THE GIFT IS IN THE GIVING, A SHORT NARRATIVE ON THE BENEFITS OF HUMANITARIAN WORK

Through a series of unusual persuasions created by some old friends in 2004 I was suddenly on an airplane on my way to Ethiopia to embark on my first humanitarian effort. After an initial one-day stop-over in Ethiopia’s capital city Addis Abba I was loaded onto a bus with thirty other people heading south about one hundred sixty-five miles to a region of twenty one villages in the Arsi Negelle District of Central Ethiopia. It was a grueling hot ride in the old bus with only one pit stop along the way ending on a dusty hillside where thousands of villagers had assembled to greet us and celebrate our coming. I was with a humanitarian company that was newly established in East Africa, Engage Now Foundation, that also had projects at that time in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. That was the beginning that changed my life forever.

Family Pit Latrine

 

Smokeless Stove Made from Adobe Bricks

 

Drip Irrigation System for Small Family Garden

 

Water Purification Unit (Bucket Sand Filter)

 

Community Workers Instructing Homeowner on Building a Smokeless Stove

 

Meeting of Women's Committee

I remained in Ethiopia for a little over one week that first trip, but I was hooked and immediately planned to return again to Ethiopia on the December 2004 Expedition sponsored by that same company. While I was there I realized, much to my surprise the large impact the group made on the villagers. It was a wakeup call to my otherwise skeptical view of what could be done in developing countries by a group of dedicated hard-working people in a short period of time. I found out that little efforts by someone invested in making a difference can improve the lives of the poorest of the poor in ways that would astound most skeptics. I had previously spent much time in Zambia and Algeria years before, but not on humanitarian ventures. On those visits I was working on large transfer of technology projects. I had experienced in those places that introducing costly, highly technical systems to the non-technical populations of developing countries was a long and arduous process. What I learned in that first week in Ethiopia, however, was that simple technologies, properly presented, using locally procured inexpensive materials and made sustainable was the answer to immediate and long-term change, and that it could be done with little cost and minimal effort if directed by someone with the skills and desire to make simple things work efficiently.

By the time I left Ethiopia after that first trip, I had decided that since I was already pretty much retired anyway, that I would turn over my life to humanitarian work. So between my first and second trip to Ethiopia I set about to develop a few simple technology instruction manuals that would make my work a little easier and would be something that could be translated into the local languages of the host countries where Engage Now Foundation had projects. My plan was to use these manuals to train locals that would then pass on that information to their respective villagers insuring that the new technologies we were introducing and the methods to use and maintain them would be sustainable. When I left the U.S. in December of that year for my second humanitarian visit to East Africa, I carried with me manuals on how to assemble a simple water purification system for families built from buckets and sand, how to build pit latrines, how to make an indoor smokeless stove and the manner in which drip irrigation projects for small family farms could be implemented. Those I put to work when I arrived in Ethiopia. By the time I left the country forty-five days later with help from dozens of community workers I had trained on the use of the manuals, there were over fifty new stoves that had been built in five of the twenty one target villages and over on hundred pit latrines finished and in use. In addition, dozens of families had started using drip irrigation systems on small gardens that saved them from carrying large amounts water to irrigate their gardens. These new irrigation technologies gave users the possibility for year-around harvests of nutritional vegetables, something that was only possible before when the only irrigation source was from rainwater. The dozens of water purification units we built during that time were also in use in family homes providing as much as ten liters of clean water for domestic use, with the possibility of totally eliminating the lecherous pathogens that were entering people’s bodies from the fetid water that was available to them from rivers . . . their only available water source.

The key to our success in Ethiopia was finding and employing committed Community Workers that could take the simple technologies we were introducing and carry them out to their respective villages and then teach the villagers how to implement them. In Ethiopia at this same time we also initiated a program of community education that involved women for the most part. We knew women were the key to making things change in their communities, so we began assembling these village women in what we called, Women’s Committees that met twice weekly and were trained by our community workers in simple technology use, hygiene, family income, small business, and functional literacy. When I left Ethiopia after my forth and longest visit there with Engage Now Foundation (I had remained thirteen months on the last visit in 2005-2006) there were over four thousand women meeting regularly, over two hundred community workers were functioning in twenty villages, thousands of stoves and latrines had been built and were in use by families, several hundred bucket sand filter water purification systems were in use, many water projects involving roofwater collection and storage had been initiated and many other projects had been started that involved new small businesses that the women created.

Community projects like these were unheard of before in these poor villages. Overall health had been improved significantly by use of purified water and new hygiene methods were started by families and women. Because they were spending less time gathering wood and fetching water the women were able to spend quality time with their children and tend to their gardens, thus improving family nutrition and were more committed to improving overall health of their families.

By 2006 Engage Now Foundation, while still operating under that name in Ethiopia, had formed an alliance with another humanitarian company out of South America and had changed its name to Ascend, A Humanitarian Alliance. I continued my work with the company developing more and more simple technology manuals and training modules associated with those and other simple technologies such as blacksmithing, water collection and distribution by pumps, greenhouse construction and management, beekeeping, building and using brick baking ovens, making and using adobe bricks, sewing and using sewing machines and others. In all over twenty-one field instruction manuals finally ended up in the archives of the company. Most had been translated into the Ethiopian language Amharic and several had been translated into Spanish.

After my last visit to Ethiopia I continued my work with Ascend, traveling and living in places like Mozambique, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. In each instance, I lived in those countries from two to six months each spending a total to over sixteen months doing the types of humanitarian work I had come to love in Ethiopia. It was always a gratification to know that so little effort could mean so much to people that were considered the poorest of the poor. I found that in most places people were highly committed to change and improvement of their living conditions, but in most cases either didn’t have the means to make those changes or tradition and culture had held them back from even challenging their conditions. This meant for me, careful assimilation into their activities, so as not to upset those traditions and cultures while introducing new systems that would ultimately force them to challenge their old ways. In some cases, mostly because of religious constraints, people resisted change, especially those that affected the lives of women. But when those people saw the benefit of taking on new ways of living, they took it upon themselves to make those changes, regardless of the pressures from their religious leaders, and in some cases with women, from their husbands.

Some of the most remarkable things that I observed as a result of mine and my colleagues’ humanitarian efforts were the rate at which villagers that had lived in primitive conditions all their lives, changed and adapted to those new technologies we were introducing. The changes were not only rapid, but were sustainable, and after they were implemented, people were looking at ways they could make them last. Many others seeing the benefits their neighbors were having from adopting those new simple technologies took the initiative to create them themselves. The major key to that success was the use of easy to find, locally available, inexpensive materials, and training of users on how to maintain those simple devices we introduced. In Mozambique’s Beira region where we pioneered the use of simple technology rope and washer pumps to lift water from shallow wells for domestic and irrigation use, we used all locally obtained materials to build the pumps. For the pulley, we used the sidewalls of used automobile tires, cement was locally available for making concrete for the splash pad and to hold the pump in place, plastic pipe used for gutters and potable water lines was locally available and cheap, wood for the pump frame, though rough was locally available and inexpensive. In most cases we built the pumps for under two hundred dollars each. The wells we hand-drilled with an auger…the only imported item. In the six months that I was in Mozambique I trained several entrepreneurs to build these pumps and drill the wells, hundreds of new wells now exist where in most instances people draw water out of open dangerous hand-dug wells with simple devices that lifted about one or two liters of water each time the device was brought out of the well by a stick with a rope attached to the bucket. The new rope and washer pumps were capable of lifting water from wells at a rate of up to fifteen to twenty liters per minute. This made it possible with little effort on the part of the child or adult cranking the pump to irrigate gardens as large as one half hectare (about 1 acre) and have those gardens be productive year around. Early on with the Engage Now Foundation (later Ascend, A Humanitarian Alliance) I was invited to become a Board Member and continued in that role as Ascend’s Technical Advisor on matters dealing with their humanitarian work in South America, and India.

In 2009 in addition to my continuing work with Ascend I was invited to become involved with a newly formed humanitarian organization, Machara, A Miracle Network, founded by two of the Lost Boys of Sudan. This project was focused on five villages in the Apuk Padoc region of the new country of South Sudan. It had as its goal the improvement of conditions of target villages that were decimated by the civil war that ravaged over twenty years between the north and south Sudanese. For this region, with a population of over seventy thousand people, I developed a Five Year Community Development Plan that focused on developing water resources, improving health and hygiene, building schools, installing pit latrines, assembling stoves for homes and generally improving the economic status of the community by creating entrepreneurs for small businesses with loans. The entire plan was based on our successful development work in Ethiopia. The program for Apuk Communities never got off the ground, initially because of funding, but later with the political situation in South Sudan becoming too untenable. The project I envisioned in the plan would have cost over two million dollars.

When the earthquake occurred in Port-au-Prince Haiti in February of 2010 I was asked by the founder of a humanitarian organization, Foundation for Children in Need, to assist with the logistics of rebuilding the wall surrounding a small orphanage that had been destroyed by the quake. The children were without security with their downed wall, and also lacked sleeping areas damaged by the earthquake. I went there in March of that year spending two months with the project finding and purchasing the materials that could be used to rebuild some seven hundred feet of eight foot high block wall to secure the facility. Nine masons from Utah went there to do the work, and in just two weeks completed the project and cleaned up the debris from the broken wall and downed buildings. With conditions as they were shortly after the quake, building materials and general logistics of obtaining and delivering the materials to the site was a nightmare. But we accomplished the task to the surprise and gratification of the orphanage management. At present work with the orphanage continues through regular expeditions sponsored by the Foundation and its dedicated staff.

In summary, humanitarian work is an effort that cannot be described adequately. It can only be experienced to know its value. Many companies and dedicated people embark in these efforts both locally and internationally, and almost all know after their experience that their lives will never be the same. It is an effort that takes time and sometimes large amounts of money, but in some instances, there are possibilities for high school and college students to become involved by serving as Interns with these established humanitarian organizations. The challenge awaits anyone interested in having a new and enlightening experience in their lives. If one wishes to have a gift such as this, the gift is in the given of one’s self. I for one have become a strong advocate through my own experiences, and will forever be grateful that I took the initiative to become involved.

MY MEANING OF LIFE, AN ESSAY ON LIVING

 

INTRODUCTION                                             

 

I believe everyone has valid opinions about things--especially as they relate to the meaning of life. I have my own and I have come to realize that they don't always mean the same to me as they do to others. 

During the mid-1990's I was working for over a year in Ogden Utah for a Salt Lake Consulting Firm doing Outplacement work. While there I was working with two other consultants. One of my colleagues, a married woman in her mid-thirty’s, with whom I developed a very special relationship, had a huge impact on my life. During that year or so that we were together on this project we had many opportunities to discuss things other than work. Those discussions most always took place during our lunch hours. Our discussions were strange; unlike any I had ever had with another person. They were unique as well since most of our off-hour conversations were about deep, life-impacting subjects. In fact we hardly talked about anything else but these deep concepts about life and the meaning of life. Many of our conversations were started in jest as we took our lunch and walked along the streets of Ogden City or sat under a tree outside of the office or in the Ogden City Park. Our lunches most often began with my friend asking me the question, “Jack, have you come up with the meaning of life yet?” And I would usually answer something like this, “Not yet, but I am working on it, and here are some of my ideas that I have come up with today.”

This woman and I played that game for the entire time we were together on the project and in the process talked about all the things one could possibly consider about learning to live in our environment and with our families. She had a special concern that we spent hours discussing. It had to do with the difficulties she was having with her husband regarding how to manage their son that had a serious mental handicap. While she described her ways of working with the boy and her efforts to mainstream him into the school system, they seemed rational and sensible to me. How she described her husband’s reactions to the boy’s behavior were what I would expect of a person that had no sensitivity to any kind of mental illness. We never reached any conclusions on any of the subjects we talked about, but in the process learned a lot about each other and learned even more about the special and unique relationship we had when we were together. She left the employment of the company shortly after we concluded the Ogden project and I have had no further contact with her for some time.  I knew, however, if I saw her again, my first words to her or if she spoke first, her first words to me would be, “Have you learned the meaning of life yet?”

Some six or seven years after we closed the office in Ogden and I moved on to other things, I had occasion to call the company office that I had worked for during the Ogden Outplacement Project. To my great surprise, this woman whom I had not spoken to for all those years answered the phone. She had taken up employment with the company again. We recognized each other’s voices immediately and after we had a few words of recalling our past experience, I asked my old friend, “Have you learned the meaning of life yet?” Her answer took me back as she said, “Yes, Jack, as a matter of fact I have.” She went on to explain that she had just recently received what she called the “true meaning of life” when her seriously handicapped son, spoken of before, just graduated from high school and gave a two-minute graduation speech to the graduating class and parents. She said that because of the progress and the things that this boy had done with his difficult life, and what she had learned by being there with him all these years, she has grown to really understand the true meaning of life.

This essay is about many of the same subjects that my old friend and I talked about during that unique year we spent together in Ogden Utah. With this essay I will attempt to share those opinions with the world at large with the desire that the reader might either confirm his or her own opinion about their important issue in life, or by reading mine, might find something new which may affect his or her life in some positive way. If they do, that is something important to me and with that in mind, I may have in some small way improved the world in which we live in or known that I have given someone value to another person’s life. That's what I'm about here--to share some of my “meaning of life” and put them out there, as it were, for anyone to see who will take the time to read them. Be aware that there may be some duplications in the principals I am espousing here because the subject areas I have chosen are so similar.

As the reader will soon see, I have structured this document in the form of a “manual.” Yes, I consider it a manual--a how-to manual, perhaps. At least there is a lot of how I did it in there and a lot more of how "they" did it. But most important for the reader (and my self-esteem) is how what they/I did turned out or how I felt about how it turned out, or how I believe how it turned out could be improved upon (if such a condition exists).

The reader will notice that I have strong opinions about things (as I suggested above).  Those opinions I share willingly, knowing that they may not be what some people will like, or what they will agree with. I haven't always been in agreement with the world. I started as a youngster being noticeably different and paid a big price for it sometimes. But that for me has been my choice and it has turned out to be my "life" and my journey into the Meaning of Life. Actually, it has been my meaning of life or my meaning of meaning or whatever one might want to call our existence and experience here in our lives. I'm prepared to debate any issue that I bring up here, and may have to at some time. But let them come. I'm ready. Are you ready? If so, read on . . .

 

SUBJECT TENURED:

 

 

1.         Love

2.         Travel

3.         Friends

4.         Conflict/Flight/Fight

5.         Ideas--New/Used

6.         Communication

7.         Relationships

8.         Initiative

9.         Giving/Taking/Receiving

10.       The Process

11.       Keeping My Word

12.       Honesty

13.       Coping - Avoiding

14.       Running My Number

15.       Where I Live

16.       Showing Up

17.       Fun/Jest/Humor

18.       Defining Leadership

19.       God/Religion

20.       Gender Issues

21.       Work - Hard Work - Working Harder

22.       Mistakes/Errors

23.       Pain

24.       Sorrow

25.       Sickness/Health

26.       Focus

27.       Children/Raising Them/Learning from Them

28.       Perceptions

29.       Help/Assist

30.       Being Responsible For Everything

31.       Being on Time

32.       Guilt

                

1.      LOVE

 

Love between people just hap­pens. There are no definitions that can do it justice; further, there may never be any. When it happens, though, I know it, and I know I have it. How do I know?  It's happened to me a few times.

The problem with my life, how­ever, is that most of it has been acted out, believing that love was something I had for another person. I just can't have love for someone else. I can act it out and do a convincing job of it. I believe I could even talk someone into believing I love them--especially if they are lacking of love and believe that someone can give them theirs or some­how manifest it upon them. That would be hard to do and I don't believe it would ever work. How could I give something away that I can’t even define for myself?

If love just happens, can I make it happen? Let’s look at that for a min­ute. What are the conditions for love to happen? Per­haps I can create those conditions, but can I make it happen even if the conditions are all in place? I believe the only thing I can do is let love happen. Do I even have any con­trol over that? Letting love happen implies I have some means available to me that I can turn on or off at will. I can do that--at least turn the "but­ton" on, but can I turn it off too?

So what do I have to work with? I have my vulnerability. I have my kindness. I have my willingness. I have myself and my talents. I have gifts, riches and other possessions­.

On a couple of occasions (over long periods of time) I gave all these, but it was not enough. Love didn't happen--that is, the other person didn't love me for giving those things. Love didn't happen. So when it didn't work, I just tried harder. I gave more. I sacrificed all I had to give (I thought), then I gave some more when that did­n't work, always believing I wasn't doing enough. Finally the other person just gave up on me and threw it all back--what she could. So there I was. I still had all those things, but love hadn't happened.

After doing the same old thing over and over and even trying it on other people--the ones on which I hoped the most it would work, it still didn't happen. I thought I had love for the other persons, but they didn't love me . . . yet. So, was it ever there to have, I wondered? Did this person have the capacity to love me? I believe she did. It may have even happened somewhere along the way, and I may not have noticed.

What is the magic of love? I see other people who seem to have it. How did they get it? Were they "meant" for each other? Was that how it hap­pened? Did they just "let" it hap­pen  so there was some simultaneous hap­pening that took?

I've heard some say, "We work at all the time." Is it that tenuous that I have to work at it all the time to make it happen? Once it happens is it there to stay? Or it is like they said, "It hap­pened, quite naturally, but we still have to work on it to keep it alive." Does love have to be kept "alive"? 

Love is like vulnerability. I'm convinced of this based on results: If I want love to happen for myself regarding someone else, first I have to be totally and un­conditionally vulnerable. What I mean by that is, I have to be willing to let any personal facades, barriers totally down regardless how they might appear. If another person is in­volved, it might scare that person away, but that's the chance I have to take.

Secondly, I believe I have to be willing to let this person go completely--lose them forever if necessary, in order to have them in my life. No holding on, no dependencies, nothing. However, I have to be there if they chose not to go or chose to use me in some way that looks like they are depending on me or need me. That’s when I have to “show up.”

Third, I have to "stay in the process." I mean there's no giving up on the person or the process going on between me and this other person. This is the tough one. Here I am saying I have to be willing to give this person up and now I'm saying, "Hang in there." Are these two compatible? Alright, so they may not be, but it’s worth a try--until the price just gets too high.

Forth, I've got to want it to happen and be willing to pay the price whatever that price is. There's the trick--the most important one--the second part of it, that is. Pay the price. How high will I go? If I don't decide that ahead of time and commit to it, I'm doomed. Here’s how high the price has to be: Want it and be willing (committed 100%) to pay the price.

Here's where I've fooled myself all my life. I've said to myself, "Yup, I'm willing to pay the price. Just give me a chance." Then all at once some­where along the way, I realize how high the price is and I find a way out. Oops! The price was too high. Gosh, I didn't know it was that high. Those were my excus­es. Okay, so I made a mistake. Can't I make a few mis­takes? Isn't that the way I learn? So why do I keep going over the same ground over and over again? The mistakes must not have worked. They did, I just wasn't willing to learn from them. I wanted to have a reason to try harder.

So here's my conclusion about love:  If I want love to happen (and if I'm right that love has to "happen"), then I've truly got to want it, then be willing to pay the price to have it.  Simple. Love is an elementary two-step process.

 

2.       TRAVEL

 

I've traveled. A lot. There are few places I have not been--at least in the U.S. It's taken a long time--a lot of my life was used up sitting on planes, boats and in cars. Too much, in fact. Did I ever like traveling? Yes. Did I ever dislike traveling? Most of the time after the first few trips.

I've put in most of my travel time in cars. But I traveled the longest dis­tances in planes. I'm not sure which the best is or which I would recommend. Planes are safer if that's what you are worried about. They're faster too. Much faster. Too fast, in fact.

I've liked traveling most with other people I know and like. There is something about traveling with people I don't know that I don't like. Some­times when I traveled with people I didn't know I got to know them by them talking to me or me talking to them--or both. For the moment, that made traveling that way okay. But then we always parted and I don't know of any case where I got back in touch with the person unless it was to com­plete a business contact I made with them.

Most of these contacts I made with people while I traveled were quite superficial or agenda-driven. Take for example when I was working for Bech­tel from 1968 to 1980. I was pretty active in the LDS Church at the time and David O. McKay had said many times, "Every member a Missionary." I took that at face value, so whenever I was on a long flight for the com­pany and someone next to me seemed inter­ested, I would bring up the Church (my agenda). I would strike up a conversa­tion, see where it went, offer them a Book of Mormon (I always carried one I could give away), and see where it went. Some­times it worked and other times it didn't. But I met some interesting people along the way.

Only on a few occasions that I remem­ber did anyone ever just start talking to me like they were interested in who I was or what I was doing (their agenda). I do recall a few occas­ions where someone was trying to sell some­thing and thought I was a good prospect. That usually turned me off. I guess it was okay for me to have agendas, but not for them.

There were times when I hated travel­ing. That happened most often on long over­seas flights or at times when I was driving alone for long dis­tances. I could read on planes and I did. In cars I would listen to the radio or tapes and I did. But most of the time it was boring.

I think the thing I hated most about traveling alone--especially to places considered by most as "exotic," like Paris, London, Ma­drid, Riyadh, Algiers, Jeddah, Nice, etc., was that I experienced these interesting places alone and there was no one to share it with. Here's what would happen: Let’s say I was passing through Paris on the way to some place like Algiers. There are many great things to see in Paris many people would give their right arm to see--like the Louve, or the Eiffel Tower, or Notre Dame Cathe­dral. Just Down­town Paris is worth the trip. I would take pictures, knowing with the good equip­ment I had they would turn out great. So that was the process. Go to the place, see the most important sights, take a lot of photos then go home or continue to some other place.

At home my wife was doing what she did while I was away, taking care of the children, cleaning house, and doing Church work, making meals, visiting with friends. Then I would come home with my grand stories and pho­tos. Flop. It was awful. I got so I didn't share anything about my trips. How could I with a few stories and great photos. One has to experience travel. In these cases my wife and I were miles apart (when we were home). I was trying to understand where she was coming from and she would do the same with me and it would failure. Neither of us had an in­kling of the other's experiences so nothing of value was communi­cated.

While I was on my trip (let’s say my ego-trip) eating out every meal, seeing exotic places, meeting and working with interesting people, my wife was home doing her best to make out other life work without me, and she resented what I did. I resented her for not un­derstand­ing and soon we were living our lives in resentment all the time. Travel? It stinks sometimes.

Did I ever get anything personally from travel? Yes. I became a person of envy from many who didn't travel (good for the old ego). I became more aware of the world and its varied condi­tions (better able to work and live in the world). I became much more toler­ant (under­standing of other's differenc­es). I became potent­ially more interest­ing (people liked to be with me to hear my stories). 

So what's my advice about travel? Go. Go alone (or with someone, that's bet­ter). Don't go if you hope to share a quality experience with someone back home that may be resent­ing that you went in the first place.

 

 

3.      FRIENDS

 

Friends are okay. They are bet­ter than okay, they are essential. I like to think of a friend as someone I can trust, love and even depend on 100%. What does 100% mean? Uncondition­al? Maybe.

I've had friends in my lifetime. Most of my friendships, however, have been the one-sided kind. That present­ed some prob­lems for me, but I man­aged anyway. It was better than no friends. By "one-sided" friend­ships, I mean I was always "It," so I was re­quired to do all the work to keep the friend­ship alive. When those kinds of friendships were over for me, it was usually when I decided that I didn't want to be "It" any more. Then I would move on.

Now that I think about it, I don't know if I have ever had a friendship that wasn't just one-sided, unless it is my friendship with one woman I worked with while I was employed at the State of Utah. I was not been near as good a friend to her as she has been to me. She always put a lot into keeping our friendship alive. She doesn't live where I live anymore and she's married now, but for years after we were working together she faithfully wrote to me and worried about me and al­ways sent her love to me and her thanks for my being such a good friend of her.

Then there's the fellow I worked with over several years period when I was doing consulting work in Texas. He's was a friend for more years than I can accu­rately remem­ber. He's a long way away, too, but for years after our association in Texas was over he continued to communicate with me. I believe he consid­ered me his friend, as I did him.

There’s another very special woman that I first met in 1986 while I was doing some work with the outdoor experiential company with which I was associated for many years. By any definition, I would call this woman a true friend that has lasted through all sorts of iterations. She has been a strange sort of a friend that I have never really been able to connect with, other than on occasions when either of us need a friend or a favor. In every case whenever we have associated with each other (which has been sporadic over the years) it has always been a "100%" type like I mentioned before if I ever needed her to be. She even loves me, I believe, in some strange and distant manner. I was so sure at one stage of our friendship that we had more in store than just being friends, that I asked her to marry me. She said no because she didn't want to deal with my kids at the time--her being a school teach­er and continually dealing with kids was too much for her already, she said. I never pursued that intent any longer, but we have remained friends. I'm there for her too--whenever she needs me, which is seldom. That's the prob­lem with that type of friendship. I feel kind of outside of any true commitment with this woman for it ever to become any closer than it is. It's like there is not room in her life for me. I'm okay with that. I think that's just an­other way people can be friends--devot­ed ones too.

If I have some philosophical outlook on friendship, perhaps it could be explained by this story: I was mar­ried to a woman for over 22 years between 1962 and 1984. We had an interest­ing and dramatic life that ended in div­orce after years of struggle. If I were to look for a primary cause of that divorce now, I believe it had a lot to do with friendship. From the very begin­ning of our marriage I do not believe we were ever friends, as I now define friendship. We had, and still do have respect for each other. And there were times when we really loved each other, but there was always something miss­ing. It was the "unconditional" part of our lives that was not ever there. Every­thing we dealt with (and I, of course, take my share of the blame), it seemed, had conditions--maybe expec­tations is another way of saying it. We had conditions for each other's behav­iors, we had expecta­tions for each other's looks, we had expecta­tions and conditions for how our love and respect for each other had to be. These enor­mous numbers of expectations and condi­tions for our relationship eventual­ly caused its downfall. Why did it take so long, you may ask? Well, we both had ex­pectations for how long it would take to achieve the conditions we both hoped the other would achieve.

For me, these conditions were even deeper seated. I also had condi­tions for myself. I was not an uncondi­tional person with my spouse. I would not let myself be. My standards were so high for myself, that every time some­thing I was doing to "im­prove" the relationship didn't work, my "con­dition" was that I had not tried hard enough and must try harder. I was never okay with myself and my own ways.

While I was in Saudi Arabia in 1984 and 1985 (living and working there on single status after my divorce) I had a number of chances to test my theory about being an "unconditional" friend. These in­stances played them­selves out there in relationships with several wom­en. When I was unconditional about my relationship and friend­ship with these women, my life worked. As soon as I had doubts or set conditions upon how I would behave or how they should, these dear friendships faltered.

So I guess if I have any advice about friends, I would say that one should work pri­marily on being uncondi­tional--I mean 100% unconditional. That means even with the small­est of gripes, doubts, or trust issues, if it’s going to work, these must be eliminat­ed or they will erode the relationship like a cancer. It may not happen very fast, but it will happen if it contin­ues to fester, even in the smallest amount.

4.      CONFLICT/FLIGHT/FIGHT AND ANGER

 

There's a certain amount of fight in everyone if you just know how to find it. Mine has been hidden behind my bushel most of my life. That has bothered some people, but it's just been my way and I'm okay about it. Here's how it's worked for me most of my life:

I fought against the normal and it caused me a lot of conflict that I had to deal with. When I was young, I was continually doing things that were against the norm and my friends and family hated it because it was not "normal." Not normal meant I had to change to become normal and that’s what I fought against (and sometimes ran away from), mostly because I al­ways wanted to do my own thing. Most of the time what I did was done for attention because I was not getting enough--like the kid who decides to get attention no matter how he has to get it, i.e., doesn't know the difference between doing good or bad and does both (mostly bad) so he can get atten­tion. Well, that was me. I didn't do a lot of bad things, I just did things that were different and it worked for me.

I learned early that fighting, per se, was not worth it. I even joined the West Jordan Boxing Club when I was about twelve and re­inforced what I already believed, that fighting (and getting beat most of the time) was not worth it. When I was boxing in tourna­ments the few times that I did, I got hit so hard sometimes I thought my head was going to fall off. I don't know how it kept from falling off. I'm many many years older now and I can still remember the ring­ing feeling of my head when I would get hit hard. I don't know how boxers do it. I got out of that as soon as I could. I did this when an opportunity presented itself to me. It happened quite easily. During a school recess I was standing behind a girl who was hitting a softball. When she swung at the ball she threw her bat and it hit me right above my left eye (requiring two stitch­es). That gave me a good reason to get out of the club.

I also learned when I was young that getting outwardly angry causes conflict and doesn't work either. All through my younger life, I watched my dad get angry and throw fits over things, and what did it get him? He died when he was 53. Maybe not over that, but I'll bet it con­tributed some to his bad heart which eventually got him. I thought when he would get angry and shout and curse that this was not something I wanted to do very much and would never do it. It has not been actual­ly never, but almost. I hardly ever get out­wardly angry.

But I've been told, and also I've read and heard that it doesn't do any good either to hold back anger. "Let it out," "It's unhealthy to hold anger in." Maybe. I'm a little skeptical over that one, since I don't think I am any more unhealthy than the next guy for not letting my anger flow all over everyone when I get that way.

I've learned as I have gotten older, how­ever, that telling someone I am angry for some­thing they did that I allowed myself to get angry over is a healthy way of expressing myself in some situations. At least I am commu­nicating my anger in a way that puts the responsibility where it should be. If I'm angry over some­thing, it's because I CHOOSE TO BE ANGRY, not that the other person or the situation MADE ME ANGRY. No way. I'm never the victim of someone's or some­thing's actions over me. Now I might get angry over the situation, but it's because I chose to be that way, not that they made me that way (I said that, didn't I?  It needs to be said more).

I've learned also that flight is not the way to handle anger or remove myself from conflict. That's my opin­ion, but I live with that as a con­cept and attempt to act it out now. It's a hard thing to do--face up to conflict, but it pays off when I do. If you are not doing it, I suggest you do. Conflict can be pretty productive when it's used right. And if it isn't being used in a pro­ductive way, then deal with the unproduc­tive way and turn it around.

When I got married the second time I married a woman who grew up in a volatile family life where conflict, anger and fighting was always out in the open and seemed to me to be de­structive all the time. Most of it stemmed from her father who was a dramatic man who drank a lot and got very vio­lent when he drank. But when I saw her modeling her dad's behavior I said right then, I was not going to get caught up in that kind of activity. I could see no benefit in it. My acting like I did, however, caused me to have great grief in my marriage. She would say to me on occa­sions when she was mad or when we were arguing over something, "Why don't you ever get mad and scream or shout or some­thing? I hate it when you don't." I never did, and that just made her mad­der and caused more conflict. I didn't care though. I had my mind made up. I admit now, that it would have helped to give in and play it her way some­times. I got plenty angry, but I was afraid more than angry. I think I was afraid that I didn't want it to get into the shouting matches and arguments like I saw between her and her dad that never got any­­­­where. I didn't want to lose, either. Losing was just something I was not about to do in those instanc­es. I always won when I didn't get angry and that's the way I wanted it (my own little agenda that also did not work). 

So what is my opinion regard­ing conflict, fight, flight and anger? Here's where I believe the solution resides: In effec­tive communi­cations, I think anything can be re­solved through com­munications and espe­cially when it can be resolved through consen­sus. Now that's a tough one. Consen­sus is when (we're talking about two parties trying to reach some agreement) two people find a solu­tion where both can feel like they came out the winner. Where does that leave voting or com­promise? Out the window. They have no place in this discussion. Con­sensus means sticking with it. Putting in the time to reach it. Committing to a win for everyone, not a win for one and loss for the other or some­where in the middle where both parties have to give up something to reach this so-called agreement. Let’s try it another way. Maybe in some difficult situa­tions, consensus can be reached when all parties feel like there is no other way to go but to vote or to reach some middle ground. In that case there has to be another part of the agree­ment. The deci­sion has to be that, "I may not agree with you, and may never agree with you, but you seem ready to go ahead on the basis of the major­ity and I agreed that a vote would be appropriate in case of a deadlock, so, despite my disagree­ment you can count on my 100% support in that decision."

Whenever I have come to that place, I have always felt like I have not lost anything and that I will never go back on my word and say, "I told you I was right," when something has gone wrong with the other person's deci­sion that I agreed I would support.

Consensus comes in a variety of coats. But it always has one character­istic about it. No one ever feels they have lost anything when they reach consensus. They may have had to pay a very high price for it, like spend­ing a lot of time, or going over things a hun­dred times, but the price is always worth it. I say that's where to go, no matter what it takes.

 

5.      IDEAS, NEW/USED

 

I've always had a lot of ideas about everything. They haven't always been the best ideas or ones which have made me a lot of money, but they were something. It is this some­thing that I want to address here.

I've learned that an idea doesn't have to be new to be useful. Used ones are almost as good and some­times serve the need for an idea just as well. I don't mean you have to go out and steal other people's ideas and use them, what I mean is, ideas that have been around sometimes haven't been used as well as they could. Let me give you an example:

I was in Arabia a few years back work­ing on a project to try to come up with ideas on how the money that was being spent on educa­tion of the Saudi's could be spent in such a way as to benefit them most. Now there had been a plan underway for several years to build techni­cal schools and develop curriculum for the schools that would bring the Saudi's up to grade in indus­try. Someone back in the Sixties had suggested that the money they had from sale of oil should be spent to educate the Saudis so they could be self-sufficient in all things and not have to spend all their money hiring people (like me) to come over there and do things for them. That was a noble idea that definitely had some merit, had it been thought through.

What had happened in the fifteen years or so that they had been planning and building all these schools around the country, was that they were finally getting finished. However, those that were complete were not full of stu­dents as may have been expected. The Saudis had the most modern facili­ties that money could buy, and there was housing with each facili­ty so the young Saudis could come to the center from far away and have a nice place to live. School­ing was free and the students were even offered incentives to go and were given living allowanc­es to buy whatever they needed. Recreation was included so the school was not seen as a boring place to be. And the curricu­lum was designed to make it so the graduates would be able to fill jobs in all the new indus­tries that were being built in several places in the coun­try. But still the schools had no students--rela­tively speaking, that is. One large Technical School I visited one day had a capacity of over seven hundred students. Everything was in place like teachers and materials for learning, but the entire school had thirteen students with no hope in that area for any more. This was almost the case in the twenty other schools that were completed. Everything seemed logical to me (and everyone else, appar­ently), but there was some­thing missing. 

I had the freedom to go any­where and do anything to resolve the problem, so the first place I went was to the industries. I said to them, are there really jobs here for the gradu­ating Saudis? They said yes, there were, and they would wel­come any Saudis that came to the schools. They would even retrain them if the training they had was not good enough. So I went else­where.

I looked at the curriculum. Per­haps, I thought, the curriculum didn't match the indus­tries. Maybe the schools were not geared to the indus­tries; otherwise, why would the indus­tries say they would provide training and why did they have massive training pro­grams in the industries? I thought I was really on the track of something until I looked at the curriculum. As far as I could tell, they were on track and it was being de­velop­ed at a level that was okay for the entering Saudi.

So I thought that possibly it had some­thing to do with the recruitment system, and I got on that track. Noth­ing. As I asked around at how the young people were recruit­ed it seemed to fit. They would even get some young men into the schools, but they would soon leave. Most of the schools were located in the larger com­muni­ties, so most of the students that were potentials were from areas outside of those communities. It seemed that the ones that were recruited from the local area seemed to stay and were success­ful. Cross out the recruiting system unless more recruits could be obtained from the larger cities. But that went against the plan. The plan was that Saudis from all parts of the country should be given the opportunity. How­ever, the ones in the outlying areas did not have the in­terest in going to school in the cities. I had to go to the country to see why.

Finally, I arranged to go to the villages and very rural areas. Out there I could see that people were trying to develop there little areas and towns so they could live a decent life. I saw roads being built. I saw power lines leading into the villages to give the people for the first time power into their homes. I saw thousands of trucks (always white Toyota pickup trucks) and a few cars. And I also saw many of them wreck­ed and abandoned (wrecked or otherwise) sitting on the roads, in the fields and near their hous­es. I saw many houses being built--some of them very crude, but many of them quite elegant for the area they were in. I saw people irrigat­ing farms with water they were carrying on don­keys and dribbling out of sacks made from animal skins. Somehow I knew I was on the track of something, but I just didn't know what it was until I started talking with people.

I asked them who fixed their cars when they broke down or were wrecked. They said there was no one trained to do that. I asked who manned the small medical facili­ties located around and they said it was the Egyptians. I asked who taught them in the small school houses, and they said the Egyp­tians did. I asked who was building the houses and they said Yemenis or Filipinos. I asked who were the farmers and they said the Saudis were because that was the only thing they knew how to do. They had mon­ey to buy cars and put electricity into their houses and buy televisions, but they didn't know how to fix things. They didn't have anyone who could even weld a broken pipe, or fix a metal fence gate or put a wooden door on their house.

When I asked these local people if they would like to have those skills, they said yes, they would willingly learn those trade if anyone was willing to teach them. So I went to the Egyp­tians and the Yemenis and the other for­eigners there doing the work and asked if they ever offered apprenticeships to the Saudis. They said they had but the Saudis were lazy and not willing to learn. I asked the Saudis if that was true and they said they had never been given the opportunity. When I went back to the Egyptians and others and asked how long they had been in the country and why they were there, a few of them who were honest said they were there because there were no opportunities in their home countries and that they hoped they could stay there all their lives until they were rich and their chil­dren were raised and schooled (courtesy of the Saudi Gov­ernment, of course). It all began to make sense as I learn­ed more and I finally got my idea.

All we needed was to bring the Tech­ni­cal Education and Vocational Training out to the villages. Teach the young people to be carpen­ters, weld­ers, electricians, and car repairmen. Let them have their vocational start here where they lived, where they felt com­fortable and had family.

What I had done was to take an al­ready given idea and changed it a little. It wasn't my idea to train Saudis and give them vocational skills. Some­one already had that idea. What I was suggesting was to localize the training and let it grow as a culture in the coun­try. My "new" idea was to man the large industries a few more years with foreigners until these local lads saw the need to grow beyond their villages and be successful else­where.

Naturally, my idea was not a very pop­ular one. But who cares? It had merit, I thought. So what if the big vocational schools were a few years ahead of their time. They wouldn't fall over just because they were empty. They would still be around for gener­a­tions the way they were built. 

I almost got run out of the coun­try on a rail for the idea, but I persisted and soon the idea was accepted and some compromises were made to soft­en the blow with the already estab­lished educational system. That's the way the Saudis do it. The compromise and dicker and bargain. It's in their blood.

Well that was a long story to just get the idea over that used ideas are sometimes need rework. But I believe in that principal. It has worked a number of times for me. It's like always going around with the ques­tion in mind when something does not work or I've tried it a hundred times and it still isn't working, "Is there another way to do this?" "Is there another alternative?" "How come--?" "What if we tried--?" And so it goes. Don't be satisfied with the one thing that seems so right, if it isn't working. Try some­thing else.

New ideas are a lot simpler--in princi­pal, that is. The principal is just being open to the possibility that there is some new way to do something, or there is another way, or that I'm not right about the way I'm doing it. Trou­ble is with this principal: most people are invested so heavily in being right about some­thing, or that they have "done all they could" about it, or we've tried that before, that going to a place of "open to the possibility" is just not possible. Therein lies the key to new ideas, and the diffi­culty.

The price we have to pay for sitting around and looking for new ideas or reworking used ones is another issue with which to deal in this realm. New and new/used ideas don't come cheap. Back to my idea about training Saudis in their villages. There was a big price to pay for that idea:

First, there were the Germans to deal with. The German government had the con­tract to develop the curricu­lum for the existing schools and my idea would have shut down that sys­tem. The German Government had about five thousand people working on that project that would have had to go home to an econo­my that was on its knees, and even to unem­ployment. Besides, most of the money the Ger­mans were making was going back into the German economy, and who would want that cornucopia to stop.

There in the Saudi Government, a lot of high paid Saudis were going to be effected because for years they had supported the notion of building these large edifices (over twenty vocational schools alone) and how could they save face? In addition, in the late sixties, the Saudi Government had teamed up with the U.S. Labor Department to form a joint venture partnership called VOTRACON which was part of an even larger joint eco­nomic commission called JECOR.  VOTRA­CON's sole mission was to design and build the schools. Thou­sands of Americans were in the King­dom when all this was going on (mid 1984 - 1985), and their jobs would be threat­ened if all at once the notion of Voca­tional Schools were to be put on hold.

Guess who was under the gun with his "ridiculous" idea? Old Jack. Even the people he was working for, who also had been in­volved in the initial planning of the Vocational School idea many years before had egg on their face, and were they going to let a little subcontractor from Utah throw a wrench into the works? Not if they could help it.

Well, another long story cut short, I went to the Minister of Planning (without the sanction of my bosses) and pleaded my case. He liked the idea because he understood the Bedouins (those people who lived in these small villages and in the country-side) who would be most affected by my idea, and he also knew the King was especial­ly interested in keep­ing the Bedouins on his side for political rea­sons. So all at once the idea had some merit with the right people.

Of course, I was ostracized and almost banished and will likely never get any more work from the company who hired me, Stan­ford Research, International, but what the heck? I felt good about my idea, and so did the Minis­ter. What else did I need?

I don't know where new or new/used ideas come from, but I do know that for me, anyway, they come in various forms. Most of the time they come to me like an itch that wants to be scratched. However the itch in a place where if scratched at that particu­lar time might by seen by others as inappropriate--such as scratching an itch in your crotch while standing in a crowd of people who are focus­ing on you. Now do you satisfy the itch, or do you satisfy the social im­plications of scra­tching the itch?

More of the price of having good new or new/used ideas: Sometimes the itch is so un­perceivable that I don't even notice I have the itch, especially if I am occu­pied and posi­tioned (invested) in where I am or what I am doing. What I'm talking about in this case is simply having to wake up to that little intu­itive hunch or itch that is tell­ing you (me) WAKE UP!  LIS­TEN! to that inner calling that's com­ing from some­where deep inside saying, Hey, maybe there's an­other way, or a new way, or maybe you're stuck here. Back to my old adage, How long are you going to con­tinue doing the things over and over again that aren’t working?  Okay, enough said about ideas.

 

6.      COMMUNICATION

 

Big word, Communication. For a long time I didn't have a clue what it meant. Now that I think I do, I want to share that meaning with others. That sounds pretty pompous. Maybe it is. But what's this whole thing about anyway? As far as I am con­cerned, it's about my ideas and opinions. I never said I was right. I only con­tinue to say, this is what works for me and I can't speak for you. So on that premise, I will continue--

One thing I have noticed about com­mu­nication is the games that often come with it. Years ago when I was married I might play this communication game with my wife:

I've been working all day and things at work have been hectic--stressful, let’s say. When I get home I want to do something in the eve­ning that will be relaxing and not "heavy" like long serious discussions or prob­lem solving. I think a good comical movie might be just the thing.

Similarly, my wife has been home with the children and has not had one conversation with an adult the entire day. She likes conversations and had been thinking how nice it would be to get a baby sitter for the even­ing and go out to dinner followed by a light, fun movie.

I walk into the house with my expecta­tions and she has hers, but in our little com­mu­nication game, we are not going to reveal them quite yet for fear that we don't know what the other person wants to do for the evening.

After our usual greetings, hugs and news of the day, and we are set­tled down for a few moments, I begin by saying, "Say, Honey, what would you like to do this evening?"

"Gosh, I don't know, what did you have in mind?" she answers, really wishing I had asked her to go to dinner. She was really thinking–Maybe he doesn’t want to go to dinner tonight.  He men­tioned just the other night just how few times the last month he had sat down to a real nice home-cooked meal. "Did you want to do something?" she continues.

What I hear from her is, If you are thinking about going out tonight, forget it, I would rather stay home. "Oh, I don't know,” I reply, not committing to anything yet until I hear more from her. “I was just thinking on the way home that it’s been a long time since you have been out of the house for an evening and I won­dered if you would like to do that?" I was sure I had sensed a little reti­cence in her tone of voice, since I had been traveling a lot the past month.

At first she pauses, then replies, “I don’t know, what do you think?”

I believe I have my answer in her hesitation. She really doesn’t want to go out, so I say, "We could just stay home and do som­ething with the kids if you would like."

"That would be all right, I guess. You haven't done much with the chil­dren lately," she answers, picking up on what she believes is a little guilt in my voice for having been away so much this last month. "Maybe we could have a nice dinner here at home then play some games or something." However, she is really thinking, Damn, he wants to stay home and I want to go out. I've done nothing the entire day but play games with the children. I would like some adult inter­action for a change. So, she goes about quietly to begin dinner.

Seeing something of a disapp­ointment in her reply, I have second thoughts and press a little more, "Look Honey, we don't have to stay home. I think it might do us all good to have an evening out together--maybe have some fun. You and the kids like bowling, what would you think of a night of bowling. We could stop at Mc­Donalds on the way and have something to eat. You know how the kids love Mc­Donalds."

And so we end up taking the children bowling. They enjoy it but we are both mis­era­ble the entire evening. Could I have done it dif­ferently? Sure. But I didn't learn to for many years of suffering with my misery and experi­encing my wife's second hand.

Sometime late in my life, I learned a simple communication trick that almost always works for me in these kind of situations. In the same scenario, my conversation on coming home would sound like this: "I would sure like to go to dinner and a movie tonight. It’s been a long time since we had a night out, and I know for me anyway, it would relieve some of the stress I am feeling about my work. What do you think?” It’s will feel a little risky, but I've said what I want, then we can deal with her desires for the evening, that is, if she is willing to be honest with me the same way. In this scenario, I would expect my wife would reply, “I have been thinking the same thing all day, Honey. You know, I have not had one conversation with an adult this entire day. I will call right now for a baby sitter. What time do you want to leave?”

Will that always work as a communica­tions strategy? Likely not, espec­ially if the other person I am dealing with is not willing to risk saying what he/she wants to do, to have or to be. So maybe we will have to do a little work on communication styles before we try something that straight forward. ­

If I have it figured out and ask the ques­tion to my companion, mate, friend, etc., "I've had a day and a half today, I would sure like to go out to dinner tonight and have a long conver­sation.  Would you be open to joining me?" and she or he answers, "Oh, I guess that would be all right," when he/she might be think­ing, I've been hand­ling prob­lems all day, I'd just like to have a simple night out, to a movie or something, then I have to do some more to find that out what he/she really wants. In other words, I'm not going to be satisfied with the sort of neutral, "Oh, I guess---" statement.

"You seem a little reluctant in your answer," I might ask. "Tell me what you would rather do, if that's the case."

If I get the same neutral answer again, I might concede that I have a problem of com­munications, or it may be that the other person is truly all right with doing what I suggested. But if I continue to work on that premise, that I always tell the other person what I want first, I am working toward a more clear and concise com­munication with that other person that will even­tually pay off.

Another time when this type of strate­gy (saying what you want) could have paid off was demonstrated clearly to me one day: A cou­ple of friends had dropped by to see me--a mother and her son. The young man was just seventeen and was strug­gling with a problem with some repair work he had recently had done on his car. After receiv­ing the over $500 bill for the work and thinking the cost was too high, he confront­ed the me­chanic about why the cost was so high. The mechanic said his price was in line with the competi­tion, and if the boy would like he could check out competitive pricing for the same work and the mechanic would make adjustments if the price was way out of line.

The boy did check out prices at several mechanic shops and learned he could have gotten the same work done in three places for more than two hun­dred dollars less. Now he was faced with the problem of going back to the mechanic and fighting it out with him. Lacking experience, the boy asked my advice on how to communicate with the mechanic on what he wanted (to get a refund of some of his money), but first he had to get clear what he did want.

After a long discussion about how he was ripped off, and how the mechanic likely doesn't want to hear back from the boy, my young friend decided to call the mechanic, anyway. With some coaching before the call my young friend hesitatingly started, "You remem­ber a couple of days ago you fixed the front wheel on my truck, and I didn't like the price you charged me? Well, I got the prices you wanted me to, and they were much lower than your prices. Now what do you want to do?"

That left the mechanic open to doing what he wanted to do in the first place, so he replied that he didn't know how to handle the situation, and the boy would have to call the Head Office of the company (Midas in this case). 

The boy hung up quite disgrun­tled that he had gotten the runaround, as he suspected he would (funny how the Universe serves up just what we expect it to). Then began a long dis­cussion between he and his mother about how much he was taken advan­tage of and how young people and women are always taken advantage of in these situations. Soon they were both in agreement about their victim­ness without even realizing how much the boy’s communications to the me­chanic had contrib­uted to it. More coach­ing.

After a second round of coaching where I encouraged the boy to be direct with the man in the Home Office by telling him what he wanted, the boy rang the man up.

After several moments while the boy tried to give his contact the back­ground of the problem, he finally said something like this, ". . . I have prices from several places and I suppose you may want to have them in writing before you do something about this situa­tion . . ."

My friend, despite the coaching, had forgotten to say what he wanted and offered the written documents by his suggestions. Of course, the man immediately picked up on that and told the boy he had to have written docu­mentation before he could make any determi­na­tion if the Midas cost of work was too high. My friend had complete­ly lost his leverage despite all the work he had done to remedy his situation. There was no more I could do for him.

Now for another type of failed commu­nication very common between people that have differences: I saw a cartoon once that illustrat­ed how communication often takes place be­tween people--at least that's how it has worked for me a good part of my life. In this cartoon, two people's faces are pictured on two separate TV monitors which are facing each other. Both are talking to each other at the same time. That illustration doesn't take much interpretation. I'll leave it at that so you get your own blinding insight.

I believe one of the most com­mon faults in good communication co­mes when people attempt to make things better or differ­ent than they are by telling part of the truth or none at all or covering up all that they say or do with skill­fully crafted facades. Here's an often heard statement which leads me to believe that another person has been communi­cating with me in a way to get me to believe something else: "Do you mind if I be real honest with you?" or "To tell the truth--" or "Let me be perfectly honest with you."

When I hear that kind of state­ment or anything like it I immediately go to the place in my mind--You mean you have not been honest with me up to now? This instantly has some effect on me and my communication with the other person. Am I to go on in this conversa­tion as if nothing has hap­pened? Am I to con­tinue to be part of this dialog? Is there such a thing as "part" honesty?

I had a colleague at work who spoke in those terms very often. As I got to know her, I noticed there were a lot of other things she did that indicated to me she was not always speak­ing the truth. She had this facade, for exam­ple, which she used on most everyone to cover up who she really was. Really, she was a wonderful person under­neath all that stuff, but to impress her fellow workers, she main­tained this cover that she had developed over many years (I suspected) for it to be so per­fect. She could convince most anyone, initial­ly. After a time I noticed people start­ed to get uneasy around her, avoid­ing her, talking behind her back and gener­ally gaining a dra­matic dis­liking for her. I noticed I even began to feel suspect of her when I got to know her better.

However, I valued the potential of her friendship enough to want it to be different with us, so one day I said to her something like, "Why don't you just knock off the bullshit with me and say how it really is with you?" You can imagine her reaction. I won't repeat it here. She was devas­tated, and didn't speak to me for days. Then one day she came into my office and shut the door as if to say to me, "It's time we had a conversa­tion." We did and I was able once again to gently confront her about my reaction to her dishonesty about who she really was. Lucki­ly, I was able to convince her that I was not being critical, but rather wanted to have a relationship with her that was above board and without all the cover. I guessed she under­stood and had a desire to have a relation­ship with me too that was strong enough for her to drop her smoke screen. We were soon best of friends. She never got out of the old facade with the other cowork­ers and soon left the organiza­tion disgruntled and vic­timized over how badly every­one was treating her. 

So, what are some of the key princi­ples of living in a place of en­hanced communi­cation?

 

1.         Quit playing games with your (my, our) communi­cation.

2.         Say what you (I) want.

3.         Listen, listen, listen, then listen some more.

4.         Speak the truth.

5.         Want it to work bad enough to be willing to pay the price to make it work.

 

7.      RELATIONSHIPS

           

There are lots of kinds of rela­tion­ships. I've had several kinds in my lifetime. Some have lasted and some haven't, but all have been perfect for me at the time. All have been just like I wanted them to be (based on results), other­wise I would have done something about them to make them differ­ent. It was always up to me, and I was always completely responsible for how they turned out (from my perspective, of course). Sounds funny, doesn't it, since most people believe (at least I think they do), that relation­ships are the respon­sibility of both people who are in the relation­ship? In my opinion, not necessarily true.

            It only takes one person to make a relation­ship. People have always thought it "takes two to tango," but if we really look at this issue care­fully, anyone can develop a rela­tionship with someone else. The relationship, more­over, can be developed without the other person's permis­sion or partici­pation.

I know this man who was work­ing as a counselor in a rehabilitation program for way­ward boys. This facili­ty only had in it the most difficult cas­es, boys from fourteen to eighteen years of age that had been incarcerated for major crimes. The counselor was a dedicated person who had a great interest in the boys and worked hard to make his job meaningful to all the boys with whom he made contact. To most everyone's standards his work would be consid­ered success­ful, but in one case, with a boy named Mike, he felt the process was not work­ing.

The counselor wanted in the worst way to develop some kind of meaningful relation­ship with this Mike, but sensed that Mike was not interest­ed in having a relationship. This both­ered the counselor and for weeks he agonized over the matter believing that if he was to have a relation­ship of any kind with Mike, Mike had to be a willing participant.

After weeks passed with no progress with Mike, the counselor decided to look at the sit­uation in a different way. "Can I have a relation­ship with Mike if he was not at all interested?" the counselor asked him­self. Even­tually he decided that he could if he was willing to pay the price and was willing to accept it (the rela­tion­ship) however it turned out.

With new energy and a restored dedi­ca­tion the counselor initiated a different tactic with Mike. Every time he saw the boy or passed him in the hall of the institution he greeted Mike with a friendly, "How're you doing, Mike?"

Mike never responded, but the coun­selor persisted, "How're you doing, Mike?" was repeat­ed day after day--sometimes more than once in a day. For days, weeks and months on end the counselor persisted. Mike com­pletely ignored the counselor, not even establishing eye con­tact when they passed. The coun­sel­or hung in there greeting Mike with the same friendly and sincere greeting. No response. Twelve months passed then thirteen with no change, but the counsel­or contin­ued. By then he was sat­isfied that he and Mike had a rela­tion­ship even though he didn't like how it appeared. The fact was he did have a relation­ship and he owned it at that low level with love and dedi­ca­tion.

Finally on the second week of the four­teenth month after another greeting by the coun­selor, Mike stopped and looked at the counselor for an instant, as if he was going to make some comment, but as he had done hun­dreds of times before, Mike lowered his head and walked on.

The counselor for that instant had re­newed hope, but again for the next several days Mike continued to ignore the counselor's greet­ing and walked on. Once again, howev­er, on the fifth day after Mike had stopped and looked the counselor in the eye but said nothing, Mike turned and looked the counselor in the eye again. While he was standing there angrily staring at the counsel­or, he finally burst out, "What do you care?"

The counselor was about to respond when Mike turned heel and walked away. The counselor shouted after the boy, "I do care, Mike, I care a lot."

For the next several days as the coun­sel­or continued greeting Mike in the same way, the boy would stop listening to the counselor's re­inforce­ment that he did care. It seemed to the counselor that Mike still doubt­ed his sincerely.

Finally one day Mike said, "No one has ever said they cared for me. Why do you? What are you trying to accomplish by continuing to say that you do?"

It was a beginning that took another year to resolve. During most of that time Mike re­sisted any efforts the counselor made to have the relationship look different. Even­tually, Mike gave in to the counselor's persis­tence and they were able to change the nature of the relation­ship.

But the fact remained. In all the thirteen months that the counselor tried to commu­nicate to Mike he had a rela­tionship with the boy. It didn't look like he wanted it to, but it was indeed a relationship.

Now the question is, can anyone have a one-sided relationship. Yes, we can if we are willing to stay in the process long enough and be amiable to having it be however it turns out. Could life be a little better if every­one believed this and were okay with the way things turn out? I'm not sure. In some cases the price may be too high to pay and it would be better that the relation­ship did not exist at all. But this is a choice we can make. Would the counselor in the story have been able to carry on another year with his one-sided efforts? I don't know. Would he have been a greater person for hav­ing done so?  Per­haps.

There’s more I would like to say about relationships. As I said before, I have had many, but most of them have not been quite like I would prefer.  But I cannot deny that they have been relationships and that they have been a valuable piece of my life.

When I was young and about to get married the first time the girl I was to be married to was someone I had known for little more than six months. We had developed a relationship which seemed binding and it had a lot of elements in it that according to what I had learned by watching the relationship my mom and dad had, it would be a lasting one. I believed in those early days that a relationship had to be very loyal for it to work, and I was committed to be loyal to the tee. I believed that in my relationship with this young woman, I had to provide her with everything she needed, particularly in the area of material things. I believed too, that if I worked hard at the relationship, that nothing could go wrong with it.

So in the next seven years with this woman, we had a relationship of sorts that was based on my beliefs. She had hers, of course, which were equally solid and based on what she had seen in her family. We both wanted to have what we believed in and both for those seven years strove to win over the other in how we wanted the relationship to look. Neither of us were very happy as a result and soon she was looking elsewhere for another relationship that would match what she believed a relationship could supply. She found it, and after three children of the marriage and what I had initially believed was a great marriage, we broke up and went our separate ways.

Not long after that I found another person with whom I would try my luck. I had learned little from the first seven years, but was confident that I still had the right idea about what a relationship should look like. I knew there could be some improvements on what had happened before, and set about to change them. So, soon, I was married again to another woman with all the confidence that our relationship would be different and would last forever. We eventually ended up entering into a Temple Marriage in the LDS Church which promises a relationship which would last for the “Eternities.” How could that fail.

It did fail, however, and after twenty-one years we separated and divorced and I was wondering what had happened. For the first three years after our breakup, I was still convinced that I had done all the right things to make a relationship work, but had failed only because I had not tried hard enough or put enough into it. I was not yet of the mind that I am now with a clear understanding that trying harder at the things that continually don’t work is not necessarily the best solution to a problem.

Finally after twenty-four years of being in a relationship with this woman with twenty-one of those years being married and another three being divorced, I came to a sad resolution that there was really two types of relationships going with us all those years, and that there was little common ground upon which we agreed. First, like my first marriage and long relationship I had my beliefs about relationships and she had hers. The same was basically true with my second marriage. We had spent a little more time at it, but had never really concluded that there were some areas that needed work. We worked at it. Oh, how hard we worked at it.  But it was like we were paying in different ball fields at the same game. We loved the game and played it with all our hearts, but one thing came clear to me, in this game we were playing, I had to be IT all the time. Once I figured out that I didn’t want to be IT and that my ex-wife had to be IT at least part of the time for me to continue the game with her, I discovered she didn’t like being IT and the game was over. 

That brings me to another point I want to make about relationships that occurred to me after my two year stint living in Arabia during 1984 and 1985. I found a person there, an American woman that was working in a hospital there, whom I believed I could have a meaningful relationship with and went about to see if that were possible. At the time I was still playing the game with my ex-wife of my second marriage and was not over that relationship, but I felt like I needed something else, and lovely woman came along as that “something else.”

She and I hit it off well from the first. She liked me and liked what I could offer her with no strings attached–companionship and transportation. The “not strings attached,” however, was a tough one for this woman. She had experienced a great number of relationships that always had strings attached and she was for the first eight or nine months of our relationship, suspicious that at some point, I would come by to collect my chips. But I found out a few things about relationships with this new friend. First, I discovered to my complete surprise that it was possible to have a relationship with a woman that didn’t have the old loyalty/sex/long-term commitment tied to it that I had previously known with the two other women that had entered my life over the previous thirty-some years.  With this new friend, I was able to commit to the “friendship” one hundred percent and have it be void of all those things. All I had to do, I learned was to be committed to anything that relationship asked of me, which turned out to be vulnerability, trust and a sense that either one of us could walk away from the relationship without the normal “crash and burn” fallout so common on most relationships which break up. We had a wonderful relationship that was built on commitment to each other at all cost, and it served us both greatly.

Sometime later while I was still in Arabia and the relationship with this first woman I got to know there had dissolved (she met another man whom she at first believed would be her “knight in shining armor”), I met another wonderful woman with whom I soon developed a very solid relationship. After I returned from Arabia (she remained there for another year), we managed to get together her in the U.S. and continued our relationship for another ten months before it dissolved.  It didn’t turn out to be a long-lasting relationship because I got carried away and reverted back some to the past norms that brought me back to that point of “survival” in my life, and when this woman walked away from the relationship, I was devastated and knew once again that I had not been enough, had not done enough nor had I been available as required. I took the entire responsibility for the “failure” of the relationship and felt miserable for a long time after.

Oh well, I can say now. That was then and this is now. I did have a wonderful time with both these women while it lasted. In all reality, because of the trust we had in each other, the respect we had and the vulnerability we shared, I am convinced we had all the elements of a perfect relationship. It was just that it lasted so short a time. 

 

 

8.      INITIATIVE

 

Initiative is a strange and scarce com­mod­ity in human behavior in my view. It exists for a few people, and is rarely seen in most. I personally think it is one of the most important charac­teristics that a person can have, and that it is one that can be of more value in character-building than almost any other attribute of human­ness. Now that I have said all that, I must support it with some grandiose examples:

While I was working for the State of Utah a few years back I was visiting a State Park in Southern Utah with my boss on a data gather­ing mis­sion. While there we were taken on a short tour around the park by the Park Super­intendent, a young energetic and enthusi­as­tic man who seemed totally dedicated to his work in the park. This particular park, Dead Horse Point State Park, is situated on the top of a wind-swept mesa overlooking the deep gorge of the Colorado River. The views from the top are spectacular, but the trails leading out to the edge of the cliffs are nothing more than gravel paths cut between scant vege­tation, blown clean by the constant winds coming up over the cliffs.

We had walked about two hundred to three hundred feet along one of the trails when the Superintendent that was guiding us and talking about the park gave us his best de­scription of the park and its surround­ings. He was slightly ahead of us on the wide trail talking continuously when with­out interruption or seeming to skip a beat in his interpretation or his gait he bent over and picked up a small gum wrapper that had been rolled into a ball and thrown on the ground next to a piece of sage brush. Putting it into his pocket as if he had done nothing, the Superintendent continued his pre­sentation, leading us to the edge of the precip­ice where we concluded our tour.

What he had done struck me as a gallant example of initiative. The small paper gum wrapper (likely biode­gradable, anyway) which was almost impossible to see in the first place, and was nestled near the tangled root of the sage brush would have likely rotted within a few weeks even if it didn't rain. But the young Super­intendent picked it up, despite his attention to us and our orientation. I am sure he did not do that just ­to im­press us. There was nothing to gain from his doing that. He had just done it because it was the thing that was there to do--nothing else, in my opinion.  

I believe initiative comes from that very principal: that it is there to do. How much more simple could it be. If it is there to do, do it--so what of the price? So what of the immedi­ate consequences (unless it is unsafe or extreme­ly consequential). 

There are opportunities around us all the time to take initiative. "Take initiative."  That sounds almost counter to what needs to be done to show initiative, but everyone always says, "Take initiative," so I'll leave it at that. What I'm trying to get at is that there are times avail­able to me (all of us) when I can (we can) take initiative and give myself (ourselves) some value in life and perhaps improve situations or make a dif­ference in this world.  There I go lecturing.

I'd like to say that initiative co­mes in various forms--lots of forms. But it always presents itself to us, we never have to go out to find it. In other words, we can't learn how to use (take) initiative. It's one of those things we just need to do when it pres­ents itself to us. Here's an example on how initiative (or the opportunity for me to take initiative) comes to me: I'm driving down the road and I see that someone has dump­ed a sack or large plastic bag of garbage on the road. I'm late for wherever it is I am going, so I look at the garbage and pass it by saying to myself, I should stop and pick that garbage up, but I'm already late and that would make me later. I've just missed a chance to take some initia­tive and do something for the community. Not such a bad thing that I did, but big enough for me to know now that I know all about initia­tive, that I have missed a chance that I will never get back.  That's one more thing about initiative.  While it keeps present­ing itself in all these dif­ferent forms, if we miss taking it, it's gone and there's no getting it back.

There's one more thing about initiative that I want to mention.  It almost always speaks to us (that's the way it works with me, anyway). This little voice in my head says something like, You better do that. Most of the time I ignore the voice--just another voice speaking to me to get me to get off the duff. One day, for example, I was sitting at my computer writing something and I get this call in my head, Call my son and see how things are going with him. The voice called me a couple of times, then perhaps because I was writing something that seemed not so important at the time, I stopped doing what I was doing and him. As it turned out, there was an opportu­nity waiting there in the call to him to take some initiative and give him some assistance with an issue he had been working on that was resolved after our conversation. I hadn't called him about the issue (I didn’t know there was one at the time), I had just called to see how things were with him. But after a few moments talking with him I could see that there were some things I could do or offer to do that might help him with his issue. I simply took the initiative to do them.  Afterwards, I felt good that I had.

That's an example on how initia­tive sneaks up on us sometimes. Most of the time, it presents itself quite blatantly, like the gar­bage on the road. Sadly, most of us (there I go speaking for the Universe) go around asleep to the op­portunities. We (I) have good intentions, but the habits we (I) have devel­oped for insulat­ing ourselves (my­self) away from such nonsense are more dominant and we (I) pass those oppor­tunities by. Sad, but true.

Now, here's what I suggest to myself (another challenge that I offer to the reader as well):

 

1.         Notice gum wrappers on the trail.

2.         Pick them up.

3.         Don't make a big deal out of it.

4.         Go on about your business, but be aware there's another gum wrapper just ahead.

 

Here’s another example of initiative that I think is important to relate: During the period between 1999 and 2000 I worked on a consulting contract that took me to Zambia in South Central Africa. In my observations of this vast, poor country, I saw a physical example of how the general lack of initiative had contributed to and in my opinion was the leading factor in bringing the country to its knees, causing it to be the third poorest country in world. Here’s some of what has happened over a period of about 35 years:

Before the 1964 Revolution, Zambia was known as North Rhodesia and was a protectorate of the British. All business in the country was privately owned, including the large copper mining deposits in the northern region called the Copperbelt in addition to another lead and zinc mining region near Lusaka. At that time about ninety percent of all the mining assets were owned by a British company, Anglo America.

After the revolution, which amounted to a peaceful takeover of the country by the native population, all major assets owned by foreign companies were taken over by the new government of the country, renamed Zambia. Anglo still retained a small percentage of the mines, but it was almost insignificant.

At the time of the takeover, the copper mines in the Copperbelt were producing about 700,000 tons of copper per year that by all international standards was considered very high productivity. The mines are all high grade and contain large percentages of Cobalt and some significant amounts of other precious metals.

At the time of the takeover, Anglo was providing for almost all the needs of its workers. Along with benefits that even included death benefits and caskets for the people who were dying, the mining company owned and ran the hospitals for workers and dependents that were also open at little charge to the public. The company owned and operated all the schools, which also were open to the general public. It owned and rented out all the homes for the miners that were segregated into compounds for different levels of workers from the lowest levels to top management. The city services were provided by the city but subsidized by the mining company. This included road repair, water, sewer and garbage pickup. The power that was purchased from abroad was also controlled by the mine, and excess power was sold to the city.

In a sense, all the needs of all the workers from birth to grave were provided by the mining company. They were given good pay and benefits, anyone who wanted to increase their education and showed potential was sent off to special training schools, many of which were outside of the country, and even the colleges in the country were completely supported by the mine. Engineers, doctors, administrators, you name it, were all given free educational benefits and in addition, were paid their salaries and considered for benefits and vacations just as if they were working while they were going to school. Some employees, such as medical doctors went to school for as much as eight to ten years without ever having to work one day, and their training amounted in many cases to as much as $1,000,000.

Generation after generation during these years before the takeover of the mines from the Government, local nationals were conditioned that they didn’t have to do anything to get these benefits. Employment was for life; retirement came for most at forty-five years; employees were given the option to purchase their house when they retired for much under the market value; their children were assured jobs and life was easy with little risk of ever losing their means of income.

At the time of the takeover of the country by the nationals, benefits as they had been for the miners continued, except one major change occurred. Now that the government owned the mines, all the money filtering out of the mines from the sale of product was being siphoned off into the government official’s pockets. At the mines the giveaway programs continued and money flowed like water into the hands of the top officials. No money, however, went back into the mines.

People working had a high dedication to keeping the mines running, but as the machinery broke down, production accordingly went down. Even people with initiative were hampered when they had ideas about how to get production going because of the lack of money coming back into the coffers of the mining company.

Production continued to decline over the years, but the giveaway programs continued full bore, and no one except the workers who were in the know, knew that the country was slowly folding up. As the mine production went down, so did the level of services provided at all levels of the economy decline. Road repairs all but stopped, building construction stopped, new housing ceased, city services were slowly curtailed, garbage collect was closed down and no one took any initiative to stop it. Rather the government begged for money from world lending sources and kept things going with borrowed money.

By 1990 things were so bad that no country or lending source would give the government any money and the country was next to bankruptcy. President Chiluba who had been in office for two terms, and who was known to have siphoned off most of the money made by the mines into his own private Swiss bank accounts, after being forced by the World Bank and others that the nation’s industries must be privatized to bring about an economic growth and mitigate the country from going into bankruptcy finally gave in and ordered all government-owned infrastructure be privatized. This took place and for the next eight or nine years, most of the industries were sold off and purchased by local or international firms.

The mining companies were the last to be sold. Negotiations went on for at least two years with the Government of Zambia holding out for the highest price and best conditions they could get. Buyer after buyer surfaced and some smaller operations like Chibuluma Mines and Chimbishi Mines were sold to foreign companies. Finally in early 1999 the deal was struck and the new companies (Anglo being one of the buyers) came forward with a final offer and the four major mine operations remaining were purchased.

Many people were laid off (retrenched) by this action (at least 70000 mine workers, hospital workers, and educators at all levels were included in the layoff).  Many that were laid off were under the impression they would be recalled when the mines reopened under new foreign management, but few were. The ones who were rehired believed things were going to continue as they were and they continued their behaviors toward work as if the regime that was on board was the same as the old government regime.

Hopes continued through 1999 and on to and through 2000, as workers who were laid off continued to believe they were indispensable and would be rehired. This didn’t happen, so the unemployment rate continued to remain at or near the sixty percent range throughout the country.  More and more workers were laid off as the mining companies weeded out the deadwood, and rehired expatriates to take the place of the workers who showed little or no initiative.

In summarizing this bit about Zambia, I have some opinions that the heart of the problem that has taken a country to its knees, is the lack of initiative. Yes, there has been corruption and theft all along the way, but that could have been stopped had the people cared enough or known how to stop the flood of giveaway programs. But people laid back with hope and faith (they are very religious people in this country who believe that things will be okay if they just have enough faith), and did nothing.

To give an isolated but common example of how the people think, I had occasion some one day while I was working there to give a ride to a retrenched manager to his home after a workshop I was conducting in which this person had been a participant. I learned from him that he had been a senior manager at the mine before he was laid off and that he had purchased the home he was living in during his tenure with the mining company (an option all retrenchees had when they were given notice they would lose their jobs). As I got near his home in Kitwe, I was directed to turn into a crescent-shaped road which circled around about ten houses all on one side with a small park in the center of the crescent. I could see right away that I was in a very nice part of town. All the houses on the crescent were large and beautifully landscaped. They seemed to be well taken care of and the trees, blooming as they were at the time made the place look like it was once a beautiful place to live. However, the road leading to the houses was a series of pot holes, some so deep that an ordinary car would bottom out if a wheel went into the pot hole. Of all the roads like this I had seen in the town (and there are many as there had been no road repairs anywhere in the town for nineteen years until some money was borrowed from the World Bank for repair of the some of the main thoroughfares).

As we entered the crescent and approached the man’s house, he apologized for the condition of the road and blamed it on the lack of support by the City Council. Then he went on to complain that the City Council never did anything and were always saying they didn’t have the money to fix the roads. I asked how long this condition had prevailed on his small crescent, and he answered that the roads had been like that for at least ten years.

I was appalled, but continued the questioning by asking my rider if it had ever occurred to him to get together with his neighbors and make a formal complaint to the City. He said they had not done that because it is the City Council’s job to fix the roads, not his. I followed with one more risky questions: Why haven’t you just gone out and filled up the potholes yourself? What would it take? I knew I had overstretched my bounds with that question since I received no answer and he immediately got out of the car and said thanks for the ride.

I just shook my head as I weaved my way out of the circle trying not to tear the bottom of my car out as it hit bottom more than one time. But here was a crowning example, I thought, of how a little initiative would correct a small problem and how if just a few people took that initiative how great this country of Zambia could be today. I concluded that they have a way to go and a few more lessons to have. I guess, as I have said before in this document, that the price has not gotten high enough yet for it to be any different.

 

9.      GIVING/TAKING/RECEIVING

 

During the summer of 1986 I was standing in a circle of people facing another circle of individuals that were facing us. We were all in a work­shop learning about our­selves. I had been going to these workshops faithfully, but had not been learning about myself as much as I could have been doing. This one eve­ning when I was in this particular circle, it was the final hour of three long, grueling eighteen hour days and the facil­itator was saying to us over the instru­mental mood music that was playing, "Step to the left . . . " (meaning step to the left until we were facing another person in the other circle), then there was a pause while we made eye con­tact with the person facing us. "Vote," he said (meaning for us to take our right hand from behind where we had been holding it and hold up either one finger, two fingers, three fingers or four fingers while the person facing us did the same). Whomever held up the least number of fingers decided the vote (one finger meant do nothing but maintain eye contact, two meant shake hands, three meant shake hands and greet the other person with a pleasant greeting, four fingers up meant you should hug the next person. "Do it..." was the last command (meaning for us to execute the lowest of the two votes). This was soon fol­lowed by the next command, "Step to the left . . ." and so on until the entire group had moved completely around the circle and faced every other person in the other circle.

This initiative was called, The Hug Line, for obvious reasons. As the inside circle moved around it was most people's propensity after the vote of four fingers to hug the person they were facing and it became almost automatic when we faced another person (at least it was automatic for me) to hold four fingers up so I could GIVE the other person a hug. I was really enjoying GIVING other people hugs, and I could see they were enjoy­ing receiv­ing them from me by their smiles and warm response (men and women were in both circles).

The circles were very large. As I recall, there were about one hundred and eighty people in this particular workshop. So the process of stepping right took a long time to make it around the circle. Well, we were almost all the way around and I was just enjoying giving all these people hugs, when all at once one of those Blinding Insights hit me and I realized I was RECEIVING hugs as well as giving them. RECEIVING. This was something new for me to realize that I could receive something from someone. I thought I always had to be the one to GIVE. I had never thought of myself as someone who could re­ceive anything. What a break­­­­through, that I could GIVE as well as RECEIVE. And I didn't have to TAKE any­thing to receive it.

While I continued around the circle facing the people I had not yet faced, I noticed the won­derful sensa­tion of RECEIVING the gifts from others whom I thought only I had the power to give. What a pompous asshole I had been all my life (and per­haps still am), that I believed I had to be the one giving all the time. What a power play I had been running all my life. To think that I was so powerful that I didn't have to receive anything from anyone was a terrible and selfish place to be. No wonder that I had not been able to make either of two mar­riages work, and my family and friends seemed to be so far in the distance. No wonder that I felt so alone all the time even in the company of friends and fami­ly.

In early 1992 I had another chance to do a little thinking about this concept of giving and receiving. I was working in Questa New Mexi­co with two colleagues from the same company that I had not before gotten to know very well. One of these people was a married woman in her thirty’s the other a man about my same age (fifty nine). In this short time we were together, however, I learned a lot about these two individuals and got to know them quite well. Both had a gift for me that I took and both received a gift from me. The gifts we gave each other in both cases were each other. I wrote a couple of poems about those experiences which I quote here:

 

IN THE GIVING

 

I touched my hand to the heart of this woman

Whose being was on hold for the mo­ment,

And it seemed to make a difference with her.

 

I couldn't help but notice

How awakened she became

On examining those things of her expe­rience.

 

Like the warmth of my heater,

I saw a glowing in her eyes;

And her voice, it said, Am I not dream­ing?

 

She smiled and her countenance strengthened.

She marveled at the experience she'd had.

How had she changed her position

All at once, and at­tuned to her heart

And her mind, I wondered?

 

What had happened was as simple as giving,

And the gift was only my heart.

It was not so much what was given,

But rather in her willingness to take

And to let go of all she had held as belief.

 

I had given no more than myself.

And I had received from her a similar gift.

 

      January 16, 1992

 

 

      I STOPPED THE OTHER DAY

      AND HELPED A FRIEND

 

I looked with some contentions and in doubt

At the time I have used

To ponder on my beliefs,

Avoiding my realities.

I get confused when I depend

Upon those things I've thought to be there

When in truth they don't really exist.

 

I stopped the other day,

Requested by my past,

To reach out and share those old sto­ries;

To tell him of my past.

Returning there in memory and in pic­ture,

The stories told were of my life's re­treats

Into journeys of my ego.

 

We laughed, he and I,

About my sorry programmed plea­sures

And of the journeys into places in my mind.

I sorrowed at my own return to plea­sure,

And the narrowness in all I did for me.

 

But it didn't stop there

As easily as it could have.

Perpetuated by my inner drive

I went on to more--the stories of my life,

And told of things long past.

I even made them sound heroic.

 

He listened with intent.

I felt my ego swelling as it had in days before.

I felt the inner pleasure of it all

As more and more I captured

His obvious envying quest.

 

Run down, but not out,

The stories continued,

Taken now to theories and beliefs.

In time, my ego faded into realism

Of the things I'd come to learn

From all these journeys of my past.

 

We talked now not of stories,

But rather probed into the questions

Still unanswered.

We talked of friendship, common in our pasts,

Those strange and different

Relations we had known.

He asked, How can I retain

Endearing pleasures I once had?

I said, For me, gaining them

Was all in how I gave. 

I gave myself to know that pleasure dear.

 

I believe, I continued,

My reality is in my giving of myself.

Those few such times I've had

Flow back in glowing memories.

They are stories, yes,

But living there within them

Is my true self.

 

I said, I still cannot come close

To what I had with what I have right now.

His voice tailed off as memory took its place.

He had lost this loving friendship

Of his past,

And my stories had brought them back.

 

He later told me clearly

That he yearned for their return.

I think he cried within for lack of stories

That help to bring the past to here.

 

      January 21, 1992

 

10.  THE PROCESS

 

The term “Process" alluded me for some time. I heard it stated in many ways, like, "Stay with the process," "Re­main in the pro­cess." There's "The Process," the noun, and "Pro­cessed" the verb; there's "Processing," some­thing we do in sin­cerity, and "Process the hell out of them," some­thing we do out of vindic­tiveness or out of our own self-righteousness. All these "Process­es," be they noun or verb, in this context are quite dif­ferent than a "Pro­cess" one goes through to create something or make something happen: "That was quite a process to get my Driver's License. I had to . . . “You know that kind of process. Anoth­er process oc­curs in a refinery, for example, when crude oil is turned into gaso­line. Most people know about those kind of pro­cesses. I don't have any trouble with those kind. It's the others with which I have issues.

Here's where it gets me. During one period of my life I was facilitating workshops or initiative games with groups of people for the purpose of team development, or therapy, or personal growth. When any of these exer­cises or events were over and the participants were waiting for what comes next, it was time to “process” the exercise or event.  The "Process" was already over, but now it was my turn to "Process" what happened. Maybe "De­brief" is a better way of putting it. As Facili­tator it was my function to debrief the pro­cess. Some might even say, I would now be about "pro­cess­ing the proc­ess." Does that make sense? See how I have an issue with it.

Let’s try "stay in the process" if you want another example of my con­fusion. Okay, I'm processing the pro­cess, when all at once I find myself getting involved emotional­ly or other­wise in the process, so I'm sup­posed to say to myself, "Stay in the process.  Remember what you're about here, Kid.  Don't get off track.  Stay in the process."  Or did I say, Stay out of the process?  Am I in it or out of it? I really believe I'm sup­posed to stay out of their process and stay in mine. There I have it. I can be out and in the pro­cess at the same time as long as I keep it straight whose process I'm in or out of. Don't I have a right to be con­fused?

I first started hearing this process jar­gon when I started on my quest for self-awareness and personal growth (learning how to stay in my own process, as it were) back in the 1980’s.   While enrolled in Lifespring (a transitional training workshop), the first of many personal growth work­shops I at­tended beginning about 1986, terms like, "Stay in the process" and "Pro­cess the group" began to pop up. Like many of the other jargon terms I heard staff and lead­ers of these work­shops use, I began to become aware of an entirely new way of thinking, speak­ing and being aware. Then came "The Training" and "Steps to Mas­tery" and Waking Up" . . . all advanced Lifespring-type events, so to speak . . . more jargon, more new terms and chal­lenges. Then I got into Ropes. Ropes? Yes Ropes, called by many other names like: Experi­ential Educa­tion, Outdoor Adven­ture Based Programs, Chal­lenges, Initia­tives, etc.

I liked some of what I was hear­ing and experiencing. I began to hang out often with people who were "In that process." I acted out like they did. I liked being "In the Pro­cess." It made me different. I looked differ­ent. I acted different. I was different--changed. I had gone through a process and been processed. Oh how I had been proc­essed. I watched my new friends change or not change, whichever the case was. Some said how they had changed and I couldn't see any changes. They seemed the same to me. Perhaps I was the same, too. Maybe this is all bullshit. "Be open to the possibility that it is." I said to my­self many times.

Some of my friends went beyond where I was willing to go to "stay in the process." They started working with a person that was "Channeling" a ten thousand year old prophet of a sorts named Ramtha. They went and got into another "process" and came back to tell me stories that they said changed their lives and opened them up more to what is possible. I listened with fascination and awe as they told of this channeling process (pro­cess?). They de­scribed a woman (J.Z. Knight, if you're inter­ested) in her 40's or 50's stand­ing in front of a group of over nine hundred people, being the "chan­nel" for this man who lived ten thousand years ago on the island of Atlan­tis, who is telling all these people how to live their lives in a more expand­ed way--how to under­stand and use the power within--how to recognize the God within. Wow. This was powerful stuff. They would go to these events and be there for days. Some­times they would sit on the ground being quiet (at­tempting to stay in the process), sometimes sitting out in an open field in all kinds of weath­er, blind­folded for more than a day at a time. That's staying in the process. I admire their tenacity.

Does all this mean anything? The process, I mean. I think there's something to it. I have noticed when I stay focused on something (stay in the process) long enough for my senses to get in tune and remain there, I can accomplish great things. It all seems to be there inside me, I just have to stay with it long enough to get it out. I've often said, and others have said this too (no big blinding insight this time), that I can have anything I want if I am willing to pay the price to have it. Paying the price can sometimes mean staying in the process. When I really under­stand the price something is going to cost me (psychologically, or other­wise) and I am willing to pay that price, I can have whatev­er it is I want.  Let me share an example (this tends to be quite philosophical, so hang on, there may be something in it for you):

In early 1986 I was fortunate to ac­quire a consulting contract with the Exxon Shipping Company in Houston, Texas. It was going to be a long-run­ning effort which that eventually last over one and one-half years. I was to assist in the design and imple­mentation of a week-long leader­ship work­shop. During the planning of this endeavor my friend and workshop planner came across a new type of training called, Ropes Courses, which he thought might work into this program we were planning. After an investiga­tion of the firm that originated the program, Project Adventure, the deci­sion was made to have this Boston firm build us a course in Texas on a scout camp near Conroe. The contract was signed and a training was scheduled for those of us who would be conduct­ing the pro­gram with Exxon employees. While all that was going on I was busy working with the Co-facili­tators of the program--ten senior employees from Exxon who would alternatively work with me on the pro­gram.

From the moment we entered the facili­tator training on this new Ropes Course that Project Adventure built for us, I was convinced I was onto some­thing big. The course activities, I could see, were a grand leap ahead of any­thing in the way of training that I had seen in all the years I had been doing that kind of work.

As the program progressed, I got more and more excited with experien­tial training and knew somehow I had to begin incorporat­ing it into my life and future activities. Ini­tially, I had no answer, but knew I had to do it.

At the same time as the program with Exxon was beginning, I had en­rolled into the afore-mentioned program for myself in Salt Lake called Life­s­pring. This was an experiential program of another sort aimed at transition of life's values and habits and mores to something new. I was quite taken by the program and eventually learn­ed a lot about myself and gained things I used to enhance the workshop I was doing with Exxon.

When the twenty six workshops were com­pleted at Exxon, I was just completing the third of the Lifespring activities. Toward the end of those activities, I learned that it was the "tradi­tion" with Lifespring programs to culmi­nate them with a Ropes Course. I knew a lot about Ropes Courses by then, so I volunteered to investigate for the Lifespring group, of which I was a mem­ber, which of the few Ropes Course companies in Salt Lake was the best to provide us with a course. Previ­ous groups had used two different local compa­nies, so I contacted both of them.

I was not impressed by the first person I called. She was the owner of a small com­pany called Ultimate Adven­tures. The second person I called seemed to have a better pro­gram (at least I believed from my short conversation) than Ul­timate Adventures, so I selected him to be the facilitator of Ropes for our Lifespring group. The program was initiated, but I was out of town, so I never attended. Everyone seemed to like the program, albeit, they did not like the facilitator and owner of the company. I later learned why when I met the man face to face. My opinion, shared by many others, was that this facilitator was phony, set on achieving his own agenda with the group that had nothing to do with their own personal growth.

            Not much happened for a short while after I completed Lifespring. I still did not have a Ropes program I could tie into in Salt Lake, and I had already made up my mind that I did not want to have any more to do with fellow and his program. Then on what seemed like pure coinci­dence, I was in a glass shop in Midvale one day pur­chas­ing some materials for some remodeling I was doing with my house, and I met the owner of the glass company who as it turned out was currently a partner with the woman that owned Ultimate Adventures, Inc. In a short con­versation I had with this man I learned they had two ropes courses; one in Alpine, Utah and another in Mount Pleasant, Utah, and I was invit­ed to come to monitor the courses at my convenience.

I did that and soon learned that both courses in my opinion were badly designed and constructed so I offered my services to rebuild them according to Project Adven­ture standards.  The Partners agreed to finance the operation and I committed to volunteer my time to the project and we set about to revamp both cours­es and add a num­ber of new activi­ties. Everyone was thrilled with the effort, and I in the process came to be an unofficial Princi­pal in Ultimate Adven­tures, Inc.

Now with all that background out of the way, I can proceed with the point of this "Pro­cess" example. While I was involved in the Ropes activities in Exxon I had gained a vision of what I wanted to do with my life--that I want­ed somehow to be involved in Ropes. I didn't know at the time what process I would have to go through to do that, but I knew it was something I had to do.

Later meeting the Ultimate Adventures partners helped me to cement that vision into some reality and define it better in my mind. I was convinced that somehow here in the West, we could devel­op a program, or system that was as good as Project Adventure had in the east, and I set about to make that happen.

Staying in that process from that time (late 1986) to the late 1990’s, I saw many things come about that brought me closer to my dream. I not only facilitated many coursed, but entered into contracts with other companies, schools, institutions and individuals to build twelve other courses in Utah and elsewhere. I learned that I had the cap­ability to build to at least the standards of Project Adventure. That meant that I could design and build courses that were innovative, safe, reliable and long-lasting. I was also able to build a curriculum that is almost as large as anyone at Project Adventure has and much larger than anything in the West. That curric­u­lum, coupled with the things I had done in my other consulting work included not only Ropes Course Activities, but many other initia­tives and games which could be done anywhere--providing us an even broader base upon which we could provide services.

The closer and closer I got to my dream, the more I was rewarded (psy­chologically for the most part) and con­vinced that "staying in the process" pays. I never once let down on my dream, though I ran up against many barriers and reasons that would have made most people drop out. I had to pay a big price and learned a lot in the process about how easy it is to fall down on the job when the going gets rough. But in persev­ering, I had learned much and seen the reward going to others as well. Though I have long been out of the Ropes business, I'm not there yet, but I'm clearly still on the journey and the rewards come at every turn.

In essence, I have learned to distance myself from the "Process" while staying "In the Process." Quite an accomplishment, if I do say so my­self.

 

 

11.     KEEPING MY WORD

 

I've learned there's only one way to keep my word, and that is at a level of one hundred percent and not a smidgen less. But, you might say, "How can I do that all the time?" I hope to illus­trate that it is possible, one hundred percent of the time, no matter what. "But," you say, "there are things on which I have no control. What about if I give you my word to meet you at a certain time and something comes up, like I get in an acci­dent or some­thing (out of my con­trol, you see), and I am unable to, say, keep an appoint­ment I made with you? What do you say about that?" And I say again, it's possible to keep my word even in that circumstance.

A few years ago I was attending a work­shop with a group of people for the purpose of personal growth and waking up to possibili­ties. The work­shop, unlike any other in which I had been a part, was to be a contin­uous thing for the participants for a period of about ninety days.  Each of us were to be work­ing on a project for this ninety-day period, but we wouldn't be togeth­er all the time. Rather, every two weeks we would get togeth­er for a weekend and summa­rize where each was on his or her assign­ment, then go about our business until the next get-togeth­er.  There were about forty people in the group divided into five sub-groups of eight people. Each sub-group had a group leader, or "Se­nior," as the person was called. My Senior was a young lady named Candi.

During the first kick-off weekend of the program Candi got the group together to go over the ground rules of the program and discuss what kind of a project we would undertake. Our pro­ject for the ninety days was to be a service project that would somehow contribute to society in a positive way. We spent all of two full days and evenings work­ing on our plans, finally reaching con­sensus on what our project would be. We would find resources to contribute a ton of food to home­less people in the Salt Lake area.

That out of the way, the group was about to break up when Candi intervened with a con­cern she had. She wanted a way to keep in touch with each member of the group every day of the ninety day period so she could monitor our activities and progress. After a short discussion about her concern she told us she wanted each one of us to contact her every day for the next ninety days with a short tele­phone call. She said she would block out a period of time each day--the same time every day--and that each of us would be given a time to call her. Each call, she said, should be no longer than five minutes. She selected a time she would like each of us to call her and asked from each a commit­ment that we would make the call at that precise time every day--no matter what.

A couple of the members of the group answered right away that they would do it. Two or three others said flatly that they would not consider such a scheme and I and a couple of others just stood there with our mouths open. I don't know what was going on in other's minds, but I was thinking, "How can I do this? I don't even know where I will be every evening at pre­cisely 10:05 p.m. How could I keep my word if I had an emergency? I wanted to, but how could I? What if I was in a plane going to Houston or coming home? I was scheduled to be in Hous­ton for at least six of the twelve weeks of the pro­gram, how could I possibly justify calling her every evening I was in Houston? The cost alone would be exorbi­tant." On and on my conver­sation went with myself as I weighed all my considerations about keeping my word and making that kind of a commitment. 

Finally, I started my conversation with Candi about all those consider­ations. First I told her I didn't think I could do it. That was a mis­take. I had just finished two workshops that were prerequisites to this one where I should have learned that there are no consider­ations; there is only "can" or "won't." There is no "can't" or "think I can." Right away I was nailed and asked by Candi if I would or would not commit. She had to have one answer or anoth­er, and wouldn't be satis­fied with an, "I'll do my very best," or "I will call you every night that I can." That just was­n't good enough for this strong, persua­sive wom­an. She wanted a solid, one hundred percent commit­ment and would not take anything less.

For hours I hung out in my con­sider­ations. Two others did the same. Those who had immediately said no were off the hook. She wasn't con­cerned about them. Those who said they would were challenged to test their com­mit­ment against all odds. One of them finally changed his mind, but the others held their ground. I still had doubts. Everyone had made up their minds one way or another. I had to take a stand.

We were running out of time, and I was beginning to feel like a real ass, so out of my own personal need to get on with the process, I finally gave in and made the com­mitment that I would call Candi every night at exactly 10:05 p.m.  Making the commitment was an amazing process for me. I knew as soon as I made it, I had made one of the most profound decisions of my life. I was up against myself to keep my word. It was a simple matter, but I had given my word, and I was going to have to make it work. I was deter­mined to make it work. It would work. I would not miss one night, no matter what.

Once I got to that point with myself, I knew it was a "done deal." I knew it was not going to be a problem. Having made the com­mitment that I was willing to pay the price, it was going to be easy. I had in fact already paid the price. The hour or so I had vacillated over the matter had been one of the most dramatic and valuable times I had ever spent with myself. I had truthfully put my­self on the line for the first time in my life.

I knew nothing would happen if I didn't make the commitment. It wouldn't hurt the project any. Candi would simple not hear from me that night and I could bring her up to date the next night. No problem. But it was more serious than that. I had promised her I would call. That was important enough. I had created an impor­tance over this matter that was bigger than life. I would not let her down.

I didn't let her down. In the actual eighty-nine days we worked on the pro­ject, I called every evening. I set my watch to alarm ten minutes before call time so I wouldn't forget, but I didn't really need to do that. Every evening when it was getting close to the time to call, I made arrange­ments to be at a phone. More than once I pulled off the freeway and found a phone. Once I excused myself from a dance, leaving my partner on the sidelines while I made the call. Another time while I was in the air circling over Dallas on my way home from Houston, I got permis­sion from the Hostess to use the airline's phone if the plane did not land in time. The plane touched down in time and I got to a phone in the Termi­nal. The over thirty times I called from Hous­ton, I had to call an hour later be­cause of the difference in time, stay­ing up at times when I would have given almost anything to go to bed and forget about the whole thing.

It was an amazing process that changed my life. I learned that I could do something like that, and moreover that it was easy. I also learn­ed that if I hadn't been able to call for some reason "beyond my control" I would have had a way out. I would either call ahead of time and make another ar­rangement (thus still keeping my word), or I would have someone call for me. Say if I became uncon­scious or was involved in an accident and was unable to make call, I would have known that I had done one hundred percent and really hadn't broken my commitment.

So therein lies the key. If I am com­mit­ting to keep my word, and something comes up to interfere with that, I just get to handle that interfer­ence with another arrange­ment or an acknowledgment that I have a broken commit­ment. Here's how that all works now for me now. Let's say I have told someone I would be at their place to pick them up and that I was going to be there at 3 p.m. That now means to me that I will not be one minute late. I have given my word that I will be there at 3 p.m. and no later. I just put things in order to be there on time. If some­thing comes up and I know I might be even three minutes late (I have allowed myself three min­utes for differences in time clocks), I call the individ­ual and explain that I will be three minutes late. My word is so impor­tant to me now that I have almost become a fanatic about things. I have made it a personal policy, as it were, that is as firm as con­crete. 

Coming to that conclusion about keep­ing my word has made a major differ­ence in my life. It works in all contexts--whether I am going some­where, whether I commit to get some­thing done for someone, even to things I promise to myself. I just do it. Or, if I am not going to do it, I say I won't. It is as simple as that. I will or I won't, there is no in between--no gray areas. There are no half-truths, no partial commit­ments, no "I'll do what I can's," there's just do it or don't.

I've noticed with some people, keeping their word means a lot of dif­ferent things. It means: If it is conve­nient . . . , If nothing gets in the way . . . , I hope that by committing I can get him/her off my back . . . , I know that's what he/she wants to hear . . . , I'll do my best . . . ,and etc. Too bad for them. They are missing a wonderful opportu­ni­ty to see what it feels like to do something that is not only easy, that gives value to life. It's like my calling com­mitment to Candi; it wasn't the biggest thing in the world; but when I finally commit­ted, it was a done deal. I knew it was going to be easy--and it was. And it served me.

12.   HONESTY

 

Honesty, like keeping my word, is all that it is, not part, not half, and there's only one kind. Who­ever made the rules for today's hones­ty, however, left a few loop­holes in the system. I hear things in people's con­versa­tions all the time like, "Do you mind if I be honest with you?" or "I'd like to be frank and honest with you" or "Let me be honest with you." When I hear things like that and it's directed to me, my first reaction is, "You mean you weren't being honest with me before?" I usually don't say that, but I always think it. Honesty just seems to be a thing that people think they can play around with--that they can manipulate and make their own rules for, and they do. They have that right, of course, but is it okay? That's the question I will try to answer here.

I've played the game I just described as much as the other guy. I just play it differ­ent now. I've made up my own rule, so to speak. I play at the game of being "honest all the time.” Howev­er, even that has its down side. Most of what I have expe­ri­enced in being honest all the time, is the pressure and the price I have to pay to do that. Let's take for instance that I'm with someone and I've made a little mis­take or done some­thing fool­ish and it is easy to cover up that this has happened. The price I have to pay for admit­ting that I had made that mistake is looking bad or sav­ing face. Now if I am invested in looking good to that other person or persons, then the price is may be too high to admit that I had made a mis­take. If that is so, I will leave things as they are.

Now there may never be any conse­­quenc­es in a move like that, and the effect may be minuscule, so I ask the question, "It is really important to be honest in that case?" Perhaps not. The trouble is, in my view, however, there may be a later price to pay, with penalties and interest. Here's how I believe that works:

I start out with a small untruth because the price was too high to have it any other way, and get away with it. I have learned a little about how to play the game of half-truths. As I continue to play the game, I get better at it and better at it, until I believe I am infallible. And I may be. I've seen people who seem to lead their entire lives in a lie and never ap­pear to be any worse off for it. Well, I think their time will come. "Dog will have his day," as some old sage put it. But it's the habit of lying that gets me and has made me afraid. Habits can get pretty possessive. I don't like to see what they do to peo­ple. I think a habit of part honesty is like a habit on drugs. The same delete­rious effects, though perhaps not medi­cally or behaviorally so visible, are just as serious.

Help me if I am wrong here, but if I'm in a conversation with someone and I all at once come up with the statement, "Do you mind if I be honest with you?" have I really been honest with them, and am I really not serving that person by all at once becoming "honest?" Give me a break.

I've got some children that are car sales people and I worry about them and their deal­ings with the public. I overhear their conversa­tions some­times how they set things up in their busin­ess that it's okay to manipu­late the custom­er a little to get them to believe they are getting the best deal in the world with the car purchase they are considering. I hear things like, "I have to build rapport with the customer so they will believe what I say." It's like the other day I drove up to the car dealer­ship where my daughter works and a young man met me as I was getting out of the car. With a warm smile and apparent sincere greet­ing, he said to me, "That's sure a nice car you are driving." "Thanks," I said, but what I was thinking was, "Does he say that to every­one to build a little rapport?" I was really suspicious that he was, but could not tell. Now if he was, was he being dishonest with me for the sake of a possible future sale. I think he was, and that's what worries me about what my kids are doing every day as they exploit their customers into purchas­ing a car.

So how have I handled this in my life, you say? I haven't really. Almost every day I confront myself that I am being a little less than honest in some dealing. But the key to it for me is that I am willing to confront myself every time and not justify the thing I am doing with some rationalization. That has seemed to make a major difference in my life. To re­duce and deduct from my habit the second nature I have dis­covered in myself to tell half truths about things, or cover things up a little has been the thing that has made the differ­ence. Does it make a difference to be honest first with myself? Always. But I didn't always know that.

What am I saying? That I have to be honest with myself first above all else? That's about how it is. If I start there, then the rest is easy.

 

13.  COPING/AVOIDING

 

There I was, miserable as I could be with the situation at hand, hardly able to keep my sanity. I had gone through many prob­lems, but this was one of the worst. I was on my last bit of energy and was just making it. I had talked to all of my friends and family about the problem and I had gotten much support and encourage­ment and was making it--however, only just mak­ing it.  I was "cop­ing" with the situa­tion . . . Or was I "avoiding?"

That's what I want to talk about in this section of my blinding insights. Do I avoid attempting to solve the problem when I only cope? Is coping just a way of get­ting out of dealing with the problem at hand? Now this may seem very philosophical at this point, and I was trying to avoid any mention of philoso­phy in this treatise. Maybe this is what it really is, and if so I will give in this one time.

I have noticed that when I have been able to cope with things that were difficult in my life, I seemed to lose a lot of time that I may have been able to use more wisely, in, for example, solv­ing the problem. In some cases, like when I divorced my second wife in 1984 I was devastated and drawn to the bot­tom of hell for a while. The same time as I was beginning the formal process of divorce, I had left the country on a two year, single-status assignment to work in Saudi Arabia. I would be alone there to work out whatever it was I had to work out. It was an ideal time to really get down to the brass tacks of a disrupted marriage of twenty-two years, and what did I do? I coped with the situa­tion . . . for the entire year and one half that I was in the country. I actually avoided any hint of setting myself down to the realities of my situation. I tried the entire time I was there to repair the dam­age I had made and get back into the relation­ship--making little or no progress, I might say. Then when I came home, I continued the process for another year before setting it aside and finally "going through" the divorce.

It was a great game that I played with myself those three years after January of 1984 when the divorce pro­cess started. And did I play the game with all my might! Once in a while, while I was coping with all the uncer­tainty I got to deal with, I would look around me (and into other possible relation­ships) and I would actually wonder if I was doing the right thing. Then I would get a letter, have a con­versation with my ex-wife or feel guilty that I was not doing enough about getting the marriage back where it was before, and I would fall back into my coping (avoid­ing) mode again, and all would be lost. As a result, I lost at least two opportunities to gain meaningful, long-lasting relationships with other women that may have given my life extreme value. I was driven by my coping with my situation so gallantly that I forgot to notice that I was making no headway in solv­ing the problem that I had.

I believe our society has forced us into coping with all life's miseries. I have heard it said and even read many things (self-help books, for example) that justify coping as a way of getting through things in the easiest manner possible. That may be partly true. It is easy to cope, but in my view, it never gets a person through the process. It only helps the person to easily avoid dealing with the situa­tion. In many cases, too, it fattens the pocket of the counselor or psy­­cholo­gist. Do they have reason to keep some­thing going with a client as long as they can? Of course they do. I believe that is why so many of them are as rich as they are. 

Slap your hand. How do you know that for sure? I don't really. I'm just venting and thinking of the year and one half that my ex-wife and I (while we were still married) visited a psychiatrist for marriage counseling, and about the tons of money we paid him for his services.  He allowed me to hang out in my resistance and denial that I had a problem all that time, and never once confronted me. I'm sure he must have known I was going to the sessions not for me but for my wife’s sake.  In my opinion at the time, she was the one needing counseling, not me. I enjoyed those sessions. I relished in them when she had breakthroughs.  I saw it merely as an intellec­tual stimulation that I found interesting. And . . .   And I learned coping (avoiding) skills there which would keep me from dealing with the problem for several years thereafter.

Now that I have brought you this far, reader, what do I have in mind for an alterna­tive to coping?  I've said before, all I have to be willing to do to have what I want, is be willing to pay the price. What is the price I have to pay if I don't want to just cope with a situation? That's going to vary on every instance. But I can guaran­tee, the price is going to be higher than the one I'm going to pay for simply coping with the situation. I might have to be honest with myself, for example. Or I might have to confront a situation or a person with my concerns and be hon­est with them. Or I might have to get some help or figure out for myself, just how I am going to deal with this situa­tion. Any of those can be a very high price to pay, I know. I have learned to pay some of those prices, and it hasn't been easy. But the 1, 2, 3, and 4 of it is always going to be the same:

1.         Recognize and admit that I have the problem.

2.         Own that I have a problem and that it is mine, not someone else's or out "there."

3.         Know that I am going to have to pay some price to get rid of the problem, and be willing (honestly willing, I mean) to pay that price.

4.         Go for it.

 

14.  RUNNING MY NUMBER

 

When I say this or that person is running his/her number, no one seems to understand what that means. It's a handy statement for labeling behavior, so I thought I would add it to the list. I will try to explain in what fol­lows:

I haven't the foggiest notion where that expression comes from, and I don't really care, but it sure does fit some behaviors I have observ­ed (and of course employed my­self). Let's see, how do I "run my number?" First, there has to be something that I am ashamed of or not willing to face up to or admit to. If that's the case, I have a real "opportunity" to run my number. I'll explain using a couple of examples:

Jim (I'll call him Jim, but that was not his real name--confidentiality, you know), was developing an elabo­rate plan to make his way into a busi­ness in which I was involved with a number of other people. Jim was very charis­matic and made friends fast, especially with the women in my group. He was charming, witty and smart. Jim had some money to invest and wanted to invest it is our business and had talked to the head person about it and had sold her on the notion.

I knew Jim before his pending engage­ment with this company in which I was in­volved. He had only a year before left anoth­er organiza­tion under some very strange circumstances. He and three other gentlemen had been work­ing on a project and were using money that had been allocated to that project quite freely, when an unexpected audit re­vealed that $50,000 had been miss-appropriated or lost (no one could tell, for sure). What was apparent, howev­er, was that the money could not be traced. 

Jim and his two colleagues were brought to the carpet and eventually accused of collabora­ting on misuse of the funds. One man was summar­ily fired, the other was kept, but taken off the project and Jim resigned. Not long after, Jim suddenly appeared with a new truck, a new computer system and a new house. It was rumor­ed that he said he had been awarded a large sum of mon­ey from an inheritance.

Jim joined our firm with his new car and new computer at our disposal and was soon lining up contacts for business left and right. In the mean­time, Jim benefited from scads of training from our firm's repertoire of pro­grams and was reproducing the docu­menta­tion of these programs on his computer in the name of Market­ing.

On the sidelines, I was saying to the powers to be that we should keep our eyes on Jim, that he had an agenda up his sleeve that I had not yet figured out (I told them he was "running his number"). Initially, no one wanted to hear my con­cerns, so I continued to watch my own back and kept out of Jim's way.

It wasn't long after he started with the organization that I began to see things going awry.  In a way, it seemed like he was doing a lot of things with our new clients that put him in the driver's seat and made him look like he had created all the pro­grams he was marketing. Sort of like it was his company now, and he was in charge. I saw a couple of letters he wrote and from the words I read, the programs looked like they were all his, not the company's.

About six months into his tenure, he invited us to get involved with one of these clients. His story was that he had arranged a deal with his client that if we did this work for them at cost of materials, only, we would be able to benefit from it in the fu­ture. He made it look like it would be to our advan­tage to make a large in­vest­ment of our time into that other organiz­ation's pro­grams. Everyone fell in line with his proposal (even me in this case--it looked like a winner) and we all put in a lot of time setting up the pro­gram on the client's facility. Jim had a special tie with this or­ganization, we all knew that, but did not know just how it would be all sorted out.

When we finished the project, we all had hopes that we would continue to be in­volved, but as we moved to do this, the client told us that we were not eligible according to the rules under which it operated. That left us with nothing to do but back off, and we did.

Things continued, and Jim began to get involved with one of our staff in a very intimate way. Jim was married, but the staff person was not, so the whole thing looked a little fishy to all of us. The relationship continued and Jim and this lady were soon quite heavily involved and doing their own things (using the company's resources) on their own time. Then we learned that some of these extra-curricular activities that Jim and his friend were up to were being done on this client's facility--the same on which we were supposedly ineligible. Jim and his special rela­tionship with this organization had somehow made it all right and he had one of our staff now on his side going great guns with our pro­grams.

As his workload outside of our organi­zation increased, his efforts on our behalf dwindl­ed. Soon we never saw him unless he was pass­ing by on his way to one of the programs he had created for himself and his new friend. The ground swell of his efforts soon became apparent to the powers to be in our company and Jim was confronted. In his suave manner, he somehow slid out and made a run for it, suffering no retribu­tion and feeling no pain for the loss. We lost a staff member to his little scheme and all of our programs that he had taken and called his own. The money he invested in the firm was also given back to him.

Jim had "run his number" on us, is the best way I can describe the situa­tion. He ap­parently had his own agen­da coming in and used us as the means to set it up. He had done is so cleverly that few in the organization even knew they had been had. He was so slick, suave and demure, most of what he said and did went over their heads. I felt strongly like saying, "I told you so," but I knew that would do no good, under the circumstances.

15.  WHERE I LIVE

 

It doesn't matter where I live. What matters is what I do where I live. Now you may dispute this with questions like, "What if I'm in jail?" or "What if I don't like where I live or there is something wrong that makes me sick when I live there?" Once again, I've said this before, you or I have a choice about where we live. Or, we live there because we have made that choice and don't want to pay the price to have it different. Or, on the extreme, I made a choice to do some­thing and I'm living there because of that choice, and there is no way out for the time being. So, it goes back to my original statement, it doesn't matter where it is, it still matters what I do where I live.

Here's how this has worked in my life. I have lived many places over the last many winters of my life. So many places, in fact, I don't even remember some of them unless I take it upon myself to get into my records and find out just exactly where it was. But there are some places I remember--places that made a difference in my life.

 

Henderson Nevada--

My second wife and I lived there for a short time in 1968 just after I joined Bechtel. We chose Hender­son, a small town south and a little east of Las Vegas, because it seemed like the best place to live while I was working at the second job with Bechtel in Mountain Pass, California. It was the closest town to Mountain Pass, but it was not necessarily the best, as we would find out shortly. 

The place we rented was really a dump, but it was all we could afford--at least that's what we thought. It was old, rambler style with no garage and an alley for a back yard. The lawn was a mess (like all the lawns in Vegas area), and almost everything we found in the house was wrong for us. Added to that was the job I had at the time which took me away from home seven days a week for over twelve hours each day. Not much of a home for me--only a place to rest most of the time. For my wife, it was even worse, because she was so miserable all the time with all she had to do being in charge of everything most of the time while I was away.

She immediately became sick after our first week in the place.  Her stomach got so bad that she had to go on a special diet. I am convinced now that most of what she was suffering was from stress, but we didn't know much about stress in those days. We were both just doing the best we knew how to do. But still, the place where we were living didn't add much to the game.

First, it was the first place we moved after our rather dramatic start with Bechtel. I had been laid off my previous job and Bechtel came into the picture just at a time when we were in crisis anyway. I didn't stay long in the first job with Bechtel before we were moving for the first time--I believe we were in Salt Lake with Bechtel only five months. We didn't know about moving then and didn't know how it was going to be. And then the long hours I was working didn't help matters.

Being close to Las Vegas was the other part of the equation that made it so we were miserable most of the time while we lived there. It seemed we all at once had so many visitors that we didn't have any time to ourselves. Every weekend we were there (over a six month pe­riod), we found ourselves entertaining people from Salt Lake who used our place as a con­venient stopover for their own visits to the gambl­ing casinos in Vegas.  It was incredible how much people used us while we were there.

When we moved in we believed we had the Church to rely on, and my wife got quite involved in those activities. But I was working so much myself and had no weekends off, I didn't really have any time to go. I think in all the weeks we were there, I only went to church a couple of times, and one of those times was when we were asked to speak.

Even that episode at church made her life a little more miserable. We had been asked to take the entire meeting to give our talks and she had prepared for several weeks on her talk. But I had not prepared at all, being so busy as I was and all. So when I got up first to talk, I took all the time that was allotted to both of us and she had to cut her talk down to nothing. One more aggravation we had to deal with while we were there.

Then there was young son. Our boy was only two or three at the most when we were in Nevada, and he decided he was going to be the neighborhood bum. He was a friendly little sort and wanted to get to know everyone in the neigh­borhood, so he would go from door to door and ring the doorbell and ask if he could play. He couldn't talk well enough to tell people who he was or where he lived, so in the few months we lived there, he had to be rescued by the police at least three times.

So why am I telling this story as part of my treatise on Blinding Insights?  Here is the reason: It really didn't matter that we had all the things in the world going wrong while we were living there. It was just exactly the way we made it. We always had a choice at making it different, but instead, we just couldn't wait to get out of the place. About six months after we went there, we were moving. It must have been about April, 1969.

 

Niagara Falls, Wisconsin

Things could have gotten even worse the way they started for us in Wisconsin. We moved there in April thinking that April, like every other place we had ever been was going to be the beginning of spring. But we quickly learned that April in the upper north country of the U.S. is just the tail end of winter. Everyone but us knew it, so they didn't mind.

We had thirty days of move-in time that the company was paying for in those days, so we believed we had ample time to get into some place we liked. We already had some experience moving, so we felt like "old timers" on this move. As it turned out, however, we could not im­mediat­ely find any place that was vacant that we could rent. In addition, the motel we were rent­ing only had an upstairs place with a little balcony and we had these three small children who soon got cabin fever and wanted out. The motel was on a busy street, and I had to go to work as soon as I got to the place, so once again my wife was saddled with all the house-hunting to do and no help doing it. Every day I would come home, I would hear another story about how things were terrible, and would we every get a place to live in.

Finally, after thirty-one days of motel living, we found a place in this little town of Niagara, Wisconsin. The house was in terrible shape. It wasn't a bad house, it was just how it had been lived in by the previous tenants. They had not paid their rent and had been evicted, but worse than that, they had left the place and just walked away from it--messes and all. It was so bad, we almost had to shovel things out. About a week after we rented the place we had it all cleaned up and painted and my wife had redone the drapes, so it was looking pretty good to us--especially after our miserable time at the motel.

Once we were settled into our new place there a different sort of attitude seemed to set in for us. We actually began to enjoy our life there. In fact, as I look back on our experience in Wisconsin, for the most part, it was for both of us about the most productive and happy time of our marriage. 

There wasn't the church organization there to hold us together, and I believe what happened was that we discovered each other for the first time in our marriage. There wasn't much else to do, and I believe that was part of what made it so good for us. We just had each other and the children. Because we were "outsiders" too, it seemed none of our neighbors wanted anything to do with us. So we were isolated with only each other to lean on.

One other factor seemed to make it worthwhile living in Wisconsin. There were LDS Church missionaries in the area that were not doing too well, so we found them and started to invite them over frequently. They became our ties to home and we were able to help them a lot. So service to the "community" became a factor. We were really serving them, and it became a matter of pleasure and wonderful contribution for us.

In Wisconsin, we made it good because we made it home, without distractions and other matters to take us away from what needed to be worked on. During the last few months we were there, we really became acclimated to the place and really didn't want to leave when the time came.

So the keys to our success living in Wisconsin, seemed to be, 1) finding each other and the children without distractions, 2) having some service we could provide to the community that would make us feel needed, and 3) being willing to overlook the things that could have made us feel like victims of our circumstances.

The more places I have lived in my life, the more times I have experienced and reinforced what I believe, that a place is what one makes of it, and our happiness in any one place has little to do with where it is. I learned that living in Saudi Arabia and I leaned it living in Africa during year 1999 and 2000. Of those two places to live, one could look at them as likely the most awful places to live one could ever expect. In Arabia, it was always hot, dusty and dry and in Central South Africa (Zambia) it is always wet and muggy and dirty. But in both places I found things that interested me, I met people who were interesting to be with and I gained friends in both places that have left me with memories I shall never forget. All the places I have lived have presented their challenges to me, but also in each instance there has been many opportunities for learning and growth.

 

16.  SHOWING UP

 

Here is a concept for you to think about: Showing up is a state of being when one person enters the “space” of another human being until the “space” between them no longer exists. Now, for that concept to be understood, I should do a little explaining. I’ll start with “Space” because it is the most dif­ficult to inter­pret--and I will have to do it by explaining it in the context of my own experience of being in someone else’s space:

From time to time I meet someone and at that instance whether I know them or not I find that I have connected with them in a very special way. With someone whom I do not know, the encounter usually begins with simple eye contact. Then in the next instant I find that I have entered their space. This place is an undefined or un­marked region, but it truly exists, and I’m inside quickly moving into what comes next. The next “step” usually begins with something verbal like “hello” or “hi” and sometimes, even, with a nod or other physical (non-verbal) signal. In that multi-instant, I may have “shown up” with the other person.

If I have truly shown up, the individual will acknowledge the gesture with some comment or non-verbal recognition. At that moment, if I am alert, I will know that I have brought some­thing to the individual or that there has been some reward for my being there. Anything can happen after that. A relationship can start right away, or we can part and will never see each other again. But in either case something magical has happened between us that I cannot forget and I am sure the other person has similarly understood.

In this showing up process as I have described, there is nothing manipulative about it nor is it ever planned or expected by me. I do always know when it is happening, however, and I can build on it or ignore it as I see fit. But when I have made that kind of step forward, I have found that if I pursue it a little more the reward expands exponentially.

One example of this phenomenon: During one of the four times I was living in Zambia shortly after I arrived there I met a woman, Francina, who was a neighbor and a good friend of my Landlady, Sylvia. The first moment I met Francina, I was sure that there would develop something between us that was very special. It wasn’t by any means like falling in love at first sight. Rather it was just a connection that I cannot explain. From that moment on, I knew that our relationship would develop and that something special would eventually come of it. Now, mind you, I am not falling in love with this woman, and likely would never do so. She is engaged to another man, she has grown daughters, she has a life, and I am not about to put anything into that life that would upset any of what she has. But what I have noticed about Francina, she seems to be the same with me. She acts like she loves being around me, she sought me out by coming to the house where I lived just to talk and one time just before I left, she called on me when the man she is engaged to was in London on business, because she was sick and didn’t have anyone else to call on. I was thrilled to be there for her and showed up as it were to be with her the entire morning.

I have no idea at this point if I will ever see Francina again since I live in the US and she lives in Zambia. But I am sure that what we had will never die nor will it ever wane because we both showed up when we encountered each other.

I mentioned that this is just a concept, but I am convinced that it is something that is available to anyone that wakes up to the opportunity and takes the initiative to step into someone’s life.  The steps are simple: be available, recognize the opportunity and take the first step.

17.   FUN, JEST AND HUMOR

 

I like to think that there is a place for fun, jest and humor in any context--I don't care what it is. So often I’d seen just the opposite bringing down people to their lowest denominator and that's very sad. Beliefs and maintaining status, I believe are the biggest inhibitors of people being able to enjoy themselves in any setting. Beliefs are the worst. Let’s take a person who believes that a certain activity should be serious. It could be a funeral, it could be a work situation, I don't care. But, this person has brought this belief into whatever context they are in at the time and they impose it upon themselves and others. In some cases it may even be more than "imposed." It may be forced--like with their children, "You shouldn't do that (laughing at the table, for example). It's not proper." So the little child hears this over and over again, perhaps enforced with a slap on the bottom or across the face, and soon the child adopts the belief that he/she shouldn't laugh at the table. And so it goes. Whenever a belief inter­jects itself into a situation, it is going to have an impact on the situation.

Now getting back to fun, jest and humor. Why have I chosen this as a subject for my Blinding Insights? It just came to me one day when I was thinking about how much I laughed as a child and how much I enjoyed humor and jest and how little of that I allow for myself now as an adult compared with my youth. It's awful how serious I make some things and how that seriousness inhibits my growth and learning. How much better I grow and learn when I'm having fun at it, and how little that happens when all my focus and energy goes out to the task, the completion on the "successful" end of it.

Here's an example of how seriousness, properness and belief can get in the way. This happened a number of years ago when I was working full-time at Eclecon in Salt Lake and was reporting to the president of the company, Don Simon. Don was a fellow who took almost everything serious. He was so intent upon portraying a certain image in all he did, that he seemed to be unhappy all the time. People around him never met his expectations. Well, I was with Don this one day while we entertained several executives from some prominent company. Because of the image thing Don had, we were eating in one of Salt Lake's most prestigious private clubs (to which Don was a mem­ber, of course). As we all waited for our meals to arrive several times loaves of San Francisco Sour Dough bread were delivered to the table (really baguettes cut in thin slices with ample butter on several separate plates). The bread was continually being passed around as the crowd of about seven of us munched away at it and talked. Don, of course, in his charismatic way, was the center of attention spewing much wisdom and grand thoughts about what Eclecon was capable of. Everyone paid strict attention to Don who sat at the head of the table. The bread just kept coming for what seemed an endlessly long time, and I kept going after it, each time taking one or two slices, buttering them one at a time then gulping them down followed by another drink of ice water.

Several times during the pre-lunch period, I noticed Don looking at me in a sneering, unhappy way, but I could not imagine what I was doing "wrong." In all my deepest thoughts I could not imagine what was bothering Don. Nothing I was doing that was making Don unhappy made any sense at all.

Lunch finally came and soon the party was breaking up and Don and I were trekking back to the office. At first Don was unnaturally silent, then all at once he broke into a tirade that almost crescendo to screeching before he finish­ed. It went something like this:

"Jack, I am very angry with you about how you were eating at the table today."

I knew he was angry, but I didn't know why, so I said, "I noticed something was going on, but couldn’t figure it out. What was I doing that bothered you?"

"It was the way you were buttering your bread," he retorted, raising his voice on every word.

"The way I was buttering my bread?" I questioned.

"Yes," he said. "Every time you took a slice of bread, you buttered the whole thing before you ate it."

Now I was really puzzled. "What's wrong with buttering my bread? Everyone butter­ed their bread. Even you did. I like butter."

"That's not it," he said, now almost screeching. "You're supposed to break a small piece of the slice and butter only the piece, not the whole frigging thing. I was so embarrassed watching you I could hardly stand it."

So there it was. Etiquette. Don's belief. It's improper to butter one's whole slice while eating in a prestigious place with important potential clients. Why, contracts have been lost for such breaking of the "rules."

When Don finished I was so astonished, I could only laugh, and I couldn't stop myself. And as I continued, Don just got angrier. By the time we reached the office, Don was so bad off his face was glowing red and his bald head was glistening with sweat. It was an incredible blinding insight to see Don's real self bear itself in this instance. Don never forgave me for laughing at him over a matter as serious as buttering a complete slice of bread, but I still laugh just thinking about it again. The laughing for me was the only expression I had for this incident.  I could have felt bad and been very embarrassed about the situation, but truly, I was not. I saw it as something funny which needed to be acknowledged, no matter the cost.

I do, however, acknowledge that laughing at Don about this incident was inappropriate and likely could have been handled differently. I could have continued to be sober about it, and simply acknowledged that he had his opinion and in the future I would be more careful not to cause him embarrassment. But I still would have laughed about it later.

Here's my belief about having fun and letting levity be a part of your/my life. On some occasions to laugh about something or tell a joke is out of place and inappropriate--especially when the laughter or job is at the expense of someone's feelings, culture, gender or life-style. I believe that realistically, while this is an impor­tant factor, it only represents a small portion of what is really possible. In other words, I believe it is possible in work, family or life to have fun at it most of the time. In addition, I believe that when I am having fun, I'm setting myself up to life longer and to be healthier. The two just seem to go together.

A good example of how fun and jest can make life easier follows: While I was in Ethiopia during the period 2004 through 2006 I was living in conditions that for most people would be almost intolerable. It was dirty, there were bugs and all kinds of sickness around me and in some instances I was living in conditions that would not be considered tolerable for many people. But I was doing humanitarian work while there and that made life tolerable.

During the many months that I lived in this country (Ethiopia) I found many things that seemed to me to be either unexplainable or really fantastic and mysterious. I tried everything that I could try to understand some of these anomalies, but failed in most cases. Others that came there from the U.S., were equally amazed and in wonder about these strange anomalies that were around all of us, and because I was a longer-time resident of the area, they often asked me about these things they were seeing or experiencing to see if I understood them. I had not good answers for these people and when I perceived that they might be gullible for any kind of answer, I made answers up for them. I even created a set of “rules” for Ethiopia that helped me to explain these phenomenon. These rules were all made up, but I created them to be so convincing that these vulnerable visitors for the U.S. gobbled them up.

Here are some of the examples:

-          There seemed to be no explanation for why feral horses that were left to be roaming around the country seemed always to find places in the middle of the one paved road in the country to stand exactly on the center line of the road. I made up quite a good story about this that many people fell for.

-          On the vehicles that transported goods across the country (large trucks and busses), many carried live goats tethered (and sometimes not tethered) to the tops of their loads. I learned later that these were goats that were purchased from street vendors in the countryside to be taken to the city where they were sold to customers that were using them for ceremonies (weddings, parties, and etc.). People coming to Ethiopia often questioned me about these goats, so I made up a story that they were signal goats that were used to signal drivers of the vehicles when dangerous conditions were apparent along the highway. This was a fun and convincing story that many people bought hook line and sinker.

-          Then there were the funny looking cattle that were everywhere in the country that looked very much like the Brahma Cattle that are seen in the U.S. (large humps on their backs).  People wondered about these animals that for the most part were exclusively seen in the dryer parts of the country. For them and those people that had questions, I made up a story that these cattle were Cowmels (a cross between camels and cows) and that the hump on their back was like a water storage container similar to camels. People loved this story and bought it without question.

 

During my entire stay in Ethiopia and later when I went to Mozambique and to several countries in South America I found interesting things that contributed to my portfolio of amusing and fun antics. But this made life easier for me, and whenever I have the opportunity I make frivolous comments or try my luck at humor. It makes my life easier and more fun, and I believe I am healthier as a result.

 

18.  DEFINING LEADERSHIP

 

There is something that has been both­ering me since sometime around 1985-1986 while I was involved with Exxon in Houston. Here's how it adds up: In this Leadership Program in which I was involved, there was a drive among the team leaders (myself and all the other facilitators) to define our program to the nth degree so there was no mistaking what the program was. Every time we had a workshop we debated definitions--always improving on the last one or devising new definitions. Every one of the definitions made sense until we got a new one and that seemed to override the old one. That seemed to satisfy everyone but me. For some reason this all didn't set right. We would always come up with a convincing and clear definition for Leadership, but it always needed to be changed. After twenty-six workshops and a continual revision of our Leadership definition, we finally just let it go and let it turn out what it would be--that leadership is as fluid as the moment and the situations making up the present moment.

I've bumped up against that definition issue a number of times over the past ten years, but never gave it much more thought, that it was just something, sometime that would be looked at. Then as if it were a really blinding insight, I had an opportunity in early 1995 to review it all over again. This is how it came about:

I was teaching a course in an MBA program at a local private college. I had fourteen students that are all working adults finishing their MBA's as a continuing education program while they worked on their various jobs. One of the students who was work­ing as a marketing person for a prominent leader­ship training organization popped the question to me during one sessioin, "How do you define Leader­ship?"

Hearing the question brought me back to the Exxon Leadership Program at the speed of light and my immediate impulse was to begin an interactive discussion about the definition.

There is this thing about leadership that seems always to bring on the need to define it. I don’t know why, but leadership seems to need definition. I was in that place when this chap brought it up in my class. I was almost forced by my past experiences to want to define the term. But to my surprise, I let it go this time and resisted the urge. Rather than answer his questions, I asked him back a question, “What is the purpose of your question?” When he didn’t seem to have a clear purpose, he quickly changed the subject. So there it was in a nutshell. If I have some clear purpose in having a definition (rather than the usual urge to just get on with the dialog) then a definition might come out of it. But as yet, and as I look back on all the times I have attempted to define the term, I cannot once think of a time I had a real purpose in wanting the definition. I leave it at that. If I have a purpose in defining Leadership then it may be time to go about defining it.

 

19.  GOD/RELIGION

 

            I’ve never been one to have a strong (or even a weak for that matter) commitment to either God or Religion. Sure, I played the part for a long time as an LDS Member (Mormon) in good faith, but at one point in my life I realized that I had based my entire activities in that faith-based program on borrowed concepts and other’s faith. I never really had my own, though there were times when I sincerely attempted to gain that faith. I paid my tithing, I prayed and read the scriptures and went to all my meetings regularly. I even went to the Temple and took on the vows that were offered there along with wearing the required underclothing that everyone is encouraged to wear after they have been to the LDS Temple and taken on the vows there. I held jobs of leadership and even for a period of time was a member of the Bishopric of a Ward in Connecticut. I held many other jobs and did them with conviction and strived to do my best to be a good and faithful servant. But at one point, I realized it was all for naught. I had been basing all my “convictions” on what was intended of me by others.

            So here I am, still a member of that faith (LDS) and still considered on the records of the Church as a High Priest (a status I gained at one point of my progress along the road to faith), but I am not an active member any more, and haven’t been for many years. As far as religion in general goes, I believe it is all right for others who want to have something like that in their lives and are willing to go it strictly on their faith or as the Mormons say, “having a burning in your bosom” that there is a God and Jesus Christ is out Savior (at least that’s the Christian view). For me, neither concept is valid anymore (nor for that matter, have I really ever had it, though I might have believed at one time that I did). So does that make me and agnostic or atheist? Perhaps, but that again is just another definition for someone to hang their hat on. For me at this point in my life, I believe I can get along without God and Religion just fine. I can be a service to others in a God-like manner, I can be a morally upstanding person in the community, I can have love for others and their well-being and I can do it without having to lean on a personage like that defined as God in our society.

 

20.  GENDER ISSUES

 

            For as long as I can remember I had always had a strong belief that issues about gender are simply power plays by individuals and societies that are maintained as a means of keeping some people from assuming equal status. I hate to see these issues played out in our society and by individuals. I consider all people of all genders to be equal, and though they may have physical and mental differences, these should not be held out as gender issues that would keep them from being all they could be.

            Over the years, and especially during those years I was working in developing countries doing humanitarian work, I saw the deleterious effects of how gender issues are maintained as used as ways of keeping some people under tow. It was most apparent in Saudi Arabia and the African countries where I worked and especially with the Muslim populations. I saw case after case were women, for example, were considered property, rather than partners in marriage. As property, they were treated no better than dogs or material things that were valid “property.” I saw cases where women were sold and bartered like slaves and kept covered (Saudi Arabia). I saw instances where young woman were abducted to become wives of men that already had several wives. I heard one man tell the man that had bought his daughter that she was now his property and he could use her as he wished. He was further encouraged to beat this woman if she got out of hand and didn’t obey him. The father of this young bride then released the girl to the man and said that from that moment on, she was no longer his daughter. Those were the extremes of gender issues.

            But here in the States, there are still gender issues that go on as a means of power and position not unlike those that I saw in those extreme cases in developing countries. Here the means of keeping these issues in tow are more subtle and in some cases governed by laws (that are blatantly broken). I see it in the workplace, and sense it is happening on a large scale in religious circles. And though there are laws that say that these issues should be dealt with, they seldom are. These issues are so strongly embedded in our society, that I believe we will never see them changed—at least in my lifetime. As long as there is an opportunity for one person to be in power over another, I am sure some people are going to exert that power and maintain their status as the owners of it.

 

21.  WORK - HARD WORK - WORKING HARDER

 

            I was raised for a number of years (at least until I was twenty years old) under the influence of a father that had a work-ethic that maintained that Hard Work was a virtue. His lived his life that way and preached it to his children, and incidentally died at an early age (fifty-three years old) after an event in his life that resulted from his ethic that made him believe it was necessary to work hard, even when hard work was what was ruining his life. Much of my father’s ethic rubbed off on my so that for many years of my own adult life, I believed sincerely that hard work was a virtue. There were times when things weren’t working in my life then I attributed it to the belief that I wasn’t working hard enough, so I worked harder at the things that were not working, believing that this was the solution. Thankfully, I finally came to the conclusion that working hard at the things that don’t work is a wasted effort that can usually be rectified by working smart or discontinuing to work at it altogether.

            Here’s an example that happened in my life that I have seen others do in almost the same manner: While I was married to my second wife, during the latter part of our twenty two years of marriage when things were going awry and our marriage was falling apart, I believed for years that if I only worked harder at looking for solutions and doing the things I was doing better (working at it harder, as it were) that the problems would be fixed and we could go on with our marriage in happiness. What I came to find out in this situation was that I was simply playing a game. And in this game as long as I was IT (working harder at the things that weren’t working) the game continued. Because I was it I had to do all that was necessary to keep the game going. I loved playing the game and so did my spouse as long as she didn’t have to be IT. I ran myself almost ragged trying harder at everything I could try and by the results loved playing the game. But at one point when I realized that in order for the game to continue I had to be IT and the price got so high that I was really being victimize by it, I decided one day that I didn’t want to be IT any more. When I presented this to my spouse and said I would continue the game if she was willing to be IT for a change, she suddenly realized she didn’t want to play the game anymore under those circumstances, so the game was stopped and we were both able to go on with our lives.

            This same concept works in other contexts. Imagine yourself working at something (a job, a career, a marriage, etc.) and you are finding yourself working so hard at it that you are constantly exhausted or debilitated or your life just isn’t working like you believe it should be. Examine the circumstances and see if you are simply working too hard at making it work, and should you terminate the situation or start to work smart, not hard? Try it. You might find that you are playing the same kind of game as I was for so many years, that you are IT in the context of that game. And if you don’t want to be IT anymore and the price for not being it is reasonable, you may want to change the game rules and find someone else to be IT instead of you, or simply quit playing the game. 

 

22.  MISTAKES/ERRORS

 

            I think our society places too much emphasis on mistakes and errors and they do so rather than being responsible that they have created their own reality and that they are fully responsible for that reality. Now this is a difficult aspect of living your life, I will agree. But when you or I are willing to take responsibility for everything that happens in our lives and that we have created it to be just like it is at that moment, our lives with suddenly be richer and freer than it ever has been. Here’s how that works for me. In any situation that I am in, especially if it is one in which I have made a mistake or found the situation to be in error, I ask myself this question: How did I create that to be the way that it is? When I am able to answer that question honestly, knowing that I am responsible for everything that happens in my life at some level, I can then chose not to have that experience again, or if the price is too high not to have it, I can continue on that road and continue to have the erroneous or mistaken experience. I have no one to blame for anything in my life that way, and because of my attitude, I am never the victim of my circumstances. I always have a choice and those choices have put me where I am today (not that I was influenced unerringly by my family, friends, environment or other factor). I am responsible for my own universe, and thus I can be in control of it at all times.

 

23.  PAIN

            I’ve been fortunate in my life of having had little pain (physical or mental for that matter). On the mental side, I’ve had  plenty of opportunities in which I could have become completely debilitated by pain (two divorces, a father that died quite young, money hardship, losing a house that I loved, etc.), but for some reason, I have somehow maintained a pretty good attitude about all of these potential pain-giving situations.  Like most people, I have had situations when I suffered physical pain for a short time, but those have been in my own case temporary and were treated with drugs or they simply just went away on their own. But the other things that might have cause me pain were not suffered because of one thing that I held in my life that seemed to be the solution. The things I mentioned in the above section (about being responsible for everything in my life) was the key to my ability to mitigate potential painful situations that might have debilitated me. I’ve looked back on these situations many times and realized that in all cases where I might have suffered mental pain and agony, I realized that at some level I had a choice that might have mitigated that situation, and had I made that choice I would not have been subject to the mental pain that was brought about from the incident. One example that stands out is how things turned out with the loss of the house in Bennion Utah that I lost to the bank when it was repossessed. Here’s how that worked out and how I realized that it could have been avoided had I made other choices:

            When we moved back to Salt Lake Valley after I had quit my job with Bechtel and left California, we (my second wife and I) bought a home in Bennion Utah. It was a lovely place on a large lot that had to potential of being more than it was standing. So after a short time of living there we decided that the home needed to be upgraded and enlarged for our family to have it the way we thought would be ideal. With the great deal of money that I was making at the time, we went about to get an architect to redesign the home and started in with a one-year long project that after spending almost $70,000 we had the home like we wanted it. That was what I thought anyway. My wife didn’t quite see it that way for some strange reason, and even though the house was ideal in my own view, to her it was just another project that added to her complaints about all the other things that were going wrong in our marriage.

            We went on in this ideal home for a couple of years then things got so bad that we decided that divorce was the only recourse we had so we parted company. For almost two years I lived in Saudi Arabia while she maintained the home and continued to hate it. When I returned, she moved out and I took over the home.

            After about a year that I remained in the home and settled there with three of my children, my ex-wife decided that she wanted her portion of the equity out of the house so she could purchase one of her own and have a place where she and her current partner (another woman) could live and raise our two youngest children. I conceded that this was all right and refinanced the home in Bennion to get her money out and she had her wish fulfilled. She was out of the remodeled house that she had come to hate and now had one of her own.

            That left me with a huge payment for the refinanced portion of the home loan that came to bear with me when I had to quit my consulting job that was paying me a great deal of money and settle for a lower paying job. I did that so that two of my children that didn’t want to live with their mother wanted to live with me. I took them in and eventually with the lower income I was bringing in, I realized that I could not afford to pay the payments on the home loan anymore and soon was in default. This went on for about a year until it got to the point that I was about to lose the house to the bank through default on my loan. I was stubborn at that point and decided that I would just let the house go and pay the price down the road of losing my credit. And I did that and for several years after rented homes and had poor credit.

            Now to make the point of this discussion: All along the way with this situation of the house that went into default and caused my great anguish and pain, I had made choices along the way that were completely stubborn and unjustified by any standards. I had created my own reality by my choices. I could have had it different had I wanted to and was willing to pay the price, but I chose not to, and ended up paying the price with principal and interest tacked on.

 

 

24.  SORROW

 

            Sorrow is something that I believe most everyone has felt more than once in their lives. It serves most people and assists them in getting through difficult times like the death of a spouse or a loss of some kind. Sorrow brings about healing in most cases and should be considered as essential to forward growth. But one must get over sorrow at some point and move on with their lives. And when they do they usually have left over memories that are either good or sad depending upon how they have regained their composure after there experience with true sorrow.

            There’s another kind of sorrow that some people carry around with them for  long periods of their lives so that they can continue to be the victims of what it was that caused them to be sorrowful. This kind of sorrow is not productive and usually leads to other debilitating issues with the individual. People who carry around sorrow and enroll others with similar sorrows live in their victim place and as long as they can talk to others and share their victimness, they can continue to be the victims that they believe has caused them to be sorrowful.

            A  person that considers himself or herself a victim and carries their sorrow off to share it with others like themselves usually do it in a manner that is shown in the example below.

 

Sorrowful victim in the process of enrolling someone else in their sorrow---

“. . . I’m sure glad I had a chance to talk to you about my situation with my boy that has run off. I’m feeling so bad that he’s gone. You know he was headed that way all along. I’ve continually told him that he has to stop his bad behavior or I will kick him out of the house. But now that he’s gone, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

 

Friend who has had a similar situation in her life---

“I know exactly how you’re feeling, Edna. You know my son Billy went through the same thing that I know your boy has gone through. These boys, I don’t know. I’m still feeling the loss, and cry all the time over it. You know I heard that Martha had the same problem with her oldest daughter. Have you talked to her? She went almost out of her mine over that situation with her daughter running off with that older man. I told her about Billy the other day when I saw her in the grocery store. I think it would be good for you to talk to her. I’m sure she feels the same as you do about your loss. 

Both of these women will continue to enroll others in their victim stories continuing to resist doing anything about the situation that caused their problems. Victim stories, especially those that contain sorrowful antidotes are contagious and one can always find someone that has a story like yours or one even better. That’s the game that is often played when one person enrolls another in their victim story; the game becomes one of “how can I beat his or her story with mine.” And they usually do until they run out of others with whom they can share their victimness. 

 

 

25.  SICKNESS/HEALTH

 

In my opinion sickness and health are about the most abundant conditions of the human race. I’ve seen my share of both and for some reason, I have my biases about how they occur and what is the result of them (both sickness and health). Sickness comes to mind first. I saw plenty of it while I was in Africa and what I determined from it, was that most of what I saw was preventable with little or no special attention. The problem with the sickness that I saw in Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Sudan and Zambia all seemed to stem from the local people’s lack of understanding of the dangerous conditions and things they took into their bodies that made them sick. I use these examples as metaphors of how sickness is a condition everywhere that in many cases can be avoided and eliminated altogether through the addition of simple things like improved diet, hygiene, training and the availability of cheap and available medications. Here’s a few example of the situation in Africa:

 

            In Ethiopia where I spent a lot of time living with and working with the poorest of the poor villagers in the central part of the country, I noticed that almost every person I met (the natives, that is) were sick with some kind of ailment. Many of them were so sick that they could no longer function. It was so bad in some areas with children that statistics showed only fifty percent of children were living past five years of age. Most all of the little children (those under the age of twelve) were undernourished and showed their undernourishment by the extruded stomachs they all had. Most of their mothers as well were sick because of the smoke they were inhaling every day from open fires they built inside their homes to cook meals. Because these fire pits were usually in the middle of their homes (circular mud huts with thatch roofs) and small children were constantly in the area near the fires and hot rocks, many children were often burnt by those rocks and the fires.

            Water in the central part of Ethiopia was also a major factor in the health of all the people. Since there were few wells that might produce clean water, most of the water used by households was drawn from rivers that skirted the country. These rivers were public places where people brought their cattle to water, where they cleaned their clothing, and where they filled their jerry cans with this putrid water to carry back to their homes for drinking and cooking. All the rivers that ran through this central part of the country were polluted with a number of pathogens that when ingested could cause the people to continually be sick and contribute to the early death of small children that had little or no resistance.

            Hygiene was another issued that contributed to the sickness of the people I saw and worked with. Few people had toiles or latrines they could use, so they went into their back yards (usually on their own property) and defecated wherever they could. Children played in these same areas and were usually barefoot so they carried back these disease-ridden wastes with them into their homes.

            Since this entire area was considered a strong candidate to malaria-bearing mosquitoes most of the natives had at one time or were suffering from malaria. Yellow Fever was another factor in some of the villages where it was at pandemic levels and killed off many people.

            HIV-AIDS was the other killer that was rampant in the country. Many people did not recognize this factor and when they died of it, they were usually counted as having died because of the effects of Malaria. This was true in some sense because the people that were effected with AIDS were struck down by malaria because they didn’t have any resistance since their immune systems were broken down from having AIDS.

            I saw similar conditions amongst the poor villagers that lived in Zambia. Water was not so severe a problem since they had rains occasionally and most of the people could draw water from wells, but malaria and AIDS were killers of the people to the extent that when I was there in 1999 and 2000 it was reported that over forty percent of the people either had malaria or AIDS or both, but statistics from the government played down the deaths that were caused by both of these conditions saying that the deaths were merely due to malaria.

            In the area in Northern Mozambique (by Beira) I found that most of the sickness people had there was due to consuming polluted water. There was abundant water in that region and also a huge malaria pandemic. The average life expectancy in all these African countries for women and men was about forty-five to forty-nine years. It was rare anywhere to see a person in their sixty’s.

            In the area of Central South Sudan where I spent some time there was the malaria and AIDS situation and lack of clean drinking water, but in addition, there was another condition that existed that most people had at one time or were currently suffering from, and that was due to a parasite called Guinea Worm that found its way into the bodies of people (young and old alike) where it grew to great lengths in their intestines and other body parts, then at maturity exited the body through festering sores that debilitated the people until they were able to get the worm completely out of their bodies. The worm in its early stages was a tiny parasite that lived on the body of one type of fly. This fly would land on bodies of ground water where people took their cattle and drew drinking water, where the parasite worm would leave the body of the fly and further mature in the water. When people stepped into the water to draw it for drinking or when they took water to their homes this now mature worm would find its way into the body of the person where for the next six to eight months it would grow to great lengths (I heard some worms grew to over ten feet long). The stage when it needed to get out of the body of it host, it would drill a hole out through the leg or arm of the person and begin to exit. At that point the host would usually find a stick to start to wrap the worm’s body on and slowly draw the worm out of their body rather than let it exit on its own.

            The people I talked to said that at the stage where the worm was first attempting to exit, the pain was so great that the only relief they could muster for the pain was to wade into the water where they first got the worm, thus opening up the chance that another worm in its early stage of growth would enter the person’s body. So most people that had this condition continued to be victims of it from their actions to rid themselves of the pain caused when the worm was exiting their bodies. 

            I use the example of these four African Countries because I was so close to those occurrences and could see how easily they might be mitigated by simple and cheap methods that were available to most of these poor people. While I was working in some of these countries I was able to introduce some of the simple technologies that would change the way people lived and give them hope that there were solutions to these deleterious problems they had. Most had no knowledge before I showed them these technologies by how easily they were to implement and how effective they were in solving the people’s problems.

            In the areas where people were drinking polluted water and did not have the fuel to boil water to make it safe, we introduced a simple bucket sand filter that purified a small amount of drinking water that was enough for a family of six to ten people. These bucket filters used locally available materials and were easy to build, costing a little of five dollars to make (the cost of two plastic buckets.)

            For those people that didn’t have latrines, we introduced a simple ventilated pit latrine that had a roofed enclosure and door. Inside we installed a two-foot square concrete pad with a hole in it that could be squatted over for relief. These fifteen foot deep pits we had them dig would last a large family for five years before they were filled. Venting them with a pipe that went through the roof gave the people a clean-smelling latrine that was devoid of flies (those latrines that were not vented became breading places for flies and smelled awful all the time).

            Where water collection was far away from village locations, we introduced a method for harvesting roofwater from certain kinds of roofs then storing the water for later use in a number of different tanks. One model was a tarpaulin-line underground tank. Another was a vessel like a large vase made from concrete. Another model was a partial underground tank that was lined with concrete. In one location we rebuilt three large cisterns that had been started by others years before that would store water harvested from roofs of three school buildings for use by the students and the village at large. The last of the tanks we introduced was a large Ferro concrete tank that was built above ground. Most of the models we introduced would hold enough water to supply people domestic needs for all the dry months of the year.

            Most of the villagers in these poor area were undernourished from lack of fresh vegetables. Most of them subsisted on corn and other grain products and occasional meat. To mitigate this problem we showed people how to fashion small family gardens and irrigate them with a water saving device using drip-irrigation methodology. People that were close enough to water sources benefitted greatly from this new garden technology.

            Since inside of homes were places where woman cooked their meals in open fire pits that gave them a lot of smoke to inhale and were a safety hazard for children, we introduced a simple smokeless stove that could be built inside the home and vented outside that was made from adobe mud, stones and cement. These stoves were off the ground and were safe for milling children. They were also proven to be very efficient using at least seventy percent less fuel for cooking. Because of their design, several types of fuel could be used other than the wood that was scarce and expensive the cutting of which was contributing to gross deforestation of the area. Alternate fuels included grass, corn husks and cobs, dry dung and any other material was would burn.

            To increase the villager’s functional knowledge we introduced literacy, hygiene, family finance, family health and business enterprise to the women in the community through various training programs that would assist them on improving their family’s health and welfare. The men in these communities were for the most part not interested in the training, but for the women it was a great success and gave many of them hope for a better life for them and their families.

            These above partial, sustainable solutions were just a few of the possibilities that are available to people. The greatest challenge, however, is convincing them to change old way, put down stated traditions, adjust social norms and in some areas get rid of politicians that were corrupt and uncaring for their population. An example of a political barrier that I learned about in Zambia is just one example of the lack of intuitive that some politicians have for solving community problems. I learned there from a Foreign doctor that had lived in Zambia for about fifteen years and was a specialist in OBGYN treatment, that the pandemic of AIDS that was effecting pregnant mothers and was being passed on to children during birth, could have been prevented completely by a single dose of medication that was available in most parts of the world. This one-time dose had a cost of less than three dollars, and once administered just before the woman’s baby was born assured the baby to be free of AIDS. This medication was offered to the Minister of Health of Zambia (a woman physician by trade) by the pharmaceutical company and was rejected by her because the company was not willing to pay this Minister a fee under the table for her acceptance of the drug. So according to this doctor friend of mine, the condition with women he was treating that were passing off the AIDS virus to the newborns would continue unabated. This was in year 2000. I am not sure if the drug is available in Zambia now.

 

26.  FOCUS

 

           When I think of the term “focus” in the context of the meaning of life I am reminded that there are a number of conditions upon which focus is considered. Years ago when I was a surveyor using survey instruments, I had to be focused all the time, both mentally and physically. Looking through a long-range theodolite (transit or level) one had to focus the instrument to get the best view of the sight ahead. To be focused on what was occurring around me with my colleagues, the environment, and the general ambience of the area was also necessary to bring about clear decisions and make good choices.

           The same is true in all contexts of life. If we are not focused on what we are doing at that present moment, we might miss the big picture of what is going on around us. I marvel at the times when I have seen others or have been this way myself, that when I was out of focus on what I was about at the time, I often lost the meaning or context of what the event was about.

           Through trainings that I received over a number of years when I was looking at self-help programs and participating in transitional trainings (like Lifespring, Waking Up, Steps to Mastery, etc.) I retained a little of what was necessary to be focused all the time. Some of those concepts that I retained and have used successfully include the following that also might be useful to my faithful readers that have made it this far along my essay on the meaning of life.

 

-          Be responsible for everything that occurs in your life since you have created it.

-          Know (be focused in other words) that the universe is going to continue to serve up useful and non-useful experiences to you no matter what, and be ready to sort those out that are useful to you and reject the others that are not

-          Be prepared to pay the price for what you want (what you are focused on), so you can have it. Don’t be satisfied with less than one hundred percent.

-          Be able to focus on the here and now and quickly adjust to the far and away with equal skill as necessary. That is, don’t just stay focused on either all the time.

 

 

27.  CHILDREN/RAISING THEM/LEARNING FROM THEM

 

            For quite a long period of my life I was a single parent living and managing three children of my second marriage. Each of these children had left their mother for various reasons and chose on their own to live with me. I was working as a consultant at the time that this took place but soon realized I had to have a steadier job that kept me home so I could take care of these difficult and wonderful children.

            At the time that this took place (around the middle of 1985) the two younger children were about ten and twelve and the older one was in her last years of high school. With the younger children I felt obligated to set rules and standards that went about the philosophy that they had to earn my trust in what I was doing and what they were doing. For a while that worked out, but as the children got older and the two younger ones were high school age (by then the oldest daughter had moved out and was on her own), these younger ones began to exert their independence and I had the notion that they could not be trusted in anything they did. So during that short period I pushed on them attempting to force my knowledge on them, but continually failed since they were so powerful at that time, they simply ignored me in almost anything I would insist that they do or that they be. This was a frustrating position to be in, since my ex-wife that was at times monitoring my situation with our children and was constantly criticizing me for my bad parenting, I was about ready to throw in the town.

            This went on for some time while my two younger children got in various troubles and I was unable to do anything about the situation they were displaying to me. Most of it centered on my latent philosophy that they had to earn my trust, then all would be well. That was not working, so one day while considering my options it hit on me that I needed to give my children some free rein and not be so demanding that they do all the things I wanted them to do according to my standards. At that same blinding insight moment, I thought of a new way of handling trust that I would present to the children. This new concept said that I would no longer depend on them earning my trust, but would instead let them earn their distrust with me. When I presented this to the children, their reaction was predictable: they didn’t really understand what that meant and laughed it off as just another plot on my part to control them. However, once that I explained what I meant by their having to earn my distrust and that it meant that going into any situation I was going to trust in their good judgment, brains and initiative, they were free to do what they were about until they earned my distrust. That new approach worked like a charm.

            In the meantime, while I was watching them exert their activities in various places and I was free to observe rather than control, I realized that there were things that they were doing that were new to me and that they were indeed very smart and astute in many places. As a result, I took it upon myself to begin to learn from the things they were doing and the suddenly became my teacher in many new concepts and activities that I had never dreamed of. They had their quirks, of course, but passing them off I realized that my children in the intent upon being individuals and learning new things every day were encyclopedias of knowledge that I could tap into and I did. Leaning to be an observer rather than a controller of my children was truly the key to their becoming the good citizen that they are now.

 

28.  PERCEPTIONS

 

            I have come to believe during my search for the meaning of life that my initial perceptions of the universe around me are for the most part accurate and dependable. The trouble with that is for the most part of my life I have been conditioned to believe that perceptions I have of things are suspect and should be analyzed and taken apart to make sure that the perception is accurate or not accurate. That hold on perceptions had kept me from being successful and doing great things or meeting wonderful people for pretty much all my life.

            When I came to this realization that my perceptions were for the most part accurate, I suddenly began to live my life in a new and creative way. I sat aside my constant analysis and began to live I the moment, suddenly surrendering to that moment. I began to own and acknowledge my propensity awkward and most often debilitating trend to analyze everything I came into contact with and started for the first time in my life to be vulnerable and open to risk against the first perception I have of things.

            Here’s an example of how that all started for me:

            I was in the Boston area attending a workshop with my daughter during the late 1980’s. The workshop was a Project Adventure Training that involved exposure to a number of difficult group and single ropes course (outdoor adventure) challenges. On one of the challenges that I was taking my turn on as an individual prompted by a Facilitator for Project Adventure, I was be connected to a belay line that was tethered to a high horizontal cable connected to three in-line trees. I first walked up an incline log until I reached a horizontal log that was suspended between the two last trees about thirty five feet above ground. From their the challenge was to walk unaided across the log to the last tree. There the Facilitator would let me down (just like he had with others that had taken the challenge before me) to the ground on the belay rope.

            I managed the first part of the incline log without incident and was not standing next to the one side of the horizontal log analyzing how I was going to cross the log unaided just by my physical balance. I knew that if I fell I would be caught by the belay rope, so that part was okay by my calculation and analysis. Secondly, I was certain I could cross the log without falling because I had done this many time over rivers on fallen logs while fishing, so that was okay. At that point I had full confidence I would walk across the log and be at the tree on the other side without incident, so I stepped out and began the trek.

            At mid-point (and I believe this Facilitator had an inkling of my analytical nature) he commanded that I stop and turn facing him and not continue further across the log. I did what he said and after a couple of seconds getting my balance, I listened to her second command. He then asked me to extend my arms out to the side like wings, and then fall forward (as trust fall, he called it), assuring me he would catch me with the belay rope.

            This was a new experience for me for which I had not previous knowledge and for a few seconds I was terrified trying my best to analyze how it would be to fall forward like he wanted me to. A good minute went by as the Facilitator and the crowd below continued to coach me to take the fall. Finally, I had this clearing of my head that this was indeed a new experience that I must do and surrender to the chance that it might be a learning experience for me. At that point I leaned forward and in about three more seconds I was on the ground safely having surrendered to the moment. That moment change my life and my concept of perceptions.

 

29.  HELP/ASSIST

 

Most people don’t realize that there is a great deal of difference between the concepts of help and assist especially if they are in some kind of leadership, instructor or facilitator role. And because they are unaware of the potential of assist they too often give away the opportunity they have to become excellent mentors or coaches with those people for which they are responsible. Let me illustrate my views about the differences between helping and assisting with some examples:

            In one example I might be a parent with a child that has a new bike and he or she is about to learn how to ride that bike without training wheels. As the child’s parent, you are there to make sure the child learns how to ride the bike safely and efficiently, so you start out by holding onto the seat of the bike while the child is learning the first parts of balance, guiding the bike and using the peddles and brakes. At this point you are helping the child ride the bike.

            You get through this phase of the instruction and the child is ready to start out on his or her own. You may choose to run along the side of the child barking orders and monitoring every movement of the child’s pilot attempt just like you did while you were running along holding the back of the seat. In this mode you are still helping the child and there is little opportunity for the child to learn on his or her own.

            The other option is to assist the child with this next phase of their learning by posing some questions that would allow the child to review what happened in the first trial run and see how that might be applied on the solo run. It might go like this---“What was it that you did on the first run when you got you balance?” With that question the child is able to think about what happened on the first run and might have a moment of learning from it and answer something like---“Well I had to maintain my balance by continuing to peddle. That kept up going without falling over.” In this case the child has been assisted in his learning to ride the bike (not helped). 

            Another case involves my previous work as a Facilitator of outdoor experiential programs (i.e., ropes courses). We had many opportunities as Facilitators to test the validity of assisting people rather than helping them when they were part of the challenges we were always giving them. One of these challenges, for an example, was the element we called The Perch. On this element the participant was put on belay with a rope that was strung on a single cable about forty feet above ground and he or she was required to climb a tree that had a small platform on a cut-off portion of a tree about eight feet back of the belay cable. The platform was about thirty five feet above ground. The idea was for the participant to climb the tree and stand on the platform unaided by the belay rope then jump off the platform and catch a ring that was suspended from the belay cable about eight feet out away from the perch platform and about waist high to the individual.

            Where helping and assisting came into play on this type element was while the person was climbing the tree before they reached the platform. For the climber, we had inserted staples into the tree at random distances apart that would act as hand holds and places where the individual could place his or her foot while ascending the vertical tree. Quite often we found that people that were afraid of heights or basically fearful of climbing these staples would hesitate for long periods of time looking down at the group or facilitators for the challenge wanting to be told what next to do. This was a great opportunity for the facilitator that may not have understood the value in Assisting over Helping to jump in and help the individual with the event. He or she might say to the climber: “Look, there’s a staple right by your left knee that if you lift you left foot up you can use it to gain one more step up. Also there’s a hand hold staple just by our head that you can grab onto.” This might go on until the individual reached the platform and was ready to make their jump out to the ring. The person might feel that they successfully climbed the tree to access the platform, and that would be true, but had they gained any knowledge on the way like taking initiative, looking at alternatives to problem solving, or taking risk on their own (all valid goals for the experiential education that we as facilitators were about).

            Another option open to the Facilitator was to assist the person cimbling the tree by encouraging them with questions (we called that “staying in the question”). Here’s how that might work with the same climber who has hesitated from climbing and is looking for help to go on: “What do you have to work with that right in front of you?” The person then looks around and notices a staple by his or her knee and another right by their head. “There are some staples here by me, can I use them?” the person answers. “What’s your best guess why they are there,” you answer, again posing a question. “I guess they are there for me to use to climb the tree.” He or she answers now fully aware they have been assisted, not helped.

            And so the principal here in distinguishing the difference between helping and assisting and the power one has to encourage learning by assisting, is by staying in the question and not being the answer man or woman that is the easiest way to remain in power and control over others.

 

30.  BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING

 

I have this belief that based on results, I am responsible for everything that happens to me, for everything that I receive, for everything that I experience and for everything I do. Furthermore, I know that I have no one to blame for where I am, for what I do, for what I experience or for what happens to me. Even more than that I am responsible for creating all my realities.

Having said that, I suppose I need to do some explaining. I will start with what I own–my own reality, and why I believe I own it. First, I have a choice at every instant of my life to be where I am, to do what I am doing and to be who I am. Because of that free choice (some would call that my Free Agency), if I don’t like anything about what I am involved in because I have a choice about it, I can choose out. Now let me say here that choosing out of something that I don’t like or feel victimized by is not easy most of the time, because of the price I have to pay to have it different.

Let me put this discussion into context: Let’s say I am married (I’m not but I was) and the marriage is not going very well. For this scenario, let me further say that I have been married for about twenty years and I have children ranging in ages from four to twenty. The nineteen-year old is in college and is depending on me for a place to live while he goes to school. The other children are in various grades of high school to elementary school and my youngest is not in school at all.

I have thought for a long time that since our marriage is in such bad shape that it would be better for my wife and I to just divorce, but I haven’t done that because of the children. We have even discussed the matter and have decided that we will stick it out, no matter how bad it gets, “for the sake of the kids.”

How often have we seen that scenario played out as couples go through years of a bad marriage because of the Church, the Kids, the Job, etc.? It happens more than one would believe if one were to look at the facts of how many marriages are on the rocks. But that brings me to the point I am making about being responsible for everything. In this case that I mention, if I am really truthful with myself, I am in my bad marriage because I have chosen not to have it any other way because the price, I figure is too high. So, based on results, I have created that reality for myself. No one is to blame, not the kids, not our situation, nothing but my choice to stay in the marriage because of the kids.

Here’s the sad part of the scenario. I am not saying here that it would be best to separate and to hell with the kids in this situation. But what I see around me in situations like this and many others where the person believes they are the victim of something created outside themselves, i.e., the job, the kids, the wife, the location, health, etc., and as long as they can blame it on that outside influence they don’t have to take responsibility for doing anything about it. They can go on being the victim forever if they want, and they can even die begin the victim and martyr then. What way to go, I say.

The problem with victims, it seems, is that the responsibility for what has happened in their life is always outside of them. There are plenty of victims around too who will support and acknowledge the victim and his or her story, by relaying their own story or feeling sorry for the person because they know “just how they feel.” People with victim stories will also enroll others in their stories by telling them over and over to the listening audience that is more than willing to listen, because they are “good listeners,” and being a good listener is a sign of good character. But good listeners are many times just waiting their chance to tell their own victim story so that the person will know that because of the story they have heard that is worse than theirs, somehow that relieves them of sad feelings and they feel that they are alone in the world.

Being responsible for everything means that you don’t have any victim stories, because you have created all that you have and no one has caused you to be angry, to be sick, to be out of a job or other sad thing that has happened to you. Having lived with this concept for many years, I now will always ask myself the question “how did I create that for myself?” whenever I am up against a difficult situation or I am feeling put upon or victimized. I don’t care what it is, if I know that I created the situation for myself because I made some choice, or was at a certain place at a certain time (getting run into as I cross an intersection by a person who ran the red light).   was still there by my own choice and it wasn’t this other person’s fault. He may have run the red light, and he may also get a ticket or be sued for running the red light and hitting me, but when I got back to that moment of my life, I know that I was there at that moment because I made a choice sometime in the past to be there I have created that little reality for myself.

I know on this point that there will be plenty of argument since there has been many times in my life as I have relayed my views on this subject. But I can only speak of myself in this case, that by owning my own realities all the time, my life has been simpler and more full and I have not had to be the victim of everything that has been unpleasant in my life. Furthermore, what has been really remarkable about this concept, is that if I ask myself the question, how did I create that moment in my life and answer the question, I can now ask myself another question that is even more important: since I see that I have created that incident in my life, do I want to have it again? If I don’t, I can make some choices right then and there and I might not have the incident in my life again. That works most of the time for me. But if there is a lesson to be learned by what I have created in my life and after I created it and haven’t learned the lesson, I can be sure that in some manner I will have the lesson over and over until I learn it. Then I can go on to another lesson.

This world would be a much more pleasant place to live in if we all understood the power in being responsible for everything. 

 

31.  BEING ON TIME

 

Being on time means that you are exactly on time, not one minute off. Now how could that be a principle of living, you might say? People are always late to things and it can’t be avoided, you say. Well, being on time is really a lot like keeping your word. If I say that I am going to be someplace or it is expected that I be some place on time, then I must be there at exactly or before I say I will or I will have a broken commitment. This is how it works:

Let’s say I am working with someone or having a date with someone, and I say I will show up at 10:30 a.m. that day.  That does not mean 10:31 or 10:40, or some other time, it means 10:30—period! Now how can that be if I am driving there and I have a flat tire or that I am delayed ten minutes because of traffic? Then I have a broken commitment that has been caused by my inability to do something or other. It has noting to do with the flat tire or the delay factor. So here I am going along and it’s 10:15 and I know that I am going to be delayed, then I must do something about it and not just come to the place I am expected to be at 10:30 with my excuse. I must call or make some other arrangement for the commitment to be handled. It’s as simple as that. I can’t think of a time when that isn’t possible at some point. Well, yes, there may be times when things are unavoidable and they too, can be handled sufficiently so that I can keep my word. But first let’s consider that avoidable ones. So, I am driving down the road that I have been on before and it’s the time of the day I know there are usually delays. Then I just leave earlier. Simple. I’m driving my old car and I know that my tires are getting worn. Get some new tires, or don’t make the promise when I know that I may have a flat tire on the way. So there’s the other side of the coin. If I am not willing to do what it takes to keep my word, then I should not give my word like I will be at a certain place on time. It could go like this: “I know you want me there at 10:30 and I will give it my best, but I may be late since it is very often that the roads are plugged with traffic and getting there on time is very unpredictable. So I have made the commitment, but I have put the factor into the commitment that saves me from having a broken commitment.

I’ll tell you how this actually worked for me on a real case where I had a lesson to learn and learned it. It was back in the 80’s I was participating in a workshop with six other people and a leader. The program was to take ninety days to complete and for those ninety days I was going to be working on this program along with all the other things I had going in my life at that time. This was an extra commitment I was taking on. The leader of the workshop, a young lady, was with us the first three days of the program, then we would not see her until the last week of the commitment. Otherwise we were to be on our own, but needed to be in contact with her every day to report our progress. This was a commitment she wanted us to make with her so she could know how we were doing—an essential component of the program, she explained. Then to do that she said she was busy herself, but would set aside some time each day to talk to us on the phone, and that we should call her within that time frame each day. She said she would assign us a time and that we were supposed to call her every day at that exact time every day for the eighty or so days of the remaining program time. 

It was a challenge that she wanted all of us to keep and promise to her that we would not break ever one day of that period. I was assigned to call her at 10:05 p.m. every day. Everyone was assigned times between 10:00 and about 10:30 and she said she would only take three to four minutes of our time each day, but that we were to call her at the assigned time.

At first, and all day throughout the program we all discussed this commitment she was asking us to make without any considerations. Some were saying, I can’t do that, what if--- and so on. I thought the same thing, as at that time my schedule was very busy and I was traveling back and forth to Houston from Salt Lake once a week every months and staying there for a week. That meant for me when I was there I would have to be near a phone at 11:05 p.m. each day since the hour was on ahead of Utah time in Texas. I was also in a relationship with a woman at that time, and we did things like going out and we had a dance practice we went to twice a week when I was home that went past the 10:05 time that I was to call. Then what if I was on an airplane at that time and that airplane was backed up and couldn’t land at the time I was to call?

All those considerations were mine and others and we all argued that it was not possible to keep that commitment for such a long time and not break it one time. The lady in charge, however, was relentless in that she wanted to be in touch with us and insisted that it WAS possible and that if we committed to it one hundred percent we could make it happen. We would all have to pay a price for doing that, but she promised that what we would learn from the experience would be more than worth the effort.

Finally on the late evening of that miserable day, I committed to do what she wanted. Several others I the group refused, and were asked to leave the program since this was a major part of what we were there to do and she insisted that without that commitment, it would not be possible for the people to continue. They left and lost the money they paid to be in the program, and I was not about to do that.

Well, the program started and the first thing I did was set my watch so that an alarm would ring ten minutes before I was to call. I figured by doing that, I would not forget if I was occupied in something. That helped on a couple of occasions, but for the most part, I found it easy to find a phone and make the call (I didn’t have a cell phone at the time). But there were some circumstances that made it difficult, but not impossible like she had said. One time I was going down the freeway and had forgotten what time it was until my watch rang out. I knew the exit was about ten minutes away and I knew I would have to hurry to find a pay phone, but I did it. On another instance, I was dancing with my friend at the University of Utah where our classes were being held and my alarm went off in the middle of a dance. I excused myself and in a panic found a phone and made the call on time. It was a difficult call since I was leaving my standing in the middle of the floor, but she understood when I made my apology. Another time I was on an airplane circling over Dallas Texas on my way home from Houston, when I was sure I was not going to make the call on time. I got up and asked the hostess if there was a phone on the plane I could use, and she said there was an emergency phone, but it was costly and would I be willing to pay the amount. Of course I was and did and made my call. I never missed a day during that eighty days, and learned a big lesson that if I want to keep my word and am willing to pay the price of doing that it is possible. But I must know the price and be willing to pay, otherwise I am not going to be an honest person.

32.   GUILT

 

Guilt is something we create for ourselves to maintain our status while we continue to do the thing about which we are feeling guilty. That’s quite a thought when you think about it, isn’t it? When I first heard that statement in some workshop I was attending many years ago, I had no clue about what it was conveying. But when I really gave it some thought and put it into the context of some examples, I really made sense. Here’s are some hypothetical examples:

Let’s say I was married, that I lived in a religious community that had a high regard for marriage and that marriage was even considered sacred and holy. Now along comes this woman into my life. She is a work associate and we are together a lot, just because of the nature of our business. She is beautiful, and over time I fall in love with this woman and we begin to have an affair.

Now my religious morals are strictly against this and I naturally feel guilty about what I am doing. In fact, I feel so guilty that soon it begins to show and the signs are apparent to my wife. At one point we discuss the matter or she confronts me about it, and since I am feeling so guilty and know without a shadow of a doubt that what I am doing is wrong, I confess all to my wife and promise that I will cease being with this woman. My guilt goes away for the time being, I straighten things out with my wife and all seems well.

But the problem does not in reality go away. I still desire this woman and hold on to this illicit relationship even though I feel terribly guilty about it. This time, however, I have learned to hide my guilt, but I still have it. The rational here is that as long as I feel guilty and know that I am doing wrong, I can still continue to have the affair with the woman. My thinking is that if I simply didn’t feel guilty, I would be a bad person. So what I have done is sustained my guilt to maintain the status I have of myself that anyone in my situation would naturally feel guilty (how could I not feel guilty? After all, in the eyes of the Church I have done something terrible, so therefore, I have maintained my status of as good person by continuing to feel guilty, but guilt has not brought me to repentance, nor will it ever.

In this case I have stated, I have another scenario that shows possible solution to this deleterious concept of feeling guilty. The truth is, I want to have the relationship with this other woman, and if I am truthful to myself, I will admit that I want the relationship with the other woman more than I do with my wife, no matter the cost. If I admit that the first time around, then I can go about with my relationship with the other woman, and I will not have guilt.  So, the question is, why should I feel guilty about something that I want in my life, if I am simply feeling guilty because I know deep in my heart that I should feel guilty if I am that good person (status) that everyone believes I am? It doesn’t make sense.

After living with that concept for many years, and have listened to others tell about their guilt and sorrow for things that they have done “wrong” I really believe in the concept as I stated it in the beginning of this section. For me it works. If, for example, I have done something and I am feeling sorry or guilty for doing it, when I recognize it for what it is and really ask myself the question, what am I feeling guilty for, I will usually come up with the answer that I am feeling guilty because I would be a bad person if I didn’t feel guilty, and I really don’t want to be seen as a “bad” person. Once recognized, I will cease doing what I am feeling guilty about or will continue to do it knowing that I get to choose what I do that turns me into a “bad” person if I want, and I can continue to do that if I am willing to pay the price.