General Learning • Tenneson Woolf

July 27, 2016

Less is More

I’m giving myself permission to be a bit geeky here. Indulge me, please.

I like to golf. No, I don’t like the elitism of golf. It has grown to an experience that tends to be for the privileged — though I’m a city links person myself. And it has become a venue in which many courses simply do not sit in alignment with environmental need. Green fairways amidst desert red rock are very beautiful, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

That said, I love the game of golf. The game and the experience. A set of sticks. A ball. A hole. Put the ball in the hole. Spin the ball left. Spin it right. There is a simplicity that I appreciate. I love the feeling of a good golf shot — it still feels a bit miraculous, just like it does in the common experience of a 200 ton airplane taking flight.

I have been golfing for more than forty years, beginning first with my Grandma in a small town in Saskatchewan during summer holidays as a 10 ish year-old. Forty plus years of anything makes it sound like one should be a pro. Nope. Far from it for me. Golf is as much a practice as it is a game. I’m a bogey golfer. That makes me good enough to hit some good and even great shots. That makes me bad enough to hit some embarrassing shots too, you’d think would be reserved for beginners. They aren’t. That’s golf, and what makes most of us laugh together (and sometimes swear).

In forty plus years (for me it is typically two times a month between March and November), one of the key lessons I have learned and continue to learn, is the simple truth that less is more. Less is more. It is a game that can teach one a lot about greed. “Just ten yards further — if I swing just a bit harder….” At my level of ability, that extra effort typically results in more error (spraying it right, pulling it left, or just chunking it) and less distance.

Less is more. Easy swing. Solid contact. Nice line. Good distance.

You see, golf is an amazingly intricate game in which the slightest shift in one thing can change a lot. Keep in mind that there are about 30 little things at one time that are all in play together. Grip on the club. Stance in relation to the ball. Tempo of swing. Plane of backswing. Grip on shoes. None of them by themselves are complex. Yet taken in relationship with all the others, it can be very complex.

Golf teaches me. The game, yes. It’s satisfying to have a good game. It occurs to me because, for that moment, I’ve given myself to less is more, being in the practice, that tends to result in lower score.

The application of this is plentiful. In life. In community. In work. In teams. It is a bold and challenging question — I’d say essential — to ask ourselves. Are there areas (now) where we can agree, and practice, that less is more?

Just a ball, a club, and a hole.

July 26, 2016

Move The Ball Down The Field — A Systemic Awareness

In a recent interview that I watched, U.S. President Barack Obama was asked what qualities he felt were needed for someone holding his office, President of the United States. It was another approach to thinking about the candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

One of the qualities he spoke was “committing to move the ball down the field.” “Not every play is a touchdown.” If I let myself stay with what is often overused sports metaphor, Obama was naming the fact that it takes more than one star player to accomplish big dreams. Even though many professional leagues market their individual stars, the reality is that it takes an intricate layer of cooperation among a team for any stars to arise.

Not every play is a touchdown. Not every at-bat is a home run. Not every golf shot is a hole in one (OK, not every golf shot is even a great shot).

Barack Obama was, I believe, debunking some of the myth that you can accomplish anything you promise as an individual, as admirable, and as western, as it is to try. The system is more complicated and complex than that. Duh! It is particularly relevant in this campaign season (though it is starting to feel like there isn’t ever a non-campaign season, right), when candidates are trying win votes with over-simplified yet grand promises and command and control seductions

I think the only promise that I can hear, and maybe want to hear now, is that we will do our best to debunk the delusional myths and overpraising in the name of winning favor. Just moving the ball is enough. And much more honest. And that is enough, to start.

July 25, 2016

American Politics as Reality TV

Warning — it’s a bit of a rant.

The American presidential election process continues. It goes on. And on. And on. And on. It’s a two year process that started feeling like bad reality TV quite a long time ago. Drama. Name-calling. Hyperbole. Grandstanding. Partial truths masqueraded as whole truths. Spin. Spin. Attack. Argh! There is little that is attractively compelling to me. Participating feels more obligatory, like cleaning somebody elses’ mess in the kitchen. It’s needed. Just not much fun and a bit unfair. I still watch, trying to understand and make sense of it, including some of the Republican Convention last week, and likely some of the Democratic Convention this week. They both feel like a circus — they have my curiosity, but are really a bit creepy.

I have three things I’ve noticed about the process in the last months, one of them this weekend. In the recent months, it is that the behavior in the process feels very adolescent. Adolescence run amuck. This is very much the Donald Trump phenomenon. “I don’t like what you said about me — I’ll strip you of credibility.” It’s aggressive. It’s pouty. “I don’t like what I’m hearing — I’ll speak more loudly (yell) to drown out voices.” It just reminds me of a neighbor’s teenaged son from many years ago that was all bravado in appearance, but everyone knew that insecurity was what laid beneath that persona.

Let’s pretend this is true — adolescence run amuck — for a moment. The problem for me isn’t that one person is acting this way. That’s Donald. The Donald. So be it. The kicker for me is that people are buying it. To watch the frothiness, the doting by the masses for the adolescence that exists in both U.S. political parties — that says something scary about the system and culture of people that we are all living in (well beyond the presidential election process). Eldering please. Just a bit more, please. Grow it up a bit.

My second observation is, I suppose, a commentary from Democratic VP Elect, Tim Kaine. I saw a brief clip where he and Hillary Clinton were being interviewed. One of those Sunday morning news programs. I didn’t know much about Kaine and wanted to see how he carried himself. The interviewer asked Hillary Clinton how she felt about what she was being labeled by Donald Trump. “Crooked Hillary” was the reference. To be clear, I suspect the label fits in some ways. As it likely does for Trump. Or for anyone. There is more maturing to acknowledge, or search for the way in which any of us are crooked. OK, tone it down — not completely honest. The honesty of that is far more helpful than the jacked up reciprocated denial. Sheesh!

Clinton responded with something quite strategic — “I want to talk about the issues.” Good for her. It was political strategy. But it was Tim Kaine’s remark that made me laugh in it’s “get to the point” quality. He described how Hillary Clinton was doing a good job of letting that water / insults run off of her back. But then he added, “for most of us we stopped name calling in the fifth grade.” Good for Kaine. And maybe that is what good VPs, seconds, are supposed to do, so as to preserve dignity of the person who will hold the office of president. Name calling, though entertaining, I suppose (adolescent reality TV) isn’t truth-telling, even when it comes from a person running for the office of president. Makes me think this election will be remembered as the tabloid election — a peek at the absurd is sufficient, but I really came to the store for some milk and essential groceries.

OK, on to the third point, which is less of a rant. I’ve been thinking and writing a fair amount lately about emergence. For sake of today, to say that emergence is what arises when parts of a system interact. It is a quality that the system possesses, but not the parts (or far less of it in the parts). I wonder, does the system that is American Politics — or more broadly, American culture, or western culture — arise as a systemic property that has the parts acting in ways they wouldn’t otherwise? I suspect so. Donald Trump is more accusatory. Hillary Clinton is more boisterous. News reporters inflame difference and guffaw. Voters numb ourselves, watching more blathering — and expecting it — because it is more entertaining than last nights baseball game or ridiculous summer block-buster release that is really a crappy movie.

The system possesses the quality that none of the individuals are responsible for by themselves. I think this is true. It’s not completely clear to me how it is true in more subtle ways.

Maturing. I believe this is what is called for in all of us. As individuals. As nations. As a planetary community. Less jumping in to the fray, which perhaps I’ve done here today — more deliberate pause and stillness, which might just be the most helpful thing we can do. More real encounter with gardens and forests, lakes and oceans — less Pokemon Go glued to the virtual.

OK, rant complete. It doesn’t happen that often — and I wouldn’t want it to. But sometimes, it’s a must in the company of friends, no?

July 21, 2016

Tensions of Awakening

Yup, more from Mark Nepo. Well, actually Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest and writer, who eventually lived in Canada, quoted in Nepo’s book, Facing the Lion, Being The Lion.

“To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage, but also a strong faith.”

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It takes strong faith these days, doesn’t it. What, with the everyday reporting of massacres. Or environmental extremities. Or economic systems failing not just individuals but nations. Or the senseless death of loved ones. For some, our faith is in our religious communities. For some, in our families. For some, in the depths of the loneliness that Nouwen writes, from which can come oh, so subtly, purpose, and essential refining of soul, and quintessential letting go, and, ironically, belonging. From the void, from the seeming barrenness, some of us hold to a faith that there is irrepressible life (and have friends to remind us when we can’t see it anymore).

I like happy endings. Of course. Yet, I have learned that happy comes in many forms — sometimes from the deep honesty in sorrow. And that endings are rarely endings — little is so clean. Some stories transpire over a decade, or a lifetime. Some stories stretch the limits of our ability to remember that gardens do exist. My 19 year-old son reminds me — “most of it is about learning and growing; not forcing.” That’s a different kind of happy and a different category of ending.

So lays these tensions that most of us live. Some very personally. Some very globally. Good to be aware of as we walk, and die, on these many paths of humaning.