When Your Vision Is Too Expansive

I have difficulty compartmentalizing information.

This is often a blessing. I am easily able to take a broad view of systems and also transfer information from one system to another. At classes and workshop, I find myself impatient when other attendees have to stop and ask, "What does this have to do with...[fill in the blank with whatever the topic is]?" (Yes, I found college almost painful.) If the teacher or leader of the class or workshop has made the connection, you can be certain that I too have made the connection. When other people are saying things like, "This is nice, but I was really hoping to get some tangible ideas I can take home," I often am sighing inside. My neurons have usually been firing off ideas the whole time as I've connected all types of information in response to what I am learning.

At times, though, my inability to compartmentalize becomes problematic. Today I found that a global perspective I have been taking for granted for some time is not a common world view. I didn't realize until after I pissed someone off (at work, no less) by taking my broad view as a given. Actually, it took me getting upset that I'd pissed someone off. I got upset and called a colleague who listened to me explain my thinking to her, and then she said "I have never thought of it like that before." The subsequent dialogue in my head went something like:

Oh.

Oh! Huh.

Really? I could have sworn that other colleagues have talked about this before.

Is it just me?

I don't get how this can be compartmentalized.

I am so confused. I am so hurt [that the person I pissed off was so offended].

Sometimes it is hard not to feel crazy.

Postscript: A few days later, I am feeling much better. I called another colleague, one from the west coast whose response to the idea that I think much differently than others was, "you do?!" Ah, it is likely another one of those east-west coast adjustments I am making. So then I talked to a colleague out here who is one of the longest-serving and most respected in our field. And though she has worked for 30 years in the northeast, she also is very involved in the national organization of our association and has a good understanding of regional differences. She is a tremendous mentor for me! I wanted her to help me shift my thinking, if necessary, into a more regionally-appropriate form. But she told me I was spot-on in my thinking, and that more than anything I just have to be patient (and try harder not to scare people so much with my wild west ways LOL).

You Know What?! I Am Good At This!

Every once in a while, it is good for a person in a marriage to be challenged into decision-making without over-consultation with the other party.

Buying a house is, in my opinion, a decision best made jointly. But there was a lot of prep that went into making it possible for me, during G.'s trip, to follow through with what I understand to be our shared desires, without G being here in person. There wouldn't have been time to do it any other way.

I learned yesterday and today as I:

• viewed the house,
• decided on an offer price,
• put down an offer,
• began collecting more information about mortgages and making initial decisions about home loan programs,
• received information about the bidding war and made a decision to change our offer price,
• received more information about the bidding war, and made decisions about addendums to the offer

...that I am more capable than I'd been giving myself credit for lately. I received a lot of little affirmations regarding my ability to be astute, to be sharp and flexible at the same time, to ask the right questions, to study a situation and act on it in the best way I can for my family, to track down the information I need when I need it, and to think quickly.

And here is the other thing. I learned just how much G. trusts me. I learned about her ability to relinquish control when it is a well-informed and necessary action, and to have faith that even if things don't work out perfectly, that I have acted in our best interests to my fullest knowledge.

I am proud of myself. And oh my goodness, do I love G. soooooooo much. She is incredible! She is a strong, thoughtful, sharing, diligent, and trusting person with whom to share my life. Though the nitty gritty work was largely my own today and yesterday, it is the work we have done together, and the search process we have been on together for a new home for about a year now, that resulted in the events of today.

I pray for continued happy endings to each segment of the journey as we make our way to our new home.

A Tribute to Artists and Reflections on my Childhood

Disclaimer in Advance: The following are my own impressions and memories, which of course are colored by the perspective of years and my own feelings. As other family members frequently find my various memories to be inaccurate, I am writing this as a tribute based on my impressions, which may or may not be particularly historically accurate.
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I grew up in a home filled with music of all kinds, and colors rich and deep, and words artfully arranged, and images of intrigue.

This is my mother, the brilliant artist and writer with a creative and powerful mind:
http://www.sarahfishburn.com/ (note if you are at work and want to wander onto her blog to turn down your speakers, as there is music, which you can control using a fixture on the right column of her blog.)

This is my father, the brilliant musician and engineer with a creative and powerful mind:
http://colin-quodlibet.blogspot.com/

If you scroll down the links to other blogs on my mother's blog, you can see the type of people with whom we associated as I was growing up. http://lisahoffman.typepad.com/ and the likes.


We moved around a bit, but my childhood home always included art everywhere, not just on the walls but on and in our cupboards, on top of shelves, on the floor, painted onto furniture...everywhere. For some period of time, if you were a friend visiting my home, and you decided to snoop around in our bathroom cabinets, you would be greeted with a line of those funny fat little plastic troll dolls, artfully arranged as entertainment for the "snooper," which I think my mother might assume we all are.

It also included lots and lots and lots of books, tucked all over the place but many of them on this huge bookshelf made from old barn doors or an old barn fence or something like that. I wonder, mom, if you have photos of that, so people can get an idea of what I am talking about?

Creativity and clarity of thought were values in my home of origin. As was a wonderful, complex intermingling of notions of both simplicity and the value of beautiful things.

We read constantly, and art was a part of our daily lives. We also played a lot. We hiked and camped and played wall-ball and four-square and basketball and frisbee and all sorts of things. My mother does not drive. My father does but hates it. We walk and rode our bikes a lot. I started riding the city bus at a young age. At first my mom was nervous about it, but then she considered my ability to use my cunning conversational skills to get through almost anything ;-).

I mostly would walk around talking to myself. For a while I had a collection of imaginary friends with funny names like "Bookie," and "Stampie," and my "best friend" who I called "Maradawn" (I have no idea how that would be spelled). After my imaginary friends began to fade away, I would talk myself through my imaginary games: I was the attorney, the teacher, the mom. Eventually my self-conversations began to just be fairly straight-forward conversations with myself, imaginary play loosely tossed in throughout. I was always processing! There was so much to take in, in my world.

My siblings still tease me about the ski pole. I used to take one of our ski poles and walk around the back yard at our duplex, jabbing it into the ground and talking away to no one but myself. The kinesthetic feeling of it striking the ground and then pushing it through the resistant soil helped me think. For a long time I have felt ashamed when my siblings would talk about the ski pole. Now I see that child self walking through the yard with it, and I feel so loving and understanding toward her. I am a little neurodivergent afterall, and that is what they call "heavy work" and "joint compressions" and "cognitive ordering through speech" now in my children's occupational, educational, and speech therapy. I am lucky that I had parents who let me do my thing. I was able to develop my cognitive abilities without unecessary impediments that result when one's neurological system is trying to regulate and order the world and is supressed in its natural efforts to do so.

My mind went constantly. It still does. It happens with all of the members of my family of origin including my older sisters, I am guessing, but I've noticed it is especially true in the case of my younger brother and me. When we shared a room, we would talk nonstop until we fell asleep. Deep conversations, I am sure, for people 5 and 7 years old or whatever.

My brother's mind seemed to work mostly in images and words. He was and is an amazing artist. Mine almost always worked in words. And also in feelings. Often thoughts would pass through me as feelings alone. For someone so verbal, so wordy, it is hard when you can't articulate a thought because it comes in a wordless form. But it would happen. It still does. Sometimes I start writing something, and I feel perfectly clear and the words are flowing right out of me, and then suddenly the thoughts come to me instead in waves of purely gut-level feelings, and I will only be able to scribble. If you were to look at a journal of mine, you would find pages filled with just scribbles. At the time I made them, these would be very clear thoughts. But totally nonverbal. Somewhere there is an abstract artist in me who is working through these images, though the images themselves are very unskilled, unpracticed, and completely child-like.

This might be a part I of a II part series. I have to post this before my laptop battery runs out because I don't know where the charger is right now (the red light is flashing-- ack!). I may or may not have more to say in this tribute at this time...we'll see tomorrow or sometime later this week.