Category Archive for Systems Thinking

I keep thinking about writing a change manifesto for changethis.com.

Something about marriage. About committing to the design of a great life rather than to an institution. About how marriage is something that you do, that you are creating in the moment, not a thing that is good or bad and that needs to be fixed.

Something about how  it’s not how much you know when you go into it, but how open you are to learning. How it takes fearlessness. How it’s not about compromise as much as it is about taking on different realities. How it grows you and you grow it. How marriage is a complex system formed from two complex systems and exhibits the processes, all of the beauty and messes, of every complex evolving system in nature. How, when it all goes wrong, often it isn’t a problem of distance–It’s a problem of being too close, too bonded to see and to grow. How stepping back from it can feel like breaking the bonds but it’s what you have to do to get it right.  About how one little shift from one of you can change everything and big emotionall-charged attempts will change nothing. About how real growth can involve breakdown and chaos before the emergence to the next level. How it can involve risking everything–all that you’ve built together.

Marriage is a learning space and a design space for life. It’s a space to come in to, lick one’s wounds, and go out from again. But also a place where you can practice all of the skills you’re going to need on the outside with someone who is on your side–or not. It’s a space to learn what love and family and life really is and can be.

Why is this important?  The processes of the complex system of marriage are the same processes in family, community, nations, the world.

This kind of marriage is complex but it’s exciting. With a few basic ideas in place, marriage becomes the very best game going.

I think that I will write this proposal for a manifesto. Any thoughts?

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.

In yesterday’s NY Times magazine, Bruce Stutz in his article “Self-Nonmedication” writes about his midlife breakdown, how he went on antidepressants, and then the horrific experience of withdrawals from them.

I wrote the following email:

Hello Bruce,

Thanks for your lovely article, for your clarity and honesty. A beautiful description of a
classic radical life transition complicated by fear and ignorance and then medication.

I have so many questions for you:

What if, when you were going through that craziness, your psychiatrist had said that what you were going through was not only normal but an essential brain reorganization? What if he/she had said that you were in the process of a “system upgrade” and that in a year or so you would be at a higher level of functioning, that it is not just normal but something to welcome?

Without the fear and as an observer of your own process–something that you are obviously very good at–I suspect that the experience would have been very different.

I flipped out for a while when my children were 4 and 2. We had a mortgage-free oceanfront home with pool and hot tub on Maui, great work and friends, world travel. Everything. And I was nuts. I was ready to leave it all for a man with nothing but the time to listen to me. Fortunately, I freaked him out, I really didn’t want to blow out my life, and my husband has an amazing sense of humor. My husband and I both grew up and moved on, much better off because of the experience.
This is my take on it all:
We are medicating people at 6, 13, 19, 25, postpartum, on and on.
A loss of sense of self is considered a disabling disease. Adolescence is pathology.

A loss of sense of self is the normal process of metamorphosis from one stage to the next. Okay, some transitions are more radical than others. Some you sail through and some are so disorienting that you blow out your marriage, home, and life’s work.

But, if someone had told you that the mind chaos you experienced was not breakdown leading to death but a creative breakdown that will lead to a higher level of functioning, then what would your response had been?

It’s the fear and the diagnosis of permanence that is freaking people out. Craziness in
any form is seen as permanent. Medication, the answer.

This pervasive medicalization of normal processes has been tackled before. Kubler-Ross did it for death and dying. La Maze did it for childbirth. Now someone needs to do it for the natural, painful and disorienting processes of life transitions.

I’ve written about it in Chapter 9 of my book Men Are Easy. It deserves its own book.
I’m considering just pulling out descriptions like your’s–One could argue that Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name” was a classic description of mothers/women in transition–and asking the questions.

Once you see life this way, so much makes sense. We are not machines with broken parts. We are complex evolving systems living within complex evolving systems of family and society. With a few shifts of perspective, the entire picture changes.

I’m inspired.

Aloha,
Lynn

Does this make sense to you? Have you had similar experiences?

In Arianna Huffington’s Fearless Voices site, in a blog entry titled “Happiness Is. . .”, Anastasia Goodstein writes about The N. Y. Times Magazine article “Happiness 101″ on Martin Seligman’s positive psychology. She questions psychoanalysis and a bit less so, psychotherapy, and then she cringes at, although supports, David Lynch’s efforts at getting TM into the schools.

“Happiness 101″ describes Seligman’s intentions to teach happiness in high schools to “restore ‘wholeness’ to the teenage years” and to convey “sense of certainty” that the 60s took away. Is that “sense of certainty” what made movies like “Rebel without a Cause” and “Peyton Place” blockbusters? When Betty Friedan interviewed women in their homes in the 50s she found a “problem with no name,” not June Cleaver. And ‘wholeness’ is not a feeling that people in transition, whether teens, mothers of toddlers, or new-to-retirement boomers, experience. Read the rest »

I read in the New York Times that Tillie Olsen has died.

I read her story, As I Stand Ironing, for a literature class, and I have schlepped that anthology around for over thirty years. I pulled it out again today.

“As I Stand Ironing” is the story of a working woman at her ironing board when her daughter comes through, hellbent on going the same way her mother did, and all the mother can do is stand there ironing.

Last June Dick and I were in Marfa, Texas, at the Brown Recluse. Great food, an old house, a young NYU grad owner with a great used book collection on old bookshelves against the walls. In short, heaven. Read the rest »