by Karen Mathieson
On that summer afternoon in California’s Sierra Nevada, the trail was long and the sack of potatoes heavy for a child of five. I set down the lumpy bag along with the doll’s suitcase stuffed with my clothing, and recited from a beloved Little Golden Book: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”
Then I renewed the trudge upward toward Morning Meadows, a cluster of dilapidated mining cabins where I and my family would spend the coming weeks.
In “You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself,” Harry Beckwith and Christine Clifford Beckwith tell of a columnist who consulted the proprietor of a bookstore on the topic of career advancement. The owner cited several tomes before stopping to lead the way to a shelf holding his favorite guide to success in business. It was, of course, “The Little Engine That Could.”
The Beckwiths are firm proponents of a positive attitude in the pursuit of goals personal and professional. While their advice is largely geared for company folk, I’ve been thinking about what best supports sole practitioners like myself on our vocational climb.
Put too much of a load on your locomotive and inertia takes the day. Approach the elevation gain in stages, breathe deeply at the switchbacks, and rely on your buddies for support, and it’s more likely you’ll reach the place where you have set your heart.
The Beckwiths speculate on why we choose people to provide our goods and services: “Time and again, you bought their hearts and souls. You bought them and their spirit: their enthusiasm, and warmth. Without realizing it, you bought their love of life and their love of people.”
I’ve written a High Five Tip Sheet to help keep independent contractors chugging toward the clients who will love us for our enthusiasm, and our warmth. Click here for a PDF.
And check out these related links: Lori Grant of Smart Lemming posted an interview with the Beckwiths shortly after “You, Inc.” came out in 2007, and Adam Jesko gave the book a thoughtful review in the Technorati online magazine, BlogCritics.
Finally, if you enjoy connecting childhood experience with adult understanding, click here for a PDF of my evocation, “Orpheus, Sierra Nevada.”
by Karen Mathieson
Winter along the 45th Parallel in the Pacific Northwest is a matter of degrees – and of elevation. Near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, stray blasts of Arctic air confound forecasters. The sky above Portland fills with swirling patterns like the froth of a thousand lattes, while the surface becomes a solid LED display of blinking red brake lights.
Most of the time, as Sharon Wood Wortman notes in Windfall, a regional poetry journal, “Our natural worry is flood, the rain lately slumping the earth to her knees like the converted come to Jesus.”
I like this imagery on both auditory and tactile counts. In concussive alliteration, we hear those knees strike the floor. With the verb “slump” in a sense best known to potters, we are reminded of the mucky, slippery, heavy ways precipitation can change life in the lowlands.
Not that sunlight is entirely absent in winter here, and crocuses and violets do appear beside and within mossy, astringent green February lawns. It’s still tempting to escape, even if briefly.
Some prowl the coastline and return with poems. “Waves leapfrogged and came straight out of the storm,” wrote Oregon’s late Poet Laureate, William Stafford about the hurly-burly at the beach. In a skillful turn of vowels, “I hear the wind honing my bones clean as driftwood,” writes Mark Thalman, a contemporary Oregon poet who helps keep Stafford’s memory alive.
Others head for Mount Hood and another vocabulary for the senses. Glisten, gleam, sparkle, crunch – when I strap on a pair of snowshoes, I am elated by the words set free in my mind.
It Melted Away in 1912
Emily Dickinson never donned snowshoes, but she knew that feeling well. At first tracking snowflakes with the sedate protocol of a census taker, she is soon swept by delight: “I did resign the prig – and ten of my once stately toes are marshaled in a jig!”
For a bracing alternative, consider the poetics of winter along the Eastern seaboard and beyond in an essay by poet Annie Finch: “One brief winter image can infuse an entire poem in a few pen-strokes, bare-branch-black and snowdrift-white.”
A poet’s encounter with nature often reveals how we humans project our concerns, our culture, our very selves into the world around us. Listen to this post’s podcast companion A Word Upon the Wind: Encountering Winter to hear a pair of 19th-Century Americans doing that in markedly different ways – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow eloquent on the unburdening of a “troubled sky,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson exuberant after a “tumultuous privacy of storm.”
By Karen Mathieson
The owners of the old motel had taken care with their website, on which images and text promised cozy ambiance along with spick-and-span housekeeping. My unit was indeed clean, and no fewer than 19 pillows – all but four of them decorative – adorned the two beds. The guest book on a side table offered an astonishing record of how these accommodations affected people.
Some writers described the place as a low point in their travels, denigrating everything from the staff to the state of the venetian blinds. Others painted their stays in the glowing colors usually reserved for black velvet, assuring future guests that they themselves would return for another experience of sheer joy. In my own relatively moderate entry, I offered thanks for a restful night and suggested installing another wall socket for modern electrical prongs. (My laptop battery had run down, and an outlet next to the bathroom sink had been the only place to plug in and take advantage of the onsite Wi-Fi.)
The fervor of those fellow guest book authors stayed with me long after I had left the motel and the piles of fancy pillows behind. I wondered who among us had actually spoken to the owners about our pleasure or dismay. In retrospect, I felt chagrined I hadn’t had done so myself.
A Good Word Opens Many Doors
Months later, I made an errand run near my home and returned in a cheerful mood. It was produced not only by having found some bargains but by the uniformly excellent service I’d enjoyed – and by the fact that this time, I had connected directly and cordially with the people who served me. That inspired me to come up with a handful of ways we can contribute as customers to what I’ve heard called a “delicious circle.” That sounds like more fun than the official “virtuous circle” (or cycle). Certainly, either term beats its vicious twin!
The feedback loop model is well-established, but now comes news via the series “This Emotional Life” on PBS that positivity is viral – spreading like influenza or juicy gossip. However you think about affecting customer service for the better by one’s own behavior, you may find an idea to try (or to hate like faulty blinds) on my Person-to-Person High Five tip sheet, Spread the Good Word.
by Karen Mathieson
What does “Hamlet” have in common with a farmers’ market? It’s full of apostrophes!
Hamlet Turns to Yorick
Shakespeare knew that having his melancholy Dane address someone not really there – his father’s ghost, for instance, or the skull of the jester Yorick – would reveal inward torture better than your average conversation. Classic Greek rhetoric used that trick first, and gave it a name meaning “to turn away” from an audience: apostrophe.
By Shakespeare’s time, another sense of apostrophe was probably already producing some tortured moments in English, and the market square in Stratford-upon-Avon may well have sported signs advertising fresh beet’s, onions’ and potato’es by the peck. This speckled state arose when writers first tried to put words in their readers’ ears by way of their readers’ eyes.
Enter the printing press and you have a single, curved bit of typography representing both missing letters in contractions, as in, “it’s clear he’s losing his mind,” and possession in nouns (if not in relative pronouns), as in “the speech is long, but the thrust of its meaning is that he doubts his mother’s honor.”
“Eats, Shoots and Leaves” by modern English stickler Lynne Truss offers numerous accounts of catastrophe-by-apostrophe. My job as a simple communications coach – “neither a linguist nor a pundit be,” Polonius might opine – is to offer practical help for people who just want to be able to figure out whether “i-t-s” should take an apostrophe in a particular case. (Follow the clues in the previous paragraph.)
Click here for a PDF of my skill-building sheet on the everyday apostrophe. Click here for the views of American linguist Gabe Doyle, and here for a clear, scholarly paper on the haunted history of a symbol of confusion.
