I woke this morning just in time to jump into a string of phone meetings. It was one of those days that I got stuck at home because there wasn’t enough time between meetings to drive into work. By the time I had a break I could use to drive in, Diane was coming in from her Yoga class. Jen and Avery had been in the class and came in for tea. Diane wanted to talk to me about my blog last night.  She often has cool insights about things I say in the blog that help me work things out better. This morning she gave me her thoughts on the whole ‘wrong place at the wrong time’ theme from my post last night. In her view.. everything happens for a reason.. she suggested  that the reason that I had missed  the Ben Zander and Eli Wissel talks wasn’t a case of not being in the right place at the right time.. it was that I didn’t’ need to be in those places, She suggested that in some smaller way I had already learned the lessons those guys were there to teach and was already living them in some small sort of way,  I like that thought. It sort of removes regret at having missed something.. and I don’t have much energy for regret right now. I also like the idea that I’m getting wiser through the lessons around Sam’s death. .Maybe it’s self serving to think so.. but then  I request permission to be self serving    

    After this conversation with Diane I had to zoom out to get to work . As I did I saw something pretty amazing. Gabe had grown three inches in his sleep last night.. Check this out.. he’s absolutely towering over Diane.. I took this picture.. then he said to me in his best Darth Vader voice ‘you’re next !’ ..

 

   The rest of the day was good and productive. I met my good friend Jim for lunch. Jim was up from Poughkeepsie for a meeting. He’s been really attentive to us since Sam died.. he even bought me lunch. today. what a guy.   I had a string of phone meetings in the afternoon. It was nice out, so I took one of them out in the field next to our building.. I went out and sat on my  favorite ‘meeting rock’ I sometimes  use for phone calls..   I always feel better when I spend more time outside.. I feel Sam so much stronger out there.

     I got home around 6 to find Max working hard on his Pratt course work.. I spent some time talking to him.. then I sat down to write.. few minutes later  I was talking to my mother on the phone when I heard a huge crash… I ran upstairs to find RJ. Abbot and Silas in front of the (wicked cool) video game console  staring at a pile of glass and a tennis ball. on the floor…   One of the top panes of the second story window was smashed to bits. Two seconds later Max charges into the house and I quickly learned that  . Max , who was outside, was attempting to get the attention of the three guys upstairs so that he could moon them. Evidently they didn’t respond to the first few gentle thumps on the wall.. so  Max tried the window.  Ugh..

That 2^nd story window  is about 25 feet in the air.. and it’s in an ancient wooden casing that probably hasn’t moved since Truman was president.  I really, really  tried to get angry. I started yelling and eventually screamed as loud as I could.. but I just couldn’t get properly angry.. I ended up  laughing.. Max cleaned up the glass and covered the hole while I went and apologized to our guests who were still cowering in the corner..

It was pretty funny.. At least this window will be easier to replace than the one in   that Sam broke last spring  with a lacrosse ball  . That one was over the front door and required a 30 foot ladder to rach,,   Ahh life.. it’s never dull is it Sam ?

-jc

Ps. Ivy sent me a note yesterday about a SamStone that she left on  top of the Empire State Building. Thanks Ives..   Everyone.. please  remember to let me know where you place those SamStones.. We like to keep track..

 

I feel like I have been  just a little out of step  the world for these last two weeks. I seem to be constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time… or…  actually … not at  the right place at the right time. It’s like my whole ‘be in the moment’ thing has slipped a few hours into the future. Not wildly so .. like it used to be.. but just enough that I keep missing stuff I feel like I’m intended to see. None of it’s earthshaking stuff.. I’m thinking of stuff like missing that Ben Zander talk at the conference last week.. and having everyone come up to me and tell me how much the message was perfect for me.. or at the same conference last week.. always being in the boring conference presentation while hearing laughter or loud  clapping  coming from the meeting in the conference room next door. Monday I managed to miss an important meeting at work in which the secrets of the universe..  ..actually  the secrets of our product roadmap and the  budget for the year….  were finally revealed..  Everyone has been talking about that ,meeting all week about wha a great turning point it was for our area… sigh.. Tonight I had another one of those things. Several of our friends went and saw the Nobel prize winning Holocaust witness Eli Wissel  this afternoon at UVM. Wissel was in town to receive an honorary degree from UVM. I’d thought about going.., the talk was free and open to the public,  but I had work meetings throughout the afternoon   and miles to go before I sleep…

    From what I heard from Deb, Jen and their kids  Wissel gave a memorable talk.  They said he talked three types of reaction to tragedy like the holocaust: the first is to close off the past, try to forget it and live for your own pleasure and preservation.. the second is to become bitter and angry about the wrong that has happened to you and to stay angry at the world.. the third  is to become a witness to the world of what has happened to you and to become a force  to teach and to prevent others from ever having to face that same pain. Those descriptions sounded alot   (I know alot isn’t a word, mom 🙂  like the way that people react to a tragedy like  the death of a loved one.  Since Sam died we’ve met folks who’ve reacted in each of those three ways.. I always try to live in the third way….. that is live in such a way that we help others learn from Sam.. and learn by our experience of his passing.  but I don’t always get to choose how I react. In fact, I’ve come to believe that people generally don’t get to choose the way that they  react.. It comes from your nature, circumstance  and surroundings more than from choice.. and for that reason, I’ve also learned not to pass judgment on people   who react in one of the first two ways.  Deb told me that Wissell said exactly the same thing.. I think grief has no scale.

   Deb and Jen told me that Wissel also talked about  how unbelievable it was to him that despite all that the world has learned from the Holocaust that we still have genocide in our time:  in Darfor.. in Rwanda, Kosovo in Iraq.. He told a story about when  Pres Clinton had said that ‘if Americans had been in Rwanda.. 400,000 lives could have been spared…’ he wrote to Clinton and said  ‘why if ?’ . I think that’s a pretty telling story when you think about how fast our country moved  into Iraq or Kuwait when our business  interests were at stake.. makes you think.. no ?

  I really wish that I’d heard Wissel’s talk  today… but I was in the wrong place at the wrong time… .. and you already know what that’s like Sam.. you really know

-jc

 

ps. The TakeYourKidsToWorkDay thing I did yesterday was covered by the Burlington Free Press and  WCAX TV. Here’s a low-res video of the story

Today was Take Your Kid To Work Day (or TYKTWD for those of us in the biz). This morning there were over 800 kids roaming the halls of IBM. I always find it very cool to have all that ygood kid energy inside the walls of Big Blue. My  job this morning was to entertain roughly 500 of them with stories about how video game consoles are put together.

My  hope is that kids that like playing video games will get psyched about  learning more abut how the game consoles and game software works. It really, really  is cool stuff. I took the kids through ‘Game Tomorrow’,  a story that starts with the  history of video game consoles.. how the current ones are put together and the amazing stuff we expect from the next generation of machines. I was using a presentation from IBM Corporate Communications that I’d help put together back in November. In fact, the story line for the presentation was the thing I was working on the day that Sam died. Going through the same material today .. especially in a room full of kids really started out hard, After the first few minutes the feeling eased up and I was able to get into the material. I got pretty good audience participation and I think the kids ‘got’ the message. I had a whole bunch of them come up tot alk to me after I was done WCAX and the FreePress were there.. I just saw that there’s a short piece on WCAX’s website about the event.  (http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=6420872) Maybe there will be something in the paper tomorrow.  I can say that it really feels good to be ‘back in the saddle again’ and doing some education outreach work. I feel good when I’m working with kids.. and I think it’s a good way to honor Sam with my work.

    The rest of the day passed pretty quickly.. I managed to write Sam’s name in the snow of the parking lot.. I added some mud ofr contrast. I plan to do this until all the snow dissapears,

I got home about 6:30 just in time to leave with Diane and Gabe to go see ‘Citizen Cope’ at Higher Ground. I love live music anytime.. but live music mid-week is a great and rare treat. It was a  really young crowd at Higher Ground tonight.. which was funny because the music was definitely not  just for kids. Stylistically, Citizen Cope has a little of everything . including reggae, R&B, conutry and jazz . It grew on me as the night went on.

I loved the young crowd. At one , point I decided to take some of our spare French fries down to Gabe and friends who were right up near the stage. As soon as I walked into the crowd it was like a feeding frenzy.. hand were coming out of every ware to grab for the fries.. it was surreal and fun.. and a little disgusting.. I felt like I was in the company of piranha’s.

Overall ,he show was pretty good.. we saw lots of friends there including Sumner who’ still on crutches. Notice where those crutches come to on Gabe.. that Sumner is one tall boy

   We got home just before midnight to find Max studying hard. When we came in he took a break to make the world s most perfect baked potato.. Here he is just before the sacrifice…

   Oy.. I’m sleepy.. I’ll end here. Sam.. I wanted to let you know that I was in a book store today and saw one of your favorite books It made me sad and happy to see it.. I’m sure your know it…

 
-jc

 

 

The path we’re on is certainly tough. One day I feel like I’m making great progress and getting strong, the next day I feel like I don’t want to get out of bed. Today was the latter. I really struggled today at work.. and came home feeling like a whipped puppy. Nothing specific happened.. It was just hard… lots to ponder at home too.  I think I’m  getting too busy to do the grieving and healing I need to do.. I end up putting it off to later.,. then never make time for later. I’m going to have to work on  getting more down time in my schedule to think.. or actually to not think.

    I have been spending the little quiet time I have trying to figure out where I am on this new spiritual journey I’m on since Sam’s passing. I’ve been part-way through several books on death and dying. life after death,  men’s healing and I’m not sure what to think .  I know that I believe in something bigger than we are.. at the same time, the teachings of any organized religions I know of don’t do it for me. I was deeply moved by the Gandhi quote I saw at the Peace Abbey which I mentioned yesterday.. “There are as many religions as there are people’“ I think that is so true.. Diane, Pat and I were talking about this in the car on the way back from Boston last night . None of us can know what is true .. we can only know what we believe.  Even many of the strongest tenants of science that we take as facts are just elaborate belief systems.. Think of Newtonian physics before relativity.. it was believed as fact, taught as fact… and still it was wrong.. or at least it was incomplete.   

I’m thinking that all the scientific training I’ve received over the years has made the spiritual journey I’m on harder and more confusing..  On one hand my training makes it hard for me to beleive in a soul.. yet my heart ablolutely knows that we have one and that it lives on after we die. I hear it from Sam all the time. I remember a Terry Gross interview I heard last year with Brian Greene the well known String Theorist and Author of ‘The Elegant Universe’ (String theorists believe that all things in the cosmos from the very large big bang to the very small sub atomic particles can be explained by the actions and interactions of tiny one dimensional vibrating ‘strings’ of pure energy) Terry asked  Greene if string theory is true, does it make religion unnecessary. I can’t recall Green’s exact quote.. but he said something very similar to this quote of his  I found on the internet  “The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand,” he said. “If someone wants to place the word God on those collections of words, it’s OK with me.”

   I find it hard to believe in a G-d that is outside of me.. since I can’t rationally explain why that idea is necessary to explain what I see and experience . At the same time I can’t help believe  that the collective consciousness of all of the living beings in the universe can be  explained by physics as we know it. To me the organizing energy that makes us us is somehow divine and worth of respect. I also somehow believe that that organizing energy endures and builds, ..even learns throughout time. To me that’s our before-life, during-life and our afterlife…  And even though  its impossible to know this.. . I believe it  with all my heart. I know that Sam is part of that as am I, Diane, Max, Gabe and all of you.. That’s John-ism… and I’m the high priest.

-jc