Balance

By Dan Crane

A few years ago, I had lunch with the guy who created MacGyver. No, he didn’t teach me how to defuse a bomb with a stick of bubblegum and a paperclip. He did, however, teach me something interesting about creativity and energy.

“Whenever I have a script to write,” he told me, “I’ll write a question on my whiteboard. For example: 'What happens in Act Three?' Or, 'How would MacGyver escape having to have lunch with this young man?'”

I didn't know what to say to that. I said nothing.

“After that,” he said, “I’ll go build a model airplane.”

It might not surprise you to learn that the guy who created MacGyver builds fleets of model airplanes; but it might surprise you that he does it instead of writing scripts. Let me repeat: INSTEAD OF WRITING SCRIPTS.

He explained: The mind, he proclaimed, does its best creative work while at rest. Posing a question, then going away to do something else, was a way to level off, rest the mind, and let the subconscious take over. Basically, it’s like meditation—with the help of model airplane glue.

“It’s why people say they do their best thinking in the shower,” he said.

After our lunch, I went out and bought a model airplane. One day, I swear I’ll get around to building it.

Is there enough play in your work?

Dan Crane is a journalist, author, comedian, host, musician, and retired competitive air-guitarist. He is the author of To Air is Human: One Man’s Quest to Become the World’s Greatest Air Guitarist.

Building Community

Nicki Pombier Berger

A friend of mine on Facebook has some extreme political views and an extreme interest in expressing them. We were once friends in real life, more than a decade ago, but now he is just a voice online, a welter of words and opinions. In the wake of every outburst I always wonder: what happened?

He was my first college friend. We met in the dorm elevator, Day One. He lived one floor below me, and we evolved a system of communication. He’d blast a song he knew I liked; I’d feel its bass in the cinderblock walls; I’d send a bucket on a string out the window down to him, with a note requesting another. I don’t know whom I hear in our exchanges these days. Sometimes I think I hear the undoing of our past communication, or its unmasking. I thought it was conversation, but maybe he was only ever down there, in the blare of what he wanted to hear, alone.  

How do you build a community without consensus?

Nicki Pombier Berger is a writer in Brooklyn and the co-founder of the Underwater New York literary salon.

Defining Moments

By Wayne Koestenbaum

I’m trying to figure out why — or how — or if — I became intellectual.

One place to begin: the time my mother “pulled a knife” on my father.

The expression “pulled a knife” — is it correct?

I think a kitchen knife.

Certainly a knife from the kitchen drawer.

Probably not a steak knife.

Perhaps a bread knife.

Just a soft-edged, relatively harmless butter knife.

Let’s say she was making a statement.

Her performance had two direct witnesses.

One, my father. He saw her “pull the knife.”

Two, my father’s aunt, Alice.

Seated in a black chair, she was waiting for my father to drive her home.

My father and his Aunt Alice often spoke together in German.

My mother didn’t understand German.

I imagine that she “pulled the knife” as a performance directly aimed at the aunt.

The act — “pulling a knife” — had two other indirect witnesses.

My sister saw it. I saw it. We were standing in the hallway. Later, we talked about the incident.

It has become, for us, a touchstone.

“The time Mom pulled a knife on Dad”: that scene is a card we sometimes play; a trick we pull out of our hat; a piece of evidence.

[From “Heidegger’s Mistress,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 2, Spring 2006]

What is a childhood experience that became a touchstone for you?

Wayne Koestenbaum is an American poet and critic whose works include The Queen's Threat and Jackie Under My Skin.

Being Aware

By Carl Jung

Anybody whose calling it is to guide souls should have his own soul guided first, so that he knows what it means to deal with the human soul. Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people. It would not help you very much to study books only, though it is indispensable, too. But it would help you most to have a personal insight into the secrets of the human soul. Otherwise everything remains a clever intellectual trick, consisting of empty words and leading to empty talk. If you have a close friend, try to look behind his or her screen in order to discover yourself. That would be a good beginning.

Can you help others understand themselves before you understand yourself?

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychoanalyst and author.

Coincidence

By Ben Greenman

I dreamed there was a painting called James Brown’s Prison Shoes, and it showed just a bunk and then six pairs beneath it, each pair squared off so perfectly that they were like one thing, and the six things parked like cars in a rich man’s garage, green leather, red leather, brown leather, black leather, black leather, black leather. It was a strange thing to dream about: a painting. In the dream I was just standing in front of it, wondering whether I would be shown other paintings as well. I was not.

A few weeks later I read a poem by Terrance Hayes that also mentioned those same shoes. Were I more rational or less interested in invisible wires making invisible networks, I would have assumed that he had run across a mention of the shoes in a news article, or biography, or television special at roughly the same time that I had, and that the seed had produced two sprouts in two different minds. But I was not particularly rational that day, and so I wondered if he had dreamed the same dream.

Do you think two people can have the same thought at the same time?

Ben Greenman is a New York Times-bestselling author who has written both fiction and nonfiction.

Awakening

By B.J. Miller

We all need a reason to wake up. For me, it was 11,000 volts of electricity. One night, sophomore year of college, a few friends and I were out on the town; one thing led to another, and we decided to climb a parked commuter train. Fun, no? I scurried up the ladder on the back, and when I stood up, whammo!  The current arced to my metal wristwatch, entered my arm, and blew down and out my feet. I lost half of an arm and both legs below the knee. I spent a few months recovering in the St Barnabas burn unit in Livingston, NJ. One day, several weeks in to the affair, it began to snow. I was told it was coming down hard and pretty. Around that time, a friend of mine smuggled a snowball into the burn unit for me. I cannot tell you the rapture I felt. The sensation of coldness on my skin, the miracle of it as I watched it melt to water. In that moment, I was amazed enough to be any part of this planet in this universe that whether I lived or died became irrelevant.

Are you awake—really awake—right now?

B.J. Miller is a pain doctor and the Senior Director and Advocate of Zen Hospice Project.

Talent

By Nicole Spector

As a child I never cared for poetry because I felt I couldn’t write it right. It employed structures that felt menacingly mathematical. Stanzas and couplets—how could I remember all that? I preferred the straightforward sloppiness of prose. But when I was 13, I discovered Sylvia Plath and became obsessed. I wrote poems that mirrored her style exactly and gave them to my mother, who read mostly Anne Rice. “Read this Sylvia Plath poem,” I would say.  

She would. “I think you wrote this,” she would say. Bad answer.

Eventually I went to the Ouija board to share my newfound talent with dead relatives. One had helped me find lost jewelry in the past.

“Stick to stories,” a spirit told me.
 

When is the last time you tried or dedicated yourself to something that doesn’t come easily to you?

Nicole Spector is a writer and journalist living in New York. She is the author of Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray.

Communication

By Theodore Dreiser

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. Here were these two, bandying little phrases, drawing purses, looking at cards, and both unconscious of how inarticulate all their real feelings were. Neither was wise enough o be sure of the workings of the mind of the other. He could not tell how his luring succeeded. She could not realize that she was drifting, until he secured her address. Now she felt that she had yielded something—he, that he had gained a victory. Already they felt that they were somehow associated. Already he took control in directing the conversation. His words were easy. Her manner was relaxed.

In the century-plus since this passage was written, how has technology changed the way we communicate? 

Theodore Dreiser was a novelist who wrote such works as Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy.

Family

By Andy Corren

Mom has a plus-sized can of Maxwell House Coffee clutched to her bosoms, one of those Costco-sized cans you buy for your office, or your camper, or for visiting one of your sons at the Hyde Correctional Institution. Which she has had to do once. Okay, four or five times. Mom doesn’t drink coffee—it makes her paranoid. I sense things are amiss. Why would she carry an entire barrel of coffee on the plane, all the way from Miami to Newport News to Kill Devil Hills? She knows full well you can buy whole beans at the Food Lion for $4.99 a pound. Renay Mandel Corren clearly has a plan.

All I want to do with what’s left of this non-celebratory Passover day is curl up on the couch, watch TV with my probably-gay nephew, gently program him with correct homosexual diction.

I’m too old for my mom to plan for me. So I pretend I don’t see “Free Haggadah With Purchase!” written on the front of the coffee tub. I pretend I don’t see her ripping open a cellophane bag filled with tiny little Jewish hand booklets, and strewing them over the table, her eyes glowing with an unaccustomed religious fervor.

“I didn’t buy it for the coffee!” she triumphantly exults, “I bought it for the free Passover kit!”

Have you ever had a total holiday fail? What did you learn from it?

Andy Corren is a talent manager and playwright in Los Angeles.

Reflecting

It’s time to take stock of your year. It’s happening this week in a financial sense, as you pay taxes. But it’s also happening right here in the Friday sense, with the help of these five questions. Answer them quickly and accurately, and then spend your evening thinking about your answers.

This week's content is brought to you by 10Q, a Reboot project that engages you annually in a series of contemplative questions around the Jewish High Holidays.

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Describe a significant experience that has happened in the past year. How did it affect you? Are you grateful? Relieved? Resentful? Inspired?

Is there something that you wish you had done differently this past year? Alternatively, is there something you're especially proud of from this past year?

Think about a milestone that happened with your family this past year. How has this affected you?

Describe an event in the world that has impacted you this year. How? Why?

Have you had any particularly spiritual experiences this past year? How has this experience affected you? (“Spiritual” can be broadly defined to include secular spiritual experiences: artistic, cultural, and so forth.)

Moving On

By Jonathan Ames

I was going to write that my heart feels less now that I’m older. I thought this because I was recalling how I used to weep while listening to Cat Stevens. I was eighteen and my heart was broken and I was driving my car on a long trip and for hours I would just play over and over my Cat Stevens album, which was, I believe, Tea for the Tillerman, and all the while I would cry, thinking about the girl I had lost.

So as I sat down to write just now, I didn’t think I could cry like that any more. But I put on a Cat Stevens greatest hits album to reacquaint myself with the music, and maybe because it’s first thing in the morning and I’m tired, but, in my mind, I was back in that car, I was eighteen again, except I was imagining what it would be like to lose someone now, and I felt the tears coming. I felt like I could weep. I didn’t, but I could have. I turned off the music and the water left my eyes and my heart closed; that is, it went back to normal.

There’s something a bit seductive, though, about crying. I sort of wish I hadn’t stopped myself. But I guess it would be melodramatic to cry about a heartbreak that hasn’t happened. Recently I was terribly worried about something that could possibly occur in the future — something that could go wrong, a small personal disaster — and a friend of mine, quoting some Hindu text, said, “The problem that hasn’t happened yet does not exist.” I like that quote; it’s been very helpful lately. [From “Cat Stevens,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 6, Fall 2007]

Do you allow fear of the unknown to impact your decisions?

Jonathan Ames is the author of a number of books, including Wake Up Sir, and the creator of the HBO show Bored to Death.

Tech

By Ben Greenman

Everyone knocks technology, especially social networking. Everyone worries that the Internet is giving us a false sense of connection while in fact creating new kinds of separation and isolation. Everyone worries that sites like Twitter and Facebook are encouraging us to curate our lives rather than be honest about them, to present ourselves in a favorable light to others rather than keep our own counsel. Everyone wants to lament that children today are harmed by the immediate gratification of sites like Wikipedia. None of this is true. The Internet and particularly social networking is the greatest means ever invented to represent ourselves authentically. The notion of human identity—of the individual—is stronger than it has ever been, thanks to the Internet.

Is this an April Fool’s piece?

Ben Greenman is a bestselling author who has written both fiction and nonfiction.

Creating a Ritual

By Allan Gerson and Daniela Gerson

A Shabbat haiku:

A shot of lightness

Sent to all your dearest ones

Before sun goes down

How do you do a Shabbat haiku?

Write what's on your mind about the week that was, or the moment that is now. Don't worry about style or conforming to haiku's ancient rules. Keep it short and sweet. Prepare for your day of rest by spreading warmth to those you love. Maybe even send your haiku to friends and family.

Allan Gerson is a retired attorney and author; Daniela Gerson, his daughter, is the community engagement editor at the Los Angeles Times.

Waking Up

By Julie Hermelin

I picked at the bandage of my new tattoo. When we decided to get the tattoos that morning, I sketched something quickly on a napkin while we ate our eggs. “What’s that?” Joy asked. “Just something I’ve been doodling.” I didn’t mention that to my eyes the six points made up an abstract Jewish star bursting open. When the tattoo artist offered to put special “glow in the dark” ink in the center, I eagerly accepted.

How do you awaken?

Julie Hermelin is a storyteller, idea generator, filmmaker, and co-founder of Momstamp. She lives in LA with her three monkey children.

Progress

By Edgar Allen Poe

There is, perhaps, no point in the history of the useful arts more remarkable than the fact, that during the last two thousand years, the world has been able to make no essential improvements in road-making. It may well be questioned if the Gothamites of 3845 will distinguish any traces of our Third Avenue: and in the matter of street-pavement, properly so called, although of late, universal attention has been directed to the subject, and experiment after experiment has been tried, exhausting the ingenuity of all modern engineers, it appears that we have at last settled on a result which differs in no material degree, and in principle not at all, from that which the Romans attained, as if instinctively, in the Via Appia, Via Tusculana, and others. The streets in Pompeii were constructed on the very principle which is considered best by the moderns: or if there be any especial variation, it certainly is not to the credit of modern ingenuity.

What’s one way that the world has improved in the last ten years, and one way it hasn’t?

Edgar Allen Poe was an American prose writer and poet.

Unplugging

By Ben Greenman

I would like to say that I unplugged because of an interest in higher orders of spirituality and connectedness, but the truth is that my wife gave me an ultimatum.

“I’m sick of this,” she said. “You have the phone on your night table when you go to sleep.”

“To listen to the news,” I said. “Like a radio.”

“And then I wake up and it’s in your hand.”

“To check the time,” I said. “Like an alarm clock.”

“But a clock radio’s not always occupying your head and your hands. And you don’t take an extra thirty seconds with a clock radio to text a friend or watch a video or look up obscure song lyrics.”

“Though that would be a good clock radio,” I said.

“Stop it,” she said. “I’m serious.” When someone says they’re serious in a joking tone, you can joke back. When someone says they’re serious in a serious tone, it’s a good idea to try to do what they’re telling you to do, particularly if the person doing the telling is a usually patient wife.

I didn’t completely unplug in the sense that I did away with all devices. I used my Sonos speakers, along with one smart lightbulb I got as a novelty gift but that ended up being immensely helpful for brightening or dimming my office. But I did what she said. I put my phone out of arm’s reach while I slept or ate or sat and read. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t holding it. It was that I didn’t, for a moment, know exactly where it was. During those times. I couldn’t check for emails or texts. I couldn’t look at Twitter feeds.

I’d like to report that it changed everything.  The truth, though, is that it changed only small things. I felt more relaxed. I recovered some measure of internal monologue. I got to do different things with my hands—I started doodling again, which hasn’t happened since the early part of the century. But those are seeds, and seeds grow.

What can you do when you unplug?

Ben Greenman is a New York Times-bestselling author who has published both fiction and nonfiction. His most recent novel is The Slippage.

Crisis

By Ben Greenman

Everybody has seen movies with gurus who advise inner calm. “Take a break,” they say. ‘Take a breath.”

Everybody has seen other movies with people who face life by clenching their jaw and soldiering forth. 

Everybody has to make that choice.

Everybody has trouble with the world. That’s one of the things the world’s for: to give us trouble. Sometimes it is trouble within the self. Other times it is trouble that takes the form of watching someone else in trouble, especially a loved one.

Everybody wonders, in those moments, about the best strategy. What will it take to dissolve the trouble? Can it be dissipated through peaceful waiting? Must it be attacked with weapons? Do you have to understand trouble to combat it?

Everybody has to make that choice—and not just make it once, but make it several times, for the self and others, never fully certain which road will lead to resolution and which to ruin. 

Everybody, upon making that choice, just waits and sees. There is so much beyond our control. There is no prescription, no matter what any of us have heard.

Everybody has seen movies.

How would you like to think and act in times of crisis?

Ben Greenman is a New York Times-bestselling author who has written both fiction (most recently, the novel The Slippage) and nonfiction (including Mo Meta Blues, with Questlove).

Idleness

By Bertrand Russell

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: “Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution.

I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. This traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it.

What is a time that you’ve been able to be idle without also feeling anxious?

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher and writer.

Love and Loss

By Sarah DiLeo

One year ago, my dog Ella died. She was a sweet, mischievous, expressive little pug, whose hoarse bark a friend once likened to a broken garbage disposal.  

I began volunteering at the pug rescue, from which I had adopted Ella. The backstories of the dogs read like a Debbie Downer routine from SNL—elderly, blind, diabetic, abused. (My wife, who reluctantly tagged along once and only once, dubbed it the Island of Misfit Pugs.) But I felt sustained by the very existence of this place—the relentless optimism and abiding hope that I saw in the people who keep it going.

A few months in, I fell for a sassy 12-year-old pug named Midge and decided to adopt her. When I shared the news, I was met with a variety of incredulous reactions, from my wife’s genuine concern for my well-being, to a stranger at a holiday party who gasped, “But she’s just going to die!” 

Mostly, people asked why? Why would you knowingly enter into an emotional attachment that’s likely to end in sadness so soon? It’s a divisive question, one that forces us to consider the relative value of love and hope. To me, it’s worth it. As renowned pug enthusiast W.B. Yeats said, “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes; what more is there to say?”

What have you learned from brief loves?

Sarah DiLeo is the producer for integrated content at award-winning commercial and digital company Tool of North America. She is also an award-winning film producer.

Return

By Shawn Landres

“Why would you go back?” asked my Austro-Hungarian-born grandmother in 1994, when I announced I would be spending the summer in the former Czechoslovakia. She had never looked behind her after fleeing Bratislava in 1940, first to Italy, then traveling across continents to Sydney, then Los Angeles, where I was born.

“We knew you would come back,” said my wife’s grandfather as Zuzana and I prepared for our 2001 chuppah in Košice, Slovakia, her hometown. He had always looked forward; a Jewish surgeon under state socialism, he had moved his family from Prešov to Bardejov to Košice, no one city more than 80 kilometers from another.

“Why would you want to come back?” asked the ministry official as I reclaimed my Slovak citizenship, in the name of my forebears whom the wartime Slovak state had disenfranchised, dispossessed, and deported. By right, I replied, and the only restitution that mattered to me: the acknowledgment that my multinational, multilingual family had always belonged here, and that this new Slovak Republic was the heir not to fascist chaos but to cosmopolitan “civitas.”

The guns of August, first sounded 100 years ago this summer, resonate across the generations. Empires disaggregated, nation-states pronounced and divorced. To the different roots of our children’s family tree, the changing seasons brought wealth and poverty, death and life, love and loss. There were those who migrated and those who remained. We, their descendants, have recovered, rediscovered…returned.

Of course there is no undoing the past century. But for our family—for me—I am not so sure that there is no going back. The United States, unquestionably, is my home. But today we also are at home in Slovakia. The art of return? It is dance—a round—always in motion, ever unbroken. [From Jewels of Elul, jewelsofelul.com]

What are the things in your life that you would like to return to?

Dr. Shawn Landres is co-founder of Jewish Jumpstart/Jumpstart Labs and a L.A. County Commissioner.