Category Archives: Life

Astronomy, Life

The Power and the Beauty

The sky was a canvas of science and magic. 

For 53 years, I have dreamt of this sight: the night dancing in ribbons of light. And, finally, there I was, barely dressed, cold, and in tears on my deck, letting it consume me.  

The forecast had been promising, but it’s been promising so many times before. We’re just too far from the North Pole, and too thoughtless with our use of electricity. There’s little chance of seeing an aurora borealis in Connecticut.  

It had been a great day in many ways, an island of life’s simple joys. Basking in it, I was both sleepy and restless, and thought I’d calm my brain by checking the night sky. I was braced for disappointment, but Luna’s beautiful crescent was visible through the window, teasing clear skies overhead.  

I stepped out onto the cold, wet deck, regretted not wearing slippers, and let myself be annoyed at bright light low to the northeast. A high school athletic field there normally blots out the darkness.  

Then the light moved. 

Green, then orange. Then pink. Then purple. I struggled to make sense of why, though I knew. 

I tilted my head to look straight up, and lines of light shifted and twisted. 

Magic. Pure, breathtaking magic. 

But not. A tiny shield of gas and magnetism, smothering our tiny rock, in a dangerous neighborhood around a tiny star, was afire, protecting our irrelevant species from destruction on a scale we’ve never experienced in modernity. 

A collective joy rose online, as tens of millions of us shared photos. We stood together in the church of nature, awestruck by the mighty God that is the universe, so much more powerful than our missiles, bombs, and technology. So much greater than our petty squabbles, our endless discontent, our vain belief in our own influence. Or, as I write this, so much greater than meager words can or should even describe. But in vain we write about it, think about it, share our joy, and try to understand what we saw on May 10, 2024. We stood united in awe at the power and the beauty.  

Beauty in the science of the colors and movement that our eyes have adapted to see. 

Power that, with an inadvertent whim, would end modern civilization if just a tiny bit stronger. One of my favorite sayings about nature is, “The mountain doesn’t care about you.” Nor does the ocean. Or the sun. 

This morning, the storm on our star is visible to us as a massive rip, so much larger than our planet. In days, it will be gone, replaced by more turmoil on the sun’s surface, and all that will remain of it will be the memories created by fuses in our simple brains, which we’ll reconnect for the rest of our lives to share the story of this night. 

A moment so rare and precious that many of us will take our last breath never seeing something like it again.  

But while we could, we took in the night sky together, and we reveled in the majesty of it all. 

Life

Find your place, find your space

Fewer than 50 steps from my back door is a small piece of heaven, an altar to nature and life.

My Meditation Station took under $100 of wood and stone to make and returns priceless dividends with each visit. Out here my mind is at home, can empty, and take in the scene: a burbling stream, birds, the wind in the trees, a frog, and the rustle of creatures around me.

The stream that runs next to my chair and platform doesn’t exist on any map I’ve found, marked only as a patch of wetlands, but it is more real than I could imagine.

There is no feeder to the steam but the Earth itself; it originates in a spring behind my neighbor, and gravity then pulls it past me next, barely six inches deep and a few feet wide.

From here, it makes its way through the woods, under a road, past businesses and neighborhoods, under another road, then another, until it connects to the Quinnipiac River. From there, it traces the course of my life, through the towns I lived and grew up in, then into the Long Island Sound of my childhood.

As it empties into the Atlantic, it becomes the water my great-grandparents sailed to escape war and seek a better life. The water my grandfather crossed in the other direction to instead head to war. The water I’ve crossed six times myself in far greater comfort than them all, chasing their ghosts.

Out here on my platform, there’s little of that. My son’s energy is nearby, though…the tree and clump of dirt in the middle of the stream that used to be called “Ryan Island” is now toppled and lost to nature’s cycle, but the large sticks he drove into the stream to trap fish somehow remain. Until they rot  away, like we all will.

There’s no other place on Earth I’ve found where I can empty my messy, conflicted brain as well as here.

It’s always buggy and often smells of decay and water and life. Countless creatures live Hobbes’s nasty, brutish, and short lives just a stone’s throw from my peace. The citronella candles I sometimes light can give it a primitive feel, which is both inadvertent and profoundly accurate.

It’s cool on hot days, sheltered by the branches above and around, and frigid in the winter, when there’s no block to the wind and the marshy ground is frozen solid under my feet as I walk out to the platform.

It comes alive in the spring, when  snapper turtles, frogs, and water striders emerge, skunk cabbage sprouts, and trees burst to green. In the fall, it’s like a snow globe of orange and red and yellow. At night in the summer, it’s a miracle of lightning bugs and singing frogs.

True to its name, it’s a place of meditation and escape, a nook to hide away from lawnmowers and cars and airplanes I hear in the distance. It’s a place to read, to write, to think, to dream.

We all need those spaces today, with so much information, distraction, and false urgency. When so much is fake, it is real. It’s 50 steps and may as well be 50 miles, and time spent here becomes more and more valuable as the hours left of my life grow fewer and fewer each day.

Find your place, where everything flows around you and there’s room to breathe and think.

Find your space, to consider your role in it all, ponder your infinite value, and realize your utter insignificance.

But most importantly, get outside and away from what’s false and easy, and toward what’s real and difficult.

Then meditate on how lucky you are to do so.

Life, Professional

Nothing New and Missing the Point: An Essay on AI and Humanity

There’s nothing new in this essay. The topic has been covered by thousands of other articles. Scores of films. Countless novels.  

And that’s the point I keep coming back to in my use of AI, specifically ChatGPT, in the last month. 

I’m intrigued by what it means to me as a writer, marketer, and human to have a tool creating content that, if not great, is clearly good enough. I’ve paid more for worse. Written worse myself. I started off with curiosity (“Write a poem that involves a lemming and a biscuit.” “Describe the love for bacon.”) and sat up straight within seconds. 

A simple bit of stilted but passable ChatGPT writing today, plus millions of inputs to improve tomorrow, turns into something near-indistinguishable from human dialogue in a week or so. 

I’d hoped to retire before this came along. 

Some smart people I know aren’t concerned. We’ll always need the essence of humanity to create good art. AI can’t strategize like humans. The machines will hit a ceiling. Human inquiry leads us forward. They may be right (though I think they’re not), and I won’t deeply strawman argue them here. 

The larger point to me is we’re noticing how good AI is or could be, and we’re ignoring how unremarkable we’ve become.  

This seems ridiculous, here in the golden, enlightened era of human advancement. In one century, humans have created and done more than previous ones combined. Including making AI, which will kill us all spiritually, intellectually, and maybe physically.  

Make no mistake. We’re the host, AI the invasive species, and there’s frightening little buffer between where it is now and our own peak.  

The argument that human creativity differentiates us from the machines must—and fails to—intellectually exist alongside our increasing folly. Ten movies in the Fast and Furious franchise. TikTok. War. Florida Man. Most laws. Most societal trends. “The news” as a blanket concept. We’re just not that good, far too often, in fields from writing to medicine to policy to social sciences to business and everything in the middle. We’re advancing faster and getting weaker, long before ChatGPT. Already letting the machines define our intellectual and emotional lanes. Dehumanizing ourselves and each other by the day.  

We’re amazed that ChatGPT can create a realistic conversation, until we listen to a human one. Make a solid argument, when ours are increasingly wafer-thin. We ease our minds that AI is only additive in nature (always adding a ‘yet!’ at the end), until someone mentions we’ve tried something before, or correctly affirms, as I am here, that there are no new ideas. 

The greatest terror with this is how effortlessly low the bar is for AI to take over our lives, literally. Technology already steals our attention, alters our physical states, steers our views, and blinds our sight. So, let’s theorize you could combine ChatGPT’s dialogue with your digital exhaust with your location data with Google with your peer group’s actions with your past purchase and browsing history with your photos and Reels and YouTube and TikTok videos. This isn’t science fiction…each part of that is available today, just not aggregated. There’s no reason it couldn’t be. Someone is doubtlessly doing it now.  

You’d rapidly create an avatar that knows what you know; knows where you’ve been; knows your deepest preferences, desires, fears, and interests; looks, sounds, and talks like you; and improves from a perpetual stream of increasingly refined data about you. It’s an enhanced digital you in short order. Everyone would scroll through the 20 pages of Terms of Service and click Accept. If we’d even get the choice to, and not that it matters. Mandatory subscription required.  

The danger isn’t just that a nuclear war gets launched by a fake person giving fake orders, it’s in the mass realization that for all our pride, all our identities, all our esteem, we’re easily replicated.  

The pandemic has reset so many assumed truths of our institutions, and diseases of despair soared. We’ll look back at this as quaint compared to the despair when we ourselves are reset. There is no upper limit to where this can go. A clear lower limit.  

There’s no moral to this essay, no clever “10 Ways to Use ChatGPT to Offload Your Content Marketing” lesson. Everything I’m describing has been portrayed by our imaginations already. There’s nothing new here.  

Except what’s old, in that realm of the real, not the digital. The realm that, as I look at the words scrolling out on my screen from ChatGPT, I vainly feel compelled to embrace more than ever.  

Life, Professional

Memento Mori

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I wasn’t an unusually avid fan of Bob Saget, so his death didn’t particularly strike me hard. Still, reading the posts from those who were fans, he seems to be a guy who made people laugh and enjoy life, and that’s pretty damned good praise. You can say his life was cut too short, or you can say it lasted precisely long enough to give that much joy.

Every day, I carry in my pocket a coin with a stoic expression on it. Depends on my mood, and what’s ahead that day, to the degree I know. But there was only one choice today, which is coincidentally my favorite: Memento Mori. Remember that you have to die.

At 51, it’s no longer shocking when someone my age dies, not like it used to be. It also is a reminder that we all have that unknowable date on the calendar ahead of us and every breath is one more toward it. A million more? A thousand? Two? No way to know, and the older I get, the less I think there’s much we can do about it.

So, this coin. It’s a reminder. To live larger. Laugh too much. Care less what people who aren’t you do; you can only (and barely) control yourself. Go about your day with the rule of five in your head…will this matter in five minutes? Five days? Five years? And when you start applying that, not much will.

Not much you can do, not when you see what fate did to others, the prepared and the unprepared, the heartbreaking deaths and the ones where death was a blessing.

Poor, rich, liberal, conservative, black, white. It’s the only thing we have in common. A loss of control that makes us realize that there is nothing to do but love this next breath, live this next breath, and be the best you can be in that short time. Rinse, repeat.

Memento Mori. Remember that you have to die. And remember this moment is your chance to live.

Addendum: You can buy the Memento Mori coin from The Daily Stoic. I don’t receive any benefit or proceeds from the link, but it’s a great site, and I encourage you to read more there.

Leadership, Life, Professional

Class of 2020, We Need You!

Embrace this difficult moment, and move forward hard and engaged.

____________________

Posted by the UCONN Center for Career Development on April 22, 2020

Class of 2020 Huskies,

I do not know exactly what you’re going through. No one can; no script explains all of this right now.

What you’re experiencing is the grief of loss, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Rites of passage like graduation, the joy of being on a campus in the spring, or getting your first “real” job have meaning. Your rites of passage were snatched away at the buzzer. Mourn them hard. You’ve earned that.

But then move, equally hard and fully engaged. Because we need you. And need creates opportunity.

While I don’t know exactly what you’re going through, I do know this: if you learn to embrace loss and losing, you will discover they are the only path to growth. The obstacles in your life ARE your life.

Let me share some perspective more connected to UConn and less abstract. By any objective measure, my two degrees from UConn were horribly timed, terribly planned, and poorly executed. I nearly dropped out of my first semester with a 1.3 GPA in engineering. I changed majors three more times and earned my journalism degree just before the Internet changed everything I’d learned about the media business.John Sponauer, '92, (CLAS) ’10 MBA

I wanted to be an international reporter and studied Soviet political systems when the Soviet Union collapsed mid-class. I graduated into a recession and struggled financially. I earned my MBA later in life and was in a finance class when the markets spasmed and crashed. I graduated into a second recession, never became that reporter, and never traveled for work. 0 for 5 in the things I thought I wanted at age 21. If attaining goals or sticking to plans are measures of success, I am an unmitigated failure.

And for that, I am profoundly grateful.

My journalism degree never made me a reporter, but it taught me how to write. That skill sustained my career in countless ways. The Soviet Union died, but the ability to examine issues from multiple perspectives helped me at every job. In a dreadful business environment, the MBA opened doors to connections exactly when I needed them.

I’m privileged to have been able to fail, and I’ve learned that failure creates opportunity just as need does.

You’re privileged, too, but you’ve been dealt some really bad cards as of late. There are large, seemingly insurmountable problems in our state, nation, and world.

You have so much going for you to take them on.

First, you have us, an alumni base of 250,000 that will have sympathy for anyone with a ’20 after their name. Use our networks and use our help.

You also have a worldview centered on connections, unlike any generation prior. If you need any more evidence that we’re all connected, well… (gestures wildly all around).

Lastly, you have new ideas and energy, and we do need those right now.

I have been lucky to meet many UConn students at networking events, and I always share the same advice. I suggest making a Venn Diagram of three things: their skills, their passions, and their opportunities. Aim for the middle as the ultimate goal, but settle for any two as a step toward that middle.

You’re naturally passionate at this age. That part’s easy. It’s a tremendous gift that you should explore and nurture. Never let it wither. You’re loaded with fresh skills. Find as many uses for them as you can, like writing and analysis served me.

And that last part, the opportunities? I can’t tell you when or how, but you will find them. Maybe not always as you wanted. Maybe not as you’d planned. Like need and failure, searching will reveal opportunity, maybe where you thought it would. Maybe not.

Maybe somewhere better.

I do not know exactly what you’re going through. It’s true. But to be fair, you cannot know now all of the great things that will come.

Good luck. Go get ‘em, Huskies.

#BleedBlue

 

Leadership, Life

Share Your Strength

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“We weren’t poor growing up. We didn’t have to look for coal by the railroad tracks, like some families did.”

My grandmother—of the Great-Depression-and-crushed-fascists generation—used to say this all the time, and what rolled my eyes as a teenager now seems to me to be a pretty good benchmark. These are desperate times, for sure, and while we almost certainly won’t sink to a Great Depression, that it’s even on a radar screen of remote possibilities for the first time in my life is striking.

Despite the endless histories of “the Greatest Generation,” I am of the opinion that they waited too long to tell their stories—certainly on an individual basis. They’re mostly gone now, and with them are millions of untold lessons of how to survive desperate times.

Don’t let this happen today. Tell your story, and tell it from a position of strength, because if you’re able to tell it, that means you’re still alive, and if you’re still alive, that means you’ve got strength…of health, of your personality, of your beliefs.

Write or record daily. A paragraph. A sentence or two about the most remarkable thing you saw or heard or witnessed. A 30-second video. Save them all.

My story yesterday involved a cucumber. We’re more than prepared at home with staples, but I was craving fresh vegetables, so did an off-hours grocery run. Of course, there aren’t “off hours” any more, and it was busier than I’d have preferred. I avoided people, grabbed some peppers and tomatoes, bagged some cucumbers, and headed to the register.

The bag broke, and the cucumbers fell to the ground. I swore, because that’s what I do, and a very kind older woman bent over to retrieve one.

“DON’T TOUCH IT!,” I barked, embarrassed at myself as soon as I spoke. The cucumber is on the ground, for god’s sakes, so we’re already well past the point that a woman who likely wiped her carriage twelve times is going to add to my premature demise.

She stopped, and I apologized and thanked her. She said, “Oh, I get it. Believe me.”

The register lines were crowded, so I picked a self-service one and kept my distance from a younger mom rushing to check out, the belt full of young kids’ food. The machine got an error, and a flashing light signaled for staff assistance. She started shaking. She looked back, eyes reddened and crying, and apologized.

I was chastened from my behavior earlier and said something like, “It’s no problem. We’re all in this together.”

She smiled, said thanks, and we wished each other good health as we went our own ways.

They were two very human moments in very inhumane times.

If you spend any time in nature, I mean really in nature, you know this: it is brutal and harsh and unforgiving.

As nature’s most advanced creation on this Earth, we do not have to be.

These are the stories we can tell. So tell them. Tell them to your children. Tell them to your grandchildren. Somewhere down the road, it will cause rolled eyes.

Until it doesn’t.

Until future generations look back and see solidarity, preparedness, acceptance, sacrifice, kindness, science, new thinking, and the individual actions of billions got us through 2020. We will lose too many, and we will learn so much.

We have been too slow this time. Nature’s most advanced creation is reeling from one of nature’s tiniest. Telling your story will help it be different the next time around.

Because there will be a next time around. And they will need our strength, as we need that of those before us.

 

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Flight, Life

Keep Them Flying

“How old is this kid?”

“Older than my grandfather was in 1944.”

I didn’t intend to be a wiseass to the reporter, but these things happen, and it was also true. Standing in front of us was Rob Collings, 25, our pilot for the day, taking us on a shuttle flight between Hartford and Oxford, Connecticut in the Collings Foundation’s B-24 Liberator bomber. He is the son of Bob Collings, founder of the organization, and is, today, very likely one of the highest-hour rated B-24 pilots alive.

But this was 20 years ago–this week–standing on the tarmac at Hartford’s Brainard Airport, after a dismal, rainy Saturday had turned into a gorgeous fall Sunday. I was a new dad, an aspiring writer, and I was knee-deep in establishing a relationship with my paternal grandfather, who’d flown 50 missions over fascist-occupied Europe in a B-24. We’d almost never talked until 1999, when, meeting my daughter for the first time, he saw the news on TV and said, “Huh. We’re bombing Yugoslavia again. Some things never change.”

The following months, and later years, turned into a family history project, perfectly merging my love of words with my love of history with my love of aircraft, and that October day seemed an alignment of stars, taking a flight on the only B-24 left flying as a bomber of the more than 18,000 made.

Bob Collings had been a kind soul, hearing my story and offering a seat on the shuttle flight. I was planning to write a freelance article about the experience, and the rainy Saturday the day before had moved me to tears, connecting with dozens of veterans and families who braved the elements to see Collings’s magnificent flying machines and talk about what the aircraft meant to them.

At the time, the flight, and the overall experience of that weekend, was second only to the birth of my daughter as the most moving experience of my life.

Along with the reporter covering the planes’ visit for the local paper, I was flying with a wonderful vet named Walt, who is a volunteer for Collings and was taking his family on the flight to show them a bit of what he did over the Pacific in the war. The Collings Foundation B-17 Flying Fortress, “909,” flew in formation with us from Hartford to Oxford. It was stunning.

Soaking up the experience of men like Walt, I’d recently joined an online community of WWII bomber crew and their families, led by a kindred spirit from Texas who was also knee-deep in the connection to his own grandfather, a B-17 crewman over Europe.

Dear friends we became and remain, and also friends with dozens of “bomber boys.” Gene, John, Jim, Lloyd, and so many more. Young men who climbed into their imposing but fragile machines, gathered over their bases into metal storms of a thousand planes, and hurled themselves into a frozen hell at 25,000 feet.

Death and dismemberment greeted them at every turn, from the savagely random flak, fierce, slashing attacks of enemy fighter planes, mid-air collisions with damaged planes, bombs dropping from above, collisions in fog over their runways, mechanical failure, hypothermia, fire, smoke, falling, and more. Their pilots nursed damaged planes home for hours, missing engines, smoke trailing behind them, gashes in their metal skin, fuel leaking, cursing pain and loss around them, alone in the sky over an angry enemy. If they were lucky, they saw the next morning, but it also brought empty bunks, empty chairs, around them.

The young men, in machines made by young women, rained war onto the cities, the citizens, the machinery, the soldiers of the Third Reich, Italy, and Japan, in a way not repeated since. It was as raw and brutal combat as has ever existed in mankind’s perpetual history of combat. A total war we could not and would not replicate or tolerate today.

This mighty generation–Depression babies and young builders and warriors–today rapidly slipping the surly bonds of Earth, leaving nothing but legacies and memories.

Oh, Lloyd.

The online conversations frequently veered into politics, and into debate. Lloyd was a sharp debater, a good man, and a passionate advocate for his beliefs. He left us in early 2002.

———

Fast forward nearly two years from that day in Hartford, and to the first anniversary of 9/11.

It was a brutal time, a gut punch. So raw. So real. You randomly burst into tears during the day.

I was home in my kitchen, thinking about cleaning up after dinner but really thinking about writing something for the anniversary. I cleared the table, and my two kids were running around underfoot, doing kid things.

I wondered how I would explain this crazy world to them, and worried what they’d have ahead. Who their heroes would be. I know who mine had been: astronauts and pilots. I started thinking about how the events of the past year would look, say, 20–25 years from then. I couldn’t help but think that the guys who fought WWII came home victorious, built this country in good ways and bad, committed the whole post-war world to rebuilding, and watched 25 years later as the nation seemed to rip apart. Would my kids look back at 2001–2002 as some bygone era they never really felt? Just a chapter in history, as distant as the Romans? Would they find strength and purpose? Did we understand, as a nation, what was ahead? Could we?

I was thinking about these things, and also specifically about Lloyd and what a decent man he always seemed to be. What his generation went through. I hoped that we would be as strong and give our kids as much of an example. His death, still raw, hurt.

And the house shook.

I ran to the front door and looked out. Then up. The Collings Foundation bombers were in town, soaring low overhead, eight magnificent radial engines roaring, skin shining in the setting sun.

Lloyd was with me. So were all the bomber boys. It would be OK. We’d been through this before. We knew these times. We knew worse.

———

I don’t know any of the people on Wednesday’s doomed flight of the Collings B-17. I may have spoken to some, as I’d often seen the Collings birds on their annual stops in the fall. Got my dad to do a flight like mine. Ran in similar circles. The loss was personal and real and raw when I saw the headline and the photo of the black smoke. I checked in with people I knew close to Collings. My friend in Texas checked in with me.

I also don’t know what happened on that emergency approach to Runway 6, although I have a theory. But I can guarantee that the crew was doing what the bomber boys were doing in 1944 when their planes were hurt: everything in their power to fight Newton’s damned laws. Flying the plane through the crash, to the end. No computers. Just strength, cables, metal, and thousands upon thousands of accumulated hours of experience with their baby. There would have been no one better in the cockpit than the crew that was there. You can’t understand the passion of organizations like Collings in maintaining and flying these aircraft until you see it for yourself.

There have been calls to ground warbirds like “909” for years. They will get louder in the wake of the crash; some already have. They are misguided.

These birds are pieces of our complex history, flying museums, touching thousands of lives a year, connecting generations, connecting a nation to its past. There is no static display that can replace them. Flying on them is a visceral experience. Feeling their engines near you, imagining the two bombers times 500, to imagine what a raid looked like, to see what we did, leaves you awestruck, in the literal sense of the word.

There is a cost to keep them flying, of course. Wednesday showed us. But risk has cost. So does knowledge. So does freedom. So does laying waste to concepts like fascism. It’s worth paying.

Keep them flying.

Life, Professional

Connections

“I’ve got 4G. Three bars.”

NO.

It was the first thought that came to mind. I saw my son looking down at his phone, as shocked as I was that on this rocky island off the coast of rural Maine, we had steady cell coverage for the first time in three visits.

“That’s unbelievable. Put it in Airplane Mode.”

“Yeah.” He agreed without even a second word.

We dropped our heavy packs and got to work, setting up camp under tall pines in a routine now familiar from years of doing it. Stake, tie, hitch, gather, chop, light, organize. Food over there. Flashlights by our sleeping pads. Lines tightened up. We wordlessly helped each other by instinct, and the two phones sat over by the fire ring while we worked.

But they were on my mind the whole time.

This changes things.

We’ve camped together since he was a toddler, but in the last five years—the last of his youth—the destinations have been more remote. Baxter State Park in northern Maine and Isle au Haut in Acadia National Park had been, previously, near-total escapes. Our trips have been exercises in getting back to basics and each other.

Long after you lose cell coverage on the drive to Baxter’s North Gate, you’re bluntly reminded by a wooden sign that help is many hours away and you are responsible for your own safety. Isle au Haut, while not as remote, is six miles off the coast, and reachable only by a mailboat that makes daily runs to the island’s small village, four miles to the north of the campsite.

Once you’re at either, it’s you and what you chose to haul in on your back. At Baxter, I learned to carry dollar bills and Post Its so that I could pay a buck to any outgoing visitor I encountered if they’d text my wife that we were safe. Trivia: all but one held up their end of the wilderness deal. People are generally good.

On Isle au Haut, there previously had been a large rock on the shore where, if you stood still for a while, you’d get 3G and one bar. Not great for anything but texting home you were safe, but that was all I’d need.

Now, with 4G, the time away would be changed. Home, world news, texts, work, emails were all there if we wanted them.

The week before we’d left, I told a colleague about the remote nature of our camping. She said, “That’s good. Get your kids off their phones.”

It’s not really that simple. I’m as guilty as anyone of being glued to my screen, and if you look around any idle crowd, it’s clear phone time is an equal opportunity distractor. They’ve got us, these companies. This technology.

We talked about it at dinner that night, Triscuits and pepperoni grilled over smoky, hot coals. The rule would be, aside from texts home that we were safe, no phone for anything but photos. I took a photo of dinner, because of course I did, proud of my perfectly charred cracker.

That ban on data lasted 45 minutes. A storm rumbled and I found I could get radar for the island.

Ok, just this one other use. Other than that, Airplane Mode.

And then the notifications popped up every time I turned data on. An acquaintance joined Duo (!). A person I don’t know would like to add me to their professional network on LinkedIn. Google asked me to review the campsite. Facebook wanted me to know a friend posted pictures of her trip. My daily activity level was reported to be excellent (Yeah, no joke, I’m almost 50 and that pack almost killed me walking uphill to the site.). Starbucks was offering a deal. Capital One let me know my breakfast that day at shore charged to my card.

Off, off, off, off their switches went in Settings, one by one, until I finally just decided they were all getting turned off. I had no idea how many apps I even had set to notify me of something.

The icons remained and I realized they still tempted. Laying on my sleeping pad that night, I moved everything social, everything news, everything but camera, phone, messages, and voice recorder to the farthest right screen, five swipes away from home. Deleted others. Made a home screen shortcut for radar. All of the rest of it…out of sight, out of mind.

And my brain changed. I lay in the dark, and what had been a low-level state of worrying about what I was missing turned into serenity.

They can’t reach me now.

I fell asleep.

I woke up and found my always-spinning brain, well, still. My phone alarm didn’t wake me, because the morning sun did. Listening to the birds, the distant sound of a lobster boat checking its traps, and the wind. A quick text home to assure that we were still alive, and back it went back into Airplane Mode and back in my pocket.

I didn’t miss it. At all. For four days.

I don’t regret keeping the radar icon. A nasty storm blew in on Day Three, and it was good to know how long we had to get back to camp and hunker down.

But other than that, what did I miss?

Absolutely nothing.

On the trip home, my son took a shift driving, I mentally prepared myself, flipped on data, and checked my apps. Dozens and dozens of posts, comments, updates flooded in. But if I’d suddenly died in the second before I checked, I’d have died no poorer.

The president said what?
How many people were killed in the accident?
We’re doing what now?
My friend really posted that?

It reinforced to me that the connection we have through our little dopamine devices is mostly fake, and mostly unhealthy. I could feel my anxiety increase, I could feel my focus to here and now fade.

After what seemed like five seconds but actually was 22 minutes, my son chimed in, “Hey what exit do I need to look for?”

I looked up. I’d been connected to the world in those 22 minutes but profoundly disconnected to what was around me. It was startling, and totally unlike the experience on the island, when I noticed things…the way the wind shifted leaves, the subtle and perfectly rhythmic pattern of waves, how green the trees appeared, the deliberate manner in how a squirrel checked out our campsite.

It was no different than if I’d been at home on the couch, honestly. A house full of people, near each other but far away.

We’ve lost so much. And gained so little.

I made a social post about my trip the next day. Of course I did. Posted my favorite pictures. Of course I did. It got a lot of likes. A few loves. Some nice words. I’m glad people enjoyed seeing and sharing in the beauty of the island. One friend may go there with her own kids sometime. That’s nice. They’ll love it.

But the island they’ll visit, or the woods they’ll see, won’t be the same as the one I did. Certainly not the one I had been used to seeing.

I’m no luddite. I embrace technology. But you can embrace something and still realize how harmful it can be.

There’s no profound lesson here; no call to action. The technology of connection will advance as quickly as our lights have blotted out the natural night sky. This connection is, largely, good. Lives will be saved.

But when we each take our last breaths, what will matter won’t be any of that. It will be in the connections–the real connections–we make. Technology can support but not replace it.

And the two should never be confused.

Try the Triscuits and pepperoni over smoky, hot coals some time. So good. Tastes better when you’re disconnected to the world, yet so connected to what’s around you.

Leadership, Life

Think Ten: Entering the World of NCAA Rifle

I’ve seen countless, wonderful posts about baseball, softball, basketball, wrestling, hockey, football, gymnastics, swimming, band, track, volleyball, robotics, cheer, lacrosse, dance, ski team, drama, karate, and soccer. Now that the season is done, and my boy is a man, I’d like to share a largely unknown bit of our life, to educate and share my pride.

Throughout high school, Ryan has competed in air rifle and smallbore rifle against hundreds of other youth across the state, region, and nation. Next year, he’s earned a spot on the NCAA rifle team at the University of North Georgia, and will be one of only about 300 student-athletes competing nationally at that level. Perhaps one of 75 or so freshmen. It’s an amazing honor.

Rifle is fascinating. It’s a rare NCAA sport where D1s, D2s, and D3s compete directly, and where men and women compete side-by-side, with and against each other for individual and team scores, which is awesome. Women dominate. Also awesome.

The NCAA champion this year is an all-women’s team. Eight of the top ten individual scores this season are held by women. A woman shot a 599 (out of 600) in the NCAA Championship this year, breaking a six-year record…held by another woman. Ryan’s coach the last two years, as well as his coach at UNG, are women who were top shooters themselves. It is wonderful for Ryan to see and experience all this.

Rifle is also one of the original sports of the modern Olympics, dating back to 1896, and remains one of more than a dozen shooting events in the winter and summer games. Also pretty awesome.

So, this is really, as someone once asked me, “a thing.”

From cold morning practices to clinics and matches across Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the last few years have seen his weekends and summers centered on the zen of marksmanship.

Like all disciplines, it’s a mental activity first. Anyone can pick up a target rifle and shoot decently. They’re amazingly precise instruments.

But it takes a dedicated person who can regulate their breathing, clear their mind, focus on the precise placement of every element of their body, and hoist a 13-lb rifle onto the target, 20, 40, 60, sometimes 120 times in a row, with standing–the most challenging rifle position–saved for last, when you’re exhausted, running out of time, and fighting your own mental battle about how you’ve done so far.

You’re wearing a rigid jacket, boots, gloves, and pants, whether it’s 30 degrees in the ventilated range or 95 outdoors. You’re covering your nonshooting eye, limiting your field of view with visors and contraptions, watching your sights weave and bob over the two-inch target with every minor movement. When everything is aligned just right, you gently squeeze the trigger and follow through. There’s a light crack, a small tap of recoil, and lasers and computers calculate your precise accuracy. You get instant feedback on a small screen next to you. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that isn’t. The unforgiving, running sum of basic addition up to a perfect 600 taunts you. You reload and do it again. And again. And again. And again.

It’s a discipline of intricate, near-obsessive attention to detail. The difference between the perfect shot and a mediocre one is barely bigger than a pinhead. Everything matters, every shot.

Rifle requires maturity, smarts, discipline, strength, fine motor skills, judgment, sharp vision, muscle, mindfulness, focus, and patience. It’s an unfair generalization, as much as any other stereotype, but rifle seems to attract a fair share of Eagle Scouts, as well as top students.

Is it dangerous? Define “dangerous,“ but no. It’s been yet another injury-free season on the team, but Ryan’s coach records plenty of missed practices because of football, soccer, or skiing injuries.

I worry about Ryan driving to practice far, far more than practice itself.

There are several local junior rifle teams. Yes, here in Connecticut. Many private schools, but some technical schools and even public high schools. When you look at the NCAA shooters from Connecticut and Massachusetts, you’ll generally find a connection to Ryan’s home range, Blue Trail Range in Wallingford, “home of championship shooters.” This year, to experience a top-notch electronic collegiate range, we joined a league that shoots at West Point; so humbling to walk its hallowed ground.

Although the sport is on the upswing nationally in recent years, there used to be many more teams. Explore old high school basements and you may find a rifle range, now sheetrocked into offices or storage. People barely older than me recall bringing their rifle cases on the bus to school for practice. Some local tournaments are proudly going on 80+ years.

I know this discipline zigs where some people zag. I’d say I understand but I truthfully don’t despite trying. Nonetheless, we have been aware of the need to be discrete, which is why I’ve generally not mentioned it. A shame that we’re at that point in conversation and society.

The misconceptions have been enlightening to clarify. No, his team is not “training to be snipers” any more than someone who does javelin is training to spear things, someone who plays hockey is training to shove people into walls, someone who does robotics is training to make a Terminator, or someone who dances a perfect Swan Lake is training to become a bird.

The coaches and facility at Blue Trail Range have been wonderful, steered him in profound directions, and connected him to interesting, caring people. I’m grateful. He’s found some good friends and mentors. He got a great part-time job, coaching younger shooters and doing physical work at the range. He comes home dirty and tired, but enjoying work. May we all be so lucky.

Never an immature kid, his better personality traits of responsibility and inquisitiveness have been strengthened, and coaching has helped him to grow, speak up, and lead. Not the type of “leadership” accolades we give out to kids like trinkets, but real responsibility to serve others through guiding them in serious matters.

Most importantly, because of rifle, he found colleges below our radar that offered him significant merit aid unrelated to the sport, as well as a few scholarships for collegiate shooters. It opened doors he didn’t even know existed.

Because of his aspirations to shoot at the NCAA level, he got practical experience interviewing and communicating with four very different coaches, selling himself, and working toward big goals.

There have been some fun and some not-so-fun moments, like everything. But it’s a great little community, in general, and it’s been a great experience.

It provides challenges for a lifetime, and his local league has more than a few men and women his grandparents’ age. Who, I should add, often outshoot the kids. He’s learned that asking “an old guy” for advice usually gets you pretty good advice, and they’ve been universally gracious with their time, guidance, and lived wisdom.

One inspired me, sharing that he thought the sport aligns perfectly with the quote from Browning (Robert, not John), “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” A writer, I couldn’t love that more.

The lessons learned on the range will stay with him for a very long time, which is why people pursue interests, isn’t it?

Think 10, as coaches say. Every moment, every shot, is a chance for perfection and redemption. And in target shooting, as in life, the small stuff is the big stuff.