We Reap What We Sow: Modeling Positive Adulthood for Adolescents
216
We Reap What We Sow: Modeling Positive Adulthood for Adolescents
216eBook
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Overview
As anyone who lives, works, or spends any time with teenagers knows, adolescence can be both the best of times and the worst of times. Teenagers are undergoing miraculous, world-altering shifts. In light of these changes, how can society help adolescents move safely from teen to adult? How can adults and adolescents engage with each other in ways that are positive and mutually beneficial to one anothers journeys?
In We Reap What We Sow, author Dr. Anne W. Nordholm blends philosophical and educational approaches to demonstrate how you can cocreate an abundant future and help you guide a young person toward an engaging and meaningful adult life. She first describes what it means to know ourselves and the difference that knowledge can make. She then offers strategies that, when modeled by adults, adolescents absorb not from what we say but how we behave.
Every person must figure out a life that is individual, is connected to a community, and has a particular historical context. This guide explores how we know and connect to our communities and how historical consciousness assists us in finding and creating meaningful work. It also considers how we can be better guides to the next generation via skilled and disciplined communication and reconsiders the institutions weve established for adolescent learning to better reflect what we understand as effective adult maturation.
Through the strategies presented in We Reap What We Sow, adults can help youth navigate adolescence to become healthy, thriving human beings.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781475989571 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | iUniverse, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 07/02/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 245 KB |
About the Author
Dr. Anne W. Nordholm earned a PhD from Marquette University. She is a constructivist learning coach and has served as a university faculty member, project coordinator, district learning coordinator, and school development coach. She has also taught at all grade levels. Nordholm lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Read an Excerpt
We Reap What We Sow
Modeling Positive Adulthood for Adolescents
By Anne W. Nordholm
iUniverse LLC
Copyright © 2013 Anne W. Nordholm, PhDAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-8956-4
CHAPTER 1
Know Yourself
* * *
Make sure that [the device] is set up properly and connected to the network.
Before calling for service, review this list. It may save you time and expense. This list includes common occurrences that are not the result of defective workmanship or materials in [this device].
If [the device] is not operating, be sure the plug is pushed firmly into the electrical outlet and that the device is turned "on."
These samples are text from real user's guides. It seems that, increasingly, over the forty years that I have accumulated owner's manuals and manufacturer's instructions for devices, the distributors of such documents have added longer and more explicit troubleshooting tips to their booklets, which are usually prefaced by, "Before you contact our customer service department ..."
Now imagine that every time our lives get a little out of whack, we are able to consult an owner's manual for possible solutions to the current operational crisis. Believe it or not, human beings come equipped with manufacturer's instructions and complementary troubleshooting guides. Though these remedies are not found in the convoluted, overly technical text of guides for technological gadgets and household appliances, we can engage our physical and nonphysical feedback systems to tell us when something is off. We can also use our skills of learning, creating, and adapting to get ourselves back "on" and operating in alignment again. We gain access to our self-contained and externally reinforced owner's manuals by becoming self-aware and proficient in learning, creating, and adapting. Knowing oneself is the pathway to the owner's manual and smooth operating.
The shuffled and dramatic version of the "owner's manual" is usually introduced to human beings in adolescence. Based on varying circumstances, the manual could be dumped on us all at once. In other cases, the manual comes more incrementally—chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence. It all depends on the unique, nontransferable journey of each life. For example, in normal development, at around the onset of puberty, an adolescent's brains, hormones, physicality, and emotions reorganize in ways that highlight the contrast of being a member of a group as well as a separate and unique individual. This realization is at once terrifying and liberating. Anyone who remembers his or her own adolescence, has parented adolescents, or has spent much time with them can speak to the trapeze ride between autonomy and belonging that marks the adolescent passage, a particularly challenging chapter of the owner's manual.
I remember when our son went through a challenging phase in his early teen years when, according to his values, he had to be seen in acceptable, brand-name clothing—regardless of the cost or who was paying for it. From his perspective, his identity demanded it. I gave great speeches about balancing individuality and peer pressure with a dash of financial responsibility, but the line between autonomy and belonging was narrow and constantly changing. Paradoxically, it was essential to look like everyone else while individuating—the proverbial keeping up with the adolescent Joneses. We all know adults who are still working to reconcile this duality of self and group, apparently having missed or misunderstood this chapter of the owner's manual.
Based on the work of José Ortega y Gasset and the other thinkers included in this book, being an authentic adult human being includes living one's life mindful of one's design. By design I do not mean a linear pursuit of perfection. The assumption here is that human design is a flexible, dynamic tension among three components: learning, creation, and adaptation. These three design elements are common to all living systems and serve life's intention of alignment and expansion with a universe of infinite energy. These dynamic system processes fluctuate between contrasting phenomena such as infinite/finite, death/birth, bliss/struggle, freedom/enslavement, ritual/novelty, and capacity/passion. Discovering one's identity along these continua happens as a person engages with and responds to his or her circumstances. Each of us attempts to reconcile these tensions, and by doing so we consciously evolve ourselves to thrive in increasingly complex environments and with increasing understanding of our own alignment with possibility. The more we expand and evolve, the more we understand the owner's manual and the more self-aware we become.
As early as 1914 in Meditations on Quixote, Ortega began to explore his philosophical stance that individuals are not separate from their circumstances. His now-famous philosophical premise—"I am I and my circumstances"—provides a useful lens for revealing and pursuing the general attributes of an authentic, self-determining adult. For Ortega, human being and becoming was all about what happens as each person negotiates between the necessities of our physical world and the freedom of our nonphysical world. A human self who is fused with his or her circumstances is, for Ortega, the most essential owner's manual tip for understanding the human "device."
The world is designed to expose contrasts and compel choices. By these contrasts, life reveals to us, individually and collectively, the harmonious functioning and the discordant malfunctioning of human life. In turn, the experiences and insights of life help one to have preferences and to choose paths aligned with learning, creating, and adapting that satisfy the wants and needs of the physical and the nonphysical self. In this process of self-awareness and evolution, each person comes to accept and reject previous assumptions and beliefs that he or she and the community held.
For example, in the early twentieth century, many scientists and philosophers began to seek clarifications and deeper distinctions in the human instruction manual and imagine the possibilities of human life from a quantum perspective rather than a Newtonian perspective. Beginning with (and going beyond) Einstein's exploration of reality, a notion of quantum fields has been permeating the thinking about matter, energy, their relationship, and the implications for understanding what it means to be human.
Quantum theory is based on the idea that reality is iterations of boundless energy that is interconnected across space and time. This quantum field of reality, considered to be all energy coexisting in time and space, suggests that a self's probabilities and all potential experiences are limited merely by what we can imagine and allow into consciousness. The natural cycle of learning, creating, and adapting is consistent with and better understood using a quantum interpretation.
A quantum perspective significantly influences one's understanding about cause, effect, and agency. If we are connected to everything in the quantum field, then we are connected to all knowledge and wisdom in a dimension beyond physical space and time. Proximity of time and space, which are limiting variables in Newtonian-model physics, no longer determine reality because our reality is now considered to be organized patterns of energy and information that are unified with everything in the quantum field.
Consistent with Ortega's early understanding of quantum theories, Joe Dispenza (2012) in Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One suggests that each of us is a distinct energy pattern. Our specific histories, circumstances, physiologies, personalities, and experiences inform our personal webs of existence. While human beings share common attributes, individual energy patterns have unique aspects that get pushed and pulled. Each person will necessarily struggle with distinguishing his or her own unique energy alignments from those assumed or inherited from family and community. One example of this is the way a person "chooses" his or her religion. Many children inherit and pursue the rituals of a particular religion without checking in with themselves about its appropriateness or alignment with their lives. Some young adults reject the religion of their parents using the exact same lack of process. It is through self-awareness and intentional choice that the values we embrace and live by are aligned with who we really are or not.
Our personal webs of existence, our energy, are shaped by our choices and perceptions and, in turn, shape the energy that is seemingly external to us. We are in a perpetual, existential energy dance of nonphysical energy and physical energy. As Dispenza (2012) asserts, "Mind and matter are completely entangled. Your consciousness (mind) has effects on energy (matter) because your consciousness is energy and energy has consciousness. You are powerful enough to influence matter because at the most elementary level, you are energy with a consciousness. You are mindful matter" (KL 543–545).
Dispenza goes on to explain that the entanglement of our consciousness with the physical world requires that we accept the unknown as a necessary and equal partner in our lives. "This principle asks us to lay down what we think we know, surrender to the unknown, then observe the effects in the form of feedback in our lives. And that is the best way we learn" (KL 805–811).
Dispenza concurs that one of the tasks of being human is seeking alignment, at which point our behaviors synchronize with our aspirations and our actions manifest our desires. "When our minds and our bodies are working together, when our words and our deeds are aligned ... there is an immense power behind any individual" (KL 1083–1084). We are reassured that we are operating according to the manufacturer's design when we have the sense of ease and fluidity in the world and when we have the feeling that "this is right."
How do we arrive at this synchronized level of self-awareness when each life emerges onto a stage already filled with players, specific dialogue, expectations, and assumptions? There is a rather "dis-integrating" effect of the phenomenon that we enter into an already furnished life. The challenge for each of us is to learn to recognize within our circumstances the choices that are consistent with ourselves versus those options that are imposed on us and that need to be culled or reconfigured. We have all heard the urban legend of the woman who, for years, lops off the end of the ham before cooking it. As the story goes, when her daughter comes of age and becomes responsible for cooking the holiday ham, a debate ensues as to the cause and reality of lopping off ends of hams. As it turns out, the woman's grandmother began the "tradition" because her ham did not fit in her inherited roasting pan. Not only had she inherited an insufficient pan, she also had inherited and passed on for generations a belief that was based in pragmatism, not some ideal of human best practices.
An example from my own life involves men wearing hats inside homes and restaurants. I know, I know—who cares? However, as a child and young adult, I heard my parents' and grandparents' discussions that led me to believe that this behavior is rude and insulting to the hosts of the event or owners of the restaurant. I am now hardwired to bristle at the sight of someone wearing a hat indoors, especially at a dining table. Our son's generation has a different conversation about hats during dining—no big deal! No matter how I may attempt to reign in my judgments intellectually, I am conditioned in how I think about this act, knowing full well that it has been imposed on me from some other generation's understanding of social class.
Self-awareness toward alignment is not always fun or easy. Distinguishing my beliefs that are my own from those that I have merely received without question is difficult. In fact, many circumstances in life nudge a person to abdicate his or her freedom to respond authentically (in alignment). For example, mass media today projects others' beliefs and values on audiences at record levels. How many commercials are squeezed into a show? If the average person watches four to six hours of television per day, that is a lot of influencing tastes and preferences. In a consumer economy, mass media sells citizens an understanding of the world that suggests that personal consciousness or self-determination is not required. Advertising and commercial programming suggest that there is a common standard of an abundant life to which each of us is entitled. In addition, if one merely buys the product, engages the services, or follows the program, he will find himself blissfully aligned with an abundant universe. After all, it is uncomfortable, hard work to stay conscious and deliberate about finding oneself. The accepted standards of human being and doing are broadcast by cultural media and can become a default identity waiting for the unconscious. A default identity will simply mirror the readily available dominant (and heavily marketed) alignment identity of the society. A person may feel actualized even though, in reality, he or she is merely wearing the ideological wardrobe of others.
The unfolding and development of any authentic, self-determined life is partly influenced by the degree to which the person invests in self-awareness and the discovery of his or her unique alignment with the energy structures of learning, creating, and adapting. Self-awareness should be a natural and liberating process so that the activities of learning, creating, and adapting are connected and intentional. Branching into unknown territories can evoke feelings of vulnerability and fear. Unfortunately, human beings have the ability to minimize the experience of fear by going unconscious, which is a defense mechanism that takes all sorts of shapes and forms and is used to protect us from vulnerability and fear. The most common forms of unconsciousness include numbing oneself with food, alcohol, television, work, days filled with moment-to-moment activities, and so on.
As individuated creatures, we have a mechanism for self-referral. We human beings are equipped with a way to check in with ourselves to know whether what we are about to choose is sincerely in sync with who we say we are and who we intend to become as material and nonmaterial beings. We have five senses that give us feedback about pain and pleasure in the external world, and these senses help us survive peril and thrive in material gratification. We are also equipped with a feedback system for our interior world—our emotions. With awareness and practice, we are able to refer to our physical and nonphysical feedback systems for orientation and guidance.
As socialized creatures, we have a tendency to turn wisdom from self-referral into reference points for others. We struggle with the idea of our unique journeys when we assume that something that is true for us must be true for all. In our well-intentioned desire to serve our intuitive sense to survive as a group, we tend to enshrine standards of alignment that seem to evidently apply to all successful lives. While learning is a natural design process, each learner needs to learn, create, and adapt along personal existential lines. So while all humans will wrangle with life's many dualties (e.g., infinite/finite, bliss/struggle, freedom/enslavement, ritual/novelty, capacity/passion), each person's struggle will be somewhat unique because the circumstances or context of each struggle is personal, nontransferable, and compelling to that individual life. These hazards and available options for the quest and reconciliation are revealed and concealed along the unique energy pattern that each life is. Therefore, while witnessing examples, sharing experiences, and exchanging wisdom are useful, each individual life needs sufficient liberty to navigate its unique alignment.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from We Reap What We Sow by Anne W. Nordholm. Copyright © 2013 Anne W. Nordholm, PhD. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse LLC.
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