Learning to be Human

I was your classic bookworm growing up. Most of my free time was spent nose inside of some book. I had a teacher in about the 4th grade who challenged me to see how much of the World Book Encyclopedia I could get through whenever I was done with my other classwork. I made it through by year’s end; probably with time to spare.

This was one of the few sources of friction between my parents. My Dad would often push me to set my latest book aside and connect with the actual world. My mother gave me free rein. I once asked her why she took my side in this struggle. She said,

You were compelled to read. I didn’t know what was driving you but I could see that it was something you had to do. I decided it was more important to let you follow your own curiosity than try to tell you what you ought to be doing.

Depending on what you choose to read, you can learn a lot about the wider world. I gobbled up science fiction and science related non-fiction.

This is not a vein to mine if your goal is a deeper understanding of other people and human relations. The characters in most classic science fiction were pretty wooden. Add a daily 45-minute commute to an all-boys high school and my exposure to real people in real settings was constrained.

By the time I got to college I was behind. In catch-up mode and unaware that I was. In retrospect, I think there were a handful of people who took me on as a development project. Oblivious as I was, I was nudge-able. And nudged over time into something resembling a functional human being.

So, thanks to all those nudgers. You know who you were, even if I didn’t.

Say yes to the mess

The fundamental rule of improv theater is “Yes, and…”. Making something good happen always starts with agreement.

I didn’t learn this rule until well into my career. One of my consultants suggested that Improv training might be a good idea for our people. Naively, but correctly, I agreed and we brought in Chicago’s Second City group to our next All Hands Meeting. It was the success that Rik had foreseen.

Looking back, it occurs to me that I’ve long operated by a version of this rule. Decisions that others often characterized as risky or brave seemed more a function of being willing to say “yes, and…” to life in general. I haven’t been following some master plan or overriding dream. I do think Pasteur was on to something with his observation that “chance favors the prepared mind.”

There are always forces that want to channel that preparation. Sometimes those forces are internal (or at least internalized) and you find those souls who always knew they were meant to be doctors or athletes or writers. There was some compulsion to travel a particular path. And the world is often a better place for all of us because of those individuals. Sometimes they benefit from a support environment that helps to reinforce and focus their focus.

My internal curiosity has never had that degree of sustained focus. And my external environment had enough other things to worry about that there was little external pressure to walk a specific path. As long as I was doing well enough, I had free rein to follow my curiosities wherever they led.

I got to “yes, and…” my way through a lot of experiences and gates. No master plan. just an openness to opportunities when they surfaced.

When I complain about addressing the mess, I think what I really need to acknowledge is that the mess is where those opportunities lie. I suppose you can craft plans that avoid much of the mess. And, there’s a lot of advice committed in support of the value of plans over flexibility. Scripts are fine. But improv works too.

Searching for signal

Although I can’t sing a note, theater somehow became an integral part of my college years and beyond. I did once audition for a high school play with the older sister of a classmate. No preparation, no idea what I was doing, but Kathy grabbed me by the hand and dragged me on stage. The result was predictable and less mortifying than it might otherwise have been given how little time I was given to react.

It did set me on a path. I became a stage manager. That’s the person responsible for keeping all the pieces moving in the same direction. While you’re rehearsing, your job is to keep the schedule, map people to rehearsal spaces, keep track of the decisions the director is making, and generally be aware of everything that is going on.

During performances the job remains much the same but the stakes rises. Are the actors in position for the next scene? Are the stage hands set to switch things in and out? Is the lighting crew ready for the next cue? You’re generally standing just off stage with an annotated script in front of you and a headset on connecting you to everyone in the crew. You’re also likely to be giving hand signals to other crew members for their next action.

To an outsider, backstage all looks like chaos. Another professional will look for the stage manager. If they are calm, the chaos is an illusion. When something goes wrong (pretty much always), the stage manager’s job is to remain calm while dealing with the problem.

How and when do you learn to manage chaos? One method is to have a passel of younger siblings. By the time I was nine, I had six of them. This turns out to be a very effective lab to learn how to separate signal from noise. And be given and earn responsibility. There’s always lots of noise trying to claim it is signal.

Another is to show up and stick around. Showing up is easy. Sticking around can be more of a challenge. Presence by itself won’t do a lot. You need to learn what matters and what doesn’t. Figuring that out can take time even with the help of others pointing things out.

Coming back to stage managing. The noise you do wait for is the applause after the final curtain falls.

Moments on a train

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

I was on a train traveling somewhere in the Boston-Washington corridor (many of the details are lost in a brain that struggles to recognize what is pertinent). I shifted my attention away from the book I was absorbed in. “That” turned out to be two young children bickering with one another a few seats in front of us. While the bickering had apparently been underway for some time, I hadn’t noticed and my failure to notice surprised the girl sitting across the aisle from me.

“I grew up with six younger brothers and sisters. I can ignore pretty much anything.”

This is one of those stories I tell about myself from time to time; often as a way to reveal something about me that I think is important.

What I think is important has evolved over time. I did indeed grow up in a noisy home environment and thought this story said something about my ability to concentrate. Many years later, when I began to suspect that ADD was a factor in understanding things I did well and things I struggled with, it became a story about hyperfocus.

Today, I wonder whether this was also a missed opportunity. Was this a bid for a bit of conversation and possible connection? I’m pretty sure I went back to my book. Actual humans are unpredictable. Books are safe. They can also be lonely.

Mapping words to feelings

I’m a Baby Boomer and a guy. That means I grew up largely without a vocabulary for emotions. If you don’t have the words, it’s hard to make sense out of certain things.

There were things that startled me like bugs and snakes. I learned that the spike in my heart rate and the shaking in my hands meant I was scared. When I was asked to get up in front of a group of people and speak, I wondered what that had to do with bugs or snakes. Was something making me afraid? Learned a new word. I was anxious.

Circumstances kept putting me in front of audiences. “Scared” was no longer the right word. Nor was “anxious.” The feelings remained similar. Raised heart rate, shaking hands. I needed a new word. The one I landed on was “energized.” I can’t tell you whether I chose it for myself or someone suggested it. A new word offered a new perspective. “Fear” and “anxiety” were things to avoid, “energy” was something to use and direct.

The words I chose could affect how my body responded.

This was not a connection I made quickly. I loved words so much that I was quite content to live inside my head. Connecting what was going on in my head with what was going on in my body didn’t occur to me unless my body’s reactions were adamant. Fine gradations of wording made sense. Learning that those gradations might map to equally fine gradations of feelings has been a long, slow, still incomplete, process.

Exercising heart and brain in equal measure

My Dad served in the Navy during WWII. He was stationed in San Diego. After the war he returned home and completed an engineering degree at the University of Delaware on the GI Bill. After earning his degree he left Delaware and his family, ended up in St.Louis where he met my mother, and started our family. He chose to move half a continent away from his parents, a sister and several brothers, including his twin.

It was many years later before I learned that alcohol was one of the major drivers of his decision to leave. Dad was a very controlled guy. Funny and charming in a quiet Irish way but he liked a certain degree of order in this world. Control the environment and the world was a better place. Mom was more on the crazy side but those are stories for another time and place. His simple solution to deal with a family environment too fond of alcohol was to leave and create one that put alcohol in a better and much less central place.

I did drink in college and had the usual pleasant and unpleasant encounters. If there is a genetic component to alcohol abuse, I never triggered it. I had instead inherited some portion of my Dad’s preference for controlling my environment. As an aside, I don’t drink at all these days and haven’t for forty or so years. Again, a story for another time.

What’s on my mind today is the question of using the environment to establish control. Maybe it’s the Catholic notion of avoiding occasions of sin or avoiding temptation. The price of environmental control is that you don’t develop the internal controls and sensitivities to situations and circumstances that might prove more adaptive. If you’re quick-witted enough you can talk your way out of trouble when you’d be better served having to deal with the consequences of the humanly stupid thing you just did. If your brain is over-developed, your heart doesn’t get the exercise it needs to manage the complexities of the bigger world.

Nail it before it rots

I’ve been told that procrastination can be a symptom of perfectionism; you can’t turn something in until it is perfect. I wish I had known of that excuse when my father first called me on my tendency to put things off. Forty some odd years later I found an answer in ADD, but when I was about twelve my tendency to put off finishing things was a sore spot.

The incident that sticks was the day my father interrupted my working on a model airplane. He asked me to look up the word “procrastination.” Without looking up or skipping a beat, I answered “I’ll do it later.” Let’s just say that my attention was immediately and forcibly redirected to the dictionary on my desk. It’s a word that I’ve known for a long time.

While I was never especially adept at finishing things ahead of time, I did become very practiced at meeting deadlines. About the same time I was so memorably learning the word “procrastination,” my teachers also noted that I was a pretty competent writer. I was nudged into writing for our school paper and yearbook. I was tasked with editing the schools annual literary magazine. In college, I dated a girl who was the editor of the college yearbook and she assigned me quite a few articles when she was on a tight schedule. This pattern repeated itself in my professional work when I began to write consulting reports for clients.

The thread through all of this was my ability to produce a deliverable on deadline. There was a quality threshold to hit but deadlines ruled. The curtain goes up at eight because the show must go on. If the lead is throwing up in a bucket the understudy goes on that night.

If you could meet or exceed the quality gate by the deadline, you became the go to guy. Practice made you better. It also made you faster. “Done” was the metric. I became a carpenter not a cabinetmaker. Similar skill set, different expectations.

I learned my actual carpentry skills building stage sets. Again, the show must go on. You don’t want a set to fall on an actor mid-performance. But no one is going to live in that room when the run is over. The expression you will hear in the shop backstage is “nail it before it rots.”

A state of constant confusion

“Where did you prep?”

I was walking to some orientation event in my first week of university. I was with a new acquaintance I had met on the soccer field earlier that day. I can’t recall his name or anything other than that odd question. I hadn’t even started classes and I was already hit with questions I didn’t understand. “Prep” for what? I had showered. My shirt was clean. What was I missing?

Turns out the question was about what elite prep school had I come from. Definitely not in Kansas (or Missouri, my home state) anymore. In his world, if you played soccer you must have learned the game in prep school. This was 1971 and soccer was not a widely known or played sport in the US.

I spent a good portion of my time those days in some level of confusion. I was a reasonably bright kid. Introverted and fond of books of all sorts. A very perceptive nun in my parochial school persuaded by parents to channel me into a private boys school in St.Louis run by English Benedictine monks. Turns out I had indeed “prepped” without knowing so. I did so, however, with none of the social and cultural shaping that can be part of that environment. Intellectually overdeveloped and lagging or backwards everywhere else.

Fifty five years later, I’m closer to balance overall. There was an overall odd benefit to my unbalanced development. I became comfortable with confusion and not knowing. This was a long and slow transformation for someone rewarded for knowing answers. Turns out that clueless is just a starting point for figuring things out.

There used to be a show on NPR called Car Talk. Ostensibly about cars and car repair, it was really an ongoing seminar on how to figure things out by asking questions. There’s a quote from the show that is pretty good advice:

I fully realize that I have not succeeded in answering all of your questions. . .Indeed, I feel I have not answered any of them completely. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions, which only lead to more problems, some of which we weren’t even aware were problems. To sum it all up . . . In some ways I feel we are confused as ever, but I believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.

You have to see the mess to manage the mess

Most days, at some point, my right shoulder will hurt. This is because of a bicycle accident twenty years ago, when I managed to shatter my shoulder by falling at zero miles per hour. With the help of a metal plate and half a dozen screws my orthopedic surgeon reassembled the jigsaw puzzle I had created . A year’s worth of physical therapy and rehab restored 90–95 percent of range of motion and function. I happen to be left-handed so there’s little that I can’t do, although I remain suspicious of bicycles. Last week, i was up on scaffolding installing siding on a house being built by Habitat for Humanity..

Pain is a message from your body that something needs attention. How much attention is a function of the level of pain plus whatever else in your life is demanding attention. The accident occurred just outside our house as my wife and I were beginning our ride. Before we could leave to visit the emergency department at the hospital, my wife insisted that she had to change out of her new spandex cycling outfit. How she thought she looked in that outfit demanded more attention than the fact that my right arm wasn’t working correctly. I still tease her about that.

Attention is what catches my interest about this moment. That pain message was adamant and demanded my immediate attention. A serious enough injury can cut through a lot. But it’s also a reminder to me that I struggle to manage my attention. My ability to ignore demands for attention can be both a strength and a weakness. This accident occurred when I was 53. That was perhaps three or four years after working out that I had a pretty clear case of ADD.

I grew up in an era and environment where ADD and ADHD were not something available to account for certain behaviors. They certainly weren’t something you thought of when trying to make sense out of someone with advanced academic degrees and a fair degree of career success.

The nuns in elementary school in the 1960s were quite comfortable managing your attention for you, although if you were quick-witted you could often fake your way out of most threatening moments. Natural curiosity can direct your attention in lots of interesting and productive ways. The theory, I suppose, is that you gradually learn to manage your attention on your own. Unfortunately, lots of people around you have strong opinions about where your attention should be directed. Most of us learn how to work within those opinions and expectations.

Some of us don’t. Or can’t.

My attention is a bit like a broken sense of pain. Some signals don’t register. Others get stuck on or off. I might easily miss a fire alarm if I am hyper-focused on a task that interests me. Or miss an opportunity to flirt with a pretty girl because I am absorbed in a book (that’s happened more than once in my past). General awareness helps a little bit. Medications not at all. A fair amount of mess in my life can be traced to this deficient sense of attention.

Becoming clueful

If you’re clever in school it can take a long time to grasp that you are clueless elsewhere. Gathering clues proceeds slowly.

An example that comes to mind was a math class in my second year in college. Professor Tucker mentioned that he had asked Professor Kuhn from the Economics Department to cover for him in Friday’s class. This was when it dawned on me that I was learning the Kuhn-Tucker algorithm in our textbook from its creators. Over the years, I’ve shared this story as an example of the quality of the education I was receiving. It only now occurs to me that it was equally a marker of my cluelessness.

My wife is on record that, based on photographic evidence of my sartorial choices then, she would have crossed the street to avoid me in college.

I could go on.

It’s hard to be surprised by something that you don’t notice. Professionally, I spent much of my career noticing systems and processes and designing better ones. To use Wendell Berry’s term, I “solved for pattern” I believed in organizations that wanted to behave more rationally. I cleaned up messes.

Where I got, and get, in trouble is with those who thrive on creating messes. This is less of an issue in retirement. I can avoid many chaos creators. In the wider world, that has become difficult of late. In the end it depends on getting better at noticing.