145-13-05-2010

Groups Sometimes Violate Human Kindness

By W. Owen Thornton

Each human being is a unique individual but most of us spend most of our time attempting to fit into a group or groups.  We ARE social animals.  Life, for most people, is better in a group.  I won’t get into the strange paradox regarding being a unique person and then somehow finding ourselves willing to give up parts of that individuality so that we can fit into a group.  What I am interested in here, is what groups are about, and how they can violate human kindness.  I will go on record as saying that there is usually nothing wrong with a group unless its morals, values and beliefs go against overall societal norms.  A negative example of a group might be the Nazi’s from the 1930’s to the 1040’s.  So groups are “mostly” a good thing.  They give us a common place to talk about our interests and our hobbies.  They make us feel comfortable and normal … whatever normal means to six billion unique individuals.  “Normal” is highly theoretical term that appears indescribable yet it’s a word we all use and we think we know what it means.  The problem is not with groups in themselves, but when the members of the groups forget that there are people outside of the group.  When this happens, groups can violate human kindness.

What I mean by that is that groups can ostracize others: make others feel like outsiders … freaks … someone whose views that are different from the groups’ views are wrong.  As soon as a group does this, human kindness may appear to remain within the group, but it falls apart for outsiders and those who are members of different groups.  In other words, once a group becomes isolationist, human kindness is out the window.  I can better explain things by citing a series of examples of groups that make others feel uncomfortable.

Consider a sports bar where Montreal Canadian and Pittsburgh Penguin Fans are both watching the game.  Friendly barbs back and forth between the two jersey-wearing clusters of fans, is expected.  But when a bad check happens on the ice, the indignant fans of the team who’s player is lying on the ice begin to turn hostile towards the other group.  Someone from the offending group says the victimized player had it coming because the victimized player had been “gooning” the members of his team all night.  Suddenly barbs become a pushing match and a fight breaks out.  Ironically, these two groups are subsets of a single larger one that should get along: Fans of hockey.  The people caught up in the moment and who are slowly devolving into a fight are just members of different groups.  But what they have now failed to recognize is that they are members of a single larger group: that of the human race.  There is nothing to be gained by a fight here.  In fact if any of these people who are about to enter into a fight were to look at the situation from the outside, they would all say that fighting is wrong and there’s never an excuse to fight … unless life and limb are threatened.  From outside the situation everyone would know that they all have to go to work tomorrow and no one wants to go to work with a busted jaw or a knocked out tooth while waiting for further dental surgery.  What started out as a fun night out with the group, turned unfortunate because the group failed to see others outside of their group as people who essentially want the same things from life: to enjoy watching a good hockey game.

Across town lies a church.  It is an active church of 300 or so members.  These folk are members for lack of a better term are part of a group.  The fancy term for this group is “congregation”.  One thing these church members fail to recognize is that their group looks exclusive to those from the outside who want to join.  The church members didn’t mean to look exclusive, but any group quickly takes on that appearance to outsiders.  It doesn’t help that this active church has its own lingo to further exclude people.  The WHO is just one of a series of nicknames for the various committees that exist within the church.  WHO stands for the Wharncliffe Hospitality Organization.  Wharncliffe is in the name because that is the street that the church is on, and Wharncliffe is in the church’s name.  I’ll call this made up church Wharncliffe Episcopalian.  What it does WHO do?  It is the group that is called upon in emergency situations when the church is asked to host a reception for a funeral.  This is a group of ready volunteers who make sandwiches and squares for funerals.  But the church and the specific committee rarely says the full name of the organization and even if they did, it wouldn’t help newcomers learn what the people of the “WHO group” did.  The term WHO makes people feel ostracized where no intention to do that was deliberate.  The problem?  There are a host of groups with committee and subcommittee names all of which have cool acronyms … all of which make belonging (once you belong) sound cool, but all of which make newcomers feel estranged and this prevents newcomers from getting involved.  It would be an act of human kindness to name church committees for exactly what they do.  IE WHO should become “The Committee That Makes Sandwiches and Squares for Funerals.”  It’s a silly thought, but it is one related to human kindness.  Still, failure to consider that every introduced term, every kitschy idea or slogan estranges people from the group … something that is completely counter-productive to the Christian denomination which is supposed to help introduce people to Christianity.

What is lost in the bigger picture for the members of Wharncliffe Episcopalian is that for complete outsiders to even enter a church … where the people look like members of an exclusive club … it is hard enough to approach those doors and check out Christianity without there being odd terms that the group has created which makes them feel even more different and strange.  I remember once, hearing someone who had come to my church, one with all sorts of catchy acronyms for groups, that said that they had stared at our exterior doors for two years before they found the courage to enter.  Once they did that, they were very grateful for they found our church is one that is very friendly.

And what is lost in a picture even bigger than that is that if someone is considering exploring their spirituality, many no longer grow up knowing anything about Christianity.  So these folk don’t even know anything about Jesus and what he said.  They would have to learn how the Wharncliffe Episcopalians worship, how people of their denomination pray, why they hold the order of worship in the way they do theologically (yes there is a theological methodology as to how churches worship) etc.  They would have to learn all these things let alone come to learn it’s idiosyncrasies of the specific church what with all their “cool” committee acronyms.

Examples of groups of hockey fans or members of a church are one thing.  Schools and places of work do the same thing.  What we do to make the group members feel welcome and to make the group experience fun and relevant and interesting are the things we do that prevent other people from feeling comfortable in that group.  I’m recently leaving the University of Western Ontario as an undergraduate to attend Laurier University in their Master’s program.  It has struck me that all the things I knew about going to one school are useless for attending a different one.  All of the terms are different.  Universities have a tendency to reference their buildings by code numbers or initials.  So you might want to go to the philosophy department at S004 where the “S” stands for the first initial of the building where the department is located.  But if there are two buildings with names starting with the same letter, then new students/professors/office administrators won’t be able to find these buildings … even on maps that might be provided.  And the names of the buildings and the location of departments change faster than maps.  I attended one school where the map from the visitor’s centre was two years out of date.  So ironically the visitor’s welcome centre was handing out a map that would have led me to the wrong place.  How welcome would I have felt had I actually followed the map when I arrived at the wrong building with people looking at me saying, “What’s the matter with you?  This department hasn’t been here for two year?”

A lesson to be learned here is that groups adapt to the changes within their organization more readily than people outside of the group.  The members of the group have a grasp of much of the terminology of the group so when one thing is changed, they readily adapt.  But if support documents are not changed and web sites are not updated, these minor changes simply confuse those people that these groups are intending to serve.  If a retail store changes the return desk from one side of the store to the other, and I only return things once every five years, I, as a customer cannot be expected to know this.  Nor do I, as a customer, need to put up with “attitude” from employees who are members of the group who think I am foolish for not knowing this change of location took place five years ago.  Any group member who can accept that people outside of the group may not know what they as a group member already knows can act in a manner that promotes human kindness.

The trick then for groups to help reestablish human kindness towards people outside of the group is to:

• Examine all of the codes and acronyms of your organization to see where they are needlessly complicated and then to do something about streamlining those complications.
• Remember when names are chosen for committees and departments, don’t choose them because they are cool, but because they are “at least somewhat descriptive” of what they do such that anyone outside the organization can understand what the committee or department does.
• Remember the people you serve outside of the group/company/church/fan club will not know your lingo.  Have a sheet of unique terms readily available to help explain the language your group utilizes so that people outside the group aren’t made to feel silly or uncomfortable.
• Remember that whenever a name or group is changed or created that there is a host of other things that need to be updated like stationery, signage and web site pages and that a plan to update these aspects of your group/company/university/church need to have a concise timeline to ensure the changes are made.  If you cannot successfully budget for all of these changes, perhaps the name shouldn’t be created or changed in the first place.

These are just some of the considerations one needs to consider when one is a member of a group.  Remember: groups are always friendly internally: that’s why they exist in the first place.  But groups usually either want more external people to join them or they serve people outside of their group and when the group makes themselves look unfriendly towards external folk, lack of human kindness problems quickly ensue.

142-05-04-2020

Human Kindness Means Doing the Hard Thing: Optics ARE Important

By W. Owen Thornton

A corporate executive sought a promotion in another branch of the conglomerate.  The position was open to the world community at large, including folk from within the company.  No promises were made to any internal candidates: what was desired was to hire the best candidate for the job – and sometimes that can mean hiring from outside.  The internal candidate did everything she could think of to create a winning portfolio.  She provided all the required materials and submitted them on time.  It turns out, she had even met the individual doing the hiring upon several occasions and she thought she had a bit of a personal relationship with her.  But when the response to the application came back it was a mass, impersonal rejection letter sent in the worst way possible: via email.

In today’s culture, where – at least in Canada – there are not enough qualified workers to fill the jobs, employee morale is critical.  I can think of fewer ways to demotivate a highly qualified individual than doing something this careless.  Human kindness sometimes means doing the hard thing: like calling the individual, or … mailing them a polite letter … or at the very least sending them a personal email rejection.  But to be treated the same as people outside of the organization whom the hiring committee didn’t even know … that’s just wrong.  Let’s look at the circumstances more closely, shall we?

In this case the position was rather a high level one.  That meant that from across the entire conglomerate there might have been between five and ten qualified candidates who could have applied … and not all of them would have applied due to the fact that they would have to move and uproot their family etc.  So the hiring committee didn’t have the worry that they were going to take hours and hours in order to send out hundreds of personalized rejections to their own staff.

There are a great many problems with receiving a rejection letter, especially one that is a bulk email letter.  First, it’s just demeaning in a general way.  But second the individual who applied is supposed to add some merit to the company via her current position, and this rejection has just indicated that their worth, perhaps … or at least the tone of this rejection could hint that … this person’s worth may not be as appreciated as she thinks.  But there are far greater problems with this kind of treatment should the employee do either one of two things: tell others how they were treated (likely) or leave the company (a chance).

In the case of telling others about the manner in which they were rejected, this shows everyone else in the company how the company brass treats people.  If this candidate, a solid person in every way, can be treated this way, there’s little hope for anyone else to be treated any better.  In other words overall morale could go down in this individual’s department.  But this type of rejection also smacks of a problematic corporate culture which may already have a negative trickle-down effect on employees: people are not stupid – they KNOW how the game is played.  They know the brass “just doesn’t care!”  And remember, we have already seen how MRI scans in conjunction with newly-found mirror neurons demonstrate that whatever emotion or feeling someone sees in others, they feel the same emotion or feeling to a lesser extent themselves.  So if I smile and you take a picture of me, and then you hang that picture up in an MRI machine, when the person being MRI scanned looks at my picture the same part of their brain glows as did the part of my brain when I actually smiled!  In other words, what we know about mirror neurons means that in rejecting anyone’s application in this way, you’ve rejected everyone else who learns about the rejection, to a lesser degree in the same way.  This leads to low morale and a lower through-put and that’s a far greater cost than it might have been to simply respond in a human kindness, or a professional manner.

And what’s worse, if the employee becomes too disenfranchised with a thoughtless organization that can’t step up and do the humanly kind thing, they could pick up their know-how and move to another company.  Now the company left behind suffers from brain-drain, a corporate competitor also picks up what the former employee knows of their operation (and how they treat people) and the company is on the hook for upwards of $60,000+ in job search and training costs for a new employee in a highly competitive market.  Now it seems unlikely that a company that treats people in the way that they did this individual would care about the money to search for someone new but in a shrinking marketplace – there are fewer people being born to buy goods that are being produced – the thing is the company should really care about their human resources costs!  In addition to the $60,000 lost in job search and training, they have a less effective employee for upwards of a year as the new person learns the ropes.  Last, if the new person doesn’t work out there is the risk of having to spend the money all over again, and waiting for another year to have a department or division brought back up to normal levels.  In narrow markets a thin black line might become a thin red line on the balance books: a situation no company wants to face.

The bottom line?  Optics matter because people matter!  Optics and people have always mattered.  It’s a fallacy to think that we can treat people in a negative way with mass rejection emails and think this doesn’t reflect badly on an organization.  There is a far larger cost to this kind of treatment of people than simply doing the hard thing and picking up the phone and calling them, or sending them a personal letter of thanks for applying. 

141-11-02-2010

Great Tips For Human Kindness

By W. Owen Thornton

Long have I held the notion that our lives are the summation of all that we take in.  This statement makes so much sense it seems redundant.  In two courses in Philosophy this term I have stumbled upon some ideas that will lead us to practicing human kindness in a practical manner.  In fact, in one class I learned practical tips to help me practice human kindness to a near perfect degree and I want to share that with you.

Phenomenology (the study of “stuff” or everything) is the branch of philosophy that best suits my way of thinking.  In it, there is a term called sedimentation.  Sedimentation is everything that is taken up into us: all sights, sounds, language, the attitudes we see of others as they express themselves, what we watch on television or read in magazines etc.  From these layers of ‘stuff’ that rain down upon us like the microscopic bits of dead sea life that constantly falls upon the bottom of the ocean, this sediment builds up inside of us.  It is what forms us and shapes us and makes us who we are.  And all this is good stuff … except for the sediment that gives us bias and prejudice and racial hatred and well, you name the problems we can find on planet earth and it all comes from sedimentation.

Now sedimentation is not all bad as I said.  Much of what we take up inside of us is about love and kindness and goodness and about keeping promises … all those things are inside of us too.  The problem with sedimentation is that it gives us a ‘gaze’ (another term from phenomenology) that lets us see the world as we interpret it … not as it really is.  This is the kind of thing I have been talking about in my newsletter articles from the beginning.  Our sedimentation is what makes us take important things for granted.  We see what we want to see, not what is really there.  Our sedimentation is what tends to drive us because that is what we know and are familiar with, rather than doing the things from our inner truth, an inner truth we all tend to have buried deep somewhere where we cannot get at it.

In an essay by Margaret Olivia Little called Seeing and Caring: the Role of Affect in Feminist Moral Epistemology[1] she writes about how we can overcome our sedimentation: our normal, somewhat biased way of looking at the world so that we can look at the world and see the real truth.  If we do this well, we will overcome taking the world for granted and we will be practicing human kindness.  Oddly enough, while Little is writing about is the importance of emotions in how they help us determine our morality.  Her work was not intended to be a phenomenologist paper in any way yet her work is very phenomenological in its approach.  (Her work was learned in the second branch of philosophy I have found very interesting this term: the philosophy of emotions!)

In her paper, she cites the example of a nurse.  The nurse picks up the tray of food from the patient.  We could see this as a kind act.  Or we could simply see the act as the nurse being a good nurse and doing her job.  When the nurse approaches taking the tray as a means of doing her job, she is not as good a nurse as she could be.  In this case, the nurse is caught up in her sedimentation.  She is fulfilling the list of duties required of her so she can succeed at her work, so she can get paid, so she can go home with a set of lists of jobs done and ticked off.  But the problem with the tray of food is that it is full.  The patient hasn’t eaten anything and the nurse hasn’t noticed.  Her ‘sedimentation’ has prevented her from seeing a vital and important reality.

Little suggests two things to help make the nurse a better nurse which will thereby make her a better person … a person who practices human kindness.  These two things are both in the title of her paper.  First, the nurse needs to find a way to actually care about the patient.  The patient just simply cannot be patient number 1,523 that the nurse has taken care of this year.  The patient has to become Joan Smith who is recovering from gall bladder surgery.  Joan has to be a mother of two, a husband of John … a woman of 46 who simply wants to get well so she can go back home and back to work at the advertising agency.

So when we invest ourselves in others … when we care … we start to notice different things than what our sedimentation would normally allow us to see.  But, and here’s the really concrete tip, (because telling you to care about someone is difficult to do and hard to give you specific tips on how to go about doing that (but my tip is in coming to learn things about Joan and her family and her job and her desires)) Little suggests that good nurses make a mental list of all the things they are seeing as they are seeing it.  This second tactic is like having a running dialogue inside your mind.  So, when the nurse walks into the room she sees that the food tray is pushed over to the side of the bed, and that the food hasn’t been touched.  That its mid day and the curtains have been pulled closed by someone else and that the room is dark and gloomy.  When the food isn’t consumed, and the nurse notices this, she can begin to talk to Joan about why the food isn’t consumed … and there is how she starts to practice human kindness … and how she becomes a great nurse.

Before moving to conclusion, I want to offer a second scenario of Little’s.  In this situation, the nurse cares and she is running her internal dialogue.  This time she discovers something more subtle.  Whenever Beth leaves the room after visiting Joan, Joan always appears to be a little blue.  This “catch” of the nurse’s is more difficult than the food example as it takes multiple situations of the nurse noticing certain things before the evidence is built up for her to come to a conclusion.  Upon talking to Joan about it, she learns that Beth is a doom and gloom kind of person who always talks about how long people stay in hospital after surgery, and this talk bothers Joan.  Whatever the nurse decides to do with this information, either calm Joan’s fears or perhaps to talk privately with Beth before her next visit, the nurse has practiced human kindness.

What is all this about?  Well we all get caught up in our own stuff (sedimentation) and we begin to miss things that are important (to us and others) … things that make us unkind … not because we’re deliberately doing bad things, but because we’re missing stuff we should be catching.  Important stuff is slipping past us.  The reason?  We need to strike a balance between always being on, like the nurse is when she steps into patients’ rooms and starts reciting a listing of everything she sees, and being off and letting our ‘sedimentation’ run us to the point that we become unkind because we’re taking things for granted.  We need to change our gaze on the world from one that reflects our own sedimentation – there we see what we expect to see – to one that actually sees what is really going on.  And the tip of listing everything in your vision is one you can apply to:

·         Your significant other

·         Your children

·         Your friends

·         Your poker buddies

·         Your office workers

·         Your employees

·         Your boss

·         Anyone you say that you care about.

So there are two criteria to help lead you to human kindness in this essay: Care about the people around you and list everything in your line of sight … for a while.  Because you can’t run that list all the time or otherwise you’d go a little odd!

140-11-01-2010
NOTE:  this is article 140 which has been placed ahead of article 139.  Upon reviewing 139, I liked the subject, and it will reappear, but I didn't like the tone.  (Also, it was 16 pages double spaced.)  It sounded like a rant and ... I don't think rants do much to promote human kindness. It is difficult sometimes, to see a problem and to write about it with clarity and without being ... hurtful or mean-spirited towards that problem and the people who created it: in this case, it was humanity.  I need to step back and gain perspective before submitting that piece to you.

Two Sizes of Human Kindness Footprints
By W. Owen Thornton

Here’s a new idea for human kindness.  I’m going to suggest that we leave two different sized foot prints from our lives: both must exist and neither can be avoided. 

The first footprint I’m talking about represents the environmental or the ecological one or perhaps it is simply the footprint of “stuff.”  The second is the footprint of people.  What I mean by the first footprint – that of “stuff” – are things that cannot make us happy on their own.  These are the things that may help lead us to happiness: career, owning things (toys – big screens, electronics, shoes) etc.  What I mean by people is self evident. 

Think of the two footprints of how we live our lives as this: when we die we will leave two distinct footprints in this world: the one that impacts the earth for good or ill (what kind of physical world will we leave behind) and the one that impacts people for good or ill (what kind of emotional, value-based, belief-based, ethical world will I have left behind).  So, when I pass away, I hope I will have lived my life in such a way so that the footprint that is measured in “stuff” will be a small as possible and the one measured by the people left behind will be as large as possible.

The Footprint left from Stuff
 

The footprint from stuff will be (should be) small for many reasons.  One, stuff alone does not make us happy.  There’s no point in putting a big stamp upon the earth from this perspective.  I’m beginning to realize that jealousy and greed … ogling, admiring and aspiring to have as much as the Joneses is what is principally wrong with our society.  Stuff, by that I mean career and the things I own and buy and use and throw away, these things are not as important as people.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  Maybe I shouldn’t even lump career into this category, but seeing as I’m lumping the entire world into two categories: people and everything else, career has to go somewhere.

Career is important because it gives meaning for our lives and because it helps express who we are and what we desire to contribute to the world.  But often career isn’t about the right things.  Career should be important for the number of people that we can serve … the qualities that we can help bring to the world through our career choices that makes as many lives as possible better.  But I don’t think that’s what we think about most when we think about career.  We think about pay raises, and stress, and ladder climbing and passing the buck and going home early and pointing fingers and finding blame for screw-ups.  And we worry about having enough to support ourselves and our families and having nice Christmases: even when we know that Christmases are not about stuff but about a different thing: spiritual and religious meaning.  Okay.  Admittedly, if I’m going to deal with career, I need to think some more about this entire footprint idea.  But a beginning, I think, is suggesting that if we change our focus on career from what we do to who we serve, we place more emphasis into the people category.

Another reason the stuff footprint should be small is that the less stuff we have, the less damage we ourselves have contributed to the destruction of the environment.  Say I’m a DVD collector.  More DVDs means buying shelving units and making plastic DVD cases out of petroleum products, and using energy to watch them.  These are the same DVD packages that many of us will watch once in our lives (sometimes we’ll never find time to watch them) and then they will become collectors of dust and they will end up in a dump somewhere.  And it is these DVD cases that we work so hard for, so that we can posses them.  And in the process of working hard we work long hours, past our kids’ bedtimes so that they don’t see us or hear us read stories or get important things from us, like learning lessons that people are always more important than stuff.

Now I picked DVDs here but it could have been anything.  Why live in 2,000 square foot homes (or larger) with families of four when families of six in the 1950, lived in 1,000 square foot bungalows?  We live in and use energy to heat 2,000 square foot homes because kids cannot go outside and play for at least two very good reasons.  One they require 24/7 attention for fear that they will be harmed or kidnapped.  Oh come one!  You have to agree with me here, right?  I’m 48.  We played outside on our own until it was time for dinner.  Today, if a kid could find enough green space to play in and should anything befall them, the first thing we would say is, “What were the parents doing?  Where were they that the child could suffer any harm?”  So kids stay home and the second reason we need large houses is because we don’t pay attention to people: rather we pay attention to stuff.  We don’t play board games in the family room (admittedly a “stuff” item, but one that brings people together) after a family meal together.  Rather everyone needs their own screen (computer or TV – and each day they get larger and draw more power to operate them) in their own private room so that they can entertain themselves individually in vast spaces of isolation.  And the problem with how we’re living is that people are excluded and stuff is required to make this kind of life work.  The footprints that we’re leaving behind are contrary to the size we should be leaving.  Our “stuff” footprints are huge, and our people footprints are way too small.

People Footprints
 

When I die I want my ecological or my stuff footprint to be close to invisible.  If people tried to find me from this perspective of life, I would want them to have to search VERY hard for my footprint.  But when it comes to people … I want to impact as many people in as positive a manner as I possibly can.  Should I die before the majority of my peers, I want to have the biggest funeral in the world.  I want hundreds of people to cry because they don’t know what they are going to do without me. 

Okay.  That sounds perverse like I’m into hero worship or it may sound narcissistic but that’s not what I mean.  I believe why we grieve is that we take the best parts of people up into us.  Grieving then, is about letting those parts go.  So, I want to be such a person of human kindness, a person who has been so kind to so many that there is a great deal of me inside a great many people such that they will know how much I impacted their own world for the better.  I want to be that kind of person for so many people.  I don’t wish them the harm of grieving my loss.  What I’m really wishing for them is the betterment of their lives through me while I’m alive: and in the process of doing that, they will have taken a lot of me up into them … and upon my death, there will be a lot of me they will have to let go.  I see this as a vast net gain for all of them, if I but practice the right kind of human kindness throughout my life.

I believe my acts of human kindness in this regard are to make meaningful connections with as many people I can.  But I know that I cannot be all things to all people either.  There are some people I will simply rub the wrong way.  I won’t be their cup of tea.  Let me give you an example of what I mean.  I have met a number of erstwhile young people at university these past few years.  Those who have taken special time to have lunch with me or debate questions from class, I have made a special point to reach out towards them in as meaningful a way as I can.  I have invited them all to my home at least once for dinner.  I have come to realize that my four years as a mature student are hugely precious to me and part of the reason why it has meant so much is because of the tremendous young people I have met along the way. 

I know that these days are escaping me quickly.  Soon, if all things work out I’ll be in graduate school and everything will be different.  I won’t have opportunity to meaningfully connect with as many people as I once did.  I won’t see these young people ever again as they graduate and move around the country, no, the world, seeking the lives and vocations they so richly deserve.  And I miss those who have gone before, just as I cherish the ones I have connected with this year.  So I have endeavoured to savour the moments I can with them, in a busy world where “stuff” footprints seem to consume so much of our time and where people footprints seem to take up so little of our time.

So, I ask you this.  If life is like a walk in the snow and one footprint represents the stuff you leave behind and the other footprint represents the depth and number of relationships you have left behind, what will your foot-path look like?  Will your path look like two even footprints?  Will the footprint of stuff be large and the one representing people and your relationships be small?  Human kindness, I think, dictates that one footprint looks exceedingly small (stuff-print), while the other looks like a massive creature has just passed through this world (people-print).  Hey, it’s just something to consider!

138-12-11-2009

Human Kindness and the Hamster Wheel
Finding the Sweet Spot
By W. Owen Thornton

A recent car advertisement depicts a man racing on a giant hamster wheel.  He runs on the wheel at home, at work and on the trips to and from work.  I thought it was both tragic and funny.  I thought it was tragic because being on a hamster wheel would seem to reflect something counter to human kindness: where I’m thinking to experience human kindness we would like to be free of that hamster wheel.  Conversely if we’re in a rut we’re not dynamically charged about our lives.  And I thought it was funny because someone so accurately depicted much of what life is like in an visual manner that was not cruel or mean-spirited.  The cleverness of the ad is that the man only feels like he is out of the hamster wheel “rat”-race when he enters his new car.  There, in his new car the man experiences the way life “should” be if we were living in a world full of human kindness.

The more I thought about what I was watching I began to wonder if the hamster wheel depiction was a good and real depiction of life that runs true with human kindness.  Humans do well with repetition and routine, don’t we?  It is understood that our work-week wake-up time should be kept throughout the weekend so that our sleep cycle remains constant and we remain healthy as a result.  And without routine, sometimes we’d be lost.  Think of the ISO-2000-and-whatever strategic plans that were created by the auto-industry and which raced through secondary and tertiary businesses as well as it being similarly incorporated in the service sector.  Instead of acting upon instinct when it came to rework and mistakes, it was deemed advisable for businesses to create an action plan or a “hamster wheel routine” to ensure the same mistake wasn’t made twice.

Still there seems something wrong with a hamster wheel depiction of life, regardless of where that depiction occurs in our life: at home, to and from work or at work.  When a hamster wheel is a true negative that suggests we’re running on the spot, or maybe, a better example is pacing back and forth.  Pacing back and forth when equated to that hamster wheel creates a rut, in which we can become permanently stuck: we can entrench ourselves in places that are not meant for us.  When this happens that hamster wheel analogy is a wake-up call that we are supposed to find some way of getting out of that rut.  It is best to see it before it gets too deep, because the deeper they become, the harder they are to climb out of.

I’ve mentioned this idea before, but it is really nearly impossible to grasp.  We need to both be on autopilot and fully engaged … at least semi regularly.  What I mean is, it is okay to be on the wheel, as long as we step off periodically and check to ensure we’re on the right wheel.  For example, say marriage has fallen into a routine.  This can be a good thing when things are going well.  Here we need to rinse lather and repeat.  But from time to time, it is still great to have heart-to-hearts with our spouses to ensure we’re both on the right wheel at the same time, and that both wheels are pointed in roughly the same direction: IE saving money for a big vacation or in disciplining the kids, etc.

I think the real problem with hamster wheels today, and what makes them particularly dangerous to our overall human kindness is that we don’t have enough time to stop them and to get off and assess where we are.  We lean on them for too long.  We don’t see them in our mind’s eye often enough and suddenly we’re caught in places where we’ve been spinning in circles for far too long.  Let me tell you a story about that at first doesn’t seem connected to hamster wheels.  I’m 48 and I was born a half-generation out of sequence: my parents were a half generation older than most folk are when people have children.  The thing is I remember things that are far older than I ought to because of the age of my parents and how they were raised.  Because they were older, I only ever had one grandparent.  I remember my grandmother well.  The Sabbath was sacred to her.  She wouldn’t even play rummy (a card game) with me on Sundays because that just wasn’t appropriate.  SHE knew what it was like to step off her hamster wheels.  In fact, she had created for herself a hamster wheel that compelled her to examine her other hamster wheels: she did nothing on Sundays.  Now, zoom forwards 40 years.  My wife recently read a book from a world-class theologian who suggests the loss of the Sabbath day of rest is a big detriment to our society.  We’re on the go so much of the time, now, that we don’t even realize we’re on the hamster wheel, and even if we do, we believe we don’t have time to step off of it to make any kind of value-based assessment of our lives and to see if we’re on the right hamster wheel or wheels at all. 

What I’m saying is that my Grandmother knew how to turn life off.  I suppose you could say that once a week she stepped onto a pensive hamster wheel … a hamster wheel that forced her to contemplate about all the other wheels she might have been on at the time.  She could step back from her life and give it a bird’s-eye view.  We don’t have that in our lives any more do we?  We just jump from wheel to wheel without thinking.  It is this pattern where the danger of hamster wheels lie!

The busy-ness of our lives and the speed with which we lead them is seductive like the dark side of the Force, to use a Star Wars metaphor.  We can be on those sick and twisted hamster wheels, the ones that make us perennially unhappy for years before we realize what is happening to us.  And when we’re on these wheels, I think human kindness is one of the first things that go straight out the window.  And we can justify that too, can’t we.  “I don’t have time to do that special thing for someone else.  I want to, but I don’t have the time.”  A big thing to remember is if you have thought that a friend is on an unfortunate hamster wheel, then someone else has probably had that thought about you.  It won’t necessarily be a one-to-one correlation, but it will be a thought in the form of a large circle.  You believe A is on a wrong wheel while A believes B is on a wrong wheel, while B believes C is on a wrong wheel until Z is looking at you and thinking, She just needs a little shot of encouragement to make her life better.  I wish I had the time to make that call and tell her …

To be fair I don’t know what the perfect hamster wheel kind of life looks like.  Life is full of good routines.  But there are also bad ones.  There are sticks out there used to place in the spokes of those wheels that jam up our ill-advised hamster wheels.  The problem with the stick is that we often fall flat when they are used.  But, even so, when a stick is used we then have a chance to assess our lives from a bird’s-eye view.  I’m not talking about the random, life-re-evaluation type of sticks like the following.  Life sometimes places those sticks in our wheels whether we want them to or not.  A distant acquaintance of ours lost his wife.  He finds himself a widow with two young children to raise without a mother.  That’s a big stick in the routine of all of that family’s hamster wheels.  I would imagine, in his position, there is not a hamster wheel in his life that he is not considering right now.  What should he continue to do?  What wheels can he no longer get on (without his spouse to help him)?  What new wheels should he start up? 

The kind of stick in the wheel I’m thinking about is the self-imposed type: where we take time, slow down and force ourselves to get off a hamster wheel of our lives and really take a proper assessment as to whether or not we want to get back on, or whether we want to be on a totally different wheel altogether.  An example of this is like someone who suddenly realizes they are overweight and they want to get off the wheel of overeating.  Another one is doing the kind of work the way in which we continue to do it.  Has life lost its zest?  Hamster wheels are designed to give us zest, but with no self assessment they can also be a trap.  Like any good thing, too much of it can lead to a life without the degree of human kindness we desire.

So we need to use our hamster wheels and carry a big stick … one that compels us … for the better … to get off our wheels and see if we’re really running the right race for us. 

My prayer for you and your 2010 is this.  May all your hamster wheels be ones made by you.  May they all be happy hamster wheels.  May you all be given a large, meaningful stick to stop your hamster wheels so you can stop your own hamster wheel (before the random wheel-stopping-stick of life does it for you) and with complete awareness you assess if you are in the right spot(s) for you.  You will know you are in the sweet spot if you are in hamster wheels that have no guilt in their results … where there are no regrets.  May you be on your wheel, or off it, assessing your predicament in the exact right proportions for you during this upcoming year.  When you are in balance along these lines, you are in the sweet spot of life.  And when you are in the sweet spot of life, look for ways that you can help others: places where you can practice human kindness.  I’m thinking, to continue my analogy, that sticking sticks in hamster wheels only works when we do this for ourselves.  So, to help others, you can give them sticks in order to help themselves … nudges of human kindness that lead your friends to help themselves to stop and assess their own hamster wheels.  In fact, your willingness to practice human kindness towards others is an indicator of whether or not you are in the right series of hamster wheels for you because you have the right way of thinking in order to have time to reach out to our fellow travelers.

I realize that sometimes the sweet spot cannot always be maintained.  Sometimes something or someone else comes along and stops us cold and we don’t even see them coming.  But even in times like this if we are running our lives well, enforced stoppages of the wheel cannot stop us for long.  We fall off, assess we were in the right place … and we get right back on.  A hamster-wheel life can be good and human kindness can flow from us like water from a fountain.

God Bless and Happy New Year.

Owen

Our lives are Leading us, Rather than Us Leading Our Lives 

136-07-15-2009

 So.  I recommend that we all stop watching reality television … that we pry ourselves away from this form or programming.  What it’s doing to us is nasty to the point of being dangerous.  Besides taking time watching others live their mean-spirited lives, means we have less time to lead our own lives.  We’d be better off doing something positive to help us strive towards our own goals than learning from others how to lie, steal and cheat our way to the top.

FROM ESSAY 134-06-29-2009 by W. Owen Thornton

Why We Don’t Do The Positive Thing

By W. Owen Thornton

I realized that as I read this near-to-closing paragraph on my essay “A Call for the End of Reality Television Programs” where I talked about the fact that people make unconscious decisions based on the last material most recently taken up inside of us, that I specifically and that many people in general have a problem. 

Many of us don’t know what is next for our own lives or if they do know they don’t know how to get there or lastly, they have tried what they know, have gotten stuck and are now lost souls.  So they turn to reality television to live their lost lives vicariously … because their own lives are going nowhere.  When we don’t know what we don’t know or when we are stuck along the way we’ll do anything rather than admit we’re lost.  

And when we’re lost, I find that we lack the patience for human kindness … human kindness towards ourselves and if we cannot be kind to ourselves, then we certainly have too little energy to be kind towards others.  When we are lost … when our goals are hanging out there … our lives in limbo … we drift with any wind that catches us … reality programming included.  Mel Gibson, in “What Women Want” is trying to figure out what he should do about his love for Darcy.  He’s blown it.  He started out attempting to sabotage her and fell in love in the process.  He is walking through his apartment, wondering what to do.  Then, he looks in the fridge.  “What am I doing?  She’s not in there.”  I thought the scene was clever.  To me it is suggesting that we turn to eating something when we don’t know what to do, stuffing down our raw emotions rather than feeling them and doing something about them.

Man’s Search For Meaning

Before I launch into things that can be done in regards to our three potential problems: that we don’t know what to do for ourselves: that we do know what we want but we lack the knowledge about how to get there; or three we do know where we want to go, we’ve tried, failed a few times and are now unsure if they goal is real or whether life is telling you to give up: I want to talk about the importance of meaning for our lives.

Meaning in our lives is critical.  Being somewhat of a lost soul in regards to career (I fit into category three) I have made a study of ‘life.’  One cannot do so effectively without stumbling across Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search For Meaning”.  Frankl lived through the Nazi concentration camp experience and his key question was, why do some good people give up and die and why do others who seem less likely to, live … why did they survive the experience?  It turns out that people who had something to go to, people who had a reason to live, something to do after the experience was going to be over: those are the folk who lived.  It didn’t matter what kind of career was enjoyed by the individual.  A doctor with what we might think had everything to live for might give up and die while a construction worker might still have to say good bye to his wife or attempt to create that dream experimental whatsis that he’d always wanted to build.  It was those who had a meaning for their lives who lived and those who had no meaning for their lives who died.

Problems with Finding Meaning

There are many problems with finding meaning for our lives:  Simply stumbling on our giftedness is difficult;  Knowing that we deserve the rewards should the goal succeed is another; being too humble such that we cannot do the things required of us to achieve our goals and failing to acknowledge our giftedness are but four of them.  I’d like to tackle these four scenarios before moving on because they act as barriers to our success … to our ability to be able to share human kindness.

Some fall into their giftedness and have the inner workings to run with it.  I think these are the folk whom we admire … the folk who make headlines … the people who run mega-million dollar companies or after three weeks of being a waitress in Hollywood become a big star.  We envy these folk and we may be jealous of them.  But for the rest of us we’re gonna have to do some work in finding out what suits us and how to overcome the parts of us that we don’t have that allow us to fully access our goal or dream.  Now there’s a cautionery note here.  Those who succeed do pay their dues.  Paying dues to the point of mega-success suggests that we require to work at our goals doing the things we want to do for 10,000 hours.  This amount of time in a goal helps breed success.  With this much practice, one it seems, cannot fail.  So while we might envy and be jealous of the folk who fall into their goals easily, they must work at it in order to succeed.  But lest we think paying our dues is a bad thing consider this:  when successful people pay their dues they are doing something they love so much that it isn’t like work to them to place time and effort to the tune of 10,000 hours into their goals.  The time just flies by!

So one key thing to note is this: your goal should be a natural part of you … if you’re doing it for free or for minimal results and the 10,000 hours fly by so fast it doesn’t even feel like work … then you know you’re on to something.  Two good books to help you discover what you need to be doing for yourself are Wishcraft by Barbara Sher and The Artists’s Way by Julia Cameron.

What would hinder us from completing these 10,000 hours?

·         A sense of entitlement: that we should be able to have the dream while short-circuiting the 10,000 hour model.

·         Impatience.  Disliking the 10,000 hours worth of work to the point that we bail somewhere before we finish.  (Suggesting that you’re in the wrong place.)

·         Lack of persistence.  Thinking we ‘should’ have by now put in the time.  I’ll call this the, “Are We There Yet” syndrome where we believe we should arrive on a cross country trip 10 minutes after starting out.

·         Lack of vision.  Where we get lost in the midst of the 10,000 hours and lose what our initial purpose was supposed to be.

Two Things to Know That Can Help Us Survive the 10,000 Hours

I’ve read some of the story about Bill Gates and his 10,000 hours.  Some of the experience suggested that he fell into a position where he could work with computers at a time in the cycle of the computers where they might or could become big.  He just worked at them so long, that things began happening while he was working on them.  He started to write little programs that would help systems.  I’ve never read that when he started that he wanted to become what he is today.  He just invested himself in his goal, to perhaps obsessive levels – IE working on computers throughout the night because there were so few university computers that the only time a student could get on them was to work all night – with punch cards by the way!  Bill just did what he loved and things grew out of that.

Secondly, the folk I’ve read about who were doing this kind of thing were often in a think-tank of sorts: they were working through their 10,000 hours with someone else they knew and liked.  The Fab Four, the Beatles racked up their 10,000 hours at a German strip club/bar.  But they had each other.  The men who set the world on fire with the computer industry, such as Gates … well they didn’t work in isolation.  Bill worked with a few others who were doing the same thing.  So … it seems important to have someone doing something similar with you at the same time: a support group if you will.  As I’ve always speculated at www.thehumankindnessproject.com life is better when we hold hands and walk together.  But more importantly when the days are long and perhaps dark, it is good to have someone with you doing something very similar who you can talk to in order to pull you through the long stretch that makes up your 10,000 hours.

But there are bigger things that can hijack a dream or our Meaning!

When working through a skills list people are often asked for a list of their skills and weaknesses.  Most people come up with a list of weaknesses as long as their arm while often leaving the skills list blank.  There are a few easy things to say about this (though changing our attitudes around in regards to them will still be difficult).  First an example of what I mean.  A friend of mine attempted to gather together a list of skills of people so that they could learn what kinds of gifts they could offer the church.  They wanted to get all 2,000 parishioners to fill out the skills form within two months: a lofty goal.  Of the people who where hard to get to fill in the chart of their skills were those who didn’t think they had any skills to offer.

Some people genuinely feel this way.  They are wrong, of course because everyone has gifts to give the world: for various reasons they just can’t see them.  But whether people suffer from humbility – that they shouldn’t brag about their gifts; they genuinely suffer from such low self esteem to the extent that they do not feel they have any gifts or lastly that they downplay their gifts – that these gifts come so naturally that they assume everyone else has them too and they don’t feel that their own gifts are unique and special, doesn’t matter.  Our perception is our reality.  If you’re one of those who cannot fill out a skills section, start talking to people about this … and even that may be a tall order.  Ask others what your skills are.  They always know.  They are the people jealous of your gifts.  Keep talking this up to the point if you must, find a good counselor.  What you need to know here is: you have gifts.  Acknowledging them must come before you can use them!

Once you find the skills that lie within, the secondary problem: that of not being worthy of the rewards should you succeed, may well be taken care of as well.  Our sense of self worth will limit our level of success.  Somehow we must feel worthy of success.  I believe that the reason why people who win lotteries and who spend themselves back down to the same financial level as they started within a year – a common trend – are limited by what they think their own worth might be.  Having too much money in the bank is as stressful to us, when we don’t think we’re worthy of that money, as having too little money in the bank.

A bigger, vaster problem here is statistics which are difficult to overcome and which have enormous complications in regards to attempting to solve them.  It is estimated that fully 25 percent of children grow up with someone in their family being addicted to either a substance (alcohol) or a process (work).  In addition another 25 per cent grow up in homes where they are abused.  Often these two groups overlap.  Sadly we turn a blind eye to these statistics and we do nothing to change this.  Anyone growing up in these homes will struggle with attaining a level of self esteem that enables them to even believe there may be a meaning for their lives.  If you belong to either of these two groups or both, then success because you have the skills and you are worthy of the rewards will be far more difficult to achieve than had you grown up in a home without these two ‘conditions’.  These victims struggle just to be okay each day.  Too many people fight this fight.  But, sadly as I do not have a solution here … other than great therapy for free by seeking out Emmaus International Support Services immediately.

Finding Meaning and Moving the Dream!

Finding meaning begins with being okay with yourself, acknowledging your gifts/skills and being worthy of future rewards.  Once you have achieved this position (sometimes this is no easy task) you need to discover your own inner knowing about why you are here.  Meditation may help.  Get a book on this or find a guru.  Reading Wishcraft can be freeing and liberating.  Once you identify something where you might like to spend 10,000 hours doing something (and this will NOT be a daunting task, but will look like fun!) dive into the deep end of the pool (first ensuring that there’s water in the pool!). 

But if you don’t know what you need to know … don’t know how to begin your dream … then you begin by being open to it.  Advertisements for courses that could help you along the way will suddenly appear to you … people who know someone who know someone where you can glean advice and useful tips suddenly appear.  Sometimes you do need to work this list.  What is the rule?  Five questions … five people will lead you to the answer you seek.  “Do you know anyone with who has …”  and sooner or later you will find the right person to talk to. 

Never stop.  Keep trying.  If the person who is your keystone doesn’t answer right away, don’t give up.  This is where reading Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone comes in.  He’ll tell you not to take unanswered calls and emails personally.  If you are taking it personally you may desire to revisit those self esteem lessons you learned.  Because unanswered calls and emails from people who don’t know you but … they know a friend of a friend of yours … well they go unanswered because people are busy, because emails go into junk folders, because they are on holidays because they are stretched for time, because they are bad administrators of their own time, because they don’t see the relevance of needing to talk to you ya-da, ya-da.  Keep calling.  Keep emailing.  You will succeed.  Not hearing back from someone is NOT about you.  It is about them! 

Don’t take no for an answer at this stage.  You take no for an answer only when you’ve done everything you can with all of the knowledge you require and you discover, as Stephen Covey would say, that you’ve leaned your ladder against the wrong wall.  This is the wrong dream for you.  Start over.  Things will go faster this time because you’ve done a lot of the steps required.  Never give up.  You will succeed.  But at this stage, when you’re still investigating the process, well … you don’t know whether or not you are on the wrong wall.  People owe it to themselves to do everything in their power to succeed at their goals and stopping before you have the information required to enable you to succeed, isn’t the way!

So far, what I’ve written helps someone who A: doesn’t know their dream, or B: knows what they want to try, but doesn’t know where to begin.  But what about my position?  Position C:  knowing what you want, trying to get results and failing.  What happens then?  It may mean that you need to ‘try another way.’  Let’s say you do the right things but still fail.  Well, here I’m talking about my novel writing and why my works aren’t published.  I’m running up against a wall where my lack of skill hinders my ability to give me a fair chance.  What I’ve done is tried a few times and gotten crushed and I don’t want to be crushed anymore.  I’m learning … now … to have a tougher skin.  That’s one thing!  (And that comes from some great Emmaus therapy, I’ll tell you that!)  Second I know that I didn’t try hard enough because the pain of rejection was too great. So I’m going to try some more.  I can do that because I feel better about myself.  I’ve learned that rejection of my work is not a rejection of me as a person!  But third, I tried one way and it didn’t work.  So I got better at that way and it still didn’t work.  Then I tried the same way some more.

Insanity, they say, is doing things the same way and expecting different results.  Recently I learned that someone I taught creative writing to has since published nearly a dozen books.  So I’ve contacted her.  I don’t know if she’ll contact me back.  I’m not sure my method of contact will reach her.  There are other ways to get to her though: IE sending a letter to one of her publishers!

But doing this does two things for me.  It may well give me someone to talk to as I work along my 10,000 hours.  That’s a good thing!  Someone who’s been there can encourage and guide.  I won’t be alone in doing this.  If you’ll recall from above this was a key to success.  Second, she may be someone who knows someone who knows someone who can help me get past my “try only one way” method.  She might simply be able to hook me up to an agent or … a good editor or some solution like that!  So that’s an additional possibility.

So Why Have I been Watching Summer Reruns?

I’ve been watching summer reruns and some reality programming (never a full episode of any one show – I just can’t do that because it’s not entertaining enough).  I’m watching other people live their lives rather than living my own.  Why?  Partly because I didn’t know how to live my life after nine months of school.  I was sort of shell-shocked from going from 70 hours a week to working on projects around the house.  Don’t get me wrong, some form of a break was required, but after a while, I just found my brain turning to mush … then I found myself letting that happen.

But I believe that we all have the capacity to do something great … something wondrous … that we can all do something with our lives that will make an impact on this earth and even if I don’t find out what that gift is, I’m not going to go down without trying to do it because that’s living out human kindness for myself … and if I can be kind towards myself, then I can be kinder towards others.

And so I’m writing again … getting new ideas again … finishing old projects that had been lingering on and wondering about what I’m going to do with them once they’re edited. 

School is part of my plan now too.  Should I be able to go on to Graduate work, I would love to teach philosophy … help to shape young minds … help to divulge knowledge … to teach people to think for themselves and to lead by example by sharing the things that I believe in … the things that I believe make up a wonderful life.

In Conclusion

So why do people watch reality television?  There may be little harm in taking a break from our own lives.  But the problem comes when that break becomes watching it all the time!  Suddenly people are not living their own lives: they’re watching others live theirs.  How sad!  Maybe watching others live their lives gives folk a normalization check.  People see that others live as I live … so I’m not odd or weird like I might have thought I was.  But when I continue to watch, well … I’m just wasting my time: stealing time away from myself and my own dreams.  Maybe people watch reality television for the entertainment value: but I question that.  I recently heard a celebrity say they are saddened by what passes for ‘entertainment’ lately.  S/he was referring to reality television.  In truth, I feel, according to my own sense of aesthetics at least, that there is no redeeming value in reality television.

Watching reality television is not a problem but a symptom of a lost people bent on finding a way to continue to stay lost.  Watching reality television is an excuse for not succeeding.  If we’re busy here, we don’t have to be busy working in our own lives (and confronting our demons that we may not be worthy of success or that we don’t know what the next step towards our goal might be.)  Watching reality television programs is the same as going to the refrigerator door and looking for something to eat when we know we should be going to the home of the person we love and telling them that we love them (Gibson: What Women Want!).  It’s a sidetrack and it’s an unhealthy one at that!  Especially when we consider that we make decisions unconsciously based on the information recently taken up inside of us.  Do you want to live your life making decisions based on the fact that you’ve watched so much negativity on a reality television program?

Real life is scary and frightening.  It can get you hurt.  But real life is about getting hurt and getting back up again.  Sometimes getting hurt like that is a way of knowing that you’re still alive.  In fact, if you want to go numb, watch some reality programming.

Professional speaker Jack Canfield says that the average millionaire of today went broke three times trying to become a millionaire!  Success cannot be made without making a few mistakes along the way … without breaking a few eggs.  Human Kindness towards ourselves means taking risks … getting out there and being alive.  There are risks out there … risks for greatness … risks required for us to succeed.  You’ve heard me talk about healthy risks before and maybe I’ll do that again soon.  But I don’t think the risks I’m talking about are as scary as you and I think they really are.  I’m betting that if you and I launch ourselves into the 10,000 hour program that you and I will take many risks during that time and you and I won’t even “see” some actions as being risky: they will just be part of the things you and I had to do to go to the next step.

Think of the riskiest thing you can.  Now … go back 2,000 some-odd years.  Become an itinerant preacher.  Find 12 dudes to give up their work and families to follow you and now, for the next three years go preach a new way of being in relationship with God … ways that will get you into trouble.  No one is saying that you need to end up like Jesus: that was his special gift to humankind: his blood so that people could find God through grace.  Now I mention this, not because you need to be Christian.  But it seems to me that Jesus lived out a life of high risk.  His reward?  His legacy has lived on for a full 2,000 years creating challenges and controversy for humankind ever since.  Debate whether he was the Son of God all you will.  Read his message and you will find incredible wisdom for leading a successful life including loving yourself.  His messages and the lessons he taught: they are difficult to refute.  And he did all that by one day deciding that he’d earn no money, but would go from town to town preaching The Way.  How scary would that task be for one of us today?  None could do it, I dare say.  Not that way.  Not to THAT degree.  Yet he lived and was fed and had places to stay … most nights.  But he wasn’t afraid of a cold night out on the desert floor every once in a while either.  The greater the risk, the greater the rewards.  Christ’s reward was a 2,000 year living history: and, of course, the saving of millions of souls who believed in his Way.  Have many others so impacted the world for so long in such a positive way?

Maybe I should also talk about rewards, because I now don’t think they will all manifest themselves in a monetary way.  Maybe too, we have to rewrite that script before we comprehend what it means to lead a rich and full life.  Maybe there are many ways to win … but we have lost track of those too.

Blessings

Owen

Dear Fans: I do sincerely apologize for the prolonged absence.  I do have more articles forthcoming and still more in my mind that haven't hit the page yet.  School has become a very high priority as I consider applying for grad school in philosophy.  So while I'm trying to get great grades, I'm also doing the research required for attending school next year.  This entry is quite long.  It has the good thing about it that it unifies many different thoughts, helping me, and hopefully you to comprehend the much bigger picture of why it is so difficult to practice human kindness towards one another.  God Bless, and hopefully over the next few days, I'll make some more posts.

Owen

135-07-13-2009

Diminishing Respect
By W. Owen Thornton

I’ve written before, years ago now, about the lack of respect we show one another in our automobiles.  Human kindness demands that we respect ourselves and others.  While in our cars we turn in front of one another with too little space, accelerate through late yellows – early reds etc.  We make aggressive driving mistakes at the expense of safety in regards to our own and others.  We literally risk life and limb on the roads in an over-inflated sense of our own driving skills.  I use this kind of behaviour now as indicative of our reduced respect for one another in all things.

It is not always clear why we should respect one another just a little bit more on the roads.  One man I know said that doing 110 kilometers per hour he did a shoulder check on a four lane highway in order to begin to change lanes.  The car ahead was going a little slow.  In an instant his wife screamed.  The man ahead stopped in the middle of the road for what appeared to be absolutely no reason (there were no cars ahead for quite some distance as it was early in the morning.)  Our chap jerked the wheel to change lanes faster than he ought to have and over the next few agonizing seconds he overcorrected his steering several times until he did a 180 in the middle of a large major city. 

He lived with only a dent in his rear corner but he came away with two more things than a little car damage.  One, he had a renewed sense of the value of life.  The second was that in a crisis, most normal people cannot handle their car at highway speeds.  Those little aggressive moves we make on the city streets leave people with split-second reactions to avoid a great deal of misery.  At least in the province of Ontario, insurance being what it is, most people will now spend upwards of $5,000 to repair their car on their own, rather than go through the hassles of dealing with insurance hoops and having their insurance rates go up more than the cost of doing the repairs.  Insurance today is seriously unkind to folk who have fender-benders (To be kind to insurance, it still works well when the user needs serious help, however).  And Insurance woes have nothing on the emotional cost of what happens when someone scares themselves silly by having a near fatal crash.  Hence one would think human kindness would be the order of the day because otherwise the cost of lack of human kindness is more than we want to bear.

So, when it comes to respecting one another, human kindness exhibited on our roads is an excellent example.  It shows us why we should practice human kindness because the cost of aggression or rudeness is emotionally visible and financially real.  Likewise we see this to a lesser extent in the contact sport of hockey.  Each time players up the ante for the last check … making the next one a little harder and a little dirtier, this lack of respect means players run the risk of injury and loss of a life-long income.

Oddly, I see lack of respect for others as an internal matter.  Aristotle said that we are meant to live in a political world … that we need one another to live valuable lives.  But today we have the sense that we can and that we should do it all on our own.  And so, because we’re doing it on our own, no longer relying on help from our fellow travelers, we seem to gain permission to ignore them.  We operate in little bubbles of isolation.  Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone tells the story of how the ‘wealthier’ classes get wealthier.  They go to their friends with an idea and ask for help in areas where they cannot readily do something for themselves.  And selflessly, more often than not, these requests are met: Not because the person granting the request expects something in return.  But rather, they know that when you put something good out into the universe, that the universe sees it as a vacuum and … and because nature abhors a vacuum, this means something good, from some other as-of-yet unknown direction will come back to you.  And if it doesn’t happen right away, as Norman Vincent Peale says, the longer it is withheld, the greater the return will be.

Where does doing it on our own come from?  Well, for one thing there are many things we must do on our own.  We must all work in our own jobs.  We must all be diligent and faithful to ourselves and our livelihood because in part we know that we cannot expect others to take care of us.  Doing it on our own, for the most part is a good thing.  These facts are truisms.

But in these pages I’ve also explored how sometimes our greatest traits lead to what I will now call excessivism.  Excessivism is a condition where we enable our best traits, which is normally a good thing, and we take them one step too far.  For example we like to joke to make things light and funny but we do it while teasing people.  Most times this makes someone popular and the atmosphere light and fun … until someone steps one step too far and their teasing results in an unintended but still hurtful insult.  This example demonstrates that we are never truly alone in the world and because of that fact, our actions are monitored and our negative excessivism, whatever trait that might be, can be harmful and demonstrate lack of respect for one another.

Combine our own tendency to excessivism with the false dream of avarice and that money and stuff will make everyone happy when we’re all millionaires and we’re driven to succeed on our own so we can retire at age 40 with our millions in the bank.  I recently read that humanities greatest sin is covetousness.  We all want more.  I remember an episode of West Wing.  One of the president’s men is sitting at a bar in a strange city, socked in by bad weather, unable to return to Washington.  He starts talking with someone who represents Joe or Josephine Q Public.  Without knowing that s/he is talking to a president’s employee s/he says, “It’s hard.  I get that.  Life is supposed to be about the struggle.  It wouldn’t be worth living if life were easy or free.  But it could be a little easier, you know?”

Foolishly we fall for avarice or greed each and every time.  Ponzi Schemes appear to be thriving right now.  Tell people that they can invest money and earn it back faster than it can be believed and … people fall for it.  (Thus the old adage, “If it is too good to be true, it probably is,” comes into vogue!)  But we’re bombarded by images of the ‘rich and famous’ – mostly entertainers and professional athletes – and we believe that we can all have that kind of life: like we can all get people to pay upwards of $1,000 a seat for 70,000 seats in some ‘Dome” somewhere.  But everything has a cost and we continually forget that fact, much to our own detriment. 

The kind of money that the ‘stars’ earn often comes with the sacrifice of privacy and normal lives.  I don’t know much about the story of Michael Jackson when he was alive, but give any fellow with some demons (and we all have a few of those – don’t kid yourself) hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to live out their eccentricities and watch us all go a little weird!  I believe that there are few people in this world who, as Rudyard Kipling once wrote in his poem “If” can approach wealth and fame in this manner: “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue/ or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch.” 

Sadly most of us get swept up by our own success thinking we’re someone important.  We ‘did it ourselves’ didn’t we?  So we must be someone important!  Success often seems to come at a cost to ourselves … to our humanity.  We need to be wary of that fact and ask ourselves if we are willing to potentially give up the great things we have for fortune and fame.  Few people have the virtue that Aristotle believes we can achieve where we can hold onto both ourselves (our humanity) and fortune/fame at the same time.  It can be done, but it is rare and usually it comes with a cost we cannot imagine.

But all this is vastly complicated.  We should do some things ourselves … but not everything.  And which things should we do ourselves and which should we do by requesting help from others?  Sometimes the way is clear.  Other times it is not.  Sometimes we bang our heads upon a ceiling we cannot penetrate it.  We do this out of pride that we can do it on our own, when we should have just asked a friend and we would have reached our destination by now.

And we all want things to be a little easier.  We all want the ability to be able to pay for that renovated bathroom and the new roof and … student fees … and new clothes and Toronto Maple Leafs season tickets at the same time.  But the reality is most people cannot afford to do all of those things.  But the trick of our society today is that somehow through our own gullibility … our own hopes and desires – also two good things that we should hold onto, but that can trick us if we take them to excessivism – is that we believe we can all have all of these things all of the time.

And some government agencies are not helping us.  The Ontario Lottery Commission has the slogan, “Just Imagine.”  This is a modified version of the previous slogan, “Imagine the Freedom.”  So … “Just Imagine” is telling us that we can “Imagine the Freedom” when we win millions of dollars in lotteries.  This message confronts us despite counter notions that might tell us that having money is like living in a friendless prison.  Look at movie stars or the wealthy people in poverty-stricken nations: both live behind walls and barricades to keep out the ne’er-do-wells (that’s people like you and me, you know!).  If you need to live behind gates and have security … who’s living in a prison, I ask you?

When I wrote earlier about unconscious thoughts helping us decide things, we see the danger in messages like this.  If money means freedom and we don’t have money now, we must not be free.  Not being free means we’re imprisoned.  If we’re imprisoned in our own lives … well who wants to live a life in a prison?  “Just Imagine” cannot be a good message to be sending us: that our normal lives are prisons but ones with untold riches mean freedom.  These thoughts enter our unconscious minds and we begin to see how we can make decisions that show others a lack of respect as we all trundle off down the road of life trying to do it ourselves … often at the expense of our fellow travelers.  And who can blame us for acting this way?  All we’re trying to do is get some freedom for ourselves?  And that freedom has a cost more than just living behind walls and bars and chains and security guards, doesn’t it?  It will also come at the expense of friendships.  People will wonder, with all our millions why we don’t buy every round, or why we won’t loan them money for their house or … and therein lies why these people have to build walls and barricades and pay for security people!

To cite another example, too many images of too many female models who are too skinny, and suddenly we have young women unconsciously emulating these models who starve themselves for fashion and we find new dis-eases of the mind: anemia and bulimia!  Look.  In a psychology experiment when people were asked to work with words and create sentences from them where some of the words they work with remind them of being ‘old’, these people will later walk more slowly than those who work with words that do not remind them of being old.  Let me restate that.  If you work with words that remind you of being old, you will unconsciously walk more slowly.  Mad-eye Mooney of the Harry Potter series has it right.  When it comes to the things that enter inside our minds we must have “CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”  Therefore we should not look at magazines with too-skinny models otherwise we will come to see that as the new way we ‘should’ be … whether we consciously decide to be that way or not!

And here’s a second complication: money in and of itself is not evil.  So it should be okay to accumulate it without becoming corrupted.  So what’s the deal with it?  I recently read a book by a pastor who was driving down the road listening to an evangelical pastor on the radio.  The man on the radio was going on and on about the evilness of money: like everyone who had it was evil.  The author writing the book said that he wanted to drive down to the radio station and correct this terrible mistake: this terrible misread of the Bible.  Money is not evil.  Christ did not say that!  He said the ‘love’ of money is evil: that one cannot serve two masters: God and Money, for if you love the one, you will not have room in your life for the other.

So money is good because we need it to live, but loving it too much is an evil and this corrupts us.  And corruption in regards to money is so destructive because it is so seductive.  A little money makes things easier and we can have some fun, so a LOT of money should make life completely simple and provide an endless future of fun.  Wow!  That seems to make so much common sense.  But when we consider another human foible … that of taking what we have for granted … I’m betting we get used to having a lot of money very quickly.  And then life goes back to normal … with its good days and its bad days … and once you have money and life isn’t ‘perfect’ like you thought it would be … do you give up the quest?  Nope!  Most of us think that we need MORE money … then we’ll find happiness.

Aristotle said that everything we do, we do to bring about our own happiness.  We might decide to do one thing in order to bring about the next in order to bring about the next such that once we’ve done these things we will be happy.  Working to earn money to buy the things we need to live and be comfortable will make us happy.  But fall into the trap of the love of money and suddenly the means to our goal – that of happiness – or should I say the means to the end (the target called happiness) becomes our focal point.  And Aristotle said that a means can NEVER become the end in itself.  It will leave you hollow … always chasing the means and never reaching the end.  The love of money is a deadly, depressing trap, I’m afraid.  Money can only ever be a tool … a step along the way … that can lead us towards happiness.  And in the process, the pursuit of too much money has devastating consequences for human kindness.

Many philosophers believed that the way to happiness would be to have enough money to live and to spend some time with friends where you can talk about the big issues that trouble us … the philosophical issues.  In fact, living a life like this would be a relatively simple one where we didn’t have many excesses.  But, philosophers know too that should people aspire to this kind of happy and joyous life, that they would look very strange to most people: because most people think happiness is about s/he who has the most toys wins!

So that’s a complication too … isn’t it?  If we don’t fall in line with what society thinks is important – the almighty dollar … then we’ll look weird.  And we want to fit in.  We don’t WANT to be weird.  But if we want to fit in, which means being like everyone else, then why would we want to do it all ourselves because ‘fitting in’ doesn’t seem to matter when we’re out there doing everything on our own.  So that’s really strange isn’t it?  We want to do everything on our own so we can fit in with everyone else who is doing it all on our own … but in that world, then it would seem that we don’t need to fit in because fitting in wouldn’t seem to be an important priority.  But it is in the human kindness sense of desiring to ‘fit in’ which seems to be a natural human tendency that we learn to accept that ‘doing it all on our own,’ cannot be the right normal tendency that we first thought it was!  Doing it all on our own to fit in becomes an oxymoron: an impossibility. 

So to conclude this section: take a positive trait like a person’s independence – that of doing it on their own – and drive it to excessiveness.  Then combine it with the falsity that materialism and wealth – and all the tricks that lay in that minefield – are major, prime desires and people fall in love with money as the means to the end: they think money will “buy happiness”.  And they fall for things more easily than they might think because of the emotional and societal atmosphere around them and they make unconscious decisions based on the words and images that repeatedly strike them.  Because of these things they believe the false promises that doing it on their own and that money buys happiness and then because they’re on autopilot they do things for themselves that show a complete lack of respect for one another. 

In our cars we pull out in front of one another where had we waited just a few seconds the road would have been empty.  We pummel one another for slight offenses in hockey rinks.  We take advantage of others to garner gains in our business and financial lives because everyone else is doing it.  And we do all of these things for good theoretical reasons which are all taken to false extremes.  We forget that “holding hands and walking together” makes us feel better than isolated “money” dreams or goals.  And we forget that sometimes we simply cannot do certain things alone.  We are often better off when we work as a team.  All “isolated-greed-goals” lead to a complete lack of respect for others in the process.  But, if our goals were realistic, based on working together and refusing to allow the love of money to overwhelm us then we’d do different and truly meaningful things.  If we REALLY did things to “fit in” we would be practicing human kindness towards one another and the entire world would really be a better place: rather than each one of us “going it alone” and never really arriving at that better place.  We would do things that would be kind to others and towards ourselves.  And then we would all feel better.

Maybe part of the problem is that we don’t have a vision for what that better life means.  Maybe that is why we find it easy to be caught up by the world telling us that we should live our lives alone and for the almighty dollar.  Perhaps the problem is that many of us have never been given the knowledge and the tools that we can really do that for ourselves: figure out the thing that would make us happy and then do the right things to enable us to go for it.  Maybe some of our platitudes, that each person can become Prime Minister or President, fail to come with a list of behaviours and attitudes required to get there.  Maybe that’s the thing we lack.  Maybe we all want too much handed to us rather than desiring to work for it … yes … on our own … or maybe working for it on our own together with others who all want to achieve the same goals. 

The world is a great and tremendous place.  We have so much.  I believe each person lives in a world where we can all achieve our dreams and desires.  And if we don’t know how to get there, we can find those who can help us along the way … while we help others to achieve their goals and desires.  And if we don’t know what our goal or desires need to be for us … we have people who can lead us out of that wilderness too.  We can all have the kind of inner wealth we cherish and desire.  No one ever needs to go hungry.  No one ever needs to worry.  No one ever needs to lose sleep at night.  No child ever needs to go hungry.  No child should ever be abused or neglected or die of diseases that could be cured.  We have had that legacy given to us.  But in our isolated struggles for our own results we fail the world a little bit, every day.  We could all be heroes to the world.  I believe that.  The answers are out there.  We just need to stop doing some of the things we are doing and to start doing something different: rather than continuing to do more of the same kinds of things. 

Human kindness is the way.  It is the focus that can turn our isolated and selfish considerations into a beautiful reality.  It is not easy.  But it is not as hard as we think.  It takes some sacrifice, but had we the vision required the rewards would be greater than we can know.  The sacrifice would not seem like a sacrifice in hindsight.  Human kindness is love and respect for ourselves and for others.  We need to become selfish about doing deliberate acts of kindness for others.  We need to absorb good things so our auto-pilot does good things.  We need to have constant vigilance against words and images that lead us to bad unconscious decisions.  It’s all right to win a lottery as long as you have your eyes wide open and that you realize money is not equivalent to happiness: it only lies on a path towards happiness.

I think I could go on … and if this doesn’t feel like an ending … which it does not … I don’t know what to tell you.  Maybe this essay shouldn’t end.  Maybe it should be the beginning of your own thoughts leading towards kindness.

Cheers

Owen