How to Rock the How, part 1.

“How now brown cow?”

I’m thinking I need to go to the grocery store. Or get the mail. Perhaps lunch? But no, I must How. Rockingly. I did look up one of those lists of fill-in-the-blank blog titles to find something that would encourage click-through and “How to Rock _______” seemed the title for me. After so many weeks of dancing around the Why, it’s time jump out of the cake and rock the Hows, baby.

To help people capture clearness in who they are & what they bring so that we can find & connect with one & other.

Okey-dokey. That’s nice but, um, huh? Ideas are easy; implementation is hard. Want to win the lottery? Sure! You just need six numbers. Easy. Until you have to do it. Luckily for me, there are not six Hows, but five. Glorious 5. Sinek says that no one has more than five Hows. You might have fewer, but if you come up with six then you are repeating yourself and need to revise to five. You can bet I have 5. (Author's note: but there are only two here now.)

Express the unexpressed

There was a lot of talk at the workshop about how the brain processes language and emotion. Now, I am no scientician, but here is my best summary of why all that is important to my How: our brains feel emotion in one area (Limbic brain) and verbally express feeling through another (Borca’s area in the neocortex). And, to complicate what seemed so simple, the area of the brain where we feel emotion is also the area in which we process non-verbals. So, when you see something beautiful you cry though you can’t really put into words why you are crying.

If all of this is true-ish, then non-verbal forms of art such as music, dance, painting, etc. do a better job of expressing feeling than verbal forms such as writing. And, because of the way our brains develop, the non-verbal areas of our brain are accessible to us earlier in life. Mozart composed at the age of five and Picasso completed a one month entrance assignment for art school in one week and was admitted at age 13, but there is no such thing as a writing prodigy. 8 year old poets write poems like this:

C ats are soft
A lways there to comfort you
T apping you with her paw all the time
S aying "Meow" to you when you come in the door.

He delivers pure observation through a well-developed sense of line, but he’s missing the insight that comes with experience. The 8 year old above, when he was 5, sang me a tuneless, melodic song about love and mommy and la, la, la. When my husband asked the same son to sing the song for him, he refused. “This song is for mommy,” he said, “because it has pink and purple words.” I cry every time I think about it. It’s not the pink and purple abstraction that makes me cry, it’s his framing and drawing out, like a magnified illustration on a textbook page, a moment purely observed and made up of only me and inhabited by only him that I can return to and feel again.

Act on intuition

Sometimes the thought is not enough. I heard you crying, and thought about reaching out to you, but I didn’t. I saw that the child looked confused and there was no adult around, but I kept walking. I wanted to speak up in your defense, but I stayed out of it. My sister always says never ignore a generous impulse. Or an opportunity to act laid out in dancing letters on a lighted marquee in your head.

A couple of years ago around Easter, I was wandering through Macy’s downtown and saw a man shuffling out the revolving doors in front of me. He was quite elderly and not the most agile walker and both of his shoes were untied. I thought to myself, if he trips on his laces and goes over, he won’t get up. I caught up to him and asked him if I could tie his shoes. I’m sure he was a little taken aback, but he said yes. He clearly needed someone to do it and who was he going to ask?  So I tied his shoes. He said thank you, promised me extra candy from the Easter Bunny, and we went about our travels.

I’m sharing this story not because I want a ribbon but because the message to perform a simple action presented itself and I did not ignore it. It’s not about doing the right thing or simply being nice, but about knowing when you have something to do. And doing it.

To help people capture clearness in who they are & what they bring so that we can find & connect with one & other.

In writing this out I realized I wasn't ready to write it all--perhaps that is why I didn't want to start. I believe writing is the act of scoring the page until what we write takes up space in the world. Right now, I have only two Hows dimensional enough to take up space. But I'll keep grasping for motes that break apart, recombine, and sometimes let us catch them. This one got away.