The various relationship between siblings fascinate me. I've always envied folks who have great loyal relationship with their brothers and sisters. Yet from the small sample I know about, that is less common than I might have expected. I am somewhat estranged from my three years younger sister and eight years younger brother. Not that we had a lot going for us. We were split up to the four winds when I was 16 and reared in diffrent circumstances, none of which were particularly wonderful.
I was apparently seen as the one who "escaped" first and somewhat resented for it. In later years I became a surrogate for my alcoholic father and that certainly didn't help much. You want evidence? Consider the Father's Day call where my sister came out to me even putting her partner at the time on the phone to me without much by way of introduction. That was pretty classic, as she often did things when we were growing up designed to provoke a reaction. I suspect that this time she was disappointed in the lack of disapproval. For a while she and my brother were close but some kind of meltdown occurred when he and his third wife were staying with her and now they don't speak. I don't know much more than that, except that since my brother became a christian he has decided that his sister "really isn't gay because she's not in a relationship." This is a smart man, believe it or not.
For his part my brother and I have an off again on again relationship which seems to flower between his marriages. The second wife actively interceded in my efforts to stay in touch with him, keeping my letters away from him and intercepting phone calls and not putting him on the phone even when I could hear him in the background. "Blood doesn't count," was her line. Best time I had with him during that relationship was at my younger son's wedding when they arrived late and a few sheets to the wind. My wife kept her busy while I had a chance to talk to my brother. New wife has some struggles of her own and he has been hammered by successive bouts of unemployment and underemployment that have left him pretty resentful in general. Hard to figure out how to relate.
My own sons seem to be beginning to get along. They certainly have little reason to. Unknown to both parents the older one spent much of his school years being bullied and rather than asking for help decided that that entitled him to abuse his younger brother and threaten worse if parents were told. Maybe they will get to a place where they can depend on each other in need.
My wife's sons struggle as well, though there is an issue with alcohol for one of them that tends to introduce a kind of bipolarity in the relationship. Her relationship with her siblings is mixed, also the oldest, she was born in a family where sons counted more than daughters and had paid a heavy price as a result. Could be ethnic culture, but we have a daughter-in-law of the same ethnicity who has brothers who would die for her and are intensely loyal and protective.
I guess families are really a mixed bag, a spin of the roulette wheel with extra double zeroes. We have friends with children who are close and fun together and all round decent kids. My mother's siblings did a lot to help each other out throughout their lives, while my father's were a toxic alcoholic brew of antipathy and resentment.
Just musing on this. It has been on my mind for some reason.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
The Universe Doesn't Give a Sh*t!
Here we go--from the mundane to the ertzatz sublime.
In one of those big public workshops someone was whining about the tsouris in his life and the trainer said, "The stars don't care. Look up at the sky when you leave tonight. Ask if the stars care. They don't." It was sort of a shocking moment and I sat there thinking, "He's right. The universe doesn't give a shit."
Later on doing some academic work in semiotics, the meanings of things, and narrative studies it anchored for me.
The meaning we make is the meaning we make. That's all there is.
That could seem bleak, but it doesn't feel that way to me. It informs my beliefs and politics and how I try to live in the world. If that's all there is then shouldn't we be doing our damnedest to make what we do have during our short tenure mean something? If that's all there is why don't we work together to make things better for each other?
I used to have a list on my office wall. I still have it on my computer. It was Sheldon Kopp's ‘A Partial Register of the 927 (or was it 928?) Eternal Truths’ from his book "If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him." I won't reproduce it here. You can find it in multiple places on the web. But there are a few of the 43 items he listed that bear and are worth repeating anyway.
We make our meaning. If you have to have a big father figure in the sky to give you meaning, fine; but either way you and I are not likely to be having this conversation in the hereafter. If you are right, I'm pretty sure to be in that other place. If I am, we will be quietly decomposing and giving up our atoms to the universe, which doesn't give a shit, remember?
I heard a beautiful man give a sermon once entitled, "If Thine 'I' Offend Thee..." in which he played with the biblical passage about plucking out the offending "eye." He told us to look around the room. That for some of us we would only pass this way once, we would only intersect with the person next to us once. He suggested that letting our 'I' get in the way of making the human connection that was possible in the moment called for "plucking it out."
So I guess this post is about ego. The arrogance of ego is an overwhelming force in our interactions with one another that we could well do without. Even if the stars don't care, it would make our world a better place.
Now, just where is that rock?
In one of those big public workshops someone was whining about the tsouris in his life and the trainer said, "The stars don't care. Look up at the sky when you leave tonight. Ask if the stars care. They don't." It was sort of a shocking moment and I sat there thinking, "He's right. The universe doesn't give a shit."
Later on doing some academic work in semiotics, the meanings of things, and narrative studies it anchored for me.
The meaning we make is the meaning we make. That's all there is.
That could seem bleak, but it doesn't feel that way to me. It informs my beliefs and politics and how I try to live in the world. If that's all there is then shouldn't we be doing our damnedest to make what we do have during our short tenure mean something? If that's all there is why don't we work together to make things better for each other?
I used to have a list on my office wall. I still have it on my computer. It was Sheldon Kopp's ‘A Partial Register of the 927 (or was it 928?) Eternal Truths’ from his book "If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him." I won't reproduce it here. You can find it in multiple places on the web. But there are a few of the 43 items he listed that bear and are worth repeating anyway.
- We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that’s all there is.
- How strange that so often it all seems worth it.
- We must live within the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge.
- All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data.
- Yet we are responsible for everything we do.
- No excuses will be accepted.
- You can run, but you can’t hide.
- It is most important to run out of scapegoats.
- We must learn the power of living with our helplessness.
- The only victory lies in surrender to oneself.
- All significant battles are fought within oneself.
- You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.
- What at do you know … for sure … anyway?
- Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again…
We make our meaning. If you have to have a big father figure in the sky to give you meaning, fine; but either way you and I are not likely to be having this conversation in the hereafter. If you are right, I'm pretty sure to be in that other place. If I am, we will be quietly decomposing and giving up our atoms to the universe, which doesn't give a shit, remember?
I heard a beautiful man give a sermon once entitled, "If Thine 'I' Offend Thee..." in which he played with the biblical passage about plucking out the offending "eye." He told us to look around the room. That for some of us we would only pass this way once, we would only intersect with the person next to us once. He suggested that letting our 'I' get in the way of making the human connection that was possible in the moment called for "plucking it out."
So I guess this post is about ego. The arrogance of ego is an overwhelming force in our interactions with one another that we could well do without. Even if the stars don't care, it would make our world a better place.
Now, just where is that rock?
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Typos...
I suppose this could be a paradigm for life in general, but it comes up because I seem to catch typos in these posts after they have been posted, usually when they show up in an email from a reader. Sometimes I think they are as persistent as bed bugs. I found one that had been hiding out in my LinkedIn profile for at least a year, and had even escaped a public review of the post at a workshop where my profile had been used as an example. Spell check doesn't help much and I think it tends to make you lazy about hunting them down. Besides, this blogger doesn't have one and when I do these in word and paste I don't like what happens to the font.
Usually I read them aloud, preferably to someone else, like my wife. She can also be a help in fixing something wacky I've written. Recently someone asked me for advice about writing her blog and this was one of the things I suggested. The other was about getting ahead of deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise by banking a few posts ahead. [BTW, my savings account is nearly depleted, so these may come a little less frequently.]
The reading aloud thing I got during my first job out of college. I was an "assistant to" an old PR guy at a bank. After he first spent several weeks evicerating my copy with a pencil and I started to get better, he would have me read what I had written aloud. I'd catch my own now less frequent gaffes when I did it. If he wanted to be a little snarky about something, he'd read them aloud, exaggerating my punctuation choices. Ouch! "I'm an anti-comma guy," he'd announce, when deconstructing one of my run on compound-complex sentences. He was a character. A gentleman C's Harvard grad in the late thirties, he'd served on the fast battleships in the Pacific as a Lieutenant Junior Grade. Having been trapped in an ammunition hoist at some point with live ammunition, he never took elevators. Fortunately our building was only nine stories. He had worked for a by then folded city newspaper and done a stint doing PR for Ford during the Edsel days. I remember feeling particularly pleased the day I got a piece of copy by him without a pencil mark or an argument.
For someone who got put in remedial reading in third grade, I started writing well by my high school years. College sharpened my skills. Two people should be acknowledged. One was my seventh grade English teacher. I don't know if they still teach kids how to diagram sentences, but she was a sentence parser par excellence. While I still get confused about the technical grammar lingo, I learned something from her about putting words together. My first year in college in one of those big education factory co-op schools--it was what i could afford--the basic English writing class they had was brilliant. It was brilliantly taught for my section by a young instructor who was absolutely committed to teaching it well. Basically, we spent our class time writing and then reading aloud what we had written. We might have been given a topic to think about or not, but we just wrote.
I got pretty good, to the point where one grad school prof used to tease me that he sometimes wasn't sure that I was writing brilliance or bullshit, but that whichever it was it was superbly written. My ability made me a little lazy about studying, because I knew in a pinch, that I could knock off a 1500 word paper in a sitting. I knew I was good at it, but I had no idea how good until I started reading student papers as an instructor. I really do wonder about our school system now.
Anyway, I started this with something to the effect that typos and finding escaped ones is a "paradigm for life." I'm not exactly sure where I was going with that, but it's something like this. We make little not very visible mistakes all the time, at least I do. Catching them before, during, or after making them takes some effort. It used to take a lot more in the days of typewriters and carbon paper. Our technology has made it easy to be sloppy because it has made things easy to fix. Bad habit for those mistakes that aren't in photons on a screen. I think I want to keep working at attending to this. You can do what you like, but for me, cleaning up after myself feels like the right thing to do.
Kind of a silly little musing, but there it is.
Usually I read them aloud, preferably to someone else, like my wife. She can also be a help in fixing something wacky I've written. Recently someone asked me for advice about writing her blog and this was one of the things I suggested. The other was about getting ahead of deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise by banking a few posts ahead. [BTW, my savings account is nearly depleted, so these may come a little less frequently.]
The reading aloud thing I got during my first job out of college. I was an "assistant to" an old PR guy at a bank. After he first spent several weeks evicerating my copy with a pencil and I started to get better, he would have me read what I had written aloud. I'd catch my own now less frequent gaffes when I did it. If he wanted to be a little snarky about something, he'd read them aloud, exaggerating my punctuation choices. Ouch! "I'm an anti-comma guy," he'd announce, when deconstructing one of my run on compound-complex sentences. He was a character. A gentleman C's Harvard grad in the late thirties, he'd served on the fast battleships in the Pacific as a Lieutenant Junior Grade. Having been trapped in an ammunition hoist at some point with live ammunition, he never took elevators. Fortunately our building was only nine stories. He had worked for a by then folded city newspaper and done a stint doing PR for Ford during the Edsel days. I remember feeling particularly pleased the day I got a piece of copy by him without a pencil mark or an argument.
For someone who got put in remedial reading in third grade, I started writing well by my high school years. College sharpened my skills. Two people should be acknowledged. One was my seventh grade English teacher. I don't know if they still teach kids how to diagram sentences, but she was a sentence parser par excellence. While I still get confused about the technical grammar lingo, I learned something from her about putting words together. My first year in college in one of those big education factory co-op schools--it was what i could afford--the basic English writing class they had was brilliant. It was brilliantly taught for my section by a young instructor who was absolutely committed to teaching it well. Basically, we spent our class time writing and then reading aloud what we had written. We might have been given a topic to think about or not, but we just wrote.
I got pretty good, to the point where one grad school prof used to tease me that he sometimes wasn't sure that I was writing brilliance or bullshit, but that whichever it was it was superbly written. My ability made me a little lazy about studying, because I knew in a pinch, that I could knock off a 1500 word paper in a sitting. I knew I was good at it, but I had no idea how good until I started reading student papers as an instructor. I really do wonder about our school system now.
Anyway, I started this with something to the effect that typos and finding escaped ones is a "paradigm for life." I'm not exactly sure where I was going with that, but it's something like this. We make little not very visible mistakes all the time, at least I do. Catching them before, during, or after making them takes some effort. It used to take a lot more in the days of typewriters and carbon paper. Our technology has made it easy to be sloppy because it has made things easy to fix. Bad habit for those mistakes that aren't in photons on a screen. I think I want to keep working at attending to this. You can do what you like, but for me, cleaning up after myself feels like the right thing to do.
Kind of a silly little musing, but there it is.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
A Random Rant of Sorts
I recently obtained a certification in my field that I had been avoiding getting for most of my career. I considered the process something of a racket, and having successfully achieved it, I still do. The certifying body charges a substantial fee for taking a multiple choice examination that is difficult, not because the content is particulary difficult, but because the question forms are purposely tricky, often with double negative wording and answers known in the prep groups as distractors.
Besides charging a substantial fee for the test, the same organization makes considerable money selling prep materials and courses, which one has to make use of because the exam is based on "the world according to [insert organization name]." It's all based on the models developed in the medical and legal professions, but I suspect as difficult as bar exams are supposed to be, they are not quite so mickey mouse. And I don't know for sure but I don't think the bar exams are proprietary products.
It's all done in the name of "certifying" that a given practitioner supposedly knows something about what he or she is doing. I can understand that, having spent much of my career in an allied "profession" that has no gating mechanism and has all kinds of people claiming that they are [insert acronym] consultants. As regular readers here are aware, I did a lot of human potential personal development in the seventies and eighties. It annoyed me no end when someone who had taken three weekend workshops would stand up and announce that "I am an [acronym] consultant.]" I spent two graduate programs and years of doing the work, and what they knew about the foundations and principles would have filled a small thimble.
I had someone I considered a friend, who was also a bit of a dilletante about any number of professional personas he assumed in his working life, announce one evening that he was an [acronym] consultant. I kept myself from going completely ballistic, but I demurred.
The cert exam in this allied field still seems to me a racket to make money for the organization. Saying that passing their tricked up test says that the certified person can actually do the work is like saying that someone that passes the written drivers test can actually drive. It may or may not be true, and it certainly says very little about the quality of their driving.
And I am annoyed that this practice is closing doors for me. Much of what I do involves working closely with people and coaching them about what they are doing. Well now there is a cottage industry of coaching "programs" and there is a "coaching certification," etc. etc. For the last two decades in professional networking meetings I have heard people who you probably would not want to have walk your dog announce how "coaching" was the cure for everything from acne to bad leadership skills, and I'm sitting there thinking how this activity was an integral part of my practice and wondering whether it was being co-opted by a mickey-d franchise operation. We now have "life coaches" and "retirement coaches," and a raft of others. And mind you "it isn't therapy" as they seriously assert. Not sure if it does not use the tools and principles of applied social psychology how it works exactly. Maybe we should change that old saw to "if you can't do, teach, and if you can't teach, coach."
I know there's a lot of snake oil being sold out there. And I know that it is sometimes hard to tell if the person who wants to work with you knows what they are doing or is a bs artist. Frankly, though, I don't think certification exams, especially proprietary ones, are going to get you out of that dilemma; especially if they are themselves more snake oil.
Rant over.
Besides charging a substantial fee for the test, the same organization makes considerable money selling prep materials and courses, which one has to make use of because the exam is based on "the world according to [insert organization name]." It's all based on the models developed in the medical and legal professions, but I suspect as difficult as bar exams are supposed to be, they are not quite so mickey mouse. And I don't know for sure but I don't think the bar exams are proprietary products.
It's all done in the name of "certifying" that a given practitioner supposedly knows something about what he or she is doing. I can understand that, having spent much of my career in an allied "profession" that has no gating mechanism and has all kinds of people claiming that they are [insert acronym] consultants. As regular readers here are aware, I did a lot of human potential personal development in the seventies and eighties. It annoyed me no end when someone who had taken three weekend workshops would stand up and announce that "I am an [acronym] consultant.]" I spent two graduate programs and years of doing the work, and what they knew about the foundations and principles would have filled a small thimble.
I had someone I considered a friend, who was also a bit of a dilletante about any number of professional personas he assumed in his working life, announce one evening that he was an [acronym] consultant. I kept myself from going completely ballistic, but I demurred.
The cert exam in this allied field still seems to me a racket to make money for the organization. Saying that passing their tricked up test says that the certified person can actually do the work is like saying that someone that passes the written drivers test can actually drive. It may or may not be true, and it certainly says very little about the quality of their driving.
And I am annoyed that this practice is closing doors for me. Much of what I do involves working closely with people and coaching them about what they are doing. Well now there is a cottage industry of coaching "programs" and there is a "coaching certification," etc. etc. For the last two decades in professional networking meetings I have heard people who you probably would not want to have walk your dog announce how "coaching" was the cure for everything from acne to bad leadership skills, and I'm sitting there thinking how this activity was an integral part of my practice and wondering whether it was being co-opted by a mickey-d franchise operation. We now have "life coaches" and "retirement coaches," and a raft of others. And mind you "it isn't therapy" as they seriously assert. Not sure if it does not use the tools and principles of applied social psychology how it works exactly. Maybe we should change that old saw to "if you can't do, teach, and if you can't teach, coach."
I know there's a lot of snake oil being sold out there. And I know that it is sometimes hard to tell if the person who wants to work with you knows what they are doing or is a bs artist. Frankly, though, I don't think certification exams, especially proprietary ones, are going to get you out of that dilemma; especially if they are themselves more snake oil.
Rant over.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Unfinished Business
The kind that can keep you up at night. You wake up thinking about something that someone said to you or did to you once. Ancient history. And you can't let it go because it has you by the limbic system.
I know I'm letting that take hold of me, but I can't shake it.
The question that comes up for me is whether people just don't know what they are doing, or do they know perfectly well?
The patronizing "Up in the Air" talk when they tell you you're being "let go." The punishing put down to end a relationship (business not personal) when if they had communicated more effectively earlier, things could easily have worked out differently. It feels intentional, but I just don't know.
I try to look at this to see if there are times I have done something like it to someone. I can remember some instances--not many, fortunately--and I don't think I set out to hurt the other person. Nor was I protecting myself in some way. It was just careless and thoughtless. What I don't think I ever did was to pretend that it didn't happen when I see the person again, and I have had that done to me. That really grates,
What's mine? What's theirs?
I think of the instance where the person who termed me the week before, was in a meeting I was managing during my last week, and beckoned me across the room. Literally beckoned, as in hand turned up, index finger beckoning. Come here, little one, and be obsequious and servile about it if you please. Not much choice about how to respond to that in front of a room full of people. That was intentional.
Obviously it still hooks me. I can say to myself that I have a choice about that, but it doesn't take. It doesn't register in a way that I can let it go. There's no finishing this business, and I'm not going to get even (as in "Don't get mad. Get even.").
I'm writing this at an odd hour because, you might have guessed, I cannot sleep. As if writing will expiate the demon.
Who knows. Maybe it will. I can let this one sit for a few days unpublished and think about it.
I know I'm letting that take hold of me, but I can't shake it.
The question that comes up for me is whether people just don't know what they are doing, or do they know perfectly well?
The patronizing "Up in the Air" talk when they tell you you're being "let go." The punishing put down to end a relationship (business not personal) when if they had communicated more effectively earlier, things could easily have worked out differently. It feels intentional, but I just don't know.
I try to look at this to see if there are times I have done something like it to someone. I can remember some instances--not many, fortunately--and I don't think I set out to hurt the other person. Nor was I protecting myself in some way. It was just careless and thoughtless. What I don't think I ever did was to pretend that it didn't happen when I see the person again, and I have had that done to me. That really grates,
What's mine? What's theirs?
I think of the instance where the person who termed me the week before, was in a meeting I was managing during my last week, and beckoned me across the room. Literally beckoned, as in hand turned up, index finger beckoning. Come here, little one, and be obsequious and servile about it if you please. Not much choice about how to respond to that in front of a room full of people. That was intentional.
Obviously it still hooks me. I can say to myself that I have a choice about that, but it doesn't take. It doesn't register in a way that I can let it go. There's no finishing this business, and I'm not going to get even (as in "Don't get mad. Get even.").
I'm writing this at an odd hour because, you might have guessed, I cannot sleep. As if writing will expiate the demon.
Who knows. Maybe it will. I can let this one sit for a few days unpublished and think about it.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
The Unexamined Life...
You can go look up the rest of it, if you don't know it.
This one is going up real time for what will be obvious reasons.
I have at least three dear friends who are regular readers and I think I got a little scold sent lovingly from one of them yesterday. ".. break out of that Freud induced coma..." she says. Meu esposa (we're trying to learn a little Portuguese for an upcoming trip) says "She just thinks you should stop talking about your parents and all that stuff (not sure I have been all that much, though this has clearly been an introspective venture), and talk about something else."
Hmmm.
Write about something else? I have a bit.
I started this primarily to sort myself through this transition after a conversation with a therapist. It has proved useful that way. Also, I am an INFP (Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiver) and we NFs are prone to look for the meaning, and Introverts look for that inside. And it's not that I am not doing out there in the world. A couple of volunteer projects, teaching, writing this is actually doing, and getting ready to direct a public staged reading of a friend's script. Not to mention one of the best flyfishing days ever on the Yakima and wounding myself twice on my bicycle.
Okay. It's a little "me" oriented. Reminds me of an old Lesley Gore tune: "It's My Party..." I'll let you finish that one on your own, too.
This day when all available media are "All 9/11, All the Time" one can't help but look back. The public events one looks back to often are self-defining. My parents referenced Pearl Harbor, FDR's death, and Hiroshima. I reference JFK's assassination, 1968 (more here in a sec), and now 9/11. (1968 gave us MLK Jr.'s and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations, and with "the whole world watching" the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention.
For the first event I was newly married and still in college in one of those very large urban universities with large buildings of multiple classrooms. The hallways were abuzz. The sweet man teaching us American History tried to distract us by leading a conversation about succession but gave up after 20 minutes. That Sunday singing in the choir a verse of Tagore set to the most difficult music full of sharps and double sharps had most of us in tears.
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
Seems even more relevant to 9/11.
In 1968 I was working for a very conservative financial institution and a boss whose political acuity consisted primarily of identifying the realtionship of any given person or event in cold war terms. So while MLK might have been at some point a "card carrying commie" when he was killed it was "a plot by the communists to cause a breakdown in our society." I at least had the stones to go ahead and wear my (Gene) McCarthy button during that campaign season.
At the time of 9/11 I was making more money that I ever had (or would), doing work that for the most part I enjoyed and meu esposa and I were in the middle of having our whole first floor torn up for a remodel. So after getting sent home from work, noticing the eerie silence because no planes were passing overhead, I got into old clothes to paint the dining room and listen to NPR. I was as upset as anyone about the images of Palestinians dancing in the streets. (BTW, the media really does do some nasty shit to our heads.) As aligned as anyone in outrage and commitment to my country. Lovely how long all that lasted, as we watched what unfolded.
Sometimes this doesn't feel like my country anymore and I don't have a clue of what to do about it. I've been a delegate to two state conventions, I've participated, I've been engaged... and I must admit, I've been disengaged, more interested in what I thought I needed to acquire, blase and annoyed at my fellow man, and engaged in partisan screaming fits at the televison.
I feel in someways driven back onto myself as the only place I can look for meaning.
My dear friend has supplied a reading list. I've just finished Christopher Buckley's "Losing Mum and Pup,"--delightful, sweet, very funny, illuminating--so maybe I'm ready for something with more meat on it's bones.
This one is going up real time for what will be obvious reasons.
I have at least three dear friends who are regular readers and I think I got a little scold sent lovingly from one of them yesterday. ".. break out of that Freud induced coma..." she says. Meu esposa (we're trying to learn a little Portuguese for an upcoming trip) says "She just thinks you should stop talking about your parents and all that stuff (not sure I have been all that much, though this has clearly been an introspective venture), and talk about something else."
Hmmm.
Write about something else? I have a bit.
I started this primarily to sort myself through this transition after a conversation with a therapist. It has proved useful that way. Also, I am an INFP (Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiver) and we NFs are prone to look for the meaning, and Introverts look for that inside. And it's not that I am not doing out there in the world. A couple of volunteer projects, teaching, writing this is actually doing, and getting ready to direct a public staged reading of a friend's script. Not to mention one of the best flyfishing days ever on the Yakima and wounding myself twice on my bicycle.
Okay. It's a little "me" oriented. Reminds me of an old Lesley Gore tune: "It's My Party..." I'll let you finish that one on your own, too.
This day when all available media are "All 9/11, All the Time" one can't help but look back. The public events one looks back to often are self-defining. My parents referenced Pearl Harbor, FDR's death, and Hiroshima. I reference JFK's assassination, 1968 (more here in a sec), and now 9/11. (1968 gave us MLK Jr.'s and Bobby Kennedy's assassinations, and with "the whole world watching" the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention.
For the first event I was newly married and still in college in one of those very large urban universities with large buildings of multiple classrooms. The hallways were abuzz. The sweet man teaching us American History tried to distract us by leading a conversation about succession but gave up after 20 minutes. That Sunday singing in the choir a verse of Tagore set to the most difficult music full of sharps and double sharps had most of us in tears.
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
Seems even more relevant to 9/11.
In 1968 I was working for a very conservative financial institution and a boss whose political acuity consisted primarily of identifying the realtionship of any given person or event in cold war terms. So while MLK might have been at some point a "card carrying commie" when he was killed it was "a plot by the communists to cause a breakdown in our society." I at least had the stones to go ahead and wear my (Gene) McCarthy button during that campaign season.
At the time of 9/11 I was making more money that I ever had (or would), doing work that for the most part I enjoyed and meu esposa and I were in the middle of having our whole first floor torn up for a remodel. So after getting sent home from work, noticing the eerie silence because no planes were passing overhead, I got into old clothes to paint the dining room and listen to NPR. I was as upset as anyone about the images of Palestinians dancing in the streets. (BTW, the media really does do some nasty shit to our heads.) As aligned as anyone in outrage and commitment to my country. Lovely how long all that lasted, as we watched what unfolded.
Sometimes this doesn't feel like my country anymore and I don't have a clue of what to do about it. I've been a delegate to two state conventions, I've participated, I've been engaged... and I must admit, I've been disengaged, more interested in what I thought I needed to acquire, blase and annoyed at my fellow man, and engaged in partisan screaming fits at the televison.
I feel in someways driven back onto myself as the only place I can look for meaning.
My dear friend has supplied a reading list. I've just finished Christopher Buckley's "Losing Mum and Pup,"--delightful, sweet, very funny, illuminating--so maybe I'm ready for something with more meat on it's bones.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Besides, I Guess I Really Am...
...
Intellectual, that is. At least more than the average bear.
It must have been 16 or 17 years ago when the spouse and I were first living together that she got invited to attend an "Executive Development Seminar" that her company paid for and paid for spouses or spousal equivalents. There were maybe seven or eight people in it and it was taught by a brilliant lawyer who is, I believe, a specialist in intellectual property and entertainment law.
The content was interesting because it was all great literature or significant works from Before Common Era down through to the twentieth century. I'm writing this because a reader/friend suggested that I watch "The Legend of Bagger Vance," a modern retelling of the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu text, which was the first book we read. Some of the others were Aristotle's "Nicomedian Ethics;" the Book of Job; one of Paul's epistles; Shakespeare's "King Lear;" Hobbes "Leviathan;" Locke's "Treatise on Civil Government;" and John Maynard Keynes "The Economic Consequences of the Peace;" among a few others.
I suppose that I have read things like that might make one say I'm an intellectual, but I have to say that much of the discussion made me feel like I was treading water.
Two things about it. First, that it made me always want to teach something like it. I proposed it to a couple of places I worked and got no traction. I even added a couple of things to the list; Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," and Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." What it all was seemed to be to be about how one thinks. That if you can dig into that and see how you think, you can expand your ability to think more effectively in a variety of situations, see more options, and be less captive of your reactive system.
The second thing is about the Gita and dharma and karma. Karma has found its way into popular culture as "fate" or "kismet." Dharma is not so well known. I suppose that is because it is about duty, about one's obligation to support or align with the natural order of things and to fulfill one's obligations. If I remember correctly in the Gita it comes up when Krishna tells Arjuna that yes, it is his duty to battle against his cousins.
I suppose it contemporary terms this is something like those excercises about getting clear about one's purpose. The difference being that the human potential movement seems to favor the self-generated purpose, as opposed to discovering one's purpose in interaction with the social and physical environment one exists in.
Karma, dharma, dogma... ???
Intellectual, that is. At least more than the average bear.
It must have been 16 or 17 years ago when the spouse and I were first living together that she got invited to attend an "Executive Development Seminar" that her company paid for and paid for spouses or spousal equivalents. There were maybe seven or eight people in it and it was taught by a brilliant lawyer who is, I believe, a specialist in intellectual property and entertainment law.
The content was interesting because it was all great literature or significant works from Before Common Era down through to the twentieth century. I'm writing this because a reader/friend suggested that I watch "The Legend of Bagger Vance," a modern retelling of the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu text, which was the first book we read. Some of the others were Aristotle's "Nicomedian Ethics;" the Book of Job; one of Paul's epistles; Shakespeare's "King Lear;" Hobbes "Leviathan;" Locke's "Treatise on Civil Government;" and John Maynard Keynes "The Economic Consequences of the Peace;" among a few others.
I suppose that I have read things like that might make one say I'm an intellectual, but I have to say that much of the discussion made me feel like I was treading water.
Two things about it. First, that it made me always want to teach something like it. I proposed it to a couple of places I worked and got no traction. I even added a couple of things to the list; Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," and Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." What it all was seemed to be to be about how one thinks. That if you can dig into that and see how you think, you can expand your ability to think more effectively in a variety of situations, see more options, and be less captive of your reactive system.
The second thing is about the Gita and dharma and karma. Karma has found its way into popular culture as "fate" or "kismet." Dharma is not so well known. I suppose that is because it is about duty, about one's obligation to support or align with the natural order of things and to fulfill one's obligations. If I remember correctly in the Gita it comes up when Krishna tells Arjuna that yes, it is his duty to battle against his cousins.
I suppose it contemporary terms this is something like those excercises about getting clear about one's purpose. The difference being that the human potential movement seems to favor the self-generated purpose, as opposed to discovering one's purpose in interaction with the social and physical environment one exists in.
Karma, dharma, dogma... ???
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Intellectual? Moi?
I guess by some lights, though I don't think I am a systematically deep enough thinker to qualify. I'm smart, I know a lot of "stuff," I read all the time; but also I don't think of myself as original enough to qualify. I'm a great synthesizer. I can draw on many different sources when I am sorting out a problem whether that is with something I am working on with an organization or something I am writing.
I once was told that I was "too academic" by someone as a reason not to hire me. Don't know if that was just the "nice" reason they were using to blow me off or whether it had substance to it. I've also been told I was not academic enough for another role. So who knows?
I think of myself as being very practical when working on a problem or project. I try to do things that will work in the real world of the people who have to use the systems I design or the solutions I help them to develop. I may go about it in a more thoughful way or a more deliberate one, but the solution is still aimed at the practical. I designed something for an organization recently where they had no structured way of managing what they were doing. Without saying what it was--anonymity, remember--I gave them a more basic and structured approach than what they had been fantasizing about based on the most recent airline magazines they had read. Their front line managers needed baby steps and guidance, and the system I built supplied it, much to the relief of the people I designed it for: those managers and supervisors and employees, not the executives.
It's a mean world where being smart gets you excluded from places you could make a difference to, but their loss...
Yeah, so maybe I live in my mind and thoughts a lot. Doesn't make me impractical or not worthy. I have gotten things done. I do have accomplishments to point to.
So, Nyaahhh! Nyaaahhh!
I once was told that I was "too academic" by someone as a reason not to hire me. Don't know if that was just the "nice" reason they were using to blow me off or whether it had substance to it. I've also been told I was not academic enough for another role. So who knows?
I think of myself as being very practical when working on a problem or project. I try to do things that will work in the real world of the people who have to use the systems I design or the solutions I help them to develop. I may go about it in a more thoughful way or a more deliberate one, but the solution is still aimed at the practical. I designed something for an organization recently where they had no structured way of managing what they were doing. Without saying what it was--anonymity, remember--I gave them a more basic and structured approach than what they had been fantasizing about based on the most recent airline magazines they had read. Their front line managers needed baby steps and guidance, and the system I built supplied it, much to the relief of the people I designed it for: those managers and supervisors and employees, not the executives.
It's a mean world where being smart gets you excluded from places you could make a difference to, but their loss...
Yeah, so maybe I live in my mind and thoughts a lot. Doesn't make me impractical or not worthy. I have gotten things done. I do have accomplishments to point to.
So, Nyaahhh! Nyaaahhh!
Monday, September 5, 2011
One More for Labor Day
I know I said I wasn't going to get into politics and this post might be seen as that. Note that it is not my intention to start conversations about partisan politics.
If you work for a living or collect Social Security, you should probably thank a union member today. Much of what we take for granted in the world of work--the 40(?) hour week, child labor laws, the more humane approaches to management and employee relations that is SOP these days, paid vacations, sick leave, and numerous other things--are ours today thanks to the work of the labor movement. States with higher percentages of unionized workers have generally higher pay rates for all.
For all the abuses of some union leaders, and the results of highly adversarial union-management situations which tend to be rigid distributive solutions, the improvement of the lot of working people owes almost everything to the union movement. True that now most companies, in the interest of avoiding being unionized, offer the benefits unions fought for. Of course now, some of those supposedly "enlightened" companies, ship work to factories in China where the buildings have nets around them to prevent suicides, and the workers are sent back to the farm when their hands become too crippled to assemble our high tech goods.
So, agree or disagree, thank a union member today anyway.
If you work for a living or collect Social Security, you should probably thank a union member today. Much of what we take for granted in the world of work--the 40(?) hour week, child labor laws, the more humane approaches to management and employee relations that is SOP these days, paid vacations, sick leave, and numerous other things--are ours today thanks to the work of the labor movement. States with higher percentages of unionized workers have generally higher pay rates for all.
For all the abuses of some union leaders, and the results of highly adversarial union-management situations which tend to be rigid distributive solutions, the improvement of the lot of working people owes almost everything to the union movement. True that now most companies, in the interest of avoiding being unionized, offer the benefits unions fought for. Of course now, some of those supposedly "enlightened" companies, ship work to factories in China where the buildings have nets around them to prevent suicides, and the workers are sent back to the farm when their hands become too crippled to assemble our high tech goods.
So, agree or disagree, thank a union member today anyway.
This One Is "Real Time"
...so to speak. This one's going to be a little different, too.
It's Labor Day and we just got back from our third bike ride in the last eight days, second in the last two. The weather here is at its loveliest.
My goal with riding is to have my next ride be without incident. Two weeks ago we rode for the first time in a long time and I found my old bike shoes would not do anymore. They had always been snug, but now they tend to cause some numbness after a while. Went to REI and found some great shoes, very comfortable, that it turned out would not fit in my toe clips.
Back to REI. The solution, it seemed, was to get new pedals and set up my shoes to clip in. I'd never really trusted that set up, but it seemed my only choice. The only other shoes were as tight as my old ones. Home with the pedals and a pedal wrench--this is beginning to add up--and the reminder that "righty-tighty" works on one of the pedals, but the other is the opposite. A few hunts for the right size allen wrench later and everything was assembled. We went out for a ride. I seemed to be able to get out of the clips with a little effort, though the left one didn't seem to go in or come out as easily.
Coming back on a steep uphill section I shifted my front chain down and threw the chain and as I came to a stop desperately trying to get my left foot free I went down, cursing loudly. Mostly just a left knee thoroughly road rashed and hurt pride.
Back to the drawing board. Or as it was more properly, when all else fails, read the instructions. I cranked down the tension to a low point.
Yesterday's ride went much better until at some point I was trying to get my left foot free--I had stopped and was standing on my right foot--and I literally had to twist it almost 90 degrees before I got lose, only to see the the clip fitting had come off of my shoe and was affixed to the pedal. At least no road rash this time. Back to REI with shoes and bike.
In the shop they reinstalled the clips in both shoes, taking out the shim that the salesperson had said I needed (the guy reinstalling the clips said they should not be used), and tightening them down.
Today's ride: the clips worked really well. Much easier in and out, and I was feeling pretty confident until in one careless stop I didn't release my foot quickly enough and acquired a road rashed elbow diagonally opposite last week's knee. Well the guy in the shop and the guy who helped me up today both said the same thing: "Everybody falls." Be a little nicer if it wasn't onto concrete or asphalt.
I used to ride a lot. Not macho stuff. Just a 15 mile or so ride most mornings along a river where I lived. A friend and I used to compare notes every day and push each other a bit. She was a real athlete. Around the same time I used to cycle in New York with a woman I was seeing at the time. We went all over the city on bikes.
A couple of years after that my younger son and I did a bike trip through Denmark. I was on the same bike I was on today, one purchased to have on the west coast where I was commuting for work every month. My son rode the Peugot that I had bought in the seventies. He still rides, now on a much newer pretty upscale machine, and distances I will probably never do, but it has been good to get back on two wheels.
The thing this has made me think about is that an orientation to physical activity is something that I wish I had learned at a much younger age. It takes effort to instill it at my age. It took effort to do it twenty-five years ago on my east coast river, but it got me in better shape than I had ever been. My father never did much with me in the way of physical activity and I regret that I never did much with my sons, though I did get the older one into paintball when he was in his late teens.
It's good to see my grandchildren doing things. The boy skis and started T-ball this year, and the two girls dance, and lately the older girl has taken up cycling, complete with her own facebook post about road rash. Life's a circle.
It's Labor Day and we just got back from our third bike ride in the last eight days, second in the last two. The weather here is at its loveliest.
My goal with riding is to have my next ride be without incident. Two weeks ago we rode for the first time in a long time and I found my old bike shoes would not do anymore. They had always been snug, but now they tend to cause some numbness after a while. Went to REI and found some great shoes, very comfortable, that it turned out would not fit in my toe clips.
Back to REI. The solution, it seemed, was to get new pedals and set up my shoes to clip in. I'd never really trusted that set up, but it seemed my only choice. The only other shoes were as tight as my old ones. Home with the pedals and a pedal wrench--this is beginning to add up--and the reminder that "righty-tighty" works on one of the pedals, but the other is the opposite. A few hunts for the right size allen wrench later and everything was assembled. We went out for a ride. I seemed to be able to get out of the clips with a little effort, though the left one didn't seem to go in or come out as easily.
Coming back on a steep uphill section I shifted my front chain down and threw the chain and as I came to a stop desperately trying to get my left foot free I went down, cursing loudly. Mostly just a left knee thoroughly road rashed and hurt pride.
Back to the drawing board. Or as it was more properly, when all else fails, read the instructions. I cranked down the tension to a low point.
Yesterday's ride went much better until at some point I was trying to get my left foot free--I had stopped and was standing on my right foot--and I literally had to twist it almost 90 degrees before I got lose, only to see the the clip fitting had come off of my shoe and was affixed to the pedal. At least no road rash this time. Back to REI with shoes and bike.
In the shop they reinstalled the clips in both shoes, taking out the shim that the salesperson had said I needed (the guy reinstalling the clips said they should not be used), and tightening them down.
Today's ride: the clips worked really well. Much easier in and out, and I was feeling pretty confident until in one careless stop I didn't release my foot quickly enough and acquired a road rashed elbow diagonally opposite last week's knee. Well the guy in the shop and the guy who helped me up today both said the same thing: "Everybody falls." Be a little nicer if it wasn't onto concrete or asphalt.
I used to ride a lot. Not macho stuff. Just a 15 mile or so ride most mornings along a river where I lived. A friend and I used to compare notes every day and push each other a bit. She was a real athlete. Around the same time I used to cycle in New York with a woman I was seeing at the time. We went all over the city on bikes.
A couple of years after that my younger son and I did a bike trip through Denmark. I was on the same bike I was on today, one purchased to have on the west coast where I was commuting for work every month. My son rode the Peugot that I had bought in the seventies. He still rides, now on a much newer pretty upscale machine, and distances I will probably never do, but it has been good to get back on two wheels.
The thing this has made me think about is that an orientation to physical activity is something that I wish I had learned at a much younger age. It takes effort to instill it at my age. It took effort to do it twenty-five years ago on my east coast river, but it got me in better shape than I had ever been. My father never did much with me in the way of physical activity and I regret that I never did much with my sons, though I did get the older one into paintball when he was in his late teens.
It's good to see my grandchildren doing things. The boy skis and started T-ball this year, and the two girls dance, and lately the older girl has taken up cycling, complete with her own facebook post about road rash. Life's a circle.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Be, Do, Have
It's a line from the Ehrhard Seminars Training. One of those koans or mantras that were used to get you at how you organized your life. Came up in a conversation with one of my reader friends that started out with an interesting observation he made that while he seemed to organize his career around "line" roles where he was actually "doing" something that produced specific results, I seemed to organize mine around helping others to "do" by "being" an aide or support or mirror or in a way the king's fool who would say the things that needed saying that were not being said.
Think "King Lear" in the wilderness with his Fool if you will. (Although now, truth once again, I think I feel a little more like Lear than the Fool.)
Where did this "being" way of living and working come from? What led me to make the choices I made for work? And for that matter, life?
The Fool is a dangerous occupation. There isn't much certainty in it. If you stray too far into confrontive truths you can get killed, yet if you do not push the envelope you aren't doing your job of holding the merciless mirror up to yourself or others. It is an arete with selling out on the one side and getting dispatched on the other. Neither are good outcomes.
Growing up in an alcoholic home is like that. Finding the way to be your own person amid the chaos is like being on the knife edge between capitulating to victimhood or resorting to outright rebellion or destructive violence. How can you stay there, centered on that fine line, and realize a sense of self? I think the answer is you can't quite without a long effort that is mostly inwardly focused, yet with the odd outward element of trying to keep things in balance and to make them work. Maybe in the "what is my act" terms, the injunction is "never be a victim."
The irony is that you so often find yourself being what it is that you are trying so hard to avoid being.
One of my wife's favorite songs is Linda Ronstadt's "When Will I Be Loved?" (Not an accident that we found this durable relationship we have with each other.) Ronstadt sings it like an anthem. "I've been cheated. I've been lied to. When will I be loved?" BTW, my wife also likes Ronstadt's "Feels Like Home."
So maybe part of the current struggle is that without having a place to do my "being" of being a help and aide and confidant, I'm feeling a little lost. Could be that this blog is one way I am creating a space to "be."
Think "King Lear" in the wilderness with his Fool if you will. (Although now, truth once again, I think I feel a little more like Lear than the Fool.)
Where did this "being" way of living and working come from? What led me to make the choices I made for work? And for that matter, life?
The Fool is a dangerous occupation. There isn't much certainty in it. If you stray too far into confrontive truths you can get killed, yet if you do not push the envelope you aren't doing your job of holding the merciless mirror up to yourself or others. It is an arete with selling out on the one side and getting dispatched on the other. Neither are good outcomes.
Growing up in an alcoholic home is like that. Finding the way to be your own person amid the chaos is like being on the knife edge between capitulating to victimhood or resorting to outright rebellion or destructive violence. How can you stay there, centered on that fine line, and realize a sense of self? I think the answer is you can't quite without a long effort that is mostly inwardly focused, yet with the odd outward element of trying to keep things in balance and to make them work. Maybe in the "what is my act" terms, the injunction is "never be a victim."
The irony is that you so often find yourself being what it is that you are trying so hard to avoid being.
One of my wife's favorite songs is Linda Ronstadt's "When Will I Be Loved?" (Not an accident that we found this durable relationship we have with each other.) Ronstadt sings it like an anthem. "I've been cheated. I've been lied to. When will I be loved?" BTW, my wife also likes Ronstadt's "Feels Like Home."
So maybe part of the current struggle is that without having a place to do my "being" of being a help and aide and confidant, I'm feeling a little lost. Could be that this blog is one way I am creating a space to "be."
Thursday, September 1, 2011
"You Can Change the World, Rearrange the World..."
It's a line from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Chicago."
Written after the Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention and the subsequent trial of Abbie Hoffman, et al, it was a kind of anthem for my generation. I had just graduated from college and was in my first job (doing PR for a financial company that preserved the wealth of rich people--consider that irony), my wife and I were living in Cambridge MA, I had spent weeks in the spring stumping for Gene McCarthy who helped knock LBJ out of the race, and the year had seen the assinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy who would probably have been a shoo-in for the 68 election. We ended up with Richard Nixon and that household name, Spiro Agnew. Both men would later resign their offices in disgrace.
A year later was Woodstock. My wife and I were expecting our second so there was no way we would go, but I'd spent some weekends traveling to conferences of people who were examining communal living. Early the next year I made a stop at Kent State after one conference, two weeks before the shootings. The unrest that would result in them was well underway.
We helped set up a commune in the fall of 1969 and lived in it for a year. There were three or four other constants but for the most part we ended up feeling like house parents to a revolving cast of students and nomads. Had a couple of pretty intense parties though. The next year we left for "Going Up the Country" (yep, "Canned Heat") and a job in the human services.
Probably the only thing it all changed was my life and the lives of my wife and children. The water did not taste like wine.
I'm teaching now, part time and online. My students are earnest twenties and thirties somethings working on a graduate MBA in Human Resources. What I notice most about them is the effort they put into managing their world. They try to condition how their worlds respond to them. They do it with me when I try to get them to evaluate each other and give feedback by making their response an effort to influence how I will evaluate them.
It isn't a selfish, me-me sort of thing. It's more like a prevent defense. "How can I survive and make my outcomes more to my liking?" What it isn't is some investment in making a difference out in the world. Well I guess that didn't work so well for us, so why should they throw more effort down that hole. I can understand that.
At the same time I recently took a course on Nonprofit Management and found a room full of people of mostly that age--there were a half dozen fogeys like me--who were engaged. They were frustrated with a perception they were condemning themselves to low income careers, but they were engaged. We did a project with a local community group that offers opportunities for people of that age group to do projects in the community and to be trained in doing board work for nonprofits.
So it's not all bleak. It's different.
But I do sometimes want to say to my students that they should not expect to be able to manage their worlds--that ultimately the choice will be about simply responding to it in the best way they can and knowing that while they can't make it the way they want it to be, they can find a place in it.
Other than that, Sisyphus, how are things rollin'?
Written after the Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention and the subsequent trial of Abbie Hoffman, et al, it was a kind of anthem for my generation. I had just graduated from college and was in my first job (doing PR for a financial company that preserved the wealth of rich people--consider that irony), my wife and I were living in Cambridge MA, I had spent weeks in the spring stumping for Gene McCarthy who helped knock LBJ out of the race, and the year had seen the assinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy who would probably have been a shoo-in for the 68 election. We ended up with Richard Nixon and that household name, Spiro Agnew. Both men would later resign their offices in disgrace.
A year later was Woodstock. My wife and I were expecting our second so there was no way we would go, but I'd spent some weekends traveling to conferences of people who were examining communal living. Early the next year I made a stop at Kent State after one conference, two weeks before the shootings. The unrest that would result in them was well underway.
We helped set up a commune in the fall of 1969 and lived in it for a year. There were three or four other constants but for the most part we ended up feeling like house parents to a revolving cast of students and nomads. Had a couple of pretty intense parties though. The next year we left for "Going Up the Country" (yep, "Canned Heat") and a job in the human services.
Probably the only thing it all changed was my life and the lives of my wife and children. The water did not taste like wine.
I'm teaching now, part time and online. My students are earnest twenties and thirties somethings working on a graduate MBA in Human Resources. What I notice most about them is the effort they put into managing their world. They try to condition how their worlds respond to them. They do it with me when I try to get them to evaluate each other and give feedback by making their response an effort to influence how I will evaluate them.
It isn't a selfish, me-me sort of thing. It's more like a prevent defense. "How can I survive and make my outcomes more to my liking?" What it isn't is some investment in making a difference out in the world. Well I guess that didn't work so well for us, so why should they throw more effort down that hole. I can understand that.
At the same time I recently took a course on Nonprofit Management and found a room full of people of mostly that age--there were a half dozen fogeys like me--who were engaged. They were frustrated with a perception they were condemning themselves to low income careers, but they were engaged. We did a project with a local community group that offers opportunities for people of that age group to do projects in the community and to be trained in doing board work for nonprofits.
So it's not all bleak. It's different.
But I do sometimes want to say to my students that they should not expect to be able to manage their worlds--that ultimately the choice will be about simply responding to it in the best way they can and knowing that while they can't make it the way they want it to be, they can find a place in it.
Other than that, Sisyphus, how are things rollin'?
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