Dogs are animals of integrity. We have much to learn from them.
Category: Communication
Another gem from Cynthia Gomez.
Do you remember the beautiful pictures of the horse and mare from Saturday, 4th August? Well many did and loved that Post as was recorded by the number of ‘Likes’. That was sent to me by Cynthia.
Here’s another one from Cynthia; a beautiful insight into the world of nature, seen over 20 million times!
Wonderful.
Raise your eyes in wonder at the most wonderful annual show from space.
As the EarthSky website explains,
As of August 8, 2012, the zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) of meteors visible in a dark sky has gone up to 21! That’s according to the International Meteor Organization. Clearly the Perseid meteor shower is rising to its peak, as it does every year at this time.
The peak mornings will be August 11, 12 and 13. August 12 might be the best morning. August 11 might be better than August 13. The moon is waning now. And many people are seeing meteors!
The Delta Aquarid and Perseid meteor showers combine in late July and August to create what most consider the best and most reliable meteor display for Northern Hemisphere observers. As always, after midnight is the best time for meteor-watching. The moon will be there, but getting thinner every morning. On the mornings (not the evenings) of August 11, 12 and 13, the moon will be a waning crescent, and the meteors should be flying at a rate closer to their peak of 50 or 60 meteors per hour. As an added treat – on August 11, 12 and 13 – the moon will be sweeping past the brightest planets Venus and Jupiter in the eastern predawn sky. You can’t ask for more!
Well you could ask for more and there is more on that very helpful website, ergo:
August 10/11, 11/12, and 12/13, 2012 Perseids
Meteors are typically best after midnight, but in 2012, with the moon rising into the predawn sky, you might want to watch for Perseid meteors in late evening as well. You can get moonrise times via this custom sunset calendar. As seen from around the world, the waning crescent moon will rise later on August 12 than on August 11, and, on the morning of August 13, although you’re slightly past the peak, the moon will rise later still.
On any of those mornings, moonlight shouldn’t be so overwhelming as to ruin the show. Plus the moon on those mornings will be near the bright planets Venus and Jupiter in the eastern predawn sky. It’ll be a beautiful early morning scene.
The Perseids are typically fast and bright meteors. They radiate from a point in the constellation Perseus the Hero. You don’t need to know Perseus to watch the shower because the meteors appear in all parts of the sky. The Perseids are considered by many people to be the year’s best shower, and often peak at 50 or more meteors per hour in a dark sky.
The Perseids tend to strengthen in number as late night deepens into midnight, and typically produce the most meteors in the wee hours before dawn. These meteors are often bright and frequently leave persistent trains.
Starting in late evening on the nights of August 10/11, 11/12 and 12/13, the Perseid meteors will streak across these short summer nights from late night until dawn, with only a little interference from the waning crescent moon. Plus the moon will be near the bright planets Venus and Jupiter in the eastern predawn sky.
Finally, here’s some fabulously helpful information on the NASA website:
NASA Chat: Stay ‘Up All Night’ to Watch the Perseids!
Escape the heat of the waning days of summer for an evening of sky watching. The Perseid meteor shower peaks on the night of August 11 through the morning of August 12. Perseid rates can get as high as 100 per hour, with many fireballs visible in the night sky. A waning crescent moon will interfere slightly with this year’s show, but viewing should definitely be worth a look!On the night of Aug. 11-12, astronomer Bill Cooke and his team from the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center will answer your questions about the 2012 Perseid meteor shower via an “Up All Night” live chat. To join the chat, simply return to this page and log in. The chat experts will be available to answer questions between the hours of 11 p.m. – 3 a.m. EDT, beginning the evening of Aug. 11 and continuing into the morning of Aug. 12.
Watch the Perseids! Live Video/Audio Feed
On the night of Aug. 11, a live video/audio feed of the Perseid shower will be embedded below (go to here). The camera is mounted at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. During daylight, you’ll see a dark gray box — the camera is light-activated and will turn on at dusk. At night you’ll see white points, or stars, on a black background.
About the Perseids
The Perseids have been observed for at least 2,000 years and are associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun once every 133 years. Each year in August, the Earth passes through a cloud of the comet’s debris. These bits of ice and dust — most over 1,000 years old — burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere to create one of the best meteor showers of the year. The Perseids can be seen all over the sky, but the best viewing opportunities will be across the northern hemisphere. Those with sharp eyes will see that the meteors radiate from the direction of the constellation Perseus.
The truth is always our friend.
The last couple of weeks of Posts seem to have been rather dominated by the risks to the planet’s biosphere from the highly probable actions of mankind. I feel a little uncomfortable about this as Learning from Dogs is not a single issue Blog. Well not in the sense of a tightly defined issue. But in another sense, it is about the issue of integrity; about raising the values of truth and openness so that it’s clear how we are to move forward as a species and pass through these ‘interesting times’ with hope and confidence.
Dogs are such pure creatures, as I try and explain in the Dogs and Integrity sidelink. As I wrote in the Vision,
So that’s the issue!
If we don’t embrace the truth of what is happening to our planet, then we can’t embrace change.
With thanks to the Yale Forum on Climate Change for promoting this video.
A futile attempt to explore the concepts of truth, reason, craziness and … (I give up!)
Yesterday, I republished an article that Pete Aleshire recently wrote in the Payson Roundup, our local newspaper, on thinking outside the box. Pete entitled his essay, Strange theory reveals secrets of the universe, the logic of sycamore leaves and why even smart people struggle with new ideas.
And it was part of that title that resonated with a mind-bending (literally) essay that Patrice Ayme presented on his blog on the 27th July. The part of the title that ‘clicked’ with me was “why even smart people struggle with new ideas.”
You see what Patrice wrote about on the 27th July was about the proposition “that superior intelligence in a species can only come from an ability to engineer (productive) craziness.”
As Patrice explained,
Two of the creators of modern mathematics and metamathematics, Georg Cantor and Kurt Godel, experienced some craziness. Nietzsche produced some of his best work before he went insane. Van Gogh experienced serious mental difficulties. Bolztman killed himself. All these cases were within a generation. Those may all be unrelated accidents, sure.
Immediately leading on to him writing,
However I will show below that superior intelligence in a species can only come from an ability to engineer (productive) craziness. (Perhaps the reason why chimps and bears are so unpredictable: they are not just clever, but a bit crazy!)
Then after some very detailed reflections on man, Patrice wrote,
Hominids who practiced a bit of craziness were evolutionary advantaged, because they found more readily solutions to logical incompleteness at hand. Craziness allowed to find new, necessary axioms. Thus evolution learned to exploit logical incompleteness.
Typical of Patrice Ayme, the essay is not an easy read but it is brim full of fascinating ideas and well worth the effort. Patrice concludes,
If craziness is so useful to augment those mental powers we need so much to survive as a civilization, how do we survive it? Precisely by augmenting the truth. Thus only craziness compatible with the truth will be able to survive. That is why I have not hesitated to tell various truths about Obama (whom I have intensely supported in all sorts of ways), or Hollande, whom I approved of, until he started to say lies about World War Two (details soon to come).
Truth is my religion. A touch of craziness my sanity. (Latest demonstration: It’s not like I did not know of the danger in advance. I was slightly charged by a large bad mood moose with calf today on an Alaskan trail, where I was nonchalantly running with a bad ankle; after a high speed retreat, as a good predator, I circumvented the difficulty, and anxiety switched sides, the calf nearly spraining its own ankle in the process… . )
There is no truth but the full truth, and a touch of craziness is its prophet.
Now go back to Pete Aleshire and see the harmony between his beautiful prose and the fascinating ideas flowing from Patrice’s mind. This is how Pete concluded his essay,
So Drake [Larson] and I spent the day wandering along the banks of Fossil Creek as he kept trying to come up with metaphors so I could grasp math’s secret within the beauty of Fossil Creek’s sycamore leaves. The well-designed sycamore leaves adhere to the Fibonacci sequence, a mysterious progression of numbers that crops up throughout nature — from the spiral of a nautilus shell to the layout of the ruins of Chaco Canyon.
So I figured I’d just write this — and get earth’s 17 PSI cap for dark energy out there in the time/date/ stamped world.
Oh, yeah: And about Kenny Evans. [Mayor of Payson, AZ]
So that night, I took Drake to the Payson council meeting. Turns out, Drake’s family was growing grapes in the Coachella Valley at the same time Evans was farming 10,000 acres in Yuma. They both managed to survive that tempestuous time when the United Farm Workers union organized agriculture workers.
I introduced them and listened as they recalled events and figured out whom they knew in common.
It was then that I decided to blame Drake for my faith in Evans’ ridiculous conviction that a university will build a campus here in this itty bitty tourist town — complete with a research center and convention hotel. No sensible small-town mayor would risk public ridicule while spending thousands of hours on such an outside-the-box notion … unless he’d learned to gamble on dreams and hard work during all those years as a farmer.
Evans’ notion is almost as silly as a farmer who calculates the amount of dark energy emanating from earth, while credentialed experts scratch their collective heads.
Still, I’m thinking maybe I’ll get a nice suit jacket — something I can wear to both the university’s groundbreaking and the ceremonies in Oslo.
Hey, never hurts to be prepared.
So there, I feel much better now! None the wiser, indeed even more confused, but just grateful there are some out there who have a go at trying to explain ….. whatever it is they are explaining!
Strange theory reveals secrets of the universe, the logic of sycamore leaves and why even smart people struggle with new ideas.
A guest post from Pete Aleshire, Editor, Payson Roundup.
Introduction
The Payson Roundup is our local newspaper here in Payson, AZ. I first saw this article by Pete a couple of weeks ago and was just utterly engrossed by it. Not just the tantalising peek into a physics I know so little about but the beautiful prose. The latter is not surprising because as well as being editor of the paper, Pete also teaches the creative writing course at our local college. Jean and I had the benefit of attending the course, I guess about a year ago, and therefore can speak from experience.
So settle down and enjoy.
oooOOOooo
I finally got Drake Larson together with both sycamore leaves and Payson Mayor Kenny Evans. Moreover, I have been entrusted with a formula that may win me an invitation to Oslo if Drake gets a Nobel Prize.
But even if that don’t work out, I did get to eavesdrop on Drake and Evans. Quite the event, from my bemused point of view, since it shed light on dangerous delights of outside-the-box thinking and the Nature of the Universe.
But wait. You look confused.
Let me back up — and start somewhere closer to the beginning. Be patient with me — by the time we’re done, you’ll realize why God’s a math nerd, one surprising secret of Dark Energy, why farmers become original thinkers and what sycamore leaves tell us about the universe.
But first, I have to explain about Drake.
We grew up together, getting into (and mostly out of) various varieties of trouble. Very early on, I realized that he was much (much) smarter than me. This initially really irritated me, as I was previously inclined to vanity about my intelligence. Turns out, I love learning stuff other people have discovered, but Drake only gets truly excited when he has hold of a completely new idea that no one else can quite grasp. This prepared me, as it turns out, for meeting Kenny Evans — but that’s getting ahead of the story.
Drake and I grew up doing math homework together, before I wandered off into a career in newspapers. He got his degree in mathematics, turned down a job with the RAND Corporation and took up growing table grapes.
But he never quit picking at the lock of the universe.
Years ago when I was the science writer for the Oakland Tribune, he came to me all excited about a set of formulas he had. I did my best to follow the two pages of calculations, but all I can tell you is that they described instabilities of any sphere with uniform density. He predicted that when the Voyager spacecraft reached Jupiter, it would report inexplicable turbulence at a certain depth in the atmosphere. I ran his numbers past various top-level physicists and mathematicians who couldn’t find a flaw in his formulas — but concluded that it had to be wrong since it led to a violation of the keystone laws of conservation of mass and energy.
But I took note some months later when the Voyager spacecraft reported mysterious levels of turbulence deep within the atmosphere of Jupiter.
The years passed. Drake kept growing grapes, flowers, dates and vegetables — and working on his calculations. He wrote a book, “The Cults of Relativity,” in which he described a few of his theories, delighted in the conundrums of mathematics and pondered the curious resistance of even smart people to unconventional ideas.
We got together again recently. I took him down to Fossil Creek, all overhung with sycamores with the rustle of floppy, five-pointed leaves. Drake was his old self on our Fossil Creek tour as he tried to show me math’s beauty around us, although I was but a blind man clutching the tail of his mathematical elephant.
He had now connected his formulas to dark energy, a still hypothetical form of energy invoked by desperate cosmologists to explain the startling observation that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating. To explain this seeming impossibility, they invented “dark energy” — which they figure pervades the universe and at certain densities creates a repulsive force stronger than the attractive force of gravity.
Anyhow, here’s the point: Drake was in awe that his mathematical wanderings offered a way to calculate dark energy’s cap within earth — it happened to be an “inside is now outside” inversion of Isaac Newton’s simplest integral. No. Please. Don’t ask me to explain that. But earth’s dark energy cannot exceed 17 pounds per square inch at a depth of about 1,500 miles. He’s been working with University of Southern California computer crunching guru professor Barry Boehm, and the University of California at Riverside geophysics professor Shawn Biehler on its implications. Among other things, it could explain the perplexing observation that major earthquakes increase the earth’s rotation rate.
No one knows how to measure such a quantity at present. Someday they will. If it turns out that 17 pounds per square inch is a relevant benchmark for earth’s dark energy, then this column will maybe win Drake the Nobel — and I’ll get to dress up and attend the ceremony.
So Drake and I spent the day wandering along the banks of Fossil Creek as he kept trying to come up with metaphors so I could grasp math’s secret within the beauty of Fossil Creek’s sycamore leaves. The well-designed sycamore leaves adhere to the Fibonacci sequence, a mysterious progression of numbers that crops up throughout nature — from the spiral of a nautilus shell to the layout of the ruins of Chaco Canyon.
So I figured I’d just write this — and get earth’s 17 PSI cap for dark energy out there in the time/date/ stamped world.
Oh, yeah: And about Kenny Evans.
So that night, I took Drake to the Payson council meeting. Turns out, Drake’s family was growing grapes in the Coachella Valley at the same time Evans was farming 10,000 acres in Yuma. They both managed to survive that tempestuous time when the United Farm Workers union organized agriculture workers.
I introduced them and listened as they recalled events and figured out whom they knew in common.
It was then that I decided to blame Drake for my faith in Evans’ ridiculous conviction that a university will build a campus here in this itty bitty tourist town — complete with a research center and convention hotel. No sensible small-town mayor would risk public ridicule while spending thousands of hours on such an outside-the-box notion … unless he’d learned to gamble on dreams and hard work during all those years as a farmer.
Evans’ notion is almost as silly as a farmer who calculates the amount of dark energy emanating from earth, while credentialed experts scratch their collective heads.
Still, I’m thinking maybe I’ll get a nice suit jacket — something I can wear to both the university’s groundbreaking and the ceremonies in Oslo.
Hey, never hurts to be prepared.
oooOOOooo
A big thank-you for the permission to republish this on Learning from Dogs. I have no doubt that many LfD readers enjoyed it as much as I did! Stay with me for tomorrow when the theme of thinking, innovation and craziness is explored a touch more.
Just a personal muse!
This has very little to do with anything other than my lifelong fascination in exploring space, which is why just over 21 hours ago I published the taster for this Post. That ‘Earthrise’ photograph and the one below changed forever how we feel about the home we all live on.
First Full-View Photo of Earth
Photograph courtesy NASA Johnson Space CenterThis famous “Blue Marble” shot represents the first photograph in which Earth is in full view. The picture was taken on December 7, 1972, as the Apollo 17 crew left Earth’s orbit for the moon. With the sun at their backs, the crew had a perfectly lit view of the blue planet.
December 7th, 1972. Coming up to 40 years ago. I was in my late-20s. This photograph touched me in ways that I still don’t understand. This is such a beautiful planet.
Thus Curiosity: NASA’s latest Mars rover is due to touch down at 05:31 UTC Monday 6th August. I decided to publish this at 04:31 UTC on the 6th one hour before the crucial and novel landing, or in terms of local time here in Payson, Arizona, 9.31 pm on the 5th August.
Wishing the Mission and all the hard-working people who have spent so many years working towards this critical point in time in space history the very best of luck! It will be wonderful wherever one is on this Planet to wake up on the 6th and hear that Curiosity has landed safely! And if you want to follow the Mission then NASA have a website devoted to the latest news.
Let me close by offering you a couple of videos from the fabulous BBC Horizon science series, full hour-long programme about NASA’s latest Mission to Mars.
NASA Engineer Adam Stelzner describes how he hopes the Curiosity rover will land.
Chief Project Scientist John Grotzinger talks about Curiosity’s scientific instruments.
Nature, once again, shows the value of loving contact during those crucial early years.
I’m writing this at 7.45am on the 30th. Coincidentally, Jean and I were chatting in bed about an hour ago about this ‘touchy – feely’ stuff. This was a bed having four dogs on it! One of those, Hazel, was laying alongside my left leg just sucking up me stroking her head and tummy. Jean and I were musing that for animals and humans, how we are touched by our parents, especially our mother, during those first few years of growing up has profound implications for how we as adults respond to being touched and hugged.
So then I opened up my mail box and there was this sent by Cynthia Gomez serving as a wonderful reminder of the power of touch. Thanks Cynthia, great timing!
oooOOOooo
The cumulative effect of millions of decisions brings about change!
Yesterday’s Post was about personal change. It came on the back of a short series that was triggered by the Bill McKibben essay in Rolling Stone magazine that I republished on 31st July. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favour and read it soon.
The essay highlighted the challenge of how we change our ways, that is at a personal level, which is why I decided to devote a complete Post to the subject of change. There was no doubt that the McKibben essay opened our eyes to the need for change, if they weren’t open already. So being clear about the need for change and how, initially, it can make us feel less sure of ourselves, where do we go from here? As John Fisher explains, within the change process, there is the stage where things start to happen. This is what he writes about that stage,
Moving forward
In this stage we are starting to exert more control, make more things happen in a positive sense and are getting our sense of self back. We know who we are again and are starting to feel comfortable that we are acting in line with our convictions, beliefs, etc. and making the right choices. In this phase we are, again, experimenting within our environment more actively and effectively.
Keep this stage in mind as you journey along your individual path towards reducing your impact on the planet. It really does act as a beacon for you, as a candle in the darkness.
OK, there’s an old saying in business ‘if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it!‘ So let’s start off by calculating the CO2 we are presently responsible for.
There are a number of CO2 calculators available on the Web but this one from The Resurgence Trust website seems as good as any. Easy to use and it provides a starting point from which to plan your attack! Make a promise to calculate your present CO2 output, soon!
Then to the plan of action! A web search on reducing CO2 produces a huge number of results and I recommend that you undertake your own trawl to find the information that ‘rocks your boat’. But on the Brave New Climate website there’s a summary that caught my eye, especially how it was introduced:
Top 10 ways to reduce your CO2 emissions footprint
Posted on 29 August 2008 by Barry BrookSolving climate change is a huge international challenge. Only a concerted global effort, involving the governments of all nations, will be enough to avert dangerous consequences. But that said, the individual actions of everyday people are still crucial. Large and complex issues, like climate change, are usually best tackled by breaking down the problem into manageable bits.
For carbon emissions, this means reducing the CO2 contribution of each and every one of the six and a half billion people on the planet. But what can you, as an individual person or family, do that will most make a difference to the big picture? Here are my top ten action items, which are both simple to achieve and have a real effect. They are ranked by how much impact they make to ‘kicking the CO2 habit’.
Then follows ten solid recommendations:
Each of these recommendations is supported by great web links and plenty of advice. So don’t just skip through those 10 options, go here and commit to doing something!
And when you are ready to involve others beyond your family, 350.org has a great selection of resources for potential organizers.
We can make a difference!
It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. – Chinese Proverb
Yesterday, in a post that picked up on the deep implications of Bill McKibben’s chilling essay on where the world is heading if we don’t change, I set out my understanding of what holds us back from that change. I wrote, “ … the process of change cannot start until we truly want to change; a total emotional commitment. And the formation of those emotions, that realisation, requires a new understanding of the world around us, who we are and who we want to be.”
Previously on Learning from Dogs I have quoted Jon Lavin, “The best way to save the world is to work on our selves.” I remember decades ago when working as a humble office-products salesman for IBM UK the well-worn saying, “Selling is 90% me and 10% the customer.” Sort of reminds me of Woody Allen’s: “Eighty percent of success in life is showing up.”
OK, enough of these mental perambulations. Let’s get on with the task of looking at change. Because make no bones about it, if we rely on ‘them’, on others, to turn mankind back from where we are heading then it’s all over! It comes down to each and every one of us deciding to change.
Think this is all melodramatic nonsense? Go and read the first paragraph of Bill McKibben’s article where he states, “June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average..”
Want more reason to change? Try this from a recent article on The Daily Impact:
From American Drought to “Global Catastrophe”
Some poet invented the name “Arab Spring” as a label for the tsunami of public desperation that last year took down the governments of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Poets and Pollyannas saw the events as an upwelling of love for democracy. Realists related them to the spike in world food prices that threatened the survival of whole populations and made them desperate for change — any change. Now, thanks in large part to events unfolding in the American heartland, get ready for another, worse, spike.
We are running out of superlatives with which to describe the Mid- and Southwestern drought and its effect on this year’s corn and soybean crops. According to this week’s USDA crop update the situation during the previous seven days went from “critical” to, um, worse than that. The drought is the worst in half a century. Of the largest US acreage ever planted in corn (industrial agriculture was crowing about that just a couple of months ago), only one-quarter is still in good condition. (Modest rainfall in drought-stricken areas early this week provided mostly emotional relief; the drought is forecast to continue unabated through October.)
Change really does seem like a ‘no-brainer’!
Here’s a lovely cartoon that summarises the steps of change, the process of transition, for you and me.
That diagram is from John Fisher’s model of personal change, full details of which are here. It includes a link to the process of transition diagram, show above, here.
The most important thing to note, and this is why so many ‘change’ ambitions fail, is that change is deeply unsettling at first. When change happens for the majority of us, often ‘forced’ on us as a result of unplanned life events, we are left deeply unsettled; a strong feeling of being lost, of being in unfamiliar surroundings. Think divorce or, worse, the death of a partner or child, reflect on how many sign up for bereavement counselling in such circumstances. Big-time change is big-time tough (apologies for the grammar!).
Stay with me for a short while while I reinforce this from my own experiences.
My previous ex-wife announced in December, 2006 that she was leaving me for a younger model! It came as a complete surprise. Subsequently, I was invited to spend Christmas 2007 out in San Carlos, Mexico with Suzann and her husband, Don. Suzann is the sister of my dear, close friend of many years, Dan Gomez, hence the connection. There I met Jean, a long-term friend of Suzann living in San Carlos and, coincidentally as I am, another Londoner by birth. Jean and I fell deeply in love with each other and a year later I moved out from SW England with Pharaoh to Mexico.
Throughout 2008 I suffered from what was eventually diagnosed as vestibular migraine. It involved partial loss of vision, vertigo, headaches and significant short-term memory disturbances; let me tell you it was pretty frightening!
Eventually, in 2012 well after we moved from San Carlos up to Payson, Arizona, I got so worried that I went to see a neurologist, convinced that I was heading down the road of dementia. Dr. Goodell examined me thoroughly and said that there were no signs of dementia or early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. His conclusion: I was showing the normal signs of forgetfulness that any person of my age (now 67) would show having been through similar life changes. Dr. Goodell went on to explain that back in England 98% of my life was constant and familiar and therefore adjusting to a 2% change was unremarkable. However, on moving my life out to Mexico and then on to Arizona, it was all reversed: 2% of my life was constant and 98% was change and that was a huge psychological hill to climb with all the associated mental stresses that I had been experiencing.
Interestingly, that diagnosis rapidly set me on the path of feeling so much better!
So, apologies for that personal diversion but I hope it underlined that life-change is a big deal!
In my trawl across the Web looking for change references, I came across a software engineer by the name of Dave Cheong. Dave writes a blog. In Dave’s blog was a piece about change. Change as a result of a merger of his employer. This is what Dave wrote:
As a result of the merger, lots of change is happening. Some folks are questioning where things are headed, what management have planned, how their lives will change, etc. Most certainly, there will be job losses as the two companies consolidate things, in particular administrative positions.
With the chaos that’s been unfolding, I’ve thought a bit about “change” in general. What is it? Why do people resist it? Is it always a good thing? What should I do?
And later he writes after referring to the Satir Change Process model, named after Virginia Satir, an American author and psychotherapist:
The diagram depicts several stages of accepting change. The first stage is known as Status Quo (Gray Zone), a state where everyone is generally comfortable with the way things are. The second stage is a point in time a Foreign Element, trigger or change agent is introduced. What follows is a period of Resistance and Chaos (Red Zone), personified as a result of people being scared of the uncertainties the change has brought about and how their lives will be impacted.
The level of performance generally drops off and fluctuates more greatly between the Gray and Red Zones. There are various reasons for this – people may reject the change to protect the status quo; are confused with the change and are unsure of what to do; or simply become less competent with the new tools and processes introduced.
This describes why people by nature resist change. They don’t want to become less useful than they already are.
Just reflect on that. Dave calls it being ‘less useful’ but that downplays the emotional significance of partially losing one’s self-image, one’s self-identity, the undermining of who we think we are. As I wrote earlier, life-change is a big deal!
Here’s my final example of how dealing with change is all about the self. It’s from the Best Self Help website, and opens,
Self help, personal development and self-improvement are topics of considerable interest to pretty much everyone on the planet.
In 1975 my life was a total mess. I was depressed, unemployed and my 5 year marriage was ending.
I’m not going to quote it all but it really is worth a read. However, I do want to quote the conclusion,
Finally, I Got It!!!
In the Western world, we are educated to look outside ourselves for validation. We want more money to acquire “things” with the mistaken belief this is the source of happiness.
The true source of love, health, happiness and financial success cannot be found outside of ourselves – each of these is already within us. The key is learning how to access and activate that which we already possess.
“True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.” ~Socrates~
So that’s enough for today. If you haven’t got the message about change coming from within, then not sure what else I can offer! However, if you do want to explore changing the way you impact this beautiful planet (and it applies equally to me) then drop in tomorrow.
The business of acting to make a difference.
The future depends on what we do in the present. – Mahatma Gandhi
Yesterday, I republished a long essay from Bill McKibben under my title of Stop, read, reflect and Act! Bill’s essay was called Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math and terrifying the numbers are!
If you didn’t read it yesterday, I encourage you to do so as soon as you can. Why? Because the process of change cannot start until we truly want to change; a total emotional commitment. And the formation of those emotions, that realisation, requires a new understanding of the world around us, who we are and who we want to be. An outcome that is all part of being better informed, which is why the McKibben essay is so profoundly important.
Tomorrow, I want to explore that process of personal change.
But before then, let me go back and repeat some words in Bill’s essay that really jumped off the page and hit me between the eyes.
Writing of Germany, Bill said, “… on one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern-latitude nation generated nearly half its power from solar panels within its borders. That’s a small miracle – and it demonstrates that we have the technology to solve our problems. But we lack the will.”
We lack the will!!
Then in the next paragraph, Bill went on to write,
This record of failure means we know a lot about what strategies don’t work. Green groups, for instance, have spent a lot of time trying to change individual lifestyles: the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of energy-sucking flatscreen TVs. Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about going green: We like cheap flights to warm places, and we’re certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them. Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself – it’s as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.
This is what hit me between the eyes, “the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the millions, but so have a new generation of energy-sucking flatscreen TVs.” That describes me to perfection. OK, we have installed solar panels as well but I admit to a significant degree of ambivalence! ” tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself”
Let me remind you of Bill’s next paragraph,
People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2; by 2010, a poll found that “while recycling is widespread in America and 73 percent of those polled are paying bills online in order to save paper,” only four percent had reduced their utility use and only three percent had purchased hybrid cars. Given a hundred years, you could conceivably change lifestyles enough to matter – but time is precisely what we lack.
So it comes down to change; change in a timely manner, to boot!
Let’s hold that until tomorrow and I will leave you with this: Put your future in good hands – your own.
Learning from Dogs 