Dissed Stance

Dissed Stance

My Pen Mates,

Haven't made a play on words for a while; no time like the present.

Looking back on forty-five years of existence, I could be honest only to admitting memories from six or seven years old onward. Before that was a period of unremembered nourishment, perhaps an extension of my womb-being_alive yet unaware. Yet for many more years after I've formed memories, it seems that I've paid more attention to physical space changes rather than time. Like most, it has been mostly how far I've gone as opposed to how much I've grown.

Forty five is a weird age. Colloquially, my life began five years ago. It should be the ideal middle-age since hardly anyone lives to a hundred anyway, and people do live beyond eighty nowadays. Within the last year, I've put on more weight than I've ever had in any one year since the growth spurt during my teens. Presbyopia has caught up with me as well and I need longer arms to read and more intense light to see. My exercise recovery period is a little longer, and getting winded comes more readily now even with minor exertion. With the thinning hair comes unwanted ones on body areas I'm not familiar to seeing hair in. My wife often cautions me now to be more patient and tolerant, perhaps a sign that she's loosing her patience and tolerance of me.

But with age come certain advantages too! I command more attention when I speak, I can laugh heartily at anything without producing insult, and I trust myself a little better when making decisions. My tastes are also a bit more sophisticated; perhaps not in fashion or material stuff, but certainly in food, leisure, and the company I keep.

I can be and am usually haughty when I make statements. All these years of school and street smarts give me that entitlement, and I feel no need to defend my positions and ideas once expressed. I am not error free, but most willing to embrace my failings knowing that living through them make me wiser and stronger. In general, I have learned to mark progress not by where I've been or where I am going, but the value of the experiences that time brings. While the physical world cannot be isolated from the internal being, aging has, to me, become a reflective transformation. There doesn't seem to be such an urgent need to be somewhere nowadays, as there is a yearning for finding comfort and peace of mind. The distance I seek has metamorphosed from geographic travel, to an escape from physical, mental, and spiritual discomfort. I am quick to dismiss that which does not bring positive awareness and am more grounded as to where I can find happiness.

It's not in the hills, valleys, beaches, and far away shores that were gilded in my minds eye of years past. "Been there, done that" as they say; but I have yet to tire of visiting my soul, finding ways to enjoy the place where I am__summoning the spirit within to find peace, without needing to acquire more.

Mon

A Review of Outliers: The Story of Success

A Review of Outliers: The Story of Success

My Pen Mates,

Malcolm Gladwell is one of those geeks who I imagine grew up known to his peers as a talented story teller. With a smile on his face, I see him delight in watching people react to preposterous concatenations of incongruous events and pursue the thesis with more improbable arguments. I can almost hear his belly laugh to both cajole and mock the unconverted, even as his mind spins to flesh out the frame of his idea.

My son bought Outliers using a gift card; a curious choice I thought given that it's not his usual fare of fantasy/science fiction/adventure genre. The book starts with a hook on longevity dissociated from the modern day formula of diet, exercise, and even genetics, but rather on the backbone of socio-dynamics. After that opening chapter, I was prodded to keep on going, to see how this author was going to fall mightily flat the rest of the book.

Instead, Gladwell keeps on stringing together history, geography, opportunity, family dynamics, and yes, luck to describe "advantages" that lead to a status we commonly ascribe to as success. And he was astute enough to apply his formula to individuals, social class, even racial profile; such that he delves into assessments of "accumulated advantages" ranging from Bill Gates to the Jewish population of New York. He was equally critical of immigrant profiles who end up populating the Adirondacks, and has a lovely outtake on "power difference" among various nationalities and cultures. I particularly found intriguing the chapters on Korean Air, and the social-calendar-defined development of Canadian hockey players

The author succeeds in teaching a manner of understanding how people advance and excel in society. To some extent, the book extends a panacea to the helpless and downtrodden, that hope can be advanced through keen assessment of ones history and accepting those variables or tendencies that limit pathways to success. Choices play a big role among all the examples outlined, but the author believes that knowing origins, cultures, socio-dynamics both past and present are critical components to success. Of course these have to have a strong native ability and personal discipline component to work, but what the author proposes certainly makes one furrow the eyebrows and say, hmmmnn....

Ray