Every afternoon he’d come toddling in and the wait staff would fall in behind him as wound his way through the bar and headed to the patio where we offered draft beer for a buck a glass.  WE called it our really, really happy hour.  The first brew would land nearly simultaneous with his arrival at ‘his’ table.  He would smile a broken smile and settle in, shoulders slouched, ankles crossed, and adopt the thousand yard stare of a man who has been too many places but no place to go.

We became friends of sorts. I’m not good at having ‘buddies,’ especially when I have a restaurant to run.  He loved to start a conversation knowing it would lead to prolonged discussion.  Sometimes I could feel the day growing longer, passing in slow motion, but for him, I think the conversations made days going slowly nowhere feel a little more life-like.

He was a smart man.  He talked about encounters with great thinkers whose names I knew and books I had read but never dreamed of meeting.  And to be really truthful,   my little judgmental voice oftenwhispered that he hadn’t met such people either.

We sold the restaurant and I gave no thought about what would fill his long afternoons.

Within a month a flat, letter-size envelope arrived looking for all the world like it had been carried in a back pocket for a week.  The return address, written in dull-pointed pencil, read “Richard Cage” in block print letters that looked not much better than mine.

I thought, “Who the hell is Richard Cage?” and turned envelope every which way in a futile attempt to divine the answer.

Buns had just finished with her pile of mail and with the eagle-eye of a BINGO player poked her finger at the slab of Manila and pronounced, “You know Richard. He’s the buck-a-beer guy!”

Sliding the contents the envelope onto the table revealed a letter. Nine pages. Little did I imagine that this scene was to be repeated every month or so. Each envelope followed by as surprisingly artful rendition of an armadillo?

There were letters, all of them long, on a wide range of topics.  We discussed, via old fashioned post, aerodynamics, hydraulics, basic physics, management, history, and more. His final letter was on philosophy and his big point was, “You can’t punish or embarrass someone into doing something.”

Our hometown weekly paper includes a column by a local radio personality and, in this particular issue he told the tale of a local builder attempting to file a request for an inspection.  Being close to City Hall the builder entered the appropriate department and stated his business only to be told by the clerk that all inspection requests must be phoned in. (The system allows requests to be logged and performance measures to be reported.  In the vacuum of an office it makes pretty good sense.)

Not thinking, the busy clerk said she could not accept his request in person. And without further thought or explanation told the gentleman to just use his cell and an inspection would be scheduled right away.

Now there is some debate as to whether or not he was denied use of the department phone or whether or not it was suggested that he leave the building to place his call.

Even if you don’t believe the entire story there is still plenty of reason to shake your head and think, “Your tax dollars at work.”

If you think about it, someone who cares about the city might have called for a supervisor. But if your goal is not to solve the problem but to rub a face in an innocent mistake, you take the story to the media. Where it grows with each retelling.

Perhaps the intent was to make things better by “punishing or embarrassing someone into something.”

“Oh, golly!” said the poof of silvery hair that sits across the table from me at breakfast.  “Richard Cage died.”  I thought instantly of the pile of letters I had received and the pile that would go unwritten.

At the funeral there was a small clutch of Masons and, other than ourselves, only one couple who we guessed managed the small apartment complex where Richard had spent his final days.

When the preacher spoke we were surprised to learn that Richard had been CIA and Special Forces, an expert in the martial arts.  That he held numerous degrees from elite universities explained the long and thoughtful letters he shared with me.  He was someone. But I knew that.

And so I suspect that the clerk who just for a moment got a little stupid is also someone. Maybe she is a good mom, a loving daughter, and who knows, a budding musician or a community volunteer.  I’ve got a feeling that had Richard Cage been the one applying for the permit the situation would have turned out differently.  He would have recognized that this clerk was ’someone’ and that you can’t punish or embarrass anyone into something.

(Richard, I owe you another seven pages.)

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Consider your Circles of Connection.  On whom can you most depend and how?  What can you ask of each other?

Two key, interwoven questions to consider:

• How are you honing your main talent for a more fulfilling life?
• How are you using that talent to be helpful to those in your tribes, your circles of connection?

To practice your greatest talents more often and maximize your value for and with others, visualize a set of circles of relationships, with the strongest connections in your inner circle and the weaker ties further out.  Here are the rewards for picturing them, then the plan for identifying those circles.

First the rewards.  Circles create a context for your life that…

1. Enable you to make wiser choices with …
   • more grace towards yourself and others, and
   • less stress or regret.
2. Equip you to be …
   • less rushed and more focused, and
   • able to accomplish “first things first.”
3. Use your best talents more often to hone them sooner.
4. Provide help that is appreciated and often reciprocated.
5. Collaborate in ways to use best talents  – and benefit all participants.

Now, look at your circles:

In light of your …

• top two goals (one for work and one for life) for 2009.
• two kinds of resources – yours and those you can attract from others.

… what is your “first things first” plan for each month?  What tasks will you do “first thing” each week, each day … each hour?

To become higher-performing and happier – with others, see how you want to involve them in the next chapter of the adventure you want for your life story in 2009.

Picture your personal circles in a more concrete way using Christopher Allen’s helpful template. When done, consider people you’d like to move to a closer circle or further out or add to a circle. How will you make it more likely to happen?

(I add a first category to Allen’s four circles)

1. My Main Friend
   • To whom would you turn first for any kind of help, sympathy, celebration or other need to connect? (How many would not turn to a spouse, other kind of partner or family member first?)
2. The Support Circle
   • Any time, night or day, you can rely on these 3-5 people, some of whom may be kin.
3. The Emotional Circle
   • You can turn to these individuals for sympathy and whose death would be devastating to you. You may have a “non-mutual” emotional connection with them. Many have 10-15 people in this circle yet others have 7 or 20, according to Allen, yet other research shows those numbers are going down.  Increasingly individuals have just 2 to 3 people in this circle.
4. The Trust Circle
   • You have experience with each person in this circle, instances that made you feel you could trust them. You feel strong ties to the 40 to 200 people in your circle.
5. Familiar Strangers
   • People you recognize and they may have heard of you. Individuals here may be a two or three degrees away “friend” such as those who have befriended you at Facebook or LinkedIn because you share a mutual friend or friend-of-friend.  These are weaker ties than those in your Trust Circle yet are also valuable in job-hunting and other needs.

The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable.

- Martin Buber

When you finish writing your top two (actionable) goals and then crafting your Circles of Connections, tell me how you would improve this approach – or suggest a better approach to planning for a positive 2009.

What emotional shifts, if any, happened in you as a consequence of this process? Did it help you picture your opportunities? Did you discover a way to be more valuable for yourself – or someone else?

Concluding caveat from Tom Paine, “It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies…”

Check these other posts for some additional insights:

• Christopher Allen’s helpful template at www.lifewithalacrity.com.
• Thoughts on weaker ties.

Photo by Daniel.

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Despite their differences, the two boys become friends across the barbed-wire fence that separates their two worlds.

Based on the stories they hear from the adults in their lives, Bruno (the General’s son) says that he and Shmuel (the Jewish boy) are supposed to be enemies. You can see Bruno wrestling with this concept starting at the 6 minute 49 second mark in the video with this post.

This movie is set in a time filled with racism and violence. A time when the differences between us became much more important than the similarities. And, I wonder, have people really changed? Have we gotten better? Or, are we just better at hiding our thoughts that condemn others because they are different from us?

As we work to collaborate, build teams, forge relationships, and work with others; can we get past our differences? Is different necessarily bad? Do we all have to look, act, and think the same? Is there room for differences in our relationships? Can we work for common good despite them?

Just because we might be different, are we really supposed to be enemies?

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Maintaining and growing friendships has become increasingly important to me as I age. In fact, VibrantNation.com, a social networking website dedicated exclusively to women 50+, has recently released a study that reveals that we are of the first generation of women in history whose personal networks at midlife and beyond are actually growing over time. The stereotypes of shrinking connectedness and increasing isolation belong to the women of generations past, clearly not the women of my own Boomer cohort.

In fact, I am often pleasantly surprised by the spontaneous level of intimacy with which women 50+ interact upon chance encounter. For instance, by the time we’ve stood together in line at the women’s room at a concert, we may know each others’ marital status, number and issues with various grown children/grandchildren, health problems and solutions, and so on. Similar exchanges are taking place online everyday at Vibrant Nation as well as on other social networking sites such as Facebook, where women 55+ are the fastest-growing segment.

That said, developing on-going relationships is a new skill for many of us–one I am attempting to learn, the way women newly divorced return to the dating world on shaky legs. This is in part because when I was my daughter’s age, I was too busy liberating workplaces to make maintaining and growing personal friendships a priority. In fact, back then, a good friend was considered to be someone who understood when you had to cancel a social lunch for a business meeting.

Ironically, the inspiring interest in friendships amongst our daughters’ generations can be considered an unintended (but happy) consequence of Women’s Lib. Having earned our older Gen X offspring the nickname “The latchkey generation” is not the part of my generation’s legacy of which I’m proudest. Given how often we were still at work when they came home from school, they turned to one another and the notion of social peer packs was born.

Gen Y, their younger siblings, have taken this even further. They showed us the way to integrate friendship fully into their lives, mostly through the gift of technology, which keeps them connected all the time. Now the friendship equation is reversed: social friends help each other figure out how to make money. For example, my daughter is laying plans to rep her friends’ artistic abilities to ad agencies–a win/win scenario for a generation who, by and large, value their friendships above traditional workplace ambition.

Happily, it is not too late for the women of my generation. committed to making up for lost time, to reach out to others for non-business reasons. We can take a page from our grown daughters to use social networking to keep us connected–and when we do, to remember to put friendships first, professional advancement second.

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According to David Holmes’ research up to 40% of the information displayed on MySpace is fabricated. Holmes believes that many people are being brutalised by the online experience of assuming you can trust someone and suddenly finding you cannot. One day you are pouring your heart out to a virtual buddy, and the next this “soulmate” is simply gone.

They got bored, or found someone else, or simply switched off. It is no semantic detail that users often talk of “friending” rather than befriending.

As well, a third of people on social networking sites give false information about themselves, according to emedia. Why all this ‘lying’? They say they are worried about the security of their personal data. Falsification maintains privacy, though of course also undermines the value of social networking sites. Or again, according to recent YouGov research, ten percent of teenagers said they have been bullied online, by being bombarded with instant messages and emails that make their life a misery.

The “casual callousness” of the Internet is partly at work here. Who has clicked ‘Ignore’ on Facebook? Someone contacted you whom you hardly know or even don’t much like. In the real world, such callousness is usually avoided because you can read the signs and avoid the direct confrontation. Online, the issue is forced. You have to give the virtual cold shoulder.

Anyone who has received an email that struck them as blunt understands this reaction. Yet, now that some send a cancellation, a rejection, even a notice of dismissal by email – on the grounds that it is more efficient – the world can seem a little less humane, less friendly.

Online living is deskilling us, found MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle. We are less able to be alone, or manage and contain our emotions. Instead, we are developing new intimacies with machines that lead to new dependencies – a wired social existence, ‘a tethered self’. Paradoxically, online friendship hovers between communication and solipsism.

Yet, for good and ill, the Internet is as much a part of modern friendship as a pint of beer or a phone. The answer is to be wiser not about the Internet but about friendship. What is it, what does it take, what are its perils as well as its promise?

Professor Ray Pahl, for example, studied how people use Blackberrys. He found that they are used to keep people at bay as well as to stay in touch with those they love.

Yet at an experimental village in Canada where all the houses were wired to make getting online as fast as turning on the telly, neighbours physically met up more as a result.

There is a vital difference between apparent friendliness and friendship – and between different kinds of friends, from work colleagues, through people in the pub, to personal soulmateship. Hold onto this hierarchy because if friendship is flattened human life is eroded too. And friendship is what’s most vital for happiness according to Aristotle.

Then the practice of differentiating the kinds of friendships – and deepening them – might begin where we face the greatest “newness” – online. For starters, why not take this Friendship Intelligence Test?

Related posts:

1. Are You Facing Screens More Than Faces?

It’s no surprise that people lie to others to cover up misdeeds, crimes, blunders and bad behavior. But the kind of “self-justification” we write about is not the same as lying to other people when we know we screwed up, to avoid paying the price. We’re talking about an unconscious, hardwired mechanism that allows us to lie to ourselves, that blinds us even to the possibility we screwed up. It comes into play following just about every decision we make or important action we take.

The mechanism is “cognitive dissonance”: the uncomfortable sensation we feel when an important belief, memory, or decision clashes with evidence that it might be wrong. If you smoke, and you know smoking is dangerous, you’re in dissonance, and you have to resolve it – either by quitting or by justifying your smoking (“it keeps me thin”).

But the most painful dissonance occurs when our self-concepts are challenged: when we, who see ourselves as smart, ethical, and kind, are confronted with evidence that we did something foolish, immoral, or cruel. We could reduce dissonance by admitting it: “I realize I hurt you”; “I stole from my own sister”; “we were wrong to think that Iraq had WMD.”

Yet it is easier simply to deny the evidence and justify what we did. “Sure I took my sister’s bracelet from mom’s estate, but I deserved that bracelet after everything mom gave her all those years.” We usually do not feel consciously that we are “justifying”; we feel merely that we are right – because of the brain’s need to preserve a coherent belief system and protect our view of ourselves.

Self-justification lets us sleep at night without tormenting ourselves about bad decisions, or roads not taken, or embarrassing mistakes. In fact, the people who can’t reduce dissonance often suffer precisely because they keep beating themselves up over things that can’t be undone. But if we blind ourselves to the possibility that the decision wasn’t the best, that we made a serious professional mistake, that the road we didn’t take might have been better, then we can’t change direction when we need to.

Dissonance is hard-wired, but what we do about our mistakes is not. Almost anyone can learn to let go and ‘fess up, and it usually turns out not to be as hard as we imagine. We need to separate the two dissonant realizations, and understand that “I was wrong” does not mean “I am hopelessly stupid.” Saying “I made a mistake; I’m sorry” goes a long way toward defusing anger and setting the stage for reconciliation and problem solving.

Setting down the need to pass the buck and blame others, accepting our own role in our own life story, can be liberating. It allows us to come to terms, make amends, build bridges, and improve our lives.

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