Learning to act right (43)… from intuition to thinking to intuition

Torrey Orton

Sept 30, 2014

I have always been clearly an intuitive thinker, but I am not without logic. The right thing to do springs into my awareness automatically and years of being an object of my own commands has largely worked. In a current consulting assignment I have been “making it up as I go” for three months, week to week, and I’m open with the clients (a family of 5 in one business) about the fact. One effect is that I am including them in the design of my interventions, which also ensures they are “on board with it” as this week’s make up turns into next week’s activities. For an average of six contact hours a week I generate another couple of days thinking, mostly consciously done at night, spurred into action by an intuition coming into view at 3am or so and recorded on double sized post-its on the bedside table under torch guidance.

This is an unusual experience for me. I can do conscious thinking about technical matters in training or therapy once the target / objective / direction has been intuitively formulated. In what matters to this client family, the targeting is always in doubt because I am having to do it for them and then test it each week. So, for some as yet unclear reason I am able in the dark to lie there and work slowly thru the week’s development challenge in a manner mixing intuitive and analytic. This looks like the following:

A direction for action presents itself such as getting them to appreciate each other’s life a bit. Entry level tools for this already exist – mapping a group’s history with current and past players present, if necessary. With the family all the players are present. So what to do to map it? Try it out with them on a segment of the history which is big enough to show a pattern and small enough to be graspable. What these time quanta are is a matter of importance, but can be revised as we go. What the contents of the map should be is also revisable in retrospect, as patterns and time chunks assume useful shapes. But, the choice of starting content labels (the basis for the content eliciting questions which frame the exercise of mapping) is critical to the viability of the process. The specification of desired contents has to be sharp enough to matter and loose enough to give personal wriggle room in the early stages as trust is explored and built. And, the content needs to be elaborated from events to purpose(s) so the meaning is shared as well as the ‘facts’. A sheet of butcher’s paper for each time segment (e.g. decade) may be appropriate as the data recording system, allowing all participants to record items themselves at times and the whole map to be visible as it emerges.

So, that’s what I worked thru bit by bit (there was a lot more, but...) in a slow, pick-a-brick-and-try-it-for-fit kind of building way. Intuitive grasp with mixed salad of analytic components. I’m pretty sure that I’ve only given the results not the feel of the process here, which means I’m more in the analytic than the intuitive but there ya go. One characteristic of intuition is that it is a not-to-be-summoned-by-will kind of process.

What’s normal now (4)…beyond the boundaries – passing for / as…?

Torrey Orton
Jan 20, 2013

Passing for white, or Jewish or gay or…another passing identity?

I’ve passed briefly for German, Dutch, Irish, Swedish, but never French, Italian, Russian…where passing is defined as being treated as one of those origins by birth members of that origin. I don’t even mention Chinese, except where I’ve passed as Chinese on the phone a few times by dint of a capacity for fluently mimicking the standard politenesses which make everyone comfortable in Chinese (and my face is not visible!!). This passing is always a treat, usually a surprise the first time around and enduringly a source of pleasant assumptions about my flexibility…or maybe that’s my evasiveness?

The treat is intensified by the fact that I’ve never passed for Australian in my present home country, though when back in my original one - the US - I’ve never passed for American for 40 years. In both places the locals say ‘how long ya been here’, or similar (where’re you from?), which on an irritable day I reply to thus: “Here longer than you’ve been alive” (when being prickly) or “Richmond” (when being passive aggressive). This ‘passing’ is not to be confused with the contemporary euphemism for dying…

 

For others with stigmatised attributes – race, ethnicity, sexual preference, gender, religion – passing may be both an opportunity to share the dominant class privileges of the culture in question, to feel a traitor to one’s class, culture, etc., and to be in danger of being self-outed by misspeaking. Misspeaking is one of the dangers the effective passer has to master since accent and vocabulary are among the easiest signs of an identity group membership and motivation for exclusion of others. This is sharply observed by Tim Winton in The “C” Word (The Monthly, December 2013).

Normal boundaries

One of the minimum requirements for being normal is a workable definition. Usually this requires some kind(s) of clear boundaries for some normal to be other than another unanchored evidentiary mote in the everyday eye. Another level down, or up, we have the boundaries of the language in which the normal is being expressed. ‘Passing’ carries a sense of either leaving something behind or being left behind, which is probably why ‘pass’ has replaced ‘die’ as the privileged descriptor for death events in the Obits pages of our papers and tellies. ‘Pass’ implies a continuing presence anchored by the past still in someone’s mind. Die is just that – dead and gone.

So we can imagine that to ‘pass’ in this sense suggests the living, those left behind, are in a defective state of some sort (see the major religions for established answers to that assumption). And so, segue to passing for white, or straight, or religious (or not) where not being the real thing in any of those domains may be experienced by the unreal ones as an intentional, discriminatory exclusion. Here’s an example:

“Isabelle Mussard is 41 and lives in Oakland, California. She is sometimes mistaken for Latino or Iranian but is actually of Métis descent, by way of France and Senegal, and of unknown mixed origins on her mother's side, as she was adopted. She takes no pride in passing as white, but sees many parallels in the experience that spans the varying identities of her family. "I think a lot about the analogies between coming out as a black woman of mixed heritage and my lesbian mother's coming out." Mussard remarks on another tension, a "triple consciousness" for passing as white, being black, but resisting America's definition of blackness given her European ancestry. Not having a black identity that is linked with the American history of slavery renders her identification even more complex. She is wary of appropriating a culture that is not her own and says that she wants to stay cognisant of and responsible for her privilege in passing.”

Koa Beck “The trouble with 'passing' for another race/sexuality/religion …”theguardian.com, Thursday 2 January 2014

This background presents the kind of situation in which constant renegotiation of one’s identity is a requirement, or threat, of everyday living and typifies a characteristic of our culture of “liquid fear” which Z. Bauman characterizes so exhaustively. The exclusion experience can occur also for members of an imagined dominant identity whenever they are caught in the minority role such as turning up at a largely LGBT event, or a working class pub by default of any other option and so on. Overseas travel can be a great opportunity to learn about being a minority person though few seem to do so, reliably treating encountered (and, one would have thought, sought) difference(s) as a deficit of the dominant identities they are visiting. Try some. You may like them. Food is a recognized boundary riding opportunity for most humans.

The identity boundary problem reaches into the future in unexpected forms like this: One of my favourite passing problems is artificial intelligence. Here’s my take on it. When a robot can conduct a life it is no longer a robot; it’s a person. Prospects of this occurring are not too great …but then…

As for robotic persons, they’re around aplenty in public discourses speaking in the tongues of commodification and politicisation in repeated sound bites answering questions the enquiring reporter hasn’t asked, or as often disregarding the reporter’s queries to mount as if not heard their mantra of the moment. This is a party-free phenomenon.

Appreciation (36) …out of Africa?

Appreciation (36) …out of Africa?
Torrey Orton
May 4, 2011

"Ask him when he came out of Africa?", she said quietly.

We were in the fourth day of four in a leadership program for journalists. The group of 9 held six women and three men from seven countries/regions: Indonesia, Fiji, Vanuatu, Irian Jaya(Papua) province of Indonesia, PNG, Timor Leste and Solomon Islands. They spoke 15 or twenty languages between them and no one language was competently held across the whole group. Individuals often had 5 or six, including English, pidgin, family or clan languages and a national language. So there was a constant play of interpreting throughout the learning activities. I was the only non-islander English speaker in the group. I was also 30 years older than everyone but Jason, who was about 50. Jason held down the darker end of the colour spectrum for which I anchored the lighter, with everyone else spread out in between* - the ethnic Indonesians closest to me, the Papuan next and the others following to Jason.


Our program included five segments, in this order, on personality, stress management, culture and leadership, negotiation and conflict management, and mentoring/networking, all with an orientation to the leadership demands of being a journalist in their respective contexts. The culture segment opened the door on a range of shared histories among us, and the overall shared history of European colonialism. In the process of exploring the cultures in the room I pointed out that we all come out of Africa. This was news to everyone.


At some later point in our excursion through negotiation and conflict management I mentioned to the group that there is published research evidence about the out-of- Africa claim and I had the book – Spencer Wells' The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey. Jason jumped at it, along with another – Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies – which explains cultural success in geographic terms, as well as the unintended depredations of Christian colonialism (germs, mostly).


On reflection, I have to admit that saying I come out of Africa has a very low face-value truthfulness about it. A case of the mind's eye getting it wrong to any unbiased observer. I just don't look anyone's 'black' or tan or Asian, or…Italian. The research shows (love that frame!) that my relatives are traceable to a female origin out of Africa quite a while ago. But it is demonstrably obvious that I'm not black or tan or anything other than fading lily whiteish. And it is even more incontrovertibly clear that I didn't come out of Africa in any comprehensibly practical sense. Talk about an inner truth?! The genes shape us but the appearances make us.


And so the quietest group member, and occupier of a prime position in the darker range, Fijian Dorothy said, pointing at the leader with no clothes running the training – me:

"Ask him when he came out of Africa?" she posed quietly.

 

And three of us – Diana, Jason and I - broke into unstoppable laughter, with tears, which lasted three or four minutes, reigniting as they do with recollections or repetitions of the cue line "Ask him…" I've since repeated it enough to drain the trigger of its tickle.

 

 

*I recalled as I was entering the culture segment of our work that I had first encountered the colour conundrum 45 years ago as a beginner high school teacher in New Haven, CN, USA. This was particularly the first time of my really being a minority person for a bit. Years later in China it was daily for two years – a more shaping experience. At that US time I devised a simple experiment. In English classes with a majority of blacks and an ethnic multitude of whites, I offered an exploration of the substance of the terms 'white' and 'black'.


We (including me) lined up in a horseshoe (so everyone could see everyone else) whose gradation from darkest to lightest, and back, was agreed by all. The result always was that some self-identified 'black' kids actually were over the line into 'white' and vice-versa, as agreed among the participants in any particular line-up. (This kind of perception is the empirical origin of the current identification 'mixed', which is established in the identity stats of the UK census and an ongoing subject of discussion in the US). The kids had little trouble agreeing on the fade from light to dark and vice-versa, yet clung energetically to the soundness of their practical judgment that the difference was black and white clear!! Black hung with black and white with white. Therein the dilemma of the difference which is not, but is!


This dilemma is played out in both light and dark communities as they privilege the other in their beauty gradings – for some purposes. The lights approve tannedness among themselves (even fake tan!), but get queasy with permanently tanned members of their 'community' (maybe they've got a bit of dark the lights suppose) and the darks approve with envy the lights of theirs while at the same time reserving true darkness membership to the darkest (nearest to Africa??). What a human mess. Was 'mixed' cooked up to bridge the unbridgeable distinctions without creating a discriminatory difference??