, reflects, attracts, and generates my will to surrender.

Instead, I just have him. I’m hoping he sees it all, and I think he is actually smart enough to pick up on the subtleties. Or rather, not smart enough: just aware enough, even at age 11, that there is something worth surrendering too, that his father has seen and recognized and will never abandon, ever, and that merits staying aware, humble, and ready to give oneself up to when the moment and the person demands it.

A midweek day off is a good day to ponder such things. It’s almost over; the boy’s bus will drop him off in about a half hour, and I’ll have to go pick up the dog from day care, and there’s a Zoom call for the town at 4:30pm. But I’ve had the time, and the upcoming connections make me keenly aware that I’m part of the great collective experience that is being a loving, open human being. I’ll be ready for tomorrow when it comes.

Oh, and a quick shout out: I’ll be in London – finally again, for the first time since the pandemic – from 10 to 13 June. I would love to see any and all Essence of Water fans who are in the area. I will pick up the tab.

When I worked in mainstream finance, I came across a lot of people (men, mostly) with big-sounding job titles and hefty salaries to match.  Frequently, they would claim, or at least imply, with great confidence that their success was evidence of the meritocratic nature of the financial services industry: they were smart, they had worked hard, their efforts had been recognised and rewarded.  As things go in milk-making, so they go in business: the cream naturally rises to the top.  Once, I was foolish enough to say to my CEO that the problem with senior managers at our firm was that all the people at the top thought they owed their position to merit but almost no-one who worked for them shared that view.  I added that this was also true in most comparable firms.  I doubt my career trajectory improved after that conversation, but it was probably already too late.  Nonetheless, I still stand by what I said then: if you really want to know how good a manager is, don’t ask them, talk to their junior staff instead. 

Mohandas Gandhi was once asked his opinion about Western civilization, and replied, “I think it would be a very good idea”, which nicely sums up my view about meritocracy.  What we have in the West is a system that encourages people at the top to believe they deserve to be there, without paying much attention to whether there is any evidence to support that belief.  We are born with nothing and we die with nothing (the Book of Job reminds us), so we convince ourselves that what we make of our lives is down to us, and that consequently we should bear responsibility for our failures and take credit for our successes.  Except that we are not born into nothing: we are born into a complex socio-economic world, which supplies advantages to some and disadvantages to others, and what we are able to make of our lives is significantly constrained by the place of our birth, our sex organs and skin colour, and the attitude our parents take towards our education.

Continue reading “Lucky, lucky, lucky”