Learning is Change

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.

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.