The Discordant Colored Thread Talk 10 of 25
Topic: The Discordant Colored Thread
Theme: The Human Condition
Author: Barry Sweet
Date: January 7, 2018
Video Production by Tim & Karen Morse. Morsephotography.com
Music Courtesy of Jake Almanrode www.harbouredm.com
I think of it often as the H.C. and the C.H. The “Human Condition” is that we bumble stuff. We are not perfect. We just are normal humans, living normal human lives, but we hurt each other. We don't mean to, but we do. We drop things and break them. But… the other side of that… is the C.H. The “Charming Humanity” where we leave someone's favorite candy bar in their inbox… with no note… and they're delighted because they have someone who knows them well enough to leave their favorite candy bar.
But you know we're bumblers. I'm a fly fisherman. I flyfish for my sport.
I bumble. I fall. I get tanked. Tanked is when you slip on moss and all the water goes into your waders… down… It's freezing cold and you tank and you get full of water and you weigh a ton, and you can't get out of the river and the rivers draggin’ you under.
I don't claim to be perfect. I couldn't be if I tried. And I bumble my way through life looking for solutions… trying to be a good person…. all that stuff.
The Navajos in Arizona realize that there is no perfect life and so they would take their Navajo rugs on the loom, as they were weaving them and weave in a discordant colored thread, that didn't go with the pattern. It would be a thread that didn't fit in that spot and everybody knew that there it was, "Yep, there is the discordant colored thread..." because right up front they're going to admit that life is not perfect, and you can't make a perfect rug, even if you tried, you couldn't, so we're going to just weave a discordant colored thread right in there from the beginning so that everybody is clear on it. These are the Charming Humanity things that we do for each other, when we understand “He's not perfect or she's not perfect and that's okay…” So there's room to bumble in our office.
There's room to do things wrong, mess stuff up. I don't want “RTMs” Ranger Teller Machines at the front desk. I want a living, breathing, genuine, authentic, real, not plastic, human being that will have interchanges with people and help them plan their dream trips into wilderness so that people say “Wow… wasn't she the neatest Ranger you've ever met?’ That's what I want.
And when she messes things up… so do I… so do we. It's part of life on Earth.
My bride, one time I dropped a really important artifact of hers when we were first getting to know each other… and it broke into ten pieces. And I was I was crestfallen because I had broken something that she loved and… I swear it was less than a seconds time when she said “That's OK. It's just Earth Stuff” and that gave me the freedom to be a human. She didn't demand that I be perfect and that freedom, that we grant to each other is one of the kindnesses that we do. And you guys are never going to get away from my spiritual life. So here it goes… Jesus says “Love one another”. But I say unto to you “Delight one another” and to “Delight one another”. We've got to know each other. We've got to know what would cause delight for another person.
And I know Jesus is probably mad at me for upstaging Him, ya know, and changing his words and stuff… but we've got a relationship that I'm pretty sure he loves me so I'm OK… I think He is too. But it's about knowing each other to be able to delight one another, to know what their favorite candy bar is…to know with their shoe size is…to know what their dress size is…to know what foods they don't like. So that you don't serve them… and what foods that they love so that you can serve those…what their favorite donut is…or do they not even like doughnuts... These are the things that we need to know. And the only way we can know each other is to get into the deep end of the pool with each other.
You don't do that when you simply, just stay in the shallow end of the pool with each other. But also part of the Human Condition is recognizing that sometimes we'll be hit with strong emotions. Someone will make us really mad and we've got to work through that. And with this one…. what I've learned to do is use the psychological principle of Sorting. Let's say… someone makes you furious. The psychological principle of Sortingsays… that just like going to a wardrobe of clothes, you go and take something off the hanger and put it on and say…
“I’ll say this Na , na, na, na, na, na, na…” then and then you go… “Oh, that’d probably alienate them and we'll never have a relationship again…”
You take it off, put it back on the hanger. Take the next thing off the hanger and you might even escalate it up and say “No, I’ll say this: Na , na, na, na, na, na, na…”
And then you go “Whoa… that one would really alienate them and we'll probably never speak again”.
And then through the process of Sorting just like you sort through a wardrobe, you say, “OK I'll say this….” You put it on and try that on for size and then you say “No, I'll probably just say this…” And then finally work it back down to a manageable level. Sorting has allowed us to vent out some of that acid, some of that poison, some of that anger, and get it out.
It's ok… you don't have to be perfect. No one expected you to be perfect from the beginning. And… you deserve to bleed off some of that anger… If you can do it with a safe person, it's really cool, even if that person has values that doesn't let them be that “dirty” in their emotions. You can all kind of get used to it, and say “Wow that it felt good to at least be able to say it to myself… I'll never say it to them... but at least I could say it to myself" And then you do get back down to a respectable, respectful, reasonable thing that you will say that does keep relationship intact. Connect. Disconnect. Choose. And Connect in this relationship and keep it going…. Or am I going to Disconnect because it's too toxic. Those are the choices we make in life. But Sorting is one of the most powerful things that we can use as a tool to help our self, work through strong emotion.
And when you couple that with “GUTI time” (Get Used To It time)… When you give someone a new idea, often they immediately put defensive walls up and say “I'm not doing that”. “I'm not doing that… not doing that”. But they go home and sleep on it.
Yeah, a week later they go “Maybe I could do that…” And then before you know the GUTI time has worked its way through them and they are less defensive, less polarized, less oppositional… and so we recognize that part of the Human Condition is that everybody needs GUTI time… and we can give it to each other, it's a gift that we give each other to say “I'm going to present a new idea. They might not like it. but I'm going to give them some GUTI time and I won't freak out when they go,
'No. I'm not doing that…!' because they have the right to say 'No, I'm not doing that' because that's what Sorting is…" They're just Sorting vocally in the community rather than quietly behind the scenes.
One of the most powerful things that I use is understanding the developmental model of Lawrence Kohlberg. All of these developmentalists, they basically study life and the stages that humans go through and then they write about them. Understanding those stages help us to either understand what we've just been through… or help us to understand what we're going through right now… or help us to understand we're about to go through. That's the whole nature of a developmental model. One of the most powerful ones that I've found, that I use almost daily, in understanding the nature of The Human Condition, is the one given to us by Lawrence Kohlberg. Lawrence Koberg did the studies on moral development. How do people develop morally…? In a nutshell, here's what he said.
If you come to a stoplight at 2 o'clock in the morning there are three levels of moral development. Level 1, level 2, and level 3. The level 1 person will sit there until the light turns green because the law is the law. You don't ever break the law. Period. There's no question. You stay there because the light is red and when it turns green then you go through. It doesn't matter that it's 2 o'clock in the morning and no one's around.
The person at Level 2 will kick into a moral conversation in their brain and it goes something like this… “Man, there's nobody here… This is stupid. Why am I sitting here at the stoplight at 2 o'clock in the morning when nobody's here? If this was a stop sign… I would stop, look both ways and go through. But because it's a stop light… it holds more power… so I should stay because it holds more power. Yeah, I can understand why people don't go through red lights, because then there'd be chaos and anarchy in society and we can't afford that, so…" and then the same thing happens every single time, in the middle of their moral debate in their head, the light turns green and they don't finish the conversation.
And they go through. And then it happens again the next time… they get in the conversation with themself and they always go up to that same place that they never finish the conversation and so they always remain at level 2. Stuck… in the moral debate.
The person at Level 3 will do three things. They'll look around to see if there's anyone that they would hurt or anyone that would hurt them, because the law didn't drop down out of the sky and land on our laps. We made it up for ourselves. It's pretty clear you can't run red lights. And we made that law so that we wouldn't kill each other. It's the same law for double lines on a road. They're there for a reason, but we've made them up for a reason. If they decide that there’s nobody around that I will hurt then they'll do the second thing… which is to look around and see if there is a child present (for some strange reason) at 2 o'clock in the morning that they would be a bad influence on, because if they went through a red light, it might teach that child,
“Wow, you can just drive through red lights when you want to…” And so if they saw a child they might refrain and stay there so that the child would learn. “Yeah, if a light’s red, even if it's 2 o'clock in the morning… you stay stopped. They wouldn't want to be a bad role model, in other words. The third thing they would do is look around to see if there's a level 1 Cop hiding behind a billboard, because a level 1 cop will absolutely give you a ticket for running a red light. It doesn't matter what time of day (or night)it is.
Whereas, a level 3 cop will flash their lights (not their bubble lights but their headlights) saying in essence “I recognize what you just did. I recognize that you did it safely, continue to have a safe evening”.
And when you look around America today, there are level 1 politics, level 2 politics, and level 3 politics. There are level 1 churches, level 2 churches, and level 3 churches and people are just self-sorting. They're going to the place that they're the most comfortable, and that comfort comes from a lot of background baggage that we've got. My brother grew up in our household and was beaten by my father (for some reason my dad didn't hit me) but he hit my brother, and my brother left at 18 and went to Annapolis, and was in the Navy until he was 40. And at age 40 he called me and said
“Barry! I'm free! I retire today! No one will tell me when to eat, what to eat, what to wear, what to drive, when to wake, when to go to sleep… I'm free…!” And I found it interesting that within a three month period my brother became a born-again, fundamentalist Christian… because he needed to replace the government that was telling him what to do, what to wear, what to drink, what to eat, when to go, when to not. He replaced it with a God that would do exactly the same thing and tell him exactly in black and white what to do. So my brother was solidly a Level 1. He came to visit me in grad school and I don't claim to be a level 3 but I'm somewhere between 2 and 3 and he left these little sticky notes that were offensive to me quoting the scriptures on how I was living wrong and giving me little quotes on what I was doing wrong in my life.
I had invited him to come and visit me and he basically assaulted me every day with his value system. So I took him to class with me one day and I said “You’ve got to come to my class and see Dr. Martin.
Dr. Martin has three Ph.D.s… is one of the most brilliant professors I've ever heard. Linear logic like I've never heard in my life. And with the gift of wisdom as well. Come and hear Dr. Martin speak. We went to class, and Dr. Martin is a black woman and intentionally… I had not used a male pronoun. And he was shocked and said “Why is she teaching and why is she doing this and that?
And I did it just to kind of dig him to say “Hey look, we are different and different is OK because we both believe in the same God. We both believe in the same Jesus. But you believe that Jesus is a level 1… and I believe that Jesus is a Level 3 and we can still love our God, love each other and not have to beat each other over the head with our value system. Because traditionally level 1s hate Level 3s, “You wild-eyed liberal!” and Level 3s can't stand level 1s. “You narrow-minded little thinker”. When in reality, level 1s are level 1s because they usually come from a crazy childhood where there was no structure and there was physical abuse, sexual abuse, all sorts of things can happen that causes people to need structured, black and white little square boxes that work really neatly, even if life doesn't fit into them…
You make the boxes, because that's how life is supposed to be.
And I talked to my brother about Lawrence Kohlberg… and told him about the differences… and my brother and I now love each other very much.
He calls me his “Liberal brother” and I call him my “Fundy brother” and we've come to terms now with the differences in the Human Condition and how the Kolberg model is not meant for us to judge each other. It's meant to help us understand each other. And it's not that level 3s are better than level 1s… It's that we're all different and we grow different ways and we go through different life experiences that make us who we are… and rather than judging harshly, it helps us to understand each other and give each other a place to be who we are, and where we are, for that time in our life.
With generosity and kindness. Generosity and kindness. Two of the greatest virtues that I know on earth. All those things and that model of Lawrence Kohlberg helps me understand a little bit better the nature of the Human Condition and who we are, and how we can be good community with each other.
Telling you about Lawerence Kolberg tells half the truth because Carol Gilligan came along and said “You know Lawrence, you did your study on boys. So we need to understand how girls do moral development. So she did her developmental study and discovered that females also have three stages of moral development. One, two and three. And in the same way that you can't skip stages in Kolberg’s levels of moral development you… (and by the way, Kolberg does say that the majority of the American population is fixated and stuck at level 2, not level1, not level 3). But just always waffling in this world of trying to decide what to do and having a moral dilemma every time. But Carol Gilligan did her study and she said that girls grow up like this: They are socialized to be altruistic and give their lives to people around them and when they're fully in Level 1 they do that without question and obediently without any second thought, giving their life to everyone around them, because they are supposed to love people, and that's what they do.
Somewhere in there as they do their own moral development they say “Well I’m supposed to love people… I'ma people so I'm going to love me”. So they step out and love themselves… instantly they feel guilty and jump back to level 1… And when they get enough courage… they go back to level 2 and stand there for a while, and say “Nope, I definitely am supposed to love people around me. I'ma people and so I'm going to love me too and love others. And when they finally navigate through that channel, they move to level 3 and say… “I absolutely am fine loving myself, and it's OK for me to take care of me and not just exclusively take care of everyone around me”.
And so they go through a different set of moral developmental stages. And very important to be able to identify those so that you can liberate at the earliest time possible.
But since we're talking about the developmentalists… there are a couple I just have to throw in too to help understand the nature of the human condition. The next one is Benjamin Bloom who talks about the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. And let's just give an example: He says that there are levels of human knowledge. Knowledge is the first one, where you just understand an idea. Then you can move to the second level where you rather than just memorizing the idea, as we do in school, you actually Comprehend the idea, which is the understanding level. Then, you move to Application where you can make applications of that knowledge and comprehension. Then, you move into Analysis where you can analyze the ideas. And then into Synthesis where you can put the ideas back together in a new way. And then Evaluation where you can say “How well did we do with all of that?
An example of this… is when my son Landon went to school for Aeronautical Engineering. He can know that a plane flies. That's the Knowledge stage. But it's different when he can Comprehend how it flies… that it's air going over the wing that gives lift to the airplane. After that, he can do Application which would be being able to fly a plane, and from there he would go into Analysis, which would be his ability to take a plane apart down to its minuscule identifiable parts and lay them out on the tarmac (an entire plane) and then Synthesiswould be for him to be able to put that plane back together again making sure he didn't miss any of the nuts and bolts or screws and then Evaluationis where he can evaluate how well he had done on the whole process.
If you want to get straight A's in school… study Benjamin Bloom. Don't just throw back out knowledge. Teachers don't want that, professors don't want that. Don't just show that you comprehend it, but show some application, show that you can interchange with it and analyze the ideas. Be able to synthesize them and put them back together in new and creative ways and then do some evaluation about your work. You can get straight A's…
That's what life is about. They're trying to teach how to do that and if you can just take another glance at Benjamin Bloom before you start your higher education you'll do great.
The next developmentalist… His name is Erick Erickson and he did the Stages of Psychosocial Development. He's the guy that says that occasionally you need a Psychosocial Moratorium so… you finish high school and you just take a couple of years off and go travel around and just find out kind of who you are with the world and then go to college. So that's not unusual and that's actually a really healthy thing to do.
But as he studied the developmental stages that all people go through from birth to death, he came up with these eight stages. So what Ericsson does, is he lays them out through a person's lifetime. And he says that…
From birth to 18 months is the Stage: Trust versus Mistrust. Do I cry in my crib? Do my parents come and help me and assist me and take care of me? Or do they just let me cry until I cry until I'm cried out? Can I trust the world or do I mistrust the world? From 18 months to three years, this stage is Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt. If I start to walk and I use the couch as I'm walking along… am I encouraged to go and have fun. Or do they say “Now you get back here!” and don't have autonomy. From age 3 to 5, this stage he calls Initiative versus Guilt. Can I take initiative and start projects on my own or do I have guilt for starting things on my own because I've pulled away from my parents?
From age 5 to 13… This stage he calls industry vs inferiority. Can I start projects on my own or am I inferior and impotent to be able to start projects on my own and fulfill them to completion. From age 13 to 21… Erickson calls this age Identity versus Role Confusion. This is the time in life when we're in adolescence we're trying to figure out if we're the person that's a Jock, or a person that’s in Theater, or a person that's in Band, or a person that's a Geek, a person that’s a Head. It doesn't matter which group they end up in the end, it just matters or trying to figure out “Who am I?” Their sexual identity is determined during this time and they’re trying to figure all that out for themselves as well.
From age 21 to 39… he says this stage is called Intimacy versus Isolation. This is where we learn who our partners are going to be, what we're like, what our partner is like, what we are like together as a couple, in social settings, or will we be isolated and pull away and just be alone and just be single. From age 40 to 65… Erickson says this stage is called Generativity versus Stagnation and here's where we're at the point in our life that we're starting to say “How can I give something back to the world? What can I do in volunteerism or by having some sort of service that I'm involved in where I give myself back to the world that's taken care of me? And the last age from 65 on… he says is Integrity versus Despair. And remember the ages are not exact… they're just approximations, but Integrity versus Despair as we're trying to find out if we've lived a life that's filled with integrity and has had integrity and has had meaning and substance and value and weight.
Or if we fall into that other side where we feel like “Gosh, I really haven't done much with my life and I don't know if my life really counted…” So the important part of understanding Erikson is kind of, to know where you've come from, why you are who you are now today, and perhaps who you might be in the next stage… and then do those stages well. (It is) interesting, that now, we're trying to start wisdompool.I'm 60 years old… I'm in Generativity vs. Stagnation so I'm now wanting to give back to my world because I'm doing very much what Erikson said I would be doing, which is looking for ways to return the gifts that were given to me.