(Depth) Perception
In the largely carefree days of the summer before my second year of university, I made the acquaintance of one Christopher Caliendo, an American composer of proud Italian heritage. We’d crossed paths at the campus gym a few times and one day got to talking—me from a small town, he from Queens, NY, neither of us inherently LA-cool, and both open to meeting strangers.
Christopher was a keenly energetic self-promoter and had the chops to back it—I quickly learned he was the only composer in Vatican history to be twice commissioned by John Paul II. He’d also won the prestigious Henry Mancini Scholarship for Film Composition, and Mancini had invited Christopher to UCLA to finish his graduate work.
I myself had recently joined the staff of The Daily Bruin (“LA’s third most-read daily paper”, thank you very much) and the quiet summer months offered nascent writers the opportunity to pitch and publish features. Christopher, as expected, was more than happy to sit for the interview and talk about his life, which is when I learned about ‘appreciation dinners.’
Once a month he’d invite a group of friends to his house in Venice Beach for a pasta dinner and, following the meal, gather everyone in a seated circle. Choosing a talisman from a random assortment of props—conch shell, sheep’s horn, conductor baton—the group would pass the object, ceding control to whomever held it, with the imperative to share the positive events of their lives, the things going well, recent joys, appreciations, and achievements.
“It’s so natural for us to default to talking about problems, struggles, whatever challenges we’re facing, and I wanted to create a space that was different,” he told me. “If we can create time to explicitly focus on the positive, to be intentional in making room to honor what’s going well, it gives that positivity more energy and is reinforcing, even inspiring.”
It feels strange remembering how novel the idea was then, how foreign a concept, even with my hippy commune roots. It was compelling enough that I’ve adopted the dinners into my own life, replicating them in whichever city I’ve lived—San Francisco, London, New York; no matter where it’s happened, the appreciation for appreciation dinners has always lasted longer than the dinners themselves. (Sometimes for reasons unexpected—the grade-school friend going on about how wonderful I was, thinking it was a ‘Zachary appreciation dinner’; a dear friend I’d met through dating her girlfriend, thinking I’d called people together to announce my coming out).
There is power in intention, which is always a good lesson, if not simply a reminder, of the option we have every day to tailor our perception, to choose our focus. You can look up into the moody London fall skies at dusk and marvel at the way light shines off the hull of an airplane and the ingenuity that got that plane there in the first place; and you can look at that same plane and wonder what terror runs through the veins of children in war zones who’ve learned to fear the sight of engines overhead.
It isn’t that one choice is right and the other wrong; and it doesn’t have to be one or the other, although these days nuance in public discourse feels an awful lot like it will go the way of Lonesome George, the now extinct giant Pinta tortoise. It’s been some time since I’ve hosted an appreciation dinner, but perhaps it’s time again, as appreciation has of late been at the forefront of my mind.
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Two weeks ago I returned to London from New York, having crossed the pond to officiate the wedding of close friends. If you want to truly deepen into appreciation, pull yourself out of a mid-October ocean swim, stand on a beach on a spectacularly hot sunny day in front of 130 people under a cloudless blue sky, look deeply in to the eyes of people you adore, and help tell their love story to their closest friends and family. I promise, appreciation galore.
It was the highlight of an immensely rewarding trip, full of connection and reconnection—long walks with old friends, a potluck to gather my nearest and dearest, two separate 50th birthday parties, a ‘man dinner’ (intentional, vulnerable, tender, invigorating), powerful one-to-one conversations which continue to reverberate and inspire (if not course-correct), and a long boozy farewell gathering to soak up and reinforce the bonds of community.
As is the case with humans of a certain (any?) age, the lives of those in our inner circles vacillate, and there is always challenge, pain, confusion—the cycles of love and life cresting and falling with work, health, family, circumstance. It is (too) easy, for me, to be drawn in to the lives of those I love; I’m learning to show up without being drawn in, to hold space while holding back.
There is a proverb with which I’m sure you’re familiar which says ‘no news is good news’—if you haven’t heard anything to the contrary, you can assume all is well. (If you actually follow the news these days, you may be tempted to think ‘no news is good news’ a simple declarative statement, but I digress).
Last week I was listening to the radio (yep, still) and heard the following top of the hour update, lightly paraphrased below:
“More than a hundred people missing and tens of billions of dollars in damage from the devastating effects of Hurricane Milton in Florida. Dozens killed in Lebanon last night from IDF strikes against Hezbollah. The US is escalating its presence in the Middle East by sending forces to Israel. The Arctic is warming at more than four times the rate of the rest of the earth.
The stock market is up 108 points.”
If that doesn’t speak to the indefatigable nature of human optimism, to the evidence of multiple opposing realities holding simultaneously true, I’m not sure what does. My dad used to joke that the only difference between a brown-noser and an ass-kisser is depth perception, and while I try to refrain from embodying either, the fundamental truth remains—perception is reality. And reality, as it Lily Tomlin so eloquently put it, is nothing more than a collective hunch.
So what better gift than to again make time for what’s good, to hold space and intention, to celebrate the blessings of existence—accentuate the positive, and all that. Even the toughest moments of being alive beat the alternative, so with that in mind, please, join me in inhaling the wonders of humanity, exhale any sort of anxiety you’re holding, and imagine yourself sitting down to fresh pasta, a glass of red, and a dozen beautiful humans sitting next to you. If you cock your head to one side and slightly blur the vision in your left eye, why, you can see the good in any moment, even this close to the election.
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Sitting down to write, an alert came through that a federal judge has ordered Rudolph Giuliani to turn over most of his possessions and cash to a receivership in the name of the mother/daughter Georgia election officials he falsely accused of costing Trump the election. The accusations lead to a storm of insults and threats on the lives of the women and their families; and now it leads to seven days in which Rudy G. has to turn over his apartment in NYC, his vintage Mercedes once owned by Lauren Bacall, 26 watches, and even some furniture and his TV. There is good news everywhere, if you pay attention.
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On Monday I called my credit card company. In the crisscrossing of time zones and exuberance of reconnection I’d forgotten to pay my bill, and was curious if I could request away the accumulated $60 in financing and late fees. I explained to Jennifer that I’d been in New York to officiate a wedding, had lost track of things, and simply forgotten. I wondered, could she, in this moment, find any room to help, any way to consider the circumstances?
“That’s ok, we’re all human here, let me see what I can do,” Jennifer said.
It’s nothing new, this whole idea that kindness begets kindness, that you catch more ants with honey than vinegar. Plus I’m a man, and for years I did what every man knows you’re supposed to do when you come upon an obstacle, a wall in the way—close your eyes, put your head down, and run as fast as you can directly into it. I can’t say when, but one day I learned that you can actually raise up your head, take a deep breath, and just walk around the damn thing.
There was a brief moment of silence as Jennifer’s words sank in, before I let her know how grateful I was, how kind of her it was to hear me, how much I’d appreciated the ‘we’re all human here’ response. “I actually just texted that exact line to a friend last week,” I said, still in that exalted state of surprise and gratitude.
To which Jennifer took an audible breath (I imagined her in a cubicle wearing a headset under fluorescent lighting in an office park in a suburb, sitting up a little straighter, setting her jaw ever so determinedly) and said, “the robots are coming for all our jobs, but I’m not going to let them take my humanity, not today.”
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Yesterday as I walked along the canal toward the Angel tube stop and a coffee-shop rendezvous, I passed an elderly man with a walker, coming toward me, head mostly down, moving slowly and cautiously—walker forward, step, step; walker forward, step step. As I neared, he looked up, and I simply raised a hand in greeting, to say hello. His face broke in to a wide smile, his eyes warm, meeting mine. The interaction lasted a second, at most, and I took joy with me for the rest of the day.
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On this most recent trip to New York, while three fathers huddled outside smoking and checking the meat in a smoker, I entertained five little people by letting them launch themselves off the couch and on to me and the bean bag. In a rare quiet moment, one of them paused and in a conspiratorial whisper asked if I’d liked being a kid. It’s quite a disarming question from a seven-year-old, and I laughed and told her that yes, I did like being a kid. She agreed it was fun to not work.
Two nights later, at the aforementioned man dinner, I learned about epigenetic trauma, and the idea trauma can be (is) passed down genetically—not so difficult to fathom traumatic experiences impacting the eggs of a woman, and therefore her offspring. It doesn’t necessarily change your DNA, but can influence which genes are activated. It can also be overwritten by life experience to the contrary.
Last night I stood outside as the very last smears of deep blue turned black, looking up into the branches of the tallest tree in the neighborhood, feeling the gentle breeze, following the flight of dropped leaves as they floated downward. That tree happens to be in the back garden, and looking out today the sky is grey, cold, a little wet—London at its prototypical. The leaves have congealed in bright little piles, yellow orange and brown, a Monet writ large.
Paul Simon’s ‘Love Songs and Negotiations’ is in the CD player (yep, still), taking me back to high school, when for a year it was the soundtrack to which I fell asleep. That was years before leaving rural for urban, country for city, before meeting Christopher, before learning about appreciation dinners.
It’s common—prototypically human, even—to wax nostalgic about simpler times, times before obligation and awareness challenged the ease with which we move through the world. Experience begets awareness, and awareness influences experience; the circular economy of our individual existence, long before we know about brown-nosers, ass-kissers, or the subtle differences defining the two.
It’s less common, in my experience, for us to wax optimistic about possibility, to do the hard but simple work of attuning our awareness to what serves, to filter for fantastic. The pre-requisite for experiencing the magic power of intention is to at first believe that magic is possible. After that, any dinner can be an appreciation dinner; it’s simply a matter of perception.