Live and Let Live

I don’t know whether its the world we live in these days or the specific circumstances we find ourselves in on our hilltop and in our semi-retired states, but both Kim and I find ourselves increasingly at philosophical odds with people we want to maintain relationships with. This is happening at the personal level (both friends and family to varying degrees) and at the institutional level with the organizations we have been trying to either stay or get connected to. The divisiveness that everyone talks about on the political landscape seems to have invaded all sorts of different spaces and seems to linger in the air as a natural state. Once again, I can’t really tell if this is unique to these times or if its just what happens in life and has always happened. Maybe I just never noticed or didn’t really care much…and now I do both notice and care. Maybe I have too much time on my hands or my tendency to overthink everything has made a mountain out of a molehill. I really don’t know, but it seems to trouble both Kim and me more and more.

My friend Steven recently asked me somewhat rhetorically in a text, “When did this country start to prefer hating each other versus helping our neighbors?” He went on to say that the world needs more puppies and less people…especially the assholes. I told him I thought the problem of the hate/help index has always been with us and that perhaps it was just being exacerbated by the fact that 8.4 billion people on the planet is just too many, not so much from a space or feeding standpoint, but from a broader resource standpoint that leaves everybody in their own way leaning more toward the nature side of existence rather than the grace side. Darwin was a very astute observer of the world around him and I suspect he would tell us that the population of a species plays a very definite role in their ability to comport themselves well and get along. But its not like our hilltop is at the vortex of the teeming masses, so why does that find us up here?

I’m pretty sure that as life gets harder and we all know more about what we want and where we want to go (thanks in major part to our friend the internet…and now it’s kissing cousin, AI), we get more set in our ways. I can make arguments that say that’s a good thing and that focus is what gets the job done most often. But there is also something to be said for less intransigence, and determination has a way of breeding inflexibility and causing us to dig in our heels deep.

Both Kim and I have experienced this recently at an institutional level. I had always wanted to teach, both as a way of sharing what I feel I have learned and to give back or pay-it-forward, as they say. The phrase “pay it forward” has ancient roots but also a more recent coinage. The concept can be traced all the way back to 317 BC where it was used as a key plot concept for a play in ancient Athens called Dyskolos (which translates to “The Grouch”). The play includes the concept of paying kindness forward. An act of kindness transforms a misanthropic grouch, who softens his character and proceeds to do a good deed. The concept was described by Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Benjamin Webb dated April 25, 1784: “I do not pretend to give such a deed; I only lend it to you. When you […] meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation”. The actual phrase “pay it forward” was most likely coined in 1916 by author Lily Hardy Hammond in her novel In the Garden of Delight, where she wrote: “You don’t pay love back; you pay it forward”. Sci-fi author Robert Heinlein is credited with popularizing the term in his 1951 book Between Planets. And then, the concept became a household phrase through Catherine Ryan Hyde’s 1999 novel Pay It Forward and especially the 2000 film adaptation starring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, and Haley Joel Osment, which tells the story of a young boy who creates a movement of chained good deeds as a school project.

My pay-it-forward attempt had to do with teaching business ethics to MBA students at USD. The compensation was about enough to pay for my commuting, so it was an act of passion for me. After three semesters, I gave up. The student evaluation and feedback killed me. I had taught for a dozen years at the graduate level and always got excellent evaluations from students about my teaching, but the topic I most wanted to teach, ethics, left me wandering in the borderlands between the hate/help divide which permeates human existence. Half the students loved me and fully half hated me. I cared so much and it hurt so bad that I decided to just give it up as a lost cause. It caused me to stop teaching altogether after 13 years.

Kim has just had a similar moment. She spent four years singing with a big local vocal ensemble. It was a lot of work, but Kim loves music and she brought a level of performance skills to the mostly younger group that few of the group possessed. That led to her being a player/coach in the staging process until this year she was “hired” to be the Staging Director. Like with my teaching, her compensation was barely enough to pay for the four months of commuting. She spent hours and hours working to improve the quality of the performance and work with the members to up their game. It was a lifelong passion and she was very open to saying that she loved doing it…even more than performing. She was giving back from a lifetime of musical theater performing is a selfless and meaningful way. The performance was the best I had seen in the four years of watching the troupe. Her impact was a visible improvement and the audience gave a standing ovation, something that had not happened of late. But then the member evaluations came in and Kim suddenly looked like I looked when I saw my ethics course evaluations. The raft of performer complaints was a pail of cold water into Kim’s lovely face. All of the complaints were directed at things shat she had responsibility for, so there was no escaping the disconnect. It so upset her that she has chosen to acknowledge the disconnect by quitting the group altogether. What a sad moment for someone so dedicated to the craft…and so good at it.

This and various interpersonal interactions of late have caused me to ponder the state of the hate/help firmament. We would probably all agree that hating is bad and helping is good. None of us want to hate, but sometimes we can’t help ourselves (is that a tautology?). And sometimes we want to help, but our hate gets in the way (again?). I suspect that the answer is that we must all learn to take a step back at times and allow the world around us to live and let live. Life is too short to be in angst or to create angst. Be kind to others and to yourself and consider disengaging at times to keep the peace and let the world sort out its own hate/help balance.