Third Grade and School Singalongs

It was 1979, and if there was one thing that was great about being a third grader at Burton Elementary School is was all the singing. The tradition that continued until at least the 90s, by which time the old school had been torn down and replaced. When I was there, though, each of the two or three classrooms had a well-used piano, and several days a week the two classes would meet in one room or the other to sing our hearts out. We turned the desks sideways to form long rows and sat on top of them. Show tunes, patriotic songs, Christmas carols, songs our grandmothers had sung, songs that had been popular in the distant days of our teachers' youth. A decade later, YouTube suggests, the kids were still singing many of those same songs, but at the "new" Chautauqua Elementary. 

Each kid had a special song or two. They'd jump up, go to the front and help lead/perform the song (usually song and dance). There were concerts, of course, several times a year, and once I remember taking it all on the road to perform at another school. 

Third grade was also the year I really became a reader. I devoured chapter books, memorized poems, and composed stories of my own (which were terrible, I am sure). At some point that year I was tapped to go down the hall and tutor a first grader who was struggling to learn how to read. Craft projects and drawing were also a big deal at school, and that may be where my sister's passion for art first bloomed.

I had not yet begun to dread recess. But I remember the first clues that I might in how I felt when the tether ball went whizzing by my face and when a kid named Eric went out of his way to praise and encourage me as I kept missing balls on the foursquare court. 

That was the year the P.E. teacher, Mrs. Adams, called my mom to come in for a conference. The topic: how my sister and I needed to improve our ball-handling skills. We had both been born without depth perception and were hopeless at games and sports. At the teacher's recommendation, Mom bought us a big, bouncy, red rubber ball to play with. But our driveway was gravel, the road in front of our house a rough pavement with no sidewalks, so there was no place to really bounce or roll a ball except the garage, where we used it to "bowl," knocking down rows of my dad's empty beer cans. His drinking would later become a problem, but this is before that really happened, or at least before I had eyes to see it. At any rate, music and the arts were at least as much a big deal as sports and games, so I had little sense of falling short as I leaned more toward one than the other.

All in all, a very happy year. It brought the dawning of self-awareness and self-possession but came before the rise of self-doubt, social awkwardness, and hopeless crushes on the boys all the other girls liked, too. By junior high my parents' marriage would be on the rocks and my sister and I would become rivals, alternately rejecting and seeking to please one another, bickering, getting on one another's nerves. At this point, though, we were mostly just fast friends.

I wonder what it would take to regain the playfulness of an eight-year-old, the joy of singing and dancing and playing and drawing and telling stories? 

When People Used to Sing

Singing and singalongs were also a big part of life in many of the old-fashioned books I loved as a kid. Betsy and Tacy, for example, performed duets when they were children, and in high school and beyond would gather round the piano with friends and family to sing popular songs and songs well remembered from days gone by. I think, too, of Pa Ingalls pulling out his fiddle. The music we played at home, whether it came from my parents' record collection, the stereo, or my mom's little transistor radio, was often pretty singable; folk music had left its mark. So much of the contemporary music of that time was meant to be sung along with, perhaps unlike a lot of today's popular music.

And we sang a lot at camp. I went to Girl Scout camp, once to a Camp Fire Girls camp, and starting in sixth or seventh grade, five years of music camp. Eventually, as a church-going teenager, I helped with vacation Bible school and went on youth group retreats. But even in less-likely settings singing was part of camp. My sister brought home new songs from science camp. Do kids at camp still learn camp songs? Some of the same silly, singable ones? Or has that gone the way of gathering around the piano, except maybe at church camps?

Churches still sing, of course. But almost all church music, in the places I go, is worship music. You're singing directly to God. It's for him. Gone are the hymnals and harmonies. You rarely hear singing in parts. Even "rounds" and echo songs are gone. The music still stirs the emotions but you aren't supposed to be critical of it or focus on it. It's like it's all a means to an end, setting a stage for something more important than mere music. I get it, I guess, but somehow that no longer feels as much like singing to me. I miss the musicality.

"Praise and worship" music also has little room for storytelling. Complexity, artistry, and narrative are often replaced by emotion alone. But I'd rather come at worship a bit less directly at times. Churches where worship is so central that the singing is incidental feel kind of like schools only using music for educational purposes, like mnemonics. In those third-grade singalongs we sang "Fifty Nifty United States" with its list of states in alphabetical order. But not so we could pass a geography test. We also sang songs that were rich and beautiful, and others as joyful and playful but evidently purposeless as "The Beer Barrel Polka" and "Ragtime Cowboy Joe." 

Why Not Bring Back Singing?

A while back a friend of mine wrote an article advocating for more singing in modern life... including singing at work. Why should children and churches, field hands and fisherman have all the songs? Anyone game for an office choir?

See also, from the archives, a reflection from my Young Life days, Songbook.

(Image from Pixabay)

Anticipating Travel: a tale of two attitudes.

Things are moving ahead with our trip to Southeast Asia in January! I just bought the tickets yesterday. One thing I may not have said in my last post about this is that the day after I mentioned the scheme to one of the top guys in our office in Florida, he told me he and his wife had talked about it and would like to pay for my husband's ticket so he could go. Awesome! So his assistant got things rolling with Finance and HR and I'm getting a one-time salary "bonus" to cover the airfare. Most of our on-the-ground expenses will be either be covered by those organizing the events or are legit to reimburse from my work account, so we can make this work without breaking the bank. The big cost will be the loss of income, since Hubs doesn't get any paid time off.

I have been quite grumpy in the process of researching and buying the tickets. So many options! Go East! Go West! Go fast! Go slow! Fly a US airline! Fly an Asian airline! Fly all the way around the world!

Add to that the fact that my least favorite thing to do is spending large amounts of money. And even with all the reimbursements, it's a lot to put on my credit card. I have a hard time getting past my mother's warning when I was 17 and going off to college with my first credit card in hand: don't use this. It's only for emergencies.

There's one more reason I've been grumpy, I think. It comes from the tension between two different approaches toward anticipating or preparing for the future.

You know how the key difference between extroverts and introverts is where they get their energy? Introverts recharge by spending time alone, while extroverts are energized by being with groups of people.

I wonder if there's terminology or a model to describe two tendencies in how we view upcoming events, and maybe especially vacations and travel?

If there aren't words for it, maybe I will make some up.

Here's what I mean. Clearly some people love to talk about, envision, and prepare for their next big trip. I think of a family I know that "surprised" their kids with tickets to Disneyland, but months in advance so the whole family could enjoy looking forward to the trip. And my dad and stepmom take a trip to someplace warm and sunny every February or March. Anticipating their vacation helps them keep going through each wet, depressing winter. And my husband finds that learning all about what he's getting into helps keep him from being overwhelmed by it all when he gets there. All that makes sense to me.

But... I'm not like that. I find thinking much about the trip to Asia that's two months away, especially when I have two domestic trips to plan between now and then, quite stresssful. Told a coworker yesterday that I kind of take pride in not packing or planning a trip until it's time. It means I may miss out on things that have to be set up in advance. It also means I don't put a lot of energy into making plans I can't carry out when further info comes in or circumstances change. It lets me put boundaries on things, and not think about a thing until it needs my attention. And that reduces my stress, a LOT.

Must sound funny to someone of the plan-ahead-and-anticipate style, though, to hear me complain about wasting energy looking forward to something. For them that's half the fun.

Good to be able to label my own thoughts and emotions in this. Better still if I can be prepared to push them aside and not get irritable when talking to someone who approaches all this differently than I do.

Making Improvements

These days I work closely (though remotely) with A., who works in our office in Orlando, and I tend to stay with her when I am in town.

A. has been learning about a personality type model called the Enneagram.

Heard of it?

One thing that makes the Enneagram different from other models is that rather than describing only the strengths and greatest contributions of each type, it tries to get at your motivations, fears, and weaknesses... maybe even your favorite deadly sin. One sign you've been correctly assessed is a gut-level groan of recognition. You've been "found out."

Many Christians are really into the Enneagram these days. I was curious. So, when we were hanging out a few weeks ago, A. pulled up the Eeneagram app on her phone and started asking me the true/false questions so we could figure out my type.

This is one of the books Christians
are reading about the Enneagram.

Looks like I'm a "Type 1," called The Reformer, Perfectionist, or Improver. Type 1's tend to see what's missing, what needs to be fixed, or what can be done better... and they aren't very good at giving themselves permission to stop and have fun. They are always looking for ways to make themselves, others, or projects and processes better.

According to this podcast, Type 1's not only have an inner critic, but a whole chorus of them. Well, maybe not a chorus, says the woman on the podcast. They're yelling, not singing!

Critical thinking is, of course, the secret to my success at work.

It is not so helpful or valued in my closest relationships, where telling people I'm not good enough, that they and their work aren't good enough (and no, we can't go out and play!) are not so well received.

According to this article, Type 1 is also the rarest of the types, with only 1% of the population. You might not want more of us... a little salt will do.

Contrast that with Type 7, "The Enthusiast," evidently 29% of the population, or Type 6, "The Loyalist," with 28%. Maybe the world needs more of of those. But you can see how we might clash. (Um, don't have to imagine, actually!)

Do you know your Enneagram type? How have you found that knowledge helpful? What do you think of the model more generally?

Fandom Fancies

Yesterday was game day, a fact well-advertised (at their own expense) by a good many of the residents of Columbia, South Carolina. As we went about our Saturday errands I noticed how many sported crimson gear demonstrating their allegiance to the South Carolina Gamecocks, especially when it comes to football, the sport currently in season.

The Need to Know

We didn’t watch the game, but felt we had to be in the know. As the evening progressed Hubs inquired about the score each time he asked Siri how the University of Oregon football team was doing in a simultaneous match against Wyoming. Though Oregon won 49-13, a sell-out crowd here in Columbia watched the Gamecocks lose 23-13. Had they won, the crowing would have continued throughout the city for another day. Instead, I suspect a hush has fallen over the topic for most fans, for now. Still, as Hubs connects with local guys he works with over Facebook or around the proverbial water cooler on Monday, he wants to have a basic grasp of what happened.

What's the Appeal?

It still catches me by surprise that so many people find their identity in the sports teams they cheer for, yet I have to admit enough interest to give a fair amount of my time to following my favorite teams. I’m not a “true fan” of any sport, I suppose; I use it primarily to establish or maintain common-ground with others, such as friends and family members back in the West, and to some extent, to those who aren’t.

Yes, I think that’s it. Showing allegiance to teams from the hometown or alma mater makes a statement of place both to those who share it and those who don’t. It’s part of my “I am from…” statement. Not as much as Puget Sound and Mount Rainier, blackberries and bookshelves, but a part.

Appealing to Allegiances

On a recent trip to the Northwest I went to an arts festival which featured Northwest icons in a prominent way. Not the sports things: as a juried art show, it did not have Huskies, Seahawks, or Mariners gear, at least not that I noticed. But it did feature more natural Northwest icons. I brought home a piece that managed to include Mount Rainier, Puget Sound, a Washington State ferry, and someone riding a bike down a hill during a sunset, all together in the form of a paper-cutting by a Japanese artist. All those points of appeal to my allegiances in one piece were hard to resist, and this one seemed made to fit in my suitcase and my frugal price range, too. So now it’s on my wall.

I suppose that makes the same kind of statement as the football jersey or baseball cap.

Now Consider the Funatics...

Attending the art festival meant skipping another Everett, WA event, the opening of a new headquarters for Funko, a Northwest company that got its start making bobble-head dolls and grew into what may be the world’s largest manufacturers of licensed toys and pop-culture collectibles. Who knew? They’ve made their new HQ into quite the interactive consumer experience, like a seamless blend of Disneyland and the Disney store. It features sections catering to fans of Marvel Comics, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and more. They were expecting thousands of "Funatics" to attend the grand opening.

Sports and pop culture, all in one.

Taxonomy of Fandom: Justified or Unfair?

I find my own prejudices affect how I view the world of fandom. Picking up watercolors of Mt. Rainier and ferryboat knickknacks seems like healthy home-town-ism to me, while my-country-first rhetoric seems like dangerous patriotism. Why? What's the difference? Is it that Puget Sound is real and worth celebrating, not costing anyone else, whereas American Dream is a political philosophy or fiction with a high pricetag for other people and the planet?

Sports fans seem, to me, sometimes excessive, but ultimately more acceptable than pop-culture collectible collectors. Why? What’s the difference? In both cases we’re talking about commercializing on someone else’s achievement, licensing the work of a team of athletes or artists and selling overpriced “gear” so others can identify with it. Is it that a quarterback is a real person while a comic-book character is not?

In the end I think my taxonomy is little more than a ranking of prejudices... concluding that while I'm entitled to my opinions, so other people are entitled to theirs. Cheer for who you will and collect what you want; we all have our preferences and our own ideas about how far we'll go to proclaim or protect them.

Considering Cohousing

Until a few years ago, many of the grad students at the Christian college campus where we live made their homes in a community called The Village. This cluster of mobile homes out in the woods had been there a few decades. Many of them were pretty run down and plagued by mold and dry rot, but the married students and families who lived there loved the sense of community they shared.

When a complex of new, modern apartments was complete, The Village was closed down and the rotted-out trailers sold, given or hauled away.

The apartments, no longer limited to the same population, include not only graduate and seminary student families, but also older single students, faculty and staff, and alumni like me. They are clean, well designed, and a big step up in luxury.

But no longer do all the residents know one another. Sometimes nearest neighbors still share meals and families with young kids still get their kids together to play, but it isn’t the kind of place you can easily meet people or shoo your little ones out the door and know they will be looked after. In fact, we have policies against that which help protect the children. I was glad those policies were in place when a young daredevil crashed a scooter and broke her arm coming down the hill outside our building not long ago. No, we don’t want the kids running wild. But in The Village, I think they pretty much could. It was a tight community.

What keeps the apartments from creating that same sense of community? In part it’s the architecture. American housing is set up to protect values like luxury, convenience, and privacy. It’s not like The Village, where everyone would see each other coming and going and know who lives where. I imagine some would put up a cute wooden sign with their name in front of their trailer. I suppose I could still put a sign on my door, but with few shared stairwells, who would see it? So, physically, we can't create that atmosphere. We don't have balconies or patios; most can't see each other come and go. While there is a good amount of shared space, many avoid it.

We do have a nice community center which hosts events, formally and informally. There's coffee, and a printer, and some places to study, play games, or hang out. Staff and residents do what they can to foster relationships. The laws and ethics placed on apartment managers require them to protect the safety and privacy of their residents, though. They feel that their hands are tied. No nametags at community events, for example, and they are rather cautious about introductions, though they love to see us meet one another. We also have a Facebook group now. That may help. Our shared faith and values certainly help.

But most who become friends know each other more from taking classes together or working together in a campus office, not from being neighbors. Counseling students, bonded by the forced intimacy of their small classes, stick together. MDiv students meet to study Greek. People form alliances according to their sense of direction or stage of life, along, of course, with their level of interest in forming connections with others.

There are people who never show up at events; they want to go their own way. So that points to another reason we don't have as much community as we might: a lot of people don't want it. That's not necessarily what they are looking for, here.

On the other hand, some of the moms and single students seem to have hoped for more community and find themselves lonely or isolated. We have a lot of international student families. I think it's pretty tough on them, maybe especially if they come from more communal settings. Last year I heard one of the Chinese students say his wife cried every day. She was at home with little children and didn't speak much English. Ouch. I need to try harder to connect with my other Chinese neighbors!

Then there's the size of the place. There are too many of us, too spread out. I'm glad they stretch the net wide enough to include people like me. But the size of the group? You can't be friends with that many people. It’s a lot to overcome.

No, I don't want to move into a trailer park. "The Village" is gone and even if it weren't, I'd find my clean, new apartment a better choice. Yet I wish we could have the sense of community that from all accounts they seem to have enjoyed.

Meanwhile, my dad and stepmom, as they get older they are looking at joining or starting a co-housing community. It’s a trend that has spread to the US from Denmark, in part, where a large percentage of people live in some kind of intentional community. Some buy up houses, tear down the fences, and put up shared kitchens, dining halls, laundry facilities, and gathering spaces. Others take over small apartment buildings and remodel them to overcome that American push for privacy. They plan social events and work parties, plant gardens and hold community meetings. Apparently, in the US, it’s illegal to require residents to commit to volunteer a certain number of hours in serving others, but that kind of thing is encouraged or understood.

A key distinctive of co-housing, it seems, is intentionality. It's there in the architecture, in the number of units, in the way the place is managed, and in the expectations people have in choosing to live there. These things don't tend to come together accidentally through a few people trying to create them, not when others are pushing for privacy. It works best if everyone knows this is what they are opting into from the beginning.

On the other side of my family tree, my mom and stepdad have moved into a retirement community that offers many of the same benefits as co-housing, plus services needed more by the elderly, including multiple levels of nursing care and help with transportation and shopping. On visiting, I thought the amount of interaction one could have was great. Everybody has dinner together every night. You don't have to come every night, but you're paying a lot of money for them to make you dinner every night, so most people are there most of the time. Other services and activities are purely optional, but diverse and appealing enough that people can easily form friendships through them.

Every person or couple has their name on their door, and there are shared hallways. It's easy to run into someone in the elevator or on the way to the dining room, bistro, meeting room, or post office. It's easy to make friends. A newsletter uses people's names and apartment numbers freely, and many wear their name tags to dinner and activities. I like that.

I also saw how it could feel a little pushy. It's not as counter-cultural as full-on co-housing, but it's still a little weird. Mom and I went to visit a nearby church and I wondered if she would want to go back given how many of her neighbors noticed us there and remarked on it when we ran into them later. It's one thing to have dinner with the same people every night (as Mom has begun to do) and be missed if you aren't there or if you eat at a different time; no big deal. It might be annoying, though, if you just wanted to sleep in and people bugged you about missing church or a fitness class, as if you need to do this because it's good for you and why weren't you there?

What's accountability and inclusion, and what's just annoying? Intrusive neighbors could really restrict one's sense of independence. When it comes down to it, being independent is a much stronger value in America than being interconnected.

Would you want to live in co-housing? How far would you be willing to go to share life with others to whom you weren’t related? What things do you think you'd enjoy most about it, and what things would be hard for you? Intergenerational families living together assure me that each woman needs her own kitchen! What else?

To learn more, see The Cohousing Association of the United States.

Advertisers as Guides

“The American self characteristically chooses advertisers instead of apostles as guides,” says Eugene Peterson.

I recently felt the pressure myself as we were driving the ad-saturated route to the tourist town of Myrtle Beach. We decided to count the billboards advertising a single “attraction,” a dinner-and-show experience called Pirates Voyage (“The Most Fun Place to Eat! TM).”

We counted 57 billboards. Our hotel lobby also had brochures, and “Pirates” had provided the little sleeves for the hotel key cards.

Is it any wonder I picked up the message, “a trip to Myrtle Beach would not be complete without going to ‘Pirates’!”?

Nevertheless, we did not go there.

We also failed to visit almost all of the hundreds of beach supply stores, despite their loud fluorescent signage, as well as the many all-you-can-eat seafood buffets and pancake houses. We did not play a single round of miniature golf. We never made it to Ripley’s Believe It or Not. (Believe it or not.)

I don’t say this with an air of superiority, as if I am above such things, but one of acknowledgement. Though I am not a person interested in fun (per se) I still felt the strong tug to check them out.

Advertising. It's powerful stuff.

Image source

A Taxonomy of Clutter

The article, found on Facebook, was titled 11 Things in Your Home That Are Making You Unhappy, and I couldn't resist clicking through. Though flawed (inevitably) by the "how to be more like me" bias, I thought the conclusions seemed pretty helpful.

(Remember, "All models are wrong, but some of them are useful.")

It also introduced me to several kinds of clutter. Do you, or people you love, pile up stuff for these reasons?

1. Sentimental clutter: Do you have furniture, knickknacks, or other "treasures" that were once important to you, received as a gift, or passed down through your family? And do you feel bad whenever you see them because they no longer have the magic and you feel guilty getting rid of them or giving them away? Your heirlooms may have become sentimental clutter.
2. Bargain clutter: Who can resist when stuff is free or on sale? Swag from conferences, great deals, and things that seem to good to pass up but don't look so good as time goes by may have morphed into bargain clutter.
3. Abundance clutter: And what about those extra items that you might need someday? If you are so fully stocked, with backups for your backups, that you can't find things or forget what you already have, you might be amassing abundance clutter.
4. Aspirational clutter: A stash of books or magazines you mean to read or an excess of tools or hobby supplies that triggers guilty feelings may be reminding you of the time you thought you'd have (but don't) or the person you thought you'd become (but haven't). It could be aspirational clutter.

What do you think of this taxonomy? "When we understand why we are holding onto clutter, it makes it easier to get rid of it," says one author.

Image found at https://futuristicallyyours.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/clutter.jpg 

"Icebreakers Are Terrible. They Also, Unfortunately, Work Really Well."

This is the time of year when walking into a group of strangers with the hope of charming them enough that they will listen to me talk at them for a few hours, or making a new friend (of sorts), is something I do rather a lot. But as a shy (broken?) extrovert, I sometimes find it intimidating and welcome help, like having a bit of structure or someone in charge to set the tone. What about you?

Check out this article from Cari Romm of New York Magazine for an interesting perspective on the effectiveness of "icebreakers."

"It’s back-to-school season, which means it’s time for fresh starts, pumpkin-spice overload, inappropriately themed sale displays, and — if you’re actually going back to school — racking your brain for suitably fun facts to share with a classroom full of strangers, or gearing up for endless rounds of two-truths-and-a-lie in a dorm lounge. Truth: Here’s a thing I did this summer. Truth: Here’s something about, I don’t know, a family pet. Lie: This is fun.

"To all but the most enthusiastic few, icebreakers are just a necessary evil — even though they’re supposed to dispel the awkwardness, forced getting-to-know-you games often feel like they’re just making an awkward event even more so, whether you’re at freshman orientation or a corporate retreat. So why do we insist on beginning so many situations by suffering through trust walks and elaborate name games? Is there any value to making a roomful of people miserable with false cheer?

"Psychologist Anton Villado is adamant that the answer is yes, and that icebreakers don’t have to be pleasant to be effective."

Keep reading to see why Villado says they work and what they can accomplish.

H/T Tony Sheng.

What if everyone had an ocean?

For a big chunk of my childhood we lived on an island. The waterfront was never far away; any drive around Vashon was punctuated by glimpses of Puget Sound. An easy bike ride would take me to the beach or fishing pier (though riding back home might be too much for little legs). Seattle, where we lived next, was much the same.

Soon, though, life took me further inland, first to college a vexing hour-long drive from the Pacific (but at least surrounded by broad, beautiful rivers heading that direction), and then to Colorado, where the nearest beach was 1000 miles distant and nearly every body of water was a man-made reservoir.

I pouted. No water? "We should flood Nebraska and put in an ocean!" I quipped, privately pondering whether I'd prefer having one to the east of me, for sunrises, or west (so long, Utah), where it would have to be on the other side of the mountains, but better suited for sunsets.

Never did I really think that, short of massive climate change, such a thing might happen.

Turns out that half a dozen US development companies have been been formed around the idea of inland seas. Well, something like that: a chain of surf parks. 

It's not about strolling on the beach, soothed by rhythms of waves on the pebbles and changing tides, or birds, bonfires, and boats. Such things, though widely appreciated, might not be able to provide the financial drive to support this move.

But competitive sports might. With surfing set to become an Olympic sport at the 2020 Games in Tokyo, the appeal of acres and acres of perfectly designed waves may find its audience.    

To learn more, see For Developers, the Surf Is Always Up (New York Times, via Eugene Register Guard) or visit Inland Surfer.

The Ledger Sheet

(See also Pesky Emotions).

It would be great if the language of gratitude were my native language; it isn't. I still increase my own suffering by interpreting situations with an invisible ledger sheet in hand to record the pain, loss, or disappointment. At times I just count up my losses while overlooking or discounting gains and take the whole thing very much to heart. To change this approach takes a conscious decision rather than doing what comes "naturally" and getting upset.

I'm keenly aware that we moved out of our house five weeks ago and I still don't get to go home, not for another two weeks. We're staying with people when we're not in hotels, and moving from one set of circumstances and relationships to another, without the chance to go "home" to some more comfortable way of life in between. This vulnerable season has brought lot of my insecurities to the surface.

The first morning we were staying in the place where we're currently laying our heads was a rough one. I was the first one up and in my pre-coffee stupor got confused about how things were supposed to be done in this house and ruined the coffee maker. I filled the entire house with smoke, woke the household, and added to that ledger sheet of mine the humiliation of being laughed at by my husband and the folks we're staying with  (who were glad the smoke wasn't from something worse and happy to laugh it off, though of course we speedily replaced the damaged items).

I hate being discovered making foolish mistakes and being laughed at, though. So I took the whole thing very hard and just wanted to run out of the house and never return. Yeah, not really an option. And certainly an overreaction to the event.

Then over the next few days things like that happened again. Not so dramatic, just little situations such as often come when you are staying in another person's home and reminded that they want you to do things the way they would do them. My cross-cultural experience seems to make it worse rather than better as previous parallels come to mind, situations I navigated either poorly or well but where the same emotions surfaced.

So I wondered if there was anything constructive I could do with that. As I reflected on the strength of my own emotional response to these incidents I remembered occasions from when I was as young as five or six and received correction for things I often didn't know were seen by others as wrong or inappropriate. You know, "getting in trouble." At what point did my little brain decide that "getting in trouble" was the worse thing that could happen? How much as this affected the way I see myself, others, and God or how I navigate life even now (at least at times)? And what can be done, even without professional help, to heal the ancient wounds and improve my responses to these "trigger" events?

Deep questions. But probably good ones to unpack if I want to conquer my fears, stop taking myself too seriously, and grow in resilience.

 It's OK, Marti, said the gentler voices I'm trying to listen to more often: your pain and suffering are real and valid and it's OK to be stressed and worn out by all this transition. But are you willing to consider that there might be another way? Yes, I know there is another way, and I'm willing to lay this way down and consider other ways to look at things and other ways to respond.

One of the strategies that seems to work the best is to start a fresh ledger sheet: a list of blessings, gifts, benefits, and wonders. It doesn't take much more than just a choice to shift my gaze to see how this season of transition has been one with blessing after blessing, troubles averted, and unexpected gifts. I'm grateful for so many signs of God's hand on us and ways he's using this season for our good and to bring good things to others as well.

Just writing or talking it out helps put my melodrama into perspective and provides the objectivity I need to carry on. If I don't want to take all this out on others, it helps to keep a journal handy. If I use it to record troubles, it lightens them. If I use it to record blessings, it gives them extra weight.

See also: Counseling (2010 post)

People don't need good advice.

"People don't need good advice, they need good news," one of my Twitter feeds tells me. "My friends appreciate my advice most if it’s brief and wrapped in encouragement. Advice is a seasoning, not a meal," says another.

"Few people like to be told what to do or how they should do it,"  says a leadership guru I also follow. "Leaders often inadvertently discourage their staff by being overly directive."

Many of us get defensive when someone tries to tell us, to our face, what to do. Like little kids are wont to tell their older siblings: "You're not the boss of me!" Just listening to another offer unsolicited advice is tough for me... I find it hard not to leap to the advisee's defense and defend their right to reach conclusions and make decisions on their own.

Despite this resistance to being told what to do, why do we we embrace advice so readily when it comes from a more impersonal source? Few can resist seeing what someone else has to stay in a those ten-steps-to-success, eight-mistakes-you-might-be-making, or five-things-you-need-to-do-right-now sort of list-icles.

Maybe it's like reading your horoscope or a fortune cookie. You know you can take it or leave it. Whereas when a friend, colleague, or family member puts a finger in your face or starts laying out a case, whether harshly or lovingly, about what you (yes you, personally) need to do, emotions are provoked. You know that a response is required.

What do you think?

Odd jobs, new ones, and those soon to be obsolete

About a year ago I wrote about a woman I met who had one of those jobs I didn't know people had... as a pretend patient to train medical students. New jobs crop up all the time these days. Back in the late 50's when my mother's parents urged her to become a teacher (a suggestion that didn't stick) they probably had no idea that the career as a software tester she'd eventually pursue was even an option. Who'd imagine it? As Douglas Adams once said,

“Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things.”

One of my favorite movies, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's Desk Set, explores the tensions of a group of information specialists afraid of being made obsolete by a computer, one that probably had less power than the phone you carry in your pocket.

Such tensions haven't gone away, but gotten "worse." Today I came across an article from a 2014 edition of The Economist assessing the likelihood that various livelihoods will disappear as people are replaced by machines. The article is behind a pay wall, but here's a chart summarizing their predictions along with a caption:

"Which jobs will be obsolete in 20 years and which are likely to survive? We looked at the impact of automation in an article last year. Telemarketers and accountants beware. Personal trainers, dentists and the clergy are unlikely to disappear any time soon." http://econ.st/1KKj91U

"I can't believe Gilbert is dead!"

I grew up spending as much time with my nose in a book as with my friends; probably more. As an addiction, reading had some good side effects but some downsides too. My ability to make real-life friends was sometimes enhanced by the insights I gained from my imaginary friendships but also hampered by the limited amount of practice I gave myself with real people. It was often easier to retreat to re-reading a favorite book (where I could be sure that everyone would behave just as they had last time) than to get out there and learn the lessons of the playground. Even now, I sometimes struggle with frustration when others don't say the lines I've written for them and when scenes don't unfold according to script. Though I think that happens to non-readers, too.

These days many seem to find television and movies the more satisfying, engrossing medium. "Today, the TV set is a key member of the household, with virtually unlimited access to every person in the family," says the sociologist George Gerbner, who compares the power of television to the power of religion. "The more time people spend 'living' in the television world, the more likely they are to believe social reality portrayed on television."

I am not surprised to know people who feel more connected to characters on the screen than to neighbors, classmates, or coworkers, and maybe even family members. But when you add on the continued growth of celebrity culture, it has some funny effects, doesn't it? We start to feel as if musicians, athletes, and other celebrities are our real friends. And you can actually meet them. Follow them on Facebook. Write to them on Twitter. They are real people, even if their "brands" are carefully managed.

But what about actors? The job of these men and women, explicitly, is to present themselves as something other than they are... to portray the characters that, in a novel, would live only in one's imagination: Now they have flesh and blood.

A number of people I know were recently upset and saddened by the death of Canadian actor Jonathan Crombie. He's best known for portraying the young love interest in the much-beloved 1985 movie Anne of Green Gables. He was still in his forties and died rather suddenly of a brain hemorrhage, so that ups the tragedy factor.

Yet why were the fans sad? Few, I suspect knew much about the actor or had followed his modest career these last 30 years, much less his health, family, or inner life. They were sad because Gilbert was dead. Of course Gilbert was a fictional character and had never been alive in the first place.

What do we make of this? A healthy sign that one's imagination, empathy, and sense of play are still working, or something more ominous and distorted? Is it different from children playing with dolls, animal-lovers attributing human motivations to their pets.... or me crying over a book? (which seems perfectly justified! Or.... okay, maybe it's the same thing.) Is it a matter of degree or effect, a question of whether they express a healthy creativity versus an obsessive, corrupting, or idolatrous one?

We live in a post-modern day and age where it's hopelessly old fashioned to defend the notion of a common "reality" or the importance of being connected to the "real world." Under such conditions, it would seem like nonsense to evaluate these behaviors in terms of how they reinforce or distort our sense of and taste for what is true, real, good, or best. Wouldn't it?

Free ice cream other fringe benefits

"Crying because 'free cone day' at Ben and Jerry's is tomorrow while I'm at work!" posted one of my Facebook friends. She's a young woman characterized by a mix of sharpness and silliness I find rather endearing. While other friends bemoaned such bad luck, I briefly considered pointing out the happy fact that activities like going to work are what make treating oneself to an ice cream cone possible on any day, not just once a year. I said nothing, though, not sure that my relationship with her is strong enough to bear the weight of such logic!

Since then I've been thinking about how much I take for granted the intrinsic blessings, big or small, that come with the intrinsic limitations of my own life and maybe those of each one of us.

Friday we stopped by Chris's university in Portland to have lunch there on our way to Seattle, and caught sight of a flier advertising a sunset dinner cruise for seminary students. No price listed, but tickets for that particular experience run $70 a person; no chance it's free? Actually, it is, and we're signed up. One of those little perks that come along with the sacrifice of time and money we've made to get Hubs through school. And a nice way to celebrate graduation. Thank you, Lord.

Today I am working on resource reviews for the weekly, online magazine I manage. I regularly rejoice that I've got a job that allows me to spend so many hours playing with words and putting together articles, almost all of which are published. This morning, that meant spending a couple hours reading a mission-related novel. It's pretty good. I'm going to recommend it. But am trying not to feel guilty about starting my work week with such a pleasure!

None of us love our jobs (or our lives) all the time, but isn't it great to have a job with many moments you can love... and that provide the means of enjoying other things you love? 

Smiles in the Aisles

When I went on a company-sponsored cruise a few years ago, I was dismayed by the pressure to be pleased at all times. It's not that our company was necessarily supporting this manipulative practice, but the hospitality industry certainly was. Am intrigued by the idea that happiness is something you can mandate, cajole, engineer, or  produce.

It seems that a significant part of the business of offering great service these days is telling people you’re offering great service. Persuade people to like you by telling them how much they like you. Give them a gift and leave the price tag on; make sure they know about all its features and how "perfect" it is for them. As if they have no choice but to like it. And be happier as a result.

Amazing how often this actually works. People are happy because you tell them what a great time they're having (Though, silly me, I want to reserve the right to come to my own conclusion).

On a flight home from Orlando I noticed (and yes, smiled) at Delta Airlines’ boast of “75 years of smiles in the aisles.”

Is labeling the java “great coffee” supposed to set people up to enjoy it more? Does it work? 

Your Problem and How I Can Fix It

Duane Elmer, in his book Cross-cultural Connections, tells the story of a monkey "rescuing" a fish which was swimming against the current:

"He carefully laid the fish on dry ground. For a few minutes the fish showed excitement, but soon settled into a peaceful rest. Joy and satisfaction swelled inside the money. He had successfully helped the other creature."

The monkey was brave and noble, says the author, but because he could not see beyond his own frame of reference, he assumed what would be good for him would be good for the fish. And he may have never known the damage he did.

It's easy enough to draw the moral from a simple story like that and apply it to, say, serving the poor, or any kind of cross-cultural ministry. In his next chapter, however, Elmer quotes the newspaper editorial columnist Sidney Harris who applied the principle much more broadly, claiming that "every book that is ever published, every article ever written, and every speech delivered should have the subtitle 'How to Be More Like Me.'"

Why do you suppose we find this kind of thing so appealing? Why do we eat up the self-up titles, the seven steps to success in this area or that, the recipes for happiness? I'm amazed how appealing these promises can be.

What would it take to drop the subtitle and stop making those kind of false promises in what we write or say?

Full of darkness at one moment and full of light the next.

"Like the majority of humankind I don't know much about wholeness at first hand," writes Fredrick Buechner. "It is something that, at most -- like Abraham and Sarah and Moses and the rest of them -- I have every once in a while seen and greeted from afar, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, but that is about all. I like to believe that in a disorganized way it is what I am journeying toward, but the most I have to show for my pains is an occasional glimpse of it in certain people who had clay feet more or less like the rest of us but who struck me as being at least a good deal wholer than I have ever managed to become myself."

"...To be whole, I think, means among other things that you see the world whole." Having told stories about his grandmother Naya, one of the people in whom he had seen something more like wholeness, he explains, "She saw both the light and the dark of what the world was offering her and was not split in two by them. She was whole in herself and she saw the world whole.

"The world floods in on all of us. The world can be kind, and it can be cruel. It can be beautiful, and it can be appalling. It can give us good reason to hope and good reason to give up all hope. It can strengthen our faith in a loving God, and it can decimate our faith. In our lives in the world, the temptation is always to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running strongest. When good things happen, we rise to heaven; when bad things happen, we descend to hell. When the world strikes out at us, we strike back, and when one way or another the world blesses us, our spirits soar. I know this to be true of no one as well as I know it to be true of myusself. I know how just the weather can affect my whole state of mind for good or ill, how just getting stuck in a traffic jam can ruin an afternoon that in every other way is so beautiful that it dazzles the heart. We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors. The fragmentary nature of our experience shatters us into fragments. Instead of being whole, most of the time we are in pieces, and we see the world in pieces, full of darkness at one moment and full of light the next.

"It is in Jesus, of course, and in the people whose lives have been deeply touched by Jesus, and in ourselves at those moments when we also are deeply touched by him, that we see another way of being human which is the way of wholeness. When we glimpse that wholeness in others, we recognize it immediately for what it is, and the reason we recognize it, I believe, is that no matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons to us.

"...All his life long, wherever Jesus looked, he saw the world not in terms simply of its brokenness -- a patchwork of light and dark calling forth in us now our light, now our dark -- but in terms of the ultimate mystery of God's presence buried in it like a treasure buried in a field."

Source: Essay "The Journey Toward Wholeness" in the book, The Longing for Home, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.

What if it did happen?

Do you have dreams apparently entirely in another language you're trying to learn, or see yourself shine as you show off a skill you'd love to master?

Have you ever composed the perfect essay, story, song, or sentence in your head only to find it flee (or flawed) when you get a chance to write it down?

Or maybe you just imagine conversations where you connect (or conquer, as the case may be) in ways that never seem to happen in "real life." (Why not? Do you think it's just because the right circumstances didn't quite coalesce or the other person botched their lines?)

I'm wondering if the voices in our heads telling us the words could be perfect are more about confidence and not content. That feeling of getting it right, not the key to getting it right.

If that's the case, it's a beautiful dream about speaking flawless French; you didn't dream it all in French. It's the hope of writing that great song or story, it's not the one that actually came to you and somehow got away. It's wishful thinking about how you'd like to see yourself navigating relationships, probably not some kind of divine or diabolical inspiration.

Is this part of the appeal of fiction? Does it open the door for us to dream those dreams awake?

We watch a lot of action films in our house. Not my thing, really. On the one hand, I don't find them credible. I don't believe. You may see yourself as a soldier or superhero but the chances are very slim you will ever shoot anybody with a gun or run for your life or get in a car chase. Maybe the same could be said for the cheesy chick flicks for which I [sometimes] have more sympathy.

Is that desire, though, why you want to be that guy or that girl for an hour or two - maybe every night! - because it's not going to happen for you otherwise?

For me, the adventure aspect of the action films is overshadowed by the violence. When I watch violence on screen, I feel much much the same as I would if I saw it on the street. That's not what I want to feel. Even if I could suspect my disbelief, it's tough so suspend my dismay at what I'm watching.
  So the other thing about the fantasy stories of whatever type is the question, "what if it did happen?" Is that something to hope for, or a threat? Both?

Inside, do you really believe you'd have the courage, strength, or skill to come out on top? If opportunity or grand adventure really did come knocking - if your dreams began to come true - how would you respond? How would you handle it? Do you have what it takes, like that character?

Self image is a funny thing, isn't it? Maybe dreams and fantasy are where our hopes and fears come out and play.

"Many drowning victims go down unheard"

In a recent newsletter, a friend of mine serving in sort of a pastoral role overseas described an "aha!" moment he had when reading about how people people drown:

"While TV and movies typically depict drowning victims thrashing about, yelling for help and waving arms to get the attention of anyone who can help, in reality the opposite is generally true. When someone is drowning, they struggle quietly, with little energy to attract attention as their body and mind instinctively act to reserve energy just to try to keep afloat. In fact, there are many victims of drowning who are within earshot and perhaps even within reach of someone who could help but who isn’t even aware that someone is in trouble. With no energy to hold up that arm to signal that they’re in trouble, many drowning victims go down unheard, unseen, and sadly, unhelped."

(Read an article about this here.)

So basically, when people are most in trouble may be when they are the least able to cry out for the help that they need. See an analogy that goes beyond the beach or pool? Ever seen it in your own life? What are the applications to us for our lives and ministry? There could be people near us who are close to going under but can't get our attention. How might we train ourselves to be better lifeguards, more alert to the subtle signs that someone's in trouble, and prepared to take the initiative to follow through with a response?

The School System and a Diversity of Subcultures

Not long after my sister and I had our seventh birthday our family had a garage sale, loaded what was left into what seemed a very big moving truck, and piled into the station wagon with the dog for a long trip from one coast to the other. We were moving.

My father had been raised on a farm in Indiana and told my mother he had little or no interest in farming, but after some years away from it had gotten involved in managing a community garden project and now wanted to reconnect with the land. Maybe raise some sheep.

He got a job on the West Coast, where my mother was from, and we moved to a small farm on an island in Puget Sound. That's where we lived for 5-6 years until for a variety of reasons my parents' marriage dissolved.

Growing up in a small town / rural setting had a lot to offer a kid. We had plenty of chores to do around the house and property - picking vegetables, gathering eggs, minding the sheep, stacking firewood. Mom and Dad both worked hard while we complained about doing our share but had little of the back-breaking, all-day work that might have characterized life on a larger farm. There was plenty of time to play in the barn and build forts in the woods and name all the chickens. Our place had been landscaped so that something was in bloom every day of the year, and I loved to fill vases throughout the house with camellias, forsythia, roses - almost as much as I loved going out to the garden to graze on green beans, strawberries, and tomatoes of every description.

The School System

There must have been some homeschoolers on the island, but I wasn't aware of them; otherwise all the kids on the island went to the same elementary schools and middle school, and most would go to the same high school unless they took a ferry to mainland.

Although island life attracted folks others might consider kind of weird, in other ways the diversity was limited. In the schools, there were rich kids and poor kids but few black kids or Asian kids, and there was really only one clique of "popular" ones. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't Lord of the Flies or anything, but there was a pretty strong sense of social organization. I grew up having crushes on the same boys and wanting to be liked by the same girls as everyone else in my class.

Only later did I realize that while this is a common experience it is not a universal one. Both the D.C. suburb where I'd begun my education and the urban Seattle schools I would experience next were characterized by much more diversity and tolerance. I was taken by surprise in my eighth grade year at an inner city junior high to find how provincial I really was - how much I assumed people would at least try to march to the beat of the same drummer. Why didn't more people make fun of the kid in my math class named Geronimo, or the boy from choir who minced down the hallway like a girl and liked to paint his fingernails?

While I continued to look down on those who tried to be as weird as possible for no reason in particular, I was intrigued by the culture where, in spite of some bullying and racial conflict (of which I was sometimes a victim), it seemed as if people really were largely free to be themselves. Rather than pressured to fit into a restrictive mold.

Another move brought me to a school system and culture once again fashioned to form and favor just a certain kind of kid. There was less friction, and more money, and everybody was a lot more the same. I did well academically, but it was pretty lonely. In such a context I believed the lie of the enemy that there must be something wrong with me if I wasn't just like everybody else. Once again, even though the school was much bigger than the schools on the island, everyone in my class had crushes on the same boys and wanted to be liked by the same girls and there was really only one clique of popular kids.

I wonder if that's part of why I chose a college where diversity, once again, was "cool." Though I'm not sure I realized, going into it, that college would be so different, socially/culturally, than high school had been. It was a pleasant surprise.

Multiculturalism v. Blending in

Where is this rambling memoir going? I'm just wondering, now that I'm in my 40s, about the relationship between the culture(s) of a community - and particularly of a school system - and its effect on kids. How they feel about themselves. What kind of conclusions they reach about their own identity. How they look at other people. I don't think I'll ever have the chance to do this, but having tasted both I think I'd rather raise my kids in an environment that values diversity over homogeneity and "success." Living in an urban or international setting, at least for a number of years, would provide that. Is it something we can "make happen" without moving into a big city or going overseas?

Of course there are all kinds of other factors that go into where we decide to live and what we think will be best for our kids, including how we try to educate them. The three schools I attended that had a "free to be you and me" culture only got it through a great deal of social engineering. In the first case, the whole town had been designed - as Wikipedia describes it - to eliminate racial, religious, and class segregation (more here). The student bodies of the schools I attended in eighth and ninth grades were the result of Seattle's policy of forcibly busing kids long distances to create more integrated schools (more on that here).  

The world has changed so much since I was in school. Doing the kind of work I do, I keep running into people from medium-sized and small towns now hosting large populations of first-generation immigrants, refugees, and international students. In some cases this has brought conflict and violence, but I can't help but think the net result of growing diversity is good for all of us, that it will help us learn lessons about respecting other people's values and ways of life that we might not learn any other way - simultaneously, perhaps learning to accept our own eccentricities without idolizing them, becoming comfortable in our own skin, whatever its color.