Rewards

Made a list of things I'd done in my life. Whatever came to mind for five minutes. Then asked myself "what was the most exciting thing about it? Why did I stop when I did? Doing that gave me a clue what my rewards were. Would you like to see that list?

To connect people together and see them create or discover something that didn’t exist before
To be around when discovery is happening – improvisation, performance; how communication and thinking can be like dancing and singing together.
To “save” what would have been wasted and make it functional again with small encouragements that cumulatively add up over time.
How to gradually sneak out of habitual traps that were gradually gotten into – it’s like magic but makes so much sense.
Presence of mind – wisdom – persistence are all rewards.
The ability to sleep anywhere – ( not sure if this is a skill or a reward!)
To feel a conduit of connection while tapping the unknown – while making art, the line flowing from my eye to my hand without me being in the way; music emerging from me without interference, invention and the absorption of curiosity surprising me as it bubbles out; effortlessness of motion while on a bike or in water…
I have an “other worldly” fascination – worlds of expertise that I can dip into by knowing someone and experiencing what they know first-hand, invented worlds like authors do in scifi, science worlds like the biology in a puddle, snorkeling in an underwater world, or just hitchhiking and getting into a stranger’s world. This gives me endless patience to listen to whatever people want to tell me because it’s feeding my fascination with how they are – what their own story is by describing their world.
I can see so clearly how things could be easier for people when they make it so hard for themselves and so I’m motivated to tip the balance a bit in their favor. I know I must respectively wait for them to ask for my help, but I sit impatiently waiting for them to get a clue of what I could do for them. Pretty much, they have no clue.
Best reward: a state of flow…effortlessness. A natural state that feels as if I just ate some sort of magic mushroom. Timelessness absorption where there is no ticking measurements; just complete and utter involvement.
Would you like to try this as an activity? Or perhaps you already know some of your own rewards  - why you do what you have done.....?

Aware Expectations

I was just a kid, excited about going on a trip. Because the logistics of going on a trip were beyond me and depended on many factors about which I knew nothing, the anticipated fun event didn't happen. Or course, I was crestfallen. 

Fortunately, I had very wise parents who took my childish disappointment very seriously. They apologized for giving me the idea that this exciting thing was going to happen. But they also made me realize that I had built up the expectation on my own, with very little encouragement from them. They hadn't committed the family was going to go on this trip, they had stated they were going to explore making a decision about it after they researched the details. The trip was going to happen eventually, but not when and how I had expected it.

They attributed me building up my expectations to how much I like to make up stories; making me see that I had created my own disappointment because I had a talent and a passion for storytelling. They helped me to realize that I couldn't blame them for being the cause of my distasteful disappointment. If fact, I came to understand that because I liked to make up stories and explanations for many things, that I couldn't blame anyone else for that talent in me. The nature of talent is that it is irresistible. Paradoxically enough - talent can be almost an obsessive curse.

But still, here I was, causing my own emotions, feeling bad and how was I going to deal with it? Surely this expectation that I'd built so carefully into a blissful state of excitement wasn't a negative thing?

Even if an adult promised me who had the ability to make these things happen, was it really in my best interests to expect it and possibly make myself feel bad if it didn't happen? I realized that, so many events and factors were out of my own knowledge and influence, things could go wrong for grownups too that were unexpected. It was possible for disappointment to happen to me at any time because of what I had packed with meaning by doing this expecting.

My family offered me a much more interesting question about expectations: How was I going to use my irresistible ability to tell stories to make me feel good instead of bad?

Real Natural

Do you have a claim to fame?

It's one of my standard fallback questions that I developed from my days of hitchhiking in the quest of becoming an entertaining conversationalist. If the person can say yes to this question, it never fails to yield an interesting tale about who they are and what has been important to them.

A former teacher of mine is someone who claims he's the inspiration for the character made famous by R. Crumb in the hippie comics era. In fact, he even changed his name legally to become Mr. Natural. This confounds those who have him fill out forms because his first name is Mr.  That's right - not Mister, but Mr. with a period.


But Mr. Natural as a real person has further claims to fame beyond his name and how he became famous for having assumed it. For instance, under his previous name, he personally fought and he won a case as that shaped landlord/tenant rights in San Francisco.

Natural has written a book about his own way of teaching music. It's a sort of reverse engineered jazz theory for beginners based on "do-re-mi..."  He and his business partner Angel have published a pretty easy-to-understand disambiguation of a college level music theory course called "Music Theory Decoded - Strictly by the Numbers". He's uploaded many group courses on music from classes he recorded and put on youtube for many instruments. He even invented a short-cut for composers to sketch their musical ideas before the song makes it into notation that's an improvement on what's known as "Nashville Notation."

 So - do you have a claim to fame?
If you don't yet, what would it be when your ship comes in?

Give and Take Collection

    One of my ideas about blogging on so many subjects has been that themes would emerge by themselves. As I saw this happening, I reasoned that I could sift out the posts related to a certain theme and use them to start a targeted blog subject. A new subject seems to have emerged!
    Having written so extensively on this subject, I have decided that I should collect these posts into a separate blog that specializes in this subject alone. This post is a collection of the various posts on this subject, collected for your pleasure. 
     I've decided to collect these into the subject of a new blog - to be announced. I've been exploring this phenomena for some time now. I have previously written about the different aspects of the problem quite a bit, as you can see here.

    The subject of giving and taking is important. It's going to get to be a big factor as the baby boomers get to the point where they need to accept care gracefully during aging. For that reason alone, this issue could become a really important one to discuss.

Would you subscribe to a blog on just this subject as a way to allow yourself to free up the acts of gracefully accepting and learning about well-placed giving?

Here's where I ask questions about the different style of how gifts are offered, http://is.gd/5JfL6  asked around the gift-giving fervor of Christmas time.

Tacit Obligation http://is.gd/bMfhY
If someone has difficulty accepting, many times if you can vary the style of how the gift is offered, it will result in making it easier for them to accept. Making light of it's value is sometimes effective, because the best situation between giver and "givee" is when the thing is of great value to the givee and is easy for the giver to offer. But sometimes an action carries much more weight than anything they might say about it. Thus, accepting a gift incites obligation that may be only tacitly guessed. Why can't people accept a gift? A mystery part of a person is not sure what is the (sub)culturally tacit agreement about this gift; talking about it probably won't help.

Random Acts  http://is.gd/bMeST
Some people feel a need to remove themselves from the act, so that the receiver has no idea where the gift came from. It becomes impersonal. Thus we have all of the organizations that specialize in accepting tax charitable gifts and doing the messing actual giving to others.

Giving Back The proper way to "give back" is not always to do the exact same gesture, because needs are different. The mistake many people make in selecting what to give is they assume their value system of what is valuable is identical to the givee. This is not true. Being able to put oneself in the shoes of the givee is a thoughtful, compassionate act. So this is often a good reason to reject the offer of help - because what is being offered is misplaced and not of value from the point of view of the givee.

Gifts That Fit http://is.gd/bMeDi
In the small town of Bolinas, CA, we have a "freebox" where mainly articles of clothing are dropped off to be made available to anyone who wants them. The proper way to give back for the value of what you have gotten from it is to clean and organize the Freebox. Many people focus on the stuff itself; they mistake that the proper way to reciprocate is to bring more "stuff." Actually, having a place to bring your stuff to get rid of it is also a significant benefit. So the proper way to reciprocate is more like assuming the role temporarily of a "shop-keeper." A person who wanted to reciprocate would make the good stuff available to those who stop by looking to get something, (like pairing up shoes,) glean out the trash and every once in awhile, clear out the Freebox of all of it's donations so it's empty again to accept more stuff.

Allowing Benefits of Being The Giver  http://is.gd/bMeMk
 The Hawaiian spirit of Aloha is a wonderful template. It observes that you must allow someone to give, even if what is being offered is not of value to the givee. Being able to give is a human right, and by gracefully accepting, you are allowing this pleasure of giving to be exercised.

Consequences of Acceptance Generally with people who have trouble accepting being given to, it's important to ask what the accepting of gifts symbolizes. To some people, accepting what is offered is a "one-down" position in a competitive sense.  To others, they are fearful that accepting the gift will make them obligated to play the role eternally. They fear they're going to lose their independence as they learn to rely on the gift being provided routinely, and will act to prevent the source going away.

Independence Declarations Causing a Split I've also seen repeatedly a situation that seemed to be a direct result of mistaking the roles and pleasures giving and receiving. The situation was where a partner was forced to accept help because of a temporary injury. Evidently after recovery, the person who had been injured wanted to reject help from their partner to re-establish their independence and self-respect. ANY help was rejected entirely, so often and completely that even the "normal" pleasures of doing things for one's sweetie symbolized infantile dependence to the person who was in the process of recovering. If this was not purposefully addressed, it caused a breakup!

Respect http://is.gd/aTqdM 
Giving and receiving seems to be connected to how respect is shown. In our culture, you must choose between respect and having rapport. Here's a post where I explored it's application in how respect is signified in the context of speaking in a group interaction.  It's curious how listeners are valued socially, (which is a receptive role) when in the situation where the gift is tangible - suddenly the giver becomes the authority.

Suspicious of Greed It's also curious that when someone is in a situation of getting or having gotten a personal benefit, somehow what they offer or receive is suddenly suspect, because there's now a "invested interest." This is what happens when a person is really passionate about a belief in how something works for them and wants to communicate the benefit of their experience to others - everything they say about what they are passionate about is suddenly considered in that light or frame. They're proselytizers, rather than merely sharing their experience. I'm not sure why people believe that someone who is enthusiastic about something is self-involved or selfish. I would imagine the love of something would be an even higher recommendation of it!

Bonding http://is.gd/aTspT 
Some people take the giver/givee challenge to the point of refusing to establish the bond of a relationship entirely. I talk about that here: There are many rituals of establishing a bond as there are subcultures.

Entitlement http://is.gd/aTtf1
Here's another post where I talk about the anger that results when the givee decides they are "entitled" to what the givers are offering before they're getting it. This talks about greed.

Compliments http://is.gd/aTsR9 
Complimenting is also an interesting way of giving back that some people feel strange about accepting. Of course, it's a benefit to find out that what you do easily is notable for others - because it signifies what could be a valuable talent. Some people automatically reject them out of hand as an expression of the deadly sin of pride or ego. Some people regard compliments of the possession of an item as a way to ask for the thing to be offered by the person who has it. Here's a story about why I believe that complimenting is an important thing to do. In my culture, handing out a compliment implies the person was (like a puppy) explicitly seeking your approval, which may or not be true. Rejecting the gift implies that you would prefer to give yourself the approval. There are many other values signified by accepting a compliment that have people have reacted negatively to it.

Surpassing Expectations

"What is it about your environment, history and values that encourages you to surpass limiting social expectations?" It's a very interesting question to ask in polite conversation of any grownup.  Asking it in a non-specific way leaves the answer open.

Curious answers occur. When you ask the question of a woman, you must take the replies with a grain of salt. Women tend to "tell 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."

It took me a great deal of thought about this question to find the answers for myself. There were three pivotal experiences for me.

What made the biggest difference motivating me to think for myself first 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...Here were these serious mis-matches about snakes that I knew was completely urban legend. 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, because I decided at five that you could be free of fear if you knew more of the facts.

Of course, the most obvious solution to change 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. Not to mention how regional fashion codes really are.

The other pivotal issue was attractiveness and the 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; they wanted 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. That they were there in addition to matching social definitions of beauty - well, I could accept the attention I was getting now. The attention was my fault, instead of purely an accident of nature.

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 girls 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 to deal with this big question.

The last pivotal experience for me was when I discovered creative thinking skills. 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 a 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. Young people have refreshing bull-pucky detectors. These natural talents can be fostered into effective and constructive rebellion. In fact, the more rebellious, the better this education works to help you go your own way more intentionally...against the crowd.

Probably nobody is going to take my word for it. But 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.

Stereotyping and trying to be "right" affects everyone.

Heartbreak Resistance

It's very personal. What is most person can become the more universal when expressed. I'll leave some of that really personal stuff out, but I'll try to tell enough of this story to make you understand how much of a cross-roads it was for me. Well, maybe I shouldn't parade a story this heartbreaking here, since everyone knows who I am here in real life. Ah - I guess it doesn't matter what the content of the problem was. You can guess. It was a baaaad thing. Instead I'm going to talk about the solution.

You know all the stuff people tell about how to get past your self-sabotage? Well, it doesn't work when things are really baaaad. This is a story of what did work for me.

The problem was a huge gaping wound. It had already been resolved, and now I had to deal with how I felt about having resolved it the way I did. Talking about it didn't help. Crying about it didn't help. Freaking out about it didn't help. Couldn't stop thinking about it either. It was eating out a heartbreak.

I'm trained as an artist, but for some mystery reason I was resisting making art. I think what happened is that this thing heartbreak was preoccupied with bothered me badly. Suddenly, making the art became less stressful than everything else I was experiencing.

That's the thing about resistance that I've just learned about from a podcast by Barbara Sher. Learn it yourself here.

Behind resistance is an avoidance of something important, something that totally makes sense. You've got to find out what that is, because it's often hiding from you. Using positive affirmations just signals the resistant part of you that it's time to protect you even more - positive stuff doesn't really work. Positive thinking never helped me stop procrastination; it actually made it worse. In fact, using affirmations can make the resistance so strong, it can cause me to hurt myself to put a stop to all progress. As my friend Chris once said, "Got in a fight with myself and I lost."

If you can find the source of your resistance, then the stress and pressure of not being able to do the thing vanishes. You can go forward with no problem into whatever you've been avoiding. The tricky part is finding something inside of yourself that part of you is dead set about protecting you from noticing while you're busy running in the other direction.


So that's what happened with me. My concern that was eating at me finally outweighed the resistance I'd been experiencing about being an artist. I began to make art. I had to make art - I had no choice. I painted and painted and painted. I hung a huge roll of paper on the wall in my garage and slung paint at it. I pulled out another length of paper, got more of the paints and did it over and over and over. I painted like a fiend for a solid week.

I felt better.

A week later than that, I stood back and looked at the art. It was completely and totally abstract. I had done it without any thought of what I was making. Yet, somehow, accidentally on purpose, images, symbols and scenes had emerged in every single painting.

I sat there and looked at what I had painted. I hung them all over my walls and looked at them. they went floor to ceiling - they were huge. Somehow, these paintings had turned out to look like exactly about what I was upset about. I don't know why I was surprised about that. All of the images in every one of these paintings was directly related to why and how I felt about being upset.

What I had painted in each picture was just like one of those "magic" drawings for kids in "Highlights" magazine, (does that magazine still exist?) where there were images hidden in other images, and it was a game to find what they were and where they were. I had done it by slinging paint around - completely by accident, yet, obviously not by accident at all.

The whole process of what happened totally blew my mind. How could I have been painting completely abstract and had these images emerge in the work? What was really going on that something like this could happen? I rolled up these paintings, stuck them in my storage unit. Later I burned most of them. Think that I have one left somewhere. I have never again painted like that since. It scared me, but at the same time, being able to paint like that satisfied something big inside of me.

I've done little glimmers of being able to paint like that before. I'd been told that I could be a great painter by someone who knew enough for me to believe they knew what they were talking about. They said, "Not just good, not just famous - but great." Tried it for a little while, being a painter. But I didn't like the art scene and had no clue how to get into a gallery. So I became a sign painter. It allowed me to work big, which was something I liked to do. It paid the rent, which was also nice. I didn't like painting in a studio, I liked painting where there were people around, so painting on the street was fun for me.

The really weird part was that, after making these hugs paintings, I wasn't upset anymore about this thing that I'd been preoccupied with for months and had tried to accept but couldn't. Whatever I had done when I painted had resolved what I had been so upset about. It scared me that in order to paint like that, I had to feel that intensity of emotion. But painting worked as the solution to express the pain. I guess it worked because the pain got expressed in a non-verbal way - accidentally on purpose. I did something to externalize how I was feeling that went beyond words. So now - art is what I resort to when I can't use words.

So now, even though it's can be difficult to remember what works when I feel that nothing is helping me. When I get really stuck, sometimes it dawns on me that I can paint.

What do you do when nothing works to express how you're feeling?  

Time Flies & Slows

This year is the year of the boar, (if I've gotten it right.) Got to participate in pageantry by holding up a forty foot Chinese dragon. It was quite a challenge physically because I was near the front, untangling bamboo spines and hoops, but was quite a fun time.

I was born in the year of the water snake in the Chinese astrology, in the hour of the dog - which makes me an awfully sociable snake lady. Do you know your Chinese astrological sign?

Was thinking the other day how time seems to speed up and then slow down, back and forth during the course of my life. What reason it does it do that? What do you think about this?

Perhaps, the more events being noticed means more of time slowing down. When nothing in particular stands out, the faster time speeds up...

There's a species of tick that sits around on a branch for up to nearly 17 years in a state of semi-hibernation. ...Until a nice warm body happens to come within jumping reach and it seizes opportunity. In only a few days, it feeds on blood, makes babies and dies. Can you imagine what its perception of time would be?

How does time work for you?