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Grizzly

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Poem: "In the Park" by Maxine Kumin, from Nurture. © Viking Penguin, 1989.

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You have forty-nine days between
death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim
the English Channel in that time
or climb, like a ten-month-old child,
every step of the Washington Monument
to travel across, up, down, over or through

–you won't know till you get there which to do.

He laid on me for a few seconds
said Roscoe Black, who lived to tell
about his skirmish with a grizzly bear
in Glacier Park. He laid on me not doing anything. I could feel his heart
beating against my heart.
Never mind lie and lay, the whole world
confuses them. For Roscoe Black you might say

all forty-nine days flew by.

I was raised on the Old Testament.
In it God talks to Moses, Noah,
Samuel, and they answer.
People confer with angels. Certain
animals converse with humans.
It's a simple world, full of crossovers.
Heaven's an airy Somewhere, and God
has a nasty temper when provoked,
but if there is a Hell, little is made of it.

No longtailed Devil, no eternal fire,

and no choosing what to come back as.
When the grizzly bear appears, he lies/lays down
on atheist and zealot. In the pitch-dark
each of us waits for him in Glacier Park.

Habits

clipped from www.vitalsmarts.com

Kerrying On

Breaking Habits

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Since the dawn of humanity, philosophers, scientists, and puppeteers alike have been asking the same penetrating questions: Do we have free will? Do we actually make choices on our own, or is our behavior determined by powerful forces from our environment such as nagging parents, our outlook calendar, or the snarling pit bull next door?

Kerry Patterson is coauthor of three bestselling books, Influencer, Crucial Conversations, and Crucial Confrontations.

During my first year of college I came to the conclusion that by the time I was aware that much (if not all) of what I did was, indeed, a function of my upbringing and surroundings, it was too late for me to undo the effects. The die had been cast. My language, my actions, my very methods of reasoning—all had been shaped before I realized what was going on.

So, I came up with a plan. In order to regain control of my will, I would act in ways that were opposite to my proclivities. Surely, this would put me back in charge. Ah, but this thought too had been shaped by my life's experiences and was therefore hardly a choice, so I'd do the exact opposite. I'd follow my natural desires. Wait a minute, this couldn't be right . . . and thus I swirled down an infinite loop of circular thinking until I eventually stumbled on a philosophy of my liking: gluttonism. I'd think about other (more important) issues over a chocolate milkshake.

And so I plodded along unfettered by concerns over free will/determinism until one fateful day—the day my wife and I bought our first home. Along with the automatic dishwasher and two-car garage, our home came equipped with, of all things, a test of my free will. The test was cleverly disguised as a redwood deck, but it was a test nevertheless and I couldn't easily escape it.

Here's how the free-will test worked. The first time I walked out on the second-story deck to take in the view, I leaned over the railing, looked down on our new lawn, and spit. I was thirty-four years old and hadn't spit in more than fifteen years. My wife certainly had never seen me spit. And my kids, well, the whole idea of their father propelling germ-laden loogies into space was beyond the pale.

Before the spit hit the ground my wife pronounced me a filthy beast, and my seven- and nine-year-old daughters squealed in disgust. Normally the three of them saw it as their job to ridicule me for burping aloud or drinking milk straight from the container. Now that we owned a deck, their job had expanded. Because from that moment on, every single time I leaned against the deck's rail, it pushed my spit button. It was creepy. I couldn't not spit. When it came to the deck, I was little more than a loogie-marionette, jerked into action at the mere sight of an open space below me.

As a child growing up in Puget Sound I had lived around docks where, like all of my childhood friends, I spit every time I looked over the edge. It's what boys did. Children, I'm told, often push their food off their high-chair tray, not solely as a means of rebellion, but as a method for learning depth perception. Perhaps my hard-wired act of spitting as I approached a railing was an extension of this mechanism.

In an effort to re-captain my spit reflex I tried personal pep talks. I'd approach my backyard deck and think, "Don't spit, don't spit! You can do it!" But then I'd get distracted ("Oh, a pretty butterfly!"), lean against the rail, and—patoohee—I might as well have been a cowpoke leaning over a spittoon.

"Dad spit three times," my daughters would tell my wife when she returned from the market.

I mention this problem of reflexively jumping into inappropriate actions not because I want to enter the free-will/determinism debate, but because it's highly relevant to something I do care a great deal about—improving one's interpersonal skills. Here's how the two topics relate. Much of our daily social interaction is tightly scripted. We engage in the same conversations so frequently that they become rote. In fact, if pressed, not only could we say what needs to be said without really thinking about it, we could act out both parts.

The good news is that these patterned responses free up our brains to muse about other things. The bad news is, once we start into a script, it's hard to change what we do and say. We follow the script much like a well-worn and familiar path—actually, more like a steel railway.

For example, one evening my wife asked me to request fry sauce (a local product) when I ordered our food at a hamburger joint. I entered the queue, waited my turn, and then the clerk started into the counter script.

"May I help you?"

"Why yes," I replied—and off we went. I didn't merely know what I was going to say, I knew what the clerk was going to say. He was going to ask me if I wanted fries and a drink and when I said yes, he was going to ask: "Large?"

Of course, once I switched into auto pilot, I flew through the interaction without much thought and, you guessed it, I didn't ask for fry sauce. I was never going to ask for the fry sauce because the interaction was programmed from the beginning. I started into the counter script, and once I did, I fogged over, coasted along, and stopped making decisions.

This particular issue becomes important to people who have decided to improve their ability to communicate with friends and coworkers. For instance, many individuals who attend our Crucial Conversations Training return to work feeling excited about the prospect of using their new skills. However, despite their enthusiasm, they often don't think to bring what they've learned into play when called upon to do so. When a conversation starts to heat up (at the very moment when they should be thinking: "Cool, this is a time to try out some stuff I learned!") they get sucked into an old script. Only after the conversation has ended do they realize they missed a good chance to behave differently. At the beginning of the conversation, just before they think to try out their new skills, the dominos of habit begin to fall and—clink, clink, clink—routine behaviors tumble down one after another until, once again, they've messed up the entire interaction.

But it doesn't have to be like this. There are ways to bring cognition—and with it, the hope for change—into highly routine interactions if only you can remind yourself to do so. For those of you who have found it hard to change your conversation style, here are a few hints for breaking the bonds of pre-programmed scripts.

Put up a Sign. This was the ultimate solution to my redwood deck challenge. I posted a sign (on the rail itself) that simply stated "Don't Spit." I would read it just before I hit my spit button and I eventually broke the habit. When it comes to learning interpersonal skills, trainees often post pictures of the model they're following right in their office. This visual cue reminds them of the new way of dealing with high-stakes issues at a time and place when they need the reminder.

Set Aside a Time. With certain behaviors or skill sets, it's best to set aside a block of time where you can practice what you've just learned. For instance, when it comes to holding a crucial conversation, devote an hour a week during which you seek out high-stakes discussions. Then, as opinions vary and emotions start to run strong, you'll be on guard to bring your newest and best skills into play—avoiding the pitfalls of rote scripts.

Get Cues from a Friend. When I become too forceful, pig-headed—and then maybe a tad punishing—my wife calls me on it. If my bad behavior is aimed at her, she says something to the effect of, "You're doing it again." She does this in a pleasant way; I stop, take a breath, and then try to get back on my best behavior. In public when she spots the same nasty habits (only I'm applying them to others) she gives me a look that serves the same function. You can contract with a colleague at work to do the same thing. In short, as you head down the highway of interpersonal disaster, trusted friends hold up a stop sign and you backtrack to the right route.

Apologize and Start Over. Sometimes we miss the cue that says we need to bring newer and better skills into play, but we don't miss the fact that we're now careening down a dangerous road because we've obviously made a wrong turn (i.e., followed our old scripts). When this happens, rather than keep on truckin' because you're already well underway, stop, apologize, and start over. With this practice in your arsenal, you don't have to be perfect, just willing to try again.

Well, it's time for me to head to lunch with a friend. He wants to go to this Thai restaurant up the street, but I'm a bit apprehensive. It's not the spicy food that has me worried. It's the building. You see, the place has this deck . . . with a railing.

Down with dreaminess

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

It's the birthday [9/19] of writer and editor Roger Angell.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Angell]

Born in New York (1920), he was mostly raised by his father, but his mother was Katharine Sergeant White, an editor at The New Yorker, and his stepfather was the writer E.B. White. Young Roger liked to read detective stories and books about cowboys and reptiles, and go to the movies.

He went to Harvard, then into the Air Force, and then worked for magazines. He wasn't really planning to be a writer, and after watching E.B. White slave over short columns for The New Yorker, write them over and over and still feel like they weren't good enough, he wasn't sure if it was the job for him. But after about 10 years at various jobs, and occasional submissions to The New Yorker, he found himself drawn back to the magazine. He joined the staff as a contributing writer and the fiction editor. He was the editor for writers including John Updike, William Trevor, and Woody Allen, and he is still a staff writer and senior editor.

In 1962, he was talking to William Shawn about baseball. He said, "I told him about spring training; he didn't know there was such a thing." So Shawn sent him to Florida to write about spring training, and he's been writing about baseball ever since. He said: "It never occurred to me that I was going to spend my life writing about baseball. I had no such plan. No such plan. And at no point did I say to myself, What I am is somebody getting together a body of baseball writings. I think of this as one piece at a time and hope that I'm still enthusiastic about the game, that if something happens I'll want to write about it."

And he said: "The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the Field of Dreams thing, gives me a pain. I hated that movie. It's mostly fake. You look back into the meaning of old-time baseball, and really in the early days it was full of roughnecks and drunks. They beat up the umpires and played near saloons. In Fields of Dreams there's a line at the end that says the game of baseball was good when America was good, and they're talking about the time of the biggest race riots in the country and Prohibition. What is that? That dreaminess, I really hated that."

The Woodcutter Changes His Mind

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

The Woodcutter Changes His Mind

by David Budbill

When I was young, I cut the bigger, older trees for firewood, the ones

with heart rot, dead and broken branches, the crippled and deformed

ones, because, I reasoned, they were going to fall soon anyway, and

therefore, I should give the younger trees more light and room to grow.

Now I'm older and I cut the younger, strong and sturdy, solid

and beautiful trees, and I let the older ones have a few more years

of light and water and leaf in the forest they have known so long.
Soon enough they will be prostrate on the ground.

"The Woodcutter Changes His Mind" by David Budbill, from While We've Still Got Feet: New Poems. © Copper Canyon Press, 2005

Where has all the water gone?

Lake Oswego Draw Down

Number 11

We’re No. 1(1)!

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 11, 2010

I want to share a couple of articles I recently came across that, I believe, speak to the core of what ails America today but is too little discussed. The first was in Newsweek under the ironic headline “We’re No. 11!” The piece, by Michael Hirsh, went on to say: “Has the United States lost its oomph as a superpower? Even President Obama isn’t immune from the gloom. ‘Americans won’t settle for No. 2!’ Obama shouted at one political rally in early August. How about No. 11? That’s where the U.S.A. ranks in Newsweek’s list of the 100 best countries in the world, not even in the top 10.” Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

























The second piece, which could have been called “Why We’re No. 11,” was by the Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson. Why, he asked, have we spent so much money on school reform in America and have so little to show for it in terms of scalable solutions that produce better student test scores? Maybe, he answered, it is not just because of bad teachers, weak principals or selfish unions.

“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson. “Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”

There is a lot to Samuelson’s point — and it is a microcosm of a larger problem we have not faced honestly as we have dug out of this recession: We had a values breakdown — a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism. Wall Street may have been dealing the dope, but our lawmakers encouraged it. And far too many of us were happy to buy the dot-com and subprime crack for quick prosperity highs.

Ask yourself: What made our Greatest Generation great? First, the problems they faced were huge, merciless and inescapable: the Depression, Nazism and Soviet Communism. Second, the Greatest Generation’s leaders were never afraid to ask Americans to sacrifice. Third, that generation was ready to sacrifice, and pull together, for the good of the country. And fourth, because they were ready to do hard things, they earned global leadership the only way you can, by saying: “Follow me.”

Contrast that with the Baby Boomer Generation. Our big problems are unfolding incrementally — the decline in U.S. education, competitiveness and infrastructure, as well as oil addiction and climate change. Our generation’s leaders never dare utter the word “sacrifice.” All solutions must be painless. Which drug would you like? A stimulus from Democrats or a tax cut from Republicans? A national energy policy? Too hard. For a decade we sent our best minds not to make computer chips in Silicon Valley but to make poker chips on Wall Street, while telling ourselves we could have the American dream — a home — without saving and investing, for nothing down and nothing to pay for two years. Our leadership message to the world (except for our brave soldiers): “After you.”

So much of today’s debate between the two parties, notes David Rothkopf, a Carnegie Endowment visiting scholar, “is about assigning blame rather than assuming responsibility. It’s a contest to see who can give away more at precisely the time they should be asking more of the American people.”

Rothkopf and I agreed that we would get excited about U.S. politics when our national debate is between Democrats and Republicans who start by acknowledging that we can’t cut deficits without both tax increases and spending cuts — and then debate which ones and when — who acknowledge that we can’t compete unless we demand more of our students — and then debate longer school days versus school years — who acknowledge that bad parents who don’t read to their kids and do indulge them with video games are as responsible for poor test scores as bad teachers — and debate what to do about that.

Who will tell the people? China and India have been catching up to America not only via cheap labor and currencies. They are catching us because they now have free markets like we do, education like we do, access to capital and technology like we do, but, most importantly, values like our Greatest Generation had. That is, a willingness to postpone gratification, invest for the future, work harder than the next guy and hold their kids to the highest expectations.

In a flat world where everyone has access to everything, values matter more than ever. Right now the Hindus and Confucians have more Protestant ethics than we do, and as long as that is the case we’ll be No. 11!