Squint

The card from the Observation Deck says:  Squint

The idea is that squinting at a familiar scene lets you see it in new and less familiar ways by observing lighting, angles and nuances not previously perceived.

For me, it becomes a blurred and shimmering glimpse of a terrifying future in which one of my most precious senses, my sight, might be diminished.  I'm filled with intense gratitude right now that I still have my vision.

Both my mother and her mother had macular degeneration - an eye disease that, spot by spot, robs you of your central vision leaving you with some peripheral sight if you're lucky.  For years my mother brought Granny talking books from the library so she could continue enjoying one of her greatest pleasures, reading.  Famous actress Dame Judith Dench who has the disease and now has to have new scripts read to her, has said that the thing she misses most is being able to see the face of her dinner partner at a restaurant.

Recently my optometrist gave me a sheet of paper with a grid and two angry red dots at the edges to be used for self testing. She sees the first signs of the disease in my eyes.    The idea chills me to the bone; of course, fear of what the future might bring is one of the things I am constantly trying to resist.

There are preventative measures:  diligently wearing sunglasses in the Colorado sun, taking supplements like lutein, regular check ups.  How could I face not being able to see the forest in Spring, a beautiful sunset, a future grandchild's face, or words on a page?  If all prevention fails me, will I in fact perceive the world in new ways, hearing the birdsong in the forest at dusk more distinctly and the beloved voice of the grandchild more clearly?  Helen Keller, who surely knew, said, "When one door of happiness closes, another opens."

Need a new perspective?  Just squint.

Create a Sacred Space

Since I've had quite a dry spell in my writing, I decided to pull out The Observation Deck--a deck of cards with creative writing ideas to give myself a jumpstart.  The point is to make your self write something about the idea on the card no matter what; there's a little booklet with a few paragraphs about each card to help get the juices flowing.

The first card I pulled read:  "Create a Sacred Space"

I was reminded of my small efforts over the last several months to create a more welcoming spiritual place for myself in my office at work. It's a small corner office many would envy:  huge windows facing west the a clear view of the Front Range. In one corner of my desk I've placed a small cascading fountain and I've arranged my five little ivory laughing buddhas around the fountain and up its steps.  Nearby stands a small white statue of a guardian angel given to me by a friend during some very dark days a couple of years ago.

Next to the fountain is a meditation chime--a metal cylinder cradled on a wooden base with a small wooden mallet which can be used to strike the chime, issuing an extremely clear, bell-like tone that fades ever so slowly back into silence again.  The chime helps me remember to breath and be present.

Also on the desk is a daily Zen calendar with a new quotation for each day; I've saved some of my favorite quotes which are arranged somewhat haphazardly on the desk for repeated reference, including:

"Always stay in your own movie." - Ken Kesey

"Only the madman is absolutely sure." - Robert Anton Wilson

"My father considered a walk among the mountains the equivalent of church-going." - Aldous Huxley

"Awareness is therapy per se." - Fritz Perl

A weekly calendar is on another corner of the desk with beautiful photographs of nature and wild animals;  I look forward to turning the page each Monday morning.  A monthly wall calendar has nature photographs and quotes by that master of the here and now, Eckhart Tolle.  A carved wooden bowl sits nearby which I keep filled with tangerines and apples.  

On the wall opposite the windows is a framed panoramic photo of Boulder's Flatirons glowing pink and orange at dawn.

I spend a lot of time at work and I'm glad I've succeeded in creating a welcoming and spiritual space there.

My bedroom at home is a restful place, with a huge picture over the bed of the ocean viewed through a window with thin white curtains stirring gently in the sea breeze.  Deep blue glass bottles filter the light from the window, pictures of my family grace the walls, a big white goosedown comforter covers the bed.  On the wall by the door is a photograph given to me by my true love of a tree-lined Parisian walkway, the sun filtering down through the leaf canopy.  Perched on one corner of the picture frame is a yellow and purple feathered Mardi Gras mask.

So I think I know how to create sacred spaces for myself.  But when it comes to my writing, I lean toward extreme portability. I like to load my backpack for long walks, carrying with me everything I'll need to write anywhere.  In this case I carry my sacred space inside my head by staying aware and noticing the vastness of the world around me.

Do you have a sacred space?

Gamify This!

Last weekend I succumbed to temptation, and with the kids watching on in amusement I downloaded a game onto my iPad that I had been curious about for a long time—a game called “Angry Birds".

The premise of the game is that the green pigs have stolen the birds’ eggs and the birds are now attacking the pigs, who lurk in various precarious and increasingly elaborate structures made of stone, wood, boulders and other materials. The gamer’s challenge is to launch each angry bird from a sling shot and hit the pigs and their structures at just the right angles to destroy them. It is very much a strategic problem of physics to determine angles and accurately predict cause and effect—since at each of the many levels you are given only a certain number of angry birds with various capabilities.

The game boasts many sound effects—bird chirps and pig mutterings along with a high-pitched cry of “Wheeee!” from each bird as it is launched by the slingshot, sad little “oofs” and “ouches” when they fall to the side after missing a pig, and of course the smug chorus of pug grunts that occurs each time you fail in a try to get all the pigs, along with the triumphant “Woo hooooo!” from the birds when you succeed.

There are many levels and tasks to achieve, all clearly laid out and tracked so you can see your progress or lack thereof as you cycle through various strategies for getting the most pigs with the fewest birds. Clear and straightforward—unlike the messy ambiguities of life you are escaping when you play the game.

“Be sure to turn off the sound when you’re out in public like on a bus—or everybody will jump you,” advised my son as I sank further into addiction with my new toy. I found myself driven to achieve the next level and to think about the problem at each level and come back to it later to try new strategies. I stayed up past my bedtime working to get just one more level. I did research on the Internet to learn about best practices. I strove to beat my personal best. I did many of the things with Angry Birds that companies want their employees to do.

After a recent acquisition I’m now part of a very large company that, among other things, develops software applications used by companies to run their businesses. And in this company, one of whose goals is to produce “beautiful software,” the concept of gamification” comes up fairly frequently. The idea is that if the same compelling qualities that games possess could be injected into business processes and applications used by employees, those employees would become more engaged, involved, and driven to achieve the desired results, especially if they could understand exactly what they had to do and could always see their standing and progress from both a personal perspective and in comparison to others.

This is an idea I can buy—I saw it in action recently when I signed up for an exercise program at work. Each employee who signed up pledged to do 2100 minutes of exercise in 7 weeks, and record their minutes on an ongoing basis on-line. And each employee could see their personal progress, the cumulative progress for their site, and how they ranked overall in number of exercise minutes—updated every quarter hour.

Many quiet little competitions sprang up over the 7 weeks between people and sites, and I have no doubt more than a few people pushed harder and got more exercise because of this very public feedback, myself included. It was gamification in action, not only at an individual level but at a group level with the site rankings. If we could figure out how to do this for software development it would be very interesting. The agile approach, dividing the group into small scrums and measuring the productivity of each scrum over short periods of time with very publicly demoed results, can be tricky, since the challenges each scrum faces may be very different, and comparisons may negatively impact cross-scrum cooperation. Complex and creative work is not easily measured. And how do you inspire greater individual achievement without discouraging collaboration and teamwork?

Is all of life a game after all? And how do you avoid ending up with a flock of angry birds slinging themselves at throngs of obnoxiously snorting pigs? Gamify that.

Cargo Cults

I recently discovered the concept of "cargo cults" while reading about potential pitfalls in science and software development. The term surfaced after World War II. The South Pacific island natives had welcomed the valuable and more advanced cargo brought by the planes during the war. And when the war ended, the planes and cargo stopped coming to the islands. Since the locals never understood why the cargo was coming in the first place, the only thing to do from their perspective was to duplicate the previous conditions--so they built crude runways, wooden planes, bamboo radios and headphones, all in hopes of luring the planes back, and with them the cargo. Some of these ever-optimistic cargo cults persist to this day in the South Pacific.

Now that I've heard the term, I've started to see signs of cargo cults everywhere. At work, I see mixed results from efforts to put the structure of agile development in place (short iterations, Scrums, standup meetings) in some cases without a full understanding of the underlying principles of the Agile Manifesto (e.g., individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, responding to change over following a plan, trusting a motivated team to get the job done). I see senior managers without a true belief in the end results possible with agile (greater opportunity to quickly respond to changing customer requirements, better quality much earlier in the process), conducting the scrum meetings with agendas they've devised but being unwilling to listen to and trust their teams enough to let them surface and resolve impediments, grow and improve together each day.

Some organizations go through the motions; they “do agile” without “being agile" and then are perplexed not see the hoped-for results. Without the willingness to trust the teams, good results can be hampered by fear-driven behavior.

If the previous jargon-filled example sounds like mumbo jumbo to you then consider my kitten, Zuni. Each morning (barring an egregious lapse by her faithful guardian), Zuni's food bowl is refilled with just enough cat food to keep her from becoming a fat little indoor cat. Who knows why it happens from Zuni's perspective, this reappearance of food, but it does happen with great regularity. On the rare morning when the bowl remains empty longer than expected, Zuni searches the house for one of her toy mice, carries it to the food bowl and sets it down. If there is no result soon, she searches the house again for a second toy mouse, sometimes placing this one inside the bowl for added emphasis. The weird thing is that this ritual does work from her perspective--eventually food appears in the bowl, and Zuni's cargo cult continues. Of course, this is my own less than scientific theory about Zuni's behavior and I have to admit therefore that the cargo cult in question may be my own.

I propose that a good number of religious activities in certain contexts are also examples of cargo cults. What cargo cults have you seen in your journeys?

Do You Want Assertiveness with That?

There are all the other promises to myself, of course--like exercising, losing weight, and connecting more with other people. But my main resolution for 2012 is to be more direct. I am astounded at how often I phrase a desire or intention I have as a question. Instead of making my desires clear, I throw out a query. What often happens next is that the perfectly reasonable recipient responds with what he or she wants and that becomes the plan.

This is not because the other person is an overbearing asshole.

It's because I almost always default to what other people want. So I end up getting less of what I want, and quite unnecessarily. The reasons for this are rooted in the distant past and likely have to do with my childhood; therapy fodder for sure. Meanwhile, a yellow sticky is emblazoned on my computer at work that says, “Be Direct.” I am mildly encouraged that it does not say “Shouldn’t you be more direct? ” or “What do you think of the idea of my being more direct?” Or a crafter, sneakier version: “I’ve been thinking about whether I phrase too many of my ideas as questions lately—what do you think?”

The Christmas Cactus

A little less than a year ago, I received a Christmas gift. It was a Christmas cactus with a note attached explaining that if I took good care of it, next Christmas it would bloom.  I set it on my desk at work, and as the new year began I made a pledge to myself that despite my decidedly not green thumb, in this case I would channel my father the master gardener and tend lovingly to this cactus, in hopes of seeing the promised Christmas blooms.

The Internet is your friend in cases like this and I found a wealth of advice on how to care for a Christmas cactus, with promises of abundant blooms next holiday season.  I conquered my sense that it would be hopeless (based on the mourned deaths of houseplants past who were unfortunate enough to be under my care).   I acted on faith alone and  entered a repeating note in my computer calendar for each Tuesday morning that said:  “Smile.  And water the Christmas cactus.”  Each Tuesday I did just that.  

A few months ago something told me to move the cactus to a sunnier corner of my office to catch the western sunlight.  In early November the Christmas cactus pushed out many promising buds.  By Thanksgiving, glorious pink blooms emerged.  And they’ve continued to grace my office with their happy color all this holiday season.

I assure you that I am grateful for the many ways this past year I’ve seen proof that faith can work miracles and bring unexpected blessings; I wish both of these for each of you this Christmas season.

The Old Bag Allegory

A domestic conversation with M recently had clear parallels with what I’ve observed at work. At the time, I was performing the mildly onerous daily task of sifting the poop out of the kitty litter box with my trusty slotted scoop and dumping it into one of the used plastic bags we save for this kind of thing. A particularly battered bag had been prominently placed next to the litter box so I went ahead and used it. M said, “From now on, be sure to use the old bags I put by the litter box.”

“Okay,” I said. “But how do you define old bags?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we have a drawer full of plastic bags and to me they’re all used and therefore old bags. But I’m sensing you have a more specific definition of the preferred oldness of the bags to be used for kitty poop and I’m just trying to understand your logic.”

“You don’t need to understand my logic. Just use the bags I set out for you by the litter box.”

“But I do want to understand the logic.”

“Why? Why do you need to understand the logic of which bags are the old bags?” he said with some annoyance.

This is where I started to see the work parallels. I smiled.

“Because, one day when I’m ready to scoop the poop and you are not around, alas and alack there will not be a bag set out for me to use, and I may have to Think for Myself and select a bag from the old bag drawer. Wanting to do the best possible job of following your old bag orders under this challenging circumstance it will help me greatly to know how I can tell which of the old bags are suitably old enough to be graced with cat poop,” I explained.

“Ah—well, a bag that has merely been used to convey vegetables from the grocery store to our house is not sufficiently old. A bag that has been subsequently reused after initial arrival at our house—that is a truly old bag,” he said. We were both laughing by then.

“Aha,” I said. “Now I know.”

And so it goes at work. If you want people to do work that meets your expectations then you had best give them the supporting logic as well, and you’ll get more consistently positive results, even when you aren’t around. They might even help you come up with some better logic; you never know.

“I assume that since you never reuse the green bags the newspapers come in that they can immediately be classified as old bags suitable for kitty poop; would this be a correct assumption?” I asked.

“Why yes,” he replied.

And there you have it.