The Spice Must Flow … and That’s Not Sean Spicer, the Spice Girls, or Piquillo Peppers!
August 1, 2018
As a dad, I don’t often get feedback on my job performance. Sometimes, the plan is to throw everything on the wall and see what sticks. This mish-mosh style acknowledges that my children may do the opposite of what I say. I liken this behavior to a parental remix of Schrodinger’s Cat of quantum physics fame—while multiple possible outcomes are superimposed in the quantum wave before observing the child, upon fixing the parental eye on the target, all that momentary potential collapses to the least desired result!
Once in a while, however, I abandon the scatter-shot parenting and take the direct approach. Included in this wishful category are books I consider a must for my children to experience. Thus, my tale today concerns science fiction novels—specifically, books that forever transformed my worldview. I have a long list, but for the teen years, my top four reads—and many of you may disagree—are Foundation (Asimov), Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke), Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), and Dune (Herbert). These are generally not for the early teen years. Certainly, any good reader can get through these novels, but the magic occurs with a mindset mature enough to “grok” the beyond.
I have previously quoted many a Dune reference to my daughters with no avail. And so, with my eldest leaving the nest for college, I had almost given up hope that she would crack the book’s pages. Two weeks ago, she walked quietly into my home office, where I was working at my desk. She pulled up a chair, and then began the conversation in a measured tone, “Dad, I have some questions.”
I had immediate feelings of dread and gratitude—could this be about boys, and hadn’t her mother handled that topic … and she still wants my advice.
Taking a deep breath, and turning off my computer, I prompted, “Okay, what’s up?”
She let loose with, “I’m confused about the relationships between the Imperium, the Great Houses and the Emperor. How does the CHOAM company fit in, and is the Spacing Guild more powerful? Does the Emperor control the Bene Gesserit?”
Cue the huge smile on my relieved face. Inside, I was laughing with pure joy. Outside, I nodded and asked, “How far into Dune are you?”
“Not very,” she admitted tentatively. Then she quickly added, “His writing style is amazing. I can see why it’s one of your favorites.”
Not wanting to leave her questions hanging, I managed a half-reply along the lines of, “Herbert’s world-building—organizations, governance, trade, religion—is a lot to process. These are great questions. There are layers within layers within layers. It’s not unlike real life. The CHOAM … “
We chatted iteratively for five minutes on a framework. The rest was for her to discover. I finished with, “I’d love to hear your ideas after the next hundred pages.”
Addendum: I took my daughters to the Jersey Shore to visit Grandmom, and this gave my wife a staycation break. My eldest daughter forgot to pack hair conditioner, a brush, extra shoes, and other sundry items, but the big win—she remembered Dune in a plastic bag for reading on the beach!
Question: Regardless of the reader’s age, what are your top five transformative science fiction novels? If I had to provide a fifth choice, it would be from Zelazny, Gibson, or Niven.
Breathe slowly, observe humbly, dream deeply, and evolve.
W.L. Hoffman
Actions Have Outcomes – Digging into the Soil of Life
April 28, 2016
Spring, for me, means planting. On this topic, there is a treasure trove of technical and intuitive gardening information to discuss. While I’ve absorbed a fair share, I’m not tackling that beast for this entry. Instead, I feel compelled to share what I love most about gardening . . . drum roll please . . . the process.
Sure, gardening is a stress reliever, delivers good exercise, and enables you to feed delights to your family – both visual and culinary. And there’s an undeniable joy to smelling good earth after a rainstorm. But in a world of digital digression, exacerbated with moments of feeling stuck on a phantasmal merry-go-round, I am rescued from despair by a lesson from my garden: actions have outcomes. Seems obvious right? And yet, how often do I succumb to digital nirvana only to wake after an hour goes by and ask – what the hell just happened? I get this “dirty” feeling, a self-guilt far worse than the grimiest recess in my garden. Please avoid the lurid conclusions. Yes, that Content is pervasive on the Internet, and hey, I’m a guy – happily married with children – but still a guy. Curiosity and an open mind are healthy human traits. So, putting aside those distractions, the feeling I’m struggling to convey is one of life passing me by while I run like a hamster on the treadmill.
There are online interactions that are worthy, humorous, social, informative . . . I acknowledge these positives. The problem is striking the balance. Our minds crave data. This is concurrently our great strength and our weakness. It takes effort and time to sort through a seemingly infinite field of electronic Content, and the few actions we take in the digital realm rarely have outcomes that we can predict, let alone recognize when they manifest. There is such a thing as too much connectivity, with too little impact. That largesse of other people’s stories, available with a finger swipe or keystroke, overwhelms us subconsciously, if not outright – paralysis by analysis. Or perhaps, it’s all too illusory, in that we think we have gotten somewhere only to glance askew at a mirror of empty dreams, and then turn away. For who among us truly wants to stare into that abyss?
Little steps, joined together, inevitably produce results. Rather than being a voyeur, I jump into the fray. I stand, stretch and walk outside. The fresh air awakens my spirit. My garden is neither fancy, nor expansive, and I won’t win any prizes. The chicken wire needs fixing in places, and I have to constantly excise rotten wood in the raised beds and stakes. At night, I scrub the black soil from under my nails. My muscles ache with a soreness that is satisfying. My girls have become experts in removing my splinters. My thoughts alight with compost, companion plantings, succession crops, pest remedies and seed experiments. The preparation began in December. In February, seeds were ordered and pulled from my reserves. Then as March arrived, the clean-up hit me in earnest. Those days were cold, the wind raw and the weeds tenacious. I had cuts, thorns and reptile skin on my hands. I could sand wood with my palm, and that touch certainly wasn’t going to win over my wife. Early April saw pruning and mulch, and with the soil finally ready, I savored our seed choices. The girls had their favorites, too. I visualized the growth patterns and light sources, checked the day and overnight temperatures, and noted the weather forecast. Perennials that we had labored over last year began budding. Those ferns that seemed dead and gone . . . their fiddlehead fronds continue unfurling today. In a week, we should have vegetable sprouts poking through to the sun.
Slowly, taking these myriad tiny strides, our garden comes into awareness. There will be outcomes, both good and unexpected. There’s no “easy button” to push. Gardening is patient work. But the process harkens to everything else we do in life – actions have outcomes – and sometimes when I’m lost, I rejoice in the comfort and motivation of that simple wisdom.
Smile When Your Child Says, “No.”
October 9, 2013
This past week, my inner voice drove me to abandon work and attend an afternoon lecture on “Free Will & Philosophy” given by a Philosophy Professor from a top University. As an aside, we all need to listen to those subtle instincts and energies that guide our paths. That’s a hard task for many… filtering the white noise of life to note signals in the system that have deeper personal meaning.
Returning to philosophy, the topic wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was nonetheless captivating. As a bonus, the Professor was entertaining, energetic and nimble. At one point, the presentation focused upon the Yale University Milgram Experiment on obedience: why seemingly normal people when put in the role of “teacher” (and encouraged by a lab-coated authority figure) will administer electric shocks to a “learner” test subject in another room even though they can hear the person screaming. Hold the objections, the electric shocks were faked. The learner responses were pre-recorded theatre to observe each teacher’s reaction. The Professor then mentioned another famous psychology experiment: the Stanford University Prison Study where ordinary people were randomly assigned roles of guards and prisoners. Guards were told to be firm, but their actions grew steadily more brutal. So much so, that the two week experiment was prematurely terminated after only six days.
Perhaps you are now asking “what do these studies have to do with my children or my parenting style?” The Professor viewed the discussion from a philosophical perspective of questioning Society’s idea of morals and blame, and whether we live in a deterministic clockwork world of no free will. This is an oversimplification for brevity, so my apologies to the good Professor. Still, why did more than 60% of the people in the classic Milgram Experiment keep shocking the learner subject until the occurrence of what might have been death or permanent injury, simply for a wrong answer? Why didn’t more people refuse the instruction, or acknowledge the desperate pleas (pre-recorded) of the learner subject? Did the teacher volunteer have free will or was another mechanism running the show? Well, such questions remain under avid scrutiny today, although there are several theories for the unexpected results. As you may have already guessed, I’m tossing out a proposal for you to consider, both as to your children and your parenting choices.
After the Professor’s formal presentation, I took the opportunity to ask questions (as did others). For a while, I listened to everyone… absorbing the ebb and flow. The Professor suggested that humans have a behavioral template that influences choice even when their actions have horrible effects. He posited that in a situation of conflicting data (i.e., I don’t like administering electric shocks that severely hurt a normal person, but the esteemed scientist standing over my shoulder calmly says to continue doing so), humans have a predisposition to obey the person that we think has more information or authority. This may stem from our early evolution, where snap decisions to follow the leader – a person appearing to have better data in a confusing situation – resulted in survival. Standing among the crowd circling the Professor, I agreed that this adaptive “Darwinian” strategy was a component to the equation, but my thoughts drifted to conclusions that would challenge that paradigm.
Before you ask for my academic credentials on such matters of the mind, the short story is “nothing formal.” I am a father, a fan of metaphysics, I believe in critical thinking, and my opinions rely on observation and theory. If that’s not enough, feel free to stop reading here.
As the conversation hit a lull, I asked the Professor, “Have you considered the implications of the Industrial Age public education model on the obedience found in the Milgram Experiment?” He seemed uncomfortable… there was a camera man filming the exchange… I waited, but was disappointed as his reply effectively dodged my question.
I wasn’t about to let the Professor off the hook. After another minute, I politely pressed, “Is it possible that the behavioral template evidenced in Milgram is being dramatically reinforced by our educational model of teacher/student that begins at pre-K? Teachers tell students they must sit down quietly, must memorize what is said, must study the knowledge presented and must be a productive worker/member in society.” I paused, and silence ensued. So, I fired away, “How often can students disagree with their teachers without receiving punishment or social stigma?” I really wanted to add mandatory prescription drugs for ADHD or similar en vogue behavioral disorders to the litany, but opening that door would have muddied the waters.
This time, the Professor launched a counterargument. He knew of a Milgram Experiment variation using test subjects in cultures without public education, and the results were essentially unchanged. Before I could ask him if the experiment’s designers had truly verified if they had a sampling with neither public education, nor a surrogate teacher/student learning system, he moved to another question… another philosophy twist.
I thought about his answer. While that study might have unexplored pitfalls in the analysis and conclusions, what would happen if I assumed for argument purposes that his Milgram variation had merit? This logic pushed my thoughts to another common factor that would reinforce such disturbing behavior. I again wedged my voice into the conversation, “Professor, what about the earliest form of education, the parent/child relationship? Those roles pre-condition an obedience template from birth that is not much different from teacher/student. Could our relatively modern parenting style, from the Victorian Era forward, which emphasizes discipline, respect, and obedience be unintentionally hard-wiring our children’s cognitive weakness?”
I could see him thinking about this… and the camera kept filming. Then, another audience member interrupted with a book reference to a related psychology topic, and after a moment, the Professor shifted to his core material, leaving my supposition dangling over the cliff in the company of Wile E. Coyote.
So, what’s my “takeaway” from this pleasant interlude of philosophical thought? I’m admittedly surprised at the outcome, though maybe I shouldn’t be: when you “select” the path, things happen.
Rather than knee-jerk disagreement or admonitions of impracticality, I hope that some of you will perceive the faint glimmer of light roiling against the darkness. To that end:
Life Lesson: Be open to letting your child explore asymmetrical or unconventional forms of education: apprenticeship, travel, homeschooling, independent study, art, experiential investigation, play, etc. Mainstream public education can be a positive (I have met teachers that give heart and soul to the kids), but as applied across the board in its lowest denominator, today’s public education is designed as a compliance oriented Industrial Age necessity for managing the masses, instilling societal programming and producing workers.
Life Lesson: From this point on, I will do my utmost to look beyond the surface when my child says “No,” whether it’s to me as a parent, to a teacher or to anyone. Safety concerns aside, I will encourage my child’s instincts, independence and critical analysis skills. I don’t want to produce another cog in the great wheel of Society. This approach won’t be easy, convenient, or peaceful. I will suffer a fair amount of impingement upon my existence to the extent that I freely choose to sacrifice my expectations for the sake of my child. Of course, it’s maddening to hear your child reject your direction, and there are certainly risks to encouraging a non-conformist model. But I’m going to reap the wind, and think of it in terms of a contemporary film metaphor:
Neo must awaken from the Matrix.
Extra Credit: anyone recognize the picture reference below?
Soulstealer War Weblog 