Why Prove It?

What is the relationship between opinion, the interpretation of experience, conviction and Truth?

Somehow for others, empirical reasoning and personal observation seems to be at odds with subjective observation and "personal research." For me, personal research is the Truth - but of course, it's an operational truth that can always be updated.

So - what is "proof" of reasonable, operational truth?

Why - it's the sum total of your ability to integrate the conclusions and insights you've gathered and how you are making use of them. Sometimes it's the collection of assumptions you've decided to believe that other people have told you, you've read, and some of what you've decided to believe purely because it sounds like a good idea to you.

Perhaps this is why many people continue to imagine that the Alexander Technique stuff that I enjoy teaching is some form of hypnosis-type or alternative medicine. We in the field of Alexander Technique think of it as primarily an education in reason, self-observation and self-control that happens (as a by-product of enough practice,) to have a cumulative, preventative and therapeutic benefit over time.

F.M. Alexander "assembled" and furthered his work with empiricism and reason. Yet utilizes such "crazy" things as Direction and advocates Directing for being an effective and reasonable tool for change.

Then brain research comes out and declares that before we know we've made a decision, our body has already prepared itself...and we only have 1/64th of a second to veto what we've already prepared to do. We don't have the "will to do" that F. M. described as his mistaken assumption. We have "free won't" just as F.M. tried to describe the use of what he calls "inhibition." (That's another word for impulse control without inner conflict.) After this brain fact, suddenly Alexander-style Directing isn't so "crazy."

Well - most of us think in our language. (Actually, that's another way I differ from most people. I don't...think in words all the time. Sometimes, I think in images. When I think in words, they are randomly shifting phrases of words, poetically intermixed and remixed, depending on shifting priorities.)

Describing reality "seems to be" one of the irresistible assumptions inherent within the structure of English...and the nature of reality will differ depending on perception/attitude/conditioning.

Well - let's take the saying "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth."(For those in ESL, it's an expression implying a justification that revenge is justice. But now it's been proven that a judgment of what is equal isn't going to be fair.
A scientist proved how perception misjudges intensity: the work of Daniel Wolpert. He says people hitting each other are going to escalate the payback until there is war. How the brain interprets relative force depends on if you're doing it to someone else or getting it done to you.

Apparently, relative force is just one perceptual misconception that got measured - there are many more that haven't been measured...yet.

I think the culprit is that English doesn't have a convenient way to indicate subjective experience. English has... "seems to be," "from my point of view" or "IMHO," but these are examples of qualifiers that attempt to serve this function of describing subjectivity.

When using those qualifiers, there's danger that a person's motive will too easily be misunderstood. Writers will be admonished by editors to come out and dare to make the declaration. Uncertainty is regarded by editors and readers as "timid." But, these qualifiers won't adequately convey the writer's motive of an open mind. What if the subjective attitude is not meant to be considered a rhetorical point delivered with uncertainty, self-effacement or with tongue-in-cheek? "From my point of view" is not necessarily another way of saying "I haven't taken a poll or conducted my research properly."

For me, using a subjective qualifier is a proud way of conservatively stating my own open uncertainty toward the possibility of discovery.

...and this attitude of mine certainly backfires sometimes!

Readers have reacted to my using language in this way as if I'm obligated to talk this way legally. Because otherwise I'm "making claims" that could be proved false and might be sued for making promises I can't keep.

Huh?

Happiness Sensations

How do I tell when I'm happy? I have had lots of trouble with answering the question for myself. Here's a report on my discoveries.

First problems were my misconceptions about the nature of happiness. From having lots of tragic intense experiences, what I didn't want was obvious - and it was repulsive: a huge NO! I made the mistake of assuming that what I did want would have that same intensity of feeling. The admonishment to "Find my passion" did not help.

Inside of me, it turned out that happiness is subtle. Happiness is absorbing, It is something that I do so naturally it's pretty easy to miss it in action. Something I'm doing that makes me happy doesn't tell me that it is making me happy - only in retrospect does this realization of "I was happy!" happen for me. While I'm doing what makes me happy, I'm so absorbed my it that I am too busy to notice how I feel. It soaks up my attention like a sponge. I'm engaged pretty much completely. In fact, the intensity of this engagement can make me a bit scared. I will surface from doing what makes me happy as if I've been asleep and I've just woke up in a fog. Like Rip Van Winkle, who slept for eons, I'll experience a jolt as I if I'm waking myself out of doing what has been making me happy and wonder what has been going on while I've been gone.

Another characteristic of happiness for me is that it's an unnoticed, irresistible action. I can't resist not doing it. Of course I'm going to do things that way, silly. Doesn't everyone? It was a shock to realize that "everyone" didn't value what I thought was "obviously valuable." I began to realize that I needed to consider that other people might wanted to be treated differently than I did, and act accordingly. I also needed to find positive ways to tell other people what I wanted, valued and enjoyed so it could come true for me and them.

For instance, it turns out that I have some big opinions on how I prefer to be touched. As a kid, my brother used to love to have me scratch his back. He wanted to scratch my back in "payment" for getting me to scratch his back, but that didn't work for me. I really did not want to be scratched - it doesn't do anything positive for me. People tend to scratch me too hard. Being touched "softly" is also an issue for me. If someone "tickle touches" my skin, it is slightly irritating because my skin becomes numb rather quickly to the creepy-crawly surface sensations. It feels to me as if a bug is crawling on my skin! In Hawaii we call this sensation of goose pimples, "getting chicken skin." It is as if my skin is too sensitive for such pastimes. But if another person makes calm or firm contact with my muscles underneath my skin, it's heavenly. I love to be massaged deeply. I love to feel someone's body warming my own. I love to feel contact with another person and have them relax and lengthen their muscles, taking contraction away from themselves while they are in contact with me.

One time in my early life when I was first struggling with this question of how to feel what I wanted and what made me happy, I tried a radical, time consuming strategy that worked well for me. I went back to a time when I really wanted something. As a kid, I constantly wanted a horse. At one point in my early twenties, even though I didn't want a horse anymore, (because I'd grown up and my priorities had changed radically) and *because* I didn't know what else I wanted...I got a horse. Clearing the time it took to have a horse helped me to have something to give up when I finally did get a "real yes" about happiness.

There was another more serious problem about recognizing happiness for myself. Decisions that didn't involve considering external circumstances or other people just did not register on my radar. Having someone in front of me who had an opinion one way or another about what made them happy completely outshone any emotions I did have by a mile. Other people's wishes distracted me so completely, that I did not experience my own emotions. Not know what you want is a real deal-breaker in relationships with other people, because they can't tell what to to expect that you might do.

So I had to work on drawing a curtain between me and them to experience what I really wanted to do, irrespective of what they wanted me to do. This meant at first actively seeking solitude - and it was hard to sense my own emotions even then. On top of everything I was even rebellious with myself. I had a hard time picking something I knew I enjoyed doing that didn't take but five minutes a day and doing it every day regularly because I had so much resistance about setting any deliberate routine in place. But with practice, (this took five years or so) I became much better at checking in w/myself and getting an answer. Now I'm almost sixty. All I need to do to find out what I feel is to look away from someone's face for a bit or excuse myself from their presence.

But the way I worked out deciding what I feel is a bit odd too. I only discovered this by taking a poll about how other people determine what makes them happy. I discovered that my own feelings and emotions did not "rise to the top" like cream does, in a hierarchy. This was the most common way most people have access to their feelings. They can merely ask themselves "What would make me happy here?" and they get an answer that is their first priority.

Discovering my own feelings is more like a two step process. It's as if I'm fishing in a mysterious cauldron of potential, pulling up what comes out, describing it. Then I must draw statistics on the results of how I feel about it, after having described it for myself a number of times. I have learned that it's not a good idea to narrate this process in front of others. Because they might assume that because I dredged it up and mentioned it to them, it must be my first priority for wanting it...and that's just not true for me. Many things I want come up, irrespective of "time of arrival." I have learned for myself that when it comes to emotions, it is an important consideration for me to compensate for "time of arrival."

How does feeling what makes you happy work for you?

For Your Own Good

Actually, I find the opposite strategy of slowing down to be a productive strategy. Except at my current pace, it seems that I'm slowed to the point of irritating productive, functional people. I've been accused of being passive-aggressively slow, which is not what I intend.

I do feel a bit self-righteous when I'm driving exactly five miles over the speed limit and I still hold up a line of cars behind me. I can feel the anger of those who are tail-gating me. Then we pass a cop car and they all fall back, obviously thankful that being behind me while I was driving slow prevented them from getting a ticket for speeding fifteen miles over the speed limit as a matter of course.

I used to feel self-righteous about the level that my culture doesn't want to touch each other too - almost to the point of "forcing" or "training" people to allow me to touch them and to invite being touched.

There were many other actions I did that violated people's cultural expectations about autonomy, independence, personal space and respect that I needed to become aware of and problem solve.  I've had to learn so much about body language to be able to deal with feeling rejected, isolated and misunderstood. For instance, being near-sighted and not comfortable with glasses or contacts, I tended to stand too close to people when talking, encouraging them to back away from me or flee during a conversation.

When I finally gave in and accepted that it was OK that people in my culture did not want to be touched, I think others lost out on the value I could offer them about the importance of being touched. But they didn't seem to want it anyway.

It happened at the point where the mother of my stepson gave me this little talk about how the people closest to children are the ones who are most likely to be sexually molesting them. She got it from the news, so I could have merely cast it off as a fad. But I couldn't help but take what she had said personally. Because it resulted in her son no longer wanting to enjoy being read to while sitting in my lap, or hang out with the family and friends on the couch draped over each other. It was as if his mother was, in a roundabout way, trying to accuse me personally of molesting her six year old son by cautioning him not to trust people about an issue which he had no clue what it meant at the time. It really made me angry. But it also made me realize how an accusation like that is pretty much the same as a conviction. So I decided to let sleeping dogs lie and stop trying to get people to touch each other more often. I think my decision at that time was a mistake, in retrospect.

At what point does an opinion or belief in a value become a coercion or a sales technique or proselytizing?

People are getting hit with so many advertising ploys, making persuasion into a skill that is getting every so much more sophisticated. I can understand how consumers tend to be suspicious of extremes when they catch wind that someone believes in what they are saying. A person must be very sophisticated in their use of language to gather any sort of support for what is important and personally valuable to them, even if they have no invested interest in the sale of the product itself. Probably jaded from being sold too much useless junk too often, people have become too quick to brand an endorser or a convinced believer as a fanatic.

Front End Intuition

It's easy to assume that the sign of a "passion" or "intuitive flash" is something intense. As a kid I used have intense feelings of "yucky" about something that repelled me or made me want to rebel. But over the course of my life, I've realized the quality of an impression about what makes a person happy or is a signal of engaging a talent is just as often more curious and subtle than the opposite shocking and obvious "yuck!"




For me sometimes, it's many different qualities that signal something "important to me" is going on. Those qualities of Importance are also different for each person. Here's some examples:

•  Me noticing myself musing over what "sticks out" as a logical fallacy or "not fitting." I find my mind has jumped over to a completely daydreaming type track of thought, despite the attraction of real life.

•  Perhaps a sense of effortlessness, as if I've just forgotten to feel bad in the last recent period of time where something that I had just been doing makes me happy, because it has completely absorbed my attention.

• * It does sometimes happen fast, in a "flash." The quality of my attention suddenly jumps to attention that makes time artificially slow down into a focal point. This happens in movies when the script writer wants the audience to notice an important point in the plot line. (Usually accompanied in movies with a curious sucking sound or whiplash sound effect! But such sounds don't happen in real life.)

• * Sometimes I only notice something was important in hindsight, after a calamity where I "should have known" to pay attention to a clue I was given, but it went over my head at the time. An example of this came for me in a flash of intuitive prediction where I didn't know I was getting a self-preservation warning message until after the (fortunately minor) accident had happened. I had to think back what made that predictive thought different from any other paranoia...so I could recognize it and be certain enough to act on it to become for me the useful intuitive warning it was.

Apparently, listing more of these from other people would be useful.  Because I've talked about this very subject in dinnertime conversations as one of my favorite Dialogue subjects to trot out in polite conversation. The results of doing it quite often over the course of my life are that these qualities that help people recognize intuitive messages are completely unique to each person.

What have you noticed?

Enjoy Learning

When I was a kid, I learned by imitation; gaining rapport with my teachers was irresistible. When I was a teen, I learned by accident, in spite of myself. I was lucky to have teachers who accepted that I was learning while half asleep. Once I got to college, I began to learn by absorption - so I started to choose my teachers carefully because I realized I had no idea what I was absorbing. After college, I thought knew how to spot a fantastic teacher. I became fascinated with what makes a teacher worth the topic they're teaching.

For this community musical "Carnival" in 1989, I learned how to walk on stilts, how to juggle clubs, how to hang and build sets, install stage lighting and manage drama queens. There I am on the ladder.

Sometimes I would just learn whatever a fantastic teacher had to teach. Fantastic teachers seemed to bring out talents their students never knew they possessed. I had to admit that often what attracted me to being taught was trivial, irrelevant or downright foolish. It was only after my ignorance had subsided that I could say there was "a method to madness" for wanting to learn that particular thing. My tolerance extended for learning about something before making up my mind about its value. While learning, I gained and defined the value and use of what I'd gotten on the fly.

Absorption is still my favorite style of learning, because I realize that many people who attempt to teach come up with an explanation that doesn't really match what they actually do. It's the doing of something that I'm often interested in more than the explanation. People teach how they learned - if they take what they learned further, they often don't have ways to explain what they're really doing, so they use their former teacher's words. A learner sometimes needs to ignore that presentation, and get to the source in a more direct way.


What I mean by "absorption" is to merely open up as wide as possible to the skill that is being demonstrated. With absorbing, time of arrival or sequence does not matter. Pretend as if you can already do the skill, even though you are vastly inexperienced. Imitate everything you perceive - body language, attitude and facial expression. Cast your attention wide to take in as much as possible at once, and see if it's possible to juggle all these unknown factors. "Fake it 'til you make it." Count on "beginner's luck" to fill in the blank spots. You have nothing to lose, because you have nothing invested.

Since college, have always been able to learn from books. Surprisingly to me, this is rare. People seem to get a book to "have" the contents or refer to it, seldom do they get a book to really learn it. I outline a book if I think it's something I want to learn.  Learning using a book by outlining it can be done with a library book; it's cheaper than buying the book - and I have the contents that I want to use or remember after I outlined it.

The learning skill that has been the most useful for me as a learner has been to observe. Observation pays off when choosing a teacher; barefaced self observation allows faster learning. Each discipline, skill, world of knowledge or study has it's own sense, body language and lexicon, which  it pays off to learn - but not at first. I find that I want to directly experience a subject first, before I'm trained into looking at it from the traditional point of view of how most people learn it. After that direct experience as a complete beginner, I'll understand what the classic solutions have answered. Sometimes confronting a subject directly will allow me to innovate beyond the classic learning procedures. Sometimes the way I give back to teachers is by asking them original questions that they haven't yet thought of asking themselves. The way to come up with these original questions is to note what puzzles you or fascinates as you first encounter the skill or subject, before you know what others think is "important" about it.

How do you learn best? What do you enjoy about learning?

Stories Drive Invention

 Since the art of telling stories is so essential for the articulation of almost anything that is communicated, I thought I'd bring forward the continued inspiration for new creative inventions that I get from the field of screenwriting. What fascinates me about screenwriting is how it is the art of selecting what is relevant to a story that "drives" the plot line forward - and of course, what is left out as extraneous. For this reason, I'm always curious to look at movies that are inspired by much longer and more detailed books to bring forward this selection process, scene by scene.

One point that's not obviously revealed by merely watching movies is how movie viewers have been educated over the years to figure out what is happening in a story. Viewers are shown what has been determined by producers to be relevant to the story in the scene action of the actors, set and events. Of course this also includes indications of time frames, foreshadowing of later events, suspense, drama, character building, etc. Movie watchers are, to a great extent, completely unaware of how much work they are doing to construct the plot, events and characters as a story unfolds - and good storytelling never disturbs the illusion of how a viewer must continue to be tracking these elements to make sense of the illusion that is being created as an experience.

But how to put an ability to observe and analyze into becoming a new invention? Comparing to reveal differences is my favorite means. Then the differences can be used as a model or form, plugging in the different content from an unrelated area that then becomes related.

Recipes are an obvious example of this. You can take the form of a casserole, for instance - which is some sort of grain or starch in a container that is baked, containing some sort of vegetable or meat and a type of topping. Now you can take a genre of food, such as Lasagna which is a baked dish - and switch the contents to another country's food style - and you can make a Mexican food casserole instead of an Italian one and have an original combination that wasn't obviously apparent.

To apply this idea to music and screenwriting, there's a fascinating parallel that imagines a piece of music as if it were a story. This suggested to me how musicians could be playing roles in carrying out what this story will become using their ability to improvise. If you'd like to see the result of this invention that was inspired by this parallel thinking of marrying the genre of screenwriting to musical performance, check out the unique advantages of playing with the arrangement and instrumentation of a musical piece as if it were a story.

http://www.franis.org/out4improv/

Any invention takes a bit of investment to wrap your mind around, and this one is no different. It's unpredictable what happens when you take one genre and use it to inspire unique characteristics in another arena. It often creates a synergy type combination, that is often useful for more functions than could be originally expected. Using and playing with a unique combination of genres will make these characteristics apparent. Projects need to be "born" and brought to maturity by figuring out what they are good for. Any baby is lots of trouble and not really good for much of anything until it grows up into a person who can do stuff - ideas are similar.

In this case, what started out as a convenient way to combine the differing abilities and involvement level of a large group of performers turned out to have other uses. As I used this newly invented system to describe existing characteristics of musical styles that already existed to see if it was relevant to them, I realized it could be used as a way to invent a completely new musical style that could be infinitely varied. It can also be used for one person to compose arrangements of a performance piece...as a way for a music teacher to have all of their students to improvise together, as a way to discuss musical arrangement in general...how to give form to generalized "jamming" among musicians who do not know each others songs. Possibly it could be crafted into a composer's game with some programming - but I would think that the experience of making music together with other people would be it's most interesting and fun application. Of course, that means you would need a "troupe" of people who played music on instruments or performed and were interested in playing together with each other, which may be a unique situation to find in this day of virtual reality.

For instance, a business application of such descriptive function in common with the A-Game I invented is apparent in the "music genome" of Pandora.com. Musicians working with Pandora listen to music and describe the characteristics of common factors such as instrumentation, style, use of harmony and rhythm and these descriptions are correlated to other "similar" songs. These commonalities are now organized into a database, so now any user of the site can specify a type of music they like and a whole radio station is generated from these descriptions, containing songs that the user would not normally become exposed to knowing about.

I'd love to know how you think the field of screenwriting could be applied to your favorite project.

Surpass Stereotypes

"What is it about your environment, history and values that encourages you to surpass limiting social expectations?"

Asking in a non-specific way leaves the answer open.  A warning, when you ask the question of a woman if you happen to be another woman, take replies with the awareness that women tend to "tell their troubles" to bond with other women.

(To understand much more of how all this happens and more about what the issues are concerning women and those who do not match the current social trends in their conversational style, I recommend the very conversational but content-rich books written by linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, PhD - especially her book "Talking 9 to 5.")

 Stereotypes and trying to be "right" by using mind-reading affects us personally, as well as affecting the culture in general. It took me a great deal of thought about this question to find the answers in myself. There were three pivotal experiences for me as a young person.

What made the biggest difference motivating me to think for myself happened when I was only five years old. My idol, which was my elder brother of eight years, gave me a snake for a pet - sanctioned by my parents. It was 1959, and in that era, snakes suffered from many social misconceptions about their nature. At a crucial stage when I was going to transfer my family's authority toward the authority of school&a greater social world - there was this serious mis-match. People I did not know or trust mistakenly thought snakes were dangerous, contradicting what I knew to be true according to my family and the San Diego Zoo. This experience encouraged me to think for myself and put out effort to learn the true nature of things before I accepted societal norms. It inoculated me against cigarettes as well as sent me to college.

Of course, the most obvious solution to free the minds of young people would be world travel. Becoming an exchange student during middle or high school is the most socially acceptable way, but spending at least six months in another culture works just as well. Once you have been a young person in a radically different environment, you return and realize how self-absorbed your peers are.

The other pivotal issue was attractiveness and the accidental social authority that went along with it. It upset me that, according to society, women were expected to be helplessly manipulative to get things done. The social fact that an attractive female asking for a "favor" gets it from a male who has temporarily lost his reasoning - this bothered me.  For me as a young girl, there seemed no way to "opt out" of that game gracefully. I did not want the power men handed me to deny or accept their attention. Because of the accident of birth making me coincidentally attractive, I had to deal with this issue early on. Only later I realized that this was a social reality for almost every girl. If you're a straight guy reading this, imagine if you had to deal daily with attention from people you did not want - from other guys, for instance. This is the environment young women find themselves.

What eventually remedied this issue for me was learning about body language. After this education, it was indisputable that how I behaved was evident for anyone to see. What sort of a person I was, my values, showed beyond my physical features. A person's character is expressed in their walk, how they move, where their attention goes & the quality of attention used. After learning about body language, I had to accept there were, in me, obvious additional desirable qualities of character, in addition to matching social definitions of beauty.

So I would recommend to teach body language as part of a relationship communication class as a solution for the common desire for membership and bonding - in high school or earlier. (For me, studying Alexander Technique in a classroom situation worked.)

There are many reasons why there is a sudden drop in confidence when girls (and boys) reach middle school age. They realize how they do not match the social norms, and there is the tendency to envy what they are not. This is when they first must grapple with social questions about how they are going to deal with sexual attention. A desire to for membership and to belong becomes important, as well as trying on what roles might suffice for gaining membership.

The last pivotal experience for me was when I discovered creative thinking skills at around fifteen. Not just the result of thinking creatively by making things artistic, or modeling creative people I admired... I'm talking about the actual nuts and bolts of how to do problem solving in any situation of decision-making. Creative thinking skills taught me HOW to think for myself. Wanting to think for yourself in spite of societal norms and actually doing this thinking constructively are two very different things. Edward de Bono has a series of proven simple but effective creative and strategic thinking skills designed for middle school aged students and older. Again - not What to think - but How to think. Young people have refreshing bullshit detectors. These natural talents can be fostered into effective and constructive rebellion.

Nobody is going to take my word for it...but I say if creative thinking skills and relationship classes were taught in high school (instead of so much of what is ridiculous mind-reading for "correct" information that is taught now,) society would experience a big jump in social responsibility from all young people.

Small Talk Skills

I've worked for a long time to make small talk meaningful. From my experience, even standing in line in a supermarket talking to others can be a fascinating experience, if one of us can figure out what we have to offer each other in the time we have together to spend now.

What I look for in others to indicate what this "magic topic" might be, beyond the niceties of over-used one-liners. Now, how do I do this in such a short time? Turns out it pays off to examine the assumptions of social cliche` and come up with other avenues that yield high-interest answers.

To do this yourself, you would follow the same routine as others expect, but ask similar essential questions that are more to the point than the stock questions. I came up with these alternate questions by wondering, "Why is this common social question really being asked?"

For instance, "Where did you grow up?" This is a question with the motive to find out what environment made the person who they are. So I'd avoid asking that question in a way that will illicit the answer of a town or specific location. Instead, I might ask, "Can you describe environments that you most enjoyed playing in as a kid? What did you like about those sorts of places? Do you ever do something like that now?"

Different answers to the same question, (Why is this question being asked?) will point in alternate directions. Perhaps, this question of "Where did you grow up?" might be: to find out what subculture influenced childhood. So why not ask that as a direct question? "What sort of subculture shaped your early experience?"

Obviously, this is a technique that can offer high yield possibilities for any set of mundane conversations that would be under the heading of "small talk." It can also be a source of humor. "Where did you come from?" This can now be answered with a smirk, "My mother of course - wasn't that true for you too?"

Find A Mentor

Why would I consider apprenticeship? That began with a college experience.

I had previously had the experience of adopting a mentor with a professor named Dung Fong Lee at U.S. International Univ. in Poway. I was in the habit of "checking out" my teachers before taking a class. After sitting at the back of this teacher's office all afternoon, I observed to him how I now understood the confusing comments I had gotten about his teaching style from his previous and current students. He seemed to radically change his persona to suit the needs of each student, (joke & storyteller, factual info dumper, sparklingly polite conversationalist, bumbler, impolite psychologist, political leader, confessor) without being concerned with presenting a consistent identity. His reply was that he believed this ability to be the mark of an excellent, flexible teacher - and that I probably also had this ability because I had noticed it in him. This began a very interesting relationship where he allowed me to hang out with his family and included me, (and my boyfriend at the time) in his social life. He also taught me Chinese at a breakneck pace for seven weeks. (Since he decided I already knew the content of a introductory class on the I Ching that he offered; he proposed I learn something else.) Later he offered me an opportunity to travel to Taiwan where he would continue my Chinese lessons and set me up teaching English. But I wasn't able to accept at that time, as I would lose the remainder of a four year college scholarship. (One of my life's regrets!)

I believed Lee and I crossed over into a personal relationship partly because he was from another culture and how the USIU college had been intentionally structured to encourage such behavior. Probably my being orphaned as a teen also had something to do with it. So that is how I found out how the apprenticeship experience could go far beyond the content of what was being taught. The few situations where I adopted a position of apprenticeship happened in the course of my various work projects, but later I got the nerve to propose it barefaced... (By asking, "would it be OK to ask you a few more questions again later?") Of course, the questions and answers became more elaborate as they had the inclination and time to teach me and as I showed more interest.

The next mentor I adopted I found by landing a job doing illustrations for a sales booklet of a solar design sales course for a sales manager, Chuck Lewis. This was a presentation meant to be displayed during a home sales call by a troupe of salespeople to introduce hot water solar panels to customers. He was also writing a book of aphorisms about life lessons, and needed a cover illustration. We spent quite a bit of time together because he wanted to explain the book to me so I'd understand how to make the cover...and we enjoyed talking with each other. Then he began to write another book, (eventually titled "You're Gonna Love It!") about sales, so he wanted to talk to me about that too, to help him write the book because he said I was his "perfect customer" that he wanted the to be written for. The book grew from our personal conversations about how to teach sales to people who formerly had assumed that selling and marketing was vulgar and beneath their ethics about how people should be treated. He also taught me quite a bit about telling jokes and how to invent them, which seemed to be a supporting subset skill of salesmanship.

Another person I routinely called where he worked and jokingly asked for the "Terry Delsing School of Comedy." (Which of course, was not where he was really working. But his boss put up with it.) Terry would tell me a joke. I would figure out why it was funny, change around the particulars and tell him the joke I'd just invented. It only took less than five minutes a call. We did that ongoing maybe once a week for a couple of years until I spaced out calling him for too long.

My next mentor, Ray Belange of Apache Signs, came from attempting to paint and fabricate signs as a business. The way I found and adopted Ray as a mentor is the most easily translated to any genre.

I had developed this strategy, when I wanted to learn to do something practical, to call up people cold out of the phone book who were in the business of doing what I needed to learn and asking them a few questions about it. The first few people I asked about what was the proper terminology for the field; the next few I asked how to phrase useful questions I could ask other people and so on... My reasoning that people were willing to answer a few questions was sound, because they were busy at work, and I was asking for free advice. So I just kept calling different people until I had the whole picture, (short of actually doing it.) As I got involved in the process of doing it and hit a snag, I'd call again on those people who seemed willing to talk with the the first time around because some time had passed. They seemed interested in my progress too.

Ray was someone who, as I explained my thinking about what I was trying to do, recognized that we thought alike in an unusual, original way. Turns out, he had expanded on the same idea I had independently originated too. So he invited me to his shop and not only showed me how he'd designed his way past the questions I had, but where to find suitable materials, how he had expanded and innovated how to use the materials, where to find new customers, as well as the joys of riding on motorcycles in foreign countries and living in RVs and warehouses as a lifestyle. (He had raised five kids as a single parent that way!)

Since then, I've hit on the idea of contacting admirable authors and volunteering to help them in whatever way I could be useful. In return I've gotten many free perks in the form of trades of me writing reviews for their book which they sent me free...to helping them using my writing abilities in exchange for their lessons in an ongoing way. One time a mentor I had contacted like this put me in the hot seat of representing them as a tele-workshop host, despite not being trained formally by them. This experience taught me that I had an unusual proclivity for talking coherently, being a high idea producer when everyone else had run out of idea, all while tending the engineering side of an online workshop, (being a natural multi-tasker) which was a talent that I never knew I had, (but Barbara Sher had recognized the ability in me.)

So - mentoring needs a dream - a focus that's practical involving what you are trying to learn to do. Then you ask for help - a little at a time. You find examples of skills you admire in people who enjoy offering the benefits of their experience. You don't admire them, but ask them specific questions about what you'd like to do, encouraging them to be the authority and to think about how they do naturally what you cannot do. If they have other students, you offer the benefits of what you're learning to others who aren't as far along as you are. As you show interest by involving yourself in what they love to teach - you're on your way to learning something and having an interesting relationship with them. Sometimes you're in the position of giving them an idea of how and what to teach others that they couldn't imagine before they met you...

Good Enough

It's Christmas Eve, and lots of kids might be wondering if they've been good enough. Just think of the pondering poor Santa has to do about each and every character, deciding who might deserve something or not. I was thinking about that, as I was drawing this picture.

Playing Santa is not for sissies - as can be heard in the tune below...

Horrifying October

Partly the reason I love October, is that in most places, fall makes dramatic changes. It makes me feel like getting busy. This is probably a squirrel-like urge to sock away food for the winter. I still enjoy fall in Hawaii, even though there isn't much evidence of change. It's making me think about getting ready to paint holiday windows in the San Francisco Bay area again.

Of course, as as artist, I find that it's also fun to mess up people's windows during this time of year - as I did here for a "Fright Shop" in Hawaii. It's so much fun for me to just draw big, improvising along as I see what happens in front of me. 

I enjoy the images and themes of Halloween; the magic and the unexplained happenings. I love the idea that it is, for one night, socially acceptable to assume and act out as another persona - even if it is just for a costume party or an evening of dancing.

But strangely enough, I really cannot watch horror films. I'm just too impressionable. Horrifying images make it into my dreams and haunt me in ways that aren't at all fun or even have a purpose. Movies are intentionally designed to get an emotional reaction from movie goers; in a horror film this is overkill. 

This doesn't make much sense to me, because I do enjoy taking chances and being adventurous. It seems like a strange purpose to look for horror on purpose, when so much real challenge is available in the world.

But extremes are entertaining to some people.
If you enjoy horror, what is it about the experience that you enjoy?

Recluse

There are many reasons why a person ends up being alone. Some of them are negative, and some are positive, and some are accidental, and some of these choices happened "accidentally on purpose."

Sometimes you make choices to do what you think you want to do, and only later find out that you've inadvertently chosen to do it all by yourself after you're entirely committed. If you think about how long it takes to get exactly what you want, how long people work to set themselves up for retirement - it's a long haul. Most people don't know what they're going to do with themselves when they retire because they never had a chance to do what they loved to do - or they're not able to reinvent themselves.

Sometimes it is just that we cannot "sell" to others our desire to have things the way we want. There has to exist someone else who wants share that situation with us, and that is sometimes a tall order if our dreams are unique. Or sometimes, we end up alone because there is something we do that is not socially acceptable to others who would usually want to hang out with us - too much "baggage."

I am overwhelmed with how many of my peers have become alcoholic as they age - probably somewhat because "it doesn't matter now." Some people go through a process of "giving up" (sometimes necessary) without ever coming out on the other side of it to understand what they positively do want. Some just decide not to bother learning anything new and get along with what they have. For them, it's just too much trouble to feel like you don't know what you're doing. This is one example of circumstantial isolation. If you don't change with the times, you get left behind. And possibly disillusioned about what you believe is not possible now.

Relationships teach you about yourself. (At least, that is how they have always worked for me.) In a way, it's expending less effort to be alone. All those character defects that are irritating to someone else don't matter when you're alone. Nobody else is there to accept the consequence except you. If you're OK with what you do, you can have things be any way you want. Of course, some older folks get very "set in their ways." But think of the advantages, you don't have to explain or apologize about the way you are, how you work, why you do what do. There is nobody to answer to. Being alone is both an advantage, and a disadvantage.


Someone asked an old woman past 100 what is the best part of being old - and she said, "No peer pressure."

Lightly skipped over by most is underestimating the power of a significant booby prize that is the strangest feature of being lucky enough to get old. Watching those twenty, thirty, forty year friendships dissolve or suddenly disappear is not for sissies.

I don't know what your experience with death and the process of grieving is, but in my peer group - people do not want to hang around someone who is grieving. Oh, after someone dies, people will gather to console one another and commemorate, but then, they go away. They don't call, they don't make contact again for another...three months or so. Then it's only a light check-in.

Somehow the person who is grieving is supposed to "get over it" or "deal with it." Most of your friends will get tired of hearing about how you feel when you miss someone who has died. This distaste perhaps reminds them of how they have trouble thinking about their own death. Maybe it's just too close to how unpleasant it would be to be the one who is left after best friends and lovers are gone - as you are now. It's as if grief is a state of social quarantine.

There isn't much social support either for accepting each person's unique process of going through their own grief. Instead of recognizing that grief is a special time of self-knowledge, if the process of grieving goes on "too long," it is labeled "depression."

It's not depression, it's grieving - but this is the cloak that society wraps it in. This mistaken label for grieving as "depression," is yet another very good reason for circumstantial isolation. 

In A Fight

In brain science and in hand-to-hand combat, the person who has the ability to calm themselves under the threat of fighting has the upper hand. A person who can calm themselves can use an incidental strategic advantage as well as their faster reactions of their reptile survival brain.

A friend of mine was once in a bad situation where a group of thugs were threatening to roll him and rob him. He looked around, figured it would be easier to defend himself if he were in a small space where one person at a time was going to come at him. So he backed in between two parked cars against a dead end wall and proceeded to wait. The thugs taunted each other to go in after him; but eventually one of them said, "Look at him - he's too calm. He's got a gun. Let's go."

Defending oneself in real fight is a whole different matter too, but again - calm observation and questioning one's own assumptions paid off...

At 24 years old, I was once walking uphill on a one-way switchback to the little Mesa to a party in a remote place in Bolinas near the beach at night. As I walked, I began to suspect that someone was behind me, matching my footsteps. Was it in order to sneak up on me for some nefarious purpose? I shuffled my feet. The person behind me matched my footsteps again. The houses I was passing had occupants who were on vacation, or gone to bed and locked their doors... So I decided my advantage was that he did not know that I suspected what might be going on.

At fifteen paces, I turned around, still walking backwards and started blabbing to him in an over-friendly way in the dark silence. "Oh, hi! Were you at the beach like I just was? I didn't notice you there. Did you get that shirt at the freebox? I love the Freebox... I'm going to a party; are you going there too? "

He stopped, somewhat shocked...not answering me. Which indicated to me that he might have untoward intentions and wasn't very smart because now I knew what he looked like. But there we were...walking along, twenty feet apart. So I kept blabbing to him and decided to choose my battle ground to conduct a little test to allow him to get closer to me to see what he might do when we came to a steep switchback.

When I reached my chosen spot, at that point I said, "Oh shit! Forgot something at the beach, gotta go back..." Sure enough, he ran the last ten feet uphill across the street towards me and pushed me down. But I was on the ground parallel to the outside edge of the road; next to me was a steep drop off. I had the advantage of familiarity with the terrain.

While I was on the ground, I realized that my legs were a whole lot longer than his arms. I remember thinking, "I must have been planning this." As he loomed over me, still saying nothing, I crouched in a fetal position. As he bent over me, all I had to do was extend my legs and plant them in his crotch to toss him over the steep edge of the road. Then I got up and ran while he took the time to get up. When I breathlessly arrived at the party and explained what had happened, people went out looking for they guy. But there was enough time to for him to disappear.

Later I went back to the scene of the crime and saw that what I had done to evade the attack was an even better plan than I imagined. Where he'd landed off the side of the road, there were many poison oak bushes...

Manifesto

I'll put what I mean in the positive,
leaving behind passé routines and shortened regrets.
Who, how and what I love shows my genius.
Coincidence-control is my delight.
I count on timing to take my talents for the ride they deserve 
Around a cycle of return, they're crying, "Me! Me now!"
Humility dazzles wealth.
  
I'll help with respect, merging with your bonding language  
to inspire, laugh & free you -  
because I am so often connected,
helped, awed and laughed. 
 
May my ruthless emotions be artful & tactful;
allowing others to misunderstand,
accepting who they are now,
releasing the curse and blessing
of glimpsing what is not yet born in everyone.
 
I'm always learning what "appropriate" means,
expanding connections & meaning-making.
My complaints are fodder.
I will design a way though artfully
dancing around my own resistance & fears,
forgiving myself again, in gratitude
as I learn what I can do, and
how I can do what I know.

Where's the Music?

 Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(The last stanza of Keats's "To Autumn." when he was dying of TB.)

When I read a poem, I wonder..."where is the music to this?" For me, unless a poem has a tune and is sung, it's not complete. When I hear poets read their poems, or rappers rap their lines, I think, "that person really wants to express themselves and they haven't learned to sing yet."

 I love it when poetry is lyrical or when poetry is an expression of meaning that has additional images or experiences in context with it. But by itself, usually poetry just doesn't do much for me. Part of the reason I don't really get into poetry is probably because there's no music attached, or I'm not connecting with the emotional content that's being expressed.


Words and grammar structure meaning - and poetry is where words become free of their structure. Poetry is how you can rub words together and they can become something original that hasn't been meant before. But unless you're skillful, the reader won't know what you're really saying and will read things into what you wrote that you didn't mean. Understanding is constructed by the person who is experiencing it. Their assumptions and perceptions trump your intent as an artist.

Sometimes poetic words will be so delicious on the page that I can actually imagine them complete without a tune attached. But usually that is when I can imagine images that go with the words instead of a tune, as I can do with this stanza from Keats. The poetry that goes beyond this "lack"of no music will evokes its own images that completely affect me. If a poem doesn't "do it for me," then usually it just doesn't contain enough of what it's hinting at. It's not "juicy enough." Hints are OK, I guess, for those people who like them, but I'm after experiences, or the hints of experiences that I have yet to embody.

Oddly enough, this is also the reason I listen to mostly instrumental music. It's also the reason I carefully select the films and video content to which I expose myself. If I listen to music with lyrics without selecting the content of it, (the radio, for instance) I am often so disappointed with how much drivel is out there. It's that I'm so affected by any art that I must be deliberate. When there is a song with words worth listening to, I never get tired of hearing it and may even take the time to learn to play and sing it. But frankly, most of what my culture imagines is valuable to say in a song or violent movies are ...not what I want to program into my psyche by repeating it. We humans seem to be preoccupied with the sounds of our own self-indulgences - we're verbal and like to blab - even when we don't have anything to say.

Being an artist, how can you tell if what you have to say is going to be considered notable by others unless you say it? Any expression seems to find it's audience. It's always interesting how "great" works of art continue to grow in meaning as the culture changes. People continue to find new meanings in "timeless" artistic vision. What is most personal becomes the most universal, as it is artfully expressed.

What do you think?