An Unexpected Job Offer

We design our lives through the power of choices.
--Richard Bach

Sixteen days ago, I answered a Craigslist ad for SEIU union organizer trainees. It requested that applicants submit a resume. I didn't, because I didn't have any work experience even tangentially related to union organizing. But what I did do is apply for the job by writing a very candid letter explaining why I was interested in the job and why I believed that my lack of experience needn't be an issue. When I didn't hear back from anyone after two weeks, I believed that that was the end of it.

So when I answered the phone two days ago, I was very surprised to be speaking to the woman to whom I'd submitted my application and to be subjected to an on-the-spot job interview over the phone. I wasn't nearly as well prepared as I would have been for a face-to-face interview, but I apparently did well enough between the interview and my letter to be asked if I was interested in taking the job. I replied that I would need to discuss it with my wife and that I would get back to her the next day.

I ended up declining the offer partly because, after hearing what the interviewer said and reflecting on it, I decided that I wasn't cut out for the kind of work a union organizer does. That job would have required me to go to places of employment where employers didn't want me, to try to talk to people who who didn't want to be seen talking with me, to attempt to reassure people who were afraid to start or join a union that they and their families would be safe from vindictive employers, and to comfort and help people who'd lost their jobs because of union involvement.

Furthermore, I was told that SEIU organizers average twelve to fifteen hour work days six days a week and often travel away from home for days at a time. Neither I nor my wife liked the sound of that.

It sounds to me as though the union is the focal point of the union organizer's existence. Family comes second, and there's virtually no time left for outside interests. I wasn't up for that. I love my wife and cats, and I have outside interests, such as my reading, writing, bowling, and friends. I'll have more to say about my writing in my next post.

Part of my reinvention process is to make wise decisions and follow through with them. I believe that I made the right decision in this case. I also believe that my best chance of landing the right job is not to try to snow people with BS resumes or answers to interview questions but to turn my weaknesses in job experience into a strength by being uncommonly open and honest in a positive way about what I haven't done in my life but what I nevertheless believe that I can do with the aptitudes I have and with the skills I either have or am capable of developing.

Overcoming Perfectionism

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
--Leonard Cohen from "Anthem"

In my previous lifetime or, at least, my previous blog, I posted an entry about how challenging it is for me to interpret most poetry or song lyrics. But I think I may understand the meaning of Cohen's words above. I don't understand the entire song, but I interpret the words above to mean that we should say and do the best we can and not worry about being perfect. Nobody's perfect. We all make mistakes, and it's from those mistakes that we learn valuable lessons and grow wiser.

This is something I need to take to heart. I don't know how many times I've given up in discouragement after the most trivial mistakes. If I couldn't be perfect, I'd just stop trying to be the best that I could.

I've sometimes felt this way in my efforts to reinvent myself. And I've been feeling it even more over the past couple of days since accepting a writing job offer for a local online publication. I look around at the qualifications other writers for that publication have that I don't have and I read the superb articles some of them have written, and I want to be so perfect that I find it challenging to even get started. My friend Tom says to just jump right in, but I think the equivalent of, "What if I can't swim like Michael Phelps?"

Well, Leonard Cohen is right. Tom is right. My bell may be a little cracked, but I can still ring it. I may not be Michael Phelps, but I can still make it across the pool, and the more often I do it, the better swimmer I'll become.

Oops!

Expect the unexpected.

A funny thing happened at the dentist's yesterday. Funny as in unusual. At least, I hope it's unusual.

I went to have a temporary crown removed and a permanent gold crown put in. John, the dental assistant, had removed the temporary and was working to make the permanent crown fit. He had taken it out it several times and made adjustments to it, but it still felt a little tight, so he placed a thread of floss between the crowned and an adjacent tooth and pushed down. Suddenly, the crown flew off and backwards into and down my throat.

My first thought was, "Uh oh." My second thought was, "Oh, God, I hope it didn't go down my trachea! If it did and I can't cough it up, I hope the dentist knows what to do!"

At that point, I told John what happened, and his face took on that "I can't believe what just happened" look. Before either of us said or did anything else, I reflexively swallowed and felt a lump pass down my throat and knew that it was in my esophagus on its way to my stomach and not my lung. Huge relief!

John went to tell the dentist what had happened. He came to make sure that I was okay and then advised me to see my doctor, even though he said the crown would probably just pass through me without causing any problems. John said that was the first time this had ever happened to him in his nine years of dental assisting. My dentist said it was the first time it had happened in his ten years of practice. Certainly, nothing like this had ever happened to me before or to anyone I knew, even though I'd thought about the possibility before. In retrospect, I'm surprised it doesn't happen a lot more often. I smiled and replied, "I guess there's a first time for just about everything."

I don't know how much this incident has to do with reinventing myself, but I think it's a tale worth telling nonetheless. I guess you could say that I'm pretty happy with the way I handled the incident. I was the one who ended up trying to make John feel better more than it being the other way around. And keeping my cool and good cheer in that situation felt so good that I'm now more determined than ever to stay calm and be comforting no matter what's happening around me or to me.

Taking a Career Chance

The biggest chance you can take is not taking a chance at all.
--Unknown

Part of what it means to reinvent myself is to find gainful employment in a meaningful career. I've long assumed that it would have to be in some kind of clerical capacity. But today I saw an online ad seeking union organizer trainees, and I felt compelled to respond.

I know that some unions have acted irresponsibly over the years, but I also believe that unions have been a godsend to countless workers (and their families) who would have been exploited or abused had they not been protected by unions.

Do I have what it takes to do what a union organizer does? What exactly does a union organizer do? I don't know. But something in me said, "Take a chance and go for it," and so I did, and now I'll see what happens and let you know if anything does.

Reinventing Empathy and Compassion

Our culture seems to say that if you don’t feel sadness at another person’s distress, you must be indifferent or lacking in emotion. Sadness is falsely equated with compassion. If I were suffering from an illness, and a friend came to me in tears, saying how sorry she felt, it would not do me one bit of good. But if instead she offered me some remedy, I’d be very interested. The sadness by itself is just not useful.

--B. Alan Wallace from The Four Immeasurables

I think highly of B. Alan Wallace, but I'm not sure I agree with the passage above. It seems to me that when we feel empathic sadness over another person's suffering, this is the very definition of compassion. What's more, it can help the other person in two ways. First, it's comforting when we're in distress to know that someone else cares enough about us to experience our suffering along with us and to openly express this to us. Second, feeling another's physical or emotional pain and feeling the sadness that grows out of this empathy may move us to look for ways to help ease the other person's suffering.

The power of empathy and compassion is a premise behind Morgan Spurlock's fascinating series 30 Days. Spurlock was inspired to do this series by the success of his documentary film Super Size Me that had him subsisting on nothing but McDonald's meals three times a day for thirty days. By the end of his experiment, he had gained almost 25 pounds and deteriorated dangerously in his fitness and health. His subsequent TV series 30 Days, about which I posted an entry to my other blog, was on the FX channel and featured people making radical lifestyle changes over the course of thirty days, often living with others whose lifestyles or beliefs diametrically opposed their own. Among the more provocative episodes I saw were a fundamentalist, almost Islamophobic Christian living and worshipping Allah with a Muslim family; a computer software engineer whose job had been outsourced to India going to live with a family in India where individuals from that family held jobs outsourced from America; an adamantly straight person living and frequenting gay bars with a gay roommate; and an atheistic abortion rights activist living with a "pro-life" family.

And then, over the weekend, I saw an episode in which a man who legally immigrated with his family to America from Cuba in the 1950's and who now so strongly opposed illegal immigration that he served with the Minutemen to deter uncocumented aliens from crossing over into this country from Mexico went to live with an undocumented family of seven in a claustrophobic 500 square foot apartment in a rundown area of LA and work as an undocumented day laborer. Toward the end of his stay, he visited the family's relatives in Mexico and saw firsthand the crushing poverty that they and others like them endured and from which his host family had escaped by immigrating to this country illegally, and he was virtually moved to tears by what he witnessed. By the end of his thirty days, his empathy for the plights of illegal immigrants had gr0wn profoundly and the almost violent stridency of his opposition to illegal immigration had softened dramatically.

I was very moved by this episode, and I found my own powerful antipathy to illegal immigration weakening considerably. I still believe that illegal immigration should be stopped or, at least, discouraged, and I still take exception to the militant refusal of illegal immigrants and their supporters to acknowledge that they don't have a "right" to break our nation's immigration laws to come and stay here, but I feel markedly more empathy toward the human beings who are so desperate to escape their dire circumstances in Mexico and Central America that they take the terrible risks and endure the painful sacrifices they do to come and live here the only way they can.

I mention this on my blog about reinventing myself because I believe that opening my mind and heart more to other human beings and their difficulties and suffering is part of my self-reinvention in that it helps me to become the more compassionate and fulfilled person that I long to be. Watching shows such as 30 Days is a modest but important step in this direction.

One Part Lifts the Others

I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.
--Walt Whitman

Someone wrote to me in private that the problem with efforts to reinvent oneself is that the person who's trying to do the reinventing is the same person who's to be reinvented. Alan Watts used to make a similar argument about trying to enlighten oneself. He said it was the spiritual equivalent of "trying to life yourself up off the ground by tugging at your own bootstraps."

I understand the point, but I disagree with it. I believe that it's based on the false assumption that a human being is a monolithic entity, a unified self. But, in fact, we are a multitude of parts or sub-selves, and some of these parts or sub-selves are wiser and "higher" than others.

In my case, there has always been a part of me that knew I needed to change my life, and it had ideas about how to do it. But it didn't follow through with its ends and means. Today, it is beginning to follow through with its goals and its plans for achieving those goals.

I can't say that my progress has been unbroken and remarkably swift. I take two steps forward and then fall a step back. But then I move forward again. I don't give up the way I used to. I don't tell myself it's a hopeless cause, because I don't know that it is.

I am not trying to lift myself up by my own bootstraps, but, rather, part of me is lifting the rest of me. It's a strenuous, long pull, but there is progress, and I believe that there will continue to be progress.

Physical Reinvention

Reinvention is noteworthy movement from point A in your life to point B, for whatever point A and point B represent for you.
--Jeff Davidson from The Complete Idiot's Guide To Reinventing Yourself

Personal reinvention can take many forms. It can be as extensive as a complete personal makeover or as partial as taking up crossword puzzles. I've undertaken something pretty extensive, and I realized from the outset that remaking myself includes helping others to remake themselves. I began this blog to further both ends--to inspire myself and others to create positive changes in our lives.

This is why I was delighted to read my Internet friend Mary Lois' blog entry yesterday. Mary Lois undertook a pretty large reinvention of her own when, single and in her later 60's, she moved from Fairhope Alabama to Hoboken New Jersey in late November, 2007. I didn't realize until now just how long ago it was; it had seemed like only a few months ago. In any case, Mary Lois' move has required her to make numerous changes from the life she led for years in Alabama. I encourage you to read all about it in the beautiful prose of her blogs and books.

But now Mary Lois has decided to make yet another big change in her life. She's going on the CRON or longevity diet to lose weight, become more fit, and to live a longer, healthier life. And she says reading my blog has encouraged her not only to do this, but to put it out there on her blog so that knowing that other people know about it will encourage her to stick with it through the hunger pangs long enough to see just how well it can work for her.

Before she went public with this yesterday, she told me what she was planning to do and implicitly encouraged me to go on this diet too. I thought I had enough on my plate, figuratively speaking, and wasn't ready to take on such a radical change in my diet. I'm still not. But I believe that we human beings are comprised of a biological, psychological, and spiritual dimension--body, mind, and spirit--and that if I'm going to transform myself as thoroughly as I wish to, I need to make substantive changes in all three dimensions of my being. So, while I'm not going to take up the CRON diet at this time, I am going to stop eating as much fat and sugar as I have been, and I'm going to significantly increase the amount and variety of my physical exercise. I still need to plan this out in more detail, and when I do, I'll have more to say about it and my progress here.

In the meantime, I want to thank Mary Lois for all the encouragement she's given me over the past few years, to tell her how happy I am to have been able to return the favor in some small way, and to credit her for inspiring me now with her example to take better care of myself physically.

It's my hope that more and more people will discover this blog (and Mary Lois') and that we can become a community inspired to help ourselves and each other along the path to personal reinvention.