A few days ago, the morning walk started off deep in thought – mostly about work and philanthropy and trying to “solve” issues like poverty. By the end of the walk, the thoughts had subtly migrated to the benefits of being connected to others. I was trying to expand on one of my favorite quotes about love in which Adrienne Rich describes love as a process of refining the truths two people can tell each other. She says “It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.” My expansion was to think of how this applies to friendships as well – a different kind of love. I began to think about the benefit of sounding boards – both casual and serious… the richness of conversation and sharing ideas – small and large… the dinner conversations about the kids or the jobs or the “issues” in the world – politics, religion, interesting news, etc. etc. By the end of my walk I was realizing that I spend a lot of time in my own head thinking about some big topics and I have few outlets for sharing. By the end of my walk, I wondered if other people are as lost in these topics as I am. Buy the end of my walk I yearned to know how other people live and think and go about their day-to-day. By the end of my walk, I wanted to know the minds of others because knowing the minds of others seems essential to breaking down human self-delusion and isolation, seems essential to getting out of our own heads for a bit.
I had started that day tired, after a rough night of sleep. Lately, I’ve been waking up around 1 or 3 and struggling to fall back asleep. I often think about all of the things I don’t have time to do or haven’t gotten to. It’s left me feeling exhausted and sometimes nodding off on the sofa by 9 pm. That morning, powering through, albeit sluggishly, I ate breakfast and tried to write a little bit. I wanted to work through my thoughts on the nature of work, human value, and philanthropy. I went down too many rabbit holes to get anywhere – which is when I decided to take the dog for a walk.
Mentally, I was struggling with the question of why the nonprofit sector even exists. Many of us work hard on problems like poverty yet policy changes and changes to the tax code could have a much greater impact (it’s estimated that the child tax credit could halve childhood poverty). For years, I’ve been inching my way to the conclusion that suffering on a large scale is, to some degree, a policy choice. In a world of abundance (private space travel, mega-billionaires, endless resources spent on elections, sports, consumerism, etc…) why do we wrangle and haggle over lifting kids out of poverty, why can’t we take action to avert climate disaster? The argument among some seems to be that capitalism requires a hungry workforce and that poverty is character flaw (they’re just lazy)… that hunger (and perhaps greed) drives innovation. The argument for the current system is work hard and you get ahead… except we have too many examples that counter that narrative (our entire investment system is built on the concept of wealth creating wealth, putting your money to work for you).
The end result, of the writing and the one-sided conversation on my walk, was discarded drafts and a feeling of despair… that these problems are too big, we’re not serious enough to really want to address them, and that maybe my thinking doesn’t fit in. The end result was thinking that I need some like-minded friends who can commiserate, but also switch the subject on me – drag me out of these “frustrations”. People who are going to make me laugh – friends who will share their warmth and passions and ideas about other things (art, music, beer, wine, the color of the sky in the morning, the fascinating stranger they met on a plane, their fondest childhood memory).
That night, perhaps in an effort to be less serious, I scrolled through my old Facebook posts and re-watched clips from a bunch of different concerts I’ve attended: Glass Animals in Pittsburgh, Beck in Philly, Michael Kiwanuka in Nashville, lots of blues shows in Clarksdale and Memphis. I thought back to dinner conversations I’ve enjoyed – strangers in restaurants, a handful of dates, bolognese with my friend Mike, an ex’s co-worker and his wife, meeting for the first time a different ex’s family and group of friends. I thought about that quote from Rich which ends, “It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”