Moments In Succession

One of the best books I have read in the last year is The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk, which came out yesterday. I have had the good fortune of knowing David for several years, and I was privileged to read an early draft of the book. The book’s core message — that every individual’s genetic potential is elastic, and very few of us realize that genetic potential — is powerful stuff, and has implications for our kids as well as our early-middle-aged selves.

Many of my favorite non-fiction books of recent years have been in different ways about the process of human improvement – Non-Zero by Robert Wright (from a species perspective), The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris (from an individual perspective), Good to Great by Jim Collins (from a business perspective). All quite different, but all share that theme. I would add The Genius in All of Us to this list — it’s the kind of book that could substantially change how you view human behavior and approach your life.

I interviewed David for Babble — you can read the interview here — and we also ran two excerpts from his book as Babble special features. This passage, four ways to guide your child towards excellence, contains some exceptional parenting advice.

David and I spoke at some length about the implications of his book for early (indulge me) middle aged folk like ourselves. I particularly enjoyed this portion of our conversation, but it was edited out by our wise, merciless Babble editors. I am including a portion of it below for your middle-aged amusement and edification.

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David: When it comes to intelligence and talent and abilities, there’s every evidence that at many different points in your life, possibly every point in your life, you could do something about your capabilities in all these different areas. If you have the time, the perseverance and all these different resources and you could go from mediocrity, or even less than mediocrity, to extraordinary achievement.

Rufus: Well, I’m very happy to hear that. Watching the free-style skiing in the Olympics last night I thought, Maybe it’s not too late for me.

David: You know, you made a passing reference before about being middle-aged as I am too, although I am very much your senior. I think I am almost two years older than you. I really should be talking down to you, almost like you’re a little brother. To me, one interesting thing about being middle-aged, or whatever you want to call this, is that yeah our brains are less plastic and of course we’re less limber physically. We could not become Andre Agassi now or anything like that; physically obviously there are all sorts of limitations. But overwhelmingly, the things that keep us from making some kind of enormous new stride, as opposed to advancing incrementally, is our life circumstances. We have no time to do something different. We’ve either got kids at home or we have something else to do. We’re really really busy or feel like we’re really really busy. When you’re a kid you can develop a habit of practicing three or seven hours a day on something because you can carve out that time for yourself. You can still do that as an adult but you’re now in a 42-year-old’s rut of having a certain kind of life. The idea of changing from spending fifteen minutes on your guitar in the afternoon to spending seven hours on it — it’s almost unthinkable. Everyone would think you’re a crazy person if you’re turning your life around like that.

Rufus: There’s a combination of factors — particularly if you have a family and kids, and need to put food on the table. One factor is that we become less desperate to prove ourselves. We become less emotionally needy for evidence of our greatness. Which may be good or not good. I’ve often found it quite depressing to see how few musicians create their greatest work in their sixties or seventies. With novelists, there are a few better examples. But still, so many of the great works of the novelists occur earlier in their careers. I think this is something you speak of a little bit. It does seem like this is a combination of access to time and then access to hunger. Once you won a Pulitzer Prize for your novel, do you still have the burning, burning appetite to prove yourself?

David: I think it’s an important thing to identify. I think one of the challenges for us is in mid-life—I mean it’s nice to be calmer. I don’t know how you feel to be past forty, but I think it’s kind of nice to have calmed down a little bit and just be less anxious about all these existential questions. At the same time I think it’s also really really important to constantly be trying to step outside yourself and say, Okay. Is this really the life I want to leading? Is there something else I want in life? Can I or should I be shaking myself a little bit? Should we be selling the house and moving to the country so we have less economic pressure and more artistic freedom? Should I be pivoting to this kind of subject matter as a writer or this kind of new genre as a writer? Not to say that I will actually take myself up on all those challenges but if you don’t ask those questions, of course it will never happen. I think that’s what we need to do as middled-agers, is to re-ask ourselves those questions that may become more naturally to us as we’re yearning to become something in  the first place as teenagers and “twenty-something’s. “

Rufus: In other words, we have to pretend that the only way we are going to  actually have sexual congress with the female is by spending thousands of hours obsessing, like learning a musical instrument.

David: Exactly, just become obsessed all over again with some unobtainable person and put the delusion in your mind…

Rufus: Or just ask your spouse, “Honey, please refuse me until I can produce X, Y, and Z.”

David: A nice marriage of Nerve and Babble if you don’t mind me saying.

Rufus: Something I am hopeful about Is, it seems to me, that hopefully in the next many decades, that our generation will find that there is more opportunity for 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th acts than previous generations have found.  It seems to me maybe for a few reasons; one is that we are living longer, careers are a little more fungible, there is more entrepreneurship and less of a sense that you work at IBM for 50 years.  Also, we are seeing this evidence, as 40 year-olds are winning Olympic events.  I think the importance of books like these and examples of people achieving at older ages is that it does fundamentally affects what people think they are capable of.

David: Yes well, I appreciate the compliment and I absolutely agree with you.  My anxious answer to that is, the one thing I really worry about, all those things you mentioned are working in our favor-but I worry about,-maybe it is not worse than it was before, but it might be a little worse, is this combination of economic pressure and material comfort that you and I, and a lot of people in our circles find themselves in.  There are so many good things to have in life, there are so many great foods to eat, and neat places to live, and places to vacation and cool tools to use, and amazing schools to pay for, that the rut a lot of us find ourselves in, a lot of us, and me included in many respects, is that we find a way to pay for this stuff and we take fewer risks and we therefore then find ourselves less free or we feel less free creatively.  That’s the rut I worry about most with myself, and with a lot of my friends. And I don’t know what to do about that, but I constantly think about that, I have to admit to you.  I constantly think about, “is there some radical way to breakout of this?” This is even in the context of me doing relatively well right now, but I just think, “is there a way to kind of get off this train? Or get off it for a while?” Maybe even drag some friends along with me where, instead of having to earn X a year I would only have to earn 1/10 of X.

Rufus: We can take over a town in the Catskills.

David: Exaclty, you’re laughing but I have thought about all of this.  And if we did manage to do that, just think of what we can do.  Now, you can argue and I do argue this with myself, “well maybe the economic pressure helps somehow create this stuff?” Maybe there is a synergy that is going for some or all of us, but that is one of the things I really wrestle with.  Is it ever time to get off this train or maybe try to temporarily get off it and do something as a middle-ager to become creatively rejuvenated and not have to pay for private school and all this stuff.

Rufus: Well, this is one of the great advantages of youth that we hope we can tell our sons and daughters to appreciate hopefully, which is, the ability to be happily impoverished for a decade or more is a huge advantage in terms of the possibilities it opens up.  You don’t appreciate when you’re 22, you’re not thinking, “Oh, it is so great that I can live on $18,000 dollars a year.” You don’t think of that as a privilege, but it is a privilege.

This morning has been long on what I call “prestalgia” — pre-emptive nostalgia for the present. Moments when you suddenly appreciate that you are in the sweet spot of your own life, and you get a glimpse of the rose tinted haze through which you will see the present moment in years to come.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, the word “nostalgia” was on a school vocab list, and the definition stuck with me. I remember it to this day — “a wistful yearning for things and events in the past.” There was something peculiarly resonant about this sequence of words, sing-songy and fun to say on the surface, but speaking to some kind of deep muscle ache of human experience.

Since then I have identified nostalgia as the enemy — a glance or two in the rear view mirror now and then is fun, but any more than that siphons off one’s capacity to fully enjoy the present. It’s in effect a bet on the past rather than the present or future, a hedge in the wrong direction. I love New York for many reasons (more on this to come), and one of them is that it is a city with history that is not stuck in the past, a city whose heyday is unfolding.

I like to think prestalgia, unlike nostalgia, is a healthy experience — it’s the recognition of the value of current experience in the context of our finite lives. It’s a way of saying to oneself, earmark this page … sit back, smile, and take it in.

Last weekend I took a spectacular four day ski trip to Snowbird/Alta, Utah, with five dastardly partners in crime: Greg Dillon, Leif Ueland, Jay Haynes, Mark Harris and Michael Hovey. On Saturday, I went heli-skiing for the first time with Mark in the Wasatch mountains — it was a beautiful experience, no doubt made all the more resonant by the risk factors. In the 48 hours that followed we got 12 inches of fresh powder, and skied it hard — at least by my 42-year-old standards.

Here I am enjoying a few turns in the fresh stuff on Monday morning in Mineral Basin, on the back side of Snowbird:

Here (below) is a shot of Michael Hovey, a freestyle bad boy in his youth, bombing the bumps, followed by Mark and Greg Dillon.

Here are a few photos of exquisite fresh tracks Monday morning in Catherine’s Area off the Supreme lift in Alta. You have to hike to get to Catherine’s — I call it the Mark Harris health plan — but it is well worth it: it’s long on gorgeous glades and chutes and short on skiers.

I love to ski. I dream about it during the winter, spring, summer and fall. It occupies a place for me that is unrivalled by any other physical activity, with the possible exception of making babies. The closest I can come to describing it’s magic is that it combines the speed and exhilaration of racing motorcross with the zen of surfing or sailing. On the one hand there is a jockey adrenaline-ratcheting physicality to it — you can rapidly accelerate to 30 or 40 mph on the flats, carve tight, precise turns, and soar through the air by stiffening a leg or ripping a last minute turn over a knoll. Ski technology has come a long way in the last couple decades — skis are more tortionally rigid and thus unyielding on high-G turns, and at the same time damp enough to offer a smooth, cadillac ride. This is my younger self talking — the gearhead thrill seeker.

On the other hand, there is the connection with the mountain. There is a gentle push-pull to skiing the backcountry half-way competently — it’s more about absorption and deference to the terrain rather than a blunt inscription of will. You are water finding it’s stream bed, wending around bigger obstacles, playfully cascading over the smaller ones. Done properly, it’s a gentle and intuitive touch, ski to slope — your legs are a pliant, load-sensitive suspension system, and your upper body, the happy, oblivious passenger, eyes on the horizon, enjoying a tempo several beats slower than the clatter occurring below. Powder makes the mountain more silent, beautiful, and forgiving — it amplifies the otherwordliness of skiing. It is a drug and I am not sober … as you can see, just talking about it renders me delirious.

That’s what it feels like when I am doing it right, when I am in the groove, which is not always easy to come by — when I lose it my suspension bottoms out, I instinctively hunch over, my fore-aft balance disappears, and I am all of a sudden a septuagenarian with a ski pole for a cane. The groove is not always with us. The groove can be flightier than a beaten cat. Which makes it all the sweeter when it comes.