Good Money

A few days ago I heard someone use the term “good money”, a comment that I have heard quite often over the years. “Good money”, as far as I can tell, means that that person makes a lot of money for what they do.

Obviously, “good money” is a relative term. In this case a Waffle House server said that the cook there made “good money”. She went on to say that he makes about $16/hour. Since a server there typically makes about $4/hour plus tips, I’m sure $16/ hour to her sounds pretty good.

I’m sure that you, like I, have also heard the expression “chasing good money after bad.”  This can mean a lot of different things, but the gist of it is what happens when you refuse to cut your losses, when you keep putting time and money into a losing endeavor.  This leads to a couple of economic terms: “sunk cost” and “sunk cost fallacy”. A “sunk cost” is an expense that cannot be recovered regardless of the outcome. The “sunk cost fallacy” occurs when a business refuses to give up on a project because of all the time and money that has already been invested. This phenomenon applies to individuals as well as businesses.  Let’s say that you have non-refundable tickets to a concert. However, the day of the concert you’re sick and don’t feel like going, but you go anyway so that you don’t “lose your money.” Now you’re at the concert, but you can’t enjoy it because you feel so bad. So now you’ve lost the money and your night in bed recuperating.  Another aspect of the “sunk cost fallacy” is that the more time and money you’ve put into the endeavor, the greater the temptation to keep going even though it’s not working. Could this phenomenon apply to a relationship? I think so.

The first time I heard the term “good money” was when I was a teenager working for fifty cents an hour at the Levi Theater in Enterprise, Alabama. An associate who made the same as I did referenced a truck driver he knew who made $300 a week!  And he said that he made “good money.”  If you do the math, taking into consideration that the trucker drove about twelve hours a day, six days a week, then the pay wasn’t all that good after all. But $300/week sounded a lot better to a teenager than fifty cents an hour.

Part of my compensation at the Levi Theater was that I could see as many movies as I cared to free of charge. Now, theoretically, I’m making “good money!” Unfortunately, since I lived in a staunch Southern Baptist household,  my parents didn’t let me go to very many movies. So scratch that “good money” comment. Now I’m just making “money". And not much of that.

So how much money do you have to make in 2019 for it to qualify as “good money”? Not very much. It just has to be more than someone else who’s doing about the same thing for less. For the record, I wouldn't take any amount of money to be a Waffle House cook. Would I be an air traffic controller? Maybe. But not a Waffle House cook. After about an hour, I would be "covered and smothered" regardless of how much money I made. 

Feeling Good--Emotional Resources

During the 1980s, groundbreaking research by neuroscientists, neuroanatomists, and molecular biologists offered hope to those who are chronically anxious, prone to worry, subject to panic attacks, depressed and other negative emotions (stuck in grief, etc.). That research continued to be espoused in books like Feeling Good by David D. Burns in 2008 and recently in books like How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Barrett. The gist of all of these books and research is that emotions are controlled by our body chemistry, but the good news is that we control that chemistry. Turns out, our thoughts and our habits control that system. For example, you choose whether or not to intake opioids and other chemicals that you introduce to your body.  At first these “mind-altering drugs” make you feel good by manipulating this body chemistry. But after a while when these feel good biochemicals, such as dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins(d.o.s.e.), are depleted, you take these drugs not to feel good, but so you don’t feel bad. Since emotional resources are limited, your body no longer has the capacity to flood your system with these happy hormones(neurotransmitters), regardless of  how much of these foreign substances you ingest. You take  more, or inject more and more of these drugs to feel progressively worse. This pattern can lead to all the feelings you’re trying to avoid and ultimately to overdoes and suicide. You choose whether or not to eat responsibly and to exercise, both of which have a dramatic impact on releasing these happy hormones (d.o.s.e.). You choose what you think about. You can focus on some negative memory or event or you can choose to think about something good or happy. All of this affects whether or not your body is releasing d.o.s.e. or powerful chemicals such as adrenalin and cortisol, both of which can make you feel worse than you already do. Your nervous system tries to accommodate the way you want to feel.

Body chemistry is complicated. If you study the naturally occurring chemicals in your entire nervous system (your whole body), then you will become familiar with terms like synaptic connections, neuron-firing patterns, biochemical reactions, neurotransmitters, synapses and receptor cells. These body actions are the tip of the biochemical iceberg that influence your emotions. You will learn that “gut-reaction” is an actual physical and biochemical reality. Turns out there are more emotional-controlling biochemicals in your gut than in your brain.

If your formative years were in the 60s and 70s, as mine was, you heard the term “bummed out.”  This term originated with hippies as they dealt with the aftermath of drug experiences from psychedelic drugs such as LSD and “magic mushrooms.”  No doubt a “good trip” was nothing short of incredible—for example, seeing the notes coming out of the musical instruments, seeing the process of photosynthesis in a leaf. But the body had shot its wad and because of limited emotional resources these flower children were left with nothing but neurotransmitters such as cortisol in their system and bad feelings. Worse than that were the “bad trips” when the experience was negative and even horrifying.

Descartes is credited with saying, “I think, therefore I am.” If you want to overcome negative emotions, you must start by altering what you think about at any given time of day. Your thoughts, because of all of the above, control much of how you feel. The lines from the song Whistle a Happy Tune in The King and I include, “Make believe you’re brave and the trick will take you far. You can be as brave as you make believe you are.” To overcome negative emotions, you must discover and nurture positive emotions. Is it as simple as that? Not really, but it's a good start toward feeling good. 

Feeling "bummed out"? “A happy tune” can change those feelings in a hurry.

Emotional Resources

My counselor and I are working on this idea of “emotional resources.” In a few words he said, “David, we all have a limited amount of emotional resources. We all have to decide how to spend them.” I am finding that to be a very powerful statement. As an example, for years my extended family converged on the family beach house at Laguna Beach, Florida for the fourth of July weekend. The group included my grandmother, her sister, my aunts and uncles, my mother and father, my siblings, my cousins, my wife, our son and his cousins.   There were about 25 of us in all. Besides spending time in the “cottage” (slept all 25 people), we also played on the beach. My uncle always brought a boat and we went water skiing at “Phillips Inlet” about eight miles from the house. I had learned to ski and even to slalom at an early age and was really good on that ski. It was great fun for all of us. I had a reputation for being able to all but fall in  the water, regain my balance and keep skiing (they say it’s not bragging if you did it).

So what does remembering this family gathering have to do with “emotional resources”?  It  has everything to do with them.  This morning as I remembered those gatherings for over 30 years I felt a wave of sadness.  All but one uncle of that generation above me died several years ago.  I have lost touch with most of those cousins. Well really, all but one of them.  My sister, brother and I live in adjoining states and I only see them on  rare occasions. The beach house was sold to a stranger  years ago.  I don’t know who owns it now. So adding all that up, for a few minutes I felt pretty crummy about all of that. Then I heard my counselor say, “You have to decide how you spend your limited emotional resources.”  In this case I decided not to spend them in sadness over what was such a fabulous family tradition.  In spite of the losses, I chose to remember how good it was to be together with my extended family for all those years (and all those years ago).

The internet definition of  “emotional resources” includes this “:

“Emotional resources are the most important resources because it keeps people from returning to old habits. A lack of emotional resources refers to being able to choose and control emotional responses, particularly to negative situations, without engaging in self-destructive behavior.” I think something was not quoted correctly as it’s the employment of “emotional resources” that keeps us from “engaging in self-destructive behavior” and not the lack of them. Or possibly it’s saying, “Since there is a ‘lack of emotional resources’ you have to “choose and control emotional responses.”  In either case, thinking about all of this has really helped me to deal with my feelings prompted by memories of past situations. This has also helped me to deal with the current news cycle as I am deeply disturbed by so much that I read and see. I have to choose not to deplete my “emotional resources” on things that I can’t control (which is nearly everything).

The definition above also includes that “emotional resources are the most important resources.”  It doesn’t state that they are some of the most important resources or are among the most important resources, it states that “emotional resources are the most important resources.”  That includes a lot of resources!  That suggests that “emotional resources” are more important than, for example,  financial resources and relationship resources.  And if you think about it you will understand why.  It’s not what we have or who we hang out with  that makes us feel good or bad, but it’s how we think about and respond to other resources that makes us feel good or bad.

I have recently been introduced to a Christian singer named Audrey Assad. Her song "Drawn to You" has come to mean much to me.  One lyric in particular touches me every time. "After everything I've had, after everything I've lost, I'm still drawn to you.  "Drawn to 'you' doesn't have to be God or Jesus or anything of a spiritual nature' , it can be anything or anyone where you find hope, love and joy instead of grief, pain and sadness. Independence Day is as good a day as any to begin taking ownership of your emotions. It's not what has happened to us that affects the way we feel but how we choose to remember these things, how we think about them. I challenge you to discover your emotional resources and to use them to find joy and fulfillment.

Here My Am

“I am a writer if I never write another line, I am alive if I never step out of this room again; Christ, oh, Christ, the problem is not to stretch a feeling, it is to reduce a feeling, all feeling, all thought, all ecstasy, tangled and tumbled in the empty crowded head of a writer, to one clear sentence, one clear form, and still preserve the hugeness, the hurt-fulness, the enormity, the unbearable all-at-once-ness, of being alive and knowing it too…”  from the essay A Life in the Day of a Writer by Tess Slesinger. Published in the book Present Tense:The Arts of Living . Copyright 1941.

Today my wife and I completed an arduous task—cleaning out a WWII army surplus trunk that I inherited from my sister ten years ago who inherited it from our  mother some years before that.  Mother was a hoarder of sorts. It was not the kind of hoarding that would make it to Buried Alive, but it was hoarding.  Besides textbooks from my  father’s college days at Auburn, she kept his notebooks, assignment books and correspondence.  In 2001 when my wife and my sister cleaned out our “home place” after mother went to assisted living, they found a mountain of paper in drawers and chests that featured her three children in church bulletins, school grade books,  the local paper, anything and everything that printed our names and our accomplishments. Just like my wife and sister did in 2001, most of the contents of the trunk went in the garbage, to save my son from throwing them away after we’re gone.  I did keep some of my dad’s composition books that include his writing and his sketches.  As I was throwing his engineering textbooks one by  one  in the garbage, I decided to keep three books that weren’t technical in nature.  Turns out, two  of them were my mother’s books from Judson College and not his. One of them is the book from which I quoted  The Arts of Living. That book, as I mentioned, was copyrighted in ’41. The cover includes the “All Rights Reserved” and language and instructions to not reprint any part of it in any form.  Don’t I remember something about after 50 years copyrighted material becomes a part of the public domain?  Well, be that as it may, I’ll take my chances.

One of my readers complained that I haven’t been writing.  Something happened either to my blog or to Facebook, but according to the Blogspot analytics, my 200 or so readers has shrunk to ten to twenty. I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.  But a few days ago my counselor said, “David, don’t you enjoy  writing?” And I said, “Yes I do.”  “Then what difference does it make who reads it? You benefit from it even if no one else ever sees it.” Good point. So here my am (the way a certain three year old in our lives would say it). Just as it was true for Slesinger, writing helps me to create “one clear sentence, one clear form” from “the tangled and tumbled” thoughts in my head.

That three year old is named Cole. For all his life we’ve called him “Baby Cole” and we still do.  Yesterday, as he and his family were leaving our  house, he was playing on the driveway.  He had his arms extended, swaying in and out,  flying like an airplane and making airplane noises.  His older sister said, “Cole, what is that?” And he answered “Baby Cole.” His sister was thirteen years old when her family took us in. Now she’s driving. It was a gut check to see that child driving away with her siblings and no adults in the car. Her mom was in another car. “As you age, you get older.”

I don’t know what’s going to become of me and my writing. Well, I know what’s going to become of me, but hopefully that’s some years down the road.  But I try to live my life every day. “A life in the day” as Slesinger wrote.  Hopefully, at least some of my writing will outlive me. If so, I will have achieved some level of immortality.

So here my am. Ready, willing and able to scratch up my thoughts and feelings here.  Tossing the contents of that trunk wasn't easy. I’ve gotten rid of its contents, now to get rid of the trunk.

A New Publication--The Lizard Way by David R. Helms

I’ve been writing and “publishing” to my Facebook audience for about twelve years. My “Facebook notes” eventually became a blog. But I published those posts to Facebook, as well. My Facebook friends were my only readers. That’s about to change. Since the beginning of this pilgrimage of thoughts and words, several readers have said, “I really enjoy reading your stuff, but you need to publish to a wider audience.  More people need to read this.” That’s about to happen. A publisher called Nurturing Faith has accepted my manuscript for publication.  “Nurturing Faith” might sound like a “Christian publisher” and it is, but they publish a wide variety of books including manuscripts like mine.  They would not have accepted my book if it they only published works that are churchy and devotional in nature. Although Nurturing Faith has its roots in the SBC (Southern Baptist Convention), the tree you see is in the CBF(Cooperative Baptist Fellowship) and its publication Baptists Today.  The CBF sprung to life during the takeover of the SBC by radical fundamentalists during the late 70s and early 80s.  This misguided group of Baptists, whose leaders have been exposed as hypocrites and charlatans , used the inspiration of the Bible to divide families, churches, colleges and seminaries, and eventually the denomination. The CBF then was made of disenfranchised Southern Baptists who were not ready to give up the name, but wanted to give up the fight and find again a place of warmth and inclusion under the banner of “Baptists”. There are rumors that the SBC is swinging back to the left toward normalcy, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

During the process of getting this book published, I’ve done very little writing and much reading. I’ve read a number of books especially of American history, more particularly America’s westward expansion in the 1800s.  I’m reading a book now by an author I really enjoy. The book is PrairyErth by William Least Heat-Moon.  I read and adored his Blue Highways many years ago and decided to read this one. The book is about one county in Kansas, Chase County. And totally by coincidence (or Providence) it includes much history of America's westward expansion during the 1800s.  It’s the Walden of travelogues, the Pilgrim at Tinker Creek of documentaries.  On page 203 refers to  a diary of a “pioneer woman” in 1862.  “Seen together, her little penciled accounts go against the conventional notion that pioneer life was all toil and burden, an eking out of drudging survival and little else: Elizabeth’s pages reveal horseback trips out to Jacob’s Mound, canoe trips on the Cottonwood, and overnight visits with friends.  Her pleasures may have been simple, but they are abundant.”  And I thought, “That’s what I’ve been scratching up all these years, my simple pleasures”. 

My “publications” began in March of 2008 with a memorial to my then recently deceased mixed shepherd, Maggie.  I did the best I could do in about 1,000 words to convey her physical beauty, her personality, my love for her and my grief for her sickness and death. Since the response was immediate and positive I just kept writing and hitting “publish”.  So now Nurturing Faith tells me that they want to publish my book.  To think that the editors feel that “my simple pleasures” are worth their audience means much to me.  And  your encouragement to seek that larger audience means much to me as well.  I’ve suggested as my title either  In a Different Light(the title of my blog) or The Lizard Way (the title of one of my blog posts).  Either one is fine with me. 

This future publication by “Baptists” brings it all full circle for me.  I grew up in a Baptist Church. I graduated from a Baptist college and seminary.  Baptists birthed me, burped me, diapered me and sent me on my way.  I’ve traveled far and wide since then and  now it’s Baptists, after these many years,   who want to publish my words. Go figure. A distant cousin who I’ve never met, one of my first Facebook readers, told me, “David,  you have become one of my favorite authors.”  Considering who she read, I took that as a high compliment.  I have not felt like I deserved the tittle, but now thanks to the editors of Nurturing Faith, author” is going to become a reality.  My dear Facebook reader, thanks for being a vital part of this pilgrimage. After the book is published, you will be among the first to know.

Intermezzo

intermezzo--a usually brief musical interlude or diversion.

coda--the concluding passage of a piece or movement, typically forming an addition to the basic structure.

I enjoy music. I used to enjoy making music as a church and school music director, and as a vocalist. Those days are behind me. So now I enjoy listening to music.  I listen to a wide variety of music including Classical, choral music, Christian music and popular music, especially from the  60s and 70s (my formative  years). At home I use Spotify as my medium.  Besides the many playlists I have created, I make good use of the search box to find any song or composer I care to listen to. I employ the Spotify "radio stations" as well. Spotify is a wellspring of unending musical pleasure. On the road I listen to Sirius/XM radio. The ability to drive across the country (hypothetically) while listening to the same station is quite phenomenal. The only time I lose the signal is while driving slowly under an overpass or through a tunnel. Other than that, XM plays an uninterrupted stream of my favorite music.

Listening to music as often as I do, I have come to notice things about certain types of music and certain songs. Most popular music lasts about three to three and a half minutes. Some songs, however, last much longer. Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, for example, lasts over eight minutes. The Eagle's Hotel California lasts nearly seven minutes.  The Beatles' Hey Jude lasts over seven minutes. There is something else that Hotel California and Hey Jude share in common. They each have an extended  coda.  Listening to my favorite songs over the years, I've noticed that I tend to tune out the interludes while waiting for the song (the vocals) to start again.  And then it gradually got in my head that the introduction, interludes and codas are just as important as the vocals. But I noticed something else. In Hotel California as soon as Don Henley finishes the line, "You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave", the guitar solo starts. To my ear it sounds like an intermezzo, an interlude. Musically, it sounds like the vocals are "to be continued".But then I realized the song ends with that guitar solo. As soon as that solo begins, the vocals are done.  That two minute guitar coda has been named as the best guitar solo in all of music. It's not just tacked on to fill time; it's important music.  And then listening to Hey Jude for the nth time I thought "that 'nah nah nah nah, hey Jude' part goes on a long time". So I timed it.  It goes on nearly four minutes. Four minutes!  Most popular songs don't last four minutes. The Beatles must have thought it was important. And they were right.

In our lives we tend to think that some parts of the day are better than others, are more important than others. During some parts of the day we are marking time until we can get on with the things that really matter. There's nothing wrong with feeling that way. No doubt, most of us treasure the time with family and friends over time we spend on the clock.  On the other hand, unless we're fully retired or independently wealthy, even if we don't particularly enjoy our job,  that time on the clock is, at least, a means to an end. It facilitates that time with those special people, which makes the time at work just as important as the time at home. Another thing, how many more office shootings will it take for us to realize that we don't have any control over when and where we will draw our last breath. That coffee break may end up being that long "coda" of life after death. When we walked away from our desk, we never walked back. It wasn't just a "break" after all;  it was the grand finale!

Maybe you don't listen to as much music intentionally as I do, and maybe you don't want to. But when you find yourself listening at home, at work or in the car, instead of it just being a distraction, tune into the song and you may be surprised what all you find. And if you don't find all you want to know by listening, use Google and Wikipedia like I do. "Nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah hey Jude". The end.

The Speed of Music

When I listen to music, I feel like the music is moving toward some unknown destination. I don't mean just that it makes me want to move, I mean that the music itself is moving.  Like you, I read a page left to right and top to bottom. If I'm reading a novel or the daily newspaper, I read left to right and top to bottom.  It's the same with music. I read a sheet of music left to right and top to bottom. Because of that, when I'm listening to music, I'm hearing the music moving left to right from its beginning to end.  If I imagine I'm facing north, then the music is moving west to east.

As I hand the young lady at the desk my key tag at the gym, I chuckle to myself when she says, "I hope you enjoy your workout."  "Workout" to me involves great effort and lots of sweat. I intend to do neither. I spend 40 minutes or so walking on a  treadmill at a brisk pace and then another fifteen minutes lifting and pulling weights. No sweat. I'm "keeping the mass in motion" as my wife puts it. Like many people at the gym,  I listen to music while I "work out." Unlike most people who use the beat of the music to rev them up, my playlists consist of my favorite music.  Some of the songs have a steady beat, but many of them do not. I just enjoy the music while I'm walking and using the gym equipment.

Although I am not looking for some specific beat, or "workout" music, many times I realize that the beat of the music is very close to my pace. When that happens I adjust my speed and my step so that I'm walking in time with the music. A few days ago when this happened, I was walking at 3 mph, or a 20 minute mile. That's when it occurred to me that the music was moving at 3 mph. As the playlist continued song by song, I paid attention to the speed of the music.  I learned that most music that  I listen to moves west to east between 2.5 mph and 4 mph. There are outliers such as "Desperado" on the slow side and "Boys of Summer" on the fast, but they are the exception and not the rule.

I know of no practical use for this information. There is benefit to walking on a treadmill. There is benefit to listening to music you enjoy. There's benefit for doing them simultaneously.  I'm not sure there's any benefit for assigning a speed to that music. A recent study suggests that there is benefit for even 10 minutes of exercise per week. That's good to know. At 3 miles per hour, I don't have to go back to the gym for a month.