The Moment

Aleathia says:

When I lived in Seattle in a boarding house, I met a woman named Jen. She was an elf really...maybe 5 foot with elfin features and interesting ideas on the world. In our time together as friends she always talked about "the perfect moment". Her life, everything she did, was based on finding this unicorn of an idea. After we parted ways as people do in big cities, I had that longing for "the perfect moment" swirling in the back of my mind. As a person who grew up in adversity this notion seemed unattainable, but definitely worth chasing.

In my life I have spent an exceedingly large amount of time trying to be "perfect" even after I became a Buddhist. It seemed as if it were my Achilles heel and this drive for being seen as perfect, having the perfect idea, the perfect solution, the perfect everything became the downfall of my own personal identity. In middle life, I have discovered that there isn't perfection and that frankly, perfection is boring.  It is the oddities of our character that make us attractive and interesting. But in the same breath, I understand what my friend was talking about. It wasn't so much about perfection as it was about being aware enough to see when something amazing is happening to you so that you can enjoy it. In a world where much of the population walks with their head down, void of eye contact, void of the possibility of moving outside their own circle. I understand this and still, I struggle.

Last week, I went to see Jad Abumrad. He is the creator of Radiolab which has been one of my favorite shows for years. I wasn't sure what to expect from the lecture titled "Indoor Plumbing", but I was keen to find out. It was an intimate setting with a packed auditorium of about 200 local people and Jad on the stage with a few electronics and a stool. He was warm and personable and it was acutely surreal to hear his voice while actually watching him talk. Jad's lecture was about how he lost his deep connection with his love for Radiolab, his disillusionment with journalism, and how he came back to the light.

Sometimes we are given things we need. I had been looking forward to this lecture for a month and at the last minute my friend asked me to watch her baby. I had my ticket already (it was free as I was a member of the museum hosting it) and I sat in the dilemma I have sat with my whole life. Do I give up something for myself to make someone else happy? I had such a huge guilt as I text her back to say no I can't do it. I walked to the lecture in a beautiful fall night, watched the sunset over our valley as I crossed the bridge, and felt as if I was on the verge of something I couldn't name.

Jad Abumrad's lecture had four parts:

Chapter 1: Indoor plumbing
Chapter 2: Be Quiet
Chapter 3: Little Shit
Chapter 4: There was trouble aboard the Washington Bus

I am not going to recount this lecture in detail but I did want to share what I learned from it, because I think it was pivotal for me and could be useful to others as well. More and more I learn that I am not on an island with my disparities and that knowledge lends me to be more open to the world and the people in it. It makes me look up from the ground.

Chapter 1: Indoor Plumbing

This section of the conversation was about learning to step out of your normal routine and how when you do this...even if it is a very small step, it opens up your vision and sense of the world around you. When you find you are stuck in a loop you have to do something surprising in order to find the gratitude in what you are doing. After you have this realization and step back into your life you can begin to recognize the miracle you were living in the whole time.

Chapter 2: Be Quiet

How often do we really be quiet in life? How often do we stop and listen to what people say, to what the world says to us? Jad talked about how he uses this in Radiolab episodes and calls the negative space the "sizzle silence" because it is alive. Sometimes you have to sit in the quiet space and remain unmoving and listen. He said something profound in this section that really sparked me:

"It's hard to perform in a relationship you never really had"-Jad Abumrad

Chapter 3: Little Shit

Yes, we all laughed when he said this, because we brush away the "little shit" and move on, but he says little shit is like punctuation...it's the detail that fills in the space. It adds movement or stops it. It creates a rhythm. Little shit is the tension between the cosmic and the ordinary that makes life interesting. They are the things that seem incidental but are connected to something deeper beneath the surface. Little shit helps you discern what you are truly interested in rather than what you think you SHOULD be interested in. Stop when you feel something. Take notice.

Pay attention to the "can't stops" which he says are the things you hear that you can't stop thinking about. Those are the pieces of life you have to pay attention to, the ones you follow down the rabbit hole.

Chapter 4: There was trouble aboard the Washington bus....

He said he took this quote from Octavia Butler's story "Speech Sounds" which is about a post-apocalyptic world in which half of the population can speak but can't read and the other half can read but are mute. Imagine this world. Imagine it. Is it that far off from where we are headed?

Jad talked about how in this place where he questioned his chosen career and the great podcast he had built he had to hit rock bottom first. He had to be in the space where nothing makes any sense. He said that Octavia Butler went through this too. She was having trouble getting published, her dear friend was dying of cancer, and there seemed as if there were little hope in the world for her to achieve her dreams. She was on that Washington bus; she had hit rock bottom. Then, the first line of a story popped into her head. She went home and wrote it down. Then she wrote another and another. She couldn't stop writing out this echo of a world that she felt inside. This, this is called "writing yourself back to hope".

Here I sit in the cliche coffee shop drinking tea, listening to Mac Miller, and writing myself back to hope. I am going to do my best to blog every week, to keep checking in with my "can't stops" and my silences and my off trail happenings. Keep your heads up everyone. There is so much to see.

Thanks for reading.
Aleathia

Lit Bits-12/31/2014 The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

Aleathia says:

This year in review for literature is pretty slim for me.  I have had a wholly distracted year when it comes to reading or keeping up with print media other than comic books and the occasional news story online.   This is somewhat distressing to me as I have been an avid reader all my life.  Books are what I have turned to in my darkest times.  Hell, I have even slept in a bed with a pile of books to not feel so alone.  But in the last three years, with Michael in my life, the need to escape into the pages of a book has been reduced to next to nothing.  While this is exciting news (I'm happy!) it is also saddening because I miss books.

Our recent work schedules find me spending more time alone and therefore more likely to pick up a book and actually finish it.  I mentioned my lack of reading to a Forked Road cohort and she simply said..."look at all the writing you are doing".  I do blog a fair amount and I suppose I am doing a fair amount of reading to research for these blogs, but it isn't the same as a worn book in the hand.  I digress.  You get it.

Another amazing factor about being with Michael is that he has, over the years, given me a new love for non-fiction reading.  This summer I found a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" at the Salvation Army store.  I only knew something about the book from my Barnes & Noble Literary Desk Planner which had a blurb in one of the corners about it.  For 49 cents, I'm game for just about any book.

This book started out as my "bathroom book"....yes, you all have them.  A book that isn't quite interesting enough to carry around or read in bed, but interesting enough to read while pooping.  The first half of the book was spent like this and now this second half finds the book in the living room where it is likely to get read with a cup of coffee on mornings when Michael is at work.

"The Tipping Point" looks at the world from a sociological/psychological point of view.  It cracks open seemingly insignificant factors about individuals and groups of people that go unnoticed to the average person.  In reading this book I have felt like a foreign government receiving inside secrets.  It is like a Wiki Leak happened in my brain.  The ideas in this book are relevant to my life because I work in an industry where there is a great mix of personalities, psychological conditions, and different types of people.  It would be a travesty for me to NOT read this book.

This book came out in 2000 and yes, it is nearly 2015, but I don't think it renders the information obselete with time.  I think the basics of the formula are pretty concrete in its understanding to last.  It is a book about how epidemics get started and grow and how they can be altered with simple, small changes.  It has three rules:  The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context.  I won't rewrite the book here for you.  It's interesting and you should read it but I will give you a little idea.

Malcolm Gladwell

The Law of the Few

"The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts"-Malcolm Gladwell

Supposedly there are three main types of people that get things done.  There are Connectors who are people that know a large population of people and tend to make connections between these people. They do a lot of introducing of one group of folks to another.  They are a network hub not unlike Facebook.

Mavens are people who connect us to knowledge and information.  They are gifted in spreading this information around and would be the type of person behind the driving force of "word of mouth" type epidemics.

Salesmen are just that, salesmen.  They have charismatic attitudes and can get you to buy the information they are selling or negotiate terms of an agreement.  They have a powerful use of body language and non-verbal cues that subconsciously make you want to do what they want.


The Stickiness Factor

This is the theory of how well a message or idea stays with a person.  How well does it stick?  Will it be memorable enough to change a person's habit without them realizing it?  Does it enhance retention of an idea?


The Power of Context

"Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur"-Malcolm Gladwell

The idea of context is that the environment around us will greatly influence our set of behaviors despite how we may or may not have been raised or how our values lie.  The world immediately around us can change the structure of behavior and minute, seemingly insignificant changes in this environment can make bad situations better.

I have not finished this book yet, but I am on the last section, The Power of Context, and I started thinking about how this can relate to my own little environment in the ER where it is a world within a world.  The staff is its own tribe of people and each department a new tribe.  We have to "trade" with each other and work together despite our differences in habits, rules, and work ethics.  In addition to this, there is the tribe of people that come to us for healthcare.  Each time we enter a patient's room, we step into their world.  They bring with them a different set of political ethics, education, social value, moral value, and life experience.  These may clash with ours, but I think that some of Gladwell's ideas could prevail in making the healthcare experience better.  It could make all of us understand where each of us is coming from and how to better deal with the community on a social level that we had not considered before.

I am not sure I have been this excited about a non-fiction book in a long time.  It isn't a difficult read despite it being wholly about sociology and epidemics. Gladwell uses real life events that happened in our country to detail and explain the theories or laws of his tipping point idea.  Pick up a copy, throw it in the bathroom.  Give it a try.