Today I received a challenge:

Imagine that any aspect of your habits or thinking could be rewired with enough practice. What would you change or rewire? Why?

Last summer, I was a pedestrian hit by a car. For someone in that situation, I got off very lightly. Most of my physical injuries have healed, however I am still significantly impacted by the post-concussion symptoms.

In thinking about this challenge today, I want to fix the wiring that was shaken loose in the accident.  Ultimately, I would love to learn more about how my brain works and what kind of exercises can enhance that, but for now I think it's enough to simply heal and strengthen the wiring to be less susceptible to future shake-ups.

Goals and Process

When my daughter was here a week ago, she started a jigsaw puzzle. I've been puttering on it over the week since and I'll likely finish it this afternoon.

While I was puzzling, I remembered some professional development class I took years ago. We had an exercise where each table was given a set of jigsaw puzzle pieces and 5 minutes to work on it. After the 5 minutes was up, each team was given the picture for their puzzle and another 5 minutes. After the exercise, we discussed the lesson of how it was much easier to accomplish the purpose (completing the puzzle) when we knew what the goal was (the picture).

At my table, though, we were only 4 pieces short of completion at the 5-minute mark and it was obvious where they went. The picture was moot by the time we got it.

What was different? We had TWO very experienced puzzlers who had PROCESS for tackling the problem - highly compatible processes with a common understanding of the ARCHITECTURE. We tasked the other 3 people with sorting out specific piece traits that we identified. Then together we worked the initial structure of the puzzle. It helped that we had a similar vocabulary for describing the pieces (meta-language) so when we described a space we had, the other easily handed over the matching piece.

The lesson is not that process is better than a common goal. We had a goal. By looking at the pieces, we knew a lot about the final goal - dimensions, texture, and complexity level, for example. Process enabled us to (1) divide and conquer the work with minimal discussion and making best use of skill sets and (2) accomplish the bulk of the work with a less defined goal, allowing the goal to evolve.

I read a lot toward professional development, including process and team management. In my readings, I've noticed two major approaches - one lead directing a team or a team of equals taking the assignments round robin. A team with one lead is limited by that lead's blind spots and by the team's willingness to follow the lead's personality. The lead is also a frequent bottleneck. A team of equals is limited by the average skill level of the team and how well the team handles their knowledge base. It suffers from a lot of rework. In the puzzle exercise, two leads institutionalized the authority and prevented the bottleneck. It also allowed for growth and skill development in the rest of the team.

I wonder why I've never seen a team model with two leads. I wonder if architecture and process life cycle models would be more effective and more workable with a dual-lead approach.

The only rational thing to do

I'm coming to the conclusion that Buddhism is the preeminent rational approach to the world - interacting with reality as it is rather than with models we construct in our minds for how we *think* reality works.

Many of the arguments I hear in American public discourse - what to do about the Gulf Coast oil spill, what to do about the continuing recession, what to do about health care, what to do about jobs, etc - suffers from two fundamental problems. (1) People aren't really talking about what they say they are talking about; and (2) people don't agree on how reality works.

How many times have you had a conversation where the person you are talking with agrees with all your premises but disagrees with your conclusion? My husband, Jon, has an example he likes to use: he and a friend talking about the Iraq war. They agreed that all of the stated reasons for war were debunked and that there were no other reasons out there to list and yet they vehemently disagreed whether the war was justified or a necessary thing.

I read an op-ed piece in today's New York Times about the rage of the Tea Party demanding, among other things, government to stay out of their health care and especially their Medicare (which is and always has been a government program). The piece lays out an interesting thesis that the Tea Partiers are really talking about dependence and not about the government.

This Wednesday, the US District Court for Northern California will be hearing closing arguments on the challenge to Proposition 8 passed by California voters in 2008 to ban same-sex marriages. The transcripts of this trial have been particularly interesting. One of the main "issues" around same sex marriage is that it harms heterosexual marriages (or the "institution of marriage") and/or that children are harmed. People sincerely believe both of those things and yet the actual evidence shows that neither is real. The lack of truth behind the concerns, though, is no barrier to people citing them as legitimate concerns. Why is that? Because we're not talking about actual reality. We're talking about the constructs people have built within their own minds about reality.

As a society and driven by the international media, people are too caught up with their fears of what might be and "messages" of people's actions to actually look at what is. We "know" more about Sarah Palin's family than the family next door to us in our own neighborhoods and even then, what we know is the superficial distortions we get from the media.

How much better off would we be to let the world go for a while and practice mindfulness in our day-to-day activities? What if we ate mindfully, did our work mindfully, paid real attention to the person we are talking with, really looked at and listened to our children? Maybe we could avoid the feeding frenzies and fear-driven stresses and actually have real civil discourse where we actually talk about what we're talking about and come to some solutions to the very real issues facing us today.

Pain and Discouragement

The past four years have been a very long haul of seizures, C6 disk bulge, muscular spasms, sinus drain and coughing, neuropathy-like pain, fears about not being able to work, dental emergencies, sleep disorder/insomnia, disabling drug side-effects, a teenage daughter with severe depression, a relapsed-alcoholic husband, terribly deteriorated living conditions, and an intense job.

I am under the active care of a primary doctor, neurologist, psychiatrist, social worker/counselor, Stephen Minister, spiritual director, Reiki/BodyTalk practitioner, family counselor, and off-and-on care of a physical therapist. I've had several MRIs (with and without contrast), CT scans, ultrasounds (with and without contrast), EKGs, EEGs, video-monitored EEGs. I've lost track of the number of drug changes for seizure control, pain control, blood pressure control, and cough control. (My doctor has taken to prescribing without refills because we so seldom refill.) I have regular traction, soft tissue work, structural manipulation, exercises (with and without weights).

And that's just off the top of my head. Just the thought of it all exhausts me.

So it's no wonder that occasionally I give in to despair, sure it will never end. The wonder is I only give in occasionally.

Management as Sculpting

Back in May, I spent quite a bit of time pondering the nature of managing people. I decided on a model I thought I liked, and set it aside to see if the idea developed further. It didn't because I don't know enough about the art of sculpting. Since I'm not likely to go out and learn anything about sculpture any time soon, I've finally decided to just put the idea out here where I can find it again later.

The best manager I ever had didn't manage me the way she managed others in the team. In fact, we broke down into three basic groups - those who thrived being pushed as fast and hard as possible, those who were comfortable with concrete tasks and weren't interested in growing for various reasons, and those who needed a lot of hand-holding no matter what they were assigned. We all thrived because she managed us as we needed to be managed. It wasn't about her, it was about us.

Years later, I started preparing myself for eventual management. I read books, trade magazines, talked with people. Basically, the management profession recognized exceptional manager like the one I'd had, but had no guidance for how to become like them. The one place I finally found guidance for how to manage was the Rule of Saint Benedict, in the instructions for Abbot or Prioress where it goes on at great length how to delegate, how to identify potentials, etc. It discusses both how to rotate tasks, how to encourage growth as appropriate, and how to avoid setting up disaster.

So what does this have to do with sculpture? Well, it occurred to me that the management is the art of building people with a variety of temperaments and personalities. In other words, sculpting with a variety of materials.

Here is a rough outline for how I think the metaphor would go:

- Michelangelo talked about seeing an angel within the marble and removing what didn't belong. Some people have a very clear potential in their strengths and a manager helps them prune away the distractions.

- With clay, the sculptor has to add mass first and then shape it. This seems especially appropriate with most youths who need to build experiences first to have something to shape into a longer term career.

- Granite is very set in its ways and wears down the tools used to shape it. But once it has shape, it keeps it for a long time. These are the people where you take advantage of what shape they have and don't expect much flexibility.

- To contrast, I have known managers whose approach was to identify an employee's weaknesses and have them spend all their energy on shoring those up. A sculptor who randomly grinds away rough spots ends up with a shapeless mass rather than a work of art.

To become an effective manager then is getting a feel for the materials, choosing appropriate tools, and working a piece appropriate to the medium.

Come to think of it, if I aspire to management maybe I should take some actual sculpting classes to get a feel for how tools, medium, etc. work together.

The instructor would think me crazy if I say I'm there to learn how to manage people. : )

The nature of suffering

Any model that says "there shouldn't be suffering" must be flawed. That's like saying "there shouldn't be rocks." Obviously, there SHOULD be rocks because there ARE rocks. The probability is 100%.

Let me rephrase that to "any model of reality" or "any world view".

So a world view has to account for suffering. Some world views have dealt with suffering as a punishment for sins, [malicious] acts of Satan, or tests of patience. These have gone in and out of fashion over generations because it we would rather be miserable for a reason than just be miserable. but these don't last because they don't really match up with people's experience. WHAT could we possibly have done to deserve this pain? (Since we can't think of anything, maybe a past life?) WHY would Satan bother afflicting people so? (Well, he is Evil personified so what else would he do?) WHY do we have to be constantly tested? Basically, we don't see anyone benefiting which takes some wind out of the sails of purpose.

My favorite of these purpose models is a meditation that was given in a vision to an Episcopal nun. I have gotten years of spiritual growth from pondering and wrestling with this. If there is a purpose to suffering, I think this is it:

From Suffering to Glory (in five hard lessons.)
1. The purpose of suffering is wisdom.
2. The purpose of wisdom is freedom.
3. The purpose of freedom is compassion.
4. The purpose for compassion is love.
5. The purpose of love is glory.
- Ellen Stephen, OSH

I suspect the rock metaphor is more appropriate. Pondering the purpose of rocks may be a useful spiritual exercise, but more usually we consider rocks simply a state of minerals after being formed in the earth, broken up by volcanic or tectonic action or glaciers, and not yet worn down to sand or dirt and combined with plant matter to be cycled back into the earth and recompressed.

Applying this metaphor, suffering could be a transitory state between formation of our existence or condition and resolution by acceptance or conclusion of the condition or existence. We can apply it to the individual experience, to humanity or community. We can explore several levels of conditions or existence. Rather than looking for purpose, we can look for the nature and implications. We can see it as a dimension over time.

Yes, there's food for thought here. I'm hungry and off to snack.

Appropriate use of models and metaphors

In 1931, Kurt Gödel proved that theories of elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. My husband periodically reminds me that Gödel's incompleteness theorems have a rather narrow scope and formal applicability, but I have found it both useful and practical to apply the general principle to any and all models. I don't work in a formal enough environment to require an actual proof of the wider application, so I am open to the possibility that it will be DISprooved. Until someone presents such to me, though, I will freely use the principle.

Jeanne-Anne's extension: Any model or metaphor will hold "true" only up to a point. It will not explain everything or, if it tries to, it will have inherent contradictions and inconsistencies.

This is not to say models and metaphors are not useful. They are extremely useful communication tools for describing and analyzing reality. We just need to remember they are merely tools and not confuse the tool with the reality being described. Frankly, the boundaries where a model breaks down can be interesting highlights toward understanding the actual nature of reality.