Humility - Is it Possible Anymore?

020/365 united we stand... (Photo credit: Joits)

There's been a big pause since my last post.  It's been a busy time for me at my job and quite honestly,  I  wasn't sure what to write about the election. It was the only thing on my mind for awhile but I didn't know how to talk about it here. Now that the ballots are counted though, I do have two thoughts that keep swirling in my head - humility and concern.

Obama and Romney were in a near tie for the popular vote.  Even in the most Republican or most Democrat controlled outposts there was still a respectable contingent voting for the opposing party. (Yes, Virginia, there are Republicans in Chicago.) In theory, whomever wins an election will be making decisions based on the needs of people who voted for and against them. Our leaders may get financed by a specific party but when they arrive in office they are the public servant for everyone. Right?  That's what we say.

Public service to a whole country or state requires genuine concern. True public servants ask questions about what the people need.  The concern, if pursued, demands humility, the deep understanding that none of us knows it all. Is humility possible anymore? Humility requires that we listen to the experiences of others to better inform our limited experiences. 

I've always lived in urban areas and in my circle of friends, growing up, were people who had been injured on their jobs in the Gary steel mills.  Government controls like the Environmental Protection Agency or OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) were just "givens" in my mind.  Everything those agencies did was necessary and important and valued, in my experience.  I was taken aback when I visited rural New York and talked with folks who were small business owners.  They were struggling to absorb the expensive testing and safe disposal fees for their auto body shop.  The same laws that protected one set of my friends were bankrupting others.  I still felt that workplace safety was important but now I better understood the financial impact of those policies and how the issues were so much more complicated.

I hear alot about the need to cut the deficit and have family members who are frustrated about the amount of government supports for the poor. In my own job however, I work with an organization serving the homeless.  I know that ignoring the needs of the poor, regardless of your value system, is expensive to society.  Homeless prevention funding has been reduced dramatically and yet $3,000 in prevention costs, money that keeps a family from ever becoming homeless, can save the community up to $50,000.  Cutting the budget in the area of social services often means more people incurring expensive emergency room care, police costs, and prison expenses for the taxpayers.

The issues are always like this - complex, nuanced, and not served very well by hyperbole and name calling.
The time for sound bites is over for now.  We need to move our conversations to a more productive and less condemning place.  With a little bit of humility and the willingness to listen to another's perspective, we might just have a chance to talk about solutions instead of blame. We might be able to improve our problems a small fraction instead of worrying about being 100% "right".  We need to practice that lost art of conversation and teach the kids in our life about it as well.  If we do, maybe we'll raise a few future public servants that actually know how to think about all of us.

Asking the "village" - apples and oranges

I started talking about this yesterday but just to remind you - my boys are very different.  They have the same mother and father, born two years apart, live in the same environment and go to the same schools, and yet they are different as apples and oranges.  Per my brief bio, my boys were born at home, so we can rule out some weird mix-up at the hospital.  Whether our kids are with us from birth and share our DNA or whether they come to us as toddlers or teenagers, through adoption or foster care, or whether "our kids" are the neighbors who visit us on a regular basis, they are "our kids" because we love them as they are.  We love the pieces of them that we recognize and the pieces that are bizarre and foreign (my husband is convinced that our one son's early morning rising is perhaps an early warning sign of some strange mutation).

So, if we accept the fact that our kids are going to be unique creatures and not cookie cutters of us, how do we meet the varied needs?  We want to encourage their talents and be sensitive to their concerns but we also want to be sensitive to our desires or those of others in the family.  Take my guys, one is a raging extrovert.  His ideal day would be talking non-stop in a mosh pit of humanity, taking breaks only for food and reading.  My other son can be very social but in his perfect world he is juggling or unicycling for hours, with no more than one other friend. They are both smart, but one thrives on group projects while the other prefers to work alone with focused attention. One lingers on, saying, "goodnight" multiple times and remembering one more story or footnote on the day that needs to be shared.  The other keeps watch of the time himself and can disappear at the bewitching hour without a peep.  If we decide to go to a museum, we have one child who is in heaven, reading material and mingling with people everywhere while the other son is "peopled out" 30 minutes into the outing and begging to do laps around the parking lot instead. How do you engage two (or three or four) divergent personalities in a way that honors everyone?

This was my dilemma last summer.  Our normal vacations involve road trips to visit family members.  For the very first time we took a family vacation that was just our little foursome, planning our days and nights, routes, food, and entertainment for a whole week.  As the planner of vacations I was a little nervous.   I decided that the best way to get "buy in" was if everybody was part of the plan.  I asked everyone what a perfect trip to the Black Hills would include from their perspective. We made a list of all those ideas and made sure that everyone knew their thing would get done and when.   I also told them that if we ever got to a point where we weren't sure what to do next on a given day, everyone could have one wild card choice during the trip.  They could choose to use it during the week if they felt their needs just really needed to be considered most in our decision.  That week we went horseback riding, explored caves (in the dark and in very confined space), toured the Wounded Knee Museum, and took incredibly long and beautiful scenic drives through Custer Park.  We all participated, even though the museum almost bored my youngest son to tears and my husband had a bloody scalp from scraping the ceilings of the caves. 

When the kids were little such idyllic displays of cooperation and enlightened compromise did not exist.  It often felt like a day was not complete unless someone was pouting, crying, or in full blown, red alert mode.  Usually the upset was directly linked to somebody needing to sit outside of their comfort zone for just a titch too long.  I could count on a meltdown when the extrovert was forced to stay home with me all day or the introvert was required to hangout at a church activity AND stay indoors.  I would sit at baseball games for one, watching the game part of the time and part of the time playing catch with the other one who hates team sports but loves being physical.  I ended most days feeling like I had let somebody down.  

Fast forward ten years.  to my oldest son surprising me and  putting all of this in perspective.  He said that while he didn't like it at the time, doing things together as a family helped him.  His insight came when I asked him if he had any idea how he came to be such a cool person (the single most awesome conversation I've had with him).  He shared some interesting thoughts and one was, "I hated having to do everything together but I also think it ended up helping me.  Whether you planned it or not, it was teaching us that "it" isn't always about what we want."  It absolutely wasn't planned but he's right.  The differences in our families allows us to practice cooperation and compromise.  They allow us to set aside our own personal desires once in awhile and think about other people.  They allow us to learn new things and try new things that our own little comfort zone wouldn't have made possible.  It isn't very pretty at times but it's absolutely better than only doing things that we want, when we want them.  Our family is our first little practice run at having classmates, coworkers, and personal relationships.  You know the people in your life who didn't get enough practice as kids.  Differences can be a pain but they can also help us learn how to be great grown ups.