March 2010 – Simon Fowler

The problem of pain and its cure

There’s no ultimate escape from pain. Gautama Buddha observed the inexorability of suffering. Shakespeare, before we knew about evolution by natural selection, saw “Nature, red in tooth and claw”. It seems that suffering is at the heart of reality itself.

Even if we do escape it for a time, it just reappears in a different form. Or in a different person.

So our main problem, as M. Scott Peck observed years ago, is that we think having a problem is the problem. We think that pain and suffering and trouble and strife are bizarre and embarrassing abnormalities in an otherwise smooth and happy world.

The cure for that problem, dear readers, is courage and hope. And you’ll find courage and hope amongst the poor and those who work alongside the poor. You’ll also find it, in a very different way, amongst scientists, researchers and others who look at some of the world’s toughest problems straight in the face, day after day, year after year.

You may even find it in yourself. Courage and hope in the face of pain. Not looking away, not pretending it isn’t there. But also not letting it have the last word, as though it determines the course or value of your life.

The source of courage and reason for hope depends to some degree on personality and circumstance: personal failure, job loss, accident, cancer, depression, traumatic injury, poverty – all provide different possibilities of hope and will be reacted to differently by individuals.

But hope must not be confused with optimism: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” So describes the Stockdale Paradox.

I confess that I don’t totally understand it. I’ve not been in such a situation as to warrant knowing the difference. But I believe it, and I’ve witnessed it, amongst the poor and oppressed in El Salvador and in Burma; stories I may tell another time. I also see it exemplified, in fact, defined and extended, in the suffering of Jesus of Nazareth on the night before he was crucified.

On Maundy Thursday we Christians [must] remember with solemn humility that Jesus, knowing the betrayal, abandonment, suffering and death that was before him, did two amazing things. First he shared a last meal with his disciples, including his betrayer. Second, he washed their feet and told them, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” In the face of death, Jesus turned his suffering into an act of love and an exhortation to love. Suffering, it appears, is at the heart of love, which is ultimate reality.

It is important also to remember, and to contemplate this Maundy Thursday, that his suffering was only just beginning. Resurrection was far off, almost unseen, almost unbelievable. Instead, death and hell was before him. A long, long night, increasingly alone, increasingly in despair.

Jesus suffered alone for us, so that we would suffer with, (lit. have com – passion), others. Because we have a God who literally identifies with our suffering, we can and must bear each other’s sufferings. We must bear it, in all its hideous ugliness and persistence.

People you know, or you yourself, know that there are usually no quick solutions to suffering; no platitudes, optimistic statements, or symptom relief that will satisfy. More than anything, you want presence; simple, helpless, powerless, wordless, loving presence that won’t give up no matter how bad it gets or how long it lasts.

On this day then, let’s cure the ‘problem’ of pain by being willing to face suffering, with and for each other.

:p How do you show feelings and attitudes in live online learning?

The good news is that words matter.

If you think by that I mean, “words?! pah! who cares about words?!”, then you didn’t read the sentence properly. Or you think I’m being sarcastic. Context will tell you if you’re right – context given by your knowledge of me as a person, and your knowledge of other things I’ve written. But absent those, the words mean what they say. They may be factually incorrect – maybe words don’t matter – but the sentence means what it says.

It’s commonly believed that 7% of communication is verbal; the rest is body language and tone of voice. Along with many people, I took that for granted, even though it made no intuitive sense to me, especially when thinking about learning live online.

But if you didn’t know already, the 7% is a myth; or rather, it’s a fact that’s only true in certain cases.

The original researcher, Professor Albert Mehrabian, looked at situations in which people say one thing and mean something else in a face to face situation. According to Mehrabian, the 7% holds true only when talking about feelings and attitudes. In those cases if you say one thing but indicate something else with your tone and gesture, the something else (the non-verbal 93%) will dominate the substance your communication. So the statistic seems to only matter if the non-verbal and verbal are in conflict. (See Training Zone, especially the video by Martin Shovel, shown also below).

However, this still rings true online if a facilitator says, “hey, like, yeh, this is going to be, like, yaaaawn, really fun … let’s do some really engaging interactive stuff on a whiteboard now, yaaawn”. It’s obvious, now that I think about it, that it’s the dissonance between the mode and content of speech that makes us largely ignore the content. Equally obvious is that words matter when mode and content are consistent: “You are, in fact, an idiot.”

The 7% is (mis)used to make an important point, however: Yes, words matter, but words are not always a necessary, adequate, or even feasible way to communicate. Especially when communicating feelings and attitudes.

So, here’s the question: how are feelings and attitudes communicated online, in a virtual classroom setting? What’s the real data about the relative power of mode or content in live, online communication?

And how do you show your feelings online, in an online classroom? Come on, you can tell me.

Balls and dropped balls

The First Follower project is a ball, but one of many. I realised in my last post that if I’m going to do a 30 day project it’s just going to have enhance the projects (loosely termed) to which I’m already committed. There’s only so much time in the day. I want to get better at doing and being what I already am: Christian, husband, father, brother, friend, neighbor, colleague, leader, clown etc. And a Word from our preacher last Sunday, sleep is an act of faith, confirms that the world doesn’t depend on me.

How to conceive a project that feeds and builds those aspects of me, perhaps even ties them together a little more neatly? Whatever I do, I hope it creates a little magic with what I already have.

I just hope I’m not too late with this post. The only rule Andrew Wicklander gave with the invite was, “you’ve got to blog once a week about the project”. That’s all. I thought it fair enough, and actually a genius way to keep us involved. He’s kept his word and dropped people (i.e. they can no longer get into the project website) with a sense of regret and feeling a bit of a jerk for doing so. But I don’t think he is; he’s shown great integrity in the process and importantly (for anyone who has to deal with him in life) that he’s a man of his word. I hope I’m not too late, I don’t know when the ‘week’ ends. But if I am, that’s okay. Some balls are meant to be dropped.