”We can not be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.” – Eugene Peterson
Another great episode of On Being that I can not recommend enough if you love words and poetry. Readers Note: much discussion of the Christian bible.
Lizard Brain: “The body feels bad, why? A cookie will probably help.”
Thinking Brain: “That bad feeling is menstrual cramps, not hunger. Take some ibuprofen. Cookies taste good at first but end up making us feel crappy and sad later.”
Lizard Brain: “Oh yeah, ibuprofen. Cool. But also probably a cookie.”
Thinking Brain: “How about some water? Cookies will make us feel more tired. It’s 9am for heaven sake. We had a big, healthy breakfast and are not feeling hungry at all.”
Lizard Brain: “Water and three cookies? On it.”
Around this time of year I tend to catch myself acting weird, and realize in astonishment (every year!) that I’m feeling some low-level anxiety about Christmas. Consistently and inexplicably, I worry that The Kids Will Not Have A Good Christmas.
Where does this come from? Why does it not collapse under the weight of its own complete improbability? I mean really, what kid ends a morning of opening gifts and says, “that was the worst”? OK, I realize this is a hugely privileged statement; obviously families that struggle with abuse, poverty, food/housing insecurity can definitely have a terrible holiday season. But that’s not the situation for my kids, so why do I keep telling myself the story that Christmas is a time that I’m in danger of displeasing them? I don’t seem to worry about this at breakfast on Jan 11, for example.
Giving gifts is weird. When you give someone something, you make an anticipatory decision about what they want or what they might enjoy. It’s a strange kind of defining action, a test of the gift giver’s knowledge of the gift getter. To excel (because I love to excel in all things), you have to go deeper than what the person *says* she wants, into the depth of her unexpressed desires. I get it, it shows connection and intimacy. It’s also an exercise in deep vulnerability. “I think I found a material object that will please you,” says the wrapped package. “Let’s see how right I am.”
So yeah, the holidays — if you celebrate them with a raft of material-gift-giving like I tend to — is a vulnerable time, with multiple chances to love your loved ones in the wrong way, or with the wrong thing. (Whose idea was this, anyway?) I want it to be fun and relaxed and exciting and fulfilling. But at the same time, I carry all these expectations and fears and they make it hard to do the fun stuff because my hands are already pretty full. Also, dread makes me hungry so my hands are also full of cookies, argh.
I hope this year (and every year) that I can put down the fear of failure long enough to embrace the vulnerability and accept the chaos. I hope you can too.
Recently I’ve been talking with community organizers about how we can both organize inclusive events and also do that organizing in an inclusive manner. WordPress is an open source project, and because open source depends on a large active contributor base, we have to constantly think about how to make the project welcoming and inclusive.
One of the goals for the WordPress Community Team is to organize in-person events (meetups and WordCamps) that help connect and inspire WordPress enthusiasts. We ask organizers to organize welcoming and inclusive events, AND we ask them to do that organizing in a welcoming and inclusive manner. (Double play!) This means we encourage organizers to recruit a diverse organizing team, work transparently, and embrace community involvement and feedback.
All of that sounds great and seems simple enough, right? We have great tools for publishing information for everyone to see (namely, WordPress), we have great language around how our program is open to everyone, we have a code of conduct, yay! Inclusion!
Except of course we’re all humans, thinking with our human brains. Human brains, alas, are not always our friends when it comes to diversity and inclusion, because human brains are primarily wired to keep our bodies alive. And from our brains’ perspective, diversity and transparency have not kept our bodies alive for millions of years. What human brains have found highly successful re: the survival of the human race is: to create and stay in small groups of people with similar looks and values.
So in many ways, the work of a community organizer in an open source project is to fight with your brain a lot. This is what happens for me at least, multiple times per day:
“Danger!” say my brain. “Someone different wants to join our group!”
“Shhhh…” I say back to my brain. “It’s going to be ok, they just want to help.”
“But they’re not like us and they might fight us and we might lose and then we’ll die!” suggests my brain.
“I see what you’re saying,” I reply, “but really this discomfort is not dangerous, and we really need more people who are different, to help us grow.”
“Harumph,” says my brain. “I’m certain you’re wrong, so I’m going to sit back quietly course-correct us toward safety with my favorite tools, adrenaline for change and endorphins for sameness, until you stop endangering us with your crazy ideas.”
“Ok,” I sigh, “I realize you can’t help it, so I’m going to use logic and patience to keep reminding us that tight-knit exclusive groups, paranoia, and suspicion will not serve any of the goals we have in building open source communities.”
And scene.
I don’t have a solution to my assertion that open source goes against human nature, other than this practice of fighting my instinctual attraction to exclusivity and closed groups/processes. If you’ve found a method that works for you, I’d love to hear it! 🙂
I participated in a 5K this morning, along with a bunch of folks in my company.
I ran it slow, at roughly a 12:00-13:00 pace. It was cool and a little rainy, but quite beautiful. We ran on a trail around a golf course in Whistler BC — this is the week of our annual meetup, in which all of us spend a week together in the same place (the other 51 weeks of the year, everyone works remotely). It’s been an intense week of classes, town halls, workshops, and face to face communication, and running this trail every morning has really helped me keep my head on straight.
Amelia crafted a “microphone” this morning so she could conduct interviews and provide commentary during her day at camp. In this video, she interviews Baxter about “how he got his look;” the coaching fail is killing me. ❤️
Baxter has never seen any Pokemon anything — show or Go — but he’s been picking up some of the mythology via oral tradition, at day camp this summer. And now he’s running with it. As the story goes, when it’s night in our land, it’s daytime in Pokemon world, and so Baxter goes and visits there while I’m sleeping — has his own house there and everything! The house has no heat, though, which is why he’s cold and wrapped up in a blanket. The story continues in this video:
