Staying Calm
I am watching Crimson Tide tonight, that great submarine movie about a nuclear launch crisis in the Pacific. It pits Gene Hackman, the Captain against Denzel Washington, the XO, in a face-to-face confrontation caused by a contrived partial communications situation. The set-up is whether a pre-emptive nuclear launch to gain a tactical warfare advantage is worth launching nuclear weapons in an unclear situation where there may have been an Emergency Action Message (EAM) to contravene the initiation launch order. It is the ultimate high pressure situation that is meant to be played out at the human level. The writers have made it multi-layered and involved other members of the officer corps aboard the submarine as well as a number of the crew ranging from the radioman. Viggo Mortensen, James Gandolfini, Ricky Schroder and Steve Zahn all do a great job sweating through their shirts over this thriller below the sea.
In the beginning of the story, much is made of whether the XO is staying calm enough under duress to suit the Captain and his old-fashioned view of how to follow orders at all costs. As the story and action unfold there are two more extreme examples of duress. The first is the junior radioman and the pressure the XO puts him under to get the communications systems fixed so that they can confirm the message sent in the truncated EAM. At one point he says to the radioman, “it’s a shitty deal, but you have the lives of a billion people riding on your ability to fix the radio.” Few have known that sort of pressure.
As the story thickens, the Viggo Mortensen character, who plays the weapons officer on the submarine is in the position of being the only person that can release the nuclear trigger so that the Captain can execute the launch. Viggo has already gone from being a friend of the XO to getting recruited to the Captain’s team of counter-insurgents to then having his conscience invoked by the XO to not take preemptive action. This all happens in a close-quarter rebellion with what we tend to call a Mexican standoff with guns pointed in all directions on the bridge of the nuclear submarine. At various times the Captain stays calm and at others he loses it. the XO is calm at the moment of truth, but has his sweaty-lipped moments as well.
Now, we are rarely confronted with the pressure of nuclear holocaust and forced to stare down a pistol in the face or the fate of the world. But we all have to learn to deal with the pressures of life and how to stay calm. There are moments when I might be inclined to say that staying calm is over-rated and that it is sometimes better to just go crazy on people to shock them into action. But that is simply wrong. You never win in the long run by letting loose. Sometimes you can’t help it, but you have to do everything you can to, in fact, help it.
I remember in my banking career two distinct types of people at opposite ends of the spectrum. They guy who always went bat-shit over increasingly trivial things lost impact and then became ineffective. The guy who always stayed calm was frustrating to deal with because you could never get a reaction from him when you felt it was required. He would smile and laugh lightly, which made you wonder if he even understood the situation. When he didn’t change course you began to think that he was mocking you by finding your concerns petty and unimportant. Eventually you came to realize that whether accidental or intentional, this guy had figured out that being offhand and calm under any sort of fire, worked to his advantage. It made him look in control and being in control is what business leadership is all about, right? In addition, if you stay calm most of the time, the impact of getting agitated is that much more noticeable and can make people who are not used to seeing you like that, sit up and take notice. I think it makes them think more carefully about what is going on and most often, that attention to the issue should work to your favor.
In theory this should all work the same in one’s personal life. But the very nature of it being personal takes that ability to be offhand and calm and makes it so much harder. My friend Terry has always been my hero in that regard. i don’t honk I have every in twenty0five years of friendship seen him be anything but calm and composed. Nothing seems to rattle him, and I have always thought of that as an enviable quality that I wished I could possess. i remember someone who I was working with one time declaring that I was showing my Italian heritage. He was Dutch and therefore much more reserved than I. Some might call him dispassionate. There are definitely cultural tendencies with regard to the degree of emotionality in one’s manner. In my experience the Latin, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures are far more passionate than the more Northern European or Nordic. I am fairly certain the Southeast Asians and Chinese are more like the Nordic cultures, which removes the latitudinal delineation. I feel that Chinese can actually go either way as I see gambling tendencies as a bit of an indicator about passion and the Chinese are, as a culture, prone to be big-time gamblers.
The Ancient Greeks, not known as people who fly off the handle for the most part (though there was that whole Hellenic legend of the face that launched a thousand ships). But it is said that the Ancient Greeks eulogized a man by asking one simple question, “Did he have passion?” The implication was clearly that was not just a good thing, but a necessary thing for a life of purpose.
I know myself well enough to know that I am passionate, and hopefully in the good way intended by the Greeks versus the “fly off the handle” way that we always have a harder time respecting. In general, I both expect the best of people (an optimistic trait), but I also am less surprised when I encounter less than perfect or good people as counterparts. I like to think that I do not hold grudges and that I have few or no regrets, but the older I get the more realistic I am forced to get with myself on those counts. I do not range up to the vengeful standards attributed to people of Celtic origin, nor do I tend to adhere to the wearing of the proverbial hair-shirt and all the whoa-is-me mannerisms. But what I have learned about myself is that I am disproportionately disappointed and upset by people and situations who have betrayed my kindness and my trust. I can point to some of those situations in my life and I am force to cop to the plea that I begrudge them those feelings and actions.
I am in the middle of one such “betrayal” at this moment. It is not a person, but rather an organization that is betraying my kindness and trust. Organizations are impersonal entities that do not think like people think. To begin with, they assume that they will exist in perpetuity. That makes them more rigid and generally less concerned about the triviality of betrayal. I find myself wanting to shout my indignity to the rooftops and yet who would listen? I give my trust and kindness to very few organizations by design, so that makes this betrayal all the more stinging. I am writing this to get this off my chest (partially) and in hopes that I can find my path to staying calm in the face of what wants to become an exercise in passion. Ultimately, we all work through the stages of grief in the same way: shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance and hope. I’ve made good progress and am in between bargaining and depression, which means acceptance and hope are just around the corner. As George Orwell might say, stay calm and carry on.