We’re crawling together through the deepest darkest jungle, chasing dragons.  Our dragon-chasing tool is humble, yet powerful:  an unfurled paperclip.  Jordan, my younger brother, has seen the dragon in its lair and I have no reason to doubt him, as he’s nearly three years old.  I’m soon off to kindergarten and so it falls to me to lead the expedition.

We slink amongst the hulking animals of living room furniture to find the tiny entrance to the dragon world:  two miniscule black tunnels, each sitting below a pair of rectangles.  The grown-ups call them lightning sockets, but we know they’re dragon caves.

We’ve been warned away from these dragon caves, told they are dangerous, but now we’re old enough to understand that the grown-ups probably store their treasure in these caves and don’t want to share it and that’s probably also why the dragons are there—guardians of the treasure.

Some of the dragon caves are blocked by three-headed serpents, which snake and slither off under the hulking couch and chair animals that hardly move during the day.  The long wily serpents have their tails in ornate lighthouse towers, all topped with brightly glowing lanterns.

Jordan has told me that the dragons look like a blue spark.  We crouch before the awesome silent cave, our tiny spear quivering in challenge to the dragon coiled within its richly hidden abode.

We know that baby dragons are often blue or sometimes yellow and have a habit of suddenly leaping at our fingers from brass doorknobs.  Clearly dragons love metal, and our necromancer’s baton must have the beast salivating for battle.

I can’t quite recall now if the dragon chickened out that day or if it was us, but the battle did not transpire.  Perhaps we agreed to return at night, thinking this might give us the advantage, fighting darkness with darkness in darkness.

But through countless adventures, and forts and bike rides we formed a bond one only comes to truly understand years later.

*

Jordan turns fifty-years-old today.  He’s the person in my life I’ve consciously known the longest as my capacity for memory largely begins with the arrival of my brother.

I’m told that I tried to hit him on the head with my toy hammer upon his arrival home from hospital into my world.  But of course if the only thing you have is a toy hammer, everything looks like a baby’s head.

I fed Jordan money from an early age, dropping coins into his orange juice—an American buffalo and some honest Abe copper.  My mother went on her own dragon hunt with a Popsicle stick.  Those soiled coins stood watch in our bathroom for a long, long time, a warning not to eat money, a reminder of just how dirty and fascinating treasure could be.

*

Jordan and I chased our treasures into “the factories,” where we would, forbidden, ride our bikes and dive into gaping dumpsters off of loading docks, dodging roaring trucks and thundering locomotives to pilfer rejected toys and once a palimpsest of Swedish writing and bled-through pictures of blonde goddesses without any clothes on at all.  Many people hide their treasure in the trash.

Today marks fifty years of adventure and we’ve both found treasure in luminescent wives and dragon-seeing children.  We still wear our wolf-suits, and when no one is looking are carried away to places where the Wild Rumpus is forever madly dancing in ecstasy and mirth.

Jordan is a man with vision, a man who is at once an artist and an entrepreneur.  He works his ass off, but he’s a fantastic friend and one of the funniest people I know.  When we were kids he had a drawer of balsa wood for creative projects and I had a drawer of capacitors, resistors and switches to engineer inventions of all stripes.  In our world where design has come to lead engineering, perhaps we’re all coming into our own by organic design, ripening like wine approaching true drinkability.

Some day perhaps we will finish our musical, set in the garage of our childhood home.  Or maybe we’ll change the world, or maybe we’ll just hang out, quietly.

Happy Birthday.  I love you Jordan.

“Thanks for taking me on these boring errands,” Nate said.  We were driving between the tailor and the florist, prepping for prom.

“I can’t begin to express how happy I am to be doing this,” I told him.

“Did you go to your prom?” he asked me.  “No,” I said, “but I’m really glad you’re going to yours.”

The tailor had great and loving energy, her woman’s touch pinning to get his suit just right.  The young woman at the florist channeled romantic enthusiasm to work with Nate on the exact color palate of the corsage, while the sales woman at the store, not that far removed from her own prom, helped match a tie perfectly to the dress she gazed at on his phone screen.

For months I have been intermittently melancholy about launching and separation, at times swept by tears and nostalgia.  But as Nate and I zipped around our neighborhood, no shop or stop farther than a mile from home, I could not have been happier.

The plan was for parents to gather and take pictures before the kids embarked by busses, limos and cars for a hotel ballroom and the after-party beyond.  The energy of that photo-op surrounded me like cross-hatching waves of innocence lapping at the shore of experience.

A friend asked, “Would you want to go back and be a teen again?” and  I realized that I would not, even if I could bring my current insights born of age and life along with me.

I just want to be myself now, as I am, where I am, when I am.  I looked into the eyes of young emerging adults, and of parents letting go, and I saw love and spirit everywhere I looked.

Twenty years ago I was drinking Margaritas at El Coyote with my dear friend.  We met there every Tuesday for years, through crappy jobs and big breaks (at least for my friend) and the ebb and flow of early adulthood.

There were fires burning on the TV of the bar as we left, suddenly aware that things had gotten heated in our city of angels.  Whatever it was all to mean, I stepped into the lobby of my apartment in Hollywood through a door no longer there—it was now a carpet of twinkling safety glass, blown out by gunfire.

From my apartment Andy and I watched the fires burn on TV and out our windows:  the same fires from different angles in our city of angels.

I took a lot of pictures before Nate’s prom.  Everything looked beautiful to me—not sad and fleeting, not an ending of a special time, or even necessarily a beginning of a new time:  rather, it just was its own time and I felt so happy and present and sad and hopeful and eternal and aging and renewed and awakening and fine with everything and everyone, filled with gratitude and beginner mind.

As the kids embarked into their night I mentioned Our Town to a doctor dad, and he didn’t know the play, but when I explained the theme and Emily’s poignant realization of life’s beauty, but only after life’s end, my friend readily shared with me how he had left an important medical conference to be present to this moment—just now fully grasping in the fading light how much he had missed already, and how much he needed to be here now.

And then I was in bed with a book as my son and his friends danced and laughed and owned their night and their time and life as it rushes to meet their unfurling steps.

As I turned the pages of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying I felt a red robe of friendship whispering that although all is impermanence, love and relating to each other is the point, the key, the treasure and the door; it is the carpet and the jewels, the blossom and the kiss; it is the comfort and the freedom, the bond and the embrace; Love is the hello and the good-bye, the quarrel and the repair.  It is the coming and the going, the reaping and the sowing; it is the mirror on pins and needles, it is the just sewing; it is the scent of jasmine in the night, the feel of air soft on our soft skin, the stubble on a chin, the fizz evervescsently floating over vanished gin, paths that led me through the out-door in, and finally through the in-door out.

In the morning there were boys everywhere, rumpled suits and sweetly tired eyes.

And in the night of Sunday, gazing at pictures of the pre-prom with Nate, he remarked that it will be fun, when he is my age, to look back at these pictures.  And he thanked me again for being excited about all of this—and best of all, he gave me his blessing to include these pictures; beyond the awkward skirmishes of the past, it’s just so crystal clear that we all (across bounds of family, friendship, age, community and world-view) love each other so much—a rippling Love whose Truth sounds a note not old or far away, but eternal; the ephemeral dance of what remains, not of our days or nights, but of our Love.

“I’m killing you,” she says.  “That doesn’t sound good,” I reply.  “It’s for the best,” assures the producer.

It’s Tuesday and I’m sitting in the green room at the television studio where I’ve been half watching a low-speed chase for half an hour.  The helicopter cam continues to observe a host of police cars languidly following a tow-truck all over Los Angeles.

I keep thinking of Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town… on tranquilizers.  “Maybe they’ll find Goldbug,” I muse to myself almost hypnotized.

I had been thinking about this day for a week, thinking about it a lot, to be perfectly honest.  I had been invited to go on television and talk about Privilege of Parenting, and so I had thought and thought about what I should say, and about whether or not I would sweat like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News or have a panic attack, or maybe suddenly vomit as one of my kids had once done on the “fun” camera at Bright Child.

The universe is an interesting place, given that I’d been recently writing all about my introversion when the chance to “accelerate toward embarrassment” (as an actor friend likes to say) in front of a TV camera presented itself.  It’s a basic tenet of anxiety:  expose yourself to your fears and they will calm down (avoid them and they grow stronger).

Yet after all the build-up (in my own mind) I was sent packing as the entire news hour stayed “live” on a slow-moving tow-truck.  I found myself laughing in my car in stopped traffic:  I had been afraid that I would suck, but it’s hard to be much worse than a slow-moving tow-truck.  And besides, now I knew my way around the studio—where the parking was, the elevator, the hallways and the green room—the sorts of things that might make me just a little less nervous upon my return.

I couldn’t get David Byrne and the Talking Heads out of my head:

Television man made me what I am
People like to put the television down
But we are just good friends
(I’m a) television man

As I drove home, untried and untested, I thought about another green room, the one at Lincoln Center.  I’d been parked in there one time, waiting for a friend when someone entered and started to meticulously place a row of Interview Magazines on the coffee table.  It was Andy Warhol.

*

It’s Thursday and I’m back, sitting in the newsroom, off camera and hanging with the anchors, enjoying the banter and the bustle.  William Shatner is talking about horses.

I’m at the very end of the line-up, and vaguely wondering if I’ll get killed again, when a news flash about Ryan Seacrest’s recent bout of vomiting is reported to television land and I find myself trying not to think too much about the two bags of IV fluid he received.  That seems to add up to a lot of vomit.

The sand of time is ebbing out of the news hourglass as I’m watching another doctor get interviewed.  My view from behind the news cam is of an ominous black box, which is opened and out comes a skull.  Alas poor Yorick, apparently he had a weak chin—but silicon implants shall do nicely.

Suddenly it’s my turn and I don’t feel nervous, I feel lucky to have a chance to talk about helping parents and kids.

My Warhol fifteen minutes, trimmed down to three minutes on a Thursday in late April, gets shaved closer to two minutes.  And then it’s done.

Everyone in the newsroom is terribly nice, saying I did well.  Once upon a time I directed a TV episode and the producer assured me that it wouldn’t lead to anything.  Little did he know that one day I’d be in front of the camera—for two minutes.

And suddenly I was in my car, and traffic was moving, and I was greatly relieved.  An NPR story came on, all about Andy Warhol’s abstract work from the 80’s, the very years when I saw him in the green room, work the critics didn’t much care for.

And then I was home and my kids were fighting.  I tried to counsel compassion and one of them said, “You’re trying to be the hero—you go on TV as a parenting expert and now you think we shouldn’t be fighting.”

I said, “That’s a low blow.  You guys always fight, but it’s not because I went on TV.”  They did apologize to each other and that was sweet.  It was nice to finally be in bed with my kindle, and I could hardly send a Words with Friends offering to my friend in New York before drifting off.

Television man…I’ve got what you need
We are still good friends…I know the way you are
Television man…I know what you’re tryin’ to be
Watchin’ everything…and I gotta say
That’s how the story ends.

One of the core concepts in Privilege of Parenting (the book) is the concept that everything in parenting turns on relationship.

Cultivating good relationships with our kids requires addressing three core motivations in life:  feeling safe, feeling loved and feeling empowered.

These apply to us grown-ups as well:  if we don’t feel safe then we don’t feel connected and may tend to either retreat into isolation or become aggressive, angry or explosive (and then end up in a place of shame and/or isolation).

When we are in our own red zone, or are parenting a child in the zone of anger or alienation, it is worth keeping in mind that in these moments we do not feel safe.  This is not the time to talk and reason, it is not the time for limits and consequences: it is the time for openhearted compassion and understanding.

If we, or our kids, are truly not safe, this is a time for action to protect them or ourselves; but when we, or our kids, are in actuality safe, but do not feel safe, we have moved into the second motivation (and its frustration).

Feeling loved rests upon feeling understood.  Thus when our kid says that they are a loser and everyone hates them, or that they do not feel safe, and we tell them that this is ridiculous and that they are wonderful, they tend to clam up and feel neither heard nor understood.

This is when parenting turns to crap because we know we love our kids, but our love is not landing and we feel powerless, lame and sometimes angry that our child won’t just cut out the nonsense and realize how wonderful they are.

When we’re down in the dumps, we don’t really want “glass is half-full” talk so much as we want someone to bear witness to our experience.  When we do this for our kids they feel company in misery and they do more than know that we love them, they feel that love.

Finally, we all want to feel empowered.  This can take the form of self-expression, autonomy, athletics, academics or social relatedness (to name a few arenas of potential empowerment).  As parents, empowering our children is where we must walk the line between love and limits, between helicopter and absenteeism: if we overprotect we suppress autonomy, but if we under-protect we leave our kids at undue risk.

Here we circle back to the need to feel loved; if we listen with our hearts to our children (and to our own instincts), we will better calibrate our love and limits and facilitate empowerment.  Kids are constantly growing and changing (as are we), but listening deeply and observing our children’s subtle shifts in mind and behavior allows us to better understand, and thus make them feel loved, safe and yet free to learn, grow and develop.

Given that in parenting we are often striving to bestow upon our children some of the very things that we ourselves did not get, parenting can trigger us to feel scared (for our kids, for our economics, scared about our abilities); and it can trigger us to feel unloved (i.e. not understood, mischaracterized, unsupported); and it can lead to our own feelings of disempowerment (particularly when kids test, or break, limits and our words are shrugged off and our consequences received without behavioral change).

This is where we parents particularly need community, camaraderie and support from each other to help us feel safe, loved/understood and empowered.  Community and understanding will prove more important than expertise, and the “expert” arises as the wisdom and love of the group, not the ideas of experts.

We generally know things like that it’s best not to yell at our kids too much, it’s finding ways to calm down, be effective and to sustain our right-actions that tend to elude us.

I write about parenting, here and in my book, in an attempt to provide insights, support and encouragement to other parents in the service for all our collective children, but also as a way to connect with the group through bringing something to the table.

Perhaps today is a good day to take a deep breath and to set an intention to deepen our understanding of where our kids are at today (emotionally, intellectually, socially), to intuit what they might be feeling—and to re-envision this exploration as love in pragmatic action.

*

p.s. Kristen over at Motherese was kind enough to review my book; she is one of the best spirits I’ve met in the blogosphere and I adored her even before she said such nice things about me and my book.  Friendship is one of life’s great treasures and in this realm I consider myself extremely blessed.  Please check out what she has to say (and thank you, thank you, Kristen):  http://bit.ly/I1nlqL

You might think he’s a legend, but he’s my friend.  I’m not going to tell you his name because that’s not the way he rolls.

XOX Man doesn’t drink often, but when he does, it’s Italian red wine (and it need not be expensive).

XOX Man runs an international company, but he doesn’t get his mug on magazine covers.  That’s not the way he rolls.

XOX Man is raising daughters, but they have cojones.  And they’re still every inch young ladies.

XOS Man could cook the pants off of Scarlet Johansson, but he doesn’t.  He cooks the pants off his wife because he loves her and she’s sexy and that’s the way he rolls.

XOX Man is the sort of friend who’s truly there for you, a man’s man who’s literally climbed mountains with his family.  I just hear about it later.

My teen sons love and look up to XOX Man.  They can tell that he truly takes an interest in them and isn’t phony.  You can’t fool teens and XOX Man doesn’t have to.  Fake is not the way he rolls.

XOX Man is not afraid to give hugs and kisses.  That is the way he rolls.

Although he didn’t exactly say the following, he might have if I had asked him nicely:

“Generally I don’t breed, but when I do breed, I sometimes turn to Privilege of Parenting as a field guide to remind me that I don’t need no stinkin’ parenting book.”  XOX Man

*

I love you XOX Man.  I want to grow-up to be just like you.  Namaste

To my regular readers I apologize for a post about what you already know.  I truly love and appreciate my blogging community, but I realize that there are those with whom I chat and cross-read posts, and there are those who happen upon this site when searching for information about how to help a child or troubleshoot parenting.  This post is for you, the readers who don’t know me, but who are trying to do better with your child.

I started blogging after I had written a parenting book, and after I got a wonderful agent, and after several major publishing houses claimed that they loved my book (one editor said that it was the only book proposal she’d read that made her cry), and after those very houses sadly passed on publishing my book because I lacked a “big profile.”  In plain speak, I’m not a celebrity or a media-psychologist and the market for parenting books is considered over-crowded.

Plus, I wrote my book as something of an anti-expert, anti-parenting industry tome… something that would offer authentic help at a price rather than stir fear and controversy to sell books.  And now thanks to Susan Cain’s book, Quiet, I realize that I, and my book, are introverted.  Therefore I need to make myself a little more clear if I hope to share my hard-work, carefully considered, designed to truly help others.  I’m not going to get louder, instead I’m going to quietly ask you to seriously consider reading my book if you want to be a better parent, and to help me “promote” the book to people who might benefit (if anyone comes to mind, particularly introverts, or parents of introverts or kids who are having a hard go of it these days in a loud, aggressive and competitive world).

I write this post to “explain” my book.  Because it is called Privilege of Parenting I realize that readers who do not know me might well assume that since my blog and my book have the same title, that the book would be a compilation of blog posts.  It is not.

Every post in my archives is fresh material crafted for this blog, but the book is an entirely different animal, more of a curriculum to encourage the re-thinking of parenting as a spiritual path.  Something like yoga, but perhaps less crunchy.

My grandmother much admired a philosopher named Martin Buber.  I didn’t get around to reading him until long after my Buby was dead, and he’s not an easy read, but I later realized that my Buby had lived his core message and had wrapped me in it when she held me in her arms and in her heart and mind:  life is about relating, soul-to-soul.  The rest is just so much chatter and transient melancholy emptiness.

Privilege of Parenting is inspired by this sort of soul-to-soul relating, seeing it as the very heart of parenting and of all manifestations of Love.  What matters is not so much what a book, or a person, says as how books and people make us feel.

We want to be the sort of parents who go beyond simply loving and disciplining our children (we all love our kids and do our best) to somehow manage to understand and attune with our kids so that they actually feel loved.

Feeling loved hinges on being accurately understood, which is why Privilege of Parenting works to offer deeper and more authentic insight into children and relationships in the hopes that with better understanding we will be more patient and effective in conveying our love—and we will feel more connected, happy and successful in our parenting and relating.

Privilege of Parenting is not about “raising winners,” or about exactly what to do at every step of the way (like What to Expect when… fill in the blank, make an Ap, plug in the answer).  Instead it is a book that offers a relationship with you, the reader, so that a certain sort of relating might ripple out to your child or children.

You know you love your kid(s), but if they are scared, angry, suffering low self-esteem, etc. then somehow they do not yet (or consistently, or at the present moment) feel truly, deeply and safely loved enough to be free, playful, risk-taking, social and engaged with others and the world.  This is healed by relationship, not by advice.

What I lack in slick marketing strategy I compensate for in authenticity and craft.  I realize that in a world of strip malls and chains I’m running a small publishing business.  I hired a single mom as my editor, I hired a mom-blogger who I met in this bloggy world as my designer (of book and blog).

While the book is at Amazon, and I’m working on getting it to Barnes and Noble, (and perhaps I shall write in the future about the journey of self-publishing and the jungle in which one finds the Amazon, like it or not) I am really seeking relationship directly with parents to support and encourage the good of all of our collective children.

Finally, I offer a link to the Table of Contents of my book in order to illustrate the key issues that are explored, including self-esteem, depression, anxiety, oppositionality, intuition and, ultimately, re-framing parenting itself as a spiritual path (as opposed to religious paths that may no longer work for many of us, or at least be less than enough to get us where we truly want to go).  The book offers many stories of kids from group homes to the lap of luxury and everything in between and it offers many practical exercises to help put new learning into pragmatic practice.  Ultimately, I am telling you this for the same reason I wrote the book—to offer sincere love and help, and because no one else is going to tell you about this book (there’s just not enough money in this to interest “big” voices; this should be all the more reason for the discerning reader to give it a chance).

Click to read:  “Privilege of Parenting” Table of Contents

If you want to buy the book, please CLICK HERE to purchase at Amazon, and/or if you have questions send me an email (right hand side of this blog @ “contact Bruce”) and we’ll chat.

And if not, that’s cool too—thanks for considering and All Good Wishes for you, your parenting and All Our Collective Children.

And if any of my faithful readers (especially of the book) care to forward this post to those they believe might like the book, if only they ever heard of it, please be part of our rising tide of:  Buy Introverted

There is an angel bent over every blade of grass whispering, “Grow!  Grow!”

This may be why grass is generally so short.

*

I’m a bit enchanted by Susan Cain’s Quiet, a book whose principle characters (i.e. Elaine Aron, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) include voices I’ve long known and much appreciated.

My first point for today’s blog is to sound a mournful note of compassion for students far and wide who are putting themselves back together in the face of rejection as the blood and dust settle in the wake of the absurdist ritual known as college admissions.

The psychology of competition, elitism and scarcity are such that the more difficult something appears to be (expensive, rare, etc.) the more it is treasured and thus the higher the price (financial, emotional, etc.) becomes… until, at some point, the bubble of delusion and inflation inevitably burst.  Trees do not grow to heaven.

Thus I am both wishing love and hugs to young kids who have put themselves out there in the most personal and vulnerable sorts of manner, only to be told that they did not quite measure up.  This s a brutal process that appears a sacrificial rite of spring promulgated by bogus and inflated would-be rain-makers (brain makers?  connection makers?  status makers?  heart breakers?).

I’m not too interested in deconstructing our manic culture of extraversion so much as encouraging a quieter listening for the rise of something kind, connected and more authentic.  I believe that spirit counts and I invite you to join me in wishing love, confidence and mending to kids who may be taking their “no’s” personally.

No makes sensitive kids wonder, was it my essay, my scores, my grades, my background, my what that made some other kid get chosen?

Applying to college is a loud and extroverted fracas, a sell-yourself sort of awkwardness that makes me particularly want to put arms around the sweetest of the kids, the ones who lack guile, and also those who tried to out-tiger all the others and still tasted dirt in the end.  They’re kids.  It’s we who should know better, who should not be playing Hunger Games with our babies.

Perhaps it is up to us introverts to raise our own esteem and consciousness, to take stock and own that we may have some solid ideas on how to do things differently; and to pragmatically accept that “no one” (meaning currently dominant culture) cares what we think precisely because we are not extraverted and brash.

Maybe it’s time for us sensitive sorts to carry our sensitivity more proudly, to see that it is a gift and a valuable part of a balanced culture.  Perhaps we will not get the loud to listen, but we could stop trying to catch a meaningless ride on the loud cloud.  We could think more quietly, we could listen more to each other, the formerly overlooked people in our own sphere; we could re-think what we personally wish to seek and promote and, upon reflection, begin to buy that which is sensitive, reasoned and introverted.

We vote with our money, and we “pay” with our attention.  Perhaps our feverishly burning culture is akin to cleavage, of which Jerry Seinfeld counsels that one should “look, and then look away.”

So… Introverts unite!  But only very loosely.  Unite, but don’t come over to my house (or at least call first).  Better yet, let us employ our powers of poetic imagination to realize that we are indeed, and already, united and voting with our hearts and minds for a pendulum swing back toward realness and away from empty, cynical and money-extorting hype.

Susan Cain inspires by stepping up and playing the extravert game in her own style.  But what really excites me is that Cain helps me realize that I don’t even have to be like her (book tours and talks; I could try for more of that, but I don’t have to).  If my metric is not Ivy League, or NY Times “best seller” or what have you, perhaps I, we, participate in a radically different world in which our group and its spirit, heart and ethics become a sort non-personal or personified hero rising to its own collective hero’s journey, and not from the glory of any particular one of us.

For years I had a “fear of success” and I could not explain it to those who would seek to encourage me, to whisper “grow, grow.”  My fear, I sense, was to become empty and hollow in the pyrrhic victory of soulless “success.”  But when I look at what our culture has become, what is “famous,” and what hyped-up mediocrity passes for brilliant, great and amazing I realize that the mind we carry with us from childhood knows what it knows, and it knows what is crap.  It just turns around and lies to itself in order to fit in, to be popular, to be “cool.”  That, as I mature, strikes me as a dangerous sort of failure.

Thus we need the courage to keep it real, to actually care about each other without conforming to some monolithic and saccharine crunchiness any more than we conform to some monolithic and inane idiot wind of the social media.

We don’t need to take our stand against extraversion on steroids, rather we need to take our stand, together, for realness.  Authentic extraversion?  Fine.  It’s those cloying and doomed-to-suck attempts at mimicry and conformity of the dominant, brash, deeply unnourishing culture that ties us introverts into hopeless and hapless knots.  Opt out.  Let it go.  Perhaps try to connect with us fellow introverts and see if you don’t move from virtually invisible toward interwoven and included, visible as a trend more than as any given spokesmodel for nothing but one’s self.

People always point to Gandhi as a quiet example of world-changing.  Yet it’s been quipped that it took a lot of money to keep Gandhi living in poverty.  Maybe our new world is better served by an even quieter, leaderless and organic rising consciousness.  Perhaps we are co-creating that very consciousness as we write, think, care and love.

Meanwhile I’ll see you in the secret quiet cafe, the lovely inward-growing garden, along the trail one forges through the wild and wooly authentic unconscious, and in the soft-spoken corridors of life well-lived according to our own terms.  Sure, we’ll need a little money along the way but even then we need to embrace and trade in our own economy, make our own marketplace founded on spiritual wealth before material.  Then we will have trust, honest exchange and we will be the market-makers.

Then we will arrive at what the trees-grow-to-heaven crowd will never have:  enough.

Perhaps if we give ourselves some space and time to think and breathe, to create what interests our soul-Selves, daring to transcend the rushing time-frames of hyper-competitive preschool admissions, and middle-school, and high-school, and college, and graduate school, and corporate director, VP, President, pundit, I-am-my-resume and my prizes and then my tombstone as identity… perhaps we quieter sorts might tumble into a different consciousness, a boon of spirit gold and a genuine ability to craft things and ideas, lives and loves—co-crafting a consciousness of loving kindness deeply rooted in pragmatism and thus able to reach its branches toward real clouds.

And maybe we’ll do a little better by each other and all our collective children.

Sometimes I wonder why I blog.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy it, I do.  Yet in the seemingly silly, unfair, bullying, loud, shallow, cacophony of our world, any intelligent and sensitive being must ask:  “Surely, WTF is the point?”

All I can say is, “Don’t call me Shirley.”

Seriously, how many readers, Twitter followers and Facebook “friends” does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer:  Only one, but it has to be Kim Kardashian.

And even then the light-bulb only goes on for a nanosecond, and if you’re not quick enough to look around you’ll miss the crude point of that sort of illumination:  we were better off in the dark.

*

I Spy with my little eye, a rising trend:  the rise of the introverted, quiet, compassionate and authentic.

Jung had as vision of this (the rise of a globally unifying spirit, of the feminine principle and of introversion).  He thought it would take around 600 years.  We’re at 540 and counting down, give or take.

What is introversion?  (BTW, Jung used the term extraversion, not extroversion, for the counterpoint)  It is the tendency to be highly sensitive, quiet, shy and be interested in the inner world of feelings, thoughts, and private spirituality—an ability or tendency to sense the numinous (i.e. a feeling of divine presence) in the seemingly mundane.

Conversely, extraversion is the tendency to be focused on the outer world.  Such people are more hardy (i.e. less “sensitive” to loudness, roughness).  The extraverts are the kids who immediately join the game, try the toys, and explore the preschool yard.

The introverts are more like those of us who literally crawl into the cubby at preschool (yours truly) and when pushed to socialize might inexplicably push a kid in a wagon down some stairs (also, yours truly).  We are not necessarily “bad” kids, but we are most assuredly “different” from the loud and the brash.

In honoring the confluence of opposites it must be noted that every extravert has an introverted side (this is why even muggles enjoy Harry Potter, even if they would tease and exclude him if he actually showed up at their school); and every introvert has a secret extravert lurking within (and hence meek Ian Flemming birthed Bond, James Bond; hence many terrific actors are able to inhabit wild characters but are actually shy when the cameras stop rolling).

Although it has taken five decades, love, true friendship, work, yoga and the luck of the zeitgeist (the spirit of the subtly shifting time) for me to begin to grasp this, my own chief problem has been that of being a highly sensitive person in a world where the deck is severely stacked against us quiet and sensitive sorts.

This self-realization has also been a by-product of blogging.  For in the virtual blogosphere I have formed what I would consider to be “real” relationships with “real” people.  With some I have “real” phone chats and sincere private email exchanges, with others I now have real, consistent and treasured lunches.

In addition to blogging, perhaps the rise of memoir also reflects this trend of rising interiority?  Perhaps memoir and blogging mark ways for an introvert to make herself or himself known and find a place that is valued in the group without having to become a loud, aggressive, branding, marketing, socially dominant person?

Can writing deeply and honestly touch other humans and allow one who sucks at cocktail parties and conventions to nevertheless gain a feeling that even shy sensitive people yearn for:  to feel truly seen, heard and loved?  Moreover, can writing, or any other way of authentically sharing ideas, consciousness and soul allow the quiet person to influence the consciousness of the group, perhaps even to trend the group toward compassion and sensitivity, micro-millimeter by nanosecond?

The highly sensitive are not “better” than less sensitive people, but we are not worse.  Yet we have all too often come to believe that we are worse:  inferior, shy, nerdy, geeky, lacking social confidence, too feminine (if male) or too masculine (if female), too odd, too… sensitive.

And all too often the dominant social world is one in which we continually fail (or succeed at great price and still end up on the shrink’s couch) because we’re playing the wrong game.  We introverts cannot win at the game of extraversion.

Are we to launch a civil rights movement for highly sensitive people?  No one makes us sit at the back of the bus—we are invisible to the dominant world, not even on the bus of what ranks, matters and is paid, literally and figuratively, attention.

I think back to my experiences with big publishing houses saying that they love my book but couldn’t publish it because no one has ever heard of me.  How the hell is a quiet, sensitive person supposed to make the loud people hear about them and take notice?  Suddenly you are trying to “build a platform” when that is totally the opposite of your personality and your desires.  You start blogging and while you fail to build a platform, instead you meet a few really cool authentic people—and sharpen your understanding of who you actually are.

I think of my once upon a time entertainment lawyer saying, of his more famous client, “Spike (Lee) is out there burning down a building right now.  You’ve got to get out there and make it happen.”  He was lovely, and encouraging, and saw me as highly talented… but he could not understand just how impossible it was for me to be anything like Spike in terms of sheer social audacity.

Perhaps we introverts need to self-identify, begin to team-up and help each other.  We’re never going to get anywhere trying to get the loud to include us; we truly don’t fit in with them.

I realize that “my people” may be famous and glittery or quiet and low-key—but all of them are real, soulful, can take me as I am and can let me relate to them as they are.  My people are the ones who want to connect at the real level and not just at the mass level.  Ironic that I come to realize and discuss this in a blog post.  How two-thousand-and-twelve is that?

It’s the realization that quiet and authentic is cool, in its own quietly authentic way, that can help us heal our introverted shame and confusion.  And, BTW, often we make pretty good parents (if we learn to manage our anxiety and anger that can creep up from struggling with being sensitivite in an insensitive world), friends and partners on all sorts of endeavors.

So, ciao, bonjour buenos dias my fellow sensitive introverts.  You are the ones who actually bother to “read” me (the socially gifted extraverts do not waste time on things that lack the social gravity of trending, swelling bigness—therein lies their social intelligence, they’d be fools to waste time on the small when the goal is always big).  Yet we, my introverted friends, just may be a groovy little clique of our own, a good cafe no one’s heard of and thus pleasantly free of trendsters, scenesters and those loud, often gifted, folks who make us feel even shyer and quieter when they show up guffawing and throwing their heads back in laughter at jokes we’re never quite in on.  I always liked that Janis Ian song, “I learned the truth at seventeen…” She’s my kind of artist.  I heard the song at seventeen, but I didn’t really get that it was about me until I was fifty-one.

If we introverts are to connect in our own way (i.e. NOT at blogging conventions for the highly sensitive) our first step is the awareness that we are highly sensitive, and not merely “losers” for being quiet, thoughtful and disinclined toward being the loudest one in the room.

None of us need the whole world to pay attention to us, but we do need a few people to actually understand us.   Through self-awareness and self-acceptance we highly sensitive sorts might function better in the world, relate better to extraverts and re-think what “success” might actually look like for ourselves.  It might turn out to look an awful lot like life as we’re already living it.

The take-away?  We don’t need to change our personalities and our behaviors when it comes to being quiet and thoughtful, we only need to shift our consciousness.  Then we can trust that we don’t need more followers and that our true friends are just that, and that we already have them and know who they are; we might make some new friends amongst our ranks, but we’ll certainly keep the old.  Silver and gold, innit?

Fish are programmed to always head to the middle of the pack—that’s what makes fish into schools.  Perhaps the same can be said of extraverts forming the group, all trying to be the center and thus forming society itself.

We more sensitive folks do not much care for that mile-wide and inch-deep ocean that some call our “culture.”  As fish out of socially dominant water we introverts need to realize that we can, in fact, breathe just fine out of that water, and in turn we might form a kinder, gentler, less obvious school of our own.

I suspect I have a lot of readers who rarely, or never, comment here—after all, you’re introverts, why bother?  But somehow I do sense you’re with me on this, as I am with you.  Maybe we can just feel it because we’re sensitive—and that’s the way we roll.

Now let’s see what we can do for all our collective sensitive children.

Namaste

P.S. This post was inspired by a conversation with a dear introverted friend who felt quite inspired and reassured by the recent book, Quiet by Susan Cain.  Since drafting this post I have downloaded the book and can hardly put down my Kindlefire—Susan Cain is the virtual mentor I’ve been seeking all my life (at least as far as the first couple of highly reassuring chapters suggests to me).  For introverts seeking a friend in letters beyond yours truly and obscurely, check out her site and book:  http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com/

We’re all busy.  I’ll try to be brief.  I’ll fail.  Thanks for reading.  Thanks for caring.

The comments last week in response to my post about Invisible Children reaffirmed my own sense that awareness is important and useful in fomenting social change and co-creating a more compassionate world.

Last week a Goldman Sachs executive resigned in protest about his company’s practices.  The New York Times mentioned that he was not a highly paid worker, at $500,000 per year, by Wall Street Standards.

Last week the man who made the documentary gone viral about Invisible Children ran half-naked in the street cursing at traffic, “an unfortunate incident” suggested the head of Invisible Children, the result of a “severe emotional toll,” perhaps the sort of emotional toll that finds gifted painters lopping off their own ears and tossing them to toll booth collectors on the road to collective change.

Last week Ira Glass and This American Life focused on Mr. Daisey who turned out to be lying about conditions at Apple’s suppliers in China in his previous interview on that same show (and in numerous other appearances as well as in his theatrical monologues).  The radio retraction show was as much about betrayal and self-delusion as it was about “truth,” which Ira Glass sees in a fact-checked, vetted and socially agreed upon sense while Daisey sees it in a theatrical, perhaps self-promoting, perhaps justice-promoting and awareness-raising sense.

This American Life’s retraction of story culminated with a review of the “actual facts” per solid NY Times reportage, which left us, the listener, right along with Ira Glass, wondering, “Should we feel bad?” (about having Apple products that could be had, either at a higher cost to us, or at a lesser profit to Apple).  Thus I found myself asking, “Do I feel bad?”

What I feel is inspired.  Inspired by the words of that NY Times journalist, Charles Duhigg, who suggested that we could demand better conditions for workers in other countries, pointing out that we are not merely beneficiaries of those who toil in terrible working conditions, we are the reason that human beings in other countries toil in terrible working conditions.  By creating laws in America that prevent the sort of conditions that Upton Sinclair exposed in The Jungle, but in falling short of demanding equal justice for our fellows beyond the borders of our now-relatively-advantaged country, we have effectively exported injustice and inhumanity.

When it comes to facts, monologues, emotional tolls and social awareness I think of 80’s New York and going to see Spalding Gray do his electrifying and brilliant monologues in little spaces in Soho before it was today’s Soho.  Swimming to Cambodia and, later, drowned in the East River, Gray succumbed.  Suicide.  Where is the love for those who care so much that they go mad?  And where is the love for those who hurt so bad they go bad?  Might we not intervene upstream in the river of consciousness and avert the suffering borne of lack of consciousness, which leads to lack of community and lack of compassion?

Ira Glass suggested that if you say something happened then he, in turn, trusts that it happened.  I like Ira Glass.  He’s a trusting and smart man; his voice rings kind.  If it’s not factually true then Ira suggests truth in labeling.

The consciousness we seem to be missing at a collective level is that while there may not be any objective “truth,” we are essentially one collective consciousness that is wiring up into a realization that it is one unified global heart-mind.  We have thus historically wrestled, Hamlet-like, with all sorts of pairs of opposites (God/no-God; good/evil; greed/generosity; reason/emotion; thinking/feeling; truth/lie, etc.).

To individuate (i.e. be a distinct reasonably complete being) AND to participate fully in the group (i.e. to care for, and find one’s full identity in, the family, tribe, country, planet) is to cultivate a trans-personal, empathic and loving consciousness that spans the duality of self-other and bridges it into an identity which is self AND other(s).

The Goldman exex’s assertions that things have gotten really bad in his twelve years at that bank brought to mind a personal recollection:  Times were lean on Wall Street at Christmas of 1987, but the present I found on the swivel chair in my cubicle as a temp secretary in Mergers & Acquisitions at Merrill Lynch Capital Markets just about summed it all up:  a tiny cactus that I was, apparently, invited to sit on.

Were these bankers with names like James Mason and Mr. Quackenbush pirates in Hermes ties?  Were they practitioners of Darwinian superiority with their homes in Connecticut and on Park Avenue?  Perhaps.  But perhaps in them I met my own greedy, frightened self in those corner offices amongst the Lucite trophies celebrating billion dollar deals; perhaps now I might see more clearly just how hollow-man-poor that particular Shadow self was despite all that greed-is-good money it bathed in; perhaps I might also see how blessed my relatively more modestly paid self has been, for I am lucky in love and I’m blessed to care, to not be famous and to, so far, have not gone mad.

Perhaps we can share that soft-hearted love that sees our world, and each other, as One.

I’m not at all convinced that banking, or depravity, or abuse of children, or materialism has grown so much worse in the last twenty-five years.  Maybe we’ve all grown collectively more aware that in Monopoly not everyone gets Boardwalk and Park Place.  In the Great Depression we plebes were happy to play Monopoly, thinking we too could be rich, even if only in our minds for an ephemeral evening, softened by the knowledge that everyone who “lost” was merely disgruntled rather than actually ruined; in the here and now of our current consciousness where global Monopoly is growing stale, bitter and oh so clearly debauched we have an opportunity to re-think the game we are eternally playing.

In “reality” it does appear that workers in China toil miserably at 60 plus hour weeks, sleep packed into tiny rooms and occasionally die in explosions that are easily prevented by way of things like ventilation… if only Apple and its international fellow-corporations are willing to make just a little less money, or if we are willing to pay just a little more money (and I, for one, would pay more, or buy someone else’s less cool but blood-free product) we could do all sorts of good things in this world, including taking better care of all our collective children.

Step Right Up Folks and See the Invisible Children.

“Did you hear anything about this on NPR?” my wife asks?

“I think kids are into it because they want a sense of community,” says my fifteen-year-old, “but they are asked to pay three dollars a month and they get posters of a bad guy to sneak around at night and put up—how’s that going to help?”

“The dad who made the film seemed kinda… I don’t know, like he’s not a grown-up; and he has his six-year-old in it and he’s adorable, but what does he have to do with the issue?” wonders my seventeen-year-old, adding “And then they interview this African kid who says, ‘I wish I wasn’t alive,’ and that’s powerful, we get it, but then the guy keeps asking him, ‘So, you would rather be dead than be on this planet?’ and other questions until the kid is crying.  It seemed like he was exploiting him.”

My younger son honestly wonders if it’s a scam.  He’s read around on the topic and tells us that Kony’s army is down to two hundred people in remote areas and is hardly the biggest problem the world needs to be aware of at the moment.  And the ten million dollars donated (money from the one third of the revenues that goes to actually helping) only helped five hundred kids, while there are tens of thousands needing help.

After dinner and the dishes I Google “Invisible Children NPR” and bingo, four concise minutes on the topic, my sons drift over, listening to the radio emanating from my battered laptop.  Only the younger one listens to the end.

“You trust NPR,” he says.  “They made my same points,” he adds, and this is true.

*

We walk the dog in the moonlight and my fifteen-year-old tries to study vocabulary but his eyes can’t adjust and he keeps stopping by house lamps to read a word and then quiz my wife and I on the baggage continually loaded on the train to nowhere, to SATs and college, and NPR and invisible children.

*

Of course there’s a “sucker” born every minute, since we all enter the world needing to nurse.

I guess most of us just never get enough, and it’s our untamed greed that makes us vulnerable to the con.  There’s a pro to take every last nickel.  There’s an art to the con.

“This way to the egress, see the egress.  Don’t miss the egress,” P.T. Barnum would say to the folks who’d already put their cash on his barrelhead and gawked at his lurid sights.  And after they’d seen the egress they found themselves standing in an alley just short of the money they’d started with.

*

The next day my fifteen-year-old tells me that Invisible Children has enough money now and is not accepting any more.

I wonder to myself about the sort of genetics and experiences and economics and politics that conspire to create “bad guys” of major proportions, and about the forces that create viral fluxes in mass attention.  I wonder when consciousness might go viral, when treating hurt kids with compassion rises as a bigger agenda than killing the bad guy.

I picture the old trope of townsfolk with torches and pitchforks swarming after Frankenstein, of Nazi propaganda and tides of hate binding youth to bloody purpose.  I realize that I have no idea about what is right, about who is bad, about how to help us see the invisible children.  I feel free, suddenly, of opinion.

And I’m at dinner, at that Cuban place I love, eating garlic roasted chicken and plantains and rice and black beans and cold Mexican beer and life is good and my fifteen-year-old is talking about the sheep’s heart he dissected at school that day.  The wall of the heart was as thick as his knuckle.