Last year I was driving The Lady and other people nuts trying to organize group activities and socially relevant things to do.  I pursued it with the same focus and intensity that Lizzie Borden showed toward her parents.  The results were predictable.  I had to reconcile some different ideas and I think I've gotten to a point where I need to write this down, for myself as much as for you.What I had to reconcile was the idea of where style and substance meet in my life.  Style without substance is fake and fades quickly but at the same time, substance without style is joyless and cynical.  I think my life up to this point has been in pursuit of substance but since I neglected to nurture any kind of style, I've missed out on a lot of joy in my life.  The false narrative of substance without style is, "celebrating and Kodak moments are fake, I'm not the kind of person who needs that kind of phony validation."  I've skipped out on a lot of opportunities to enjoy some time with friends out of some misplaced cynicism and in the end, the only person I hurt was me.

Grace Slick is quoted as saying "... loss either teaches you to persist in the face of suffering, or hardens you into a bitter cynic.  Sometimes, it does a little of both."  I think my cynicism is born out of a lot of things but rather than focus on that, I just want to focus on learning how to not be so cynical.  Cynicism tends to be a protection from emotional pain but it isn't a panacea.  One of the best things I've ever heard on the topic came from Conan O'Brien as he left the Tonight Show [skip to 03:27 to hear it]:

As I move to recapture some style along with my substance, I want to get back to some core beliefs.  When Little Man was first born, I was struck with how happy and joyful he was.  I would say (jokingly) that he reminded me of myself 'before the world got ahold of me.'  I meant it as a joke but now that I look back on it, that's pretty sad.  I've spent way too much time trying to reconcile bitter cynicism with the happy, joyful person I naturally am.  The truth is, cynicism is the opposite of hope and you can't be both at the same time.

Cynicism, I've noticed, requires that you surround yourself with things and people that support that viewpoint.  Misery loves company, right?  Conversely, hope and positive thinking require that you're surrounded with people and things that support that viewpoint.  Mixing hopeful and cynical people in a crowd means they're both constantly butting heads, trying to win the other person to their side.  It'll become a war of attrition where the hopeful person can't have that much hope (being surrounded by a pessimistic jerk) and the cynic can't have hopeful people around (because who needs a bunch of Pollyana rose-colored-glasses-wearers?).

Cynicism doesn't work in a team environment: trust and hope are involved (you have to trust the other guy and hope he does a good job).  You can't be a cynic and expect to make much forward progress in life - progress isn't made without risk.  I can see now that I was blind with cynicism and now my goal is to eliminate that negative trait from how I view things.  How, exactly, I go about that  ... well, I haven't figured that out yet.  This guy has an idea but you'll have to try his suggestion yourself to see - that in itself would be a step in the right direction.

The good thing about living sensibly is that you know you'll eventually be proved to be right.  The bad thing about living sensibly is that 'eventually' can mean anywhere from 1 week to 30 years.  Bill Watterson - the creator of Calvin and Hobbes - said it best: "Virtue needs some cheaper thrills."  Living sensibly means that you exist on a longer timeline.  You forgo the faster, cheaper success for the long term accomplishment.  Existing on that timeline means that you have to tune out the noise from the party and keep reminding yourself "It's hard but it's worth it ... I want the long-term goal."

All that being said - this is hard enough to do now that I'm in my 30s.  The idea of being an aesthete now starts to wear thin after a while.  My beef is that the payoff for living well is so far in the future that you risk losing chances to be happy now or 'live in the moment.'  It robs you of joy and you have to live with the that hindsight is 20/20.   Maybe you're doing the right thing now, maybe the long-term goal will be worth it.  Maybe cutting loose and splurging so that you and your family can create a happy memory won't matter in the grand scheme of things.  There's a Yiddish proverb that says "Men plan and God laughs."  Nobody really knows what tomorrow will bring.

The two ideas that I'm wrestling with are this:

• How do I navigate between short-term and long-term goals?
• How can I communicate that narrative without falling off into 'angry curmudgeon' mode?  My peer group doesn't seem to get what I'm talking about [when I talk about it] and I get a lot of 'just a hater' comments and stink-eye.

I think my family was trying to communicate this even though the way that they went about it was so hard-nosed it was like being force-fed chunks of broken glass.  The reason why I don't want to be a young Archie Bunker about this is that now, looking back, I can see the value in some what was said but at the same time I know that childhood is a limited time and it's also a time when the little sponge of your life is getting filled up with all kinds of things.   I don't want to fill Little Man's life up with lessons from the Horatio Alger playbook.  I don't want him to look back on his childhood and go "Glad I don't have to do that again."

For thirty years people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don't. Everything about me is a contradiction and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

The thing that I've been thinking about since I got back is this - tell me what you think.  One of the biggest challenges of the trip was the fact that I hadn't trained enough to go.  I didn't know what I was getting myself into and I paid the price.  Going from sea level to 8,000 feet and then hiking to 9,500 feet is something I wouldn't recommend for anyone but the most dedicated masochist.  Surrounded by all that beauty, I was miserable - I could barely breathe.  I was huffing and puffing like a fat guy climbing to the cheap seats and it was quite embarrassing.  Altitude sickness is nothing to sneeze at but somehow I thought at 9,000 feet it wouldn't be much of a factor.

And maybe it isn't ... maybe I was just out of shape.

So I thought about why I hadn't pushed myself harder and a philosophical discussion ensued.

As previously noted, Henry Rollins said "The Iron never lies to you. [...] The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver."

The trail didn't lie to me, either.  As I was hauling my overweight carcass up those steps, I had to admit that I wasn't ready for this and I had to watch people of all ages and body shapes slip past me on the trail.  Sure you can go "well, they're carrying less weight" but not all of them were.  Or you could say "They were more acclimated" but there were 6 guys in my group who had as much time as I did and they were all ahead of me (save for a kind soul who hung back and helped me through - and you know who you are.) No amount of justification was going to change how I felt or the situation.  If I was going to make it home, I had to gut it out right there.  I did as much as I could until I came down on the third day and I had to sit back in rueful contemplation knowing that I'd just had my butt handed to me and there was nothing I could do about it.

Ouch.

Strange as it may sound, I'm not complaining.  It's more like sitting back and going "Oh, wow ... I really sucked at that.  Interesting."  If I want to do this again and do it better, I'll have to make some changes and that uncovers a very, very large question:

How can I conquer the mountain without leaving you behind?

I've been practicing my consensus building skills, diplomacy and negotiation over the past year or so.  There's no negotiating with rocks or trees and a steep switchback isn't going to level out no matter how many kittens you herd.  To get through it you need that John Wayne mentality where you're doing it all by yourself no matter what.  Negotiation goes right out the window.  Come back down the hill to where the rest of the Hobbits live and you're back in the land of 'let's-all-get-along' and collective ego-massage.  If you don't want to spend your days arguing with people, you have to learn to tune out the double-standards they apply in life knowing that when you were out in the back country, there really was only one standard.  If you come out of a few days at that single standard (walking around feeling like you're going to crap, puke or die) you realize that the vast majority of time spent winking at the double-standard was ultimately of no value.

That is irritating.  I felt cheated.

Being around people you care about shouldn't mean that you abandon that drive and that spark inside of you.  We celebrate the accomplisher, the provider and the doer.  No statue was built for a critic.  You can't argue with success.  The flip side (as far as I can tell) is to climb the mountain and sit at the top ... alone.  "It's lonely at the top," they say.  Is that what I'm pushing myself toward?  Metaphorically, we all have our own mountains to climb - must we choose between the mountain and the crowd?  Logic would suggest that the answer is yes and that is a very scary, depressing thought.

So I don't have the answer to what I'm saying right now.  I'm applying the adage from a few friends that says "Take a step back and look at the big picture."  I don't have to reconcile any of this.  I can choose not to climb the mountain and stay at a nice beach resort where they change the towels every day.  The question will still be there and I won't be able to sit right until I've found the answer.