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I’m Voting for Participation

Random thoughts November 4, 2014 Leave a comment

I will vote later today, I will walk over to my polling place after I come home from work – all the way across the street – and then walk home for dinner and the rest of my evening. I used to vote when I dropped off my kids for school, or picked them up, once I was working full time. Having polling places that are accessible is a wise move. People are more likely to participate in something that fits in with their routine.

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Way back when I turned 18, long before these kerfuffles about voter id laws, my birthday was in October and I went in to vote with my parents a few weeks later in November – I registered right there. I was excited to participate, and hadn’t given much thought to the specific candidates or races until the moment when I pulled the curtain to close myself into the booth – other than governor. (It wasn’t a presidential election year.) It was one of those old machines with levers – including one that would allow me to vote straight ticket. One swipe and I could be done, having performed my civic duty. I was a bit dismayed that there were so many different races. And incumbents and opponents. I hadn’t prepared myself.

At that moment I realized that my right to vote, just like a lot of other things in life, was complex and required more from me than a bit of time and effort on Election Day. If I voted strictly based on party affiliation I could be voting for a person who wasn’t qualified. That didn’t sit quite comfortably with me, even then when I was still new to the adult world and believed that everyone acted with good intentions.

The newspaper has become a great ally in my quest to be a regular voter. I believe strongly in the importance of participation. Without the newspaper it would be much more difficult to be an informed participant. Who is running against whom, why, what do they stand for or against? So many names flow in front of us in TV ads, on flyers and bill boards and yard signs. The candidates don’t always tell us the basics – what office are they seeking, what party do they represent, what reasoning do they offer? Our Founding Fathers expected citizenry to be informed and act accordingly. (We won’t consider their understanding of human nature today.)

Regardless of each voter’s level of information on the candidates and issues, participation is a basic element. Without it, what can we expect?

The Strangeness of Ordinary

Random thoughts September 2, 2014 Comments: 3

The litany of ills and travails – big and small, natural, geo-political, economic – seems to be unusually long around the globe right now. Many people in many parts of the world are steeped in or trying to fend off chaos, their ordinary life set aside for the time being. But plenty of other segments and corners of the populated world go about their ordinary business day after day and only encounter the chaos when they access the news.

Does that seem a bit strange to you? While the main part of my mind is keeping track of my appointments, facilitating tasks at work, planning and cleaning and ticking through my days another part is contrasting my regular schedule against the topsy-turvy days of all the people affected by these various storms (manmade and natural). And wondering how these people that I don’t know are coping.

It is back to school season and I see the effect at the school across the street as I leave for work. My company supplies products to schools which means that we are quite hectic these days. But aside from some people having flooded basements thanks to all the rain, or difficulty getting in to the office for the same reason we are all going through actions that we have done for ages, routine.

I do know someone whose son was evacuated from Liberia due the Ebola outbreak but that is as close as I personally come to most of the turmoil. How about you? Do you have relatives in Ukraine or Israel or Syria or Ferguson, MS or…

August 2013 Political Map, credit Wikipedia

The world is a big place and it has always been true that there will be turmoil here and there and normal life will occur everywhere else. Routine is annoying, but also comfort. A seismic shift – either literal or not – that removes a person, a group, or a whole region from the ordinary usually seems to happen elsewhere. Until it doesn’t. Most of the time ordinary is just that, but every once in a while there is such a spike of chaotic activity, or the chaos hits too close to home, that ordinary seems rather strange.

I remember my first jolt of the strangeness of ordinary. We were all called together because my grandmother was not doing well, but when I woke up the next morning at my uncle’s house and heard laughter downstairs I believed that she must have made it through the night. Until my dad came up to tell us that she hadn’t. How could they have been laughing?

I used the phrase ‘seismic shift’ earlier in this post because I have experienced real earthquakes, including a major one, and it is quite disorienting to have the ground beneath your feet move violently. To see the damage that an earthquake can wreak up close. The mind can’t quite take it in.

Knowing that disquiet I can’t decide if it is right to carry on normally or that there is great strangeness in the ordinary.

Rule Bound

Random thoughts August 22, 2014 Comments: 2

Where do you stand on the role that rules play in life? Do rules create valid boundaries for protection of yourself, others, property? Do rules hinder you from doing what you really want to do? Do they offer guidelines? Is the rule the most important thing, what the rule is meant to safeguard, or is it the spirit of the rule? Do you think that rules should have a shelf-life, come up for periodic review?

I know people for whom rules are a means to an end. The rules are to be applied or ignored in whatever fashion necessary to achieve the goal. Perhaps sometimes just bent or loosely interpreted. Creative thinking is liberally applied.

I know people for whom the rule is the ultimate. The letter of the rule, the face of it – each rule stitched together with all of the others to provide these people with the comfort to get through all the moments of life. No creative thinking necessary.

And I know plenty of people of varying stripes between these opposites. And some who don’t seem to think much about rules one way or the other.

photo credit: Wikipedia

It couldn’t have been long after people started to congregate that it became clear that some sort of standard was necessary. Rules were born. And they can be found in nature – plants and animals have them. Do this, don’t do that.

Rules serve a purpose except when there are rules for the sake of rules. They help to create commonality and structure. But they can and should be examined for validity. (Old laws on the books can be very odd, and sometimes hilarious.)

I used to tell my boys that if they thought any of my rules didn’t make sense, they should tell me. Along with why. Scoffing at a rule is easy, but putting together a compelling argument why the rule should be removed or changed is important.

It comes down to one of my favorite questions – what is the intent? If the intent isn’t clear, well hmmm…. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it is ok to ignore or flaunt the rule.

How are the bindings on the rules around you?

Mr. Nobody’s at it Again

Random thoughts May 12, 2014 1 Comment

Two boys can get into rather a bit of trouble in the blink of an eye. Especially when led astray by a rapscallion like Mr. Nobody. I never clapped eyes on the fellow, but he apparently freeloaded at our house for quite a few years – from the time that my boys were 3 or 4 years old on up until they figured out how to get into mischief on their own or with their friends.

He just came into being one day – the day before the standard answer to questions about what was going on was the universal ‘I don’t know’ accompanied with a shrug and shifty eyes, the next day with a wink and a nod the answer changed to ‘Mr. Nobody did it’. I took to sharing pointers with the boys that they should pass on to Mr. Nobody. Like respecting property and what was considered acceptable or not. They would listen and solemnly agree to pass on the lesson or concern.

Mr. Nobody was a safe scapegoat who, to the best of my knowledge, never got into anything really awful or unforgivable. Well, there were the two broken windows (of the two windows in the boys’ room), but luckily no one was actually hurt.

Mr Nobody won’t show up for a few more years, but the mischief is there.

Boys have a lot of energy and curiosity which can be a dangerous combination – it is proven that males have a higher mortality rate from conception onward. Mr. Nobody allowed us to talk about dangers, actions and consequences without accusations. Sometimes the boys even participated in talking about how Mr. Nobody should be punished so that he would understand the gravity of his actions.

Mr. Nobody probably had a hand in helping the boys to develop their critical thinking skills – his invention was certainly a bit of creative thinking. He came about as a bit of avoidance, a hope of deflection – a sophisticated use of humor for boys so young – and he stuck around as long as he was useful.

Is there a Mr. Nobody in your life? An inspired invention that fulfilled much more than its original purpose. (My younger son says he was a diabolical super-villain. Ah, perspective.)

I Can’t Make Me

Random thoughts March 17, 2014 Comments: 2

That moment when you realize that you are really an adult might just have something to do with motivating yourself to do an unpleasant task. We think of being an adult as finally getting to do all of the things that we were prevented from doing as kids. If I thought at all about all of the things that require prompting to do, I assumed that adults didn’t need that external push. I found out soon enough that I was wrong.

This topic is coming to mind because I’m trying to get up the energy to do my taxes. Bleh. There are some chores that I don’t like I have come to a neutral place on – I just do them and as long as things go smoothly, I don’t think too much about it. But taxes never seem to go smoothly. Just the act of gathering all the right paperwork is so tedious that it brings out the obstinate little pouty kid who shouts ‘you can’t make me’ over and over.

My sister used to have a friend who went to the trouble to run the vacuum throughout the house without turning it on in an act of defiant compliance. Even as a kid I thought that defied logic – if you are going to go to the trouble to run it over the carpet, how hard is it to turn it on? But I also get the defiance, the dig your heels in contrariness of the act.

Sometimes even as adults we need to have someone else make us do something – hence the need for many laws – things that will give us great benefit like eating healthy, saving for retirement, getting our teeth cleaned.

There must be a solid evolutionary reason why we are so obstreperous at times. I have found myself splitting into two minds – one is being terribly unruly and the other is consternated not only by the childish stand but also by the choice of the fit. Why-ever have I chosen to cling to this particular cliff?

How about you, what was the oddest situation where you dug your heels in?

That Little Push

Personal Growth, Random thoughts, Work Life February 24, 2014 1 Comment

The sun rises, and even on a cloudy day, the world around us starts to wake up – circadian rhythm kicks in. External and internal prompts work together to give us a little push to start our day. Routine, or the schedule for that particular day take over to encourage our next moves. Is the pull of that day’s activities enough for me to push myself forward into it?

Probably very few of us found our internal drive worked consistently in our growing years. Little and big pushes to do this or that had to come from external sources – mom, dad, teacher, coach. The object was to teach us to develop our own internal drive, to push ourselves to do the things we needed to do so that we could achieve the things that we wanted to achieve. Oh, we needed no push on certain days, for something exciting – up, fed, dressed and maybe even got a few things ready for mom and dad.

Once we launch into our ‘real’ lives, our adult post-school experiences, that’s when we find out how well we internalized the push – our ability to create and implement a daily schedule. Some people do it so well, they can plow through even the most onerous chores without having to cajole themselves in any way. Some of us become leaders and push ourselves and our team through the good, bad, and the tedious. Many of us become parents and suddenly want to apologize to our own parents on a regular basis if it will help our children to find that internal push sooner and more strongly.

I don’t like to leave things hanging, but there are tasks that I dread or dislike doing. And then there are the ones that I’m not entirely certain how to move forward. I can usually figure out some means to push myself to do these things. Although sometimes I have to give myself a bye, and sometimes I just channel my younger self and wonder why I have to do this stuff at all. And sometimes I dream that I can hire an assistant who will take care of all these things.

Imagine what we can each do today, with a little push.

Breaking the Escalation Pattern

Random thoughts February 19, 2014 Leave a comment

How many times do we see the news or hear about a situation when we think how did it get to that point? Why didn’t someone intervene, somehow put a stop to it?

When to step in? How to step in? Who should step in?

I don’t remember how old my boys were when I started to talk to them about the part they could play in keeping things from escalating to a point where there is a loss of control and something unfortunate results. Somewhere in their grade school years, long before their brains would mature enough to develop impulse control. (Of course, age doesn’t always correlate to impulse control.)

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The calmest among us still has a trigger or two – perhaps one or both of the universal triggers, hunger and lack of sleep. The calmest people are less likely to be set off by their very calm nature, do they also better understand how to take action to keep their surroundings more serene? Or how best to respond to chaotic surroundings to keep themselves serene?

We are under constant bombardment from outside forces – bills, relationship pressures, the world around us – which can keep us at a low simmer. Add in one more aggravation and it might make a volatile mix. What do we each do to understand our own simmer, our own triggers; what do we each do to counteract or prevent our triggers from being tripped?

Diffusing a volatile situation takes some skill, but helping ourselves, a friend or a family member to ease down their simmer is a much simpler and more pleasant task. Breaking the escalation pattern early, before it even has a chance to start, is sometimes as simple as getting a meal with a friend, sharing a laugh or offering a hug.

A Highly Developed Sense of Duty

Personal Growth, Work Life January 17, 2014 Leave a comment

I came home from work last night with a blog post idea floating around in my head. This isn’t it, I hope to retrieve it later and have it show up on this site at some point. No, I walked in thinking I would just start in on the computer but the dishes called out, and a load of laundry too. Once those things were no longer disturbing my sensibilities, I didn’t have it in me to write that other post.

This post is about the sense of duty that drove me to work on the chores first. Is it a gene, a cluster of brain cells, or something else entirely? Why do some people have this sense practically oozing out of their pores and others wouldn’t recognize duty if their existence depended upon it? And then there are the majority of people who have just enough to keep them from scampering off to Tahiti and instead make a life which includes a considerable dose of responsibility.

I believe that I’ve written about this before. And I will certainly write about it again. Dad was big on fulfilling duty first. His words and actions showed us daily. I wish that I had more of this trait when it comes to keeping my house in good shape, but I have plenty of ways that I relentlessly apply my energy to duty first.

“Let’s have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
~ Abraham Lincoln
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A sense of duty is a very helpful thing to develop and maintain – I am thankful to have it. However, I have spent the last few years seeking to balance this duty with other important things too. Time with people that mean something to me, opportunity to gain new experience, pleasant pastimes.

Now that duty has been met, I need to get my head back into the right frame for that other post. First I will wish for you a nice balance of duty and leisure in your weekend.

Catching Up, Keeping Up, Staying Ahead of Things

Random thoughts January 8, 2014 Comments: 2

A New Year starts a fresh calendar, but the slate isn’t wiped entirely clean. There is much that gets carried over, all of the open tasks on your lists – wherever you keep them. And snow. We are having a much snowier winter than last year here in the Midwest and perhaps even snowier than average.

Whatever you thought you might do on a given day, show removal gets added in – almost every day of this New Year. This also means adding in longer travel times, altered routes, changes in plans. Instead of ticking something off of the endless lists, snow might mean moving it back days or weeks so that it lurks undone instead of smartly checked off. Harder to catch up, keep up or stay ahead.

In our house this year, it is my son who is taking point on snow removal here and for an older neighbor. He is both happy to help her out and weary that it has been so frequent. Snow and cold make me want to hibernate. I am happy to live in modern times with central heating, wicking fabrics, and the internet.

But home isn’t entirely solace and a cozy den from the cold. I have once again neglected to pour treatments down the drain regularly so that the main drain that is meant to efficiently and silently whisk used water from our house is calling attention to itself. I haven’t ever had this problem with any previous house so I can’t help but wonder if there is a design flaw in this particular drain layout – an awkward spot that narrows too quickly or bends too sharply and allows for difficulties if not given regular attention.

A few years ago, at great expense, I discovered that collusion between the long ago builder and some housing inspector allowed for the brilliant installation of heavy coated cardboard – called Orangeburg pipe, I believe – as the piping which connected all the houses in my neighborhood to the city sewer. Not surprisingly, this pipe fails to stand the test of time. The pipe for my house had lasted amazingly well, the house being in its 40^th decade. Lucky me, I was the lottery winner with a prize to pay out and new pipe to dig and lay out. With the bonus of a messed up front lawn for a year as things settled and grass reestablished itself.

Sometimes I feel like a maintenance person with a push broom. Push this personal thing along, push that household thing along, push this professional thing along. Go back to the beginning and start again. Replace the broom with a shovel and push that snow out of the way.

As thankful as I am for modern conveniences, is it an illusion that life was simpler and therefore easier to keep up with things in past generations?

Whose Job is it Anyway?

Personal Growth, Work Life October 16, 2013 Leave a comment

The result of the problem (incident, challenge, situation, happening, occurrence, negative event, etc.) lands splat in the middle of the team. Does everyone stare at it? Or perhaps everyone immediately finds busy work somewhere else? Maybe a couple of people circle in closer for a look at least until a supervisor moves in at which point everyone fades back?

The supervisor picks it up and starts to ask questions – what is this? Who knows something? Do the hands start to form into pointers, poking this way or that? If you get caught too close to the problem when the supervisor moves in, you become ‘it’ and that isn’t a desired position.

But why not? Turn things on their ear, at review time, and almost everyone on the team is likely to put that they are a ‘go-to’ person for the department on their review somewhere. When I read that as a manager, I immediately start to sift through my memory to see where they stood for those unclaimed problems. At what point did they jump in? How proactive were they with follow up and resolution? Did they know the point at which it should be escalated? Did they bring in the appropriate people from other departments to address it thoroughly? Did they solve the underlying problem to prevent a repeat incident?

I think some people might be more willing to get in there and claim a problem to solve if they realized that it is like being a mini project manager. You don’t have to do all the work, you must move the project from problem to resolution. This doesn’t mean all by your lonesome. You can bounce ideas off of co-workers, your manager. You can enlist the aid of the appropriate people in other departments. This becomes a chance to grow.

What happens to unclaimed problems at your office?