Pattern Interruptions
Greetings from Los Angeles!
Lea and I have rented an Airbnb in West Hills, Los Angeles, for 3 months to ditch winter and to spend time with three of our kids who live there. We packed up the Tesla, hooked up the Thule cargo box to the back of the car, and drove out of Minneapolis in a snowstorm on December 28th.
That is the Thule box on the back of our car, two days before we drove off. We elected to get the box that hooks onto the back of the car, thinking there would be less drag on the car and therefore better fuel (electricity) efficiency with more distance between recharging. Whether this is true or not, I have no idea, and I did not ask ChatGPT.
(Take note of the hammer resting on the box.)
Given that my life has played out entirely in an urban context and that I have been confined to city living my entire life, I have never engaged in any serious outdoor activities, such as camping. Well, I did go camping once in the Boundary Waters. My then wife Linda and I struck out in a canoe and promptly got totally lost and after one night in a tent surrounded by woods and bugs and a flat terrain utterly identical for as far as the eye could see, and after one failed attempt at fishing and one successful squatting bowel movement in the bushes (mine not Linda's - I can still see the bushes and woods and the entire scene as it was so traumatic) we bailed and canoed (to canoe is a verb!) to safety and drove the hell home.
So I was unprepared to deal with the world of hitches, since I had no knowledge of or experience with hitches on the back of a car or pickup truck.
So I had to "figure it out," one of my favorite phrases that I like to sprinkle on the brains of my offspring here and there.
Which brings up a small issue I had not thought of before. When we tell people we are going to LA to visit our "kids," the word kids doesn't really fit. I mean, they are 31, 29, and 24, a bit old to be calling them kids. The word offspring my brain just typed seems a bit too biological and sciency. If you have a better phrase, please share it!
One of my other favorite phrases (perhaps my ultimate favorite phrase) is "assumptions are the mother of all fuckups," borne of my days teaching residents and learning the hard way (for example) not to dismiss a low-grade fever after an esophagectomy as "atelectasis."
Yet, even though I live by that phrase to the best of my ability, I failed to do so with the hitch setup.
My assumption when I bought the Thule cargo box was that the Tesla had a hole or "female" part in the back to insert the "male" end of the platform holding the box into. There was a small plate covering the area where I expected to find the female part, but when I took to it with a screwdriver and popped it off, there was NOTHING but a black hole.
We are now 8 days out from lift off!
This is the kind of situation where I institute a well-honed protocol of information management with Lea. When I encounter an issue such as the hitch issue, rather than running in and complaining to her about the situation, I operate on a need-to-know basis until I get the problem either solved or come up with a solution.
It is a system that we both agree works beautifully for us. She is not plagued with unnecessary anxiety about the issue, and I don't have to contend with her anxiety. I just solve the problem, then tell her, unless of course I need her input.
I called Tesla in a state of red alert and learned I had to have the "female" part installed by Tesla. Eight days out from departure. During the call, I immediately instituted the be patient and kind protocol by noting the service guy's name (Tyler) and using it while gently unraveling my situation to him, all in an effort to guide his brain into my mental pen to influence him to care about my hitch problem.
Tyler got me in and hitched up the hitch! They had the part, and he made a space for me, given my brewing crisis.
Now I thought the rest would be smooth sailing.
Another assumption.
Another near total fuck up.
As you can see, the Thule box has taillights, and there is a cable that plugs into an adaptor on my newly installed hitch. My implicit assumption (not an unreasonable one) is that the cable on the box would just plug into the newly installed hitch, and the lights would work. This assumption was baked into my decision to wait until two days before departure to go through a test "insertion" run with the hitch set up.
So two days before lift off, I trundled out to the garage in the freezing cold and stuck the male end of the hitch box into the female end on the car, and then fell to my knees to open the little door covering the hole where you plug the cable from the Thule box into.
Notice the circular imprint on the door that indicates the shape of the adapter that you plug the cable into. Dread filled my bones when I saw this, since the end of the cable from the box has a flat four-pronged adaptor. I flipped the door open, and sure enough, it's a circle.
This is on Friday.
We are leaving on Sunday.
Panic in my chest ensued, though I showed no outward signs of my internal state (a skill honed to perfection by my surgical career) so as not to alert my wife Lea to the issue, since my panic was a direct response to my fear of her panic if she found out about the tail light issue.
You see, Lea is wired to worry about the weather, driving, thunderstorms, other drivers, you name it. Safety defines her nervous system. Every morning, she checks the weather, and if anything even vaguely threatening is on the meteorological horizon, she broadcasts her concerns with the verve of a television weather personality. Then, every night when she comes home from her studio, she downloads the details of each interaction on the road with the crazy drivers who should not be allowed to drive.
If it were just me driving to LA, I would have said fine, they can see the Tesla back lights since they are above the box. Should be ok, even though even I was a little anxious about not having the lights hooked up.
I knew in that moment that I had to deal with this, and fast. I called Tyler back to see if they had an adapter.
Nope.
I fell to my knees again and prayed to ChatGPT in a panic (she could not tell I was panicked), and she told me I needed an adapter (no shit) and recommended a couple.
Next, I turned my prayers to the Amazon God. Thank God for the Amazon God. They had one, but to get it delivered that day, I had to buy some extra stuff to get the total to over $25. Of course in this situation I would have paid anything they asked, but I only had to order some microfiber cloths and a bottle of Lexol leather cleaner to clean the slobber from our dog Juno's mouth (she has huge floppy lips that hang well below her jaw which makes her oral cavity behave like a leaky faucet that dribbles saliva continuously) that gets all over the headrest and top of the front seats when she rides in the back seat.
Now, keep in mind that Lea is still on a need-to-know basis. But I felt secure in my clandestine operation, given the imminent delivery of my hitch cable adaptor.
I got the adapter the next morning (delivered around 4 AM, which triggered a transient feeling of warmth and love for Jeff Bezos), and I went out in the garage, flipped open the lid, plugged the adapter in, and plugged in the cable from the Thule box.
My next problem? How to tell if it is working by pressing on the brake pedal, since I am alone and Lea is still on a need-to-know basis. Fortune favors the prepared, and sure enough, a couple just happened to be walking by our house, and I enlisted his visual services.
He stood behind the car while I hopped in and pressed the brake pedal.
I pressed on the brake pedal for a few moments and hopped out with excited enthusiasm for a positive outcome, which was not forthcoming. With the big sad eyes and the slumped shoulders of a child who is trying to console a close friend whose toy was stolen, he reluctantly muttered:
"I'm sorry."
Despite our newfound deep connection to each other, borne of our struggles, I didn't feel I could detain him any longer for my little project. I think he would have been delighted to help, but it was cold as hell out, and, unlike his disappointed shoulder slump, his female partner was waiting with her shoulders scrunched way up to her ears, indicating her internal temperature was declining. It was very difficult for me to unhitch him from my hitch problem since I perceived the guy had a vibe of a guy who knows about things like hitches.
Near desperation is washing over me, so I grab the hammer and, to be sure I have inserted the adapter into the circular plug well enough, I give it a couple of whacks. I wasn't 100% certain, but I thought I saw it go in just a little more.
But how to test it?
Another brilliant idea surfaces from my 100 billion brain cells (well at age 71 the number could be closer to 80). I drag our compost bin over behind the car, take out my iPhone, reverse the camera, switch to video, hit record, and prop it up on the wheel of the compost bin so it can record the back of the box. Then I scoot into the car, press the brake pedal, and with the excited energy of a gambler looking at the spinning wheel waiting to see where the little metal ball will land, grab the phone and watch.
The lights came on!
I damn near fell to my knees to thank the Amazon God.
With great relief, I stroll in to inform Lea about my problem-solving prowess, secretly hoping for validation and a few well-placed accolades about a job well done. Instead, and as I should have known so well by now after having lived with Lea for over 30 years, the information only served to trigger her anxieties, which led to the predictable disgorging of her mounting anxiety about the box, packing, , the house, the winter storm coming, and our safety on the road.
We got the hitch and the box hooked up with the lights working and we pulled out of Minneapolis in the middle of the snow storm at 7:30 AM on our way to the first stop in Lincoln NE with our French Bulldog Tuco sitting on Lea's lap in the front seat, Juno our Cane Corso taking up the entire back seat, and the trunk, Frunk, and Thule box loaded up with stuff for the next three months.
I felt like Henry Fonda in the movie The Grapes of Wrath.
Take a look at the lady seated next to Henry Fonda. That's his mother, and the look on her face is just like the one on Lea's as we drove onto 35W south in the snowstorm and the snow squalls and wind and sleet and ice on our way to Lincoln, NE.
So why am I telling you this story?
Well, aside from all the humorous (to me now, anyway) prep work outlined above, there is a somewhat interesting psychological thread lurking beneath the surface of our travel festivities.
As I was dealing with my various assumptions and the struggle, I would at times question this decision to leave the comfy cozy world of my home and all of my cookware (I do all of the cooking and love it) and my computer setup and my bed and my fireplace and my TV room where I like to watch the old Perry Mason TV show (don't judge me!) and my walk routes with Juno and .......my life as I know it.
It's also hard for Lea, and not just because of the snowstorm and her incessant worries about safety. She has a great art studio that she loves, and it was hard for her to leave her sanctuary, where she is so creative and productive. She LOVES it there.
We have traveled extensively throughout our lives, and in the last several years, we have gone south to Costa Rica for one month on two occasions and once to LA during the winter. One month seems like a short sprint.
Three months seems like an eternity when you are leaving your home and your setup. It felt like moving, because it is a prolonged pattern interrupt.
Our situation reminded me of a great article from Harvard Business Review (attached below) about the previous number one restaurant in the world: El Bulli in Spain (since closed).
El Bulli (Bulli is a French term for French Bulldogs, which is utterly apropos given Tuco's presence in the picture above) started as - no shit - a minigolf installation, then it evolved into a beach bar, then into a small restaurant, and over the years it morphed into the Number 1 restaurant in the world.
Who says number 1? Three stars from Michelin, and the top spot in the coveted The World's 50 Best Restaurants.
And how do you get to be number 1 in both? Flawless and near-inhuman perfection of execution day after day, so each dish comes out exactly the same without any flaws, and by driving the creative process to come up with new and interesting dishes.
The challenge for restaurants that need to execute day after day with massive precision? No time to brainstorm, create, and come up with new ideas and dishes. El Bulli solved this by closing the restaurant for about 3 months during the winter season, and the team then spent that time traveling, brainstorming, testing, iterating, and working on creating a new menu to blow people's minds.
Those are the two necessary ingredients for any top-performing restaurant: precision and flawless execution, AND creative prowess to develop new ideas and dishes.
Case in point? The world-famous Paul Bocus' restaurant held three Michelin stars for over 40 years with the exact same menu, but never even made it onto the 50 best list.
Why? Because it virtually never changed its menu for over 40 years.
Ok, that's great for restaurants, but what does this have to do with you and me?
It has everything to do with our own personal creativity and mental health, for three reasons:
- It breaks something called Cognitive Fixation (I know several people who appear to be cognitively fixed for life!). Turns out, when you work on something for a long time, you get entrenched or fused with it, meaning your thinking becomes more fixed and rigid, which, of course, stifles any creativity (beware of this, you surgeons!). Pattern interruptions, even small breaks like a walk, or big ones like our trip, with a change in environment, stimulate divergent thinking, which is the key to connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. It allows the subconscious to do its background work without having all of the sensory inputs of your routine jammed down its neurologic throat, opening the mental door to ideas and connections one would never see while being choked to death by your work.
- New experiences and environments created by pattern interruptions like travel and other new experiences causes dopamine release from the novelty which is the fuel of motivation and improved mood (I am seriously feeling that right now as I look out the open glass doors into the sunny warm California sunshine - sorry if you are in the winter). Not only that, but immersion in new environments increases cognitive flexibility and problem-solving skills and increases neuroplasticity.
- Here is a big one, especially for someone my age: environmental enrichment by intentionally putting oneself in environments with diverse sensory, cognitive, and social stimuli not only restore ones ability to pay attention better and recover from the endless "directed attention fatigue" of our modern lives (bet that phrase may resonate with you!) but it also is associated with better brain aging and higher "cognitive reserve."
Well, we made it to LA safe and sound without a hitch (I cannot tell you how much it pleased me to use the word hitch there), and we are all set up in our new home for three months. Our "kids" are coming for dinner, and we meet them for coffee or lunch, and it is great to see them again. Lea has taken the opportunity of being extracted from her studio to work on specific portrait-painting skills with a master portrait artist, and I have dialed back on other things to focus on writing, my coaching practice, and to further advance my AI skills.
Which brings me to a closing point. Everything I write is written by me. Period. If I use AI for any aspect of my newsletter, I will be clear about when it was used, and it will be primarily for graphics and summaries. Again, I will be crystal clear when I use AI.
Once I actually sit my butt down in the chair to write and start, I love the process, and I would never abandon something to a computer that gives me so much pleasure and meaning, meaning that I derive meaning from the hope that this newsletter and my writing have some meaning for you and your life.
Happy New Year!
A couple of references.
