John Dickerson's Navel Gazing: Time Travel Via an Assortment of Journal Entries

This episode delves into John Dickerson's personal journal entries, reflecting on his past experiences and thoughts as he navigates through them in the present.

1. Life's unpredictability can be navigated through systematic reflection.
2. Interactions with others, even if brief, can profoundly impact one's narrative.
3. Personal health crises can reshape one's outlook on life.
4. Historical and family contexts deeply influence personal development.
5. Reflective journaling serves as a tool for understanding oneself better.

1: Early Morning Reflections

John begins his day with a disrupted routine, setting the stage for an episode about coping with life's chaos through reflection. John Dickerson: "Forces of interruption...have launched my day by trebuchet into the sun."

2: Dive into the Past

Dickerson navigates through his past, randomly exploring journal entries and drawing insights about his life's journey. John Dickerson: "Each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up."

3: Encounters and Memories

The episode touches on various encounters and memories, such as playing tennis with political figures and the impact of family relationships. John Dickerson: "You can learn a great deal about a person when you play tennis with them."

4: Reflections on Health and Identity

John discusses a previous health scare and its influence on his identity and life's perspective. John Dickerson: "I just didn't have brain where most people had brain."

5: Concluding Thoughts

The episode wraps up with a call to value the mundane yet profound aspects of life, emphasizing the importance of memories and personal growth. John Dickerson: "Remember the times that you held them. The times that you will hold them will never be forgotten."

1. Embrace Routine: Start your day with a reflective routine to ground your thoughts and intentions.
2. Journal Regularly: Keep a journal to document life’s events and your reactions to them.
3. Reflect on Interactions: Consider the impact of daily interactions on your life and take lessons from them.
4. Health Awareness: Pay attention to your health and recognize how it influences your life choices and perspectives.
5. Value Family History: Explore and appreciate the impact of your family history on your personal development.

In this week’s essay, John discusses Mothers’s Day, playing tennis with the Attorney General, medical scares, and more

People

John Dickerson, John McCain, Thad Cochran, Rick Santorum, John Ashcroft

Books

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

Content Warnings:

None

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John Dickerson
Hello and welcome to navel gazing, episode eight. I'm John Dickerson. Notebook 19, page 16, April 2011 in London. Is it possible, through applied thought, to become systematic in an approach to life? If you want to do that, how would you proceed?

Oh no, not this guy again. You remember this guy from episode six? The entries are ten years apart, but this 2011 entry is written by that same getting your life in order again guy. Systems, habits, craft flourishing. We've had enough of that guy for the moment, I think.

Plus, here in this time period where I'm writing this episode, it's 05:00 a.m. early. Garbage trucks, sirens in the street, coming through my window like a knitting needle in my ear. I've left my computer at the office, so my systems are shattered. I've just gotten a text.

I've got to get to the studio. I have lost the morning. Forces of interruption arrayed all around me have launched my day by trebuchet into the sun. Okay, we don't want that guy either. We'll let that guy go off to work and go back to the garret on the orange carpet safe.

The constructed atmosphere of navel gazing around us, unopened moving boxes, the aroma of cardboard every now and again pays a visit to the nostrils. The one box I have opened contains a lifetime of notebooks spread over each other like the pile of holiday cards you keep on the table. You're not sure why. The 2011 entry that starts this episode is the first one I fished out of the box. I think it's the first one anyway.

What I can tell you, Dear Listener, is that in this episode eight, you and I will no longer evaluate the notebook entries of those early days of September 2021, where we spent the first seven episodes. The notebook entries in that yellow one note notebook held together by blue painters, tape along the spine. Instead. For this episode of Navel Gazing, its host and its audience, I hope you're still with me. We are all going to inhabit those days in this episode, journeying around without much design through that box I watched a documentary once that featured the fish buyer for the high end sushi restaurant Nobu.

To test the grade of the tuna that would be served in the restaurant. He visited the wharf in the dark hours in the morning. He was right there at home plate when the 300 pound deep sea tuna skidded off the boat where they'd been stored in the ship's deep freeze. Walking around through the silver forest of fish on the ground, he spelunked a special tool into the side of the beasts. It looked like an ice pick.

Then he'd withdraw the ice pick and extract a long pink cylinder of flesh. He'd squint into it, drawing some kind of conclusion about the quality of the tuna. If the tuna met the grade, the tuna from that fish, the whole fish, would fulfill its final purpose in life, resting on some delicate rice before customers who could afford the whole business. Was it hedge fund manager grade tuna or venture capitalist grade tuna? I was sinking my own ice pick tool into the collage of notebooks, picking a book, opening its pages without design, and landing on a date somewhere in 30 years to take a reading, following myself around in different stages of my life, looking over my shoulder until I was in a mood of keenest appetency, trying to follow the man, the crowd of his own life.

Each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up, said Pliny the elder, the roman philosopher.

Notebook 16, page 6 July 26, 2005 Im here with a bunch of midshipmen and wondering what there is to do around here. Boy trying to hit on a girl working at the reef in Castine, Maine. Was Eisenhower still president when I wrote this? This acquisitive midshipman fellow sounds just like a gent from the 1950s. Castine, Maine, where I wrote this, has its share of midshipmen.

The harbor there is very deep, which makes it an excellent place for the cadets at the Maine Maritime Academy to study. You wouldn't want to go building a maritime academy in shallow waters. Castine is also the site of the greatest naval defeat in us history. Before Pearl Harbor. I visited Castine in the summer of 1999.

I was 31, leaving the campaign trail where I'd been covering Senator John McCain's fledgling presidential campaign. McCain was the war hero who spent five and a half years in prison after his plane was shot down over Vietnam. The fate, also, I should note, of the midshipmen who were shot down trying to chat up the young woman working behind the bar. My in laws owned a house in Castaigne, Maine for 20 years. They're from Tennessee, but love the northeast.

And so they drove around Maine looking for a town where they could spend the summer and escape the heat of Tennessee. They stumbled on Castine, a very small little town. They found a broken down house and spent the next 20 years fixing it up. I admire that sense of adventure. I should like to look at that sense of adventure a little longer someday, to see if I can locate anything like that in myself.

37 minutes away from Castine is Brookline Main. Eb White escaped to his saltwater farm there at age 40. He wrote one man's meat when he did this. I always admired that kind of bravery, too, that risk of picking up and leaving a job in New York to live and work on a Maine farm. Should the kids ever get orange carpeted someday, sit around cross legged on the distinct flooring, pawing through memories, they'll remember Castine Main.

It's where they learned to ride a bike, where they learned to walk unaccompanied to the store for blueberry muffins or the creamed danish, if they were there early enough. The oldest learned the memory palace skill in Casteen. In order to learn the order of the american presidents, we used the house as our memory palace. Woodrow Wilson was in the front bedroom, Zachary Taylor in the hallway, Eisenhower in the laundry room. Ike could fold a mean fitted sheet.

I was inspired to do this by the book moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, which I read in when I can't fall asleep. I recite the order of the presidents through the memory palace built in that house on Perkins street.

Notebook 15, page 30. September 2004 head problems Sunday nine five morning Tuesday nine seven evening Wednesday nine eight before lunch. For a time in 2004, doctors thought I might have a brain tumor. My hands shook, and they surmised that it might be the result of a neurological wire crossing. They rolled me in and out of an MRI machine like a knife in a silverware drawer.

On the first MRI, theyd seen a dark spot, which was either a tumor or proof that my brain was just missing some material in that location. Unfortunately, I would have to wait to find out the answer to this question. They werent going to just crack open the old melon and have a peek inside. So after six months, I was to come back and theyd give me another MRI and theyd see if the tumor grew during that time. If it didnt, that meant I didnt have a brain tumor.

I just didn't have brain where most people had brain, which would go a long way towards explaining why, if you stew rhubarb like cranberries, it doesn't taste nearly as efficient as applesauce. That is to say, missing brain would go a long way towards explaining why I am the particular brand of model that I am. During the interim, I was to keep a log of the sharp pains I felt in my skull during this six month period so that we might find out if it was linked to anything. That's what these notebook entries are, the recording of those spikes in my brain. Also, if I fell down from lack of motor control, I was to take note of that.

Or if I lost hearing or any other wacky things happened out of the blue, I was to report back as those glitches were signs that we had a tumor on our hands, or on our brains, as the case may be. In the end, we didn't have a tumor on our hands, but we never really knew for sure because the images of the first MRI and the images of the second MRI werent on the same kind of machine. So it was apples and oranges or betamax and VHS, and you couldnt watch your friends copy of Porkys two that youd smuggled home with you on the machine that your parents had bought. But the doctors thought it was probably nothing comforting. I could, I suppose, take another turn in the MRI tube of delight, but I, who would not admit to being a claustrophobic person, did not like the experience of the MRI one bit.

Before they roll you in, they give you a red button and you're supposed to press that if you can't handle being encased in a tube of metal. I've never had a more acute struggle between my lizard brain, which was screaming at me to get the hell out of there and press that red button with all my pressing power, and my executive function brain, which was saying that I had to endure the ordeal to get the answer to this black spot in my brain. The only thing that saved me was they allowed me to bring a cd to play while the machine did its thing. Ani DiFrancos little plastic castle saved me, even though it had to compete with the jackhammering sound of the MRI in. A coffee shop in a city, which is every coffee shop in every city on a day, which is every day, I picked up a magazine.

In the end, the black spot on the brain is still there, but the tremor and the headaches may have been muscular. It was a campaign year. I was traveling all the time, and I carried a work bag with lots of books in it, straining my forearm muscles, which then made my hands shake through the rest of the day. This is the least exciting episode of House ever.

Notebook 22, page 22 April 24, 2014 what did you want to be when you were a kid? What do you want to be now? Why the difference? I can't remember what I wanted to be when I was a kid. I think I said Superman or a fireman when people asked me.

I can poke around at what I think I wanted to be, but upon reflection, I think I wanted to be something that I couldn't have articulated at the time I was a kid. Is that a useful distinction? Can you look back on who you were from wherever you are now and divine a desire that connects with who you are today? A desire that might have been totally unknowable to yourself when you were old enough to still enjoy candy from the 711? Or, when you do that, connecting your present self with a past one?

Are you inventing a memory, seeing a through line in your life that wasn't really there, but that you pick out now to validate or invalidate if you're in a darker mood, the person that you've become today?

Notebook 919 95 that's just the ticket the doctor ordered. Anne has a talent for malapropisms, the enthusiasm of communication unbuckled from language and meaning, in this case, merging the idioms just what the doctor ordered and just the ticket. That's just the ticket the doctor ordered. Notebook 13, 2001 free as a clam free as a clam is how unburdened Anne feels to mint these pearls, in this instance, combining free as a bird and happy as a clam into one marvelous effect. I don't know where the first example is is of taking note of this habit, but it continues today.

It's not a waltz in the park, she said recently on our morning walk. I'm thinking of putting them on a coffee mugs.

Navel gazing is sponsored by field notes. As you know, my most recent field notes practice is that I've been resisting touching my phone until 10:00 a.m. if I can stand it. Texts are accepted. And so instead, my morning is based around my field notes and planning for the day and having it in the coffee shop while we have our morning coffee.

And it is the perfect companion to a slow, long looking morning, and I'm totally enjoying it. And now that it's part of the beginning of my day, I have been cured of the not going back and looking at the notebook for 30 years. So if you want to make a field notes notebook a part of your morning routine, visit fieldnotesbrand.com and save 10% on your first order by using the coupon code. Gazing this episode is brought to you by audible, the destination for thrilling audio entertainment. I've recently been thrilled by a novel by David Archer and Vince Vogel, and it's called the burden of the assassin.

And I realized as I was listening to it, which is I listened to it around the house when I'm on my morning walk. If Anne isn't here. It is so much fun to be in the grip of genre when it's like galloping along. Last night I was listening to it as I was going to bed, and usually I fall off to sleep pretty quickly, but in this case I was listening all the way up to the moment that the sleep timer goes off after 15 seconds. And it was right at the moment, like one of the things was happening and I had to wake up to press it and listen to what was going to happen next.

Which is a good sign of a galloping genre novel if I've ever heard one. Audible members can keep one title a month from the entire catalog. New members can try audible now free for 30 days. Visit audible.com navelgazing or text navelgazing to 500. 500.

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High five Casino Notebook 17, page 67, December 2006 the man sitting next to me has a face on the boil and garlic and old booze on his breath. When he sleeps, he sighs. For this leg of the flight, I am wrapped in his breathy gumbo. I don't remember this fellow, but I remember the years of being encased in the middle seat on airplanes. As a campaign reporter, you live in whatever experiment on the limits of human limits science is carrying out using regional planes.

Do any of you out there who have lived a life of travel feel the same pang I do about the basic human process of travel acquaintances. You spend hours next to a person, another collection of experiences, woes, hopes, dreams, and mostly you never talk to them. You go to a hotel and live among people having what I imagine to be a vast array of experiences. A hockey dad, someone in sales who really needs to land the account, a daughter making an emergency visit to take care of a relatively I've always wanted to write a nonfiction book about all the people staying in a courtyard inn on a specific night. The desire to connect in this idea is affirmed when you do have an actual conversation with one of these people, they make a conversational bid and maybe you don't have so much work to do.

So you respond and you get a tour through their world. Notebook 15 page 7 April 2004 in all these there are messages for those who use their reason Quran quotation the chance readings from these notebooks in different to chronology started to feel like sorties which brewers Dictionary of phrase and Fable describes as a species of divination performed by selecting passages from a book haphazardly. Virgil Zeneid was one time the favorite work for the purpose, but the Bible has also been in common use. The method is to open the book at random and the passage touched by chance with one's finger is the oracular response. What was the oracle of these notebooks saying?

Who was the oracle? Am I the oracle now? Or was I the oracle when I wrote the entry? Or do we all need to take the box and go find ourselves an oracle to explain the contents? The theory of the first episode of navel gazing was that we are on an oracular journey together.

The meaning doesnt come from me alone, but me interpreting me for you in the hopes of putting something on the button. Were all trying to put things in perspective, use our reason to build our messy selves on the fly with the material of our past and our interpretation of the present. Now ill quote Emerson, the poet in utter solitude, remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in cities vast find true for them. Also, the deeper he dives into his privatest secret presentment, to his wonder, he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and universally true. Well, I can't go that far.

First of all, I'm not a poet and I'm not sure I'm ready to dive all the way into the privatist secretist presentment. But I do think this is what we've been trying to do here. So I take it as a fishing license to keep on long looking.

Notebook 15 page 82,005 would like to meet her. I wrote this while I was writing the biography of my mother. Learning about her life after she died, which included reading her diaries, meant that she became almost an entirely different person to me. Is it a constant truth true for everybody? I mean, that kids are more empathetic to their parents as they get older and have adult struggles and therefore recognize what their parents were going through as they get older?

I have a hyper version of this because I was no picnic as a kid, so I was even less aware of what my mother was going through when I was a kid, and because I've read her journals as a part of that writing experience and have eventually, despite all my best efforts, gone into the business she was in, I have a particular window into how difficult it was for her. She was the first woman news correspondent in a world full of men, and I don't know if you've ever read any history, but men were no picnic either in the fifties and sixties. Sometimes this feeling hits that I want to have talked to the person I now know existed, and it hits in a way where I think, well, I'd just like to ask her some questions now that I know about her life. Other times I'd like to just compare notes about the fickle world that she worked in and that I now work in. On Mother's Day recently, Ann had to go out of town for work, so I ate at the counter of a restaurant near us, and around me there were multi generational tables, unwrapped bouquets set aside.

I was susceptible to incursions of memory. I mean, I do have a damn podcast that excites that kind of thinking. And the memory that hit me was my mom holding me as a little kid after I cracked my head on a stone step. This happened more than once when I was a kid, along with the MRI findings. This explains things.

Also. I got concussions playing sports in high school. Anyway, I was at the counter struck thinking about her holding me as my head was responding to having hit the corner of a stone step. And I realized that this posthumous parenting takes place long after our parents are gone. It's not just that we think about them.

We feel and have internal residuals of the effects of their imprint on us. So it made me think, if you are a mom deep in the weeds, with a kid following along behind you with one of those melted faces as they push their scooter down the street in absolute bawling tears, or you are trying to manage a laden diaper and a stroller at the same time, or your father doing any of those things, either, although it was Mother's Day. So I was thinking particularly of moms. And if you're down in the weeds, remember the times that you held them. The times that you will hold them will never be forgotten.

And if your mom is still alive, here's what I'd say to mine if she were. I couldn't have known how hard and lonesome it was at times. But now that I do, thank you. I love you. And if you're like me, and there's no one you can place that call to, there's probably somebody you know who could use that call.

That instinct comes, I think, from feeling the residual effect of a mother's career. In France in the 13th century, a teenager ascends the throne. He seems calm, collected, and, as it happens, drop dead gorgeous. But looks can be deceiving, and no one is ready for the death, destruction, and chaos that lie ahead. Step inside.

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John Dickerson
Can't wait for next week's episode? Listen to it now. Immediately unlock the next episode of Navel 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.

Notebook 54 July 26, 2020 writing requires a reader. You cant do it alone. John Cheever oh, there you go. Thats what I was talking about just a little bit ago. Maybe this is where the idea this whole damn thing came, working with you, the audience, to figure out what we believe together.

Notebook 15, page 71 2004 in the light of sobriety, not sure what this means. Well, I can't help you there.

Notebook 13 on some page March 2001 yesterday I played tennis with John Ashcroft, the attorney general of the United States. I wrote that down, I'm sure of it, because I thought, someday I'll want a record of the very weird things I sometimes did in my life. I was right. John Ashcroft, senator from Missouri, had thought about running for president for a few minutes, and I traveled with him for a couple of trips. I also covered him as senator, and I became friends with a top staffer of his who was a great tennis player, and he looped me into their regular games.

We played with Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi and senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. They joined us on the tennis court. There is a tennis court built into the Dirksen Senate office building. You can learn a great, great deal about a person when you play tennis with them, whether they cheat, whether they throw their racket, whether they are generous to those with whom they play. Senator Ashcroft was extremely competitive but sportsmanlike.

He carried himself on the tennis court like the devout Christian he was. I cannot say this for all of the other people we played with.

Later, when Ashcroft became attorney general of the United States of America, these United States in which we all still live, I played basketball with him on the Justice Department court. There is a court, a basketball court in the Justice Department. During the pickup game. Everybody kept calling him general. Notebook 13 page 108 December 11, 2001 Anne just called.

There is one little heartbeat beating in her today. Everything is okay for this hurdle, I must say, I was really worried. There are now two of those heartbeats in the world, and I've been worried ever since. Notebook 2010 December 24, 2013 sometimes dad says weird stuff. Just ignore him.

And to the kids about me, I cannot gainsay this. Notebook 15 page 84 2004 life goes on Hayawi says. We are in the middle of a war and we still smoke the water pipe. This quote from the middle of the Iraq war appeared in the Washington Post. Notebook 45 page 24 April 16, 2019 our savior lives by the manner in which we live.

This reminds me of St. Francis. Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.

Notebook 19 page 23 2011 people on their mobile phones in England say goodbye a lot. Cheers. All right, speak to you soon. Ta. That's four ways of saying goodbye.

Amelia tells the story of a man who thanked a ticket taker by saying ta. Magical. Cheers. Amelia is a british friend of mine. She's married to Adrian.

You may remember Adrian from the first episode when I listed some snippets of the notebooks. Adrian has fallen into. The trash can was the entry. He has since come out of it. We all lived together in Washington during the bush years.

Our kids are about the same age. During the period after 911, we had dinner together almost every night to stick close when it felt like the world was falling apart. We live on different continents now. Our kids are grown and gone away, but we still get together once a year, often in the most remote corner of Ireland, to keep close when the world feels like it's falling apart. We've come to the end of this episode of sorties.

Our next episode is the last of this season, we will return to the entries from that period of September 2021. The yellow field notes notebook with the blue painter's tape. And I shall try to roll it all back into a final conclusion. For now. Ta.

Magical. Cheers.

Christina Kotorucci
In 1978, gay people in California faced a dire threat. Proposition six, the Briggs initiative. The teaching profession is riddled with the homosexual element. John Briggs is going to fire every gay and lesbian schoolteacher in the state of California. I'm Christina Kotorucci.

This season on Slow Burn, we'll explore how a nationwide backlash against gays and lesbians led to a massive showdown in California. This was tens of thousands of pissed. Off gay guys and lesbians roaring down Market street. Much at stake. Young people became activists.

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Gaze against Briggs. Out now, wherever you listen. That's it for this episode of Navel Gazing, or as the pig Latinists say, evil. Nay, azingay. Navel gazing is produced by Shayna Roth.

John Dickerson
Alicia Montgomery is vice president of audio at Slate. Our theme music is by the band Plastic Mary. Remember, send us a note@navelgazingpodcastmail.com. and let us know your thoughts. If you are a wild noticer out in the world, a mopey parent or a note taker, or the kin of a note taker, or a person who eats breakfast alone at the counter, spying on happy families all around you, I'd love to hear from you.

That's navelgazingpodcastmail.com. i'm John Dickerson. Talk to you next week.

All right. 1995. And then notebook 2001 is. You're very meticulous about this. Well, you know, do you think the people care when I said it?

Well, I do. You see? Okay. It's very important. You ready, darling?

Ready for your big moment? That was fun, guys. Okay. All right. See you, dear.

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