Category: Relationships
Automaticity in Everyday Life
Automaticity is when you have become so good at something, you can do it without thinking. Until we achieve automaticity, things seem very difficult (i.e., we have to think hard while doing). After we achieve automaticity in something, we forget a time when it wasn’t easy. For example, do you remember learning each of the tasks below? Try to imagine what learning the below tasks would be like for a young person:
infancy: learning to crawl, walk, use a spoon
early childhood: put away your toys, get dressed, use a pencil, crayon, or marker
middle childhood: write with good penmanship, pack your backpack, zip a zipper
adolescence: drive a car, make a meal, take notes
photo by A M Carley
Adults have gotten good at many things. Automaticity makes us able to do more tasks and more tasks that are complex. Still, there are times when we have to learn new things, and when it’s not an advantage to be able to do something without thinking. The 21st century demands a lot of new learning from all of us–especially adults. I’ve gotten too good at ordering take-out and throwing away the styrofoam at the end of the meal. I’ve gotten too good at going to the grocery store without my cloth bags, because years of stores that provide me with bags have trained me that way.
Automaticity intersects with everything–how we navigate the world, how we educate our young people. It’s about how we treat each other, and how we use the social and environmental resources around us. Having just completed a big move, I’m re-evaluating my habits–the things I do automatically, without thinking. Which habits should I keep in my everyday life? Which ones should I discontinue (a psychologist would say, extinguish)?
Learning new things requires attention, a limited resource. Which is part of why I often urge friends to make sure to take rests and vacation. The benefits of free time are clear. Now, if we could just make resting something we do more automatically in this culture…
Social Capital Is Part of Inequality, Too
Inequality is talked about a lot. Poverty is talked about a lot. In my work, poverty and its consequences are considered the “no duh” reason for a lot of children’s problems in school.
Parents who, to make ends meet, have to work more than one job, without a steady schedule, suffer all sorts of consequences. Maybe they can’t get childcare at the last minute, have to skip work, and lose their job. Maybe they don’t have time to fix a taillight, get pulled over, and are fined an amount they can’t afford to pay. A recent report described how this type of inequality–maybe we could call it unequal labor rights and privileges– doesn’t just stress out parents. Children in low-income families without regular schedules are stressed too.
Money–financial capital–comes up a lot whenever people talk about inequality, but there is another type of resource, social capital, that makes a huge difference. Social capital includes all the resources you have access to because of your social connections. The “Hey, I need a babysitter, can I drop my kids with you, Auntie?” and the “I have an extra X (crockpot, grill, bike, mattress–all things I have lent or borrowed at some point), do you want to use it?” Or the “Hey, I know a gal who knows a gal who can…(get you a job, review your resume, proofread your website for free).”
I recently met a woman–a longtime Buffalo resident–who, after we discussed real estate, got to talking about “poor people.” At first her comments bordered on insulting. Then, after she talked for awhile, she seemed to catch herself. Empathy seemed to come into the space.
She finally said, “I bet it’s really hard to be poor.”
“YES!” I thought. Poverty is hard, and part of why it’s hard is because it’s about more than money. But when it’s about community–social capital–that means we can solve it, as a community. I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly how, but I’m proud to live in a city that wants to try. I think it has something to do with social relationships.
Opportunity [to Smile and Say Hello] Pledge
For the last year or so, I’ve made an effort to smile and say hello to people in passing. Before adopting this habit, I had this complicated conversation with myself whenever I approached someone on the sidewalk.
Will they say ‘hi’ back? Will they think I’m weird? Am I weird?
Then I decided, who cares? If one of my goals is to, on a daily basis, make the world a more friendly place, this is a low-cost way to do it.
At first–when the behavior was new–saying hello felt like a lot of effort. This is because I hadn’t done it before, and the awkward questions in my head still sounded. But now, saying hello feels almost automatic. Do I say hi every time I pass someone? No. Some people are on their phones or intently looking down at the sidewalk in a way that says clearly “don’t talk to me.” I skip them. But everyone else–whether they’re sitting or standing, passing me by or clear across the street–gets a hello.
I’ve found that most people say ‘hello’ back. When that happens, I feel good, and I feel a little less like an anonymous stranger passing another anonymous stranger. I feel like part of the community in a way that I didn’t, before this habit.
Today I heard Buffalo’s #1 community leader, Mayor Byron Brown, encourage the citizens of Buffalo to sign the “Opportunity Pledge.” (You can sign the pledge here.) This pledge means that the signer appreciates and respects diversity, and acknowledges that only through taking advantage of and celebrating our diversity can we become a prosperous, healthy, and dignified community.
I can get behind that. So, Buffalo, I pledge to take the opportunity to smile and say hello, as often as I can. Maybe I’ll make someone’s day–maybe that someone will be me.
Either way, the community wins. Because I am the community, and the community is me.
How To Talk About Things That Are Hard to Talk About
How to talk about the things that are most difficult? Choose one or more answers that apply.
A. Don’t. Keep it inside, and when a thought that pains or confuses you comes across your mind, wave it away like a fly.
B. Talk about it haphazardly. Talk about it when you don’t mean to, with people you don’t know or trust, and say things that you didn’t realize you thought, accidentally and without intention. Take the consequences and regret.
photo by C E Cameron
C. Talk about it awkwardly. Start to talk about it, then change your mind and see how the conversation partner responds. If they want to talk about the weather, sports, or a TV show, take it as a signal that they’re not ready, either. Talk about the weather, sports, or a TV show so neither of you has to act awkward in public. Or keep pushing until they hang up or become angry or stonewall. Feel sad that they won’t engage.
D. Talk about it thoughtfully. Mull your feelings over for a while first, write about it privately, decide how to open the topic and with whom you feel safe discussing it. Resolve not to become offended or hurt but to instead take new information in, like you’d feel a fabric before deciding to try it on. Feel grateful when the person(s) responds with thoughtfulness back, validating your feelings and telling you what they think. Feel more connected, trusting, and less alone.
There are so many topics that we would all like to pretend don’t hurt us. Catastrophic climate change, sexist family members, racism and police brutality, end of life decisions, second weddings, our personal writing. What are the consequences for not talking? Are they worse than trying B-D and going from there?
Memorial Day 2014 ~ Remembering Ada Grace Cameron
It’s starting to feel like a long time that I’ve been alive. When I was born thirty years ago – though if we’re being precise, it was 33 years, in 1981 – my mother was 30 herself. She was a single mom and we moved in with my Grandma Ada Grace, mother of eight and schoolteacher again. Again, because Ada went back to teaching shortly before her husband Duncan Cameron, my mom’s beloved father, died of brain cancer at age 53, in 1971.
Nine years before that, my mom was a little girl of twelve leaving Escanaba, MI, to put down roots with her family in Greenville, MI, where I mostly grew up.
Some years before that, before her birth in 1950, my mom was only a hoped-for daughter, existing in the future of Duncan and Ada’s growing brood. They’d begun their family in World War II with three sons who saw little of their father at first, because when he wasn’t able to be with my grandmother, he was off somewhere fighting and experiencing stories he’d never tell, and getting what turned into brain cancer.
Before that, in the war years of the ‘40s, this country was still able to rally around a common good, and get it together to save metal and fuel so the soldiers overseas had what they needed to fight a clear and true evil that was trying to take over everything.
Diorama for Ada Cameron’s retirement | photo by CE Cameron
…
Before that, things are quite fuzzy because the primary sources in my life, the ones who are left, don’t speak much of those days, the Depression days of emerging efficiencies and still lots of people growing their own produce and learning to sew.
Before that – not long before that – women had just got the vote and found it difficult to be more than teachers, nurses, and secretaries. That world is unimaginable to me now, here in these United States, even though the same world exists today for millions of women. It’s just that they live elsewhere, six to twelve time zones away. They live under cover, under secrets, under the control of the power hungry, and they are stronger than I can ever imagine, and braver than I can ever believe.
…
My grandmother bore eight children, and when her husband Duncan died, half their brood was still at home, all the ones after my fourth-born mother. When my Grandpa Duncan died, their youngest child was twelve.
What did my Grandma Ada feel, think, and say, when this happened? We know what she did: she kept teaching, and she somehow scraped them by. They had the house and plenty of space and it was walking distance to school, and people didn’t need all the stuff of today, the stuff that keeps us working and driving, preoccupied and indoors.
Was she grateful that she could teach in the 1970’s, given that the last time she taught, she’d had to keep it secret that she’d married my grandfather? (In the 1930s, a married woman in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was a pregnancy waiting to happen, and the teaching contracts prohibited marriage.) Did she think on those years ago, or did she wonder only about the now, about her new responsibilities as head of the household, and which bill would be highest that month?
How much and how deeply did she miss her “Dunc,” the man she loved ‘til her death, at age 91, in the same big house he bought them in little Greenville, in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan?
…
When I was small, that house was everyone’s rock, all us cousins who visited in the summers, the fruit of Duncan and Ada’s eight. My grandmother decorated in green, blue, and brown – drab Nixon florals that didn’t get anyone too excited, but which also weathered the years. My grandfather was a handsome man, I could see from his portrait hung above a green leather chair, and I thought of it always as his chair. I would go and sit beneath him and feel love emanating from above and from my grandmother, on the sofa across from me, where she watched TV after reading to me and bringing me soup.
Did my grandmother ever wish for early death, to see her Dunc again? Or did she wish against Fate, that he could meet all of us grandchildren who came after he passed, and it was most of us?
She loved us enough for both of them, making us meat pasties from scratch, sloppy Joes and potato salad, foods I loved, even though she said she couldn’t cook. She shooed us out to play and there was that one time – the only time I can recall – when she was cross with us. It was for fighting and being unkind. A clump of us sat in front of the TV, sniping away until she said, “You stop that, you kids! I’m tired of you being mean to each other.”
Did Ada think at night of her Dunc? Did she think of when she would see him again? Because she had her own kind of faith, in the Episcopals and the Democrats, and the notion that the poor deserved some help. She’d lived in a world where everyone was poor, and it was no one’s fault, not due to anyone’s being lazy. To the contrary, in her world, everyone had worked hard and still: poverty.
My Grandma Ada waited to see Duncan and talked more about him as she aged, spending 30 and then 40 years without him in that big house, making us food and shooing us outside. After my cousins and I grew up, she cooked for only herself, loading oatmeal with prunes, bananas, and nuts each morning. She liked ice cream and always had Tin Roof in her freezer, and she was never afraid to eat ice cream with you. She never called anyone fat, except herself, and not very often, because she wasn’t.
I inherited these gifts from my grandma: four metal mixing bowls, a serving tray engraved with a map of the world, an embroidered jewelry box, a diorama of her first-grade classroom that the other teachers made for her retirement.
And the priceless ones: Thrift. Hope. Love.
With thanks to Mary Cameron Mitchell for fact-checking this updated post. Mary writes: “Fact check #1. My dad died in 1971 at age 53. My mother had gone back to teaching before they knew he was ill. There was a teacher shortage and my dad encouraged Ada to apply. Fact check #2. Ada wasn’t fired from her first teaching job for getting married or being pregnant. The contract stipulated that marriage would result in a termination of her job.”
Jewelry box, serving tray, mixing bowls | photo by CE Cameron
claire e. cameron 