Is Integrity Obsolete?

“Yeah, cash is great.  You don’t have to pay tax on that,” Sally said.

 

I just stared at her, stunned.   “I report all of my income.” 

Now it’s her turn to look at me like I’m an alien lizard from Alpha Centauri, or clinically insane.  “I prefer cash for my international clients because it’s easier, that’s all.”  Now she’s looking at me with pity.  I’m really, really stupid, she’s thinking. Could be.

I admit to disappointment in my friend.  Professors Kohlberg and Gilligan developed frameworks to explain the levels of sophistication of our human moral reasoning, and doing whatever you can get away with is the level typical of a 3^rd grader.  Later in our development, we grow through understanding that general lawfulness makes everyone safer, on up to doing The Right Thing just because it is The Right Thing, from focusing solely on yourself through level after level until you arrive at the place where all living creatures are your siblings and the earth itself is your mother and father, and you devote yourself completely to the alleviation of suffering in the world.  Nobody gets to that summit but some folks get closer than Sally seems to be aiming.

Then there’s another colleague, who changed her email signature to “Amazon Best-Selling Author” a month before she even finished writing the dang thing.  Her reasoning: she had hired someone who guaranteed to make her book a best-seller (it only sold 200 copies), and thus she was just jump-starting what WOULD be true.  Except that she didn’t change it when she saw the sales results.  [Which were totally predictable, for a newbie author tackling a popular topic that had dozens of real bestsellers to compete against.]  I’ll bet that “I’ll make you a star” charlatan suggested it, but it was my colleague who did it, and still refuses to own her lie.

And she’s not alone.  Everyone who releases a print or even an e-book these days claims it as an “Amazon Bestseller” before it’s even on the metaphorical shelves.

I pity the real bestselling authors, who have their hard work and quality product cheapened because everyone (including me) who knows about the “Amazon Bestseller” scam, assumes they are lying also.  Except Ian Brodie, who does such good work, he doesn’t have to lie to impress you.  I’d be willing to believe that his book really IS the best seller in its category of e-mail marketing.

That’s something that my blow-hard pals don’t seem to understand.  If you cheapen the status of an Amazon bestseller because everyone with any level of thrown-together product is claiming it, then when and if you ever do achieve that real pinnacle, no one will believe you.  It’s a short-sighted strategy, based on the belief that the rest of us are too stupid to see the pattern.  We’re not.  So cut it out, already.  Work for your accolades, like your pre-iPad ancestors’ generations did.

My colleague – whose name really isn’t Sally and isn't even a woman – who thinks that integrity is something you turn on and off, is an example of the driving force behind so much cheating, on every  level, these days.  You tell yourself [and there’s always at least a tiny grain of truth in here] that you have been cheated, or the whole system is unfair and corrupt; this belief and the resentment it generates frees you from your moral imperative to being fair and honest yourself.   And then anything is possible.

Many people have a situational-cheater’s response to taxes.  Taxes are, as my anthropology students learn [see my YouTube channel Anthroisfun], the way that complex societies make sure that resources are redistributed.  In small groups of 20-40 individuals, as our ancestors lived for millions of years, until around 7,000 years ago, we shared our good and bad fortune on a daily basis.  No one hoarded; you shared the food you gathered or scavenged (or later, hunted) and no one went hungry.  If you made two knives, you gave one to your sister or cousin-in-law.  Once a money economy emerged, people could contribute coins instead of wheat and barley and goats, and still no one went hungry.  

Modern Western societies have become so complex, and so many of them,  including the USA, are unequal, unfair oligarchies, that the original purpose of taxing – to share food and provide for common goals like roads, medical care, education of the young, and defense against enemies – can be ignored, while you focus on the things you don’t like or approve of.  It’s impossible to have 330 million people agree on anything, including “the sky is blue.”  For example, in Seattle, the sky is actually varying shades of grey.  If we get a tiny patch of blue sky, we all go nuts and stop talking about politics for the duration of the blessed event.  My otherwise-admirable colleague could give you a litany of things that she refuses to contribute to, and thus is morally justified, in her own mind at least – maybe in yours – in pocketing cash that she refuses to share.

But taxes support children and disabled people, and I’ve been both. You have been a child.  If you are blessed to live a long life, you will be too old to earn a salary.  Taxes fix the roads, provide fire protection and libraries, and you need those things.  Taxes provide Sesame Street and Nova, the National Weather Service and Meals on Wheels; I’ve learned from the former and may live long enough to need the latter.  We all may.

 

I know how selective resentment can make nearly anything seem morally acceptable – and I am asking you all to become aware of it, too.  I have a class that brings people into connection with all the components of their ancestry (Meet Your Ancestors, launching on www.soaringdragon.biz/classes) including the noble and heroic.  These heroes are the parts of your DNA that you can tap into when you feel yourself getting up a head of steam around justifications for resentments.  A new class on Freeing Your Soul From the Poison of Resentment is debuting soon to give you tools for this.  

It all starts with awareness of what is really going on inside your thinking, and a commitment to listen to the better angels of your nature.  Deep breath and make a choice.  Pay your taxes, on all your income.  Give generously to those who have less than you do.  Realize what a hero you are for doing both.  YOU, my friend, are protecting seniors and children, and the disabled, and you are the guardian and protector of your community.  Be proud of yourself.  

And remember the Hindu scripture, “Do not despise your neighbors who are poor, for many poor people were once well-off.  And you may someday be poor.”  We’re all in this together, my friends, we truly are.

If we all learn how to call on our inner hero, regardless of the choices that the swamp around us makes, we will have a roadmap to creating a paradise out of this Earth that we have inherited. 

  Take a step on that path today.  Take another step tomorrow.  Repeat until the day you die.

Are You Sick of the Valentine Hoopla? A view that might surprise you.....

You Choose: What Does Valentine’s Day MEAN – Mindless Commercial Holiday or Deeply Meaningful Reminder Day?

What do you really believe about Valentine’s Day, right now? 

Some of my clients don’t celebrate.  There is a continuum from those who brush it off as a concocted, artificial, commercial sham, an excuse for everyone in a relationship to be guilted into gifts and expensive dinners, to the other extreme of a mellow “Let those who want to buy chocolate, do so.  It’s not harming anyone.”  Are you somewhere on that continuum?  

Others celebrate, and again there is a continuum of what is being celebrated.  At one end of the rainbow are the “We need a romance holiday, to help us remember that romance is what started us on the road to bills, diapers and trash pickup day.” And at the other end of the Let’s Celebrate are the people who are celebrating love, not romance.

I’m in the Celebrate Love camp.  In modern US culture, romance is what we mean we say “love,” but the word has a much broader definition.  That opening of the heart that is love encompasses how we cherish our favorite family, the brothers and sisters of the heart that our deep friendships become, the animals who enrich our souls and extend our healthy lifespan.  Our heart-opening is what makes us human.  Our caring for each other, those we know deeply and those of our community and nation whom we don’t know but who are beset with illness or troubles, is what ennobles our existence.  After all, every mammal species finds food, raises young and tries to stay alive.  Caring only for oneself means nothing.  Love for others, human and otherwise, known to us and unknown but in need, is our legacy from our 10,000 generations of ancestors and our gift to the future.  I think that enormous component of our humanity deserves at least one holiday – don’t you?

Can you celebrate Valentine’s Day as the holiday that belongs to every heart that knows and practices love? 

www.soaringdragon.biz

All the advantages of living in cities..... really aren't! Fascinating stats!

You know that urban neighborhoods are more ethnically diverse than small surrounding cities (aka suburbs), right?  With a more diverse political spectrum, right?  And big cities are where more and more people are congregating for better quality of life, right?

Turns out all of that is wrong.  Central cities are full of singles, urban neighborhoods are more uniform with respect to ethnicity AND political philosophy, and have the highest levels of economic inequality in the nation.  They are also lonely places where no one except the hipster singles interact outside of their immediate circle of friends.

It all makes sense.  What pulls people outside their homes isn’t just the mating game of the affluent Young Urban Singles that Microsofties are the poster boys/girls for.  There is much more ethnic diversity, political diversity and meeting-your-neighbors in surrounding small cities, because that’s where the child-raising is happening and kids pull you into church and PTA activities. 

One of the stats that runs particularly counter to popular assumptions is that high-density megacity neighborhoods that are multi-cultural are NOT highly interactive.  It turns out that having to navigate a half-dozen different social and cultural norms, and people whose goals, needs and preferred living style are at odds with yours (seniors who want quiet at night and parents of babies who are anything but, comes to mind), along of whom are right on top of you, without adequate soundproofing or privacy, does NOT cause neighbors to reach out and connect, kumbaya.   It creates the stereotypical city culture of everyone living parallel lives.  Parallel lines never cross, you’ll recall.  As someone who has lived in moderate to megacities, yes, indeed. 

So what on Earth am I talking about?  A fascinating library read by Joel Kotkin [The Human City], focused on the kinds of human environments cities and small surrounding cities create.  It turns out that it’s not what I – or maybe you – thought it was.  

Let me explode more barriers that are holding you back from living the life that you want to live!  www.soaringdragon.biz.  Email for a FREE Getting Unstuck session today.   victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com

5 Ways to Boost Your Energy, Boost Your Joy, Lose Weight AND Much More!

 One of my constant refrains in my group coaching as well as individual programs is that joy comes from learning new things. If you haven't done any significant non-career learning in a while, this probably sounds .

So here's my suggestion: trust me enough to try it. Options are endless. There are practical classes (what to do when the next disaster strikes; how to fly-fish, etc), and there are fascinating, intellectually-stimulating classes (how did the early Christians evolve their idea that Jesus was god; how did dinosaurs evolve into birds; how to write engaging travel stories for your family to enjoy).

What they all have in common is that they are engaging (you are thinking about them, not politics, the bills, your teenagers, your boss or the job market), and they are FUN.  When you spend time having fun and learning, as opposed to fun that you’ve done many times before (watch football on TV), you make more areas in your brain work.  You particularly make your hippocampus, where memory is stored, work hard.  The harder it works, the larger it gets.  New neurons emerge from neuronal stem cells if you work your hippocampus enough.  [Stress kills neurons and shrinks your hippocampus.] 

As you move through life, you tend to get into habits and routines, so your brain starts to “coast.”  When you are not learning new things, you invite cognitive decline to make a home, a process that doesn’t wait until you are in your 60s, please note!  I totally get why most of us don’t want to go into Learner Mode.  A Learner, by definition, hasn’t got a clue what’s going on. Do you enjoy that lost and clueless feeling?  No, course, not.  THAT, dear friends, more than the “I don’t have time to have fun” is the real reason why Learning isn’t compelling.  If we’re honest, those of us who “don’t have time” do make time for sitcoms and sports.   

Do you have any idea how many dinosaur species you get to learn about and try to remember in the Paleontology: How Therapod Dinosaurs Became Birds class from U of Alberta on Coursera?  A lot. I wasn’t taking it for a grade, so who cares how many times I take the tests before I get it?  Just trying to remember as much as possible was enough of a workout to kick my hippocampus’ butt.  Man, was that fascinating!  Hubby and I couldn’t tear ourselves away, every evening for a week.  And it was FREE. 

You want your hippocampus as robust as possible if you are going to avoid Alzheimer’s, and besides, learning is FUN. 

So here’s my challenge to you all:  One night this week, turn the TV off, get the kids to do their chores, and sit down at your Internet and research:

·        **  Coursera – where I do my dinosaur study, and many others learn history, language, writing, and on and on.  Most classes are FREE.  I've learned from Laura.com, but that's mostly work-related, not fun.  I have heard good things about Udemy, but haven't taken anything there.

·        ** The Great Courses – which aren’t free, but are regularly discounted, and many libraries carry some of them.  I bought How Jesus Became God and was amazingly enlightened at hundreds of years of conceptual evolution on just exactly who Jesus was, and if he was god, when he became god.  Whatever your actual beliefs, the history is can’t-stop-listening engrossing.

·       ** Local community centers  – where you can try something entirely different to give your hippocampus a real workout.  How about art?  [Can’t do it?  Great.  Skilled is what you are when you FINISH, not before you start!]  You can sign up for exercise classes while you’re at it.  My community center has a water slide that is open on Saturday mornings.  Just try to convince me that’s not fun.  You can’t.  Your head is shaking but your lips are curving up in an unconscious smile.  You know how much fun it is. 

·       **  Local community colleges will let you attend some classes without a grade.  If you want to attend Over 55/Senior college, you can, even if you’re not quite that experienced with life.  You don’t have to dye your hair grey and the yearly fee is only $125 in my town.

The key is to set aside your performance anxiety and your reluctance to be clumsy and dopey (as one of my clients put it).  Not knowing what you’re doing is the fog that clears as you work at it.  Working your brain and having fun doing it is the greatest rejuvenator of tired minds, hearts and souls, second only to physical exercise.  I combine the two by looking through crochet-pattern and art-instruction books while I fast-walk on a treadmill, 4 days a week.  [The other three I splash and laugh in water aerobics classes.  Not too much learning, but lots of movement; laughter reduces my cortisol load as well.]  When I emerge from my dinosaurs, or my crochet-treadmill, or my splashing, I have such a surge of energy, the “lost time” is more than made up in increased cleverness in solving problems and getting tasks done, and the enthusiasm to embrace all the boring and/or scary parts.  It’s easy to plunge in and just git ‘er done, when you have so much fun to get back to!

Next week: pick something to learn.

Week after: start it.  Get through the initial discomfort to break through to the “wow, that’s cool.”   The discomfort that has been scaring you for years might only last a minute!

Want to discover more ways to have fun with the same 24 hours you have now?  Call for a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch).  www.soaringdragon.biz

Do You Want the FDA and Medicare to Save You From Isolation and Dementia?

A select committee of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has identified a BIG problem for Americans as we age: hearing aids are not a covered medical expense in Medicare, and Congress has a history of resisting changing that.  Costs average at least $5000/pair and research indicates that at least half of us who need this help try to do without, with results that vary from uncomfortable to disastrous.  Sociologists, social workers and medical researchers have long linked hearing loss to increasing social isolation in elders.  If you can’t hear, you can’t keep your social networks strong, which in its turn is closely linked to poorer physical and mental health.  Now Alzheimer’s researchers, including Dr. Frank Lin at Johns Hopkins, part of the committee, say that an aging brain that is over-tasked with trying to discern language from faint, muffled sounds is a brain that is deprived of the power to maintain cognitive tasks.  In other words, if you need a hearing aid and don’t get it, you are making cognitive decline inevitable.  

The obvious answer, for those who can’t afford a $5000 set themselves, nor the Medicare Gap policies that can cover them, is to do without.  As the Boomer generation continues to swell the elder ranks, this is becoming a public health problem.  In addition to the purely humanitarian aspect, adding to the ranks of dementia is not in the best interests of the nation.  Some members of the committee want the FDA to make hearing aids an over-the-counter purchase to help drive down the cost, while other members caution that hearing aids require careful tuning so the comparison with OTC reading glasses doesn’t really fit.  The committee also asked for more consumer information, including forcing vendors to tell buyers if the product can only be tuned by a particular provider (locking you in if you don’t like the service) and forcing vendors to unbundle the product and services, so that people can determine how much fitting and tuning they want (or really “can afford”.)

The committee also had specific suggestions for helping an elder who needs hearing assistance and can’t afford a hearing aid: speak more slowly and distinctly, not more loudly; face the listener; reduce background distraction noises, so meeting in a library is better than a crowded coffee shop; turn off the radio and TV; rephrase, rather than repeating yourself.  The latter is particularly important.  If the person can’t hear certain sounds well, using different words will be more likely to lead to comprehension.  And do your best to get Congress to change its mind…. Which will undoubtedly require a new Congress, one focused on improving the lives of ordinary Americans.   No elder should be forced to slide deeper and deeper into an isolating silence because they lack the financial resource to both hear and eat. 

Don't Stay Stuck!  Blast through the barriers that are preventing you from living the life you want!  You CAN do it!  www.soaringdragon.biz

Tubman's Glory is Our Hour of Glory as Well

 I admit it, when the news first broke about Harriet Tubman being chosen for the new $20 bill, I was disappointed.  For about 30 seconds, I mourned the loss by my top choice from the short-list.  Eleanor Roosevelt has always been one of my heroines, with her tireless advocacy for the homeless and dispossessed of the Great Depression, and all the courage that took, to allow herself to be so hated by the big-money interests, what we would call the 1% today.  She cared about women, about children, about animals and natural resources, about infrastructure and about the power of the vote.  Members of the 1% who break ranks and stand for economic and social justice - a country that lives up to its hype - deserve great praise.  Eleanor worked monster days to get fractious enemies to collaborate on the initial UN documents.  The fact that the UN isn’t as effective as she/we all hoped it would be doesn’t change the glory of her dedication to that hope.

But it was only 30 seconds.  I’ve always admired and adored Harriet Tubman also, another woman of enormous personal courage, who maintained a sharp tell-it-like-it-is tongue for those who needed a swift kick and a kind heart for those in affliction – that difficult combination.  Contrary to what some of her admirers have been saying, she was not a one-issue woman.  She didn’t just care about ending slavery.  She didn’t just care about the economic and social plight of newly-freed but resource-destitute black farmers, and the urban black poor.  She also championed women of all colors, who were no more powerful than slaves in the mid-19^th century, who were beaten and killed with impunity, who had no power to obtain a divorce or retain custody of their children if they were dumped by a husband wanting a younger model, or even travel as they chose.   She cared about factory workers who signed contracts forbidding them to quit or complain of abuse and ill treatment, and who also could be killed by goon squads with impunity if they tried to organize or blow the whistle.  She annoyed abolitionists who sanctimoniously condemned black slavery while making a fortune on this factory-slavery, by calling them on their hypocrisy.  She cared about the treatment of animals, horses in transportation and on farms, and pets in the cities.  No one is perfect, and she had plenty of human blindness and flaws, but she tried hard to make the world a better place for us, her spiritual descendants, and for that, she absolutely deserves the place of honor on America’s most popular bill. 

Jackson will be gone soon, although not entirely; he will be on the flip side of the bill.  Perhaps the next generation can get rid of him entirely.  Much ink has been spent on his racist, genocidal actions against the native people of the south.  He was also an awful president, per se.  His spoils system fit the backwoods money-grubbing mentality of his peers on the frontier, but as a responsible principle to run the government of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious supposedly-better-than a child’s view of “fairness,” it’s appalling.  The fact that historians are reluctantly, and not whole-heartedly stating the obvious – He was an awful President; any one of the other candidates would have been a genuine statesman in comparison; OMG - is a belated step in the right direction. 

And a big shout-out to the writers who have managed to discuss all the various candidates for the new face of the bill without resorting to cheap racial reasoning.  Soapbox commences:  No, everyone who says that Harriet was their original #1 choice isn’t a better human being than people who originally had a different candidate in mind, even if they are telling the truth.  All the potentials were wonderful, admirable people who would honor our country’s currency and ourselves for recognizing their value.  No, people who had a warmer spot for a different woman aren’t racists.  If we used that word sparingly, and for people who are truly and provably motivated by hate, then the real tribulations of my sister and two brothers, and my black friends, would not risk being trivialized by over-use.  I don’t want to see the word “racist” trivialized.  The pain that true creeps like Donald Trump cause is too serious.  End of soapbox.

Everyone’s favorite bill is getting a face to be proud of.  Glory, glory, hallelujah!  One giant leap for all of us….

Digging Deeper Into the Terror Attacks, A Brilliant, Simple Explanation for American Disengagement

What We Miss When We Jump….

One of the key teachings of all the wisdom traditions concerns the dangers of jumping to conclusions on the basis of inadequate information.  Our limbic systems, bless them, never, ever think that they have inadequate information.  What we call a capacity for critical thinking is merely a limbic system that has been trained to stop, loop in the prefrontal cortex, and then and only then step lightly to a not-deeply-held conclusion.  Everyone who has taken the training with me is glad they did. 

I’ve felt for some time that the answer to “why didn’t Americans get emotionally involved with the East African embassy bombings?” wasn’t simple racism.  I knew that the knee-jerk “they’re all racists” explanation for why there hasn’t been a Je suis Ankara movement to complement the solidarity Americans felt with Parisians after the terrorist attack, was missing a core truth.  But simply knowing that someone else is engaging in simplistic thinking isn’t the same as being brilliant oneself. 

Then I read an article in APU Insider [In Homeland Security contributor Sylvia Longmire] that supplied the brilliant missing link. [I got my 2nd MA at APUS, great school.]  The reason why Americans are emotionally wrought about Paris is because we either have been there, someone close to us has been there and connected us to it vicariously or we dream of going there (mostly because – again – it is someplace that others we know have been).  Few Americans have been to, or wish they could go to, Dar es Salaam or Ankara.  Psych research clearly shows that a huge part of emotional connection is familiarity.  When something is just a point on a map, we humans don’t feel connected.  But places that feel “familiar,” we care about.  [Advertisers understand this: even if you rationally don’t want to, your limbic system, where decisions are made, feels more positive about products you have heard about repeatedly.  The familiar has a positive vibe to it.]  

** My earlier post misattributed the brilliant idea.  Pls forgive my error.

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