Season 2, episode 3: in the boat // Thursday, October 22, 2020

Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together and a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I'm Laura Joyce Davis

Kelly: One thing that I wish people would take away from our research is there are almost no bad people on this planet. Really there aren’t. There are just people who are doing their best given the situation. It's hard to be judgmental of somebody when they're just out there doing what they can to feel safe and to feel protected and to protect the people they love and live with.

Laura: In the last episode, I talked with behavioral scientists and resource scarcity experts Kelly Goldsmith and Caroline Roux. I wanted to understand the upset that 2020 has brought to our world and to my family. 

If you're just joining us, I suggest going back to the beginning of the season, where I set the stage for this Pandemic Odyssey. You might even want to go back to season one, which will give you some context for the journey.

In this episode, I'm continuing my conversation with Caroline and Kelly to get some perspective on a part of our story that happened fast, but that was not at all simple. In the original Odyssey Odysseus is the main character, but he never would have made it home to Ithaca without his crew. They stick by him even when he makes crazy requests, like asking them to tie him to the masthead while they sail into the deadly song of the sirens. They risked their lives for him. And some of them don't make it home.

Omid Safi is a Duke University professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies who specializes in Islamic mysticism, contemporary, Islamic thought, and medieval Islamic history. He's also a columnist for On Being. 

In his essay, “The Blessing of Friends Who Weather the Storm With Us, Omid Safi writes. “We learn a lot about the people who stay in our boat during the storm. Sometimes it's exactly who you expect. Sometimes there are those whom we expect to be in our boat. And at the moment of deepest crisis, they go missing.” 

Going into this school year, there was one friend in particular who I was sure would be in my boat. I'll call her Ruth. Ruth lives just a few blocks away. Her kids are the same ages as our kids, and they've all gone to school together since they were toddlers. Ruth’s family is one of the few families in our neighborhood who share our faith. We’ve shared a lot of life, too. We’ve carpooled to school, dropped off dinner for each other weekly, shared countless meals, swapped keys to each other's houses. We were each other's emergency contacts. And for years Ruth's house had been the place my kids felt safest outside their own home.

But a couple of weeks before school started Ruth and I had coffee in her backyard, and she told me she'd formed a distance learning pod with another family from our school. They were going to hire a tutor, and the tutor wasn't comfortable taking on any more kids. I could tell she felt bad not including me, but also relieved to have a solution to the problem. We'd all been fretting over how to work without completely ignoring our kids, who were still young enough to need full-time supervision.

I tried not to feel stung, but as I walked home from her house that day, I realized how disappointed I was. I’d taken it for granted that Ruth and I were in each other's boat. Now I began to doubt not just that assumption, but our friendship. 

A couple of days later, Ruth reached out again. She gave me the names of several parents she knew who might be interested in teaming up with me, but she also wanted to check in to make sure we were okay. 

It was a watershed moment in our friendship, and it says a lot about what a good friend Ruth is that she invited that conversation. It wasn't easy for either of us. For the first time we peeled back the layers of our friendship, revealing unspoken expectations. 

Ruth and I had been in each other's lives daily for years. Most of our time together was with all six of our kids underfoot or in the next room. In the absence of family nearby, I'd thought of Ruth and her family as our substitute family. It had never occurred to me that with their own parents in the same state, Ruth and her family didn't have the same expectations for us.

And that's the thing about friendship. There are no written codes or contracts. Most of the time, we don't even realize what we expect of our friends until a particular situation reveals it. 

There were other layers, too. Ruth knew we were struggling financially, and didn't want to invite us into a situation where we'd be burdened to spend more money. 

Omid Safi says when you turn around and the friends you thought would be in your boat aren't there, don't assume the worst. 

He writes, “Maybe they were trying to survive in their own boat. It's been said before, whenever possible. Be kind. You never know what battles others are fighting.” 

Ruth confessed her own weariness. She’s a working mom herself, a frontline essential worker. Parenting during the pandemic had been hard. She'd often felt like she wanted to be there for me, but she was so exhausted that she didn't have the energy. 

“You do so much,” Ruth said. “Your tolerance for chaos is so high. Sometimes, I just don't want to get swept up in the tornado.”

Later, when we talked about this again, she said she regretted that comment. She worried that it came off as overly harsh. But her words rang true. I don't want to be the tornado family--I long for us not to be--but the amount of chaos and disorder in our life during this pandemic in particular has felt torrential. Part of that was circumstantial. Our family has dealt with a massive amount of change in 2020. We're still dealing with it.

But part of it was personality. Ruth had often told me that her central need in life is to preserve harmony in her environment. When the offer came to join a situation that was already set up, it was a way to instantly solve the problem of distance learning for her kids and eliminate disorder. It wasn't hard for me to understand why she jumped at it. 

I like peace. I even long for it. But if given the choice in relationships, I'll choose intimacy over ease every single time. Sometimes I have to work through a lot of mental noise before I can get to the truth. 

And this taps into something Caroline and Kelly talked about in our conversation. Something that helped me understand the boat I'm in a little better, and why my family and I often get stuck in the storm. 

Caroline: So there's people in life that always seek the best. Like they spend a lot of time looking for the best job, best partner, best everything. And these people tend to have experiences of scarcity, because it takes a lot of time and resources to seek the best all the time. 

Laura: These people are known as maximizers. They're always looking for a better way to do things or trying to get better results. Generally speaking maximizers end up with better jobs, better partners, better things. All of that striving pays off . . . sort of. 

Caroline: But ironically, because they spent so much time considering so many options and alternatives, they actually end up being less satisfied. And this is partly because they're also very afraid of regretting making their decisions. Constantly re-comparing your decisions decreases your satisfaction.

So maximizers have the best outcome, but they're less satisfied with it. 

And then there are those known as Satisfizers. Those are people that are happy with “good enough.” Like if they find something good enough, they pick and move on. So they have a minimal threshold that they try to reach, and then once they reach that threshold, they usually move on to other decisions. So the outcomes might not be the most ideal, but it's usually satisfying enough that they're happy with their lives. And then don't spend a lot of time ruminating about it and wondering if they made the best decision. 

Laura: A quick note here that Caroline says you can be a Maximizer about some things--say, your career--but as Satisfizer about others, like the kind of house you live in.
When I think about my situation with Ruth, it helps a lot to think in these terms. I had a vision for a family distance learning co-op that checked off a list that kept growing. I wanted it to be equitable and safe and sanitary. I wanted it to satisfy the conflicting risk tolerances of many different parents. And of course it should be Spanish-speaking and educational, and there should be exercise and no one should have to spend any money because we'd all take turns helping each other. 

Not surprisingly my plan failed. But even if it had succeeded, it would have been a little chaotic. Depending on how many families have more than one kid, we could have ended up with as many as 10 kids in a group. And this was understandably a deterrent for Ruth--and for me if I’m honest. She didn't want to manage 10 kids. She just wanted a situation that was good enough. 

I tend to be a Maximizer in most areas of life. Back in the pre-COVID days, when we used to go out to eat, I would always ask the waiter what their favorite things were on the menu. Ideally, I'd get to split several dishes with Nate so that I got to try as many things as possible. When I would spend vacations at my parents' cabin and Minnesota, I would wake up at 6:00 AM on a Saturday, just so I could ski on the calmest water. It's not unusual for me to have 16 or 17 drafts of short stories or even novels.

My husband Nate is a Maximizer, too. We were both raised in families of Maximizers. Part of why the San Francisco Bay area has fit us so well is that it's a whole subculture of Maximizers. Where else in the country can you go skiing and surfing in the same day? (Not that anyone I've met has actually done this.) You can find the best of any cuisine, farmer's markets year round, 12 months a year of pleasant weather. You can have fresh herbs in February and oranges in December. Twenty-somethings come to Silicon Valley to become billionaires. Some of them actually succeed. There are endless possibilities for potential. Even children can attend science camps and become social justice ambassadors and learn to ride horses and become masters students of the cello. 

After 16 years here, it's hard for me to let good enough be good enough, which can be kind of exhausting. And I think maybe that's what Ruth was getting at with that tornado comment.

I asked Caroline if it was possible to convert--that is, if the two types could learn anything from each other.

Caroline: For Maximizers, if you want to be able to increase happiness, find a way, I guess, to close the door once you've made the decision. So there's some research that shows that if you leave the door open after making a decision, people tend to be less satisfied with their choice.

So for instance if there's a refund policy on a product, or if you have a short amount of time to be able to return a product if you're dissatisfied, people tend to be less satisfied with their choice than if there's no way to return a product, because then they're stuck with their choice and then they have to rationalize that they made the right decision. For Maximizers, if there's a way you can come up with closed the doors, at least you can help enhance your happiness with that decision. 

Another problem with being a Maximizer is that their goal to get “the best” is not very clearly defined.

How can they determine that they’ve finally reached “the best,” because as you move through life, “best” can get refined. And then the goalpost always moves. So maybe you got the best entry job, but now you want to have the best promotion or the best next job. And so you're never really satisfied because there's always something else better out there.

So I think one way Maximizers could also learn from Satisfizers is to have a better defined threshold of what “best” means. If it's a best job, it could be a salary, benefits, promotion availability, title, or anything that helps you define what “best” would be. And these boundaries might evolve as you go through life, but at least if you have some criteria, that helps with this idea of closure in the sense that once you reach that threshold, you've reached the “best” job for now. 

Laura: But she said Satisfizers can learn from Maximizers, too, that sometimes Satisfizers need to raise the bar on what they deem as “good enough” so they don't settle for less than what they should. 

Caroline: Raising a little bit that “good enough” threshold, you could help increase the quality of the outcomes that you get, but still retain the benefit of Satisfizing. Once you've met whatever threshold you've set, then you don't constantly keep looking for other options. 

Laura: I'll be back with more of this story, right after this short break.

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Laura: As a Maximizer in most areas of life, it comforts me to know that Carolyn and Kelly are great friends who work well together, but even they have differences in this area.

Caroline: I was tenured last year. I'm on sabbatical this year. And I'm seeing that even if I'm on sabbatical, I'm repeating a lot of work patterns as if I'm still on tenure track. I do hope that I can use this as a bit of a reset for me to try to have a healthier relationship with my work, being recharged instead of being exhausted, because it is a heavy topic sometimes to study.

Kelly: I'm not like Caroline. I do not want work-life balance ever. I love the hustle and the grind, and that replenishes me in a certain way. It gets me excited. And if I could do it all again, I'd love to be back to Kellogg with Carolyn in 2009, like making her sit in my office for three hours designing 50 studies at once, putting them up online and analyzing them that night and emailing until two in the morning. I love that kind of frenetic work hustle. Now that we're all working from home, I do feel like I have more hours in my day, so hopefully I will find a way to bring even more work into my life. That's my hope. 

Laura: I can understand where Kelly is coming from. When I'm really on a roll and enjoying my work, I feel that way sometimes, too. But I'm also glad I have friends like Ruth who can balance out that ambition and remind me that there's something to be said for finding the calm after the storm. It helps me to remember that there are a lot of reasons why we've responded differently during this pandemic.

Kelly: Hopefully one thing people can take away from our findings is just a little bit more compassion for other human beings and other consumers. People have to do different things to feel safe and to feel protected, and situations like a pandemic or a recession are going to amplify that, and that plays out with different strategies for different people. And especially during these times of crisis, when our country is experiencing an economic crisis and a health crisis, we really need to extend that compassion to others and to ourselves. 

Laura: When I stepped away from the emotion of the situation, the feeling that Ruth wasn't in my boat, I could see that the problem was bigger than personality or finances or even circumstance, because I didn't need a rescue boat. I needed someone to be in my boat all the time, to weather the storm with me. Because of the pandemic, I couldn't have a big crew to spread out the burden of that responsibility. What I was asking of Ruth was more than any of my friends could give me, especially in a time when we were all just trying to survive and keep our own boats afloat.

So I tried to close the door and my Maximizer vision for school, to learn from the Satisfiesers in my life and just find a solution that would get us through. We teamed up with one other family and paid someone to watch our kids. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. And for a week and a half, it seemed like maybe it would be okay.

Then halfway through our second week of school, a heat wave and freak lightning storms set fire to California. We woke up to a pink sun and a yellow sky. The air was so smoky that our lungs hurt within seconds of being outdoors. The kids had been doing school in the backyard with masks, but now they had to move indoors.

Most Bay Area homes don't have air conditioning. Until a few years ago, we never needed it. We have a single window A/C unit that we brought from our days in Minneapolis. It's not meant to cool an entire house, but we set it up in the living room where the kids were working and ran three air purifiers nonstop.

Meanwhile, Nate and I worked in the backyard writing shed with fans blowing hot air on us. We put ice packs under our feet and tried to ignore our pollution headaches. We spent most of the day snapping at each other irritably. And suddenly good enough wasn't.

That night we opened up a conversation we'd never wanted to have.

We talked about leaving. We put our Maximizer tendencies to work and made lists of the reasons to leave, the reasons to stay. For the next two days, we obsessed over our lists, adding items to each column and wanting to believe that there was a solution we had not yet thought of. We knew from years past that the wildfires usually didn't stop until the rains came in late October or November. These ones had come just halfway through August. We could be cooped up inside and breathing unhealthy air for months. One day in and our kids had already developed a persistent cough. 

We'd made lists like this in the past when Nate had been between jobs, and the exercise had always filled us with a sense of abundance. We could buy a bigger house somewhere else, but we couldn't duplicate the breadth and depth of our community.

But so much of our support had disappeared with the pandemic. We knew our friends still loved us, but we weren't sure who was left in our boat. My situation with Ruth was just a glimpse of a bigger problem: everyone we knew was trying to manage their own crews. They didn't have it in them to join ours--and we weren't joining theirs either. But we needed someone on our boat, someone who wasn't daunted by the chaos, who had the wisdom and experience to help us weather the storm.

That weekend, Nate called his mom in Massachusetts and asked if she'd be willing to take on all three kids five days a week so that we could work. She said, yes, these were unprecedented times. Minutes after Nate got off the phone, we got a message from our preschool. One of the teachers had tested positive for COVID and they were shutting down the school for two weeks. They were not in a position financially to refund anyone's money for the second half of the month.

We sympathized with our preschool's decision, but we also knew that it wouldn't be the last time. We knew we couldn't sustain a life where our support structures were knocked out from under us again and again. We needed to somehow get our boat to shore, or to anchor it to something stable. Our distance learning pod didn't want to risk exposure with our three-year-old back home. Overnight we went from having all three kids accounted for to having all three kids at home with no help. 

So just like that, we decided to go, we packed as quickly as we could, wanting to get the chore of moving over with fast. Every cluttered counter or drawer or box was a thousand little decisions. Should we keep it? Bring it with us? Give it away? Store it until we returned? We tried to put aside our Maximizer tendencies and take only what was absolutely necessary. 

Three days after we'd made the decision to go, friends of ours told us that they wanted to rent our house and could move in October 1st. We put the house on Airbnb, and had a September 3rd booking by the end of the day. It all happened so fast. But with those final pieces snapped into place, we could finally close the door on the decision. There was no more deliberating. We were leaving.

The weekend before we left the smoke clear long enough for Ruth and I had to go for a bike ride. “This makes me so sad, she said. “I keep wondering if things had happened differently if you'd still be going.” 

I thought about how to answer her. If she'd said yes in that first conversation or invited me to be a part of the group she and our friend were forming, would we even be talking about leaving? 

“I don't want you to put that on yourself,” I said it last and I meant it. The fires and COVID weren't Ruth's fault. Even though the decision to leave was painful, there was a certain inevitability to it. Eventually we were going to have to make some really hard decisions about our life in Oakland; either we were going to run out of money, or we were going to have to quit this work and just get whatever jobs we could find to pay the bills. How long could we have made it if we'd had Ruth in our boat the way we'd imagined? Until Christmas? Through the school year? And at what cost? Would our friendship be able to sustain the tornado family in a difficult time-- or would it have brought us closer? 

I'll never know the answer to that, but I do know that by the time we had that final conversation, it was too late to turn back. We needed to close the door to stop looking over our shoulder to see if we could have done it in another way. And so we did. We loaded up our Honda Odyssey until its belly sagged and hired someone to deep clean our house while we packed. Every day we got closer to our departure we were reminded that we still had people in our boat. Mom friends at our church delivered dinner to us every night that week. We were short a sleeping bag, and so our church administrator gave us one that she didn't need, and told us that the church's COVID-19 relief fund could help us pay some of that month's bills. “This is how we care for each other,” she said. “This is what it means to be part of a community.” Then she said, “We'll look forward to welcoming you home when you get back.” 

We left Oakland exactly two weeks after that first conversation about whether or not we should go. Several neighbors stopped by to say goodbye one last time. Our next door neighbor cried when she hugged us goodbye. Ruth came by with a gift and things to borrow for the journey and the promise that this goodbye was only temporary. We were going to see each other again soon. A few minutes before we left, our neighbor across the street brought us bag lunches with gourmet sandwiches and snacks she'd put together, complete with drawings of bikes and cars and the words “have fun” written on paper bags. 

Like Odysseus, we've spent a lot of time on this journey thinking about home, and I've wondered what it would look like to find a home where we could be satisfied. As we've traveled, we've stopped to visit family and friends who've made homes for themselves in Placerville or Wabash or Hillsdale or Ithaca. The ports on our journey that stuck with us the most were the homes that exuded peace and contentment, but that also welcomed us--and that's no small thing, especially in a pandemic. 2020 has been a year of scarcity for most of us, and for some people that's meant hunkering down, clutching to what we have. But the homes we admire most are the ones that extend hospitality, places where we could arrive weary and broken and leave restored and hopeful. They gave us a vision for the kind of home we hope to find. 

No one is able to be in our boat all the time. Not substitute family. Not actual family. Not the best of friends. The trick is learning to appreciate who is in your boat--even if it's not who you thought it would be, or if their shift is brief, because they've got to tend to their own crew. It's learning to be in other people's boats, too, to welcome weary travelers and restore them so they can get back to their journey.

I'm ending each episode with an invitation. And so my invitation today is a poem, the closing to Omad Safi's essay. He writes 

“In life, learn who's in your boat. 

Cherish them. 

Learn to be in other's boats. 

Cherish them. 

Cherish your boat. 

Cherish your ride. 

Cherish your life.” 

Today's episode is dedicated to Peter Canton, whose kindness, laughter, and musical genius made this world a richer, better place to be.

Thank you to Kelly Goldsmith and Caroline Roux for sharing their expertise about scarcity and abundance, and to Omid Safi, for permission to share lines from “The Blessing of Friends Who Weather the Storm.” I'll include a link to that essay in today's show notes. Additional music and sound effects for this episode came from Storyblocks. As always, if you listen all the way to the end of this episode, you'll hear some Shelter in Place outtakes, a little something to make you laugh. But first, I want to thank a couple of our newest supporters. 

Rebecca Alvarez Fitzpatrick, when I asked Nate what he appreciated about working with you, he said that you're a strong, successful woman, the kind we hope our daughters grew up to be. He also said that you're the best combination of Maximizer and Satisfizer, that you make lists at the beginning of the day and actually check off all of the items. We are in awe. 

Madeline and Nick van Santen, thank you so much for believing in this work and staying connected from across the country. When I think about the kind of home I want to have, a place that radiates hospitality and contentment, yours immediately comes to mind. Maddy, you've inspired me for as long as I've known you--not just because you're talented and formidable on the track, though you are--but because you are endlessly gracious and generous to everyone who knows you, even in life’s storms. Thanks for being in our boat.

In the next episode, our house in Oakland is overrun by an unruly Airbnb mob, and I get advice from a former Navy Seal who's working hard to make our world safer. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss it. If you've enjoyed today's episode, I hope you'll subscribe and share it with a friend. In our conversations with potential sponsors, the first thing they ask about is the number of downloads we get, so when you share this with others and ask them to subscribe, you move us a little closer to making this work sustainable. Rating and leaving a quick review about what you like about Shelter in Place helps others to find us. You can also follow us on Instagram and Facebook at the handle @shelterinplacepodcast and on Twitter @LauraJoyceDavis. If you're thinking, ‘Hey, I'd like to get occasional emails from Laura,” you can sign up for our newsletter, find show notes and information about our incredible sponsors, Brick & Mortar and Delta Wines, and Imagine Mindfulness, as well as ways to support the show at shelterinplacepodcast info. We'd love to hear from you.

The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horseman at Reaktor Productions. Nate Davis is our Creative Director and Sarah Edgell is our Design Director. Until next week, this is Shelter in Place. I'm Laura Joyce Davis. 

And now if you're still listening, here's a little outtake. 

Grace: This is me, Grace. And I'm going to tell a story about the little--some people in a boat. Once upon a time, there was this enchanted forest. And one family lived there in a little cottage. There names were Bella, Lucy, and Charm, and their mom and dad were named Isabella and, um, um, Rocky. And they were very happy because they always heard birds tweeting, the sky blowing, and they were so happy also because there was a little lake nearby. They were very happy. But then they foun it would be much more funner to live on a boat. They didn't know it was going to be so fun. So that's just what they did. They went on a boat and sailed across the river until finally they got to a little forest. Now, this forest was very beautiful and new. Their old forest was very old. And I don't know, it was just so old.