Ampersand Gazette #51
Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on some of the news of the day. If you know others like us, who want to create a world that includes and works for everyone, please feel free to share this newsletter. The sign-up is here. And now, on with the latest …
&&&&
What if our alienation stems, at least in part, from a profound failure of our educational system to teach the habits of connection, most of which boil down to thinking of others before speaking to them? So let’s put kids together and teach them how to talk, to hear and be heard, to resolve differences and forge consensus without flameouts, rupture, vituperation.
This solution is hardly new. Invented by educators and philosophers in ancient Greece, the discipline of rhetoric—originally defined as the study of persuasion and now more commonly known as the art of public speaking—remained the cornerstone of education until the 1700s.
Our modern educational system, largely developed in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Age of Reason to serve the needs of the Industrial Revolution, prioritizes the acquisition of knowledge and technical skills while demoting speech to the realm of soft skills.
The result: Students spend the better part of two decades learning to solve problems on paper, then graduate into a world of real-life speech, where professional and personal success often depends on making decisions in groups of people with diverse viewpoints.
When speakers put themselves in their listener’s place, they find it easier to explain themselves. The confidence that we can make ourselves known and understood is transformative.
For 2,000 years, rhetorical training allowed us to talk, argue, fight, negotiate and engage—even with those we disliked. If the term feels too fancy, let’s call it success skillz. By any name we choose, it’s time to resume teaching the skills that form the basis of interaction and a civilized life.
Words are cheap indeed, but neither history nor humanity has contrived a better means of coming together to address injustice or to explore the meaning of truth (mine, yours, ours). What’s good? What’s right? What do you think? Talk to me.
from an Essay in The New York Times
“Talk to Me”
November 27, 2023
Today’s page-a-day calendar by Mary Engelbreit boasts a mere two words: Only Connect. Only. As if connection in this day and age were that easy. But, as John Bowe writes above, what if it is?
Prerequisite to connection with others is always and forever connection to the self. What do you believe, want, choose, about the issue at hand? Until you know that, you have no basis for connection with others.
The first hurdle to connection with others is to realize that most of what we deem connection in our tech-ridden world isn’t. Likes, clicks, data are not connections, and never will be. There’s a reason they’re called Facebook friends. Really.
Real connection is up-close and personal. Sure, it can happen via technology, but that’s a matter of the connectors involved. If you want to connect, you will. If you don’t, you won’t.
The second hurdle is figuring out whether you want to connect or you don’t, and I promise, you do have a choice. There’s nothing wrong with choosing not to connect to certain persons, nothing at all, your reasons notwithstanding. But our Judeo-Christian based culture, whether you are Jewish or Christian or neither, has violently misconstrued a major tenet of faith which has skewed this portion of connection for a long, long time.
We have taken Love one another as a blanket instruction. The Rabbi in question, at the time, was speaking to twelve people. Not the crowd of five thousand. Twelve. If you have real connection with twelve people, you are multiply blessed. Twelve, only twelve.
Consider the facts here: start with your family. Most of us have two parents, some have as many as four. So, already then, we’re one-third of the way through loving one another. Got siblings? One? Two? Let’s call it two. Okay. Now there are six love-one-anothers left. Six. A bestie. Or a small friend group, say three more. You grow up. Dang, only three left! Alright, one spouse—down to two. How about two offspring. Zero slots left. There are twelve people whom you love.
Which doesn’t take into account … work colleagues, group members of any kind—a Greek society, a merit society, the military, a special-interest gcohort, continuing education. I could go on and on.
Real connection requires desire, Beloved. You need your Free Will to choose to connect, and then follow through. Again and again. Because real connection isn’t usually a one-time thing, although, it can be. I held a mall door open for a mom one day juggling a toddler, and twins in a stroller as well as her purse and a diaper bag. Our eyes met for … what, three seconds? Five? I can’t speak for her, but I know I felt like I’d had a whole relationship in that interchange.
I taught public speaking for several years, what Mr. Bowe calls rhetoric, strangely enough, in a community of genuine rocket scientists. From top to bottom in the organizations I served, no one was comfortable connecting with other persons. No one. And their public speaking skills—success skillz, as Mr. Bowe redubs them—were deplorable.
They ate up my training. All of them had the experience of the shades going down over their audiences’ eyes when they spoke of their work. None of them knew what to do. In fact, a group researching the use of radioactive isotopes to treat breast cancer, to a man, (and yes, I mean what I say) were thrilled at their success, and they needed to know how to communicate that to their higher-ups, especially since the latest trend was for them to have to make the case for their next year’s funding in order for their work to have an annual budget.
Anyway, they gave their presentation to the bean-counters and got a turn-down almost before they finished speaking, so they hired me to help them craft a better presentation. At the time, the going rate for consultation services like mine in that market was fifteen hundred dollars an hour!
I showed up, asked them to give their presentation, and almost fell asleep during it. B-o-r-i-n-g doesn’t begin to cover it. And yet, I could see they were trying to connect; further, they were connected to one another.
I said here’s my best advice. Begin your presentation with these sentences …
How many of you have a mother? A favorite auntie? A sister? A wife? A daughter? A niece? A grandmother? Well, if you do, listen carefully.
Then I told them to give the exact same presentation as before. All of the team were completely disenchanted with me, disgusted even. They lamented that my fees were so high, and that I had so few tricks up my sleeve to help them. All except … the youngest researcher on the team. He was about my age.
He spoke up, and said, “Well, I don’t care what the rest of you say, I’m going back to the budget team and doing exactly what Dr. Corso recommended. What’s the worst thing that can happen? They’ll turn us down again.” Grumbling, grousing, rugga-rugga-rugga, peas and carrots, peas and carrots, peas and carrots.
I volunteered to stay (at no charge for the time) until he returned. Off went Young Guy Rocket Scientist, armed only with a few sentences, and the presentation they’d already given. Within forty-five minutes he was back—with their work funded for another year, in full.
What happened? He connected. He thought about the simplest way to make what they were doing day-to-day matter to his listeners. If any one of those women got breast cancer, he told them, this was the fastest, healthiest, least invasive cure. No wonder they listened.
Connection takes desire, and it takes time, mostly thinking time to figure out how whatever you want from your discussion affects, not you, but the other person.
Only connecting is easy, especially with the twelve you’ve decided to love, if you’ll set your body, heart, mind, and spirit to the task. You can motivate the other side to see your side, by identifying their self-interest, if you’ll make the time, the commitment, to talk and listen one to the other.
P. S. this phrase caught my eye in this morning’s Times Letters to the Editor: “skills employers care about—collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creative innovation” all of them both learned and enhanced by connection first to yourself, and then to others.
&
“Why does what you are experiencing right now need to have some greater purpose?” my therapist asked me. “Not everything has to be meaningful and you don’t have to grow from it. Why can’t it just suck, at least for the time being?”
A large body of psychology research shows that constructs such as growth mind-set,
gratitude and construing meaning out of struggle can promote well-being. However, there are times when what you are going through is so painful, vexing and void of purpose that trying to adhere to these constructs hinders, rather than helps, your healing.
Not only is what you are going through terrible, but you end up judging yourself because you can’t even do what all the self-help books, inspirational podcasts and #growfromstruggle social media posts tell you to. The result is you feel as if you’re not even good at feeling bad. Which, of course, only makes you feel worse.
from a Guest Essay by Brad Stulberg in The New York Times
“Not Everything Has to Be Meaningful”
November 26, 2023
Ever wanted to be good at feeling bad? Me neither. And yet, I have definitely had times when I needed to stay in my (not-so-good) feelings until they lifted despite all that I knew about metaphysical approaches and cures.
What sets those experiences apart?
I’d call them Ts in the Road.
And although I disagree with Mr. Stulberg’s therapist, I agree as well. Some situations need to be given larger space in a life, especially when they feel like they have no meaning. My disagreement with the therapist comes from the conviction that all things in a life have meaning—whether we know what that meaning is at the time or not.
When we don’t know the meaning of something, it’s best to hold still, and allow it to be. As in, Don’t just do something, sit there. For real. I believe meaning can have a ripening process, and it, like grieving, has its own mystical timeline.
I thought I knew at a very young age what it meant that my dad died in a plane crash when I was five. I couldn’t possibly have known the fullness of it until I lived into that knowing—that’s what I mean by ripening. Believe me, my insights at age twenty-six, the age he was when he died, were worlds apart from those of the five-year-old.
Not only that, but an event that we think we’ve “settled” in our thoughts can rise up with no warning to add another layer of meaning whenever it’s appropriate.
Only you can know the difference between a mundane event that can be let go at day’s end and a T in the road. It’s your call.
This is why humans have the ability to self-reflect, to witness to self. Every event will eventually reveal its meaning in its own good time, and often it comes as an epiphany, something that changes everything.
Be good to yourself, Beloved. The holy-days of whatever festive cycle you celebrate are upon us. Go gently. Breathe deeply. And gift yourself all season long.
&
Don’t forget this bottomline prayer. It works every time …
&
And in publishing news …
I’m on the last lap of The Lazy Verbs List—only six left—and then I’ll read the whole book all over again. It’s been a slog this time, but I’m so glad I took my time. The book is all the better for it. I anticipate that I’ll be able to turn in a clean MS to my beloved editor, bookhusband (and legal husband) Tony Amato before Christmas.
If you are in need of a good editor, you’d be wise to consider Tony. You can find him here. All of my books are exponentially better because of his brilliant attention. It doesn’t matter where you are in the book writing process—an idea kicking around, fifty thousand words written, done and needing a line edit, or facing a revision, he’s good at all of it.
I’ll also be re-reading Jezebel Rising and Jasmine Increscent in preparation for two-volume paperbacks of those in the New Year.
So while I’ve taken my time with the lazy verbs, and I was up to my eyeballs in debutante books for Jacqueline Retrograde, I’m also reading cultural histories of the circus—one of the first home-grown forms of entertainment, and the roots of the four Baileys in The Subversive Lovelies. These subversives are determined to have their stories told, and soonish! Plus, I’m missing writing.
The first two of the tetralogy can be found at the live link above, and I’m expecting to public book three within the first quarter of 2024.
P.S. Don’t forget there are plenty of gift possibilities in my oeuvre … The Mex Mysteries, The Boots & Boas Romances, and The Energy Integrity Chakra Workbooks. For even more, visit The Emporium on my website.
&
As for my chakra work, I’m currently working on a delightful chakra playlist as a giveaway for next year.
Listening to different treatments of the same song has been a fascinating process for me. The song is Pachebel’s Canon in D Major, and apparently, it one of those you can hear in all kinds of music.
Here just for fun is one of my favorite of all-time Pachelbel videos. Enjoy Rob Paravonian’s rant!
I’m hoping to be able to release the playlist soon after January 1st.
&
I’m also still dreaming The Phoenix Initiation tetralogy, the first volume of which is called Ancient Umbrage. Nary a day goes by without finding some little-known fact or yummy article all meant to support this series. I find the world a magical place because of this conspiracy phenomenon.
Isn’t it amazing how everything works in our favor?
If we’ll allow it, believe it, and expect it.
&
This is the little tree I park in front of season in, and season out, in the grocery store parking lot on Wednesdays. Just this morning we had to make a quick stop for a forgotten item … and we brought a couple of ornaments to cheer other shoppers. As we enter the holiday season, I am aware, as are we all, of the stress that many of us suffer at this time of year. If you can, add a little cheer in some public place where you’re holy-daying this year in the name of genuine connection. I am, of course, more convinced than ever that And is the solution to everything, and so, Be Ampersand, Beloved, until next time.