105-2008-05-07

NOTE: The following essay has been written twice.  I first attempted to make it accessible to everyone by making it generic.  But it was really an essay directed to a specific friend with a specific challenge and so I thought the first draft was too vague.  So I rewrote it to make it an essay directly targeted at him.  That made it too specific and too personal for all of you.  However, he has given me permission to print this draft of it, making him a ‘generic professor’ somewhere out there, and now it holds relevance for anyone who might read it.  I believe it is some of the most important thinking I have done in some time.

What IS the Point?
By W. Owen Thornton

A friend of mine is a university professor somewhere in Canada.  There he brilliantly leads his life as the head of a department teaching and leading.  First let me say that I admire him greatly for all he has achieved in his life.  Had I to live my life over again, I would be more like him.  If I had a do-over, I would have found philosophy at the same time he found his discipline, and together we’d have been professors these long years.  Where I failed in my career path he has succeeded.  He is tenured and I’m only now going to school in philosophy after years of being lost in the wilderness.

Initially I say that it is shocking to me that someone who would seem to have so much of his life together would come to a point in his life where he would be asking a question like, “What is the point?”  But I know I shouldn’t be shocked because I think nearly everyone comes to that place eventually.  None of us is immune to it.  Maybe what I’m feeling is a genuine sadness for my friend because I know what it is like to ask that question (or similar ones) and not be able to come up with a very good answer.  It’s a terrible place to be and I would “will” it that he would not be in that place.  But … there he is.  And so, after a conversation with my friend which further clarified some of his challenges, I will now do the human kindness thing and see if I can help answer some of his challenges from the various perspectives we have taken here in this weblog.

“What is the point?” is a question with an unspoken ending.  It is really asking “What is the point of my waking up in the morning doing what I do?”  Before embarking on the specifics of this question and what it means for my friend, I feel required to address the theoretical issues of what is going on in this real-life scenario.  First, I believe introspection in our society is far too rare.  And for those of us who arrive at an introspective time in our lives, it is often not well tolerated by others who want us to pick up our socks and get on with life.  Some introspection is what being human is all about, if we but knew that fact.

The problem with, “What is the point?” is that the question doesn’t allow us to come up with a satisfactory answer.  Therefore it is not that helpful in the introspective collage.  “What is the point?” seems to direct us to two pretty poor answers.  First there is the easy answer, which remains erroneous: “There is no point.”  Second there is the ignorant but somewhat better answer, which equates to nothing more than a shoulder shrug combined with a hapless, “Eh!”  This answer reveals that there may be a point, but we haven’t got a clue what it might be.  Neither answer helps us find what we’re looking for in our lives when we ask, “What is the point?”  And the answer we’re looking for is finding meaning in our lives.  If we desire to find meaning in our lives we need to begin to ask better questions that will compel our minds to give answers where we will begin to once again see the point.

In terms of early modern philosophy (1600s) “What is the point?” leads to the very skepticism promoted by Montaigne, and which Rene Descartes fought against when he attempted to defeat skepticism by rebuilding the foundation of knowledge on God by using the cogito: “I think, therefore I am.”  Descartes believed that the rising skepticism of his day not only required a hearing, but demanded a response because he felt skepticism was dangerous to human kind and to our relationship with God.  If nothing matters, we really don’t have any reason to wake up in the morning, and Descartes knew, as I believe, that there is ALWAYS a reason to wake up in the morning.

“What is the point?” allows total skepticism to thrive and this must not be tolerated by any of us.  If we have a friend whom we love and we hear them using this kind of language is it up to us to help them to help themselves refocus their compass so that they can once again find meaning in their lives.  I have read Frankle’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” and I can tell you that if a person can find a reason to live his/her life in a Nazi death camp, we can find meaning in our lives whether it’s being a second year university student taking philosophy or a tenured professor.

So, the result of this ‘theory’ is that we need to ask better questions than, “What is the point?”  I’ll return to this in a moment.

To help you understand the situation more fully, my friend teaches liberal arts.  Universities encourage scholarly subjects which do not guide students towards a specific career whereas folks in the real world wonder “what is the point.”  An internal battle ensues for my friend because s/he would like to teach what he does while appeasing the others who want him to make a practical contribution towards the student’s education.  My friend is a gifted teacher and administrator.  I believe he has a true sense of his own worth, but I also believe his efforts are not recognized and therein lay a part of the problem.  Students come and go, papers are graded, marks are dispensed and little is seen in regards to the impact in their lives.  The administration knows he does his work and like many work environments the good employee is ignored while those who don’t do their work well get the ‘attention’ whether they like that attention or not.  So thousands of students are tested, the department runs smoothly, courses are taught, grades are submitted on time, extracurricular work is done which makes the university look good … all these things are what’s supposed to be achieved, but there is no good word, no follow-up … no appreciation and definitely no pat on the back.  The time when you might hear about something is when something has not gone well.  Administration pays attention to mistakes, but fails to recognize accomplishments.

So, dear reader, you need to hear that I completely understand why someone would ask, “What is the point?” under these circumstances.  Oh, and lest you think that I believe that everything would go away if my friend received a pat on the back … well I’m not that naïve.  “What is the point?” is not about to be completely solved with a pat on the back by the boss.  It’s not ALL about the rewards.  They would help.  They would alleviate the situation … but they wouldn’t solve things entirely.  Sadly life is not that simple.

Two paragraphs above I said a large part of the problem is a lack of recognition and then I said that being recognized by administration is not the be all and end all of solving our problem.  There is a second ‘body’ that isn’t recognizing my friend’s achievements.  Sadly that person is my friend.  This is also a tragically normal syndrome.  In the book “Discover Your Sales Strengths” authors Smith and Rutigliano talk about the 31 predominant themes people have.  (Remember from early essays that they have interviewed hundreds of thousands of people from different walks of life through the Gallop organization, asking them millions of total questions to come up with their ideas about how we operate as a species!)  Of the 31 themes, we excel at five of them.  These themes are how we behave and why.  They are our greatest gifts.  We know these aspects of ourselves so well they are like four-lane highways.  We travel along them often.  Mid-range themes might be like two-lane roads, while the last five themes might be like dwindling tracks in the wilderness.  Smith and Rutigliano argue against the commonly held theme that employees should be well rounded.  They say that regardless of what the lower five themes in our lives are no amount of training will bring those themes up to ‘average.’  We fail to do those kinds of things because we hate doing them and because we don’t see the point!  They tell the story of the crackerjack salesperson who could sell igloos to Eskimos but who hated to fill out the paperwork for the orders.  He knew how to do it, he just hated doing it.  Finally the company hired an administrative assistant to do his paperwork and once they had freed him from having to do this tedious task the salesperson went out and sold that much more product which paid for the assistant, gave him a hefty bonus and made the entire company more prosperous.

They go on to note that when asked about our five best themes in our lives, people often struggle to come up with any gifts.  This is the taken for granted syndrome.  People believe because their gifts are so second nature that their gifts have little value.  They come to erroneously believe that everyone must have those gifts and therefore they don’t see them as an asset.  But ask people to make a list of shortcomings and the list might be longer than their arm!  I have another friend who found this situation to be absolutely true.  In a church of over 2,000 members they decided to conduct a faith skills survey over a couple of months.  The people whom they had a hard time getting a survey response from were those who were afraid they had no spiritual gifts to offer!

It is difficult to know how to help someone become realistic about their giftedness.  Personally, I have had an eye-opener in my spiritual life.  People who consider themselves Christians are supposed to be saints first, sinners second.  Most often they see themselves the other way around.  I know that I make a first-class sinner.  Lately, I’ve become tired of being a sinner first.  I’m a pretty good person.  I’m not perfect, but I’m pretty good.  In fact, I’ll wager I am more of a saint than I am a sinner.  In the reformed faith, Calvin created the prayer of confession as part of the order of worship.  It was designed to acknowledge that we are sinners and that we need God to help us overcome that nature inside of us.  But Calvin also felt it was wrong to dwell on our sin.  If we are ‘holier than thou’ because we acknowledge our sins over our saintliness, we fall victim to pride.  Therefore it is better and appropriate to see ourselves as saints who err, rather than sinners who occasionally get things right.

In other words to fail to recognize our gifts and to dwell on our failings is theologically erroneous (a sin) and it is simply plain WRONG to fail to acknowledge our giftedness … our saintliness.  We need to give our heads a shake and wrap our minds around that!  (And you’re hearing this from a person who until a week or so ago lived his life this way, so I KNOW what I am talking about!)

Reframing the Question

And now, I’d like to look at reframing the question, “What is the point?”  I’m convinced by things I have read that if a human asks themselves an inner question that the mind feels compelled to go about finding a meaningful answer.  Ask bad questions.  Get bad answers.  Reframe your question to get the answer you’re really asking yourself, and you may begin to get better answers.

And so, I would reframe “What is the point?” with something like …

“What kinds of things do I do where I find meaning in my life?”
“Where do I find meaning in my life?”
“How do I go about finding meaning in my life?”

If we start asking questions like these, we begin to have introspective thoughts which redirect our minds to meaningful answers that lead us out of the “What is the point” syndrome.  I think therein lies another thing about, “What is the point?”  It’s a treadmill question that doesn’t yield a good answer and so we keep asking that question of ourselves waiting to see if we can come up with some kind of meaningful answer, and the problem is, there is no specific and meaningful answer to that question.

Now things get really tricky.  First we have to give ourselves permission to win.  In other words, when the mind comes up with meaningful answers to the above questions we have to pay attention.  We cannot ‘dismiss’ these good answers. 

Now I need another sidebar to talk about honoring ourselves and the answers we come up with.  In fact, I need to tell one sidebar to lead to another sidebar before I get to my main point.  My friend said that he could not succeed because he could never be done.  For example, in preparing for a lecture my friend said that he could never succeed, because there would always be another essay/book/article he could read that would help him prepare for that lecture which would make the lecture that much better.

Now let me say that we need to understand that ‘Being Done’ is a fallacy.  We are never done.  Businesspeople often never have enough or all of the information they require before they feel compelled to make a decision.  To wait for all the facts would force the decision to be too late to be effective.  That’s one perspective on the ‘being done’ fallacy.  Here’s a very theoretical one.  We should celebrate the fact that we can never be done.  We should celebrate the fact that we work in such a field that is so rich we can never be done.  This gives us the motive to wake up and read another essay/book/article because it leads us to a new place of learning and growth and understanding.  This is the exciting part of the world we live in. 

Personally, in thinking about this line of reasoning, I believe I never want to be done.  If I’m done, I’m at the end.  There is no more.  And if there is no more and that’s what I love to do … now, perhaps I really do have a reason to ask, “What is the point?” or at the very least, “Now, where do I go from here?”  To return, for a moment to our earlier meanderings perhaps we have a third answer to “What is the Point?” which might be our best yet: “The point is the point!”  Still to rework a beer advertisement metaphor this answer might taste better, but it still isn’t satisfying!

And herein lays my sidebar to my sidebar.  My friend spoke to me about an exciting essay he had recently edited.  In this I want to point out that it’s okay to love what you love.  He spoke to me about it with enthusiasm and passion.  But, he wanted to know the point of his reading it.  It didn’t change the world.  It didn’t matter.  It felt like to him, that only about six people in the world would care about this content.

The thing is the essay meant something to him.  It made him come alive.  It made him feel vital and excited about his subject area and his craft of teaching.  It added value to him which will in turn add value to his teaching which adds value to the students he teaches, his peers across the country and the world and with his team at work and the administrators who will one day wake up and come to care about his contributions.  It was important to him and therefore it is important.

Seriously I wish I was a better success at many things I’m writing about.  In truth, I think about three weeks ago I couldn’t have written this essay because … I didn’t have these kinds of answers, so I’m hot upon this subject matter for sure, but I am sure as hell no complete expert in living my life this way either … yet.  Exploring these very issues are the reasons that both compelled me to create the www.thehumankindnessproject.com  project and to go back to school in philosophy.

Here’s my personal example of doing what you need to do.  I remember having a recent conversation with a writer friend about an upcoming article I wanted to write for www.thehumankindnessproject.com .  I have had other people tell me that I should write how-to articles because that’s what people are interested in reading about.  I have had all sorts of friendly feedback about what I should write about and how I should do it, but the advice this writer friend gave me was the absolute best.  I told my friend that others had said I should write articles this way or that.  With those frameworks in mind for my upcoming theme, I found I didn’t want to write my next subject based on any of those strategies, sound though they might be.  And he turned to me and said, “I’m tired of writing what other people tell me to write.  Today I write about what I want to write about and in the way I want to write it.  If you have these different, clashing ideas which you think add up to some odd, but viable third point and you need to write that article that way … write it that way!”

Bravo!  Now I suppose that the other advice I have received might be the kind of advice that helps me write articles/essays that leads me to finding a publisher who puts me in a book where all these articles from the human kindness project earns a skillion dollars.  But doing what I have to do because I have to do it because that’s me … well … alas … that’s the way I have to write … isn’t it!  I don’t have a choice.  And … I’m beginning to become comfortable inside of my own skin because a friend gave me permission to be me.  So if you love an insightful article that only you and three other people in the world can appreciate and talk about … read it!  Love it!  Appreciate it!  Talk to your two friends about it.  Cherish it.  That’s you.  That’s who you are.  In this regard I would say to my friend, “I love you for it, old friend.  Please.  Love yourself enough to love you too … you and all your quirks and the rare, scholarly information that makes you my wonderful, unique friend!”  (There’s a point!)

And here’s something else to think about.  No one has any right to criticize that you love scholarly information in a rarified sphere.  I have one friend who reads World War II technical manuals about tanks and battleships.  I have another friend who can tell you to go to the page where you can find any answer to Dungeons and Dragons in well over a dozen different books.  And depending on the time of my life, I could have been able to quote lines from the original Star Trek, Star Wars (4 - 6) or Spaceballs!  Now I ask you what is the point of that?  The answer is that’s me memorizing lines from things I love.  It might be weird, but, hey!  It’s me!  Anyone who criticizes your love of ‘whatever’, exposes themselves to have their different, unusual thing that they love to be criticized and no one wants to open that kettle of fish!  If you can criticize others then they can criticize you.  That only seems fair.

To all of you I include YOU in my list of people who cannot criticize the things YOU love.  You cannot run them down because you are in turn running everything down about everything everyone else loves to do which doesn’t seem practical or relevant or perfect, or whatever we think we’re after here.  However, in saying that, if not allowing you to talk negatively about an aspect of your life prevents you from opening up to someone special and talking about these issues, you have to ignore that last comment.  Talking about these things is another way of processing all these thoughts and feelings inside.  Here’s another thought.  Whoever said that everything we think or do has to have a specific point?  If we believe that point then that too is a dangerous game to play!

Over the years I have come to discern that we have to feel worthy of hearing answers like that friend gave me: to write what I need to write.  A few years ago, I would have heard his response, and wrote the article the way other people told me I should have written it.  Today, I listen and have the confidence to do what is right for me.  I wrote it my way!

Low Ebb Times

I know a “What is the point?” question comes from someone at a low ebb time in their lives.  They have been down so long they can’t see that there is a way out.  And what’s worse is the only person who can do this work, the work of digging themselves out of their low spot, is the person asking the “What is the point?” question.  As an adult survivor of child abuse, I found it exceedingly unfair that after I had had my childhood stolen from me, and because of that I didn’t know how to live in the world, that the only person in the world who could re-parent me back to wellness was … me.  It took a lot of work.  (Some rare days even today, it takes a lot of work, but I’m getting better!)  At the time, my therapist was right when she said I should do little else other than work on my exercises to get well because by the end of the day I would be emotionally exhausted.  She was right.  I spent six months sleeping … a lot!  It is not fair that the person going through the tough times has to do the work of getting themselves back on track, but no one else can ever tell you what the point/meaning of your life is.  We can only offer you input to help you change your own compass.  You have to find meaning for you on your own.  (But I think you already know it, you’ve just been temporarily misdirected.  I think you simply need to let yourself see what you love, accept it and find the joy in it!  (But that can be so freaking hard to do!))

I think most of us who arrive at, “What is the point?” stages in our lives haven’t completely lost the point.  We know what excites us, and pleases us and challenges us.  We’ve just sort of temporarily forgot.  Maybe we have amnesia.  Maybe we begin to believe someone else telling us what SHOULD be important to us and we get derailed.  (Sometimes that other person can be our ‘own practical voice of reason’ (which can simply be dead wrong, by the way!)).  But being derailed is okay too.  We all get derailed at times in our lives.  The means on how we get to “What is the Point?” doesn’t matter.  What we do about it does!  My friend, there is a way out of “What is the point?”

To reiterate:

1. Reframe the question to ask where you find meaning in your life and you will get better answers.
2. Understand that to give in to what is the point is skepticism and skepticism is fallacious.  There IS always a point … we do know it internally, it’s just temporarily lost or buried.
3. Find ways to win by:
1. Getting recognized.
2. Recognizing your own achievements.
4. Recognize your gifts and accept them.  This one can be hard, but I hope I have presented some good things to think about why we should begin to do this!  Our unique giftedness is what makes us and the diversity is part of what makes the world a mystical magical place.  (And yes, you’re a part of the mystical, magical place.)
5. Release the sinner and embrace the saint whom you really are: know that to think otherwise is unhealthy.
6. Remember the world is unique and that each of us will find some small part of it fascinating in a way and to a degree that no one else may.  To criticize anyone’s search for knowledge means we begin a slippery slope where anyone’s about this ‘love’ means everyone else’s unique ‘love’ can be challenged and none of us wants that!  (Otherwise we won’t enjoy reading tank manuals or memorizing lines from movies.)  Everything we do is valid to us and that’s okay!  (see a future article 118 on judging versus accepting!)
7. Let yourself love what you love, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense because it doesn’t have to make sense.  We are both rational and irrational beings.  And yes, I know that does not survive the law of non-contradiction which states that two opposing forces cannot exist inside a single entity at the same time.  To which I will say, except for humankind!
8. Do what you need to do for you and don’t let anyone else mess you up!
9. It’s okay to be at low ebb … for a while.  Then you have to change your questions and start at number one so that once again, you know the point!
10. Know that there is someone out there worried about you and who loves you and accepts you for the way you are and is delighted to hear you talk about something unique that may only interest you!

114-2008-07-08

Teddy Bears and Mirror Neurons
By W. Owen Thornton

If what we suspect about mirror neurons is true, then teddy bears may have a phenomenal and positive impact on human kindness.  Susan Hurley wrote about mirror Neurons in her 2004 essay, “Imitation, Media Violence and Freedom of Speech.”  The material is groundbreaking.  Daniel Goleman, in his book Social Intelligence, examines much of the details about mirror neurons calling our experience of it, emotional contagion.

First, let me give you the short, short version of mirror neurons.  The discovery of them helps us understand who we are as creatures better than we have known ourselves in the past.  They create two direct impacts on our psyche.  One, when we see even a picture of a person in terror, we feel the same terror.  Put us under an MRI brain scan, have us look at a picture of someone smiling and the same parts of our brain become active as the person who originally expressed the smile.  We have the same emotional experience to a “T” though perhaps somewhat lesser.  This means that the same brain chemicals that fired in the person’s mind who did the initial action then fire in the exact same way in our own minds. 

Two, we also have the desire to immediately copy the act we’re witnessing.  The desire to mirror has been proven in two human cases.  One, it happens in babies.  Have a button on the floor to turn on a light and touch that button with your forehead, and the baby will turn on the light in the same way.  Even a sophisticated ape, with similar brain functions, might turn it on like that once or twice, but would eventually realize that a more efficient way of doing it would be to reach out and press the button with your hand.  Not so with the human baby.  The reason why adults don’t imitate everyone else and can act independently?  Eventually a part of the brain evolves that allows us to filter this response and we no longer have to copy people.  However, the second group of people who are compelled to mirror others are those who have had brain damage to this part of their mind.  Once again they will imitate everything they see.  They are compelled to imitate.

Hurley talks about why we resist even allowing this knowledge to enter our minds.  One, denial of the desire to imitate appears to be internal … without our own comprehension of it.  When you ask someone with the part of their brain that is damaged which prevents normal people from imitating NOT to imitate, they continue to imitate and they simultaneously deny doing it even while they are imitating.  For example, tell them to not imitate scratching their face as you are and they scratch their face.  Confront them with the fact that they are doing what you asked them not to do and they will say, “I am not doing it!” 

Two, denial of imitating others or denying to have the desire to imitate others seems rationally motivated.  We believe ourselves to be strong, fierce, independent creatures.  We have free will.  To even consider that we feel compelled to mirror what we see, even though this appears to be fundamentally true and proven according to the best science we can apply to the situation, would mean that somehow we lose a portion of our autonomy.  This is such a hideous concept that we cannot rationalize it and we deny that this element exists within us.  We cannot be ‘determined’ to do things based on simply seeing what someone else is doing.  If you are one of these latter people, then the speculation portion of this article about teddy bears is not for you.  If you can accept the notion that we have mirror neurons that compel us to feel and react in a controlled fashion than you just might be able to use this ability to practice even more human kindness.

Just before we get to teddy bears, then, we need to deal with envisioning ourselves to success.  This is tricky business.  To lose weight people have often placed pictures of pigs on their refrigerators, or people who are massively obese.  But seeing these images mean we are pigs … we are obese.  Our minds fire off chemical compounds to confirm that we are these things.  Therefore, what we need to do is place a picture of a person on our fridge who looks like we want to look like.  We place a healthy-bodied person on our fridge door and then, the mind affirms that we are healthy … we’re experiencing healthy, even if we are at the moment overweight.  Remember, see it … and experience it.  See it and you mentally have the desire to imitate it.  Only place things around the house that allow you to envision what you desire for yourself, and you manifest this result for yourself.  Those who emotionally or rationally deny that we imitate therefore lose this special ability we’re talking about.

And so, we arrive, at last, at teddy bears.  Let’s think about what a teddy bear represents to a child.  Teddy bears are stalwart companions.  They are loyal.  They love you.  They care about you.  They are totally dependent upon you.  They love hugs and kisses and tea parties with dolls.  They like to sit and watch you play baseball, or better yet, they even like to have their own hand of cards in front of them so they can play with you.  Humans anthropomorphize teddy bears: that means we project human characteristics into them.  And we usually project the best of human characteristics into teddy bears.

Now stick with me on this next bit.  Because we, even as adults “know” teddy bears are ‘human’, they therefore still must have human characteristics even if we rationalize that they don’t have any of these characteristics … that they are thread, fabric and cloth … that they are no more ‘human’ than a lampshade.  Really!  Why else would we buy a teddy bear for a child: because we connote meaninglessness to a teddy bear?  No!  We buy a child a teddy bear because we connote all of these meanings with them … even as an adult … even though we know it’s not real.  If we didn’t believe we were giving all these loving, kind, caring things to a child while we simultaneously gave them a teddy bear, we would buy them a computer game instead … or … a desk lamp.  Just think about how long it takes most of us to buy that child’s bear.  We examine them, pick the right colour, choose the one with the friendliest face, and determine the one we think will most connect with the child.  I’m betting that in almost all teddy bear purchases, they are examined for these human characteristics to some degree.  How heartless it appears to us to simply reach out and buy a teddy bear like we were grabbing a box off a shelf that contained an alarm clock.

Just what are we talking about here, when it comes to mirror neurons, then?  We make teddy bears real with how we think about them.  They evoke real emotions.  Therefore just as when we see a picture of someone flirting and we feel ‘flirted with’ then as we see a teddy bear we must be feeling loved, accepted, and cared about.  So, when we hug or kiss a teddy bear, or if we tell it our sad stories, then we must be getting the same chemical buzz in our brains as though we had hugged or kissed or told a real person our sad stories.

I believe what I am about to reveal to you is an anecdotal story, that it is not a fiction.  A man who had suffered from child abuse became powerful in industry.  While psychologists estimate that the dysfunction caused to most people suffering from child abuse is in the billions in Canada alone (lost wages due to horrific low self esteem, costs due to hospital and psychological treatments for physical harm and emotional problems etc.) sometimes these folk can bury the hurts deep enough to truly succeed … for a time. 

It all unraveled for this man while he was in the midst of running a successful company.  The threat of the loss of his livelihood and the negative impact on his employees should his problems run amok and destroy his company compelled this man to do whatever he had to do to overcome the abuse.  He sought professional help and did so in a way that allowed him to do whatever was required to get better … fast!  He found a counselor who wanted to fix what was broken: the man’s childhood.  The only real way I’ve heard of helping folk like this is to have them parent themselves to wellness.  This laborious task means buying … yes … a teddy bear and treating it like the abused child within the adult.  You have to be emotionally hurt or damaged a great deal in order to desire to be fixed to the point where you will buy a teddy bear and treat it like it was you when you were a child.  If you cannot overcome this bit of weirdness, true therapy remains a long ways off. 

Guided by the therapist the hurting adult gives the child (teddy bear) the emotional support it needs.  The only way to overcome the things never received as a child, which are required to let people be fully-functioning adults, is give the child what it needed when it needed it and how it needed it.  This means saying the words of love and comfort aloud to the teddy bear, telling it that it is loved and cared for and wonderful and a delight to be around etc.  As the barriers to treatment and a dysfunctional life are broken down, the adult survivor of child abuse slowly comes back to him/herself for the first time.  At last the mentally tortured child within integrates with the adult.  The child learns it was not the cause of the abuse … that it was not a black hole of evil … and that it was a loving, caring child who is accepted and … well … perfect.

So, this man went through the healing process.  A good therapist can walk someone through this healing path in six months.  Grateful for the cure, and in love with his teddy bear/child the man then wanted to fix his company.  I’m betting that there were two problems with his company at this stage.  One, for however long he was in treatment, his company was probably taking second fiddle and so he would have to bring it back to its earlier status.  Two, people who suffer from child abuse are most often polarized flight or fight people.  In other words the way they survive is by either being so nice no one will ever get angry with them, or they act angry all the time and dominate others before they can dominate you.  It would seem likely that the man succeeded by being a holy terror.  This then, because people mirror what they see, would have been the dominant attitude of his management team.  Be a holy terror or cease to survive in this company and ‘get out!’  The owner had to do something to bring everyone back to a more normal sphere … to make his business a friendlier, more caring place to work.

That’s when he had a stroke of genius.  He bought teddy bears for every manager’s desk and sent down an edict that it must be clearly displayed and kept on their desks.  Now, the edict might have been a hold-over from his old days and patterns of behavior, but it surely would have been clearly understood by a crew of staff he had groomed to respect that method of management.  They would do what they were told upon threat of being fired!

Subtly, slowly, everything in that company changed … for the better.  It is unknown clearly why, it changed but the speculation relied on those teddy bears.  When employees came into the office to chew out the boss’s a**, they would see the teddy bear.  Either they couldn’t take a boss with a teddy bear seriously and so they didn’t yell and shout and complain, or there just seemed something disarming about a man or woman with a teddy bear on their desk that they couldn’t yell, or complain, or … maybe you just couldn’t yell and complain in front of a teddy bear because you simply don’t do those kinds of things in front of loving, caring teddy bears.  And if the boss has a loving creature on his/her desk, then maybe the boss is a loving creature (though at the time it may have seemed highly unlikely!). 

And the power of the Teddy Bear worked in reverse too.  When a manager called an employee into their office to yell and scream at them, bosses found that they couldn’t do it.  They couldn’t be taken as mean-spirited SOBs who would fire someone’s a** as soon as look at them because … well … there was that darned teddy bear on the desk.  Somehow, people in that company found their humanity in stuffed teddy bears who, in reality, had no more love and affection than a desk lamp.

So teddy bears must trigger reactions in mirror neurons just as though we were dealing with a caring, loving person.  What you do and say to a teddy bear is what you do and say to yourself and others.  Maybe teddy bears are loving, little ‘people’ because we envision them that way as a child.  And because we envision them that way as a child and we carry that vision inside of us into adulthood (even when we know this is silly).  I’m betting, therefore that if we could place someone under and MRI and have them hug and kiss a teddy bear we would discover one of two things.  Either the same parts of the brain would light up as would in a child doing the same act, or the same part of the brain would light up when you were doing it to a human being.  I’m suggesting, though I’ve not seen the scientific study to prove it, that teddy bears are like perfect creations of accepting, loving human beings. 

This then has massive and positive repercussions for us.  If you’re feeling lonely, or down, you could talk to a teddy bear and receive the same positive brain chemistry as though you had done that with a real person.  You may not get the advice you need, (or you may, I’m not sure even about that because sometimes just having someone to listen to you is all you really need) but you would get the same positive feelings as though you told a real person.  And you can tell a teddy bear anything.  Remember what we said about teddy bears earlier? 

Teddy bears are stalwart companions.  They are loyal.  They love you.  They care about you.  They are totally dependent upon you.  They love hugs and kisses and tea parties with dolls.  They like to sit and watch you play baseball, or better yet, they even like to have their own hand of cards in front of them so they can play with you.  Better still teddy bears can keep secrets perfectly.  And when something is distressing you on the inside, the best medication is to get it out … safely.  What’s another great characteristic of teddy bears?  They never judge you.  You can tell them anything and they still love you. 

So if you’re lonely and you need a hug and a kiss, would you get the same brain chemistry reaction from doing it to a teddy bear than if you did it with a person?  Well the entire therapeutic model that the business man above went through seems to rely on this fact doesn’t it?  Otherwise, the entire treatment method wouldn’t work … it would be powerless to change the person.  How could telling a teddy bear, which you project your little wounded child into, that you love it and that it is important and perfect and loving … how could that work if somehow the mirror neurons weren’t aiding the process?  I know!  I was healed this way!

So where do we find ourselves?  Teddy bears may have a great dearth of purposes.  Feel lonely?  Hug and kiss a teddy bear.  If you check in with your ‘numbers’ as I’ve written about before, I bet if you check in before and after the hug, that your number of how you are feeling goes up.  Need to confess a sin?  Tell a teddy.  Want to unravel negative thoughts?  Talk them out with the teddy.  You’re NOT insane!  The beauty of mirror neurons means this is a good thing … this is a good way to be … this is a way to practice real and meaningful change in a completely safe and loving environment.

Can’t say a speech in public?  Place teddy bears around a room at home.  The great thing with them is they won’t laugh at you if you make a mistake.  And they have eyes.  As you speak, roam your eyes around the room making meaningful eye contact with the teddy bears.  Suddenly the thought of doing the same thing in a human setting isn’t quite so frightening.  I wanted to write, “in a real setting” where I wrote a human setting in that last sentence.  But the thing is, talking to a room full of teddy bears, because it may be triggering the exact same responses in you as though you were talking to a group of adult humans, means that delivering your speech to a group of teddy bears IS A REAL SETTING!

If you’re nervous for your first board meeting, place teddy bears around the table at home.  Set up as many chairs as real people in the meeting.  I have over 70 bears around the house.  I could probably hand-pick them according to teddy bear characteristics in order to somewhat ‘match’ the characteristics of the real people who will be in that meeting later on!

If you’re running a small business, you know how many hats you wear.  But this next example doesn’t have to be about running a small business.  Any job today has more tasks required of it than there are hours in the day to get them all done.  Sometimes getting all the work done seems impossible.  As you can guess I’m a writer.  So, I have writing to do most days.  But I have marketing, financial (invoicing/accounts receivable and my favorite part, paying the employee!), scheduling, upgrading/training, hardware and software concerns, public relations, branding, ordering supplies, seeking out new clients and new story ideas … all of that.  It got out of control.  And so, I listed the number of hats I wore, got bears on a table to represent each ‘department’, and had a board (bear-ed?) meeting with them.  I would do this whenever I would feel overwhelmed with all the tasks of running a writing business.  I even suggested this to the local media and the London Free Press came and took a picture of me in my ‘board room.’  I may have looked queer to people then, but now, with what we know about mirror neurons, I may well have been ahead of the curve!

On the Negative and Mirror Neurons

And here’s my last tip of this article.  Always express what you desire for yourself in the positive.  This is a sidebar to mirror neurons which is quite important.  Scientific evidence suggests that the human mind fails to comprehend the negative.  If this way of expressing what I have just stated sounds or ‘feels’ weird, here’s what I mean.  To write that, “The human mind does not comprehend the negative,” is improper if we comprehend that the human mind fails to envision the negative.  In other words to write, “the human mind does not see the negative,” is to really be writing, “the human mind does … see the negative.” (But it clearly does NOT see the negative.)  Therefore in writing what we would consider to be a traditional sentence with a negative in it, because of the way the human mind works, we are stating a sentence which really means the complete opposite to a reader than what we intended to impart.  (Maybe this is where reverse psychology comes from?)

All this goes to say that if I ask you to close your minds and imagine the following, “The dog is not chasing the cat,” most people envision a dog chasing a cat.  The word NOT goes unheard or unregistered in the statement.  So when I look in the mirror (a real mirror this time) and see my ‘muffin tops’ (excess weight around the middle) and I say, “I do not want to carry this weight,” I am really saying, “I want to carry this weight.”

Therefore you need to be clear of what you desire.  It would be better to express that which I do want, rather than that which I don’t want.  Therefore saying, “I desire to have a trim ‘middle’ or core,” would be better.  Better still would be to say it as though I already possess it because this would conscript the positive aspect of mirror neurons.  See it or say it and therefore you feel it.  “I have six pack abdominal muscles on a trim body.”  Somehow, this statement then makes me more like the person I desire to become.  In fact, I am that person, because as I say it, the brain chemistry fires in my mind so that it affirms what I have just said.  I am pleased that I am the way I envision myself.

I think it is important to examine what is really going on here when we say something like this to ourselves.  In one aspect, telling ourselves we’ve succeeded at something when we haven’t feels like a lie.  It seems wrong.  But mirror neuron science tells us it is truly the way to change ourselves, of how we should begin the process of becoming the people we desire to be.  The science doesn’t lie.

For example, here’s an instance of how truth and falsehood exist in the same instant.  Hold your arms up in the air in triumph, hold your head up high and then say, in a down, depressed voice, “I feel terrible.”  Next, round your shoulders and look down as though the weight of the world were upon your shoulders and shout, “I feel terrific!”  Most people experience the body aspect of these moments as the truth and the words as the falsehood.  You cannot feel down, when you’re head is held high.  So … in holding your head high and sitting up straight, there must be some brain chemistry firing off in the right directions to overcome the audio of the words you are saying.  What’s most effective, then, is getting both the language and the body in the right aspect to help begin to change who we are … how we think about ourselves.

This, of course, all sounds too easy … too packaged … too canned.  Sometimes you feel crappy.  Life blows up.  You lose your job unexpectedly, loved ones die, health concerns pile up.  There is a time and a place to practice these things.  You know yourself well enough to know when you should make the attempt.  Use your mirror neurons to your best advantage whenever you can.  And when you’re doing nice things for yourself, people see that, and desire to model that, and then they’re doing nice things for themselves and this improves everyone’s attitude and that means … we’re all happier and if we’re happier we have time to practice, just a little more human kindness.

God Bless

Owen

115-2008-07-18

Belated Book Review:
84 Charring Cross Road
By W. Owen Thornton

I just ‘experienced’ a book written in 1970 that oozed humanity and human kindness.  It’s called 84 Charring Cross Road and was written by Helene Hanff.  The true story evolves over 20 years in a series of letters between a woman in America buying books from a used book dealer in England.  This is a book written in a format I would have never read, unless my intelligent and loving wife hadn’t read it to me aloud.  I would have been a fool to have dismissed this book.  This is a light read you must discover.  And it’s easy going too at a total of 97 pages. 

What I found endearing about the book is that it is about kind, ordinary people living ordinary lives in an extraordinary way.  There’s something comforting about reading how two complete strangers develop a genuine fondness for one another through a series of letters ... connected by the exchange of money for rare books.  The story is hopeful and heart-warming.  I think sometimes I feel odd or different, even with the intellectual knowledge that Louis Armstrong might have been right when he sang,  “No matter, where you go, you’re gonna find, that people have the same things on their minds.”  This book is living proof that while we are all unique, we all have similar hopes and desires and fears.  So, next time you’re feeling alone, you can think of this book and know that you truly are not alone but just like millions of other people all over the planet.

The letters were written from 1949 to 1969.  The book offers an insight into post-war England that I never comprehended before: about the shortages of eggs and meat products.  There are other interesting tidbits too.  Like the fact that Frank Doel (rhymes with Noel), the manager of the bookstore, can send Helene her books via ‘book post’ whatever that is.  This notion harkens back to the romantic times of receiving snail mail at affordable prices.  Today, it feels as though you could shop for the same used books in your home town and save a bundle on shipping costs … but in those years … not so much.

I think a part of the power of this experience was listening to my wife’s sweet voice as she read the letters to me.  (She was reading them for the first time herself!)  Reading them aloud seemed to give the letter-writers voices in my head.  While the letters were the real correspondence between Helene, Frank, Frank’s wife and a few other folk from the bookstore, somehow hearing their words seemed to give them life and physical bodies.  And so, should you be able to buy the book used, (I think it’s out of print) or get it from your library system, I would encourage you to read it aloud to your spouse, loved one, aging parent, anyone.  The book will be a hit, I am sure.  I think we blitzed it in less than a week!

Tonight?  Tonight we’re going to watch the movie version of the same name.  But don’t short circuit this process by going directly to the movie.  Get the book.  Let the characters become alive for you.  Revel in the experience as Frank and the bookstore staff share in the wonderful food packages that Helene periodically sends them … food they cannot ordinarily buy because of the rationing or the shortages.  And Frank too, knows that he is providing a much-pleasing service for Helene as she writes him letters thanking him for the delicious books he sends her.  Go.  Now.  Go out and find this book and dig into the human experience of it all and appreciate the loving, caring human kindness that is exhibited towards one another throughout this little gem.

Cheers

Owen

PS: Don’t worry about seeing the movie. Compared to the book it is uninspired.  The visual of the movie acts only as a back-drop while the principle characters simply read the letters.  In a word, the movie is boring.  You will get the same experience reading them for yourself!

117-2008-07-21

Too Much Stuff
By W. Owen Thornton

The rise in self-storage lockers is a sign that people have too much stuff in their lives.  Too much stuff hangs like a millstone around your neck.  The sudden rise in self storage lockers offers proof that we’re out of balance.  When we’re out of balance, we need to work longer and harder to spend $110/month to pay for a storage locker.  Perhaps we also need to work longer and harder to fill it … or perhaps to fill it with better quality excess crap!  Working more to have more stuff, which we keep “off-site” from our houses, creates less time for us, family and kindness, adds stress and reduces our ability to practice human kindness towards one another. 

It would seem the smarter option would be to give the extra stuff away and work less.  This plan gives you more time, makes you feel more in balance and affords you the ability to think outside of yourself, which makes you a kinder, gentler person.  Now I will qualify the need for self-storage lockers.  If you need a storage locker because you’ve been compelled to downsize due to job loss or a divorce or you’ve lost your home, those are different reasons and you must do what you need to do to make life work.  Self-storage lockers are not a scourge unto themselves, they are only a warning sign when we’re living normal lives and our houses and sheds and garages are already full of too much stuff.

To live a life of human kindness we need to “be real.”  Living outside of your financial means places stress on you and puts you in a dangerous emotional place where your focus is on the wrong kinds of things.  “I have to work more to pay for all this stuff,” becomes a mantra we truly believe but the problem is we don’t stop to consider if we even need this “stuff!”  Working to procure “stuff” is a treadmill to failure.  It seems too that the more we think about work and the “stuff” it buys, the less we think about the people around us.  Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” shows we’re no longer as civically engaged in our society as we used to be, that we don’t have family dinners together, and that we want to go to university to earn a whack of cash so we can be rich … and in the process we don’t really care about making the world a better place … as long as we’re rich.

The west has created a consumer society.  It works because we continue to buy stuff … stuff beyond what we need or require.  Don’t believe me?  In a June 11, 2008 article in Maclean’s Magazine called, “Getting Stuffed: Will the U.S. real estate crisis put an end to the self-storage boom?” by Jason Kirby, the facts are in!

In recent decades U.S. houses have doubled in size to an average 2,500 square feet.  Their homes are fully 500 square feet larger than those in Canada.  In addition in the past decade self storage units in the United States has doubled.  Today it is a US$22 billion annual business representing 2.2 billion square feet of space, 85% of which is occupied.  Fully ten percent of the home owners in the United States, living in homes larger than the typical Canuck are paying $110/month to cram extra stuff into a storage locker.  Stuff, if I’m any judge of human nature we probably never go back to and get or to use.  Once it’s off the property, it’s really as good as gone anyway.  We adapt and learn to live without it … but there’s some kind of hope there that one day … we will use it again.  And to pay for all that stuff?  The average individual debt in the U.S., outside of mortgages is thousands of dollars higher than in Canada.

We need to really think about what it means when we write the size of homes have doubled in the past few decades?  In the 1950s in Canada, with larger family sizes than today, the typical bungalow ranged from 800 to 1,000 square feet.  Today, with fewer kids in the house, our homes are 2,000 square feet.  Self storage units in Canada may not be as popular as in the U.S., but in newer subdivisions with these larger homes, you rarely see a garage with one of the family vehicles parked in it.  Why?  Because it is usually chocked full of stuff that can’t fit inside the house … and that stuff is more than the lawnmower and a few bicycles.  It’s full of beer fridges, old computer monitors, pantry shelves, kid’s toys, skis, and old stereo speakers.

The Maclean’s article introduced, but didn’t talk about an important side effect of all this stuff.  It asked, “What is all this saying about our souls?”  It said it didn’t know … they didn’t want to speculate what it meant for us.  They stuck with the facts and perhaps rightly let us think about that answer for ourselves.  Interestingly enough, here’s something odd.  Noam Chomsky has written about “Manufacturing Consent,” about how media continues to propagate the myth that we need to support the status quo and keep on buying stuff to keep the rich, rich and the rest of us placated … with all that stuff we can buy.  I wouldn’t say Maclean’s ran from that idea.  I’ve seen evidence that it can and will slam aspects of our culture when they think it needs slamming!  It simply may not have wanted to open that kettle of fish.  Most articles today are 800 – 1,000 words long and the notion that we’re all playing a role in a society that demands we buy more even at our own expense is the content of books, not short articles or essays!

There’s little wonder why we’re reluctant to throw stuff out or give it away.  It may be about less than what it cost us at the time, and more about what it represents.  It represents a great deal of overtime and stress incurred while we paid off the debt to cover it.  Throwing it away seems like throwing out the time and effort required to accumulate it.  And some city governments make throwing it out totally inconvenient … an additional waste of time and energy.  What do I mean?  I mean that a computer, its monitor, some old paint from the living room, a couple of batteries, some yard waste (might as well while we’re at it eh?), our son’s old mattress and a couple of expired compact fluorescent bulbs could well mean driving all over the city for hours as each item can only be taken to a specific waste-recovery depot.

But there’s something else being said about us if we’re all becoming pack rats.  We’re afraid things are too good to last … that we won’t be able to manifest all this wealth a second time, so we’d better hold onto the stuff we have for fear it won’t come back to us should we get rid of it?  What’s that sentiment saying about us?  We’re living in fear.  Fear that things are too good to last.  We have to store it away in case of a rainy day that may never happen.  In some ways, it’s a silly thought, really.  If we manifested it the first time, we can do it again.  We have evidence that it happened and that we could do it the first time because we still have all the stuff!  Though, naturally we’re never sure we’ll have the good job to do that again. 

Our companies have definitely proven to us that they can function without us.  Either we’ve been right-sized (fired) or we’ve watched someone be fired after an amalgamation made jobs redundant.  If we’ve survived the purge(s) we still know that the office next door is empty where a friend used to sit.  That could be us at any moment!  Better buy the stuff while the getting’s good.

Or maybe all that stuff says something different about us altogether.  Maybe we’re just a greedy culture.  How did we get there?  Covetousness has a large role in this I think: keeping up with the Jonses.  I sometimes believe people have stuff, expensive stuff, they don’t even really want or need because they think their self worth is somehow attached to that stuff.  AND, if our self worth is attached to our stuff, then we cannot throw it out.  If we buy a new HDTV to replace a perfectly fine working older model, we don’t throw out the older model … because it still works.  We didn’t ‘need’ the HDTV, we simply desired it.  But the older model was given to us by grandparents when we first married, so we don’t want to separate ourselves from it for sentimental reasons.  Really … sentimentality about a television?

But then, the size of our houses too says something about us.  The bigger our homes, the bigger our paychecks must be, the bigger woman or man on campus we must become.  It’s all about status, people!  To hell with the environment!  We’re paying lip service to it if we’re living in homes twice the size they used to be a couple of decades ago with fewer people under their collective roofs! 

And there’s something else about these large homes on post-it sized lots.  We’re all living inside all of the time.  The lots are too small to even play a game of catch on them, so there’s not much point in going outside!  We want our homes at 21 degrees centigrade 24/7 every day of the year.  We don’t want ambient noise from the street to interfere with our screen-time: whether it is on one of the three or four televisions or computers in our houses.  Houses have to be larger to contain all the screens we possess.  And larger houses do not speak of family togetherness, but more about family isolation.  We’re almost afraid to be together anymore.  We may come together in the hallways, but we often retreat to our private demesnes to watch our favorite show or play a game, or surf the internet.  Shoot!  Young teens now sit in rooms together and text one another.  Talking is free, but we get to spend money texting one another … and naturally we need to buy the coolest cells, in order to send and receive the most complex images and videos, so that we can spend more money on the cell phones and on the air time sending all that … stuff!

But maybe there’s a ying-yang to all this stuff which we still haven’t explored.  First, we make stuff to be thrown away in five years.  If I were to use a voice that makes me sound like an old codger, you’d hear inside your minds, “I-I remember when, back in the ooooold days, people used to take stuff to a repair person and get it fixed!”  Now the base charge to fix something costs as much as the item would to simply replace it.  So why bother getting anything fixed?  But things don’t have to break more frequently simply to get us to buy more stuff.  Technology grows by leaps and bounds suggesting we have to continue to upgrade.  Computer games make computers obsolete.  Why own a computer to play games if you can’t play the games, so, you’d better buy a new computer!  Phones are smaller with more features, refrigerators come with ice makers, water dispensers (there’s one at the tap, but it’s not ice cooled … and naturally it’s too much time to waste to walk over to the old fridge to get a cube or two out of the tray of ice!), and televisions built into them.  We have to have the best of the best and nothing else will do.

The saddening rise of the self storage lockers is proof that we’re out of control with our spending habits.  We’re machines buying stuff for reasons we’ve long forgotten what they are!   We’re making ourselves sick over it!  There may be only correlation and not “causation” to suggest this last point but all this stuff which takes all this time and money to acquire must be placing stress upon us.  Something’s causing our stress levels to rise.  In Putnam’s Bowling Alone, a graph demonstrates that malaise and stress are on the rise for each generation, and as the generations grow younger, the malaise and stress is higher for each younger generation than the last.  So while seniors are finding more stress in their lives, their children find even more and their children have more still.

I have wondered now for some time why China, Africa, the Middle East and India et al want to ramp up their economies to parallel ours.  We’re killing our environment with throw-away appliances and other stuff, and we’re killing ourselves in our attempt to house it and acquire it.  Those who hate us for our wealth don’t need to be jealous of it!  They should be running from our greed and spending habits.  They should be looking for another key element to base a society upon other than consumerism.  We’ve made consumerism our God and it’s killing us, but now we don’t know how to stop and we don’t want to look foolish in admitting that we’ve barked up the wrong tree for the last hundred (?) years.  There seems to be a notion that we might even be able to buy our way out of … well … spending!  Throw enough money at something and all problems go away eventually … don’t they? 

Look.  Meditation, quietly focusing on a flame, a flower or even the sound of your regular breathing does more to make us feel better than any toy will.  But we don’t think we have time to stop long enough to meditate for five minutes.  Meditation is stupid!  That’s a waste of time.  But mediation will go further to balancing us than working harder to get the next toy so we can have more stuff ever will. 

Meditation is only one answer that begins to challenge our consumerism.  Meditation restores balance faster than any new purchase ever will.  But we won’t have anything to do with it!  Time with family … really connecting with those we love … that could be a place to start … if we could ever peal each family member away from their large room and their glowing box to make that time.  But ‘family’ is stupid!  Dumb!  A waste of my time.  We’d rather be alone in our rooms … apart from one another.  But it’s proven that a single, gentle, meaningful touch from someone we love will do more to restore our positive brain chemistry (we’ll be happy, warm, nurtured, cherished, loved) than any degree of ‘fun’ we have watching a television alone in a room by ourselves will. 

Playing cards or a board game is less about the game than the social activity around it!  How long has it been since you played cards?  Bowling Alone proves that we do far less of it than we used to … that and a host of other things that all make us more kind to one another … like having friends over for dinner or a visit.  We can’t do that because we’re too busy working too hard and feeling too tired to get together.  But we can work hard and buy stuff to fill storage lockers.  Yeah!  That’s the ticket!  That’s the way we want our society to work!  We want elevated blood pressure, increased stress, and estrangement from our family members.  These are the things we ‘get’ from our stuff.  Storage lockers aren’t evil.  They’re the lynch-pin to the entire scam of buying stuff to feel better … which really means feeling worse!

Here’s something that is proven.  If we suffer from more stress today, than in the past, which is true, and we know that people lived in smaller homes and rented fewer storage lockers, then people lived with less stuff and were happier 20 years ago than we are with more stuff and less happiness today.  (Correlation, not causation, but are we willing to BET on that?)  Consumerism is on a cascade effect that seems unstoppable.  There are a lot of great toys and things to own.  I want some of them.  Really, I do.  But I try to save for those things before buying them.  I hope to want less stuff, so I don’t have to save so much, so I can be more available to the people in my life … and to me … so I can meditate … all too infrequently.  I fail at this stuff too.  I’m in this world.  It sucks me in.  I swim with the current.  What’s important at moments like this for both you and I is that I bounce out of that track from time to time to see its real impact on me and you and all of our society so I can write an article about it to make you think a little. So you can go out and spend some quality time with your family without fear of having to work to buy something because you haven’t been spending enough time with them!

I don’t really know all that much.  But I do know that unless you own a storage locker because you’re forced out of your home, or going through a divorce, or maybe you have a large, once-a-year hobby that takes lot of gear that you can’t really store at home, then a US$22 billion dollar a year business in storage lockers is all about the wrong kind of stuff.

113-2008-06-30

I’m On My Way
By W. Owen Thornton

It struck me as I was riding my bike home through the park that I have spent my entire life on the way to somewhere.  That’s a sad statement, really.  It means one of two things.  It means I’ve always been on my way to do something else I thought was important.  Or it might mean that I never really felt comfortable hanging around with the guy who wasn’t on his way to do something … that I wasn’t comfortable around … well …me.  And that says that I may not be okay unless I am doing something.  Phew!  That’s a head trip too.  Let’s explore these ideas, shall we?

Human kindness sees something wrong with both views.  The first one reflects today’s common world view that there are just too many things to do and we’ll never get them all done.  So when we’re between assignments, we had better be on our way, smartly, to the next job we have to do.  We have seen that when we have too many things or when we’re rushed to do them that we’re not at our best.  Remember the story told by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point?  Seminarians were asked to do an extemporaneous talk about the Good Samaritan story.  They chatted them up and then told one half of the group that they were late in delivering their talk.  Knowing that they were to talk about the Good Samaritan story, the testers placed a fake homeless person along the student’s pathway to where they were to deliver their talk.  Many who were ‘late’ stepped over the body.  Few stopped to practice what they were in moments supposedly to preach about.  Those who were told they had time before their talk, well a far higher percentage of these folk stopped to help the fake homeless person.  So, when we’re in a hurry, we fail to do the right thing.  And stopping to smell the roses … or look at the river as we bike through the park … bah!  That’s just a waste of time, isn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong.  We all have things to do.  Lists are good ways to remember them.  The problem is we become a slave to them and we fail to be good to ourselves, and when we fail to be good to ourselves, we fail to be good to others as well.  We get things done at our own and other’s expense.  And for some bizarre reason we never put, “Stop to smell the roses,” or “Stop and meditate,” on our lists.  Those things just never seem to be important enough to make the cut.  We need to begin to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in: one in which things get done or one where we treat ourselves and others with human kindness.  These seem to be two different worlds.  Sometimes in the doing of some things we are practicing human kindness, but these instances of overlap are far too rare in my life!

Somehow we need to find a real and meaningful way of dealing with the seemingly never-ending tasks on our lists.  I remember the story of the aircraft carrier, told, I believe by guru Jack Canfield.  Jobs, or things to do, are like launching the planes.  We line them up on deck and one after the other we knock them off … we launch them.  When the boss comes in and asks us to do something new, right now, we’re supposed to say:

Okay, chief.  Here’s my current game plan and time-line as already set out by you.  You reveal the planes in order of launch sequence (your task list) and approximately how long it will take to realistically do them.  I have found as a rule that however long we think something will take, that we should add another 50% more time.  Next, you ask the relative importance of the new task and where it should go in the launch sequence, asking if it is okay to delay whatever is already on your list by however long it will take to do this new task.  This is not a way to complain or dodge work, only to realistically highlight the previously assigned work and where this new project should go on the list.  Bosses sometimes forget what your launch sequence really is, and they may underestimate the real amount of time it takes to get the jobs done right!  Upon seeing the reality of the situation, the boss may assign the new task to someone else, may give you a more realistic time-line, or s/he may withdraw another, lesser important plane from your launch sequence to make room for this new one.

Naturally the aircraft carrier scenario works in a sane world, not one where more work is automatically piled on, where the boss says something like, “It sucks to be you!”  But, most bosses are realistic.  And if you’ve been good to keep them abreast of where you are, and if you go to them when projects explode and seem to take you too long, then they are better prepared to work with you in creating real time lines for work projects.

But this only seems to work when we’re either dealing in theory, or when we’re dealing with a sane boss.  Often, when the list is our own, we tend to overlook reality and think of ourselves as miracle workers.  That list of things to do inside our heads just seems to get longer and longer and that leaves little or no time to think about life, to smell the roses or to sit alongside the river and watch the water go by.  Naturally there’s a balance with these things too, but we all need some down time to regenerate so that we can once again return to our lists and be effective.  Down time is what helps us notice that the person in front of us just dropped a stack of files and that we should stop and help them pick them up.

I think there are a lot of things on our lists which are unimportant but which we think are important.  In the weeks to come I’m going to be writing another article from a new slant about our world called the free market economy.  Our need to buy things is out of control and when we are buying things, that means we have to work longer to afford them and if we’re working longer then we have less time to be with ourselves, our spouses, our kids and we cut them out of our lives to spend the time required to make enough money to buy off our guilty consciences for not spending time with them in the first place.  (Phew!  That was a mouthful!)  What that is, is a very ugly cycle!

A way to begin to see our way out of this ‘list’ mess requires that we examine what we are putting on our lists!  Maybe if we placed making love, eating a family dinner mid-week, jotting a note to a friend, buying and sending a thinking of you card to someone we care about that these moments would jar us out of our endless to-do lists, in as much as we’re doing something for human kindness in the midst of our nutty lists.  I know, I know, you can hardly afford the time to do anything more.  It does mean cutting something out.  We have to start doing that more and more, don’t you think?  If world knowledge doubles every two years (which suggests if we do nothing to learn over that time period we become one half as knowledgeable about things in relative terms as we were two years ago) then surely the number of things we are expected to do has increased too. 

Church evangelists and the Boy Scouts bemoan the competition for time.  Dance, hockey, soccer, more school homework, and a host of other things compete for time that was once spent with God or with nature: two great ways of kicking back with God and ourselves and just enjoying the world!  There are more things to do out there than there used to be.  Life is far more than Forest Gump’s box of chocolates!  It’s Twizzlers, and jube-jubes, and gummy worms, and sours, and gum drops and … we can’t do it all.  We are finite creatures in an infinite world who tend to want to believe we are infinite creatures.  And therein lay another tale.  We must begin to see ourselves in realistic terms.  We cannot be it all.  We cannot do it all.  To think otherwise enters us into the realm of fantasy.

And I haven’t even begun to write about what’s wrong with the guy I might be sitting with along that river side!  Why don’t I want to spend time with him?  Am I afraid to get to know him?  Maybe I think I do know him and he’s boring.  Maybe he can only be complete when he’s doing something.  That old adage, we are human beings, not human doings rears its ugly head again!  One of the simple reasons why I might not want to spend time with myself is that because I have been so busy I don’t know myself.  Do you spend time with people you don’t know?  Of course not!  The problem is, the only way we can come to know ourselves and thereby begin to practice human kindness is to slow down long enough to take time to get to know that person … which seems uncomfortable at the least and a big time-waster at best.  Somehow we think we should have intimate knowledge of ourselves because we’re with us all the time.  But if we think we’re about human kindness and we can still walk past the homeless the moment we’re busy, I would suggest we do NOT come to know ourselves through being busy.  We are not ourselves when we’re busy.  We’re not Owen, or John, or Beth or Jan, we’re Busy Owen, and Busy John, Busy Beth and Busy Jan.  We know who we are when we’re busy, but not when we’re calm, at peace … relaxed.

Maybe I only exist when I’m doing something!  Maybe that is the problem.  And the moment I’m not doing something is the moment I become a nothing.  Certainly if that’s the way we’re feeling there’s no incentive to stop and get to know ourselves: stopping means ceasing to exist!  Yikes!  If that’s where we are, we have to take a much closer look at the society we’ve created!  We have seen in these pages examples of how we treat ourselves as a species.  Given an exercise to create a list of our gifts and our flaws, many lists will be about our flaws and often, there is none or only a very few things listed on our gifted column.  Churches liked to have a list of giftedness of their parishioners so that if a skill is required at church, they know who to call.  When one church undertook to get a complete list of these skills, some people didn’t want to fill out the form for worry that they didn’t have any skills to offer.  Faith … religion may have many problems, but at their core none of them would accept that we are skill-less … that we have nothing to offer the world.  A place to begin to find yourself, may be in the nearest place of loving worshippers.  Just remember.  Some of those folk are more advanced in their faith than others.  Some get it.  Some are struggling to get it.  We are all saints who sin occasionally, and if you find someone who is a sinner first and a saint second, keep on searching for a person who is deeper into their faith than that!

Now here’s a really ugly reason why we might not be spending time with ourselves.  With 25 percent of the population being an addict to something, whether it is a substance or a process, and with 25 percent of the population being abused, whether it is sexual, physical, verbal or emotional (and there is a great deal of overlap in the addict/abuse groups) we are raising a great many children to become dysfunctional adults.  I define being addicted to a process as gambling, workaholism, even the process of earning money or greed could be an addiction to a process.  Whether they become addicts or abusers and continue the cycle or whether they struggle to never be like what they saw as a child both are emotional time bombs waiting to decompress some day in the future when life becomes too much to bear.  Why are they time bombs?  Both groups do not believe they are worthy of … well, in a nutshell … of life!  They think they are nothings.  Perhaps they think they are worse than nothings, and where there is a void anything will rush in and fill that void and work and to-do lists seem to fit the bill because there is a false sort of identity in ‘being what you do.’

Only those who find successful therapy will make it out of these traps.  Having come from these two groups and having had successful therapy, I know whereof I speak!  Undoubtedly, a part of my unwillingness to sit quiet with myself stems from these things.  And what’s easier to do that pay attention to the ache inside of yourself, is to go out and do something because at least then you have accomplished something … been something … done something.  And you can see where the problem begins with attaching the wrong kinds of things to ourselves when we assess our individuality.  Doing something becomes who we are.  And therefore, stopping to sit and watch the river flow by, to sit and meditate on God … these things affirm our nothingness, rather than building us up to face the day.

Here’s a startling fact, then.  Every single person in North America is surrounded by, and influenced by the two dysfunctional groups of the population who are either addicted to something or are abusing their children or who have grown up abused.  Next time you’re in a meeting somewhere, look around.  One in every four people is seriously battling a problem they may not even know they have.  A problem which is readily answered as to who they are, by replacing that void with what they do!  That’s a scary thought for two reasons.  One, on the simpler level, it is no wonder it’s a challenge to communicate with folk when 25 per cent of them haven’t been given the emotional processes to make them fully adult human beings.  Two, on the more complicated level, what does it say about a society that we A: have created a place where life seems better addicted or abusive and B: that we continue to ignore these facts and let it continue?  That’s a question for the ages, isn’t it?  One we don’t have time for here, I’m afraid.

Oh, yeah!  And where did all this start?  With me riding my bike past the beauty of the river because I was on my way to do something … something important … something that might help define me and who I am … an act that is not just about me but is typical for most of us.  So you’ll forgive me if I stop writing now, and go and read from my good Book and spend some quality time meditating and listening for the word of God.  Suddenly … I don’t know why … but that just became really important to me!

God Bless
Practice human kindness and be good to one another out there, eh?

Owen

Here's a printable copy of the article.  Should you use the material anywhere I would apprecate contact from you and name credit, please!

HKP Newsletter July #4

112-2008-06-03

Mirrors of Everything
By W. Owen Thornton

Susan Hurley wrote about mirror neurons in her essay, “Imitation, Media Violence, and Freedom of Speech.” Essentially what the science is telling us that everything we experience, we feel exactly as if we were doing it ourselves.  This has repercussions upon everything we do.  From a human kindness perspective, it means that every single act we do is felt by every single person who experiences it.  Remember how I’ve spoken about our lives as threads in the massive tapestry of life?  Well now our thread not only weaves beautiful pictures (hopefully) but everyone is feeling what we’re sending at the same time too!  So … now … what kind of world do you want to live in?

When an employee is walked out of the building with a box in their hands and a security guard at their back, anyone who sees that scene has just been walked out of the building in the same way.  In fact, according to science, we’re inclined to imitate the action ourselves.  Only a small part of the brain inhibits us from wanting to follow that person out the door … walking and expressing and hurting and feeling in the same way as we see them walking and expressing and hurting.

I know that some employees do need to be released from their positions and that some of these folk could wreak a great deal of havoc if given enough time to hack the computer or mess up the order system or whatever.  Therefore when they are released they do have to be escorted out.  I don’t think that’s kind to the individual, but it is kind to everyone else who is left behind.  The sad thing is, that whomever sees the dismissal will feel as though they too were dismissed.  This new information has far more repercussions than we might like to think about.

Remember in the old days when lay-offs happened and offices sat empty?  We originally thought that those empty offices acted like reminders to everyone else that dismissal COULD happen to them.  Instead of becoming lean and mean or to use better language, lean and effective, we became intimidated and afraid (of losing our own jobs).  But those feelings, which bred disloyalty to our companies, were only the tip of the iceberg.  Each time those who remained behind watched someone leave the office for the last time, they lived those feelings themselves.  Each time they saw a friend, acquaintance, coworker … whatever you desire to call your fellow employees they too were fired.  They couldn’t help feeling these thoughts.  Mirror neurons are not selective, hitting some people and not others, they are inside of each and every one of us.

One of the big problems we have in believing all this is due to the following.  Because our adult brains have overrides to prevent us from actually imitating everything we see, we do not believe we desire to imitate everything we see.  This is a subconscious happening.   Yet when we are children and before our override mechanism is fully developed, we are true imitators.  And people with brain damage in the area that overrides our need to imitate also imitate everything they see.

We also don’t like this the idea that we feel everything we see because this notion makes us feel more like automatons than we might otherwise have thought about ourselves.  I won’t get into the argument here about whether or not we have free will (or if because of mirror neurons we’re all determined to do what we do) but this inbred fear of ‘not being in control’ also prevents us from actually believing the truth.

Lastly we won’t believe the truth about these facts because all this happens to us subconsciously.  It seems impossible to believe that we’re hot-wired to imitate when we KNOW we’re not … but … we ARE!

Now there is some news and some great news about all this information too.  The news is that it may be harder to change than we think.  Okay.  It was never easy to change, but now it appears that because we imitate and because neurons like to fire in friendly-similar ways, that patterns evolve and mirror neurons will keep us in those patterns … if we continue to see the same ones.  However, the great news is this!  Remember Bruce Jenner, US Olympic Decathlon winner?  I believe the first man to ‘envision’ himself succeeding was attributed to him, although there may have been someone else who was first.  At any rate, because he sprayed pictures of himself winning the ten events he needed to win at the Olympics all around his abode and because he ended up winning his event his ‘envisioning himself winning technique’ was introduced and it became a big deal.  Well … seeing yourself win, whether in picture form, or in mental form, or in watching someone else do the form well … it is as though your mind is doing it.  So now we know the science behind what Bruce Jenner did.

The test is in.  A group of 30 youth were tested to shoot free throws.  Their average number of baskets made, versus shots missed were recorded.  Ten were asked to go away for a week and do nothing.  Ten were asked to practice 20 minutes a day.  Ten more were asked to mentally practice shooting hoops 20 minutes a day.  They came back.  Those who did nothing … no change.  Those who practiced … better results.  Those who imagined shooting great hoops … EVEN BETTER improvement.  Holy Hanna this stuff really is only in our minds!  I say only because while it is in there in a pattern, we can envision a different pattern and really, effectively change it and feel that change each time we envision it!

So, sadly, if you repeatedly watched someone stuff themselves when they were down, you felt that action (did it in your own mind) and probably would later grow up to imitate it even if you didn’t really want to.  But if you can watch someone NOT do that, or if you can envision yourself refraining from doing that … and in fact if you can envision yourself doing something that would empower you in another, completely positive manner, then slowly, over time, you would A: feel the new feelings from the new, vision for yourself and I believe you would come to change yourself.  (So, in this manner, the free will to choose to sit down, close your eyes and envision yourself doing something terrific, would suggest we ARE creatures of destiny … AND imitation!) 

So, for those of you who can believe all this there is good, no great news!  Change only takes the time required to envision yourself succeeding in whatever endeavour you so choose.  Remember change must be relative.  You would improve your free throw shooting if you watched Toronto Raptors shoot hoops.  Would you become an NBA caliber player?  Maybe, but maybe not.  What you could guarantee is that you would become a better you-basketball player! 

A Great Responsibility

Lastly, I desire you to think about the following.  If what we have just read is correct, that when we observe someone else doing something that we feel it as though we have done it, then we have a great responsibility to the world to always do the best we can in all situations.  If every act of frustration, every unkind word is sucked up by every person and every other person’s actions are making us feel what they’re doing/feeling, then if we’re sending negative stuff, we’re a nest for breeding the negative.  If we cut others off while driving, they feel as though they have cut off someone.  If we flip the bird, everyone who sees it feels as though they have done it.  Every act of unkindness reflects in every living soul who sees it.
So it is up to us to do our best to always send positive reinforcing messages so that everyone else always feels those kinds of feelings … so they desire to imitate those kinds of actions.  This is also great news.  Maybe this knowledge acts as a filter for any unkind action we might like to humanly (for to be frustrated and upset is normal) express but can refrain from doing so where others can see us.  I don’t mean bottle it up.  Shoot, write down the frustration and shred it in the shredder.  Get it out, meaningfully and effectively without letting everyone else ‘feel’ it too!  And when we can, become actively kind.  Wouldn’t that environment be an interesting place to work and live in?

Cheers everyone.

Owen

 Here's a printable copy of the article.  Should you use the material anywhere I would apprecate contact from you and name credit, please!

July 3 HKP Newsletter article