Learning is Change

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.

Sometimes I wish I were the managing editor of a major news publication. Sometimes I wish I had the ability to put certain stories on the front page. I would balance the rich world news coverage with homespun stories of heartbreak. I would focus on what matters and build my readership by capturing imaginations. I would only let the best writing in. I would put together an America’s best non-fiction collection every day. And I would send a message that nothing was off limits. I would include things that caught my fancy and make sure that every lead was well vetted. Sometimes I wish that I chose what the news would be that day. 

But, mostly I don’t. 

Mostly,  my flexibility isn’t in deciding what is fit to print.

It is in fitting everything that I can into my little life and seeing if anything comes out the other side. My flexibility is in cramming all that I can find into the smallest spaces of time and seeing if collapse is imminent. I’m not eliminating the fluff; I am embracing it. 

While I know that an editors job is never done and every issue comes down to the wire. Their obsession is in pruning and getting the best from everyone. Even if this is an idyllic view, it is one that I hold up in the hopes that one day it may be mine.

I do not prune. I grow like a weed. 

I am producing and creating and collecting and reframing, all in the hopes that something will result. There is no guarantee that an issue will come out or that there will be more readers and observers and cheerers on. It is a futile exercise in sheer volume. There will be things that rise above and resonate simply because of the fantastic dregs that they sit upon. 

I cannot rest upon my laurels because I can’t afford it.

The flexibility I seek really is choosing what to be passionate about and then only doing that. Not some peripheral version of that. It is in committing time and resources to the things that focus my energy rather than scatter it. To things that energize instead of drain. 

I’m in the market for momentum, for progression, for choice. 

I’m looking for the kind of flexibility that ushers me daily into orchestrating my own fate.