Crunch Time

The mind's two elevators

It always strikes me that we have yet to understand the complexities of our mind. We have been able to map out the physical components of the brain but we are uncertain as to where the various functions of mind reside. The brain and its corresponding contribution to our consciousness is a complex, magnificent, and wonderful dynamic.

One thing I have learned about the workings of the mind is its polarity. It oscillates between high mood and low moods. Think of it as having two elevators. One elevator takes you up and the other elevator takes you down. Like any elevator, we choose which direction we want to go and push the corresponding button.

The up elevator takes us to a top floor penthouse where a party is in full swing. The excitement there is wonderful (think of the birth of a child or the acceptance from a college). Conversely, the down elevator takes us to the bowels of the basement where our experience there is usually dark and dank (think of the loss of a dear one or the loss of a job). 

Taking both elevators for a ride brings us to the full spectrum of what it means to be human. Yet we know life is more than just the highs and lows. In fact, it seem to reside in the mundane, the first floor of existence.

On that floor are various rooms and hallways that we enter and walk every single day. The hallway of work leads us back and forth from our home to our place of employment. We walk it every single day for years. One room might be a marriage or other relationship that is lived in close quarters and can often erupt into challenges and frustrations. And so it goes.  It is our experiences in the room that leads us to wait for each elevator.

At that time we have a choice. We can choose to ride the elevator down to the basement or the elevator up to the penthouse. Often the situation dictates which one we will choose, but at other times we can intentionally choose to respond (push the button) to one or the other. Both bring us to different places and experiences. The problem comes when we allow our brain to leave the essential first floor of our lives and constantly live on the lower or higher floors.

Ride the elevators as you choose, learn the lessons that there at their destinations, but don't allow your choices to chronically ride the elevators.  That only leads to a diminishment of life on the first floor.  That is where the real life is lived, smack dab in the middle of joy...

Six pack abs and Family Dinners

A new study revealed that average bodies are as appealing to others as men who have six pack abs. That is good news for the majority of us who either by genetics or by lifestyle have bodies that are, quite simply, average.

Due to time constraints and shifting demographics, less and less families are sitting down at home to share a common table together. They seem quaint, unrealistic and outdated these days.  Average. They are mundane it's true, but how critical they are to communal health. 

It seems to me that most of the ills we are experiencing today is because we didn't want to be average. The mundane was something to be avoided and seen as a roadblock in our pursuit of excellence. The creation of exotic mortgage packages, our overspending, and intense sports activities for the kids are all symptoms of our flight from normalcy.

The point? All of our striving today and our frenetic attempts to be "excellent" may not be the best thing for us. We are conditioned by the myth of progress and the tug to be outstanding to believe that everyday life just doesn't cut it. Yet it is everyday life with its dirty dishes, pesky weeds and average tasks that ground us in reality and provides the greatest joy.  Being average doesn't mean mediocrity. It does mean that every moment of every day is spent unleashing the power of average.

The persistence of joy

My lived experience has been an attempt to effectively migrate the quandaries of change by tapping into the persistence of joy. In a previous post, I defined joy as that smoldering internal ember that refuses to be extinguished despite repeated external attempts to douse it.  Happiness is embedded in our constitution and is a protected right.  Yet happiness is fleeting in our attempts to capture it.  Joy, on the other hand, captures us.

Joy is the deep undercurrent of life. Independent from any temporal realities, joy compels us to tap into the transcedent dimensions of our lives.  The two eternal dimensions that buoy joy are humor and hope. Both are in desperately needed today.

Humor: This is the closest we can come to facing our failures and moving on with renewed vigor.  When we can laugh at ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in, we are engaging in a very courageous act; for both our egos and our culture don't like to be laughed at.  Yet it is the discovery of humor and the act of laughter that disarms them both. As the great American philosopher Jimmy Buffett once said, "if we all couldn't laugh, we would all go insane."

Here are some suggestions for finding humor and engaging in laughter:

• Listen to comedians.  Most comedians will tell you that their humor is inevitably birthed from pain and insecurity.  Some of my favorites are Jim Gaffigan and Demitry Martin, and Ken Davis

• Share a bottle of wine (or two) with great, close friends and loosen up the nerves enough to laugh with one another. A nice affordable merlot that does the trick for me is Red Diamond

• Read and watch satirical content such as the Colbert Report or "The Onion".

Hope: I define hope as an act of the will that stubbornly leans into and moves forward against the headwinds of life. It is a refusal to be knocked down completely. Hope exists at the interface between the temporal and eternal. All that separates this world from the next is a sigh. That deep, audible exhalation of sadness or duress is the signal to begin leaning forward. 

Here are some suggestions for accessing the will and leaning forward in hope:

• Nurture the soul. This is best done in contemplation and silence. It is very hard in our noisy world, but try sitting silently for 20 minutes. Let any thought that comes your way to flow along out of your consciousness so that can be fully presence with the eternal.

• Don't go it alone. Share your worries and fears with those who can be trusted. The act of verbalizing them with others can normalize your situation and provide much needed camaraderie and support.

• Absorb stories of lives lived hopefully in the midst of extraordinary bleak circumstances. You will learn how powerfully resilient the human spirit is when enriched with hope.  Two wonderful ones are: The book "A Paradise Built in Hell" and the movie, "Life is Beautiful"

I wish you all joy as you move forward into the new year!

Amusing Ourselves to Death

I found this intriguing and have attempted to explore the concepts in a previous post.

Physical vs. Virtual reality

The following is from Adbusters, an organization that calls itself a "global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society." 

I always explore their magazine of the same name as I personally find it provocative and challenging in these in-between times:

Have you noticed the contours of your life changing with every must-have technological innovation and minute spent on the Internet? Have you detected any differences in your once richly textured, wildly spontaneous way of being? Have you begun to suspect that the more interconnected you are, the flatter, duller and more predictable your existence becomes?

A specter is haunting the mind of the industrialized world – the specter of the virtual.
-Metaverse Manifesto, Orange Montagne

At what point did our computers go from being a tool to enhance our lives to a medium through which to live our lives?
-Alan Beck

As the physical world slips away and our culture flattens, the bluish glow of the virtual realm beckons … Suddenly humanity is faced with an existential choice. Will we take the plunge?

Social Media Guidelines

Social media is changing the game in how we relate and how we work.  How to use it appropriately is still being explored.

Here are some of the official guidelines for social media at Intel.

If you participate in social media, please follow these guiding principles:

• Stick to your area of expertise and provide unique, individual perspectives on what's going on at Intel and in the world.
• Post meaningful, respectful comments—in other words, no spam and no remarks that are off-topic or offensive.
• Always pause and think before posting. That said, reply to comments in a timely manner, when a response is appropriate.
• Respect proprietary information and content, and confidentiality.
• When disagreeing with others' opinions, keep it appropriate and polite.

Finally, Intel strives for a balanced online dialogue. When they do moderate content, they moderate using three guiding principles:

The Good, the Bad, but not the Ugly. If the content is positive or negative and in context to the conversation, then they approve the content, regardless of whether it's favorable or unfavorable to Intel. However if the content is ugly, offensive, denigrating and completely out of context, then they reject the content.

Relating in the ecotone

We see examples of it all the time.  The transitional zone between ocean and land, forest and grassland, sidewalk and yard, even hairline and forehead.  The area of transition between two adjacent communities is called an 'ecotone'. It is a fertile place, containing species characteristic of both communities as well as species occurring only within the particular zone - ie, head lice and bacteria.

There are five generations alive today in the United States.  This has never happened before in the history of our society. As such we find ecotones in offices, classrooms, families, churches, and other places that contain not two, but five different species of human beings.

These transitional zones are fertile generational communities that require behavioral nutrients for them to thrive in healthy, dynamic, and organic ways. Work them in to your daily life:

Revisit Assumptions: You need to be in constant vigilance of your stereotypes. We all have them (blondes are dumb) but are they accurate? Constantly test your assumptions about other generations by prefacing your interactions with, "Help me understand".  It is a precursor to rich conversation and understanding.

Relax Control: Life is messy. Relationships are tough. Managing is stressful. 90% of the problems middle managers and above face are ambiguous. It usually is not clear what the problem is or what the solution should be.  So lighten up with one another. As that great philosopher of our age Jimmy Buffett intones, "If we all couldn't laugh we would all go insane".

Return to core values: You are who you were when. That is to say, the values that shape your behaviors, attitudes, and expectations were set by the time you were a sophomore in high school.  Some cultural values change over time, but what about you personally? What hasn't changed?  What are you really all about? What are your 'nos'?  Clarify your values so they aren't muddled for others.

Model the highest standards: This behavioral nutrient interfaces closely with core values. Behavior is ten times more important than words in building respect. Does your behavior align with your core values? In other words, how is your brain, mouth, and hand coordination?

Engage the other: This is easier said than done. It requires you to stretch and expand your behavioral repetoire. By expanding your engagement across the five age groups you become more effective across a larger number of situations. I always say everyone has the gift of eating. Invite someone younger or older than you to lunch today.

Friends and Aquaintances

It's fascinating to me that in this day and age of Myspace and Facebook there is no longer a relational category of "aquaintance".  Everyone is a "friend". 

The problem is, we aren't quite sure what a friend is.  Modern American friendships have lost the force and importance they once had. C. S. Lewis for example, in his The Four Loves, writes:

"To the Ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it".

According to a 2006 study documented in the journal the American Sociological Review, since 1985 Americans are thought to be suffering a loss in the quality and quantity of close friendships. The study states 25% of Americans have no close confidants, and the average total number of confidants per citizen has dropped from four to two.

In the age of social networking, we are all alone.

But in the avalanche of ceaseless change, we need good friends to migrate with us through its intensity. In your social network who are your friends and who are your aquaintances.  The distinction is important. How do you know? 

To me, an aquaintence is more like a CEO. You know, the boss that keeps you on task, highlights the bottom line, and has the power to promote or demote depending on your performance.  They put conditions on your future behavior and leverage your vulnerabilities as a show of their managerial finesse in helping you.  

We all need people to play that role in our lives, but as aquaintances, not friends. A friend is uniquely suited to nurture your soul and invigorate your thinking.  It is a relationship of mutual caring and intimacy among one another. A friend is one who knows you as a person and regards you for who you are and not what he or she is looking for in a good friend. 

A friend suffers fools because we all are fools from time to time. Aquaintances don't put up with our crap for long. Friends do, thank God.  Savor the following quote from Frederick Buechner as you reflect on friends in your life.

“Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.”

It's On

Southwest Airlines launched a new Ad Campaign on June 1st aimed at tough times. At the end of the ad a narrator intones that the airline doesn't fly around tough times. It's on, and they're ready.

It's on for all us... 

It's on every time our minds persist in discouraging thoughts.

It's on every time we think we can go it alone without the comaraderie of those who care.

It's on every time we stubbornly refuse to admit our fear and hide behind a facade of platitudes.

It's on every time we avoid nourishing our souls with silent listening, contemplation, and transcedent faith.

It's on every time our decisions preclude others who are in greater need.

It's on every time we become too enamored with our technology to solve our problems.

It's on every time we rely on massive military might to secure our happiness.

It's on every time we stop taking initiative for the health of our relationships.

It's on every time we live without grace.

This is the time of our lives. It's tough. It's on. Are you ready?

The constants of change

My main focus over the last twenty years has been helping people effectively migrate through the quandaries of contemporary change.  Without a doubt, the recent perplexities we are encountering are unprecedented in their scope and the challenges for us is extraordinary indeed.

I've discovered too the irony that change is consistent in its effects.  The larger the scope of the change the greater these constants seem to become:

1) It is frightening: Change makes the world seem less predictable.

-Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inaugural address took on an unusually solemn, religious quality, and for good reason. By 1933 the depression had reached its depth and the nation was struggling. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address outlined in broad terms how he hoped to govern and reminded Americans that the nation’s “common difficulties” concerned “only material things.”  It is in this address he uttered the now infamous words, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself". 

We must learn to harness fear's energy and make it our heart's ally and not its enemy. 

2) It is threatening: Change implies that what exists now is inadequate

-We can get so confident in the way we've done things in the past, that it is can be a surprising and agonizing moment to discover that it no longer works for our current condition.  When we are threatened by change we usually choose one of three stances in reponse: Retreat, Retrench, or Relaunch.  For me relaunching is the most adventuresome and leads to richer discoveries and deeper redemption.

3) It is embarrassing: Change requires admitting and understanding our past errors.

-Being vulnerable is one of the most powerful attributes we can harness.  I believe it requires two elements: Humor and Honesty.  Laughing at ourselves is one the most mature defense mechanisms human beings have at their disposal.  In spiritual terms, it is the closest we can come to confession. Being vulnerable forces us to get to the heart of the matter in deliberately open ways. It means not pointing fingers at people or the past.  It means taking responsibility. Honestly interrogating our hearts during change is the first step in moving through change unencumbered by anxiety, insecurity and blame.