Life Shapes Our View

“The darkest night in someone's life may be the brightest day in another person's life. Life rests on perceptions and conceptions or missed perceptions and misconceptions.” ― Israelmore Ayivor

I have been in the technology field for over 38 years and feel I have stayed pretty close to the leading curve of all things new and cool. The advances being made in all fields of human progress continue to grab my interest and time. Even new music, trends and ways of thinking how we live our lives.

But I have a confession on this perfect late summer morning.

We still have a house phone cradled in its base. In our defense, it is not attached to the wall in our kitchen with a rotary dial and fifteen foot long twisted cord connecting the hand set to the base unit. It is a hand held and we have remote hand sets in various rooms of the house.

This phone serves 98% of the time as a place for telemarketers to waste their automated call time selling great insurance deals, lowering my credit card rates and attempts to ensure my Microsoft operating system license is fully paid for. Caller ID and the answering machine make for a great way to monitor and ignore the calls.

The blinking yellow message light, blinking, blinking, blinking.

Each hand held has a small yellow LED light that blinks when a message is left. It is very easy to push the key sequence on the phone to delete the messages. Some days it is part of my regular bed time routine. Many nights though I forget to delete the daily messages and fall blissfully asleep.

In the darkness of night there are moments I wake to this bright yellow beacon filling the room. It might as well be a road construction warning light sitting on the dresser. Seriously, one night in half sleep I combined the rumble of our AC unit and the yellow light into wondering why a garbage truck was parked outside of our home. My wife barely notices it.

And there it is, how we perceive things in life.

One definition of perceiving is to interpret or look on (someone or something) in a particular way. Shes perceives the light as nothing more than the small dimly lit LED that it is. I perceive it to be a lighthouse guarding ships from coastal dangers. Her view is perfectly normal and rational. Mine is probably exaggerated.

In an article by Gregg Henriques, Ph.D., professor of psychology at James Madison University titled Perception and Perceptual Illusions, he states "Through experience, the mind/brain builds perceptual categories of objects. ... The matching process is what gives us the experience of figure/ground relationships."

Our life experience has us wired differently.

If we read Twitter, Facebook, opinion columns and listen to all of the noisy differences, one might wonder how we accomplish anything. The conversation can be good for advancing humanity, but we need to understand how we perceive one thing is perceived differently by others.

One could apply my blinking yellow message light to current politics. What I may view as bombastic deception, another will view as quiet guidance. Our frame of reference is simply different.

In our haste to send off eye popping Tweets only results in widening our divide. Maybe the starting point should be acknowledging the difference. If we try to perceive things slightly different we can lessen the divide.

Maybe that little yellow message light is warning us.

Stay inspired my friends!

Blink of an Eye

“Time flames like a paraffin stove and what burns are the minutes I live.” ― Irving Layton

Not long ago I heard a story from a pastor talking about the words we use and how we understand those used by others. The story began with a question to another person in which she asked, "Do you know what a fetter is?" This person responded, "Sure, I grew up on a farm and my Dad would always ask if the horse had been tended to. My response was always yes, I 'fed her' today."

To understand where this is going, a 'fetter' is normally defined as a chain or manacle used to restrain a prisoner. But I am going to use it to explain how our lives are chained together in many different ways. The interlinking through family, marriage, work, and lots of groups, institutions or other connections binds us all. So how we treat those connections remains important.

Take the binding of two people in marriage. The words spoken as a vow are, "...til death us do part." The life of two bound together is full of words, at first only words of love, then others enter in as they become comfortable with each other. Sometimes too comfortable as we try to mold the other into what we wish them to be, forgetting the "who and why" we married them. Those words spoken can create disharmony, cause conflict or turmoil instead of enjoyment of life and togetherness.

... and then time catches up and the 'til death do us part' arrives.

Life passes by, gone in the blink of an eye. And for what have we wasted with words the time bound together. Was it in bliss or in conflict of each other. And if in conflict, what was the most likely cause of a continued conflict in our life?

I would suggest the answer to that question is pride. Pride keeps us many times from living a more peaceful and enjoyable life. I am talking about the kind of pride that prevents us from being honest with ourselves. In other instances, we do not want to admit defeat. And for many reasons, we do not want to be seen as weak or incapable.

But our vulnerability is exactly the thing that could help us build connections and stronger relationships. Pride gets in the way of our fettered relationships. It gets in the way and prevents us from enjoying the time we have together.

Yes, there are many reasons our relationships dissolve. There are many reasons we cannot seem to get past the walls of division we build. But remember it all goes by so quickly and in the end, was pride worth it?

Stay inspired my friends!

Blustering Came The Wind

“Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.” ― Samuel Johnson


Recently I was listening to a colleague complain of a slight taken upon him by another person. The words used were "...he stabbed me in the back." The remaining parts of our conversation were filled with an over abundance of colorful verbs and exaggerated adjectives. It felt as though this person had a compelling reason to convince me of the wrong that was enacted upon him.

He had me at hello.

In actuality, it did not take all of the bluster to convince me of the wrong. And in all of the bluster, the wrong did not rise to the explanation of a knife being inserted into the back of this person. So why was the use of a bloody physical attack needed as the described result of a wrong done by another? Does exaggeration have to be so bold in order to prove one's point?

Is it self importance that we feel the need to do so? Well, sort of it is, but a few reasons people explain things in exaggerated ways are;

- To communicate a certain trait: In the case of my story, was the fellow trying to exhibit his strength to sustain a bloody blow of a knife. That no matter what befalls him, he is a survivor and cannot be defeated?

- To prove something: Maybe he felt I would not believe or consider his concern valid without the graphic explanation. He really was not injured by a knife firmly incised into his back. This could be a common sign of low self esteem. While he raised the wrong to such a high level, did he really think it would have generated greater belief on my behalf?

- To support a point of view: It is said that many people would rather be believed even if they knew their argument is invalid rather than changing their opinion or admitting they were wrong. To me the knife in the back description has always seemed quite over the top in any explanation.

Can we just call it "Twitter Bluster"?

I have a healthy respect for what social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook can accomplish in keeping all of us connected. In business I use it as a tool to teach others how to be succinct, to the point, with their updates on various subjects. With a pre-defined number of characters, how well can you get that point across quickly? Think of it as the 30-second elevator pitch to the division vice-president or to a promising new customer.

But these social media sites have also given birth to the "age of unfettered bluster" in making our point known. Our politicians are not the only ones, but we ourselves have raised the level of exaggerated noise to new levels of just noise. In all of this noise, we are simply trying to shout louder than the next person. We are likely trying to be more important than the next person.

Take the story of a gnat sitting on a bull's horn for a long time. Eventually, he asks the bull whether he would like him to leave. The bull says he had not realized the gnat was even there in the first place and will not miss him when he is gone.

Self importance will soon be forgotten if ever noticed in the first place.

The wind blows through the grass, bending it for a short amount of time. The wind is here and gone, unseen, only temporarily noticed as is the exaggerated word. What remains is the grass, standing tall and proud.

Stay inspired my friends!

Swimming In Life

“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.” ― Michel de Montaigne


I would have to guess that the older we get, the more we realize how much we do not know. Of course we know a lot of things. We attend school, we get our degrees and through years of work the knowledge grows exceedingly within us.

But we learn to know what we do not know.

There are depths of learning that are described in different ways. Norman Webb defined these as DOKs or Depth of Knowledge stages. Another descriptive way has to do with water. Learning can be like walking into the water, finding the depth of what you know and understand.

In Webb's use of the DOK Wheel, there are four levels the first of which is DOK-1. This is the simple ability to recall and reproduce data, definitions, details, facts, information, and procedures. This level is known as knowledge acquisition but I call it wading into the water ankle deep.

The second or DOK-2 is the building of skills and concepts. This means making a decision on how you will approach your learning process. It includes decisions that require more than a single step such as comparing, organizing or estimating. Here we have knowledge application or entered knee level depth in our water approach.

We now move onto DOK-3 where we think strategically, with reason about the how and why various concepts can be used to get and explain those things we have learned. This is a point at which we can analyze our knowledge in a waist deep way.

With the fourth or DOK-4 level, this requires the most complex of thinking. It is a multitasking of thoughts and knowledge, using multiple sources and multiple ways of solving problems. This is what Webb called knowledge augmentation but I call it swimming.

Swimming in the deep end.

Do we allow our perceived intelligence to be the end to all we know? Are we ready to swim across the lake or an ocean for that matter? Or are we willing to explore a fifth level, the level called wisdom. It is a level brought on by time and age. This is the point at which true knowledge is revealed.

Never let yourself be satisfied with just the gaining of knowledge. As we swim the waters of life, enter the level of wisdom to grow until the end of our swim.

Stay inspired my friends!