Speak your mind ... but ...

Resident Kid has a mug that I've borrowed on occasion, most times resulting in great complaints and chastisement, but the thing that I love about this mug is that it is GIANT and it has a picture of a bucking horse (and yes, with a view of the back side) that says, "Speak your mind ... but ride a fast horse."

I realize now what my problem has been in my life.  Being a marginally fast runner, I tend to speak my mind and endure the wrath or enjoy the giggles of the audience.  A few encounters with audiences of the former ilk have impressed upon me there are times when it can pay to not speak my mind, mostly on the topics of politics or religion.  While this tactic leaves a broad range of other worldly topics that are ripe for the picking, it is sometimes an indictment of public discourse practices in our society.

Vitriol that mutes writers is disturbing and violates my sense of what should make up our right to freedom of speech but this and other events made me curious enough about the varying dynamics behind public discourse to try an experiment during and just after the recent election period.

I decided upon certain situations where I would remain deliberately silent about my opinions on who the best candidates for the jobs at stake were and came up with some surprising, at least to me, outcomes.  What I thought was most interesting were the assumptions that people would make that, if I didn't disagree, I must agree.  My assumption going into this process was that others would assume that I was silent because I was following the maxim of, "If you can't find something nice to say, don't say anything at all," that corollary of, "Silence is golden."

I suppose I should be heartened by this in that others were fully expecting that they would be engaged in a lively debate of diverging opinions if the opportunity arose.  And in fact, I found it difficult, if not impossible, to remain silent if the lively debate was couched in questions that sought to identify the realms of possibility amongst the options.

My silence was not at all difficult to maintain when I was confronted by loud statements of opinion that were presented as fact that could not possibly be impugned.  What surprised me about my own reaction in these cases was that it was not the tendency towards being loud and overbearing that turned me away.  In essence, my response of silence meant that I, the listener, gave up on the speaker as a lost cause.

Outside the Comfort Zone

I was recently exhorted to move outside my comfort zone by an anonymous "they."  Actually not totally anonymous because while I was peripherally in the know about this person, they don't know me at all, so it was an exhortation to the anonymous masses, of which I happened to be one at the time.  The interesting thing to me is that I perceive myself as tending to push the limits of my comfort zone, after all two of my primary hobbies are performance based and tend to put me out there in exposed situations.  But as I thought about the exhortation, I thought about what my comfort zone is and what makes it comfortable, or not.

Around the same time a friend posted her musings about her writing and publishing and agents, or lack thereof, and getting confirmation that what she is doing is worth the huge investment she has made. It occurred to me that pushing your boundaries or taking the leap to do what you love and taking the risk involves intestinal fortitude on your own behalf, but also some confirmation that you have something of value to offer the world.  After all, no matter how much I may love the work, patenting a new screw top lid to a bottle may not be the best use of my energy and dedication.

In the first case, my exhorter was encouraging people to take action to make their little piece of the world a better place ... to join a community of people working on a task within an organization to make things run.  Pick any organization, a social club, a community center, a church, 4-H, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts...you name it, and there are committees within the organization that need people to make things happen.  This is the exhortation I was hearing.  Find an action that appeals to you, join up and do it!  And this was considered to be working outside people's comfort zone or pushing personal limits.  I understood why I didn't understand.  This is what I do all the time.  I have to set limits so that I don't get eaten alive by hungry groups.  I pick and choose my actions to correspond to my needs, to those areas where I feel the need to grow.  This type of involvement does not threaten my feeling of comfort.

So what does?  My friend touched on it with her post - what is uncomfortable is not knowing whether what you do is worthwhile or an effort in developing a new screw top lid.  On some level, we need to do what we love and if we love it enough, we will take the leap to try to make it happen.  But on another level, we need to know that we are on the right track.  Or we need to know that there was a pebble we missed when we were looking under rocks for treasure.  We need guidance and encouragement and honesty.  Perhaps that's a "duh" statement.

Because I look for honesty in people's comments about my work, I am continually frustrated that the things I find easy in life (the join up and work stuff) gets all the praise and commendation.  The things that I truly love in life tend to be met with silence.  All sorts of things run through my head when met with these silences.  A big one being, "If you can't say something nice, don't say it at all."  Perhaps this saying is precisely why I tend to voice my opinion, it's that golden rule thing.  I would rather someone said something to me that was helpful in finding that perfect pebble than have them worry about hurting my feelings.

Another thing that runs through my head, and this is when I'm feeling optimistic, is that people don't say anything because they can't.  I think, well maybe what I'm doing is so far outside their realm of experience that we don't have a point of resonance.  In other words, that they are in some way intimidated because they can't relate.  And that is the edge of my comfort zone, right there.  How do I engage the people that intimidate me so that I can progress and learn from them or the opportunities that may arise?  How do I reach out for those opportunities that I want to take advantage of when I hate feeling like I'm selling myself as a bill of goods that may not have any substance?  In short, how do I know that what I do beyond the join up and work stuff is worth anything?

I obviously don't have the answers for myself. I am still utterly reliant on the rest of the world to tell me their opinion regarding my own efforts.  I have to continue taking my leaps of faith in a vacuum.  But it is a good reminder that I need to be aware of where others may be stretching their boundaries and needing the occasional or not so occasional good word and bear in mind that sometimes silence is a version of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Speaking in old tongues

I have long been a fan of those pop, or maybe not so pop, culture entertainments of the audio-visual kind. I enjoy the print versions, too, in a nod to a sibling that invests a great deal of personal and professional energy in the science-fiction literature scene. But I think my brain has been moving picture oriented since birth because I am constantly thinking how I would produce a live action version of what I am reading. In fact, that is often how I write, by using that little video camera in my mind to figure out how action unfolds.

I am also very fond of escapism, which has also been lifelong, but the preference has intensified over the last decade or so while I held a series of mentally and emotionally challenging jobs. Recently, I have been struck by the nature of language use in movies and TV. Being a lifelong Star Trek fan, and yes, I am of that generation that uses the term, "Trekkie," I followed the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and all the movies. And Star Wars was of course on my radar beginning with a vivid memory of opening night of the first movie in Kansas City where a giant furry thing was handing out "May the Force be with you" buttons.

Star Wars unabashedly used Kikuyu (I think that was the language and have no clue how it is spelled...), a language from Kenya. While it produced some sniggers, it made sense to me not to spend time and energy in a new production to make up a language from scratch.

Then, in the Star Trek movies in the 1980s and Star Trek: The Next Generation, a whole new language came to light and developed a life of its own, Klingon. And the real die-hard Trekkers (as they prefer to be called) of this era would learn Klingon and challenge each other to duels at conventions. This was a created language with the creator, Marc Orkrand, drawing inspiration from Native American, Chinese, and south asian languages.

Fast forward to today and there is Avatar. The Na'vi language has garnered its share of fandom with people learning what they can of the language, even to the extent of e-mailing the language's creator, Paul Frommer, entirely in Na'vi. Another famous example of created languages was birthed in the Tolkien books of Middle Earth and which came to life for me in the movies.

It is a great and interesting achievement to so capture the imagination of people that they would adopt a new language and learn it as inside and out as you possibly can a language of perhaps a 1,000 words. But at the same time there are so many indigenous languages in the world, and so many of them in danger of becoming extinct. Would it be so unimaginative to use the time and energy that it takes to to create a language to catalog and record these dying languages and perhaps create a new population of speakers? What a way to raise consciousness about people on our own world that often live lives that are completely alien to so many of the new generations.

Different kinds of energy

Resident Kid recently took a short summer class from a local martial arts studio (Sorter Bushido Kai Karate) called "Hollywood Stuntman Training." Perhaps the course name created a bias because the class was predominantly boys. But it was fun to watch, not because the stunts were spectacular or even that apparent from where the parents could watch, but because of the different interaction styles amongst all the kids.

I walked in at the end of one of the classes to see bodies crawling up walls and ropes and appearing generally scattered, and then I heard the instructor telling the kids that they needed to focus on the task at hand and that if they were not involved in a stunt that they had to sit quietly and not make noise or motion that would distract from the scene that was being recorded.

Perhaps the kids, or perhaps the parents, assumed that they would be running, jumping, hitting, climbing, falling...you name it...for the entire class. But that neglects the "Hollywood" part of the class title, which implies movie making. Hollywood stunt performers do not spend their days running, jumping, hitting, climbing, falling...you name it...all day long. There are huge periods of time when they have to be quiet and wait for their turn to perform.

Resident Spouse commented the other day how the kids in a summer program at work had the attention span and retention of gnats. Resident Kid's dental hygienist had similar comments about issues she had with kids being able to sit still and cooperate. Twitter is the greatest because the messages are so short. Are we training ourselves to create attention deficits?

Hmmm. It occurs to me that I may be writing to an ever limiting audience because nobody wants to take the time to read more than one paragraph. Makes a person want to hide in a hole and read War and Peace.

Science fiction and foresight

I happened to be quite sick earlier this week and ended up spending quite a bit of time lolling about with little energy to do anything.  Sleep eluded be because of congestion and aching body and so I tried reading a book.  Some might gasp at such audacity in this age of instant information in the micro-doses of tweets, but, in fear of stating the obvious, I am a blogger, not a tweeter, and so I relish the long form.

I actually ended up rampaging through two huge (1,000+ pages) books while actually ill, and two smaller books while improving.  Three of these happened to be books I had read before, and recent conversations or events prompted me to take them up again after many years.  Retreading old territory might have been helped by the fact that I was in no shape or mood to go peruse the offerings at the local used book stores.

At the time, especially which actively sick, I viewed these as a fun romp that diverted my mind, but now I am interested in how the three re-reads treated the issue of communication, particularly in today's world of e-mail, Facebook, and those giant brains lurking behind the internet where all of our missives are saved in perpetuity.

The first book, Battlefield Earth, by L. Ron Hubbard (no Scientology in this tome),  is set in the year 3000 with an alien race that has taken over Earth and the story follows how the remnants of humans quest to take back their own led by one incredibly smart dude.  What interested me in hindsight, and I think highlighted by a re-read of Asimov's Foundation immediately following Battlefield Earth, is the total reliance in Battlefield Earth on physical forms of communication.  Communications between worlds were printed, sensor readouts were printed, little messages rolling out on long strips of tape.  Shredders were a means of controlling the passing of information into unfriendly hands.  Given the publication date of 1982, the context of the writing is clear because the first Macintosh computer wasn't introduced until 1984,  fax machines didn't become really affordable until the mid-1980's, and e-mail and the internet weren't widely available until the 1990's.  Even when these machines and services came available, they used dot matrix printers rolling reams of perforated papers or heat sensitive tape.

The book is filled with other wonderful gizmos and technology and I'm stuck on the means of communication.  But then, like I said, I read Asimov's Foundation immediately following Battlefield Earth, and what do I find?  Little ticker tape communications coiling out of little capsules that were delivered physically.   The echo through four decades from Asimov to Hubbard was remarkable but the question in my mind is whether these major authors in the world of science fiction were constrained by the methods of communication in their respective experiences or were they actually so foresightful as to know that we may want to be able to control our personal information a bit more discreetly?