shhhhhh

Hm. It has been so long since I posted on this blog that Blogger changed the editing screen on me. Tells you something, doesn't it?

I just wanted to update anybody who might be wondering what I've been up to. I finished the catalysis chapter! I was all ready to post it about two weeks ago, but then I took a good look at what I have written so far. I realized it would be silly to put up another chapter without fixing all the "to be completed" bits in the previous chapters. So I've been going through and fixing things, including making sure every chapter has nice textbook-style end matter: summary, questions for discussion, activities, references cited, annotated recommendations for further reading. Nice and clean. Also, I'm fixing up all the places where I say "see page xx" where the "xx" means "put in some way to link pages later." Later is now.

With the catalysis chapter, I have finished 15 chapters out of an expected 22. It's mostly downhill from here. The hardest chapters have been written, and for what remains (sensemaking, intervention, and return, basic and advanced, plus the rest of the case studies) I have lots of notes to work from. The basic intervention chapter will consist of three excellent interviews with colleagues who know more about the use of narratives in that sphere than I do. (If you are one of those three colleagues: thanks so much for your help, sorry it has taken so long to get your stuff in the book, and I still promise to send you what you said so you can check it before it goes in!)

The catalysis chapter did take forever, but lots of other things have been going on that have slowed things down. My husband took on a new job that reduces my time flexibility somewhat. I've been working half time since 2003, but now it's even more half-time than the half-time it was before. Our family's homeschooling journey has been ramping up in ambition and scope as my son gets older. Also, our two very old dogs are going through their last few months with us, and our house has been transformed into a 24/7 dog hostel as we see our friends through to the end of their days.

So when will the book be done? When it's done, I guess. I've had this fantasy of showing up at the family Christmas party with real, physical copies of the book to give to my family members ... for the past three Christmases. Maybe I'll make it this year. I hope people can get some benefit out of the book even in its incomplete state, which is partly why I decided to clean up what I have before I write the rest of the chapters.

Why haven't I been writing in the blog? I've been kind of pondering whether I should still have a blog. I started the blog to write the book. (And I don't know why ... she swallowed the fly.) The blog has helped the book, but the blog has hurt the book too. Now maybe it's time for the blog and the book to part company. When the book is done the blog will have no stated reason to exist, so why continue it?

Another thing is, having a blog can be a pain. Every thing that happens you think: good blog material? Just a few mornings ago I woke up from a bad dream. In the dream I was at a conference somewhere, and I had been asked to give a talk on "Learning How To Learn." I sparkled, I engaged, I inspired. I had no idea what I was talking about. Then I woke up from the dream, and instantly a thought sprung into my head: good blog material? And then: stop doing that! Life is life, not blog material!

Another thing is, I've done a lot of opining in the blog. I didn't start the blog intending to opine, but the opinions kept sneaking in anyway. I don't think I like that. If I want to write an opinion blog I should start a different blog. I should call it "The Hand-Wringing Declinist" or "The Decline and Fall of the Way Things Were When I Was a Kid." That sort of place would be the right place to tell people the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, instead of sneaking in "and wouldn't you know, this is all about stories!" into each post. Then when I think of starting an opinion blog I think: let's not and say we did.

Whadya think?

Lonely for ...

So yesterday I get in the mail the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, and it's a double dose of loneliness in one day. The Atlantic has an article called "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" while in the New Yorker it's "The Disconnect." I read these with interest, partly because I've been writing similar things about how we don't tell each other stories as much as we used to.

Even though I'm generally in the choir on these things, I can't help but notice something is missing, and it's the same thing I see missing from every prominent declaration of the new loneliness. Consider this quote from John Cacioppo, "the world’s leading expert on loneliness."

“Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” he writes. “But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh. 

Wait: "the real thing" means people, and only people? Every non-human contact can only be a "surrogate" for human contact? Do these people realize what they are saying?

The human species has been around for at least a million years. Up to about a hundred years ago the majority of people were habitually conversant with the natural world, or, as it was then known, the world. If we redefine loneliness in terms of human contact only -- by saying we can only be considered lonely if we are lonely for people -- we risk ignoring a source of loneliness that might be even more powerful.

Imagine a world full of people, a world in which nobody is ever lonely ... for people. But in this new world it is possible to live an entire life without seeing one leaf, hearing one bird, touching one pebble, feeling one raindrop or gust of wind. If we can no longer be lonely for life itself, are we still alive?

The frog interview

I just got back from a social outing. Our pond is a frog pond, and it's getting to be time for the frogs to lay their eggs in the water. Every year I try to catch the frogs in the act of laying their eggs, and every year I miss the event and discover the egg sacs already there, anchored to branches under the water. So this afternoon, mindful of the time, I started out walking from the house.

Halfway there a red squirrel sounded the alarm: large animal coming! But this guy didn't just sound the alarm: they never do. He conversed with me. He stared straight at me, chittering, stamping, running up and down the tree, defying me to come closer. To each move I made he responded, escalating the tension. Finally I moved away (toward the pond, where I was going in the first place) and he sounded a triumphant call. I've been accosted thus by many a proud squirrel, and I defy you to say they intend nothing communicative by it. When we started on our project to build a playhouse a few years ago, I was leveling the space and laying out concrete blocks for the foundation when a squirrel came within a few feet of my face and delivered a five-minute lecture on the proper occupation of space in the forest. I listened with respect, and I have recalled that lecture many a time as I made sure our construction avoided presenting any hazards to our neighbors in that part of the woods.

Getting back to today. As I approached the pond I could hear the frogs going at it: a complicated chorus of calls was sounding back and forth as they negotiated the deposition of eggs and sperm into the right places. I was excited to have gotten closer than ever to the event of egg laying. I stood for a long time just listening. I could see little ripples on the pond where the frogs were dancing together; but I wanted to see more. I tried to advance quietly, but of course they heard me and stopped singing. I knew what to do next. I walked up quickly and sat down in my pond-watching spot, ready to participate in the frog interview. Time passed. A different squirrel started up a different confrontation, not towards me but towards some other ne'er-do-well, perhaps a deer, off somewhere past the pond. Flies buzzed around. Trees sung songs.

At some point I realized the interview had begun. A frog had swum up right in front of me and was staring directly at me. Now we began the formal process. I knew that I was to prove myself by remaining stock still for as long as was required; meaning, until the frog moved. Frogs are the absolute masters of stock-still, so I knew the challenge was difficult. The first frog that came up was a young, small one. After a relatively short staring session it swam off, apparently satisfied with my performance. Then a larger, more authoritative frog swam up and began the stare. This time I simply could not make it. Three times I tried and three times I failed. My fingers got numb, or my toe got jammed into my boot tip, and I simply had to move. The interviewing frog immediately spun around in the water and disappeared: interview over. By the way, to the uninitiated the interviewing frog would have seemed to be doing nothing but floating in the water, seemingly dead or unconscious. When the wind moved the water the frog moved with it like a floating twig. But I noticed that no matter which way the wind blew, the frog carefully and subtly bent its body so that its eyes never strayed from mine. During these three failed interviews I could see other frogs off across the pond, waiting and watching to see how the interview would turn out. A few times they even started up with a few hesitant croaks, but the interviewer declined to respond with an all-clear, so they continued to wait. Finally, sensing their rising impatience with my ineptitude, I rose to leave. I'll come back tomorrow, ready to try again.

I don't blame the frogs for being suspicious; I've seen what happens to them. Every year there are millions and millions of tadpoles. You can pick them up and run them through your fingers. Later in the year the numbers thin to thousands, and a year later there can't be more than twenty or thirty frogs in the pond. Some of them go elsewhere: we find the travelers roaming about looking for new ponds to settle, and sometimes give them a lift across a dry spot. But many must be eaten. That's another event I've wanted to see. I'm sure some kinds of birds must eat the tadpoles, and I've come to the pond at the time when this should be happening, but I always miss it. I see birds coming and drinking, but never dining. To cross that boundary I must surely endure additional interviews of an even more demanding nature.

I defy anyone to claim that the social experience I just described contains nothing but "surrogate" forms of sociality. For nearly the entire run of human existence, interacting only with other human beings has been an aberration, a deadness, a loss: loneliness.

Strange games

Here's Henry David Thoreau in Walden:

You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns. 

Later he describes a game of tag he played with a loon that sounds a lot like my frog interview.

He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon.

I'll bet you twenty dollars that when Thoreau wrote that, any random person would have had a dozen stories to tell just like it in response. Not so today. But nobody ever says anything about that kind of loneliness.

You may have seen news articles about a man named Robert Biggs, who claims to have been saved from an attack by a mountain lion ... by a bear. A wild bear. According to Mr. Biggs, he had known the bear for a long time, having hiked the same trail for decades. He believes the bear saved him because it knew him and considered him a friend. There have been documented cases of wild animals helping people before, mostly dolphins and apes; so while I can't possibly know what happened to Mr. Biggs I concede the possibility. What I find amazing about this story, though, is the nasty tone of the many deriding comments about it. Here are a few fairly representative comments:

This is a really cool story. But he left out the part aliens fought off the bear before he time travelled from la la land.

So he was attacked by a duck, and a rabbit saved him? I don’t blame him for embellishing, the last time I was attacked by a duck I had to use martial arts. They are blood thirsty.

If I ran across a mountain lion and a bear, I would use my secret Dim Muk Kung Fu moves to immobilize them for 30 minutes with my deadly one finger touch. 

One thing I've noticed about the comments on this story are that many of them involve fantastic or gaming elements: aliens, magic, mind-altering substances. The idea of interacting with wild animals is evidently so far outside of "normal human" experience that people have to refer to things they know better: movies and computer games. As a visiting kid said one time while we splashed in our local river, "This is just like a movie!" High praise indeed.

Visitors in our own world

The stories of my frog interview, Thoreau's loon game and Mr. Bigg's bear all contrast with the presentation of nature I see in campaigns imploring people to "visit" and "see" nature. Have you noticed those ubiquitous posters in which children stare wide-eyed at butterflies? Have you noticed that the children are never doing anything? It's almost as if nature has turned into a museum of nature, an abstraction of itself, an idea without a reality. People who "visit" nature expect to see things, and they might even hope to see things happen, but they don't expect to have things happen to them.

Even though I grew up in the country and should know better, I have found this nature-as-theatre idea taking root in my own expectations. I find myself constantly surprised to discover that nature doesn't just sit there as I watch it. It jumps up and plays with me. Squirrels chastise me, birds surround me, hawks survey me, deer watch me, grouse fly from me (from me!), bears assess my motivations. I can't stand back and watch: I'm drawn in, engaged, included. It's not a zoo, it's a world. It's the world. It is the same world as it was before. The only change is that we have somehow got the idea that we don't belong here anymore, that we are visitors in our own world. It's no wonder we are lonely.

People say people are lonely, and they think people are lonely for other people. But what if people are lonely for more than just people? What if they are lonely for life itself? And what if life is lonely for us, and misses us?

Which is worse: the loss of the gift you miss, or the loss of the gift you have forgotten you ever had?

P.S. David Abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous says much of what I said here, and better too.

P.P.S. Having finished this post, I went to have dinner and noticed my copy of The Atlantic sitting open to the picture for the article "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" Guess what the picture shows. It's a man and woman holding hands while looking away from each other at computer tablets. But look beyond the man and woman. Guess what they are standing in. Are they in a yard? In a forest? On a hill? Near the sea? Nope. They are in an empty space, blank, devoid of all life. Seems pretty lonely to me, people or no people.

P.P.P.S. The next morning this post sounds all show-off-y, holier-than-thou, I have a pond and you don't. But you don't have to live in the woods to reconnect to life. The world is so lonely for us that even a little potted plant will be your friend if you let it. My favorite cartoon of all time (surpassing even the Far Side explanation of dinosaur extinction) is one I saved from a newspaper a long time ago. It showed a very old man sitting on a bench in a giant concrete city, conversing happily with a tiny flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk. Nature is good company.

How wisdom happens

Lately my thoughts keep returning to the topic of wisdom. Why? Because it's my own particular friend, in a way I will now explain.

One spring day when I was about ten years old, my Aunt Honey came to visit. She came into the kitchen carrying a woody shrub covered with tiny yellow flowers and declared, "This is for Cynthia."  (Avid gardeners: you will have got the joke already.)

I was elated at the unexpected gift, and I pranced all around my mother and aunt as they planted the bush directly under my window. Later in the day I said to my mother, "I'm going out to visit my bush." "Your bush?" She said. "What do you mean?" Indignantly I replied, "The one Aunt Honey brought! She said it was for Cynthia." To my surprise, my mother burst out laughing. When she could speak, she explained that it was a forsythia bush, and that it was just a coincidence that they planted it under my window.

This did not faze me: it was still my bush. In fact, it was even more my bush than before. I had gained not just one bush, but a whole world of for-Cynthia bushes. Decades later, every time I see a forsythia bush anywhere, I say, "There's one of my bushes." I have never actually planted a forsythia bush on my own property, however. If they are mine I am theirs, so if I plant one and it dies...

Wisdom is mine in the same way that forsythia is mine. When I was a kid my dad had nicknames for all of us, each of which came with a silly little song; and my nickname was guru. I think he called me this because I had developed a solid reputation as the daydreamer of the family, the one who spent most of her time staring off into space thinking about nothing in particular, the one who was always in need of a good poke in the ribs before she would respond to what was going on around her. Because of this early name, all my life I have thought about what it means to be a guru, and what gurus do, and what gurus have, which is generally always described as ... wisdom. So I think about it.

Don't hate me because I'm wise

The penultimate story about wisdom, for me, is a conversation that took place in my late 20s. At the time I was slowly recovering from my back injury and had recently jumped ship from the academic world. Out of spite mixed with desperation I had taken a job working for an older couple who owned a chain of beauty salons. I was doing their payroll while writing a payroll program for them so they wouldn't need anybody to do their payroll anymore. In the frame of mind I was in at the time, this was nihilistic enough to be satisfying. The children of my kind employers were all grown and gone, and I was lonely and short of funds, so I started staying to dinner each day after work.

One night at dinner my hosts were talking, not for the first time, about some friends or relatives of theirs, a married couple who were always at each others' throats. "You know what I think?" I said. "Some people don't know what they have when they have it." The husband looked at me for a long time, then he said: "How did you get so wise for a person so young?"

I have thought about that conversation many, many times in the twenty-plus years since then. I have never been able to figure out why he said I was wise. I didn't mean to be wise. The full and honest extent of the not-very-deep thought behind my statement was: "Gee, I wish I was married."

Another reason I keep replaying that conversation is that it keeps happening. Over the years I have been called wise, or deep or profound, more often than I find comfortable. I don't know if everybody goes around telling everybody they are wise and deep and profound all the time, but somehow I don't see it happening to other people as much as I see it happening to me. Sometimes the word seems less like a compliment and more like a taunt. If I'm so damn wise, why do I make so many stupid mistakes?

Well, the other day I finally figured it out. I was replaying the "how did you get so wise" dinner-table story on waking up, for the millionth time, and this time I finally, suddenly, saw it. It was not me that was wise. It was the situation that was wise. Wisdom wasn't something I had or did or said, it was something that happened.

Here was a married couple who had made the journey over the swamps of marital disappointment, talking about another couple who were mired in them and couldn't see their way out. And here was me, a lonely young woman longing for the promised land of married life. To me at that time marriage was nothing more than a place where I could never be lonely again. I had had enough of friends moving away and boyfriends losing interest, and I longed to be part of something that lasted. I had no way of knowing that the permanence of marriage means everything is permanent: what you choose, what you accept and what you overlook. We all happened to be in the right places to see the swamps from before, during and after. As a result, views impossible to see from the other sides of the situation were exposed, and that -- not any quality or ability of mine -- was wisdom.

Thus it also makes sense that the reason I understand the conversation now, and couldn't then, was because I am now finally on the other side of the swamps. I have been married nearly twenty years, so my view now is much like the view of my employers then. I can now finally see all the sides of the issue, so I can now finally see how the wisdom happened.

Thus, reader, I submit this question to you. What if wisdom is not a quality, either of individuals or groups? What if it is not something anyone can have or get or be or do? What if wisdom is an event?

In this context I can't help but think of that great old Pantene commercial where the woman said, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful." The premise was that it was not the woman who was beautiful: it was the interaction of the woman's hair with the wonderful Pantene shampoo that was beautiful. In other words, beauty was an event, one in which we great unwashed masses could participate.

Three more tales of wisdom

After this revelation, I started thinking about other times when I've seen wisdom happen. Sometimes wisdom flowed through me to another person, in which case they said I "was" wise. Sometimes it flowed from another person into me, in which case I marveled at "their" wisdom. And sometimes the wisdom flowed from and to everyone, in which case nobody said anything about anyone "being" wise or "having" wisdom; they simply remembered the event and learned from it. So I thought, let me try and come up with one story for each of these situations and think about them.

For the first I-am-seen-as-wise story, I could use the marriage conversation above, but there is another conversation that has always puzzled me and which might work even better. When I worked at IBM Research, we often had people coming by for advice on organizational issues. Organizational studies were entirely new to me, though I did notice some useful parallels from my years studying non-human societies. Others in the group were knowledgeable about organizational affairs, so I happened to sit in quietly on a lot of conversations about knowledge management and organizational culture.

One day some people came in who were responsible for the operation of some sort of large government bureaucracy. They were looking for ways to improve their effectiveness as a "learning organization" and so on. They brought with them some sort of organizational chart, possibly with knowledge flows mapped. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it had a lot of little person icons and lines between. I didn't know enough to know what I was looking at, so I thought to myself that it looked kind of like an architectural drawing of a big old mansion, with halls and floors and wings.

They asked all of us for input on their situation. When they got to me I said, "Why don't you have any trick stairways?" "Trick what?" they said. I explained that in big old English houses they used to have all these hidden staircases, so you could get quickly from the parlor to the kitchen, or from the stables to the bath, or whatever. In old houses, trick stairways were built in because people realized that no matter what structure was set up on the surface of things, it would still be useful to circumvent that structure at times, privately and quietly. Then I said that when a lot of people work together, as people did in the big old mansions, I would presume the same needs for flexibility in structure would come up. Maybe the CEO would need to drop in on the factory floor from time to time, or the word on the street would need to drift up through the air vents, or things like that. I suggested that maybe they, as the people in charge of their edifice, might want to build some trick staircases into their mansion of bureaucratic efficiency.

Our visitors loved this idea. They got very excited about all the "trick stairways" they could create and looked at the diagram as if they had never seen it before. I was glad what I said was helpful to them. But the thing that was strange to me, and the reason I keep replaying the conversation years later, was how they kept saying how wise I was. "How in the world did you ever think of that?" they said. But I didn't think of anything at all, really. I just happen to love reading old English novels, and I thought their diagram looked like a big old English mansion. I didn't "have" wisdom, and I didn't "do" anything. I just saw the issue from a different angle because I had had different experiences. Again wisdom happened because different people saw different things, and again the wisdom was mistaken as a quality or ability rather than an event.

Second story: this one about wisdom coming to me. After I left home I went through what I now know to be fairly predictable stages of finding oneself. I was confused, lonely, arrogant, selfish, and very much afraid. At some point during this time I went to see the movie Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, was its French title). I remember coming out of the movie feeling exposed, ruined, flayed. Somehow, the woman who had made this movie had got entirely inside my life and flung it out for all to see. The film explores the tug of war between freedom and comfort, and how one always goes when the other comes. This was exactly the issue I was living with for those several years of my life, but seen from both sides and thoroughly, devastatingly explored.

Most importantly to our topic today, I came out of that movie believing that its creator (Agnes Varda) had to be the single wisest person on the planet. How in the world did she ever think of it? Even as I write this, as hard as I try, I still cannot think of Varda in any way but as a giant of wisdom, alongside whom my meagre fund of insight buzzes like a gnat.

But still, the wisdom was not necessarily in Agnes Varda. It was in the juxtaposition of what she had experienced and what I was experiencing. One essay I found about the movie says that it was inspired in part by Varda's experiences with a young woman she "met on the road." So again: an issue is important, critical, to someone; one person sees it from one side of experience, one from another; the communication of experiences creates an event that is wisdom. When we place the wisdom on the person, we are wrong. It belongs on the juxtaposition. This may also be why people disagree about who is wise and who is not wise. To me Varda is only surpassed by Dostoyevsky in wisdom; but to many others those people created burdensome, irritating things of trivial import, while others have possessed absolute wisdom. If wisdom is not a quality but an event, we are all correct in our assessments.

Let me ask you this: If there was a person who knew everything there was to know about life, the universe and everything, but that person absolutely refused to share what they knew with anyone, would we call that person wise? No. Knowledgeable, learned, but not wise. Wisdom is not transmitted through interaction; wisdom is interaction.

Third story. As promised this is one in which nobody can possibly be seen as an originator or owner of wisdom. In college I drove half an hour to school. One winter day I drove onto the on-ramp to the highway, only to find a large barrier blocking my way onto the highway itself. I can't remember why the road was blocked, but it was probably a sheet of ice, as it often was in winter. There was nothing I could do but turn around and drive back out of the on-ramp, slowly and carefully.

Halfway back I met a police officer in his car. He stopped, rolled down his window, and issued a blaring tirade at me for driving the wrong way on an on-ramp. I was so stunned -- knowing that if he only turned his head a few degrees he would see the barrier not one hundred feet in front of him -- that I could only sit there with my mouth hanging open. By the time I summoned the thought to speak or point, he had rolled up his window and driven angrily off. I watched his car in my rear-view mirror as he drove to the barrier, stopped, and turned around. When he got back to me he stopped, rolled down his window, and issued an apology as vehement as his tirade of blame. I still said nothing, because what was there to say? Then we both drove off out of the on-ramp, slowly and carefully.

I often think of that incident when I catch myself about to jump to a conclusion based on inadequate evidence. I consider the memory of this event to be a great source of wisdom in my life. But nobody "had" the wisdom, and nobody "was" wise, and nobody "did" anything wise. The wisdom just happened, and again it happened because we saw different things.

Conditions of wisdom

I have been thinking back through many other examples of times when I have seen wisdom happen, and I have been thinking about what conditions have been common in such situations. I have come up with six conditions under which wisdom can happen. In any happening of wisdom at least one of these things is going on, and usually more than one. Briefly, they are as follows.

Juxtaposed experiences. When people who have had differing experiences surrounding a unifying theme or topic come together in some way, wisdom sometimes happens. My dinner-table story features this type of event, as does my on-ramp story. This condition seems to me to be more important than the others (so far). You will have noticed that the juxtaposition of experiences leads naturally into the telling and hearing of stories. This is exactly why story books like the I Ching are known as "books of wisdom." The wisdom is not in the book itself; it is in what happens when you read it. This is true for every good collection of stories, but especially so for stories about your own community or organization.

Juxtaposed manners of thinking. When people who habitually view issues and problems from different perspectives, based on personality, background, and beliefs, come together in some way, wisdom sometimes happens. Other less desirable things are also likely to happen, like prejudice and jealousy and anger, but I never said wisdom happened all by itself. In folk tales wise people are often those who turn "conventional wisdom" on its head and look at problems with new eyes. But if their way was the only way they would not be wise, would they? It is the difference, the juxtaposition, that matters.

Well-placed ignorance. When people who know little or nothing about a topic become mixed up in it, wisdom sometimes happens. They may be allowed to do this, or encouraged, or they may just blunder in unwanted; but they get mixed up in it. My trick-stairways story fits best here. All "from the mouths of babes" stories such as "The Emperor's New Clothes" also satisfy this condition. Jerzy Kozinski's great story "Being There" is a treatise on the ways in which wisdom can flow from well-placed ignorance.

Communication. Wisdom cannot happen when it is impossible for people to communicate juxtaposed experiences, manners of thinking, and useful ignorance. Communication has to take place on two levels. People have to speak, and people have to convene. When people cannot or do not come together into the same space, it doesn't matter what they say. Then, when they do come together, what they say begins to matter. In my dinner-table story, I first had dinner with my employers. I was not, say, segregated away from them by age or gender. Then, when I said, "You know what I think?" I paused to see to see if my friends wanted to hear what I had to say. If they had indicated disinterest, no wisdom would have taken place. Similarly in every other story, if there had been no way for the juxtaposed elements to communicate with each other, no wisdom could have happened.

Well-placed curiosity. If wisdom is poised to enter and the door is closed, the circuit cannot complete and wisdom cannot flow. In a state of incuriosity we keep our doors closed, and we hunker down in our houses of what-is, never venturing out to see what else could be out there. In this state all connections are impossible, and no positions are juxtapositions. But please, let's not make the mistake of labeling people as wholly curious or incurious: we are all both. I am curious about many things, and I avoid curiosity about many things. I don't see a problem with this: sometimes hunkering down is called for. The danger lies not in lacking curiosity but in being unaware of it. That's why this condition is not curiosity in general, but curiosity in context.

Reflection. The last thing I have observed about wisdom happening is that it does not happen when nobody ever ruminates over anything. Wisdom needs to bounce around inside us as well as between us. The wisdom I felt happening when I saw Vagabond took place because Agnes Varda met a homeless girl, reflected on the experience, and wrote a movie; and that movie reverberated throughout my own reflections about freedom and comfort. When nobody ever ponders anything, either because they have no slack time for it, or the culture does not permit it, or they simply don't have the habit of it, wisdom is less likely to happen.

I started writing longer sections about each of these conditions, and about how people in organizations can improve them to consciously create greater flows of wisdom. But I stopped, because the post was stretching on for too long. Also, I am unsure whether it would be useful to people to have these points expanded. I could expand each of these out into a blog post, but I won't do it unless somebody says they want me to. (Meaning, I am saying "You know what I think?" then pausing to see how you respond.)

Wise people

So finally I come back to the question of what makes a person wise. I can think of three ways in which a person can become involved with wisdom.

A wisdom whisperer is somebody who consciously knows how to create the conditions under which wisdom happens. The great intuitive organizers of people belong in this category: facilitators who can take a roomful of strangers and help them reach new heights of insight; negotiators who can defuse explosive situations with the right whisper in the right ear; motivators who can get the least interested people involved and excited.

A wisdom starter is somebody who unconsciously creates the conditions under which wisdom happens, because their personality or background - just who they are - causes them to spread the conditions around them as they move along. These people are like the little girl in the movie Firestarter who started fires everywhere she went, for no reason she herself understood. Some people are just put together in ways that create conditions of wisdom around them, and just by "being there" they hold up a mirror that makes everyone see themselves anew.

A wisdom wayfarer is a person who keeps finding themselves in places where wisdom happens, but not because they make it happen. They just fall into it. These are the people who get caught between the giant grinding gears of historical change, are seized by their situations, and find themselves compelled to play a role they would not have chosen for themselves. These people are sometimes said to have been "born at the right time" or destined for some purpose, but they themselves may feel trapped in the wisdom they experience. Krishnamurti comes to mind as such a person: he was selected as a child to be a spiritual leader, and when he later tried to spread the message that having spiritual leaders was futile and that people should think for themselves, people only listened because he was a spiritual leader.

I think I am starting to understand my frustrations about being called wise. When I try to explain to myself my involvement in the happenings of wisdom, I can see that I am mostly in the starter category. First, compared to most people I know I have had more varied experiences than most, because I've changed careers relatively often. I've been a scientist, software designer, organizational consultant, what next, who knows? Second, my manners of thinking are sufficiently different from the norm (reclusive, nocturnal, apparently absurdly reflective) as to be uncomfortable, thus probably real. Third, I am famous for my willing ignorance, well or poorly placed, as evidenced by the arrogance of this essay itself (am I an expert in this? have I read the proper volumes?). Fourth, I mentioned the absurd need for reflection, which is where the nickname came from that started me on this journey of reflection. And I am dangerously curious. The only condition that does not fit is communication. If I were to communicate more (like, say, finish the damn book) perhaps more wisdom would flow in my vicinity. We shall see. I would say that wisdom-starter elements account for about 75% of the accusations of wisdom I have encountered; wayfaring the other 25%; and actual conscious creation of wisdom, none at all.

Therein lies the answer to my decades-long conundrum. Because people think of wisdom as an ability, they attribute all manifestations of wisdom that appear around any person as deliberate actions. But much of the wisdom that happens is not consciously created. It is an emergent property of circumstance. Some people, because of the way they are or where they are or both, live in wisdom without meaning anything by it. Thus they feel strange when someone calls them wise (or deep or profound), as though someone had praised them for their height or eye color. If you are one of these people, these reflections might be helpful to you. If you have wanted to "be" wise and have not perceived yourself thus, maybe you "are" wise in ways you had not realized. I find it liberating to think of wisdom as an event, because it converts wisdom from something that distinguishes us into something that brings us together. I begin to look for it in new places.

To bring this essay together into some sort of conclusion, here is my proposition to you. I believe that an increase in the habit of thinking of wisdom as an event rather than an ability or attribute might lead to a corresponding increase in the number of events of wisdom in the world. Do you agree?

Too hard

Have you ever been pursued by a phrase or word that keeps knocking on the doors of your mind? Something that comes up in conversation so many times that you begin to wonder if its repetition means something? I've been hounded lately by the phrase "too hard." It keeps coming up in relation to story listening.

The phrase seems to come from two sources. Roughly half of the people who have told me that story work is "too hard" refer to the difficulty of getting people to tell useful stories, of dealing with masses of collected stories and other information, and of making sense of what has been collected. Participatory narrative inquiry as a whole seems daunting, and they are wary of plunging in.

The other group of people have reacted not to the difficulty of story work in isolation, but its relative difficulty when compared with other means of inquiry, usually of direct questioning. Story work is too dependent on motivation, and it asks too much of participants. People misunderstand; they walk away affronted; they don't do what they were asked to do. The collected stories are ambivalent, the answers to questions are confused, and none of it can be used to prove anything conclusively. Asking directly for opinions is simpler, less risky.

It seems to me that if I am to regard myself as knowledgeable about story work I ought to be able to develop some response to each of these statements. So I've been thinking, what do I have to say in each of these situations? How can I respond to these reactions?

It's not that hard, really.

Every human being has the essential skills to tell and listen to and make sense of raw stories of personal experience. The main reason I think many people find story listening overwhelming at first is that they start out in the wrong direction. They try to learn about stories: what they are and are not, how they tick, how to put them together, and so on. It seems an obvious way to go about learning, but I don't think it is useful, at least not at first. The best thing to do first is simply to be with stories, to get to know them, to walk and talk with them until they become as familiar as everything and everyone around you.

There are two ways to be with stories. The first is to be with recorded stories, which you could say exist in a semi-dormant, slow-growing state, like a slime mold as it lies dissipated across the forest floor. Don't look for Hollywood stories or novels, but smaller, more intimate, more natural, wild stories that lie closer to the origin of stories as agents of community sensemaking. Find books of oral history interviews, folk tales, records of conversations, old letters, old diaries, things people actually said about things they actually experienced.

You might think, by the way, that folk tales don't fit in here. But people didn't always use folk tales the way they do now, as mass-media entertainment. In times past folk tales wove through everyday life in the form of lessons, warnings, messages, questions. People told them, or referred to them, just as we refer to proverbs now (which are mostly ultra-compressed folk tales) in everyday speech. Any book that presents folk tales close to their original forms, usually recorded from elderly people, will capture enough of their everyday meanings to work for your purposes. Avoid illustrated folk-tale books with only one or a few tales in them; avoid themed collections chosen to make a point; avoid reading only the works of one author. Pick up broad collections instead like the encyclopedic Folktales from India or Italo Calvino's collected Italian Folktales. When choosing between two collections, pick the one that says its entries were changed the least from the way the old folks told them.

The other way to be with stories is to encounter them in conversation. This is the excitable, fast-moving state of narrative life, like a slime mold in the rapid coordination of assembled movement. To encounter stories in this way, plant yourself in a busy coffee shop or social gathering and listen. You will hear stories enter into conversations, hesitate, jockey for position, join forces, seize control, retreat in confusion. Take a notepad and start writing down the things you hear. Eventually you will start to pick up on nuances you blundered past at first, like someone retracting a story poorly received, then reframing it and attempting another introduction with the same story arrayed in more suitable attire for the group.

Which of these methods of being with stories is more natural to you will depend on your own background and personality. I love to read far more than I love to sit in busy coffee shops, so I seek out large bodies of recorded stories. You may find listening to stories in conversation more to your liking. The two types of immersion complement each other, so a combination of both is best, but either will teach you much about stories.

Whichever form of story immersion you choose, what will happen to you as a result is likely to be similar to what happened to me and what I've seen happen to other people. You will start to develop a sense of the shapes and functions and movements of stories that no explicit explanation can give you. This will give you the confidence of experience to support your first steps in actively working with stories. How many stories does it take to get to this point? It has to be different for every person, but I'd say if you have not spent time with at least one or two thousand stories yet, you need to spend more time with stories. I wouldn't keep a count, though: when it happens you will know.

After you have been with stories for long enough, all the books about how stories work will not confuse you; they will help you make deeper sense of what you already know. This phenomenon is not unique to story work. It is a pattern you will find in any endeavor that involves natural complexity. Someone who has been with gardens for twenty or thirty years is not confused or intimidated by books on gardening; the confidence of experience gives them a context in which they can make sense of advice and instruction.

The other thing you will notice after you gain some experience being with stories is that you will begin to feel ready to interact with them. You will find yourself eliciting stories by asking questions whose answers are stories, and you will find yourself asking questions about stories people have told. People often find interacting with storytellers an especially daunting aspect of the work. They say, "What should I ask? How should I ask? What will people say? How should I respond?" What they don't realize is that this sort of thing becomes much easier after you've had a good soak in stories, especially in conversational stories. When you listen to people exchanging stories for long enough, you will see how storytellers surround their stories with evaluative information, and you will observe how audiences incorporate questions into storytelling events. You will see that this doesn't always happen in words. Sometimes it involves a language of gestures and grimaces. But you will see it happen, and you will learn what to expect.

Once you understand the question asking and answering that naturally goes on during storytelling, asking people questions about their stories will become easier. It will become less an act of interrogation than of participating in the conversations that naturally revolve around stories during storytelling events.

How many questions do you have to ask about a story to be asking people about their stories? One. You don't have to ask people to fill in long questionnaires. Just ask them how they feel about their story. Or ask them if they think lots of people have had experiences like that. Or ask them who they've told that story to before. Or ask them how long it has been since they told that story.

So in summary, I would say to the person who says story listening is "too hard" because they don't know where or how to start: this is the best way to start. Soak yourself in stories, then start interacting with stories, and you will have a much easier time doing anything you want to do with stories afterward.

Above all, start small and build your skills. Everything is something.

It really is that hard.

The second group of people who have said story listening is "too hard" have not been daunted so much as disappointed. Typically they have come from a different discipline, usually qualitative or quantitative research, and they have tried going the narrative route and found it frustrating. The problem in this case is not so much that people don't know where to start; it's that they are used to things being faster and easier. They seek to gather conclusive evidence for or against something, but find they can't. Or they expect people to tell stories and fill out forms quickly and clearly, but find people drag their feet or misunderstand or walk away. Or they want greater volumes of stories to give them clearer answers, but find diminishing returns for their efforts. Or they want firm answers but find themselves wading through conflicting interpretations and mixed messages. It's all too hard.

Story work is hard. It is not clean or clear or simple. It is high input, high risk and high output. I find there is a tendency, probably common to all human beings, to jump past the first two parts of that sentence and pay attention only to the last part: high output. But all three parts are equally important. If input is not high enough -- yours and every participant's -- or if things go wrong, the potentially high output of story work could be low or nonexistent, or even negative. Nobody should work with stories in organizations or communities without a full awareness of this fact. The reason story work digs deeper than other methods of inquiry is the same reason it is more likely to fail than other methods of inquiry. It is hard because it is good, and it is good because it is hard.

All of this makes working with stories hard to popularize. It's not an approach that spreads like wildfire. I'd rather it be slow than wrong, and I'm not in any hurry to change the world, so I don't mind if the majority of people stand off and view story listening from a distance.

But still, I do find it sad when people get frustrated with story work and give it up, because the high output part is real. Stories can work wonderful magic. I cherish those moments when I've seen people come to transformative insights that have freed up unimagined sources of energy to solve impossible problems. When participatory narrative inquiry works well, it's like that moment when you bite into the one perfect tomato, the one you finally grew after three years of blight, dog disasters and worm invasions. That moment is one you remember every time you touch the soil in the spring, because you know that someday it will happen again. There will be a lot of dirt in your fingernails before that happens, but you don't mind. That's how you feel when you know: but some people give up before they know.

So, what do I want to say to the person who has tried the narrative approach and has found it "too hard" because it asks too much and is too risky? It's the same thing I want to say to the daunted: soak yourself in stories. Why? First, because before you have a good long soak in stories you can't see the values they bring to inquiry, so you can't sustain the high input required. Second, because until you understand the life of stories you won't know where to place your high input, and you won't know where the risks lie. Like a gardener who tries to grow food without learning to love the soil, you will bring failure upon your own efforts. Most of the people I've seen come to story work from other fields have not been willing to be with thousands of stories and learn how they live. They just want results, and that's part of why they get frustrated. They aren't in the world of stories to settle down, just to visit. But the world of stories doesn't open itself to casual visitors. Only the locals know the soil, and only the locals grow the best tomatoes.

So if you want to work with stories, and you come from other lands of inquiry, and you don't want to be frustrated and disappointed about how hard story work is, respect stories enough to get to know them well. Stay the course and you'll be more likely to end up satisfied.

Above all, start small and build your skills. Everything is something.

There goes the hand

It's morning, a few months ago, and I'm making coffee. First I set up the coffee mug with its ancient thing-that-holds-the-coffee on top, ready to receive the boiling water. Then I grab the empty electric tea kettle and swing it across the counter to the water faucet to fill it. In the midst of the swing I realize that the kettle will soon hit the mug and send it flying off the counter.

It just so happens that the time that remains before the crash is not enough to stop the hand's deeply rutted movement. The kettle goes to the faucet daily, and the hand knows its way there. But the time is enough to fit in several cycles of internal dialogue. The dialogue goes like this:

Look at that. There goes the hand.
    Yep.
The kettle is going to hit the mug and send it to the floor. No chance of catching it before --
    Nope. Too late.
Why oh why did they think slapping linoleum on a concrete floor was adequate for a kitchen in which people might actually, I don't know, handle breakable items?
    We've been over this before.
Yes, well. You see it's the yoga mug, I suppose?
    I do.
The same one we had to replace last year, after pretty much the same thing happened?
    I see it.
This has to be a judgment on the part of yoga. Do we have the right to own, let alone use, a yoga mug at the rate we've been doing yoga lately?
    I don't suppose so.
Probably a judgment then. Remember the mug that said "Beauty will save the world" and how we were sure we ordered the right size, but we got the wrong size? Didn't we decide that was a judgment?
    We did. Probably happening again.
Do we have any of those little boxes we use to keep broken things from poking the garbage guys?
    I think there is one left on the porch.
If we had put the mug on the other side of the sink this wouldn't have happened. The swing from the kettle base to the faucet is pre-programmed. We shouldn't have put anything in the way.
    Starting tomorrow we will put the mug on the other side of the sink.
You mean another mug.
    Yes. This time we should choose one immune to judgment.
The yin-yang mug?
    Probably safe.

And then the crash came.

The reason I recount this incident is not because it's funny or interesting (about which opinions may vary) but because I find it a near-perfect analogue to what has been going on as I have tried to rewrite my book. The part of me that writes books, like the hand that draws the water, has a programmed path. It has written book-length texts before, and it knows how to do what it does with or without my help. For the past two years, all attempts to change the rutted path of the book-writing apparatus have been simply swept out of the way. The only difference in the two incidents is that in the case of the hand holding the kettle I understood what was going on right away. In the case of the book, I thought I was in control of it for much longer than was healthy.

Round about October I reached the cycle of internal dialogue where I stopped trying to make rational demands on the book-writing apparatus and started observing it. The dialogue went like this:

Look at that. There goes the book-writing apparatus.
    Yep.
It has been writing for two years. All of our estimates have been nonsensical. All of our attempts to control it have been useless. It seems to do whatever it wants to do.
    I see it.
What the heck is it doing?
    Well, what did we tell it to do? What did we say when it started?
Let me think. We said we wanted it to go back to the original book and make it better. A lot better. We said we wanted something comprehensive, a reference work, a "bible" for story work.
    We actually said "bible"? 
We did.
    Oh.
That's the problem? It's writing a bible?
    It is writing a bible.
Maybe that's not all of it. Maybe the fact that it's taking so long is a judgement from story.
    All those who undertake to write bibles of story will be struck down with endless labor?
It does make sense, judgement-wise.
    Probably. So what can we do about this?
Nothing. We set it up that way. We have to let it run its course.
    But we told people it would be done a long time ago. We look stupid.
What if we release versions of the book as it goes?
    That is probably the only thing we can do.
Tell you what. After it writes the next chapter we'll start putting up what we have so far. And the next time we ask it to write, we should choose our words more carefully.
    And choose a subject immune to judgement.
Are there any subjects immune to judgement?
    I don't know.

This conversation took place in October. As a result of it I sent a copy of what I had so far (500-700 pages, depending on formatting) to a few closest confidants. Reviews were encouraging, so I planned to finish the catalysis chapter in a few more weeks, then send it to the next tier of interested parties for review.

Then I hit another snag: the rutted path encountered another rutted path. Writing about narrative catalysis has been like pulling teeth -- my own teeth. My guess is that I am asking yet another "hand" -- the part of me that does catalysis work -- to describe its rutted path. Its reply, constantly, is "I know the path, get out of the way." (And then some curse words you don't want to hear.) It has taken daily cajoling to get the catalytic agent to tell me anything I can write down. And even when it does tell me things, when I reread them later many of them make sense only to myself and the catalytic agent. I have to keep rewriting sections to make them make sense outside the rutted path. So the catalysis chapter is being written, but very slowly. I am lucky if it advances (without retreating) by a page a day. I do think it will be useful when it is done (indeed it may be the best part of the book), but it cannot be rushed.

Hence my plan to let the book out of its confinement when the catalysis chapter is done has also failed. Meanwhile the book has stopped begging to be let out and has started work with a hacksaw. It has forced itself into several emails and threatens to break out of my control entirely. Worse, as I work on the catalysis chapter the other trapped chapters keep up a steady chant of "let us out, let us out" -- all of which hampers my already glacial progress.

So, powerless, I relinquish control. The book will now and always reside in its rightful place at workingwithstories.org. I will put up new versions as the chapters become complete. If you told me I could send you a copy of the book to read, please do read the book and please do help me make it better; I would appreciate it just as much now as I said I would before. If you told me no such thing, you will find the book where it wants to be regardless.

Now we can get back to writing.