A new calendar on a desk or on a wall is a possibility for change.  Each January  brings new calendars with spaces for new appointments and ideas.

Calendars are a miracle in bringing people together.  They unite us and organize us as a collective on a planet.  By the calendar, we, on a round globe, are all on the same page, within the same day, occasionally separated by a date line.  It is truly magical. By our calendars, we agree to meet, and, if we are on the same page and remember what day it is and what time it is, we do. Within those meetings, if we let them have a little breathing room, new and unimaginable things happen.

Calendars can remind us of what we love.  I like wall calendars full of pictures, numbers, and pure white squares, each one ready for soemthing to happen.  My mom  likes cute animals: kittens and puppies, ducks and geese, chickens and roosters, pigs and horses. She loves them. (I wonder if a calendar with great pictures can take the place of having a pet.) My personal favorite calendars were from Gary Larsson’s Far Side and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. For me, nothing since then has matched those sublime little stories within a single picture.

Calendars take us through seasons, both natural and legal. In the New Year, we prepare to organize, even if it’s just to pay taxes. Even if you don’t believe in the power of the Winter Solstice, celebrating New Year’s Eve, or taxes, the New Year brings us from darkness into daylight. It is hard to ignore.

This year, you may simply use your Blackberry or iCal to update To Do lists and appointments. These are very helpful and necessary. But where are the cute cartoons and funny pictures? I do miss them.

I find it helpful and grounding to have that hanging paper on the wall, or that book on the desk.

To keep track of time and change, I also keep an organic calendar of my own, a journal, in which I write every now and then.  In addition to my wall calendar, at the end of the year I can look back over these notes and refresh my life meaning before the treat of the next year’s calendar, it’s open possibilities, and pictures to make me smile.

When we don’t get social feedback, it upsets neural responses, so we have to learn to override that stress, by increasing our understanding. When we are informed, our customary emotional responses need to be readjusted — but only slightly. It may help to know that you are not alone. Very few people understand that we humans are largely in denial and in the dark about how our brains and feelings are responding to lags in online communications. I believe that, if we understood more, we would be able to cope better.

In the traditional workplace, we show up, sweep off the doorstep, to show we are open for business. Similar to face-to-face environments, showing up is a big deal. In an online environment we “show up” by contributing, such as by writing regularly, and by staying in touch with communities we would like to be a part of. It’s really great when we make a connection!

Through my articles, and planned seminars, I seek to teach people to understand the dynamics of how their brains work in online environments and how groups can better connect. This understanding should help them to get a handle on the emotions and frustrations, so that they can focus on getting the job done, whether seeking work or completing work already assigned.

If there are any areas that you would like to ask about specifically, I would be glad to write about those areas and post them through my web site ( www.thewellmanmethod.com ), and my facebook page (The Wellman Method) and Twitter (wellmanmethod). In this way, your question can help others. If you have any topics that could help others, please suggest. Perhaps it will start a new discussion group.

I make time available by appointment through telephone or Skype. This way, I teach people how to deal with their specific emotional and mental blocks.

Feel free to contribute to the discussion!

The virtual world sets up new anxieties: the faceless void.

Many people are sending out resumes to online sites, and often hear nothing back. HR resources are cut in many companies, which creates a void in responsiveness. Many companies say not to phone or call.

All of this leaves the individual at a loss and not knowing what the reaction was. Most of us are social creatures. Our sense of self and reality is confirmed by those around us. The lack of response in the online environment is very high in the job search arena. If people can’t see how they can use you, they won’t respond. Worse yet, if no one is responding, do I even exist or matter?

This sense of futility often accompanies job searches and is a key psychological matter that needs attention.

In these cases, it is very important to stay close to your friends, remain creative, and take care of your health and stress levels. Keep your vision fresh and going strong. Talk to people who will encourage your strengths and be honest about your not-so-strengths. Redefine friendship if you need to, to see these people as your friends.

Some people use visioning partnerships to keep moving forward. The Wellman Method is an example of one of many of these. Using a visioning partner, you can explore strengths and integrate these with your life story. From this you can refresh your personal vision, keep appraised of changes in the market place, consider moves, and have new hope.

This is important – even if you are a success.  Keep dreaming and dreaming large. Keep moving forward. Otherwise, as Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, “What we have here is a dead shark!”

So here’s to keeping your shark alive and swimming forward into the world of business!

Leadership development remains a mystery to most, which can make it difficult to choose or justify a results-oriented coach or leadership development program. While there are infinite ways of approaching this topic, this post is going to define leadership development in four stages or steps of increasing self-awareness to metacognitive awareness.

Research shows that leaders are aware of what is going on around them. And the best leaders continually integrate information and communicate it so that others feel included. Some leadership styles are authoritarian, while others are more democratic. This brief sketch includes both kinds of styles.

This step-by-step guide will be based in a sense of purpose, but it can also be understood as knowing defined goals.

A Very Brief History of Leadership Development

In the 1960s, leadership development was a matter of a retreat that could take 3 weeks or longer.  This pressure cooker allowed executives to achieve greater awareness–which they called “personal development”–which allowed them to understand their employees better.  This metacognitive awareness opened doorways to shared understanding.  This inclusive state of leadership is a characteristic of what we now call transformational leadership. A transactional leadership style gives instructions and says what the employee needs to do to get paid.  Either kind can work, depending on the temperament of the workers.  Usually, employees and coworkers prefer a style that demonstrates some degree of interest in the employee’s welfare and so opens up potential of listening to input.

A Word about 360-degree Feedback

With the retreat seminars also came a realization of the importance of feedback. 360 degree feedback is now used universally in all organizations to create new results. Feedback has become a form of formalized communication with an intercessor (a coach) and the next step of metacognitive awareness.

These days, we have many feedback tools in the coaching industry.  These are computer printouts that tell us about ourselves after we have answered a series of multiple-choice questions.  Typically, following the printout, the executive or employee has a session with a feedback expert to discuss the feedback and begin to work on areas that are called “weak.”  The problem with this approach is that we can spend a lifetime working on “weak” areas, because we are just not born that way.  However, this is good for your coach, because it means a long period of guaranteed income.   Other coaches are “strengths” based and help you to develop your strengths.

So, is this really scientific? Is it subjective? Or is it objective with measurable results? I will discuss how it is and how it isn’t.

It’s subjective: Leadership is perception. If someone thinks of you as a leader, then you are one to them.

It’s objective: Leadership is an agreed-upon status. You have a job that allows you to administrate or inspire others toward a defined and described goal.

In either case, here are the stages toward leadership. Starting from you and your Self, circles of awareness move out from there:

1. Self (often defined by purpose)
2. Self and Goal (often defined by purpose). This takes planning and effort to articulate.
3. Self and Other and Goal (often defined by shared purpose). We bring in others to help us to reach our goals. When we do this, we have the opportunity of expanding our awareness to include them and how they see the goal. We do this as leaders, to be able to predict how and when we will reach the goal.
4. Self and all Others and Goal(s) (often defined by shared purpose. We bring in more others and see how they interrelate and create a shared understanding of how to reach the goal. As leaders, the more aware we are of how they will reach the goal, how reliable they are, and what motivates them, and how they fit together, the more we can predict how and when we will reach the goal.

That is the size of it. This will give you enough information to select a consultant or leadership development coach to help you to achieve your goals. It will also guide you to choose your team and encourage you to learn about them.

The continuous integration of self and purpose and goals and others is the activity of leadership. It is a continuous activity.

Metacognitive Leadership development contains an awareness at these multiple levels.  Sometimes it is helpful to develop a shared leadership paradigm so that everyone shares responsibility for holding aspects of awareness. That is good management structure, when you have set up a communications system that acknowledges expertise in all the following areas.

Put another way:

1. awareness of Self
2. awareness of others
3. awareness of direction, purpose, and goals for the group.
4. Leadership awareness that is integration of all the above.

Leadership development requires metacognitive awareness. What is that? Here is an example:

If you have self metacognitive awareness you are aware of your actions and what effects those actions have. You know how to achieve goals because you know how to plan and sustain your energies. You know how to communicate your ideas to others becuase you have an awareness of how your words can influence them and teach them.

This begins to take you from Self awareness and what you can do on your own into Other awareness and how others can help you to do what you set out to accomplish. Metacognitive awareness also allows you to assess what the abilities are (i.e., the resources) of those around you to accomplish your tasks. In a perfect world, you know that anything can be done with unlimited resources. As resources become constrained you adjust goals and deadlines or you add to the talent pool or change it.

So, when choosing an executive coach you can focus on one of the stages and then you can measure the progress for yourself.  Do you want to

1. Develop your own personal vision and purpose?
2. Develop your awareness of one of your colleagues, and their skills, goals, awareness and purpose?
3. Develop your awareness of two or more of your combined colleagues, and their skills, goals, awareness and purpose, and how they interact?
4. Develop integration awareness of all goals and purpose and their skills, awareness, goals, and purpose?

In the process, you as a leader with goals to achieve, must communicate to others what the goals are and how you see you are proceeding toward them. The joy of leadership development is really You development. Enjoy the process.

Mark: Can you describe what makes you unique and distinct from other consultants or executive coaches.

RCW: Well, first of all, I believe in the regenerative and developing brain.  Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize winner for his work in neuroscience on memory, observed that the neurons seek something familiar and grow new synapses to connect.  I also believe in T.S. Elliot the poet who said, “Only connect.” I work with connection instead of problem solving.

A lot of consultants focus on problems and provide answers. This is their job, to solve problems or come up with answers. But nobody really has all the answers. Every situation is unique. I’ve read a lot of books on how to make your business succeed.  But in the end, I believe that the person who is in the situation is the one most informed about the situation.  So I find a way to get them to talk about it. And they start coming up with new information that they didn’t even know they had.

Executive coaches use a lot of different methods, so I can’t really generalize.  But what makes me unique is that I have organizational knowledge about how people work well and what motivates them.  I also believe that everyone is looking for someway to make sense of the world.  And the only way to get to that is to find out what is making sense to them now, or what and when was the last time something made sense. And then I draw connections between that way of making sense and bring it into the present moment.  Experts know what they know, but that knowledge has to apply to the situation.  There is no one answer.

MS: So what is your approach?

RCW: I energize the brain.  I make observations. I ask questions. I rephrase and encourage reflection.  All of these activities massage the brain and stimulate the neurons to look up and look around.  Then, if you allow the brain to proceed, with proper support and tranquility, the neurons will grow new synaptic connections and energize the entire person. I see it in their eyes. A radiance comes over the entire face.  The “aha” moment is far beyond intellectual.  The neurons find something they  recognize and link up. It is a miracle.  We were born to think like this, but it happens in the context of peace and awareness.  It happens in the space of a kind of friendship of trust.

MS: What about goals?

RCW: I think goals are good. You need a mental model in place to hold things together while you find out what it is you are really meant to be doing. Sometimes it can be good to say, “I’d like to be more like that person.”  But would it? I find that when you know yourself, you don’t really need those mental models anymore. Those models are like training wheels. Once you know who you are, you take off the training wheels and just go.  No one can stop you because you are having so much fun being yourself.  The goals become a means of being yourself.

MS: So the goals become secondary?

RCW: Absolutely.  But once you are experiencing all this energy that comes from being authentic, you need something productive to do.  So, in a way, you just start eating up goals and producing a lot.  In a way, you can turn out to be an overachiever. Reaching far beyond any goals you ever dreamed of.

Mark Solomon is an Emmy-nominated television writer/producer.

Hello All,

It was a 4-hour drive from Ojai down the 101 then 405 to San Diego where 10 of us met at the UCSD Faculty Club.  But how exciting!

On Wednesday, Sept 15, 2010, Tom Munnecke hosted a 2-hour forum with James Fowler, (see  http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/cooperative_behavior_cascades.pdf :

“The results suggest that each additional contribution a subject makes to the public good in the first period is tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence. These are the first results to show experimentally that cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks.”

The purpose of the group was to discuss the relevance of Fowler’s research to implementing positive changes in health care and health care delivery. In his invitation to us Tom said: “This is a topic that Heather and I have been thinking about for at least 15 years, picking up on Jonas Salks’ thoughts that it is possible to “create an epidemic of health” here is our paper on the subject: http://munnecke.com/papers/USM01.doc”

Tom Munnecke (host) introduced Dr. Fowler, who spoke about his research to an eclectic group, and then hosted a discussion.

Of interest to me were the diverse points of view from experts in their fields:

Lewis Shuster – Stanford MBA, former COO of Invitrogen, active in personal genomics startups

Joseph Weiss, MD  UCSD Med school, plus his Nancy Cetel, MD, and daughter Danielle Weiss, MD.

Jay Kunin, PhD from MIT/Sloan; has done a lot of work on innovation and biotech startups.

Heather Wood Ion – cofounder of Uplift Academy, co author of our paper on Epidemic of Health, friend of Jonas Salk from whom the idea emerged

Stan Pappelbaum, MD, former CEO of Scripps Health, now consultant to a variety of health care delivery organizations

Tom Velez – CEO of Computer Technology Associates, a health care IT company.

And me– Renita Wellman – (current area of research is establishing communications practices in virtual teams), psychologist, coach, www.theWellmanMethod.com

Following James Fowler’s presentation, there was a spinoff discussion from varying position of expertise and a great deal of experience in the health services field.  Some of the points were:

(a)   seeking an alternative to hierarchy in health services

(b)  pointing out that “health teams” are often not really teams as in the combat squad sense where people really rely upon each other

(c)  how to change health systems – perhaps from the edges as opposed to a frontal assault

(d) a new generation of health practitioners is working to create change from microcosms in their own practices, employing a leap of faith

(e)   Directional asymmetry has value.

(f) Hospice teams are a good working model of effective health teams and so are operating room teams.  It was pointed out that operating room teams are there for a clearly defined objective (and, I would add here, each one knows their role).

(g) Teams which misunderstand that teamwork is unquestioning agreement make mistakes:  medical teams need a corrective voice embedded in them, so that they don’t just blindly do what all the others are doing (e.g., removing the wrong arm).  An example of mixing up teams for greater effectiveness: Co-pilots are switched regularly as partners to ensure safety.  For me, Renita, this was a fascinating point—to remain a team, while questioning and not always trusting that what is being initiated is the right thing.

(h) One question about Fowler’s research–a bias that all social connections are good–was how to approach social decision-making to break with associations that may not be a healthy influence on mental or physical health.

(i ) another was how to enter closed-off groups such as smoker’s groups to influence health habits

(j) For me (Renita), personally, it was a chance to consider how overlapping narratives and values can be useful.

We suggested using MeetUp.com to keep in touch and continue discussing ideas.

Best to all,

Renita

Executive coaching typically focuses on individual development, not on group processes. There are very few coaches who can separate and then integrate the two—monitoring group processes as well as acknowledging individual talent.

Look for someone who is familiar with coaching communications, processes, and noticing and integrating talent.

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005

David Foster Wallace

Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious

guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting

this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you

finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children

will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

We are social beings. We are social beings who learn about who we are through making sense of interactions. We create stories and narratives to make order of these events.

That means we learn through our experiences with others and deepen these by integration and self-reflection. The more deeply we live, the more complex our branch and root systems are.

As social beings, we seek to develop complexity and our brains are interwoven with faces of people and markers of places. Any person who interacts with others, who travels and integrates other cultures, or who reads with depth of interest has the chance to grow and change more than those who are shut off from new experiences. They will tell you that they have grown and changed through others.

Changes in our situations affect us as well. Sometimes not positively.

Trees which are easiest to move have fewer roots.  The oak is very difficult to move without traumatizing the roots, which must be bound and protected from shock during transference. The palm tree is easier to move as it has shallow roots.

If you have ever revisited an old neighborhood where you grew up, you may feel uneasy or sad if the house where you grew up is no longer being cared for.

This is experience and response is shared universally, by all human beings.

We carry our stories — our narratives. We are social beings who learn through experiences with others and deepen these by integration and self-reflection through creating narratives.

We carry in ourselves a sense of who we are and work to create continuous meaning. By considering our stories, we can care for our branches and roots and keep expanding in strength.