Learning is Change

I have never fired a gun. At least unless you count pellet guns at camp in middle school. Sure, I won minor marksmen awards for accuracy and consistency. Sure, I loved the feeling of loading up the tiny pellets and shooting them off one by one. I may have hung up the targets that had a few bulls-eyes in my room for a few months and looked on them as a source of pride. I guess, technically speaking, I was firing a weapon capable of maiming another person. I suppose if pressed, I could have seriously injured someone’s ability to have children or at the very least, lodged a piece of metal in their body. Even as I lined up those tiny pellets on the wood floor of the firing range facing the woods, I knew there was something to the process that made sense. Not the gun part, but the trigger part. I didn’t want the power of harming something else. I wanted to simply concentrate everything I had into a single action that would propel my intention forward with aim and untold force.

I performed that single action again today. Not with a gun, but with a job.

At the beginning of this year I said that I would start a new company.

Today I find my vision colliding with another.

Edmodo is where my vision met its equal. They started the startup that I have yearned for every day. They let me sit in on what it is like. They brought me into meetings where all contributions are counted. They implemented updates on the software as I talked about what it should look like. They listened.

And, I want to listen too. I will take all that I have learned in creating spaces for learning and collaboration and I will work for them because they will teach me how to craft the future. They are already working on it. And, I want to play in their playground. I want to get dirty and find out just how big we can make the intersection between networks and learning.

Today I pulled the biggest trigger of my life. The pellet now holds my future within it. As far as I can tell, it left the barrel straight and true. And as I watch it find its target, you can trust that I will be hanging up that bulls-eye for years to come.

You see people loitering and being congratulated for doing so.

You hear authentic and original voices throughout the day.

You see the sunlight hitting everyone and nothing is left in dark corners.

You entrust your fate and the fate of your children.

You simply don’t want to be anywhere else.

In every gymnasium I have ever been to, whether it is at a recreation center, athletic club or school has a ball or balloon stuck somewhere in the rafters. There is never very much of a story behind it, but everyone knows that it is there. Kids and adults tried in vein to knock it down for months or even years. And eventually, it does come down. The helium and static abate and let it float to the ground or the natural vibrations of the court game below are enough to push it from its perch. Yet, whenever the ball or ballon makes its way down, it is a mere matter of days before another gets lodged in a new place. It is an equation of sorts within this space. If you have one gym, you require one ball or ballon for getting stuck. Its a 1:1 relationship that cannot be sacrificed because it will throw the entire balance of the gym off.

Without the ball up there, kids who are too bored to watch what is happening will not have anything to contemplate. Without the ballon’s string getting wrapped around those steel beams, adults will not have something to get conversations started with.

Everyone asks how the ball got up there. And we start to make up stories, even if we know the truth. We tell each other about amazing competitions gone by or little children who wept when the ball didn’t come back. These are innocent deviations from the truth and we all perpetuate them because we know that the relationship of one ball to one gymnasium must be respected.

Really, we know that the ball looks down on us and protects us. It makes sure that the scrapes and pushes aren’t too bad. It makes sure that everyone says “Good Game” after they are finished. The ball is benevolent. It doesn’t pressure us into playing our best, it merely suggests that everyone will feel better if they do. It is flawed by being up there and it represents this flaw to everyone watching. We do not have to be perfect. We just have to be witnesses.

My belief in the balloon that floated up the rafters never waivers. It is steadfast because of how special that balloon gets to be. It is the symbol of that event that gets to outlast everyone else. It is the after after after after party. And it continues the pageantry even as it shrinks and shrivels up and hangs on by the string, just waiting for the non-existent wind to tug it down. The balloon is sacred. It is the memory of a moment and as long as we let it hang there, the moment will not really be in the past. While it hangs there, we can speak about it in the present tense.

We need balls and balloons up in the rafters. They are reminders that things exist after of our little games and events. They are the ones that know when we cheat and they are the ones that see when we succeed. They may not say much, but they know when a good day is had.

I know that any time I walk into a gymnasium and there isn’t a ball or balloon waiting for me in the rafters, it is my responsibility, and the responsibility of everyone there with me to make sure one finds its way up there before we leave. This relationship is too vital to be put off for too long. We all need our guardians and our cheerleaders. We all need something to just watch us. Watch, and not judge.

Making a decision is the hard part, but letting everyone know requires skill. You have to be tactful and allow everyone their own time to process. You have to pay respect to everything that has come before, but the clean break is so enticing. You want to run as fast as you can to your new opportunity, but tying up all of your loose ends is the only way that everything will get done.

So, you spend a day packing up your stuff. Everything goes in boxes and into your car. Everything that you have worked on and seen through to completion will seem small and insignificant. And you will realized just how much you coasted on those accomplishments because they are what you are known for. Even if you did a great many things, the ones in these boxes are going to be your legacy. The plaques and the notes and the computer cords. These are the objects you now have to remember your time and how others will too.

You spend a few more days telling everyone what you would have done if you stuck around. You forecast how everyone will have to pick up where you left off. You will write things out for those who will fill your shoes, even as they attempt to get a different pair to stand where you did. You tell everyone that you will miss them and you spend a few moments with each one in remembrance of  time gone by. And you will regret for brief seconds what will never be.

You spend one day going to every meeting you possibly can and alerting everyone to your new job opportunity. You will then go on and make sure that everyone has your correct contact information and that they know they can come to you for anything that needs explanation. Your meetings will be short because there is nothing left to say when you can’t have any action items. So, you disseminate all of your information and you go. That is pretty much all that anyone in the meeting has in them.

Two days are spent wishing that everything would just hurry up and you could move on. You avoid every contact you have in the hopes that no one will try and give you anything more to do before you leave. You eat by yourself in your office, if you stay at your office at all. You come in late and leave early, otherwise. You are a ghost because nothing of importance can be saddled on you, and you want it to stay that way. You want none of the credit and none of the blame for the things that are decided. You just want to slip out of the back door and let everyone go on without you.

One day is spent telling your bosses. They will be shocked and they will try and get you to stay. They will tell you about all of their big plans for you and how the next few months are going to be better. They will go through all of the stages of grief in a 20 minute cycle, and then they will start the cycle again. They will snub you the rest of the day, and unless you are careful, they will start to backtrack every compliment they have ever said about you. You will stand by your bosses and not say a word while this happens. They have every right to be mad about your departure, and you have every right to leave. You both know this.

Two additional days will be required to send and respond to emails. Each person you know in the organization will ask for a reason why, and you will provide them with one, you owe them one. The emails will be short and long, but they will all question how happy you will be in your new position. They will appeal to reason and to duty as if you hadn’t already made your decision. They will also be happy for you, but this will be a veiled insult about the fact that you have gotten out while they remain. They will lament how much more work they will have to do now that you are gone, and they will malign your timing. You, of course, will not care. Your responses will all be open invitations for praise and reminiscing. You will love all of it.

And that is how you will spend your two weeks of notice. Those events can happen in any order, but expect them to occur in quick succession. You may experience some compacting or expansion of these events, but they will all be major part of your life for as long as you are at your old company, school district, or organization. This is a part of the process. Take it and run with it.

I once waded out into a river where other children were happily playing. I found myself unable to go in past my knees. My legs started to feel like dead weight and it was everything I could do not to run out into the warm sun and let them dry off. But I stayed with it. I let my calves get used to the water. Then I introduced it to my waist. I stood for a long time there, breathing in shallow and quick. My belly button I then submerged and I was onto my chest. I had to crouch down in the shallow part of the river because I didn’t want to go further in. From this position, I inched toward the center of the river. I paused for minutes at a time just to make sure that my fingers were still working. I was finally able to get all of me under the water, save my head. That was the last thing I wanted to get wet. I thought that perhaps my brain would freeze and I would be stuck in the rushing water. I looked downstream, though. I saw the other kids playing and splashing and not fretting about how cold the water was. So, in the hopes that I too could join in, I dipped my head below the water. I was in. My body got used to the cold as I held my breath for a long time. When I came up, I realized that I was going to be okay. My brain wasn’t frozen. My legs worked. I could now go and play catch. I could take part. I could be happy in this water.

As I have tested the waters of my own ideas, of starting a company, of venturing further from my working past I have had moments of fear. I have found the water cold and uninviting. I have found that there is nothing to be done until I let myself come to terms with how much I have invested. As I continued to invest more and more, I become both more afraid and more emboldened to try and go further. Someday, maybe tomorrow, I will take the plunge. Someday, maybe tomorrow, I will know what it is like to feel the unfamiliar sensation of being weightless and fluid. I will hold my breath and count as everything around me acclimates and I become someone who knows what it is like to feel the free and easy sunlight on my face and make the conscious decision not to stay there.

Someday, maybe tomorrow, I will have decided that it was better to go through each and every cycle of pain and waiting to get to where I can play. I will pick up the ball and throw it to others that have done this trip too. And we will share and exchange ideas that aren’t possible on land. We will make swimming catches. We will dive down deep and see what is on the bottom. We will know every inch of this river, and we will become a part of helping others to join us.

We will say: “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

I once bought a snoopy diary. With my own money.

I took it to the Rec. Center immediately because I was proud of having some place to put my innermost thoughts. I wasn’t quite as proud when I got laughed at for it. They laughed at my secrecy and my interest in writing. They laughed at the little lock on the side that could easily be broken with a little force. Probably they laughed at Snoopy too, but I didn’t care about that. Snoopy is cool.

I kept that diary for approximately five days. It took me about that long to figure out that I didn’t lead a very interesting life. I didn’t have daily realizations or go on adventures. I was about 8 and I knew that my life couldn’t be lived internally. I couldn’t be Emily Dickenson, even though I didn’t know who she was. I couldn’t just imagine everything and have that be enough. I also couldn’t just write for myself. I needed someone else to know about it, to take a look. I think it was probably about then that I realized my words couldn’t just go down on paper that was locked away.

In middle and high school I tried again. I kept journals this time. I wrote in them every day and they were very important to me. But, I would copy out of them for others and I would read them out loud constantly to my friends. I started writing and sharing so much that I would write on scraps of newspaper that had little bits of white space. I would write poems and ideas that made sense to me, and then I would seek out feedback. My words were still so incredibly mine, though. I didn’t even contemplate letting others use them or do anything other than think about what I had meant by them.

Then I started blogging. And that’s where my words went. And I stopped guarding things, and I stopped forcing people to listen to me or dragging my notebooks and diaries around just so that people would discovery that I was a writer. My blog became that same space that was formerly so limited. I no longer control the words or where they end up. Some end up in a teacher’s course. Some end up in a tweet. Some end up captured in a PDF on someone’s hard drive.

I am giving these words away.

I realized in three hundred days that I don’t own them. I am using them to get somewhere and other people may use them to get where they are going. These stories are mine in that I have lived them, but they only really exist if they are told. They belong to anyone who finds them useful. These questions belong to anyone who is asking them.

If our words are going into diaries, we need to know why we feel the need to hide them from the rest of the world while we advertise the fact that we have things worthy of writing down.

If our words are going into journals and scraps of paper, we need to know why we are desperate for an audience of the few people around us we trust most.

If our words are going on blogs, we need to know why we are setting them free to live among everyone else’s stories and ideas.

I write now because my words are making meaning. For Me. For Us.

I love you. I’m sorry. You’re fired.

Pretty much everything else can be done with innuendo and body language. Those three things and every story and explanation that requires on of them, must be said out loud. They must be spoken and heard. There is no room for verbal tiptoeing or hyperbole. They need to be stated, in no uncertain terms.

I didn’t say enough of any of those three things when I was growing up. I didn’t tell my friends that I loved them. I didn’t say I was sorry when I lied or screwed up. And, I most certainly did not fire nearly enough of my ideas, friends or time-wasting experiences.

I daily fire things that aren’t important enough now. I hear that I am loved by my children and wife every Morning and Night (and usually once or twice in the middle of the day, too). I apologize for royally tanking or not staying on top of or not working with or being overzealous much of my time. And I am better for it. By saying these words out loud as often as I do, I know that I have actually made connections that are worth something. Each one of these statements requires an investment to have been made. Loving is an ongoing relationship, apologies are a reassessment of the relationship, and firing is an end to the relationship.

The only thing that is missing is the beginning of one. But relationship starts are almost always about a movement: A handshake, an eye roll, a sideways glance or even a cold shoulder. These are the kinds of things we need innuendo for. It is once we get past that, though, that we need words. To put it another way, beginnings are easy. Everything else needs work.

There are many secrets that would make no one happy to hear. They are things that are hidden for a reason. They are the things that we hold onto because we are afraid of what might happen if we didn’t. We are focused on their secrecy because any subtle sign that we are holding back would be met with retribution or distrust. We hold them close because we must.

And then there are other secrets that show themselves at the slightest suggestion of their presence. They are secrets that curl our mouths into smiles by just thinking about them. And we let them. We tell one another that they are secrets, but we are bursting at the seams waiting to tell one another what is inside.

I saw one of those secrets today. Just in the right corner of someone else’s mouth, not letting it open and not letting it fully shut.

Somehow that secret transferred to my mouth too. Now, I am half smiling, half knowing what comes next. I have a secret and it is making me smile.

I once waited at home all day waiting for a friend of mine to call. He said that he would, and I believed it was my duty to make sure that I was there to pick up when he inevitably did. I watched TV and played on the computer. I fondled the phone and made multiple calls of my own without response. I went through the emotions of rejection to anger. I regretted that I didn’t set up more concrete plans when we saw each other at school. I just wanted him to pick up the phone and dial my number so that we could hang out like we had the previous 10 weekends. Why was this one so different, and why wasn’t he calling? At about 9:00 pm that night, I called and he picked up. He was surprised that I had been waiting. He was surprised that I hadn’t just found something else to do. He was a little sorry about not calling, but he really didn’t see the problem in it. He wasn’t the one who had wasted an entire day by the phone. And he was right about that.

On that day, I realized that I had no way to take the pulse of my friends. I had no way to figure out what they were thinking or where they were going. I couldn’t search for it and certainly I couldn’t see on a FourSquare map the places that they had checked in. I know that the reality of landlines and unreliable brother answering systems made this so, but I don’t think that was really it. I couldn’t take the pulse because I didn’t know what it felt like. I couldn’t feel the pressure rise and fall. I couldn’t see the fluctuations in what mattered and didn’t. Perhaps most of all, I didn’t know that it was good to raise the pulse rate from time to time to make sure everything stayed healthy.

I have gotten better at this, though.

We exist in a world of perpetual search. The status updates that seem to emanate from the air define us and create more content than the world has ever known. The sheer volume of ideas being generated about even the most minute topics is flabbergasting. And we haven’t learned from much of our formerly terrible tools for keeping track of what is going on.

We create Google Alerts and subscribe to RSS feeds. We follow one another on twitter and friend each other on facebook. But we have no way to archive and we have no way to see patterns. Keeping the pulse isn’t just about knowing what is going on now, it is knowing where we are in a cycle and whether what is going on now is important. We need to know when quiet is a good thing. We need to know when noise is terrible. Right now, though, it is as if we are waiting by the computer waiting for our friends and business associates to say the right things for us to take part in the conversation.

Taking the pulse is about determining what should come next. It is about acting to raise expectations and then fulfilling them. It is about exercising our communities to make sure that they are still there for us. And we do this badly.

The communities that exist about indie rock music are just as fractured as the ones about tupperware. The individual places that we inhabit don’t come together in any way we can make sense of. Now, we do not need an aggregator of aggregators just to prove that we have the capacity to keep track of everything. We need to be able to develop the spaces that give us the most concrete information about the conversations we care about. We need to become collectors and people who put together puzzles. There is no stream of data that is worth less than another stream, so we should stop treating Twitter as better than HTML pages. We need to stop acting as if knowing where someone is is more important than the stuff they are doing there. All of the context matters, and we need to be able to take it all in and then parse it all for significance. In other words, we need to be able to make meaning, of all of it.

Let’s make a backup of all of our conversations.

Let’s make the answering machine that actually makes answers.

I do not, in general, gamble with my wallet. I have been to a casino once, and it wasn’t what I would consider all that entertaining. I played a few slots and sat down for a few rounds of Blackjack, but the thrill of a big win just wasn’t that prevalent or enticing. It was a little bit like attending a movie. I payed 20 bucks to get in and it was worth about 2 hours of fun. Even with my somewhat limited understanding, I knew that any time that I placed a bet, I should consider the odds and made sure that I had at least some chance of winning.

I’m not sure that we are doing that now. I’m not sure that we are placing bets that have any chance of winning, or at least that the odds are so infinitesimally small that only the enormous payout keeps us interested.

We are backing the horse of collaboration and openness.

We are backing the horse of hyperlinks instead of heirarchy.

We are backing the horse of the individual rather than the institution.

We are backing the horse of social inclusion rather than social isolation.

We are backing the horse of co-creation instead of ownership.

And we have only seen it work in fits and starts. We have seen backlashes. We have seen movements against each one of those precepts. And yet, still we bet. We bet with our every action that it will be better than working against what we believe. We bet in these ideals despite the entirety of human history going against them. We bet on these new phenomena because they make sense to us in a world where very little does, but there is no groundswell. There is no overwhelming mass of people that are pursuing these in political, economic or social environments except to co-opt them and make the payout that much less for any real change.

Are we backing the wrong horse? Is there any chance that all of this is just a bottomless pit of effort, money and words? And, are we becoming addicted to the idea of hitting it big if we just try enough times?

Perhaps we are just playing a huge game of blackjack with the world. If we get 21, we move forward. If any other combination of cards falls before us, we lose big. I’m not sure I like our odds.