Good night and good luck

And now comes word that Jim Haney died on Dec. 2. Consider me officially knocked off the rails.

In the early days I would tell people I discovered Jim Haney, who was a year behind me at Ripon College. I saw the engaging fellow with the authoritatively resonant voice and recruited him to do a daily newscast on WRPN-FM.

Of course it’s silly of any one person to say they “discovered” Jim Haney. That bright, intelligent man was going to burst onto whatever scene he chose and own that stage. He was one of the most likable, intelligent and intentional people I’ve ever met, with a smile that made you smile. They chose a perfect photo for his obituary — that little twinkle as if we were sharing a special joke, just how I remember him.

Jim returned the favor three years later when he “discovered” me, or at least helped me get established as a newly minted college graduate. I was looking for an entry-level job in rural Wisconsin radio with limited success, but Jim had a summer job at WDUX in Waupaca, not far from his hometown of New London. He encouraged me to apply for the news director and put in a good word with the station manager. Even then Jim’s word was worth everything, and I started at WDUX the morning after graduating from Ripon.

And on that first day, he did me one of the great favors of my life. Before I went on the air, he showed me the name of the next town over from Waupaca, a name that widened my eyes a little bit: Weyauwega.

He looked at me with that special grin and said, “It’s pronounced Why-uh-WEE-guh,” saving me from an inevitably awkward moment when I tried to figure out the pronunciation live on the radio.

Jim went on to a memorable career as a professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, taking a break from that post to serve as communications director for attorney general and then governor Jim Doyle. I probably haven’t seen Dr. Haney since he left Doyle to go back to UWSP, which means 15 or more years, but it was always a pleasure to see him and I loved seeing his name when it popped up in my field of vision from time to time.

He’s the third unique individual from my WRPN days whose obituary caught me off guard in the last year or so. Wayne Davis was a walking encyclopedia, a great photographer, a tremendous wit and caring human being. Rob “Tex” Meyer, so named because of the ubiquitous cowboy hat, a truly original human, died a couple of weeks before Jim Haney, it turns out. All of them died too soon; my memories of them bring a smile to my face and an ache of nostalgia for what truly were good old days.

I find myself wishing I’d stayed in touch and making a mental list of people I really need to touch base with again, while I can.

Permission to repeat myself

Writing with a pen in a journal is a different exercise from writing at a keyboard — this almost silent scratching out of words in the old way, as Hawthorne and Emerson must have done, the words forming letter by letter from my hands — but I repeat myself.

Of course, if I write every day, I’m going to repeat myself from time to time over the course of a lifetime or even over the course of a few weeks, months or years exercising this habit. So …

Repeating myself: Refuse to be Afraid. Free yourself. Dream.

When fears claw at your consciousness, rein them in as best you can. Remember that fear is a way to control you, and ask. Who wants to control me, what do they want, and why? It will help to understand and empower you to go your own way.

Free yourself — choose yourself — give yourself permission — because freedom is a certain, unalienable right endowed by the Creator. That is to say, you were born free.

Dream. See the possibilities. “I have a dream,” the speech, resonates because it touches universal desires — to be left alone to pursue peaceful ambitions and make a better world.

I would live my life with kindness

I am reading a 1996 book called How, Then, Shall We Live? by Wayne Muller. It was one of a dozen books I grabbed from a table in a room at an estate sale, where everything you could fit in a bag was $10. So I bought this book for pennies; it’s a miraculous bargain.

Muller’s subtitle is “Four Simple Questions That Reveal That Reveal the Beauty and Meaning of Our Lives.” The four questions are Who am I? What do I love? How shall I live, knowing I will die? What is my gift to the family of the Earth?

I’m just past the halfway point, on the third question, and Muller has just shared an anecdote his friend Paul, who is in the final days of his life. Paul has accepted this reality but also wishes he had 10 more years so “I could really live as I always wanted.”

Muller asks what Paul would do if we could give him those 10 years.

“I would be kind. I would live my life with kindness. I would be kind to children. I would teach them to be kind, too. This is all I ever really wanted to do, just to be kind, to be loving.”

We all imagine how we might adjust our lives if, right this minute, we were told we would die soon, or within a matter of weeks or months, or on a specific date in, say, 2027. It focuses our attention on what’s important.

Muller recalls a question in the Bhagavad Gita: “Of all the world’s wonders, what is the most wonderful? The answer: “That no man, though he sees other dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.” It’s indeed a wondrous thing — and how different life would be if we felt, every day, all the time, the reality that all of us are going to die.

I have to believe this would be a kinder, gentler world. I have to believe we would be more fearless about living the lives we want to live. I have to believe most of us would try harder to live our best life, to be our best selves, and to be more patient with those around us who, after all, are just trying to live their best lives, too.

How shall I live, knowing I will die? We literally have a finite amount of time to work out the answer to that question. Best get busy.