Hasta La Gadget!

 A deal from nowhere, which went nowhere, Microsoft’s partnership with Barnes & Noble’s Nook came to an ignominious conclusion today with the bookseller kicking the software firm a chunk of cash and shares. The official verbiage indicates that Microsoft will sell “all of its $300 million convertible Series A preferred limited liability company interest” in exchange… Read More

Wisdom is the creative outcome of knowledge and experience that have become integrated and joined together, and it is our emotions that inform this process and make it possible. Our emotions are continually live and online. Like a navigation system, they are continually informing us. When we talk about quality of life, we are talking about the way that we feel. Our emotions let us know when life is going well, and in no uncertain terms, they let us know when it is not. This is how we learn and this is how we develop understanding.

Wisdom is dependent upon our capacity to listen to and understand our emotional experience. Our emotions underpin every aspect of our well-being. When we talk about our mental health, we are not simply talking about our mind and the way that we think; we are talking about the way that we feel; and we all know that when we are emotionally stressed or unhappy, this will have a massive impact on our physical health and well-being.

Wisdom is an internal journey. It is dependent upon our ability to trust our own inner experience and our own inner voice and to be responsive to this. Our emotions are integral to every aspect of our lives and to our very experience of being. If we are shut off from our emotions then we simply cannot arrive at a place of integrity, a place of connectedness or of wholeness, either internally or externally.

Wisdom is dependent upon our capacity for reflective thought. To integrate our experiences and transform them into a wealth of understanding we will need to develop an internal place of reflection, of curiosity, and of interest. Paradoxically, reflective thought is both a place of stillness and yet also a place of profound growth and therefore a place of movement. When we develop an internal space inside our mind where we are open to receiving, it enables us to be engaged in a continual state of real experience, where every moment of life becomes a journey of interest and possibility. This is why mindfulness and meditation are so incredibly valuable.

Wisdom is dependent on our ability to receive. For us to be able to integrate our experiences in ways that inform us and build our internal growth and resilience, we will need to be open to receiving. If we have been brought up in a world in which our ability to make choices were not supported or encouraged or indeed if our entitlement to choice was in any way violated, then we may have learned to defend against receiving. And this will get in the way of our capacity to develop wisdom. We may be locked into a more defensive way of living rather than being open to our greatest possibility.

Wisdom results from a healthy relationship between our emotions and our mind and for this relationship to flourish we will need to learn a fluent emotional language and a good emotional vocabulary. It is impossible to fully integrate experience and thought without an emotional language. Emotional intelligence is exactly this. Emotional intelligence is our minds ability to develop a language that allows us to interpret and make sense of the way that we feel. This in turn allows us to process our life experiences and turn them into a bank of healthy knowledge that supports us and fuels our ability to navigate our lives successfully.

Wisdom is a state of well-being and it’s not static, it’s a continual process of evolution, a natural process of continual growth and integration. It’s not an end goal, it’s a journey, and true integrity is being fully available to participate in that journey. Integrity is the birthplace of possibility and the birthplace of our fullest potential.

Wisdom is the ultimate state of integration. A connectedness and a relatedness between all aspects of our lives, both internally and externally; a meeting place where we can define our autonomy and yet at the same time stand vulnerable in the uncertainty that surrounds us, trusting in our inner knowing and responding intuitively and organically to our daily life experiences.

Wisdom is dependent upon the health of the relationship between our mind and our emotions. This is the most influential and significant relationship that you will ever have in your adult life and the honesty and congruence of this relationship will determine the shape of your adult life and the shape and direction of your actions and therefore the shape of the world that you live in.

True courage is about looking inwards, not outwards. Being able to stand firm in a place of vulnerability and to flourish and grow with honesty and humility is a strength beyond measure. This is the power of emotional wisdom.

Jenny Florence welcomes conversation with her readers, via Twitter or on her website forum. a-z-of-emotionalhealth.com
Jenny’s new audio book, Emotional Health, the Voice of Our Soul, has recently been released. It is also available in Kindle.

(Illustration by Raffael Cavallaro)

Life, as John Lennon told us, is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. The same can be said for lessons, which sometimes arrive as unexpected gifts from our beautiful boys — and girls.

That’s what I learned nearly a decade ago when I took my then 8-year-old daughter, Ella, to Central Park’s Strawberry Fields on the Dec. 8, 2005, the 25th anniversary of John’s death.

I’d stopped by the park on Dec. 8 pretty much ever year since 1980, but never with Ella, whom my wife, Theresa Wozunk, and I raised as a Beatle Baby since birth. We’d spared Ella this annual ritual, even as we embarked on familial Magical Mystery Tours to Liverpool, London and Hamburg.

Only two months before, Ella unexpectedly met Paul McCartney, producing a sweet tale that traveled around the world. Now, I decided, Ella needed to experience another part of the Beatle story.

***

As I walked hand-in-hand with Ella past the Dakota in the early December chill, memory transported me back to 1980, when I was a 14-year-old high school freshman.

It was nearly 11:30 p.m., and a school night. But that didn’t stop my younger brother, Drew, and me from our weeknight ritual of secreting ourselves in his room, huddled around our 12-inch black-and-white Zenith TV. With the volume turned down to a whisper, we waited for “Prisoner Cell Block H” to begin on Channel 11.

We were moments into the latest jailhouse melodrama when words to this effect crawled across the bottom of the screen: “A man tentatively identified as former Beatle John Lennon has been reported shot on the Upper West Side and rushed to Roosevelt Hospital.”

The 11 p.m. news broadcasts were over. CNN was about six months old — not that we had cable TV in our working-class corner of Brooklyn.

But ABC’s “Monday Night Football” was still on.

The words “tentatively identified” and the lack of the word “dead” gave me some optimism as the dial clicked four times under my hand to Channel 7. Howard Cosell quickly dashed those hopes:

“Remember, this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses,” Cosell began in his voice-of-authority nasal tones. “An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.”

I pounded downstairs past my father, still in his mailman’s uniform, eating dinner off the tray table in front of his Archie Bunker-like easy chair as he watched “The Tonight Show.”

“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.

“Somebody shot John Lennon,” I said. “He’s dead.”

“Oh,” my father replied, taking his attention off Johnny Carson’s monologue for just a moment. “Well, it’s too damn late to play any records. Go to sleep!”

I jumped into bed and turned on my clock radio, making sure I kept the volume down on my makeshift pillow speaker.

I flipped from radio station to radio station — WPLJ, WNEW, WABC — listening to the DJs struggle with their emotions, field calls from weeping fans and play John’s music. Meanwhile, scores massed outside the Dakota brandishing candles and singing John’s songs.

I wanted to be there. But there was no question I would be staying put. My father usually stayed up through Tom Snyder’s “Tomorrow Show,” which didn’t end until 2 a.m. I wasn’t going to sneak out of the house and take a train to a place I wasn’t even sure how to find. Not in 1980 New York. Not at age 14.

***

I began to wonder whether I was making a mistake as Ella and I walked into the packed park. The turnout was the biggest I’d seen since the first anniversary vigil.

Thanks to both the crowd and the cops, the line leading up the “Imagine” mosaic was as orderly as it was long. As we got closer, the candles made it almost seem like we were approaching a round patch of daylight, to a soundtrack of Beatles songs provided by hundreds of voices and dozens of jangling acoustic guitars.

“I can’t see!” Ella said.

Someone overheard her. “Hey, there’s a little girl trying to get in!” a woman said, and the message began to travel up the line.

Suddenly, cops cleared us a path. We stopped a moment and took in the light, flowers, photos and fan art that obscured the mosaic.

I looked into Ella’s gray-blue eyes. She was smiling. Ella was cold and tired — but happy. For her, it was another fun Beatle day: full of music, nice people, a certain amount of physical discomfort and a pleasant surprise. For her, this gathering represented a celebration.

In that moment, 25 years of sorrow — or something — lifted. Believing in yesterday is fine, but living for the moment and embracing the future is where it’s at.

I was thinking about the future that night when I extracted from Ella a vow I hope she’ll keep.

“I need you to make me a promise,” I told her. “I took you here tonight. I want you to take me here in 25 years, on Dec. 8, 2030.

“When I’m 64.”

Adapted from “Raising a Beatle Baby: How John, Paul, George and Ringo Helped us Come Together as a Family” by Jere Hester. Published by Books by Brooklyn.

It isn’t every day I head to the White House and share ideas with the President and First Lady, but on Thursday I’m attending the White House Summit on College Opportunity, discussing ways to strengthen the college-to-career pipeline for low-income students.

By including career readiness organizations like mine, The Opportunity Network, the Obama administration is moving the conversation in the right direction. The administration recognizes that academic achievement is clearly linked to career readiness. The share of jobs that require postsecondary education has doubled over the last 40 years, as jobs require more skills. This means that, not only do students need to continue their educations after high school, they also need to start thinking about their careers while they are still in high school so that they can evaluate options, choose the best match and maximize their college opportunities. The more engaged students are in career planning, the more likely they are to do well academically and to complete college.

High school students need to be exposed to a range of careers to understand their options, set career goals and identify the postsecondary requirements to achieve those goals. Too often, these conversations don’t begin until college, and by then it is too late for many students.

High school guidance counselors need to ensure that students understand the link between college and career before they begin filling out applications so they choose colleges that fit their needs. It’s much harder to become an engineer if you don’t apply to an engineering school or to become a music teacher in a school that doesn’t offer music or education.

Students who start college with a sense of purpose are also better prepared to compete for summer internships. In a recent study, business executives said that internships and work experience outweigh college majors or GPAs when they are deciding whom to hire.

In addition to their core curricula, high schools should also teach “soft skills” in areas like self-advocacy and building networks of people with common interests. While these are traditionally considered part of career training, they are as important for college as knowing how to take notes or study for exams. Every college student needs to learn how to write a professional-caliber email, conduct himself well in a meeting with a professor and work effectively on team projects and study groups.

Learning to build networks and social capital is an essential lesson for all students, and it can start in high school. Eighty percent of Americans find their jobs through people they know. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen summed it up in an interview about the opportunity gap: “The meritocracy works if you know the right people, if you have access to the networks. How do venture capitalists make decisions? We get referrals based on people we already know.”

My organization, The Opportunity Network, has developed a robust curriculum that combines college counseling with career exposure, professional etiquette and skills to build networks. I’ve seen firsthand that this approach amplifies the impact of college counseling and college preparation. One hundred percent of the low-income students in our program graduate from college, and 85 percent start career-track jobs or gain graduate school admission within six months of college completion.

As part of this summit, I will commit to training front line staff and guidance counselors at schools and college access organizations nationwide in The Opportunity Network’s holistic curriculum that combines college preparation, college transition and success and career readiness. Our staff is eager to help schools and community organizations increase their rates of college matriculation and college completion, and to help young people prepare for careers.

I’ve been a fan of the President and First Lady’s initiatives to expand college access and success since they were launched. I’m grateful for this opportunity and can’t wait to help make these initiatives succeed.

Let’s be honest: The word white often makes white people uncomfortable. Many of us who are white, when asked to describe ourselves, do not say our race in our personal descriptions. A typical white person’s description of themselves will likely include their gender, their ethnicity, and their looks. For example, my description would sound something like this, “I am male, of Italian and German descent, 5′ 8″ and bald.” Notice how race is not often mentioned.

The reason many white people don’t often think in terms of our own race is privilege. It is privilege that makes it so we don’t have to think about our race every single minute of every single day.

In 1989, a professor named Peggy McIntosh wrote a paper titled White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. In this document she lists many privileges that white people have been taught to ignore and just accept as normal without even thinking twice about them.

Here are a few I selected from her list that are incredibly relevant for today:

• I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
• If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
• I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
• I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
• I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
• If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
• I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

Her list goes on. She wrote this piece 25 years ago, and all of the items on her list still ring true today. In light of the events over the past few years in Ferguson with Mike Brown; Sanford with Trayvon Martin; Cleveland with Tamir Rice; Brevard Country, Florida with Jordan Davis; Beaver Creek, Ohio with John Crawford; and New York City with Eric Garner, I added a few more to the White Privilege list:

• I (as a white person) can wear a hood, buy Skittles, and walk down the street in the evening without fear of harassment from police or “neighborhood watch.”
• I can listen to loud music in my car without being told to turn it down.
• But if for some reason I was to be told turn my music down, I could be assured in knowing that no one would shoot at me because of it.
• My son could play with a toy gun in the park (even though I hate toy guns) and I know no one would call the cops on him.
• My son could play with a toy gun in the park, and if a police officer saw him playing with a toy gun he would not shoot and kill my son in under two seconds.
• I could rest assured knowing that if ever my son was ever shot, someone would attempt to perform CPR on him.
• I know I could walk into a Wal-Mart, pick up a BB gun since they are sold there, and walk around the store not be shot.
• I can choose not to speak up when black people are being killed by police and racist “Stand Your Ground” laws in this country and go about living my daily life, like America really is the land of equal opportunity.

It is this last privilege that I really want to focus on. We white people have the privilege to live in a bubble. We can choose to live in areas that are all or nearly all white.

We can share stories of that one time when we were in a “dangerous” (e.g., black area) of a city and how we made sure to lock the car doors and not get out of the car and then afterward joke about that “scary” situation back in the safety of our suburb, rural area, or safe (white) part of the city that we live in.

Beverly Tatum, a scholar on race, compares racism to breathing smog. “Sometimes it (racism) is so thick it is visible, other times it is less apparent, but always, day in and day out, we are breathing it [racism] in.”

Whether we accept it or not, racism is very much alive and going on at all times around us. By not choosing to actively resist and fight back against it we are actually promoting racism and prolonging its very existence.

Lisa Delpt, another scholar on race, wrote a letter to her daughter when she was 8 years old titled “Dear Maya.” In the letter she says:

As much as I think of you as my gift to the world, I am constantly made aware that there are those who see you otherwise. Although you don’t realize it yet, it is solely because of your color that the police officers in our predominantly white neighborhood stop you to “talk” when you walk our dog. You think they’re being friendly, but when you tell me that one of their first questions is always, “Do you live around here?” I know that they question your right to be here, that somehow your being here threatens their sense of security.

In much the same way I now will write a letter to all of the white people I know who are not or don’t know how to speak up about the legalized killing of black people in our country.

Dear White People,

Over the past two years very extreme and public examples have come out about police and regular citizens using certain laws to kill unarmed black people in the name of self-defense. Some of you have expressed outrage, some of you said nothing, while others of you advocated for the police and the laws that allowed these tragic events to happen.

Just because a something is legal does not make it just. Just because it is a law does not mean it should be allowed.

Most of us are not comfortable talking about race since it is not something we often need to talk about. We get defensive or afraid we might say the wrong thing. But we must start talking about race as uncomfortable as it might be. It cannot wait any longer.

We must start reading authors and educators who are helping to teach us about our own whiteness. We must sit down and read Lisa Delpit, Theresa Perry, and Beverly Daniel-Tatum as a start.

We must actually spend real time with people who don’t all look like and have the same experiences as us.

And once we actually sit down and talk and listen to someone who does not look like us we actually have to listen to and not dismiss their experiences.

I’m writing this as someone who grew up in a small town that was nearly all white outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’m writing as someone who chose to work at a YMCA in a predominantly black area of Toledo, Oho while I was going to college. I’m writing as someone who chose to live on the South Side of Chicago in one of the few racially-diverse neighborhoods of the city. I’m writing as someone who has spent the last eight years successfully teaching in schools that are nearly all African-American.

I’m writing this not to say I still don’t have a lot to learn about race, institutionalized racism, and my own whiteness, but I am writing to say that if we really want too we can start to truly understand how our skin color impacts our daily existence.

This letter could go on, but this is a start.

We must start and we must start now.

#WeCantBreathe
until
#BlackLivesMatter
and
#AllLivesMatter