Birthdays, Signposts and meaning

I just had a birthday and am now 62 years old.  WOW.  What does this mean?

The CBC is on a campaign to interview 500 centenarians in the next year.  They say that currently this is the fastest growing demographic.  Once interviewee, a woman who was 102, said that you should never think of your age, just do what you want to do every day.  It struck a real chord with me.  By this standard 62 could mean either 40 years of life left, or it means nothing at all if you never think of it anyway. I rarely do - think of my age that is. 

I have thought of it numerous times this summer while I was having a fibromyalgia flare-up but I have concluded that this is only indirectly related to aging. It is more a function of my genetic predisposition to wheat intolerance - the Icelandic connection. (When did those people get much grain for 1000 years?)  I also seem to be having issues with anything red - red candy, watermelon (alas), strawberries, other red berries.  It's a bit hard to avoid all those things all the time, like at the dinner party last night, but only because I love yummy desserts.  Further proof that this is not a sign of aging is the fact that I have grand-children whose eczema is triggered by red, and five of my children are more or less off wheat and the sixth one should be. The youngest of these is not yet 27.  At least 5 of my grandchildren are completely off wheat or have to limit amounts.  So much for arthritis being a sign of aging, at least for me.

When I was younger, birthdays definitely had meaning. Six was a landmark in aging, i.e. starting school. Thirteen meant become a teen-ager, although that didn't mean much to me in the 1960s - I was more interested in my horse.  Sixteen meant I could drive.  Eighteen meant I was leaving home and becoming an adult. Et cetera, Et cetera.  My age ceased to mean much after 30.  When my son David was born, someone asked me how old I was and I hadn't thought about it since 30 and had to do the math to answer. It was like that for years, me doing the math to figure out my age. I don't know why since age 60 I have been so aware. Luckily it hasn't changed my life much. 

What have I noticed about being 60+ that is different from younger times?  Only one thing. When I let myself get soft, getting into shape takes longer, is more painful, and must be approached more gently than I ever had to before. I just have to find a regular way to exercise during Alberta winters, and I definitely have to make it a priority or I WILL be feeling old.

In every other way my life is happier and busier.  I am 3/4 done a Masters Degree program, am starting a program in Equine Assisted Learning with a partner, am hoping to be deliver a new workshop to the GOA soon, and I am registered with the City of Lethbridge as a writing coach. I also have 17 very soon to be 18 grand-children and they are getting to be a lot of fun for me.   I thought you might like to see what they look like, at least what they all looked like a year ago. Children grow up so fast.  What does that mean about aging? 

The one blank space is for the new on coming this month.  After that we may have to start a new page.

passwords and other memory teasers

I have finally found a password to use on this and other pages that seems to satisfy the rules about complexity and is also one I can remember.  The trick for me is that I want to use the same one for the hundred or so other internet sites I use that require a password. Is that allowed? Doesn't that make it easier for a hacker to figure it out somewhere? And what about the suggestion that passwords should be changed occasionally to protect from that? For example, what if someone were to unravel my silly code?  They would then have access to everything - my private familysearch account with my children's and grand-children's birthdays and birth-places. Surely you don't want the whole world having access to the private records of living people.  Maybe you don't even want one hostile stranger to have that access.  And then there are my bank accounts.  And the risk of identity theft. 

So okay,  suppose I agree it is good to change passwords on really important accounts occasionally, but how to remember then what password goes where. Surely no one has the time to change the password on every account regularly and how do you remember which ones you changed and which you didn't?  And you are not supposed to use the same one over and over are you?  I know, store them on a Rolodex!  Back to the dark ages.  Just to get into the sites on the computer you want. 

This all came up because a friend mentioned to me that she tried to find this blog and it came up missing.  I then remembered that when I originally registered it, because I didn't understand what part of the URL I was supposed to fill in for the address, I ended up with a ridiculous looking address nana-www.nanasworld.blogspot.com).  So I changed it.  Then I forgot what the new address was so when I tried to access my own blog from my facebook page (which only had the old address), I found out it didn't exist.  I didn't remember my user name and password anyway, because I had been accessing it from the address for so long and didn't actually sign in. And I couldn't remember the new address because I didn't blog for so long.  Well, you can see I finally did find myself on blogger.com.  (I also found out that there is a blog with an almost identical name on Blogspot.com - mine is more interesting of course.)

However, the whole thing did revive some frustrations I have with passwords etc.  Recently I changed my PIN for my bank card.  I just suddenly got nervous about my card's security - inspiration or gut feeling or something.  And you are supposed to do that anyway.  In any case, I remember the PIN for that card just fine since I use it all the time, but who has only one bank account these days.   We use four banks actually.  Ridiculous I know, but our Mortgage line of credit is at the TD, personally banking at the ATB, our old account which proves useful sometimes at the CIBC, and we have an old PC account that we have started using recently because when we use the card we earn points for free groceries.   After I changed the PIN on my personal account, I couldn't remember if I used the old number or the new number for the PC account, and if it was an old number, which number it was.  When I tried to access it, I tried so many numbers the machine froze my card.  I knew it was the same as one of my other accounts, or what one of my other accounts used to be.  It is a mass of confusion and a gigantic bother.  The teller at CIBC told me when I got that PC card that she just uses the same PIN for all of her accounts, although you are not supposed to do that, the rationale being that if a hacker figures it out they can access all your accounts.  I guess you just better not lose your wallet in that case. 

Then there are the telephone accounts for banking, telephone and satellite accounts. Some of them use and a three number PIN and some use four numbers.  When I called PC to get them to unlock that account, the person asked me for the first and last letter of my telephone password. I thought she was nuts. It wasn't even numbers at all but a 'secret' word.  I probably established that one 10 years ago, and as if I was going to remember it.  I told her I hadn't the foggiest idea.  So she told me the first letter was a "V".  Well anyone who knows me could have gotten her to put in their own PIN for my account because once I knew the first letter, the last letter was a giveaway.  Hundreds of people who know me would have known it also. So I guess now I have to change that one too.  Not too big a sacrifice since I couldn't remember it anyway and she had to tell me what it was.  But I know it now and if I change it, well, just one more thing to remember.  Funny though, even telling her the whole word didn't work for her - I had to tell her only the first and last letter! How bizzarre is that?

The only conclusion I can draw from all of this is that in order to function in our computerized and technological society you have to be a computer yourself.  No human could keep track of all these secred passwords, codes and PINs.  You are not allowed to use easily understood and remembered passwords like birthdates of yourself or family members, or names of people you know and love, you have to make it as difficult for yourself as possible - random combinations of letters and numbers are perfect because no one can guess them, and neither can you! 

I have no solutions for this frustrating problem.  If I did, I wouldn't be frustrated would I?  If you have a solution, I wish you would share it with me.  I am certainly sick of going to a bank machine to make a deposit only to find out that the PIN I thought was the PIN for that account isn't.  Not to mention being made to feel stupid by some telephone banking person because I can't remember the secret code I only have to use once every ten years!  I NEED a solution!

Feel free to make suggestions.  Since I rarely hear anyone mention this problem that I think I must share with hundreds, maybe thousands, even millions of people, maybe there is a secret everyone else knows except me.  There's a conspiracy theory for you.

Kudos, bouquets and giving appreciation

Whew!  March was one busy/ stressful month.  Well, not that stressful.  That is really the surprising part.  In my last post, I described the "re-e-ally bi-i-i-ig" (as Ed Sullivan would say) things I had going on. And now they are all finished - the workshops, the banquet, the materials re-write.   Everything worked out well, which is what I expected to happen, and I feel that for the most part I did a good job. Not perfect, but very good, and certainly good enough.  Not too long ago I would not have handled all that so calmly.  I think my confidence level must be improving or I COULD NOT have been so calm.  Maybe I am beginning to think that what I do IS good enough.  What a concept!   A huge thank-you to the people who give me such great encouragement all the time.  Mostly you probably don't know how much I appreciate it, or what a difference it has made to me.  You will know who you are, I think.

 I believe in the statement: "there is not enough love in the world."  Not nearly enough.  I read an article once that said something like this: Every person needs 10 positives for every negative to feel happy and confident.  That probably wasn't exactly it, but it was along those lines.  That means 10 compliments for every criticism or put-down. I think the world isn't like that. Mostly people get 10 negatives for every positive.  In the workshop I do about dealing with difficult people, I encourage people to try to make a difference in the world by smiling at others, thanking them, recognizing their accomplishments, taking cookies to people just to tell them you appreciate them.  There is way too little of that.  I once taught primary under a Primary President who came into my classroom nearly every time after Primary to tell me how much she appreciated the work I did.  I don't know if I did that great a job, but one thing is certain, I will never forget her and she certainly made a difference to  how I felt about the job I did.

About 10 years ago, Jim was the bishop of the High River Ward.  At first people told me that this made me the "mother" of the ward.  That was not true, and I told them so. The mother of the ward was the Relief Society president. I was merely the wife of the bishop.  However, one day I was standing in the lobby waiting for the bishop to finish his bishop stuff so we could go home.  I happened to glance across the lobby at a woman who was standing there by herself.  As I noticed her, a little voice whispered to me that she really needed the "bishop's wife" to come and talk to her.  I inwardly shrugged but admitted that this would take very little effort on my part - you know, in terms of cost/benefit, the cost to me was small and maybe the voice was right and the benefit to her would be substantial. Even though I didn't think I was that important, maybe she did.   When I talked to her, she perked up considerably and as we talked I learned that she was having a hard time and was lonely.  We had a nice conversation, I got to know her better, and I was able to be a friend to her on a different level.  I also learned that even though I knew that I was not important, an effort on my part to act as if other people were important WAS important.  From that moment, I tried to really notice people, smile at them, and take opportunities to be positive and appreciative.  A well-deserved compliment certainly makes as great a difference to other people as it makes to me.

I learned an important lesson a few years ago that is related to this.  People don't need criticism.  A person who to be really out of it not to notice when they have made a mistake. And generally people are trying their best to do a good job and not mess up.  This lesson was particularly in relation to members of my family.  I somehow just "got" this one day.  Even my children could figure it out when they had made a mistake without me going on about it. As a result of this enlightenment, I totally stopped pointing out their mistakes.  Sometimes I did a little problem solving with them, but the "you should have been more careful, smart, or wise" lecture that point out how 'dumb' they had been stopped happening.  The interesting thing about this is that generally, the mistakes got lessened instead of increasing as a result of my keeping my mouth shut. Some things that really drove me crazy just stopped happening.  I don't really understand the dynamics of that, I only know that is what happened.

One time when I forgot, David said to me, "You know Mom, I know it's making you feel better to go on and on about this, but really, I get it."  I knew he did.

I was raised in a family where recognition was pretty scarce and even the smallest mistakes were noticed, and lest we become arrogant, commented on. I don't think the result of that contributed to my success. I don't think I ever made a mistake I wasn't totally aware of myself, or didn't wish I had been smarter. Maybe the right approach with me when I made mistakes would have been reassurance and encouragement rather than criticism.  

So maybe people don't really need ANY negatives.  Who woulda thought?  Maybe husbands and children really can just raise themselves without us.  They just need us to love them and think they are wonderful, and not notice anything else, ever.  Maybe that is what EVERYONE needs.  Who woulda thought?

Family patterns, hot buttons and arrogance

  I am in the enviable position of being more excited about my future prospects and activities than I have ever been. I currently have 4 large projects on the go;  I kind of wish this had happened 10 or 15 years ago.  However, the opportunities just did not happen then. They are happening now.  My only recourse in this case is to work and be active for 10 or 15 years longer than most people expect to.  The downside is  I think  it has focused my attention totally on brain stuff to the detriment of some other areas in my life.

It is almost a joke, how busy and engaged I am in interests most people would just not have at age 60, and don't understand.  Actually, there are few people who even want to hear about it.  So I am posting it here along with my problem.

Yesterday I spent 3 hours with a friend and colleague putting her horses through their horsespaces to see which ones would work in an EAL program.  It was a lot of fun and encredibly soul renewing.  Back to my 10,000 hours with horses, like going back to my roots and to who I really am.

I am also re-writing the materials for the EAL certification program at Cartier farms.  It is a big project, for which they cannot possibly pay appropriately.  Part of my payment will be a free workshop in April on how to use horses in leadership programs.  It is also worth it to me since in the re-writing I am learning more about the EAL process.

The EAL education is also part of my Master's degree program.  I will be writing 25% of my Masters thesis on EAL and learning.  Right now I am working on a review of literature in the field of adult education.  I am finding this very interesting also, but it is a lot of work.  I want it to be done, but still have a lot to do. 

In March I will be facilitating 5 workshops for a software company that is marketing an emergency response program to oil and gas companies.  The first one is this week.  That means that I am studying the government regulations about emergency response, and also getting comfortable with the software and how it works.  I am feeling quite comfortable with the regulations and pretty good on the software.  I just have to go over the workshop materials and put that all together.  By tomorrow.

My husband and I are 40% of the organizing committee for the Honoured Guest Party.  This is the 96th year for this event in Raymond honouring the area's seniors.  We are planning for 400+ people, with a roast beef dinner, entertainment and special recognition for those over 90.  Last week I helped put up posters all over town and arranged for newpaper ads. This week we bought 'spring' plates, only a small part of the shopping that needs to be done.  We have already distributed invitations (abt 500) to the wards as part of organizing their responsibilities, and contacted other churches about what they want to do (not much). This project isn't really what I want to spend my time doing.  However, I try to do what I am asked, and we were asked to do this a whole year ago.

I am feeling so happy, enthusiastic and stimulated that I tend to forget some things I really know.  Like that there are members of my family who don't understand my conversational style.  Why is that important, you may say.  My style, which I have worked hard to understand, (and sometimes change) is one of making connections through commonalities.  That means that when you talk to me about something, I try to find things we have in common.  I forget that some other people just want to talk.  They are not interested in commonalities.  My oldest sister really got that, and we used to talk on the phone for hours about everything.  Lots of times she talked and I just listened.  But she was interested in what I had to say whenever that came up.  I really miss her.

My youngest daughter is a Rec Therapist.  She worked in an assisted living complex for seniors. Once she told me that people in their 80s and 90s just want to talk about their families - not their spouses or children, their parents and siblings.  Recently I watched two of my children in conflict and realized later that so much of what happened was about patterns, hurts and insults that happened 30 years ago.  We carry these things around with us for years, into our 80s and 90s.  I am certainly carrying mine.  The single defining thing that has influenced my life and probably my personality was the absolute certainty that I could never be good enough.  It was totally about my value as a person.

I have a sibling who thinks I am self-righteous and sanctimonious.  I really think this is about him because it is impossible to be self-righteous and sanctimonious when you carry around the certainty that nothing you can do will ever make you good enough.  I have another sibling who thinks I am arrogant and is certain that I think I am smarter than anyone else.  Her response is to put me down at every opportunity, and on occasion, to be ungracious and even rude, as she was recently. The effect of that on someone like me who fights the concept that nothing I can ever do will be good enough is not a happy one. It also leads me to the inevitable conclusion that she doesn't like me at all.  I am also certain that my hot buttons and hers seem to just trigger each other.  I know that I am not my best self when she is around, and she certainly isn't around me.

I have asked myself if I am actually arrogant.  These are the arguments I came up with against that point of view:

• none of my clse friends are 'educated.'  I don't care.  I enjoy them because they are smart, good-hearted and kind, in addition to being generally entertaining. Value has nothing to do with education.
• the more I learn, the more I know I don't know anything.  As a percentage of what there is to know, my information base is miniscule and I know it.
• I have never been any kind of social butterfly, the kind of person like my son David, or my grand-daughter Jill, that everyone remembers and hundreds of people 'know.'  No one would ever say I was the life of the party.  I have been painfully aware of this my whole life. It certainly does not lead to feeling  arrogant. I admire people that everyone wants to be with.  I am not one of those.
• I cannot play the piano in public.  I know it goes back to the feeling that nothing is good enough and I get so focused on that that I cannot play at all.  The connection between brain and hands becomes totally severed.  I gave up trying quite a few years ago.  This summer I played hymns in Sacrament meeting in a small branch in igh Level, but only after making it plain to everyone that I was poorly talented and they would have to accept my poor efforts as being the best they had at the time.   I admire people who can do it, I'm just not one of those. This contributes to great humility, not to arrogance. 
• I haven't done my visiting teaching and this month I don't want to. 
• I am re-writing the Cartier materials because I have a knack for making complex information simple.  In this case however, I will be making simple information simple rather than complex. Lots of people could do it.  I am doing it because of the rapport I have with the Program Director who is a high-power, alpha female (as you would say in the horse world).  She is also inactive because she doesn't have confidence to go to church alone in a new place.  She says it is a self-esteem issue.  I totally understand her. I think she has been treated like she is arrogant.
• When I moved to Calgary in 1966 I was quite miserable.  At a ward activity, I met a girl I had known in grade 1.  Some people would think she was a bit odd, but I liked her and it helped me to be less miserable to have a good time with someone I felt comfortable with.  Afterwards, her sister who was in my ward, told me that before she saw me with her sister, she had thought I was arrogant.  She thought I was arrogant because I didn't talk.  What does that word mean anyway?

ar-ro-gant:
    1.  having or displaying a sense of overbearing self-worth or self-importance
    2. marked by or arising from a feeling or assumption of one's superiority towards others. 

Maybe it is all in your perspective, but in my perspective, that's not me.

The question then becomes, when some one sees or feels that I am arrogant because I open my mouth (or don't), What to do?  One choice is to say we are both better off not seeing each other.  At the current time, this is my preference. Married people who do not bring out the best in each other end up in divorce.  "You can choose your friends but you can't choose your relatives."  Why try to build a relationship when there seems to be no advantages to me? It certainly is not making me happier.  That seems like a selfish point of view, and I guess it is, but in this case, there are no advantages to the other person either - back to: we are both better off.

The other choice is for me to try to never talk about anything, not my family, not my work, not any sharing of ideas, nothing.  Just a zippered up mouth.  That actually would work in terms of avoiding put downs and rudeness. I think the other person would be happy about it to.   However, I actually did already decide to do that, but then in my enthusiasm for whatever the topic was I forgot.  I always will. What kind of relationship is that anyway?

The only problem is the whole eternal families thing and my duty.  So I am at a real loss.

Back to horses

My life is wonderfully interesting at the moment, which is great for me.  I have better health than I have had in 45 years (that's amazing and totally goes against any assumptions about aging).  I am also incredibly busy doing really interesting things.

 I have spent a couple of week in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan taking an Equine Assisted Learning Certification course and I'm going back next week. It is a part of my Masters Degree program, so not only am I loving it, but I will get something permanent out of it.   I may or may not use this professionally, but it has already changed how I think and will change how I facilitate workshops.

Equine Assisted Learning is an approach to facilitating or enabling learning in life skills, problem solving, teamwork, and even creativity using horses as 'tools' in exercises.  I am blown away by the concept.  I am trying to learn to be the kind of facilitator that makes the process as powerful as possible.  Mostly that means stepping back and watching, letting people figure things out, and if there is a problem, asking questions to help them reflect, review, assess, and try again, maybe in a different way using a different approach.  It is about support, encouragement, and the positive learning atmosphere. It is also about the horses.

I grew up with horses.  I have a feel for them, what they will do and how they will respond. I knew I was not exactly a 'horse whisperer,' but really, my response right now is, "Who knew?" 

Who knew that horses were so totally intuitive?  The instructors (who facilitate a lot of different people and groups and have lots of experiences) tell a story of a couple in their 30s who came from a nearby reserve to look at their program with an eye to implementing and funding it for the kids on their reserve.  They brought a couple of their own children with them.  They took the opportunity to try some of the exercises, and so did the kids.  The kids were cheering and high fiving each other because they were totally successful at working together and accomplishing the tasks with the horse.  One of the tasks was to get the horse to side step into a box. (You lead the horse in front of the square, then using pressure and release, you get the horse to step sideways until he is in the box. You don't even have to push the horse or even touch it, just the energy from your hands sometimes gets him to move.) The kids did it, but the horse refused to move for the parents. It didn't matter what they tried, it just seemed to annoy him more and more until his ears were laid back and he was stamping his back legs.  The facilitators were very worried - it was important to them to get this contract and the funding, but it looked like the couple were not having a good experience.  The facilitator was silently cursing the horse under her breath and couldn't understand why he was responding to them that way.  Finally she went over and asked them how it was going.  They looked at each other and started to laugh.  "He totally knew! He totally knew!" the wife exclaimed.  They were sold on the program.  Apparently that morning on the way to the farm, they had had the biggest fight of their marriage.  They were acting all happy and friendly to others but were secretly seething and and not looking at each other.  Not a team.  The horse totally knew! He refused to do anything for people like that who couldn't even get together.

 I watched a young teen-ager who was very scared of the horse.  She wanted to do this reaching-in  thing without getting very close.  The horse responded by trying to nip her, not with his teeth, just his lips.  She didn't like it very much.  When the girl got more assertive, leading the horse through the course, he did things for her that he normally hates doing and balks at doing (going in a tight circle). He wanted to help  her to be more confident. She did get more confident for awhile. When the horse was tied up again, she went back to the reaching-in thing.  He went back to trying to nip her.  It will probably take her a couple of weeks to get it that the horse responds better when she is more confident.  We get more confident when things work for us. Not exactly an earth-shaking observation, but for her, life changing. Did the horse 'want' her to be more confident?  Who knows? He certainly did reward her immediately for it.  Blew me away.

That's what they tell me:  horses bring down the too-agressive ones and bring up the unassertive and fearful ones.  They sense beyond anger to grief and then they comfort and help.  When people are just angry at each other, a horse often won't work with them until they get over it.  Who knew?

More about context

In my last blog about context, I posited that it is impossible to make a judgment about anything without considering the context.  When we make judgments that ignore context we are highly likely to be wrong. Across my desk today came a very startling example of this.  Look carefully at the picture below.  It appears to be a quite ordinary single vehicle accident where a pick up truck went through a guard rail and off the road.

The truck was travelling right to left at about 75 mph (abt 115 km/hr) when it broke through the guard rail to the right of the culvert where the people are standing pointing...  It did an end-over-end on the culvert platform and landed as you see it, to the left of the culvert facing the opposite way.  The 22 year old driver and the 18 year old passenger sustained only minor cuts and bruises.  It is kind of interesting that the truck could land where it did instead of going farther down.  I can only surmise that, from a physics standpoint, its forward motion - going at a high speed - was enough to carry it directly to the left. 

Good thing the passengers were wearing seat belts, at least I presume that they were since their injuries in an end-over-end accident were minor.  This kind of accident seems common enough that it is hardly worth noting.  However, there is a bigger picture here - the context - that totally changes its significance.

Look at the picture below:

Kind of makes things look different.  Again, I wonder if, when we get to the final accounting, if we will be given a view that we missed on a lot of things.  Could it end up making us think we didn't know anything at all?

(The comment that came with this one was, "If this guy didn't believe before, do you think he does now?)

Context is Everything:The Parable of Pill and Pal

I woke up in the night with this parable in my head. It is all about context.
"Pill and Pal are scientists with offices at the opposite ends of a long hallway. They have collaborated on a couple of projects but try not to anymore because they can't seem to communicate. Recently they had a big blow-up that has not helped.
Pill is in the middle of a very big project. He has stayed up for two nights in a row monitoring reactions and recording data. He couldn't really ask Lab Rat to do that for him since there ARE labour laws after all. So he is tired, very tired.
Also, he is running through the funding really fast and has had to spend his own money on such things as beakers and test tubes, so that is making him feel stressed. While Pill is out for supper, Lab Rat, who is finished working, gets a small poker game going in the lab, inviting Barney from across the hall and Pal. While they are playing, Lab Rat's wife drops in with their child and while they talk the child inadvertantly knocks a rack full of test tubes onto the floor. They all stare at it. Wifey thinks Lab Rat has more time to clean it up than she does and leaves. Lab Rat, Barney and Pal think it can wait until after the game, or maybe the janitor can come in later and clean it up.
That's the situation.
Pill re-enters and sees the mess on the floor. "What happened?" he asks. The others are very focused since Barney is about to collect the whole pot. So Pill asks again. Lab Rat holds up his hand in a "just wait" motion. Losing patience, Pill tells them the game is over, they have to help clean up the mess (it is partly under their feet, broken glass and test tubes mixed up together). The others start to stand up but Pal says, "I may be missing something here but I don't see how it is so important to do this right this minute. Like what is so important about a few test tubes?"
Pill loses it here and becomes a genuine pill. He yells at Pal, "It's important because it's important to me! That should be enough, it is important to me, okay?!" He really is yelling and his face is white.
Barney pipes up here with, "Whoa, Pill, wait a minute. I don't think Pal meant anything!" They have a little exchange while Pal escapes down the hall to his own lab. Lab Rat, Pill and Barney clean up the mess in silence. Pill thinks about it and feels bad for over reacting. He knows it was all about his fatigue, worry about money, and feeling important. There is nothing like having people ignore you and try to brush it off when you are upset to make you feel unimportant. But he knows that Pal does not understand his context. He goes down the hall to apologize.

Context is a trigger for much of what we do. To ignore context is to ignore a part of reality that hugely influences how we will act and react. To ignore context means that we have little basis for judging anything.

Stephen Covey (in one of his books, I don't know which one) tells a story of a man getting on a Transit Bus in New York City with his children. He sits down and immediately puts his head in his hands, ignoring the children. The kids create mayhem, running up and down the aisle, wrestling with each other, knocking into the other passengers and grabbing things. The passengers are tisking, rolling their eyes, and in every way possible, indicating their annoyance. Finally one gets up and taps the man on the shoulder. "Buddy," he says, "you should control your children. They are bothering everyone." The man slowly looks up and then says, "Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. They're a little upset. We just came from the hospital. My wife just died." Suddenly the other passengers on the bus have a huge paradigm shift. Knowing the context has changed everything.

Those RCMP officers at Vancouver airport had a huge context that influenced them. The fact that four officers were sent to control a "violent" man scared them. He had to be violent, right, or they wouldn't send four guys to control him. They didn't want to get hurt and decided they would just tazer the guy - without seeing him or doing any assessment. Of course they did.
The Polish guy had just completed a TransAtlantic flight, had not slept in 36 hours, had eaten very little in all that time; his mother had told him to remain in the baggage area and she would find him there, the airport officials would not let her go to the baggage area; the guy could understand no English; and he was at his wits end (meaning crazy) from waiting in there for 10 hours; he didn't know what to do. When the RCMP told him to put down the stapler (he didn't understand) he yelled at them. Of course he did. So they tazered him. Of course they did. It was all about context. If they had taken time to figure out the context maybe the outcome would have been different.

Back to Pill and Pal. What do you think Pal did and/or what should he do when Pill comes to apologize?
a. ignore Pill and not say anything.
b. say, "That's okay, tell me why it was so important? I really want to hear about it." (find out more about the context)
c. say, "I don't care about your context. You're a real pill and you always yell at me, so we aren't pals," and then turn away.
d. say, "I'm sorry, I can be a pill too sometimes, when I'm in a certain context, and I don't remember ever trying to apologize. So I appreciate you coming to apologize to me. If I was insensitive to your situation, I apologize too. (show charity.)

I vote for b. and d. However, that hardly ever happens. Mostly we only care about our own context. That is the challenge of communication and relationships. I guess the issue when choosing our response is, how much do we care about our relationships? Do we care about our relationships enough to show some charity and then forgive, and I mean, really forgive.

Vagaries of Memory

When I posted "Broca's Brain" in December, I promised to do a post about memory. The thinking I have done since then has me totally befuddled about the accuracy of anyone's memory. If the accuracy of memory is affected by so many things, how can anyone testify as a witness at a trial, for example, or make a judgment of anyone or anything based on what we remember?.

My favorite recent example involves the incident at the Vancouver Airport where a Polish immigrant died after being tazered by four RCMP officers. At the enquiry following the death, these four officers recounted the incident in four very similar stories. They described the Polish guy as violent and threatening. (He had a stapler in his hand.) They said he threatened them and they 'felt' fear for their lives. After he was tazered once, he continued to scream at them and threaten them. The problem with their story is that it was not supported in any material way by the amateur video taken by a bystander. The ruling of the enquiry after the death was that their use of tazers was premature and inappropriate.

Most people think that after the incident, the four officers colluded on their story. There was evidence, contrary to their testimony, that they had decided ahead of time based on what they were told about the situation, to use tazers on the guy. They had a firm, pre-conceived notion about what they would encounter and as a result actually saw what they expected, even though it was not there.

Does this mean that what we think becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy? We see what we expect to see, even though it doesn't really happen that way? The beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992 by four police officers using excessive force parallels this story of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport. There was an amateur video in that case also. In his book "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell adds some other vivid examples.

All this convinces me that suggestion, adrenaline, past experience, and expectation can create what is effectively a false memory. I have seen some examples of this process from people in my own life recently. As I result, I am very interested in memory and how it works. The examples above demonstrate that people's perception can be seriously skewed so that not only can they see miss crucial parts of the event, but they can actually see and then remember things that didn't happen.

Researchers interviewed a large number of people about their experience at Disneyland. In the corner of the interview room was a lifesize cut-out of Bugs Bunny. After the people had been asked a number of other questions, they were asked if they remembered seeing Bugs Bunny when they were at Disneyland. 45% of said them said they did. "He was a person dressed in a Bugs Bunny costume and he shook my hand." The problem? Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character and would not have been at Disneyland. The cutout in the room was a powerful suggestionthat created the memory for them.

Here is something else that research has shown about memory:
The more a person thinks about an event over time, the less accurate his/her memory of the event becomes. How does this work? Researchers have discovered a drug that causes a person not to remember events that happen while under the influence of the drug. In other words, it interferes with the brains ability to store the memory. If researchers administer the drug to people and ask them to describe their memory of a previous event, when the drug wears off, the subjects can no longer remember the event! The act of remembering erased the initial memory but the new thinking was not recorded so it was ALL lost.

The conclusion: Each time we remember an event, the act of calling up the memory erases the initial memory and the thinking we do about the event is stored as the new memory. That means that what we think about the memory becomes part of the new memory as if it had happened. If we overlay our memory with a series of what-ifs, or add our own meaning, or think about the situation, and even though we can't remember everything exactly, we imagine how it MUST have happened, these new details become part of our memory of the event. Ergo, over time the memory becomes less and less accurate.

What this all means to me, is that as humans with frailties, we can never be sure that we are remembering anything exactly right. If our judgments of other people are based on memory, and if we have done a lot of thinking and remembering events as the basis of our judgments, there is a gigantic possibility that we have got it all wrong. The implications of this are huge - what we think of our parents, for example. Negative events in our life probably were not actually what we remember. Because of this it is important that we be forgiving and give everyone the huge benefit of the doubt, even if we think we "saw what we saw and heard what we heard."

I wonder if, when we get the instant replay of our lives at the last day, we will find out that much of what we thought was just plain dead wrong.

I wonder.