"Hit 'em where they ain't!"
Sometimes you are forced into it. You find yourself in a situation where everything you try backfires and while reconsidering your actions you realize you went about it in the wrong way, you did what was expected of you, you played by the rules, their rules. And out of desperation you gather the courage to break those rules and declare a different game. That it when you realize how much of your power you surrendered willingly all this time and how the game looks when you reclaim it.
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We had to do it when we pulled our daughter out of school in the middle of her 6th grade and attempted to enroll her in a different, private school. It was against the rules, we were told.
Pulling a student out of school in the middle of the year without permission is not an option; even if it is your own child and you observe a real problem. She should go back to school and bear with it while the parents jump through the necessary hoops.
We said “no way” and at that moment we realized what was so obvious to others before us.
“The rules “in any game including the game of life are powerful only to the extent that everyone is willing to accept them and play along. They can be changed,"Hit 'em where they ain't!" is what we chose to do.
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It might sound strange but if you give it a serious thought you’ll be impressed with the logic. Instead of spending days looking for answers in all the obvious places, where they are likely to be or easy to be found, in close proximity or in well lighted spots, do the unexpected and it will take you to places you did not even dream of.
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Some call it second degree change, referring to the fact that most people develop over time a set way of doing things, an established view of the world they use every time to assess situations and plan actions. If you do not fall for that, for the obvious and expected, if you realize that in every life situation there is at least one more layer, the one less predictable, the surprising, the angle not often seen, if you’ll use this knowledge to change the rules, create new ones or just refuse to play along you will always have the upper hand.
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And so we did the unexpected and took our feud to the public in a form of a newspaper paid add. Not an open letter or letter to the editor, since those are accessible for the other side to respond to, just few lines written by our daughter, questioning how for over a month she was forced to sit home with no solution in sight. Public opinion is a forceful power and by stepping into the public eye we stopped being victims of a stiff birocratic system. What dragged on for over a month was resolved in less than twenty four hours.
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I strongly believe that our private experience, since that what it is, goes way beyond that. Like a visual illusion, once someone helps you see beyond it no one can take the new acquired sight away from you. Each story told about an alternate way used to resolve a situation facilitates the ability to change. The tactics we used were not ours, being an avid reader I often borrow ideas from books and I owe the one I told you about to the two books you’ll find being referenced below. I feel it’s my obligation to pass this knowledge forward.
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You can spend considerable time trying to define change and find that it is an impossible task taking into account how varied and multifaceted it can be. Most dictionaries come up with a long list of optional definitions trying to cover the many options and variables. So at the end all we come out with is rather vague and amorphous. And yet change is very real to all of us, it is part of our life and a source of many sleepless nights and hours of debate with ourselves and others. It’s an intriguing concept; like a light at the end of a long tunnel some search for it all their life, but like the bluebird of happiness it is often in our back yard just waiting to be found.
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Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution by Paul Watzlawick, John H. Weakland, Richard Fisch and Milton H. Erickson (Apr 17, 1974)
The partner: John Grisham
Dell; 1ST edition (January 7, 1998)
I hope it is OK that I borrowed the quote but it really hit home.
ReplyDeleteLong time since I've thought of Paul Watzlawick, but I die read 'How Real is Real?' and 'The Situation is Hopeless, but not Serious' thirty years ago and more.
ReplyDeleteBooks like that or Bateson's or Laing's or Havens' or even Freud's have a double life in my mind. On the one hand, they are part of my everyday thinking without ever crediting or even remembering the writers whose ideas sunk such deep roots into me. On the other hand, so much of what these brilliant 20th Century therapists and analysts had to say has been thrown on the scrapheap as unscientific nonsense, rightly in my estimation--and a part of me is always at war with my own instinctive acceptance of their work.
But that's me!
A piece like this goes in and out for me. I'm interested in your struggle with the schools and your audacious plan to short circuit their games. Less interested in general reflections on life, change, etc.
Again, that's very much me, a matter of my taste and proclivities more than a comment on or criticism of the writing.
Where did the bluebird of happiness come from? I use it in a particularly dark version as a 162 prompt and wondered if you had seen it (the prompt, that is, not necessarily the bluebird itself.)
The bluebird, I thought it’s a known fact that everyone has one in their back yard :-)
ReplyDeleteThe “deep thoughts” just my try at making this piece something more than a personal story injecting the expertise flavor.
Paul Watzlawick, some of his stuff changed my way of thinking completely, I am surprised you did not ask about Grisham, unless you read the book and then the connection is obvious.
I don't remember the Grisham particularly but since I've read them all.... The ad idea rang a vague bell in a dark corridor somewhere upstairs.
ReplyDeleteHere's the prompt I came up with for my other class: ". The bluebird of happiness flies over the battlefield and lands on a boot left behind."
As a writing matter, I worry about 'injecting.' If the thoughts arise and are written down, that's one thing; if the writer feels the need to give the piece more heft and depth and grafts or injects thoughts after the fact, that's another.