Karen Miller asks of parent-child relations "Who imparts to whom?" It seems clearly a two-way street. Well, a multilane one actually, since giving and receiving habits, worldviews, philosophies and convictions come and go from many sources in an organic way. I think what we learn and what we are like can also be described as "multifactorial" or "multivariate". There are many influences and they come and go, varying in strength and importance.
We watched a Nature show last night on plants and their intelligence. The main scientist, from the University of Alberta, said that it isn't clear how plants manage to show intelligent behavior, altering what they do in the presence of related plants vs. actions surrounded by non-related varieties and species.
We are reading "Masterminds and Wingmen" by Rosalind Wiseman, who has also written well-received books on girls' lives and intergroup pressures. This one is about boys' world of ideas, practices and social pressures while becoming men. Naturally, the author discusses main currents and most probable causes and situations while reminding us that each person, each life and each situation is unique.
She could also say that any given theme in a life, say relations with the opposite sex or ways of making and handling money, is "organic." Wikipedia says
Organic may refer to: "Of or relating to an organism, a living entity; Of or relating to an organ."
It is the "living thing" part that I mean here. Our brains and our lives are living things: they change, grow, expand, shrink, rise and fall in importance, effect and amount and duration of attention devoted to them. Since our minds prefer certainty, it is uncomfortable to stay open to the possibility that my child may "hate" my attitude, politics, religion today but not in a month or a decade from now. Does he approve of me or not? That form of the question implies permanence in a way that "I wonder how he is feeling about my political party today" does not.
Over the years of teaching, I saw that I often liked one class better than another but found that later in the semester, my taste had reversed and I came to prefer the formerly less-liked to the former #1.
We, ourselves, are processes. For convenience, I like to think my personal process began when I was born and will continue until I die. But actually, the beginning of life and of my small and germ-like ancestors was much earlier and components of me will continue to join in other processes of many kinds long after the day of my death.
Expansion and contraction, acquisition and relinquishing go on all the time. Teachers see these moments of new realization. Timothy Gallwey in "The Inner Game of Tennis" mentions an experienced player, who one day, after many lessons and suggestions, exclaimed "Wow, I bring my backhand stroke back too high!" His coaches had told him that many times but, as we say, the knowledge "hadn't sunk in" until that unpredictable mysterious moment in the process of his working on himself.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
