You know what’s fun?  Watching the sun set over the Manhattan Beach pier, eating a lovely dinner at a groovy Mexican joint, and then window shopping your way back to the car.

You know what’s not fun?  Getting in the car to begin your hour-plus drive up to Burbank only to realize that you feel chilled and achey, chalking it up to muscle tension from shivering in the cold night air, feeling it get worse as you snake your way through LA traffic, adding nausea to the mix, wondering if you’ll make it to the hotel in one piece at all (please pause with me to appreciate the wonder that is GPS), collapsing over the hood of your rental car the moment you pull into the parking lot, and, ahem, “losing it” in the bushes about 15 seconds later (no exaggeration there).

No, those things are not fun.

So… I’m in LA on business travel and so far it’s not quite going as planned.  So, I’m taking the less-traveled path, being laid back, and chalking today’s post up to a loss.  Provided my immune system gets back on track between now and the end of the week I will be back in action on Friday.  Thanks for understanding.

I am a germ.  IEP was kind enough to pass his cold along to GAP, who, in turn, was kind enough to pass it along to me.  So I’m a little behind the curve this week.  My Wednesday post will either go up later today or tomorrow.  So please check back.  Hope you’re having a wonderful week!

GAP and I had a little disagreement the other day.  It was a very little disagreement, but it piqued my curiosity about other perspectives and so I thought I’d take your temperature on the topic.

We were talking about moving.  Moving as in “from one-house/city to another.”  Not moving as in “put your left hand in, put your left hand out, put your left hand in and shake it all about.”  (If we’d been speaking Spanish it would have been mudarse versus moverse.  But I digress.)  My sister just moved into a new house, which sent us down this little philosophical path.

I said that I think moving is fundamentally sad.  Not exclusively sad, but fundamentally sad.  GAP disagreed.  I opined that even if you are moving for good reasons – a new baby is on the way, you got a big promotion and are being transferred, you are living in an oppressed country and finally have your ticket out – there is still implicit sadness in moving.  My basis for this is that any time we move we experience some element of loss.  We are leaving a part of our lives behind.  And walking away from some fleeting aspect of our lives or some version of ourselves is always sad. 

This isn’t to say that moving isn’t also frequently overwhelmingly joyful.  My point is not that the sadness is predominant, but that it is omnipresent.  Perhaps it is just a drop in a bigger wave of other emotions, but it is always there in some quantity.

Every time I have moved I have felt sadness.  Every time I have moved there has been a happy occasion prompting it.  (I’m very fortunate.)  And yet a certain pang has always grazed my insides as I reconciled myself to the fact that something that was true about my life no longer is.  

Is it possible to transition from one phase of life to the next with no feeling of loss?  Is it possible to leave something behind – even something imperfect or painful – without any sadness?  Is moving always implicitly sad?  Even if imperceptibly so?  And if it is imperceptibly sad does the sadness still exist?

I say yes.  But perhaps you disagree?  Enlighten me.

According to the brief description following his byline, Thomas Moore (not the poet or the saint), “has been a monk, a musician, a professor, a psychotherapist, an author, and a lecturer.”  My initial response to that mini-bio is to think, “Wow, someone couldn’t make up his mind, could he?”  But that is tacky and judgmental and wholly irrelevant in this case because in this article he makes some very interesting points.

How many new electronic gadgets have you purchased in the past five years?  How many pieces of artwork have you acquired during that same time?  I realize the second question feels like a non sequitur to the first.  But Moore poses this question because he believes that the latter in some way counterbalances the first; like a cultural carbon offset.  He likens technological additions to our lives to coolness – with every Kindle, iPad, or Droid we become cooler.  The problem with this, he asserts, is that we should also add things to our lives that make us warmer.  The things that Moore proposes make us warmer?  Non-technological things: artwork, music, books, and the like.    

There’s something appealing about this idea to me; the idea that as things in life make us cooler (metaphorically speaking, of course) that we should take steps to make ourselves warmer.  We should not be allowed to evolve into mechanized versions of ourselves, engaging with the world and with each other only through objects with on/off switches.  Moore writes, ”There’s nothing wrong with cool… But if cool gets in the way of warm, we individuals and the culture at large lose important values: connection, empathy, nostalgia, a strong sense of home and civility.” 

This was where I really got on board.  Connection, empathy, nostalgia, home, and civility are words that resonate with me.  If those words are a part of my life then I’m probably doing something right.  Right?  At the end of a day, or even moreso at the end of a life, these are the components of our lives that matter the most.  These are the barometers of a life well lived.

The other aspect of Moore’s cooler/warmer premise that I like is that as he explains it our coolness and warmth are not mutually exclusive.  He does not ask us to eradicate our coolness; to recycle our iPhones or Tivos and return to the existence of a pre-Alexander Graham Bell time.  He allows us our gadgets, but merely asks that as we accumulate them we even ourselves with other additions to our lives that balance them out. 

I’m not a huge gadget junkie.  And I think I probably rank higher on the warm scale than the cool scale most days.  But Moore’s ideas ring true to me, and as I add new technological gear to my life I should work to make sure that the warmer things in my life are not subsumed by the cool.

Well, not really.  I don’t fish.  But I spent the weekend trying to ward off a cold while also catching up around the house from having been out of town last week.  So I’m taking today off from blogging, but I’ll be back on Wednesday with something especially thought-provoking.  Happy Monday!