Crunch Time

Welcome to the in-between world

It’s important to recognize where we are.  This is brand new stretch of water.  It’s Crunch Time, a disorienting moment of change rife with such extraordinary potentiality that people are faced with the transformative decision on how to get through it. Professor Walter Brueggemann writes that there are three major stages of orientation that reflect even the seasons of our own lives.

The first stage is being “securely oriented”. It is here that we feel settled and secure. Our lives make sense and the decisions we make are anchored in good judgement. This could be a time when your job seems secure and your family life is well ordered. Financially we are doing okay. Yet we know that this security never hangs around for long. Which leads us to the second stage.

The second stage is being “painfully disoriented”. These are times when we feel blind sided, hurt, and reeling from stress and the perceived enormity of change. Here you may have lost a job, a child, a divorce or some other chaotic and unexpected event. Yet if we persist in this movement, hang on with resilience, the third stage inevitable reveals itself.

This third stage is “surprising reorientated”. This stage is marked by surprise, the way things all seemed to work out for good and gives us something new out of something old. When we are in this stage, life seems renewed and our circumstances are compellingly welcomed. Over time this new place becomes settled and secure and we begin the process of moving through the stages all over again.

Right now we are in a stage of painful disorientation. We suddenly find ourselves in a tough new work and life environment.  We have drifted out of the current of a known world and into the vortex of a completely strange, new world. It's in-between what was and what will be. It will be surprising to see where this all leads us.

Uncharted waters

I can remember the birth of my first child. So many thoughts and feelings accompany that moment- will I be a good father?, what kind of world will he inherit?, am I going to be able to fund his hopes and dreams? can I change a diaper? will I gag on the stench?

That moment was freighted with many unknowns. My wife and I were about to set sail on the uncharted waters of parenthood. Could we do it? How were we going to navigate it? There was no shortage of advice and self-help books promising a compass to point us in the right direction. Yet parenting is messy business, it doesn't always follow accepted norms and patterns. Your final destination is hard to arrive at, let alone know where it is. We had to learn to navigate as we went along, conducting soundings along the way to chart our progress. 

In navigating the unknown waters of change today, there are helpful resources for the journey, but their applications in real life can be tenuous. So, you take soundings and periodically assess how you are doing. In essence, you make it up as you go- throwing out resources that don't work and improvising new ones that do. This requires resilience, the ability to adjust your course accordingly, and continue navigating successfully on the disorientation of uncharted waters. Those who are unable to adjust end up shipwrecked on an island of confusion and despair.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The mauraders of change

A ship ladened with gold, silver, and precious jewels was on its way back to port when it was suddenly confronted by a pirate ship, skull and crossbones flag waving in the wind. The first mate asked the captain what they should do. The captain simply replied, "Bring me my red shirt". They repelled the pirates with out sustaining any casualties.

A few days later the ship was confronted not by one but by three pirate ships. The first mate asked the captain what they should do. His reply again was, "Bring me my red shirt". The captain fought valiantly and was an inspiration to the rest of the crew. They again held off the pirates with very few casualites.

That night as they were celebrating, the first mate asked the captain what the secret of the red shirt was. "It's quite simple," replied the captain. "I wear the red shirt because then the men won't see the blood from my wounds and will be inspired to continue to fight."

Another couple days went by when yet again they were confronted by pirate ships. The strength of the mauraders this time was an armada of ten ships. The first mate, in a panic, asked the captain what they should do. The captain answered, "First mate, bring me my brown pants."

There are many reasons today to wear our brown pants. The mauraders of change that bear down upon us can cause great fear and a trepidation:

The Financial Marauder: We are currently living in the worst economic times since the Great Depression of the 1930's. No one has been immune to its residual effects. People either are, or know someone who is, laid off or underemployed and struggling to make ends meet.

So we wear our brown pants.

The Technological Marauder: We live in a day and age of rapid technological advancement. It's exciting, but is still wrought with fear. Are we able to keep up with the accelerated innovations? As more and more functions are being taken over by technological automation, where does that leave the workforce? With the blending of fact and fiction, real and digital (atoms and bits) what does it mean to be human?

And so, we wear our brown pants.

The Environmental Maurader: The degredation of our natural habitat is quickening. The warming of the planet is causing frequent and powerful weather events. Earthquakes remind us that we are beholden to the natural moans and groans of our planet.

And so, we wear our brown pants.

The Educational Maurader: Our public school system is the focus of much critique. No matter how much money we throw at our concerns, education in the United States is lagging in many ways the rest of the world. The answer to the question, 'What does it mean to be well educated today?" does not seem to align with the answer of our current educational systems.

And so, we wear our brown pants.

These are just a few of the mauraders  that are sailing the waters of incredible change. We could come up with many more. The challenges and opportunities are all there before us, confronting our abilities to engage in significant ways. Fear is there, yes, but so too is the adrenaline of where we can go with these changes. The onus is on us to engage them with confidence and in ways that will better the world - or at least our little corner of it.

Welcome to the outer limits

The old, funky television show “The Outer Limits” had one of the most creative openings I can remember. The screen you were watching would begin as a test pattern. Then suddenly it would begin to morph and act erratically as an ominous voice would begin to narrate,

“There is nothing wrong with your television set” it would intone, “Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. For the next hour we will control all that you see and hear. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the outer limits.”

It seems today that we have entered a place in the outer limits. The speed of change is mind boggling. We are held captive to a test pattern and we feel as if we have no control over our situation and its extraordinary changes.

The subsequent anxiety often expresses itself as a vice-like compression deep in the gut. Our thoughts race around in our skulls first thing in the morning toward what seems an insurmountable finish line. Days become reflective, many times obsessive, about the state of our lives and the condition of our world.

It’s no wonder. I believe we are in an unprecedented time of change, the likes of which have been experienced only a few times before. It’s an evolutionary exclamation point in human history.

Alvin Toffler’s "Social Wave-Front Analysis" looks at history as a succession of rolling waves of change and asks where the leading edge of each wave is carrying us. It focuses our attention not so much on the continuities of history as on the discontinuities--the innovations and breakpoints.
The First Wave in human history was the agricultural revolution.  It was during this time we learned to cultivate the land and grow fruits and vegetables from seeds.  It lasted for thousands of years.

The Second Wave was the industrial revolution. During this time we learned to harness the energy of steam, coal, and oil to advance the ability of machines to make work more efficient and our lives more convenient.  This lasted for hundreds of years.

The Third Wave of human development is what Toffler calls the information age.  This movement is only decades in the making and we are still trying to catch up with the speed of its change and its far-reaching impact on what it means to be human.

This is our time…this is when we discover what we are really made of...

That's the irony. Our true character doesn't reveal itself when times are sedate or situations are easy. It emerges when we are brought to the brink of intense challenges.  What a great opportunity to strengthen our resolve and build the mental and emotional moxie such times require.

 

Why depression will persist

I've often wondered what evolutionary purpose depression serves. Its been around as long as the human race has walked this earth. Because it has persisted so long and has not been phased out, it must be beneficial to our survival right?. But why?

When I'm in its throes, I don't considered my depression as beneficial to my life. Even its effects on my life have been challenging: It has stalled my life vocationally, strained relationships, and done a real number on my self-esteem. Yet reluctantly I believe it must persist. It must not be eradicated fully.  Here are my reasons:

1. In order to experience the full spectrum of human emotion, depression must be part of the mix. You cannot define happiness unless you can reference it to sadness. The reverse is also true.
2. It slows us down and causes us to ponder the deeper issues of humanity. Most of the great poetry and artisitic confrontation with the world has been birthed in the depressed heart of the artist.  It gives the existential questions of life an honest hearing.
3. Enjoyment of life is fully seized. Because of my depression, I am much more intentional about making my life truly significant. Time with my kids and wife and others is rarely squandered in my better moments.  I gotta seize the day.
4. Depression makes us empathetic to the pain of others. People who have experienced deep depression can resonate deeply with another's pain, no matter how intense. It provides comfort and consolation.
5. It inspires us to make the needed changes to make our world a better place. There is much about our society and world that is less than inspiring (you know intuitively what they are). In fact they can be downright depressing. Confronting the tough issues and helping to transform our world so they no longer drag down the heart is essential for a better world and a movement toward a meaningful future.

As much as I dread the moment of agony I know will come again, I persist in the belief that its gotta be good for my soul - and so I carry on...

Boosting mood in a tough economy

Many people in our country are currently in survival mode. Even those who had high paying jobs find themselves either unemployed or underemployed.  Finances are tight. The general mood among the populace is pretty low.

Boosting mood in this tough economy seems like a daunting task. Washington is doing what it can, putting various spins on the reality and highlighting any gains we are experiencing. It looks like we are working our way out of the financial woods - but it will take awhile before we are out completely.

I am reading a very interesting book entitled, "Deep Survival: Who lives, Who dies, And why". In it the author, Laurence Gonzales, tries to determine the reason that some people are more hearty than others in surviving disasters. He discovered that one of the deeper emotions survivors mine is humor.  It a release of tension and fears that dangerous situations produce.

The author discovered that laughter makes the feeling of being threatened manageable. It's about being cool. It's about laughing with an attitude of bold humility in the face of something terrifying. The best humorists and comedians make us laugh at life because it is a deep way we can make sense and poke fun of the burdens of life.  Survival humor is not the surface "ha ha's", but a deeper understanding of how the brain works in discovering and facing the reality of the situation.

In this tough economy, when was the last time you laughed?

The algorithms that rule our lives

This is a complicated blog and tough to understand exactly. But underneath all the big words and technical language lies some critical insights on how technology is shaping who we are and how we define what it means to be human.

It comes from a blog I follow by George Siemans, a professor in Canada who explores education and learning in the modern world.

Algorithms sound somewhat mysterious and complex. By definition, however, algorithms are basically a sequence of steps or activities, often directed toward solving a problem. The steps to solving a problem may be simple (how to bake a pizza or tie your shoes) or complicated (returning web search results based on an input term or recommending who you should follow on a social networking site). Jacques Ellul warned of the dangers of technique, and by extension technology, as a means to force humanity into states of conformity. No where is this more true than with algorithms. Google’s CEO recognizes the power of algorithms, offering a chilling and prophetic insight into the future role of search engines: “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next”.

Globe and Mail’s article on Programming our Lives Away reviews the growing dominance of algorithms in our lives

Increasingly, algorithms are used to determine whether we can get access to credit, insurance and government services. They are posing a challenge to human decision-making in the arts. They are being used by prospective employers to decide if we should be hired. They can determine whether your online business will succeed or fail, and they have revolutionized the world of high finance…
Some companies now use algorithms to make decisions around hiring and firing. At Google, which boasts that “almost every [personnel] decision is based on quantitative analysis,” engineers have developed an algorithm to identify those employees most likely to leave to work for a competitor or strike out on their own. Employee surveys, peer reviews, evaluations, promotion and pay histories feed into the algorithm. It helps us “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave,” a Google manager told The Wall Street Journal last year.
At IBM, programmers put together mathematical models of 50,000 of the company’s tech consultants. They crunched massive amounts of data on them – how many e-mails they sent, who got them, who read the documents they wrote – and used this information to help assess the employees’ effectiveness and deploy their skills in the most cost-efficient way.

The acceleration of life

None of us would have predicted on the first day of the Internet that we'd arrive where we are now. No one would have predicted that this many people would have connected, as fast as they did. No one would have imagined the range of social and cultural functions that have emerged. No one would have imagined how central it is to the operation of every key force in our society. On the first day, no one would have imagined that we would get to this point. From this point, it is impossible to imagine where we are going to go.

What we have seen is that the Internet facilitates rapid cultural evolution, dramatic change in a relatively short period of time, widespread dispersion of patterns, at a speed that would have previously been unimaginable. That means that prediction becomes that much harder.
One of the things that interests me is that if you look at science fiction, the first sci-fi novels that came out at the beginning of the 20th century had to imagine thousands of years into the future in order to imagine a future different enough to be interesting. Contemporary science fiction has to only move out five to ten years to be as dramatic. The time frame of the future gets narrower and narrower.

Our ability to look forward is that much harder because of the acceleration of change that has taken place throughout the 20th century, but particularly in the last couple of decades as digital technology has changed the speed and scale of human communication.

-- Excerpted from an interview with David M. Ewalt on Sept. 22, 2005.

Worst Stump Speech Ever

Given that we are fresh off midterm elections, the following stump speech is absolutely hysterical. Here is an example of how not to communicate effectively.

What's been on my mind

It's been a while since I wrote a post (three weeks). I've been working on a book that should be officially released in a month. That being said here's what's been on my mind lately.

The Incredibles: I just watched this movie last night and I never tire of seeing it. Now that I am in the throws of middle age (I never thought it would happen to me), I'm reminded of how fast time flies. I am also aware of the relentless changes that come with life. My body just doesn't do what it used to (heck, I take a walk around the park and my buttocks are sore for a couple days!). What strikes me everytime I see the movie is its honesty about being who you really are.

Through a series of lawsuits, the "supers" are relegated to living ordinary lives among ordinary people. Mr. Incredible thus begins to live a life of desperation. He becomes flabby. Deflated morale always occur when your gifts and talents are not being used for the better good. Today there are so many people who are underemployed, losing their home, or just scraping by. No wonder morale is so low today in our country. Too many people are not living (by no fault of their own) up to their potential. We, I, need what you have to offer the world. Part of knowing a gift is how energized you are when expressing it. You'll know you're being underused when you are drained most of the time. So, what energizes you and drains you?