A girl, fully context aware, leaps across both land and safety margins. We are making similar leaps today across multiple chasms. Becoming aware of the full context of our time in the stream of history means we hold despair of present situations in one hand and hope in possibilities in the other.
Margin – a very interesting word
I was surprised to discover how thick this word is in terms of everyday use. There are three very different uses of the word. Using synonyms to define Margin, the first definition means an Edge, Border, Boundary, Brink, Frontier, Perimeter, Periphery, Rim, Side, Verge, Lip, Hem.
Each time we sleep we move across the margin between unaware to aware of the context where we are sleeping. Maybe we drift awake, slowly becoming context aware. Maybe a shrill alarm shocks us. Here’s poet friend Nils Peterson on waking at Point No Point on the Olympic Peninsula. He titled this reflection “look hard enough and everything turns theological.”
Outside the frame of my window is the further framing of a leaf-filled alder stretching long limbs across the window’s rectangle – in the left corner, a jut of pine – tops just clearing the plane of the Juan de Fuca Strait reaching across to the many-jagged silhouette of the Olympic Peninsula – sea a warm gray, the far shore gray-blue – sky filled with grays & blues and the slightest shading of gray pink. far over the water, white flashes of gulls twinkling like the first morning stars as they turn flapping gray color-of-the-water wings against white breasts – I sit up in bed – listen to water rush against the shore and the steady breath of my meditating wife – conscious of consciousness, mine yes – but also of the room I lie in, the window, the framing trees, the sea, the gulls, the far shore, the sky, the clouds – all conscious, all of us brooding – each a discrete field of brooding yet –everything aware of everything – (and) I wondering if god is the awareness of all awarenesses…
Nils observes the physical context in which he lives; observation is the first requirement for Context Awareness. A personal example of my lack of context awareness is around how I first clothed myself in a corporate setting. When I didn’t receive an obvious, expected promotion my current manager took me aside and said, “This is a difficult conversation for me, but I know you can advance in this company. However, the way you dress gets in your way. Your clothes signal that you don’t care enough to look the part. You are clean, neat, well-dressed, but it’s not the clothing the next levels up wear. And so two people who have far less experience than you, but who dressed the part at their interviews, just secured the two openings.” This was a tough lesson for me on “Context Awareness: Observation.”
I interviewed the woman who won the promotion about her interview. Excited, she began with a description of going shopping for her interview clothes: a dark camel suit with a soft blue blouse—she wore it the next day so I could see it. (I’ll skip telling you what I wore, but to my mother’s credit it was not jeans.) I bought and wore suits with a skirt; one daring soft rose colored one, and low heels with hose. And I won the next opening. A male friend working in the old department with me took my lesson to heart, and wore suits to answer the phones, going so far as to walk in the building and get off on the floor where he wanted to be before going to his current position.
When I looked at my friends in the company I saw people of different colors, and cultures, kneeling to the clothes margin. My male friends often looked choked, even emasculated, by their ties and collars. Corporate females (like me) reinvented the lingerie industry: under those suits was lace, and whole stores were devoted to stylized bras. The non-corporate culture responded also by wearing brilliant colors and patterns. I knew western men who dared to wear brown suits (gasp!) with boots (!) east of the Mississippi.
I also learned that the most dominant person in an environment is often the most expensively dressed in whatever garb (most carved leather belt; most modern style hard hat) but frequently the least contextually aware of other people’s realities. And the converse is true for other beings in the same context; they are aware of that person’s dominance and behave accordingly.
Margin: Widening Edge, Border, Boundary, Brink, Frontier, Perimeter
If we widen our awareness to include the historical context in which we live, we all are living across margins never experienced before:
- Of history: AI and Singularity are shifting everything. The shifts from forging to agriculture to industry are blips compared to today. Name a field of human endeavor and know that its context is shifting beyond anything we have experienced before.
- Of the definition of human: how much of each of us will be non-human? Our hip replacement? Our augmented brain?
- Of the Russia/China agreement to share their strengths with each other, and their demands for the USA to become aware of the new context and change our behavior. (New World Order Bill Bonner blog, in references)
- Of margins around degrees of temperature that mean world destruction or rebalance (Guardian article by several hundred climate scientists, in references)
Context Awareness Competency: Skill I – Observation
Whatever life we have lived until now has been in a series of contexts: home, school, work, place of worship, playground, friends’ meeting places. Our race, gender, education and level of money were and are part of our birth and development. How much we observe, how aware we are of the contexts in which we find ourselves, is an essential competency. Context Awareness is understood from externals, built from observation of location, sight, sound, behaviors.
At the Margin (Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Perimeters) with Context Awareness means we:
- Can observe context in a variety of situations and determine appropriate actions
- Are able to be comfortable in many different environments and circumstances
- Are able to observe and respect differences, whether physical, or beliefs, values
- Understand how others’ awareness of context influences any interaction
- Are aware of and acknowledges the needs, thoughts, feelings, contributions of others
- Possess the ability to observe other people and interact while staying grounded in own person or role
- Have confidence in the ability to be comfortable in a variety of contexts
Becoming context aware of margins requires the ability to observe accurately, recognize how people cue others on how they want to interact, and to be able to respond in appropriate ways based on accurate observation. We can demonstrate that we:
- Are able to observe and remember details of places and persons
- Can observe body cues, interpret cues accurately, shape response to cues
- Have sensitivity to others’ observed differences
- Accept responsibility for how is perceived by others
- Accept responsibility for commitments, constraints, rules/procedures of specific contexts
- Are able to observe how people are responding and adapt behavior accordingly
- Seek to maintain others’ self-esteem
The Second and Third Definitions of Margin
The second definition uses the synonyms Gap, Amount, Difference, Majority. Here the image might be climbing stairs rather than a leap between one side and the other. The margin is more vertical; one has it or doesn’t have it.
- What’s the margin of money you have in the bank, and of food and water in your kitchen, for emergencies?
- Do we have the margin of votes needed to pass this legislation? Does that margin depend on our focus: social turmoil or common ground accord?
- The wealth of the “1%” versus the rest of the world’s people
The third, final definition of margin
Here the synonyms are Space, Surplus, Allowance, Scope, Play, Compass, Latitude, Leeway, Extra, Elbowroom
- The margins of this (room, fabric, project, adventure) allow us to/prevent us from .…
- The margin of safety for women walking alone is zero whether walking after dusk in the Americas, or for water in the African countryside in the day.
- The margin of room for species survival (e.g. humpback whale resurgence in Antarctica, see article in references)
- The margin needed for people in coastline cities before becoming refugees.
All three definitions of Margin require being aware of the who, what, where, and when of the situation where you are. The first skill then is to train to be observant, to being tuned into an awareness of your current context.
I asked JacquieLawson.com if I might use Bev Pask-Hughes’ painting for this blog because of three things: the love of adventure in the woman, the look of hope on the Bear’s face, and the shadows that are gathering around them. They have it all before them, the Heroine’s trials and tests, and Nigredo transformations. At no point are we assured she will win through.
Context Awareness Competency: Skill II – Connection
People cue others on how they want to interact. Context Awareness is being able to observe, first, and then respond in appropriate ways to build a connection. In the story of White Bear King Valemon the heroine’s journey is about mastering Context Awareness: Connection. In the series of blogs featuring the steps of a Heroine’s Journey this one is about the Road of Trials.
Thinking about the heroine’s qualities is useful. While working on this blog I realized every step of her Road of Trials requires her awareness of the context and her ability to build right connection with the others involved. Her failure to be aware of context at the beginning of the story puts her on a road of learning how to observe and then connect with those necessary to win through. The Bear King understands the context, but is powerless until she demonstrates awareness of their whole context.
What is observable that the heroine misses at the beginning but learns on her Road of Trials:
- Awareness of birth and other cultural contexts
- Sensitivity to others’ observed differences
- Ability to observe connections between people and in groups
- Observe body cues and interpret cues accurately
- Ability to observe how people are responding and adapt behavior accordingly
- Recognition of and matching the level of cohesion in a group
- Understand intent and communicate personal boundaries in any context: Yes/No, Will/Won’t, Able/Not Able
What she (and we) can do with this knowledge (the Reasons for Context Awareness: Connection)
- Understand how others’ awareness of context influences any interaction
- Ability to connect appropriately to others while staying grounded in own person or role
- Able to assess context and cues from others to help make needed connections
- Able to give connection cues to others
- Can work with current level of cohesion appropriately and increase/decrease connection as needed or desired
- Can be part of a team context, an ensemble, with grace
- Can contact person(s) involved after an unsatisfactory interaction and explore what can be done differently
- Has confidence in own ability to enter a variety of contexts and make connections
- Accepts responsibility for context commitments, constraints, rules/procedures
Context Awareness gives us the ability to explore our Margins. We can be able to make the leaps across the chasms of our time in history, and to measure the gaps and connect to make change.
Personal Choice and Context Awareness
Living in this time of critical margins requires each of us to make choices about how much context awareness we observe, believe, know. Here’s a 1-5 response scale:
- Refuse Awareness, admit only a narrow feed of information
- Numb down or Wear Out
- Dither back and forth, never decide
- Take small actions
- Engage – doing something daily however small.
On any given day in any given context I find myself embracing any of the five. I live as much as possible in #4/#5. Many people are contextually aware of the critical margins of their times. Some despair. Others work to alter the contexts in which they live. Many people around the world are choosing to Engage locally and regionally with great success.
I have a friend who walks her dog along a city trail by a river. In this context she meets numerous people every week, and says Hello! Over time these people have gone from #1 (continue looking down or away) to smiling and greeting her. At my grandson’s graduation ceremony one speaker said “We are 500 today. If every day each one of us did one thing for the good of someone we know, after we have been alive for ten years… after 25… in our whole lives: millions of actions for good.” That vision takes each graduate having the will to “make it so.”
Creating Will
“Like us, [the Venetians] had once been fabulously lucky. They had become rich, as we did, by accident… They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. Many of them gave their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had crystallized. They were fond of the pattern, just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it.”
—C.P. Snow (see references)
We can be aware in Gaza/Israel that a will to hate creates a context of death, destruction and despair. We can discover what a will to forgive, a will to love, can do in Rawanda (Article in References). One son recently in Cambodia went to a history museum about Pol Pot and the Killing Fields. The museum guide said “The survivors decided that many people had no choice—do as Pol Pot tells you to do or die. They decided to forgive all but the top echelons.”
This is a stunning application of being context aware of their ancestors’ Margins— the Edge of Live or Die, the amount of choices being zero, and no Elbow Room to do anything other than ordered.
Free Will
I’ve heard people ask about a terrible situation, “Why doesn’t God intervene?” And the answer is, “Because we have free will.” This world is not designed to have a Supreme Being come swooping in to save us from ourselves. What happens in this world is up to us. Context Awareness is a primary skill for creating the outcomes we, our cultures, and our planet need.
References
C.P. Snow quote taken from this article, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (worth reading)
Rwanda: How Rwanda went from Genocide to Global Health model
Of degrees of temperature that prevent world destruction—this one is up to us. Ignore this title – the original title was “We live in an age of Fools”—a great context comment. Link: Hopeless and Broken, Why the World’s Top Climate Scientists are in Despair?
Also in the Guardian Down to Earth. ‘I’m a blue whale, I’m here’: researchers listen with delight to songs that hint at Antarctic resurgence
I live by the idea that I do what I can, with what I have, where I am. In Judaism, the rabbis say, “We’re not responsible for saving the world. We’re responsible for doing what we can. One of the things I can do is to thank people for their help. Recently, after a clerk at a pharmacy was very helpful, I said, “Thank you so much. I appreciate your help.” She looked at me with such a peculiar look on her face, I asked what was wrong. She responded, “I’m not used to being thanked.” This is something we can all do. And it matters.
I believe these moments, like yours in the pharmacy with a clerk, are the most important actions we can take – to be contextually aware we are at this moment on the front line of helping peace and love to prevail.