I first learned of his work with non-verbal communication in the early seventies, but returned to it in a visceral way in the early nineties. I read The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time and it worked its way into my dreams. I dreamt that I was interacting with the people around me without words. I was actively interacting with them in the distance we stood apart and the way we move forward and away from each other. We interacted in the sounds that we made. I had one particularly powerful dream where I imagined myself observing the rhythms of people’s walk and motion and playing music that incorporated the rhythm of each person that walked into the room into the rhythm of everyone else already in the room.

Edward Hall’s work was the intellectual bridge that enabled me to walk out of my brain and into my body.

Evan wearing his winning designs

Here’s is the site. HATCHfest.

Amy in the park

Thanks to Fashioni.st for the picture.Fashionist: Amy – Dolores Park, SF.

Sample fact: The time American’s spend watching television commercials every weekend is approximately equal to the entire time spent in creating Wikipedia to date.

Rule of thumb: “Doing anything is better than doing nothing.” “It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”

Via Jason Sutter who lives in New Zealand but shows up in my feed of blogs local to my zip code.

Update – 28 April 2008 Here (via Gruber) is a link to the text of the talk. Also, the quoted rule of thumb is corrected.

The days of waiting and worrying about the older girl as she lay ill in intensive care, twice, are also permanently engraved on my memory and stored in my body. I find and feel that concern every time that I get to see her and admire the young woman before me. That it all turned out well in the end was fortunately, but I still feel the toll.

Without betraying his confidence, I’d just like to thank everyone who made this moment, and all of the similar moments of the past months that have lead to it, possible.

A couple of months ago, I heard a woman named Madeline Levine speak about her book about teenagers, The Price of Privilege. The full title of the book is, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids.

Ms. Levine’s points applied to American children generally. She has worked in both the South Bronx and Marin County and believe them both to be affluent environments, so she has an elastic definition of affluence. I believe this is an exact quote, “All Americans are privileged.”

I don’t want to run down her entire argument (buy the book, I haven’t) but she said one sentence that crystallized everything that she was saying for me. It wasn’t even a sentence, it was a fragment. Speaking of the power that comes with affluence she began talking about a parent who said, “I don’t want my child to feel ….”

Wow. It doesn’t matter how you end that sentence. It can’t be good. You are willing that your child be depressed.

Naturally, parents don’t want their children to feel hungry, or cold, or afraid, or disadvantaged, or unhappy, or left out, or bored, or any feelings that we identify as bad or unpleasant. As we have become more affluent, we have acquired the power to stop our children from feeling more and more types of bad feelings. Essentially all American parents can ensure that our children will never feel hungry or cold, and we work hard to ensure that our children aren’t bored or unhappy. With sufficient wealth you can even buy your child friends, or at least social acceptance.

These protective feelings for our children are a recipe for depression to the extent that we act on them. Having feelings is a profound gift. Living with, experiencing and negotiating their feelings, and the feelings of their peers, their family and their community is arguably the most important skill that we need to teach our children. Wealth allows us to keep our children from these feelings. Wealth allows us to teach them to avoid these feelings.

How can you experience your feelings if your parents don’t want you to have them? How can you learn to negotiate your feelings if you don’t experience them? How do you recognize the feelings of others if your own feelings are foreign to you?

Many of my most powerful experiences occurred in a six month period as I hiked the Appalachian Trail when I was 19. For the first time in my life I was hungry. I was thirsty. I was wet. I was dirty. I was cold. I was lonely. I was hot. I was alone.

I was alive.

This was hike was a transforming experience for me, not because I accomplished something that few people had, but because for the first time I moved into my body and inhabited it. The achievement that I had had, was the acheivement of living with, responding to, and dealing with my feelings.

The veils of civilization, and my parents wanting to protect me, and being able to protect me, had kept me from my feelings. Experiencing them was miraculous.

I believe we all have an innate desire to experience our feelings. Well meaning institutions keep them from us, an of course there is a point to that. There are experiences that no one should have to endure, feelings no one should have to manage. But lacking actual authentic experiences of feelings people will create feelings. This is where the cutting, and the drug abuse, and the acting out that Madeline Levine sees in her therapy practice arises.

The conventional wisdom is that in a person’s life, they make mistakes when they are young, which they regret, learn from and never do again.

This sounds great to me. Let’s encourage everyone to make as many mistakes as possible, then they will learn the most and become the wisest.

The corollary is that we should all make as many mistakes as possible as early as possible.

This is the compound interest theory of wisdom. The earlier you learn from your mistakes, the more payoff you get from the acquired wisdom.

Our holidays were interesting on a number of fronts. I took a great number of pictures which I’ll try to put up on flickr soon.

My oldest daughter has recently acquired a number of tattoos. Over the holidays these were brought up a few times, always with the obligatory, “You’ll regret them when you get older.” Her response was pretty neutral, “That’s what everybody says.”

I wonder though, is a tattoo the sort of thing that one necessarily regrets? It certainly does seem like if you are the sort of person to regret aspects of your life, particularly your youth, that a tattoo would be an easy focus of your regret. But how common is regret anyway?

With a blog named “Yesterday’s Thoughts” you can assume that I’m familiar with melancholy, but I don’t really regret many of my actions. Obviously there I things that I would do another way if I had a chance, and people that I have harmed that I wish I hadn’t harmed, but overall I am the sum of my experiences. I can say without arrogance that I’m happy about that.

In fact, the things I regret the most are my inactions. Those chances for experience that I declined, because of fear, laziness or complacency, stick with me today and for every act I’d like to undo in my life, there are a hundred acts I should have done.

I have to compliment my daughter on keeping those people who tell her that she will regret her actions at arms length.

I wish I had.

We moved quite a few times when I was a child. I changed schools twice in third grade then went to a different school for fifth grade. We also moved during fourth grade, but it was just up the street, so I was in the same neighborhood and school. All together I had lived in 9 houses by the time I began fifth grade.

Moving in elementary school was hard. It was hard socially, I’ve known that forever, but it was also hard mentally and physically. I’m just realizing that now, almost 40 years later.

The examples that have come to me over the past few days have to do with music and sports.

When we moved in the middle of third grade, I moved to a school with a very active music program. Every student had the opportunity to play an instrument, and I think that that included private, or at least small group, lessons. I say I think because I didn’t get to take any lessons. I came in in the middle of the year when there weren’t many available instruments, and because I wanted to play drums, the band leader didn’t try very hard to get me started.

In addition to the instrumental music (maybe there was a chorus, too?) there was weekly or biweekly music class. Thinking back on it, it must have been a model program. Each student had a flutaphone (more or less a recorder with a bell, maybe with simplified fingering) and had learned to read music and play by third grade. They also used the Koladany (sp? – Google yields nothing) rhythmic instruction method where each song was broken down into syllables (tee tee ta, tee tee ta = Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells).

As I recall, the class was already fairly expert in these methods when I arrived. They must have been doing this work since first grade. The instruction that I received was from my classmate Eleanor (her aunt was later my orthodontist, so Eleanor if you’re out there, you know who you are) who took me aside for perhaps five minutes and told me how to play the flutaphone. There may have been a fingering diagram in the book which Eleanor pointed out to me.

Needless to say I did not learn to play the flutaphone in that brief period. I am not a musical genius, and I was caught up in trying to handle the playground scene, so I wasn’t that focused either. When the time rolled around for the Christmas performance, I got to stand in the back without flutaphone.

I missed the possibility for music at this school because of moving. The train had left the station years before I arrived. I had one five-minute lesson to attempt to catch up, and I didn’t.

For other subject, the case was the reverse. For the first half of third grade I had a very good math class. After the move the new school had somewhat different program. They were behind where I had been in my previous school covering material that was familiar to me and they were teaching from standardized math workbooks with tear out pages, instead of text books. Once each page was completed, you tore it out and turned it in to the teacher. Neither of these was so bad by itself, but the teacher insisted that I complete the entire workbook from the beginning. I did my work with the class starting from the middle of the book, and then on top of that I worked independently from the front of the book. I don’t recall where the time came from for me to work on this extra work.

I guess I shouldn’t complain about both of these problems, certainly not within the space of a few paragraphs. The music teachers gave me no opportunity to catch up; the math teacher gave me opportunities that I didn’t need.

As I said above, I’m not feeling particularly bitter about either of these. I wish I had had the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument and read music at the time. I wish I hadn’t been forced to jump through an arbitrary hoop of completing the whole math book. Since then I haven’t really grasped certain experiential facts of music, and I have learned plenty of math on my own by working through the problems in a book, so maybe some it was a wash.

Mostly though I want to recognize the effect of the dislocation. Both math and music were made harder than they ought to have been because I transferred from one system to another. Moving from one school to another is very difficult, and there will be missing pieces, unless the destination school is truly exceptional.

Queenie and I are making some big sacrifices to ensure that the Little Man and the Wee One will have a more constant school environment than either of us had.

I regret that I couldn’t provide the same for E and A. But that’s another story.