I’m celebrating thanksgiving this week. America makes a big deal about it, and it is undoubtedly the start of the winter holiday season.

America has pinned down this holiday in November but almost everyone in human history celebrates the harvest. It’s a lot of work to bring in the things we’ve grown and we are grateful to realize that things have grown yet again.

The next holiday here is Christmas which isn’t as celebrated everywhere and everywhen like a harvest festival. There is one aspect of Christmas this is near universal, though.

The nativity happened in Bethlehem because of bureaucracy. Remember? It was a government requirement that every had to be registered in the place they were from. Ceasar Augustus himself was involved.

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while[a] Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register.
Luke Chapter 2

As much as every people group in the world celebrates harvest, all of them despise the bureaucracy. It’s a very old tradition.

The Roman empire didn’t start this kind of empire government. The Romans are famous for copying the Greeks. Alexander the Great had an empire that lasted long past his life and almost up until the age of Jesus’ birth.

The proof of their influence was the continuation of the fees that the government imposed on the people therein.

I haven’t found an example, but I heard that during the Hellenic empire, fictional stories of pirates who got around all the government taxes were very popular.

The story of getting out from under the thumb of The Man as he is known to me now.

People are the ones who create and then submit to the empires. And then we don’t. Or maybe we do, but only to a point.

As I study the literature of humans across time and space, I know there are many examples of how people feel and react to the control of government. I’m not done with this idea.

My job sends me to downtown LA a few days a week.  Last week I stepped out of the parking garage to walk to my office.  There was a man sitting on a concrete bench behind a stack of books, the top one open showing neat underlining on both pages.

I took all this in as I speed-walked to get to my building. I saw an intensity that drew my curiosity and I wondered what he was reading.

“Nice set of books,” I said as walked past.

His head jerked up and pivoted toward me, as he shouted, ‘CAN’T HELP YOU.”

Realization dawned as I kept my forward pace. That intensity I intuited was not just from the power of the books—there was a mental instability in this man. His shouts continued behind me directed toward the air.  I couldn’t make out the words he shouted, but I got his message.

The homeless problem haunts the crowded streets of downtown. As I go the last couple miles from the freeway to the office, I pass tents and the structures that are starting to fortify their homeless impermanence towards greater stability. People mill about with their folding chairs and carts.

Yes, they are at home in their homeless encampment. And yet, just like the man with the books, there is an unstable intensity in most of them. One morning I saw three different people lying on the concrete sidewalk shouting or moaning loudly. A block later, a man shuffled across the street in the crouch known to the fentanyl addicted.

20 years ago I worked up the street in the courthouse side of downtown. My co-workers and I would tell share stories of the one homeless guy who told the same story of being a student out of money to get a bus ride home. We took the bus ourselves and knew his request was for more than the cost of a ride and a transfer.

“He should come up with a different story. We’ve all heard his same story several times…Come on!”

This story seems vintage quaint as I pass the homeless tent shanty towns in my clean clothes and stable routines. I wish I could help these men and women in their obvious distress and yet it is not all obvious what I can do. The Fentanyl crouch reminds me that even my previous (and infrequent) habit of handing out some bills to these people could mean an overdosing death sentence.

Isn’t wisdom supposed to come with age? I hear people with strategies for solutions. One thing I know is that whatever solution is implemented has to be met with investment from the individuals it is supposed to help. I am not sure how much investment these played-out people have to give. The current strategies in this metropolis are not satisfying. I would like to help them towards a better personal situation. It’s hard to keep my eyes open, but it is the very least I think I can do.

I’ll have to keep looking for a way to help, from my tiny seat in the world. 

Ever meet a person who remembers you from an earlier meeting, and you don’t remember them? That happened to me a couple years ago. I had made acquaintance with a colleague in my industry at a mixer. I thought we were getting to know one another for the first time, but he said he remembered me from an earlier phone encounter. He said “I thought you were very organized, and had a lot of systems.”

That sounds like me. Like a beaver makes dams, I make systems. It’s how I do.

A few months ago, I was looking for a silly easy to read book. I picked up Scott Adam’s How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. It was easy to read, but not nearly as silly as I was expecting. He is a proponent of systems versus goals. He says that a system is far more reliable than a goal. Systems are crafted for success.

I know. I create little systems and habits. If you follow me on social media, you know I have a very faithful habit of posting of photo of the sunrise. And weekdays, I post a two minute “Hey you!” video greeting and inspirational thought.

Then of course, there is this very regular Weekly Wonder. I never miss it.

These are good systems, or habits I have for engaging with my day. It gives me handholds to pull me forward.

And yet, it’s worth double checking. Have I outgrown these habits? Are my systems doing what I hoped they would?

With the changing of the seasons, I think it’s time to take a look around and make sure these systems are pointing me in the right direction.

What is it I really want? Are my systems moving me towards or away from my desires?

Small trajectories that persist over time can take me very far off course. It is worth double checking my momentum.

We just changed the clocks, to match how we use our daylight. I am ready to calibrate the course I’m on to make sure it truly is going where I hope to go.

That honestly means I have to double check the maps. Are the landmarks behind me? What assumptions have to be re-examined?

The longer dark days lead to this kind of introspection. I have to bring my own light to the shorter days. The systems that support the systems need some attention.

March 13, 2020 is when the Covid lockdown started for me. That Friday my kid came home with all her books and schools closed. Restaurants and gyms shut down and we all stood very far apart.

I couldn’t stop watching the news to find out what I needed to know about this scary virus. We were shut out and shut down.

That’s two and a half years back. We are not shut down anymore. Well, not exactly. But we didn’t really have a grand-reopening. And here in California the government sends periodic warnings that it will happen again. I find myself falling into a now-habitual posture of a protective crouch.

In Chapter 21 of the last book I published The Russian American School of Tomorrow, the soviet refugee Alex said he did not come to America to live in Alaska. He wanted to be in the middle of the action.

I want that too. I didn’t come this far to sit it out.

I haven’t been participating in so long I’m afraid. This kind of cautiousness is a virus of its own.

I’ve been afraid to get out of the house and try things. I can feel it like a hundred invisible spider webs, tying back the confidence I felt once.

Monday night was Halloween, when children practice being bad—evil!—and brave. When the sun was down and the moon was up, we walked the streets and admired all the kids with their costumes.

On the inversion holiday, can I turn this unhappy cowardice habit into curiosity again? Is there a witchery I can stir up into wishes come true?

News channels are downers. Facts have limits to their usefulness. Possibilities can pick up where the facts end.

Ben Folds, the famous and popular songwriter and piano player, tells a story about how he first got a piano. He was a child, and his parents let him know they were getting a piano the next day. He was so excited he barely slept that night, going over in his mind all the music he would create once his fingers were touching that piano.

The next day was a shock. He could not in fact make the music he imagined right away. It took a lot of mistakes to get to where he wanted to go.

In one of my favorite books The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin, the author who was a child chessmaster and become a martial arts champion as an adult has a chapter on investing in loss. I love this book because of the two seemingly polar opposites of expertise. The game of chess is exclusively the world of the mind. Martial arts is realm of the body.

And yet Waitzkin sees how excellence and competition in both these disciplines have overlap. Both skills require being bad at it when you start. Both skills require repetition and intelligent practice to improve.

I get how Ben Folds felt when the reality of his inexperience crashed against his artistic vision. I can see what I want to do so clearly I can almost touch it. In fact I cannot touch it. It doesn’t exist until I gain the skills to create it.

I have to try and fail. And try and fail again. Maybe my failure will be slightly closer to the goal after a few times.

I will surely lose when I compete against someone better than me. If I were only engaging with people who were less skilled than I would not gain skill. I might in fact protect myself from engaging with anyone to keep the status of winner. If winning were the point, I could make sure to compete with lower and lower skilled people and shrink to stay in those divisions.

Losing makes me better. It is unpleasant to be knocked down, outplayed and outfoxed by strategy. But it’s that pain and that gut punch that motivates me to get better.

I have to keep losing to make progress. Winning was never really the goal.

Both feet have to be evenly placed, but that’s not enough. The rest of my body—my structure or my posture—has to be balanced. Then I can flex my muscles and swing hard to land the kick with power

I am trying to reach for new things, things I have not been able to do before. Well, that’s not completely accurate. I’ve done these sorts of things before. And yet, as I am gathering myself to do them this time and in this place I find myself off balance.

What if I’m doing it wrong? I could be mistaken, and the confidence I had at the beginning was utterly misplaced. The ideas I have worked before but they will not work now.

These imposter feelings, these doubts and insecurities are the mental equivalent of bad posture. If I stand on one foot with the other just a little toe point to the ground, I’m much easier to knock over. Entertaining negative thoughts are the same way. If my head is full of doom and failure I am likely to make mistakes.

When I practice martial arts, I take the time to stand properly. I didn’t have the knack of it at first but with time I have learned.

New situations are the same way. I don’t know how to hold the right stance at first.

With practice, with time, I can get there.

Repetition and refinement are key. Also, listening to coaching and watching others. I have done this before. I can do it again.

I’ll get the swing and deliver with power.

The good news is, I have landed a job and I start this week.

I’ve spent the last month living with the constant distraction of being unemployed. For me a job means safety. Like a meerkat popping up on her hind legs, I am surveying the horizon constantly. It that a threat? Is that an opportunity I need to chase down? Where is the danger?

Stay Alert. Look for disaster.  I can be sure it’s always coming. What is a moment away from killing me?

Never shut my eyes.

Without the safe haven of a job, my frightened prey instincts are zinging. I’ve re-calibrated the state of my world to red- DANGER.

But I am more than prey. I also have to chase down my own quarry. Fear can inspire me to do that work—to get skilled and stay moving. Lord knows, I’ve burned that fuel before.

It turns out that if I’ve got any distance to travel, fear is a very unpleasant companion. It comes with poisonous by-products. Honestly? I’m not sure the poisons isn’t the main product. Fear is a motivator, but it’s not the only one.

Avoiding the negative is a big boost. Like touching hot metal, my hand jerks away fast. Thank you pain, thank you fear, for getting me out of the danger quick!

My life has been arranged so that I encounter true pain seldom. I have shoes and oven mitts to protect my skin.

Unemployment is painful, but doesn’t require instant reaction. The solution to resolving the unemployment is actually the opposite of the fear story. I have to convince a business that I am the answer to their fears.

I had to switch from focusing on the fear to the positive solution.

Fear is easy. That hyperdrive to Get Away is a button ready to press.

 Maintaining awareness of the positive is a lot harder. My wiser higher self can see possibilities that fear hides. The fear has become the enemy. The battleground is internal.

I’ve had to create habits and practices to win the battle of positivity. Setting the stage for quiet remembering. Vaporize the fear by not looking at it. Practicing the stories of possibilities.

As I start practicing the discipline of attention, I start to see that fear has henchmen. Each of us have an instinctual army ready to leap up into action, it’s a reliable response. But that’s not all.

There are henchmen ready to manipulate that fear to their own purposes. Marketing and publicity seekers, ones who seek to gather and manipulate attention are using fear like a tool. Stories that worm into my mind and ask me for attention, getting my heartrate up and my mind racing. The news is a common villain. Certain people I know can be drags on my potential.

I’d be angry at these henchmen. But they only succeed when I cooperate. I do not consent. Even if I have to move it out of my mind again and again, I will say no again and again. Fear is not welcome.

This is my space. I say yes to my own possibilities.

It’s not like I can avoid it. I speak English, so my experience of the world is slanted by Homer. I’ve talked about him and his Iliad before.

“Rage! Sing, Goddess…!”

The wars, the passion and the poetry could never—still aren’t! —be exhausted. The British university students kept on with their Greek translations well into Victoria’s reign.

What could compete with Homer’s words?

What indeed?

William Morris, famous for his arts and crafts textile designs, was also a poet and novelist. HE had an Icelandic friend who introduces him to an ancient Old Norse manuscript, which included the Volsunga Saga.

It’s from the 1200s, talking of historic events from 800 years earlier in Central Europe. The adventures described were dark powerful stories of the Volsung family, a fierce multigenerational story of revenge and the will-to-power.

Unlike the Greeks, these heroes were not the playthings of the gods. The tribal ferocity had a timbre rooted in the cold and dark north–a strange yet familiar indigenous epic. It wasn’t only England that was looking for its own unique identity in stories and language. The Brothers Grimm are just one example of the search for essential national identity through old oral traditional stories.

In the late 1800s industrialism and colonization had toppled old assumptions. Where did people fit in their lives and in society? The people were re-examining the stories of their own ancestors, not the re-purposed stories of Olympian gods grafted into the culture so long ago.

The emperors of industry didn’t trace their family trees back to kings. They filed their power in books managed by clerks. Sign here:

to pay back the loan

that lets you own

the smokestacks and the men who feed them.

Where is the heroism? What does success mean without the story of who I am?

Wagner was finishing his famous Ring cycle opera series with the Twilight of the Gods, based on the same stories. The story chronicles the end of the world. The time of the gods—heroism, honor and love—was ending.

What brought about this annihilation? How did it Wagner show this collapse?

It began with the craven breaking a contract. The God of all, Odin, made a contract with the Frost Giants to build his dream home, Valhalla. But he made the deal with no intention of paying the price.

But in the new world of industry and capital, where trust has taken the place of lineage, a broken promise proved to be the end of everything.

The Grimm brothers, Morris, and Wagner were trying to find a shared heritage, but Wagner brought it back to trust or honor. What allows us to be alongside one another if not trust?

This story, of the ring and the broken sword that begun in Old Norse was picked up by a more modern and familiar artist: Tolkien.

As powerful as a contract is in the world of the new middle class, Tolkien found another layer needed peeling away. He was chest deep in these indigenous stories—he was a linguistics professor. But before he brushed out his first tweed jacket, he joined the fight in World War One, seeing the worst of the modern reenactment of battle. Blood and sickness and death alongside his modern life.

The Volusunga Saga told the story of unbound ambition, constrained only by the limited power of what a collection of humans could do to one another. Humans had progressed since. The industrial age for workers led to the industrial age for warfare. The same tools that kept the smoke pumping out of the factories kept the men in place on the front lines to die in ways and numbers unimagined.

The 20^th century epic story of the Lord of the Rings of Power followed a small insignificant hero. He refused to use the power. He never forgot where he came from, longing to return to his beloved shire. His sense of belonging and the peace of his community fueled his commitment to not only refuse the power, but to prevent it from being used by others.

I can read the story of the Volsungs. I wonder what they would think of us, 1600 years later. We have more power than they could have dreamed. Can we refrain from using it? Have we turned the hero’s story inside out?

What with all the things going on in my life, I have fallen back on the comfort of puzzles. I can pick up a box with and interesting picture, open it and scatter all the pieces onto the table.

They don’t look like the picture. They are chaos and upside-down beige cardboard at first. The pieces are fragments of wildly unfamiliar and also impossibly the same shapes and images. I start to sort them and make sense of it.

In the world outside the puzzle box, I’ve experienced a rise in the number of disappointments and betrayals. I could give in to negativity and lose hope. There is certainly enough evidence to support pessimism. And yet, I will not resign myself to hopelessness.

So, the puzzles, with their promise of restoring order and even beauty from chaos are a way to fight back.

I flip all the pieces so their colors show. I touch them and look them over to get the sense of how this will work out.

What things do I know for sure? The one single straight edge is something I can rely on, that’s a place to start. The edges of the puzzle is a guarantee that I’m going in the right direction.

And yet…from the very beginning there is a battle.

How can this piece fit? Maybe this puzzle has the wrong pieces.

Or

Is something missing? The box was sealed but…

Maybe there was a problem and this time things won’t come together.

All the time I sort and look and fit the pieces together I am still doubting.

Did a piece fall and on the floor and get eaten by the dog?

WHERE is that one piece that has to have purple in it? I don’t see any piece with purple. This is the one the dog ate; I just know it.

I’ve put a few together now. Once, a piece was eaten by the dog. I know because I found that soggy chewed piece, rescued it and put it back together. It was funny looking, but it was complete at the end.

It’s a pendulum swing, between victories and despair. Every piece that slides into place is a satisfying payoff. And so quickly when I search for the next piece it can swing to the despair.

Putting that puzzle together is talking myself into faith every second. And as I practice faith and action in this small flat world that fits in a box, I am building the same for the larger world.

It will work. Things will come together. Have faith, and trust.

As much as I would like to be perfect, I am far from it. I have my proclivities and my blind spots. Unfortunately, I’m not always aware of which is which. I think I’m getting better at seeing which is which. I don’t know what I’m blind to, until I have a throbbing pain slam into me.

I have a lot going on in my head. The running conversation spills easily into my writing—my blog has been around for 20 years, and this weekly wonder newsletter for more than ten. I’m not short on thoughts.

Thing is, I am so busy listening to myself, I’m not so good at hearing what others might have to say. There is a saying “Read the room.”

Ah. The room and all the people in it have something for me. It seems I need to clear out a space in my head and give some attention to what is happening around me.

This doesn’t always come easy. I love to talk with other people, but when my mind is full it’s hard for me to set aside what I’m thinking about and make room for what others need from me.

And they don’t always even tell me. I have to sharpen up and look for signs. Are they tired? Are they excited? I have to be aware of what is happening in the minds and hearts of others.

With all the noise in my own head, I can easily overlook what’s happening for other people.

I’m getting ready for a job interview on Thursday. Wish me luck! I would love to be picked and I am flashing back to job interviews that have gone very poorly in the past. There was this one interview I finally got, and I was so nervous and desperate. I got on the call and tripped all over myself, barreling down on that poor hiring manager like a runaway freight train.

I hope I’ve learned a couple things since.

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Take a breath

It’s not all about me.