Belief Makers

One of my favorite tidbits of "Mark's-ist" philosophy is "The path to my future is brightly lit by the bridges I have left burning behind me!" I think there's a powerful forward facing energy in the way Mark has re-tooled an old concept for a growth oriented use.

Labels: all blogs, authenticity, mark kaufman, relationships, stress

Labels: autism, mark kaufman

So tonight I got this really interesting voice mail from my dad who lives in Kentucky.

He said, "Hello, it's dad calling. I just wanted you to know that I'm in the hospital. I almost drank myself to death tonight. The number here is, xxx-xxx-xxxx."

There were voices in the background telling him the number as he repeated it over the phone.

I didn't call him back.

My Frigging Idiot Father
You might have read previous blogs in which I talked about Mark K and Jonathan competing in The World's Dumbest Smart Guy championships. Well, despite all their qualifications, my dad's got them beat by a country mile.

My dad grew up in Finland. When he was fourteen and his father was overseas in the US, the Russians invaded Finland making it impossible for his father to return until the end of the war. So, my dad tutored calculus to college students in order to help pay the bills.

When he went to MIT to study electrical engineering, he would take advanced math classes for fun. He would complete the supposedly impossible-to-complete three hour final exams in just a couple of hours and then go back through his test and enumerate the steps required to get each answer. The professors would then post his exam as the answer key as he never missed even one question.

A Brief Interruption
Excuse me a moment, it's Mark K calling on Skype...

OK, I'm back! As I conversed with Mark, I typed everything he said... He gave me some advice regarding my dad, told a couple of jokes, interrupted our call to talk to Vadim (trying to include Vadim by holding his iPhone up to his computer's camera), and generally said things like:

"No... see... what I understood is... No, I don't have a theory or interpretation, but, well, umm, his actions... uhhh... So, a man and a woman both buy tickets on an overnight train via the Internet..."

I said, "Mark, when I type everything you're saying, it becomes immediately clear that you never actually pursue a train of thought to it's conclusion."

Mark said, " I just want all of you in the blogoverse to know that Teflon is trying to get me to write his blog for him. Now may I please talk to Iris...

Back to Dad
While cruising through MIT, my got a summer job in Manhattan where he met my mom who was studying music at Columbia. My mom was from South Carolina, her family having been there since the 1600's. My dad was just off the boat from Finland. My mom was a singer who couldn't do math to save her life. My dad can't carry a tune in a bucket, as they say. My mom was an extrovert. My dad the silent type. She was the queen of the prom. He was a nerd. They were pretty much polar opposites. It was a marriage made in heaven.

I'm not sure exactly when my dad took up the pastime of consuming as much vodka as possible before passing out, but I can remember different incidents as a young teenager where he would just seem out of it and get really belligerent.

My mom grew up Southern Baptist and a teetotaler. So, we didn't talk about alcohol, let alone alcoholism. As a kid, I was instructed not to mention things like beer and wine when we visited my grandparents in South Carolina. Even as we shipped my dad off to rehab at Hazelden, my mom wouldn't say that he was an Alcoholic. So, it was pretty much up to the kids to do something about his drinking.

When is Enough Enough?
I can't count all the times I've bailed my dad out of a touchy situations, cleaned up after him, reconciled his finances, sorted his paperwork, appeased those he'd offended, got him into programs, found people to help him, and generally navigated his wake.

I can't estimate the number of relationships he's burned through: people who were good friends who finally gave up or were simply afraid to have him around. Over the past five years, he's pretty much exhausted the good will of everyone in his life. At times, it's come down to just me and Iris.

The crazy part is that my dad doesn't seem to appreciate or have any gratitude for any of our help. Every once in a while he seems a bit humbled by his past actions and their effect indicating that he holds a lot of judgments about them, but he never says, "thanks".

When he does get himself into trouble, he expresses entitlement. He calls or has the doctor call or has the cop call expecting me to do something.

I think that this time, I'm not going to do anything.

As you might have noticed, I'm feeling a bit emotional about this whole thing. I feel sad. I feel angry. I also have a sense of determination and a feeling of freedom.

What do you think?

Teflon...

Labels: mark kaufman, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy, relationships

written by Mark Kaufman

Lately I've been getting my fair share of ink on these pages. Mark has shared me with all of you, most notably in his blog of August 26th entitled "Defending Your Honor". Iris even mentioned me in yesterday's blog, "Belief Filters". I have thoroughly enjoyed this unexpected notoriety and am thrilled and honored to have these extra-extraordinary people as my beloved friends. And what's more, all this attention has set me to thinking.

As I read Mark's loving and delightful descriptions of who I am, I find myself reflecting on the nature of our relationship and other relationships I have had in the past.
Throughout my life I have had a series of relationships with a variety of people who I have adopted as my personal mentors. These were not mentors in the Option Process sense of the word, but people to whom I could hand over the power to define me and my relationship to the world.

The list of people who have occupied this position for me has included my parents, my sisters, favorite teachers, girlfriends, psychiatrists, psychologists, fictional characters on TV shows, co-workers, both my wives, my teachers at The Option Institute (especially Bears) and various friends of mine over the years.

The one thing all these people had in common was that I looked to them to be the authority outside myself that was capable of and qualified to tell me who I am and how I think. I depended (and often still do depend) on these people to explain why I did what I do and what was important to me. I would seek their opinion on what is the right thing to do in a given situation or how to meet a particular challenge that lay in front of me. I looked for them to have faith in me so that I would have faith in myself and to believe in me so that I could be confident in my ability to meet whatever those challenges were.

While I have lived my life as an non-believer in God, I really see very little difference between giving yourself over to Him/Her or choosing your college roommate, the Zodiac or your dog Ralph to be your guide. You're still outsourcing responsibility for who you are and how you live your life.

Rather than creating myself and my life I would describe my situation to these people and then listen to what they said about what one should do. Then I would put together an amalgam of those answers as if it were a recipe and proceed to follow those steps to make my way through the crisis du-jour. While this very effectively answered the question of how a group of people I know would live my life, it fails to address the question of how I want to live my life.

From there I  asked myself  "If I could decide who I am and what I want, what would that be?" I am astonished to find out how hard that is for me to do. So take a rest, Jesus, I find that the most important question in front of me today is  "What would Mark do?"

Don't get me wrong, I think that consulting with others and trolling around for perspectives and ideas outside your own is a very useful thing to do, but those are just inputs to a creative process. There is still an act of creation beyond that in which we can conceive and give birth to our own unique way of being in the world.

So how about you – how much of your life today do feel is derivative, how much have you  created, and are you in touch with your ownership of that creation? Do you believe that you can create yourself and your world?

I know I can, or at least that what my friends tell me.

Labels: empowerment, mark kaufman, philosophy

One of my favorite people on the planet is Mark Kaufman. In addition to being a really sweet guy, he's versed in all sorts of obscure references and he's an exceptionally quick thinker... except when he's not.

In fact, Mark and my friend Jonathan (who's one of the smartest people you'll ever meet) are in a long running competition for World's Dumbest Smart Guy. I'll explain the competition in detail in another blog, but for now, let's just say that involves grown men with extremely high IQ's finding ways to do things like:

• ending up in jail for a string of unaddressed misdemeanors...
• or, stranding themselves on power boats just yards from shore...
• or, trying to unclog a drain pipe with a hammer and screwdriver while standing directly below and looking up into the clogged pipe.

Defending Your Honor
One of the things that Mark will often do is to tenaciously defend a statement he's made, no matter what is said that might indicate his statement is a bit far-fetched or even perhaps, a lie. Oftentimes the original statement is a casual throw-away with no real implications whatsoever, it's just something he said as a filler. Nonetheless...

Typically, as Mark defends his position, the defense tends to become more and more bizarre, unbelievable and, well, funny.

For example, Mark stayed over after Iris' birthday party. The next day, I walked into the kitchen and found him preparing lunch. We had a conversation that went something like this.

Teflon: Where'd you get the coconuts?

Mark: I found them outside.

Teflon: Found them? In South Egremont? The coconut's tropical!

Mark: What do you mean?

Teflon: Well, this is a temperate zone and...

Mark: The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin or the plover may seek warmer climes in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land?

Teflon: Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?

Mark: Not at all. They could be carried.

Teflon: What? A swallow carrying a coconut?

Mark: It could grip it by the husk!

Teflon: It's not a question of where he grips it! It's a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut.

Mark: Well, it doesn't matter. Will you please go and tell Iris that I'd like to speak with her?

Teflon: Listen. In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?

Mark: Please!

Teflon: Am I right?

... or something like that.

Letting Go
Do you ever end up in really bizarre situations simply because you wanted to make a point, or wanted to be right, or wanted to not get caught in a lie, or wanted avoid embarrassment, or... you name it. Perhaps it's something you experience more often at family gatherings or holiday get-togethers. Maybe it's something you experience at work.

If you ever end up in these situations, one of the best things I've found is to...

1. Stop
2. Breath
3. Think of what you want to say
4. Don't say it
5. Repeat three times

...and then say what you finally come up with.

With any luck, you might say something like...

• I have no idea why I said that; can I have a do-over...
  
  
• Or, wow, listening to what I just said, I don't even believe it...
  
  
• Or, I'm sorry, I just experienced and internal blue screen of death and have successfully rebooted. Now, where were we?

Have a great Wednesday!

Labels: all blogs, fun, mark kaufman, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy

Yesterday I was talking on the phone to my dear friend Ellen, an amazing Son-Rise mom from Maine. She had called me at 6:08 am to talk because between her full schedule running a full time program for her daughter Emma and my schedule taking care of my kids the best time for us to talk is before everybody else wakes up. In the midst of our conversation, Ellen asked me to hold on a second and turned away from our call to Emma and celebrate her lavishly and enthusiastically for waking up and coming out of the bedroom to find her all by herself. "Wow, Emma, you're amazing!!! Look at how you just woke up and came out and found me!!! That's so AAAWWWESSSOOOMMME!" It seems that for the past few days Emma had been waking up in the morning and crying out to her mom to come into the bedroom because she was scared to be in there alone. But today she didn't. Ellen jumped on the opportunity to celebrate her and pointed out to Emma that indeed we don't "get scared", we choose to scare ourselves about things. Ellen then asked Emma why she didn't scare herself today and Emma replied "I don't know, I guess I just forgot to." I immediately understood that Ellen had jumped in to catch Emma doing something right and used that to as a teaching moment.

My next thoughts were to review in my mind how I handle that sort of thing with my kids and I realized that my usual modus operandi is to dive in when something goes wrong and attempt to repair the situation. In concrete terms, i would normally jump in after my daughter is afraid or upset and try to teach her that she doesn't have to be afraid, she can choose to be calm and happy in that moment. Of course, it is usually very hard to get the point across because Sasha is crying so hard she probably can't ever hear what I'm saying. I realize as I'm writing this that this is the equivalent of trying to teach someone how to swim while they're drowning. Well, give me credit for good intentions if not necessarily for brains.

In reviewing my new perspective with Ellen I have begun to think that maybe it would be a much more effective strategy to enthusiastically celebrate Sasha in the moment for choosing to be frightened, unhappy or any of the myriad of emotional states that I want to save her form. Maybe it's more important to be solidly empowered and I could just trust that eventually, if she really believes herself powerful enough to choose her own emotional state, she will naturally prefer to choose to be happy, peaceful and joyful. This certainly is matches my own experiences of the last two years, where I have felt that the key to me choosing happiness was once it occured to me for the first time that I actually can choose it just seemed stupid to pick unhappiness.

Well ,you learn something new every day! It is my hope that, if I and those I love spend enough time choosing happiness over unhappiness, perhaps we will get to a point where we can get Emma's gift, and just forget to be unhappy.

Love always,

Mark

Labels: all blogs, mark kaufman, philosophy

I was out to brunch last Sunday with a dear friend of mine and her parents. I brought along my 4 1/2 year old daughter, Sasha because this day was our day together. The restaurant was crowded and noisy and we could barely hear each other talk. There were lots of people which meant lots of distractions for little Sasha to enjoy as she watched the waiters go by and occasionally slipped out of her seat to explore the restaurant and go met new people. When she was at our table, she would from time to time demand my attention or come over to me and start whispering special secrets into my ear. My friend's parents were thoroughly charmed by Sasha and commented to me that they so enjoyed watching me and my daughter relate to each other. Intending to pay me a high compliment they said " You are such a good father, you are so incredibly patient with your daughter!" In a spasm of inauthenticity thanked them for the compliment and smiled demurely. But what I was thinking was "How strange they should think of me as patient. I am truly enjoying being here with Sasha and don't particularly feel that I am putting up with anything. Quite the contrary - I feel lucky to be here and that she is spending time with me." Now, Sasha is my typically developing child. I also have a son, Andy, who is on the spectrum. Andy will be 11 in July. More than once I have gotten similar compliments from friends who marvel at my "patience" when interacting with my son, at how I will happily answer him even though he has asked the same question now seven times in a row over the last five minutes. And once again it seems strange to me to garner accolades for this as my friends are simply describing how Andy and I are together. I feel as if I were getting a pat on the back for being so "patient" with the air every time I breathe.

So I got to thinking: If I accept that fact that my children's behavior would sometimes seem irritating to some people, what is different about how I look at them that leaves me feeling joyful and serene? It's really very simple - I love them. I enjoy my son's inquisitiveness, even if his curiosity is looping around exactly the same question umpty-ump times. I love it that my daughter is exuberantly outgoing and looking to have a blast wherever she is, that she is so intent on enjoying a little chat with me that she doesn't care who she has to interrupt to do it.

I notice that there are times when I do feel that I am being patient with my children (or other grown ups for that matter) and that those are times when I am choosing to feel frustrated. I also notice that at those times I am much more distanced form feeling love for whomever I am being "patient" with. In fact, the best way I know of to get past that feeling of frustration is to focus on really loving that person. When I connect with my love for them, the tension disappears and I no longer feel to need to be "patient", I simply enjoy them for who they are being in the moment.

There is an interesting corollary to this phenomenon. If I change my mind and decide that I no longer want to go along with what a person is doing, I don't have to "lose patience" with them. I can simply decide to do something else than join them in what they are doing. I can tell my son that I don't feel like answering his questions right now or tell my daughter that I am no longer allowing her to wander freely around the restaurant and even tell her that if she doesn't want to abide by my decision we will leave the restaurant. But since I wasn't being patient with them I don't need to get angry to change directions, I simply act upon my new desire.

So, dear readers, what do you think?

Love always,

Mark

Labels: all blogs, mark kaufman, philosophy

I was behind the wheel of my car the other day (as I often am) and was thinking about what the topic of this blog could be. I had just been thinking about how my life had been going lately and marveling at how much better things were going than I would ever have predicted. As I had tried to figure out what I thought was the single biggest contributor to that change I realized that I used to work on the assumption that I was fairly powerless to affect the flow of events in my life. I had felt that the best I could do was to try to react to what was happening around me and deal with the wants, desires and demands of those around me and in my life. It had never seemed feasible to insert my own wishes into the flow of events since I was convinced that no one would listen to me anyway and I was not a strong enough force in the world to shape my own experiences. As many of us do, I had proceeded from that belief to collect evidence that I was perceiving the world correctly by focusing in on every time I had tried in the past to get something I wanted and wound up not getting it. It really had never even occurred to me to assess my batting average by including those times when I did get what I had asked or tried for, I just jumped on the failures each time and said to myself "See, things just don't work out for me, why try?"

Then one day, about a year ago, I decided to try something different. What if I were to act out of the opposite belief and behave in my life as if my input not only matters but actually shapes the unfolding of my life's experience as it happens around me? What if it was actually worthwhile to speak up when I want something and ask for it out loud? What if I could actually get what I don't like to stop happening, even just sometimes, by telling the world around me that I don't want that as if someone, anyone were listening and might decide to accommodate my request?

So I did. And I learned two things. One is that it turns out I was wrong. It actually does work to approach life as an interactive experience, not just a spectator sport. I actually can take the initiative in setting the direction of my life and have a positive effect on people and events that I am involved in. While this epiphany alone was a huge bonus that i derived from my experiment, my second learning was much larger. I learned that it wasn't important for me to know for sure that my new belief would work in order for it to work! I actually started while pretty much convinced that this experiment would be a wipe out. But I was committed to looking at the results of my choice objectively and giving myself some time to collect impressions from what happened before I tried to draw any conclusions from this experiment. The results I got were nothing short of miraculous (particularly as compared to my expectations). It seems I was wrong on two counts, for all I needed to create the change in my life that I was looking for was to believe in and decide to hold open the mere possibility that my new course of action might work out. Certainty is nice, of course, but optional. Well, that certainly lowers the price of admission to effecting real change in my life and suddenly makes change seem much more reachable!

As I was developing the ideas for this blog in my head I came upon a third important learning. This particular experiment in change stared with me challenging what I thought I knew to be right and allowing for the possibility that a belief I had built for myself over the years was simply wrong. Had I not been able to entertain the thought that I might be wrong, I never would have tried something else. While I have spent much of my life playing it safe for fear of being "wrong", I see now that "being wrong" is one of life's greatest opportunities, and without that much less learning would take place. So I not only want to celebrate myself for finding a new belief that works better fro me than its predecessor, I want to celebrate here my willingness to let go of who I was so that my arms were free to embrace who I want to be.

Love to all of you, always.

Author's note: I want to express here my gratitude to Iris for this blog. I have in my life been a chronic procrastinator. I had promised Iris that I would post this blog about 48 hours ago and I left off writing it to the very last minute and beyond. I was tired when I got home late tonight and entertained thoughts of putting it off for another day, but I thought of Iris and how much I love her and how much I want to support her efforts to have this blog be a reliable and useful place for us to gather and enrich ourselves with the fruit of each other's lives. While I would normally have motivated myself to meet my deadline by feeling bad about screwing up and not keeping my promise to myself and to my friend, I found myself this time sitting down to the keyboard fueled by the warmth of the love I have for Iris and the love I feel from her to me. Thank you Iris for inviting me to participate here and providing me with a place to show up and a chance to show up there out of love.

Labels: all blogs, mark kaufman, philosophy

I was talking on the phone to a very dear and close friend of mine the other day. We were talking about how each of us felt that our relationship is "special" and my friend, in particular, was remarking that, of all the people she knows (besides her children), I am the most special and she feels closest to me. As she spoke, I was thinking about how that sort of feeling comes about and wondering why my friend feels that she has it only with me and not a wide assortment of people. It seem to me that sharing a genuine and deep love with another human being is a great thing to do and I, for one, want as much of that in my life as I can manage. I also reflected on the fact that I have several people in my life that I feel deeply connected to and wondered what was responsible both for the difference in how many intimate relationships I and my friend have as well as the why in my own life I have some people that I feel extremely close to and others to whom I don't.

While my friend wanted to ascribe the specialness of our relationship to her belief that I am an extraordinarily loving and giving person and she feels very loved by me, I am always wary of explanations that disempower the individual by assigning causality to someone or something outside oneself. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely do believe that I am a kind and loving man and an extraordinary friend, but it just didn't make sense to me that I alone could be the cause of this wonderful thing in her life. I felt that she had to be doing something to create this relationship for herself as each of us live in a universe fabricated of our own make-believes and their resulting actions. Looking over everything I have learned about my friend during the course of our friendship I searched for the creator in her that was taking action to build a beautiful experience of connection and shared love with me.

Then it hit me - Part of what my friend has shared with me is that she feels she can be more herself with me, without editing, modifying or watering down who she is than with anyone else she knows. I realized that in the context of her relationship with me she had given herself permission to be more herself than anywhere else in her life. Consequently she has shared more of herself more openly than ever before. So it makes sense that we have connected more deeply and completely than in any other relationship she has built for herself. What's more, the sheer unbridled joy of so freely and unreservedly venturing out into the world and luxuriating in the back and forth play of this dance of growing connection and love feels so damn great that I can't conceive of how that wouldn't feel "special".

Following this line of thought, I started thinking about my own life and my own relationships and I realized that this holds true for me. Over the past two years or so I have both formed many new and cherished friendships and significantly overhauled existing relationships with those closest to me. The basis for this flurry of activity was a decision on my part to be as authentic as I can and stop worrying about how others will react or whether they will approve of me or my actions. While I am still only applying this principle to specific areas of my life (in other areas I lie rather frequently and can be breathtakingly inauthentic), in those relationships where I have followed through on my new belief that authenticity is the best way to go I have been repeatedly astounded by the results I got. In those relationships where I have made it a point to be myself no matter what I have formed deeply satisfying and nourishing friendships based primarily on how much I have put into the friendship, not on what the other person has provided. And in those of my pre-existing relationships where I have done this I have seen growth, change and a resurrection of the love that originally made those relationships "special".

So naturally I find this all very exciting. It seems that we have the power within ourselves to create beauty and joy in the way we relate to others if we are willing to muster the courage to really dive in and believe that it's not necessary to hold back, it's always safe to be just exactly who you are. And since we are creating that experience for ourselves, there's no need to wait around hoping that just the right person will come along and befriend us.

So, do you want to give it a try? Who with? When? And, if you can do it a wide variety of people, how many do you think you can handle before you max out? More to the point, what if there is no maximum limit?

Labels: all blogs, mark kaufman, philosophy