The Arc of Memory

This started out as a post about horseback riding and ended up being about the nature of memory. I was out of town with my sister at a ranch in the Arizonan desert. For four days, we rode horses once in the morning, once in the evening to avoid the midday heat. It made me think about the first time I rode a horse. This is how I tell that story…

I was about eight years old and I was at a friend’s birthday party where the activity was to go horseback riding at a local park. We were a small group, maybe five or six kids. I was in jeans and a t-shirt, hair in ponytails, ready to go. I don’t recall receiving much instruction, or perhaps I just didn’t pay much attention to it, what with me being eight and all. My horse’s name was Blue.

The ride started just fine, everyone in single file walking orderly along the trail. At some point though, without warning or provocation (at least that I saw), Blue reared his head and charged forward away from the group. I’d never experienced such fear and lack of control. I managed to hold on to the reins, but not much else. This was Blue’s ride, not mine. I was a mere passenger. I’m sure there was screaming involved (horses always respond well to that!), and eventually the guide caught up to me, and along with me finally pulling back on the reins, he got the situation under control.

That’s the end of the memory for me – short, quick, scary as hell. Did we have cake and open presents afterwards? Were there tears? No clue.

I’ve carried this memory with me in one shape or another for about four decades.

Here’s how my sister remembers it…

She says we lived in Charleston at the time. She was eleven and I was eight. In fact, she was just turning eleven because the birthday party we were at was hers. We were there with Tina and Cheryl Watkins, two of our friends who were also sisters. There may have been one or two other girls with us. 

My sister says she wore jeans and a t-shirt, hair in ponytails, ready to go. Her horse’s name was Blue.

The ride started out fine, but at some point, without warning or provocation, Blue reared his head and charged away from the group. My sister had never experienced such fear. She recalls Blue racing off in to the woods. (My memory barely has a tree in it.)

This is her memory. She’s carried it with her for almost four decades.

I don’t recall ever having talked to her about this until recently. I was asking her more details about the day to round out my memory since I wanted to write about it. That’s how I fell upon the fact (I now use that term loosely) that we have this shared but skewed memory. I’m almost afraid to quiz her on other life events.

But the kicker was when we asked our mother, thinking she could break the tie. How did she remember it? Did she remember it at all?

This was all via text message.

ME: Do you remember when we went horseback riding in Charleston? And do you remember the horse that ran off?

MOTHER: Yes, I remember.

ME: Who do you think was riding the horse?

MOTHER: Cheryl Watkins

What???? So much for the tie breaker. I don’t quite know what to make of this. I was young at the time. I have no reason to trust my memory more than my sister’s or my mother’s, but even they don’t recall it the same way. It seems I’ve co-opted something that isn’t mine. How many of my other memories aren’t mine?

Perhaps, in the end, it’s all just fiction.

Why Is Procrastination A Four-Letter Word?

Okay, it’s True Confession time: I’m a world-class procrastinator. I mean, the kind worthy of tiaras, statues, and waving from podiums. What’s that saying? Anything worth doing is worth doing well? Well, I seem to have applied that philosophy to procrastinating. Probably not the original intention.

As a child, I recall this being an issue with schoolwork. I always got everything done, mind you, but it was often at the last gasp. It wasn’t even a state I was aware of until my mother brought it to my attention. She might have 1/8 of a gram of procrastination in her. It just isn’t her way. I’m sure it frustrated her to have a child who had mega doses of a trait she couldn’t understand. But worse than not being able to understand it, she couldn’t remediate it. Oh, how she tried.

I was probably at my best during college. I was so concerned that my lack of discipline was going to lead to my intellectual decline, that I over-compensated and studied like a fiend. I kept a notebook where I tallied my study hours each day, totaling them at the end of each week and month. While it may have thrilled my mother, I’d gone overboard and longed for my days of waiting till the last minute. By my junior year of college, I’d abandoned the notebook for something that felt a little more natural for me. Plus, I was sure I wasn’t going to flunk out and shame the family name at that point, so it was okay if I backed off a bit.

As an adult, I can’t say this trait hasn’t driven me crazy many times. It often makes me feel undisciplined, unfocused and lazy, assuming that I could right the ship if I really wanted to complete the task badly enough.

In moments where I’m feeling a little more generous with myself, I wonder if the procrastination serves a purpose that I have yet to identify and appreciate. While it’s true that I may need to do A, but set about doing B through F before circling back, at least I’ve completed B through F. In fact, in some cases, I can absolutely say that in my attempt to procrastinate, I become oddly productive. Maybe not productive at the thing I needed to be doing, but productive nonetheless.

There’s a wealth of information and research about procrastination. It seems to occupy the collective conscience in a way rarely seen with other personality traits. Procrastination is rarely seen as positive. More often it’s considered maladaptive and something to be fixed. When I contemplate the nature of my procrastinating (probably in an attempt to delay working on something else), I make the following observations:

1. It seems so fundamental to my nature that I’m not convinced eradicating it is a valuable exercise. I think I’d get more mileage and benefits from finding ways to manage and understand it.
2. When I look at the tasks I tend to delay, they’re things that require high degrees of concentration. I convince myself that it will take a long time to get to that particular state of mind; and once there, it’s likely that someone will call, stop by, or send an email with a pressing and urgent technical matter. I don’t want to start until I have relative certainty that I have a healthy block of time to devote to the task. You can see how that may never happen…
3. I’ve identified the conditions under which I concentrate best and attempt to replicate them quickly each day, regardless of whether or not I may be faced with those tasks. If the environment is available consistently, then things seem to flow better. It’s kind of the “build it and they will come” strategy.
4. And, finally, because there’s still a part of me that thinks I just need to get over it already, shape up, and stop obsessing over what needs to get done and just GET IT DONE, I’m still working on curing myself. I don’t want to be so precious about the necessary conditions. With the nature of my work, I’m rarely in environments of my own choosing. I work at client sites and you take the space they give you. I’ve set up my laptop on the corner of a bench with a pile of blankets as a chair. I’ve sat in the middle of a production floor on a metal folding chair, having to break every few hours to go find a power source. I might spend a few days one place and a few days at another, ever-changing conditions that don’t provide for such luxury that my delicate sensibilities may think they need. So I try to train myself to just get stuff done. Make a list. Prioritize it and go. Minimize the time thinking about the list. Thinking – that’s the real issue. That can derail me every time…

Are you a procrastinator? Perhaps a recovering procrastinator with a 12-step program you want to share?? I’m definitely still a work in progress. Hope I always will be!

#Expo2015 – Milan Welcomes the World

For six months this year, Milan has expanded beyond its fashion and design personality to act as a window to the world for Expo 2015. The Expo used to be better known as the World’s Fair, but over time, the Expo has prevailed. Major, or universal expositions (like the current one in Milan) take place every five years. The last one was in Shanghai in 2010 and had the theme “Better City, Better Life”. In between the Shanghai Expo and the current one, there was a smaller one held in South Korea. This intermediate event was considered a specialized exposition, one that usually lasts for three months and has a more narrowly defined theme; in this case, “The Living Ocean and Coast”.

The theme for Expo 2015 surrounds food and feeding the world – “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”. The Expo is a mammoth event with participation from over 140 countries, each with its own pavilion showcasing foods abundant in the area, strategies for agricultural growth, and general cultural information. There are special events throughout the day, tons of activities for families and kids; and if you’d been around in June, you would have been witness to the setting of a world’s record for the longest pizza.

In the many months (May-October) that the Expo has been in Milan, I sadly only managed to make a single evening visit in late August. (And, yes, I know there’s still time between now and the closing in October, but I’m back in the US without plans to return to Italy until November.)

So, here’s my evening at Expo 2015…

We left the city center on the metro at about 6pm on a Saturday, along with a couple hundred of our closest friends, a few more piling into the cars with each stop. The evening Expo ticket is a bargain at 5€ (the full day pass is 39€), and is good from 7pm until closing (11pm or midnight, depending on day of the week). Although the metro station is within easy walking distance from the ticket booths and general entrance, it’s a long slog from the turnstiles to the real center of activity. There are several entrances though, so find the one that works for you, wear comfortable walking shoes, and bring an extra dose of patience if you’re someone who doesn’t readily embrace crowds!

We stood looking at these statues, each honoring certain categories of food – sweets, fruits, meats, bread, wine (my kind of category!), while also trying to make sense of the map so we could plan our time. You may want to skip this step…the map can be overwhelming. Don’t get me wrong – I love a good map, but this one only served to let us know how sprawling the event is, and that chances were low, even with the best plan, that we would see everything we hoped to during the remaining evening hours.

The better plan was for us to take it as it came. Follow what looks interesting, try something you didn’t think you would, and keep the map handy should you find yourself hopelessly lost somewhere around the backside of Poland. Trust me. This can happen.

For me, the highlight of the evening was arriving in Argentina just a few minutes in advance of a fantastically fun dancing and music performance. Not surprisingly, the

line for food in Argentina was discouragingly long. It almost caused us to turn away, but thankfully we navigated around the lines of hungry folk and started walking up a circular ramp. We ended up one floor above ground, facing a stage with a screen indicating a show was starting in about five minutes. The show was 20-30 minutes of nonstop action, and we had the best view in the place.

The Expo is where entertainment meets education. After our stint at Argentina, we flowed through a couple other countries and wound our way over to the chocolate section. We watched a video about the (incredibly elaborate) process required to go from cacao bean to edible chocolate. It’s quite involved and made me feel guilty (which didn’t last long!) for munching down a bar so quickly without much consideration of what it took to make it.

When our stomachs started grumbling we headed for the food trucks in the America section. The lines were manageable and the food familiar. We’d been inundated with so many wonderful aromas as we moved from pavilion to pavilion. Trying something new would have been the adventurous play. In any case, Food Truck Nation was where we ended up. I had the spicy shrimp roll. Can we say, “yum”?

After dinner we skated through a few more places and made it back to the Tree of Life in time for its presentation of lights. Simply lovely, and while I’ve never seen it during the day, I can’t imagine that the backdrop of the night sky isn’t the preferred way to see it.

Time’s running short to plan your visit to Expo 2015, but if you find yourself in the vicinity of Milan between now and mid-October, make the effort to get there. It won’t happen again for another five years. And at that point, you’ll need to be in the vicinity of Dubai. If you can’t make it there in person, or even if you can, here are some social media accounts that can give you the flavor of what’s happening:

Instagram:

@Expo2015Milano – official site for the Expo

@USAPavilion2015 – official site for the US Pavilion

@UKPavilion2015 – official site for the UK Pavilion

Twitter:

@Expo2015Milano – official site for the Expo

@BioParkExpo2015 – site dedicated to the biodiversity park within the Expo grounds

@USAPavilion2015 – official site for the US Pavilion

@UKPavilion2015 – official site for the UK Pavilion