Monthly Archive: November, 2007

It’s raining and it’s so dark that I have lights on in the afternoon. Weird in Hawaii!  I drank hot jasmine tea and have a great working buzz going.
I’m reminded of a story that I’ve been using a lot recently that was one of the inspirations for Men Are Easy:

For a while, twenty-five years ago, every Saturday morning, my husband and I argued. I would cry. By noon it was over and we both forgot about it until it happened again the next week.  One Saturday the arguing seemed particularly vicious. In a moment of clarity, I said, “This is it. We have to go to counseling.”

It seemed to be the smart thing. Nip this in the bud before it gets worse.

Then I had a flash of insight. From Monday through Friday my husband drank 3 to 4 cups of strong coffee. I don’t drink coffee. He’s an addict. I fixed him a cup and the fighting disappeared.

The frightening thought is that I could have forced us into counseling. I would have been doing the “right” and “responsible” thing. I would have insisted on exploring he said/I said and unearthing our past faults and family horrors, and  he would have been “in denial” about anything being wrong.

I would have appeared to be right and he would have been made all wrong.

I wonder. . . Would we still be together today?

I’ve let the Easy Weekly go for a month or so for no good reason except that I’m going through some kind of change in focus. Now that Men Are Easy has been out for over 6 months, and after a weekend with some systems friends in Chicago and after a week immersing myself in the International Conference on Complex Systems in Boston, I’m thinking more about who I am and what I’m doing. Whatever I do has to from now on be important. The Easy Weekly has to be more and more about making a difference.

So what in the world does that mean?

I want to articulate a view of marriage and work based on conscious design, grounded in universal values, and emerging out of creativity and openness.

I want to promote a new view of mental health, ethics, and consciousness, so that we no longer see them as abstract but as processes that can be conveyed and cultivated at every level from the intrapersonal to the global.

I want to outline the normal breakdown, chaos, and reordering of the brain and life and work that happens at times of transition. Just like Lamaze did for childbirth and Kubler-Ross did for death and dying, someone needs to describe and teach the signs, symptoms, and process of normal life transitions. We need to demedicalize normal transitions and stop medicating people at 6, 14, 19, 25, 32, and all the other transitional times. We all need support for those times, and support takes an understanding of what the chaos of transition means, the experience and process of it, and the great news that it is not just breakdown, that it’s a reordering to a next level of awareness and efficiency of thought and action.

I want to completely restructure psychological, philosophical, religious/spiritual, medical/neural/physiological,  sociological/anthropological/political science divisions  into a whole systems/process view of people. I just want to completely restructure the entire human educational and research enterprise.

That’s all.

I guess the days of simple relationship advice are over.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’ve been right all along. Maybe the way to convey it is to ground it all in the immediate concerns of everyday life.

I don’t know any more. A bit of chaotic transition in action.