It Isn't Like Herding Cats

We have a pretty major construction project going on at our house right now.  Well, I hope the construction part starts to happen pretty soon, because so far it's mostly been destruction, but I'm holding out hope.

There are two components to the project - one outdoor and one in the basement - that requires some fairly delicate fine-tuning and cooperation between the two sets of laborers.  Here are a few things I've learned in the last four weeks:

1.  Each separate entity has their own set of quirks around how they like to work, when they like to work, and what their particular set of responsibilities entails.
2.  It is my job to facilitate constructive collaboration between these two entities.
3.  This is not like herding cats.

Herding cats is a phrase I generally like and have used often, but it conjures up discrete individuals with their own ideas and agendas who simply don't care about anyone else's silly little life. Unless it affects when they eat.  That is important to cats.  This task is much more like herding labrador retrievers.  The head of each crew is answering to me, loyal to me (the check-writer), and concerned with my needs, like a sweet puppy dog who needs my approval. That part is great.  However, they circle around each other, wary and sniffing and a little territorial and it is my job to keep the tails wagging and not get peed on.  That is more difficult.

Both jobs are big and will take months to complete. Both are fairly intrusive to my life (ahh, the perks of working from home?), and the two jobs dovetail in multiple areas which means that if one crew takes a little longer to accomplish something (or their subcontractor simply doesn't show up for work one day without notice), it affects everyone else.  The tension that ensues is no big deal unless I don't nip it in the bud.  There has been some almost-middle-school drama wherein a seemingly casual conversation quickly turns into a not-very-thinly-veiled accusation against the other crew for "passing the buck" or "screwing up" and it is all I can do not to crack up.  Thus far, I have been able to deal with these jabs the same way I do with Eve and Lola, by giving more details and explaining how such a thing might have come to pass. That said, I'm fairly certain that I have the power to tip the scales simply by appearing to side with one or the other and starting a full-scale war for my admiration.

At one point, I was describing such a scene to Bubba and he remarked that, while I'm learning a lot about how boilers work and gas lines are installed, perhaps my biggest lessons in all of this will be the ones about managing people and personalities.  I agreed, but didn't have the heart to tell him that running this household with him and two children had already given me an education in that subject.

Strike While the Iron is Hot

I was at the chiropractor's office the other day praising the massage therapist in her office.

"It was so different than any massage I've ever had before. Generally, I get deep tissue work done and I feel beaten up and bruised for days afterward, but this was gentle and soothing and I nearly fell asleep more than once."

"Mmm, hmm. She's really good." My chiropractor is less of a "rack'm and crack'm" and more of a manual therapist, using traction and gravity to stretch things back so that my body rights itself more often than not. That said, she won't hesitate to manipulate my spine if it needs it and I absolutely LOVE having my neck cracked by her.

"I was toying with the idea of asking her to push a little harder, because I grew up with the 'no pain, no gain' ethic and I felt a little guilty that it just felt good and relaxing.  I wondered if I ought to be hurting more."

The doctor stopped and let out a small laugh.

"You know, part of the reason she is so good is because she really listens to your tissues with her fingers. She pushes just hard enough until there is some resistance and then she works to gently increase blood flow and loosen that area up.  If there is a lot of resistance and she digs in, all she is likely to do is aggravate that area and make it more swollen and tight."

Dramatic, theatrical pause (mine - I'm sure this only happened in my head, but sometimes just before someone says something particularly impactful to me I remember that there was a momentous second before they said it).

"There is such a thing as a 'therapeutic window' for everything.  If the receiver isn't ready to receive the therapy, it won't be helpful."

That sentence rang in my head like church bells for days to come.

When I was struggling with depression, I had to get to a place where I was ready to hear what my therapist was saying to me.

I couldn't possibly have forgiven my father or my molester until I was at a place in my life where that was a possibility.

I remember my high school physics teacher introducing the notion of dead space to us one day. He talked about how everything is made up of atoms and how there is a lot of space between these charged particles and they are only held together by their electrical charges (I'm simplifying greatly, so if you're a physical scientist, don't get upset with this rudimentary description).  We explored the notion of crystalline structures and atomic structures and chemical formulas and he blew my mind when he said I could simply pass my hand through my desktop if the atoms just all lined up correctly.  It took a long time to even begin to wrap my head around that one, and I'm not certain I have, to be completely honest.

If we just wait for the right time for things to align themselves, we can make an enormous impact by taking advantage of that window.  By learning to recognize when someone is receptive to our message we can be more certain that our input will have the intended effect.  For many years now I have wondered how many times I will have to ask my girls to do the same thing before they change their behavior.  I looked for some magical number - 1,000? 2,500? 15,000? Whatever it took, I was willing to do it so long as it resulted in my desired outcome.  But what if it isn't a repetition but a receptivity principle?  What if I'm wasting my breath (and anger and frustration and eye-rolling) by bouncing my words off of a brick wall? What if I simply wait until I can see they are ready to hear my message and say it once?

The idea that simply talking louder or pounding my fist for emphasis or adding tears to the mix isn't likely to change anything is a revelation.  I know inherently that my chiropractor was right.  There is a therapeutic window for everything and my window isn't the same as anyone else's, but if I push harder and harder in an attempt to get my agenda across, all I'm likely to do is aggravate the situation more.  I know that lecturing Eve when she's already mad or embarrassed about something only serves to make her dig her heels in stubbornly.  I have observed that when I can hold my tongue and wait until she comes to me in contrition or asking for help, I have a much larger impact on the situation.

I can't promise I'll remember this principle every time I am desperate to impart some wisdom, but hopefully I can keep the image of this window in my head to prompt me to at least ask the question, "Is this person ready to hear what I want to say?"

Museum Revelations

I have decided that traditional museums are lost on children. I know there are "children's" museums in every major city in the US, but I'm talking about the natural history museums with dinosaur bones and things that school children are herded to every year, lined up like pearls on a string, and ushered from room to quiet room while some adult desperately tries to engage their attention and keep them from swinging on the velvet ropes.

Two weeks ago, Eve and I were in Washington, DC with a dozen or so of her classmates for a Close Up Washington tour. [I couldn't have loved this tour company more - if you haven't heard of them, check it out. What a fantastic organization!] The kids had a pretty tightly packed schedule but since they were with Close Up teachers, I was free to peel off and do my own thing and catch up with them later.

Now, I'm certain that I visited my share of museums as a kid and what I really remember about them was being bored and restless.  The idea of a field trip was almost always better than the trip itself and I know for a fact that the part I enjoyed the most was the school bus ride with all of my friends to and from our destination.

As an adult, though, heading into the Smithsonian Natural History Museum was fan-freaking-tastic. There was a life-size elephant in the lobby. This guy stared out at me from his perch, daring me to guess what he was and read all about him.

The school children around me came in two sizes: 

• middle-school-age and thrilled to be set free from their teachers for the moment, they ran around in giggling clots of girls texting each other pictures of boys they had taken on the sly (apparently these are called 'stalker photos' because the subject is some random boy from another school in another part of the US who just happens to be on your tour and he has no idea he is being photographed or talked about by tittering teenage girls), and 
• elementary-age children with matching backpacks and water bottles with eyes like marbles and brains so overstimulated that they couldn't even recall their own names (which may be why most of them were written in Sharpie on their backpacks).

[By the way, it may be the paranoid traveler in me, but doesn't writing your child's name - or having it stitched - on their personal belongings in plain sight make it easier for a freaky pedophile to coax your child over to them in a public area where they might be with a large group and, thus, not as closely supervised as you might think? Just an observation...]

I on the other hand, walked slowly but with purpose from exhibit to exhibit, reading plaques and shaking my head in wonder. I could have spent a week inside learning about the different species of bats and gaping at the Hope Diamond, standing in front of the hologram wall designed to show the structure of a crystal and marveling at the knobby skin on an egret's toes.  The children swirled around me like waves, moving too quickly to absorb much of anything and eager for lunch.

Last week Bubba found himself in Germany on business and, with a couple of hours to kill, he decided to head to the Natural History Museum in Frankfurt. He texted me this photo

I had one of those moments where I had to remind myself to breathe. And it was then that I realized museums like this are completely lost on children. 

You see, up until a certain age, most children live in their own imaginations. Everything seems wondrous and amazing for many, many years. The first time a kid visits the beach, the waves seem magical. You can totally trick a kid into thinking that quarters can be extracted from their ears. Kids will believe almost anything because they haven't been taught that most of the stuff they want to see and do and have are impossible. And so visiting a museum and seeing something like a T. Rex skeleton is cool, but it isn't hard for them to imagine that something like that could (and maybe still does) wander around crushing things somewhere on the planet. 

As a pre-teen and teenager, kids have many other things on their minds like music and boyfriends/girlfriends, how to convince their parents they need a cell phone with unlimited text, etc.  They have no use for museums except as a way to get out of their classroom and socialize with friends on the bus.

As an adult, though, I have spent many, many years in the Realm of Things Possible and Doable. I am concerned, on a minute-by-minute basis, with what is necessary (food, sleep, walking the dog enough to avoid accidents in the house, laundry, getting children to sporting practices and events, paying bills) and weighing against that, what is actually possible in any given day.  I am not given to fantasy except as it relates to these things (having my insurance company suddenly call up and say, for example, "You know what? Your deductible is too high and we have noticed that it's only May 1 and you have already had some very legitimate reasons to visit the doctor this year and these little nickel-and-dime lab fees and tests and follow up visits are killing you. Let us pick the rest of it up this year, okay?").

So to walk in to a museum and see a stuffed African elephant is jolting. It stops me in my mental tracks and reminds me that there are wondrous things that exist outside of my ability to think about. Looking at that photo from Bubba made me recall that there was once something this enormous, this phenomenal, this astonishing that roamed the Earth. It gave me pause and opened the doorway to a place of speculation and wonder where I have not spent much time in the last four decades.  I was properly awed when I made my way through the Smithsonian museum and I believe I was in the minority.

I will be heading to museums more from now on, but I won't be taking my children. I love them and I do hope that one day they, too, will discover how great museums are, but I have no desire to drag them in and spend precious time and energy convincing them or cajoling them into enjoying themselves. Nope, instead I will give myself the gift of going alone and remembering my imagination.  Because I need that more than those dang schoolkids. And I appreciate it more, too.  

Zen and the Art of Doing

Anyone who knew me during the first 35 years of my life would probably describe me as "Type A." A perfectionist, in love with control and order and predictability.  Far from being disturbed by that sort of characterization, I embraced it fully. I was in love with the concept of controlling my own destiny and often (quietly) railed against those who might stand in my way as I traveled down the neat and tidy path of my life as I envisioned it.

On the other hand, folks who have met me in the past few years might not agree.  I like to think that I have seen the error of my ways, addressed the driving forces behind my drastic need to control the parameters of my life and the lives of my children, and become much more accepting of the world and my place in it.  I am capable of letting go of worries about how others might see me and not nearly so frantic about working, working, working to prove my worth and avoiding all potential difficulties.

That said, I still have a bit of a mental struggle between "being" and "doing." I have a meditation practice that has served me well over the past several years and often at the first sign of trouble, my instinct tells me to slow down and check in with my gut. To be still and quiet and breathe instead of mobilizing for action to mitigate damage.  And yet, often as I am working to 'be,' I carry 'what to do' in the back of my mind like a pebble in my shoe. It is not front and center, sharp enough to make me stop and shake it out, but it's only a matter of time before I get annoyed and stop to examine it.  Even as I am simply experiencing the discomfort of a particular situation, working to not judge it and panic, I am acknowledging somewhere in my head that soon I will have to do something about this situation and this state of suspension is finite. Perhaps the most mundane, and certainly the most recent example of this in my life follows:

Last week I was suffering with shoulder and neck pain, popping Advil like black jellybeans on Easter Sunday, and wondering when I might find the time to go see my chiropractor. It was a particularly busy week for the girls, Bubba was in Europe on business, and I had a million projects to tackle, so my time was limited.  After two nights of migraines, I gave in and made an appointment for Sunday at noon, knowing that Eve had made plans with a girlfriend and I may have to cancel.  I put it to the back of my mind on Friday night with a little mental post-it that I had to cancel by Saturday at noon if I was going to.

Saturday morning, Eve's friend still hadn't called with the details of their plans. By Saturday afternoon, I had decided I would try to push the issue a little and let Eve know that I could either take her to her friend's house early on Sunday or for a couple of hours after my appointment in the afternoon.  I was still unsure whether Lola would accompany me to the chiropractor or not, and I was a little uneasy as to how it would all turn out, but I resisted the impulse to actively problem-solve.

Within five minutes of Eve texting her friend an inquiry about details, our home phone rang and it was a friend of Lola's, inviting her over to hang out for a few hours on Sunday. Within the next few minutes, Eve's friend texted back saying earlier was better for her and we should bring her in the morning. Problem solved.

On Sunday, what I got was a fabulous chiropractor appointment with a skilled practitioner who made me feel almost instantly better and a quiet house for three hours while I worked on a writing project I haven't been able to tackle yet this week.

But what I really got was the reminder that while sitting with uncertainty (no matter how small) does not necessarily translate to action, it often results in less action being needed.  If I had scrambled around trying to make arrangements for Lola or scheduling Eve's time with her friend, I would have used up precious energy for no real reason. What 'being' did for me was allow time for some of the details in the Universe to shift and provide a clear path for all of us. Had I pre-emptively cancelled my appointment so as to avoid the cancellation fee, I would have ended up frustrated that both kids were away and my neck still hurt.

Over the years I have noted the positive affects of not-doing again and again (this, by the way, is much different than procrastination, although I often convince myself that it is not and justify my procrastination by saying that I was simply waiting for 'things to work themselves out'). I am coming to trust in the partnership between being and doing, the yin and yang of them in relationship to each other, the notion that there is a time and a place for each and neither ought to be forced.  In my life, anyway, the more I can initially sit with a new situation and not succumb to that siren call to "Act now!" the less effort I end up expending to find a workable solution that feels right.  Beyond the weekly, mundane examples like the chiropractor appointment, there are many more monumental issues I have experienced in my life in which this principle is astoundingly applicable. Perhaps my new mantra ought to be, "When in doubt, do nothing for a little while. Just to see how things unfold." You never know - I may not have to do anything at all, and that is certainly cause for celebration.

The Fallacy of the Bell Curve: Shooting for Mediocrity

Most of us are familiar with the idea of a bell curve.  If you grew up with public education in the US in the 1970s, you were likely steeped in it.  The idea is fairly simple:

"First, numeric scores are assigned to the students. The actual values are unimportant as long as the ordering of the scores corresponds to the ordering of how good the students are. In the second step these scores are converted to percentiles. Finally, the percentile values are transformed to grades according to a division of the percentile scale into intervals, where the interval width of each grade indicates the desired relative frequency for that grade.

For example, if there are three grades, A, B and C, where A is reserved for the top 10% of students, B for the next 20%, and C for the remaining 70%, then scores in the percentile interval from 0% to 70% get grade C, scores from 71% to 90% get grade B, and scores from 91% to 100% get grade A."

Okay, that's how we got our 'letter grades.' What I find particularly interesting about this method is the following statement - also from Wikipedia.

"The grading method can thus be tuned to determine the frequency distribution of the grades in advance, and if the intervals are already fixed at the beginning of a course, then so is the number of students who will receive each grade."

Regardless of how you feel about the format of "grading on a curve," it occurs to me that as a culture, we have bought into this notion and applied it to nearly everything.  We use the idea that most of us are going to be clustered into the center portion of the curve, sheltered under its wide arc, with only the outliers spread out to either side, to make sense of our world. We live our lives aspiring to be, if not to the far right side of that graph, at least safe within the numbers of other 'normal' folks like us in the main part.

And it's no wonder, because those unlucky folks at either end of the spectrum are often the ones who are dehumanized.

Consider a bell curve based on sporting ability.  The folks at the far right - the positive 2.5s and 3s - those are Michael Phelps, Lance Armstrong, Mia Hamm. They are the ones we revere and admire and pay bucketloads of money to go see in action, but they are also relegated to that world of superhuman ability that makes them subject to expectations nobody can meet.  We idolize them and dehumanize them. We ask that they subjugate their humanity, their tendency to make mistakes and their desires for junk food and bad relationships, in order to explain to ourselves why they aren't in the same part of the bell curve as us.  And if they fall for any reason at all and show their flaws and foibles, we vilify them viciously before either ignoring them or dusting them off and placing them right back on that pedestal where we want them to be.

We have graphs for every kind of achievement and quality - musical talent, scientific thought, physical attributes - and we hold exacting standards for each of them. Talented musicians are prodigies whose lives are wasted if they deign to seek anything other than a life of fame and fortune by making music. Gorgeous models and actors are lauded for maintaining their ideal weight and if one should suffer some disfiguring accident we assume their life is now over.

And if we all adhered to our places on the bell curve, where might we be?  There would be no Temple Grandin, for she would be relegated to the negative twos with other folks whose talents don't fit in with our idea of 'normal.' The work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks would never have materialized, given their place on the bell curve of gender and race.  It is so often those individuals who are willing to step outside of the interval that society has fixed in place for them who make the biggest impact, who believe that we have something important to learn, but they suffer greatly at the hands of those who would define them as less human simply because of that place they are supposed to occupy on the graph.  We are, so many of us, concerned with having what is average, what is normal, with sitting firmly in the middle of an entire group of others just like us, that we forget to dream. We accept the idea that the game is fixed, the intervals are set, and we have little mobility to the right or to the left. We know, from working out the statistics of the bell curve, that once you reach a certain point, it is simply too hard to break through to the top part of the curve.

It hasn't always been this way. Our country used to be one that fairly demanded difference. There was a time when our shores were flooded with immigrants that were welcomed and, although they didn't always have what they needed to get by, collaboration and innovation were praised, not to mention a survival necessity. That's not to say that there aren't shameful examples of exploitation and discrimination in our history, but there wasn't always this idea that being just like everyone else was something to aspire to.  In the 1950s when television programs began showing us what we should want, we stopped asking ourselves what we actually did want and found it was simpler to go along with the crowd. Unfortunately, that has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy for many Americans who would rather blend into the sheer numbers of others like themselves than celebrate their own unique attributes and talents. It has also made it much easier to dehumanize individuals at both ends of the spectrum, pitying those on one end of the curve and holding those at the opposite end to an impossible standard. We huddle in our "normalcy," afraid to bust out at either side and show our true desires and talents, content to paint ourselves in the colors of the masses and regard those remarkable individuals who stand out like exotic creatures at the zoo.  A dynamic, diverse society is one that allows for difference and celebrates every kind of unique thought, not one that is frightened of new frontiers and innovation. Let's scrap this bell curve and start looking at our world through fresh eyes.

The "F" Word Rears its Ugly Head Again

I was asked today how I think my daughters' school views failure and I cringed.  I hate that word. It is so full of rot and worms and gut-wrenching stink.  The first thing I did was to reframe the conversation in terms of mistakes, and then I dug in deeper.

I don't know where we as a society got the notion that mistakes aren't allowed, or at least that only mistakes of a certain type are allowed.  I remember teachers handing papers back to me with a final grade written on them in red ink at the top and feeling either defeated or elated depending on the score (which I rapidly translated from a number score to a letter grade in my head, don't you know).  I remember accepting that this was the way it was. You get one chance to take that test or write that essay and the grade you get is the grade you get.  But that isn't real life, is it?  And it certainly isn't a reasonable expectation. I think if we asked, no parent or school official or teacher would say that they expect their students to come in, sit through a lecture, absorb everything the teacher says, and perform perfectly on an exam. Desire? Yes. Expect? No. Schools are for learning, and learning simply can't happen without missteps.

Last year, Eve had a math teacher who expected the girls to turn in corrections on their math homework.  If it was clear to him that they hadn't quite understood or mastered the content by the looks of their math papers, he would return them to the girls and ask them to rework the problems they had answered incorrectly.  He offered to stay in at lunch or after school to pore over the papers with students who just hadn't quite figured it out yet because his goal was that each of his students truly learn the material he was teaching. He didn't have a bell curve he was working toward.  He wasn't compelled by some external drive to "get through" a certain amount of material. He wanted these girls to understand what he was teaching and he lived it every day.

How often do we get "corrections" in life? Everywhere, I'd say.  Just because I try out a new recipe one night and it bombs, my family doesn't 'fire' me from cooking anymore.  I'm not branded a failure in the kitchen and asked not to return.  Life is about reworking problems, looking back to see where we went wrong and making it a little better next time.  Unfortunately, I think we don't offer our kids that much slack at school.  So many students are frantic to turn in perfect papers that they stay up all night tweaking every last detail or resort to buying someone else's work to turn in. They take round after round of pre-SAT tests in order to increase their scores as much as possible before applying to colleges.  They give up on themselves if they can't master a particular subject, or if they can't master school itself.  We are doing them a disservice if we continue to send them the message that there is only one way to learn and if they don't figure it out, they're doomed.

One of the biggest reasons I love the school my daughters attend is that the teachers embrace mistakes. They expect mistakes. They encourage the girls to step outside of their comfort zone and try things they are afraid of just to see what happens.  Yes, they have high academic standards, but those standards revolve around comprehension and utilization of the material they are taught, not regurgitating memorized material on a test or being at the top of the bell curve.  Their teachers believe that one of the biggest components of learning is not knowing. I mean, honestly, isn't that the only prerequisite for learning? That you don't already know?  In this equation, effort and resilience are the most important traits a student can have, and given that those characteristics are vital to the rest of their lives as well, don't we want to instill them in our kids instead of some completely unattainable ideal of perfection?

The Tyranny of Control

Ahh, control. The word has meant many different things to me in my life.  As a young child, I fantasized about having some, any at all.  I equated control with power and freedom.  As a teen, I was certain I was in control of my life - manipulating my parents carefully with my words and actions to convince them that I was mature and responsible and could be trusted.  I had been hurt badly, betrayed by friends and family, and was determined to set myself up in a tower of my own making that would ensure I was never hurt like that again.

As a young adult, I had to admit that I was most certainly NOT in control of much, living hand-to-mouth as I worked two or three jobs to survive my college years, making some really bad choices (like falling prey to the nice folks who sat at the Visa table in my school's common area) and suffering the consequences.  I struggled to rein in the world, eventually limiting my scope to a pretty small radius so that I could begin to find the way back to mastery.  Once I felt solidly on my feet again, I started to widen my range, only to lose it again when I had children.

It has taken me many cycles of loss and lockdown to discover that my life is happier when I let go of the need for control.  Consider:

Infants have no control over anything. Their bodies twitch and move without their input. And they accept that, they don't know anything else.  Sure, they get hungry and cry for help, or they need a fresh diaper and cry for help, but they are accepting of the fact that they need others to survive.  When they aren't crying for help, infants are absorbing. They are being. They are taking in everything around them, not attempting to control it or change it, just existing within it.

Again, when we get to the most advanced years of our lives, we have little control.  Many of us lose our motor skills, some of us lose our cognitive skills, and we all end up relying on others to help us.  There is no regaining the illusion of control that we had throughout most of our lives, there is no pill we can take to restore our muscle and brain function to what it once was (although I'm certain there are many, many millions of dollars spent working on finding one).  Some of the happiest people I know are those who have the least amount of control in their lives.

Michael A. Singer writes in his book, The Untethered Soul,

"We think we're supposed to figure out how life should be and then make it that way....How did we come up with the notion that life is not okay just the way it is...?"

Later he expands on that notion,

"You're either trying to figure out how to keep things from happening or your trying to figure out what to do because they did happen. You're fighting with creation."

Yup, that about sums up the vast majority of my life (and energy expenditure) to this point.  When I look at individuals who are not hell-bent on changing the external world or walling off their internal experience to fit their notion of what would make life pleasant, I see people who are happy. People with lives that actually are pleasant.  People whose energies are spent moving forward with things that are meaningful to them as opposed to defending themselves from the potential harm they could encounter.

Slowly but surely I am beginning to understand that my attempts to be in control of my own life amount to holding myself hostage.  I end up limiting my ability to experience the entire range of things I might see and do and feel because I am afraid that I might not be able to mitigate the effect of those experiences on me.    And in the end, the world I might create if I were in control would only contain the things I have encountered up until now and what a boring place that would be.  It would likely also be pretty lonely, given that a world where I never get hurt is probably a world without other sentient beings.  So while I'm not looking forward to having my heart broken or losing my physical abilities or memory, I'm not willing to trade my relationships or the wonder of new discoveries for absolute control, either.  I guess I'm going to have to keep working on being okay with pain and vulnerability. Damn.