Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life

Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life
Torrey Orton
July 30, 2011

Get a grip on yourselves before the roof blows off.

Non-verbal communication is recognised as much in its excess (hitting, slapping…) as its shortage (touch-free upbringings, non-contact sports….) in everyday life. More ordinary levels like handshakes and arm touches are the unconsciously applied media of daily interactions, from intimate to instrumental. Their therapeutic potential may be unnoticed. I offer three recent experiences for your appreciation.


M and A have explosively volatile struggles around their respective needs for care, powered by very different but equally searing injuries to self. These struggles have improved countably over three months of work (weekly) from daily 2-3 hour storms to weekly ones; from standing at the edge of the abyss of relationship implosion to enjoying each other much of the time. But still the volatility remains. The injuries will never fade away, especially his – he has a congenitally weak lower back. She only has interpersonally catastrophic parents, so far.


The signalling of their needs is still not fine enough and they turn any single glitch into another in the running sores of their past failures, still in often uncontrollable emotional flashes. Fine enough is what? It's a capacity to catch an emerging need default to disappointment when it's only a difference in the prevailing atmosphere of their joint life. Need defaults are moments like this:

Typically, he's having a bad back day, which means unpredictable pain grasping an apprehensive attitude (because always on edge for the unpredictable) and she's having a bad recall (which means direct experience of parental abandonments). He needs stillness; she needs a hug. Two into one don't go. He tenses and she pushes her need. She feels abandoned and he feels crowded. The great disappointment blast off.

Creating a fine enough treatment looks like:

This day they show up in therapy (session 12) with an increasing sense of achievement and a reminder of the distance to go – the blast off above, just a day before. In a guided revisit, they experience their respective hurts under control and agree that her hug is unreasonable for his pain. So then what? I ask her what would help her need for reassurance. She knows immediately and precisely: a held hand would do just fine.

I ask her to move a seat closer to him, within easy hand reach, and show him where to offer his hand. She places hers palm down just above her knee. He slides his under hers and she says "No". Through his shock he figures out the slide is a slip (but not what slip; it's the sexual one). She lifts hers and places his on top. Success. Abandonment defeated with visceral relief. Guilt at being unable to respond to her need fended off appropriately.

I think I may have primed this result by telling them a story of another couple (F and D) in their age range who were sitting in these seats a week before, separated by a similar need gap. It was crossed by the guy taking action to respond to her pain about their relationship arising from conflicted feelings about his responses to it earlier – that she often needed space and he needed closeness at the same moment. This typically happens at the end of the work day.

He initiated the same seat change spontaneously and grabbed her ambivalently available hand from a slightly cringed position in her chair. This allowed exploring just how close was too close, and considering how their attachment styles differed around a critical mutual reassurance behaviour. Joint distance regulation was tested live, and controllably, as they adjusted the hand holding to achieve optimum need fulfilment at the moment: giving help for him and acknowledging her distance for her in the same act.

These events seem to come in pairs and triplets, or just surges. A day later, a twenty years older couple (C and P) appeared, struggling with increasing success with rages driven largely by him and facilitated by her chronic passivity. His rage driver is an undiscoverable family history – an absent father of a one night's burst pregnancy untraceable by his mother, plus years of deception about his adoption heritage. At 17 he finally caught his otherwise caring adopters messing up their version of his life, an exposure he had long felt coming.


It leaves him hugely vulnerable to rushes of anxiety at perceived performance failures of his, or others in regard to him – a threat of not getting to anything on time will do it. This one was on the way to see me together, with her driving to pre-empt such a rage, but the tactic failing on the road. So,

...they had one of the blow-ups they so fear, but constrained enough by their joint therapeutic work to so reduce it that he just fumed in the passenger's seat about being late, maybe! Like the others above, these two had had a major explosion (first for some weeks) earlier that week.

Trouble is, the fuming is contagiously electric and bad memory inducing for her – will this be another rage or just a low grade trash fire?? So, she reached out to pat his head and he ducked away into a foetal sulk, with emanations of fury growth. They wondered what she could have done differently. It took us some while to come up with the insight that her intuitive touch had been conceptually right, only practically clumsy.

A head touch is not benign, but three others are: the shoulder, upper arm and forearm touches. These are almost universally recognised as OK touches, even between sexes/genders. Most others are sexual, domineering, or both.

The touch is essential to break the rage cycle once it has started. Words just feed it. The touch allows another level of consciousness to be accessed, wherein the path to freedom of the moment's disruptive passion.

Learner therapist (9) …”Finding my starter button”

Learner therapist (9) …"Finding my starter button"
Torrey Orton
July 24, 2011


B., 32, is struggling to step into his realistic, clearly focussed, and preferred work life. He has a track record of work and initiative in the field (food service), a plan for exploring a start-up enterprise, down to possible funding, and most recently a partner prospect of long acquaintance. What he doesn't have is a "starter button". Motivation for the last year or so has been negative – escaping a clearly unsatisfying present job, at which he is also underperforming (though his employer doesn't seem to mind because no pressure is explicitly put on B to do more or differently or better, or…anyway, actually a great situation for a career change – paid exploration time!).


But not negative everywhere. In the last six months he's discovered running and pursues it with sturdy and rewarding attention, to the point of prepping for a half marathon now. No trouble starting his engine for the morning chug around the neighbourhood. He knows he'll feel good doing it and enjoy the challenge of sharpening his times while trimming his steps to reliable sustainability. And so he knows what it means (thought/feeling/action) to be motivated, and is so about some things! His wife and child are among important others.


On the edge of his stasis lies a gambling penchant with a smoking habit attached, now under control, more or less. He recognises this cluster is a displacement of energies which could drive a new life direction and his shortage of accepted alpha aspiration for a male of his social, ethnic and religious identifications. As well, there's a family history of weak father performance in the provider role, which B reflects in his unfound "starter button". He doesn't believe he can succeed at leading a venture alone.


Some months into this exploration, along came the right business partner prospect – a friend of long standing, appropriate openness and relevant life background, interests, experience and resources. Then up jumped a new challenge. What is B expecting the partner to lead in the enterprise and what will/can he lead himself? He doesn't know, nor had he thought of the question, but can feel the relevance.


The background discussion is 'what is motivation and how can it be grown, urged, prodded…in short, increased?' Also in short, motivation is the outcome of a shapely purpose, plus attractive incentives. We know that incentives can act as a purpose, or be confused for one, because need for them (money, status, position, etc.) is confused with purpose arising from deep within – an intrinsic motivation driver. Motivation is enhanced or compromised by competence: actual, imagined and aspirational – which in turn are sustained or demeaned by hope. B. suffers from a motivation hope deficit.


So, to start again, how does B improve his shortfall in leadership competence? By replacing it with confidence in shared leadership – the everyday business solution except where compulsive micro-managers are in the seat. Two parallel leadership relationships bear on his future: the business partner and the life partner ones. While both of these people support his vocational initiative, their stakes differ; His life partner's stake includes management of the household economy, it also affects her personal vocational future(s) (they agree she should go back to work in some way). The business partner's stakes principally centre on business management issues and the household side of his own domestic economy, too.


For B, clarifying his life partner's needs is the starting place to setting some personal goals. But that cannot be done without clarifying his needs. We're talking here about real things like amount of time away from home, expected low income period for the start-up and fall back options for the venture. In parallel run her only slightly spoken vocational aspirations, motherhood self-images, and such.


Both share a habit which blocks exploratory discussions directly affecting them: the wish to do no harm to the other. This is held with something approaching the energy of medical professionals, but not the same professional obligation. The ethical one is almost as powerful. As a result they cannot enter into potentially disputable grounds – those which harbour uncertainty about life critical matters like the family economy above, for instance. And the perceived relationship of doing nothing is still too slight. Doing no harm prevents doing good.


Keep posted.

 

Learning to act right (19)… When being needy is good for others!

Learning to act right (19)… When being needy is good for others!
Torrey Orton
July 17, 2011


S. is a fixer and a guilt artist, with shame toppings if possible. Fixing things for others, preferably without much recognition, is his primary means of justifying his otherwise (in his view) unworthy self. The joy of fixing a lot is never enough, however, to compensate the wrongs he has done in the process of trying to right things…even worse when the fix itself fails, too, as it did recently. You may recognise yourselves in this caricature somewhere.


So what to do when we are unwell, injured, beset by bad karma – especially the ones which challenge others' empathy or compassion, the ones in the extremes of life like prospectively terminal illnesses / injuries, committing or being victims of incarcerateable offenses, betrayals real or imagined, etc.? If we are reasonably well befriended, some of them will rush to palliate or placate the injuries.


Others will duck and run or just not be seen when they realise they've never experienced your bad luck before or it's their own bad dream. In either case, about then helplessness sets in. What can I do for you, they may ask, and you may say, literally, nothing, thinking what right do I have to ask for help, especially if I'm partly the author of my own condition?


But the friend needs your help to feel worthy themselves!! A fixer's catch 22: need to help my helpless friends, but not to help myself if helping them means helping them to help me!! In my most recent encounter with this dilemma I think I convinced the fixer, S. above, to accept that he had to bear the taint of a little help sticking to him from the virtuous action of his helping others know what to do so they did not feel helpless. There was additional pain for him, but not enough to compensate for the self-indulgence, of identifying what he really needs help with/for!


Of, course, sometimes the friends are helpless and that's for sure. They cannot undo the damage you have suffered, or you theirs. Then the fixer's in real trouble because the only solace for friends' helplessness is that painful truth. Herein's another story – the virtue of painful truths expounded rather than withheld. Doubly difficult for the fixer, but way too hard for many leaders.

I digress.

My 50th boarding school reunion bio

SINACCORD
                

11 Wertheim St., Richmond, Victoria, 3121, Australia

Tel. (+613) 9428-7462 FAX (+613) 9427-8174 Mobile +61 419 362 349 E Mail - torreyo@ozemail.com.au

 

June 29, 2011

This is what I submitted as background info in me for attendees at our 50^th reunion May 12-14, 2011. I thought I'd post it because it captures a certain present self-assessment and history that isn't covered by topical posts but probably affects them in more and less subliminal ways. The pic's a bit out of date, so I dropped it…

Taft School Class of '61 Bio for Torrey Orton

I am leading a life I have mostly chosen, missing some things on the way that being less devoted to choosing would have given me. Much of it has been composed of things I never thought of, nor knew of, at Taft - living in Melbourne (35yrs), Beijing (2yrs), Shanghai (1.5yrs) and Paris (1.5yrs) for starters. Some has been planned like becoming a psychotherapist and organisation consultant in my 50's. As a result of meeting Jane by chance on a hot July, 1970 NYC afternoon, I started learning deeply that there are other worlds than the American one(s), whence an eventual change of citizenship couched in the Melbourne body of my life.

 

Much of this life has been an exploration of different worlds, inner and outer, prefigured by a helping professions orientation which was emerging at Williams and confirmed in 5 years of HS teaching, and alternative school and commune building in New Haven, moderated by 2 years of a Yale philosophy Masters over 1965-72. In the following 40 years I only once slipped outside the helping life to run a bank IT systems project 1989-91 – but even then it was an HR system.

 

The bank was merged-over by a neighbour and I got an unexpected redundancy package jump start into consulting, which was where I meant to go next anyway. My consulting has always had an organisational focus and in intercultural flavour, with a personal development infrastructure (I started a small psychotherapy practice in tandem with consulting). This combination produced my second biggest adult learning experience – partnering and coaching a Chinese partner in a start-up in Shanghai from 1998 til now. The third was living in Beijing in 1981-83. The fourth is a toss-up between fulltime therapist and part-time blogger for the last two years...taking both seriously, but not enough to step up or out a quantum jump. Maybe it's time to go back to aikido.

 

Jane has been accompanying me and being accompanied by me since that July afternoon in International House at Columbia Univ. The commitment to things Chinese has always been her lead. My following there has acquired its own momentum and valences, while adding my therapeutic and organisational tones to hers. She stepped into the retiring time of life 2 years ago by launching a career-topping innovation in Chinese language teacher education, with about every complexity I can think of!

 

My first biggest learning will probably be what emerges from here on. One theme is rehabilitation of public life, which I have blogged for two years with special interest in ethics and public discourses about difficult issues – climate, science, thinking while in danger. Another is living in reach of mountains and water, which will be in 3 month French chunks since we both seem likely to work til we drop, more or less. If I could give up worrying about the world it would be simpler; I cannot.

 

The great unknown is resilience. I've just been reminded this month (January '11) that I'm as prone as any to surprise attacks on the body personal – this time acute pancreatitis. 8 years ago a slow heart beat dropped me in a street. The beat has been picked up by a pacemaker since then. Along the way I enjoy more aspects of life than ever – many only accessible through the windows of age!

 

January 30, 2011

www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com

More, or less, travel funnies…(4)

More, or less, travel funnies…(4)
Torrey Orton
June 26, 2011


Fire, fire…

Walking around Bourg en Bresse in eastern France early the first morning of our five days there, having found a copy of the International Herald Tribune after a bit of a search, along the way noticing some fire trucks in fighting positions up a street which I avoided…and then wandering around the neighbouring streets until I came out a street away, out of their sight and into a strange smell – a wood fire at 7:30am before the wood-fired pizza joints opened…and suddenly realising it was 200+ year old wood burning…give or take a few years.

 

Spring

 

One repeatedly shared moment across a month's travel was spring constantly sprung on us at every turn, with backwards steps spread among the flow towards summer. Looming out of the memories are two visions: one of greens of infinite shadings but not yet the full ones of high summer, and, two, dogwoods in bloom showing off in the edges and depths of woods as flights of light in the surrounding green darknesses. From this picture you can get a sense of their suspension, unsupported by visible limbs. That's how they look where I grew up. Not the massed and florid specimens you will find if you Google 'dogwoods in flower'.In nature they illuminate their surrounds. This is how they appear in New England wilds, sprinkled across a wood, not massed.

 

The illumination strikes but the greenness dominates as the context for all things natural. And this is the story of the US ascension over Europe (the little bits we saw) in greenification. The northeast is increasingly covered with forest, growing in the relegated farmlands fallowed by refrigerated transport and short crowing seasons typical of continental climates. On the roads we saw chipmunks, squirrels, deer, turkeys, foxes, Canada geese just wandering around having a munch of this and that. But for the chipmunks and squirrels, these are animals I never saw in my 1950's youth in a small country town with lots of its own woods. Judging by the complaints of locals, and relatives, the deer and geese are taking over everyone's flower and vegie patches, as well as littering the freeway bounds like roos do some country roads in Oz – markers of the domain of the car.

 

In Europe the Alpine wild strawberries are still to be found – unfortunately we missed the ripening season by a week or two. The feeling for me in France – the Bourg-en-Bresse region above, as well as the Chamonix of Mont Blanc – was controlled exploitation with occasional spurts of wildness (4900 metres comes to mind). By contrast, the northeast of the US was more real wildness than I grew up with…a sense of nature taking the land back, swamping cultivation in goose droppings (the close relatives of those who brought down the AA flight into the Hudson two years ago).

 

My central plains and westcoast associates will remind me that northeast is not USA, and they might be pleased if it did fade back into its prepilgrim-invasion aboriginality. Cultural resentment notwithstanding, as they fear that fundamental American truth came from the east, a new truth may be on its way, revealed to them in the forced reintroduction of predator species in the face of bovine resistances. After all, the great American west was once the east, settled with a gun, etc., hiding its terrible past in the applied gentility of its age. But I regress.

 

Sprang

 

Fast forward to arriving at 11pm from Geneva with 30 minutes to spare between flights in Helsinki to be told the departure for HK was postponed uncertainly and indefinitely with next news at 1:15am.

 

As we waited for the next news cycle at 2:15am, already two hours plus beyond scheduled departure time, attempting a recuperative snooze on unoccupied bench seats, every three minutes a two-beep alarm went off – loud enough to hear and soft enough to be unworthy of complaint, and anyway not stoppable because coming seemingly from nowhere. Only an hour and half later of interrupted snoozes, more promises of eventual take off and beeps did I discover the source 25 meters away from us - a little electrified,two seat (2 year old size seats) car flashing lights in beat with the beeps and followed by a saccharine solicitation – "would you like to take a ride?"

 

I could have just pulled the plug on it but it was too late. The first call for boarding (now 4:15am) was echoing thru the waiting hall.

 

As we were taxiing for take-off the flaps, or something similar growled, with undiscernible purpose signalling the potential disaster our wait should have forestalled, sounding and feeling like a trap door opening and closing with a clank that made us wonder if the repairs had been made to the wrong parts of the plane. Lift-off was ponderous and climb slow…and here I am!

 

Sprung

 

9 days later I bumped into a dead ringer for the offending vehicle in the walkway to our local supermarket – not having noticed it sitting there for years probably until now – with a Wiggles logo on it and a similar supplication to jump in for a ride. At least I wasn't trying to sleep.

 

This is the last of these words.

“The worst class ever…”

"The worst class ever…"

Torrey Orton

May 31, 2011 Memorial Day

 

Taft School Class of 1961 50^th Reunion – 12-14 May, 2011

A Straight's View

 

We were the worst class ever we were told by the Headmaster at our graduation in 1961, or so I repeatedly heard from my classmates. I don't remember that moment 50 years ago. Nor did I remember a host of other events that came up in passing comments or explicit explorations by my classmates – even if I was centrally involved. Apparently, as JM regaled the diners on our first night, I was "killed" by a night time assault by HH in a 1959 precursor to Nightmare on Elm Street. Couldn't find the slightest trace of my death, then or now. So, maybe I should leave this summary effort to others with better neuronal qualifications.

 

Taft and me now

 

But, I can't. I have to write this for me on the way to creating my two continent 'home'. Some of that home is in the hands of you classmates of '61 who co-own my life from 1956 to 1961. I have to write to make sense of my now through the thens which underlie it. Taft was a home and I have to know it and them to know me. And anyway, I just have to understand. It's what I do. By fate's hand, my present home is also in the middle of a world historical event, I think.

    

What will be told here is mainly the story of my reunion. This better ring some bells for others of you, too, otherwise it's all in my mind (which is possible enough!). I'll try to structure the story through the main events – meals and associated functions. There are some themes which cross the whole domain, so they may be treated as such. People will be named by their initials. Fictionalising the real people who make the story what it is for me would seriously demean the reality. Initialising them should preserve privacy to the community of believers who can identify their owners.

 

Deciding what is really American is an important part of this reflection, so some of my choice of content will reflect what I think is really American, what is typical. That may be a matter of dispute for sure.

    

Paul C and us - The 50^th Reunion Dinner

 

Continuing with the theme of what can I say with some confidence to be true, I think KG noted that the kids at Taft now seem happy. This was on the bus on the way to the first event – the Thursday reunion dinner. He was contrasting their state with ours in our times. He brought into view the theme for the night – sadness, anger, disappointment – which I later characterised as "depressed affect" in the present group.

 

The intensity of speakers' feelings revealed a range of still present hurts which I had not noticed enough in their time to remember now. They were not my hurts at the time, which were strong enough to make it easy to say I hated the place for a few decades after leaving in '61 and to assure the Alumni office I would not be contributing ever and to stop sending me encouragements to do so. Some of the hurt – JH, JS and John S – arose from treatment by the school authorities (symbolised and sometimes personally fronted by Paul C) which branded them as misfits, defectives of some sorts. Their misfit was that their learning styles (kinaesthetic, tangible, etc.) and activity preferences (making and doing rather than observing and contemplating) and natural temperamental exuberance (throwing snowballs at plough drivers from open dorm windows, looking out to celebrate hits and getting caught forthwith!) did not fit the school mission: to produce college entrants on the way to professional or service (teaching, religion) careers housed behind white picket fences. How many of our classmates who got "lost" or chose not to return were also injured in the same regime?

 

The treatment reflected, in turn, institutional assumptions about human potential which still dominate schooling and professional entry. A further turn is that the era of our passage thru Taft was the leading edge of a decline of traditional authorities and boundaries, an edge which overflowed with the multi-dimensional socio-political movements of the '60's. These institutional assumptions fed on our parents' history of Depression scarcity (or its threat) and the titillating rush of post-war recovery. Our parents, too, contributed for some of us to denials of real vocational preferences like 'if you choose Yale Art you pay; if you choose Penn business, I pay' as RL explained part of his early life course to me. 50 years later he's got his art studio.

 

Historical footnote: Some of us wondered what was happening in our times at Taft that warranted or encouraged the negative attitude which was emblematic* of those times. Was it some shift in the foundations of modernity (or last seismic shuffles of pre-modern structures), perhaps? Here are some '50's precursors with potentially high impact items in bold:

Art – Pollock, Smith, and predecessors back to Picasso

Music – Jazz, blues, R and R and predecessors back to the atonal, etc.

Theater – The Sandbox; Death of a Salesman and back to Becket….

Novel / poetry – Catcher in the Rye; On the Road; Lord of the flies; Lady Chatterley's Lover…Ginsberg's Howl

Social – Brown vs. Board of Education, Rosa Parks' Montgomery bus ride, Little Rock High School integration

Political – McCarthyism; Freedom rides (first in the May of '61); Fear of the bomb (Mutual Assured Destruction, and such)

 

And, we could acknowledge that post-modernity was previewed variously by Heraclitus, Zeno, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Whitman, Einstein (relativity), Heisenberg (uncertainty), Berg, Cage, and the movement towards various personal freedoms (to be at the table, on the bus, in the school, on the job) which were denied / blocked for large parts of humanity by traditional thought and structures; and in tandem was the rise of new enemies: USSR and PRC, with boundary skirmishes starting from Korea and sliding into Vietnam under our noses as we left school.

 

*one of my brothers mentioned a week later that every second word out of my mouth in those days was 'duh', now rendered memorably in Homer's 'doh'. He was Taft '65; my brother, that is.

 

Undiscussables

 

All human organisations have undiscussables. These are sometimes fundamental assumptions like an organisation's justification for its existence or parts of its history which conflict with that purpose. They may be undiscussable because we cannot retrieve them easily from the depths of personal and collective consciousnesses. In addition, however, the undiscussable may be pieces of organisation history which compromise its justification and are undiscussed because we are implicated in the compromising. Such matters are often actively suppressed by organisation members.

 

Undiscussables ramble around in the foreground and background of life, appearing in moments like the Thursday dinner and then reappearing in voluntary, but personally compelling expressions like R, J and B's respective post-reunion emails about PC. I hope this access to each other (and indirectly to all the '61ers because the total email list has been used to carry the expression) will grow an understanding of our era, both what we shared and experienced differently!

 

Talking to HDL after the reunion raised another level of need at play in the PC discussion: that we all need a map for life, and suffer when there's none available or those on offer are felt to be corrupted – wrong guideposts, mismeasured distances, undisclosed dangers…you know what I mean. His wife recalled that her older brother had similar 'attitude' problems in his prep school times (close to ours) and that she heard similar reports of many schools like ours. We were living in mapless times led by people who had only worn options to offer. The new leaders were often to look like no map at all, and that's part of the story of our lives since them.

 

JC

 

For me an undiscussed event is around a now "lost" classmate – JC – who got disappeared in a flash of bureaucratic excess driven by now inconceivably narrow values (about drink and smoke, and not even dope). He doesn't appear in our public class records, but maybe lives in some minds because a couple of people told me bits of the story on the side. My own involvement is conflicted. At the time, I made it clear that I believed covert alcohol consumption should have been left where it was found – hidden among the co-drinkers. On the other hand, I believed that once exposed to the school's policing system, processes had to follow their course. I did not, I now can see, have the guts to confront the system's being based on a hypocrisy, even though a legal one (we were "under age" for drinking)!! With this issue we were engulfed in one of the longest standing contradictions of our culture – the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate intoxicants. This was a bit beyond my competence!! But…. it cost JC a price I still do not know.

 

Ethico-theological footnote: I wonder who decided I was the one for policing Sunday church attendance for 1960-61? I dropped into the stone church Friday morning on a wander around town for old times' sake, finding my seat in the balcony still available. From there I had ticked three hundred forty (??) boxes for attendance records every Sunday of the year.

 

At least one of our since "lost" classmates benefitted from sleights of my recording hand. I do not recall feeling the slightest compunction about this dereliction since the duty was merely formal and never audited. So, the missing member's benefit from my derelictions were never in public view, though how not is another wonder. In a similar vein (wonder at not being caught), I smoked in my monitorial suite, Level 4 Old Building, on out of hockey season evenings, using the ashtray facility of the steel frame bunks for butts. The floor master was a smoker, too, thus immune from detecting fellow travellers. As for the lower-mids surrounding us…thus were the young given their first training in institutionalised hypocrisies. Who compromised Taft values more seriously – JC or me? I vote for me.

 

Friday lunch at the golf club

 

One of the great things in life is when a group's conversation steps up to a different level of openness and vulnerability. This happened at lunch Friday at the table I was at with NP, BC, JBS, JH, and spouses, as appropriate. Obsessiveness was the subject and personal vulnerability the currency of participation. Somehow, S talking about husband JH's predilection for order elicited an unscripted opening by N about his own ADHD and the work of his foundation to support kids in developmental straits. Discussion flowed around the table from that start.

 

I imagine this kind and degree of openness would be very unlikely in a table of people who had met by chance on a cruise ship or walk in the park. Having history can block, but also open. For me the reunion was a quick opening to a wide variety of topics at significant depths. Whatever my relationships with individuals, having history of some kind with all of them allowed talking interesting / serious matters quickly. And, where there was unfinished business of various kinds it all progressed more quickly, often because I did not know there was unfinished business on others' parts with me!

 

A walk in the woods

Also contributing, as almost always, to fulfilling talk were activities like the walk in some woods near Washington, Conn (home of The Gunnery, if you remember) with NP and BC. This had been organised in advance to ensure some real exercise amid the reunion celebrations. It also allowed some more richly fledged discussion of matters raised earlier.

 

The old guard dinner Friday night

 

Some people came and went that night, visiting solely for that event. I missed them in detail, noticing them in passing. The same can also be said for the whole reunion. About this time I was beginning to get personal detail overload and re-explanation download. And my attention was directed towards what was coming next – this: saying goodbye with awareness that so much was yet to be said and done, and never could be within the time available formally. I was starting to rush conversations…

 

Proselyte's progress…KB and me

 

Talking of unfinished business, there was a promised engagement with KB which was announced to each other almost at first sight on the first bus Thursday evening. It took numerous re-enforcements and promises of continuing commitment to talk before we got to the after dinner bar bash Friday eve. Amidst a swarm of existing conversations we pushed aside the distractions and headed into our main act, which had been foreshadowed by KB's religious moments at the public lectern.

 

There followed an hour and a half nose-to-nose engagement around matters of faith and its possibilities to unfold with/for me – a question I am open to entertaining, but not driven to answering. There was a moment of feeling the engagement to be more than an entertainment, which led me to suggest some continuing virtual exploration. Three challenges of faith remained at the end for me as they had been from the start: that the Christian focus is individual profession more than collective; that Christianity is one of the religions of the Book with no greater or lesser claim than the other two on personal credibility; and, that expression of Christianity's message, like Judaism and Islam, is often perverted by the distortions of creating and, more impacting, sustaining its organisational forms – the denominations. These three are mutually reinforcing.

 

This was a classically American experience for me, offering direct access to a most distinctive American characteristic – religion and religiosity – with which I have never been comfortable, nor successfully completely indifferent. My failure to achieve confident indifference has repeatedly been fed by acquaintance with stunning personal models of faith like KB over my life course.

 

For me the main glory of this event was its basis in a mutual recognition more than 50 years ago of hidden talents, even though at the time we (KB and I) could not have seemed, to others and ourselves, to be on more different paths. These differences are the drivers of our actual paths (leaving matters of fate aside), yet are underpinned with a similar sense of truth or value or something like that. I am seeing now that this sense of truth exists with a number of other class members, though some were not visible to me in the past, notably NP and SM. I take this as a remark about me missing their capacities.

 

A class observed

 

Having tried Friday unsuccessfully, I pre-engineered a class visit for Saturday AM, which we actually got to near the right time. It was Upper-mid AP English with a focus on Whitman. Three thoughts: I wish someone had taught me poetry that way 54 years ago. It would have advanced my feeble grip of the form by a decade. Second, the class process was wonderfully flexible by offering space for individual contributions and reflection in balanced amounts and distribution across a small group. Third, the kids contributed freely and easily in about the worst setting imaginable: a bunch of short-term visitors ranging from age 8 to 68 hanging around their ears. Plus, I learned a fine point about the third line of the first stanza of Whitman's "I sing myself". What more can be wanted?

 

One counter-point: two or three times the teacher appended cautions to the room about not judging anything…as if a judgment were a moral failing…all the while expressing judgments himself implicitly in his directing students towards various aspects of Whitman (and correctly so, as far as I could tell; he both provided direction when pathways were fading in the process and when points of fact were abused).

 

Saturday lunch, after a walk to the quad

 

Publically joining the Old Guard

It's funny to be admitted to something I never aspired to join. I do not think of myself as old (more than once a day), though I do think of myself as guarding many things and people. Being formally admitted to the Old Guard by Wally MacMullen highlighted this conflicted condition. Guardians take care of things and people, and many guardians are not old. So, the 'old guard' is a special state reflecting our all carrying into age the guardianship of others and being recognised for this human service. While on the surface we are being recognised for surviving and showing up, more importantly we symbolise the worths that are to be guarded – nothing personal, of course!!

 

This reflection invites another – the guardian monitor me working in various ways like watching out for a little lower-mid who looked a bit like my brother who was to arrive at Taft the year after I left and I would not be there to watch out for him (he made out fine after thrashing a resentful types seeking to revenge his dislike of me on him) as I had not been for most of his growing up ever.

 

JS, and me

He was startling and striking from the first moment of the first night – a man realised in his release from life duties honourably sustained for decades (the family store) until able to step into the true shoes of his self: competitor and teacher/coach. I should have known all those years ago when his mother and mine somehow connected at a Mother's Day hockey game in'60 – a most unlikely pairing driven by mutual recognition. I'm sure I did not provide as much recognition to JS then and I am pleased I could amend for that somewhat now. Reunion is both of the old and the new.

 

JH the boundless

Finally, JH the boundless…I can express my extreme pleasure at being even in the vicinity of JH, but I am not sure why he is such a source for me. Well, I am sure: It is his mindless rambunctious lovingness, so unsuited to an IT design predilection he could (and can) no more change than he can his rambunctiousness; he who alone among us comes back to the place of his youthful humiliation with a gift which can only be made from one who has paid a high price for its acquisition. Aw shucks…I can't say it anywhere near so well as he did so long ago …Shucks!! And my thanks.

 

Closing openings

 

For me the reunion was confirmation that we belong to the first (?) generation of the unretired rather than our predecessors, the "undead". Many of us are still growing in different ways, some visible in encounters above. So, overall, a sense of only just having started conversations, with so long to go that will never, except in a few cases, be continued or completed. Sadness for that and gladness that I know this, which I did not before reunion. It complicates my life by anchoring my present as foreigner (in Australia) in my past as local (in USA), neither wholly resolvable.

 

Undiscussables revisited – challenging opportunities

 

When I started writing this three weeks ago, what comes next I sketched shortly after starting. The questions just emerged seeming to suggest the last step of my explorations – a collection of guideline directions for continued living. I had not yet formulated my undiscussables discussion, but since they are all part of one consciousness, I am seldom surprised by what emerges, only its order, colours and weights vary.

 

Challenges arising from reflecting on who / what we are:

• What to "out" and what not to? This is the whistle-blower question, critical to open doors into spaces which otherwise are relegated to dreams and/or recriminations.
• Telling illuminating stories to the young (and still young old) – this is the offering of lived lives requirement.
• Who did we forget? Did we forget some because they were too hard to remember in their time? What would we have to do to ourselves to open ourselves to what was previously forgettable, and how could we test our openness??
• What of ourselves did we lose on the way from then to now? We only became ourselves by both doing certain things and not doing others; some we could never have done for lack of interest or talent; others were not open to us for reasons of fate or active refusal by greater powers, though talent and interest were available; others had to be let go but still could be recovered to some extent…like my putting some time into learning to sing (which I'm considering).
• What's the price of the losses and who's paying it? (the forgotten?) My analyst once suggested I had dues to pay to receive benefits I am seeking. If I figure that one out I'll post it. Something to do with seeking forgiveness and offering it to others??
• How can we learn the answers given the frailties of our grasps on our pasts, the demands of our commitments in the present and the growing limitations of our energies for understanding? Perhaps the hardest challenge to turn into an opportunity since it seems we are surrounded by unavoidable constraints guaranteed to increase with time! How can the prospect of weakness be a strength?

For once I am going to say these are challenges that should be framed as opportunities precisely because they are so easily heard only in their confronting configurations. Maybe not so worst after all….

My warmest regards,

Straights

More travel funnies…(3)

More travel funnies…(3)
Torrey Orton
May 22, 2011


Habits for peace

It's rained something around 5 inches (120+mm) in the New York - New Jersey area in the last week or so. Every dip that can gather water is awash and the lowlands are flooding… but not news worthily. Net effect for us is to have worn our wet weather gear more often than a month in Melbourne. Each day is threatening, especially in the afternoon.

 

As so often, facts do not inhibit personal or organisational habits. Yesterday we were in Princeton New Jersey to watch some junior lacrosse being played by Noah, a niece's 11 year old. Nice day, first over 23C (75F approx.) since we arrived on east coast two weeks ago, sunny with slightly massing clouds….We headed back to the car and passed a university club's lawns being decisively (volume) and thoroughly (carefully set spray patterns) watered by ground staff. What to think?? Must have been on the work schedule. Always a good idea to follow the schedule. It is management's principal expression of both power and competence, the backdrop to premonitions of worker disregard, disrespect and disobedience.

 

Whenever a worker's acting dumb, there's probably a dumb reason. Just keepin' the peace.

 

Sign free zone

 

The Heritage Hotel in Southbury, Connecticut presents itself as a leading locale for spas and golf and all round luxe in the region. It's also the one which lost our reservation (they found it, too, after a few days stumbling!). Anyway, we had survived our first return to driving on the right in 15 years or so by arriving on the outskirts of the very well-advertised town of Southbury looking for signals of the Heritage. Finding it took another 30 minutes, a search exacerbated by my driving timidity for sure. But, there were no signs if you came from the south as we did that day. The first sign, which was too late to obey unless you knew it was there beforehand, only came into view around a corner of a four lane junction – the kind I was still a bit delicate about negotiating. Had to turn around after passing through the stop lights the sign was guarding to get to use its direction.

 

Pennies from..??

 

I imagine to modernise the currency would be seen as a part of the world socialist conspiracy to undermine American values. Otherwise why do they still have one cent pieces – and one dollar bills for that matter – in common use?? I've been collecting pennies in dribbles for two weeks.

 

The undermining aspect would be the implicit recognition the buck's hardly worth a bang anymore. It is promising for Australia's place in a world of failing advanced economies that we acknowledged that two decades ago. A decade later we got signed up for real advanced economy status with a GST, which might be seen now as a symptom of incipient socialism had it not been introduced by a conservative government. The fact that Swedish rounding was the mathematics of choice might have been an excuse if others were lacking for an indictment. The case would have been closed if it were known that New Zealand had been first by three years in this rush to rational self-management.

 

Penny wise, round foolish? This wouldn't have rated so much ink but for another fact: Americans are still wedded to the pathetic, though empirically reliable, pricing policy of trying to make any whole number look smaller by dithering with decimals. But, then so are we. Hence, Swedish rounding is a terrific late capitalist creation. Too bad about the name.

 

And then there is this screamer!

 

Note seen on front door of neighbouring house:

"I've gone; the house is locked. The key is

under the log, top left on the wood pile"

True story; unimpeachable sources; impeccable credentials; direct personal experience. Only in the USA??!!