Actually Communicating

In my winter hibernation, I am listening. To many podcasts. Of a weird assortment.

Top contenders right now are Krista Tippett, Joe Rogan, and Duncan Trussell.

Their voices are very different from one another.

I love their curiosity, broad interests, and desire to truly communicate. Rogan and Tippett, in particular, talk frequently about the need to truly communicate with one another. I've been listening to the language they use to describe this need. Tippett has a series called "Civil Conversations" meant to offer a real conversation about a hot button issue that often is debated in sound-bites. She's had people on opposing sides of abortion or gay marriage speak together. "Civil" is a word that shows up often for her in searching for meaningful conversation.

Rogan uses words like "reasonable people having a logical conversation." "Reason" and "logic" show up often.

I appreciate both of them because they're introducing me to thinkers who I don't come across otherwise and they're offering them a platform where they can actually be heard as opposed to being reduced into a bullet point.

I also love the idea about how we communicate and the potential around our communication.

I've been thinking about whether or not I'm after "civil," "reasonable," "logical" conversations.

I'm not.

All of these words bother me. I want to understand why.

"Civil" is a word posed in opposition to "wild." The implied idea is that the "wild" or nature, is chaotic and unruly. Civilization is the order imposed on this disordered natural state.

Well, that's a problem. Given that human bodies are natural, there's again an implication to impose order on our natural state, our nakedness, our frailty, our vulnerability. The natural world, in my estimation, is not disordered. There's a beautiful, soft order that often escapes human comprehension, but exists nonetheless. Even storms provide the clarity of a cleansed environment. The wild might lie outside of human comprehension, but it's not chaos. Our understanding of it might be chaotic but that only speaks to our comprehension, not what we seek to comprehend.

Similarly, words like "reason" and "logic" feel really masculine to me. They feel like words my Dad uses. "Reason" especially feels rooted in Enlightenment thinking of moving away from the fearful idolatry of gods to the clear-eyed measurements of science. (Please read the ample sarcasm.) "Reason" implies that thinking can be divorced from intuiting and feeling.

I don't believe that we can be so divided.

We are always feeling and intuiting-- my understanding of intuiting being processing information through senses more quickly than we're able to categorize that same information through analytical cognition. I think Rogan uses the word "reason" to distinguish our tendency to "react."

Logic is a useful philosophical process to work through ideas. It completely has a place in conversation. There's also an assumption of objectivity here-- that we can get sufficient distance from a subject to look at it without investment.

I disagree. We are subjective beings. We are interwoven. We are in context. Claiming logic or objectivity is simply dishonest. Honestly, we can own our subjectivity and admit how it influences our thinking. That's being an accountable human.

These words have helped me clarify what I appreciate about the conversations Rogan and Tippett conduct as well as the interactions I seek.

I think I'm trying to be in and create environments for the following:

• Context. Owning where we are situated in a topic. Claiming our own biases and acknowledging how they might influence our thinking.
• Emotional awareness. Acknowledging when a topic feels close to home and allowing it to affect us. Not trying to claim that our insight is more credible because we don't feel but owning that feeling is being human. We're allowed to feel. And admitting that doesn't invalidate our thoughts on a subject.
• Accountability. Being willing to evolve. Being willing to be wrong. Being more interested in growth than "winning" a conversation. Being more interested in ideas than the stakes we've claimed.
• Curiosity. Allowing human curiosity to drive us towards creativity and connection. To allow us beyond the bounds of the group think many of us have affiliated with.

I'm sure there is way more, but this is my working list. These are the conversations that I cherish because they take place between humans. Humans are wild, they are not logical, nor are they reasonable. They have feelings about things, passions, excitement, and fears. And we can talk about that.

Labor

This morning I had my Sunday ritual of coffee, a bagel, a few moments reading, & reviewing my yoga class plan before going to teach my weekly Sunday morning class.  On my way to the coffee shop I heard a few minutes of Krista Tippett's On Being, which is always a bonus of waking early on Sundays.  She was airing an interview with Mike Rose.  I was so happy to hear his voice again.  I'd heard him interviewed previously on a different NPR program after the release of a prior book.  His work largely examines & reaffirms the intelligence in various types of work.  He traces historically emphasis placed on intellectual work & this myth of physical work connoting a mental dimness.  During the interview he mentioned even in ancient Greece writing about physical work dulling the intellect.

Rose actually studied the processes farmers, construction workers, waitresses, cosmotologists, factory workers, & others use in their day to day functioning.  He also studied highly esteemed careers such as surgeons, lawyers, and engineers.  No matter the field he found that those who had a well-blended & utilized background in both study & real life experience rose to the top of their field.  & that contrary to common belief, whether articulated directly or implied through diminished recognition of vocational programs or slights in language, working-class work employs highly functioning & complicated mental processes.

My husband & I were really excited hearing this interview.  At the time my primary wage employment was waiting tables while he landscapes.  We'd long talked about the efficiency necessary for this type of work.  Every movement becomes economic & you constantly are retaining and reprioritizing information.  This was a confirmation of what we'd long thought, but never systematically studied.

It also resurfaced a memory I had as a child.  I was raised in an upper-middle-class household where the implicit messages were that I would study, attend a "good" college, and marry a well-to-do man where I would be a good conversationalist & entertain his bosses & partners.  Given that this was the never directly communicated, but implied path, I wasn't expected to do many (if any!) chores.  I wasn't expected to work a job.  However, given that I wasn't doing these things I felt an enormous dependency on others.  I wasn't comfortable with this.  I remember going to restaurants and diners, watching wait-staff move so quickly & purposefully, & feeling that I didn't have whatever they had.  I didn't have the common sense, nor clarity, to care for my space and environment.  It made me feel insecure.  My existence would be predicated on money I didn't earn & I wasn't entirely certain I would gain the skill-set to earn or do my share.

Eventually this became in equal parts a personal uneasiness & a political unwillingness to be unable to contribute in equal share to my consumption.  I first got a job at age 14 working at a Farmer's Market fruit & vegetable stand.  My co-workers were working class adults who woke up probably around 3 am, commuted from rural Pennsylvania, to the farmstand, & then put in a 9 hour day.  They had little patience for me.  Confirming my earlier fears, I had no common sense nor aptitude for this type of work.  I consistently had discrepancies in my cash till.

At age 19, the summer between first & second year of college, I found an internship at the Union of Legal Aid Attorneys.  This is a fantastic union of public defenders in New York.  At that time I was helping assemble a database of police brutality.  The attorneys constantly had clients coming in, obviously having been beaten severely.  We were assembling the badge numbers, injuries, dates, sites of arrest, and other information to develop a case against then Mayor Giuliani & the NYPD.  ULAA couldn't pay me, so I had a stipend from Mount Holyoke, and at nights I worked as a cashier at Integral Yoga Natural Foods.  Once again, every night my till was off.  I was always brutally honest at these jobs, but I had no sense.  I was making mistakes that caused my managers to have to perpetually stay late & account for my errors.

After some momentous shifts in my personal life & a new-found political consciousness, I decided I wanted to work full-time in grassroots, which by design is unpaid.  I would have to earn to cover my rent and expenses elsewhere.  I began waiting tables.  For at least six months I was horrendous.  Thankfully, at a certain point, I caught the rhythm, I developed my own short-hand, I learned how to move through a double almost the way a yogi meditates.  You just flow.  You waste no movement, no breath.

I waited tables full-time for about a decade. I liked work that kept me on my feet and in my body.  Rose went on to say in his conversation with Krista Tippett that work utilizing our highest intellect usually resides in equal parts in the physical body as well as our minds.  Strictly mental work is limited.  Work that integrates these various aspects of our being tends to stretch our conceptions and functioning.

I'm grateful for work.  I say that also being human and often resenting obligations.  However, I'm grateful for work that enables me to feel part of the whole.  I'm thankful to work in my body & now have the confidence that I can earn, contribute, support myself & my community.  I'm happy to know the value of various types of work.  I'm now hoping to learn more well-rounded work.  I work in my garden & get a better sense of the conversation with plants, soil, weather, & food.  I work in my body through the practice of yoga, running, swimming, & breathing.  I work at landscaping & again am in that first six month stage of feeling like an imbecile.  But learning nonetheless, & acknowledging the value of process.

& I'm thankful for unions, for people who value workers, for immigrants of today & generations before who followed resources & remind us that borders are ultimately arbitrary & that we owe one another respect & consideration.