Wrote this in 2005. Maybe I published it, but easier to re-publish than research :)
I woke up this morning really wanting to work on the website. That's happening more frequently of late. Then the reality. It's been over a year and at least one computer crash-and-burn since I changed anything but this board. So here we are again, settling for speed over beauty.
It's been crazy-busy lately. Work almost to the point of numbness, collapse into bed, wake again, clean up, a little TV with Julie, sleep, at it again the next morning. Fatigue and pain. But the body comes around. One day, like today, you feel pretty good after only 8 hours sleep. Don't necessarily want to grab for the Aleve along with the coffee.
I got a little soft with Sergio around. He was so eager to do the literally heavy lifting. Then I couldn't work a lot as sick as Julie was. Sergio quit just after Christmas. Julie is -- knock, knock -- doing better. With a major career change, you never know the exact price in advance.
I like this work because it's fully engaging. Mentally, physically, creatively. Its hot and cramped, dirty too. But it doesn't hurt you, hard work, that's just a misconception of youth. I have pushed hard since I woke up work-wise around 30. During my career as a successful suit, I toughened up mentally and emotionally. Mostly, my youth supplied the stamina. At 60. that's long gone. Now it takes really physical work too. Never the elevator, always the stairs.
Really, its my strategy for fighting off death: As I age, work harder. So far the body and mind are responding. A life of hard labor wears out your parts, or so I have heard. Starting this late, I think the parts will last as long as I need them. Retirement kills people. That I know for sure.
This life might be healthier, but its really low on the glamour scale. That's been some adjustment for me. At day's end I'm really tired AND tend to smell like diesel and gym shorts. The suit was so COMFORTABLE by comparison. Look sharp, feel good, so easy to be casually intimidating in that armor.
Corporate life is increasingly risky past 50, that's not news. You may have more skill and better weapons, but your world is less forgiving, a little tiresome even. The casual bounty of youth, other people's now, can turn on you instantly. Trading crisp suits for dirty tee shirts? Really not that big a price for independence. The change is more superficial than it appears. You're not in the same game, but its just as much fun if you can keep playing at your level. Added bonus: fuck the politics.
New careers require new skills, which come in recognizable stages. Paying for the training myself put an edge on the process. Will I make it? Was this foolish? You know enough to stick with it until it works, but wonder if the seed money will last.
At first everything is new. Fumbling along, making it up as you go. Getting by on your wits, what books you can find, your education and tricks learned in past lives. Just wanting to work, needing that raw experience most of all. Then you get paid when you work, but work is hard to find. After some indeterminate, long, scary period you get reasonably busy but expenses still swamp revenue. At least you know its going to take.
You wait for the day when at least half of what you see is not for the first time ever. That's a big competence milepost. Eventually it's easier to get going in the morning. You're finally up on plane. There's more work than you can handle. You work more carefully too, paying attention all the time, now its a habit. No more cuts on your hands, no more nicks in the boats, no more tools in the water: more mileposts. I still hit my head on things, so there's room for improvement, but its been years since I stepped into an open hatch.
I'm actually making a living at this, finally. Not like before, but at least enough to pay off the credit cards. I've become a little choosy about the work I start. Some customers are put off by the rate. I don't try to explain it any more. People don't need to understand what it costs to perform at this level. They just need to pay promptly for what sometimes looks like magic. If they understand the value, you'll hear from them again. Anyway, its not as safe working for customers who don't think they can afford you. When you feel pressured to keep costs down, you make more little mistakes.
I've relaxed just a little. The work never actually gets easier. I don't think that's the nature of work. Anyway, its not how I play the game. But its less stressful, more fluid and natural. Another milepost. Four years in and finally, really, up to it.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Child Abuse, Our Experience
Abusing anyone is always wrong. Abuse is repeatedly hurting someone weaker. The pain can be any kind. Once started, abuse continues because the weaker person often does not see the hurt as abuse. They may also feel helpless to stop it. We know from experience, from deeply buried pain.
We published the Letter to our Grandchildren yesterday because we thought it might help other children, children in much worse situations than we believe our own grandchildren to be in. The Letter is incomplete, it invites communication. Contact us, we're saying to our grandchildren. We'll help you figure things out if there is ever the slightest reason. We may not be able to help every child in the same way, but all of this post and yesterday's Letter may still be useful for other children.
We realized that our letter could be narrowly read to condone child abuse until age 18. No. Child abuse is always wrong. It is against the law. If someone regularly tells you that you are bad and must be punished, then you are being abused. If you are are being hurt repeatedly for any reason this is abuse. Talk to someone outside your immediate family. Sadly, sometimes your immediate family may ignore abuse for lots of reasons. Talk to someone like a teacher or walk into any Doctor's office or talk to any pharmacist. We believe anyone in schools or health care is required to take action in most states.
Julie did not even realize her mother had abused her until she told her second husband about it (me) more than twenty years later. We reasoned it through. I can recite plenty of details if you have the slightest doubt about our conclusion. This is the saddest part. Children will take abuse because they can be convinced they deserve it. “If your Mother says you are bad then you must be bad.” That is what Julie thought for years. No. It does not matter how anyone explains abuse away. Hurting is wrong, period.
Repeatedly hurting a child for any reason, anything at all, is always wrong and must be stopped. Julie's first husband, an alcoholic, abused her too. It took her years to finally escape. By that time she had three children. I had no idea how damaged Julie was, but she is healed, mostly.
Stopping abuse will not throw your life into ruin. Many years later Julie confided in her Aunt Margaret. Her Aunt said she would have helped Julie. Someone will help you – reach out.
There are lots of reasons Julie's mother may have felt angry toward Julie. We may be able to explain what went wrong. We might even understand. But that never makes it right. Julie and her Mother got past her Mother's anger by the time Julie was 34. They never talked about the past. Julie and her mother loved each other. Life is complex.
Some family members may not like to see this information publicized. But it was a long time ago, and we must tell our stories if they can prevent more abused children. Julie is still unnerved talking about these things that happened over 50 years ago. We must all deal with the facts, unwelcome as they may be. Abusing children is evil.
Julie and David Sheriff
Culture, with a Story About Everything
Culture is everything people learn, believe and consider real that is apart from their genetically determined physicality. Culture lives in people and is preserved in imperfect artifacts that transmit information when new people engage them. A bit of culture dies with every person, and a slightly different culture is relearned and recreated by following generations.
Culture is a living meta-creature. We may think some things are true and unchanging, but we re-create them every generation, factoring in our own needs and experience. We cannot live, even imagine very accurately, outside of our own time. Consequently, history is tricky and subjective.
Culture has limits. We are incapable of avoiding certain repetitive patterns such as war because true, awful experience dies with the experienced. Culture cannot transmit deep visceral, horrifying experience to enough new people to prevent new wars and other terrible recurring cultural patterns.
I wrote the above on FaceBook in response to a question from one of my beloved daughters, Meg, "What is culture?" It seemed worthy of reproduction, editing and extension here. I am not a cultural anthropologist, have no specialized training. So what I write, distilled from my life experience, is probably not new. Very little is new.
The culture of the past two hundred years has been grossly distorted by abundant fossil energy. We have come to believe culture has somehow advanced or progressed. The Great War killed the idea of human perfectibility for that generation, but like a weed, "progress" springs up again in the popular imagination. We just take for granted the electronic marvels that have so changed how we communicate and learn in a mere decade. We do not understand the energy it takes to develop and manufacture what will soon be yesterday's quaint marvels. We do not grasp the intricacy and fragility of the interlocking technology network. We have put culture on steroids. One fairly grim consequence, the AK-47 is ubiquitous. But losing hope would be the wrong interpretation of my little tale.
The great distortion in human circumstances since the industrial revolution was and is completely dependent on abundant supplies of energy, mostly finite fossil energy, and the new materials and methods that energy has made possible. We cure disease with that energy, redirected with all our mutual cleverness. We feed a vastly inflated world population with crops bred to respond to massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticide from petrochemicals. These crops respond to mechanical cultivation, fossil fueled, of course. Like every civilization before us, clear challenges line the horizon, but we really believe we can solve any problem. Solve it before the consequences of that problem take large numbers of us out in a massive orgy of misery.
I sail a small, fiberglass, aluminum, Dacron and polyester sailboat on the very sea men have sailed for eons. I have come to appreciate that ancient people knew more about harnessing the wind and traversing the sea than I shall ever know. The only difference is I have access to more useful materials. That, I submit is not really progress, simply better tools. I do not risk my life making a living from the sea. I don't really know how. They could do it 1000 years ago and did. For all my technology, I am ignorant as a baby compared to my seagoing fore-bearers. I cannot fit the concept of progress into this picture.
Those of us in relatively new societies, like the USA, have short cultural memories. This leads us to simplify issues. Peoples with longer traditions, Serbs, Albanians, Jews, Palestinians to pick a few you may recognize, live in a present which includes an ever living past. The emotional fire of ancient wars, massacres and genocides can be as real as going to market yesterday. These ancient cultural realities combined with exploding populations without economic future cannot be defused. They will play out over hundreds if not thousands of years. One might think I would be a pessimist. Once I was.
So it may seem strange that I am optimistic about the future of Homo Sapiens, our species. I'm optimistic about my life and my grandchildren because there is no percentage in pessimism. Yes, there's lots of bad stuff, but almost all of it is out of my control. So I chose to focus on what I can influence, which is this glorious day. One day in my lifetime, one day in the Earth's 4.7 billion year lifetime. Mere existence is such a thrill.
I must digress on ancient peoples to establish perspective. Our biological relatives, other hominids, migrated out of Mother Africa many times over at least 2.5 million years, spreading in various directions. They left clues which allow us to deduce their existence. The currently dominant view among scientists who devote their lives to studying such things, is that all people alive are almost entirely descended from a small group of people anatomically identical to us. This small group of direct ancestors, Homo Sapiens, as few as 50 thousand people, migrated out of Africa perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. More intelligent and adaptable than older lineages of hominids, they replaced other hominids, with some interbreeding of course, and spread to every environment on the planet.
Some 10,000 years ago we humans developed agriculture. Settlements followed, civilizations developed, government, organized religion and all the rest. The earth is about 4.7 billion years old. Life arose on earth about a billion years later. Some view the universe as a complex self-organizing system. Complex, self-organizing and unpredictable from the big bang onwards. Life seems inevitable in such a system. We are an instance of life. Self-organizing life.
But the entire history of intelligent life here is a mere blink in the history of the Earth. We have greatly changed the face of the earth. We are the first great, continent resurfacing intelligent species on earth. Anyone coming after us will unearth our works, sift through our landfills and wonder. Homo Sapiens took a developing planet and altered it unmistakably. Rarely altered it for the better if you look at it from the viewpoint of the planet or the biosphere. Subdued it we have. Humans are extremely adaptive and ubiquitous. We can eke out an existence almost anywhere in the terrestrial biosphere.
It has been mathematically proven that history is not deterministic. The future is unknowable, unpredictable. Every non-trivial prediction about the future is wrong. Nevertheless, if enough predictions are recorded, some come close enough to future events that we laud their authors as prophets. But prophets are right only once, thus proving by another, weaker method that the future is unpredictable.
The fun of thinking about things on a large scale is to create a plausible story about the future, sort of like science fiction. This is my story. It is most certainly false except in the most general possible way. But fictions can give us hope, can let us willfully deny the arbitrariness of the future. Fictions can give us faith. As a species, it seems to me we need faith to move forward against what seems to be an impossibly hostile future.
We are cresting a bubble fueled by fossil energy. This energy has permitted our species to increase in numbers vastly higher than the Earth could otherwise support. The ultimate drug, energy. We have reached the point where we are probably changing the climate of the planet. Planetary climate has a wide range and, if history is a guide, can exist in many varied stable states besides the one we currently enjoy.
One scientific suggestion is that Homo Sapiens is the naturally selected product of a long period of climate instability in Africa. Wet, dry, hot, cold - quick flips that rendered many less adaptable creatures extinct. We were pressed very hard and many died. Our forbearer hominids had the genetic prerequisites and variations, so to speak. The best adapted to surviving fast, huge environmental changes survived, became Homo Sapiens, us. Perhaps larger brains and language were the result of this terrible pressure to survive constant change.
What is different now is that we fully inhabit the planet, not just part of a continent. We are more adaptable and resourceful not because we are much smarter, if at all, but because we have infinitely better tools. Any horror we can imagine, including full thermo-nuclear war, vast climate disruption, asteroid hit, famine, plague, volcanic eruption, will probably be insufficient to wipe out every last settlement. Only the minimum human breeding population - perhaps 2000 people, need survive. The planet will survive as it always has, probably in some form that will support human life somewhere.
That part, the survival of just enough, is sort of based on probability, based on the effect of tools and culture and sort of based on hope. Unknowable, remember. Given time, which the Earth has plenty of, those future humans will know what we know from having decoded our garbage. Hopefully they will have developed some characteristic that allows them to avoid our fate. If not, the earth has time for more cycles of boom and bust in the inevitable self-organizing path to sustainable intelligent life.
This process is probably taking place on other planets revolving around other stars as well. Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe close enough to contact? Maybe not. Perhaps in our neighborhood, we are THE instance of intelligent life in the process of evolving the universe. We are just not ready to fly yet. Another 10,000 years, the same interval since we invented agriculture, things could be unimaginably different. And a million years? Who's counting years on a planet that has existed for 4.7 billion of them and will exist for at least several billion more? Perhaps the next step in the self organization of the universe is to become intelligent itself in some way we cannot understand, but in a way in which we played a part. We primitives, we cavemen with our addiction to fossil fuel and wreaking havoc on our partners in the biosphere. The first to leave big footprints on the planet. Probably not the last.
So that is my happy ending, smile or frown. At best a wild-ass guess in vaguely the right direction. In my story, everything really does work out in the end. We're just fixated on the wrong time-frame. Our imagination lacks enough zeros. As a population, our job is to work, eat, grow, nudge the culture and reproduce. Lives upon lives upon lives. Tiny bits of existence to experience and wonder about. Our lives have meaning, just not very much in the scheme of my imagination today.
We cannot stop reproducing, cannot stop or even influence the process very much. The problem space was bounded long before we got here. Wait, maybe descendants of the whales populate our bit of the Universe. Nah, that's a movie plot.
Culture is a living meta-creature. We may think some things are true and unchanging, but we re-create them every generation, factoring in our own needs and experience. We cannot live, even imagine very accurately, outside of our own time. Consequently, history is tricky and subjective.
Culture has limits. We are incapable of avoiding certain repetitive patterns such as war because true, awful experience dies with the experienced. Culture cannot transmit deep visceral, horrifying experience to enough new people to prevent new wars and other terrible recurring cultural patterns.
I wrote the above on FaceBook in response to a question from one of my beloved daughters, Meg, "What is culture?" It seemed worthy of reproduction, editing and extension here. I am not a cultural anthropologist, have no specialized training. So what I write, distilled from my life experience, is probably not new. Very little is new.
The culture of the past two hundred years has been grossly distorted by abundant fossil energy. We have come to believe culture has somehow advanced or progressed. The Great War killed the idea of human perfectibility for that generation, but like a weed, "progress" springs up again in the popular imagination. We just take for granted the electronic marvels that have so changed how we communicate and learn in a mere decade. We do not understand the energy it takes to develop and manufacture what will soon be yesterday's quaint marvels. We do not grasp the intricacy and fragility of the interlocking technology network. We have put culture on steroids. One fairly grim consequence, the AK-47 is ubiquitous. But losing hope would be the wrong interpretation of my little tale.
The great distortion in human circumstances since the industrial revolution was and is completely dependent on abundant supplies of energy, mostly finite fossil energy, and the new materials and methods that energy has made possible. We cure disease with that energy, redirected with all our mutual cleverness. We feed a vastly inflated world population with crops bred to respond to massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticide from petrochemicals. These crops respond to mechanical cultivation, fossil fueled, of course. Like every civilization before us, clear challenges line the horizon, but we really believe we can solve any problem. Solve it before the consequences of that problem take large numbers of us out in a massive orgy of misery.
I sail a small, fiberglass, aluminum, Dacron and polyester sailboat on the very sea men have sailed for eons. I have come to appreciate that ancient people knew more about harnessing the wind and traversing the sea than I shall ever know. The only difference is I have access to more useful materials. That, I submit is not really progress, simply better tools. I do not risk my life making a living from the sea. I don't really know how. They could do it 1000 years ago and did. For all my technology, I am ignorant as a baby compared to my seagoing fore-bearers. I cannot fit the concept of progress into this picture.
Those of us in relatively new societies, like the USA, have short cultural memories. This leads us to simplify issues. Peoples with longer traditions, Serbs, Albanians, Jews, Palestinians to pick a few you may recognize, live in a present which includes an ever living past. The emotional fire of ancient wars, massacres and genocides can be as real as going to market yesterday. These ancient cultural realities combined with exploding populations without economic future cannot be defused. They will play out over hundreds if not thousands of years. One might think I would be a pessimist. Once I was.
So it may seem strange that I am optimistic about the future of Homo Sapiens, our species. I'm optimistic about my life and my grandchildren because there is no percentage in pessimism. Yes, there's lots of bad stuff, but almost all of it is out of my control. So I chose to focus on what I can influence, which is this glorious day. One day in my lifetime, one day in the Earth's 4.7 billion year lifetime. Mere existence is such a thrill.
I must digress on ancient peoples to establish perspective. Our biological relatives, other hominids, migrated out of Mother Africa many times over at least 2.5 million years, spreading in various directions. They left clues which allow us to deduce their existence. The currently dominant view among scientists who devote their lives to studying such things, is that all people alive are almost entirely descended from a small group of people anatomically identical to us. This small group of direct ancestors, Homo Sapiens, as few as 50 thousand people, migrated out of Africa perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. More intelligent and adaptable than older lineages of hominids, they replaced other hominids, with some interbreeding of course, and spread to every environment on the planet.
Some 10,000 years ago we humans developed agriculture. Settlements followed, civilizations developed, government, organized religion and all the rest. The earth is about 4.7 billion years old. Life arose on earth about a billion years later. Some view the universe as a complex self-organizing system. Complex, self-organizing and unpredictable from the big bang onwards. Life seems inevitable in such a system. We are an instance of life. Self-organizing life.
But the entire history of intelligent life here is a mere blink in the history of the Earth. We have greatly changed the face of the earth. We are the first great, continent resurfacing intelligent species on earth. Anyone coming after us will unearth our works, sift through our landfills and wonder. Homo Sapiens took a developing planet and altered it unmistakably. Rarely altered it for the better if you look at it from the viewpoint of the planet or the biosphere. Subdued it we have. Humans are extremely adaptive and ubiquitous. We can eke out an existence almost anywhere in the terrestrial biosphere.
It has been mathematically proven that history is not deterministic. The future is unknowable, unpredictable. Every non-trivial prediction about the future is wrong. Nevertheless, if enough predictions are recorded, some come close enough to future events that we laud their authors as prophets. But prophets are right only once, thus proving by another, weaker method that the future is unpredictable.
The fun of thinking about things on a large scale is to create a plausible story about the future, sort of like science fiction. This is my story. It is most certainly false except in the most general possible way. But fictions can give us hope, can let us willfully deny the arbitrariness of the future. Fictions can give us faith. As a species, it seems to me we need faith to move forward against what seems to be an impossibly hostile future.
We are cresting a bubble fueled by fossil energy. This energy has permitted our species to increase in numbers vastly higher than the Earth could otherwise support. The ultimate drug, energy. We have reached the point where we are probably changing the climate of the planet. Planetary climate has a wide range and, if history is a guide, can exist in many varied stable states besides the one we currently enjoy.
One scientific suggestion is that Homo Sapiens is the naturally selected product of a long period of climate instability in Africa. Wet, dry, hot, cold - quick flips that rendered many less adaptable creatures extinct. We were pressed very hard and many died. Our forbearer hominids had the genetic prerequisites and variations, so to speak. The best adapted to surviving fast, huge environmental changes survived, became Homo Sapiens, us. Perhaps larger brains and language were the result of this terrible pressure to survive constant change.
What is different now is that we fully inhabit the planet, not just part of a continent. We are more adaptable and resourceful not because we are much smarter, if at all, but because we have infinitely better tools. Any horror we can imagine, including full thermo-nuclear war, vast climate disruption, asteroid hit, famine, plague, volcanic eruption, will probably be insufficient to wipe out every last settlement. Only the minimum human breeding population - perhaps 2000 people, need survive. The planet will survive as it always has, probably in some form that will support human life somewhere.
That part, the survival of just enough, is sort of based on probability, based on the effect of tools and culture and sort of based on hope. Unknowable, remember. Given time, which the Earth has plenty of, those future humans will know what we know from having decoded our garbage. Hopefully they will have developed some characteristic that allows them to avoid our fate. If not, the earth has time for more cycles of boom and bust in the inevitable self-organizing path to sustainable intelligent life.
This process is probably taking place on other planets revolving around other stars as well. Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe close enough to contact? Maybe not. Perhaps in our neighborhood, we are THE instance of intelligent life in the process of evolving the universe. We are just not ready to fly yet. Another 10,000 years, the same interval since we invented agriculture, things could be unimaginably different. And a million years? Who's counting years on a planet that has existed for 4.7 billion of them and will exist for at least several billion more? Perhaps the next step in the self organization of the universe is to become intelligent itself in some way we cannot understand, but in a way in which we played a part. We primitives, we cavemen with our addiction to fossil fuel and wreaking havoc on our partners in the biosphere. The first to leave big footprints on the planet. Probably not the last.
So that is my happy ending, smile or frown. At best a wild-ass guess in vaguely the right direction. In my story, everything really does work out in the end. We're just fixated on the wrong time-frame. Our imagination lacks enough zeros. As a population, our job is to work, eat, grow, nudge the culture and reproduce. Lives upon lives upon lives. Tiny bits of existence to experience and wonder about. Our lives have meaning, just not very much in the scheme of my imagination today.
We cannot stop reproducing, cannot stop or even influence the process very much. The problem space was bounded long before we got here. Wait, maybe descendants of the whales populate our bit of the Universe. Nah, that's a movie plot.
Friday, February 4, 2011
The Letter to our Grandchildren
Hi Nathan, Jacob and Katy,
Grandma thinks it is time we started to develop some better lines of
communication with you. So she has pestered me to write this. Well,
not that I resisted, I just had to think about what to say.
This may be a new idea for you, but Grandparents can be very useful.
We accept you for whoever you are all the time. We never expect you
to be anything other than you. We support you. We are always
available. You can call or write or Skype or whatever. We are
extremely non-judgmental. We think you are terrific who ever you
decide to be.
Both of our grandparents were important in our lives. We are who we
are because of their example and support. Julie's two grandmothers
sent her a full set of household stuff when she ran away from home at
18 and married Bobby. Julie's mother abused her, verbally and
physically from age 10 to 13. She told Julie she was ugly. She she
yelled at Julie and told her she could not show any emotion in return.
When Julie left home, Julie's mother was furious and her father was
distant. Julie's Mother stayed furious with Julie from 18 to 34.
Frances was an angry woman. (they made up finally) Julie had no where
to turn except to her grandmothers. There are plenty of other stories
like this. I just wanted to give you an example.
We want to return the favor to our grandparents. We could never do
that in a meaningful way while they were alive. We were too young.
The way we pay them back is to be as good to all of you grandchildren
as we can be. We have no program, advocate no agenda. We're just
here for whatever comes up. What happens between us stays between us
if you want it to be that way.
We did not get a letter like this from our grandparents. It was a
different time and people thought differently. But we both think we
would have had a much easier time of it if we HAD gotten a letter like
this. Here it is.
Talk between yourselves at some point and make sure everyone gets the
letter. I don't know if I have the right email for everyone. I will
not write a letter like this again. This is the first and only. If
you don't understand something I write about, be patient. You will
understand when it is time.
We love you much more than you can understand. We did the best we
knew how raising one of your parents. You are the wonderful result of
our efforts, our nudges to guide your parent. We are pretty happy
with all of our children. We think you are very lucky to have good
fathers. In large measure, they learned to be good fathers because
David's father and grandfather were such good fathers. The skill gets
passed down when things are working at their best. You always have to
make a lot of it up on the spot, you never get it right every time,
but if I remember the place my father came from toward me when I was a
kid I have a clue how to raise you. Irving loved me so much. When
you love someone, you do your best for that person.
Grandparents are not as closely connected with the day-to-day bustle
of your lives. Your parents have hopes and dreams for you. They are
guiding you in the best way they know how. They care very deeply.
The stage of life you are entering, adolescence, can be very tough.
During this time you figure out who you are, you try on various
behaviors to see what works. Usually you are terribly insecure, not
because anything is wrong with you, but because you do not yet know
enough to recognize that you are just fine. What you are feeling is
normal, whatever that is. Parents sometimes are too close to the
situation to be neutral. Parents have ideas of who you will become,
but we very rarely turn out just as our parents wished. That is
because we become ourselves, not just a projection of who they think
you should be.
It is rarely a good idea to fight with your parents, although part of
the process of becoming an adult involves creating your own identity.
Sometimes that means rebelling against them in some way. You do what
you have to, hopefully with love. You know your parents best. Some
kids refuse to really talk about what is going on with their parents.
I was lucky enough to never get out of genuine two way communication
with your fathers when they were going through their teen years. We
could always talk, and we both think that helped. But we are us and
you are you. "Your mileage may vary," as the sticker says. We each
have unique, different lives. We each have the incredible opportunity
to decide who we will be as adults. From this point in your lives,
you could be anything. You will try out lots of ideas. You will
change your mind. You will be uncertain and may feel like walking in
Tibet. You will get stuck and unstuck. You will have the first loves
of your lives. By the way, you get over the breakup, because
eventually it usually breaks up because you change as people. But you
never forget your first love. Every love of your life, really. But
the first serious deal you never really get over. Everything for the
first time. I could go on for hours and write a complete book on this
subject, if I wanted to.
The point is, Julie and I were exactly where you are and wherever you
go. We went through every life stage you will go through. We have not
forgotten in the least what it was like to be your age. Julie and I
like to say that inside Julie is a shy little girl about nine who is
very innocent and pretty. The little boy in me and the little girl in
Julie are good friends. We are buddies and you could never pry us
apart. We have a rich relationship as adults, but we are friends with
who the other person was at several ages. This is something that can
take a long time together to develop, but it's a sign that it's real.
You will fall in love. You will think that you and your love will
somehow become one person. Almost everyone goes through that. It
never lasts because it is untrue. You are really different people,
would not be half as interesting as if you were the same.
Not volunteering information is not lying. You all look after your
own interest. Don't tell a fib, but don't spill the beans either if
the result will be bad. You may be accused of lying, can't prove it
until you confess, generally. we just see it as survival. This rule
applies all through life. What people do not know sometimes does not
hurt them. The instinct to share every last bit of your life history
with someone is generally a bad idea. Better save some things for
surprises later. Don't tell people things that will hurt them. You
will feel rotten later.
You will each carve out an independent trajectory through life, be a
person who never was before and will never be again. You will decide
things, be careful about decisions that limit what you can be or do
for long periods of time. What is fun for two years is not
necessarily fun for twenty. You will make what seem like horrible
mistakes. Keep it together and you will come out of it. Never be
with a violent person. Never stay with anyone who hits you. there is
a parental exception. Parents get to raise you as they think best
until you are of legal age. Your parents may get angry with you.
Handle it as best you can and try to avoid whatever triggers the
anger. Do whatever you need to to retain your sense of self-worth
and respect. You already do that, I'm just saying it is normal not
evil. At 18 you can change arrangements or not.
Please feel free to share this with your siblings in your own words
they may not understand reading it. You know the answer. They will
not understand much and you may not understand yourselves for another
ten years. hang on to this and other letters we exchange. You will
understand what we mean when the situation arises. Go easy on each
other, you will be a lot stronger watching each other's backs than
competing with and fighting each other. I have not written anything
that would surprise any of your Fathers. They know this is how we
feel and this is who we are. So you should talk about it. this is no
secret, this is how family works. If you sense you will get a bad
reception, then wait for a better time.
We claim the right of grandchildren and grandparents to communicate
with or without their parent's approval. We claim the right of
family.
Your Grandparents, Julie and David.
Grandma thinks it is time we started to develop some better lines of
communication with you. So she has pestered me to write this. Well,
not that I resisted, I just had to think about what to say.
This may be a new idea for you, but Grandparents can be very useful.
We accept you for whoever you are all the time. We never expect you
to be anything other than you. We support you. We are always
available. You can call or write or Skype or whatever. We are
extremely non-judgmental. We think you are terrific who ever you
decide to be.
Both of our grandparents were important in our lives. We are who we
are because of their example and support. Julie's two grandmothers
sent her a full set of household stuff when she ran away from home at
18 and married Bobby. Julie's mother abused her, verbally and
physically from age 10 to 13. She told Julie she was ugly. She she
yelled at Julie and told her she could not show any emotion in return.
When Julie left home, Julie's mother was furious and her father was
distant. Julie's Mother stayed furious with Julie from 18 to 34.
Frances was an angry woman. (they made up finally) Julie had no where
to turn except to her grandmothers. There are plenty of other stories
like this. I just wanted to give you an example.
We want to return the favor to our grandparents. We could never do
that in a meaningful way while they were alive. We were too young.
The way we pay them back is to be as good to all of you grandchildren
as we can be. We have no program, advocate no agenda. We're just
here for whatever comes up. What happens between us stays between us
if you want it to be that way.
We did not get a letter like this from our grandparents. It was a
different time and people thought differently. But we both think we
would have had a much easier time of it if we HAD gotten a letter like
this. Here it is.
Talk between yourselves at some point and make sure everyone gets the
letter. I don't know if I have the right email for everyone. I will
not write a letter like this again. This is the first and only. If
you don't understand something I write about, be patient. You will
understand when it is time.
We love you much more than you can understand. We did the best we
knew how raising one of your parents. You are the wonderful result of
our efforts, our nudges to guide your parent. We are pretty happy
with all of our children. We think you are very lucky to have good
fathers. In large measure, they learned to be good fathers because
David's father and grandfather were such good fathers. The skill gets
passed down when things are working at their best. You always have to
make a lot of it up on the spot, you never get it right every time,
but if I remember the place my father came from toward me when I was a
kid I have a clue how to raise you. Irving loved me so much. When
you love someone, you do your best for that person.
Grandparents are not as closely connected with the day-to-day bustle
of your lives. Your parents have hopes and dreams for you. They are
guiding you in the best way they know how. They care very deeply.
The stage of life you are entering, adolescence, can be very tough.
During this time you figure out who you are, you try on various
behaviors to see what works. Usually you are terribly insecure, not
because anything is wrong with you, but because you do not yet know
enough to recognize that you are just fine. What you are feeling is
normal, whatever that is. Parents sometimes are too close to the
situation to be neutral. Parents have ideas of who you will become,
but we very rarely turn out just as our parents wished. That is
because we become ourselves, not just a projection of who they think
you should be.
It is rarely a good idea to fight with your parents, although part of
the process of becoming an adult involves creating your own identity.
Sometimes that means rebelling against them in some way. You do what
you have to, hopefully with love. You know your parents best. Some
kids refuse to really talk about what is going on with their parents.
I was lucky enough to never get out of genuine two way communication
with your fathers when they were going through their teen years. We
could always talk, and we both think that helped. But we are us and
you are you. "Your mileage may vary," as the sticker says. We each
have unique, different lives. We each have the incredible opportunity
to decide who we will be as adults. From this point in your lives,
you could be anything. You will try out lots of ideas. You will
change your mind. You will be uncertain and may feel like walking in
Tibet. You will get stuck and unstuck. You will have the first loves
of your lives. By the way, you get over the breakup, because
eventually it usually breaks up because you change as people. But you
never forget your first love. Every love of your life, really. But
the first serious deal you never really get over. Everything for the
first time. I could go on for hours and write a complete book on this
subject, if I wanted to.
The point is, Julie and I were exactly where you are and wherever you
go. We went through every life stage you will go through. We have not
forgotten in the least what it was like to be your age. Julie and I
like to say that inside Julie is a shy little girl about nine who is
very innocent and pretty. The little boy in me and the little girl in
Julie are good friends. We are buddies and you could never pry us
apart. We have a rich relationship as adults, but we are friends with
who the other person was at several ages. This is something that can
take a long time together to develop, but it's a sign that it's real.
You will fall in love. You will think that you and your love will
somehow become one person. Almost everyone goes through that. It
never lasts because it is untrue. You are really different people,
would not be half as interesting as if you were the same.
Not volunteering information is not lying. You all look after your
own interest. Don't tell a fib, but don't spill the beans either if
the result will be bad. You may be accused of lying, can't prove it
until you confess, generally. we just see it as survival. This rule
applies all through life. What people do not know sometimes does not
hurt them. The instinct to share every last bit of your life history
with someone is generally a bad idea. Better save some things for
surprises later. Don't tell people things that will hurt them. You
will feel rotten later.
You will each carve out an independent trajectory through life, be a
person who never was before and will never be again. You will decide
things, be careful about decisions that limit what you can be or do
for long periods of time. What is fun for two years is not
necessarily fun for twenty. You will make what seem like horrible
mistakes. Keep it together and you will come out of it. Never be
with a violent person. Never stay with anyone who hits you. there is
a parental exception. Parents get to raise you as they think best
until you are of legal age. Your parents may get angry with you.
Handle it as best you can and try to avoid whatever triggers the
anger. Do whatever you need to to retain your sense of self-worth
and respect. You already do that, I'm just saying it is normal not
evil. At 18 you can change arrangements or not.
Please feel free to share this with your siblings in your own words
they may not understand reading it. You know the answer. They will
not understand much and you may not understand yourselves for another
ten years. hang on to this and other letters we exchange. You will
understand what we mean when the situation arises. Go easy on each
other, you will be a lot stronger watching each other's backs than
competing with and fighting each other. I have not written anything
that would surprise any of your Fathers. They know this is how we
feel and this is who we are. So you should talk about it. this is no
secret, this is how family works. If you sense you will get a bad
reception, then wait for a better time.
We claim the right of grandchildren and grandparents to communicate
with or without their parent's approval. We claim the right of
family.
Your Grandparents, Julie and David.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Weakness, Strength and the Agile Hero
Some posts back, (http://swimbladder.blogspot.com/2010/10/spider-in-my-head.html) I proposed to make my shortcomings public to save everyone the time it takes to discover them. Everyone has weak areas. You do not fully understand anyone until you figure out where they are not strong. It is possible to develop workarounds for weakness, but a terrible lot of work. I was a very shy, stammering child and I have learned to speak in public and to be a successful salesman. But I am still that shy kid inside and once in a while he pops out. It is good to understand your weakness because you can team with others who have complementary strengths. This post is about weakness and strength, with a brief meditation on heroism for the Agilist.
I am very bad at acquiring names. When I meet you for the first time, if you wear a name tag or hand me a business card, I will keep peeking as we talk. If I physically write your name down, please do not take it as a sign of disrespect. By doing so I am fairly likely to remember your name. The kinesthetic act of writing facilitates my making this sort of memory.
I have worked on this problem for years with little progress. If I try one of the prominent name remembering methods, it takes so much effort I don't catch what what you are saying. I focus on your visage and message. Your name just vanishes. If you are a really attractive woman, I confess I am more likely to remember your name. Perhaps the association with potential physicality trips the switch. I really don't know.
If you repeat your name it doesn't help. I remember people photographically. I can picture you in my mind without effort. Meeting again, I probably instantly notice if you have gained or lost weight or now fix your hair differently. If I look at you embarrassingly however, please prompt me. Kinesthesis is apparently part of my name memory-making process. If I make notes, whether reading a book, listening to you talk or studying for a test, I remember more. This works even if I never look at the notes again. I'm sure Dr. Oliver Sacks could explain all this very satisfactorily and probably has.
My son, Scrum trainer Scott Dunn, embraces the concept that focusing on weakness is looking at the wrong side of the coin. Because weakness is so difficult to “solve,” Scott helps clients focus on their strengths. He uses a well-respected tool developed by the Gallup organization, StrengthsFinder, to identify what people are good at. Effort put into employing and improving your strengths is much more likely to pay off than chipping away at those annoying weaknesses. There is a strong message about the utility of working in collaborative teams here which you can work out for yourself.
We should not ignore our weaknesses, but team with others who are strong in those areas. “Hire toward your weak side” is classic management advice and difficult for many to put into practice. If I hire people more qualified than me, the little voice inside your head natters, they will overshadow me and I will fail. Oh Fear, Fear. We all experience fear at some level unless we are psychopathic. Courage is moving forward in spite of the fear. Heroism is putting yourself in grave danger, often an individual's final act. Have courage, but being an Agile hero may well end your ability to contribute at your current place of employment.
In the West, we celebrate the Spartans at Thermopylae, who set a standard for ultimate courage and sacrifice, but not heroism. Heroism is impulsive, accidental, stupid or all three. No one should set out to be a hero. Heroism is the creation of war propagandists, politicians and other venial creatures. I profoundly respect fear. Fear is healthy, fear keeps us alive. Being fear's captive protects you if hiding is a successful tactic.
But cowering is not generally positive business practice. If you shut down with fear you cannot access your strengths. Be confident enough in your strength that you can act in the face of your fear. Easily said, I know. A bit of a slow learner in this regard, I spent 20 years in management before I was really confident enough to consistently hire to my weak side. If you are not there yet, you are in good company, but keep working on it. Moving past your fear is worth the effort. Revealing your weakness is optional.
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