Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

DATELINE: kitchen island, Indy, 19 June 2006

I'm not clinical or anything. When I was young, I simply achieved the depressive through depressants, like alcohol. I always had a hard time learning to slow down and relax, so I forced the issue. Worked hard, played harder.

Then you shift into middle age and the depressive, or down times, are far easier to achieve. Hell, they simply catch you!

Now I have almost the perfect work-home lifestyle to achieve ups and downs. By definition, the road must be all ups, so the home becomes most of the downs. You go manic on the road, you stagger around in the daze once home.

The mitigating, of course, are the kids and the love of my life. Neither of them exist on the road, so that counters the manic pace somewhat. Despite appearances, I am the slight introvert, meaning I need downtime after encounters with people, and the road provides that.

When home, the kids won't let you get very depressed: they are always demanding, asking, pushing, proposing, etc. They animate your existence, remind you why you live etc. Your spouse, if you're lucky, does the same.

But I will admit: I am finding this schedule challenging in its own way. Unlike in Rhode Island, where I had the day job and the discipline of going to that M-F, here I'm either gone (admittedly a lot more than in RI) or I'm home, recovering from being gone.

And I guess it's the constanty shifting from one paradigm to the other that drains the most: you get your head completely around the work life, and then you're back home, and vice versa. I am not a bits and pieces sort of guy, as good as I am at multitasking. Truth be told, I like to immerse in big chunks of time. I like to storm--in the Soviet sense of making up the bulk of your quote at the end of the month. That's why I write my books in such a concentrated storm.

Playing the piano yesterday reminded me of that: once back into it, I could do it for hours, just losing myself in the search for chords and fingering. It becomes it's own little world.

But I am pre-writing, as it were. I have a full plate of stuff that I can and must get to this week once Vonne and Emily arrive today from the East Coast. I need to get my office in final shape. I need to catch up on the banking and make some decisions about whether and under what conditions we swap out the old cars for new (we drive too much, I am told, for leasing), I need to possibly put together a trip for NYC on Friday to see Mark Warren, I need to write something for him, I probably should nail my next KNS column before flying out to China (yes, China!), and so on and so forth. There are maybe ten calls to be made on the house, to roust certain contractors into action. I should probably clean the house before flying away to Asia, to reduce the sense of shock when I return.

I need to go, go, go!

So why the lethargy?

Some of it is the strain of the past couple of weeks with Kev, who is settling down nicely. Some of it is the looming sense of traveling overseas (my Chinese visa firmly pasted in my passport). Some of it is simply the disorientation of wanting something (this house) for so long and finally getting it. Some of it is the constant blur of the workload with Enterra, whose fortunes are constantly in flux primarily because its upward trajectory is so steep, thus presenting so many glidepaths at once.

Then I say to myself: you wanted the slower summer and whenever you get a couple of slow days, you get depressed, thinking you've haven't accomplished anything, when hell! You had a nice column come out. Last week you made a big contact with BAE. You spoke with House Intell Committee. Steve did his thing at State, wowing Fred Thompson and Chuck Robb on WMD. How much does one expect for one June week, replete with emergency hospital stay and wife gone from the roost?

I always prepare myself for the summer depression, which I think is more a matter of fretting about work than anything chemical or emotional in me. My wife is right: I do like the blitzkrieg pace, which is why Steve and I feed into each other so much on the road. The summer is just so slow that I start fearing I'll never land more clients, write anything of value, get any more speeches, etc. I mean, I know things always get slow now and then pick up dramatically over the end of the summer and into the fall, and yet I find myself both dreading this low spot while trying desperately to take advantage of it (the great catch-up time).

And so I whine. The only weird part, I guess, is that I do it here, my only justification being that I think I'm pre-writing something of use on managing creativity (you know, the usual yin-yang argument that says for every height of clear vision there must be a corresponding depth of opaqueness). If you want the analytical chops, you work them, like any muscle. But you can't work them all the time, otherwise you burn out, so there must be a balancing up and down.

My Mom asked me this weekend: what do you do to stay on top of all these things in order to play the wannabe wise man with various clients? What does that take exactly?

So you answer the usuals: I read widely, I keep myself aware of this or that, I stay on top of the news and emerging trends.

But hell, a lot of people do that. So what's the value added?

The value added is hidden in the writing and the speaking and thinking: I analyze stuff several hours a day. The pianist plays his piano several hours a day. The professional runner runs several hours a day. I analyze several hours a day.

So what really happens (I knew it would come to me if I just started pre-writing until I bumped into it!) when I'm home and down is that I talk less, read less, and write less. So there's a build up of analysis in my head. It gets overwhelming. You feel like you have to get it out or it'll get lost or wasted.

And that is where the blog is so useful. It's the 3-miler that serves no purpose but to get your ass outside and moving. It's the absent-minded noodling on the piano, fiddling with sharps. It's analytical foreplay at its finest.

You organize your thoughts. You define the universe of your day. You stretch a bit. You bump into concepts worth developing.

I am who I am because I put in monster hours cogitating. I do that simply because it's the most natural use of my skills. Pianists play because they HAVE to. Artists draw (like my daughter Em) because they HAVE to. I analyze and play visioneer because I HAVE to.

If I don't, I really risk my mental health.

I'm 44, and I'm just beginning to get a good grip on this self-awareness. This is why I tell my kids not to worry so much about not knowing what it is they want to be when they grow up. Getting there is most of the fun, and once you're there, it's finally understanding yourself in all your glory and limitations.

Best of all, you know when you're depressed and why and why it's both natural and self-limiting in scope (assuming you are mentally healthy, of course), and that is a powerful weapon in one's life--an asset worth celebrating. Thinking across my life, I can spot so many times I was never anywhere near this level of self-awareness, and how scary that was.

And I guess that is why you locate the midlife crisis in these years. What happens if you get here and find nothing?

Then I guess you return to what you found more palatable: you change out the forty-year-old wife for a couple of 20s. You cancel the current family and start over. You reboot.

And I compare that level of profound fear with what I feel today (mostly a sinus headache, I believe), and I realize how lucky I am. Some native skills, yes, but a lot of people who clued me in along the way, including the elderly woman now patiently putting shoes on my Chinese daughter.

The rest of it? It's just money. And there's plenty more to get where that came from. So my ass gets off the chair. I move toward the phone. I reengage, the pep talk complete.