Today’s post is about assumptions, but it is interesting that the prompt jumps to incorrect assumptions. Shared assumptions are a foundation of a functioning society. For example, most successful drivers assume that most fellow drivers on the road will follow the traffic rules, and move away from cars that seem to be having a hard time doing so for safety reasons. We all rely on a lot of assumptions to get through a day. They are the things we can take for granted, do on autopilot, and suppose will just work the way we expect.
Typically violated assumptions result in interest, because we are checking to see if we need to update our mental models of the world. For example, in the area of Germany where I live, people frequently assume that I’m Belgian or maybe Dutch when I struggle with the language. That’s because I could literally bike to those countries from here. When I tell them I am American, usually there is interest in what I am doing here and so on. If the people we are interacting with file their error in judgement as an exception or update their heuristics, everything works well.
Assumptions only become limiting or dangerous when we both do not fit the norm and it is not easy to update someone else’s assumptions or it has some sort of cost to do so. For example, if the person I am talking to either loves or hates Americans, things can get weird if I don’t further follow their idea about this thing they abstractly love or hate. While almost everyone has many properties that are close to average (stereotypes come from somewhere), almost no one follows all averages or stereotypes exactly, because we are all our own collection of traits and experiences. We also use our own assumptions and the assumptions of others to fashion together our identity.
In my experience, the more we are completely ourselves and transparent about it, the more space we make for others to also be authentic. Exploring my own assumptions has given me way more benefit than worrying about what other people are thinking about me. On the other hand, being able to effectively influence others relies on understanding their assumptions and manipulating them. Maybe I would be better off with a better understanding of when others are making incorrect assumptions and fixing them or using them to my advantage.
So tell me, how do you identify incorrect assumptions about you? What do you do in that situation?
A recent self portrait- What can you assume about me from this photo?
Today’s Bloganuary prompt is: What do I like most about my writing?
One reason that I chose to participate in Bloganuary is that I feel somewhat out of practice in writing. I have been reading a fair amount. I enjoy poetic language in fiction, but more straightforward prose in non-fiction. I like reading things that reveal layer after layer. Poetic language takes more effort to come up with than I have to give sometimes. And while reality can be implausible and improbable, fiction should not be. So creating fictional layers also counts as too much work.
I like that writing helps me organize and crystallize my ideas. It gives structure to my thoughts. But I like my writing best when it reaches someone. Either my present or future self, a present or future friend or colleague, or a present or future fellow human.
Today’s Bloganuary prompt is: What makes you laugh?
Laughter is a sign that something violates your expectations and surprises you in a delightful way. I laugh at silly science puns and clever turns of phrase. I laugh at my kid’s antics and sometimes the surreal. I laugh less than I used to, which I understand is common with age. I would have made a goal to laugh more this year, but I couldn’t figure out how to measure it. A real sign of whimsy.
Today’s Bloganuary challenge prompt is: Who inspires you?
Inspire is an interesting word because it both means to motivate and to breath in. From Google, we learn “Middle English enspire, from Old French inspirer, from Latin inspirare ‘breathe or blow into’ from in- ‘into’ + spirare ‘breathe’. The word was originally used of a divine or supernatural being, in the sense ‘impart a truth or idea to someone’.” So we are looking for someone who breathes new life into us. If this comes as an interview question, Indeed has a framework for answering this question quickly and neatly.
However, in my experience, inspiration is neither quick nor neat nor can be completely carried by only one person. It is one of the closest things I have experienced to real magic and I receive inspiration from family and fiction, near and far. Just about every member of my extended family has breathed new life into me, but especially my parents, who have always done their best to support and prepare me for whatever comes next. I love the chemist mother in “A Wrinkle in Time” as she leans into weaving together her personal life and scientific exploration. I’m inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision in “I Have A Dream.” to create more freedom and equality for all of us.
As I get older, however, I start to think that although inspiration is important, it might be even more important to remove the sources that extinguish your spark, that take the air out of your sails, and smother you to the point you feel ready to expire. Whether it is media that shows people being mean to know reason to their supposed friends or a real-life companion that dims your glow, no amount of inspiration can overcome a strong enough sink.
Today’s Bloganuary prompt is: What is something you wish you knew how to do?
There are so many things to wish for, it can be hard to narrow it down. Ideally, I’d like to know how to control matter and energy and live free from consequences, but those are genie-in-a-bottle-type wishes. In the real world, I am more interested in wishes I can work toward. One particular wish I am working on is knowing how to communicate more effectively with those around me.
Moving to a country where I do not speak the language as an adult has been a challenge on a number of levels. Even as a young person, learning languages was not among my strengths. As an adult, practicing a new language is like having a foreign invader in my mind and mouth. I don’t hear all the relevant sounds. Never the less, I continue to practice and learn because every step at getting better makes my daily life smoother.
Blogging is another opportunity for me to practice my communication skills. This a place to record, clarify and crystallize my thoughts. This is one factor that motivated me to take part in this Bloganuary challenge. Without work, wishes wither and wane.
Today’s Bloganuary prompt is: What was your favorite toy as a child?
The play I remember most as a child was imaginative and typically in nature. My imaginary friend, Drink, and I would roam the back yard and garden to play in the creek, a tree house, or other things we happened upon. A fallen log would become a whale or a fortress. A bit of moss would host a fairy garden. I loved feeling the wild directly, the cool water and mud squishing between my toes, earthy smells, chasing chickens, even eating wild plants (that my parents had taught me to identify) like violets or sour grass.
Because my imagination got so much practice in those days, I also loved books, especially being read to. I loved inhabiting worlds that I knew something similar, like Laura Ingles Wilder books, or E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Webb or Trumpet of the Swan, or those more remote like the Narnia series or Mary Poppins.
I certainly had many of the popular 1980’s toys. Dolls from Barbie to Cabbage Patch, Strawberry Shortcake, and a tote bag full of Care Bears. Ficher-Price, Legos, Mr. Potato Head, My Little Ponys, Voltron, and an A-team van. I’m glad that I had the toys of my time and I remember the colorful pieces of plastic fondly. It’s just nothing like the compelling memory of being close to the Earth, in tune with her cycles and wild ways.
Today for Bloganuary we are supposed to write about the last time we left our comfort zone.
I laughed at reading that prompt because I feel like I need to work harder to remember the last time I was truly in my comfort zone. I have been living in Germany with my family for the last 3.5 years. There are many advantages and opportunities, but I struggle with the language and the culture. Then we visit the US and life and culture there has moved on without us. So I try to appreciate the best of where I am while I’m there and defend whatever hard won comfort zone I can find.
On the other hand, the problem with comfort zones is that it is possible to get stuck there. It’s just so comfortable that it can seem better to never leave. If living through a plague has taught me anything, its that simple human interactions can be great, but people need to stay in practice with social norms or we forget and drift apart. I have also learned that without the support of a steady, secure comfort zone it is difficult to be in a state to venture out and learn.
A recent trip out of my comfort zone includes participating in the TechLabs Aachen Digital Shaper program in Data Science. It is an optimal mix between practicing skills I already have and learning new skills because the program has an online learning platform part that is completed independently and a group project. This is a nice balance between independent learning and working together to do or make something.
My two favorite stretches of interstate in the US are I-70 W of Denver and I-10 along the Gulf coast. These days, my road trip planning has a more European focus. For Europe, I most prefer trains for getting between cities, so if we are going by road we must be seeing some nature. One recent summer, we had a fantastic road trip from Aachen, Germany down to Bled, Slovenia and Pula, Croatia and back. There was a definite nature focus while we avoided cities for the COVID times.
The next great road trip I would love to take in the spring to see the heart of Europe in bloom. In mid-April, we would go to the Daffodil Route in the Eiffel, a German national park just south of us. Then we would head to Hallerbos Forest in Belgium that is carpeted in bluebells that time of year. Next we would drive to Champagne, France and spend some time gossiping about how everything else is just sparkling wine. As much as it pains me, we would skip Paris on this trip because I love to show up there emerging from Gare d’Nord in the center of the city on foot. We would drive around Paris to Givery, France to check out Claude Monet’s gardens in full bloom. Next stop would be Normandy Beach in France, to see the historic WWII battleground. Then we would head back along the French and Belgian coast with a stop in Bruges, Belgium to see the canals, belfry, and basilica. Finally, we would drive to Keukenhof and the Dutch tulip gardens.
I signed up for the Bloganuary Challenge to help get into the habit of posting more. The first prompt is what advice I would give my teenage self. I’m not sure I would give her any advice, because I think she did pretty good on her own and I wouldn’t want to throw her off. Many people say that they would tell their former self to not worry so much, but I see how her anxiety and ambition motivated her to do cool things when there was no guarantee that she would. That’s not to say that I did not make mistakes, learn, or have regrets. However, on the balance things have turned out more than ok so far.
I now have almost teenage kids of my own, so I can also talk about the advice I give to them. Today I was cuddling with my daughter watching the part of Dirty Dancing where Baby confronts the snobby waiter, Robby. He says that some people count and some people don’t and tries to give Baby his copy of the Fountainhead. I commented to my daughter that she should not date any boys in college who are really into Ayn Rand. A few minutes later, my husband, Rob, came in and we shared that we were discussing Ayn Rand. His reply was something like, “Oh yeah, I liked her stuff in college.” So apparently now I live in a sitcom. So maybe my best advice is to live with your own laugh track.
Yesterday I posted my favorite fiction from 2021. The real world is also interesting and important. Here are my favorite non-fiction works I read, in no particular order.
My favorite insight from this book is that rethinking becomes more valuable as the world changes faster.
My least favorite wording of this book was calling people who can interrogate their beliefs critically, rationally, and continually “scientists.” I’ve been a scientist and I’ve worked with many scientists and people in that line of work are at least as susceptible to various biases as anyone else. Still, clearly not all politicians, prosecutors, or preachers act like the personas he invokes either. It’s a useful way to refer to a defines set of traits and behaviors.
If things like identity, polarization, consensus, disagreement, flexibility, and transformation are not on your mind these days, I suspect you are not paying attention. I like the framing – revisit your assumptions periodically, revise as needed – and the vision – it’s an increasingly important skill to be able to find out what you don’t know and be able to change your mind.
This year I started experimenting with fasting, and this book was a piece of that journey. I still love food and don’t expect to get skinny, but I also would like to avoid metabolic disorders and more serious health problems as I get older. Living in Germany, most stores are closed on Sundays and Holidays. At first, as an American used to being able to get anything 24/7 , I found this weird and inconvenient. Over time though, I found that having some time off that you could not run errands allowed me to relax a little more deeply, make time for journeys out in nature, family and quiet.
“Hormones are central to understanding obesity. Everything about human metabolism, including the body set weight, is hormonally regulated. A critical physiological variable such as body fatness is not left up to the vagaries of daily caloric intake and exercise. Instead, hormones precisely and tightly regulate body fat. We don’t consciously control our body weight any more than we control our heart rates, our basal metabolic rates, our body temperatures or our breathing. These are all automatically regulated, and so is our weight. Hormones tell us when we are hungry (ghrelin). Hormones tell us we are full (peptide YY, cholecystokinin). Hormones increase energy expenditure (adrenalin). Hormones shut down energy expenditure (thyroid hormone). Obesity is a hormonal dysregulation of fat accumulation. Calories are nothing more than a proximate cause of obesity.” ― Jason Fung, The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss
I have a love/ hate relationship with self help books. I was a psychology minor in college, so I like to read the latest theories. But main stream books are by definition pop psychology and anyone can publish their theories and some do not fit to my experience to the point of possibly crossing the border from bad advice to dangerous. Luckily, on the balance, this was not one of those books for me. I appreciated where insights were supported with data, which was frequent in this book.
This book is framed in terms of romantic relationships, but I thought that the insights were much more generally applicable to any intimate relationship in my life. We don’t grow out of the need to connect authentically with our loved ones. When we feel disconnected, it’s painful and we tend to resort to bickering. That happens with my kids when they don’t have enough attention too.
It was also useful to me to see examples of where our behavior is driven by our emotions even when we explain it in terms of our logical thinking. So teaching communications skills to better bicker about stuff that does not matter will never bring someone the love they want. We can only be vulnerable with someone when we are strong enough ourselves and we can trust them. That’s what intimacy is, and caricatures of it do not resemble the real thing for long.
“We have to dive below to discover the basic problem: these couples have disconnected emotionally; they don’t feel emotionally safe with each other. What couples and therapists too often do not see is that most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me? The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and reestablish a sense of safe connection.” ― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships
I follow Jess Wade on twitter and love her project to include more female professors on Wikipedia. In her experimenting with different science communication media, now she has a children’s book. My daughter and I watched a video of it being read to us. At 10, she was underwhelmed, as she may be too old for it. Or it might be that she already lives with a mom scientist who has been telling her about materials since she was small. Still, I appreciate that it is a thing that exists in the world. I think I would have liked it as a kid. As a mom, I can imagine playing a game pointing out things in the world made of different materials with curious littles. It gives me more hope for the future than any of the A.I. doomsday scenario tomes I read this year.
An acclaimed physicist and debut picture-book author introduces readers to the tiny building blocks that make up the world around us. Elegant, friendly text and stylish illustrations explain atoms, the elements, and other essential science concepts and reveal how very (very) small materials are manipulated to create self-washing windows; stronger, lighter airplanes; and other wonders of nanotechnology. – Goodreads blurb
