In a conversation with a friend today we were talking about healing and therapy. We came to the conclusion that if therapy prescribes a specific outcome then it’s probably unhealthy and unsustainable. But if it empowers you with more choice, and if it provides you with new and better choices, and better still, if it creates the conditions that make it easier for you to choose better choices… well then that’s good therapy.
Empowered choice is where healing really begins.
It’s easier to point a finger outward than it is to point it inward.
It’s more comfortable to see the faults in others than to accept the faults of our own.
It’s less work to hold others accountable than to accept responsibility.
Accusations are not as scary as being vulnerable.
It’s simpler to rationalize than it is to be critically introspective.
Accepting responsibility rather than blaming is hard work. Owning your own shit is hard work. Making things right when things have gone wrong is hard work… especially since sometimes right just means better, and no matter what you do, you can’t get back to the way things used to be.
But when you play the blame game nothing gets better. In fact, things usually get worse. Most punishment and discipline is about blame. Being restorative means sharing the responsibility to make things better.
Accepting ownership of your own actions and consequences, that’s when personal growth happens. That’s when we get unstuck. That’s when we begin to create an empowered reality rather than a sense of victimization.
How do we make things better? That’s not always an easy question to ask, and it’s usually very hard to answer. But the answer is never blame.
I went to Google yesterday and the Google Doodle above the search box was celebrating 25 years of search.
I instantly thought of this comic that I’ve shared before both on my blog and in presentations to educators.
It is likely that no one under 30 will remember life without Google… Life without asking the internet questions and getting good answers. I remember my oldest at 5 years old asking me a question. I responded that I didn’t know and she walked over to our computer and turned it on.
“What are you doing?”
“Asking Google.”
It’s part of everyday life. It has been for a quarter century.
And now search is getting even better. AI is making search more intuitive and giving us answers to questions, not just links to websites that have the answers. It makes me wonder, what will the experience be like in another 5, 10, or 25 years? I’m excited to find out!
This is a humorous ‘contrived platitude’ that I shared on Facebook 8 years ago. It came up as a memory and I wanted to share it again:
Things definitely do not always happen for a reason, but we are reason makers and sometimes we seek meaning where there is none. Belief systems are designed around the justification of reasons, around faith as opposed to evidence. So are things like tarot card readings, conspiracy theories, superstitious habits, and lucky charms and rituals. Truth is bent, patterns are found where there are no patterns, and narratives are created to justify and satisfy, and even ‘prove’ that coincidences are actually consequences and that reasons are founded in good reasoning.
Sometimes these fabricated reasons help us. “Everything happens for a reason” can help soften an unexpected tragedy… help us find meaning in a meaningless loss of health, life, or limb. We can muster strength and purpose in times of hardship. But other times it’s nothing more than ignorance. People follow doctrines and justify their beliefs even when they are harmful to others. This is somehow done in the name of love. “We are looking out for what’s best for you, for us, for our community”… A fabricated reason. A justification. A delusion.
There is a big difference between finding a reason and good reasoning. That doesn’t mean that seeking out a reason for something is necessarily bad, it just means that sometimes the reasons you think are important or useful may not be so. It’s easy for us to rationalize anything to fit our belief system, but if that’s what we are doing we really aren’t being rational… we are rationalizing not reasoning. There is a difference between making sense of the world and making things up to make sense of the world; a deference between making up reasons and using good reasoning skills. True wisdom is knowing the difference.
There is a saying that, ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. We all see the world differently in different circumstances, but the same circumstances don’t always elicit the same reactions. Someone with a metaphorical hammer might see the world as nails… but another person might see the world as filled with fragile material and think the hammer is a tool of destruction. Another person with only a hammer, who sees the world as fragile, might be upset that they only have a hammer and feel helpless and limited.
In a world of hammers, while one person might see nails to be hammered in, another might see value in using the other end of the hammer to pull nails out… to remove them. Same hammer used to different ends (literally and metaphorically).
Moving from hammers to glasses. People really see the world through different coloured lenses. I think this is a good thing, but we shouldn’t be set on just one colour. We shouldn’t fixate on seeing the world in monochrome, but rather change our lenses frequently. A bad situation can be changed simply by changing our lens on the situation.
A traffic jam gives us more time to listen to an audio book. A miscommunication can lead to laughs. A mistake in an order can be a point of frustration or a moment to be gracefully corrected, or even an opportunity to try something new. What lens we choose determines our lived experience.
What saddens me is when people get stuck seeing the world through narrow, gloomy lenses. People victimize themselves, they see harm where no harm was intended. They feel the world is out to get them. They see the world through a lens of malice, hurt, and negative intent. They don’t see themselves as having a hammer, they see themselves as being nails. This isn’t a healthy way to live.
Still others get stuck seeing their past through just one lens. Trauma will do that to people. Recovery from an addiction becomes a lifelong battle, not something concurred, or replaced with new meaning. A moment in the past can define someone’s lenses in the future… limiting their future perspective.
How do we give ourselves more choice? How do we find more tools than just a hammer, and how do we see the world as not just nails? How do we change our lenses? Isn’t it interesting that we wear glasses to fix our focus, but not what we focus on… pick a good lens.
Sometimes you meet someone and their journey through life intrigues you. They share a glimpse of their history and you realize that you can’t really fathom what it would have been like to have had their experiences. You can hear of defining moments of good or bad luck, or even seemingly minor choices that end up with very significant consequences. Moments that alter a single life or many lives.
One interesting note is that it seems people who experience great hardships are often open to sharing them more openly than you would expect. I had one such encounter yesterday when I met a friend of a friend. Within minutes of meeting him I heard a story from his past that was from a dark part of his life, and so profoundly different from anything that I’d ever experienced that I felt I was listening to a movie plot, not an actual story from someone’s experience.
Sorry, I won’t be sharing the story. It’s not my story to tell. But it got me thinking about the road to here. About how every person is on a completely different journey. Each of us carrying with us the the successes and also the emotional as well as physical baggage that shaped us.
How different my journey is from someone born the same time as me in another part of the world… If I were to take a snapshot of the lives of myself and 8 others born at the same instance, I’d probably be in the top 1/3 financially today. I’d also be in the top 1/3 of those lucky to have a privileged path to my current life… with hardships that do not compare to the bottom 1/3, 3 people sharing my birthday, my birth second, but far less fortunate than me.
I think there is something therapeutic about hearing the stories of others. Appreciating that someone’s path is one you’d rather not have travelled is humbling. There isn’t judgment, just an appreciation that you had your own path, your own road that you travelled. And while the road can seem challenging, so many others face challenges you can’t imagine.
It’s wonderful to share the road, every now and then, with someone who has taken a completely different journey than you. To hear of their path to here and now, and to understand that we have a lot to appreciate about our own journey.
What are your defining moments on your road to here?
This evening a high school friend is meeting me and we are going to a Tangerine Dream concert. He introduced me to music like this, Mike Oldfield, Kitaro, and Jean Michel Jarre.
While I don’t often listen to this music now, it was ‘instrumental’ in my university years. I would often play a home made cassette of Tangerine Dream or Jean Michel Jarre to go to sleep. Kitaro was my study music. Oldfield’s Tubular Bells was a song I’d listen to on repeat when I wanted to memorize something or if I was writing creatively.
It’s interesting how music can define a time in your life, it can symbolize an era. This music was introduced to me in my final years in high school and sustained me for my university years. Tonight I get to revisit these years with my friend who opened my eyes, and ears, to a totally different kind of music.
Three minutes into this video Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, is asked, “Why do you think the moment for AI (Artificial Intelligence) is now?”
After mentioning that AI is already mainstream, and used in search, news aggregation and social media recommendations (like the next videos on Facebook & TikTok, etc), he states,
“Today’s generation of AI is all autopilot. In fact, it is a black box that is dictating in fact how our attention is focused. Whereas going forward, the thing that’s most exciting about this generation of AI is perhaps we move from autopilot to copilot, where we actually prompt it.”
This is a fascinating point. When you order something on Amazon, their next purchase recommendation is automated by AI, so is your next video on Instagram Reels, YouTube, and TikTok. We don’t fully understand the decision-making behind this ‘intelligence’, except when it goes wrong. Even then it’s a bit of a black box of calculations that aren’t always clear or understood. In essence, we are already heavily influenced by AI. The difference with LLM’s – Large Language Models – like Chat GPT is that we prompt it. We get to copilot. We get to create with it, and have it co-create art, email messages, books, computer code, to do lists, schoolwork/homework, and even plan our vacations.
I really like the metaphor of moving from autopilot to copilot. It is empowering and creates a future of opportunities. AI isn’t new, but what we can do with it now is quite new… and exciting!
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The full video Microsoft & OpenAI CEOs: Dawn of the AI Wars | The Circuit with Emily Chang is worth watching:
One of the dumbest tropes in education is that, ‘There is no such thing as a bad question’. Yes, yes there is. Yes there are. There are many bad questions. We live in a world filled with bad questions.
Why are people still asking if climate change is real? Why do people still question if the world is flat? Why do people still question evolution and want creationism taught in classrooms?
Because we live in a world where bad questions are asked and people respond to them. With each justification there is a rebuttal, and when millions of people hear the dumb, illogical, misleading, and inaccurate rebuttals some of them will believe these bad ideas.
Bad ideas spread from debating bad questions.
Good questions deserve debate. Bad questions should be ignored… or redirected. ‘Is climate change real’ is a dumb question based on a bad idea. A better question is, ‘We know humans are impacting the climate, what can be done to reduce that impact?’ Spending time rationalizing the first question is literally giving the question too much power, and the ignorant responses an opportunity to be shared.
It’s worth saying this again, it’s the problem we face today across many fields, spreading through news and social media… and when we participate, we are part of the problem:
Bad ideas spread from debating bad questions.
So the next time someone tells you there is no such thing as a bad question, you might want to disagree, just don’t waste too much time debating the point.
It’s not easy to be fully present. We can pay attention. We can focus. We can prioritize what is happening around us. We can’t always keep ourselves fully aware of our situation without our thoughts distracting us.
Play with a kid and they might be fully enthralled in the game or activity, but we are thinking about starting to prep the next meal. Talking to a friend, they say something that makes us think about something else, only somewhat related. Listening to a lesson in class, the teacher’s voice drifts away as our own unrelated thoughts get louder.
There is no malice, no intended distraction, we just aren’t as present as we could be. It’s part of the human condition. But sometimes we find moments of clarity. We still our mind, and it stops interfering with the one thing we are doing. Clarity and focus prevail. We are momentarily fully present.
But is being lost in thought truly being present? Is there a difference between being fully focused on a task and fully focused on a thought? Is there a difference between being present in a conversation and moving it forward in a different direction because that’s where the conversation goes, versus moving it in a distracted tangent? How do we know the difference?
It seems to me that awareness of being present takes us out of being present. But ignorance of our presence can equally be ignorance of distraction. So being fully present is illusive. It comes when it comes, and it drifts when it drifts. I guess that’s why meditation is so challenging. It is creating a state where that state needs to be unconscious to be fully engaged. Being present is a skill we can learn, but not one we can practice easily, because when we reach the state we want, the very awareness of it takes us out of that state.
I enjoy moments of being fully present, but now that I think about it, the enjoyment really comes afterwards… because in the moments of being fully present the idea of enjoyment doesn’t matter. What matters is the moment itself, not the appreciation of the moment. That comes later.
