submission

play along
Originally uploaded by rod lewis

if you are an instrument -
be played

views

will in window
Originally uploaded by rod lewis

some folks see the world through colored glass.
some folks are above that.

climbing

statue
Originally uploaded by rod lewis

Up is not the only way there is to climb.
Some people spend their whole lives climbing,
But rather than moving up,
They’re moving away.

feet of lincoln

feet of lincoln
Originally uploaded by rod lewis

Everyone knows that I've always got a lot to say after a very meaningful event. This morning, as I sat with the world and watched the 44th U.S. President be sworn in, thoughts and emotions rolled. But I know that I can say nothing that hasn't been said, and prompt no thoughts that haven't already been thought. So I'll keep my mouth shut, and ponder internally the strides that have been made, even as I ponder the strides left to take.
Instead of rambling on, I thought I'd post this shot of my kids standing at Lincoln's feet about 10 years ago.
I am not growing up in the same America that my parents did, and my kids are not growing up in the same America that I did.

There are lots of broken things in our world right now, but I do believe that when relationships heal, lots of other broken things begin to mend. But broken relationships cause everything to get infected.

struggle

struggle
Originally uploaded by rod lewis

I believe unless you struggle amongst your self, you will never be equal to any other foe.

grainy perception

grainy perception
Originally uploaded by rod lewis

I have a friend whom, after a couple decades of reading lips, received a cochlear implant, and had quite a bit of hearing restored. When I spoke with her soon after, she expressed that she didn’t like to use her implant, because she couldn’t sort out what she was hearing. If someone spoke to her, she couldn’t differentiate between the sound of his or her voice, and any other noise in the room. The clicking of the computer keys drove her batty.
When a baby’s ears begin to work in utero, no doubt that little brain begins to sort out sounds because sometimes it seems that a parent’s voice is soothing to a newborn. I tend to believe that it is recognized and filed as comforting. But the baby continues to learn to sort sounds and their sources after she is born and after she has learned to sort visual stimuli.
Some people who have had sight restored reported seeing moving patches of color, but had no mental category in which to perceive what those patches might be. A blind man Jesus healed expressed that he saw “men like trees walking.” Who knows what his mental perception of humans was before he had ever seen. It is also said that though unsighted people negotiate furniture well, and obviously understand, depth as once they’ve walked around an object, they know that it is now behind them, some newly sighted folks lose this perception once they gain sight. Once the brain is able to see an obstacle, the perception of depth and environment changes so that some have stepped backward into things that they just walked past. Seeing it move from in front of them to beside them, did not register that it was now behind them. Space had always been a tactile perception.
So it would seem that a baby has some differentiation for sounds before he is born, but further categorizes their sources even after she is born and achieves the ability to process visual stimuli. The interesting thing about this, is that a baby has no choice but to consider (even if subconsciously at first) everything that comes across the cerebral cortex and over a long life of learning, to attempt to categorize, combine, simplify, and make since of all the various bits of information that are being received.
In the early years, there aren’t a lot of categories, maybe yeses and nos make up the majority of concepts. Connections and perceptions are grainy and lo-res. As she grows, the perceptions gain clarity and resolution and the foundation is laid for deeper understanding. Society though, perhaps unwittingly, places a graduation day on forming of categories, and humans begin to check out when offered ideas that challenge the premature closing of the door to concepts.

So why ramble on about all of this? I believe that there are those among us who never stop sorting out stimuli and creating new categories for processing it and understanding it. As we go through life, not only does new information often require new categories, but sometimes the new categories demand that we go back and re-file previous information that we now know has been filed wrongly (or, God forbid, actually delete information that has been shown to be unreliable.)
There are also those among us (perhaps a great deal more in the majority) who stopped creating categories long ago. For these people, every new experience, every new bit of information has to be filed in a previously created folder. Perhaps often, new things are filed in folders into which they don’t quite fit. At least as often, when there is not a handy category under which to file the experience or information, it is promptly rejected. An experience may be as real as the taste of chocolate, the information as obvious as the nose on your face, but it will be denied if it doesn’t have a pre-existent folder into which to file it.

I’ve often attempted to explain my odd filing system to my more modern friends by means of epistemology. I can explain that my elementary school understanding of the world was formed based on Einstein’s ideas, some of which hadn’t even been named yet (the term, “black hole” was not coined until I was in Kindergarten.) With this grid, or filter through which to observe and learn and believe as I grew up, my modes of understanding were created quite differently than were my parents’ and grandparents’ – even when we arrived at the same beliefs and conclusions. In fact, new scientific discoveries – or rather, the increased public knowledge of these discoveries – have demolished religious beliefs of a great many people who had long since closed their folders and locked in the criteria by which they would believe.

It is ever so difficult to communicate with someone who does not have a folder for the information or concepts you are trying to make them understand. In my experience, it is even more difficult when they insist that they do, and continually place your concepts in their own wrong folder.
The hardest people to make understand you are those who think they already understand. These are even more difficult than those who don’t want to understand. In these cases, they reject not only your info and your concepts, but often they write you off as well. If they’re kind, they’ll pat you on the head and pray that you “get with the program.”
I sometimes wonder if anyone understands anyone anymore. I do believe that outside of small groups of friends, conversation and dialogue are only euphemistic terms. I wonder if we’ve created a system in which we take turns talking within the hearing of others, but it needn’t matter what we say, because we use only a prescribed jargon set, and references to concepts that none of us could really explain if we were actually to begin a dialogue about them.

clarity 2.0

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding anyone.

-gertrude stein

Tonight, in conversation with friends, we talked a bit about effective communication. During the conversation, I kept wondering if we’ve erroneously defined effectiveness by being understood. Indeed, with our accepted definition of communication, I could talk till I’m blue in the face and will not have “communicated” unless I got my point across. Probably this is the correct definition of communication. Unless one is understood, he hasn’t communicated anything.
So then I began to wonder if we’ve assumed we have to communicate when in fact, we’re merely asked to say what has to be said. At this point, I’m thinking of dialogue between God and the prophets wherein God tells them specifically what to say, and then adds the caveat that they won’t be heard or understood. (This of course is not the only way it ever happened – God told Jonah what to say, the people of Nineveh heard, obeyed, and were spared, and Jonah got pretty angry about it. I often wonder if it wasn’t Jonah’s norm to speak and be disregarded, so that he’d become quite fond of watching immediate consequences of ignoring him. Having been heard, he was robbed of the satisfaction of watching folks get what they deserved.)
Is the fact that people won’t listen, or can’t understand always indicative of a bad communicator? Have we not fulfilled the command to speak unless we’re understood and heeded? Or are we simply supposed to obey? Perhaps we’re simply supposed to speak when we’re told to, and keep our mouths shut when we’re not told to speak.

I remember a time when I was with a friend listening to a speaker deliver a telling of the story of Ruth. The speaker was wonderfully entertaining, deeply insightful, and very sincere. About ten minutes into his story, my friend leaned over and said, “this guy is an amazing communicator.” About five minutes later, my friend excused himself to make some phone calls. I wondered if perhaps our definitions of a good communicator differed somewhat. Truly, “this guy was an amazing communicator,” but to my friend, that simply meant he was entertaining (and that, only 15 minutes worth). There is, of course, the possibility that my friend was, in fact, commenting on the guy’s communication skills, but as it turns out, my friend wasn’t interested in what was being communicated, but only in how it was being done. Once he’d witnessed how it was done, he felt it more important to call someone on his cell phone. Perhaps he even called someone to tell them what a wonderful communicator he’d just heard, but of course he could not tell them what was being communicated.
Am I then to assess that in fact the guy was NOT an effective communicator? Or is it safe to say that he WAS an effective communicator, but that my friend was only interested in the communicating, not in the message that was communicated? Is communication in which no message was communicated communication at all? If my friend hadn’t the foggiest notion what the guy had said, what on earth did he mean when he praised him as an amazing communicator? Truly, hundreds of people benefitted from the message communicated that night – I was one of them, my friend was not. Was the speaker responsible for my enlightenment? Was he responsible for my friend’s disinterest in his message?

these questions are not merely rhetorical. I struggle with when to speak, when to keep quiet, and to what extent my responsibility reaches. Maybe yous guys can shed some wisdom?