As Your Time Comes

Earlier this evening, at a memorial for a friend who died recently, I was sitting a bit apart from the rest of the crowd with my two-year-old grandson. The ceremony was on the back deck of a museum with a broad view of San Francisco Bay.

Below us, swimmers walked by in towels or with their wetsuits half off. Children rode their trikes with training wheels. Lovers strolled hand in hand. Some people walked dogs. Some dogs looked to be walking people.

Many of those below looked up to the solemn scene: A Buddhist Monk lighting candles and the gathered friends and family of the departed chanting and singing and praying.

Up above was the mourning; down below was life, vibrant and fresh.

As the designated babysitter, I knew I probably would not be able to stay for the entire ceremony, and I did not. Although he behaved wonderfully, my little companion eventually tired of the scene and led me back indoors, and then, ultimately, back to "Grandpa's house."

The person whose life we gathered to celebrate would have appreciated the humor inherent in a memorial service conducted just above half-naked beach goers. She would have appreciated a solemn moment in a place of great beauty. She would have appreciated her husband's stirring, funny talk. She would have loved every minute of it.

***

I always cry at funerals; I always cry at weddings. I cry at births, I cry at deaths. I cry at good news and at bad news. It occurs to me I cry all too often for a big, strong man like me.

As I move through crowds, I am always conscious of being bigger and taller than most people. When the kid next to me is my soccer-playing 16-year-old, we are both taller than most everyone else -- him especially, since he is now 6'1" tall. His "little" brother looks like he is about to become the tallest of all of us; at 14, he is visibly poking higher and higher into the atmosphere, to a level none of us in this family have previously reached.

He disclaims athletics, but yesterday dusted both me and his brother at "21" in the backyard basketball court. "It's funny how the basket looks closer now," he said as he sank shot after shot.

Of course, when you are tall, basketball becomes an entirely different game than it was when you were short.

***

People come and go in life. We all know this, but this confuses me greatly. Sometimes I wonder whether I am capable of knowing who is here and who isn't in conventional terms.

Let me try to explain.

I forgive people easily. There are many who done me harm in one way or another; just as I have harmed others. Some have dealt me great harm.

But with virtually all of them, when they approach me again, I easily forgive and welcome them back into my life.

Why?

Maybe it is the same reason while at our friend's memorial tonight, my eye was drawn more to the life below than the memory of life above. Time has never felt endless to me. For many years, particularly when I escaped death by an hour or so in India in early 1971, I've not had the capacity to stay mad at anyone for very long.

They will die. I will die. We all will die.

Why hold a grudge?

They will suffer pain; I will suffer pain; we all will suffer pain.

Why not feel compassion?

I know this much -- I am at my very best when comforting another dealing with a loss that overwhelms them. I know this state; clearly, it is familiar territory emotionally, for me.

Deep emotions like this scare some people. But they don't scare me. The honor of comforting a friend about a loss that is hurting them is one I never shy away from.

If they let me in then, a friend will be a friend for life. Life and death.

There is no other way to close this post but to say that I am glad my grandson was there tonight, at a memorial ceremony, even if he didn't know exactly what was going on. It didn't matter, because when it comes to spiritual moments, even babies know.

We all know.

May she rest in peace, the one who has left this realm. May the rest of us cherish what time we have left, and try to see the world again through the eyes of a two-year-old.

"Look, Grandpa. A sailboat. It's going out to sea."

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You Might Call It Love

My Universal Theory of Love has to do not with how people fall into love -- that seems pretty obvious, but why. Also, I can't write about how or why people fall out of love because I do not understand that part.

What I think I understand and therefore can theorize about is the why. There's nothing original in my theory -- people fall in love because they need to. They seek intimacy, security, company, partnership, friendship and sex, not necessarily in that order.

The only part that interests me here is intimacy. So maybe what I have created is a Universal Theory of Intimacy. Here's how it goes:

Our expectations of intimacy form in childhood. If our parents are warm and loving toward us, regardless of their other flaws, we grow up expecting to experience that same intimacy as adults. We seek it in others, and a match occurs when the right balance of intimacy and individuality is found.

But if our parents neglected us emotionally, or worse yet, abandoned us, it's possible that as adults we will flee from intimacy when someone gets too close to us, because it begins to feel claustrophobic.

Adults can and do change their fate when it comes to intimacy. Besides therapy, which really can help, self-awareness is a tool for change. Sometimes, one amazingly loving partner can help to heal the wounds of a childhood bereft of intimacy. I've seen couples like this.

The intimacy question may remain invisible to many people; they just do not think in those terms; if so, they are likely to repeat patterns in relationships throughout their lives. They start new relationships much easier than those whose intimacy quotient is higher, and they break up much easier as well.

The pattern is to start and end relationships over intimacy. They tell other stories, some of which are compelling, but my Theory has merit. Once someone becomes "too close," they flee.

The problem here is that opposites attract. Sames attract too but those relationships often are doomed for different reasons. Opposites can form terrific relationships in intimacy, because they each have something vital to offer one another.

The deeply intimate person needs to learn how to be a strong individual on his or her own, to not let the quest for intimacy turn into neediness. Nobody long appreciates a partner who appears to not be able to make it on his own -- at least not in this culture.

The trick is to learn how to strike this balance while giving the gift of greater intimacy to the person accustomed to fleeing from it. Assuming self-awareness, everyone involved can calibrate their roles so that a true couple emerges.

Couples that last, I believe, solve this intimacy riddle. They are capable of cyclical adjustments -- both pulling apart for a while and then growing much closer again. An intimately balanced life supports both yin and yang.

The person seeking deep intimacy has to flee sometimes; the one who usually leave when things get too hot has to come back sometimes. People make mistakes, but our hearts tell us when we do.

There's a lot more to this Theory; it's complex stuff, and I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I do fall in love, however, and in various relationships I've played both roles described above.

That's because all of this is relative. There are no absolutes. And it all changes as we age, and grow emotionally.

Admitting a mistake about intimacy is much harder than admitting an affair. The latter does not necessarily spell the end of a marriage -- sometimes it even brings people closer. But pinpointing a different in intimate needs often sounds and feels like blame, because we cannot fundamentally alter who we are in this respect.

The odd and beautiful thing, though, is we can learn how to balance one another. When she needs distance, he can provide it, without guilt-ripping. When she needs intimacy, he can provide that too.

No blame games. No tricks. Just working together to stay in balance.

You might cal that love.

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New Endings, Old Beginnings

I'm mad at myself tonight, but I'll get over it. Driving my youngest to her best friend, (Eva)'s, birthday party late this afternoon, I neglected to check the route properly.

By the time we got to the venue, far south in Pacifica, she was 40 minutes late. She got out of the car without giving me our customary hug. Like me, she is always prompt, punctual, and reliable. Neither of us judge others who cannot be this way, because the ones we hold most responsible are ourselves.

But we do not easily excuse each other when we mess up. Thus, tonight, both she and I are mad at -- me.

Meanwhile, in the warmth that has embraced Northern California, the coast was crowded with surfers, joggers, sunbathers, photographers, gamers and lovers.

The plum tree (on the right in the shot above) has buds, wrapped tightly but ready to yield and open to the sun, then the flowers will fold onto themselves and turn into the ripe purple fruit that dangles seductively each mid-summer here.

It's spring but it might as well be summer in San Francisco. A time of endless possibilities. I've been in a good mood for days, which is a novelty. The rock in my life these past three months has been my oldest child. She is now heavy with child; her own daughter is due in a matter of weeks.

But when I hit bottom, she is there unconditionally. She listens, she hears, she accepts whatever it is I have to say. And that has been a lot of talking over this past quarter-year.

For me, stories hold such a prominent place in my universe that sharing my own is the most intimate thing I have to offer. And, as I have slowly my been formulating my Universal Theory of Love, all I can think about is intimacy.

Recently, it came to me that all of the adults I have known in my life are either running away from intimacy or seeking it. Often, in a couple, one is headed one way and the other the other.

Which, of course, in time ends in disaster.

My theory, which I do not have time to unfold at the moment, considers this paradox.

The Whisper of Time

"I'm so excited. Ayyyyyyyy. Do you want some lip gloss? Oh God, you saved my life. I'm so nervous I could die. I love your hair. I wonder what everyone will wear."

Yep, it was Middle School Dance Night again and my car full of 12-year-olds giggled, and signed and nervously chattered all the way across town. I wish you could have been there and heard them.

Hours later, when I picked them up, they were smiling but tired. By now they've learned not to bother about the boys their age but just to all dance together and enjoy the music.

My daughter said her feet hurt. Must have been a very good night.

***

Much earlier, today's driving lesson took us from Bernal to Noe Valley to Diamond Heights to the Mission to Ingleside to Crocker-Amazon and back to Bernal. My student is progressing nicely.

All afternoon, work meetings. Every company I'm affiliated with is getting busier these days, as the local economy springs to life, funded by angels and venture capitalists.

There are some 5,000 startup companies in this city, most composed of three to six people and a dream. Entrepreneurs are dreamers; I love them. In another part of my writing life, I cover the culture of entrepreneurs around here, and the longer I do it, the more I learn.

This city is the center of tech startups -- social media (Twitter), iPad apps, advertising technologies all are thriving. When you imagine the Internet, think of the Big Bang. From the moment of creation, it has been expanding in all directions, with no letup in sight.

This is not a linear technological revolution -- this is an all-encompassing explosion that will eventually transform every aspect of our life and future. As it does so, it is bringing endless opportunities for those bold enough to seize them.

That's the world I've chosen -- startups. You ride them like rockets -- some crash, some keep going. A chosen few break free of gravity and become moons, like Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia. These are giant planets circulating the revolving, exploding star that is the Internet.

***

Well, hi there. Nice to see you again.

I've discovered a few things living alone. I am not good at cleaning the apartment. I never realized there were so many places that patches of blackness can accumulate. I'm going to have to do something about this.

I am good at taking care of laundry and dishes; I'm organized. But I need to throw away more useless junk. Ninety percent of it is paper. I have got to let go of the past, the pre-digital era when I saved files, articles, books.

It all has to go.

Then there are the little items I leave undisturbed in the corners where they've resided for months. A hairclip. A tube of moisturizer. A stack of magazines. An envelope filled with paper. More cosmetics. Some papers.

These I leave as they are, as if in a museum. One of these days, I will gather them and throw them all away.

But the details of life matter a lot to me, and the details of each particular life matter a lot. Once someone is gone, all that is left besides memories are these last few details.

I've been down this path before; I know I am different from others. I'm quite sure that the small vestiges of me left behind with others have long ago been discarded as no longer useful or relevant or of any sentimental value whatsoever.

But I make my own relevance; the same source of writing in me is the secret life that lives on as long as I allow it to. Thus these small items do not bother me. They comfort me.

After all, a man has to be allowed his dreams.

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High Above Center Court

It's rare to be able to give your teenaged sons experiences that are as far out of your price range as a $10,000 luxury suite at a pro basketball game, but thanks to the generosity of a friend, I was able to do that tonight.

These games are, as my friend said, amazing productions -- part light show, part rock concert, part cultural spectacle. At the center of it all is the game of basketball, played by athletes with the rarest combination of size and speed plus, at times, the balance and grace of ballet dancers.

On this particular night, the home team Warriors won in the final minutes, 100-94.

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Equations

One of the coolest things about the Internet is the ability to transport yourself elsewhere in the world, at least virtually, to see sights you may never see in person. Today, Google launched the Art Project which I absolutely love.

By following the above link, you can explore museums all over the world, and view masterpieces at very high resolution images.

Art museums have long been places that fire my imagination. To me, every painting is a kind of visual story. As I gaze at them, I can feel the painter's effort to weave a narrative in a very different medium from words.

***

Computers are still our main access point to the Internet, but that will change as mobile devices replace desktops and laptops. Early adapters are already lugging iPads and Kindles and smart phones wherever they go, and an increasingly wired planet (actually to be precise, wireless planet) is facilitating their ability to stay connected wherever and whenever they wish to be.

But this explosion has never been about computers, or any other devices so much as it has been about the human networks. Networks of people are the most powerful new weapon for social change. Thus, the eruption of political protests in Egypt is a direct result of people's ability to organize themselves by using digital tools.

As the Egyptian government futilely tries to suppress a revolt that has now reached historical proportions by cutting off Internet access, activists find new ways to get around censorship and continue to connect. What we are witnessing all around the globe is the end of state power that does not enjoy sufficient popular support to endure in this powerful new era of freedom of information.

In many ways, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has finally come to life as the prevailing value of the 21st Century. There will be changes in every society due to this new reality. In the U.S., the Tea Party is one early consequence of the emergence of an unfettered First Amendment, but there will be others, particularly as progressive movements better appreciate the new opportunity to organize fellow citizens committed to social change.

I suspect (and predict) that the people currently labeled as "undocumented immigrants" will soon discover that they can exercise their very real economic and political power by organizing themselves online. Imagine an America where no houses are cleaned, no gardens are tended, no children are cared for, no fruits or vegetables are harvested, no new houses are built, and no offices are maintained, and you will easily see what I mean.

It's only a matter of time.

***

Yesterday and today in San Francisco, you might almost feel guilty that as we experience such high temperatures that sunbathers are out in string bikinis and the rest of us in T-shirts, the middle part of our country is buried under one of the worst snowstorms in recorded history.

I worry about my family members back there.

Meanwhile, the first pink blossoms have appeared on our plum trees, and today, up on Bernal Hill, my daughter rejoiced in the many blooming flowers as we walked the dogs. From one side of that hill, I looked over at the old Candlestick Park, the former home of what is now our World Champion Giants; from the other side I gazed at the stadium in China Basin, their new home by the Bay.
***

In our family, a recurring theme of the relationship between parent and child is math. As much as I love the subject, I curse it. Is there any other segment of human knowledge that causes more angst among students and their parents?

I will not say more, out of respect for the privacy of my children, but I've burned more cycles on math homework lately than on writing. Maybe that is as it should be, however, as I seem to be the only person I know whose brain appears to be split down the middle, with equal tissue devoted to words as to numbers.

My kids have random distributions that fall along this scale. My job is to help bring it all back into balance.

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Your Choice, Your Love

If I could accomplish one thing in the rest of my writing life, it would be to somehow find the way to pin down even a small portion of the the elusive world of feelings that engulf all of us, no matter what our age, situation or health.

I've been a student of emotion for the past quarter-century. Before that, if you had asked me, I would have scoffed at the notion that this realm could in any way compete with the intellectual and physical realities that, until my first mid-life crisis, had consumed all of my energy and attention.

Part of this was due to my profession. In journalism, we were always focused on actions or ideas that could somehow be documented. Emotional issues, by contrast, are by their nature ambiguous and subject to an almost jarring pace of change. Moment to moment, humans experience different emotional states that scientists now recognize are deeply embedded in our brain tissue in ways far too complex to yet document with anything close to scientific rigor.

As a student of the emotional, my main teachers have been women. Why it took me 40 years of living to discover that there was something so critical to my survival that had eluded my restless intellectual curiosity until then I have no idea.

As far as I know, I was not subjected to any kind of deep emotional trauma in my youth. My parents loved me, made me feel special, and the world around me -- though confusing and often very lonely -- didn't seem to notice me enough to inflict any kind of enduring damage.

It is true, however, that I was hit by disease in my youth, and that the authority figures in my life at that time -- my father, our family doctor and others -- blamed my illness on my "laziness." But even this scar cannot have been very deep, because no one has ever repeated that epithet in my adult life, and I also don't think I qualify as any kind of workaholic -- the work/family balance has always been important to me, and even though I've probably worked much longer hours than many of my peers I've never considered my work as my life -- or anything even remotely close to that.

In fact, love and family have always been foremost in my mind. Countless times in the past, I left my jacket on the back of a chair in my office while I raced out to where one of my children was ill or hurt to spend time with them rather than "doing my job."

And, when it comes to love, I cannot imagine that any of my partners could ever have thought that my work mattered more to me than she did -- if so, I must not be much of a communicator after all.

In my long apprenticeship studying feelings, I have noticed how different we all seem to be in how we navigate our way through this most difficult and challenging terrain. Some interpret emotional honesty as holding others responsible for how we feel. Some race away from any uncomfortable feeling like it's the kiss of death. Others misinterpret expressions of pain as an expression that we somehow are incapable of acting the way adults are supposed to act.

I'm not sure how to best express this, but I absolutely do not hold any other person on earth (or departed) responsible for how I feel. When I write in a way that captures emotions that may evoke something in a reader, it is not my feelings that matter in that instant but hers or his.

One small thing I have learned is this: Your heart will tell you how you feel if only you can hear it. Sometimes what it has to say is inconvenient or unexpected. But if you listen hard enough, you'll be able to identify your own true emotions out from the noise of others.

And then you will know the right thing to do, or to say, or (in my case) to write. If honesty hurts, guess what? The world is not always a kind or loving place. Things don't always turn out well.

Love hurts -- that's what every artist in his or her own way says. Love hurts. And so there is no right or wrong schedule for love. Love knows no calendar. Love doesn't spare your deepest fears, nor does it allow you to keep running away from it once it has a grip on your heart.

Love has no beginning, really, and it has no end. Love is fate. No matter how hard we all may try to fight it, we all are always seeking love. There are so many cliches about this that to cite any one of them would trivialize the wisdom they convey collectively.

We all, in good faith I presume, do our best in love. So don't feel bad if you have broken someone's heart. We all do this at one time or another, quite carelessly and seemingly cruelly. But not really.

As long as you listen to your own heart, and let that be your guide, in the end all will be as it ought to be. Our world is imperfect. We are imperfect. Yet love endures.

I suppose the only way to end a post like this is to wish you a happy valentine's day. I remember mine last year, and the joy I took in booking a table at a nice restaurant in this end of town, as well as the love I tried to express to the lovely woman sitting across from me that night at our table.

This year, I will spend that holiday (which frankly causes more harm than good) alone. But that's okay. Because I hold no one else responsible for my feelings -- they are mine alone.

And if I choose to love someone who is gone from me, that is my choice. Or if I choose to denounce and despise the gods of love, that too is my choice. Or, if I harbor hopes toward someone new, that too is my choice.

As it is for you.

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