Images of China

           I’m flying from China to India today, and so in a single day will touch the two countries that represent more than ten times the number of people in the United States of America. Many of us get our cultural awareness from Hollywood, like Slumdog Millionaire or Karate Kid, or from fear-spewing would-be politicians or liberal media. It dawns on me how little we know about the two countries that together make up half the world’s population. And though I’m a novice on the subject, and though a thousand words can hardly portray the reality of several images that have been inked into my brain over my ten business trips to China, I will still try my best to round out a little of the Food, the Culture, and the Comfort of this incredible country.

Images of Food
• The small fishing boat with bamboo floats and tiny motor on the long rudder pole that pull up alongside the three-deck tour boats and club their fish in just-in-time fashion to provide fresh lunch to the tourists (Li River in Guilin)
• Walking the several tables of the breakfast buffet in a remote hotel and wondering how many mornings this food has been recycled waiting for one of the three other apparent guests (or perhaps mold) to finally take it out of circulation (I have toast this particular day).
• Filling up on the first eight courses on the Lazy Susan as I realize I am only half-way into the dinner and I don’t want to offend my host by passing up the remaining dishes.
• That moment I realize I’ve taken a mouthful of meat that has chopped pieces of bone and waiting in veiled disgust to observe the entirely acceptable etiquette of casually spitting bone-pieces onto a side plate
• Apprehensively dipping into the community dishes with my fully-slurped pair of chopsticks after several other likewise slurped pairs have precede me in the dishes as they rotate around the lazy Susan
• The proud ceremonial presentation of the head of a rooster as the honored guest (aka yours truly) attempts a poorly translated polite decline to participate in the edible part of this tradition
• After a week of mindless sampling of local food to please my hosts, the sudden gurgle in my lower abdomen that foreshadows one of the most unpleasant twenty-four hour periods of my foreign travels

Images of Culture
• Listening to live Jazz played by eighty year-old European ex-pat regulars at a club at one of the grand hotels off the Bund in Shanghai.
• Watching the lighted boats parade up and down the river against the Jetson-like skyline of the Bund after a day of traveling along ancient and undeveloped countryside and wondering what century I’m actually in.
• Getting bratwurst for dinner in a German restaurant with an American ex-pat friend and momentarily forgetting what country I am in
• Old people listening to loud traditional music and dancing or doing tai chi (I suppose) in the dark downtown park near the Louis Vuitton building that hosts my company office
• Contemplating the meaning of the hearty laugh around the table as the group momentarily switches from English to Chinese for a short epilogue on a story someone just told in English

Images of Comfort
• The bicyclist in downtown Shanghai with ten feet high mounts of recyclable cardboard or textiles or plastics.
• The headlight-free moped in the dark rain with husband, wife, child and with the umbrella taped to the handle bar
• Wading into an intersection with sixteen possible routes while bicyclists and pedestrians and mopeds and cars perform an intricate dance that I cannot decipher but that consistently occurs without mishap.
• Riding with a driver that doesn’t speak English several hours west of Hong Kong, in air that is so dark there are no stars or streetlights or apartment lights, and almost no cars, and rounding a street corner with the headlights flashing across dozens of faces like lifeless mannequins in a dark storefront window, staring at the headlights that momentarily interrupt their dark and silent existence.
• Freezing in a thin sport jacket in an unheated meeting room in the middle of winter wishing I had either thicker coat or thicker skin.
• The gray-on-gray countryside of my three-hour car ride after a fifteen hour flight takes me through the dusk-like sky past rows of empty gray twenty-floor apartment buildings built for the planned urban migration that hasn’t yet happened here yet in this landscape that seems today has never seen a ray of sun.
• The orange-brown unnatural tint to the air hanging thick over Nanjing as I contemplate a run along the ancient wall near the lake, as the sun gives up on visiting (but unfortunately for my later pneumonia, I do not).

          I will not soon forget these and other images, that collectively drive me to contemplate life conditions of those that were born into another culture, that despite the entitled leanings of some born (not of their own accord I guess) a childhood “dig” through the other side of the world. Now I’m leaving one country five times the size of the United States to visit another one largely down-trodden by greed, corruption, and wrong-headed politicians and therefore momentarily less important to our American psyche. And I’m wondering what new images might burn alongside these.

Kevin Dean, January 31, 2016

Navigation Problem

               I’m sitting in 24F at 30,000 feet and have a few device-free minutes to contemplate my direction.   I’ve missed two weekend blog posts in a row now and am risking backsliding on the commitment I made last Father’s Day.   I wrote off the first miss as an anomaly, but two makes a trend. I’ve had this recurring day-mare that it actually doesn’t matter, sort of like when a tree falls in the unpeopled forest without making a sound. Then I remind myself that this is entirely for my own purpose – a form of semi-public therapy, or practice for a grander objective, or that I may stumble on some inspired musing that is mistaken for genius and enables my future eulogist to fill an extra paragraph.  And therefore I must pick myself back up and write again.

               So in keeping with the theme of directionless wandering and to partially nip my trend, and recognizing I will have opportunities for blog-post inspiration over the next five weeks given that four of them will be spent sleeping on strange and mostly foreign pillows, I submit the following pondering written a couple of years ago on an equally uninspired flight.

Navigation Problem

               I know how to sail. That is not the problem. I am no Ted Turner but I can hoist the main, trim the jib. I can close-haul and tack and jibe and I can hold a line. Regardless of any direction or speed of wind, I can get to where I want to go. I know how to sail.

               Yet I sit here in this massive blue expanse occasionally sails furled, bobbing in a storm, or becalmed in a fit of mindless boredom. Occasionally fully unfurled, sails flapping, three sheets to the wind, raging wildly yet going nowhere.

               My problem is navigation. I don’t know where to go. Oh I can read a compass, and I can point the ship in a direction and trim the sails accordingly. But I don’t know where to point it. I rack my brain for inspiration and occasionally I have moments of clarity and the stars make sense to me and I grab the helm and come about. But then the fog settles in and confuses my vision. And I unfurl the sails again and let the sheets flap wildly.

I know how to sail. My problem is navigation.

Kevin Dean, January 25, 2016

Resolute

I biked thirty-one miles this morning with three hundred or so people mostly younger and fitter than me. I’m wondering if I could get in shape to complete a Half-Ironman in June (1 mile swim, 56 mile bike, and 13.1 mile run). I dropped full “Ironman” off my bucket list a few years ago when I thought I was too close to my death-bed and wanted to avoid pushing myself into it. I recently added the half back into the bucket, and I’m thinking my odds of completing one are better sooner rather than later. I’ve heard stories of a seventy-seven-year-old nun that completed the full Ironman, but I’m going to avoid challenging that particular distinction.

I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions, mostly because everyone else is doing it and I tend to work against the grain on things like that. And also because so many so-called resolutions are shallow slightly-inebriated wishful mutterings that are forgotten with the first NFL playoff game. So rather than “resolving” to compete in the half, I am waiting until mid-February to see if I have trained enough during my extra-cold mornings and world-traveling to grasp a little momentum and potentially become “resolute.”

Despite my backward leaning on resolutions, I am always impressed with those that stick to them. Years ago, younger brother Noel bought his first house and older brother Steve and I went to help move the heavy furniture, warm things up a little, and welcome him to the world of mortgage and tax-payers. It happened to be New Year’s Day. He wasn’t a runner but he had actually gone out that morning in the bitter cold. He was in the upper 200s at the time weight-wise, so I congratulated him on just getting out.

After our interest in house-moving waned, we all went for pizza and beer at a local restaurant.

“I’ll just have water,” Noel ordered, and looked at his brothers’ to take the verbal abuse he knew would be coming.

“Really, Noel? Over-served last night or is this some sort of resolution?” We jostled and teased him for several minutes to help him reminisce fondly about growing up in the Dean house.

We ordered a couple of large pizzas, and as the waitress turned to leave back to the kitchen Noel called out, “and a large Salad.” We laughed on and off for about ten minutes after that, basically that our younger brother had kept some resolution for an entire day even in the face of taunting by his older brothers.

About three weeks later I got a call from Noel. “Hey, I know you’re a runner Kevin, so I need some advice. Do you run every day of the week or do you take a day off sometimes?”

“What? Why? Who wants to know? Well yeah, I take at least one day off a week. Sometimes two. The body needs time to recover. Why do you ask?”

“Well because I’ve been running every single day for the past three weeks and I just wondered if I could take a day off.”

Needless to say I was dumbfounded. He had never run more than three miles or so as part of wrestling training in high school, and so this was something completely new. He’d also lost about twenty pounds already, just by eating better, limiting his beer consumption, and running every day.

Another three weeks went by and I heard from him again. “Hey I’m starting to increase my long runs on the weekends and it’s getting a little boring. Can you meet me sometimes and go on the long runs with me?” After a few weekend runs he decided he wanted to run a marathon and so we trained for and ultimately ran the Bayshore Marathon in Traverse City just about five months and a hundred pounds after he had started on that New Year’s morning.

I biked thirty-one miles this morning and I love the thought of completing a Half-Ironman. But I’m going to wait until mid-February to see I have what it takes to commit to it. The trick is not making “resolutions.” The trick is “being resolute.” Anyone can make a resolution, but not everyone has what it takes to keep one.

Kevin Dean, January 9, 2016

Younger Next Year

It’s the New Year and already I am younger than I was last year. You might say I have discovered the fountain of youth. Read on and I will explain.

After the kick-off speech from my company’s Leadership Conference last February, my work-buddy Ron and I were hanging out near the open bar as our CEO walked up. He was sporting a new goatee and was thinner than I remembered and Ron used the opportunity to brown-nose a little, “Mike you are looking great. Are you doing anything special?” I’m not sure what either of us would have expected, but our CEO launched into a ten minute commentary on this fantastic book he read over the holidays on how to live a better life in your 50s and beyond.
Since I like to read as well as aspire to living “better life” I jumped right on Amazon and ordered the book called Younger Next Year. It’s a fantastic fun read, tag-teamed by a doctor (for the science part) and a retired lawyer (who acts as sort of older brother and gives the layman’s perspective). I’ve read a lot on health and have given a lot of thought to how and when I would start to accelerate my decline into old age. It’s amazing that we live in this technically advanced society and yet we are so backward in our thinking on health. These two co-authors basically spelled out exactly what I needed to hear. I highlight a few key points below just to whet your appetite, but I strongly recommend anyone in their 50s or beyond read it (there is a version tailored for Women also):

• “It is inexplicable that our society, plagued by soaring medical costs and epidemics of obesity, heart disease and cancer, cares so little about these things.”

• “A lot of people unconsciously assume that they will get-old-and-die…You can get decrepit, if you like, but are not likely to die.”
• “Your body and brains are perfect for their natural purposes, but none of them was designed for modern life: fast food, TV or retirement. They were designed for life in nature, where only the fittest survived…Left to their own devices, your body and brains will consistently and without fail misinterpret the signals of the twenty-first century.”

• “Remember that we grew up in Africa…you had to get up and hunt for hours every single day. The only reason not to go out and hunt was famine. Regardless of how much food you eat, that’s what you tell your body every day you don’t exercise.”

• “Aging is up to nature, but decay is up to you.”

• Harry’s First Rule: “Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life.”

• “People think boa constrictors squeeze, but they don’t. They just wrap around you and wait.”

• “More than any other single thing, circulation is the key to good health and to doing stuff.”

• “Nature’s rule is simple: do something real every day.”

• “If corporations bothered to look at the science, being in great shape would be a job requirement.”

• “Arthritis is largely an inflammatory disease of sedentary societies…”

• “Every single soul who cares about training swears by the heart monitor.”

• “Men who are out there in their fifties, sixties and beyond – skiing down the chutes, biking in the hills, rowing over the horizon – deserve the best equipment that money can buy.”

• “Aerobic exercise does more to stop actual death, but strength training can make your life worthwhile. It keeps your muscle mass from going to muck, your skeleton from turning to dust, your joints from hurting with every lousy step.”

• “Nothing makes you look older and more pathetic than a scraggly mess of yellow teeth.”

• Don’t stop shaving. “You may think ‘Bruce Willis’ but you may look “Yasir Arafat’.”

• “Get more rather than less interested in how you look, and you may come out even.”

• “Dieting is the False God of the last thirty years. The whole country has been on an extraordinary expensive series of diets for at least that long… And what did we get for our money? We gained forty pounds apiece, a handful of guys got rich and the rest of us got fat.”

• “So one can say, with utter confidence, that the secret behind getting fat is eating more calories than you burn.”

• “Do not clean your plate. Do not eat like a pig and call it virtue.”

• “I think of fast-food places as factory farms for people. We go there by the millions, like hogs to slaughter, and eat ourselves stupid, as if it were our jobs to become obese.”

• “Your body reads idleness as a sign that you are starving to death as slowly as possible, no matter how much you eat.”

• “Starch is bad because it continually signals you to take another bite.”

• “You burn far more fat recovering from exercise than you ever will on the treadmill.”

• “Single men die years before married men.”

• “You have to respect yourself and value your life on a daily basis. No one will do it for you.”

• “It was nuts to immerse myself so completely in my old professional life before retirement. In particular, it was foolish not to have other hobbies, communities and commitments…”

• “It makes sense to start on that project as early as you can. Today would be good.”

• “I think a lot of men see retirement that way. We can’t bear the idea of doing nothing, but we don’t know what to do.”

• “…even if you don’t actually like everyone in your pack, you still need a pack.”

There you have the highlights.  Now go buy the book.  Younger Next Year, by Chris Crowley & Henry S. Lodge, M.D.

Kevin Dean, January 2, 2016

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