My happy neighbor

I played golf last Friday with my next door neighbor which happens reasonably frequently. This was at a beautiful course up in Danville, VA that was new to us. Afterward we drove down to Greensboro to the Wyndham Golf tournament and saw Tiger woods and Davis Love play through right in front of us. I even saw myself on TV in the Saturday morning reports on Morning Drive, when they showed Tiger hitting his second shot on the 5th fairway. Lo and behold, there I was standing behind him at the edge of the fairway! How exciting!

My neighbor and friend is a PhD Chemist/College Professor, so he's got some serious smarts. He grew up in British Guyana before coming to the US to get his college education. And he's been here ever since. He's now a wiry upper middle-aged guy with slight graying hair and an aversion to chiggers.

As many times as I've enjoyed playing with my friend, this time was a bit more impressionable for me as I got fully present to his on-the-golf-course demeanor.Without any intention to be in any way critical of Mr L, I thought to share some things I noted about his demeanor when golfing.

One, he's got a heightened sense of bodily self expression.  He leans way over backwards with one leg way up in the air when his putts come near the cup as though he can will the ball to curve into the cup by body language alone. He's very limber.

Two, he cheers his own shots! Can you imagine? His standard cheer is "whew" but it's sung in a high pitch rather than just being said. When he's really wants to emphasize his cheer he adds "wee", so it comes out ,"woo wee", then a slight pause, then, "Yeah!"

Three, when he hits a good drive or iron shot he may break into that celebratory cheer along with a little jig sort of thing.

Four, he laughs a lot, and always seems happy.

I really like my neighbor a lot, but sometimes I wonder how much of this celebration and happiness I can take! After all, it's just golf'.

The Creepy Crawlies

Does anyone else experience this? Last night I woke with a start. Something was crawling down my arm which was out and above the covers. It felt like a spider, at least like some sort of small bug.

Before I was fully awake I snapped my arm up in the air to rid myself of the creepy crawler that was invading my person. Now here's the thing. These creepy crawlers visit every now and again. Not every night, nor even every month. But it's not rare.

I have in the past been so sure I was experiencing a bug infestation that I've jumped out of bed, turned on the lights, thrown back the covers, and hunted everywhere to find the invader, ready to pounce and kill the invader. But surprised as I been, I've found no culprit!

This hasn't just happened once or twice. *\*-My middle-night safaris have occurred maybe four or five times in the past say four years. Usually after my fly-swatter-in-hand-ready-to-pounce-exhaustive-searches, I settle down enough to go back to sleep, thankfully without bug invasion night mares.

 A couple of years back there was a spat of bed bugs going around the neighborhood and I was sure that was the source of my attacks. However upon close inspection, no such issue. So what's going on?
When I looked this up online here's the causes I found: Morgellon's Disease, Menopause, Allergies, Certain Medications, and/or Withdrawal Symptoms. Thank God, after some serious reading I ruled those out. Next I came upon this:

The medical term to explain the crawling sensation on skin is formication. Many researchers believe this is a form of tactile hallucination..

Ok, so now I'm left with that I'm hallucinating.

 Damm!

No complaints day

I have this friend, Marlyn.

Now I dearly love Marlyn. At least I did until she invited me to participate in a No Complaining Day!

I responded to the invitation by complaining that I couldn't possibly give up complaining.

I love complaining. Complaining is cathartic. It points responsibility toward the person or issue that has annoyed the complainer. I mean who wants to be responsible? I don't wake up that way. I wake up into someone else is responsible, maybe wrong, certainly the problem.

 Among us grumpy old men complaining is sort of a daily ritual - seeing who can come up with the best complaints, the most dramatic complaints, maybe the complaints we've so far haven't yet voiced, and that when newly shared, are instantly recognizable by all the other geezers! That's sharing at it's best!

Sorry Marlyn. Giving up complaining is worse than giving up sex - as though that's an issue anymore.

My special spot

I have this spot. It's a special spot. You might say it's a life impacting spot.

The thing is, this spot drives me nuts! Now I'm guessing most people have their spot(s). I expect they are different - in different locations. I call my spot my "be with" spot. That's because the only way I can control it; well maybe the word isn't really control, maybe it's more like have some peace with it - the only way I can do anything that works is to "be with it".

 I learned this exercise back in 1979 in the Est training. The example they used to demonstrate this exercise in the training was the example of how to disappear a headache. But my spot isn't a headache. It's an itch.

This itch occurs on the bottom of my left foot, just in front of and to the left of my heal bone. The thing about this itch is that it's not on the surface, as in, on the skin of my foot. It's like under the skin, inside my foot, maybe about say a quarter of an inch in. So it's not your everyday run-of-the-mill kind of itch.

My itch does temporarily respond to scratching, if the scratching is really hard, like using a screw driver, or maybe the bristle pad I have in the garage for cleaning the bottom of my shoes. When I say temporarily, I mean something in the order of maybe 30 seconds or so. Then it's right back under there.

But here's what drives me nuts about the spot. It seems to only happen during the middle of the night, most noticeably when I wake up and have to get up to pee. I come back to bed in a half stupor, hoping I can craw in and drop right back into that great dream I was having, when that dammed itch shows up.

Lest you think this is funny or ridiculous, knock it off. This isn't funny! This nemesis can and has kept me awake for a couple hours. I've sharpened the big toe nail on my right foot to a point so I can use it as a scratchier. I've tried a half dozen different long handled scratchers. And I've gotten up and visited that bristle pad out in the garage.

I went to the doctor to see if maybe they had some sort of magic potion that would grant me itch-freeness. No such invention! Each technique has given me momentary relief, only to be revisited by this deep internal itch shortly thereafter.

So finally, one night a few months back, I found myself doing that disappearing exercise. You know the one : "Locate that itch in your body. What shape is it? What color is it? Is it constant or does it fluctuate? Now be with that itch and begin to shrink it in size. Get it down to the size of a quarter. Now shrink it to the size of a nickel. Then a dime. and finally about the size of pea, or maybe a BB.

And then wallah! My itch has disappeared. Aaaaahhhh. blessed relief.

Live with a tune

Sometimes I'm grumpy but it can be inside of being happy - as in being happy being grumpy, or maybe it's those occasional melancholies than come on, sometimes sweet (Ray Charles singing Without a Song) and sometimes without a tune, then it's just the laments.

The clue for me is whether or not there's a tune playing in my head. When I'm happy there's always some song being sung by the voice in my head. It doesn't seem related to what the song is about, just that there's a song or there isn't. When there isn't, life gets hard, and I feel a sense of sadness.

Whatever the song it keeps me happy and present, able to consider the meaninglessness of life - so I don't need to make it mean something to enjoy it. Then all that's left to do is live the life I have and listen for the tunes.

When i notice the tunes are missing, I listen to Eva Cassidy sing Song Birds, or maybe K.D. Lang singing Hallelujah with the BBC Orchestra, and the music starts to play again. I think I'll have those two songs played at my funeral. It will mean I died happy.

Do schools kill creativity?

I've "felt" like a teacher all my life and have taught lots of things (various classes, swimming, dance, misc.), homeschooled our 2 children through 6th and 4th grades, and taught a year of school for a special needs class of 8 precious 2nd and 3rd graders.

I just lived (and worked) for the moments when they would light up. In everything we did, I really tried to see how I could approach it so each person would be able to access whatever it was (very different kids have very different learning modalities, abilities, challenges, tastes, etc.).

Granted, they were primary age (we weren't worried about careers yet), but my main thing was if, at the end of the day, they were excited because they had learned or done something (pretty much *anything*) I felt we'd won. (I guess you could say "shining eyes"). Even better was if I saw their parents' clouds beginning to lift and improve their optimism for their child's schooling, because then I felt like maybe the difference might last in their lives.

I also taught a half year of remedial (very) reading to middle schoolers, which was unbeleeevably rewarding. By then they have attitudes and decisions they've made about themselves... I knew I had to teach them reading, but my main purpose was to reignite in them some excitement about themselves and learning at all; just a little optimism - they were so defeated and resigned. I was rewarded by their complaining when we'd have to skip our phonics class - can you imagine!

Barbara.

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Barbara, my sense is that the work you did with middle school kids in remedial reading may have had a bigger impact than the one you reference in your comment about how they "complained about skipping phonics".

I talk about that sort of impact in my own experience in the "Creativity: The Artist/Coach Within" discussion on the Tribal Leadership group page in a conversation with Lynn Safford. What I hadn't seen in my experience of being so influenced by a few teachers in my life, was the impact of WHO altered the way I saw myself.

I realized while reading your comment, that by middle school age for many children, there's a certain expectation about comments from our parents. For example, I was having a conversation with my 8 year old grandson a while back while building a Knex roller coaster, and mentioned something about what his mom thought about his creative skills, being so natural. I said something like, "mom says you're a natural at building things", and he responded without pause, "well sure, but she's my mom."

Surprised, I asked him what he meant. He said something like, "Well it's not like she's a teacher, or someone. She's my mom. She thinks I'm good at everything. She's supposed to." At the time I wondered about his comment, but forgot about it until I hear the perspective of your comment. It may be that at some point authorities other than our parents move up the scale of importance. In talking to Evan about "being bored" in his Montessori School, I can see the importance of those outside environments/people. He's been expecting the kinds of stimulation he's been used to at home, and in it's missing, he naturally wonders what's wrong with him, rather than being able to discern what's lacking in the environment.

Thinking back to those 2nd grade & 9th grade experiences with those teachers I speak about in my conversation with Lynn, I wonder. Maybe the impact was significant because it was NOT my parents that introduced new possibilities for seeing myself, as you were doing with your remedial reading students.

What if by the ripe old age of say 8, as Pauline's poem jokes, we really do have a different listening for what our parents are saying about us versus the other messages we are getting about ourselves out in the world and from other "experts" - people we believe to hold authority or expertise beyond even that of our parents? And what if those people, systems, and processes don't just educate us - fill us with facts and figures - but also shift our paradigms as we're growing?

The more I think of my experiences with being labeled in 2nd grade as "creative", the clearer it becomes to me that we dwell in a very narrow definition of creativity. Could we not view Pauline's field/cow/mud peak experience as "creation" - not "a creation", nor even as "a creative experience", but as "creation"?

I enjoyed an experience similar to Pauline's in my junior year in college. It went on for 6 months. I didn't know what to call it or how to hold it, it was just there. Later others told me it was a nirvanic experience. Some said it was God talking to me. Several people told me I was just going crazy - remember this was back in 1962. For several years following that experience, I tried to figure out what had happened. I finally chose to let it be. To just have had it and keep it to myself. After all, being one-with-the-universe isn't something people talked about at dinner parties back then.

That experience was triggered following a 4 hour conversation with one of my professors (one of those outside authorities I really respected) , while driving to and from NYC. He said something during that trip that short circuited my perception of myself and life, and sent me into this strange out-of-body and out-of-myself world - he shifted my life paradigm.

Like my 2nd grade teacher, or my professor, you as someone who cared, may have created new paradigms for your remedial reading students. That may be another way "creativity" shows up in the world.

Have you checked back on those remedial reading students of yours? Or maybe, have you seen one of them now working as a teacher? Or TV commentator? Have you thought about what paradigm shifts you may have created for those students?

Good work Barbara.

Brian
Posted 4 days ago | Delete comment

Stage 4 tribes

In response to what I said about right brained thinking, Lynn came back musing, " The notion of creativity is the chatter for later -- a representation of the thing. The authentic experience for me at once is visceral and ineffable. In hind site, a Stage 3 [the stage at which most organizations function] state was more like a systemic, unhealthy condition that permeated itself from the top down. Is it plausible to interpret a Stage in the pejorative... sort of seeing it from the dark side?"

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Lynn,

It seems to me that at every stage there is a set of core values around which tribal members are aligned. They may not be consciously distinguished, and viewed from a different stage they may even seem detrimental, but they are there.

It's clear to me, having spent much of my executive career in stage 3 organizations that there were, and are, very real core values in place. I assert that domination and avoiding domination were two of those core values. And I also assert the people working in those entities are aligned with those core values, and are quite adept at working within that framework.

It occurs to me that stage 4 is a shift - something shifts in the makeup of the core values. And that shift is a function of some sort of consciously chosen cause - what we're calling here the noble cause. The effect of that noble cause is to regenerate an innate sense of integrity, one I see for instance, still naturally operational with my 8 year old grandson - one that is not yet snuffed out.

So I want to avoid making stage 4 some sort of romantic ideal. The first time I experienced it, it wasn't something we were trying to attain. It was a collective shift in being that caused extraordinary business results while leaving us (tribal members) related to each other within a different framework, feeling like what were doing really mattered and who we were as individuals had to contribute to what "we" were doing. Those that were about themselves, or not contributing were not tolerated, a true meritocracy

In that stage 4 state conflict was missing. I don't mean there weren't passionate disagreements. There were. But the territorial aspect wasn't there, so the word "conflict" didn't fit. There was variance, tension, competition, divergence, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Yet there was a harmony to it. The context was not territorial. Disagreement, when it arose, was a cause for reminding ourselves of what we were up to not for dominating another.

It's interesting when you say, "The notion of creativity is the chatter for later -- a representation of the thing.", because creativity was rampant in that setting but I doubt most people would describe the experience that way. Intense, energized, passionate, active, fun, and high-risk-but-safe, maybe, but not what they might label as "creative". For few of them thought of themselves, or even the process as creative.

As for what you say about how stages or entities come and go. I think it may be the natural order of things. Our TLCC group and indeed I think, given a choice most people, want to belong to stage 4 or 5 tribes. From stages 1,2, or 3 we think of stages 4 and 5 as nirvanic, something we want to last forever. It doesn't.

It may live as a possibility, something to strive four (pun intended), but just as you describe about the dissolution of the stage 3 organization above, (and it's unpopular I know to say) but stage 4 tribes, like all these modeled stages, come and go, ebb and flow.