Fred Rogers derived a great deal of meaning from the number 143.  This week being the 143rd OnHumaning essay, it felt like an appropriate moment to celebrate one of the most devoted life-long humanizers of the modern age.  To Mr Rogers, the numerical phrase 1-4-3 was a stand in for the phrase "I love you" (I = 1 letter, love = 4 letters, you = 3 letters).  Love was at the core of everything Mr Rogers created and shared with the world.  It was the generous spirit he brought to his work.

When the documentary “Won't You Be My Neighbor?” came out in 2018, I saw it 5 times in the theater.  And I cried every time.  It is a very sweet telling of the life and works of a very sweet human being.  The more I learn about Fred Rogers, the more I admire about.  What stands out the most to me was his utter authenticity.  He was the genuine article, as the saying goes.  He always did things the way he thought things should be done.  I try to emulate his example, being the change I want to see in the world.

I grew up on a steady diet of Mr Rogers and his neighborhood and I learned a lot of important lessons, often without even realizing it.  One thing I learned was how important it is to recognize and appreciate each person's unique contribution to the world.  No one individual has the exact same thoughts, feelings, or perspective as another person, and our coming together with those differences from a place of genuine curiosity is how we find common ground.  And that's what makes the magic happen.

Another thing I appreciate about Mr Rogers is his subtlety.  Until I saw the 2018 documentary, I had no idea he was a religious minister.  It took me by complete surprise because most examples of religious leaders I see in the media are loud and obnoxious, dripping with volatile judgement for anyone who thinks or acts differently than whatever the one way they proclaim is righteous.  Mr Rogers didn't preach like those people.  He simply existed.  And in so doing invited others to try on an existence of love and caring for on another as well.

I hope to be just a sneaky.  I'd like to be an example in the way I move through the world that inspires other people to actively demonstrate care for everyone around them, especially people they don't know and may never meet.  The things Fred Rogers had to say were similarly out of line with the prevailing societal winds of narcissism and personal safety by controlling others.  I think one reason nobody shut him down was because he didn't seem threatening.  He didn't arrive with an argument.  Therefore there was nothing to argue against.

But his message was insidious.  It seeped in through the cracks left in all our souls by the detrimental aspects of society.  And it helped some of us fill those cracks with healing and knit ourselves back together.  I didn't realize the breadth and extent of the balm I received for my soul from Mr Rogers and his neighborhood until after he died.  Fortunately, it left its mark on me forever.  Just like all the crappy parts of existing in modern society, I soaked up all the beautiful and healing love from all my exposure to Mr Rogers.

We should all be so lucky.  I don't know that there are fewer examples of people like Fred Rogers today, but there are a very high number of people actively working to dehumanize other people.  Maybe it's just because those jerks are so loud and there are so many of them in positions of power that they seem so many.  But that's also the point: there aren't enough examples of the Fred Rogers way of being in positions of power in the world right now.

This week Uganda's parliament passed a bill making it illegal to identify as gay.  It hasn't been officially signed into law by President Yoweri Museveni yet, but that seems quite likely given his vocal support thus far.  Interviews with gay and trans Ugandans have been a feature in the news since the bill passed and the future these ordinary people see for themselves is truly horrifying.  The blackmail and extortion has already begun and the ink hasn't even dried.

This morning three Ugandan women who identify as lesbians used false names to speak on the BBC program "Outside Source."  One of them paraphrased the law in a perfect way: "I have a right to take away your right and you have no right to have a right."  That is exactly what laws like this one in Uganda and the many similar anti-trans and anti-LGBTQIA+ bills in the US are saying.  It makes absolutely no sense to legislate who anyone is allowed to be.  But a lot of jurisdictions are doing it anyway.

A lot of people are also fighting back against these horrific and dehumanizing laws, but not enough of the people with the power to stop this madness are actually doing anything meaningful about it.  Talking points are not enough.  We need our governmental representatives to take action.  Bold action.  Immediate action.  Real action.  And we need them to keep doing it until the problem is all the way fixed.  They need to keep chipping away at hatred, injustice, and bigotry until everyone is safe and taken care of.

To get there from where we are right now, we all need to take greater responsibility for each other.  Not because we'll get something out of it (although we absolutely will), but because no one can thrive while their fellow human beings suffer from abuse and neglect right beside them.  This is why wealthy and healthy people work so hard to distance themselves from the existence and effects of poverty.  If they had to live among the suffering brought about by their lifestyle, they could not stand for it and remain whole.  So they put up walls around their neighborhoods, eat in exclusive restaurants, and travel in private planes.

It doesn't have to be this way.  Each of us wouldn't have to work so hard to meet our own needs if we could rely instead on our community to support us.  If we pooled our collective efforts to ensure our collective survival.  Just like adults are doing with children in Japan.  There they see children as everyone's collective responsibility, so it's perfectly ordinary for very young children to do things like ride public transit or run errands by themselves.  And if a child needs help while they are out and about, they can turn to any adult for assistance.

That's what we should be doing more of: taking care of each other.  And the good thing about that is we don't have to wait for laws to be passed or the hearts and minds of bigots to change.  We can just do it.  Like Fred Rogers, we can live-out an example.  May all our neighborhoods be like that of Mr Rogers.  May we see each other as fellow passengers on the roller coaster of life.  May we embody compassion for people whose life experience or struggle we cannot personally relate to, even if - and especially if - we don't quite understand it.

Information and Inspiration

• IMDb: Won't You Be My Neighbor?
• BBC: Uganda Anti-Homosexuality bill: Life in prison for saying you're gay
• TikTok: flower.got.power: trans women are women
• It Could Happen Here: The Trans Genocide Part 1: Eradication
• It Could Happen Here: The Trans Genocide Part 2: Hit Them Where It Hurts
• amNY: Hats off…umm, on!…to Japan’s attitude on kids​

According to the internet, well-known psychologist Carl Rogers made that pronouncement.  I had never heard of that person until I Googled their quote, but I didn't need to know who they were to agree with that slice of wisdom pie.  I feel quite strongly that no matter what we're doing or how we're doing it, we're always practicing something.  I spent many years putting other people's needs before my own in relationships, so I became a person whose needs were not prioritized.  That dynamic only changed when I began to practice a different way of relating to loved ones.

That gem of an insight also reminds me of something my Taiji/Qigong teacher has been saying for years which I now say to my students all the time: it's always your turn.  Even when you're not the partner "doing the action" in a training drill, you still have an important role and you are still working on something.  Even if all your doing is standing still while your partner identifies all the open targets in your posture, you are working on confront by watching strikes come in and keeping your awareness and your wits about you.

Beyond its application to martial arts, this concept feels especially poignant this week.  According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have all the tools and ability to avert the worst outcomes from global climate change but we're not employing them effectively.  To avoid impending doom, nations and industry must take drastic action and they have to do it soon.  Like yesterday.  But year after year world leaders negotiate incremental adjustments they fail to accomplish.  As a global community, we're not doing what we need to do about climate change because we're still practicing what we've been doing the same way we've always been doing it.

Meanwhile, people of parenting age in China aren't getting married and making babies in sufficient numbers to keep the population up.  This week a city in China launched its own state sponsored match-making app and included all the local residents without consulting them first.  This move is such a glaring example of the simultaneous missteps of missing-the-point and making-things-worse.

Marriage rates are down in China for a myriad of reasons, including economics.  Many folks say they can't afford to get married, but instead of addressing the root-causes, the government does what it's most practiced at doing: forcing people to behave how the government wants them to behave.  And best of luck to anyone who wants to avoid a stalker or an abuser, or who isn't getting married because they happen to be gay.

The whole situation is a horrifying example of dehumanizing one of the most human things in the world: romantic love.  Sure, the State has lots of data about all the people and it can certainly group two of them together.  But this "service" is not likely to use metrics chosen by those people.  The state sponsored match-maker is undoubtedly making matches according to its own criteria, pairing couples based on what is most likely to further the government's interest.  Add this to the stack of things created “for people” that doesn’t actually take people into account.

Another highlight from this week is the 20 years that have elapsed since the US invaded Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein and discover all the weapons of mass destruction he was supposedly hiding.  I heard an interview on the BBC news with Richard Armitage, who was the Deputy Secretary of State during George W Bush's administration when the Iraq invasion began.  Armitage spoke rather candidly about what made the US operation such a catastrophe.

The most striking observation to me was how Armitage described the ignorance of the US national security team.  Apparently the folks in charge thought it would be easy to just show up, install democracy, and then leave.  They had no understanding of the tribal nature of Iraqi politics, governance, or societal structure.  So we didn't know what we were doing.  But we ran in there, guns blazing, and did it anyway.  Because we thought it, that made it a good idea... because that's what the US always does.  And then everyone has to deal with the consequences of our national practice of arrogance and ill-informed assuredness.

Another quote from Carl Rogers fits nicely in with this consideration:  "Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas and none of my own ideas are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me."  Thinking about your values and imagining your principles is one thing, but it pales in comparison to the embodied experience of living-out those values in the way you move through the world.

It's always my turn.  Even if it seems like my individual actions have no effect in shaping the grand universal design, I am still a participant.  I can choose to participate passively, going with whatever flow happens to present itself to me, which lumps my effort in with that of the prevailing wind.  Or I can participate deliberately, choosing how to engage with the people, places, ideas, and world around me, which adds my efforts to the stack aimed at the outcome I desire.

As Paul Rulkens says in his TedxTalk, "If you do what everyone else is doing, you get results that everyone else is getting, and those are normal results.  And the thing is, what we are after today, are extraordinary results."  The time is long gone when mere minor shifts could save us and rescue our one and only planet.  Today we are facing the accumulation of several generations of fossil fuel use.  That means we have to take a several-generation-scale step in a completely different direction if we hope to end up in a different place.

Information and Inspiration

• Very Well Mind: Carl Rogers Psychologist Biography
• The Nature Conservancy: The Latest IPCC Report: What is it and why does it matter?
• BBV: UN climate report: Scientists release 'survival guide' to avert climate disaster
• The Guardian: State-sponsored matchmaking app launched in China 
• Reuters: U.S. grapples with forces unleashed by Iraq invasion 20 years later
• YouTube: Why the majority is always wrong | Paul Rulkens | TEDxMaastricht

So essential.  So precious.  So elusive.

Sleep is sweet.  And it comes in many iterations.  Sometimes it is pure oblivion; dreamless non-waking.  Sometimes it is a transported existence; a visit to otherwise unknowable times or places.  Sometimes it is utterly mundane; a purely practical experience.

Sleep can also generate a surprising amount of creativity.  More than once in my life I have been stuck on some conundrum.  Frustrated, I took a nap and magically woke with some resolution.  With my conscious mind on break, my unconscious mind had full freedom to explore solutions without the constraints of the waking world.  According to scientists, the two cycles of sleep work together to support the brain's creativity.  There's "a stage for abstraction and a stage for linking things together."

It is unfortunate that most of society isn't set up to enable sufficient sleep.  Young students must attend school all day, participate in extracurricular activities, and somehow also complete all their homework.  Add work into the mix for older students and students with fewer resources and the time in each day available for rest shrinks.  Then we graduate into the working world and must devote most of our waking hours to our career while somehow managing to have a family.  It's exhausting just thinking about it.

I have spent most of my life as an overachiever.  Partly out of need and partly because that's what I was used to.  One of the unfortunate consequences of trying to do a lot with insufficient resources (like time) was I often had to choose between finishing something and going to bed on time.  Whether it was work, study, house chores, volunteer duties, or preparation for the next day, those tasks always seemed to take precedence over going to bed.

I didn't want to leave anything for my future self that I didn't absolutely have to.  Future Me had enough on their plate.  So I stayed up too late most nights, then got up early to get to work or the dojo.  Once I started my own business, I could begin my workday later in the morning, but the habit of trying to pack in as much as possible before turning-in for the night persisted.  As did my tendency to volunteer for too much.

I burned out a couple times in various ways, but it wasn't until the pandemic that my relationship to sleep really shifted.  All of a sudden a lot of the working world became untethered from the 9-5 workday.  A lot of us adopted what I started referring to as vampire hours, working late into the night and sleeping through much of the daylight.  Sometimes I only stopped working and went to bed when I saw the sun begin to rise.

Although completely different than the hours I kept pre-pandemic, my switch to vampire hours was less irregular.  I missed the mornings, but I was actually getting full nights of sleep consistently for the first time in my adult life.  And that was revolutionary.  After a few months I slowly shifted my bedtime back toward midnight and away from the wee hours, but I kept the consistent number of sleeping hours.  And now I can't give it up.

I don't remember fighting naps or avoiding bedtime as a kid, but I assume I did because most children do.  It's amusing every time I see a toddler resist an offering of care-free rest so vehemently.  Restful sleep is such a valuable phenomenon at this point in my non-toddler life.  I guess I've been enough places and done enough things in my nearly four decades on the planet to feel assured it will all still be here when I wake up.  My FOMO has been recalibrated with sleep higher up on the priority list.

I've been thinking a lot about sleep lately because I'm in a particularly busy work season.  I've been working extremely long hours and missing many social activities.  I long for more time with friends and family, but there are two things I haven't skipped out on: body movement and sleep.  I'm insufficiently rested for the volume of office hours I'm putting in, but this temporary work overload is more tolerable since I'm not also under-slept.

Working out and my external martial arts practice allow me to shed the stagnation building-up in my body from so much sitting (or standing) and staring at the computer.  My Taiji and Qigong practices allow me to process the mental and emotional stagnation so I can maintain the quality of my sleep.  Despite the overwhelming nature of my current work, I feel like I'm going to make it to the end of the season.  I hope you can also find the time and space for rest in whatever shape your life is currently taking.  We can all use more of it.

Information and Inspiration

• CDC: 1 in 3 adults don't get enough sleep
• The Atlantic: A New Theory Linking Sleep and Creativity
• Sleeping Should Be Easy: 4 Reasons Kids Need Downtime
• Nature: Increased sleep duration and delayed sleep timing during the COVID-19 pandemic
• YouTube: Go The Fuck To Sleep ::: Samuel L. Jackson ::: Adam Mansbach
• CNN: The rise of sleep tourism

On International Women's Day I attended a conference organized by, for, and about women in the anti-fraud industry.  Earlier this week I almost decided to skip it because it's a busy time for me at work and the event itself was on East Coast time (which means it started in the middle of the night according to my usual sleeping and waking rhythm).  I'm glad I got up before dawn to attend virtually from my home office in my pj's, robe, and slippers because it was terrific.  Just the wind I needed in my professional sails.

I don't totally identify as a woman, but it is a title I claim because it was assigned to me by society, which means I was also assigned all the baggage that comes with it.  I don't need to feel like a woman all the time to have a lifetime of experiences and traumas and frustrations shared with most women in modern society.  It was relieving to hear other highly competent humans describe their experience being discounted due to their gender.  It's nice to confirm I am not alone.

It was also refreshing to listen to the amazing, accomplished presenters talk about the impact gender has on their investigative work.  It's nice to say the quiet parts out loud sometimes.  One of the reasons women tend to be such effective investigators is the collection of micro skills we develop in order to survive the patriarchal world.  Women are frequently dismissed as non-threatening, and because of our position in society we are well practiced at not asserting that we are "in charge" even when we are the authority.  Consequently, an interview subject will tell us just about anything if we play into their bias and act like we just don't understand long enough for them to explain themselves into a guilty corner.

There was a lot of solidarity at that conference.  So much that I could feel it coming through the magical internet lines of the virtual stream.  The in-person attendees were not on camera so I don't know how they were interacting with each other, but the group chat on the livestream was bursting with shared experience and empathy.  Presenters and attendees were more willing to call out injustice in its various forms than I ever see at a co-ed conference.  And there was not one single instance of mansplaining.  Just a whole day of outstanding professionals sharing their craft and their experience.  The way all continuing education should be.

Keynote speaker Kelly Donovan shared her struggle as a whistleblower in the Waterloo Regional Police Service in Ontario, Canada.  After calling out corruption and trying to effect change from the inside, she was forced to resign and work on fixing the system as a disgraced outsider.  Kelly's story is harrowing and unfortunately typical of most whistleblowers.  It is also touched by the impact of her gender.  The times she has appeared before a judge who is also a woman have been the most successful for her case.  Once the corruption is resolved she will be a hero, but in the meantime she will be dismissed and attacked.

One thing Kelly said about ethics landed with me in a particularly powerful way.  She opened her talk describing the current state of corruption and lack of accountability having moved the collective understanding of where the line in the sand is.  We've been living with things the way they are for long enough, we have all forgotten it doesn't have to be this way.  Kelly closed her talk by saying: if you have to change who you are to fit in to your environment then it's time for an ethical self-check-in.  Otherwise you lose sight of where the line in the sand is supposed to be.

If you can't see the line, or if you allow the influence of others to move it when it should stay fixed, then it's pretty hard to recognize when you or anyone else crosses it.  This not only applies to corruption in policing and the justice system, it also applies to politics, private sector workplaces, and many other parts of life.  The republican party is a prime example of gradually normalizing completely unacceptable behavior to the point of absurdity where politicians just make up their entire resume and face no consequences.

The way we regulate (or don't regulate) speech on the internet is also a chilling example.  In 1995 the Communications Decency Act became law and included Section 230 which basically prevented internet platforms from being held liable for the content users post on their site.  It also gave the internet platforms the prerogative to regulate speech as they saw fit.  Fast forward almost three decades and you get the internet in its present iteration.

Section 230 has been in the spotlight as politicians call for changes and two prominent cases challenging the law were recently presented before the Supreme Court.  It makes perfect sense not to blame the YouTubes or Twitters for the many utterances of every human on the internet.  But it does not make sense to grant them complete control over what content should be removed to protect and ensure the safety of people using the platform.

In the US we have a right to free speech.  It's enshrined in our constitution and it's fundamental to the continued existence of our democracy.  But it isn't absolute.  We have collectively agreed that one person's right to say whatever they want stops at the point that speech harms someone else.  Maybe cops should stop wasting their time hassling people who don't have a place to live and redirect that energy toward removing hate speech from internet forums.  It would be the responsible thing to do.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem a likely reapplication of that particular public resource.  Especially with examples abound like Portland City Councilor Rene Gonzalez ordering the Street Response team to stop giving out tents to people who need shelter.  Gonzalez said he gave the order because of recent tent fires.  So instead of doing the work to identify and address the cause of the fires, he made the lives of a bunch of people who are already suffering just that much more miserable.

The same sentiment infuses Britain's brand new approach to immigrants crossing the English Channel in small boats.  The current Prime Minister wants to deprive the trafficking gangs of an income stream.  So his plan is to deport the people who are desperate enough to risk their lives crossing the Channel in the hopes of asylum.  Apparently Britain will take everything from other countries except people in need.  The Empire had no qualms colonizing food, fashion, art, ideas, and valuable resources, but it won't absorb the people from those places who need help.

It seems to me that we're all taking responsibility for the wrong things and not taking responsibility for the wrong things.  We're failing to take responsibility for each other in the ways that matter and interfering with other people's lives where we have no business meddling.  Women are socially conditioned to take responsibility for emotional labor.  Men are socially conditioned to take responsibility for denying all their own emotions.  Anyone who doesn't fit one of those categories must take responsibility for everyone else's discomfort at their existence.

And it isn't working.  We've made tremendous strides in some areas, like technology, but we're squandering our advancements.  Capitalism was supposed to give us all 15 hour work weeks and freedom from the constant labor of survival.  But all we've done with our outstanding economic progress is allow a small few to hoard the majority of wealth when it could be used instead to feed, house, and heal everyone.  We've amassed an incredible amount of collective knowledge, but we haven't made sure everyone can access it.

We have so many healing modalities, and we can address all kinds of suffering, but we continue to traumatize each other again and again in the same ways.  I saw a tweet this week that said "how u gonna be on the wrong side of history while it's repeating itself, like bro ur failing an open note test."  Thousands of years on the planet together but we’re just still failing to take care of each other.  We need to figure that out.  It's the responsible thing.  And it's also the only way we're gonna make it.

Information and Inspiration

• Goodreads: Police Line: Do Not Cross: Silencing a Canadian Police Whistleblower
• NPR: What's at stake in Atlanta's 'Cop City' protests
• Vox: Section 230, the internet law that’s under threat, explained
• OPB: New Commissioner Rene Gonzalez bans Portland Street Response from distributing tents
• BBC: Plan for lifetime ban for Channel migrants is unworkable, say charities​
• BBC: The long haul of long Covid

Last week President Biden visited Warsaw, Poland and gave a speech about the war in Ukraine, which has now officially waged-on for an entire blood-soaked year.  Many verbal highlights made headlines, but one part that didn’t get as much coverage struck me particularly.  Biden explained that Putin could end the war quite easily.  If Russia stops invading Ukraine, then the war will end.  Simple as that.  On the other hand, if Ukraine stops fighting against the invading Russian troops, then Ukraine will end.

That moment stood out to me in a very personal way.  It’s the exact same dynamic playing out all over US politics in various forms.  If conservatives in the US stop fighting against reproductive rights, that war would be over.  If I stop fighting for reproductive rights, then my rights would be over.  If conservatives stop fighting against trans rights, that war would be over.  If I stop fighting to protect trans rights, then my trans family and friends lose their rights.  The aggressors in these scenarios are refusing to acknowledge their position as aggressors and are instead hiding behind a veil of victimhood.

Putin blames the West for his invasion of Ukraine, even though he clearly started this fight.  We were all there, Mr. Putin, we all saw what happened.  US conservatives insist they are standing up for the unborn, even though they refuse to stand up for those same people once they exit the womb.  And they claim to champion liberty and the freedom of personal choice, even though they vehemently oppose some people consulting with their own doctors to make individual medical decisions for their own body and mind.

In all these cases the real cause for the crusading is simply a desire to control other people.  There is no reason to invade another country with very clearly defined and internationally recognized borders other than to control that territory and the people in it.  There is no reason to stand in the way of medical professionals caring for their patients other than to try and control those medical professionals and those patients.  The misplaced sense of entitlement behind that drive to control is astounding.

By trying so hard to get their way, these people are not making things better for anyone.  In fact, they are making things much, much worse.  Abortions are still occurring all over the country, but they are less safe and more costly in states where laws restrict access.  Trans people continue to exist, no matter how much legislation claims they aren't real.  Those laws just make it more difficult for them to access medical care and support.  Without that care, some of those folks will decide it's better to end their life than to live a life of suffering and persecution.

In Iran, girls schools have been attacked with poison gas this week.  The authorities are investigating, and it turns out "some people" want all girls schools to close.  Apparently those people feel entitled to control these girls, so now dozens of students have been hospitalized.  The family of those students must now endure the terror and uncertainty of their children being poisoned, as well as bear the cost of treatment and manage the process of recovery.

The only result of these kind of actions is a net increase in suffering.  In the end, whoever is trying to control whether girls go to school still doesn't actually control those girls.  They never did and they never will because human beings are not things, no matter how much one person objectifies another.  People have thoughts and feelings and opinions and dreams and experiences all their own.  And no one can stop anyone else from being who they are.  All anyone can do with restrictions is delay expressions of self for a while.  But we are human beings and those of us who survive oppression make it out alive because we find a way to be ourselves no matter what anybody else tries to say about it.

These examples are real and they are serious.  And we need to talk about them.  We also need to talk about the examples that are more ludicrous and less life-or-death because they point to just how deeply this problematic sentiment has rooted itself within society.  This week a person who participated in a dognapping scheme sued the victim for failing to pay the reward originally offered for the safe return of the dogs.  The audacity of this person to demand a pile of money from the dog owner after their conviction for participating in the dognapping blows my mind.

I dated a person for a while who wanted a life-building relationship with me.  I didn’t want that kind of relationship with them, so I declined their offer to add those life-entwining aspects to our differently committed connection.  That kind of misalignment in relationship intention is not sustainable for the long-term, but not every relationship has to last forever.  Unfortunately, because they wanted more from me, they felt entitled to more from me.  So when I said no and we broke up, they got mad and accused me of withholding what I should have been giving.  They are still mad about it to this day.

My former lover and the litigious dognapper are clearly not connecting all the dots.  And I think it's because they are following the well-publicized example of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and countless other conservative and bigoted individuals.  Any reasonable person can see what's happening, but the aforementioned folks simply refuse to acknowledge reality.  They feel entitled to control other people and they refuse to take responsibility for their wake of suffering and chaos following behind them as they move through the world.

You and I probably can't personally do anything about the way Mr. Putin conducts himself, but we can at least refuse to emulate that toxic and destructive example.  ​This is one reason I spend so much time and effort engaging in self-reflection.  It’s critical to consider my thoughts, feelings, and actions in a process of sincere inquiry.  It’s important to listen to others who are kind enough to give me feedback.  And it’s vital to check-in and ask for feedback when it’s not already arriving.

Please do not avoid looking at yourself.  Please do not avoid registering your impact on the world in all the small ways because that adds up to big blank spots in your vision.  Refusing to acknowledge the existence of some of the dots makes it much harder to connect them.  And just like we learned in school: if you don't connect all the dots, you don’t get to see the whole picture.  We must look honestly at the totality of our present circumstance before we can do anything to improve it.

Information and Inspiration

• BBC: Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, Biden tells crowds
• NPR: Why overturning Roe isn't the final goal of the anti-abortion movement
• CNN: Abortion restrictions don’t lower rates, report says
• TikTok: enlighten.mentality: Fun Montage at 2:10
• The Guardian: Dozens of schoolgirls in Iran taken to hospital after poisoning
• The Washington Post: Woman convicted in dognapping case sues Lady Gaga over $500,000 reward

I had a conversation this week with a friend currently on the hunt for a new job.  We were talking about the interview process and musing about how much of your real self you're supposed to bring into those engagements.  I want it to be true that if you intend to be your genuine self at work then you should bring that genuine self to the interview.  My friend's conclusion of the process thus far is: some amount of code switching is still required.  You have to know the right moment to be your true self and the right moment for that self to be the Man Behind the Curtain, pulling levers and throwing switches, while your interview appropriate Oz takes center stage.

That conversation got me thinking about immersion and assimilation.  When I took German language classes in college, they were taught immersion-style.  There was no English in the classroom, all the instruction was delivered in German and all the interactions among students were also in German.  Beginning that course was definitely jumping in to the deep end, but it was incredibly effective and a lot of fun.  Instead of learning German through English, I formed a direct connection to the language I still feel to this day.

Before college, I took French in middle and high school to fulfill my state-mandated second language requirement.  I picked it because my mom studied French and I thought it would be cool for us to speak French together.  I started in sixth or seventh grade and continued through my sophomore year.  None of those courses were taught in an immersion-like manner.  I got high marks in all my French classes, but of that 5 years of continuous study I remember almost none of it now.

German, on the other hand, I took for only two years and still feel comfortable holding a simple conversation.  My vocabulary is not as vast these days since I don't practice regularly enough to maintain it, but the grammar and structure of the language feels like a permanent part of my personal communications array.  Even if I forget the German word for something, I can at least talk my way around it well enough to get my meaning across.

My friend's experience with the job interview process seems similar to my experience learning French.  I learned what I needed to know to participate in what was happening at the time.  I studied diligently and performed well in class and on tests.  But as soon as I stopped taking those classes, I stopped needing to maintain that information and my French essentially evaporated.  Once the interview process is over, that secret code is no longer necessary and you're faced with a different immersive experience of fitting-in to a new workplace instead.

And that is so strange to me.  Why are job interviews so notoriously not job-related?  The hoops candidates must jump through these days leave some well qualified people out of the pool and give a distinct advantage to humans who can speak the language of Interviewing more fluently.  Just as standardized tests allow children who have developed the skill of taking a test to shine while discounting and demoralizing students whose aptitudes and expertise shine through other applications.

One reason for the disconnect is probably that we're not being completely honest with ourselves as a society.  It's quite clear to me the public school system is designed to mold children into young adults who can be productive in our capitalist economic system.  At some point, it became common for employers to require college degrees for entry-level positions, so many college programs continued the molding beyond primary and secondary education.  The standardized method of schooling children into adulthood is basically just one big immersion program.  By the time those folks graduate into the working world, the language of being a productive cog in the economic machine is essentially second nature.

I have found value in totally immersing myself in some places or activities.  I just spent a whole weekend at a Contra Dance camp and it was magical.  Spending concentrated time sharing a fun activity with lots of other people who also delight in that same activity is incredibly fulfilling.  Part of what made my dance immersion such an enjoyable experience is that I chose to be there.  I put regular life on pause for a couple days to jump into the deep end of moving my body joyfully with friends.

Voluntary immersion can be nice.  But having to assimilate is not so nice.  Visiting an environment with particular protocols without receiving a briefing ahead of time is disorienting and challenging.  Things like standardized tests, job interviews, and navigating health care in the US are all examples of systems set-up for only one kind of correct interaction.  Unfortunately they are also systems that many more than one kind of human must interact with.

That means it's up to the individual person to be sufficiently resourced and informed on the often un-spoken rituals required to pass the gauntlet of education, hiring, or healthcare.  That's. Absurd.  This entire world is made up of people.  It only makes sense for the systems, institutions, and infrastructure to function for all those people.  Those pillars of society should consider and value every iteration of person.  And they should be designed as understandable and accessible to all those kinds of people.  Otherwise, what are we even doing here?

Information and Inspiration

• YouTube: Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain
• Lead with Languages: Why Learn Languages
• The Workplace Group: Do You Consider Interviews to be Tests?
• The Atlantic: How to Break Free of Our 19th-Century Factory-Model Education System
• Hack Education: The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education'
• Scientific American: Universal Health Care Could Have Saved More Than 330,000 U.S. Lives during COVID

Phases.  They’re everywhere.  The moon has phases.  Fashion has phases, usually called trends.  The weather has phases we label as seasons.  People go through phases, individually and collectively.  We even have special titles for those age-related phases most humans pass through, like childhood, young adulthood, and middle age.  Zoom out far enough and humanity goes through phases en masse we refer to as generations.  Take an even broader view and we have historical ages and prehistoric periods.

When I was a kid and I heard adults talk about someone "going through a phase" it always sounded disparaging.  As if the only phase a person could go through was a bad habit they picked up and hadn't put down yet.  Thinking about it this week, I realized that every aspect of my life is actually a phase.  The good and the bad.  I went through a phase when I always had a pet cat.  Then I discovered I could breathe more easily without all the dander, so I entered my current phase of living without cats.

Like a lot of people, my tastes and preferences have changed over time.  Not necessarily because I have grown wiser or progressed to a more sophisticated existence, although that does also happen from time to time.  But sometimes I just do something differently than the way I did it before.  Like all the hobbies I've taken-up, enjoyed for a while, and moved on from.  Or the many iterations of my self-expression.  They are all phases, some just last longer than others.

The western swath of humanity has been in a colonialism phase for the last half millennium.  I'm ready for us to collectively overcome this phase, but it's going to take a lot of people doing a lot of work to get us to whatever is next.  It can be difficult during a phase to imagine any other potential reality.  We look at what’s happening right now and think this is the way things are, the way things have always been, and the way things will be forever.  The irony of that falsehood is that humans are incredibly adaptable.  That’s our number one survival technique and we employ it constantly.

Humans also have astounding capacity for imagination, unlike many other creatures.  So why is it so damn difficult for us to imagine the potential of our own adaptation?  There are many examples of major shifts in our collective history, like the time folks skipped 10 entire days forward to switch from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar.  Or that one time we shut down much of society for months that stretched into years because of the Covid pandemic.  We can definitely do drastic shifts, most of us just choose not to most of the time.

Maybe one reason is our societally reinforced practice of short-sightedness.  Maybe it's the emphasis on perfection baked-in to our institutions and systems.  I have definitely avoided starting some things because I wasn't sure I could get it completely right.  Undoubtedly, there are many contributing factors.  One important one is our perspective.  As soon as we forget that what we're doing is only a phase, as soon as we start thinking the habits we have are permanent pillars of our person-ness, the higher the stakes seem and the more daunting the prospect of shifting.

There was the Julian calendar phase.  Then there was the Gregorian calendar phase.  Maybe we'll make it to the 28-day-thirteen-month calendar phase, whatever that will be called.  We've had the north is up on maps phase.  We could just as easily have a south is up phase, or an east is up phase.  And maybe looking at our world from a different angle would help each of us look at ourselves from a new angle.  Seeing where we are from another vantage could help us see all the places we could go.

Humanity is not just going through phases; we are a phase.  There was a time before we all existed and there will be a time that comes after us.  It's impossible to predict what will usher-in the next phase of the universe or when it will begin, but ultimately it doesn't matter.  The universe never rushes through its phases.  Stars form, burn brightly, then fade into darkness.  We are each born, we live, and eventually we die.

​As long as I continue to hang around on this planet, I'd like to do my utmost to select my next phases with intention.  I'd like to remember they don't have to be the perfect next choice, or a permanent next choice, just a little something that moves me ever so slightly in the direction I'd like to be headed.  It's easy to forget at any given moment that I'm just passing through.  But it's worth pausing and looking up once in a while to find a reminder.  I've had other phases, just like you.  And there are many more to come.  Let’s choose ones that bring us all closer to health, safety, and satisfaction.

Information and Inspiration

• Moon Connection: Understanding The Moon Phases
• Britannica: Ten Days That Vanished: The Switch to the Gregorian Calendar
• Inverse: A Calendar Where Every Month Is 28 Days Would Actually Make a Ton of Sense
• YouTube: David Banner - The World Map Is Upside-Down
• TNW:  AI is the next phase of human evolution
• YouTube: Why you should make useless things | Simone Giertz

I did a favor for a friend without them asking because they have been overwhelmed lately and I thought it would be nice.  They thanked me and asked me not to help them in that particular way in the future.  I was a little bit crushed because that act was an expression of my love for them and they did not want it.  It doesn't feel good for an offering of love to be unwanted.  But what I didn't do in response was make it their problem.  I did not insist they hear or process my feelings of disappointment in their disinterest in my act of service.  I respected their boundary and talked through my feelings with somebody else.

Later in the week, I was on the other side of a similar interaction where someone offered me an expression of their love that I did not want in that moment.  They did not handle it quite as gracefully and needed to tell me all about how it made them feel to have been refused.  It's a brave thing to advocate for oneself and assert a boundary, especially to a person who we love and care about.  Made even more difficult if the emotional consequences of asserting that boundary are that I must then also do emotional labor for the boundary-crosser.

Those back to back experiences got me thinking about access and entitlement.  Many years ago when I decided to divorce my first spouse, my parents were not the first people I called.  I called my best friend and I called my sibling.  I needed a particular kind of support I could not have received (and didn't want) from my parents.  Unfortunately, this was a challenge for my mother to understand at the time.  She called me thrice upset.  Firstly because I had not called her to tell her right away.  Secondly because I had not confided in her all my many reasons for leaving my spouse beforehand.  Thirdly that I was abandoning my relationship instead of trying to make it work.

A few years, many conversations, and a lot of processing later, I understood that my mother saw herself in my first spouse.  Their similar stories of childhood trauma manifested in similar expressions of that trauma as adults.  Most specifically, they both struggled to believe they were worthy of love and sought to prove to anyone who claimed to love them just how much they didn't deserve it.  It is a strange and human thing to resist so completely the thing which we most desperately want in our wounded heart of hearts.

For my mother at the time, me leaving my spouse because he had finally succeeded in pushing me all the way away was alarming proof that she too could be cast aside at any moment.  Confirmation that someday someone she loved might tire of being tested and leave her to suffer alone and uncomforted. ​ And none of my mother's feelings were any of my responsibility.  I am not required to reveal my inner self to anyone, even if doing so would assuage their discomfort.

No one is entitled to access my internal world.  No one is entitled to see any part of my Self I do not want to show in any given moment.  Any time I reveal a part of me to another person, it is a gift I offer.  And that gift that can be accepted or refused because that's how consent works.  Just as I am not obligated to share, no one is obligated to see or hold or appreciate any part of me or any particular vulnerability I express.

This is true for everyone.  We each get to decide what we share of ourselves and with whom.  And we can each change our mind any time we want for any reason, or for no reason at all.  I want to share myself for my own reasons; so I may be seen in the fullness of my humanity.  I don't want to share my internal world for the sole purpose of accommodating someone else's insecurity.  And I especially don't want to share my authentic self to alleviate someone's discomfort when that discomfort is rooted in their own unchecked assumptions about my thoughts and feelings.

Of course as humans we relate to each other through our shared vulnerability, so it is difficult to have a close connection with someone without sharing any part of ourselves with each other.  But the point is: no one else can tell you what you must share, when, or with whom.  That decision is up to you.  And one person sharing of themselves does not obligate another person to reciprocate.  If you want to give the gift of a certain expression of your love, it has to be okay for the other person to not want that at any time for any reason.

This is a challenging concept for many folks in modern American society.  Even people who agree intellectually that everyone should have individual autonomy still find it challenging to live-out that value in their lives and relationships.  Probably because there's a great deal of messaging to the contrary.  Just look at basically all messaging intended for or broadcast about fem-bodied and fem-presenting humans.

Just as we are not entitled to know what anyone else is thinking or feeling in any given moment, we are also not entitled to know what kind of body parts someone else was born with or currently has.  We are also not entitled to understand why a person expresses their gender in any particular way.  And we're not entitled to feel comfortable with someone else's gender identity or gender expression.  Yet a whole lot of people think they deserve to know at a glance whether someone has indoor or outdoor plumbing and get upset when they can't tell using long-established gender norm markers.

None of those feelings are the responsibility of anyone except the person who is feeling them.  People with gender expressions outside the boy-girl binary are not obligated to explain themselves.  No one is required to receive your thoughts, feelings, or opinions about their clothing, hair, makeup, or any other aspect of their self-expression.  It's okay to feel however you are feeling about whatever you're having feelings about.  Put on your big kid pants and bring those feelings to a friend or counselor or your journal to process through them.

Media does not show us many good examples for how to hold our own feelings and avoid burdening others with them.  Wednesday, the TV show, is just such an example that misses the mark.  Wednesday goes to boarding school, where she meets two boys who both take a fancy to her (and dislike each other - very original).  Maybe she also fancies one or both of these boys.  They each make invitations, which Wednesday refuses.  Then they each get mad at being refused.  The boys don't get access to Wednesday's time and affections just because they want it and asked nicely, but this is a TV series so other characters intervene and cajole her into dating one or the other.  It's so close to being a fem-liberationist show in a lot of ways, but doesn't quite get there.

We even have bad examples of well-meaning folks slathering their own emotional experience all over everybody else in a professional setting.  Take an article I read this week about relabeling what is often referred to in the accounting industry as a "clean-up job."  The author begins by explaining their personal aversion to the phrase and their regret to have created so many messes as a child which their parent cleaned-up and which they were not aware enough to be appreciative at the time.

They ask fellow accountants to choose another description for the correcting, re-ordering, and untangling work we do with a set of books in-need.  They also explain at length how we are wreaking havoc by referring to that work as "clean-up."  This author is bringing a lot of added emotional value to their discussion of this particular topic.  It’s important to consider how our word-choice impacts others, and it’s also important to remember that not everyone experiences the world the same way we do.  Be thoughtful with your language.  And also, it's okay to call a spade a spade.

Feel your feelings.  Express your feelings.  Share your feelings.  These are all parts of being human.  Just please remember that your feelings are not the sacred truth of the universe.  They are your experience of the world and the people in it, informed by all your past experiences and traumas and privileges and the narratives handed to us during our development and each and every day we continue to exist.  Your emotions do not entitle you to access or time or resources.

I know our world does not show us how to handle our emotions with grace or understanding.  We are not taught how to experience or express our feelings in a healthy and sustainable way, especially the most powerful and intense emotions.  But it’s worth learning how to listen to yourself and how to explore underneath those feelings to identify what’s driving them.  That exploration gets you closer to the truth of what you need and want.  That clarity will allow you to honor your own autonomy and uphold your own boundaries in a way that respects the autonomy and boundaries of everyone around you.  And if we all practice more of that, we all gain access to greater health, peace, and well-being.

Information and Inspiration

• Positive Psychology: How to Set Healthy Boundaries & Build Positive Relationships
• TikTok: madicalized
• YouTube: Toilets, bowties, gender and me | Audrey Mason-Hyde | TEDxAdelaide
• Stained Glass Woman: Romancing the Ghost in the Shell
• IMDb: Wednesday
• Intuitive Accountant: Don’t Call it a Cleanup

I went to a restaurant this week and hanging on the wall next to the bathroom sink was a sign that read “she believed she could, so she did.”  When I got back to the table I noticed the same saying on the coffee mugs as well.  On its face, it seems like a pleasant and uplifting sentiment.  Empowering even.  You go girlboss.  Believe in yourself and you can do anything.  But there was also something about it that needled at me in the background.

​It wasn’t until I got home that I realized what was gently tugging at my subconscious: Phase 2 was missing.  That inspirational phrase tells an incomplete story.  A fuller account would be something like "she believed she could, so she put in the work, and then accomplished the thing."  Belief alone does not make things happen.  Belief is what convinces you it's possible and worth trying, but the taking action part is what actually makes things happen.

That abridged inspiration reminded me of the underpants gnomes from the "South Park" TV show.  In one episode, the kids discover gnomes stealing one kid's underpants.  They follow the tiny thieves back to their gnome cave where they have amassed an enormous horde of underpants.  The gnomes explain underpants are big business and share their strategic plan:

Information and Inspiration

• Bleu Door: About
• YouTube: South Park - Underpants Gnomes
• Wired: The World’s Farms Are Hooked on Phosphorus. It’s a Problem
• BBC: Adolescence: Discovering identity through play
• Plos: It’s Time to Decolonize the Decolonization Movement
• YouTube: Three ideas. Three contradictions. Or not. | Hannah Gadsby

The last year I worked for the IRS, my team and I were surprise to learn during our annual training that our entire job had been changed, effective immediately.  No warning from on-high about a coming shift, just another mandatory briefing via e-learning module casually outlining how our job was going to work from that point forward.  I was so shocked when I went through it, I assumed there had been some kind of mistake.  But since we were each taking the assorted courses asynchronously I was alone in my cubicle with my confusion.  So I leaned over the wall to ask my neighbor.

They had not reviewed the briefing yet.  Neither had most of the rest of the team.  The one team member who had also seen it agreed with me about its content.  So directly to the manager’s office we went.  She had also not seen that one yet, but heard our concerns and told us she would watch it immediately and get back to us.  I called my union president and let them know what was going down.

A couple hours later our boss called an emergency team meeting.  In short, she was flabbergasted.  Completely gobsmacked by the everything different we were apparently supposed to be doing starting last week.  She told us to sit tight while she ran her objections up the leadership chain.  Meanwhile, the union chapters were talking to each other and preparing to inform the upperist of upper management they had missed some important procedural steps.

Some while later my boss received an email titled Cease and Desist.  “Oh good,” she thought, “the Union paused this madness until we can talk through the impact and implementation of such a massive change.”  Nope.  It was from upper-upper-upper management ordering her to cease and desist her rabble-rousing and fall in line with the changes.  Good try, boss.  Sorry Senior Leadership thwarted your attempt to manage in-line with the contract and advocate for your employees’ rights.  

So a procedural battle ensued, management rolling back it's changes until the execution of the new job order could be formulated in accordance with our employment contract.  What we learned much later (during the many-months-long union-management throw-down) was it all started because some analyst sat in their office for two years crafting a solution to a problem apparently identified from on-high.  That’s not all that unusual, but the problem in this case was they didn’t ever talk to any of the people actually doing the job.  Not once.  No focus groups.  No surveys.  Nothing.

That's completely asinine.  How can you solve a problem you don't understand?  You can't.  And yet many people and organizations try to do just that all the time.  Countless NGO's are working all around the world at this very moment to solve problems they don't fully understand for other people in other places with other cultures.  And it's not going very well in most cases.  Afghanistan is a perfect example of America rushing in to another country to solve its problems without listening to the locals.

Statistics are wonderful and numbers can provide a lot of insight, but they are completely useless without context.  And to understand context, you have to talk to the people living, working, and raising their children in that context every day.  Even more importantly, you have to listen to what they tell you.  Fortunately there are some great examples of folks doing just that.  A doctor in Boston has been treating patients who don't have an indoor place to live for the last three decades.  He has been successful in understanding his patents' needs and treating their ailments precisely because he listens to them.

There are also some scientists getting out of their labs and into the streets to advocate directly for changes they hope to create in the world.  I heard a conversation this week between some of these activist scientists on the BBC program Science in Action.  One person discussed the need for diversity of tactics to create lasting societal change, which is a key point.  Some folks need to be holding up signs and shouting through bullhorns among the masses.  And some folks need to be in the lab doing the science.

Modern society has a lot of problems that need to be solved.  And as historian Hugh Ryan so eloquently explained in a recent episode of the History is Gay podcast: it all comes down to whether people are getting the care they need.  People who don't have housing need care.  People who are addicted to harmful substances need care.  People who don't have enough to eat need care.  People with medical conditions need care.  Traumatized people need care.

As a societal collective, we are not taking care of all of us.  Our system is not set up to do that right now, but it could be.  We could restructure it and I want us to do that.  But first we need to listen to all the people who need care and support when they tell us what they need.  Listening to others starts with listening to yourself.  Spend some time getting to know yourself and identifying the filters through which you process the world.  If we all do that, maybe we can stop thinking we know what other people need better than they know themselves.  Then maybe we can take better care of each other.

Information and Inspiration

• TikTok: aketchjoywinnie: africa is also success
• Brookings: Americans never understood Afghanistan like the Taliban did
• New York Times: ‘You Have to Learn to Listen’: How a Doctor Cares for Boston’s Homeless
• BBC: Climate science activism
• TikTok: thekristianasmith: when I use the term cisgender
• History is Gay: Undoing Silence: Hugh Ryan & The Women's House of Detention