The Art of Doing
Father/son scenes always mean a lot to me. It may be because I had so few, if any, with my father, or it may because I try to do so many with my sons. Obviously the two are connected, but I still find they drill deep with me. Baseball seems to be a common landscape for these interactions given its prominence as an aging, but still inter-generational common ground. The first such scene that comes to mind is in Field of Dreams when Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) figures out that Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) has brought his buddy John Kinsella (Ray’s time-warped father) to his Iowa field. The theme of them having a long-overdue catch is about as poignant a scene as I can stand and it always brings forth cathartic tears to my eyes.
There is an equally impactful relationship in The Rookie when Jimmy Morris (Dennis Quaid) seeks life advice from his gruff, pragmatic father played by Brian Cox. He wants to play out his hand to join the minor leagues as an aged pitcher who is throwing anomalous 98 mph fastballs, rather than continue his career as a high school science teacher. Brian Cox tells Jimmy, “Your grandfather once told me it was ok to think about what you want to do until it was time to start doing what you were meant to do.” This is a good piece of father-on-father fatherly advice, but it was not what Jimmy Morris the man-boy wanted to hear. If only it were so easy to determine what we were all meant to do.
In The Natural, Robert Redford’s leading man character, Roy Hobbs, is driven by his boyhood farm dreams of avenging his father’s death by heart attack, by crafting a bat (Wonderboy) from the lightning rod tree that overshadows his father’s death scene. He is an unknowing father to Glenn Close’s son. His name, Roy Hobbs, invokes the Latin chivalric ideal of the white knight on a charger (maybe a reference to lightning as well). His life did not go as planned, less by choice than by fate. Finally, doing what he was meant to do is a strange reversal of the Brian Cox admonition and should remind us all that there is great artistry is deciding what doing needs doing.
I have often said that I think asking people at age twenty-two when they finish college (it used to be age eighteen when they finished high school and long before that it was twelve when they had to choose their apprenticeships) is too much to ask of people. Some people are lucky enough to have the muse screaming in their ear and know exactly what they are meant to do. Most have ideas and lingering preoccupations ranging from fireman fantasies to cartoonist wanna-bes . I remind people that I am sixty-six and I barely know what I want to do.
But life has a way of forcing these decisions on us and few have the luxury to be dilettantes through life and wander until their walkabouts show them the path. The Emilio Esteves movie The Way is a wonderful father/son epic about a Santa Barbara ophthalmologist (dad Martin Sheen) that must travel to the Camino de Compostello in northern Spain to retrieve the ashes of his lost soul, still-wandering son, Emilio. In losing his way, Emilio has inadvertently shown his father his true path in life. Heavy, but beautiful stuff and another favorite film I highly recommend.
I would like to take a moment to discuss what doing is all about. These movies portray everything from medicine to farming to school-teaching as mundane chores that lack inspiration and that would be a wrong message to give or take. Wandering, writing, painting or playing baseball are lofty acts of desire and free spirit, but I would argue that any of these activities can be uplifting or soul-destroying if the psyche is not in synch with the aspiring and the doing. The secret may lie in Brian Cox’s exact words, don’t make your decision by thinking too much about what to do, do what your heart and soul drive you to do. The truth is revealed in the doing, not in the thinking.
I know that I am prone to over-thinking and over-reacting. In my early career I was accused of having too much “Italian” in me rather than cold, calculating Germanic tendencies. Interesting take on ethnicity as it pertains to one’s expression of action and inaction. I know that my best decisions have always come about organically from my gut and less from my brain. The brain tells you to take the middle-of-the-road path that is statistically less likely to disappoint. The gut tells you to take the path less traveled and seek adventure.
Some Walter Mitty’s probably think being the CEO of a start-up scientific research and development company or the CEO of a monstrous attraction like the world’s largest observation wheel are the stuff of dreams. They may have been at one time for me, just like being a Wall Street investment banker was or a venture capitalist was. But the realities of any of those jobs is far less glamorous and exciting than it is hard-working and about slugging it out.
I am at a point where I am getting excited about repositioning my company for a future of potential success, while being engaged in using my old investment management skill sets to give my expert opinions on intriguing conundrums and planning out teaching new and interesting topics to eager minds.
I wrote the other day about the satisfaction of sweeping the garage. With the right outlook and attitude, every job can be exciting and fulfilling. It is not the job that holds the key to passion, but the passion within that holds the key to the job and the manner of its doing. So, the real art of doing is the art of what Nike so accurately puts it, “Just do it.”