She was very observant.
She was very determined.
“I never gave up and I never let anyone or anything get in my way.”
“It was very difficult when we came to New York because I spoke no English. We moved to a neighborhood with many other German and Jewish immigrants but I mostly befriended Americans since that was the easiest and quickest way to learn the culture, language, and customs of my new homeland.”
“She seems to be able of growing enormous by sheer force of will,”
Go Ask Alice,
When she is ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you are going to fall.
Tell them a hookah-smoking, caterpillar
Has given you a call
Call Alice
when she is small.
She came into my focus, late: when I was 29 years old.
I really didn’t see her clearly when I was young. She was Pollyanna to me. The Energizer Bunny personified. My Gaia.
From the beginning, she would read to me what I was interested in. I learned to read by listening to her. Not fairy tales, not silly stories, but from the natural world: she read from Time Life: The World We Live In.
She had been there all along, the all encompassing foundation: at the start, there in the beginning, my World, my life.
She encouraged my passion of Science, to be the best I could be. She loved learning, I did too.
I quickly surpassed her in understanding the natural world, although she was always better with the people world. She was my first Teacher: she is my mother: all four feet, eight inches.
She supported my father in his education, when he got back from World War II. She went back to work, when he took a pay cut to be a university professor. She was a elementary school teacher for over 40 years. Everybody loves her, her fellow teachers, her students, their parents, her children and her grandchild. She was my father’s best Advocate. And she was my Advocate too, for I am her son: the scientist.
Even more than the other Idealists, Teachers have a natural talent for leading students or trainees toward learning, or as Idealists like to think of it, they are capable of calling forth each learner’s potentials. Teachers are able – effortlessly, it seems, and almost endlessly-to dream up fascinating learning activities for their students to engage in. In some Teachers, this ability to fire the imagination can amount to a kind of genius which other types find hard to emulate. But perhaps their greatest strength lies in their belief in their students. Teachers look for the best in their students, and communicate clearly that each one has untold potential, and this confidence can inspire their students to grow and develop more than they ever thought possible. [Please Understand Me II]
How and why does the world work? That was my question from the beginning.
She started me on my intellectual journey.
Birth, Growth, Equilibrium, Decay, Death. That’s the way the world works, at the eight levels of major complexity.
Yes, Life Itself. It’s complex, with many Dynamic Relations and Varying Contexts.
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head
— Jefferson Airplane
Now that she is not here all the time. She is fading from this world, the focus blurring and memory descending. Time to take care of her, no questions, no answers, just be her foundation. I can’t explain my science to her which theoretically sound but of no practical use, as her World becomes smaller and smaller. Just appreciate her for being there in beginning as the foundation, and I hope to be there supporting as a foundation, however flawed, to the end.
Other Teacher Idealists include: Maya Angelou, Chiune Sugihara, Ziauddin Yousafzai, Ralph Nader, Mikhail Gorbachev, Stephen Covey, Jane Fonda
A gypsy of a strange and distant time
Travelling in panic all direction blind
Aching for the warmth of a burning sun
Freezing in the emptiness of where he’d come from
Left without a hope of coming home.
Gypsy — Moody Blues
He didn’t want to be a gypsy, he wasn’t really a gypsy by nature, but he left without a hope of coming home.
The world and himself made him a gypsy, an exile: a stranger in strange lands.
But he did push for the burning sun. It technically is called RADIATION. Order AND Disorder.
Lichtquant — Albert Einstein
A Photon — a light quantum
And every one, except one of his mentors, his older fellow exiles, including Einstein, eventually disagreed with Teller Ede, making him an exile three times: a stranger in strange lands, all his life.
It ain’t over, until it’s over.
In Memoriam
Yogi Berra [May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015]
They call them Yogi-isms.
1. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
2. “You can observe a lot by just watching.”
3. “It gets late early out here.”
4. “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, Performer Artisan, (May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015) was an American professional baseball catcher, manager, and coach who played 19 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) (1946–63, 1965), all but the last for the New York Yankees. An 18-time All-Star and 10-time World Series champion as a player, Berra had a career batting average of .285, while compiling 358 home runs and 1,430 runs batted in. He is one of only five players to win the American League Most Valuable Player Award three times. Widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.
5. “No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.”
6. “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.”
7. “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
Berra was also well known for his pithy comments, malapropisms, and witticisms, known as Yogi-isms. Yogi-isms very often take the form of either an apparently obvious tautology or a paradoxical contradiction.
8. “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”
9. “We made too many wrong mistakes.”
10. “Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken.”
Much of everyday Artisan speech is far more lively, more filled with vivid, unorthodox terms, though not much more abstract. Artisans like to use colorful phrases and current slang in their speech, and they pick up hip phrases quickly (“I’m outta here,” “no way,” “ya know what I’m saying?”). When they reach for images, they tend to use quick, sensory adjectives (“slick,” “cool,” “sharp”), or they say what things are like, using rather striking similes, “drunk as a skunk,” “like taking candy from a baby,” “goes like a bunny.”
Performers are smooth, talkative, and witty; they always seem to know the latest jokes and stories, and are quick with wisecracks and wordplay-nothing is so serious or sacred that it can’t be made fun of. [Please Understand Me II]
11. “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”
12. “You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.”
13. “I usually take a two-hour nap from one to four.”
14. “Never answer an anonymous letter.”
15. “Slump? I ain’t in no slump… I just ain’t hitting.”
16. “How can you think and hit at the same time?”
17. “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
18. “I tell the kids, somebody’s gotta win, somebody’s gotta lose. Just don’t fight about it. Just try to get better.”
19. “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”
20. “We have deep depth.”
21. “Pair up in threes.”
22. “Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.”
23. “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.”
24. “All pitchers are liars or crybabies.”
Other Performer Artisans include: Robin Williams, Mickey Rooney, Sid Caesar, Steve Martin, Brittney Griner, Janis Joplin, Gene Krupa, Louis Armstrong, Alex Karras, Kim Jong Un, Phyllis Diller, Jim Cramer, Magic Johnson, Josephine Baker, Whitney Houston, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley.
“You are who you are! From the time you were born, and I don’t think it changes. It never did for me.”
“I don’t know what it is..
I don’t know..”
Yes, Larry, I know you don’t know: it’s called Temperament
“When you are working hard, and focused. You don’t think about it. You just do it.” — Larry
“If it is funny to me…”
yada, yada, yada…
They crossed their boundaries.
Lise did it July 17, 1938.
Ruth did it in 1938 also.
They got out of their binds, and eventually saw the hidden bonds that were broken and not broken. They understood.
Non-bounded boundaries.
Continue reading Binds, Hidden Bonds, and Non-bounded Boundaries
David West Keirsey: Self Portrait
(August 31, 1921 – July 30, 2013)
My father died on July 30th, 2013 and I intend to honor him, if I can, by writing a blog about him and his ideas every year. First year. Second Year.
“I regard myself as the last living Gestalt Psychologist”
— David West Keirsey
Gestalt: German word for form or shape
He wrote a short autobiography at the bequest of us, it was titled: Turning Points. It chronicles some of the turning points of his life. I want to write “an intellectual history” of him using some of that material plus my fading memory about the ideas we discussed in those many years, since it might be instructive to see how and why his ideas were formed and evolved. Moreover, I think that his developed “methodology” of qualitative factor analysis and synthesis can contribute to the progress in science.
Nicolas Winton has died. He was a Serving Leader.
http://www.keirsey.com/magazine/june.html
In Memoriam
“Character is what you know you are,
not what others think you have.”
She knew what to do.
“Determination and perseverance move the world; thinking that others will do it for you is a sure way to fail.”
She did not fail, in the long run, despite all the obstacles. Just ask her numerous, successful, students.
He said to them in effect:
“That’s Fine. You made your point. The thing is I can go home, you have to live with each other when I leave.”
Yes, they had been living in that same land for nigh 400 years: Fighting.
How was it working for them?
Not very well.
Both sides could protest the appointment of George as mediator, walk out with big fan fare. Heck, they could strut like battling Peacocks for another 400 years — pride a’ struting. Not listening and talking over each other. Power parading and violent protesting. George would just go home, where he belongs, back to America — just as my namesake ancestor had done about 300 years ago.
What goes up must come down
Spinnin’ wheel, got to go round
Talkin’ ’bout your troubles, it’s a cryin’ sin
Ride a painted pony, let the spinnin’ wheel spin
You got no money, you got no home
Spinnin’ wheel, all alone
Talkin’ ’bout your troubles and you, you never learn
Ride a painted pony, let the spinnin’ wheel turn
— Blood, Sweat, and Tears
Or — enough with the violence and the peacocking. The world is moving out, if their people can’t get down to business — the business of living, get with the business of dying.
If it’s peace you find in dying, when dying time is here,
— Laura Nyro
They had publically walked out on him. But George called them afterwards: he was still here, he would provide mediation between the two sides…