dear friends

The future like a bright ribbon unspooling

I showed up at Princeton anxious, nervous, and, I realize now, quite wounded from two very difficult years at boarding school.  I was incredibly fortunate to find, amid those Gothic towers, magnolia leaves, and foamy keg beer, at last, a place that felt like home … I found a group of women who embraced me.  I still felt insecure, and wondered why any of you would want to be my friend.  I still wonder that.  I look at this extraordinary group of women and cannot imagine why any of you, spectacular as you are, would want to be my friend.

And to think: we met half our lives ago.  We have known each other half of our lives, and that percentage is only going up from here.  Wow.

But today I am thinking of how young we all were then, how naive and optimistic.  The future unfurled in front of each of us like bright ribbon unspooling.  We were so sure, so confident, so silly.  And now I think about what has happened in the intervening 15 years.  Life has happened, and it contains great brightness, as we imagined, but also sorrow, darkness, and difficulty.  Some of us have faced great challenges.  We have witnessed so much in each others’ lives: heartbreak, weddings, triumphs, divorces, funerals, christenings.  We’ve gotten on airplanes and behind the wheels to see each other, on the phone for hours at a time, and written thousands of emails.  We have shared huge moments and tiny ones, the latter sometimes, startlingly, more impactful than the former.

What we’ve done is no less than this: we have become adults together.

On graduation weekend, as we walked in the P-Rade together, wearing our matching orange Gap shirts, arms slung over each others’ shoulders, hoarse with singing and beer, what did we know of what lay ahead?  We knew nothing.  What I wonder is whether it was all already engraved, invisibly but indelibly, on our paths?  Were the bumps and hiccups and detours preordained?  How much of the vast design is set from the start and how much of it unfolds like a series of choose-your-own adventure pages, each decision triggering the next?  I just don’t know.

I do know that it will rain in all of our lives, and for some of us it will be in the form of a flash-flood monsoon and for others it will be a steady drizzle over the course of years.  And yet onward we move, arms linked as they were that hot day in Princeton in June of 1996, staggering now and then, but together, moving, always towards the finish line.  We have supported each other and will again, offering an ear, book recommendations, bottles of wine, and, most of all, patient, nonjudgmental witness.

I can feel you all next to me, your lives flanking mine, my first and most essential peer group.  We have traveled together into careers, graduate schools, marriages, motherhood.  Together we will face the aging of our parents and the growing up of our children.  We have more funerals ahead of us than behind, which is a thought both maudlin and unavoidably true.  We also have, I trust, myriad happy reunions, both formal and informal (thank you Allison, for Homosassa 2010!).  We have the joy of knowing each others’ children and spouses, and of watching each other flourish.  The road is not as linear as I might have imagined all those years ago, when I felt the future sturdy, beating next to me like a heartbeat.  Instead our paths loop forward and back, double into unexpected switchbacks, but of this I am certain: you are with me and I am with you.  Always, no matter what.

A memory framed in magnolias

Memory. Where to start? I’ve written so much about it. About the mysterious alchemy whereby small moments, inconsequential as we lived them, become significant, weighty memories, full of recollected details. About the way that certain songs can transport me back, instantly and vividly, to the past. About the occasional awareness of the memory of a moment even as I live it, the experience of present and future recollection colliding, the sparks of that collapse flickering in my mind. Also, about the way that I am losing my memory, my mind, the ability to juggle twenty things simultaneously that used to come so easily to me.

Today, I’m thinking about a specific memory, one that is framed in magnolia petals, flat beer, and laughter. My college senior spring. These weeks shimmer in my memory, so full are they of feeling, laughter, sadness, and promise. They are saturated with the impending farewell we all lived with: every single day was a step closer to leaving the campus we’d grown to love so much. We turned in our theses, the reunions fences and tents went up, and we marched inexorably towards our forced exodus from that sheltered and sunny place we’d spent four years.

Of course there was much of college that was not sunny or happy. There were difficult times, experiences that hurt me, and heartbreak. But when I think of April and May 1996, I’m hard-pressed to remember anything but the joy. It was, perhaps, my first taste of that special kind of joy, the kind that is haunted by the promise of loss, that has become so central to my experience now. This now-familiar happiness was thick with feeling, the reminder that an end was coming a viscous swirl through the fluid of every day.

What were those days like? I sit at my desk now and I can close my eyes and be back there, my mind a kaleidoscope of details recalled with startling lucidity. I turned in my thesis two weeks early, and I forgot to include my middle name on the cover and frontispiece. The entire campus seemed to burst into bloom at once, the magnolias riotous in their celebration of spring. The soundtrack included The Tide is High, Killing Me Softly, and Glory Days. Mission Impossible had just come out in the theaters, we all went to see it, and then spent many nights trying to dance to the main instrumental song from the soundtrack (very difficult). There was a heat wave and we set up baby pools on the back lawn of our eating club, sitting in them and running through sprinklers in the oppressive humidity.

At our eating club’s annual alumni dinner, some male alumni stood up and toasted the days before the club was coed. That was nice. Not. My friend wrote a thesis called I Love the Freedom of It about water imagery in Virginia Woolf’s novels, and we mocked her incessantly for that title. We studied for the final comprehensive exams in our respective majors and then sat for long hours in those beautiful lecture halls, writing in putty-colored exam booklets. As I sat in a wooden chair bolted to the floor, wracking my brain to identify a piece of prose on the exam, I looked at the shafts of sunlight coming in through the windows, watched the dust dance in the light, and felt aware of the centuries of life that this room had held.

Reunions arrived, ringing the bell that our time was truly almost up. On Thursday night we started at Forbes, at the Old Guard reunion, because they had good alcohol. We then made our way through all of the tents, visiting them all before the crowds arrived on Friday. Saturday’s P-Rade was hot and beautiful, and we stood for hours outside of Cuyler Hall, cheering ourselves hoarse. In our matching orange Gap t-shirts we drank warm cans of beer from ripped-open cases stashed on the lawn behind us. When it was our turn to fall into line, we marched across Poe Field field together, arms flung around each others’ shoulders, tears rolling down our faces as President Shapiro welcomed us to the alumni body. That night, wearing blue shorts, a cream J Crew wool cable-knit sweater, and flip-flops I bumped into a long-lost face and unexpectedly rekindled a relationship that had been dormant for two years and that I had presumed dead.

We spent a week driving all over the tri-state area for graduation parties. One night, Quincy and I decided impulsively, around midnight, to leave the party where we were. We drove through the night from the Hamptons to her parents’ house on the Jersey shore, singing Bob Marley the whole way. The next day, we made possibly the most labor-intensive recipe I’ve ever made, artichoke soup. Hand-scraping every single leaf of ten artichokes. Another night, Kathryn‘s mother hosted us, hungover, and we ate vegetables and chugged water, all swearing we would never drink again (right).

Our rooms slowly disappeared into brown moving boxes. Our parents arrived for several nights of celebratory group dinners. We ran from a restaurant in town to the Senior Arch Sing, and because we were late we wound up sitting on the bottom step of Blair Arch, belting out “Eye of the Tiger” with our class as though our lives depended on it. My instinctive use of “we” to describe this time reminds me of The Virgin Suicides, and underlines how critically important my friends from this time of my life were and are. We really were a we then, and while that we has receded to secondary status, it is still a group identity that I draw strength and solace from.

We knew we were coming to the end of something, but also knew we were about begin something. Our real lives. “We prepared our hearts for something drenching and big,” writes Lorrie Moore in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, and those words always reminded of these weeks of my life. We were liminal creatures, still in college but peering at the great wide open that lay just beyond the threshold that we were barrelling towards. We drank and danced and laughed and loved and left. I am so grateful that my memory has kept such a detailed, fully-dimensioned account of those once-in-a-lifetime weeks.

Originally written in May 2010

Day 25 of Reverb10 – Photo

December 25 – Photo – a present to yourself

Sift through all the photos of you from the past year. Choose one that best captures you; either who you are, or who you strive to be. Find the shot of you that is worth a thousand words. Share the image, who shot it, where, and what it best reveals about you.

I had trouble picking one, so here are three.  There are actually probably only about 10 pictures of me from the thousands I took in 2010.  I take pictures of everything, but there are very very few of me.  That’s part of the deal with being the official photographer, both a benefit and a burden.

The first photo is from Easter.  I’m with my daughter and my goddaughter, and this photograph reminds me of the tight community my family is fortunate to be nestled within.  The two women who form the other two legs of the stool are dearer to me than I can express, and I am immensely grateful that our children are growing up together.

The second photo is one that Grace took of me one evening in Legoland.  I am reminded of what it felt like to say yes to them.  To fully lean back into my life with my children, to watch the wonder in their eyes as I agreed to adventures previously unimagined.  It was a magical summer in my life with Grace and Whit and I would like to be that mother more often.

The third photo is from the Mother’s Plunge in Boston in September with Karen Maezen Miller.  This day brought to fruition many of the relationships that I’ve built in the ether over the last year or two.  I loved seeing Corinne and Denise, pictured here, as well as spending the day swimming in the wisdom that both Karen and Katrina Kenison shared with us.

I guess the theme that connects these photographs is community, and a sense of belonging.  In each of them I felt fully relaxed, embraced, seen, and known.  This is a fleeting feeling for me, and one that is rarer than I’d like.  May I find it more often in 2011.

A Thanksgiving Chat

My friend and HBS classmate Chris and I have connected through our blogs in the last year.  I did not know Chris at school, though I knew who he was, and my impression was that he was very bright and very authentically happy.  I assumed he would have no interest in someone with as little to offer in the HBS classroom as me.  It’s been a substantial joy, then, to have gotten to know him through his words over the last months.  He’s bright and happy, yes, but also thoughtful, wise, honest, and open.  Click over and check him out – I highly recommend it.

Last week Chris emailed me about my most recent blog post, beginning an exchange that ended up lasting much of the Thanksgiving holiday.  We touched on optimism, the underrated virtues of melancholy, and the conundrum of memory.  Here’s how the conversation went:

Chris: In this morning’s blog post, you quoted the following:

“We like to think that life is joy punctuated with pain but it’s not. Life is pain punctuated with moments of joy.”

The optimist in me wants to disagree with Kate about the joy/pain balance of life, but the pessimist in me senses that she is right. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, really, what the equation is, as long as we appreciate the joy and it sustains us through the pain. Of course everybody’s particular calculus is different, their balance of happy and sad, light and shadow individual. It’s no secret that mine leans towards shadow.

I think it’s interesting how our different personalities impact how we see the joy/pain balance of life.  You say that you lean towards the shadow.  In contrast, I’m a natural optimist with a preternatural level of happiness that my wife describes as well-nigh oblivious.  And that’s how most people think of optimists—as happy and possibly naïve.

Yet you’re different.  You’re an optimist, but it seems like you feel like your optimism is mistaken.  How do you reconcile that inner conflict?

Lindsey: I don’t think I’m a pessimist.  I think I am an optimist with a melancholy heart.  A melancholy optimist.  Perhaps I am misusing all of these words, but I don’t wake up every morning sure that the worst case is going to happen. Far from it.  I guess I do have guarded optimism, and a persistent fear of being disappointed, but more often than not that fear isn’t enough to keep me from hoping.

In fact hope is something I’ve thought a lot about.  I think it’s slippery, because I do think one of the keys to joy – happiness, peace, however you think about a pleasant life – is not being too attached to specific outcomes.  It is in the dissonance between those ideals and reality that a lot of sadness happens, I think.  And so my question with hope is how to avoid it hitching to a very specific result … does that make sense?

Chris: It makes perfect sense.  That’s the Stockdale Paradox in a nutshell (link).  Jim Collins wrote about it in “Good to Great,” which I think is one of those books that as HBS grads we’re legally obligated to quote on a regular basis.  Collins formulated the Stockdale Paradox based on the story of how Jim Stockdale survived the POW camps in Vietnam despite being repeatedly tortured and mistreated.  The paradox is as follows:

You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.

AND at the same time…

You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

The first part of the paradox is all about optimism.  You have to be optimistic about life, if only because life without optimism is hardly worth living.  After all, we are all going to die, and most of us will suffer horrible, debilitating, and expensive illnesses before the grim reaper claims us.  The lucky ones die prematurely in accidents that bring instant death.

But a simple-minded optimism doesn’t work either.  The second half of the Stockdale Paradox comes into play because Stockdale noted that it was the optimistic prisoners who said things like, “We’ll be out of here by Christmas” who died first, largely because the realities of the situation shattered their delusions, leaving them broken and vulnerable.

To some, it must seem like a cruel joke—without hope, life isn’t worth living, but that very same life has a nasty tendency to dash your hopes.

The way I deal with it is to hope for the best, but prepare myself for the alternative.  I’ve spent my entire career in the startup world, living on the hope that I’ll be able to build a successful startup.  Yet at the same time, I know that the vast majority of startups fail, and that there is decent chance that I’ll go through my entire career without experiencing a life-changing “liquidity event”.  I’ve even written about the math in greater detail here: http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2010/07/entrepreneurship-is-about-happiness-not.html

The other nuance is that I focus on process rather than outcome.  I’m a pretty avid sports fan, and while I love to win, I know that luck plays a major role.  The best we can do is to make the right plays.  If the best play is to throw a long pass hoping for a touchdown, you should throw that pass, even if you know there’s a chance it will be intercepted.  Nobody’s perfect.  But if you play the game the right way, you’ll give yourself the best chance to win—in sports as well as in business and life.

Does your melancholy tend to come when you get disappointing results, or when the outcome is still in doubt?  I think the answer makes a big difference.

Lindsey: Two thoughts.  The first is that my melancholy is more a basic orientation towards the world – in fact sometimes I think melancholy is just another way of thinking about/talking about sensitivity.  I am wired in a way that makes me hyper aware of the sadness in every situation as well as the joy.  And my “melancholy” is about one thing and one thing only, which is the irrefutable and unstoppable passage of time.  This is so bittersweet to me that it sometimes is truly unbearable.  That we won’t have any of the past moments back haunts me.  So I don’t know that my melancholy comes in advance of results or because of doubt … it’s kind of just the backdrop against which my whole life is lived.

The second is your point about process and outcome, which I think is critical.  I’m working on a memoir which is about an early 30s “crisis” in which I realized that the whole way I approached the world was flawed.  I’m guided by the famous Carl Jung quote, “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what in the morning was true will in evening become a lie.”

But your comments about process and result, and sports, make me realize that that is another way of saying the same thing.  I’d always lived focused almost entirely on the next hurdle I had to clear, the next accomplishment I had to accrue.  This is a very simple way to determine your direction, and it worked well for me for years.  But there comes a time in life when there is no “next thing” (I had the two Ivy League degrees, the two kids before 30, etc) and at that point that entire mode of engaging with the world collapses.  In your terms, the primacy of the result falters, and then we have no choice but to look at the process instead.

Chris: Your sensitivity to the passage of time really strikes a chord with me.  I’ve always been sensitive to time’s one way arrow as well.  From a young age, I was very conscious of the passage of time.  I remember being 11 years old and thinking, “I’m almost through my childhood.  I wish I could stop time now, because I know things will never be this simple and easy again.”

When I was a freshman in college, I remember staying up all night the final day before they kicked us out of the dorm, wanting to squeeze out every last drop of time, knowing that we’d never be assembled as a group again.  I’m always reminded of a line from the Eagles’ “Take it Easy.”

“We may lose or we may win / But we will never be here again.”

I find myself saving the artifacts of my life—old ticket stubs, worn out t-shirts, even holiday cards.  My wife is far less sentimental and tosses them in the garbage immediately.  I like to keep them as talismans which allow me to travel back in time via memory.  I’ve been blessed or cursed with a near-photographic memory (it sure came in handy when we were in school together!), which means that simply looking at a ticket stub can recall an entire evening.  I’m afraid to throw things out because without them, I might now be able to call up those memories.

It might be that this hoarding of memories explains how I’m able to escape that melancholy.  By putting the symbolic weight of my memories into external objects, I’m able to forget about the ticking of the stopwatch.  What kind of tricks does your memory play on you?

Lindsey: I’ve thought (and written) about memory a lot.  What strikes me, as I run through my own most prized and cherished memories, is how often they are not from the Big Days but, in fact, from the most mundane, regular days.  How the things I hold most dear are often things that happened in the grout between the tiles of life’s big experiences.    I can think of times in my life, very few, where I have been utterly present and simultaneously aware that I’m living something formative, special, important.  Mostly, though, it’s after the fact that I realize how moving or powerful an experience was, and then I find myself wishing I had been more conscious as I lived it.

I’m fascinated by the way that the mind curates our memories, and by why it is that we remember what we do (and how).  Anne Beattie has a beautiful line that I think of often: “People forget years and remember moments.”  This truth, and the pattern that I can now recognize in how my most meaningful experiences are often cached in very ordinary experiences, both contribute to my almost-obsessive focus on trying to be more engaged in, aware of, and present to my own life.  If I am not even paying attention to the mudane, there is no hope I will be able to see the magic.

Chris: I love the last sentence.  In some sense, we all walk between Scylla and Charybdis when it comes to our memory.  On the one hand, we must be present in the moment, or we’ll miss those special moments.  On the other hand, we build our memories of those special moments like an oyster builds a pearl—with layer after layer of remembrance and rumination.  Just think of how many times you’ve told your favorite stories from childhood—each retelling or reconsideration adding another shiny layer of nacre to that tiny seed of memory.

Focus too much on critical interpretation, and you’ll lose the plot.  Your Marxist interpretations of the hidden Maoist economic agenda behind “Garfield” shouldn’t cause you to forget that it’s about a fat cat who likes lasagna (even if that lasagna symbolizes the Sacco and Vanzetti case and its impact on Roaring 20s attitudes towards socialism).

Live in the moment without self-examination, and you’ll lurch from event to event without a connecting thread or larger narrative.

We began by considering whether life is pain punctuated by joy, or joy punctuated by pain.  Perhaps the answer is that it could be either…and that our lives consist of the process of writing that narrative for ourselves.

A complicated equation of gratitude

How do I love you two?  Let me count the ways.

I love you some enormous amount that is derived by a complicated equation.  The inputs to the equation include eight children, an infinite number of trips to Costco, two hundred Halloween decorations, 14 personalized red sweatbands, 30th, 35th, and 40th birthday parties, Southside mix, a sled track in New Hampshire, a sturdy three-legged stool, christenings, craft fairs, a cabin in the White Mountains with no electricity but 12 bunkbeds in a 10×14 foot room, and olde tyme photographs of eight children in costume.  The equation is complicated, but the result is simple: overwhelming gratitude.

You are my anchor and my wings.

Everyday life is a celebration with you two.

You were steadfast friends during a dark and difficult season of my life, letting me show up and just cry if need be.  You love my children dearly, just as I love yours.  Our husbands are close friends.  I think we all know we hit the jackpot.  We are twined together by the lifelong bonds of godfamilyhood.  You are family to me now, and I am more grateful than I can express.  In this season of thanksgiving, I want to try.

I love the photograph above, which is framed as an 8 x 10 in my bedroom (thank you for giving it to me in that beautiful frame!).  I also love these outtakes from that evening, though, since their blur seems to represent the effervescence of our time together, the constant laughter and motion that marks how the two of you inhabit my life.  Thank you.