Category Archives: Social Science

The Incomparable Privilege

Bill Bryson, in his book I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away, wrote a compelling address to a graduating class. All of the speech was notable, but two parts grabbed my shirt collar and shook me.

Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.

For endless eons there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you do with your life, nothing will remotely compare wiht the incredible accomplishment of having managed to get yourself born. Congratulations. Well done. You really are special.

Ah, Bill, how I wish ye lived on my shoulder to whisper this whenever I forget. But let me not neglect an equally important point. Bryson continues:

But not that special. There are five billion other people on this planet, every one of them just as important, just as central to the great scheme of things, as you are. Don’t ever make the horrible, unworthy mistake of thinking yourself more vital and significant than anyone else. Nearly all the people you encounter in life merit your consideration. Many of them will be there to help you — to deliver your pizza, bag your groceries, clean up the motel room you have made such a lavish mess of. If you are not in the habit of being extremely nice to these people, then get in the habit now.

Millions more people, most of whom you will never meet or even see, won’t help you, indeed can’t help you, may not even be able to help themselves. They deserve your compassion. We live in a sadly heartless age, when we seem to have less and less space in our consciences and our pocketbooks for the poor and lame and dispossessed, particularly those in far-off lands. I am making it your assignment to do something about it.

Again, the reminder is a worthy one. What about you? What one thing, however small, will you do — today — to better the world? One small action will have a positive impact. Yes. It really will. Ah, you wonder what it is I’ve done? Well, today I ordered books to give to my ten students at the end of the year. (The fourth graders will get The Cricket in Times Square, and the fifth graders will receive Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.) I also wrote a check to support Modest Needs. I’ll see you that and raise you one act of kindness.

I highly recommend you get your hands on this book. Bryson’s puckish, astute views on life and his ability to poke fun at himself make me hope he continues writing for a long, long time to come.

The Overly Examined Life

I saw a grief counselor today at The Centre for Living With Dying. What prompted me to call, finally, is that yesterday I expressed myself inappropriately at work, which made me realize I need a safe place to process all the pain and anger I’m sitting on as I go through life’s daily routines. The woman I met with is the minister who performed our marriage ceremony. Talking with her was the closest I’ve felt to being where I want to be since leaving Texas.

One thing that became clear is that the grief of my father-in-law’s death compounds the previous grief of leaving behind a dear community by moving to California. That community, the handful of friends, was my bedrock. They are still my friends, sure, but the physical displacement is what hurts.

I also realized something else. I lamented to the counselor how I’m not taking actions that I know might be comforting or helpful, such as making art or exercising. The realization dawned that I’m resisting because I want to feel poorly. It’s a way of making room for grief in a culture that relentlessly strives, in a life that requires returning to work and chores and bills, and where few people want to hear of one’s pain. I’ve been feeling ill in body and spirit. I want to be sick. Leave me alone and let me rest; let the process happen.

But I haven’t allowed this, haven’t given myself permission; instead I’ve countered with self-critique: What’s wrong with me that I don’t do what would be “good” for me? I haven’t even granted myself the luxury of unexamined experience. I live so much in my mind that I have abandoned my heart. The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not worth living. I agree, to a point. An overly examined life, however, is clouded by second-guessing and self-conscious narrative.

So for now, in the moment, I give myself permission and space to feel like crud and to live my life without self-critique. I’ll feel better when I feel better. My body and spirit will let me know. It’s happened before.

Leadership Styles to Enhance Creativity

Traditionally, the best and brightest specialists were promoted to positions of leadership, on the strength of the rationale that their creative success would permeate the team they headed. The legacy of this strategy, however, is knowledge organisations that are often financially and intellectually weakened by these brilliant specialists who were actually incompetent, autocratic leaders. Even today, few technical specialists are schooled in general management and, as a consequence, most learn from experience or need to receive management and leadership training after their appointment.

Recent research is showing that classic directive leadership or traditional autocratic management strategies are not effective in knowledge organisations or teams, and that knowledge workers respond to inspiration rather than supervision. Henry Mintzberg rightly notes that, in knowledge teams, the members are there because they are highly proficient at what they do so they need little coaching at a technical level. What they do need, according to Mintzberg, is inspiration, protection and support, all of which agree with the creativity-enhancing supervisory encouragement and organisational support of Amabile. Mintzberg described the type of leadership required to effectively lead a knowledge team as “covert leadership” because it is leadership that is delivered subtly through everything the leader does.

Leadership is generally accepted to occur at three different levels: the individual level where leaders mentor, coach and motivate; the group level, where leaders build teams and resolve conflicts; and at the organisational level, where leaders build culture. On the individual and team levels, leaders can covertly inspire and energise just by treating team members as “respected members of a cohesive social system”. Mintzberg stipulates that covert leadership establishes the team culture because the leader sets the culture standard through behaviour. Hardy and Schwartz also noted that a leader is only effective if her behaviour matches her directives. Therefore, the behaviour of a leader establishes the culture of the team or organisation, regardless of whether directives accompany the behaviour or not.

–Heather L. Bruce, Leading Creativity: Effective Leadership of Knowledge Teams

Exactly Where She Wants To Be

I’m a mental health professional, but I am also human. Therefore I experience the slings and arrows of life, which sometimes land solidly under a chink in my armor, and as I cannot be objective about myself, I suffer as others do.

Recently I wrote to my friend, Marta:

IÂ’m treading water of my own depression.

I could be happy, content — I ought to be. I am healthy (mostly), employed, loved, housed, fed, clothed. People like me, they really like me! BUT. Instead I feel numb, or emotionally flat, and my body aches a great deal. I carry out my daily duties and smile and laugh, but I also feel resistant, unsettled, and clenched. Meeting new people and making friends is trying. I miss you. I miss my other peeps. I avoid the phone because I want in-person connection. Ah, fuck it.

And I havenÂ’t made art. Though I did color this weekend Â— a mandala. Does that count?

What is WRONG with me? I ask this in light of my recent encounter with death. Why the hell am I not embracing my life, cherishing it? Living it with joy?

And bless her wise, enormous heart, she wrote words of comfort and meaning.

That is a cliché. Encounters with death do not make us cherish life more. I think people say that because it is expected. It is what you’re supposed to say. Maybe they do sometimes, in moments of sunshine and cool breezes on the skin and what-not, but I think they often make us more fearful, more stressed, more tired. When my mother died I felt that there was nothing except a great, horrible void all around me. There was no floor under my feet and no roof over my head, just space and the knowledge that for the rest of time as I knew it, my mother would not be there. Perhaps because her death was unexpected, it made me feel that death waited around every minute of every day. It takes a while after that to feel that any of the small things that normally bring joy had any point at all. There is nothing wrong with you. You’re grieving. It isn’t easy and it isn’t tidied up with pithy sayings and clichés. But a moment will come when you’ll realize that you have been cherishing life, and you won’t be sure when the change came. At least, that’s how it was for me.

I have grieved deeply before. The last time I was also experiencing a moderate depression, and the loss which evoked grief deepened that episode. I have much more insight now, and a vastly better support system than I had then. Pharmacology helps too. Of late, I just find life draining and irritating. I become annoyed with the unexpected, when I would rather meet it with equanimity. Cognitive behaviorists would prescribe that I need to change my thinking. Buddhists would suggest I meditate and notice my ego. Athletes would recommend more exercise. Psychoanalysts would infer that this was connected to a long-buried childhood pattern or experience. All may be true, but this doesn’t change a thing.

I long for (and perhaps this is part of the problem) the following experience, and wish it to be the general tone of my life:

I arrived for one of my last sojourns at The Farm on a chill sunny day quite early in June 1979, just after Aunt Jane and Uncle Kip had moved up for the summer, while the lemon lilies and iris were still in bloom, before all the asparagus had gone to fern. After settling my considerable baggage in the downstairs front bedroom, which would be mine now that I could no longer climb the stairs to the one above it, I wandered back into the kitchen. It was new to me, the ample wooden cabinets and yellow Formica counters and stainless-steel sinks and especially the wide bay window above the table. I stood staring through the newly ample panes at the sweep of garden, lavendar flags and yellow trumpets against a tangle of green, the whole blurred in the long spreading shafts of late light.

     “What are you looking at?” Jane asked behind me.
     “Just the garden,” I answered. “I was feeling the pleasure of being exactly where I want to be.”
     “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Everyone should have one place where, when she’s in it, she’s exactly where she wants to be. And if she can no longer return to it, well, at least she’ll have been there. That’s something.

–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: an Erotics of Space & Place

I have experienced this before, numerous times, in my original home state and then during my Texas years. But not since I moved to California.

I write about my personal struggles here both to cope with my life (the expression is curative), and with the hope that others reading it might find a kindred spirit and thus feel less alone in their journey.

A Mother and Not-Mother

Every girl should have a mother, I think, not the sort of predatory monster sketched out and whined about in pop-psych books designed to cop a chunk of the bestseller trade, but an ordinary mother like mine, flawed but serviceable, who will hang your kindergarten plaque in her kitchen and teach you to sew an invisible hem in your skirts and stay up watching a late movie with you both because she likes you and because she likes the movie. She may, like mine, take some of her responsibilities too seriously, especially in matters (not entirely unrelated) of politeness and sex, and in this way cause you a good bit of unnecessary teeth gnashing and sleeplessness. But unless, unlike mine, she’s some kind of nut, you’ll learn to interpret the clamp of emotional hands on your spirit as one of love’s shape-shifting signs and to pry her fingers free without breaking them or the heart they clutch.

At the same time, every girl should have a not-mother, a woman who has, in every sense, no stake in you. If you’re a bad child, no one will blame her. And she has a much narrower interpretation of badness than your mother, anyway. Almost nothing you do seems to strike her as bad. A lot more of what you do strikes her as funny. Like when you build a “cat house,” you solemnly tell her, for sleek, striped Minnie. Or when you lather yourself lavishly with the expensive soap from S.S. Pierce shaped exactly like a lemon, with a lemon’s maddening pungency. She’s under no obligation to warn you that certain words “aren’t nice” or to exhort you to thrift. She’s under no obligation at all. That’s what a girl needs: a woman who’s free to love her without fretting whether she’s going to grow up to be all right.

–Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: an Erotics of Space & Place

This Life

My mother-in-law is in the hospital. A sudden illness from an infection. She’ll be just fine, and for this I’m grateful. But such news is distressing!

One of my cats, Sophie, probably has mammary cancer. She may also have heartworm. One of these will kill her, maybe sooner, maybe later. She has a heart murmur that she wasn’t born with, and her breathing problems may be symptoms of worm infestation in her heart. There’s no really effective treatment to cure heartworm in cats. Because she’s an indoor cat I didn’t think she was vulnerable to heartworm. None of my vets (until the one I saw today) ever suggested prevention. However, it takes only one mosquito bite to infect a cat. There’s almost no treatment for it, but prevention is easy. Do it!

Diagnosing and treating the tumors would require major surgery and possibly chemotherapy (if they are cancerous). Because her first vet spayed her incorrectly at age six months, leaving an ovary in her, the subsequent heat cycles may have contributed to this. She had a second spay surgery when she was three. Two major surgeries is enough, especially given her size. Chemotherapy practically kills human patients. I’m unable to embrace this as a reasonable protocol to put her in the position of enduring.

Sophie weighs barely eight pounds and currently has an excellent life. She’s content, lively. The only distress I observe is a slight panting or wheezing, an occasional cough. I can give her prednisone to ease those symptoms. She is otherwise full of zing. Given that my father-in-law died only six weeks ago, I had an alarm raised regarding my own health, and now these two events, the following quote hit home.

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your life depends on it; and when the time comes, to let it go.

–Mary Oliver

And I’m thinkin’… The weather here is gorgeous. I’m working with kids Saturday night, having dinner with friends Sunday. Still haven’t made any art. Perhaps, just perhaps, I will shut down my computer and take a few days to experience this life of mine.