Emotional work culture

I used to take two nephews and a niece to buy their Christmas presents when they were little. If I were rigorously on game, we'd get in the car and I'd sit there until they started with "What are you doing?? Let's go!" When we started this in about '84, the ages were nephew 11, niece 6, nephew 4. I'd start the car and go. In no particular direction, around the block say, until "Where are you GO-ING??" "I want to take you wherever you want most to go," I'd reply. Then they'd argue about that, work it out, tell me to get moving, and I would. Disneyland, Indian country, the Andromeda galaxy were never a threat. The mall always sufficed.

I tried to let them run the show, even negotiate the parking lot traffic after we'd gotten out of the car. I stayed close and vigilant, ready to holler or grab if necessary. It wasn't. Once they realized they were running things, they'd crane their necks like goslings in all directions including at me and each other, then they'd start bossing each other--and me--and when it was more than safe, in a climax of bossing, they'd dash as a unit, me dashing with them. A fellow emotional work devotee used to do this with her young daughters, in Manhattan! They're both mothers now.

Inside the mall, my guys didn't go in all directions, and not because I hollered them in. They stuck together and I stuck with them. Lots of loud negotiation and bossing, I don't know why because we always wound up at the same place, some toy boutique shit shop long since out of business. It was tricky negotiating three aisles--different ages and sexes so they wanted different stuff. And I stayed reasonably close to the exit so one wouldn't leave, possibly under some stranger's arm. And of course Andy, the youngest, would want a $40 thing and I'd said $15 max. Hey! That's what Iwanted! $15 bought a lot in '85! I hate boundaries and when I find a way around them altogether I'll let you know.

And yes, we'd wind up at some sugar hole eating boats of cookie ice cream, multi-colored syrups, spangles and other such throwup. In the car to and fro we screamed lots of indecencies--I didn't teach them a single word--one or two out the window even. No one seemed to hear, but the ecstacy was intense.

Is this what I believe in? Yes it is. For years I've felt that when you put kids out front and let them lead, there's a change. They're more alert, their hunger, curiosity and awareness of danger, their fear, are all much sharper. In the deepest survival sense, they're more responsible.

Getting behind kids doing what they want is exciting. It's riding a wild horse. I like to stay on, to stay very near the kids I'm getting behind. And I like to because I'm selfish: I want to be near and ready if something goes wrong. I think we're protective of kids for entirely healthy selfish reasons. Something happening to them is what we don't want happening to us.

But again and again, nothing does. And it doesn't, I believe, because they'reout front, they'reexposed, the full power of their survival weaponry--their feelings and experience--are alive, the more so the less protected and controlled they are. Again, my survival instincts are alive too: I don't want something to happen to them and I make damned sure it doesn't.

Emotional work culture is a culture full of people doing and getting all they want and need most and experiencing in all their depth the feelings that come up along the way. Total greed. And I think a top thing totally greedy people will want is the opportunity to get behind others, kids or otherwise, doing theirthing. Don't forget: the reason I get behind kids and others is because it's fun for me,because I love it, about as much as I love anything.

The dream is that people who are good at doing their own thing will get behind others doing theirs, notbecause it's the good and noble thing to do, the maturething, the revered cultural value, but because it's fun, among the funnest things anyone can do.

I think this dream culture is not only possible but is the only one that can get us through what we're facing. Imagine an entire world, all 6 billion of us, consuming the way affluent Americans consume now. And tell me that isn't exactly where the entire world is heading with growing speed. I don't think a worldful of green movements or Kyoto accords can stop it. They may slow it, buy us time, but they can't stop it. They can't reverse it.

What can reverse it, this species-suicidal consumption explosion? The irony in the answer is obvious: total greed. Emotional work culture. Modesty, humility, self-sacrifice, self-restraint, self-control, self-abnegation, all were values increasingly vital to all human cultures for tens of thousands of years. Ironically, they are values vital to consumption hypertrophy. Why?

Because these values force us to substitute what we really want the most with consumption. I believe that humans, indeed all organisms, are at core pretty close to perfect. The ugly things we do we do because of what's been laid over us, laid over and over and over us by every human we've had contact with in a lifetime--a lot of them dead--in books, movies, radio, TV, the other visual arts, music, personal interaction, every human including oneself! And it's been laid over us for tens of thousands of years at least. It's a lotto shake off.

Know thyself, the sages used to say. How can you know yourself if you don't know what you feel, if you don't know what you want and need most?

What do you want and how do you feel, I believe, are the central questions of this pivotal time in human history. I'm convinced that fulfilling our deepest, most authentic wants and needs will harm nothing, human or otherwise, that these wants and needs are non-material, that the more of them we fulfill, the less we'll consume and the more we'll give. And we'll give more because giving is one of our deepest needs.

What do Iwant and need most? Click on the Wants/Needs Board at the left. I want to get the Woods Place up. I want to get this website to where I can feel comfortable directing people's attention to it. I want emotional work culture to become the culture of the world, and I want to spend the rest of my life working for that. I'm a monstrously neurotic guy, but it appears clear to me that these drives are not neurotic, that they are do-able. Anyway, I'm going for them, and I want all the support I can get.

I always think of children when I think of emotional work culture. I don't think we have a lot of time to reverse direction. Without radical change of some kind, we're cooked--I think--by the end of this century. Which is where the kids come in. I want to see as little of this old culture as possible laid on them to have to fight up through. But I don't think we're going to stop laying it on them until we've cleaned it off ourselves. If there's anything to what I'm preaching, then we've got to get cracking.

I love our species. I love our home here, the Earth. We know of nothing like humans, here or anywhere in the universe. We've made mistakes, the biggest we're making right now, all of us. But extinction is not a punishment that fits the crime. And our extinction is not a matter I take casually. I believe if we survive the century we're in, we'll be around for billions of years, and in a condition far exceeding our wildest dreams of nirvana and paradise. It's the dream I'm investing my life in.

If any of this makes sense to you, jump in. Or if not jump, ever so gingerly dip your toe. You can always pull back, for keeps. Take a look at "Call, email us" over to the left.

The Woods Place, spring