Inspiration – the smaller the better

I have always been an avid collector of quotes, pithy little sayings and epigrams. I like my wisdom in very small doses, in fact the smaller the dose the better.
While I quite often read extensive works reflecting on the nature of being human I often find afterwards the shear torrent of words becomes an amorphous lake in my brain,  ideas and concepts remain floating in this water of words but nothing to anchor them to – who said what and why. One good quote can link me to a theme in the work and like a fishing line thrown into the water can hook up bigger chunks of knowledge, larger clumps of ideas.

Another choice is not to wade through the waters –  just grab the quotes, the nuggets wherever one might find them. Following this idea further I have fallen into the trap of getting books of quotations – the thinking goes, hey you like quotes well get a whole lot of them and sift the ones that work for you. No no wrong thinking, I am back in a torrent of words trying to fish up a live one again.    

The quotes, the nuggets that have the most power are often those found by accident, stumbled across or heard in passing. . I find the same with poetry.

My poetic sensibility tells me poems of such power and depth as say David Whyte’s should be shared, found, stolen or stumbled upon in small doses . 

While I have a shelf of poetry books at home, the poems I love the most I have heard and then frantically written down, stolen while the poet was asleep, found on a bus, ripped out of a library book, sort out for a funeral’s tears, been slipped by a kind friend or simply memorised and lost the original.

I don’t pretend to understand this but I do notice the process. I find now that  I long to find an inspired poem or quote written on the back of ticket and discarded on a train, scrawled on the side of a wall or slipped into the appendix of a technical manual.

In this spirit I have hidden a poem by David Whyte about the nature of love, somewhere one this page, its hiding between two dots, waiting.

 

We need new thinking around government engagement with communities.

We need new thinking around government engagement with communities.

As Albert Einstein said “We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”

As I see it, part of the problem is the often large disconnect between those in government, developing policy and those in the community affected by those policies.  As some have pointed out those in the civil service are often caught in between these extremes. It seems that a complex web of relationships, thinking and consulting has developed trying to connect government thinking to community need, from the top down. I wonder if every new consultation process just adds another layer of complexity to this web.

At the other end is the problem of who is this community we talk about and how do they express their needs. Ordinary everyday New Zealanders rarely get a say in it and in my experience cannot be expected to come up with solutions – perhaps they may be able to articulate their needs, but who is listening? Democracy is a very crude instrument for community engagement. We vote for people and tribes who we hope understand our needs and who we hope will remember that understanding when they get in to power. With some notable exceptions the history of politics is a depressing line of failed hope.

They are others in the middle ground looking around seeing the problems in a slightly more objective light who then either try to connect with government to articulate the issues or simple get on and try to create solutions to the problems they see around them. I put myself in this camp along with the many many “community workers” ranging from street level workers through to managers running NGOs, non profits and of course government employed “front line staff”.

These are the people in my opinion who are the closest to the solutions for social problems, are developing at least some insight into why we have the problems in the first place and are therefore an integral part of developing the solutions. There is something incredibly grounding in doing the thinking toward social solutions while needing to face – in the same day – the actual reality of the problem, when for example a client phones up in tears/rage/grief/joy with their story.

Why then is government not actively seeking engagement with these front liners? Can we seek this engagement outside the usual political dynamics of central and local government? Why can we not see this wide ranging group of front liners as a key resource and find creative ways to engage, listen ( really listen) and jointly develop or prototype solutions?  Let’s have a group of trained solution brokers who seek out those people working in the community. The busy people struggling to develop answers. Actively seek out those who are coming up with innovative ideas and solutions. Sure these solutions may well need work to develop them into really effective policy or projects but that can be the place for experience civil servants.

It seems government makes up policy in isolation or tries to “consult” from the top down. Lets turn the process on its head and have entrepreneurial agents actively seeking out solutions from the ground up, developing these ideas and selling them back up to government decision makers .

 

Despair, hope and belonging

I think the biggest threat we – the human race – face is despair. I see it often in the young people I work with but I am seeing more hope emerging as well.  I mean hope in the big sense of the word. Vaclav Haval says it well, “ Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. Not a conviction that something will turn out right, but a certainty that something makes sense, regardless of the outcome.”

The hope I am glimpsing and hey we are not talking about a tidal wave here, is based on a authentic sense of our own humanity, no bullshit reality you can feel and touch. Its not a picture full of dolphins leaping through rainbows. Its harsh at times, exciting and occasionally scary but it’s real and rooted deep in the authentic human self.

In the last four lines of Mary Oliver’s poem’s – Wild geese – she offers an antidote to despair
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place in the family of things”

Hope is perhaps the antithesis of despair but belonging is one antidote to despair.

 

Field of fathering

Here’s a edited version of a talk I gave at the Massey University Chancellors’ Lecture Series on 30th July 2008

I consider my work to be in the area of fathering, I use the word quite deliberately, it’s a verb and to me indicates a quality of being rather than a particular person or role. This quality is held by a spectrum of people, Fathers, Step fathers, Grandfathers, Uncles, Older brothers, Teachers, friends of the family, to name a few and of course – mentors.
At it’s essence I think fathering is a uniquely male expression of caring – an older man caring for a younger one.
I am not sure what the age difference has to be to make it fathering – rather than say brothering -  with a father as parent its obvious – but we know fathering is more than parenting children, I am still fathering my adult children and still need the odd bit of fathering myself , fathering can be a lifelong devotion of caring for someone younger than you.

This can be turned on its head for example – a son caring for an elderly father. My dad is 90  and at the times of his various medical crisis – I feel like I am fathering my father. The last time I held him, sick in hospital – stroking his hair I found myself saying  shhhh shhh , to calm him to sleep, just like I did with my kids – he liked it.

What ever the age difference I see fathering as a male expression of caring. I think mentoring offers a very clear illustration of this uniquely male caring – in most cases the mentor has no blood or family ties, no obligations or social expectations to be met by mentoring – they simply have a motivation to show an abiding interest in someone other than their self. What has surprised me in my work with mentors is how deep that motivation can be and how the motivation towards service of this kind is as much about self development as about selfless service.

I call it the field of fathering because – as I said – it’s a form of human caring carried by a spectrum of men but also because I think it is more about being than doing, its about who you are as about what you do  – it seems more about shear presence than actions. I see it the many fatherless boys we meet, they are hungry for that presence, are drawn to it like a magnet, ask any male teacher in a primary or grade school– hey that’s if you can find one!

Before I go on I feel a need to background how I got to thinking about mentoring as part of this field of fathering.
I came to my work at Big Buddy from a long management and corporate background; In 2003 I became a corporate refugee, by choice; a steadily growing voice in me was calling me to do something worthwhile in the world, to do more than make money – to be of service. A friend offered me a job running a small mentoring programme, Big Buddy as it was then. I took the opportunity . I was intrigued by this idea of men mentoring fatherless boys as a possible answer to the huge social problems these boys can sometimes bring to the world – as adults. As an aside the negative statistics on fatherless boys can be alarming  -
I was at a presentation recently by a Principal youth court judge Andrew Becroft and in talking about the youth offenders he sees in his courts said…
83% are Male
70% come from single parent families –
He also said “Very few serious youth offenders come from stable, two-parent, homes. He was at pains to say not every solo parent breeds a criminal nor was he making judgments about separation – but he pointed out that most serious young offenders lack a positive, male, role model.

Designing a serious screening process was my first challenge, I won’t do into it here, it demands a post to itself. Once I had it designed I realized the bigger challenge I faced was recruiting male mentors – an issue every youth mentoring programme in the world faces.In pondering this I realized the issue was not with the men we wanted to recruit as some had said – the issue was with the social programme or more specifically trying to create a programme with all the usual inputs, outputs, goals, plans and monitoring based on the accepted rationale. I had an instinct we were trying too hard to create a programme we could squeeze people into  – with scant regard for how people already work, how people already help each other outside of social policies and programmes. My perception is that human beings do not behave rationally so why were trying to squeeze such a human centered programme into a tight rational structure.

I needed to look at what mentoring really is. To start I looked at the origin of the word mentor. It comes from Greek mythology. In Homer’s Odyssey – Mentor  was a old friend of the hero Odysseus and when Odysseus left for the Trojan Wars he placed Mentor in charge of his son,  Telemachus. I think he was away for 10 years or longer.  I’m not sure what Odysseus said to Mentor but I imagine the conversation went along the lines “ah Mentor my friend will you keep an eye on my boy while I’m away” Mentor may have said “er yeah but how I am going to do that Ody ” Odysseus would have said “well -hang out with him, listen to him, take an interest in who he is and who he is becoming, stay engaged with him – you know – do what I would do”. No mention of inputs, outputs, progress reporting, monitoring or achievement standards.

It dawned on me that mentoring is a form of fathering and the basics of fathering is simply showing up and continuing to show up and in the simple rhythm that ensues– caring grows. I restructured the Big Buddy mentoring programme around this simple ethic, ie what a fatherless boy needs is an adult man showing up into his life on a regular and rhythmic basis, he needs a father figure.  It was about relationship, it was about showing up but more than that, it was about one person caring enough about another to turn up into their life. on a regular basis. I figured whatever comes from that relationship had to be good.

One thing I threw away the idea of training mentors – most organizations will do 20 – 40 hours of training –  our approach is a 2 hour induction process. In this process we give our mentors three simple guides
1 Show up – regularly
2 Be your self
3 Pay Attention.
We encourage our mentors to reflect on how were fathered – or not – and we remind our volunteers that men have been doing this – looking out for the young fellas – for more than a 100, 000 years, its in our bones to do this.

I also thought the mentoring relationship should have no predefined end; this is in opposition to accepted practice – especially in the UK where they end their mentoring relationships after 9 – 12 months. My ideal was a lifetime.

We think they are just getting started at 9 months! It takes about that long for a relationship that – lets be honest – is an artificial one at the start – to become a real relationship. This simple model has, I believe, been the foundation for our success and by most standards in mentoring – we are very successful.

I am now more convinced than ever that mentoring – as we practice it – sits firmly in the field of fathering, that this form of fathering is an ongoing series of small acts of caring or simply just being there.  It is so simple – as I explain this simple ethos to our volunteers I see their shoulders relax – the smiles come up from the relief of knowing they don’t have to try to be a mentor – they already are.

I have come to believe that human beings want to care for each other, need to care for each other and need to be cared for.  This need to care goes way back, it’s in our bones. I go further to say that for men – the need to care for a younger man is primal, its goes deep and is an integral part of our own development and maturing as men. Not all men will become fathers but all men can father – someone.

In my experience – being cared about – which is quite different from being cared for – contributes hugely to our self development – that is – the development of a healthy sense of self.  New information coming from the Neuroscience labs indicates our psychological development, more specifically the development of the Self, is governed by far more than the – nature/nurture/gene model. It seems we develop the Self by our interactions with others. We are social animals and our psyches are formed through the richness of our social interactions. I think it is important a growing child has rich relationships with both genders purely to get a wider spectrum. I think that the real richness comes from the gesture of caring within those interactions, real caring – is like food for our self development. If you think about the people who informed who you are today I suggest it was the ones who engaged with you – for  who you were-  who showed a genuine interest in you alone, even for a moment and in the magic of that momentary human encounter – time slowed down and you had a deep sense – that who you are – was welcomed in the world, you were worthy, your hopes and fears had been witnessed, you were not alone and more than that – the world is a place waiting – in eager anticipation – for you.
The world is waiting especially for our young people to arrive into adulthood and while the world may seem a mess to some and despair the only authentic response I think the the last four lines of Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese offers an antidote to this despair

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place in the family of things”

I think for this call to belonging  is crucial  - and we the adults need to see our young people for who they are, who they are becoming , if we really want hold them with a deep respect for the nobility of their spirit. If we want to welcome them to this wild and beautiful world of ours.

And of course children can be insufferable little brats, or as Aldous Huxley once said  “raw egos with personalities screwed on top” . And they of course are more than that and part of the quality of fathering (and mothering for that matter) is to be able to see that , to see the bigger picture of who the child is and who they are becoming. To have faith in their inner nobility no matter how ugly they occasionally present themselves.

This may be sounding rather idealistic, well I am idealistic and make no apologies for it – but the miracle really is – it happens anyway – if we can shovel enough fear away from the door – we will want to care for as many as we have capacity for – it’s what it means to be human.

I think those of us in the social services need to hold our institutional structures lightly. We need to be careful how much rational processes we use, humans are not rational creatures in my experience.  As social workers we need to do enough and then get out of the way of the biggest asset available to us – the human capacity for love. Lets not get in the way of human caring, its can be a crucial tool to help address and properly heal our social problems.

We want to care, humans have survived not because we are the biggest, strongest or even smartest animals but because we are very sophisticated at working together, at holding relationships, in caring about each other. Yes I know many will say it’s a jungle out there, each man for himself, we are all islands etc but how much of that perception have we ourselves created? How much of that happens – because we forgot to truly engage with each other, especially with our children.

I’m not talking about being best friends with our kids, that in my opinion is a kind of cop out. I’m  talking about being fully present with our children. Sometimes that engagement can be fierce, sometimes soft and cuddly and often we get it wrong or completely blow it, but we come back to it time after time. This struggle to fully engage is a kind of faithfulness. In the struggle to be caring, in the field of fathering  is where we find our humanity.

 

God – perhaps a useful word

One constant thread in my life has been the struggle to engage with the most basic question any human being can ask themselves , Who I am .  Somewhere along the long road this question has taken me it seemed sensible to see myself as a spiritual being. I don’t know about the “truth” of this idea but it sure seems to help make sense of life and living at times. If its just some kind of conceptual lens that helps I am ok with that, I think we can get hung up on wanting our conceptual lenses to be The Truth.   But hey I’m not alone of course Wordsworth has us descending from God.

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar

Not in entire forgetfulness

And not in utter nakedness

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

If the word god troubles you and you have good reason to be troubled by it, the word has after all been abused for centuries. Try substituting your own word for that higher, deeper source, that spiritual wellspring, that other- than I place. For me this poem fragment is a reminder we are at heart spiritual beings, as Sting sang “we are spirits in a material world” . If you can go there of course.

If you need to think we are just chemistry, we are just physical bodies, buzzing with electric impulses, awash with a thousand permutations of chemical reactions, well you are going to have difficulty joining me in this idea of course.
Your concept of human as electro-chemical machine is after the Truth is it not.

Putting aside all debate over truth, the argument that says we are only what we can see and measure is often called scientific, the word science certainly give the idea some credibility but science is limited and ever changing. The difference between the Newtonian world view and current conceptual views coming out of post Einstein physics is huge. The difference seems to be growing by the day. Yet in Newton’s time his view was the Truth without question.

On the subject of “who we are” I figure the body and depth of scientific knowledge on the subject is limited.The greeks broke knowledge down into different aspects; episteme – the Greek root of Epistemology and Gnosis. As I see it episteme is the top layer of knowledge, information derived from physical observation, data. Gnosis is more akin to knowing derived from intuition, deep life experience and – if you are willing to stretch yourself – from transcendental understanding. Perhaps we need several layers of understand or knowledge to address the bigger human question – who I am. Episteme, information, data, scientific gleanings are very useful but not enough.

The question, who we are, is such a profound question that has ripples down the ages of human existence and is met every day by millions of thinking human beings, it’s a question we all live with and perhaps the striving to live with this question is the point, not in finding an answer. Perhaps in the striving itself is where Gnosis emerges.

So when the quasi scientific argument emerges saying we are just chemistry shot through with electrical impulses it seems to me an insult to the thousands of year of human exploration into our identity into our being.Its ignoring the large elephant in the room – the body of human knowing of Gnosis.

It is lazy thinking actually. Quantum physics has always been considered the leading edge of science and this field of study is showing us the deeper we look into chemistry, down below the sub atomic level, it is not so tidy, not so mechanical. It is indicating a world full of mystery and contradiction. Time and space are not that solid after all, in fact there is no solid anything, just energy and bend space. In this field everything is connected, time is everywhere, light bends, space warps. If you are looking for a tidy solution to the question of who are we and have followed the route of chemistry, keep following that road down past the atomic and deep into the sub atomic, you will find a deeply mysterious field that holds us all. Our real home is infinitely strange and for most of us incomprehensible, therefore I have no judgement on those that use the word god as a kind of cipher to say, ” its bigger than me but it is me.It and therefore I is full of mystery” .

Hey make you just want to get down on your knees and ….

 

Airlines ban men from sitting next to childeren – part 2

Following on from my last post on the issue of Airlines banning men from sitting next to children.

I noticed  the NZ herald devoted a Sunday editorial to this issue ( I know who the writer was )

My response to the herald ….

Last Sunday’s editorial on Airlines policy of separating men from children was a welcomed attempt to pull this issue out from the shadows of panic into the sunlight of clear thinking. Your writer had the courage to challenge us all about “a culture of safety that sees vulnerability as our defining position”, about seeing our children devoid of even the most basic ability to recognize who and what is unsafe. When the old primal fears around our children’s safety are evoked it seems they shadow the clear intelligence that is so needed in the sophisticated world we live in. Your editorial says “… this moral panic makes children less safe not safer: regulations and protocols that assume all men are dangerous relieve us all of the responsibility of protecting children from the men who really are”. This is the insight we need here.  To keep our children truly safe we need something more efficacious than the sledgehammer approach of shielding them from all men. Our children need help to know the difference between good and bad people, safe and unsafe situations, with simple ways to signal to others if they feel unsafe and need help.  If all you do is shield your children from all men you have done them a great disservice, their safety is no more assured and they now have the additional burden of believing all men are somehow dangerous. How on earth are they to grow up into functional human beings believing half the population is dangerous, what are our boys to do with this when they become men.

To your editorial writer, Kia kaha.

 

Airlines banning men from sitting next to childeren

Air New Zealand and Qantas have banned men from sitting next to unaccompanied children on flights.
When I read the Herald article I was shocked and outraged and felt compelled to write to the herald. I followed up with a complaint to the human rights commission.

My letter to the Herald editor ….

As the leader of an organisation that matches men as mentors to fatherless boys I find the actions of Air NZ highly offensive. Much as the Air NZ spokesperson tried to squirm out of it, their actions clearly say that all men are unsafe to be with children. Do they really understand the broad sweep of this policy? Do they really understand the message they are sending out? Do we really want a world that segregates men from children?

For the children’s commissioner Cindy Kiro to come out in support of this ill thought out policy shows an alarming lack of foresight on her part. I just cannot accept the fuzzy logic that says some men are bad therefore we should protect our children from all men. Hey some women are bad but do we protect out children from all women!  Perhaps scariest of all though is the message that this sends to our children, that all men are unsafe. Air New Zealand is contributing to the creation of  a society of fear and cynicism. Where will this madness end?

I work with men caring for children on a daily basis and I know that the vast majority of men are good, that their age old natural instinct is to care for and protect children, not to harm them. Yes there are some men who have lost this natural instinct and yes even some who would go so far as to abuse children. There are women too who would abuse or neglect children. But these are in the minority. Children need contact with men in their lives, I have seen the effects on boys of having little or no male contact and it is not healthy for them or our world.

On a pragmatic level have these “all men are bad until proven otherwise” policies actually had any effect on the level of child abuse?  I’d like to hear Cindy Kiro’s comments on that. I’d also like to hear the Human Rights Commission thoughts on this e.g. are the actions of Air NZ and Qantas even legal.

If Air NZ and Qantas believe this is what their customers want they should think again and they should prepare for a strong reaction from their male customers.

If we all genuinely want a better world for our children I think we need to think through what that really means. Creating a climate of fear is not creating a better world for our children.