Borders, or Chalk Outlines in the Sand.

“The best way to look at countries on a map is like a chalk outline drawn by the police when someone dies… what you are seeing with the borders are just outlines of historical crimes… past warlords… empires… its nothing to be loyal to. Have loyalty to reason, to evidence, to ideals… not to lines drawn up mostly by criminals.” — Stefan Molyneux

I agree with almost zero of what Molyneux usually says--and less of what he stands for--however, somehow this quote strikes a chord with me. Even a blind pig finds an apple on occasion. 

Countries are basically these magically attached, by mostly invisible lines, defining chunks of land. They are then united by historical thefts, atrocities, and other criminal behaviors. For example, the United States of America basically stole the southwest part of the country, including California, from Spain. Spain stole it before that from the Native Americans that lived there previously, and even those people overtook it from earlier tribal nations such as the Anasazi nations.

So why is this important? In my humble opinion, it reflects the human need to define itself in all matters of existence, to establish it's tribe, determine it's social and cultural norms, to inclusively segregate. The need to isolate not only cultural and social norms from differing ones that may lie across an invisible, magically determined line is somewhat a recent problem in relation to enforcement. Migration, emigration, immigration, famine, war, and other triggering events have always moved populations of people from place to place.

It seems that the real compassionate question that is not being dealt with is how to get along as a people who share so much in similar human characteristics, yet divide themselves so sharply in cultural, social or religious concepts. The figurative wall that needs to be built would be one filled with bricks of understanding, the mortar of social exploration and designed with open communication of shared values and possibilities of positive growth.

You still might have to place some guards here and there, to ensure some circumstantial and situational incursions of "bad" elements along parts of the wall are addressed, but if you build it with no way to see and engage the humanity of others, is it worth it?

Hope for Empathy

"I don't know whether your heart ever necessarily changes, but time changes the way that you perceive the world. And you just hope it gives you more empathy and all those other things." -- Mark Knopfler

"Why are you so nice to me?"

This is the question that our 5-year-old granddaughter posed to her Grandmother recently. For some reason, after my wife told me this, the inquiry hit me at a profound level, and I wondered to myself what it was that she was really asking? Was she trying to determine her place in the scheme of existence? Did she have some need to determine why this adult would patiently sit next to her, and read, and just express a caring and loving attitude to her? Is she measuring her worth in some way?

I know that I probably shouldn't jump right to all the existential issues of a simple question, but I can't seem to help myself. It is the inner anthropologist, sociologist, and psychologist in me.

Yet, hearing of this gentle child's probing question, this desire at measuring another's perspectives felt like the wrong approach to me, until I considered that this little one was just expressing--or displaying--beginning empathy, or at least trying to understand her world through empathetic eyes and heart. She was stretching her imaginations beyond herself, taking in another's thoughts and identifying with a perceived emotion, in this case, my wife's expression of "nice" to her. These are two of the core habits of empathy, in my opinion, processing another's thoughts and then identifying (yet not sympathizing) with them. 

This little one was drawing on assorted elements of her brief existence, those of inborn aptitude, social experience, personal history, patience and motivation in order to understand the people of her world, as well as how those people perceive of her.

I believe the exploration our granddaughter is starting, will lead to a balance in her need to successfully relate to others. And I would like to hope that this can be a small yet significant step in giving our children's children a chance at achieving what can only be accomplished through validation of genuine caring.

The Unreliability of Memory

"We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and re-categorized with every act of recollection."  

- Oliver Sacks

There seems to be a great deal of controversy these days focused on believing or not believing the remembered experiences of people. And for those who are dealing with traumatic events in their past, this must be very frustrating to them. Frustrating indeed. For if we believe, or at least try to understand, what Dr. Sachs was saying in this quote, making any sense of the past should be viewed as problematic. To depend on what we have remembered many years ago has to be challenged by anyone who might have looked at what neuroscience has shown to be true.

Now I would never discount a memory with corroborating information about something that has happened in the past. With the new technologies of the hand-held phone that has every type of recording device on it, a memory can be called up many years later and reviewed by the person with audio and visual to support a claim. However, in my past it was unlikely that such evidence of support existed outside of those rare individuals who were consistent, dedicated, and truthful diarists.

Getting over the belief that human memory is somehow consistent with the working of a video recorder is something that needs to be considered if we are to fairly weigh and interpret memory. Leading psychologists such as Dr. Sachs have found that memories are reconstructed each time that they are "played' or recalled and that many fragments, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, are filled-in with convenient or inaccurate details.

So it is with great difficulty that I find myself doubting testimonials of those in an accusatory role as well of those who are denying accusations. In my humble opinion, trust should not be placed in people's memories when they are offering corroborating testimony as eyewitnesses as well. In these instances, we human beings are trying to reassemble what has been imprinted in a brains neurons. However, those neurons have been colored, altered and reinterpreted by life experience, trauma, physical changes, psychological impacts, and the list goes on.

The one time I sat on a jury it was one of the most awful experience in my life, and this was even before I put much thought in things like the reliability of memory.

So how will we judge or decide about a issue or person when faced with testimony relying on a human memory from the past. I don't have an easy answer. Go with the gut? I just don't know. 

Surprised by a sound

“Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.” – Boris Pasternak

Nature is full of surprises. Visionary ones. Tactile ones. Auditory ones. Even those that would fall under the category of spiritual ones. In addition, the best part of the surprise is the element of them being unexpected as well as personally impactful.

When my wife and I were kayaking up and down a new stretch of a river in the upper peninsula of Michigan, one of the more prominent elements were the many beaver houses found along the shoreline. The intricate building designs of them and the carefully “paved with branches” runways that led down the river embankments were interesting to observe. You could see the ways that their work was subtly altering the riverway.

However, the most surprising discovery happened as we were floating back down the river after the upstream paddle. When drifting back, the trip becomes much more silent, as paddling is not as necessary to move with the current doing the hard work of moving the kayaks. As I drifted by one of the many beaver houses situated in a bend in the river, I heard a faint squeaking that seemed to be emanating from the shoreline, more specifically, from under the piled branches of the beaver house on my right. Paddling in reverse toward the sound I had passed, I slowly drifted back past the spot and again heard the sound. Emanating from deep beneath the branches, was the sound of beaver kits communicating whatever it is that beaver kits communicate to their parents. Responding to those sounds, were a deep, gruff response from what I assumed must have been one of the adults.

Beaver pencil sketch by Mitch Smith.

I indicated to my wife who was drifting down behind me to come over and take a listen. 

Together, we held our kayaks in the spot alongside the beaver dam and listened to the delightful and surprisingly cute sounds of nature, sounds that my wife and I had never heard before. We were not sure that what we were hearing was actually beavers, but it made sense that it fit the observed reality of what would live in a beaver dam (Note: Google confirmed the sounds as beavers when a nature show was found regarding the life, times and “sounds” that make a beaver a beaver).

This experience became one of the most profound of the trip; a most cherished and remembered memory. My wife and I lingering along the shore, overhearing nature, entranced by a new experience, and surprised by another of nature’s numerous wonders.

Where, When and Why of Our Thinking

"Choose not to be harmed, and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed, and you haven't been."
--Marcus Aurelius

I had to read and meditate on the famous stoic Marcus Aurelius's wisdom for quite a while to sort out his thinking and how I could apply it to my life. It came to me slowly what he was driving at. It was the principle of taking everything personally while at the same time looking at what is said or done to you as a positive opportunity. 

Yes, everything good or bad is a positive growth opportunity.

After all, if you allow someone or something to make you angry, sad or worried, you have taken what you can control and gave the power to them. Transferred your personal agency to another. Sure, it feels good to yell at the person that cut you off in traffic, be angry at the baby crying in the restaurant or just saddened by hurtful words. Maybe this is the opportunity to look at our reactions, confront our feelings, and look at them in a new, less-painful light.

First, I would challenge us to put ourselves in the other person's shoes. I know that most of us have probably heard this a thousand times before, but if you are anything like me, it doesn't seem to stick very well, like worn out Velcro. I've taken to grabbing one of three words to apply to stuff like this: where, when or why.

I would apply any one of these three words to any of the previous examples. Applying my logic to someone who has said something hurtful to me, I would ask the 'Where' verb of myself: "Where does that person want this to go?'; "Where did they learn to act like this?"; or, "Where inside themselves are they suffering?"

Or you could choose 'When.' "When were they hurt?"

And lastly, "What can I do about it so that I don't suffer?"

Doing this for myself has been a rich experience, and it has been an opportunity for me to grow as a person, and be much, much more empathetic with others. I also have come to think of where what, and when as three basic questions that can help in the understanding of people and what has shaped them, drives them and ultimately leads to the greater reflective observation of their unique, troubled, challenging, wonderful, varied story.

Maybe that crying baby will grow up to be a doctor that will help cure a cancer, that person who cut you off was rushing to a hospice to say goodbye to a dying relative, or the person saying hurtful things may be expressing unconscious expressions of the hurt that was visited on them that they may not understand.

I remember...

"On my cornice linger the ripe black grapes ungathered;

Children fill the groves with the echoes of their glee,

Gathering tawny chestnuts, and shouting when beside them

Drops the heavy fruit of the tall black-walnut tree." 

--William C. Bryant

I had to ride my bike down the road past his house to get to my friends house. It was the only route available. Four years older than me, he had salt and pepper hair before he even graduated high school. I suspected he would wait for me to ride by, and then throw the walnuts that fell from the tree in his front yard. At me on my bike. Black walnuts when they were still heavy and green. The longer those walnuts aged upon the ground, their outer husk starting to decompose, the more they stained and smelled when they painfully hit you. Exploding black and green and slimy. Sometimes his friends joined him in this pastime. He and his friends subsequently called me "walnut man" due to this exercise. 

I now have a walnut tree in my front yard, and I still can smell that sting of those walnuts all these years away when I pick them from the grass beneath the tree. 

He is a jail administrator in a northern Michigan county now, according to my mom.

"He was a nice boy", she told me over the phone.

Teach Our Children Well

"What's done to children, they will do to society." -- Karl A. Menninger

There seems to be an awful lot of attention these days to what can only be categorized as awful things that adults do to children. In Hollywood, in the legal system, in our public schools, or just about anywhere adults have the opportunity to interact privately with children, we are beginning to hear about the abuse and intimidation and betrayal that are occurring. These places and situations where our young people are being harmed are starting to be dragged from the darkness into the bright light of the truth, a truth that is very, very disturbing. More and more the despicable people that prey on children are losing their safe havens, and as Goethe said, "The coward only threatens when he is safe."  

I suggest offering them no amount of safety.

The sad realization to me however, is that we seem to be failing our children. We need to instill a sense of a higher expectation of love in our households, in our schools, and in our communities, while at the same time helping our young people to expect and demand that from other people. Society should be demanding that adults behave like adults, the kind of adults who love children. This has to be an important priority.

I have the tendency to believe that most people are good, and that leads me to trust more than I probably should. It is more likely that most of us are good, and harming children or any person is not what we are about. But by believing this, have I somehow been careless with providing tools to help children understand how they should be treated? Have I placed those in my care at risk?

I don't know. And that is my shame.