Another Thursday Night
Everybody gets into routines. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Waldo, as he apparently liked to be called, was a big thinker in his time (the mid-Nineteenth Century) and a champion of several causes that don’t necessarily hang together much these days. He was an abolitionist, a transcendentalist and an individualist. I’m not sure I ever knew all that about him. It seems that Waldo, who was mostly an intellectual and essayist, was a sort of the Forest Gump of his day, meeting up with and influencing anybody who was anybody in his day (Thoreau, Daniel Webster, John Stuart Mill, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Horace Greeley, Walt Whitman, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to name just a few). I kept looking for something he wrote that jumped out at me and the closest I can find is his essay called Self-Reliance. The man eschewed conformity above all else and felt that men and nature were both driven by goodness and that it was society and the institutions of society that screwed things up. He believed that if man could keep it simple and in synch with nature, he would do much better for himself and the world than if he tried to follow the norms and routines of society, as they were in his day.
Our weekly routine is probably as simple as Waldo would have wanted. While we both have holdover activities that are more complex, me in finance and financial education and Kim in organized cabaret and singing education, we are both trending towards more basic and simple central activities. Kim is back singing as part of a local singing group. There are few activities more pure than song. I spend the majority of my time gardening and on household projects now. Getting dirty and working the earth are pretty fundamental activities. One might even say primordial. But I suspect I like doing it as much as Kim likes singing. Neither she nor I do these things for fame or fortune. They just make us feel good. That doesn’t mean we don’t take some pride in our work, but speaking for myself, I know for sure that almost anyone wandering into Home Depot or Lowes can do what I’m doing as well or mostly better than I can. And that does absolutely nothing to diminish my joy. Kim knows that Barbara Streisand will always be better, but that too is irrelevant to her pleasure.
But our week has a rhythm to it that is becoming a source of pleasure for us as well. We start with two easy, noncommittal days of Monday and Tuesday. Where the start of the week is generally considered a dread to people of routine, we get to ease into our week. Kim has a few workouts and maybe a rehearsal and I have a little lecture prep and perhaps some minor work on an expert case or two (I have two cases on my docket right now). Strangely enough, one case is about a broker who failed to protect a client against an unsuitable investment while the other is representing a broker who was fired for supposedly putting a client into an unsuitable investment when that did not actually happen. You can’t make this stuff up.
Wednesday is my big day of the week since that’s the day we play Pickle Ball (at least for the last month or so) and then I have to teach for two to three hours in the evening. It’s good for me. In the fall I get to sharpen my finance skills by teaching Advanced Corporate Finance. The only thing I know how to do is get extremely timely and current about the topics of the moment in the discipline and line up friends on The Street to help me give students a real-world sense of the practicum. This spring I am teaching Law, Policy and Ethics. All of the cases I am choosing to use to debate and explain the ethical dilemmas of the business world are also very topical. Theranos, The Big Short, ESG and the Global Pension Crisis, among others like Straight Path and its sale of its spectrum IP to Verizon, and even a case about infrastructure. It doesn’t get more timely than infrastructure in 2022 and this one is about a privately-owned bridge in New Jersey. It’s an exciting evening for me that ends with an exhilarating whisper-quiet ride home on the 15 in my Tesla.
The weekend always feels like a time when we should do something more engaging. Sometimes we have guests, sometimes we just set up dinners with local family members or friends. We have started going to a movie now and again as well, something I wasn’t sure we would ever start up again with. But mostly the weekends feel like a time of relaxation and rest, even though I’m not sure what we are resting from at this stage.
And then there is Thursday. Thursday has become my new Saturday since I have just done my weekly job of teaching the night before and I have no particular obligations for another week, so it feels like a lighthearted day for me. But then, that’s the day that our cleaning crew comes in the morning for their Blitzkrieg cleaning of the house. They come en masse with about six or seven young women who scurry here and there to clean everything. We must absent ourselves from the premises for the morning and have to take Betty with us. Today, since our friend David is visiting, we went to Del Mar to the dog beach that Kim had heard about. It was pretty much as advertised, a nice beach with a lot of people and their dogs running free in the surf. The other thing about Thursdays that we have routinized is that Kim wants her own slice of liberation from making dinner in a clean kitchen, so she asks that on Thursday night I order from Grubhub. This is now our pattern for some reason.
Self reliance is a wonderful thing. I somehow feel that ordering in is a form of self-reliance even though it isn’t much work for me. I suspect Waldo would find our lives far too conforming and routine in a “foolish consistency” sort of way. But here’s the thing, I don’t mind being accused of being of “little mind”. I never thought of myself as a great intellect or someone worthy of much praise. I like being effective and competent, hard-working and creative, and perhaps occasionally inspired. I will settle for being considered a thoughtful person who cares. I have no particular problem if the rest of my days are just a long string of another Thursday night. There are worse places to find oneself at this stage of life.