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Common Themes List

Conference on World Affairs - Common Themes List


This year as I attended panels I began to notice recurring themes or ideas. Some points were reiterated in multiple panels. When I reflected on my notes I decided to list the things I had learned from the commonalities. Herewith is my list of things I learned at the Conference on World Affairs - 2001.
  1. If you want to be an artist get used to being broke.
  2. Dolphin strategy - Remake yourself on a regular basis.
  3. There is a lack of nobility in society.
  4. There is some great young talent in this town.
  5. It is the vision thing.
  6. Don't be half-ass. Be passionate about what you are doing.
  7. There is nothing either good or bad but that thinking makes it so.
  8. Connectedness matters.
  9. Age 12
  10. Variety and challenging yourself matters.
  1. If you want to be an artist get used to being broke.
    That is broke in money terms. You will be richer than most in spirit and joie de vivre. There was a recurring tone that sometimes what you are doing and how you are doing it matters more than how much money you are making. It was echoed by Sally Fay and John Antone in the first panel I saw.
  2. Dolphin strategy - Remake yourself on a regular basis.
    (Written up May 2003) Patrick Roel presented this idea at one of his panels and called it the Doklphin Strategy. He did so because he drew a chart that looked like a dolphin leaping his way higher and higher. (Actually a salmon swimming upstream is a better visual.) In any case he pointed at that at about seven year intervals you were best served by remakign yourself in a new image. You start out doing something and it takes a year or two to get going. After four or five years you are good at it, but you are also behind the world in skill and personal development and you are starting to get stuck in a rut. At that point all is best served by refreshing your system and creating something new.
  3. There is a lack of nobility in society.
    This showed up in so many ways and so many places. How we carry ourselves and interact with others suffers from a lack of nobility. It started with the intersection of Ian Fleming and a couple of women I I knew and liked and expressed interest in. Ian had been courting a woman who chose another man over him. They were able to take a long walk one day and talk about it. The woman later married Ian Fleming anyway. The two women I knew have not been able to talk to me since I expressed interest. Nothing to do with the Conference, but I noticed it this week and the theme showed up in many ways.
    • Respect for your fellow humans. Sitting near the front when you plan to leave early. Letting doors slam on the way out. Waiting until a poet starts reciting a poem and then getting up to clomp out the door.
    • Listening to what is happening before speaking. Latecomers who cast opinions on panels without knowing what was going on in the panel.
    • The wisdom of Patrick Roel's great explanation for sharing your passion. One can point at another and insist that they absorb your passion. The better alternative is an open hand. This is my passion and I invite you to share it.
    • Awareness of a larger purpose. See the section on Connectedness.
  4. There is some great young talent in this town.
    Panel after panel I got to hear some of the high school students speak. There is a lot of wisdom and curiosity in them and I think a major role of this Conference is to open their minds and encourage them.
    • The first time I really noticed it was at the Poet's Living Room session. I am not sure if they were early college or high school students. I just remember being really moved and really impressed by what came out. "Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King" was especially moving and could have brought anyone in the country to tears. Of course that poem walked away in someone's notebook and might not get heard from again. Perhaps there is a way to put some of those items on the web site? In any case is is good to have a chance for people to get up in front of total stangers and learn to speak.
    • In the panel on spirituality on TV there was a very small hand raised in the third row. Myself and another lady took the chance to raise our hands and point towards her hand. I caught the eye of the moderator and he nodded that he had noticed her. (Great Job! Insert moderator's name here.) Anyhow, in the future, I think the moderators and panelists should keep an eye out for the students timidly raising their hands. The opportunity to speak up and ask questions will go a long way towards building the confidence and curiosity of the next generation.
    • Several (half the room) high school students attended the panel on Career Choices. The panelists were impressed that they were thinking ahead. I knew better. They had probably been made to attend as a class assignment. However, once they got there, they got into the discussion and asked some very valuable questions. In the future it would be great to keep in mind the fact that teachers are assigning these panels to their students and design them accordingly. The Career panel was at 9:00 Friday morning. Scheduling topics with degrees of student appeal should be required. If they can be scheduled after 3:00 in large rooms more high school students would get the chance to attend.
    • Did you know there was a field trip from Colorado Springs there?
  5. It is the vision thing.
  6. Don't be half-ass. Be passionate about what you are doing.
    • As a parent, if you want to help children find their passion, be passionate yourself. Make sure you are living your passion, that you are doing something that excites you. That is the best way to show your children the value of being passionate. Combine that with letting them explore and they will eventually be able to discover activities that excite them as much as you are excited about what you are doing.
    • Look for intersections of different passions. The opportunities are in the spaces between things. Consider a person who passion is poetry, but whose great skill is brain surgery. In the Career Choices panel Patrick Roel brought up the suggestion of finding the way to combine the two. Sure poetry is your real passion, but you could not have gotten good at brain surgery without a little passion for it. How to combine them? One suggestion involved the difficulty doctors have explaining things to patients. How the surgery will work? What is the recovery like. You could use poetry to communicate with patients.
    • As people described their passions in various panels I noticed something interesting. All the passions were very simple. Help other people. Writing. Poetry. Performing. Teaching. The expression of these passions was usually combined with a hobby or some other love, or combined with some fortuitous opportunity. Writing about sports. Helping people could be expressed as a teacher, as a management consultant, or as a missionary. Performing can be local theater, Hollywood movies, or Corporate Entertainment. As you search for your passion remmeber that its description will probably be very simple.
    • Here is a game you can play if you have too many different passions. Write each of your passions on a 3x5 card or piece of paper. (Food, Writing, teaching, solving problems, computer programming, design, for example.) Toss them together. Pick up any two and figure out what field combines the two. Teaching about computers. Solving problems in a restaurant. (Maitre-d', supply manager) Writing about food (Cookbooks, restaurant reviews). If you find nothing there pick three items at a time and see what the spaces between them look like. Writing a textbook about computers. Writing a book about solving problems in the kitchen. Designing a computer program for recipes and cooking.
  7. There is nothing either good or bad but that thinking makes it so.
  8. Connectedness matters.
  9. Age 12
    • Eric Kandel, 2000 Nodel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, spoke about elite athletes and advanced motor skills. There was an increase in neurons in those athletes who started their sport before the age of 13. That is probably not any sport but one they had passion and aptitude for. (Just in case you tempted to force your kid to be a left-handed pitcher.)
    • Another panelist, I forgot the panel, mentioned a drop in neuron levels after the age of 12. This would indicate that a significant amout of the brains expected development comes before the age of 12. After that the brain settles mroe into a use and develop skills mode rather than a learning mode.
    • Roger Ebert postulated that our sexual fetishes are set when we are kids, and maybe even as early as age 3.
    The implications of the above items are that most of what we know and our identity is established early in life. That would indicate options in raising our children. OF course we all know that already since everybody knows that teenagers don't listen to anything you say. Moral values are probably set by then so we should spend more of the childs early years emphasizing our moral values and teaching right and wrong. If passion is what drives us through life, and we are better able to learn when we are young, then a wide variety of activities before age 12 would help us disvcover that passion sooner and live mroe productive and enjoyable lives. This idea runs counter to many parenting notions that we should force our kids to do what we think they should do when they are young. Exploration, play, and learning would seem to offer more promise.
  10. Variety and challenging yourself matters.
    • Memory loss kicks in at a certain age. Your mind adapts well to using a skill. After that not much is lost and little is gained.
    • To get good you eventually are functioning with outdated skills.
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