Anne Giles Clelland

I Can See

The mother died, I had a retinal hemorrhage, the grandmother died, the opthamologist said the retinal hemorrhage could be the start of macular degeneration. 

If the retina had cracked like an old tire because I was near-sighted, the leaking blood would stop, then reabsorb.  If a blood vessel bulged through the crack because I had eye disease, well, then I would starting gettings shots in the eye.

We would have to wait and see.

Much in the last five years of my life have called me to ask "What's it all about, Alfie?" 

The threat of losing my eyesight - that one scared me.  I tried to be matter-of-fact:  If I only have a short time left with my eyesight, what do I want to have seen before it's gone?

My answer was immediate:  I have already seen everything I need to.  I would be sad go blind, but I have seen what I needed to see.

I had many hours to imagine myself in my mother's and grandmother's places as they lay in their beds dying. They had regrets. I wish for fewer.

What do I want to have done with my vision before the lights go out?  Asking myself that question produced a surprising and sad answer.  I knew immediately what I most want to have done by the time I'm in my deathbed and can do no more, or before I lose my sight.  It calls as my deepest longing.  I have not listened.  

I have new time.  I learned Friday that my eyeball sprang a leak because it's been spinning half a century.  That's it.  Could happen again, will heal again.  Not going to lose my eyesight.  Not going to lose that longing, either.  I have begun.

Top Ten Sights I Have Seen in My Beautiful Little Life

(1) My sister's baby born

The list could start and end there.

(2) Alex Edelman playing the piano

Photo:  Piotr Edelman

(3) Alisha Jones Edwards performing in a play

(4) Gargoyle at the very top of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

(5) Botticelli's Birth of Venus in Florence

(6) Michelangelo's David in Florence

(7) Black, wet, pointed, leafless tree limbs against a gray winter sky in Blacksburg, Virginia

(8) Virginia Woolf's handwritten manuscript for Mrs. Dalloway at the British Library

(9) The Gem Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution

(10) My cat, my cat, my cat, anytime, anywhere, never, ever again

This Graph Thing

Several days after making a timeline of the last five years of my life, I extended it in a communiqué to myself to include my entire life.  I have had some very challenging times, especially in the last five years.  The occurrence of most of the excruciating points on the timeline were beyond my control and most people would have found them painful.  I found them devastating, however, traumatizing even, some of them almost annihilating. 

I respect the enormity of what happened to me, but I know objectively and rationally that worse could have happened and with greater frequency.  I have experienced only some of what the human condition can be.  That fact is of no comfort to me.  "It could have been worse" is one of the most patronizing, shaming statements one person can make to another. So I don't minimize the extent of my feelings about my life.  I wonder about them.  I am sorry about my on-going sorrow.  I wonder if I suffer unduly and what I might do about that.

Here's a whiteboard drawing of how I am visualizing ranges of feeling over time using three graphs.

In the top graph excerpted below, the dotted line represents to me what I would term a normal human range of a variety of human feelings, experienced as highs, mediums and lows, sometimes from internal and conscious and unconscious causes, sometimes in reponse to external events.  This, to me, represents a sound response to, and handling of, the human condition. 

I have described myself as living acutely.  What I perceive is my own range of feelings is represented with the green line, sometimes in the normal range, sometimes outside of it, with higher highs and lower lows.  The red scale on the left is my attempt to show that I think my range of feelings sits below that of the normal range.  The lows are deeper and, therefore, take more time and effort to scale to reach a medium point or a high one. When I look at my personal timeline of my first fifty-three years on the planet, I spent a lot of it sad.

My father defines "optimization" in a way I find meaningful: "Maximize, minimize or stabilize, within constraints."

Based on my temperament, genetics, life experience, even preferences, I don't expect the amplitude of my range of feelings to change much.  I will probably continue to live my green line of acuteness.  That's a constraint.  But I want to optimize my range of feelings.  I want to shift it up a tad so that my acuteness has highs and lows along that normal line, not below it.

I was born on December 30th so I'm always just hours older than the year.  I know that time is a human construct, that marking birthdays and the beginnings of new years is, at best, conventional and, at worst, arbitrary.  Whatever.  I feel inspired during this early start to what will be my 54th year of life on the next December 30th, and in these early days of a new year, to identify what interferes most profoundly with the quality of my life, especially in terms of my relationship with myself and others. 

It's this graph thing. 

When I study my timelines, seeking what caused the next point to be a bit higher, to be the beginning of what would become the way up from one of those lows, it was one thing and one thing only:  awareness.  I can only change of what I am aware.

About this graph thing, then, I've got this awareness thing started.

More Cake

"I read your blog post... So if there is no purpose to life...do we get to eat more cake?"
- Caprice, in an in-message to me on She Chooses, quoted with permission

"...kids, be free, be whatever you are, do whatever you want to do, just so long as you don't hurt anybody."
- Tourist Lady, Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical

I continue to struggle with the inevitable questions about the meaning of life after seeing loved ones die.  Have "a higher purpose than self," "Make the world a better place, "Save the world," "Do good."  Ohh, I just feel so tired...

When I read the message from Caprice, a big fill-in-the-blank came to me:

If life had no purpose, I would ____________.

If life had no purpose, I would:

• Waste (radical!) the little dried bits in the Lipton French Onion Soup packet by sifting them out, add the hard-onion-bit-free powder to sour cream, and savor that delicious dip with Lay's potato chips.
• Do another sprint triathlon.
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to take me to five sprint triathlons within a four-hour drive so I can qualify for placement in the Virginia Triathlon Series with a big, fat 54 inked on my calf (although I will only be 53; I am not a fan of age-up rules).
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to drive me around a lot.
• Get another cat.
• Without having opened their lids or gone piece-by-piece through their contents to remember and feel and think, hire someone to come to my house and haul the boxes and boxes of the meticulously selected, organized, archived paper record of my life to the recycling dump.
• Host salons and gatherings and talks and symposia and summits, something cool every week!
• Get a part-time gig as a group therapist.
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to drive me to see the people instead of sending them email.
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to pick up me and my friends for lunch at Our Daily Bread.
• Start a "$50K at 50 Foundation" and give $50K to people who start companies at 50 years old.
• Still think that attempting to answer "What's it all about, Alfie?" gives my life its deepest meaning.

Today, I am 53 years old.  That's a good list.

I always have to gather my strength to go to this video on YouTube to copy its embed code.  But a good list needs a good cat.  She was a very, very good cat.

What's Where

Mrs. Pollet asked her fifth grade students at Margaret Beeks Elementary School to make dolls of what they wanted to be when they grew up.  My doll was a writer.  With a scarf.

My writing is:

• handwritten on paper in many filing cabinets and white storage boxes.
• typewritten in manuscripts in white storage boxes.
• in print, as listed on my CV.
• on a blog I wrote from May, 2008 to April, 2009, The Anne Show
• in probably 1/2 of the almost 1000 posts on Inside VT KnowledgeWorks.
• in probably 3/4 of the 1500+ posts on Handshake 2.0.
• in a category on the She Chooses blog.
• in a workplace advice column for Valley Business FRONT, compiled in this category on Handshake 2.0.
• on this site, annegilesclelland.com

Line Segment

Begin with the end in mind.
- Stephen Covey

Suffering comes from wishing things were different.
- Paraphrase of The Buddha I read or heard

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas

I lack the ability to comfort myself.

The timeline of the last five years of my life is a line segment, a subset of what my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Pollet called a “ray.”  I can see it in my elementary school math book:  rounded off at its left side with the little black dot of my birth, my five-year timeline a thin elongated barbell in the middle of it, then the line extending to the right in an infinite series of points, arrow tip straight into the infinity of my future, until my death, when it would become all line segment.

“I read your timeline,” one person said to me, “and I just wanted to give you a hug.”  “Next year will be better,” another person said.  “Just think,” another person said.  “It can’t get any worse!”

Ay, there’s the rub.  Next year may or may not be better.  Next year could be worse. 

Over most of the events that happened in the past five years, I had no control. If what does or doesn’t happen is not within my power, I can no more make the next points in my little line segment of a life better than I can make them worse.  I can be optimistic or pessimistic to no avail.  I can make thoughtful, careful choices to reduce risk.  But life will be what it is.

What I want is to be able to handle whatever happens, no matter how heinous or how tragic.  I want to be able to give myself a hug, and more:  I want to be able to hold myself my whole life.

Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
- Maria, "The Sound of Music"

In psychology, the ability to regulate one’s own emotions from within, especially to comfort oneself during emotional or physical pain, is termed “self-soothing.”

From none of the adults in my family would I have learned self-soothing.  How could they teach what they were not taught?  I’ve watched two of them die within the last four months.  They suffered and we suffered without ceasing.

Resistance is futile.
The Borg

On one’s deathbed, all the swords and knives one has used to fend off the truths of one’s life become ineffectual.  One no longer has the strength to wield them.

“Are you having any insights?” I asked my mother a few days before her death, begging this intelligent, defiant woman to make meaning for me of any of what was happening.  She shook her head no.  I feel a child’s rage at her for not answering me and an adult’s perplexity.

On my deathbed, every truth I have not addressed will be there with me, sitting intertwined in a heavy heap on my chest, staring at me with powerful eyes as I struggle to lift my chest to take a breath.

No.

No, I say.

I will address my truths.  The points I most resist, I will examine.  I will make something from nothing.  I will learn to hold myself so well and so naturally that when I take my last breath, regardless of what I am feeling - rage, pain, relief, joy, whatever - with my last bit of strength, it will be my own arms around my chest I feel.

Whose Idea Was This?

Write as if you were dying.
- Annie Dillard

Birth. Growth. Decline. Death.

Who came up with that system? It is ridiculous.

When I look at the timeline of the past five years of my life, the deaths predominate. Of the beings I observed at their deaths or nearly, all were suffering. For the people whose deaths happened in my town, I have no words.

Of the two people whose deaths I observed most intimately, my mother’s, and then three months later, my grandmother’s, both lived their last moments in their beds, on their backs, mouths open, eyes half-open.  It was terrible for them, terrible to witness.

If my life is not foreshortened by accident, I, too, will decline through illness or old age and suffer until I will be on my back, jaw hanging, eyes staring.

What could possibly be the purpose, meaning or value to this?

I am a student of existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom’s work.  He writes, “...the only true absolute is that there are no absolutes,” and “If there are no absolutes, then nothing is more important than anything else, and everything is a matter of indifference.”

In other words, life has no meaning.

Great.

My mother died at 78, her parents in their 50s, my father’s father in his 80s, my father's mother at 101, and my father is a healthy, if-stunned-after-losing-his-wife-and-mother-within-about-four-months-of-each-other 78.  I’ll be 53 in two weeks.  Let’s say I have another 25 years left.

Twenty-five years of life ahead without meaning. Full of a timeline of deaths, ending with my own.

This is a ridiculous system.

Okay. Fine.

If life has no meaning, the lesson from the timeline is that what happens in a life happens.  I look at that list and envision a croquet mallet pounding my little wicket self closer and closer to the ground.  Although I exerted it mightily, my power was not enough to make any of the events on that timeline not happen.  Existentially, maybe they had no real meaning.  Every moment of those five years was lived by me and each one was of profound, intense, acute personal meaning to me.  Neuro-bio-chemicial-physio only?  Whatever.  I felt it.

What’s missing from the timeline is joys. I had a few. As they were building, though, there was that croquet mallet again. The frequency and amplitude of the wavelengths of the hits challenged my joy. As I was dressing a few days ago, I threw my arms up over my head. No sound, no movement had triggered the motion. Instinctively, I was fending off blows.

So, the task of the next twenty-five years is to reduce energy given to trying to control life (over which I am mostly powerless) and to increase energy given to handling what happens (I would like to offer a mild protest that the “what happens” is currently in a hard-to-handle quantity) in life (which has no meaning).

Great.

Timeline

• Mother falls and breaks hip, has hip replacement, has heart attack, gets pneumonia, Blacksburg, Virginia, January 2006
• Put house on the market, Tampa, Florida, January 2006
• Finish master’s degree in counseling, July 2006
• Leave Tampa home of twenty-three years to move to Blacksburg, July 2006
• Meet nice guy on my 48th birthday, December 30, 2006
• Eighth grade student at new school in school system of which I am a graduate enters my classroom after the lesson has begun, walks by me, and pushes me, February, 2007
• In lockdown for approximately eight hours with approximately twenty eighth grade students at a school a few miles from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, while a fellow Hokie shoots fellow Hokies and their teachers and himself, April 16, 2007
• A champion of love and truth, denying darkness, nice guy asks me to marry him, April 16, 2007
• Electricity goes out so parents come to my house for water and warmth, mother bathes, falls in bathtub, rips open leg wound, April 17, 2007
• Marry nice guy, June 16, 2007
• Eighth grade student positions himself so only I can see and hear, looks me straight in the eye, and says in a very low voice, “I’m going to shoot you,” September, 2007
• Leave quarter century teaching career, November 7, 2007
• Start writing blog for VT KnowledgeWorks, November 30, 2007
• First sprint triathlon, May, 2008
• Start Handshake 2.0, July 28, 2008
• Start company, Handshake Media, Incorporated, August, 2008
• Nice guy’s father dies, April, 2009
• Feel as if I am reading my own and my town’s autobiography in Wally Lamb’s novel about Columbine, The Hour I First Believed, March 2009
• Parotid surgery, February, 2010
• Step-grandmother dies, April 2010
• Start new company with big dreams and a team, September, 2010
• Put beloved cat to sleep, November 20, 2010
• Get new cat, May 2011
• Learn new cat has incurable, auto-immune disorder, May 2011
• Last sprint triathlon, June, 2011
• Mother dies, August 27, 2011
• Female surgery, September 13, 2011
• Mentor of five years tells me she has cancer, September, 2011
• Read writing on the wall at start-up company competition, October 15, 2011
• End new company with dashed dreams and farewell to team, October, 2011
• Do nothing at all for four days for the first time in half a century, St. Petersburg Beach, November, 2011
• Shooting at Virginia Tech, Thursday, December 8, 2011
• Retinal hemorrhage, Monday, December 12, 2011
• Grandmother dies, Tuesday, December 13, 2011
• Mentor survives cancer surgery, Tuesday, December 13, 2011
• Progressive vision challenge named as possibility by eye specialist, Wednesday, December 14, 2011
• Close The Anne Show, Thursday, December 15, 2011
• Write this timeline, Friday, December 16, 2011

CEO Blog

My plan was to share my thoughts on corporate leadership here and my insights and commentary on business on Handshake 2.0.  I seem to be sharing both on Handshake 2.0. 

For now, then, I'll let this blog be and write solely for Handshake 2.0.

Many of the posts on Handshake 2.0 are written by me and I compile some of them in the Handshake Media, Incorporated category.

To subscribers to this blog, thank you!

Social Currency

An excerpt from Five Steps for Consumer Brands to Earn Social Currency from Fast Company:

Popularity. You can't just request it. As companies amass ever-larger collections of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and YouTube audiences, they should ask themselves one question: What are we doing with them? "There is a lot of wasted effort in social media," says Erich Joachimsthaler, managing director at Vivaldi Partners, an international brand consultancy. "We forget that these programs have to pay into something, a shared value or a social context where the product actually gets used."

What's valuable isn't mere buzz but what Joachimsthaler calls "social currency." "There's more to 'social' than social media," he says. A new study by Vivaldi Partners and Lightspeed Research, which fielded the data, examines more than 60 companies and assesses customers' brand affiliations, advocacy, and sense of community, among other factors, for how they create true value for the companies, no matter whether it's online or off. The results reveal some surprising insights about the limits of social media. Most notably, smug, stunt-driven apps, games, and videos generate buzz but little else. So what does work? We combed through Vivaldi's data to find the most intriguing lessons. Here are the new rules for the game.

1. Advocates trump followers.

2. Context matters.

3. Not every brand should be social.

4. Social tools are a means, not an end.

5. Gimmicks marginalize trust.

***

My favorite quotes from Wendy's reps:

"We let the product be the hero."

"By using expert opinions, we added value in a way that doesn't come across as shilling."

Don't Take It Personally

“Don’t take it personally.”
- One guy too many

“…ay, there’s the rub.”
- Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

If one more business guy tells me one more time, “Don’t take it personally"...

What do you mean, “Don’t take it personally”?!  It is personal. I am a person, I am doing business personally, therefore I take business personally.

I define “taking things personally” as being the instrument of my fate, responsible for my choices, and responsible for the consequences of my choices.  If I see myself as the leader of my life and my company, then, you bet, what happens is about me personally.  Telling me “Don’t take it personally” is telling me to extinguish myself.

That said, I can’t say I’ve found taking business personally a particularly gratifying process.  Starting a company is so risky, and building a business so onerous, I have found myself often personally strained, frayed and depleted by the sheer enormity of the task.  Business is hard on a person.

I’ve been given the “Don’t take things personally” advice often enough, though,  and have found it well-meaning but so unhelpful, that it merited a step back and a look for a pattern at setting and circumstances.  It could still happen, but I can’t remember this being uttered to me by a woman.  In any case, in each instance when the advice was given to me by a man, I was personally upset.  In each case, the subtext of “Don’t take it personally” was “You’re so personally upset that you’re professionally absent.”

People do business with people.  If I’m personally upset, I’m unavailable for business.  Light on, shop door closed.

Yet, I treasure taking my life personally.  I cherish beyond price the depth and breadth and richness of my personal life. 

So what do I with my premise:  “I am a person, therefore I do business personally”?  What do I do with the advice, “Don’t take business personally?”

I think the premise is flawed and the advice is flawed.

It's not how to “take” business.  It’s how to “do” business.

There’s the rub.

New advice to self:

“Don’t do business personally.  Do business strategically.”

If I do business strategically, rather than personally, I take business results and business relationships into consideration with regard to my strategy.  I don’t take them personally.  I’m free to “take it personally” in my personal life as intensely and as acutely as I choose.  My business life becomes excitingly, fascinatingly, engagingly about strategically achieving a vision.

My experience is that an either-or dichotomy like this doesn’t always hold true.  In an age of transparency, where the personal-professional divide is as clear as broken lines on a road in a rain storm, I’m still going to tweet pics of my cats to my company’s Twitter feed.

My guess is that if I can operate more generally within the context of this new insight - doing business strategically rather than personally - the number of times I hear “Don’t take it personally” will decrease.  That’s because I’ll be fully and professionally present to do business.