Timothy Scott Bennett's Blog: Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word

I seem to have what might be called a tenuous relationship with the concept of friendship. While for most, the title of this piece speaks to the obvious and accepted nature of the friend relationship –

Person A: “Hey, thanks for doing that thing.”

Person B: “That’s what friends are for!”

– for me, it’s an actual question. What ARE friends FOR anyways? It’s not always clear to me.

I think this is built in to me, this utilitarian view of human relationship. My easiest social interactions are those for which the utility is clear. Interactions with shopkeepers and waitstaff and postal clerks? Easy-peasy. I understand what the interactions are for, and how they go, and what the roles are, and so am able to move through them with a minimum of alarm, and get a small and sufficient hit of social connection as a bonus. Everything about it feels honest and open and rational.

But, for me, relationships such as “family” and “friendship” are more difficult. The rules, roles, and reasons are less clear, the utility somehow assumed or unspoken or hidden or nonexistent, and the potential for unpredictability therefore heightened. I’m less able to know what might happen. Anything might happen. And I’m less certain about how to respond when anything does.

This all became quite clear to me when I was in a band. When we were playing music, when I was singing or smashing the mandolin or banging the drums, I was comfortable and happy and glad to be there. When we took a break and just hung out, I began to notice how much more difficult that felt.

It’s not that I don’t have many people with whom I am friendly, or whom I like, or with whom I interact. I just need to have a clear sense of the reason for my relationships. Most people, it feels like, are offended by the notion that friend and family relationships need to be for something, as if to speak of utility is to speak of using somebody. As if friendship and family are not explanation enough. As if, were it not for their usefulness, I would go away and abandon them. Perhaps for them, the utility of their relationships is obvious: friendships give them the monkeywired warm-body-effect their animal bodies need. And that is enough. Perhaps the utility is so obvious as to need no conscious thought or explanation.

But it’s not like that for me. I seem to have less need for warm bodies. I don’t much care to just “hang out” and “shoot the shit” and “party hearty” and all of that. And relationships apparently cost me more than they cost most others. So it only makes sense to me to be clear and discriminating in my choices. As my stepdaughter once said, or words to this effect, “a relationship with somebody else has to be better than being by myself, otherwise I’m not interested.” That always resonated with me. I’m pretty happy just being with myself, most of the time. Why would I want to be with other people if our time together wasn’t, in some way, better than my time alone?

So people’s fears do have some truth to them. I do assess my relationships in a cost-benefit manner. I do go away when a relationship doesn’t suit me, when the costs are too high, or the benefits too low. I do make judgments. I do seem to have different needs and desires from many others. And I do need a clear and conscious understanding of what a relationship is for in order to stick with it. I went away from Facebook for this very reason, and ended up on Twitter. Facebook feels more like hanging out and shooting the shit with friends to me. Twitter feels more like the marketplace. Facebook feels more unpredictable, wilder, filled with argument and persuasion and judgment. Twitter feels like a trip to the store or the post office, where people are open and honest about what they’re selling, and happy for a small hit of social interaction.

Sally says that I, as an Aspie, really only need one deep, close, intimate relationship with another human that really gets me. (In fact, one of the clues to my Aspie neurology was my take on relationships in general and the specific challenges of my relationship with Sally.) It’s true. Most of my social needs are met within my marriage. But I have room for other relationships, when I can find ones that align with what I want, and which make my life better than it is when I’m alone.

While I consciously took myself out of the friend game a couple of years ago, deciding to strictly limit such social activities as “hanging out” and “shooting the shit,” there are a few people with whom I (as a part of the Sally and Tim couple thing) happily spend time. These are people with whom my relationship to them makes some sort of sense to me. I know what it is for: I get to have with them the sort of deep discussions I love, on topics I’m interested in, in the open, questioning, dialogue sort of way that excites me. They are invariably truth-tellers, ready, able and willing to tell the truths of their lives, which fascinates me and helps me relax. And they are people with a proven ability to question their assumptions and examine and be responsible for their own triggers, so that any differences that arise between us can be processed easily, and not lead to conflict. The costs of relationship are low with these few souls, and the benefits are high. So I stick with them.

I understand that, to some, this utilitarian cost/benefit approach to human relationship might seem odd. But I wonder sometimes whether most people actually operate this way, and if I’m just conscious of the process, and open in the way I speak of it.

What do you think?

The post What Are Friends For? appeared first on Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word.

I just finished Chip Walter’s book, Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived. I have a lifelong interest in human pre-history™ and evolution, and found much of it quite fascinating, if decidedly materialist™ in its metaphysics when it came to discussing human consciousness. A good, fun tale, IMO. I’m glad I read it.

The book has an epilogue which Walter calls “The Next Human,” in which he discusses some possibilities for the future of human evolution, especially in terms of culture and technology and how those forces intersect with biology. The epilogue contains, not to my surprise, a warning:

“Evolution, as the past four billions years have repeatedly illustrated, holds an endless supply of tricks up its long and ancient sleeve. Anything is possible, given enough millennia. Inevitably the forces of natural selection will require us to branch out into differentiated versions of our current selves, like so many Galapagos finches… assuming, that is, that we have enough time to leave our evolution to our genes. We won’t, though, and none of these scenarios will come to pass. Instead, we will come to an end, and rather soon. We may be the last apes standing, but we won’t be standing for long.”

He goes on to say that we have invented “a world for which we are altogether ill fit” and that “in ourselves, we may have finally met our match,” becoming, with our consciousness and culture and ability to innovate, “an evolutionary force to which even we cannot adapt.”

It’s at this point that the author surprised me. Rather than launch into the usual Doomer™ laundry list of “horrible” problems™ we© have created, and which many think will “take us out,” he puts his focus elsewhere:

“The best evidence that we are growing ragged at the hands of the Brave New World we have busily been rolling off the assembly line is the growing numbers of us who freely admit to being thoroughly stressed. A recent study reported that the United States is ‘a nation at a critical crossroads when it comes to stress and health.'”

When I say “surprised,” I mean happily so, as I’ve long considered the evidence for stress as a compelling argument in support of my basic contention (not original to me, to be sure), which is that modern humans living inside what Daniel Quinn termed “the Culture of Maximum Harm” are not busily “saving the world” for the simple fact that “the world” – the culture and its institutions as they exist in the larger planetary setting – is not really what they want, and is making many (or most) of them miserable. And the signs of that misery, as Walter goes on to show, are everywhere, and are easily seen in the statistics, from addiction and abuse to mental illness and depression, from obesity and relationships to racism and scapegoating and the number of people experiencing dental problems from grinding their teeth. As John Elder Robison says in Switched On, his new book in which he recounts the story of how an experimental procedure called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) changed his emotional experience as a person with Asperger’s:

“Before TMS enlightened me, I thought the reason I often felt somewhat down was that I could not receive positive emotions from other people. Now I knew the truth: most of the emotions floating around in space are not positive. When you look into a crowd with real emotional insight you’ll see lust, greed, rage, anxiety, and what for lack of a better word I call “tension” – with only the occasional flash of love or happiness…. Now everything I heard, saw, or read was fraught with feeling, almost all of it negative. Everywhere I looked people were scared. It was impossible for me to stay on an even keel in the face of such overwhelming unpleasantness, and I wished I had my autistic emotional oblivion back. Great as the TMS-derived insight was, it came at the cost of losing a powerful protection. Without it, I was essentially naked in a hostile world.”

Stress. Tension. A hostile world. Is it everywhere, as Walter and Robison say? Is stress in all of us, we who live in the global industrial culture, so strong as to act as an evolutionary force? I think so. It surely seems to be a major factor in Sally’s and my life.

For myself, I find that stress falls into three general categories: the neurological, the existential, and the situational. The first is a matter of Aspie wiring, a thing of pathways and grooves and ruts, a background crackle of hiss and pop as my meatbag™ sizzles on the bug zapper of heightened awareness and sensory activity. It’s the panic that fuels the attempts to control. It’s the pulling away from sounds and sights and textures that irritate or offend or distract. It’s the flight or fight or freeze that gets triggered in the open glade. It’s the head full of chattering spin doctors endlessly arguing about good and bad and right and wrong, the “nattering nabobs of negativism” with whom I share brain space, and whom I have had to learn to ignore, just as John Nash did.

Like the first category, the second operates primarily in the background of my being, a wash of existential worry and wondering and wandering that rises in general terms, I think, from the inherent vulnerability of living in a limited, limiting body in the physical bands of reality, and in more specific terms from the more pointed vulnerability of living in the decidedly surreal times and circumstances of our “post-exuberant” world. It’s the felt sense of what Daniel Quinn termed “cultural collapse,” in which the fact remains that very few of our facts remain, where the known and the believed and the consensed-upon have all been left stabbed and bleeding on the sidewalk, where the touchstones of God™ and History™ and Matter™ and Reality Herself™ have all been torn apart on the witness stand, cross-examined by the dominating voices of science and materialist philosophy and culture and the increasingly inescapable consequences of our collective global-industrial experiment in growth and control. Where do I belong? What’s real? What does it all mean? Where am I headed, and how will I get there, and what purpose do I serve along the way? It seems that the fundamental questions never go away, and never quite find a satisfactory answer, and reality itself bobs and weaves when I try to grab hold of it. The centre does not hold…

And then there’s the situational stress, the more immediate and life-based questions and uncertainties and experiences that tend to stand out as signals against the underlying noise. We’re moving. Again. We’re fixing up houses. Selling houses. Downsizing belongings. Sorting and choosing and deciding. Finishing old projects and contemplating new ones. Moving into a new career phase. Moving into a new climate. We’re saying good-bye and we’re saying hello, saying no and saying yes, asking the ancestors and looking for doors that open. We’re busting our butts every day hauling and repairing and constructing and painting and tiling. And all of that adds to our stress.

Do we invest more to make our houses more sellable? Do we change their legal structure? Offer incentives? Where do we spend our money, and when? Do we want to be absentee landlords if we cannot sell? Is there any way to get our investment back? Do I put the editing on hold in order to make this move? Do I begin the next book? Will we regret living in the hot summer South? Will we miss the Northern climes? What will it be like, to be live so close to so many people, so much growth, so many cars on so many roads? The uncertainties are endless. There are few “right answers.” There are risks to take. There are past mistakes. There are broken relationships. There are fears. Anger. Hope. Expectation. Excitement. Doubt. Loneliness. Plans. Dreams. And all of these things add to our stress.

But here’s the thing: even with all of this stress, even though there are days when we’re sore or exhausted or down or irritated or afraid or overwhelmed, we seem to be thriving. Sally and I are working well as a team, and finding enjoyment and fulfillment in our tasks, and are learning to surf the waves of uncertainty and stress with ever greater skill and grace.

We’ve learned to recognize and make conscious the stressors in our lives, to put voice to them so that they do not control us from behind the curtain. And we have a number of daily practices we use to counter or alleviate our stress. We take a number of supplements and probiotics. We eat high-quality food. We take a long walk, during which we discuss and share and process our thoughts and feelings. Sally listens to podcasts while she works, soaking up the thoughts of teachers and leaders and gurus. I listen to wonderful music. Together we do a twenty-minute relaxation response exercise. We talk to the Cosmos, the gods, the ancestors, and ask for guidance and assistance, and look for ways in which we are not alone with all of this. We get as much sleep as we can, here in this place where the sky begins to brighten at three-fucking-thirty in the goddamn morning.

We’re finding a way to beat the stress, to use it, to even befriend it. Because while Walter may end the book by talking of stress as a negative force, it’s also clear from his long history of human evolution that it was stress that made us who we are, that shaped the human animal. Counter to the fantasy that humans were born and raised in a lush jungle filled with low hanging fruit, it seems that, while there have certainly been many times and places in which life was indeed sweet, it was really a series of massive changes and hard situations that pushed us along the path to here and now.

At one point, due to ice-aged climate changes (and perhaps the proximate effects of the Toba supervolcano), H. sapiens was reduced to a few thousand souls, clinging to hardscrabble life on the southern shores of South Africa. Think of it. Now that’s what I call a bottleneck. And yet when the stressors ended, we bounced back to spread across the globe, bringing new meaning to that famous Nietzsche quote: “that which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

And I think that’s what Sally and I are feeling these days. Stressed, but stronger. We’re doing it. Figuring shit out. Making better choices. Feeling more clear. And feeling able in our bodies. A recent study showed that it’s not actually stress that is harmful. It’s the belief that stress is harmful that is actually harmful. So we’re doing our best to not regard the stress in our lives as bad or wrong.

Walter thinks of stress as an evolutionary force. I would observe that evolution (whether of bodies, cultures, or ideas) tends to work by selecting for the few individuals, the new mutations, who are better suited for new and changing conditions, and selecting against those who are less suited. Some get swept forward in the grand parade of lifeform packaging (sorry, couldn’t resist..). Most get left behind, unable to thrive in the new conditions. In our rapidly changing world, perhaps our learning to surf the waves of stress will give us an edge. If not at the level of biology, then at least at the level of culture and thought and relationship and creativity.

It may be a hostile world™, but we’re not entirely naked and vulnerable. That feels pretty good.

The post Surfing the Waves of Stress appeared first on Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word.

I like to think that one of my superpowers is the ability to see, identify, and call into question the assumptions underlying thoughts, beliefs, feelings, ideas, and words.

Part of this superpower is, I think, a natural ability, an inborn proclivity, a gods/genes-given mashup of cognitive gifts (language, working memory, pattern recognition, etc) and the focusing effects of my Aspergers neurology. My finely-tuned attention to language, and my compelling interest in the literal and rational, leaves me on constant alert for those things which undermine, distort, or confuse meaning and hinder communication.

(It also leaves me prone to use such things as “scare quotes” and Trademarks™ and Copyright © symbols to help highlight the fact that the word in use carries underlying assumptions which can or should™ be called into question. Redundant, yes, as all language is metaphor, but there it is.)

(It also, I think, because I understand the rules so well, leaves me with the gift of being able to break those rules, create new associations and new meanings, and enter into the realms of fiction and poetry.)

Another part of this ability comes from training, from doing years of work with Landmark Education, from reading widely, from working with a guru/therapist, from participating in “intentional” communities and dialogue circles, and from processing life on a daily basis with Sally.

And another part of this superpower arises from reactivity and trauma. Being born really smart and acutely observant and “Aspie-logical” into a family and school system and society where the basic rules of human psychology made the identification of underlying assumptions challenging for many, and in which biases and beliefs and associations and expectations and reactions tend to rule the day, I had a hard and miserable time making myself accurately seen and understood. That left some fairly deep scars.

So as I walk through the world, whatever gets said, or written, or believed, or pronounced as “true,” my mind automatically assesses it for both literal and poetic truth, and tries to identify the assumptions which underly it, and calls them into question where appropriate. This is why What a Way to Go and All of the Above. This is why my lifelong interest in “the fringe,” whether it be UFOs, the paranormal, spiritual systems, idealism, quantum physics, alternative history, anomalous data, the philosophy of science, etc. This is why my focus on culture and story and belief. This is why my interest in human psychology. This is why my writing now about Aspergers. In each case, my mind sees a lush field of assumptions at work, assumptions which have fertilized an overgrowth of belief ™or “story” or so-called common sense© or pronounced “truth,” things which, I say, are due for a good trimming.

My mind sees the unwarranted assumptions, the distorted conclusions, the inaccurate communication, and my gut tightens and my face clouds over in the presence of such unfair, unsupportable, limiting thoughts and ideas and I HAVE TO POINT OUT WHY THEY ARE WRONG! When I see the waveform of possibility collapsed into the solid matter of belief, I feel offended. Affronted. Frustrated. Sad. How dare you settle so easily for a concrete reality when there is so much glorious uncertainty out there, so much mystery, so much possibility, so much yet unknown and awaiting discovery? How?

(That’s how it feels. I didn’t say it was pretty.)

I know “how,” of course. I know because I do the same darn thing, over and over. I make pronouncements. I say how “it is.” I assume. I believe, based on incomplete data and faulty evidence. I use labels and names, condensing down the truth™ for easy consumption and more “efficient” communication, painting the whole of the Cosmos with a limited number of brushes and a few habitual hues. It’s almost as if it’s impossible for the human animal to live otherwise. (We might argue that it’s this very experience of limitation™ that serves as “the reason for coming here” in the first place.) At some point, I have to forget that the floor underneath me is™ “composed” of mostly™ “empty space” and tiny blips™ of “vibrating information” or thought or whatever the hell™ and just accept that it’s made of wood©. Otherwise, I might never get up and make it to the bathroom.

But even if it’s “impossible” to live completely free of assumption and belief, it feels possible to be conscious and aware about where I choose to walk the easier, more comfortable concrete path of belief, and where I attempt to keep my balance on the high-wire of questioned assumptions and uncertainty and limited knowing. It feels possible to work at this every day, and to get more proficient. And it feels important to do this work with others, since it’s so much easier for me to see the unquestioned assumptions at work in the people and culture around me than it is to see the unquestioned assumptions at work in myself. Only others can shine a flashlight into “what I don’t know I don’t know.” You show me mine and I’ll show you yours!

Except that this feels much easier said than done. It has taken me a long time to “get” that not everybody wants this, or thinks like I do. It turns out (what a wonderful, neutral phrase) that sometimes people want or need to just work things out for themselves, without anybody else’s help or advice or wisdom or experience or thoughts or ideas or opinions or solutions or answers. And it has taken me a while to “get” that one of the reasons people don’t do this is that questioning assumptions and beliefs can feel uncomfortable and disturbing.

It shouldn’t have taken me that while, because I have all the evidence I need regarding the uncomfortable aspect of this work right in my own body. When Sally points out to me where my own unquestioned assumptions and unwarranted beliefs are at work, I squirm like a worm on a hook. I’ve so identified with being right™ and “correct” and smart© that any hint of a mistake on my part hits me in the gut. I reach out to steady myself, but then grab, instead, the third rail of hot, electric shame that runs right through my center. It takes everything I have not to turn and run.

But I don’t turn and run. Not usually. I stand there and breathe deeply and just sit with the feeling. Because I know, because I have a wealth of experience to tell me so, that this work, as uncomfortable as it can feel, is the work that frees me up. I’m burning away habit and reactivity and ego. Cutting away automatic and unconscious thinking. Peeling off the thick, sticky layer of assumption that I use to protect my vulnerable core. I am, every day, in every way, getting better and better at “relating to what’s so as what’s so.” I feel more sane. More free. More aware, not only of my self, but of the world around me.

And that helps me to become more of myself in the outer world. I get to share my gifts, at least with those who want them, and add to the conversations and dialogues in which I participate. In some settings, I am often the one who can point out the cultural assumptions at work in someone else’s suffering, and in so doing help them find a measure of relief.

I get to put my training and study into action, using my skills and knowledge where appropriate to help us make choices and decisions and find new ways to think about ourselves and the world around us.

And I get to reclaim my sense of sanity, as I get more and more clear that the things I see and know, the things I have always seen and known, while limited by my single human viewpoint, are nonetheless a real and valid and helpful piece of the larger “truth.” I get to feel that I am not crazy or wrong or bad or silly or flaky or moody or a worrier, but am instead a highly sensitized soul preternaturally™ attuned to certain bands of sensory stimuli, and in that way, I apply a healing balm to my old wounds.

Ah… balm…

The post Will Question Assumptions For Food appeared first on Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word.

After traveling around the country (and into Canada) doing screenings for What a Way to Go, Sally and I began to gather groups of souls together for what we called “dialogue circles.” Sally’s a highly skilled therapist, coach, and group facilitator, and she designed these circles based on ideas from David Bohm (the quantum physicist behind “formal dialogue”), Scott Peck’s community building work, and our own accumulated experience and wisdom. Our groups ranged from maybe nine people on the small end up to thirty five or so on the large end. They lasted for three days, and involved morning, afternoon, and evening sessions, and would generally total up to between 25 and 30 hours spent sitting in circle, when all was said and done.

The dialogue circles could be thought of as a process designed to sideline, or strip away, at least temporarily, the human ego-structure™, that suite of ingrained or habitual beliefs, expectations, thoughts, reactions, values, and assumptions which tends to run most human beings most of the time. The process could be stressful at times, as it can be very painful, to have one’s structures stripped away, or exposed for the limiting, reactionary, and sometimes insane (unrelated to reality) things that they often are. People usually identify their ego structures as “who they are,” so the process can feel like an annihilation of self.

But the process, in my experience, and I think for most of those who stuck it out to the end (some people would leave in the middle) was ultimately freeing, heartwarming, and inspiring. To my mind, what emerges in the absence, or quieting, of the habitual chatter of our “monkey minds,” is a new energy, palpable in its strength, which speaks with a wisdom and clarity far above that of any of its individual participants. And for myself, I would say that a dialogue circle is one venue where I can most clearly feel my love for other human beings.

One thing I would say that I learned in my bones from these experiences is that the phrase “of like minds,” as it is generally used in our culture, is not a helpful notion. People are often in search of, or feel pleased to find, what they call “like minds,” others who seem to believe as they do, think as they do, and want and value what they want and value, people who will join them in some project or action which is important and meaningful to them, or who will join with them in creating community.

But so often, groups of “like minded people” fail to work out the way the individuals involved had hoped they would. They start out with great intentions and high hopes and compelling vision, but then conflict arises and the group, unable to process the conflict, settles for limiting structures or tolerance or rules, or devolves into infighting, or breaks apart completely. Those once wonderful “like minded people” turn out to be mere human beings, with all their shortcomings and foibles.

Dialogue circles go through this process. They start in a honeymoon period, what Peck called “pseudo-community,” where everybody is just tickled to be with others who seem to want what they want. For a while the conversation feels light and easy, as people get to know each other. But after a while, differences begin to emerge. People share their various thoughts, feelings, goals, values, and positions with the group, only to learn that not only do the others in the group think and feel differently, but that some of them have triggered reactions to what they say, or even oppose them. “Pseudo-community” progresses into what Peck called “chaos,” as people learn that these “like minded people” surrounding them are confused, mistaken, damaged, or even crazy human beings. The members of the circle set about to convince, convert, or heal each other.

This does not work. Those “like minds” are actually deeply different, having achieved and earned their differences from long and wildly individual lifetimes of experience and learning. Those differences are not easily given up. The conflicts between them continue for a long time. And sometimes the interactions get very difficult. At the end of the first day of a circle we held in Vermont, one participant summed it up. “Well,” he said, “that was brutal.”

It’s at this point that groups face a choice: they can stop the chaos and “retreat into organization,” constructing or adopting a set of rules and limitations and behaviors and agreements and hierarchical structures which will keep the chaos to a minimum and allow the group to function, albeit rarely in the manner they’d imagined in their hopes and visions.

Or they can do something that sounds impossible or crazy to most people: they can continue to push through the chaos. They can continue to throw themselves against the mountain of differences and conflicts. They can continue to try to heal or convert or convince each other. They can continue to try to “power over” the others.

And then something magical can happen. Because eventually even human egos will tire of this. And eventually it will become clear that this will never work. And eventually it will become clear to the participants how limited their own viewpoint is, and how unfounded or incomplete their assumptions are, and exactly where it is that they do not know what they do not know. And eventually it will become clear that the others in the room hold their differing thoughts for real and understandable reasons. And chaos evolves into what Peck called “emptiness,” and the room grows quiet. Because what is there to say when you finally get that none of your habitual thoughts or positions or arguments or beliefs work they way they always had before, to keep you in control, to protect your vulnerabilities, and to make sense of the entire universe? Fuck.

The human ego can give up in such a space. The habitual programming which serves as one’s default interface with the rest of the Cosmos proves insufficient to control the situation. You literally don’t know what to do or say. And there’s little choice but to surrender and grow quiet.

But once you give up you are free to notice other things. Like the fact that those other people around you, the one’s who are so wrong, the one’s you have been unable to convince or fix or argue out of their delusions, they’re good, real, living human beings, doing their best with what they have. They’ve stuck it out, and stuck with you. They didn’t go away, even as you strove to control them, even as your told the real truth of your experience, even as you exposed your vulnerable places, even as you risked. And darned if some of the things they said didn’t make some sense. And darned if each of them, at one time or another, even the quietest or craziest amongst them, didn’t say something that was the exactly right thing to say, that added to the conversation, that brought a piece of wisdom to the room.

And in the space of emptiness, something becomes clear: those others, those “like minds” who proved to be so surprisingly “unlike,” have a great deal more in common than their differing thoughts and beliefs and assumptions might make it seem. These are not “like minded” people, but “like hearted,” and each of them is wanting something good and helpful for themselves and for others, just as you are.

What can arise in this space of emptiness, in my experience, is the palpable feeling of love for these others. Each is essentially good, and doing their best from where they stand. Each has a piece to share, a valuable experience that informs, a unique viewpoint through which they see the world.

And when you give up control, and accept the limitations of your own human experience, and feel in your body how much you don’t even know that you don’t know, and grow tired of your own habitual reactivity, and then you learn that you are surrounded by others who can see things you do not, you then have access to something you didn’t have before. Instead of navigating the world of problems and situations and questions and decisions from only your single, limited viewpoint, you can now face these things from a group perspective, seeing it from many more angles and through many more lenses than you ever could before. Once you give up your egoic desire to be right and in control, you find yourself in the space of group wisdom. And in my experience, that group wisdom can enter the room like a presence, a spirit, a force that enlivens and animates every member of the circle. It refills the space of emptiness with something new, and “pseudo-community” blossoms into “true community,” and nothing is ever the same again.

These experiences have been difficult for me, to be sure. Because I’m so smart, and so knowledgeable, and so “right” about so many things. Because I’m so wounded and defensive and reactive. Because my Asperger’s neurology is so prone to overwhelm and so in need of habit and routine and control. Because my vulnerabilities are so near the surface. Because I am usually so undone in the presence of strong feelings and conflict.

But they have been instrumental in helping me become clear about who I am and what I need. And in that way, these experiences have ruined me. Because now I know what’s possible for human relationship, and it is difficult, and even uninteresting, for me to settle for something less than that. I wilt in the presence of pseudo-community and the honeymoon game of “like minds.” I get lost and confused in the presence of unspoken and unacknowledged differences and conflicts which never get processed and revealed. I get bored with human ego structures, since I have one myself, and have seen all its tricks, and have little interest in the habitual output of others’ default programming, the limited set of assumptions and beliefs and thoughts and values and expectations proffered and pronounced as “truth” and “is.” I am suspicious of solutions and answers and advice which have not sprung from a community of souls, and suspicious of those purveyors of answers who have not submitted fully to the rigorous process of true dialogue, in order that their answers might arise from the wisdom that groups can access.

What I really need in order to love people is for them to show me something beyond their ego structures, and to allow me to do the same. This is what Sally and I have done together for all of our thirteen years: we’ve conducted an ongoing two-person dialogue circle, in which each of us regularly offers our differences to the “group,” pushes through the chaos that arises, works to re-establish emptiness, and falls back into community with each other. As wounded and reactive as we can be, we lay our limitations and vulnerabilities on the altar of dialogue, find the space that lies beyond control and judgment and rightness, and, together, find the wisdom greater than either of us.

Sally is better than I at creating this space of dialogue out in the world beyond our duprass. My Aspie nature can make this a risky venture even in the best of times, and my life of traumatic experiences, disappointments, and mistakes adds to my hesitancy. But in the sacred space of a dialogue circle, I can set these things aside and find my self, and my voice. And slowly, at least with some, I am growing slowly better at finding at least a part of this out in the world. I have been unable to find much of what feels like true dialogue and true community online, though I have looked far and wide. Facebook, in particular, feels to me like a place stuck in “chaos,” where attempts to convince, heal, and convert too often rule the day.

And it feels risky to me, to seek this in the real world, as so few seem to want what dialogue offers, or believe it to be possible, or are willing to submit to a process which asks them to suspend the strategies they have been using to survive in and control their worlds. But I remain convinced that dialogue circles, as difficult as they can feel, offer something that adds to our lives, and to the world, in amazing ways. Learning to question my assumptions and enter into collaborative dialogue, even as it has proceeded in fits and starts, has felt like an evolutionary step for me. I wonder if it would be an evolutionary step for human culture as well, or at least the righting of a boat that got overturned in the storm of the dominant global culture. Learning to integrate the practice of seeking group wisdom with the gifts of hyper-individualism may provide distinct benefits in a quickly-changing world, conferring survival value to those who practice it as the forms of an unsustainable system unravel around them.

It may be that, by re-establishing ourselves in a place with a much larger population, Sally and I will seek again to continue this work in some new fashion. Leading groups of some sort, perhaps. Working with couples or groups of couples. Perhaps working with Aspie-Non Aspie couples. The work can feel difficult. And it is difficult to know for sure whether it wants to manifest in the physical world. But the possibility is compelling, and the experiences from the past continue to tug at our hearts.

We await the next adventure.

The post True Dialogue appeared first on Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word.

As John Lennon sang to his son, Sean, in his song Beautiful Boy, “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” While the idea is not original to Lennon, it’s a useful reminder for me these days, as both my life and my plans continue to shift and slide underfoot.

It’s not that life has gone bad™. It’s just that it continues to be marked by great change, as Sally and I continue to further clarify who we are, what we want, what we need, what we are called to do, who we are called to do it with, and where we are called to be when we do it. Some of it’s exciting. Some of it is frightening. Some of it is daunting. Some of it is satisfying and fun. But all of it is change, and all of it can and does result in higher levels of stress.

And all of this change interrupts and distracts, leaving my plans to protest their frustration. Blogging slows to a crawl. Editing proceeds in fits and starts. The next book rattles impatiently in the hopper, teasing and scoffing. And all that book marketing stuff? Back burnered, baby, and waiting its turn.

Instead of writing I’m sorting and downsizing and recycling and repairing, lifting and hauling and hammering and cutting and stacking. Most of which I actually like doing, for one reason or another, save for the fact that it keeps me from my plan™, which is to focus on my writing career. So I can’t really enjoy it, and instead spend my time suffering about what I’m not doing.

Sally, of course, bless her heart, thinks that we can find our happy™ even in the midst of such change and stress and distraction and interruption. So I listen to her and do my best to see if she’s right. One of the things we do is stop and remind ourselves, or each other, whenever we think of it, that, actually, right now, right in this moment, everything is good.

And it is™, because in pretty much every moment of my life, there are all sorts of things I can point to that are right™ and good™. It’s the whole “roof overhead, food in my belly, clothes on my back” thing, and it’s true: I have much to feel grateful for.

But then I pause and think, because it also seems true, in those moments when we stop to acknowledge that everything is good, that the moment also contains anxiety or worry or a general background of distraction and alarm. And I protest a bit, because, really, we can’t say that everything is good in the moment, can we? I have both food in my belly and anxiety in my guts, don’t I? And I begin to wonder whether this is all just another instance where what the positive affirmation actually does is strengthen the negative thought it is meant to counter. (Which, according to many, is pretty much what all affirmations do.)

But then I stop again, and realize that I’m the one who’s labeling the anxiety and alarm as negative. And I ponder the possibility, as I have before, that, in fact, my fundamental neurological setting of alarm and anxiety is not as much a blessing as a curse, given the great levels of awareness and attention it confers upon me, and the gifts and skills that result from that.

So, then, uh… maybe everything is good in the moment after all.

It’s all so fucking confusing sometimes.

Ah well. The monsters come. The monsters go. John Lennon sits on the edge of my bed and sings me to peaceful sleep. Change abides. Life intervenes.

My plans will just have to adapt.

The post In the Now appeared first on Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word.

I can’t seem to write a post these days. I tried, this past two weeks. More than once. Started with an idea. Wrote a few paragraphs. Then I stopped, and never got around to finishing it. And most days, I haven’t even tried.

(This post was the same. I began it days ago, and was unable to finish it until now.)

And editing work on Rumi’s Field has slowed, as I’ve had to stop and isolate a long conversation between Linda Travis and the Fisherman, outline it, figure out what’s going on, what needs to be there, what needs to be cut, re-outline it, and then plod through it, hacking away at large chunks of text that are simply too damn long to suit the story.

Maybe “block” is the wrong word. I am slowly moving forward. I am putting down words and forming sentences. I’m just having a difficult time sinking into it. I’m not feeling excited. I’m too distracted by other things. It’s more blah than block. Writer’s blah.

Most of this I ascribe to the outward changes of my life. Sally and I are getting the condo ready to rent to vacationers. Getting prepared to head north for the summer. Getting houses ready to sell. And we’re looking further out, searching for a new place in the NC Triangle. This background swirl of change and uncertainty and newness provokes my wiring into high-alert and leaves me distracted. I am unable to find the peace I need to find my creative flow.

So I’m not worried about this blah. I’m not panicked, thinking it’ll last forever. I realize why it’s there, and trust that it will come to an end. I’m just ready for Rumi’s Field to be finished and out in the world. I’ve got more books in the pipeline, wanting my attention. And other work in the world.

Ah well. I’ll get there. In the meantime, life goes on in other quarters. I’m reading good books and articles. Listening to good music. Watching interesting series. Sally and I walk daily on the beach, and continue our marvelous conversations about life, the universe, and everything. It’s all pretty good.

Summer in Maine will be nice. We leave Atlantic Beach tomorrow. Head to the Triangle to look at real estate and see the kids. Then head to the mountains on Vejibiz. Then north.

And then somewhere else. And then somewhere else after that. We keep moving…

The post Writer’s Block appeared first on Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word.

Sally and I worked our way through the series Nurse Jackie on Netflix over the past couple of weeks. It was at times compelling and moving, and at other times silly and overdone. But mostly it was brutal, a relentlessly “real” depiction of addiction that refused to settle for a happy ending.

I found, as I watched it, that I was growing ever more angry with the show’s protagonist, played to cold perfection by Edie Falco. Didn’t matter how skilled she was as a nurse. Didn’t matter that she was so human and real and good with her patients. She was a liar. A lying, lying liar. And I hated her for that.

I know that I’m supposed to realize that it was the addiction that was lying. I know that I’m supposed to be compassionate, and think of her addiction as an illness. I know that her addiction was a response to an extremity of pain she could not bear to look at. I know that she was raised in a culture where true healing for such pain is a rare thing. I know all that. But still I was angry with her.

It’s a tough call, isn’t it? At what point do we hold people responsible for their choices? At what point do we stop and realize that what might appear to be choices are not really choices at all, from their point of view?

I struggle with this daily, as I continue to process my own life issues, and deal with the lingering effects that lies have left in my life. I have been hurt by the lies of a pervasive and unacknowledged family system, and the surrounding culture in which that system is embedded. And I spent decades telling my own lies, trying to fit in and not be found out.

And I think it’s more difficult for me because of my Aspie neurology. I find other human beings disturbing enough as it is, without adding lies to the mix. It’s all I can do, it feels like, to learn and understand the social rules in play. But when the social experience includes falsehoods, either deliberate, unconscious, or by omission, I can feel really confused. It should come as no surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed another Netflix series, Lie to Me, as it was all about the exposing of lies, and the protagonist’s heightened ability to detect falsehood. Yeah… that’s what I want.

The biggest saving grace of Nurse Jackie is that it had a secondary character, another nurse named Zoey, who was the perfect foil for Jackie. Zoey was completely open, an irrepressible truth-teller, and I loved her for that. She’s the sort of person I aspire to be: caring, supportive, and totally able to speak the truth as she sees it in every situation.

Maybe Showtime needs to do a spinoff series.

The post Lies Are Bad, M’Kay? appeared first on Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word.

I feel like I’m going through a phase change. Something stable is quaking. Something unbalanced is settling down. Something new is emerging.

I think, having explored “Asperger’s” as a useful story through which to view my life and my being, I’m ready to flip my vantage point. Having now realized the great explanatory power of my Aspie diagnosis in understanding what’s “wrong” with me, I’m growing more interested in using it to focus on what’s “right” with me.

I could go on with observations and complaints and rants about my challenges and limitations and confusions and needs (and I will no doubt continue to explore that side of things) but the truth is that every limitation I have comes with a corresponding ability or superpower, and every challenge has led to greater growth and maturity and awareness. If I but take a few steps and view the scene from a different angle, what I see changes dramatically.

If my Aspie diagnosis was a bus that hit me as I was crossing the street, then I’ve lain there on the pavement long enough now to get over the stunning shock of it all, and have pushed myself to a standing position. I’m alive. The essential core of me is unhurt. I’m changed but whole, and able to walk. Now it’s time to continue along my path, albeit with a “bus print” on my back.

I feel like I should say that “acceptance is the key here.” As if moving on to another phase requires that I first “accept” where and who and what I am. But there’s something about the word “acceptance” that bothers me, as acceptance carries inside of it an inherent judgment. I don’t have to work to “accept” something unless I first judge it as somehow “bad” or “wrong” or “undesirable,” or something over which I have no control, just as I’m now in a conversation about learning to “accept” the heat and humidity of a North Carolina summer.

But I’m looking for something more than that. Acceptance feels like a set up, as if I’m walking a tightrope, from which I can easily fall back into judgment. I don’t want to just accept myself and my limitations and eccentricities and needs and desires, any more than I want to simply accept the summer heat. I want to love myself. I want to cherish every bit of who I am, scars and limitations and deformities and oddities and all. I want to show off my “bus print” like a treasured tattoo, not a mark of shame or a scar reminding me of past failings and mistakes.

As if those scars and limitations and eccentricities and marks are exactly what I came here to get.

As if it’s those scars and deformities that make me beautiful.

The post Phase Change appeared first on Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word.

Good morning all. My posts have become more infrequent as of late. There is much going on in the background which is taking up my time, from continuing to work through the Rumi’s Field edit to making preparations to return to Maine for the summer. Life may just be extra-full for a few more weeks, as we relocate again, and continue to make changes in our lives.

I do have lots I could write about. Just a little bit of thinking left me with another dozen ideas for posts. I’ll get to them in time. I thought, since it’s Sunday, that I should write another “Sunday Cross Words,” but when I tried, I realized that I didn’t want to be in that space or ranting. I didn’t want to feel bad about something, or angry, or disappointed. There’s just too many good things in my life, for me to try to put myself to step into the space of cross words on purpose. I go there often enough out of habit.

The sun was shining and the air was cool so, instead of rant-writing, Sally and I headed out early for our morning beach walk. Saw an abundance of Brown Pelicans skimming just above the ocean’s surface. Saw my first terns on the beach, a pair of what I’m guessing were Least Terns, from the size of them. They looked like miniature Laughing Gulls, but flew in a flittery way that no gull does, save for Jonathan when he’s feeling frisky. Very fun to watch them, and they let us get fairly close.

I’ll be back here as often as I can during this time of transition. I want to write more about the word “contrived.” I want to talking about lying, and rules, about confidence, and IQ, and trauma, and why editing is so very painful for me. And I will.

For now, I wish you all a wonderful Sunday. And may all of your cross words be in the newspaper.

photo credit: Least Tern (Sterna antillarum) via photopin (license)

The post Least Tern Before You Enter Maine appeared first on Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word.

A usual morning. Slept in a little later than usual. Drank my coffee and updated my Twitter and scrolled through my newsfeeds. In the background, like an app I forgot to close, runs a vague note of anxiety. It changes how life looks and feels, like a pair of sunglasses over my heart and mind.

As if often the case, I don’t have anything in particular I can point to as “the cause.” My life is a swirl of coming changes and loose ends and new possibilities and unfinished works and interrupted routines and broken relationships and old regrets. Any of those could be the “reason” for my distraction. It could be related to insufficient sleep, or something I ate, or an imbalance of intestinal flora, or some personal eccentricity of “bad chemicals” or “faulty wiring.” All I know is that it’s there, and that it colors my day, obfuscating the sunshine like a thick morning fog.

I don’t know whether it would help me, were I able to discern “the cause.” It might. The anxiety feels akin to those 4 A.M. insomniac worries, the ones that make me thrash and churn through the wee hours, but which disappear in a puff of silliness in the light of day. So were I able to shine the light of “reason” and “cause” on my anxiety, it might evaporate. But I’ve spent so much time trying and failing to put my finger on the cause that I feel exhausted at the thought of doing it again. And experience has told me that even were I to know the cause, it might not disappear.

I also don’t know whether my anxiety is a good thing or a bad. It feels intimately connected to my heightened awareness, and it may be that my highly alert neurology, though it comes at a cost, confers upon me a certain survival value, and serves as the source of my superpowers. And there’s a distinct overlap between what I term “anxiety” and what others might call “excitement.” While my swirl of a life can frighten me, it also calls to me, enthralls me, and goads me.

Perhaps anxiety is simply the beckoning of the Cosmos, which pulls me ever forward down the path. I wonder, what would life look like, and who would I be, were I at peace?

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