It may have to be mornings after all.

— § —

No, I’m not a morning person, and I stand by the evaluation that I’ve always been more productive in the evenings and even very late at night.

But this morning, and not for the first time, as I was stumbling around trying to get coffee to drip, I was swelling with things that needed to be said, writing that needed to be done. I was composing blearily, with every footstep and every motion of an arm or a finger.

A couple of hours later, I’m deeply embroiled in domesticity. Making breakfast, dressing children, cleaning dishes, talking about furniture and bills. The mayhem is rising and will reach its daily level of ascendance soon.

And every thought I had in the early, relatively quiet darkness is gone. I can’t remember two words.

That’s a loss, one that leaves me here writing meta again, a kind of writing that seems to have overtaken my life, and not for the better.

— § —

Much of American culture today seems to me to be characterized by a distinct lack of courage. As a people, we’ve become a field of wilting grandstanders.

• We lack the courage of our convictions
• In many cases, we lack the courage to have them in the first place
• We lack the courage to do what needs to be done
• We lack the courage to associate with or even acknowledge those that disagree with us
• We lack the courage to confront our past
• We lack the courage to confront our future
• We lack the courage to face our present and accept who we are

This is where the tea party comes from. This is why a 2005 Gallup poll found that only two percent of Americans consider themselves rich but 31 percent imagine that they will be rich before they die. This is why we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and why we’re still there.

Those on the right (politicians most notably amongst them) often claim to be acting courageously, accuse the left of lacking the courage to (for example) invade other countries, “defend freedom,” upset constituencies like those of the “illegal immigrants” (despite the fact that relatively recent Supreme Court rulings tell us that there is no such thing).

It’s not courage they’re showing. It’s a combination of fear, overcompensation, and the characteristic big-talking, acting-out bluster of the playground bully that terrorizes others even as he trembles inside at his inadequacy, the teachers that don’t view him favorably, and the parents whose approval he has never earned.

Courage, in the sense that I’m talking about, is quiet. It never reacts; it never pontificates; it is never pre-emptive. It responds calmly to actualities, answers difficult questions humbly—without seeking to change the universe or rewrite the fabric of reality—when times get tough.

Real courage is reluctant but stoic, staid but determined, and deeply, deeply humane, being open enough to experience and actuality to face the injustices of the universe, regret them, and accept them with profound empathy.

But perhaps most basically, real courage does what needs to be done—nothing less, and, perhaps more critically, nothing more. Courage is not about excess, nor is it the same thing as bravery. Bravery can be misguided, even foolish; courage seeks and valorizes wisdom despite the threat to complacency and easy equanimity that it often embodies.

At every level, Americans lack courage, but for a few. I think this is what I ultimately sense as being different about New York. It is a more courageous city, by far, than the one in which I live now. It is the polar opposite of Los Angeles, a place almost completely devoid of courage of any kind.

I think that is the quality that has drawn so many Americans to Barack Obama, and that causes so many others to recoil from him in horror. To embrace him, these others would have to confront not only the lack of courage that empties their lives of significance, but also all of the discomforts that his courage and wisdom force us to acknowledge and confront.

Much easier to make monsters of the budget deficit, the national debt, Muslims, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Mexico, people of color, welfare queens, those not taking “responsibility” for their lives, the tree-huggers, the abortive whores, the godless atheists, and so on, than to understand the monsters of human nature, including our own, and to struggle to subdue them, despite the implications for our own slice of the human pie and its already meager size, despite the implications for our own individual culpabilities and those of our families for the state of the world today and tomorrow.

By skillfully deploying a lack of courage, we don’t have to face the notion that our own situations and those of the least among us result from the choices of the grandparents and parents that loved us, the fellow countrymen that claimed to stand with us. By skillfully deploying a lack of courage, we don’t have to face the devastating truth that the lives of our own children and innumerable children around the globe will be determined both by forces that we cannot control (a terrifying prospect) and by the choices that we make tomorrow, that we will make today, and that we have already made and cannot take back (a prospect more terrifying and heart-rending still).

Disaster situations draw this state of affairs into relief. In the responses to natural and national disasters, it becomes startlingly easy, for a brief moment, to evaluate the differences between courageous wisdom and schoolyard flailing and bullying. The former acknowledges difficulty and responsibility, then gets quietly down to work, never complaining or politicizing. The latter casts about for someone to blame and for easy fixes rooted in platitudes that can enable us all to forget long before the job is (or, indeed, before the many jobs are) well and truly done.

— § —

I have come to terms with the fact that my initial timetable for writing my dissertation was perhaps optimistic. It was, in short, not a particularly courageous one, but rather one that sought to short-circuit the need to face the task ahead of me by proclaiming its completion almost before I’d begun.

This does not mean, however, that I lack confidence or determination now.

The last few days have shown me that I can and will do this. But it will probably take a few months, rather than a few weeks, and they will be hard months full of sacrifice and soul-searching.

So much the better. It’s time to get to work. I finally think I’m there—cognizant of and steeped in the actual work that is to be done, step by necessary step, rather than constantly throwing myself into sudden, all-encompassing, and abortive efforts in an attempt to finish in a single day or week so as not to have to muster what it takes to stay on task for months at a time.

You can’t finish it in a single “push.” And until you accept that, you can’t finish it (or indeed even properly begin) at all.

There are sins.

— § —

(1) I struggle to say “no” in appropriate ways. Instead, I tend to say “yes” to everything, then simply place anything I don’t actually want or have time to do at the very end of my to-do list, right after “individually polish the blades of grass in my lawn.” As a result, instead of refusals, people get what they experience as broken promises. This is particularly true when I manage a refusal the first time around but someone presses me—I almost always relent, but then fail to prioritize whatever it is I’ve relented on and agreed to do. This leads people to imagine me as inconsistent. I don’t get any points for saying, “but I tried to show that I really didn’t want to do it” or “but I said no twice before I said yes!” Not that I think I do. But I seem to act as though I do.

(2) I struggle to simply write, even though I’m essentially a writer and have always known it. At times, in fact, I can be a damned good one. But rather than simply write, simply produce what is there to be produced, I’ve spent a lifetime doing “less frivolous things” or doing my writing in a “less frivolous way”, which renders my writing rare, stilted, unintelligible, and useless. The result: not much productivity, and what exists sounds foreign to me and excessively complex to others much of the time. Too often I hear someone say, “Why is it that this thing that you wrote for purely personal reasons turns my world upside down, but what you write professionally is so incredibly average and workman-like? Why don’t you just write more like that instead?” I don’t know. I suppose I’ve been convinced that some stuff is unimportant and other stuff is what The Serious People write, and that only The Serious People ever manage to pay their bills. I need to unlearn this.

(3) I mischaracterize my skills. For decades, I’ve spent my work life emphasizing skills that just aren’t me. As a result, I’ve landed jobs and contracts in those areas. And I’ve done them and rolled them into additional CV experience that earns me more jobs of that kind. Why? Normativity. It’s a good thing to be experienced, organized, a multi-tasker, a project manager, great with people, and so on. These are social values. Nevermind that I hate doing all of them—absolutely hate. That’s what I’m supposed to be and supposed to aspire to. So I keep getting these jobs and keep rolling that experience into getting still more of the same, and featuring all of these things on my CV. That needs to change. I hate doing the same things over and over again; experience is a fucking humbug. Done it before? Then I never want to look at it again. I hate being organized, irrespective of my ability to do it. It drains me. It makes life meaningless. I hate multi-tasking. Despite years of experience and intense effort, I am coming to the realization that I am a middling manager at best because my heart isn’t in it, and I really don’t feel anything like myself while acting in that role. Great with people? I like to drink with people. I like to work alone—completely, entirely alone.

(4) I have built a forest, not a career. The result of these things is that I have spent a working lifetime building the wrong body of experience, the wrong identity for myself. My wife looks at my CV and says “howcome this person looks so accomplished and yet when you talk about your life, you sound so unsure?” The reason is simple: if I were someone at home with these things, what’s on my CV would be a solid career with solid prospects for a great future. But wearing this CV is for me like trying to wear a suit tailored for someone else that is a foot shorter, thirty pounds heavier, and some other gender from me. It doesn’t fit. It’s taken me four times more emotional and mental effort to build my CV as it would have taken someone that actually reveled in these jobs and skills. And where I can get in ten years staying on this path falls well short of where they could get. So it is that despite a great CV, rather than feeling like a person with a career I feel lost in my non-academic work life most of the time, with the deep sense that everything is temporary or ephemeral.

(5) I am not true to myself as an academic. I was once, but now I often feel rather like a trained monkey. I have internalized the “norms of academic discourse” and the “conventional wisdom” on which topics and approaches are “legitimate” as opposed to the world of others that are not, and I broach them in “the appropriate ways” and through “appropriate channels.” The result is that with every passing day I have made myself stand out less, look more like every other cookie-cutter, bog-standard Ph.D. candidate out there in the intensely competitive sea of would-be professors. It’s a cancer and a poison. I am my best when I am who I am—when I get the response that “Um, this is very unconventional and I’m more than a little uncomfortable with it because you’ve broken a whole bunch of unwritten rules, but it’s quite brilliant in spite of itself.” Unfortunately, this is usually followed by “If we can just fix a bit of this naiveté and show a little more decorum and disciplinary awareness, you’ll be a real challenger.” I have to stop listening to this last part, because when I take the advice, I lose the “quite brilliant” part, which is the only part that ultimately matters to me (and, I suspect—though few will admit it—to the academic world at large).

— § —

In short, I have sold myself short, and sold myself as something other than what I am, even to myself.

This is been a difficult year. I’d like to say that it’s been a year of growth, but in fact I don’t think I’m that far along yet. It’s been, instead, a year of discovery and self-study. The number of books I’ve read, from the popular to the academic to the spiritual, on topics from life balance to personal habits to career development, is astounding.

But they all point to the same thing.

It’s time to grow up—which for me means the opposite of what I was always told by well-meaning elders of all stripes. It’s time for me to stop listening to authority, stop trying to “bite the bullet and behave,” and stop being “responsible” instead of “frivolous.” Because frivolous can be very profitable, too (something that the intergenerational splits in the U.S. always seem to exemplify but somehow never illuminate) and responsible isn’t all that productive (or, indeed, responsible) if you’re just tremendously inefficient at it.

— § —

I’m a writer and a thinker and a teacher. Not an editor, not a manager, and not a traditional “academic.”

The differences could not be more important.