Crunch Time

Amusing Ourselves to Death

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

Damn that Dumbledore

Today I saw the sixth installment of the Harry Potter movies.  I'll admit I got choked up when Dumbledore, the wizened old wizard of Hogwarts, was betrayed and killed at the end of the movie.  I shouldn't have, because after reading the book I knew what to expect.  But there came the tears. 

I lost it when I read the same tragic event in the book two years earlier with my children.  I had to stop and gather my composure and try to explain to my kids why I was such a blubbering mess. I had a difficult time trying to sort it out.

What is it about the death of Dumbledore that made me so damn full of grief.  Here is what I think.  I am grieving the loss of heroes in our culture.  I mean real heroes.  You know, men and women who are wise and have a rich, deep history with an ability to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the greater good. Heroes who are in this thing called life not for the massive amounts exposure they can garner but for the deep service they can render the human race.

There are no heroes today, really.  They are all celebrities now.  We live in a celebrity culture - a fact borne out in magazine sales alone.  There are exceptions, of course: towering figures such as Nelson Mandela and the late Mother Teresa. But these are not celebrities as such, but the globalized world's saints, its few remaining heroes.  They are to be admired and wondered at, not aped, while everyone else craves their 15 minutes of fame.

Our adulation of celebrities highlight how crucial the surface level of life has become.  If nothing means anything beyond its surface impression, it is little wonder we look for the gloss of celebrity rather than any depth of character, like that found in heroes (even fictional) like Dumbledore.  We live off the buzz that celebrity culture supplies without being involved with any form of moral commitment.  Celebrity is about appearance and spin: it cannot form character.

The problem with much celebrity is that it rarely lasts.  More tragic still, the most enduring celebrity is the dead celebrity. Think of Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain and Princess Diana, and now Michael Jackson.

Thankfully, many people recognize the superficiality of celebrity culture and seek some sort of alternative. Graham Cray, the current Bishop of Maidstone in England, states that an heroic response to the cult of celebrity must hold together several things:

• First, we have to acknowledge that there is a certain inevitability about it. It is a direct consequence of deep changes in our culture, and we will achieve nothing if we simply rage against it.
• Second, there is a fairly widespread awareness of its superficiality, which means that celebrity is usually consumed with a measure of irony.
• Third, it will be much more important to grow some heroes than to rail against the B-list stars put up for our consumption.

This may sound over the top and bit "wacky", but damn that Dumbledore, he exposed my deficiency in a depth of meaning and my yearning for heroes who can help me make life truly worth living.

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?

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.

Let's get a little bit rowdy

My wife couldn't believe I've only seen this commercial once.  I haven't seen it again on television but I found it on Youtube (of course).  It warmed the cockles of my heart.

Listen to your life

During these chaotic times of change and uncertainty in our lives, I'm reminded again of some wonderful words:

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

-from Frederick Buechner's Now and Then

Rules for new tools

The problems we face as humans are as common and enduring as our race itself.  Take the problem of communication.  Though we have developed various tools over the millenia (cave drawings, smoke signals, pony express, telegraph, etc.) to aid us in our quest to communicate one with another, ultimately the problem persists. 

That is to say, though the problems remain the same, it's the TOOLs that have changed.  Today we live in a world of overwhelming technological tools. I'm intrigued by the criteria Wendall Berry has put forth for aquiring new tools (including technological). This is taken from his article, Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer, which is a great article in itself, and caused quite a stir when he published it.

Hope it provokes your thinking as you migrate across the quandaries of contemporary life.

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Embrace Uncertainty

This morning I was reminded of my propensity to be  "duped" by the illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control, or at least influence, outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over.

I was stuck in traffic on a way to a meeting.  Traffic drives me nuts!  I feel trapped!  It makes me angry! So I began to play the jam like a game of chess.  I strategically made moves across lanes while measuring my progress in comparison to another randomly chosen vehicle on the road.  For a while, it seemed that my ability to maneuver through the morass of cars was working, when suddenly the car I'd chosen to measure my progress zoomed right past and well ahead of me on the road. By the time it was all over this morning, I was late for my meeting and realized once again that I had no more actual control over the predicament of that jam than I do over almost any other area of my life.

Recently the op-ed page in the New York Times highlighted new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying more than they were a year ago, that happiness is down and sadness is up, that we are getting less sleep and smoking more cigarettes, that depression is on the rise.

The reasons for this gloom seem economically obvious, yet the author of the piece, Dan Gilbert, concluded that it isn’t a matter of insufficient funds. It’s a matter of insufficient certainty.   The fact that we don't know what is going to happen with the stock market, or predict with any certainty when this recession is going to turn around, or why traffic can be so constricting this particular morning is a root cause of our current malaise. 

Rather than try to regain sway over the events in life, a shrewd skill to develop for navigating tumultuous change is to EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY.  Resilience demands it.  To do so involves lamenting the passing of known illusions of control.  To deeply grieve the loss of control and a previously known world where it was once operative allows for healthy forms of personality development that are largely precluded in its absence.

Undoubtedly, lost opportunities and mistaken expectations are often unpleasant to think and talk about. But a seven year study by Laura King, a researcher at the University if Missouri, indicates that individuals who take time to stop, think, and mourn their losses are more likely to mature and a achieve a potentially more durable sense of happiness.

Grieving losses is important because it allows us to unleash energy that is bound to the lost experience—so that we might re-invest that energy elsewhere. Until we grieve effectively we are likely to find reinvesting difficult; a part of us remains tied to the past.

Grieving is not forgetting. Nor is it drowning in tears. Healthy grieving results in an ability to remember the importance of our loss—but with a new found sense of peace, rather than searing pain.

Healthy grieving is an active process, you can't "just give it time". One way of understanding the work to be done is to think of grieving as a series of tasks you need to complete (not necessarily in sequence):

1. To accept the finality of the loss;

2. To acknowledge and express the full range of feelings we experience as a result of the loss;

3. To adjust to a life in which the lost experience is absent;

4. To say good-bye, to ritualize our movement to a new peace with the loss.

Magic happens

Today I had the honor of witnessing the Teacher of the Year ceremony at Denver Academy. It was particularly poignant since the award is now named in honor of a long time Denver Academy teacher and one of my all-time best friends, Kevin Gregier. He passed away last November (2008) from cancer at the age of 64.  I miss him every day.

The afternoon summed up so well the wonder of Kevin Gregier as a teacher and the magic of Denver Academy as a place for learning.  Wonder and magic together provide enchanting elixirs to enliven our educational quandaries:

•Learning that is centered more on the varied needs of the student than in the confines of a curriculum.

•Teaching that is liberated so educators can bring their own whimsy to their subject matter.

•A commaraderie that goes beyond selfishness, looks to the betterment of everyone, and exhibits a genuine joy to be in the company of each other.

•An awareness of a spiritual transcendence that resides not only in the hearts and minds of students but is embedded in the very nature of education itself.

•Leadership that realizes life is messy and in a constant state of flux. They are not afraid to take a risk for the sake of the contemporary student or for the enhancement of a teacher's well-being.

•An extended community of parents who take an active role in sparking the perpetual potential of every child they come in contact with.

Thank you Denver Academy and all the places like you who provide an educational environment where wonder is taught and magic happens everyday.