I haven’t hugged anyone except Daveen for six months.  We haven’t gone out together at night – no movies, no plays, no dinners at a restaurant with friends.  The landscape of my calendar has no social appointments.  It feels as if I’m living at the North Pole looking out on ice with no landmarks.

And yet, I really don’t miss any of the above.

Well, maybe hugging.

In short, my life during the pandemic is less cluttered. Now I have time to focus more deeply on simple pleasures – a crisp salad for dinner, an uninterrupted telephone call with a friend, or meandering through my garden.  I also share breakfast regularly with my oldest daughter, who is now living with us.

I recently asked Robert, an attorney friend of mine, how he and his family are doing.

“It’s different,’ he said, “but basically fine.  We used to have family dinners only on weekends.  Now I work at home, so I stop every day at five o’clock to cook dinner.  After our meal together as a family, I go back to work.”

Many people I know have moved, often to live closer to, or with, family.  Many are also changing jobs.

It isn’t often that nature hits the “pause” button and gives us a chance to reevaluate our lives. But this is exactly where many of us find ourselves today.  As a pragmatist I say, “Let’s take advantage of the opportunity.  Let’s rethink our previous actions and habits, with an eye toward being mindful of what works best for us. What should we keep, and what might we discard?”  I think about this often for myself.

Since we now have fewer external distractions, we are living more intensively with a few companions, and less extensively in larger groups.  In a year or two we’ll return to “the good old days”.  But we also have the rare chance to move into “the even better days” by using this time to transform our lives in the direction of simplicity.

Alan

One silver lining of coronavirus is that Daveen has been cleaning out the garage. She recently found a draft for a piece that I wrote more than thirty years ago. Had I been writing a blog back then, it would have been an entry. That piece is as follows:

I’m forty-nine.  I have never been comfortable with fast dancing.  Actually, I’m afraid of it.

At a big celebration twelve years ago, one of my adult daughters won the fast dance contest.  I was proud of her.  I didn’t dance at all.

Every year my office holds a holiday dance. Most everyone loves it.  I used to dread it.  There’s a lot more fast dancing than slow (which is easier for me and . . . well, slow dancing can be fun).

Though it’s not a big issue in my life I still don’t like to feel left out three or four evenings a year (counting two or three weddings), as I obsess about my fear of fast-dancing.

Five years ago at our holiday office party Karen asked me to fast dance with her and I reluctantly agreed. She was good.  She was also kind.

“You’re doing great,” she said.  Others agreed.  I almost trusted them.  But I knew I didn’t know what I was doing.

My young daughter Ingrid likes to show off.  This evening, between work and dinner, I flopped down on the sofa and she ran up to me. 

I said, “Are you Ingrid?”

“No.”

“Are you Carol?”

“No.”  Laughter.

“Are you Mommy?”

“No.”  More laughter.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Star Dancer.”  Proudly.

“She wants to dance for you,” her older sister explained.

We turned on the radio.  Ingrid danced.  Fast.  Exuberantly.

How could she?  Ingrid had no dance lessons.  She didn’t know the rules.

Fortunately, she didn’t realize there were rules she had to follow.

So Ingrid left the rules where they often belong – in someone else’s mind.

While I wrote this thirty years ago, I still feel the truth at its core. As an editor of Rattle, I have found that children up to about ten years old often write great poetry.  That’s before they realize they are expected to follow some rules, and their natural creativity goes into hiding.

I’m considering a fast-dance with Daveen tonight.  I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know the rules either.

Alan

As many of you know, in 2014 and 2015 I wrote three self-help books that were published by SelectBooks:  People Tools; People Tools for Business; and People Tools for Love and Relationships.  I’m pleased to say all three books are still selling well on Amazon.

A few weeks ago one of my grandsons visited for several days.  At breakfast he said, “Grandpa, I’m reading three of your people tools chapters every morning, and one of my favorites is “The 80% Solution.”  I was surprised, especially because Daveen had recently told me that one of her favorites is also “The 80% Solution.”

The basic idea of this short chapter from the original People Tools book is that in any relationship, whether business or personal, if someone meets 80% of my ideal then “I will stick with him or her and not spend one second thinking about a replacement.”

There is no particular “magic” to my choice of 80%.  Your yardstick could be 70% or, if you never want to be satisfied with anyone, you could set it at 100%.  My point is that we all have to be satisfied with less than perfection, at least in others. The popular singer Shakira told 60 Minutes she has never been 100% satisfied with any of her performances. Despite those impossibly high expectations for herself, I’m confident that most people in her audience are quite satisfied with a lesser standard.

One of my favorite (and most practical) tools in People Tools for Business is “Wait Three Days.”  Whenever I receive a business email that bothers me, I wait three days before responding.  In the book I share an example of how I made a nice profit on a real estate transaction because, after waiting three days, I was able to respond in a polite and creative way rather than impulsively or with anger.

In People Tools for Love and Relationships the initial and most fundamental chapter is ‘The Key is You.”  I grew up believing that the secret to enjoying a successful relationship was simply to pick the right person.  I was naïve about this, and wrong.  You don’t find the right person.  You have to be the right person. You have to put in the effort to make any relationship work.

As a teenager I read many books and magazine articles about love.  The best advice I ever found was a single sentence. “If you want someone to love you, love them first.”

In all relationships we begin as strangers. The goal is to lower our barriers.  (See the chapter, “Is it Safe?”).  Every couple that celebrates a tenth, or fiftieth, anniversary has learned, to a greater or lesser degree, to get along in a relationship, reduce barriers, and be satisfied with less than 100% of their ideal.

Today I’m tempted to summarize all of my People Tools about relationships with one short statement:  Be appreciative, and be nice.

Alan