The importance of joy and being fully fallably human in social justice work

It's all about balance!

If you can't give yourself permission to be human, and you can't extend that to other people, it's a good time to check in with yourself.

Sam Dylon Finch wrote a lovely twitter thread about his experience in social justice. He's been both an angry social justice warrior and a loving one.  More recently loving.  He talks about what changed here in this thread.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1174106626585874433.html?fbclid=IwAR3JnWadCJOgAPKFE0xjoOM8_C6qekc3qHMExhUHz_m0TIVhN2A4nq5had8

My favorite part is this:

Because dignity and care and kindness have to come from a genuinely loving place. And if you become too absorbed in righteousness & despair, and you don't balance it with the healing work that allows you to love on your people and see THAT as truly radical... you lose yourself.

— Sam Dylan Finch 🍓 (@samdylanfinch) September 18, 2019

Loving people is truly radical. It's ok to be mad, but it's also important to love.  Love is what helps us fight compassion fatigue.

Great writers and thinkers have been telling us how to do this for a long time. In his essay Return to Tipasa, Albert Camus says the same thing. He had found that love itself was drying up in his fight against the Nazis - and then - he returns to Tipasa (a place he had played in his youth).  He says,

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

So - in this never ending fight for justice always remember that what call us to fight - is love. And to paraphrase Camus again from his letter to a German friend - it is important - that as we fight for our truth (LOVE) that we take care not to destroy it with the very arms we use to defend it. 

Self Care

When you can’t help others, help yourself.

Compassion for self is as important as compassion for others. As Humanists we seek to live lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity. We know our meaning and purpose comes from helping others and working to benefit others.

The problem is that we can’t always help other people. Sometimes we are the ones who need help;  We all get sick. Sometimes very sick. We all have ups and downs emotionally. And sometimes there just isn’t enough fuel in the tank to help and care for others.  In those moments we need to care for themselves.

I am a mom. This means I have a kid who relies on me to provide food, clothing, shelter and emotional stability.  I am lucky that the first 3 of those are covered. Where I struggle is with emotional stability.

Struggle isn’t really the word. Most of the time it’s easy. I’m there for him.  But sometimes, I have my own anxieties and I can’t give him my full attention.  I get antsy and anxious and feel like if I have to listen to him talk about Minecraft for another moment, I’m going to burst.

It is in those moments, that to provide emotional stability for him, I have to be clear about what MY needs are.  When I do this – he knows to modulate his behavior so that I can have the head space I need for a moment. This is better for him and for me because instead of blowing up, I can calmly say – hey – this is what I need right now. He feels good that he can give back to me for a moment and I feel good that I’m teaching him self care and self advocacy through modeling.

Whether you are dealing with professional obligations or personal ones, self care is essential. Knowing what your limits are helps you to make sure that you are emotionally capable of caring for others. Taking short breaks to clear your head isn’t selfish. It’s self care. It’s what makes it so you can help others instead of being wrapped up in your own drama all the time.

So care for yourself. View it as mental maintenance to keep your brain and your body functioning so that you can do the good deeds for others you want to.

I talk about this concept more in my book: The Humanist Approach to Happiness: https://humanistlearning.com/the-humanist-approach-to-happiness-book/

And also discuss how to balance compassion for yourself with compassion for others in the course Living Made Simpler: https://humanistlearning.com/livingmadesimpler1/

Balance: Everything Requires It

A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once." ~ Blaise Pascal

 
I have several quotes I use to remind myself of philosophic truths to help me navigate difficult situations. This is one of them. It’s a reminder to me to see balance. Whenever I find myself drifting into a rigid ideology, or I find myself arguing with someone thinking I am right and they are wrong, I think of this quote. It’s a reminder to myself that we both can be right. The opposite of a great truth is often another great truth.

Holding one truth to the exclusion of other truths doesn’t help us solve our problems or win friends and influence others. Seeking a balance between extremes – both of which are true, is a good way to try and navigate life. That way you are taking advantage of all that is good and hopefully avoiding the pitfalls that come with being at an extreme.

Here are some opposites that are both good but that need to be balanced to achieve success.

Skepticism/Optimism

Skepticism is good. It keeps you honest and keeps you from making mistakes. But taken to an extreme and all things become equal and relative and it is impossible to make decisions because skepticism devolves into nihilism. Which isn’t good.

Optimism is also a good quality – in moderation. Taken to an extreme and you get unrealistic wishful thinking that not only doesn’t help you solve your problems, the lack of realistic thinking makes it nearly impossible to solve problems.

Balancing skepticism with optimism helps you be both skeptical and optimistic at the same time. Helping you to avoid nihilism and flights of fantasy to tread a more realistic path to your goals.

                Responsibility to self and to others

Responsibility is a good thing. It gives our lives meaning and purpose.  Too much responsibility and we become overwhelmed and break down.   If we only think of ourselves, we are selfish. If we only think of others, we are self-less, but not in a good way.

In order to thrive we need to balance self-care with care for others.  If we don’t care for ourselves, we cannot care for others. Balance is needed.

                Capitalism/Socialism

I am like aspects of both capitalism and socialism.  Capitalism is a pretty decent system for allowing individuals to work on what they think is important. Laissez faire capitalism is exploitative and cruel.

Socialism in moderation is also good. It helps us think of our impact on others and to collaborate for the public good. Socialism taken to an extreme, where only the community good matters, as with capitalism, also becomes exploitative and cruel. 

 The problem in both cases (extreme capitalism and extreme socialism) is that care and concern for individuals gets lost in the ideology when taken to extreme. This is unfortunate because in their moderate versions, they are both systems designed to promote the welfare of the individual!

Balance helps us remember in our pursuit of happiness (capitalism) that other people matter too  (socialism). Finding the middle ground helps us get the benefits of both systems without devolving into exploitation of the individual to advance a “greater good”

                Autonomy/Social Responsibility

This last one also requires balance. We are all autonomous individuals, but no one is or should be an island. Humans in isolation go crazy. We are tribal animals and need our tribe to feel secure. Which is why we need community.

But just as care of others (social responsibility) is a good thing, too much means the loss of the individual or the subsuming of the individual to the greater good of the community.

When we seek balance between our need for autonomy and the need to be socially responsible we realize that by helping the community thrive, we help ourselves thrive – as individuals. It’s not either or, we only really thrive when we do both – in balance.

Conclusion:

When you find yourself struggling along some dimension in your life, or in your work, the problem is probably caused  by you valuing one ideal over it’s opposite ideal and if you remind yourself to balance those competing ideals, you will probably get a better result.

Try it and let me know how it goes.

Do you take a Sabbath?

There is always work to be done. But does that mean we have to do it? Every day?

I am self-employed (see: https://humanistlearning.com) Like most self-employed people, I have to carefully guard my free time. It is VERY easy to work every single day. There is always something to do or that needs doing.

And even if I am not working on ... work. I still have chores to do around the house. Like dishes and laundry and cleaning the bathrooms. That’s work too. So when do I have free time? What should I do with my free time?  It’s amazing how hard that question is to answer.

In order for me to have free time, I have to schedule it. I have to set aside days where I just don’t work. Normally, that requires me to get out of the house and do something active because the lure of doing something instead of doing nothing is just too great!

This is why I like the concept of the Sabbath. One day out of seven, where you commit to not doing any work.  A day of rest and play. It’s not something I adhere to strictly – it’s more a reminder that all work and no play makes Jen a very dull girl.

It’s not that I do nothing on a do nothing day. It’s more that the things I choose to do – I do because they are fun to do. It isn’t work because it doesn’t matter if I do them or not. That is what makes it fun. If I don’t do a crossword puzzle, it won’t impact my business or the efficient running of my household. That’s why I like doing crossword puzzles! It’s fun, not work.

Whether it’s playing a board game or going to the beach or bbqing (which is technically working on food preparation), the goal is to do things that don’t matter if I do them or not.

What do you like to do when you are doing nothing in particular? Do you give yourself a sabbath/day of rest?

Coping in a Highly Competitive Society

I come at this from a Humanist perspective.  The key to coping well in a highly competitive society is to really have a good grounding in your goals in life. That is what provides you with meaning and purpose and helps you not be pulled off course by the rat race.

We do live in a highly competitive society. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Competition spurs us to do better and to be better and to achieve more.  That’s all positive.

The problem is I’m not sure people really know what they are competing for.  Neuromarketers have become expert on how to trigger “scarcity” and peer pressure through likes and clicks and feedback and limited time offers. And this works because – we are competitive – innately so.

Clearly, peer pressure and the desire to one up and be seen as better than our peers is a built in response we humans have. We need to fit in with our tribe for security reasons and so we can get caught up in competing to just to fit in. But that doesn't lead to happiness.

What people need to do is find balance. Balance between the need and desire to compete and the need to be happy for the sake of being happy.   This isn’t an either or thing, it’s a balancing thing.

And to balance – we have to think. What is it that we really want?  Do I even want what I am competing for?  Perhaps I should let this go and compete for something else.

It’s an amazing feeling to consciously let go of the need to compete for things that – really don’t matter to you.  Letting go of the rat race, frees up your energy and resources to compete in the things that do matter to you.  And because your energy and time isn’t scattered on things you don’t care about – and you are able to focus on the things you do – because that’s what you chose for yourself, you end up being happier and less stressed.  At least I do.

The key to doing any of this successfully though, is learning how to think more effectively and learning how to calm your brain enough so that the fight/flight response that gets triggered when we are in competition, is deactivated so that we only compete on things that matter to us personally. This is why there is such a growth in the mindfulness/meditation realm.

The meaning of life

To figure out the meaning of life, you first have to understand what life is.

Derek Sivers is a genius. I think so at least. He has a great article on the meaning of life over at: http://sivers.org/ml  He comes to the humanist conclusion that life doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning. You are free to project any meaning you want. In short, you are free to do with your life anything you want.

But it’s his analysis along the way that I think is so helpful.  He starts his article by asking – what is life?  And he tries out some answers.  Like life is time. Finite time, so perhaps you should strive to use it wisely. His advice on how to do this is to balance your future focused thinking with your present focused thinking.

• Life is also about choice. So choose wisely.  How, again, the answer is balance. Sometimes let your gut decide, sometimes stop at good enough, set ethical limits for yourself and work on what is important, not necessarily urgent.

• Life is about memories and reflection. If you don’t ever do anything, you won’t have anything worth remembering. On the other hand, reflection is important to. Once again, balance is key.

• Life is also about learning. We all learn throughout our lives. Be of the mindset that you can always learn more and always improve. 

My take away from his article is that while life has no intrinsic meaning, we still need a purpose in life. And if we are seeking to be self-fulfilled, and who isn’t, perhaps what we should seek is balance. Because that seems to be the key to everything.

Making wise choices about how to spend your life requires balance.

Who We Are vs. Who We Should Be

How accepting our flaws can help us to become better people. What can a better understanding of human nature teach us about enlightenment?

There is a wonderful website – RSA – The Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufacturing and Commerce, which at first blush seems like a weird combination of things to be encouraging. They recently changed their motto to Encouraging a 21^st Century Enlightenment.

To support this change, they created a wonderfully philosophic video about the need to reassert the ethical dimension of Humanism.  In other words, we need to not just ask about how to progress, but whether any given advance is moral or not. How do we determine what is right and what is wrong?

To do this we need to have a better understanding of who we are as humans, who we need to be, and more importantly, who we should aspire to be. To even begin that exploration, we need to have a better understanding of human nature. It is only when we understand and accept our instincts that we are able to transcend them instead of being controlled by them.

Most enlightened individuals realize that while individualism is on the whole a good thing, when taken to an extreme, it is bad not just for the individual, but to the society in which they live, meaning the rest of us.  What we should be striving for is a more enlightened self-aware socially embedded model of autonomy. We aren’t individuals going it alone. We are individuals who are mutually dependent on each other and so we ought to act in such a way that benefits not only ourselves, but the communities in which we live, because that benefits us as well.

The difficulty is that this requires us to balance our needs as individuals with the needs of our communities and the needs of the global society in which we now live. We humans are notoriously bad at finding a good balance. For me, Humanism is a reminder that I have a moral obligation to find that balance. Being a good person means not being selfish, but not subjugating myself to others either.

So, what do you think of this video? Anything you would like to add or comment on?

Balancing Introversion with Charisma

Why a little bit of introversion may help you better relate to others

I taught a course back in December and one of the students was curious to know how her fellow Humanists taking the course scored on the Myer-Briggs test. I scored as an INTJ (introverted, intuition, thinking and judgment) others were INFP’s (Feeling and perception), what was interesting is we were all, on balance introverted.

Now, obviously, we should take any Myers-Briggs test with a grain of salt. I think the value in it is not in its accuracy, but in how it helps us think about the positive attributes that people who aren’t like us bring to the table.

Regardless, there was a wonderful essay by Ram Bansal about how to be more charismatic. (see: http://pleasures-of-living.blogspot.com/2012/12/improve-upon-your-charisma.html) Ram is a Humanist by the way. One of the things he says is that being about 60% introverted and 40% extroverted helps us to be more charismatic.

Here is his reasoning. Introverts don’t suck up all the air in a room. They make space for other people to be, and this helps other people feel more secure and drawn to the introvert. As Ram Bansal says, introversion “makes the person to have an inclination towards thoughtfulness and intellectualism. His/her quality of extroversion would provide him/her courage to face the world squarely and project him/herself boldly.”

Like everything, this is about getting the balance right. Being too much of an introvert would prevent us from interacting well with others. But being too much of an extrovert means we are too focused on ourselves to truly notice other people. I think the key to getting the balance right is to understand that introversion helps us to be thoughtful of our impact on others. Being thoughtful helps improve our relationships with others because it keeps our competing interests in balance.

While I do believe that a certain amount of introversion and extroversion is nature based, I also believe we can adjust our levels of introversion and extroversion through active nurture (ie: practice). I know that I used to be incredibly shy and am now considered an extrovert by almost everyone, even though I consistently test as an introvert. My mother is the same way and changed how she acts simply by deciding to practice being more extroverted (or at least that is the story she told me as she encouraged me to be more outgoing and courageous).

I know that, for me, I am at my best when I actively think about and choose how out there or introverted I want or should be in any given situation. I find the courage to put myself out there by accepting that I might get the social situation completely wrong and come off as a complete dork. Happens a lot actually. But what keeps me going is that just as often, I get the balance right. I am able to make good friends by being extroverted. I am able to give people the space to be who they are by being more introverted. And I feel good about that.

So, the big question is: am I the only person who has to actively think about how extroverted or introverted I am? Do any of you actively think about how you are going to act? How do you convince yourself to be more extroverted and how do you convince yourself to take a back seat so that others can shine?