Coming About

Yesterday, at 1:29 p.m., I finished the final revisions of the book I’ve been working on for two and a half years. I know the time, because I looked at my watch.  The book,  Coming About, is the memoir of my client and friend, John K. “Jack” Jouett.  Coming About is the culmination of hours of interviews, long mornings spent sorting through photos and artifacts, weeks of research, and months of writing and re-writing.  We finished a draft just in time for Jack’s 90th birthday on March 8th, and I’ve spent the last several weeks editing, correcting, and polishing text I could have sworn was finished long ago.  I walked out of Odin Ink, the publishing arm of the Portland State University Bookstore, with a copy of the book in my bag.  Finished!  My husband, Doug, was with me and as we got in the car he asked what I wanted to do to celebrate.  Drink a glass of wine?  Go out to dinner?  I thought for a moment.  I didn’t feel the need to do anything.

I kept waiting for some big feeling to hit me.  Surely, after putting so much time and effort into this project, I should feel something now that it’s done. I tried out a few emotions:   Was I feeling relieved?  Joyous? Excited?

Hmmm.  Nothing really seemed to fit.  Was I happy?  Yes, I’m happy with the book.  Yes, I’m looking forward to being able to work on some other projects I’ve pushed aside for the past many months. And there was one really precious moment when I handed a copy of the book to Jack and the very first thing he did was to check to make sure that I had included my name as a co-author.  That was priceless.  But was I really glad to be done?

The answer was no.  The work involved in writing this book allowed me to spend hours and hours of my time doing some of my very favorite things in the whole world.  I love writing, reading, doing research, designing, photo editing, interviewing, archiving.  This, to me, is as much fun as anything I ever get to do.  Why would I ever be happy to stop doing it?

In other words, while working on Jack’s book, I was experiencing the state of full engagement, or flow.  As described by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, a leading researcher on creativity as well as the psychology of full engagement, a flow experience is one in which “what we feel, what we wish, and what we think are in harmony” (from Finding Flow, Basic Books: New York, 1997).  Athletes call it being “in the zone.” Religious mystics refer to it as “ecstacy.” For many people, being in flow is characterized by losing track of time, by being able to use favorite skills at a challenging task, but having it feel almost effortless.

Yep, that’s what it felt like for much of the time I sat at my desk from morning until night working on this book.  Hours passed without my awareness of time.  I would marvel when research came together, words fell into place, or when I’d stumble across the perfect photograph and knew exactly how it fit.  I didn’t need the project to be finished to feel excited or joyous; I’ve been feeling like that on a regular basis for months. Accomplishment is wonderful.  Sleeping in for a change feels great.  But being in flow beats that hands down.

Csikszentmihalyi’s research outlines several characteristics that increase the likelihood of a flow experience.  As described in his book Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, a situation is more likely to produce a flow experience if:

• You have clear goals that require appropriate responses.  There are specific goals established for the activity that eliminates the need to question what you should be doing or how you should do it.  This may be why athletes find games flow-producing.  In sports, the rules are very clear about what needs to happen and how it should be done.  But the same is true for any activity for which the goals are clear–mixing paint, practicing a scale on the piano, or crafting a sentence.
• You receive clear and relevant feedback on your activities.  You know how you are doing at every moment.  You take steps that move you closer to the top of the mountain; you see the stitches accumulate on your knitting needles; you finish the next chapter of the book.
• You must stretch your skills to accomplish the task, but the stretch feels manageable.  If the challenges are too great for your skills, you may be frustrated or anxious.  If the challenges are too low, you may be bored.  But when the challenges are high and your skills are equally matched, you may find, like Goldilocks, a situation that is “just right.”

When goals are clear, feedback relevant, and challenges and skills are in balance, attention becomes ordered and fully invested.  Because of the total demand on psychic energy, a person in flow is completely focused.  There is no space in consciousness for distracting thoughts, irrelevant feelings. Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual.  The sense of time is distorted: hours seem to pass by in minutes.  When a person’s entire being is stretched in the full functioning of body and mind, whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake; living becomes its own justification.  In the harmonious focusing of physical and psychic energy, life comes into its own.

What I Learned From Jack

In 1997, Mitch Albom published his non-fiction book Tuesdays with Morrie, which chronicled his weekly conversations with a bright, engaging, former sociology professor.  For the past 2 ½ years, I’ve had my own version of Tuesdays with Morrie:  I’ve had “Wednesdays with Jack.”  Just about every week—with occasional breaks for holidays or travel—I’ve spent a couple of hours with a bright, engaging 89-year-old former military colonel and inveterate sailor.  Each week, I’ve gone to Jack’s apartment armed with a tape recorder, my laptop computer, and an atlas.  Jack would settle into his favorite chair while I set up my equipment and sat next to him.  And then we’d  talk.

Jack, whose full name is Lt. Colonel John Kellogg Jouett, is also my client.  He hired me for two projects. First was to write a brief family history. As the product of two families with connections to pioneering aviation, Chinese politics, New England society, and the New York art scene, Jack’s family has a fascinating history. This alone would have been an engaging project.  But Jack also asked me to help him write his own story.  We developed an outline of his life, and for months, I spent my weekly visits going through the outline, interviewing Jack about his life.  These interviews, transcribed, created a 400-page document, itself a unique record of his history.  Since then we’ve been turning this transcript into prose, filling in with research, fleshing out the story.  We’re nearing the completion of a first draft.

This tells you what I’ve done, but it doesn’t tell you what I’ve learned, which to me is the most exciting part. Looking back, I’m embarrassed by how little I knew at the time I started interviewing Jack about major parts of our history and culture–World War II in the Pacific, for example, or the geography of the Caribbean, or that Sri Lanka used to be called Ceylon.  Every week I would come home from my time with Jack.  I’d meet my husband for lunch, and start the conversation with “Guess what I learned from Jack today.” Pretty soon the question expanded to my kids, and friends of mine who knew about the project.  They became wrapped up in Jack’s life, and wanted to know more.

So, guess what I learned from Jack.   On the one hand, Jack has led a remarkable life.  He’s brushed elbows with Chiang Kai Shek.  He danced with Eleanor Roosevelt.  He went clubbing with Clark Gable and called famous World War II hero Jimmy Doolittle “Uncle Jimmy.”  He served in World War II and Korea and worked in the Pentagon.  It’s amazing and humbling to research a portion of Jack’s life and find out about all the incredible people whose stories are woven with his.  Really, you almost wouldn’t believe it.

But there are other sides of Jack I like just as much.  There’s the son who to this day talks about his parents with respect and pride.  There’s the man who was absolutely devoted to his wife of 54 years.  There’s the man who raised his children to live in different parts of the world and among unusual cultures.  There’s the man who took his hobbies seriously, and even now, at 89-years-old, likes learning new things.

I’ve enjoyed the work I’ve done with Jack, and I’m proud to have been able to help him tell his story.  But I’ve also learned a lot from him as well. As a regular part of this blog, and with Jack’s permission, I plan to offer glimpses from this remarkable life, and to share with anyone who will read it what I learned from Jack.

Cookies and Asparagus

I recently baked cookies.  This may not be earth-shattering news to a lot of people, but this was the first time in, say, 20 years that I had done this.  I have had the good fortune to be surrounded most of my life by people who like to cook or bake or both.  My sister, Karla,  first baked cookies for me.  All I had to do was stand around the kitchen looking forlorn and she would take pity on me and whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies.  She even sent them to me when I went to college.

In college, my roommate Wendy was a great baker and her family lived nearby.  The first time we went to her house for the weekend we tried baking cookies together.  After about 20 minutes she very kindly suggested that I let her finish — by herself.  I was fine with this.  I’ve always been a good taste tester and didn’t miss the production part.

Later, I married a man who bakes and (proving that there is a benevolent God) somehow ended up with four children, all of whom like to cook.  I’ve made my fair share of meals over the past 20 years, but somewhat reluctantly.  I was never one who used cooking (or baking) as a way to reduce stress.  When pressed, I’d usually just stand around the kitchen looking forlorn until someone took pity on me and baked something — often chocolate chip cookies.

So what happened?  How did I finally find myself digging through the cupboards for a recipe, creaming together butter, brown sugar and eggs, sifting flour with salt and baking soda, and pouring way more chocolate chips into the batter than the recipe called for?

It was a book, Barbara Kinsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, to be exact.  It’s a memoir of sorts, about her family’s decision to live for a year on food they’ve either produced themselves, or procured locally.  It’s truly inspiring, and entertaining.  But I finally decided that it is a book about respect:  respect for the food we eat, the ground that grows it, the people who produce and prepare it.  And it occurred to me that I’ve not always been very respectful about the food I’ve had available to me.  I’ve always prided myself on the fact that of everyone in my family, I feel the most foreign in my own kitchen.  And this attitude goes way back.  When people ask me about the kind of food I ate growing up, I usually tell them about the Sunday afternoon dinner that included a roast, canned peas, and a salad made of fruit cocktail and Cool Whip.  If I’m being nostalgic, I might talk about the potato soup my mom always made on the first real day of winter.  I didn’t really spend much time thinking about my “story” of food.

This is odd, given that I ended up having a real “foodie” family living in my house.  My daughter once remarked that most of our family traditions revolve around what food we ate and where we ate it:  cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, s’mores on camping trips, Dutch babies at the Original Pancake House, sandwiches at the Carnegie Deli in New York City… I’m sure your family has lots of food stories as well.

But it wasn’t until I read Kingsolver’s book, extolling the quiet pleasures of fresh eggs, newly baked bread,  locally produced milk and meat, garden grown vegetables — she devotes a whole chapter to asparagus — that I realized how unfair I had been to the story of the food of my childhood.

It started with the asparagus.  When I was young, we lived in what we called “the country”, about 10 miles away from the nearest good-size town.  I remembered walking home from the school bus along a long lane (well, it seemed really long to me).  In the spring, I could find asparagus growing in fat fingers along the side of the road.  I would pick as much of it as I could hold in my hands and take it home to my mother, who would make it for us for dinner, no questions asked.  After a long winter of canned vegetables from the pantry (and the source of those Sunday dinner memories), being able to eat something crunchy and fresh was a huge treat.  The more I read from the book, the more wholesome, fresh food memories came rushing back. Our milk was either delivered to a milk box by the front door, or given to us in big, glass jars — the cream floating on the top — from the dairy cows kept by our next door neighbor.  My parents regularly went in with friends to buy part of a cow, and we had paper-wrapped cuts of meat and hamburger stacked neatly in our freezer.  We raised chickens and collected the brown, feather adorned eggs from the coop.  We had a good-sized garden in our back yard, as did many of our neighbors, and I remember helping harvest beans and peas and carrots and tomatoes and cucumbers and grapes.  To this day, one of my favorite things is snapping off sun-warmed green beans from the vine and eating them right there in the garden.

How could I not really remember all of this?  What Barbara Kingsolver and her family did very intentionally and with great respect, my parents did out of necessity or cost-savings or just common sense.  Either way, it’s a good way to eat, which, until recently, I took for granted.  The only explanation I could come up with was that I hadn’t really paid attention.

I’m paying attention now.  First, I am newly grateful for memories of the food of my childhood, and this is a belated thank you to my parents.  Thanks, Mom & Dad!  Second,  My husband, Doug, and I are noticing where our food comes from, and making more of an effort to prepare food worth eating.  This means I’m heading back into my kitchen, not as a helpless observer, but as a respectful participant.  Doug makes fresh bread two or three times a week.  I’m making homemade soups. We’re checking out local farms and markets, and  bought organic turkey for our daughter’s sandwiches.  And instead of buying ready-made cookies for her lunch, I thought I’d bake some, chocolate chip with no nuts, on purpose.  Once I got over my inertia, and my not insignificant panic that I would somehow screw it up, I actually sort of enjoyed it.  There’s something meditative and calming about simple work done with intention and care.

Maybe everybody else already knew this, but it was nice to find out for myself.