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University of Washington – Page 2 – Life as an Extreme Sport
Life as an Extreme Sport

trust bound

Sunday night, sitting here along with my beer and thoughts, wind howling outside, occasionally gusting snow against the window with some vengeance. Light comedy on the television, but I wonder if something more sober, or at least darker, might not be more appropriate. It’s not that I’m feeling particularly bad, or even dark and twisty, but I am feeling introspective. It’s been a very long week, a week of chaos, and mistakes on my part. I knew the chaos was coming, and mistakes were inevitable, but I still don’t like either…well, the mistakes, anyhow. I suspect I actually might thrive on chaos.

I’ve been called out on some personality traits, and it was a fair calling out, but it’s still an uncomfortable thing. I realized, talking to Jen earlier today, that it’s been a while since anyone has gotten in my face (nicely or otherwise) and thrown me back at myself, or was so pointed in challenging what I say and why I do/say certain things. I guess…I was the golden child who could do no wrong for a while, and this was an important thing for me to hold on to. It gave a lot of validity to what I did, and helped me get over things, the hurtful things, that came part and parcel with my divorce. And, that’s not here now – which is okay, but it’s going to take a bit of adjustment on my part. It’s not that I’m a prima donna, by any means, but it catches you a bit short when you’ve become accustomed to being treated a certain way, and suddenly that way is gone and you’re getting blunt analysis of your character.

Another part and parcel of that divorce is my utter terror of two words, two words I did my best to avoid in my years at UW, where I did as much as I could alone, by myself, relying on no one, stubbornly insisting I would do it, could do it, alone. Those words? “Trust me.” I don’t do well with trust, something I’m realizing as I sit here with my barely touched beer. I realize that a lot of the issues that have caused me so much stress in the last week soundly rest with that issue, that freaking out and panic in the face of having to simply trust someone.

I did trust someone, and I got my heart and life handed back to me post-paper shredder. I pulled myself back together with a lot of effort and duct tape, and learned that trusting other people is bad. Of course, I also spent a lot of time arguing that trust is good, and can happen again after it’s been broken – have marveled that we can pull ourselves back together and make ourselves vulnerable again. And that’s sort of the whole thing with trust – in opening yourself to trust, you also open yourself to what happens when trust is broken. Alfonso Lingis, in his book Trust, says this so beautifully:

In trust one adheres to something one sees only partially or unclearly or understands only vaguely or ambiguously. One attaches to someone whose words or whose movements one does not understand, whose reasons or motives one does not see.

Is it all the things that are known that encourage the leap, in this one instance, to adhere to something unknown as though it were known? Is it not because of a long past tried and true that someone becomes a trusted adviser? Is it all that one knows about laws, the institutions, the policing, and all that one knows about the values, the education, the peer pressure of individuals in a society that induce one to trust this individual met at random on a jungle path? But the more one knows about a tried and true adviser, the more clearly one sees that every act of loyalty opened an opportunity for disloyalty.

This was part of that summer institute I did, and so I have actually thought a lot about this – and I appear to have regressed a bit from the point I was at to where I am now. Perhaps that’s just a result of new environment, change,..and fear. If I screwed up in the past, no huge deal – just my pride. If I screw up now, I feel like we’re talking career bites dust sort of huge deals.

I pulled out my paper from the Institute – the project that came of it is sitting about 5 feet away, but it’s easier to just read what I wrote. And if I isolate out what I wrote on trust alone, of forming and losing and trying again, it still rings very true – almost insightful.

trust and time are intimately linked. one cannot exist without the other. time is a construct. all that exists is now, the present. we are always in the present, passing through it. we never reach the future, and the past is always behind us. we build trust, and make the decision to trust, based on experiences – events – from our past. these singular events allow us to look at the seemingly endless options in front of us and narrow them down; trust becomes a filter that allows us to make decisions. in the network of life, trust gives us a way of managing what would be incomprehensible.

when trust is broken, our options become limitless, and we are paralized, not in fear, but in choice. we have no way of narrowing down the potentiality of an event or situation without the ability to trust. but we trust – or not – based on prior events, and it is difficult to override those prior events that taught us that we cannot believe ourselves. without the ability to trust, we are everpresent in the now, unable to pass through the present. we become stuck.

to free ourselves from being stuck, we have to take a risk. we have to look at the future potentialities and guess, choose blindly, choose based on what other people offer you. trust is a multiperson experience, and if someone extends you their trust, they do so on the basis of their experience, and what they think of you. what they think you will do. the options become filtered through the actions of another. it is up to us, whether or not we accept that external filter. it is up to us to make the decision that a single anomalic event does not mean we always have bad judgment.

to become unstuck, you must trust.

the only thing that means anything is what we do.

I realize I have the choice to stand where I am, and have the future so open I am paralyzed, missing the trust I need in order to act decisively, to have futures narrowed to manageable potentiality. Or, I just…do what loyalty wants, and acknowledge that with an act of trust comes the potential for hurt, and the beauty of hope.

home

I wondered what it would be like, returning to Seattle after nearly 9 months gone. What would I feel when I saw the familiar city skyline that I can trace in my sleep, when I drove down roads I used to see daily, walk the paths at the University of Washington, go to the places I literally spent more time than anywhere else the past three years of my life.

When I saw the skyline, I felt the twinges of the familiar, but it didn’t call home. The mountains are beautiful, covered in snow, and I remembered how much I miss that form of beauty around me, but at the same time, I found myself missing the broad, open skyline that I first fell in love with in Reno, and found again in Albany. The waves at the waterfront lapped against the dock, and tugged at my heart and imagination, but not enough to pool any regret.

But at the same time, I discovered home in places I would have never thought to look. In a short, spiky bobbed hair cut and infectious laugh, and in blue eyes. In laugh-lined eyes circled by glasses. In tight hugs that ended too soon, tickled by scruffy beards, and the comfort of being able to relax into someone, safe and warm.

In not enough kisses, and too many tears.

Home caught me off guard, not being in a place, but being in people.

I know you’re scared that I’ll soon be over it
That’s part of it all
Part of the beauty of falling in love with you is the fear you won’t fall
It hasn’t felt like this before
It hasn’t felt like home before you
And I know it’s easy to say but it’s harder to feel
This way
And I miss you more than I should than I thought I could
Can’t get my mind off of you

validation

I spent a while with my former adviser/mentor yesterday, and it was weird, and it was good. In some ways, I felt a sort of closure that I didn’t in June. He was honestly surprised I’d made it through everything grad school and the universe threw at me in my first 6 months, not because he thinks little of me, but because he thought it was simply too much to ask any one person to cope with. I reminded him that he told me, several years ago, after the death of one of my closest friends, that life never got easier – you were always juggling, and what counted was how well you juggled.

“I said that?” he said, very puzzled. “Yep.” “Well, it does sound like something I’d say, I’m just surprised I would have said that then…”

But the thing that he said that actually really, really meant a lot, was when we were in the car driving over to meet some other folks. I was telling him about the opportunities I have at work, and the people I’m working with, and some of the more general stuff I’ve been doing. He paused, and said he hoped I realized that for how bad the first bit was, I actually sounded like I was integrating in faster than most graduate students do when they make the move I did, and that what’s being offered and given to me, I should take as one of the greatest validations of, well, me, that I can get.

I admit to laughing it off and telling him that no, really, it’s just that they needed a warm body with at least part of a brain, and I managed to fill both those requirements, but he didn’t let me get away with it, and forced me to acknowledge that I do realize how lucky I am. But for him, it was more than that – he really did want me to see it as validation. I guess he’s still concerned about my confidence (or general lack of it). I think he was trying to say “see, CHID isn’t the only place that thinks you’re pretty cool.”

It all kind of ended abruptly, last year, rocky and rough and not…how I would have liked. And I think I finally got what I wanted, what I needed. I’m not sure I can articulate what that was, only that it was.

one augmented human

Laurie is my goddess. She overnighted me both my copy of Microsoft Office, and my backup discs of writing. I now have a large chunk of my life back on my computer, that has been missing since the hard drive was wiped in December.

I’m in the process of reorganizing how I store my documents, and organize the data in those folders. And in that process of reorganizing, I came across this paper, written several years ago for a cultural communication/technology class taught by the guy who went on to become my adviser. It’s interesting to read it again, going on three years after writing it, and see how much and how little my writing has changed.

UW joins stem cell game

The University of Washington gets fully in to the privately funded stem cell research game, according to the alumni newsletter:

Orin Smith, retired Starbucks president and chief executive officer, has donated $5 million for the UW’s Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine. Smith, a 1965 UW graduate, is chairman of the board for UW Medicine. UW Medicine also has received a $1 million anonymous gift for stem cell research.

Dr. Randall Moon, director of the institute, said that “stem cell research is key to the success of developing new therapies for many diseases and injuries, and Orin Smith’s wonderful and timely support of the institute is really a gift to the patients of today and of the future, who will benefit from these therapies.”

Progress, he said, in stem cell research and regenerative medicine has been “severely thwarted by federal policies” that state federal funding can only be used for research on certain lines of embryonic stem cells and on adult stem cells. UW scientists have said the existing lines of stem cells eventually will wear out. And adult stem cells, they have said, do not hold the promise that embryonic cells do.

These policies have put “us way behind where we would have been” had researchers been allowed to use new lines of embryonic stem cells for their research, Smith said. If U.S. researchers can’t move forward with stem cell research, then scientists in other countries will, he said.

This is one of those issues where I agree, 100%, with the press coming out of AJOB: if the US doesn’t do it, someone else will, and if we want any say in how the technology is being used, we’ve got to get in there and create the technology to begin with. This is just another in a growing example of universities looking outside the federal government in order to do just that.