Creating Knowledge that Works

“Changing people’s minds does help with changing behavior, but it’s not the only way to change behavior, and it might not even be the best way.” ~ Jason Radford

James Baldwin wrote, “The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you can alter, even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change the world.”

Changing the world is exactly what sociologist Jason Radford is trying to do. Through his leadership at Volunteer Science and Northeastern University’s Social Design Lab, he is seeking to involve more people in scientific research and turning that research into technologies, programs, and companies that solve social problems. Curiosity enterprises if ever there were some!

Listen to Choose to be Curious #140: Creating Knowledge that Works, with Jason Radford

Check out Northeastern University’s Social Design Lab – working with scientists and practitioners to translate new knowledge and technologies into effective and sustainable solutions. 

Check out Volunteer Science – helping researchers and participants find one another around the world.

Join a study!

Thanks to Sean Balick for our theme music; “Gusty Hollow” by Migration, via Blue Dot Sessions. 

You can subscribe to Choose to be Curious on iTunes and Stitcher.

Check out the Choose to be Curious shop!*

*Any purchase from the Choose to be Curious shop supports Arlington Independent Media. 

Dear House

                                                            

We handed over the keys yesterday and walked out the door for the very last time. Moments before, I stood in front of the house and read aloud my gesture at closure. Nothing can say everything, but this felt about right.

Dear House,

This is a thank you note. A thank you for the many years you were more than a house, and truly a home. 

When D. and I first saw you, we knew you were the one. I guess it was love at first sight! I remember standing at the top of the stairs and squeezing his hands, whispering so the real estate agent down stairs couldn’t hear me, “I really want to live here.”

This is the house-that-became-home into which we welcomed our first overnight guest, Aunt Rose, for whom we bought the trundle beds we still use. The house-that-became-home to which we brought our newborn children, now grown and flown. The house-that-became-home where we carved out spaces between pipes and windows to expand just enough to stay, but not so much to change the cozy clutch of your time-darkened wood and solid plaster walls. The house-that-became-home that embraced family and friends in countless gatherings of every sort – salons, election parties, family dinners, sleep-overs, working meetings, Christmas mornings, New Year’s Eves and change-your-point-of-view Easter egg hunts.

We’ve always known we were likely to be the last people to live in this house, but that doesn’t seem to be making your fate much easier for me right now. I know in my head that, like the dinosaurs dying so Bach could live, the end of your era makes room for something new that could not otherwise be. I’m pleased that you and the land are going to a good cause. But I’m sad — really, really sad — about the end.

We’ve taken a few bits and pieces – as Gramms might have said, we’ve taken tokens of our affection, not measures of it. But you’ll always live on in our hearts and our stories, a reminder that a place becomes special not because of the four walls or the squeaky floors or even the delightful lights, but from the love that is poured into it – and that pours out of it. Thank you for being a most wonderful receptacle. 

Love,  Lynn

Meditation on Mowing

I don’t remember the first time I mowed our yard, but it must have been sometime in the spring of 1988.

Today was maybe the last.

That’s hundreds of mows in the interim, all — with a few minor exceptions when I was very pregnant or otherwise indisposed — executed by yours truly and an assortment of clunky machines. I was glad to be rid of the gasoline-powered rig, pleased to finesse the power cord.

I can’t say it’s been a chore I’ve cherished, but there has always been something satisfying about the indisputably finished product. The sudden clean-shaven order that emerges from our slightly shabby fifth of an acre, coming right up next to respectable. I could point to the effort with satisfaction, knowing I wasn’t the only one who knew work had been done.

Not much else in my life has ever been like that, so I’ve always appreciated that aspect of mowing. Kind of like painting: immediate visible results, however time-limited.

But today might have been the last pass. We go to settlement in less than a week and while we’ll still be clearing out the house for a while yet, I might dodge the next mow bullet. We’ll see; it will depend on the rain.

So I tried to savor this mow, if such a thing is possible. To feel the engine’s churn, the singular scratch of cut grass on the back of my throat, the sun on my hatted head as I swept the drying blades from the slate.

I put some extra effort into the trimming and raked the curb clean. It felt good to honor the process, a little bit of respect to the place we’ve called home all these many mowing seasons.

Hello, Dear Curious Friends

Hello, friends, how are you?

I wanted to check in and say hi. Things are about to change for all of us, in ways I’m not sure we’ve really yet fully imagined, and I wanted to just connect and say thank you. 

Thank you for joining me on this curiosity journey. Thank you for showing up for life and work in curious and attentive ways. Thank you for taking care of yourself and everyone around you right now. Thank you for being you!

My dear buddy Mo, my conscience from afar, wrote to me the other night, “Curious to learn in what ways you’ll be reaching out to your listeners. We postponed the local service jam.”

The truth is, I’ve been so consumed with concerns about Arlington Independent Media‘s fate in the throes of all that is going on, that I haven’t been thinking much about my own show. I’ve come racing up against production deadlines, hastily typing blog posts, forgoing much of what is delightful in the craft, and just moving on.

But we’re not moving around much any more, most of us. Nor will we be.

So here’s what I can say for now:

I’m going to keep looking for these curiosity conversations and sharing them with you. You may notice some shifts in audio quality. I’m trying to find the best ways to deliver good content and sound from my basement, but it’s not going to compare with what I was able to produce at AIM. Bear with me!

Our new normal is both an obstacle and an opportunity. The obstacles are obvious; it’s the opportunities that interest me. What new habits can we cultivate that bring us closer, even as we maintain safe distances? How can we meaningfully enlarge our world, even as it temporarily shrinks? Time for that classic curiosity refrain: How might we….?

“I’m in the mood to try stuff!” is how one of my intrepid AIM partners has approached our challenges there. I’m inclined to adopt that spirit as well. Here’s some of the stuff I want to try….

1. 1. 1. Breakfast with Friends: I’m going to miss meeting friends for breakfast, so I’m going to try to do that virtually. A friend who has a communications firm in Baltimore joins his staff each morning for virtual coffee. I don’t like coffee, but I love the idea. (Also: I sent a gift card for “our” breakfast spot to one friend, a promissory note to pick up where we’ve left off and a small way to support local businesses.)
      2. Curiosity Walks: Time to rediscover what’s within my four walls, to stroll the floorboards with as much attention to the textures, shadows and hidden delights as I would along the boulevards and byways of any other destination. I began in my kitchen some time ago. It was a lot of fun.
      3. Read Harder: Inspired by Dani Bassett’s “inter-book quotation network”  and Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge, I’ll read outside the familiar, let my curiosity take me to unexpected places and to mingle with a whole new crowd. Might even go shopping on my shelves. Pretty sure there are some books there I haven’t yet read….

Each week, when a new episode airs, D. and I assemble in the living room to listen. No matter how many times I’ve heard them, the shows just sound different on the radio — which never ceases to amaze me. But what I really love is that we have this date to listen together. He’s a gracious audience and a good #analogy sport. I invite you to join our virtual living room via wera.fm Wednesday mornings at 10am Eastern time.

Come, choose to be curious — and #ListenTogether.

So, I’m curious: what stuff are you trying? What opportunities are you finding? Let me know — and stay well.

p.s. The photo of me actually predates the “no hands on your face” guidance. <sigh> SO many changes. I love you.

 

Another New Beginning

Five years into this new normal, three weeks into owning a new condo that will eventually be home, I’m at the front edge of another, newer normal.

And so I return to these virtual pages to write my way through a transition. Again.

For 32 years we’ve lived in this quirky little hold-out house. The county has grown up around it. My kids have grown up in it. It’s indisputably, deeply, emotionally home.  And we’re getting ready to leave it. But not just leave it, we’re getting ready to bulldoze it. We’re combining forces with the housing group that owns the property on all three sides of us and going to replace this one quirky little hold-out house with seven spiffy market-rate townhouses. It makes economic sense. It makes zoning sense. It makes logistical sense. It all makes sense, but I will tell you I do this with very mixed emotions.

It feels like a bit of a betrayal to the past, although I know full well that what matters is the people, not the stuff — and certainly not the plaster.

It feels like I’m cutting off a piece of myself.

It also feels like shaking off a damn harness. Having a quirky little hold-out house is hard. Wily raccoons and squirrels feel entitled to share the space with us. The boards creak, the wind whistles through frames around windows and doors alike. Woe to the bare toes near baseboards in these winter months!

The stairs seem at perpetual risk of coming loose from the wall. We hope the appliances last. The woodwork is old and dinged. At 99 years, the window glass is ancient enough to be beautifully wobbly. We’ll take some light fixtures with us and hope the radiators find work elsewhere. We marvel at the concept of floors without cracks.

Every one of those cracks is filled with memories. I think: if memories, like fluids, fill gaps, then they will flow to the next space we give them. Those particular cracks won’t be there any more, but my memories will find another place to call home. That comforts me.

Last week, we celebrated our last Christmas in this quirky little hold-out house. Our grown and flown sons wandered the rooms, unsure how things would look when next they returned, suddenly nostalgic about finicky light switches and the poorly insulated oven. We made lists of what is coming, what is going, what needs a plan, another home.

Leaving a quirky little hold-out house is hard as well.

But, then: there was this →

This felt great.

Thank goodness for the county’s hazmat collection site. I loaded my car with 30+ years of accumulated toxins and felt virtuous, almost giddy, all the way there and back.

So the hard is softened by the satisfying. And while the move weighs on me, it also lightens me and I remember why this is what we want.

 

How to Change the World

Central Falls High School teacher Seth Kolker wrote:

The goal for our course on “How to Change the World” is simple and bold: by the end of the year, each student will have a working theory of how they want to change the world. All year, we’re going to meet inspiring student activists, lawyers, non-profit leaders, community volunteers, and elected officials who are working to make local change happen. And in April, we’ll travel to Washington, DC for a weeklong trip students are planning themselves.

And so they did.

It was, in a word, amazing.

I talked with the students about how curiosity just might help change the world.

Listen to Choose to be Curious #54: How to Change the World, with the Students of Central Falls High School

The students’ visit also provided an opportunity for an exciting cross-collaboration between Arlington Independent Media’s TV and radio productions. I was delighted to partner with Nathan Bynum and his Youth Can Change the World program to feature the budding activists.

Listen to Curiosity to Go, Ep. 27: You(th) Can Change the World

I hadn’t thought about the effect seeing their own words — designed, and in print — would have on the students.

It was profound.

I told them: if you stop and listen to one another, you’ll hear how eloquent you are.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the students of Central Falls High School:

Now you can subscribe to Choose to be Curious on iTunes.

201

201 is an HTTP status code indicating a new resource was successfully created in response to the request

201, in binary (11001001), is the title of an episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

Upon upload, I received a cheerful message from WordPress that my most recent blog entry was the 200th post on Listening to the Universe. That (1) came as something of a surprise and (2) makes this #201.

Upon reflection, I thought: right!  I’ve been at this almost exactly two years, and with two posts a week, every week, mostly reliably for those two years, well, here I am: 201.

And upon further reflection, I realized it was time to listen to the universe anew. Which in my case has meant deciding to hit the pause button on Listening to the Universe.

I put my listening ears on this week, both fabricated and figurative. As a Roving Reader at a local elementary school, I donned tiger-striped ears and read the story of Elizabeth Blackwell, first American woman to earn a medical degree in the U.S. to first graders; a charming confection about a child “zooming” with his mother in her wheelchair to Montessori preschoolers; and a story of Ella Fitzgerald’s youth that taught me a thing or two and kept the 4th and 5th grade band members on the stage in rapt attention despite the lunchtime din coming through the curtains behind them.  My fuzzy headband was meant to model good listening, but the kids didn’t need reminding.

I came home and put my listening ears on again, sans fur. I heard the deafening yawn of my own disinterest and knew, in my bones, it was time to acknowledge that my energy and focus are elsewhere. That this blog, in this form, was right for that time. That I’ve said what I found I needed to say, for now, here.

That it’s time to listen, deeply, to the voice that calls me in a new direction.

I invite you to join me on that journey. Much of it won’t seem very different from a lot of what you’ve seen here: in Choose to be Curious I share episodes of my radio program and plan for periodic and more in-depth writing on curiosity.  There are a few old Listening to the Universe nuggets you might recognize there already: the talk that got me started; reflections on the magical mix of curiosity and walking [this one too]; the roots of what I hope will be a robust body of work on leading with curiosity, and various interviews. It’s been fun to revisit them of late.

I began with this….

Then today, two days after my birthday, I find myself on a liquid diet, preparing for tomorrow’s colonoscopy. It’s a routine procedure and, other than a previous cancer diagnosis, I have no particular reason to be worried about it. But it is still a reminder that there are no guarantees. That life is short. So you should just do things and stop worrying about whether it’s good enough already.

Today I am reminded that my best decisions in recent months have all been about things that pushed me outside my comfort zone. That the universe offers up opportunities complete with encouraging messages more often than we realize — if we will only listen.

So here I am, taking a deep breath amid all my unvarnished work-in-progress dust, and plunging forward before I can second guess myself again. Spinning this out there among all the other stardust. Trying to listen when the universe talks. Trying to learn as I go.

The learning? I’ve certainly deepened my appreciation for the discipline of writing. I have a new reverence for the awesome accountability of wholly self-imposed deadlines and the power of operating outside my comfort zone.  I have a newfound and profound admiration for the the many, unexpected and unsettling places teachers lurk and of the innumerable lessons yet to come. It feels like two years well spent.

Please consider signing on to receive the Choose to be Curious blog posts, as you have received these. It’s been wonderful knowing you are out there, along on this journey in some form or another. Thank you for being a listening ear as I’ve tried to listen to the universe — and to myself. I am delighted to have found wisdom in both.

I hope you’ll join me next time. Until then — choose to be curious!

 

West of the Moon, East of the Sun

I’m like a woman possessed. With a plan in hand and about ten irons in the fire, things are definitely heating up. My days are full of reading, note taking, Post-it making. My walls are covered with stickies. My mind, with even more.

As I felt around for something to grab me, N. reminded me of Tolkien’s line,

All those who wander are not lost.

So I poked about, reassuring myself I wasn’t lost, exactly, just not on a known path. My plan: to get a plan.

And then this curiosity bug bit me and suddenly I’m mocking up a web site, prepping a workshop, pitching a TEDx talk and a radio show, and thinking forget wander/lost, this is wonder-lust!

I’m reminded of another passage from Tolkien, less often reprised, that captured my imagination back at 17…

Still round the corner there may wait,

A new road or a secret gate:

And though I oft have passed them by,

A day will come at last when I

Shall take the hidden paths that run

West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

 

 

 

An Inventory, or Energy Follows Attention

The new year seems ripe for blogging, what with resolutions, in-and-out lists and all. But I confess I find the ripeness rather daunting, at best wonderfully and wildly optimistic, at worst a pungent false promise.

When I feel daunted, I like to break things down, to crumble those walls into their component peddles and boulders. It helps me find a way over, around — or through. I remind myself: in the last year I’ve acquired terrific tools for this very purpose. I have my proverbial hammer and chisel. My shovels and picks. My tweezers.

Having hacked at this particular wall for several days now, I can brush the dust from a few pieces and regard them anew:

• a placeholder note, taken from a now-forgotten source, among my blog drafts: “energy follows attention”
• this week’s practice from my Community of Reflection to design our own “promise in being in the world” – a synthesis of self – who we show up as in the world, making explicit our implicit nature
• appreciation of the power of a single word to organize and simplify my life. I chose “light” one year, when I needed it most.
• Chip and Dan Heath’s “bright spots” and their admonition to “do more of that“
• and this, from Kurt Lewin: “If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.”

My rough inventory reminds me that the new year need be less about resolution than reaffirmation, more about focus than anything else.

I didn’t set out to do so and I’m not committing to focus as My Word of The Year. Not yet, anyway. But much as I did with light, I like its layers and multiple meanings. Focus a camera, focus the mind. Intention, clarity; purpose. Focus: a point at which rays of light, heat, or sound meet — or diverge. In my family, the Focus is an actual gathering place, an especially cherished spot, for story-telling, firelight, fellowship and s’mores.

And if energy follows attention, then focus would guide me into and through a year whose promises are many, potential huge, possibilities almost endless.

May the new year treat you well and offer adventures that engage, inspire and energize you.  Happy 2016, Friends!

Resisting “Retirement”

How is retirement going?

The question comes with some frequency and, I assume, generally good intentions. But it makes me bristle. Every time. I chafe at what it seems to suggest. I want to reply, “Reboot. It’s a reboot!”

What is it that is so unsettling about a simple word? Anything that gets to me like that is certainly worth understanding better. So: what is it?

I’ve always been fascinated by language. English is rich with complicated words of incongruous, multiple meanings. We’re fortunate to operate in a tongue that offers such depth and nuance. Even when it’s messy. Maybe especially when it’s messy.

To retire is to retreat, to withdraw from action or danger, to remove oneself to a place of privacy, to move back, to go to bed.

It also means to stop working — with a musty aura of Old Age about it.

For me, the other meanings cast long shadows and discolor the workplace version. They suggest narrowing, slowing, a kind of defeat. Death.

And that’s not been my experience at all. My experience has been all about an infinitely expanding universe, all about moving toward action and danger, going forward. Getting out there. Life.

S. is going through a similar transition. He thinks if we’re going to live to 90, we need some new ways to think about the back thirty. I’m with him. I submit: we should retire “retire”. What we need is a new moniker for a new paradigm.

“Retire” comes from the Middle French retirer, re- + tirer to draw. Now that makes some sense — what we’re doing here is redrawing the landscape — but if such a connotation ever existed, it’s now long-gone.

I like “reboot” – it feels right, has that techno-current thing going on. But what do you think? What would you call it?