Gumption

Commenting on Validation / Validating Comments

Ever since my last post, which started out about locked-in syndrome (inspired by The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), but which developed into a revisitation of a frequently discussed topic [on this blog] - "the need for approval ... for validation ... for appreciation ... for mattering" - I've been attuned to validation in a variety of forms and forums.

The stream of comments that followed my initial post were incredibly engaging and validating - to know that two people I admire so much were touched by the post, as was another person who serendipitously stumbled upon it - and all of them helped draw me a bit deeper (and more broadly) in a followup comment into the topic(s) I'd touched on in the initial post ... culminating in my revisiting one of the most validating poems I've ever encountered: "Love after Love", by Derek Walcott ("... You will love again the stranger who was yourself ...").

However, another comment on that thread - and a number of other recent comments on a number of other posts - initially appeared validating, but upon closer inspection (and reflection), seem less so. In an earlier post, in which I was commenting on commenting, I explicitly named - and thus (I believe) alienated - a friend who had posted a validating comment which had a very similar syntactic look and feel to other comments which I labeled spampliments - thinly, though sometimes effectively (due to my incurable addiction to validation - online or offline), disguised spam compliments. Such comments appear to be primarily intended to add "google juice" to various web sites - by incorporating a URL in the comment itself and/or in the commenter self-reference. I'm tempted to delve deeper into this shadow - I tend to be very self-referential in both my blog posts and comments on this and other blogs - but given my perception that I lost a blog commenter (if not reader (if not friend)) last time I ranted about this, I think I'll simply drop it, but not without first noting that validating comments that [initially] appear to be validating me (or my blog ... not that I think the difference is significant (and therein lies the rub)) is an ongoing challenge. I do want to be very explicit, though, that I really do appreciate (and feel validated by) comments from people who are in some way moved by what I write. [Ironically, I recently noticed that the number of comments on my blog has superseded the number of posts ... and that trend may reverse itself [now] ... but I feel impelled to write what I think and feel.]

Anyhow, returning to the original thread, yesterday, during the 4+ hour drive down to MyStrands HQ in Corvallis, OR, I had an unusually long time for audio engagement. During the first portion of the drive, I listened to the audiobook rendition of The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz. I've already written about his second agreement - don't take anything personally (the same post in which I explored my shadow(s) about commenting on commenting) - and his fourth agreement - always do your best (about which I [still] feel strongly ambivalent). One of the things that jumped out at me during this particular listening experience was his description of how, as young children, the adults in positions of authority (parents, teachers, ministers) hooked our attention, and "domesticated" us by cultivating an addiction to future attention ... resulting in, among other things, our willingness - and even desire - to [try to] be who we are not simply to please other people ... i.e., just to receive validation (from others).

I then switched on the radio, to catch some NPR news ... which was immediately followed by Terry Gross' Fresh Aire interview of Sheryl Crow, one of my favorite artists (make no mistake). During the interview, entitled Sheryl Crow: Gracefully Navigating "Detours", she spoke - among other things - of her need to be accepted and appreciated for her music, not [simply] for her physical beauty. She said she intentionally dressed in a bedraggled style and used black makeup in the photo shoots for the cover[t] art on her first two albums - Tuesday Night Music Club and the self-titled Sheryl Crow (I always thought it odd to have a self-titled second album) - in an attempt to obscure her visual attractiveness, so that people would be better able to hear and appreciate her aural artistry. Well, at the risk of dating myself, and without delving too deeply into this shadow, her first two albums were my gateway into opening up again to popular music, after a nearly 20-year "dry spell". Her musical talents shined brightly (for me), and despite her attempts to hide her physical attributes, those too shined through pretty clearly (I'll briefly note that Pink Floyd's song, "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond", was released near the end of what I consider the [last] golden age of rock and roll). Anyhow, the point I really want to emphasize here is that I find it reassuring that even an artist as immensely talented as Sheryl Crow still feels the need to be validated ... which makes me just a wee bit less self-conscious and more accepting about this need in my self ... perhaps enabling me to better love [myself] with a paper thin heart.

On Hineini, Team Spirit and Recognition

I've been reading a soon-to-be-published book on Digital Dharma: A User's Guide to Expanding Consciousness in the Infosphere, by Steven Vedro, which proposes an integration of spirituality and technology based on the seven chakras. I hope to post an entry on the book after I finish it, but one of the many gems I've encountered in the book so far ties in with some other things I've encountered in other media streams over the past few days, and so I'm going to weave them together in a new stream here.

In a sidebar, Steven recounts Flash Rosenberg's recounting of the true value(s) of Hebrew School, which include a definition of hineini from Rabbi Krinsky that I find inspiring:

The most important duty you have is to be present whenever you are called upon, whenever you are needed, whenever you can help.

My son, Evan's, football coach, Joe Morgan, recently sent around a welcome message to the players and parents of his Woodinville Junior Football team (which has strong, multidimensional team and community spirit, as I've written about before). Joe's message included a signature that offers some related inspiration:

You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

This strikes me as a fabulous philosophy to articulate and promote, whether the team is oriented toward athletics, business, politics or any field of human endeavor! [Update: this quote is attributed to Zig Ziglar]

On Friday, I heard a story on NPR's All Things Considered about the retirement of Karch Kiraly that relates to all of this. In an interview with KQED's Rob Schmitz, Kiraly, the winningest volleyball player of all time, who may be the sport's pre-eminent bumper and setter (vs. the more attention-attracting servers and spikers), shared his strategy:

If I can help my teammate - or teammates - play at a level they never played at before, then it doesn't even matter so much how I play.

While many organizations talk a good game about valuing such under-the-radar contributions, very few have any kind of mechanisms to more formally recognize and reward this kind of behind-the-scenes facilitation of others' success - systems of encouragement for being a mensch.

I'll finish off with something I used to do regularly, but from which I've refrained for the past 6 months: invoke the wisdom of Kathy Sierra. In this case, I'll simply borrow a photo she posted in a blog entry on Never Underestimate the Power of Fun, in which she shared a fun example of recognizing employees who typically operate behind-the-scenes - a calendar that includes photos of employees of the Water Services Department of the city of Bryan, TX, along with the annual Drinking Water Quality Report they help produce:

Absolution Power Corrupts Absolutely

I was listening to a story on CounterSpin where David Cole, Georgetown law professor and author of an article in Salon on "Bush's torture ban is full of loopholes", was talking about the executive order recently signed by U.S. President George W. Bush. Cole noted that one of the less noticed provisions of the document was that it absolved all present and past intelligence officials from any future litigation regarding any torture "enhanced" interrogation practices in which they may have engaged in their service to our country.

Borrowing from the playbook of Barry Goldwater, who famously argued that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice", it now appears that terrorism in the name of anti-terrorism is no crime ... leading me to wonder about how the "other side" thinks about its actions and justifications. But that's not why I started this post (and I've written about this "us vs. them" issue before).

The Bush Administration appears ready, willing and able to absolve anyone who acts on their behalf from any accountability for their actions. This week's executive order is simply the latest in a series of recent events - including Bush's ordering Harriet Miers to defy a Congressional subpoena and his pardoning of Scooter Libby - that remind me of a quote from Lord Acton:

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

All these recent absolutions serve to increase the Bush Administration's power - at a time when a decreasing proportion of the people who the administration purportedly serves support the administration's policies. Bush may not yet have absolute power, and may not yet be absolutely corrupt, but it seems that Congress is unable or unwilling to constrain our government's executive branch in any meaningful way (which may explain why a recent poll shows Congressional favorability ratings at 14% while the president is enjoying a favorability rating of 34%). Interestingly, another recent poll reveals that 45% of Americans favor impeaching the president (and 54% favor impeaching the vice president, Dick Cheney). This is particularly interesting given that in 1998, polls showed that only 26% of Americans supported former President Bill Clinton's impeachment.

In another Salon article, "Why Bush hasn't been impeached", Gary Kamiya noted some compelling reasons why the Democrat-controlled Congress probably will not seek impeachment - it may serve to rally and unite the Republicans at a time when they are increasingly fragmented, and impeachment proceedings would likely preclude progress on any other Democrat (and Republican) initiatives through the end of Bush's presidency. He goes on to offer a deeper, more disturbing analysis of why we, the American people, and not just the Democrats, really won't impeach Bush:

To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness -- come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we're not ready to do that.

The truth is that Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors, far from being too small, are too great. What has saved Bush is the fact that his lies were, literally, a matter of life and death. They were about war. And they were sanctified by 9/11. Bush tapped into a deep American strain of fearful, reflexive bellicosity, which Congress and the media went along with for a long time and which has remained largely unexamined to this day. Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves. This doesn't mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we're too confused -- not least by our own complicity -- to work up the cold, final anger we'd need to go through impeachment. We haven't done the necessary work to separate ourselves from our abusive spouse. We need therapy -- not to save this disastrous marriage, but to end it.

So, just as Bush is absolving him self through his absolutions of others, we are, in effect, absolving ourselves through our implicit absolution of - or at least, our unwillingness to prosecute - Bush. Bush's absolvees are simply carrying out his orders, and he, in turn, is simply fulfilling our unconscious - and, at times, unconscionable - desires.

I hate to think of myself as complicit in all this, but I have to admit I haven't done much, myself, to reinvigorate our system of checks and balances. Once again, I have seen the enemy, and they is me.

On Virginity, Vulnerability and Vaccines

Last night, I discovered of The Virginity Project (via Shel Israel's blog), a book project in which Kate Monroe is compiling a list of stories about how, when and why people lost their virginity. On the drive in this morning, I heard a segment on NPR's Morning Edition entitled "Young People and Sex: Parents, Can We Talk?" by Johanna Greenberg of Blunt Youth Radio. It turns out -- surprise, surprise -- that the parents of most of teens [that Johanna interviewed] have never said anything about sex to their kids, and of the few that had, it was mostly focused on the mechanics of sexual intercourse, or the risks of [unintended] pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The preceding NPR segment was on one such STD, human papillomavirus ("Detecting High-Risk HPV in Older Women"), and an earlier segment on local NPR affiliate KQED, in the locally produced series, Perspectives (I think), was an opinion piece by another young woman, Alana Germany, about The HPV Vaccine (Gardasil), focusing on the social and economic issues surrounding its availability, and the political issues surrounding the proposed school attendance requirement for the vaccine in California middle schools. Reading Kate Monroe's most recent post, "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but ...", she writes about her motivation behind pursuing this project, and in so doing, exhibits great openness and vulnerability (reminiscent of Shel and Robert Scoble's openness in Naked Conversations):

I, like most human beings, am innately insecure. There are questions that I need to ask - but I don’t think I am the only one who wants to know the answers. I want to know what other people really felt about having sex for the first time. Not the version that we tell our friends around the pub table but the no holds barred version. The reality, the joy, the pain, the sheer physical sensation of allowing somebody so close for the very first time. And if we take a step further toward truth, how does this one-off experience compare to our present arrangement? How good have we got? ... We all want to know that we are improving and we all want to know that we are normal.

Upon further reflection, I see vulnerability and sexual intimacy as deeply intertwined, and one's first sexual experience -- the loss of virginity -- as among the most vulnerable. [It's interesting that virginity is always lost ... what is gained?] I feel very fortunate that my first sexual experience (er, with someone else) was very positive, but I've often wondered about others' first experiences. I suspect it is generally, and perhaps drastically, different for men and women, but the only person I've ever spoken with about first experiences is Amy (and we did have different experiences of our first sexual encounters). I felt very vulnerable that first time, not really knowing quite how to proceed (although I was later told that my lack of experience was not apparent at the time), and feeling great fear and joy simultaneously. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I still often feel fear before, during and after a sexual encounter, and for similar reasons -- does she want to? am I being too selfish? am I doing it right? was it good for her? Fortunately, I also still [often] feel great joy, too. Johanna Greenberg's recommendation was that parents should talk more openly with their kids about their feelings and values regarding sex (wow, talk about vulnerability!). Amy has been more forthright with our kids in talking about sexual matters, which is ironic, as I generally like to think of myself as so open and communicative. Given that my 15 year-old daughter sometimes reads (and comments on) my blog, I suppose this post may represent some kind of potential opening. My feelings about sex in my own experience are often conflicted, and they become all the more so when I project them onto anyone else ... especially if that someone else is, in a significant respect, the outcome of a sexual encounter (i.e., my daughter (or son)). I already mentioned my experience of the fear and joy of sex. As for values, I value honesty and trust in all my relationships, and I believe these qualities are all the more important the more intimate the relationship ... and the more intimate the exchange. Over the weekend, I watched the movie Munich; in one scene, one of the Mossad agents is found in naked and dead in his hotel bed, after having last been seen heading in the direction of an attractive and flirtatious woman in the hotel bar. I was thinking "What was he thinking?" (he was part of a team had been involved in several assassinations, and must have known that they, in turn, were likely targets). How can such a person -- or at least a person in that role -- trust anyone, much less leave himself as vulnerable as one becomes during sexually intimate encounters (or, at least, as vulnerable as I become ... but I probably wouldn't cut it as an assassin, anyhow). Turning to the third "V", the HPV vaccine (Gardasil), I am glad that the vaccine is available, but I'm not convinced that requiring it to be administered to all students is the best policy. It seems to me that other vaccines required for school attendance are for diseases that can be transmitted through casual contact, or simple proximity. While I hear and read that casual relationships (or "friends with benefits") is on the rise, reports of any kind of sexual activities -- especially among youth -- are often greatly exaggerated, on an individual and/or aggregated basis. Taking measures to prevent the transmission of disease to others who are simply in the same room on a daily basis seems like a reasonable precaution. Mandating such measures to prevent transmission that requires a great deal more, er, engagement, seems overreaching. So I don't support mandatory vaccinations, but I am totally in favor of making [other] more casual or incidental prophylactics more widely available ... especially among youth ... who are, after all, especially vulnerable.

Openness, Vulnerability, Kindness and Greatness

I was catching up with Dan Oestreich's blog this morning, getting inspired by Dan's writing about -- and modeling -- the value of being conscious and open.  I took a break to drive the kids to school, and on the way back, listened to Steve Inskeep's interview with Paul McCartney on NPR, which provided yet another example of the benefits of openness and vulnerability.  The producer of McCartney's latest album, Nigel Godrich (who, as Inskeep notes was not even born yet when the Beatles broke up), was critical of some early cuts on the album, and by being open and responsive to some of that criticism, McCartney was able to craft better music, resulting in what may be his greatest album in years.

Indeed, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is the first McCartney album since Let it Be (the title track of which is one of those "goosebump" songs I mentioned a while back) I am willing buy.  I liked all the tracks played during the course of the interview; the following verse -- from How Kind of You -- resonated particularly strongly with me, given all the kindness we have experienced throughout our recent challenges:

How kind of you to think of me
When I was out of sorts
It really meant alot to be
in someone else's thoughts
someone elses's mind
someone else as kind
as you

The Risks of Changing, and of not Changing, Careers

In introducing this week's segment of "Take Two: Life Changes" on NPR's Morning Edition today, Ketzel Levine gave an update on the subject of a previous segment, 58-year-old Terry Rusinow and her mobile espresso cart, "Duck, Duck, Brew", who is now pursuing a "Plan B" in her entrepreneurial venture(s) -- seeking high-volume, half-day events she can espresso-ize rather than continuing her daily installation at the park ... bringing to mind Mark Horowitz' Mobile Coffee Unit.  Ketzel then goes on to tell the story of 24-year-old Brea Evans and her life (and work) during a 6-month stint aboard a fishing boat.   

I have enjoyed all of the stories in this series; today I was particularly inspired by Ketzel's observation about Terry and others who have been profiled:

She's gutsy ... and that's a common theme with all our Take Two people. Now I'm not saying they're not worried or anxious about changing careers.  Many of them have no choice, they've lost jobs, they've reached dead ends, but at a certain point they all take a risk, even if that risk is simply acknowledging that what they've been doing no longer works.

This brought to mind a whole flood of inspirational quotes on risk ... I'll restrict myself to listing only three below:

Don't be afraid of failure; be afraid of petty success.  - Maude Adams

The biggest risk in life is to risk nothing at all.  - Anonymous

Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive - the risk to be alive and express what we really are.  - Don Miguel Ruiz