I’m not entirely sure why the world works this way for us, but we seem to have a front half and a back half of the year. They are broken up by the month of July, which is our month with out family out here on the hilltop. The front half tends to be about planning some distant trip. The last few years have been, starting in 2023, Egypt/Jordan, Southeast Asia, Patagonia, and this year, Ecuador, which got cancelled due to political shenanigans and security related thereto. Next year we have on the calendar a Greek Odyssey cruise. The back half is generally anchored by an early December New York City trip to see family for the holiday gathering and then its available to be filled in as the whimsy of the moment dictates. This year it will be a Rhine River Cruise starting in Amsterdam on September 2, followed by five days of trekking through the hills of Switzerland. As of this moment the rest of September, October and November are wide open, but that seems destined to change.
When we moved out here to this hilltop in 2020, given that the kids and many friends were still back east, mostly in the NY Metro area, but increasingly also in places like Florida, we figured we would be back and forth every few months. That didn’t prove to be the case, initially probably due to COVID, but over time, just due to everybody’s various and busy schedules. Strangely enough, it was more Kim’s schedule, given her music work, that kept us home on the hilltop more than we might otherwise have been. Now that those obligations have peeled away, its interesting to see what forces of nature impose themselves on our schedule to fill in that back half.
I am seeing a trend where my expert witness company is asking me to represent them in various promotional activities. It started with asking me to write some white papers on topics of potential interest to the litigation community, the community that we serve and represents our bread and butter business opportunities. The idea is to show ourselves as thought leaders, not just topically on current events in the financial world, but also on how those events will shape the litigation landscape. I have obliged those requests and have written a few pieces that the firm has published to its client community. That has now morphed into several situations where I’m being asked to represent the firm at workshops and presentations with clients, all in a promotional and intellectual capital-focused manner. I was recently asked to be in Chicago for such an event and agreed to tack it onto the end of my trip to Europe (it was actually convenient for me to do so). Now I am being asked to be in NYC for another such event in the weeks following that. This is starting to feel less like retirement and more like my old working life. So far its more fun than not, but I am wary of becoming a traveling man yet again. The cross-country schlepp is not so awful in terms of the plane time (first class seats being as they are and my ability to amuse myself with my iPad being a mainstay of my every day existence), but the Airports…ah, the Airports… Criss-crossing the country is a lot less enticing than it used to be, thanks in large part to those accursed airports.
We are also getting the occasional request to be in NYC for social occasions. That has just happened with regard to an upcoming 70th birthday for a friend planned for late October. The older we get, the more we don’t want to miss opportunities to gather with friends to celebrate their lives whenever we can. That is a trip we are planning to make. There may well be more such requests.
The back half of this year feels very different to me. Our trip in September is not so unusual. Our planned NYC gathering at the Cornell Club in early December is not so unusual. Everything in between feels different. For the first year in five years, Kim does not have a show that she is preparing and rehearsing. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand it is always nice to have more freedom to do what we want when we want, but on the other hand, music is such an important part of Kim’s life that I hate to see her not working over musical arrangements every day. In some ways it feels like we are partially untethered this year, which is certainly going to be different. The other thing that feels different is my work situation, where I seem to be getting somewhat rethethered (is that a word?). The question becomes whether the feeling of connection or disconnection are so unusual or just another moment in life that has to be managed. Imagine how boring life would be if nothing ever changed. As I’m getting older I see people naturally getting into routines. When you are going to school, there is a set daily, weekly and seasonal schedule and you learn to adhere to it, anticipate it and even look forward to aspects of it. TGIF and “School’s out for summer!” spring from that routine. When you are working and in your stride doing your version of the 9-to-5 program, getting into a routine helps you stay on track and get through whatever slog your life might require. I know I used to plan to take a break of some sort every two months or so, specifically to have something to look forward to…and it helped keep my mind in a positive place. But none of that is supposed to be necessary in retirement. We are footloose and fancy free…or are we?
Man is a creature of habit. The evidence for habit-dominance is strong. Behavioral research suggests a large share of daily action runs on automatic pilot. Routines around food, routes, work rhythms abound because habit is metabolically “cheap”. The brain offloads repeated behavior to procedural memory (basal ganglia circuits) precisely so conscious attention can be spent elsewhere. Aristotle’s read on this was that habit isn’t just a pattern imposed on us but the mechanism by which character is built at all. Virtue, in his account, is a settled disposition formed by repeated practice, not a one-off act of will. Where it gets more interesting is the friction between habit and identity. Humans aren’t just repeating stimulus-response loops. They also narrate themselves, revise goals, and can consciously override a habitual pull, which is why habit change is hard but not impossible. The pattern seems to be that humans default to habit under low attention, stress, or fatigue, and exercise deliberate choice when stakes, novelty, or reflection are high enough to justify the cognitive cost. So “creature of habit” is more true than most people are comfortable admitting, but it’s habit with an override switch … one that gets used less often than people assume, but does exist. I read recently that it is thought that perhaps one of the reasons our species developed larger and more complex brains than lesser animals was because of need for social interaction. A distinction of humans is our combination of length and intensity of dependence when we are born. Human infants are unusually helpless at birth relative to brain size, a tradeoff evolutionary biologists attribute to bipedalism constraining pelvis width against a large-brained fetus. That forces human infants to be born less developed than other primates, extending the period of total dependency, and human childhood also extends dependency further than sheer nutritional need would require. Kids remain economically and socially dependent long past weaning, arguably a feature that supports the unusually long period of learning and brain development. And that leads to more social interaction, which leads to a need for a more well-developed brain capable of complex reasoning.
So why am I having so much trouble with the back half of this year, worrying about untethering and retethering? It must be yet another case of arrested development, right?