Notes from an Open Life

A poem after so long

Talk to me. Sit and talk with me.

Tell me of all you know. Tell me of your story. Your trials. Your heartache.

I want to hear your story as lived. I want to hear the things that stick with you. The objects.

The loneliness.

The beautiful isolation that I know you’ve experienced.

Tell me of your faithless moments. And of those moments you knew you would come through.

Tell me of the unspeakable beauty.

Tell me of the writhing pain.

 

But I know

it’s the moments of beauty

that stay with you still.

 

And it’s those things

that I want you to recall

in their beauty

and their pain

how hard it is

even to hold them for a moment

that’s

the beauty

that I want you

to share

with me

The power of the like (from a therapeutic standpoint)

I don't know why I was thinking of this while running, but for whatever reason I was thinking about Facebook, and 'liking' things. I like 'liking' things that people post on Facebook. And it dropped into my head that the power of the 'like' for the person receiving the like is: 

You see me.

I make sense to you.

Which is a powerful gift to give someone. 

Data visualizations that matter

So I'm toying around with the idea of infographics and data visualization. I was recently inspired by this Mashable article about Jer Thorpe, who is 'Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times' - an awesome title he made up himself. 

Here's one of the key things that struck me about this interview:  

What's your advice for people aspiring to get into design and specifically data visualization?

It's the same thing with almost everything. There are so many people who I hear from who are like, 'I really want to do this, what are some books, what should I read?' You just have to do it. And, the sort of underlying secret about data viz is that it's not that hard. We're doing a very simple act, we're taking (usually) a number, and we're mapping it to something, whether that's mapping it to a color to a size or to a position on the screen. Anybody can take a set of numbers and think about ways you would draw that on a piece of paper. The two things that I always tell people is that: First you need to just get started with it, and admit that the things that your first projects are gonna suck, and that's okay. Y'know, you can't expect to make something beautiful the first time. My first data visualization was terrible.

The second thing I tell my students is to think about something that's close to you, something that's personally relevant to you. If it doesn't resonate with you, you're not gonna do a good job with it. We live in a really cool world right now where there's a lot of data that's accessible to us, whether that's your location data over time, your email transactions.

The reward of data visualization comes from discovery, and if you're not doing something where that discovery is going to feel like a revelation of some kind to you, then you're not gonna get it.

I LOVE THIS. Why? Because it takes the fucking mystery out of it. 

Many years ago when my researcher colleagues and I at Sun Microsystems were interested in getting into competitive intelligence, it felt the same way. CI was this practice shrouded in mystery - none of us could really get at how one did it. We took some courses, we joined SCIP, we read books, but we still seemed stuck when we thought about actually doing it. 

I finally went to a pre-conference workshop at a SCIP conference, and I don't remember a lot of what was taught at that. But the key turned for me at the outset of the workshop. The instructor, Ken Sawka, said simply: "Competitive intelligence is information plus insight."

The light went on. I suddenly felt like the veil had been lifted and it all didn't seem so intimidating any longer. 

I got back and I decided to jump in. I went to one of my long-term clients and I said, 'would you be willing to work with me on a CI project?' He enthusiastically said yes, and so began my competitive intelligence career. 

I've been feeling the same way about data visualizations. Ultra cool, would love to do that. But how? 

Thank you, Jer - for the insight, the removal of the mystery and the permission to create at least a few crappy visualizations. It kind of feels like the birth of punk - you get instruments and you just start playing. It's horrible at first, but sometimes something great emerges. 

So what to visualize? The idea for a first visualization popped into my mind when I was conducting research on chronic conditions in the United States - diabetes, heart disease, hypertension. I came across some information (that I've since lost track of and need to track down again) about how many people in the US - adults and children - are on anti-depressants. It was a striking number, in the millions. IN THE MILLIONS. 

This is data that meant something to me. So I'm going to track it down again and see what I can do with it to make it more visually meaningful. 

In the meantime, I was looking at statistics on suicide in the US. I was struck again by the information I found.

• Since at least 2007, suicide has been the 10th leading cause of death in the US.
• It is the 7th leading cause of death for men in the US.
• It is the 3rd leading cause of death for people ages 15 - 24. 

• Men are four times more likely to successfully commit suicide, but women attempt suicide two to three more times than men. 
• Older Americans are disproportionally more likely to die by suicide, especially white men over the age of 85. 

 These are heartbreaking. But let's look at some other numbers. 

• In 2011, 38,285 people died by suicide in the US - more than twice the number of deaths by homicide. 
• For every death by suicide there are 11 attempts. If we do the math, that means there were 421,135 attempts in 2011. 

So, using these numbers, here's my first visualization - on suicide. 

 

 

Simple graphic. I tried to get the proportions about right.

Maybe not so crappy for a first attempt.

I think it's these kinds of numbers and this kind of information that make visualizations powerful. What could you draw from this? 

• That's a shit ton (I'm pretty sure that's the clinical term) of suicide attempts. 
• There are a shit ton more attempts than successful suicides. 
• These are scary numbers. I think we have an issue on our hands. 

My little visualization won't change the world. But it gives me a different way to grasp the issue. That, to me, is the true power of visualizations. 

Thanks again, Jer. I'm glad you put a guitar in my hands. 

Faith and frustration

"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill

I have a lot of blog ideas that start out as just the beginnings of ideas. I jot them down as draft posts and then forget about them. They sometimes come back around and resonate with me again, and then I finish them up and post them. This is one of those. 

I was raised Catholic, and, as I tend to say, it didn't quite "take." That said, I feel like I've gradually built a fledgling, practical spirituality based more on my life experience. From that perspective, I use the word "faith" in the sense of: no matter how dark and difficult things might seem right now - no matter how much I can't really see how things will turn out well - things actually will turn out well if I simply have faith and allow it to.

Which has led to the title and topic of this post. 

Faith that things will actually turn out OK is, of course, hardest when it feels like exactly the opposite - that everything will NOT turn out OK, but spectactularly and permanently badly. Which, I suppose, is exactly the point and definition of faith. As they say, it's easy to have faith when things are going well.

And so it occurs to me that the experience of faith - faith in its truest action - is not necessarily a positive experience. While the word sounds uplifting ("FAITH!!"), the experience itself is not uplifting at all. Faith in true practice is actually a maddening mix of a positive outlook, along with sadness, anger, frustration, and, at its deepest, elements of despair.

Because why does one need faith if there seems to be some positive solution to a situation? If there is even a glimmer of hope, it's relatively easy to have hope. It is only when there seems to be no hope, no solution, no end - when there is despair, deep in the soul - that faith becomes one of the only options (other than compounded despair, dissociation, breakdowns, psychotic breaks, or self-harm, among others).

Is this a new concept? No, of course not. But the experience and the realization seem new to me. In the face of overpowering and unexplained occurrences and emotions, where one's basic beliefs come into question - what is one to do? When one doesn't FEEL as if everything is going to turn out all right? Where does one turn? 

There seem to be two options. Follow that feeling of despair and descend into that dark and deep pool. Or repeat to oneself, even as some part of oneself screams and cries against it, "everything will be OK."

Maybe even "everything IS OK".

In writing this down, this seems overly simplistic. Living the experience - getting to the point where one is truly not sure whether one will ever get out of that pool of despair - draws out the awful paradox of this.

Life change happens one small step at a time, with simply doing something different. Thinking something different. Believing something different. For a moment. For a day.

This is at the heart of change: proving to oneself, in very small steps, that perhaps one doesn't know or understand the full plans of one's life - which is what ego wants to believe. Or perhaps not proving anything, but simply being willing, for a moment, to believe that things can be different, despite current appearances.

Having the courage, perhaps, to let go of the thought that one knows what's going on, and allowing life a small chance to lead you someplace new.

The Journey - revisited

Life is full of changes. Today is Sunday, August 7, 2011, and I was just remembering a draft blog entry I wrote almost two years ago now.

I'll let my two-year-ago self riff on this first, and then add a bit:

So at a quarter to two this afternoon, October 20, 2009, this huge thing dropped into my head - or maybe my being. It was one of those moments where everything comes together. It's like a framework falls into your life and suddenly helps you make sense of so many things.

And today it was the image/icon of the journey.

My life has been about journeys. I love road trips. My good friend Greg and I took an iconic road trip across the US in 1988. When I was in high school and in my early 20s, I would often go on long trips in the car, often by myself.

But the journey is more than just travelling. For me, it's a way of being in the world. I love to start new ventures, to try something I haven't tried before, to journey in and be the student, the learner. I get bored with what seems to me to be the same old thing.

There are so many ways the journey echos through every stage of my life. Moving when I was young, exploring, even my dreams echo this. A common dream theme for me is going someplace. Usually I don't even get to the place I'm trying to go in the dream - I just am on the way there.

And that's as far as I got back then.

So the image/concept of the journey is back in my head and my life again. What I would add to this entry is that, for me, the journey is not necessarily about the destination. It's about the trip. I often times enjoy myself so much just getting to where I think I'm going. It makes me smile just to think about this.

Another thing that popped into my head recently is a quote that really resonated with my father (who has since passed away). It's from James Thurber, which surprised me, as Thurber is one of my favorite authors, and this quote surprised me.

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.

Apparently this is written on a wall somewhere in Cambria, California, which is where my dad saw it. I always used to think the quote was kind of trite, and to some extent obvious. Yet it seems to resonate with me now, or at least more so, and I think it's worth another look.

I don't know that I have anything else to add at this point, except that I think I'm on some kind of psychic/spiritual journey right now. My life has changed so much in some ways since October 2009. I've completed my Masters in Counseling degree. I've experienced success through my business. I've grown in ways I really never could have foreseen. I've opened myself up to the world and found it a truly wonderful place. It's truly amazing. And this journey, obviously, isn't over yet.

The journey is wonderful and amazing and terrifying all at the same time. In its entirety, the journey is beautiful. It can be no other way. Because our journey is ours, and ours alone. Don't get me wrong - everyone in our lives is part of our journey. That's why they are there. But the beauty we create for ourselves is what makes the journey worthwhile. Worth every minute of it. I'm really glad to be here. I hope you are too.