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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

wellbeing

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Imprinted with fear

Partial text from Audre Lorde's poem, "a litany for survival" (1978)
From Audre Lorde’s “a litany for survival,” in The Black Unicorn (1978)

Fear learned early can affect us life-long.

In a working paper on the topic, Harvard child psychologists explain that intense, chronic fear and anxiety hampers children’s ability to learn, and undermines their ability to correctly perceive threats. Without intervention, children raised in chronically fearful environments learn to interpret ambiguous situations in a negative way, build stress as they preemptively work to protect themselves, and adopt an “aggressive” stance toward the world.

Furthermore, “simply removing a child from a dangerous situation will not by itself undo the serious consequences or reverse the negative impacts of early fear learning.” We have to create new emotional and neurological architecture to replace the old while we also work to change the outer environments that made old fears seem reasonable.

I read the Harvard paper and couldn’t help but think about the fear-based rhetoric that’s become a normal part of political, religious, and charitable communication. Lobbyists argue for one candidate by invoking the disasters they believe a different candidate is responsible for. Religious leaders warn adherents against an interpretation by threatening community censure at best and post-mortem punishment at worst. And even nonprofits that otherwise focus on reducing harm and making society more just sometimes send out letters that are full of suspicion and full of fear.

This doesn’t work well for any of us.

Take a week or two just to notice the tenor of the communications that you receive from organizations or send to your own audiences. Where does the fallacy of argumentum in terrorem, the appeal to fear, seem to crop up most? What can you do to squeeze it out of your toolbox, and anywhere it doesn’t produce good results? And how do you find fear affecting you and the small and large life choices you make?

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Keeping ambition in proportion

The whole point of dancing is the dance.” —Alan Watts

Alan Watts was a British philosopher who popularized Buddhist philosophy for receptive U.S. audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. I first heard of him during grad school, while I was around extraordinarily bright and motivated people. Many of whom were strangers to failure and most of whom were also driving hard toward a tenure-track teaching or research faculty job.

Though I wasn’t aiming for teaching, I was part of the academy’s intensity, and I was often grateful for a caution my mother sent me from time to time: “Remember to pause to smell the flowers,” she said. “No matter how busy things are.” And then, with a little wry smile, “They grant degrees posthumously too, you know.”

In the video below (captioned), Alan Watts explains how the metaphor of life-as-journey has entailments that dissuade us from stopping to fully experience and attend to what’s happening now, because society encourages us to be so driven, so ambitious, and so locked into a sequential model of progress from elementary school through retirement.

While some of us are beginning to realize that the old 20th Century progress model no longer works, we don’t all agree on what should replace it. Entrepreneur coaches tell us to be “top performers.” Others tell us to “choose ourselves.”

The message they don’t give, because it tends not to motivate people to sign up for recurring charges, is that striving isn’t the purpose of life. That’s Alan Watts’ message in this video.
Watch it:

Alan Watts – Why Your Life Is Not A Journey from The Liston Group NPO on Vimeo.

There’s a great series of short clips from Watts’ other talks, animated by South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker. These aren’t captioned.

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Environments that enable

Zoomed in photo of a Black relay runner crouching and ready to launch off the starting blocks. They are in black fitted running shorts and Nike sneakers
Photo credit: Braden Collum

Thanks to NBC’s unimpressive approach to global sports journalism, Saturday’s news has revolved around the Rio Olympics swimming and track results.

Part of NBC’s narrative programming is marketing the belief that hard, individual work plus supportive nuclear social networks equals success. The formula appears in US advertising, such as Proctor and Gamble’s “Thank You, Mom” campaign and Minute Maid’s “doingood” video. It also appears in media analysis of much smaller competing nations, like Jamaica.

Today, the NYT posted a column from Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson about factors that have contributed to the dominance of Jamaican sprinters over the last 50 years. The island produces far more winners and records than its population size and economic development might predict. Why?

Patterson cites government-led public health initiatives, which enhanced basic resources like food access, clean water, and anti-mosquito technologies, and therefore mitigated disease and improved life expectancy rates. He also outlines other factors like private investment in training programs, mentoring from previous generations’ athletics stars, coaching opportunities at well-resourced US universities, and Jamaican affirmation of hard work meeting raw talent.

Just as whole villages beyond nuclear families raise children, interacting influences beyond grit and determination shape our environments. All of these factors can enable us to become our best in each new context. All of them work together, and we progress in very different ways when those environmental factors change.

Every time you take a new job, you test this theory. If you thrived in your last position, and then move away, what are the odds that you’ll immediately thrive in your new location? Will you change how you interact with your colleagues, frame your contributions for others, describe your experience in applications, or choose training opportunities? Every change is an affirmation that environments vary and aren’t equivalent.

A major part of adjusting to each new environment is acclimating to new environmental elements that either enhance our development or undermine it. It’s not all solo-pluck: our environments can support us in becoming, and they can also sabotage our unfolding.

Sociologists talk about the social determinants of health as they invite us to realize that none of us lives in isolation from the world beyond our fingertips. Our environments shape our chance of surviving the journey from conception to birth and they also have substantial impacts on every aspect of our lives after we’re born.

Despite this, the narratives of solo-achievement persist, and only a few ever receive medals for standing at the right end of environmental interactions! Whether our growth is ever externally acknowledged, we grow in environments that enable us, and we can support others’ growth by building networks of policy and relationship that enable them as well.

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On Happiness

UN SecGen on the International Day of Happiness, March 20, 2014
UN Secretary-General on the International Day of Happiness, March 20, 2014

Happiness is neither a frivolity nor a luxury. It is a deep-seated yearning shared by all members of the human family. It should be denied to no one and available to all. —Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary-General.

Today, the United Nations and its agencies are celebrating the International Day of Happiness. A few thoughts to reflect on?

  • How do you or your culture define happiness? Have your private definitions changed as you’ve grown? Has the culture’s?
  • When you look back at the happiness you’ve created or been graced with and enjoyed on your own or with others, what factors do you think made it happen?
  • If you’ve ever tried to re-create a past moment of happiness, how did that turn out? What did you learn from the process?
  • Can you think of any ways that your society promotes or undermines human happiness? How do you relate to these social mechanisms yourself?
  • How do you feel happiness overlaps with or differs from other concepts like contentment, anxiety, joy, resilience, denial, foresight, sadness, health, well-being, and equanimity? Which of these similarities or contrasts mean most to you?

And because I couldn’t not post it: enjoy a listen to Bobby McFerrin’s happiness anthem from 1988, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” (Or read the lyrics instead.) I can see how some could interpret it as an ode to thoughtless irresponsibility, but I don’t think it has to. It never fails to make me smile.