The Guidance in Dealing with People Is What I Treasure Most
There will always be a certain distance between us. Maybe the cynics are right, and love is only ever an illusion. But maybe it’s the sacred kind of illusion, like the shimmering blue gods who appear to shepherd children. It has power, if only because we believe it does. And that’s enough. All that is required is that we keep showing up, and never stop asking each other, “What are you thinking about?”It’s not about getting an answer to the question. It’s the act of asking, of trying to reach across the gap, working through the mystery—that is what’s worth holding on to. That’s the feeling that must be kept alive, even if we never find the right words to express it.
That's the final part of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows' definition of the concept Gnossienne, the awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life. I find it a beautiful sentiment.
Today's post is going to be an even more random collection of items than usual, with maybe the only real unifying them being that they resonate with my mysterious inner life.
We're starting to form some new teams at my workplace and are starting on the teambuilding process. While I know many don't, I find this process invaluable when done right. One of the things I try to do with my teams is talk right up front about what our styles and needs are to explore potential conflict areas and develop sensitivities and strategies in advance for working things out amicably. Today I started an email chain with some thoughts about my Myers-Briggs type, INTJ. Especially stressors and a couple of fun things like What Each Myers-Briggs Type Does At A Party and The Definition Of Hell For Each Myers-Briggs Personality Type. I ended by saying:
You might be picking up that people skills are not a natural area of strength for me. I figured this out a long time ago and have worked most of my life to be better at it. (I find “psychology” books a much better help in learning how to manage and lead people than “business” books.) So one of the most meaningful compliments I’ve received in recent memory is this one from a long-time colleague after they retired:
On a related note, I particularly love this message that showed up on my feed as a meme:
A brief exchange I had with [Older], who is ten:
Me, in response to his excuses: "Don't get technical; you know what I mean."Him: "But I like technical; technical is me."
Probably one of the ways he resembles me.
A longer anecdote I shared with Facebook:
My library promotes 6 early literacy skills for parents to engage in with their preschoolers to help them develop a strong foundation for learning to read. Those skills are relevant throughout the lifespan, though, and don't just stop when kids start learning to read. Literacy and linguistic excellence take a long time to achieve.One of the skills, from our website: "Talk, Talk, Talk - Use lots of language with young children, even when they don’t understand. The more words children hear, the larger their vocabulary becomes. Children with a large listening and speaking vocabulary have an enormous advantage in learning to read. Providing them with rich language experiences helps prepare them."So in conversation with my kids I try never to "dumb down" my vocabulary to just words they're already familiar with, and instead take every opportunity to expose them to new words. Like this morning: [Mom] prompted [Older] to apologize for giving me some attitude. He complied with an unusally formal, "I'm sorry, Father.""Thank you, oh spawn of the devil," I replied.He turned to his mom. "What does that mean?" She told him "spawn" means "offspring."And there you go: expanded vocabulary achieved.
Of course, our eight-year-old's teacher recently emailed us about his impressive vocabulary (her words), that he too often chooses violent words like "destruction" and "flammable" that are too dark for the context. Most assuredly my fault.
I appreciate this thought from Mark Manson.
Sometimes I'm disgusted by something I see. I might even judge you by what that might be. Usually it's 'cause what I see is in me.
Every accusation is a confession, at least on some level.
Something I shared with my work colleagues recently:
RepresentationIf you'll forgive my DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) moment, I have a good anecdote from Preschool Storytime this morning. A term that gets used sometimes is "representation." As in, it's important that minority groups see themselves represented in programs, displays, booklists, media, and similar. This morning, an adult (I'm going to refer to as "mom" from here even though I don't actually know) and two girls arrived for storytime a bit late and settled into the back corner of the room. They were the only Black people in the room. I'm pretty sure it was their first time attending one of my storytimes, and I could tell the girls were unsure and hesitant to join in, the mom encouraging them. Near the end, the slide below was on display while we danced to the song. I noticed one of the girls pointing to it and saying, "Look, Mom, it's you! Look, Mom, it's you!" And I could see that suddenly she felt much more included, simply by seeing this silly little stock image I stuck on my slide for a visual during the music.
A plethora of articles have caught my eye lately. Here's one:
Unconscious beliefs help determine our deeply-held moral, social and political beliefs.Powerful metaphors and frames, often repeated by politicians and the media, sink into our unconscious and create a concept of "common sense” — even when the ideas behind them are the opposite of sensible. . . .Crime is another issue where we tend to be deeply affected by our unconscious beliefs. Many people instinctively think it is “common sense” to be tough on crime and impose draconian penalties. But the data says otherwise.Crime tends to be very high in states with “lock em’ up” laws — a dynamic that is rarely questioned. Decades of research shows that investing in education, creating economic opportunity and addressing other social factors has a much bigger impact on crime. Yet Democrats often copy Republicans in prescribing “tough” measures as the answer.Why? Because Americans have been conditioned to unconsciously believe “tough” is the solution to crime.Think about it: Nearly every movie or TV show about crime makes it seem as if tough measures work. The protagonist — whether a police officer with a gun or a hero with a cape — must roughly (often violently) crack down on criminals in order to teach them a lesson. Often, this cop or superhero must break the law in order to give the criminals what they deserve. It’s a story we’ve seen repeated over and over again for most of our lives.As a result, most of us have unconscious beliefs shaped by this conservative moral worldview.Understanding of the unconscious mind’s role is crucial because it steers the strategies that political campaigns employ. Knowing that most thought is unconscious, campaigns focus on symbolic language, repetition, and emotional appeal. They do not merely present policy positions. They work to shape the very cognitive frames through which those policies are understood.Once certain frames become established in the unconscious, they can be incredibly resilient. This is why changing someone's political opinion can be nearly impossible. Their cognitive frames need to be shifted, not just their conscious thoughts. That is very hard to do.
This is the type of psychological information that helps me develop my people skills.
I, like most people, am not very good at waiting patiently without getting bored.
This mystery has led me to conclude that I have gone about the whole problem in the wrong way. I have been trying to engineer the outside world to make it better for me. I should instead have been working on myself, to live better in a world of waiting.The problem with waiting for something we want—even when the waiting is not anxiety-provoking (as it can be for a medical result)—is that it produces two conditions that humans hate: boredom and lack of autonomy.One way of understanding boredom is that it’s a state in which you fail to find meaning. Standing in line, knowing that you’re doing so to get or do something but are being forced to spend the time unproductively, is what feels meaningless. That can lead to frustration. . . .Waiting also lowers your sense of autonomy—or, to use the psychological parlance, creates an external locus of control, which means that your behavior can’t change the situation at hand. This is extremely uncomfortable. . . .All of this leads to a vicious circle of waiting and frustration: The discomfort from waiting makes the waiting seem to go on longer, and this perceived extended waiting time increases your frustration. . . .I can recommend two ways to transform waiting time from something to endure into an investment in yourself.The first is the practice of mindfulness. . . .To do this involves putting down the phone when waiting in line—or for a train, or at the airport, or wherever—and simply paying attention. You may not have done this in a long time—perhaps not since you first got a smartphone. You will find—and the research backs this up—that looking around and deliberately taking note of what you observe will probably lower the discomfort from boredom.The second personal change you can try is to practice the virtue of patience. . . .Scholars have found a solution that, like mindfulness, has a strong connection with Eastern wisdom: the loving-kindness meditation. This is a mental exercise of directing warm emotions toward others, including friends, enemies, the whole world—even airlines. Research has found that this practice can increase patience. As a bonus, you can use it anywhere.The best way to lower the misery of waiting, then, turns out to be not to change the world but to change oneself. That insight can apply not just to waiting but to life itself. Most of us go about our days feeling dissatisfied with the world, that it is failing in some way to conform to our preferences and convenience. But on a moment’s reflection, we realize how absurd it is to suppose that it might. To do so is like canoeing down a river and railing against the winding course it takes rather than simply following those bends as best we can.After research and upon reflection, I am trying a new strategy for waiting—and for a good deal else that bugs me—which is this: observing the world without distraction, and wishing others the love and happiness I want for myself.
Of course, that's why I always carry a book to read, when possible. Though this is good advice when that's not an option.
I have always been glad that being good at my job requires me to read children's books.
It's to children's fiction that you turn if you want to feel awe and hunger and longing for justice: to make the old warhorse heart stamp again in its stall.Children's books are specifically written to be read by a section of society without political or economic power. People who have no money, no vote, no control over capital or labour or the institutions of state; who navigate the world in their knowledge of their vulnerability. And, by the same measure, by people who are not yet preoccupied by the obligations of labour, not yet skilled in forcing their own prejudices on to other people and chewing at their own hearts. And because at so many times in life, despite what we tell ourselves, adults are powerless too, we as adults must hasten to children's books to be reminded of what we have left to us, whenever we need to start out all over again. . . .Imagination is not and never has been optional: it is at the heart of everything, the thing that allows us to experience the world from the perspectives of others: the condition precedent of love itself. It was Edmund Burke who first used the term moral imagination in 1790: the ability of ethical perception to step beyond the limits of the fleeting events of each moment and beyond the limits of private experience. For that we need books that are specifically written to feed the imagination, which give the heart and mind a galvanic kick: children's books. Children's books can teach us not just what we have forgotten, but what we have forgotten we have forgotten. . . .Children's books today do still have the ghost of their educative beginnings, but what they are trying to teach us has changed. Children's novels, to me, spoke, and still speak, of hope. They say: look, this is what bravery looks like. This is what generosity looks like. They tell me, through the medium of wizards and lions and talking spiders, that this world we live in is a world of people who tell jokes and work and endure.Children's books say: the world is huge. They say: hope counts for something. They say: bravery will matter, wit will matter, empathy will matter, love will matter. These things may or may not be true. I do not know. I hope they are. I think it is urgently necessary to hear them and to speak them.
The stories we consume matter.
Speaking of longing for justice and sections of society without political or economic power . . .
Endowing an underfunded medical school is clearly a better use of money than buying yet another super-yacht. But it’s also staggering that a decision as society-shaping as dissolving the debt load of thousands of potential doctors could depend on the whims of one individual, and that one person has the resources to implement such a policy on their own, needing no one else’s input or approval. . . .Any individual’s wealth is dependent on the resources, effort, and cooperation of the society that surrounds them. Yet today, even though multibillionaires make their fortunes using the resources of a broader society—profiting off customers, employees, and public infrastructure; protected by government regulation and international accords—they are able to make unilateral decisions that shape society according to their desires, without that same society having much input at all.Robeyns proposes two upper limits on personal wealth. . . .The numbers are somewhat arbitrary and context-dependent, but precise amounts are less important than having a socially recognized upper limit in play—a line between being reasonably wealthy and being unethically super-rich. After a certain point, extra money brings decreasing marginal utility for an individual—instead, Robeyns suggests, those surplus funds should be used to address society’s most urgent and unmet needs, “redistributed to those who have very little or else used to fund public goods that benefit us all.” . . .It’s not the intricacies of implementation that make Robeyns’s “case against extreme wealth” compelling. Rather, it’s the challenge to often unexamined beliefs about ownership and how many people measure their own worth. Limitarianism questions the idea that individual wealth is ever individual. . . .It can be destabilizing to realize just how much of a role luck plays in our success and how much wealth is undeserved. . . .Limitarian policies would not materially affect most people’s money. But directing excessive wealth toward prosocial goals—using it to pay for a stronger social safety net and better public resources, to mitigate climate change, or to end hunger—would help everyone feel more secure.Even so, the thought of capping wealth is intuitively disquieting because it contradicts some of American culture’s most deeply held beliefs. . . .Policy change is necessary, but most essential is a change of heart. “We don’t just need institutional design and fiscal choices, we also need to develop a set of public values that are culturally embedded, where material gain is not the leading incentive,” Robeyns writes. “We must rebalance our view of society, and our view of ourselves as human beings.”
I've put myself on the list to get Robeyns' book when my library finishes purchasing it.
It's not just children's books we need.
In the contemporary world, the self is no longer a subject but a project. The self is something to be optimised, to be maximised, to be made efficient, cultivated for its capacity for productive output. The worry is that all life activities become viewed as lines on a résumé. Knowingly or otherwise, we risk being constantly governed by the question How is what I’m doing right now impacting my maximally productive self? This mindset infiltrates even our personal and seemingly private moments, turning every choice and action into a strategic move in the game of self-improvement and advancement. . . .The problem is, as achievement-subjects, not only do we burn ourselves out, but the meaning and value of our lives is always deferred. Once we have our dream job, the perfect home, a perfectly optimised life – once we are productive enough, efficient enough, successful enough – only then will we arrive at meaning. But just like the fruit that eludes Tanatalus’ grasp in Tartarus, meaning remains just outside our reach. . . .The true meaning of our lives can be found only in play.Play is activity that we do for its own sake. It is what we call an autotelic activity – it has itself as its own goal, and it seeks no further purpose outside of itself. When we play, we are guided by the spirit of passion and joy found in the activity. In play, we are not motivated by external rewards or instrumentality. We are not driven by performance and external purpose. We don’t play to be productive or to self-optimise. We play purely for the sake of itself. In short, when we play, if it is true play, we cannot be achievement-subjects. . . .The play of the child is the purest form of joy not merely because they are a child, but because they are wholly enthralled by their moment-to-moment experience. . . .It is possible for our work to become play. If work can take on the creative and self-sufficient character of play, then the distinction collapses: ‘Human action is work, not because it bears fruit, but only when it proceeds from, and is governed by, the thought of its fruit … It is the joy in sheer creation, the dedication to the activity, the absorption in the movement, which transforms work into play.’ And so our work can become play only if the gospel of the work-ethic – whose teachings enjoin us to become maximally productive – is supplanted by the knowledge that we’ve had since childhood but have lost. . . .The demand for playful living is really a demand to reject the conditions of the achievement society. . . . It’s not just an act of personal rebellion but a social imperative. A call to playfulness is not an individual psychological prescription – it is a call to collective action against the achievement society.
We also need to develop a set of public values that are culturally embedded, where material gain is not the leading incentive,” Robeyns writes. “We must rebalance our view of society, and our view of ourselves as human beings.”
This is interesting.
One of the hard-and-fast laws of economics is that people in rich countries work less than their peers in poorer countries. The rule holds across nations. British and Japanese people work less on average than those in Mexico and India. It’s also true across history. Today, the typical American works about 1,200 fewer hours a year than he did in the late 19th century.But something strange happens when we shift our attention from individual workers to households. In the 1880s, when men worked long days and women were mostly cut off from the workforce, the typical American married couple averaged just over 68 hours of weekly paid labor. In 1965, as men’s workdays contracted and women poured into the workforce, the typical American married couple averaged 67 hours of weekly paid labor—just one hour less. In the early 2000s, the typical American married couple averaged, you guessed it, almost exactly 67 hours of weekly paid labor. In 2020? Still 67 hours. . . .
We also need to develop a set of public values that are culturally embedded, where material gain is not the leading incentive,” Robeyns writes. “We must rebalance our view of society, and our view of ourselves as human beings.”
I really appreciate this thought that popped up in my feed. I think it might come from Hart's book The Story of Christianity.
Above all, Christ gave imaginative shape and dimensions to the kingdom he proclaimed by requiring that his followers forego vengeance, bear the burdens of others, forgive debts, share their good with the poor, and love their enemies, and by forbidding them from passing judgment on others for their sins. He also insisted that his disciples keep company with the most despised members of society, including even tax collectors, Samaritans and harlots.
Another unique word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
n. the frustration that you’ll never be able to understand another person’s pain, only ever searching their face for some faint evocation of it, then rifling through your own experiences for some slapdash comparison, wishing you could tell them truthfully, “I know exactly how you feel.”Latin dolor, pain + colorblindness. Pronounced “doh-ler-blahynd-nis.”
Sometimes faint evocation + experiences is enough.
And, finally, a poem:
George BilgereWhen I retire I plan to take up photography.I will buy a very nice camera, a big tripod,and a large, expensive, pro-style lens.I will rise early and photograph nature.Were you to rise early and venture forthyou might see me there in the misty landscape,pointing my pro-style lens at a heronstanding ghostly by the river bank.Ghostly stalker in the morning mist!And then, if things work out, my heron photograph,along with two dozen othersvery much like it, and accompaniedby my three-paragraph artist’s statement,will hang for a full month in Sherry’s Kountry Kitchen,beautifully framed and available for only $250 apiece.And I will sit there anonymously every morning,quietly fuming that certain patronswould rather read their sports page or play with their phonesor focus all their attention on Sherry’s Hearty Man Scramblethan look at my ghostly misty heron.So all of this, in the end,will amount to nothing morethan just another way of feeling slightedby a world too busy and self-absorbedto recognize my gift, my contribution,my secret beauty.Like the heron,I will be ghostly and mistyand largely unnoticed.But nonetheless magnificent.—from Rattle #49, Fall 2015
It’s the act of asking, of trying to reach across the gap, working through the mystery—that is what’s worth holding on to. That’s the feeling that must be kept alive, even if we never find the right words to express it.
posted by Degolar @ 5:41 PM
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