On “Idiot” Signs and the Good Life Gone Wrong

Last week, Shena Hardin, a woman in Cleveland, Ohio, was convicted for dangerous driving after she was caught zooming up on to the sidewalk to avoid having to wait behind a school bus that was dropping off small children. Each aspect of this case, at least as it’s been reported on the news, is more astonishing than the last. First, the school bus driver caught the whole thing on video – you can actually see Hardin jump the curb and race along the sidewalk right where the children would get out. Second, Hardin apparently did this routinely - so routinely, the police were able to set up a sting operation to catch her in the act. Third, upon sentencing her, the municipal judge, apparently exasperated with conventional slap-on-the-wrist punishments of a short license suspension and $250 fine, also demanded that Hardin spend two mornings standing on the road wearing a sign on her that read, “Only an idiot drives on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus.” Less than a week after reading about this case, I found myself in a surreal Harden-esque scenario. Yes, Virginia, these things can happen right on one’s own doorstep.

November 11^th was not only Remembrance Day, it was also St. Martin’s Day. In many countries in Europe, St. Martin is honored for his kindness to the poor. According to Wikipedia, “the most famous legend of St. Martin’s life is that he once cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, to save the beggar from dying of the cold.” Celebrations in his honor share a lot in common with other autumnal festivals: St. Martin’s Day also marks the end of the harvest, Thanksgiving and readiness for the long, dark, cold winter ahead.

To celebrate St. Martin’s Day, children traditionally bundle up in warm clothes and take to the streets with pretty paper lanterns, which, like the Samhain bonfires or light as a symbol of Christ, represent the triumph of the human spirit over the powers of darkness. In a little parade, the children sing about the beauty of their lanterns and the beliefs they encapsulate.

My children’s school traditionally celebrates St. Martin’s Day. It’s a bit unusual given that we’re in Canada, but there’s a lot to like in this simple and spirit-affirming ritual, so I’m all for it. This past Sunday, pupils, parents and teachers collected on the street outside the school. The children were excited because they’d all made their own lanterns and there were sweets to look forward to after their walk. Plus – and best of all – we had a magnificent escort: two mounted police with big, glossy horses that the children could take turns patting.

The route we were taking was short, off the main roads, and all the neighbors on the street had been told about the walk in advance. Indeed, many of them came to their doors to watch us go by and wave and smile at us on our way.

Except for one woman. About 10 minutes into the walk, I became aware that a large Lincoln SUV was trying to nudge its way through the children. At first I thought nothing of it. I thought that perhaps the driver didn’t understand what was going on, had perhaps turned on to the street and was confused by all the people on the street. I waited for a moment to see if she would pull over, but she didn’t. In fact, she seemed to be trying to scatter the children out of her way, and she’d lunge forward whenever there was a little break in the collection of small figures in front of her.

Perplexed, I walked over the passenger side of the car so I could speak to her without being right in her face. “Excuse me,” I said. “Can you see there are children here? Perhaps you could pull over until everyone is out of the way.”

Instead of the light going on in her eyes (“Ah, yes. Children! That’s what these small creatures are!), she said, with no small degree of venom, “I live on this street. I need to get home.”

“Yes,” I said. “But right now there are all these children on the road. They’ll be turning on to another street in a moment.”

“No one told me about this,” she spat, as if that were reason to go plowing through children. “I need to get home. My husband has to go out.”

“The neighborhood was informed,” I said, now getting testy myself. “You’re really being very dangerous. Please pull over.”

At which point, things degenerated a bit. She told me (language warning!) to fuck off, another parent got quite angry at her, etc. We were at an impasse. Our police escort was too far ahead of us to reach easily, we couldn’t get her to pull over, so each parent just tried to keep the children out of her way until we did turn the corner and she was free to speed home to her waiting husband.

We all calmed down pretty quickly…it’s hard to stay angry when you’re with a bunch of sweet, bundled children singing, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine!”. But the image of that woman’s big SUV and angry face stayed with me, merging into the seemingly unrepentant features of Shena Hardin.

I think there’s a lesson about the relationship between entitlement and the good life in all of this.

It’s best articulated by a question that a reporter threw at Hardin when she was in court. I only caught it quickly in the news coverage, but it was something like, “Why is your time more important than other peoples’ safety?”

Indeed. There’s a sense in both Hardin and Lincoln-woman’s exploits that their needs and wants are somehow more important than other peoples’, even if that actually endangers other people. It’s a pretty stark example of entitlement. We squawk a lot about “entitled” children these days, but I’m not sure that our kids have much on us when it comes to entitlement. We live in a world that encourages us to satisfy virtually all of our desires. Indeed, the ability to do so is pretty much how we’ve come to view the good life.

But that doesn’t necessarily lead us to the good life, to say the least. Though there no doubt always will be people who put their own wants first, to do so hardly creates the communities in which most of us want to live. Kindness, courtesy, reciprocity, and, yes, even patience, surely this is more of an articulation of the good life than shoving a Lincoln through a group of children, or jumping a sidewalk to pass a school bus?

I recognize that there’s a danger in sounding preachy in all of this. So, full disclosure, I’m a grumpy and impatient driver myself. My children have learned all sorts of awful words from me on our regular commutes. But the point is not that we need to strive to be saints and angels, so much as it is the small daily choices we make can grow our communities – and our own lives – in one direction or another.

Me, I’d like to sign up for a good life where no one has to be told that children are more important than cars.

Let the Children Play

One day after school when I was seven, I snuck the largest umbrella I could find out of our house and walked down to the beach. It was very windy. The tide was out, exposing the long stretch of wet, unruffled sand so characteristic of Crescent Beach. Beyond the tidal flat though, whitecaps chopped up the ocean farther out. I leant into the wind. It was strong enough to stop me from toppling over. Excellent! It seemed perfect for my plans. I climbed up onto one of the wooden pillars that stuck up out of the sand (at the time I didn’t question why they were there…they were just a normal part of the landscape. In hindsight, I suspect they were part of a groyne to prevent erosion). Strong gusts of wind threatened to topple me over while I wrestled with the umbrella. Finally, I got it open and immediately felt the wind tug at it. Another promising sign. Heart pounding, wind rushing in my ears, I closed my eyes, counted to three and jumped.

And landed in a heap on the sand, of course.

I’d really thought I might fly. I’d never seen Mary Poppins (no DVDs in those days) but I was familiar with her iconic flying umbrella. It’s not that I thought I’d conjure magic exactly (although I might have hoped). Rather that I thought a skinny kid, a wide umbrella and a big wind might add up to success.

This story came to mind as I was reading Madeline Levine’s fascinating new book Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. I’d picked it up on the strength of a New York Times book review. Judith Warner’s insightful review described it thus:

“Levine’s latest book is a cri de coeur from a clinician on the front lines of the battle between our better natures — parents’ deep and true love     and concern for their kids — and our culture’s worst competitive and materialistic influences, all of which she sees played out, day after day, in her private psychology practice in affluent Marin County, Calif. Levine works with teenagers who are depleted, angry and sad as they compete for admission to a handful of big-name colleges, and with parents who can’t steady or guide them, so lost are they in the pursuit of goals that have drained their lives of pleasure, contentment and connection. “Our current version of success is a failure,” she writes. It’s a damning, and altogether accurate, clinical diagnosis.”

Levine makes the case that we need to reframe success so that it’s less about impressive scores on standardized tests and more about developing character, integrity, problem-solving skills, empathy and kindness. Children equipped with these qualities, Levine argues, will have the real tools they need for engaged adult lives.

Levine’s perspective, developed (as Judith Warner points out) through her clinical and maternal experience, is an expression of our collective need to reinvent the good life. We’ll probably always strive for an ideal, but the character of that striving will be very different if we’re focusing on “connection and contentment” rather than material success.

But what’s so provocative about Levine’s book is the urgency of the task. Lest we think this is a purely philosophical quest, Levine provides case stories and statistics demonstrating the ways in which children’s lives have changed appreciably in the last couple of decades, and the impact this is having on them. For example, Levine reports that “…over the last twenty years, kids have lost close to two hours of play every day, most of that unstructured play.” That playtime has been replaced by extracurricular activities, tutoring, additional homework and screen time. Or it’s getting interfered with by anxious parents who fret about the harm children might come to if they’re not kept under constant supervision. And the impact, in Levine’s experience, is stressed out, exhausted, and perhaps worst of all, disenchanted kids.

Happily, Levine provides some practical strategies for creating alternatives. One of these (one dear to my own heart) is to ensure that children have more time to play and reflect. She suggests five simple things to foster play:

1)      Unplug their gazillions of devices

2)      Encourage them to play outside

3)      Avoid so-called “educational” toys

4)      Don’t over-program them

5)      Role-model the importance of play by playing ourselves (which has the added bonus of being good for us too)

Levine closes the book with the reminder that the “very things that promote your child’s well-being and happiness are the same things that will promote his or her success in the world.” It will take “courage” to change the status quo, she acknowledges, but not do so is “inexcusable”.

If I were eight-years-old now, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t make it out to the beach with that umbrella. I’d be at judo or playing Angry Birds or studying. Or perhaps an anxious caregiver would stop me from heading out the door, even if I’d been so inclined. What would the cost of that missed experience be? Perhaps nothing, or at least, only a girl’s memory of a beach, a windy day and a bit of folly. But maybe that day, and all the crazy adventures like it, taught me subtle things I’ll never be able to put my finger on. And maybe by not studying or earnestly developing myself or “killing” time, I also learned something about the value of time, enquiry and experience. Something about the good life. And something about, simply, being.

The Good Life: Calling

Over oysters on a Sunday morning in Manhattan, my friend “C” implores me to read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: “you have to look at the idea of a calling and how it relates to the good life and there is no better meditation on having a calling than Kierkegaard’s work” he said. I downed my nice little dry sherry, trembled indeed at the thought of reading Kierkegaard, and agreed with “C” that he was on to something. C’s and my conversation about having a calling put me in mind of an interview I did a few months ago with my friend, the English writer Sarah Moss. Sarah is a successful academic, travel writer and novelist. Her books are fantastic. They’re page turners that are rich with observations and ideas. Her characters are intensely relatable, no matter how far-flung and extreme their circumstances. She creates cauldrons of suspense and emotion, but manages the tension with humor and a deft touch. Which is all to say that if you haven’t yet read them, you should do so forthwith.

Sarah is in the enviable position of having found her calling and it was illuminating, and more than a little inspiring, to get a sense of the experience of having – and yielding to – a calling.

A number of aspects of her experience jumped out at me:

1. When you are driven by a sense of calling, there’s a degree of delight – if not downright wonderment - that you actually get to do the thing you want to do. For Sarah, this feeling started dawning when a friend of hers (“someone who lived in the same post code, who went to the same shops!”) became a successful novelist. Inspired by her friend’s success, Sarah herself made the leap to novelist. In doing so, she closed the gap between the kind of life she wanted and the kind of life she had. Now, research trips, hours in her study, editing galleys…they’re all a reflection that she’s made the mythic real.

2. When one’s doing what one’s called to do, there really is a sense of “rightness” about one’s work. Sarah expressed this as a feeling of engaging in “the real thing”. When I asked her to tell me what she meant by that she hesitated, then said, “The thing that I’m meant to be doing I suppose. The thing that justifies my being here.”

What’s interesting is that Sarah knows that it’s the real thing because she’s willing to give the creative writing whatever it asks. She’s listening to the signals from her own engagement with her work. She puts it this way, “That’s how I know this kind of writing is the real thing for me, where academic writing isn’t. Because with academic writing I just do it and then I want it to go away.  And I can just about drag myself to revisit and redraft if that’s a condition of publication, but I don’t want to. I would much rather write a first draft and then just sort of it despatch it into the ether and never have to look at it again. Where, with what for me is the real writing, the fiction and the travel writing, I’ll go back to it as often as it takes. And I will rewrite it as often as it needs rewriting. There’s a real joy for me in erasing 3,000 words because actually it’s not very good. And being able to recognize that it’s not very good and writing it again better.”

3. The third thing that struck me is that having a calling gives one a sense of having a unique role and voice in the world. For Sarah, this emerges through the experience of pulling together disparate topics and themes into a coherent whole: she the connections others might not. In her experience, it’s a process of discovery. Subjects call to her, and it’s up to her to dwell on them long enough to see the pattern that is, in essence, already there. This is how she describes the experience:

“I was in the Victoria and Albert Museum, kind of vaguely prowling because I was thinking about a late-19^th Century setting for another novel. And I ended up spending the entire afternoon in the Japanese room, which isn’t very big. But I really wanting to read every word about everything in there and look at things properly. And remember them. And then I went off to the library and read about them. And I don’t know why. But they really spoke to me…

"So, last summer, I had a pile of books about nineteenth century Japanese history, more about post-war British psychoanalysis, and quite a lot about Victorian prostitution – and a couple of my colleagues came and looked at these and said to me, “What on earth are you doing?” And I thought, “I don’t really know, but when I’ve done it, I will know.” And I’m beginning to see now why I was reading those three strands of things. And I’m still reading them, still with absolute certainty that something’s going to come together out of them.

"It’s very odd. I mean, honestly, I have no more doubt that something coherent will emerge from this than I doubt the alarm clock will go off at 6:00 o’clock tomorrow morning, or that I’ll have to get breakfast. I’m quite sure it will happen, but I have no idea why, or how, or even really quite when

"It’s seeing a new road in front of you that you didn’t know was there. And not being able to see where it goes, but knowing that you’re going to go along it and find out. “Ah, there it is!  That’s the thing!” The thing you didn’t know you were looking for, but you’ve recognized it now."

4. Following one’s calling requires defiance. This doesn’t necessarily look flamboyant (Virginia Woolf’s retreat to a room of one’s own, Picasso’s many mistresses), but it requires considered negotiation about what the world expects of you based on your identity (“wife”, “mother”, “feminist”) and what you need to do to fulfil your calling. Sarah didn’t make a production of this defiance, but I heard it loud and clear in our conversation.

Just to take one example, she defies the implicit norms of the intellectual feminist because she bakes, knits and even crochets. She acknowledges that sometimes this “feels that a betrayal of feminism. It’s expending energy on my own immediate domestic surroundings, and therefore not on any kind of wider political/intellectual world.” But she does it because it helps with her more “abstract” work, like her writing. It’s also a lesson for her writing, “Even if it’s going wrong, and that’s always a good object lesson as well, at least half of what I make I undo and remake several times along the way because it’s not coming out as planned.”

This is a subtle example of defiance to be sure, but the point is that Sarah reflects on what she needs to do to foster the time, energy and creativity to write.

5. Finally, to live with one’s calling is to live a life of emotional intensity. Throughout our interview, Sarah used words like “scary”, “exhilarating”, “fully alive”, “fun”, and “pleasure” (including the “transgressive pleasure” of creating characters who misbehave, which sounded particularly fun). This isn’t to say it’s easy: Sarah also made multiple references to the sheer labor involved in her work – the research, multiple drafts, dwelling with an idea, integrating different spheres of work and late nights. But, if a key part of the good life is feeling alive, following one’s calling is a good way to get there.

The rise in coaching suggests that many of us are longing to find and live our true passions. We yearn for purpose and to feel that our lives have meaning. Sarah’s experience illustrates that having a calling can be a sure path to this. It also suggests that “callings” themselves emerge from engagement with the world, not from fashionable introspection. In other words, while a lucky few might hear their calling, the rest of us can seek it. We can, to borrow my friend C’s term, take a stance on our being. It’s to be in the world and to understand how you see, hear and feel differently. And to dwell on this and think what it asks you to do.

Road Trips

What can road trips tell us about the good life? They’re a North American icon, after all. Most of us have some tale to tell about a great road trip. Every generation seems to produce at least one classic movie about them, from Thelma & Louise to The Hangover. What is it about the open road that’s so appealing?

Albert is a thirty year old contractor with his own business. He used to race bikes semi-professionally, and he’s traveled all over the world for training and competitions. He’s at once a sound guy and rather roguish: in his wilder years, you’d have trusted him with your firstborn but maybe not your sister. Now he’s married with a baby of his own and he’s a little more sedate, although there’s still mischief in his eyes. I asked him to tell me about a really great time in his life and he told me about a road trip.

“One of the best times I ever had was driving across the country by myself. I’d never spent that kind of time alone. I bought dozens of CDs, thinking I’d have listen to them non-stop to keep me going. But as it was, I gave them all away at a gas station only twelve hours into the trip. I was having too much fun just driving and thinking.”

I asked him why it was fun.

“I guess you’d call it soul-searching fun. I’d been partying pretty hard on the West Coast, and I realized that it was turning a little negative for me. I decided to drive all the way back home. Two thousand miles. I knew it was going to be hard. It was winter. There were places that were dangerous. But I wound up planning my whole future over those four and a half days. It was like a rite of passage.”

Now Albert loves travel and adventure, so it’s not all that surprising that he loved his trip, even if it was in the dead of winter. But then I ran into someone else who also said that a road trip represented one of the best times in his life. And this was someone unlikely. This was my father.

When I was last home, I asked my father to tell me about times in his life that he’s really had fun. Knowing him, I figured it was a slam dunk he’d talk about the fun he has investigating and buying new gadgets, I mean, technologies. My father has always been the quintessential early adopter. He has subscriptions to technology magazines so arcane, most engineers haven’t heard of them. He’s the guy who shows the cool twenty year olds how to use the functionality on their iPhones. Indeed, one fateful year, he upstaged one of my best friends at her own wedding by showing up with the first digital camera anyone had ever seen. (She has since forgiven me: he took wonderful pictures, and she thought the camera was cool too.)

But my father surprised me. Instead of describing the joys of shiny new devices, he told me about a road trip.

In the mid-1960s, my Dad needed to get from Vancouver to Toronto to take up a training position in public health at the University of Toronto. He and my mother owned a silver 1960 Sunbeam convertible, an excellent specimen of the genus “beloved but temperamental English sports car”, and they decided to see if they could coax it across the thousands of miles they’d need to cover between the two cities. They set off in the middle of summer:  my Dad drove, my mother rode shotgun, and John, my then two-year-old brother, sat in the back with Fred, our large and extremely vocal Siamese cat. They ambled across the country over three weeks, stopping wherever their fancy took them. They explored national parks, small towns and interesting attractions, and, since they didn’t have much money, they ate a lot of picnics. To look at a picture of the car, which was minute, it scarcely seems credible:  a toddler and a cat? In an English convertible? Three weeks?

I told my father that it sounded like a recipe for hell.

“On the contrary,” he said. “I think it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. We had a real sense of adventure, of exploring the unknown. And sharing the experience with your mother was a lot of fun. I really liked it because it felt like we were partners in this adventure. I look back on it as one of the happiest times of my life.”

By this point in the story, I thought my father was pulling my leg. He’s not much of a traveler, and my mother frankly hated it. Case in point: we had never gone anywhere as a family when I was growing up.  I helpfully pointed this out to him.

“That’s true,” my father acknowledged. “But, you see, there was necessity involved. We had to get from Vancouver to Toronto. And once we realized that we had to do it, we got right into it. We went for it and we loved it.”

Setting aside the fact that one of the happiest times of my father’s life was before I was born, I was struck by the fact that both Albert and my father described a cross-country road trip as the most fun they ever had.

It seems to come down two things. The first is exploration. Exploration is a powerful kind of fun. Road trips are gripping metaphors for discovery precisely because they overlay literal, geographic exploration with interior journeys. In Albert’s case, he was exploring himself vis-à-vis his past and desired future. In my father’s story, he was exploring a new side of himself and my mother, and indeed of their relationship. We instinctively recognize that exploration is fun, whatever the guises in which it comes: a child exploring his or her neighborhood, a reader exploring a bookstore, or a lover exploring the body of a beloved.

The second theme is connection. In my conversations with my father and Albert, both said that they loved the sense of experiencing and somehow connecting to Canada as they drove across it. The country is so big, it’s difficult to hold one sense of it in one’s imagination. But crossing a big chunk of it connects you to the reality of it. Suddenly, you’ve logged those miles, seen what it’s all about. As Albert said, it’s like a rite of passage. And crossing those miles with someone, as my father did with my mother (and John, and Fred), connected them powerfully too.

Lifestyle or Living?

The things that excite - or worry us – about our homes are favorite subjects for Toronto Star journalist Elvira Cordileone. Space. Neighborhood. Design. Green tech. Last week, she came to me with a question:  “Why are so many of us susceptible to the “lifestyle marketing” proffered by condo developers?”

There’s an easy answer here, of course. We’re suckers for condo lifestyle marketing because we’re suckers for lifestyle marketing period. In the triumph of seduction over experience, we’re not immune to the flicker of hope that a sleek new Chanel lipstick or saucy little red sports car will somehow make us more popular, glamorous or happy. When it comes to condos, the promise to provide a fully-fledged lifestyle is even more tantalizing:  after all, a condo is actually a place to live – isn’t it tempting to believe it really can provide a whole lifestyle?

And, come to think of it, why stop at condos? Many homes currently on sale in Toronto have been staged to suggest, if not an outright brand, then at least a perfect lifestyle. Jonathan Kay described this phenomenon in a hilarious National Post column last year. Walls aren’t enough: we hunger for beautiful ideas about ourselves.

But if seduction is part of the picture, I think there are also other things working to make lifestyle marketing in condos and houses effective.

What are our homes about? They are our dwelling places, sure. They’re investments, yes. But they’re more besides: as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said, our homes represent a microcosm of the whole social world in which we live. My house is thus a mini-North America. There are dedicated spaces for work (my office, the children’s crafts table), because work is important. Everyone has their own bedroom, because space and privacy are essential. At the same time, the children are invited to decorate their bedrooms as they see fit, because individuality matters. These qualities of a home are normal to us.  Natural even. Except they’re not: they’re expressions of cultural values we’ve absorbed with our mother’s milk (or formula, pace Elizabeth Badinter).

Our homes are also settings in which we can interpret and personalize the social norms that govern our lives. For example, there’s a social norm that says that, as a mother, it is my “job” to preserve my family’s memories. My home is my canvass to do that the way I see fit. So, for example, we keep and display shells that my children have brought home from the beach, rather than, say, the plastic alligator that we bought at the airport. My home is my means to understand who I am in relation to the larger world, to create the me, and the family, that I want.

And yet, as I said in my last post, we’re in a cultural trend of outsourcing. Once upon a time, our home was the site in which we did many of the tasks that centered our lives, like cooking and sharing food, caring for children, marking rituals and holidays. One of the fascinating things about the way in which the condo market now advertises “lifestyles” is that they are taking on the role of creating a sense of what our home is all about. We are outsourcing our “homemaking” to them. Through tangible elements, such as location and design, and also less tangible things like communication messages, they tell us what our home means – and therefore who we are, or more to the point, who we can imagine ourselves to be.

In some respects, this is kind of fun. Consumers aren’t stupid, and we know we’re buying into a fantasy.  But there is an attendant danger – we don’t want to be left with a hollow core, a world of messages about ourselves rather than actualities.

So is it possible to transform a fantasy lifestyle into a real life? A good life? Of course. Here are three ideas for new condo dwellers – or people who’ve bought that perfectly staged home - that Elvira Cordileone and I talked about:

1. Get connected to the physical place of your neighbourhood. Walk it in all seasons, if you can. Define your neighbourhood and community as broadly as you want to: get to know what plants and animals are native.  Spend an afternoon to research the area’s history. My house felt totally different to me after I found out that it was probably built with bricks from the Evergreen Brickworks, a site I go to almost every weekend with my family.
2. Make it a goal to know at least three of your neighbours. This can seem downright weird – when I lived in a flat in London, I was cheek by jowl with my neighbours for three years, yet barely knew them. But there is a real sense of security that emerges when we have relationships based on proximity.  And with condos – you’ve also ostensibly bought into the same “lifestyle” – surely you can take the risk that some of those values and beliefs are real and worth expanding?
3. Make sure you try cooking in that new show kitchen. Eating is fundamental to living and to our sense of selves, not to mention our health. I have a friend who “didn’t do cooking” – and ate take-out off paper plates until his girlfriend moved in with him.  If you want a “lifestyle condo” to be home, cook in it. It will make your house a home. Maybe make dinner for those neighbours.