jimazing.com

I’ve got one more thing to say about Plums, then I’ll be quiet (unless I think of something else).  I admit that I went a little overboard with the thanks, but I couldn’t help myself.  You see, I was really worried where Danae would wait for me for five hours while I drove from Charlotte.  I had visions of her at best sitting in an uncomfortable fast food joint and at worst wandering the streets.  When I found out that she was in a safe place, I was able to stop worrying and focus my attention on getting there.  When she told me that Michael offered to wait with her no matter how long it took me to get there, I was beside myself with grattitude.  He treated her kindly and with respect all day long.  What a gentleman!

I have told this story many times this week and many have responded with statements like,  “You just don’t see things like that anymore.”   I do not agree.  I believe that there are many decent people doing nice things for no other reason than to be gracious.  Most of us miss it most of the time.  Don’t get me wrong, Michael is one in a million (and so are the other million).  It doesn’t diminish his kindness at all.  The actual thing we don’t see much of is thanks.  We expect people to treat others with respect.  It’s the way things ought to be.  When someone is disrespectful, we feel angry and rightly so.  But the opposite does not hold true as often.  When we are treated courteously and respectfully, we ignore it or dismiss it.  We don’t say thank you enough.  That’s what’s missing.

I think there are biological roots for why we are not as thankful as we could be.  The book, On Intelligence explains from a logical standpoint how the mind works (intelligence).  In short, the authors explain each of us is constantly “predicting the future”.  We constantly receive sensory information from our eyes and ears and nose… We know what’s going on and we expect things to continue like they always have.  Driving down the road in traffic, we expect the cars to stay in their lanes going the right direction, or change lanes slowly and hopefully with a signal.  If someone darts out or passes us like a bat out of hell, we are startled because we didn’t predict that.  As I write this, the ceiling fan in moving the air about in the room.  Until I stopped to think about it I was unaware of the feeling of the air blowing my bald spot.  I was also unaware of the sound of a plane flying overhead.  My mind was used to these sensations and predicted that they would continue.  Here’s the kicker… When the predictions come true, our minds simply throw the information away.  It is not needed.

As humans, we can intentionally stop and pay attention to details that we would otherwise miss.  A fun exercise in Improv Wisdom is to close your eyes and describe the room you are in in as much detail as possible.  Then open your eyes and see what you missed or what you just got wrong.  Clearly we can override our automatic intelligence systems sometimes, but we cannot do it all the time.  It takes effort.

Back to thankfulness.  We miss the gifts that others give us.  Carl Sagan said, “In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” We are all dependent on the work and gifts from others present and past.  It would be impossible to be completely present and aware of everything that we could possibly be thankful for at any one time. But it is a wonderfully eye opening experience to stop and thank someone for what they did for us… even if it was their job.

My final act of thankfulness to Plums (until I get a chance to visit them) is a letter to the editor of the Bryan County News (click to read online).  Facebook messages are nice, but I’m willing to bet that the owners of Plums didn’t go into business to get nice compliments.  They surely did it as a financial investment.  My sincere hope is that one day soon, they are able look at their financial statements and say, “On June 19th, when we were nice to Jim Anderson’s daughter, everything changed for the better.”

Thank you.

P.S.  I just realized today that the letter to the editor will not remain online forever, so I have captured it here…

Bryan County News (Wednesday, June 23, 2010)

Dear Editor: My daughter’s car broke down at exit 87 on her way to Charlotte, N.C. from Orlando, Fla., on Saturday.

I drove the 5 hours from Charlotte to get her and was worried about where she could wait for me. Plums Ice Cream and Sandwich Shop was where she chose to wait. Michael, the manager, was so very helpful and friendly to her. He even let her stay there after closing time until I could get there!

Since we returned home, my friends have been filling their business’ Facebook page with thanks. As satisfying as that has been, none of us live near Richmond Hill.

The Richmond Hill community needs to know what a jewel they have in Michael at Plums. He went above and beyond.

If Michael had been rude or worse, I would have taken the opportunity to blast the restaurant and the people of Richmond Hill. I want to be just as intentional about shining a light on our positive experience. Would you help me go overboard with lavishing thanks on Michael at Plums?

This was my personal blog entry asking my friends to help… http://jimazing.com/blog/2010/06/a-plum-day/

Thank you,

Jim Anderson

family, random, reflection, stories

The kindness of a stranger can make the difference between a totally rotten day and a tolerable one with pleasant overtones… A “Plum” Day.

This morning after mowing the lawn, I was fixing or breaking my edger (depending on whether you consider my intentions or the results) when my phone rang.  Danae was driving to Charlotte from Orlando, FL after a week of Music Therapy training.  When she got to Savannah, GA (well… almost) she stopped for a bite to eat.  When she exited I-95 the engine cut off and wouldn’t restart.  Google and I helped her find a place that would look at it today. She was towed in and the news was not hopeful.  It looks like the timing belt broke, which could be very expensive to fix.

I drove from Charlotte to get her and bring her to our house where her baby girl and dogs were waiting… in fact we are on the road as I type this (Danae is driving). I was very concerned about where she would be for the 4.5 hours it would take me to drive to her.

When the repair shop closed, she walked down the street to a little sandwich shop and made herself at home.  She didn’t know what to expect.  It was, after all, a local place hidden in the back of a little shopping center.  What she found was a gracious store manager named Michael who treated her like royalty all afternoon.

On my way down, I-26 (or as Danae says, “I-twenty-sux) was a parking lot.  I took a longer route around the traffic, which was faster than sitting in it, but slower than I anticipated.  It was clear that I was not going to make it before the restaurant closed at 7:00.

Michael told her not to worry.  Even if he had to close the restaurant for the evening, he would let Danae stay there until I arrived. When I got there around 7:20, Danae was safe and sound and full of terrific stories from her adventure at Plums Ice Cream and Sandwich Shop. Michael was a wonderful host who gave my daughter a safe and pleasant experience in the midst of a pretty horrible day.

I have three little requests for you to consider…

First: I would like to overwhelm Plums Ice Cream and Sandwich Shop with Facebook Fans.  If you are thankful and/or impressed with what they did for Danae, would you go to their page (click here) and click the button to join them?  They had 92 members before me.  Wouldn’t it be cool for their kindness to be the start of a wave of positive attention and new customers for them?  Let’s do it!

Second: Would you share this story with your friends and ask them to become a fan of Plums?

Lastly: If you find yourself traveling south of Savannah in the area called Richmond Hill, please get off I-95 at exit 87, head East on Hwy 17 for a little over a mile.  They are hidden in the shopping center right behind the Verizon store on your right.  Stop in for a sandwich or the best blueberry cheesecake ice cream you ever had.  Tell Michael, “Thanks for watching over Danae and making her day a Plum day.”

See also A Plum Ending

family, random, reflection, stories

I picked up, Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Madson in one of the many bookstores in Berkeley last month when we were visiting Erin and Justin.  The title stirred me and a cursory browse of the book showed promise.  I wasn’t mistaken.

Each day I understand better that our value is not tied to what we do or even what we can do.  We all have value because we are.  There’s value in just showing up and being present.  Planning and preparing are important, but they aren’t everything.  I am learning that, while being prepared is invaluable, being present is just as important if not more so.

The section I read today in the book was on rituals.  Being one who loves variety, I have always thought of rituals as ruts, but this book has given me a different perspective.  Rituals can help us get in the groove.  Madson was relating about the rituals she was introduced to in some classes she took.  She says,

At our desks in calligraphy class, we began with the ritual of grinding  the ink.  There is a correct way to hold the ink stick and to move it in small circles in a tiny pool of water on the stone that serves as an inkwell.  The action of making ink became both a physical and mental preparation for the work of learning how to paint Japanese characters and bamboo leaves.

These rituals at the beginning of each session had the effect of creating order and harmony.  We knew what we had to do when we entered the sace.  Cleaning and grinding ink got us into the world of the art without the stress of creation.  There was a calming effect…

My best meetings have been the ones where I not only prepared for the content, but took time to prepare my self to clear out the clutter and be more present.  What a wonderful way to look at rituals as preparation for the art of being present.

growth, observations, personal, random, reflection

Molly in Charlotte

New words, laughter and smiles

Grandparents smiling

family, life, personal, random

Tonight, Jeanie and I went out to dinner as a belated anniversary celebration.  Then we enjoyed a few episodes of Damages. We got the first season on DVD through Netflix.  Oh my goodness!  This is one of the best shows I have seen in a long time.  Glenn Close does an amazing job playing a lawyer named Patty Hewes who is a real bi#$ch!  It is so very intense and you don’t know what is coming next.  Still not sure who are the good guys or the bad guys.  The lyrics to the theme song say, “When I am through with you… there won’t be anything left.”  It really fits the show.  I can hardly wait for the next DVD.  Erin tells me it is online.  We might have to watch it that way so we don’t have to wait.

In case you are wondering, this entry counts.

random, slices

Negative, critical voices from the past can be so loud!  They send hurtful messages.  They drown out rational thought and cause us to misunderstand what others mean.  They cause us to believe things that are not true.  Why do they stick so much more tenaciously than positive messages?

random, reflection, wondering

I just watched movie “This is It“, Michael Jackson’s rehearsals for his intended performance tour.  I feel stirred.  Here are my rather raw thoughts.  (Won’t be much proofreading or editing this time).

I am a music snob.  There, I said it.  I do not care for much pop music and I probably won’t ever buy any MJ music.  It just does not match my musical pallette.  That statement says more about me than it does about MJ.  I could say his music is bad, but the reality is that it is very good.  I just don’t care for it… musically.  My opinion.

I once heard an interview with Quincy Jones in which he was praising MJ for his musicianship when they worked together on The Wiz.  I have a lot of respect (musically) for Quincy Jones, so his praise for Michael made me sit up and take notice.  I also heard a lot of people who saw it in the theater say how much they liked it.  I really noticed for myself what an awesome musician MJ really was.  He knew what he wanted to hear… exactly and pushed back until he got it.

I noticed that at times, he had trouble explaining in plain language what he wanted.  He would describe something in really wacky abstract terms, like the time he said that his ear piece (monitor) felt like someone was putting a fist in his ear.  The producer guy had to ask him patiently if there was anything they could do to make it better.  Was there something missing in the mix?  He replied, “No, just turn it down.”  I thought to myself, “Why didn’t you just say that to begin with?”  However, I can also relate to having trouble communicating something simple.  Sometimes I am so caught up in what I’m doing that I can’t express simple what I want to say until someone patiently asks the right questions to get understanding.

I am reading Pops (a biography of Louis Armstrong) and they called him an entertainer.  The “real” musicians didn’t mean it as a compliment.  They complained that he was an “Uncle Tom” and too self depricating on stage.  What they didn’t understand was that was who he was… an entertainer.  It was part of the act.  Similarly I think Michael was truly an entertainer and “real” musicians don’t get it.  In his own words near the end of the video (to the best of my memory), he told his fellow performers that they (the audience) was coming to escape reality.  they want to be taken places they’ve never been before and experience talent that they’ve never experienced before.  That’s entertainment.  He put on a helluva show!

Michael Jackson was a strange man with some really odd problems.  He was born in 1958, the same year I was born.  He became famous with the Jackson Five when he was only eight.  I can only imagine what that would do to a person.  You can’t live the life of a public star and not have any adverse affects.  My guess (and it is only a guess) is that a lot of the personal issues MJ had were direcly related to his fame.  He wasn’t a normal guy. I also think that his artistry was related to his eccentricity.  In my experience, it seems like when someone has a lot of talent in one particular area, they are missing it in most other areas.

Before I started the movie, I posted on Facebook that I was going to watch it.  I got some interesting comments.  It’s funny how someone like MJ pushes so many buttons even after his death.  I like pushing my own boundaries, experiencing new things and doing the unexpected.  Most of all I love excellence and I love variety!  I’m glad I watched the show.  It was excellent.

Thanks Michael.

observations, random

While boarding my plane on my recent trip to Arizona, I overheard one passenger telling another about a different method for tying shoes.  He was just finishing the explanation and telling her how it was much more secure than the regular method.  My shoes are constantly coming untied, so I was curious, but the line was moving again and it was too late to ask.  I determined to check google for the answer.

Wouldn’t you know there is a site devoted to tying ones shoes; Ian’s Shoelace Site features 17 ways to tie a shoelace. I experimented with each of them evaluating for ease of tying and security until I came to the “Two Loop Shoelace Knot”; the “normal” knot that I learned when I was a kid.  Thinking that it has never been very secure, I almost moved on and then I caught Ian’s warning:  “It’s often tied incorrectly, resulting in an un-balanced ‘Granny Knot’.” As an experiment, I tied my shoes automatically without thinking about how I was doing it and checked the results.  No wonder my shoelaces always come untied.  I have been tying a “granny knot” my whole life!

So, I didn’t need a fancy new way of tying my shoes, I just needed to tie a square knot instead of a granny knot.  I have to think about what I am doing when I tie them now, but now that I am tying them correctly, my shoes have been quite secure for the last couple of weeks.  Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

personal, random

Confession

I have a confession to make.  I have been talking on the phone and texting while driving.  I know I’m probably the only one who does this <tongue planted firmly in cheek>. I keep hearing reports of studies demonstrating that talking on the phone while driving is akin to driving drunk.  I understand, but it just doesn’t feel dangerous.  In fact, my friends and I do it all the time and we’ve never had an accident… have we?

The truth is that I have caught myself driving dangerously due to inattention.  It stops now… before I hurt myself or someone else!  I can imagine how I would feel if I hurt or killed a child just because I couldn’t wait to talk on the phone?  Imagining that feeling is enough for me.  I don’t ever want to experience it in real life.

I pledge to never text or Twitter while driving and I will only talk on the phone while driving if I am out on the open highway and there is no traffic around.  It’s just too risky.

How I got here

On our recent trip to Berkeley, I picked up a book called, The Science of Fear (How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain). In it, I am reading about how irrational fears cause people to behave irrationally. We fret over potentially dangerous things that aren’t very likely to happen. The flip side is that we ignore real dangers because they feel safe.  For instance, we lay out in the sun to get that “healthy looking” tan, knowing that the solar radiation is harmful.  Even though we know the dangers of cancer, we soothe our fears with statements like, “My friends and I have done this lots of times and we’ve never had any problems.”

Driving while texting and talking is one of those things that we hear the dangers of, but it just doesn’t feel dangerous.  So we trust our feelings instead of the facts.  In fact, we don’t consciously choose anything, we just do what feels right… and it isn’t a very good choice.  How would you feel if you caused an accident because you were driving while talking or texting?  Will you join me in stopping before that happens?

personal, random

TED Talks is one of the coolest sites I have ever stumbled upon. Lots of wonderful, intelligent talks about a world of different subjects. I watched one this week by Erin McKean this week that is really fun and has inspired me (shared below). She’s a lexicographer (compiles dictionaries). She has a lot of fun basically making the point that this is our language and words that communicate are good words. I recognized myself in her description of people who ask, “Is that a word?” As if we have some governing authority who determines what are words and what are not.

Words emerge in our language all the time i.e. google. “I think I will google lexicographer.” makes perfect sense to us, but what would we have thought even just 10 years ago. When and how did it become a “real word”?

I’m going to try to stop asking if something is a real word and start trying to influence language by introducing some really good new words. And the first entry will be mollypops.

mollypops adjective – Containing both Molly and her maternal grandfather (aka Pops).

example: Did you see the precious mollypops photo on jimazing.com?

TED Talk by Erin McKean

More thoughts from Erin McKean about new words

family, random