Write, now???

Sarah's Issues Blog

2009-09-17T16:57:00.001-04:00

http://sarahsissues.wordpress.com/

I've started a new blog, mostly work-related. See what you think.

uh...

2009-09-07T21:32:00.003-04:00

Thanks for the comment Helen, to remind me to come back to this. Of course now I've forgotten whatever it was that had been on my mind. I guess I was going to write about being laid off and working freelance and landing with the most incredible luck in a wonderful new job just before my severance pay ran out. I lead a charmed life. I keep getting little tastes of bad things happening, but they always work out to be the mildest version of whatever bad thing they are.

I'm outta here for now though, hoping for only a mild case of insomnia!

do I have time for this?

2009-07-14T06:29:00.002-04:00

Apparently not. I just typed 3 paragraphs and then either Blogger or my fingers had a spasm and it disappeared. It's hard not to get mad about that! There's no "undo" button here. I'm going to go do something else and try this later.

Hi. I'm back. I have a lot to tell you.

the year of working hard

2009-01-20T14:04:00.002-05:00

After listening to President Obama's inaugural speech, I have never felt so motivated to work hard in my life. Funny, I did start this new year with some personal hard work in mind (finding self-discipline, for one thing), but this is different and better. I feel like my own hard work does or could contribute to my country's hard work, somehow. The trick is not to spend too long trying to discern my exact calling, but just to jump in whenever and however I'm led. I do believe that when we are doing something we love, losing track of time and shedding self-consciousness, that's a clue to our own life's purpose.

a thought

2009-01-06T09:38:00.004-05:00

I read someone quoting someone else saying something like the following: "Who we really are is revealed by our daily schedule." It got me thinking, what are the things that I actually do every single day (more or less)?

* I pay a lot of attention to my child.
* I do, plan, or just daydream about something that contributes to making the world better for my child and everyone else.
* I drink some form of caffeine soon after waking.
* I delay getting dressed and brushing my teeth as long as I can.
* I analyze, obsess over, or maybe actually learn from some past mistake.
* I connect with friends through some medium (these days it's facebook).
* I make some token attempt to clean or tidy my home or office.

Who we really are is revealed by our DAILY actions, more so than by our dreams or plans or occasional actions. Or intentions. I found this a useful thought for the new year. I don't know if I agree that the dailiness is more important than other things, but it is a useful reflection. What do these things say about me?

a poem

2008-10-27T12:49:00.000-04:00

Two Kinds of Intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence: One acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from the outside to the inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.

(Mathnawi, IV, 1960-1968)
Rumi

3 levels of tolerance?

2008-10-20T14:07:00.003-04:00

Someone told me at lunch a nugget of advice attributed to Eckhart Tolle. Our real goal for whatever we do should be enthusiasm. If we can't muster enthusiasm for what we're doing, we should at least enjoy it. If we can't enjoy it, we should try to just accept it. If we can't accept it, we need to CHANGE something.

I don't know if this is about everything in life, or more about our jobs and roles. I can muster great enthusiasm for eating, then find myself with fat that I can't accept. So it may not be as simple as it sounds. Still good words for making me think about stuff.

For the record

2008-10-08T11:10:00.003-04:00

I would be happy to persuade anyone how to vote, but I respect people who make informed choices that align with their personal values. Focus on policies. Don't just listen to the ads, find out what people stand for and how they solve problems.

cancer and the candidates

2008-10-08T10:40:00.004-04:00

The Susan G. Komen Foundation, a neutral group, got the two US presidential campaigns to give answers to four questions about cancer and healthcare priorities. This link takes you to their answers. (click on the previous sentence.) Farther down that page is another link that sets out each candidate's healthcare plan point by point, side by side, so it's easy to compare.

For any of you undecided Americans out there, I would urge you to focus your decision on healthcare plans. Sure the economy is important, security etc. are all important, but if you have thought about all that and still have trouble deciding then consider healthcare.

Here's my reasons. Our insurance situation is obscenely unfair in this country. How many of us have wasted time and coordinated our health decisions around what insurance will cover or not, whether something is a pre-existing condition, whether we can even afford the co-pays or deductibles? How many health conditions go undetected or untreated because someone can't afford to go to the doctor? No, Medicaid doesn't catch all those people. I just finished paying off the bills for the birth of our child last year, when she was two. And now I'll be paying off my out-of-pocket maximum for my recent surgery for this year and into next. And this is all WITH a "good" insurance package. Now my career options are limited because I had cancer -- and that means I can't go freelance or take a break between jobs or I will lose insurance coverage for anything pre-existing. Forever.

Sure, I'm happy to be alive and well and employed, thrilled that I had insurance, but the greed of the insurance companies is now affecting my future and I resent that. There's no other explanation that I can think of for why they would exclude pre-existing conditions than it's an excuse to limit what they pay for. So it's greed. Okay, sure, they have to make a profit for their shareholders.... Then it's the shareholders who are greedy! I can accept living in a capitalist society if the capitalists have some compassion and integrity. Go ahead, make a profit on health insurance, but don't punish people for things that aren't their fault. Be creative and figure out a way to make shareholders AND patients happy. Americans make a big deal about "freedom" but we allow insurance and drug companies to keep us trapped and financially strapped. Whichever candidates you vote for, make sure they are going to do SOMETHING to free us from the high costs of healthcare and health insurance.

rally pics

2008-10-04T10:07:00.003-04:00

the crowd 3 hours before it starts:
Joe Biden:
Barack Obama:
How close I really was (no zoom):

rallying

2008-09-28T20:36:00.003-04:00

I needed a dose of hope and inspiration this weekend and I got it at a rally for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Couldn't believe they came to my town! And have visited our state more than once! They're not writing us off as a lost cause. Thank you, gentlemen. I will post a photo and more thoughts one day soon.

I love psychology

2008-09-17T10:30:00.002-04:00

psychology of the everyday

Have a look at the PsyBlog - I love this site.

drinking age

2008-09-08T18:01:00.006-04:00

There's apparently some stuff in the news about lowering the drinking age in the U.S. back to 18 - or not. Heated opinions abound. Binge drinking and irresponsibility also abound, among our 18 year old AND 21 year old youth. How best to control that beast?

Well, my experiences in London and Paris where the legal age was not much talked about or enforced showed me that binge drinking and irresponsibility are more a matter of personality, culture, and life circumstances than they are of age.

THE MAIN POINT I WANT TO MAKE IS... we need to send consistent messages about responsibility to young people. If we believe that at 18 they have the maturity to fight in a war, vote, enter into a legal contract, or be prosecuted as an adult in court, then we need to agree that they have the maturity to drink alcohol. If they're not mature and responsible enough to drink at 18, then we need to RAISE the age for fighting, voting, legal contracts, and prosecution as an adult. I don't want someone who's too immature to drink beer protecting my country and electing my President!

What if the requirement for legal drinking was not attaining a certain age, but something like having a high school diploma? That would keep legal drinking out of the high schools, which would help a little bit. And everyone at college would be on equal footing, all treated as adults, and there wouldn't be so much illicit intrigue about seniors buying booze for freshmen or whatever. And college administrators could address responsible drinking issues more openly and fully instead of not even being able to talk about it with students under 21.

Getting drunk has become a sort of (often repeated) rite of passage in America. What if we could find better rites of passage, that were still just as fun?? Whatever we do, the prevalence of binge drinking and drunk driving indicate that our country is not doing a good enough job of teaching responsible behavior and "consequences" to people before they become "adults". Unfortunately, our culture says too many things in a polarized way: it sounds like if you don't abstain completely, then you might as well go ahead and over-indulge because you're already written off and treated as such. No one seems to see the virtue in moderation and responsible decision-making, which are where the true skills of self-control lie.

Don't let the annoying people speak for you

2008-08-27T12:12:00.008-04:00

The link below goes to an interesting blog post about a psychology study that found how easy it is to convince people that your opinion is the opinion of the majority: repeat yourself 3 times. It's almost (90%) as effective as getting two other people to state the same opinion once.

If someone does repeat their opinion in a group conversation and no one else ever counters or challenges it, we tend to assume that everyone else in the group agrees with that person.

Loudest Voice

research question

2008-08-25T16:05:00.000-04:00

Attention grad students looking for a thesis topic:

What I want to know is, what makes people grow up to be selfish?

I have a hunch that there are two kinds of selfish people: those who grew up feeling entitled, and those who grew up feeling deprived.

Please anyone comment if you know something I could read on this topic!

respectful behavior

2008-08-21T10:34:00.000-04:00

How can you tell if someone really respects you, or not?

Research literature on “respect” is interesting but relatively sparse on concrete detail, especially if you’re trying to learn about respect across cultures. How does someone know how to convey or recognize respect if they haven’t grown up in the culture? You can of course pick up cues from observing, reading, and talking to people. Many people talk easily about respect involving “listening, valuing others’ opinions, appreciating differences,” etc. But what do those things look like, feel like, or sound like, on the ground? How exactly can you tell through behavior if someone is valuing your opinion or not?

The behavioral signals of respect clearly vary across cultures, even across personalities, and it’s not that easy to learn them unless you’ve grown up with them. For most of us, we know respect or disrespect when we see it or feel it in our gut; but when we try to describe it out loud we only achieve a skim of the surface – for example, talking about how we address people or how much direct eye contact we use. Those types of things can be learned from reading the many global business books available. Successful global leaders and networkers, however, have some additional ability or quality, something more than book knowledge. Respect is such a nuanced concept: there’s much more to it than memorizing rules about when to shake hands or kiss a cheek, where to sit or how to hold a business card. Most people, I suspect, just learn these deeper things (whatever they are) over time and experience. Is there any way to capture and then teach what they know? Can we bottle it?

Another complication is that respect is a two-way street, so to speak. You can try to be respectful til you’re blue in the face but respect won’t be conveyed until the other person recognizes it as respect. How many times have we all seen someone making the “right” behaviors and statements but they come across as phony or even disrespectful?

How do you know respect or disrespect when you experience it? Please comment (on this blog or just send me an email).

2050: minority majority

2008-08-18T13:28:00.000-04:00

I just read on CNN.com that the U.S. Census Bureau has projected some big changes for the U.S. American population by 2050, which is 42 years from now. I’m 42 years old. I’m halfway to becoming a minority in my country.

Some of you may think this is not such big news, and hopefully it won't be, but bear with me. It could be very interesting. First of all, here is the specific projection: that “non-Hispanic, single-race whites” will still make up 46% of the U.S. population but will be outnumbered by, collectively, all other races that the U.S. census identifies. Together, African-Americans, Hispanics and Hispanic Whites, Asian-Americans, American Indians and Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and people of two or more races will comprise about 54% of the U.S. population.

Forty-two is a meaningful age. (After all, it’s the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.) When my blonde, blue-eyed daughter is 42 in the year 2048, I will be 82, probably happily repeating my favorite stories in an Assisted Living facility. Emma will be in her prime, leading (I hope) efforts to make the world a better place. So by 2050, chances are that she will be leading from the perspective of a demographic minority.

So what?

According to the projections, the single-race, non-Hispanic white minority will still be the largest racial group. The way my husband and I are raising Emma will hopefully make her comfortable with people from all races. Growing up alongside the increasing “minority” population, she shouldn’t have the same hang-ups that some of us do who remember segregation and its effects, who struggled to figure out how to be friends with people of different races. In fact, idealist that I am, I’m hoping that the whole concept of “race” will be archaic by then.

But what if it’s not?

It’s not like my Emma would be in the same place that Barack Obama is now. Whites are still going to be historically dominant in this country, regardless. “White” is still, in many people’s minds (of all races) the so-called “normal” face of (north) America and I expect it will be for a long time. But things will change, and relatively rapidly.

The United States is a democracy and we are accustomed to “majority rule”. So the concepts of minority and majority are important - all tangled up in POWER. By 2050, will people of color (not a great term but better than “non-white”) be united enough to feel and act like a majority? Will whites as a whole respond to minority status with open minds or with defensiveness? Will we try to manipulate the system in order to stay dominant? Will we clamor for Affirmative Action, or keep our mouths politically-correctly shut?

What will our country be in for in the areas of health, crime & justice, education, and poverty, where there are already noticeable racial disparities? These lived statistics are the legacy of whites’ historical dominance. Will demographic forces magnify the inequities or cause them to finally be given our full and best attention? Or, hopefully, will this be a moot question because we’ve actually solved the problems by then?

More on this topic in a later post. I welcome your comments.

Can I just say...?

2008-08-14T10:03:00.001-04:00

I'm tired of reading articles about leadership that start out telling you something like, "the challenges leaders face are more complex today than ever". Don't we know that by now? And they always mention globalization. Yes, the world has been getting smaller forever! You've just noticed?

I also get annoyed with the baby boomers continuing to comment on "technology" (catch-all term for all the gadgets they struggle to learn how to use) and how it's changing everything. Please stop talking about that - it just makes you sound old.

Complexity and technology are not big news anymore. They're givens. I guess I (vintage 1965, first year of Generation X) just don't remember a time when technology wasn't changing things. (It all started with the VCR: allowing us to have some control of our media diet beyond "on" or "off".) I'm kind of stuck in age-identity limbo, right between the boomers and the thirty-somethings. I'm not a techie, myself. I never learned to program a VCR, and I don't use nearly all of the features on my camera, but I definitely feel more on the side of the younger generation in my attitude to technology.

More on working from both ends of a problem

2008-08-13T12:10:00.000-04:00

We had a guest speaker at work yesterday, Martin Tan, who is co-founder and Executive Director of the Halogen Foundation in Singapore. His presentation and my conversation with him really got me thinking about how I can better connect my personal passions and volunteer work with CCL work. I’ve always wanted to work with “disadvantaged populations”. I feel a calling to do what I can toward leveling the playing field, so to speak. So in my first conversation with Martin, before his presentation, I was thinking about that kind of work and trying to mentally apply what he was saying to helping people who are disempowered -- people who are far from the typical CCL clientele.

We were talking about role models and images of “leaders” that children grow up with and how important it is to have a model that you can actually imagine yourself emulating. If our image of “a leader” and the role models we think of are powerful public figures like kings or presidents, or exceptional heroes like Mother Theresa or Mohandas Gandhi, not many of us will feel like we can meet that level of criteria to be “leaders”. However, if our image of a leader includes someone like a parent, coach, teacher, or neighbor, then many more of us will feel hopeful that we too can be leaders.

The degree to which children are encouraged to aspire to leadership varies quite a bit – across culture, class, and family (I need to find out if there is research on this). Some children are raised from birth to think of themselves as leaders or to aspire to be leaders, and good role models are pointed out to them and placed in their path. They are applauded when they exercise leadership behaviors and chastised when they are too passive. Other children are raised from birth to think of themselves as followers, and whenever they try to exercise leadership they are chastised for being too assertive and are encouraged to “step back in line”. They receive praise for compliance and good humor. For these children, the good leaders they encounter in their lives are nice to follow but irrelevant as role models.

Neither of these two extremes is necessarily better than the other. There are positive and negative consequences of raising children for leadership: one positive is building their self-confidence; one negative might be creating feelings of superiority to others which can lead to arrogance. Likewise, there are positive and negative consequences of raising children to follow: one positive is developing cooperative behavior; one negative could be creating feelings of powerlessness which can lead to apathy or resentment.

The world needs people to follow as much as it needs people to lead: we need young people to grow up feeling confident and cooperative, feeling neither “entitled” nor “victim”. What if, instead of categorizing ourselves as leaders or followers, we more mindfully encouraged every person to be both?

This insight is not completely new in the world, but it got me thinking in a new way about what I want to do. The Halogen Foundation are already operating from the belief that all humans can be leaders and that all leaders need to know how to (and be willing to) follow. They define leadership very simply for young people: it’s influence. You can influence people for good or ill, but either way you are leading. They tell young people, “All of you have this capability.”

One thing in particular that Martin said made an impression on me: that Halogen will refuse to do leadership development programs for any subset of students in a school – whether the elite or the disadvantaged. Doing either would undermine their message of equality, so they’ll only do programs for the whole school. Halogen’s work serves the elite and the disadvantaged at the same time and brings them closer together. So now I’m re-thinking my own focus on a subset of the population. Why would my message (whatever exactly it is!) not apply to everyone equally? Food for thought.

Still trying to find my purpose...

2008-08-12T12:12:00.000-04:00

Someone told me about a quote she read from author Susan Sontag relating to “locating your privilege on the map of someone else’s pain”. Never mind what Sontag was actually saying in the original quote. What I took from hearing it second hand was, “Figure out what your greatest privilege is, see what other people suffer who don’t have it, and do something about that.” In other words, the clue to your purpose in life lies in sharing or leveraging your privilege.

I’ve had many privileges and blessings in my life, but one answer came to me immediately when I wondered what my greatest privilege has been: “having great parents.” The next one that came to mind was "becoming a parent." So now I’m focusing on work that will help people in some way with parenting.

The other belief I have is that we must work at social problems from both ends simultaneously. So I’m thinking about ways to help all people be good parents and ways to help people who suffered from "bad" parents. Also how to help the elite as well as the disadvantaged, because of course any of us could end up with any kind of parents.

To anyone reading this, what is your greatest privilege? And does this idea of "locating your privilege on the map of others' pain" resonate with you at all? Please comment.

life's little paradoxes

2007-09-23T16:22:00.000-04:00

I'm so worried about my health and my weight that I can't do anything but eat cookies.

quick, some creativity!

2007-09-23T16:11:00.000-04:00

It's 4:20 on a Sunday afternoon. Water is boiling for the resented placebo (decaf), toddler waking unhappily... I just created this blog to be kind of a public (semi-public) journal and outlet for creative writing. Or uncreative. Opinion, commentary, essays, stories, or -- more likely -- fragments of stories. Please comment if you're inspired to. I'll read them all but I may not post them all.