Month: January 2020

We were reading together on the lanai one afternoon when I drifted off to a random thought. I asked Judy, “Have you ever thought about all of the people we have known in our lives? Like, whatever happened to that fellow with whom I spent all night in the stairwell of the Seven Seas talking about that Alan Watts book about Zen?  And that’s about the only thing I remember about him from that whole semester’s trip!”

I think the thought popped into my head because we had just finished opening several Christmas cards, some from people we have not actually seen in nearly fifty years.

People of a Certain Age, can you relate?  Has there been a host of people in your lives that connected with you ever so briefly, not to be seen again, or only to be heard from at the holidays? Then there are those people who, at one time or another, helped to form your social life for a spell, perhaps in another city in which you lived or at a place where you worked?

I refer to actual face-to-face contact. Facebook allows faux-friending.  Tweets on Twitter seem more trivial. Engaging with another person for a night in the stairwell or tossing around a football at Thanksgiving for several years in a row conveys something more than these 21^st century “encounters.”

What impact on your life might any of that host have had? My staircase conversation, at age 18, with my Zen friend was my first experience of listening to someone whose beliefs were different from mine explaining how he came to believe those beliefs.  Perhaps my tolerance for others’ beliefs was stoked in those early morning hours.

In a recent essay in The Week, Jeanne Marie Laskas shared a line she had heard from her friend, Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers to the rest of us. “I think the greatest thing about things is they remind you of people.” I know what he meant.

I can’t see a turbaned man without remembering the Sikh graduate student at the University of Washington who Dad brought home on Christmas to provide him companionship during the holidays while his dorm sat vacant.  Surely, that exposure as a seven or eight-year old boy had some impact on my understanding that there were good, nice, respectful people who lived in other parts of the world and wore things like turbans. 

A tweed sports jacket with leather patches on the elbows reminds me of the man who sat down at our table on the Plaza in San Jose, Costa Rica and cadged a cup of coffee from us while he told stories about his vagabond life.  He has given Judy and me a shared memory—whether the stories were true of not—and kindled our sense of the wonders awaiting travelers.

Pasta al limone recalls the woman with whom we had dinner in Florence decades ago, whose husband had taken ill on our American Express tour, requiring him to be hospitalized and her to remain there on her own in a foreign city. Our itinerary after the tour took us back through Florence where we called on her. She responded as though we were long-lost friends, reminding us that “being there” can be a kindness of immeasurable quality, even if you barely knew each other on the tour. We stayed in touch with her for several Christmases, and Judy makes fettucini al limone from time to time.

“Things” have reminded us of people who have helped to populate our lives.

Why does our basket have cards from people unseen in our lives for so long? Did we have some mutual impact on one another such that maintaining even the briefest of annual contact is important in some way or another or are the cards just something we do?

A particular card focused on the children and grandchildren of someone who was newly married when we knew her.  We are happy for her, though we had no relationship at all with the subjects of her news.

Maybe therein lies a beginning to understanding the significance of the people who have come and gone, remembered perhaps because of some thing, like a book or a jacket or a turban but otherwise seemingly unconnected to our lives.

It is difficult to imagine a life without such random encounters.  We might never see again 95% of the people whose paths have crossed ours.  But they touched our lives, and life just might be the accumulation of all of those touches.

It is also our good fortune, and I hope yours, to have others with whom we have shared experiences over decades.  The impact of these people, family, friends of long-standing, co-workers, is more obvious. With these we have traveled, shared joys and sorrows, grown old together.  It is also hard to imagine a life where none of those people were a part.

Mr. Rogers was happy to be reminded of people. He made “I want to be your friend” popular. His focus was on whomever was facing him there and then.

As a result, his life was populated with friends who found a friend in him, for however long.

How great is that?

Dan White

February 3, 2020

September 13, 2019 was the 15^th anniversary of the first day of school at Island Pacific academy.  Head of School Gerald Teramae led his staff, faculty, students, trustees and parents in celebrating, convening everyone on the lawn in front of the Elementary Building to honor Larry Caster, Judy, and me as the co-founders. We felt honored.

I was asked to say a few words and, as one might expect, I spoke about the values upon which we had started IPA: the power of human kindness and generosity of spirit.  I noted that we sensed that these and other values were living parts of the school’s daily practice, and that made us ha’aheo (humbly proud).

Two recent readings brought the event to mind.  Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, a superb history of our species and one of the most thought-provoking books Judy and I have read together, wrote that 600 years elapsed between the discovery of gunpowder and its first use in cannon to turn the tide of battle.  Only 45 years went by between the emergence of the theory behind splitting the atom and the use of atomic bombs on two cities in Japan. In other words, the rate at which our species is uncovering new knowledge and applying it to specific uses has increased exponentially.

One question left in the reader’s mind: how speedily will we uncover more potent ways to kill each other?

There is debate about how rapidly the body of knowledge possessed by humankind doubles.  The estimates are usually expressed in terms of months or years, not decades or generations. I pointed out to some IPA students in my remarks at the IPA anniversary that the first iPhone was sold was five years into the future on the first day of school at IPA.  And tweets were the domain of birds.

Of related interest was what Mark Sappenfield, editor of The Christian Science Monitor, said in a story about the work of a group of scientists who were interested in “how human beings think about one another.” They devised a simple experiment involving kindergarten children.

They divided the children at random and gave them different colored shirts.  So, some had red shirts, some blue, some orange.  Without prompting, the children found others with the same color shirt and formed a group.  As Sappenfield wrote: “And that was just the beginning. Kids shared more of their play money with their color group. They had more positive thoughts about fellows in their color group and felt they could trust them more. ‘All of this arose simply because of randomly assigned T-shirt colors,’ notes sociologist Nicholas Christakis in his new book Blueprint.’”

For centuries, human beings have lived in groups and communities characterized by their similar appearances.  Indeed, when someone of a different skin color appeared in a place where only people of one skin color lived, he or she was regarded as an oddity and seldom integrated into the host culture. The kindergarteners were just doing what their ancestors had tended to do—separate on the basis of visual information.

Once the Age of Exploration happened, different colored people met each other more frequently. Still, there were few instances of wholesale integration of multiple skin colors into a common society. Better, faster modes of transportation accelerated mixing.  But the history of the world since has been marred by instances of societies in which the differences of skin color presented major challenges difficult to overcome.

Why? The kindergarten story suggests hardwiring.  Harari’s observation raises the apparent fact that the rapid development of technology outpaces the capacity of human cognition to keep up.

If we are hardwired in a way that is counter to what we hope might be possible in terms of living together with people who look different from us, if we are overwhelmed by the rapid changing of the world in which we must live, what might we do to mitigate the disconnects?

People of a Certain Age, what draws you to a leader you trust? I think that a leader’s values play a significant part, to the extent that you can discern what those values are.  Character matters.

Policy positions, if leaders are worth their salt, are responsive to context, existing conditions that are, of course, changeable. The rapid acceleration of the body of knowledge ensures that.

Values endure, or they ought to.  And if a leader espouses a clear set of values and them tries to live by them, that matters.  Many homo sapiens are part of some specific religious tradition, and they, in theory, are connected to a specific set of values. But, asking whether or not a person lives a life consistent with those values is still a fair question.

And how do those traditions come to grips with the rapid changes in the world in which they operate?  It does no good to pine for halcyon days of the past that weren’t so halcyon anyway. They’re just passed.

Does one value the dignity of every human being? Does one see people of all colors aspiring to lives of peace and prosperity? Does one see the need for “something like a star, to be staid on,” to quote Robert Frost, in the midst of a meteoric pace of change? Does one see the power of human kindness and demonstrate a generosity of spirit?

IPA is proud to be a place “where values matter.”   So should politics.

Daniel E. White

January 20, 2020

We attended a celebration of life for a woman with whom we had worked more than twenty years ago. We had stayed in touch because of “About Aging” and other correspondence.  Several of us spoke about her life and what she had meant to kids and how unjust it seemed for her to die so young. There was in the room a sweet sadness.

Toward the end, the love of her life shared a photo show that included pictures of her at various points in her life. In one, the camera is above her, and she looked up, her eyes wide, her mouth shaped into a smile we all recognized as a trademark—friendly, knowing, and just a bit mischievous. For all of us, she was there that day, in that photo.

For three years, I worked with a group comprised of people from the California Association of Independent Schools and the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools to re-think the accreditation process for independent schools.  Our finished product featured several unique questions for schools to answer, one of which required the school to produce 10 pictures or five thirty second videos “that richly convey the climate of the school.” I have seen responses from several schools; they are imaginative and revealing.

I thought about this when Judy and I were with some friends of long-standing. They have been going through hundreds of photos to pare down their collection to keepsakes. (People of a Certain Age, is this on your to-do list, too?) They picked several photos and challenged us all to recall where we had been when the picture was taken and in what year.

We had fun trying, and we think we did well as a group. We also made some observations based on the photos. For instance, they proved that, once upon a time, we all had darker hair and fewer pounds. It was obvious that we had traveled many places together.

Each photo promoted shared memories, from our B.C. era (before children, their son) to the S.T.P phase (son taking photo). We were visiting together a shared history, and it was satisfying to do so.

I had a further thought, one that parallels the accreditation question: if I were to present 10 photos or five thirty-second videos that captured the essence of my life, what would they be? Would the pictures show people, places, memorable events, animals seen on safari, famous landmarks?

Recognizing the difficulty of such an assignment, I immediately decided that the task needed to be placed in contexts. How about 10 items for youth, 10 for the ages 21-50 phase, 10 for 50 and over? Or maybe 10 about people, 10 about places? There were so many factors that would be different in one’s life, according to age and stage. How could one limit oneself to just 10 for such a long period of time?

Clearly, I was fudging.

Perhaps with justification. How can any of us reduce our complex lives over decades to a limited series of impressions? Yet, isn’t that what happens whenever a tombstone is etched for posterity?

An obituary in any newspaper, unless you have been a major figure in the history of your time, will, at most, be four or five paragraphs long (more depending on your family’s resources). What would you want those paragraphs to highlight?  They will form a picture of you in words.

I began to try to think about photos. I would start with a picture of a Thanksgiving dinner in 1967 in Agoura, California where all members of both of our families were present, possibly the only time that whole group was assembled. I could cover a lot, I reasoned, in just one shot.

It got harder after that.  So, I stopped.

I kept wondering, though. What pictures could represent me?

It should be obvious that I like to write. I have no doubts that the words I have written for various reasons to diverse audiences might create some sense of me. I have written, over the years, pages I once called “notes to myself at age 64,” the age chosen no doubt as a result of the Beatles’ song “When I’m 64.” When I read these pages now, I can get an idea of myself over time.

And so a light bulb went on.  I could produce photographs that would have meaning to me. But there is no guarantee that the other person would see the photos as I see them or know what needs to be known to make sense of them. My pictures will reflect what I think about me, only one perspective on my life, presumably an informed one, but also biased.

Likewise, what I write in any given circumstance has particular meaning to me as I write but my words will strike each reader differently as he or she filters my words through his or her lens. Your responses to me have made that clear every two weeks since January 9, 2015.

What might be etched on a gravestone or written in an obituary will be other peoples’ pictures of me. I’d best confine myself to creating word pictures that make me proud to have been alive.

Daniel E. White

January 6, 2020