John Dickerson's Navel Gazing: Remembering Early 1990s New York

John Dickerson
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Hello, welcome to episode five of Naval Gazing. Im John Dickerson. A detour before we head into the meat of things I did not realize before embarking on this project that navel gazing was a thing is a thing. I thought it was just a clever metaphor describing a common thing, which is excessive self regard, a malady that wraps itself around my head like a page of newspaper on a windy day. No, navel gazing guided the contemplatives in the ancient world.

They accessed ready revelation by meditating on the navel by staring into the navel. It even has a greek word to describe it. And like yogurt, anything associated with the Greeks is immediately elevated. The greek word is I'm full of Skepsis. To which I say, then you shouldn't have had so much Skepsis.

You may write that off as a drastic dad joke, and you'd be right. It may have even caused you to interrupt your jogging like you'd gotten a bug in your ear. But this remark is in the tradition of 1950s borscht belt comedians, who tickled their audiences at Catskill retreats by playing with greek words. In other words, I'm giving you a historical traditional youve heard this joke. Perhaps the classics professor goes into the tailor and pants shop carrying some trousers you rip at ease.

Yeah, you mended ease. Over at the sales rack, a man lifts up a pair of trousers and said, alcibiades, that last little bit is not part of the classic joke, but ive always been interested in Alcibiades, who was an athenian general who fled to Sparta and essentially switched sides. But youll have to wait for the 18 part Alcibiades podcast to get the full story. His treachery for the moment, Alcibiades plays a role in an intergenerational anecdote ive always liked. Alcibiades was telling Pericles, who was 40 years his senior, how best to govern Athens.

This did not amuse Pericles, as any advice from younger people doesnt amuse older people. Alcibiades, Pericles said, when I was your age. I talked just as you do now, to which Alcibiades responded, how I should like to have known you, Pericles, when you were at your best. I learned this story of the age old tension between the wisdom of age and the urgency of youth from a book of anecdotes in my mother's library. I still know what's hers and what's mine, though our books have been mixed on my shelves for nearly 30 years, since she died.

That may be why I associate this book and the act of anecdote telling with something antiquated. I dont know if we have anecdote tellers in our age. Moms generation exchanged witty stories all the time of this kind, between martinis somewhere close at hand. There were cigarettes standing in a silver cup. Im sure of it.

My stepfather was told by his mother, you are the kind of person to whom interesting things are always happening. This is a definition of what I think the life of the anecdote teller is a life that has a store of interesting things happening to it. In the introduction to this book, the Little Brown Book of Anecdotes, there is a useful distinction between Ana and anecdotes. An anecdote is defined as a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident. Anna, on the other hand, is bric a brac, personal miscellany lint collected in the blue jean pockets of experience.

Anna is impervious to storytelling. In this category we might put most remembered dreams, tales about great meals eaten, exquisite golf clubs that are really working for you, and generally anything that makes you a bore at thanksgiving. But bric a brac can also be high minded philosophical bullshit, just the kind of dangerous stuff we flirt with here, where ideas become too abstract and and conceptual. The trouble with you is you write about things the poet Wallace Stevens sniped at Robert Frost, to which Frost reportedly said about Stevens abstract poetry. The trouble with you is you write about bric a brac.

A former producer of mine, Mary Hood, once told me, the way to rescue any story that appears to be doomed to be Anna and shine it up into an anecdote is just before it runs out of gas, you say, and then I found $5. It pulls you right out of a nosedive and brightens the eyes of all in the room, assuming your anna has not already caused them to flee from it. Careful of using this trick too many times, though, or people will think you spend your day head down, looking at the ground for five dollar bills like you're examining your navel. Mary Hood and I did actually run out of gas once following some campaign somewhere in a rental car on a highway after eating lunch at a cracker barrel. But then we found $5.

Anyway, back to the navels in the Louvre stands a statue of men in loincloths in a circle with their backs to each other, each of them regarding their navel. Thats what Wikipedia says they are doing. Anyway. When you look up the entry for navel gazing, others may look at the sculpture and come to different conclusions. It is possible to conclude that the sculpture depicts a group effort to to find a missing airbud in the moments before the subway train arrives.

Hard to feel sorry for them as the airbud is really not compatible with the loincloth. Frankly, this kind of chakra looking seems like it would be hell on the neck, all that staring down. But then so is a smartphone where we seek our modern answers and enlightenment. Navel gazing seeks enlightenment through long looking at the chakra that apparently resides in the navel. In the hindu and yogic traditions, the navel chakra, known as the manipura, is believed to be the center of personal power, self esteem and willpower.

It must be a wee little chakra. But after the last chapter on patient noticing, im not going to sneer at anyone who spends an afternoon by the brook having a long look into the thimble belly chakra. So what awe is bubbling in the chakra today? Were a few minutes in and I havent even announced this episodes notebook entry below 1016, the subject of our last episode, written in Notebook 75 on page nine. Just a page or so from the one that started this series, it reads on board memo for Laura.

Yes, now I do recall in the fall of 2021 I had just left 60 minutes for CB's Sunday morning in what apparently is my goal, unbeknownst to even myself, to work for every CB's news show there is. If this sounds like another life transition, thats because it is. If you could turn to page six in your official navel gazing workbook, youll see that in the transition tracker. In addition to an eldest son left for college, a dead dog, a move of body and possessions, there was also a new job. Four of those life changes Brad Stallberg writes about in the notebook.

Place the sticker of a blender in the appropriate square, connoting four life changes spinning simultaneously. If you seek an ordered life, the ordered life manual suggests right there on page one, dont choose to go through moderate to large life changes. At the same time, combining transition overwhelms the system known side effects include proclamations made into the quiet living room in the middle of a Sunday, which, as you will remember, is just the kind of behavior that kicked off this award winning navel gazing podcast. But who was Laura? And aboard?

What was she onboarding? Laura was my new colleague. Laura Doane is her name. She was moving to New York City from CBS's Washington bureau to join me in my new post as an assistant, a transition for her about which she will one day have a podcast. I'm sure of it.

In this notebook entry, I was reminding myself to write her a memo about this new life she'd signed up for, and to convey some kind of low key advice from one generation to the next about beginnings and starting out. I fancied that a well written onboarding memo would provide Laura with miles of fresh, smooth road stretching out into her future. It would outline this new life she'd signed up for, trumpet adventure, demystify the transition, and generally confirm that she'd been right to stuff her possessions into boxes, duffel bags, and that one rolling suitcase with a bad wheel. If life ever seemed unsettled or unsure when transitions were pelting down on her, all Laura Doane would need to do would be consult the onboarding memo. As an aside, I may have been an unreliable narrator for this task, since I was in the throes of some beginnings myself.

I suspect at some deep level visible only from the future. And this revelatory sheen of the navel gazing podcast process, maybe I was writing this memo for myself, an onboarding memo to a life im already on board of. It was only fair to set expectations for Laura, but more keenly, I wanted to offer a precise blueprint because I wanted to be worth the moving van. I felt a moral weight. For the rest of her life, Laura will mark time as before and after she left her friends in Washington to work for John Dickerson.

I felt the weight of having someone uproot their life for me to look back on once cozy rooms now empty, the moving van pulling away before even knowing what kind of person they were going to work for. At the time of her employment, Laura Doane was not expecting to be weighed down with an onboarding memo. Her focus was on getting to know roommates shed only met through organizing emails and learning the unfamiliar parts of Brooklyn, a barista in every passageway, peddling entrepreneurial facial hair, looking a good deal like an infielder from the early days of baseball. She might have suspected an incoming communication. However, her new colleague put a lot of weight in the written wisdom concerning how to order your days.

I had already sent her a shelf of new books. Most of them were about building systems for flourishing books like atomic habits, getting things done, the checklist manifesto, books on habits, organization, and focus. In a world where entire corporations are designed to scalpel away our focus and whip us into a scramble to win little mean advantages over each other. I also sent her evie whites, this is New York and Victor Frankl's man search for meaning. Somehow, she did not immediately quit.

I did not. In my defense, though, send her a copy of Robert Frost's the road not taken.

Ann
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John Dickerson
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Navel gazing is sponsored by field notes. This morning, I was going for my morning cup of coffee and my field notes that I carry in my back pocket at the moment. As I've mentioned, it's the spirograph version is my morning companion. Now with coffee, I have completely dropped the phone in the morning because we've got to defend the morning, and the field notes is now what I open instead of my phone. And making a regular practice of that has turned this spirograph field notes into a religious thing.

Because I know when I'm opening it now and writing whatever I'm writing or reading whatever I wrote in there last time. I am successfully putting the phone in another place and it is not dominating my life, at least in the early hours when I'm getting my cup of coffee. So if you want to try and defend the morning, I think the field notes notebook is an important tool in defending the morning. Visit field notesbrand.com and save 10% on your first order by using the coupon code. Gazing hey guys, it is Ryan.

Ryan
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John Dickerson
Listen to it now. Immediately unlock the next episode of Naval Gazing by subscribing to Slate plus. Your subscription also gets you ad free listening across all your favorite slate podcasts, plus a weekly member exclusive segment on the political Gabfest. Join now by clicking subscribe at the top of the navel Gazing show page on Apple Podcasts or visit slate.com navelgazing plus to get access wherever you listen.

30 years earlier, I had taken Laura's journey. Same city, same deal, new job. No real idea what I was getting into. As you may remember, that sound identifies in episode time travel, boarding the dirigible of memory and motoring back, if that's what one does in a dirigible. To 1991 to notebooks at the front of that pine box that holds the collection.

Notebook number three, page 44, May 1991 weve now jumped in time more than 30 years. Hows everybody feeling? No one get the bends. Notebook number three is dark blue, nearly black. Smytheson is the maker of the notebook.

Leather cover fit exactly into the back pocket, probably the back pocket of jeans since I was in college. At the time I carried it. Pages are Bible leaves, thin, whispery when you turn them fancy. My father bought one for me when he visited me in London at the start of this habit. If I was going to carry a notebook, he thought it should be better than the clump of drugstore pages speared with a wire loop that I was carrying at the time.

Now I write in a plain cardboard field notes notebook. My favorite. I'm guessing my younger self liked the status, though, of those Smythes and books. It showed I'd arrived, though, of course, I had no idea where I was heading. The entry I'm looking for in notebook number three is this 1 June 17 start job.

Good stuff. That sounds like a haiku. It's the note I made during my first meeting with my boss in New York in the spring of 1991, when I'd traveled there to meet him coming out of college that spring, I'd been hired to be a secretary to the television executive at Time Inc. Who was charged with turning the company's magazine stories from time people entertainment weekly into television stories. New technology had shrunk cameras, and the idea was that magazine journalists could carry cameras along with them when they did their print reporting.

Since you may be listening to this on a smartphone with a camera better than the ones I'm talking about, I may need to put this innovation into proper context. These innovative, new, manageable cameras were about the size of a loaf of bread, which doesn't sound very special given what we all now carry around in our pockets. But in 1991, a camera as big as a loaf of bread was a considerable achievement. It was a considerable shrinkage. Something happens between the weddings and birthday parties.

Unknown
It's called the rest of your life. That's why we created America's most popular camcorder, the handicap from Sony. At the time, the cameras used to shoot professional television were about the size of a suitcase you'd take for a long weekend in the mountains, where it's hot during the day. But you should probably pack something warm because it gets cold when the sun goes down. My new boss, a wonderful guy named Joe Quinlan, offered me very practical onboarding information about where I should rent an apartment to hang the gray suit I would wear on my first day after moving up from Charlottesville, Virginia.

John Dickerson
I transcribed his advice faithfully, the way I would lecture notes for the exams I was completing in my fourth year. Knowledge would be the key to cracking New York City. This was my only understanding of knowledge at the time. You accumulated information, the information was valid, and you put that information into play, and it led to achievement as easily as picking the right Tennyson quote on a quiz led to a high score.

I had worked summer since I was 13. Concessions stand working the books at a summer basketball league, selling and installing computers. An intern in a PR firm paid work, real world work with adults of a modeled sort. So I had real world experience that should have made me skeptical of my college boy ideas about knowledge. I knew that there were different kinds of knowledge and that power and knowledge were sometimes at odds.

But I think I had been fooled by getting a college degree, which lulls you into a false idea about the way the world works.

30 years later, I would try to find wisdom to impart when I was on the other side of the table, the boss looked to for guidance. At this point, though, age 22, I was a head down faithful scribe, learning about New York's neighborhoods. Notebook number three, page 46 May 1991 tips on buying crossed out renting in NYC. Ask about a broker. Twenties and thirties, east side, Murray Hill.

Live on no major avenue. Interest bearing account for security deposit medico locks medico locks. Oh my God, Medico locks. And oh my God, you pronounce them medico, not Medco. For 30 years I've been mispronouncing medico, but forget that.

Medeco locks. This is the kind of onboarding information a person could really use. Medico locks are hard to pick. You can't drill through them. They're durable, and they have keys that are hard to duplicate.

But in a few minutes I'm gonna have a copy of your front door. Key, and in a couple weeks I'm just gonna walk right in and help myself to whatever. Wait a minute. This is a Medeco key. Only a medeco locksmith can make a copy of this, and only with the key owner's permission.

Today they are on every New York apartment. If I were to advise Laura to look for a medeco lock on the apartment she was looking for, it would be like advising her to look for an apartment with a floor. You see, floors are a real benefit in any apartment. I mean, they keep you and your stuff from losing out to gravity. But in 1991, medico locks were a fresh topic on the mind of apartment dwellers.

This particular brand of lock was a thing you were told to look for because standard door locks were too easy to break through and you didnt want to have your door broken through. What break ins were such a thing that the kind of lock you had was that vital? Medeco products offer the highest level of protection against physical attacks, says the companys. Advertisement and physical attacks were happening. It wasnt just the theatrical production of cats that was assaulting New Yorkers.

In the early 1990s, local news reported that women were followed to their apartment and attacked just after they'd shut the door by attackers who shouldered their way past the weak standard door locks. Did this really happen? Yes, John. It really did happen. That's Ann.

You remember her? She wanted back in here. She moved with me to New York that year. We were dating but not living together. We were not heathens.

I definitely remember the fear that pervaded our arrival in the city.

The next line in the notebook from Joe's list of things to know about apartment location attests to this air of menace. Amsterdam, between 84th and 85th is crack corner. I wrote down dutifully, this was not a recommendation, but a warning. My new city had open air drug markets. Take care, or you could wander yourself into one.

Everyone we met at this time seemed to wave some kind of flag. Warnings came from current New York residents and people who had never been to the city never would go to the city. Why would you live in New York? Don't you know how dangerous it is? Carry your wallet in your front pocket.

Don't look people in the eye. Everyone seemed to have a personal grid system marking the dangerous parts of the city where you absolutely must not go. If you wind up in Alphabet City, just surrender and hope there's a prisoner exchange. Laura Doane and I, a generation apart, are nevertheless of the same class that Eb white, in his famous essay on New York, written a generation before my arrival that he called a young, worshipful beginner. Oh, hey everyone, I've come to the city.

I've got my notebooks. Make way for ducklings. But White's chipper here is New York essay contains none of the menace I felt on my Manhattan journey of adaptation in 1991. The warnings were audible in the air in those days in New York because car alarms sounded constantly. You see, radios still had value, and these alarms were meant to protect them.

They were part of a multistage defense system. The first line of defense were hand drawn cardboard signs in the front window of many of the cars that read no radio in the hopes of saving a window from being smashed. Usually these kinds of signs encouraged robbers to smash the window because they correctly identified the signs as misinformation. Everywhere car alarms were being advertised, either on billboards and flyers or because a car alarm pierced the air as it was going off. The sound of the car alarm did not always accompany a theft.

These alarms went off when a football from a game in the street went awry or an enthusiastic parallel parker kissed a bumper. Since false alarms were so frequent, the deterrent effect diminished. The only role the car radio alarm really played was as a kind of celebratory jingle for the successful car radio thief. Like a slot machine bell for thieves success. Youve won the big prize.

To live in the era of the car alarm was to live in a city with tinnitus. With all of this fear loaded into the cerebellum, its not surprising. I find this entry in one of the notebooks from this period. Notebook four, page 15. Scared standing on 34th and Broadway.

Thats hells kitchen, which you dont need an onboarding memo to know. Does not seem like the kind of place you want to get caught standing on the street corner examining your chakra. This was true in 1834, also where Davy Crockett, yes, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, was also scared standing in Hells Kitchen. I thought I would rather risk myself in an indian fight. Than venture among these creatures after night, he wrote of the predominantly irish neighborhood.

I said to my friend, these are worse than savages. They are too mean to swab Hell's Kitchen. It is Crockett who is credited with giving Hell's Kitchen its name. I wrote scared standing on 34th and Broadway. To combat the sense of looming contusion I carried with me.

Not to dispel it by naming the fear, but on the theory that if I looked like I was doing something purposeful, writing in a notebook, no one could draw the conclusion that I was completely out of place and therefore ready prey. You may remember this strategy from episode two. Every empty metal barrel, panhandler, and booming radio menaced. The notebook was a shield, a place to hide. Upon reflection, this was an unsound practice.

Imagine you spent your days looking to do harm to those on the street, which is just the kind of person I imagined was out there waiting for me in New York City. You would not pass over the shaky guy, head down in his little notebook. Instead youd Zero in on him like he was an in store display for pigs in a blanket. Reading the next notebook entry from the moment in Hells six dollar cab fare offers fresh relief even 30 years later in the safety of my apartment. As I remember exhaling into the safe harbor of the cab, the slamming trucks and car alarms on the other side of its door.

Another entry from the same period. Notebook number four, page 42. Getting lost in the village. Oh, the energy I wasted getting lost. And not admitting I was lost.

I strained muscles I didn't even know I had. Trying to show no outward signs of newness, even little acts like folding a newspaper with one hand on the subway, seemed to me designed for the purpose of identifying the new arrival. Native New Yorkers could do the single handed fold with such ease, not like a parlor trick done in pristine conditions, but while holding onto a subway pole as the car shook, rumbled and made you wonder if you'd updated your last will and testament to fold a newspaper in these conditions. Such elan. The subway newspaper reading also reminds me of what people did with their necks in the period mankind inhabited between ancient world chakra looking and staring down at the iPhone.

If you had confronted me with a newspaper and made me fold it with one hand while trying to keep my balance on a moving subway, the pages would have pooled around my feet like a moat. The forces of harm would have set upon me and served me for dinner with a nice root vegetable. My favorite story about immediate censure of the newcomer, which is probably apocryphal, is of a new member of parliament who stood to make his first remarks in the new job. Just as he was reaching to his full height and commenced to push out words into the grand space, a member of the opposition stood and shouted resignation. This terror of being out of sync with the moment propels much of british comedy.

It's captured in a Monty Python sketch called the silly Job interview, where John Cleese interviews Graham Chapman for the management training course. Every natural thing that Chapman does works against him. The tests get more and more absurd until Cleese rings a tiny bell and says, and then looks to Chapman for a response. When he doesn't get an immediate response, Cleese counts. 54321.

Graham Chapman
Right.

I'm sorry, I'm confused. Why do you think I did that, then? Well, I don't know. Aren't you curious? Well, yes.

All right. Don't you ask me. Well, what your name, please? Your name. David.

David? Sure. Oh, yes, David sure. No, no Thomas. Thomas?

Sure. No, no David Thomas. The message of the sketch was clear. Life was a test where whatever knowledge you bring from your careful study is automatically the wrong answer. So the picture you're getting of me from 1991 is that I did not stride down the avenues like alcibiades, blazing new, strange paths for a fresh generation.

John Dickerson
Instead, in order to keep from doing the least little thing wrong in New York City in 1991, I greeted events like a clandestine operative. I studied people on the subway who could fold their newspaper, but I tried not to look at them like a student on a class trip. I lived in peripheral vision. Take note, but dont get caught taking note. Also, avoid allowing mouth to go slack.

This put me in a state of double readiness. Any move I might make that would risk uncovering me had another move on deck that I would deploy to cover up from the misstep of looking like a person who had no idea what they were doing. For example, in New York, if you want to hail a cab, you must look to see if the light atop its roof is on. If it is not on, it means the cab is not available. Take no note of the cab.

Look like you're posing for a boutique ad campaign of some sort. Do not spear your hand into the clouds at just any old cab that approaches. I did not know this, of course, when I tried to hail a cab that didnt have its light on, which meant I shouldnt have been raising my hand to hail the cab because no light meant the cab was occupied. Id then realize this and id try to play it off. Id lower my hand and smooth my hair as the occupied cab whizzed by and its occupant and driver made side bets about how long id last before being turned into a lampshade.

If theres one thing that is not thoroughly normal in any city or township, its a man standing in the street who prepares to smooth his hair by first holding his arm aloft for two minutes, like the Statue of Liberty. When I was riding the subway, an outside observer might think I was looking at the subway map to figure out if id gotten on the train going in the correct direction. But I wasnt doing that at all. I knew where I was going. I didnt need to look at a map.

It might look like thats what I was doing. What I was really doing was studying the advertisements posted above the subway map. Advertisements for curing Hammertoe and shearing away unsightly body hair. Im not sure my careful attention to these commercial inducements improved the strangers opinion of me, which I would only learn later didnt exist because the stranger in New York is too busy living his or her life to take note of some dumb kid too jumpy to look at a map. This indifference, of course, is true of nearly all human behavior, no matter the city.

Since I didnt study the subway map when I was supposed to, I wound up going the wrong way on the subway a lot. Which means I gained a perverse skill in getting off the subway, crossing over to the correct side, sweaty with the surge of alteration, and heading back in the other direction.

As I go over these 30 year old entries, in light of this more recent one devoted to the onboarding memo, I realize I could have saved myself a lot of energy in 1991. I thought the New York lesson of my arrival was never look like you're new. Need help? Have gape mouthed wonder heavens, don't take joy in passing weirdness. If you do, the world will take advantage of you.

My sense of suspicion and fear of putting a foot wrong meant I arrived in New York with exactly the wrong mindset. I crouched instead of placing my open face to the world. I didn't use the time to get used to the itchiness of new things. This didn't just lead to wasted activity, it blocked me from taking advantage of the chance to learn the loose flexibility that makes it it easier to have creative ideas and the skill you can build for tolerating newness and uncertainty, as John Cleese, the author of that Monty Python Job interview sketch, would say years later in a speech about creativity. So you cannot be playful if you're frightened that moving in some direction will be wrong, something you shouldn't have done when you're either free to play or you're not, as Alan Watts puts it, you can't be spontaneous within reason.

Graham Chapman
So you've got to risk saying things that are silly and illogical and wrong. And the best way to get the confidence to do that is to know that while you're being creative, nothing is wrong. Klees was explaining the conditions in which one must put themselves to be creative. The speech was to managers in business. This is the kind of thing that's often done creative people are wheeled in to tell people in non creative enterprises how to be creative.

John Dickerson
It's an onboarding memo to creativity. I came across this Klee speech when I was rewatching the management training sketch as I was writing this essay, because I was searching for what's behind that desire to conform and the universality of panic that comes from being identified as a greenhorn. The durable wisdom I've come to is that new beginnings require two attention to getting the task right. That version of applied knowledge I learned in college. You can't go and get fired right away.

But they also require being vulnerable and embracing novice status to keep from being too brittle. Because whether you are on one side of the desk starting a new beginning or you're on the other side of the desk engaging in your 10th new beginning, you're going to live a life of starting new things and fitting into new places, so you might as well get used to that from the very first time you do it. So if I could have tapped that version of myself clanging around the city on the shoulder, I'd have tried to convince me to turn away from the Hammertoe advertisement and settle down a bit. Don't flee from the mistake so quickly or more precisely, don't treat mistakes as something you've got to jump on the express train to put behind you. Mistakes teach you.

Now that is a huge you'll find it on motivational posters available at a store near you. But while it's a cliche, it's one of those ruddy cliches that we don't put into practice. Or maybe, I mean, it's one we have to practice to put into effect mistake making as a practice, as a muscle. If you haven't made a mistake recently, go out and make one. Here's what I mean.

There's the thing you can learn from the mistake. The B train doesn't stop at local stops on the weekend. Fine, put that into practice. Go the right way, do the right thing. But the second thing that mistakes teach you is adaptability, or being awake enough to be alive in the moment, not get thrown too much off course by the mistake, and therefore be a noticer.

Still, even in the moment of maximum embarrassment, be awake for what the new opportunity presents, because theres good stuff there. And to be at ease. And uncertainty is the skill needed to see it, needed to find the cheering truth after anxiety, which is better than just being stuck with a lump of anxiety. Miles Davis said the greatest thing about mistakes, when you hit the wrong note, it's the next note that determines if it's good or bad. Herbie Hancock played with Davis, and one time Hancock hit a wrong chord at the piano.

He was horrified. Davis slowed down for a beat and then played notes that fit into the new chord. Davis didn't hear it as a mistake, says Hancock. He heard it as something that happened, and then he dealt with it it and found something that fit into that new moment. Stephen Colbert, when he was starting out in improv, trained himself at being okay with being uncomfortable, so he could be impervious to embarrassment on stage, leaving him alive to the performance in the moment, alive to play that second note.

Colbert would stand in a crowded elevator and sing at the top of his lungs rocks. And to practice being okay with everyone looking at you and searching for the eject button. Or he'd walk across a crosswalk in downtown Chicago imitating a defecating squirrel, which if you don't have an immediate ready reference for what that looks like, imagine a man carrying a safe filled with gold bars while trying to walk across the street. That's the posture we're talking about here. Engage the core.

So that's what you want to be on the lookout for when starting something new. Those moments to practice, adaptability and keenness to the opportunity to play that second note. I dont think I ever wrote the onboarding memo of my intent, at least not the intent when I made that notation in the notebook in the fall of 2021. Thats lucky for Laura and for me. Im now convinced that the vibe you dont want to send as an onboarding memo writer is that there is one set of instructions that light the way to smooth operating, which is kind of the memo that I was thinking about writing.

Because implicit in that is a rigidity that doesn't allow for the inevitable wonderful mistakes. Maybe the elegant thing to do for a person like me is to sit there with your horn on your lap and blow no trumpeting certainties. Not because you don't have them, but because you rob your colleague of adventure and progress how to be a newcomer this would be a useful memo for me to write, but experience clogs all that because the certainty required to offer instructions on being a newcomer means you no longer are a newcomer, and that makes me doubt the advice. But I shall sally forth anyway with some thoughts. The best thing I now conclude for a boss to say in this period is you will get things wrong.

Please do that. Your mistakes are your friend. For safetys sake, dont wander into the street when there is oncoming traffic, but invite exploration that might lead to mistakes. Now were not talking about being blase. Mistakes from not giving a damn are not what Im talking about.

Instead, they should be mistakes that are the sign of intentional trying and risk taking. You're trying to get the hang of a new place, but you're also working on becoming skilled at being new and correcting along the way, which is something that you will do again and again throughout your life because you're often going to be new in town or circumstance. Mastering the skill will be much more valuable than correctly knowing which subway line gets you to the Javits center there isn't really a subway line that gets you to the Javits center, by the way, that was a trick. The obvious lesson for myself now is to create the environment for mistakes. Mistakes require a margin, and a lot of people aren't lucky enough to have a margin in life.

They can't gamble at work and risk getting fired, or they've grown up being picked at. So that coloring outside the line prompts a conditioned, sweaty response. The poetry teacher Richard Hugo wrote in his collection of essays about poetry writing, if you are not risking sentimentality, you are not close to your inner self. You got to be okay with the embarrassment of looking sentimental, says Hugo, because only by bounding over into sentimentality do we learn how to inch back from going too far and say something that is true, evocative, worth posting on the refrigerator. Michael Kinsley, the founder of Slate, used to say, if you're not going too far, you probably won't go far enough.

The stories this notebook entry kicked up out of my memory prompt what is now a familiar revelation from this podcast exercise in memory. Most of what I hope to offer others in life, I'm really looking for in myself. When I wrote this notation, I wasn't facing my first job, but I was facing a new one. How to succeed in that with what I knew, but also be open and court mistakes that would lead to wonder and invention. Back in 1991, I ultimately had to become more open to uncertainty, mistakes, and adventure because I wanted to be a reporter, and ambition is a powerful drug.

Later, we'll giggle through the mistakes in that journey. My first man on the street interview was almost option for a Broadway musical. It was so theatrical. I like to think of navel gazing as progress in this project for myself. These noises I'm channeling into the conk of your ear, it's a risk, such a risk that if you'd speared it at the end of a stick and waved it at me during my early time in New York, I would have run to the river and escaped, noting, perhaps in my notebook at the time, that there was a crazy man waving opportunity to expose myself to strangers and have it recorded.

Still speaking now in this voice of this voice of this day, I still wish I were more alive to the messiness of the day. I suppose that navel gazing, both the podcast and the practice, is an attempt to write an onboarding memo for ourselves in real time, not an act of self indulgence, but of storytelling to ourselves, the meaning making that comes from looking at ourselves, that then produces some packet of notions we rely on in life, in meeting the challenges of the day. The life lived as story is not just a pleasing metaphor as we head towards the door of this episode in writing and storytelling, the process asks us to lean on the material to see what holds up, what yields universal experience, larger meaning, durable conclusions. In telling stories to ourselves about ourselves, we sift out the ana, the bric a brac, even ideas that we once thought were so profound so that we might keep the anecdote, the story that informs us, if we're lucky. These kinds of informative stories are the lasting reward for prying ourselves open in new, nervous circumstances, to welcome in the dash and fun and joy and mistakes.

We know about the inevitable, dreary parts of our human transition, lonesomeness, fear. But if we're lucky, the stories that we've sifted for durable meaning offer balance to our days and a ladder out of the grayness, or when things feel a little dark and you're lost in the village. If nothing else in the process, you might find $5 hey navel gazing listeners. You have sent so many wonderful emails, which I'm still going through, but today we're gonna have one from Angela Pancella. And here it is.

Angela Pancella
Hi John. I too, jot down my life in notebooks, and I too wrote extensively about traveling in Europe when I was young. But my favorite writing habit is a letter I write every year on the anniversary of the death of someone I cared about who died when I was 15 years old. These letters are addressed to him every year. I reread all the previous letters before writing a new one.

The earliest ones are full of teenage angst and bad poetry. Later on. I describe various crushes in relationship drama. Sometimes I talk about God or listening to music or I describe accomplishments I am proud of. I am 48 now, and I am so glad for this yearly chance to reflect on love, loss, and the ways my perspective on these things change or stay the same.

Thanks for the opportunity to share. I look forward to hearing what you discover as you investigate your notebooks.

John Dickerson
On. Death, sex, and money. We feature interviews with you, our community of listeners, getting honest about uncomfortable things. I developed an illness where it isn't safe for me to drive. A friend once said to me, sex is like air.

You don't think about it until you're not getting enough. This is a similar sort of thing. If you just replace sex with driving. Listen to death, sex, and money wherever you get. Podcasts.

That concludes episode five of season one of navel gazing, or, as they don't say in Australia, navel gazing. Navel gazing is produced by Shayna Roth. Alicia Montgomery as vice president of audio at Slate. Our theme music is by the band Plastic Mary. Remember send your thoughts, notes, random incursions into your brain to navelgazingpodcastmail.com dot.

Let us know about your reaction to this, your reaction to life. If you've gotten a notebook and started to notice things, I'd love to hear from you. Navelgazingpodcastmail.com I'm John Dickerson. Talk to you next week.

Unknown
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So I suggest you sit back, keep your tray table upright, and start getting lucky. Play for free@luckylandslides.com. Are you feeling lucky? No purchase necessary. Boy prohibited by law.

18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details.

Jeremy Stahl
Hi, I'm Jeremy Stahl. I'm Slate's jurisprudence editor. Ordinarily, I edit our courts and legal coverage from the comfort of my home office in Los Angeles. But for the next month and a half, I will be locked in a lower Manhattan courtroom with the rest of the press, a jury of twelve New Yorkers, Justice Juan Mershon, prosecutors, Trump's defense team, and the former president himself. As history unfolds, I've temporarily moved myself and my family from Los Angeles to New York to cover this case firsthand, like I have done in other cases, including the Paul Manafort case, the Roger Stone criminal trial, and Donald Trump's first impeachment.

I'm hoping that my background knowledge of the many, many criminal travails of our former president can offer something to you. Slate's listener over the next several weeks, you'll be hearing from me on Amicus, Slate's legal podcast, and in articles on Slate.com. From the jury selection, to the opening arguments, to the witness testimony and cross examination and the prosecution's case and the defense's case, and ultimately to a final verdict. We will be providing you wall to wall coverage throughout the entirety of the trial as it unfolds from the courtroom. There's no way I'd be able to do it without the support of Slate plus, so if you're not already a subscriber, please join today by clicking try free at the top of the Amicus show page on Apple podcasts.

Or visit slate.com amicus plus to get access wherever you listen. Thank you so, so much.

John Dickerson's Navel Gazing: Remembering Early 1990s New York

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1: Introduction to Navel Gazing

2: Moving to New York

3: Life Adjustments and Anecdotes

4: Embracing Mistakes and Learning

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