Regaining purpose

The New Year approaches, but this is a completely manmade event. Christmas has just passed, and it is manufactured as well.

But we all sense that something momentous happens this time of year, every year. It is in our blood, we feel the tides of the planet. The shortest day of the year has just occurred. The sun has just begun to once more make its northerly trek. In the Northern Hemisphere, we are entering the depths of winter. The coldest months are to come, even as the days grow longer and the shadows shorter.

We are disconnected from our agrarian past. But on the few remaining family farms, ancient duties are still completed. The root cellar is full of apples, potatoes, turnips, beets, carrots, onions, and winter squash. The shelves are stocked with canned tomatoes, green beans, corn, and peppers. Cabbage has been rendered into sauerkraut, excess apples into cider.

In the barn, cows low in contentment as they munch their hay, stored sunshine providing nutrition in these dark, short, cold days. The silo is full of aromatic chopped corn, more sustenance for these beasts which will provide milk and cream and butter and beef to the family.

The woodshed is stacked with cord after cord of split and dried hardwood. Burning in several woodstoves (fireplaces are too inefficient), the farmhouse is kept warm through the frigid winter nights and days.

All this munificence was accumulated with arduous work during the long days of summer and more. It may seem an embarrassment, but the store of food must last, not until spring, but until the first garden crops are harvested, perhaps six months hence.

Always working for the future, planning ahead, every season preparing for the next one and the next after that. We northerners had a keen sense of past, present, and future.

But it’s all different now. Cold? Just turn up the thermostat. Hungry? A quick trip to Domino’s or Stop and Shop. Bored? Easily addressed with Netflix or Facebook.

Our lives have become so easy in terms of raw survival. Not simple, but easy. The purposeful efforts of keeping oneself and one’s family fed and sheltered and warm have morphed into a general one of “get a job and keep it.” This has resulted in some significant angst, a lack of satisfaction, of purpose missed.

In this modern age, as our New Year approaches, what can we resolve to increase our happiness?

Here are some ideas, really quite basic.

1. Improve your health.

Eat a healthy diet at least half of which is fruits and vegetables. Consume whole wheat or multigrain breads and pastas. More fish and less beef. Eschew sugar. (That means avoid, not chew).

Run or walk vigorously. While 30 minutes a day is good, an hour or more may become habit forming.

Lift a few weights, increase your strength.

2. Socialize with friends

Research has proven that those with a wide circle of friends are not only happier, but live longer too. Join a club. Volunteer. Become a regular at a local coffee house or hot dog stand. There are many ways to make friends.

3. Expand your horizons.

Spend a weekend in your local large city (e.g., Boston, New York). Museums. Restaurants. Art galleries. Food for the body and the mind. Gain perspective, appreciate the variety and complexity of the human endeavor.

4. Adopt the AMP rule

Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose. Daniel Pink in his 2009 book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” theorized the factors that motivate us. Meant as a guide for managers intending to inspire their employees, it can also be your guide to inspiration in life.

Autonomy describes our desire to be independent, self-directed.

Mastery is the achievement of solid skills, know-how, confidence.

Purpose is the application of autonomy and mastery to something that matters, to accomplish something that has meaning.

Apply these factors to your life, choose your career and job with them in mind.

Think about the 19^th century New England farm family, working hard but happily to provide for themselves. They ticked all of the boxes above, it was a natural outcome of their world, and resulted in deep satisfaction.

We can do the same, but our evolved technologies separate us from the natural world and natural labors and require us to work at deriving fulfillment.

Foregoing are a few ideas on how to increase your satisfaction in the new year. Only you can decide if it’s worth it.

Free stuff in a cold universe

It is night in the Colorado Rockies and it’s brutally cold. Above the tree line, vast snow fields glimmer in pale moonlight. The few alpine animals that survive here, such as marmots and pikas, hibernate or munch stored grasses in their burrows, surviving from stored fat that was laboriously accumulated during the short summer growing season.

This is a severe ecosystem, where energy is meager and survival is not assured. It is an effective laboratory to illustrate the physical world in which we live and the preeminent role played by energy.

In the world of our everyday experience, smartphones and supermarkets, commuter trains and college tuition, we measure abundance and scarcity in terms of money. But money is a human invention, a proxy for effort and achievement, risk and reward. In the stark physical universe we inhabit, energy is the only true currency.

We can see that on a macro scale by viewing the development of human energy infrastructure across the ages.  The Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, offers a sweeping view, from the discovery of fire to the latest in nuclear fusion research. (If you can’t visit in person, a virtual visit on their website is highly recommended).

Human history has been fraught with efforts to wrest energy from our physical world and to direct, store, and utilize it. It is no accident that northern realms far outpaced the southern in this regard. Winter is a harsh taskmaster, and failure is met by death. Northern societies were stressed and challenged by their low available-energy environment, compelled to innovate to survive.

Abundant sunshine and warm temperatures made human survival much easier near the equator. But without the challenge of fundamental survival, there was little drive to innovate and develop beyond basic needs. Fires for cooking and oxen for plowing were more than adequate for thousands of years.

It is interesting to contemplate the particular circumstances that brought us to this point. Eons ago, a massive collision knocked the Earth off its perpendicular axis. This tilted axis gave us seasons – spring, summer, fall, and winter. The periods of balmy weather invited humans to migrate away from the equator, but the winters drove them to innovate. This innovation led to energy and transportation and manufacturing infrastructures which created great wealth. Most likely, you can thank that giant whack for the British Empire, the iPhone, and the Mall of America.

Which brings us to the topic of free stuff. What stuff, exactly, is free? In the context of the physical universe in which we exist, it is not likely that much of anything is free.

We have been told that the air is free. But is it? For air to be useful to us, we must breathe, inhaling and exhaling, and exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. All this requires energy, the only true currency. Air is not free.

How about wind? We are assured that the wind is free. But to harness it, one must build and maintain devices, whether a sailing vessel of the old British Empire or an advanced wind turbine. Just ask the people of Portsmouth, RI, who are tearing down a broken wind turbine and are left with an unpaid $1.5 million mortgage. Wind is not free.

But surely water is free, isn’t it? Water for sustenance, water for irrigation, must be treated and transported. The Romans built elaborate, expensive aqueducts to support their citizenry. The City of Attleboro, likewise, spends millions to provide clean drinking water. Water is not free.

In all of the above cases, we must expend energy (or funds representing energy) to utilize what many consider free resources. There is no free stuff. Consider that alpine marmot, hibernating in its burrow as the temperatures plunge below zero. His survival depends on husbanding the energy he has stored as fat. He knows in his genes that nothing is free.

So in this silly season of political theater, beware of promises of free stuff. We always pay – it is the nature of our universe.

A fickle winter

New England winter

Winter has been fickle this year.

Freezing cold, then spring-like warmth, followed by a double whammy of Nor’easters, winds battering our homes and felling trees. The bushes and crocuses don’t know whether to bud or hibernate again. As we don’t know if it makes more sense to break out our shorts or parkas. A dilemma.

Weather like this has never happened before, we are told. Historic. Unlike the great glacial ice sheets that covered the land or the warmth that melted them. “Has never happened in recorded history,” we are told. But recorded history is so diminutive compared to the thousands of millions of years preceding our epoch.

Yet somehow life has flourished. We have flourished. And most likely will continue to do so, God willing and absent a huge meteor strike. Which is exceedingly improbable, yet possible.

Winter, whether freezing or less so, remains a time for reflection.

Many years ago, we as children loved to camp out in the barn on a stormy winter night, the snow blowing thick and sideways, the mercury headed below zero. But the barn was shelter from the wind, with the lowing of cows and the gentle whickering and stamping of horses, a refuge. Nothing pleased us more than to cuddle a puppy in the hayloft, sweet smells of dried alfalfa and timothy permeating the air, wrapped up in blankets and snug for the night, while the wicked storm raged outdoors.

Now, we join in the New England glories of winter sports. For some, skiing mountain peaks. For others, snowmobiling on trails in New Hampshire or Maine. And others, ice fishing in the frozen north, or snowshoeing the forests trails of Rhode Island to Massachusetts and Vermont and beyond. Unlike our forebears, we like to stay active. Perhaps because necessary doings, milking the cows and tossing the hay and shoveling the manure, are no longer an imperative. Yet we feel an ancestral drive to do something.

But winter is also respite. All of God’s creatures rest, and recoup, and prepare for the spring to come. And when it does, life bursts forth.

And so we plan. Tomatoes, basil, parsley, corn, pole beans, spinach. The garden is taking shape in our minds. Traditional rows or wide rows, raised beds or containers. The form of our garden-to-come is subject to intense deliberation. But, while intriguing, it is not vital. Now it is mostly a matter of recreation rather than the bulwark against hunger it once was.

Yet, still, the garden is important. Symbolizing our connection to the earth, it provides us with healthy food and a healthy pastime. What wonderful meals we will prepare.

The weeks will grow progressively warmer, the grass will green, and spring will come. These tales of winter will fade quickly. Memories of shoveling and skiing and snowmobiling and snowshoeing will meld into gardening and sailing, golfing and other summer pursuits.

It happens every year.  And we are blessed to experience each one, silly not to recognize and appreciate each passing season. Time quickly passes. While life grows more complex, and our burdens increase, remember such childhood pleasures as cuddling a puppy in a hayloft. How could life possibly be better?

The Winter that Would Never End

Sidewalk buried under "Mount Bronson," County Street

It has been a long, cold, dark, snowy, ruthless winter in New England. It is usually said, given such conditions, that only the skiers are happy. But this winter, even ardent skiers are yearning for spring. And the plow drivers – bless them for having not yet slipped a gear.

In Attleboro, the potholes on Thacher street below the railroad bridge are of a particularly vicious nature. Multitudinous, cavernous, sharp-edged, a recipe for bone-jarring, heart-stopping whacks which test the vehicle’s suspension and the owner’s wallet.  More experienced drivers are aware of the danger, slowing to avoid these chasms . The younger ones, perhaps, with some life lessons to learn.

Persistent winds across the Locust Valley, or in opposite direction sweeping Leach’s meadow, have squeezed Locust Street to barely a lane and a half. Witness to the ineffectiveness of lightweight trucks in achieving curb to curb clearance, and perhaps calling for that Vermont Yankee solution, the snow fence. (Snow fences are temporary structures erected after golfers have abandoned the links and dismantled before the robins return and daffodils bloom). A simple solution, perhaps too old fashioned to appeal.

Repeated plowings from both the street and parking lot sides have raised up a veritable “Mount Bronson” of snow at the Bronson building on Country Street. The “Do Not Enter” sign seems balefully directed at pedestrians, those mothers with strollers and elderly trekkers who are forced to trudge in the busy street. While the city was able to quickly clear the site of the Winter Festival, Mount Bronson has remained impervious for over four weeks. We are apparently following the North Carolina model of snow removal here – “Just wait long enough and it will melt.”

Animals, domestic and wild, are having to persevere. The deep snow pack and tall, plowed banks are channeling dogs and their walkers into hoary canyons. This has the effect of concentrating the inevitable detritus of dogs, only some of which is picked up by diligent human attendants. Ah, well, a problem to be dealt with only if the thaw ever arrives.

Squirrels have been notably absent for weeks, in semi-hibernation as food sources shrivel. Only recently have they slowly reemerged to do battle with the birds twittering about the feeders, scattered black oil sunflower seeds, their common pursuit.   

Who knows where the deer and turkeys have gone? Huddled, perhaps in a deep piney  copse or thick swamp, desperate by now for a buried acorn or tuft of dormant grass or a low-hanging cedar branch on which to nosh. The next few weeks will be tough for them, as the snow pack slowly melts enough to reveal hidden nourishment and, eventually, sustain new growth.

All in all, we should pat ourselves on our collective back. There are millions of people in our broad land who have never had to deal with such a winter. But we have done it, with some aplomb. Residents with snow blowers and plow drivers honchoing big machines have done a credible job of keeping an enormous amount of snow at bay. Roofs have been cleaned, fireplugs unburied. Exercise enthusiasts are seen jogging (mostly in the streets), and many have resorted to cross country skiing or snow shoeing as hearty alternatives.

The sun is much stronger now, we can feel it. Higher in the sky, brighter, hotter, closer it seems. Even on frigid days, the ice is beginning to melt from long-encased driveways. We will survive, with stories extolling our strength and virtue to mock our snowbird friends as they make their eventual, fainthearted return. (Although, perhaps not so secretly, we envy them).

Yes, we have been tested and have risen to the challenge. There is only one imperative thing we could have done better.

Let’s clear the sidewalks. Pedestrian lives matter.