Last Quarter Alienation

I spent the past three days mostly at a meeting of people with interests similar to mine and -- in the large -- folk within 15 years of my age. I suppose I did these calculations at those moments when the threat was greatest that I might look disinterested. I suppose I heard about twenty talks over the three days and five of them (there I go calculating, again) I found annoying, boring, or "kinda-silly." That's pretty good, I suppose. Three quarters kept my attention and one quarter gave me time to either think a bit about my own stuff (relationships, the arthritis that has just appeared in my right hand, the visitors to my office that I would be seeing at that moment if I weren't in some Sheraton Hotel conference room, why the conference planners weren't arranging for coffee ... ) ... my own disgruntledness.

Ah! Disgruntledness in the Last Quarter. That's not exactly what I'd be talking about on the third day of the meeting when it was my turn "to share wisdoms," but that was part of it. I was going to show a half hour of a film about a Belgian high school student who was very different than most of his peers ... lacked social-cuing skills ... like verbal pragmatics ... knowing when to enter a conversation and how to filter out extraneous information which is so much a part of communication and to "get the message" through the garbage that accompanies it. The Director/Screenwriter had written it in response to a kid from Brussels who in those circumstances suicided. (Movie is called Ben-X).

I was to using it as a metaphor to help me understand the way difference was negotiated in the communities to which I belonged .... a number of which not untypically are plagued with infighting and splits. Such thoughts, I believe, must also relate to my own sense of adolescent alienation and I was gonna (and did) talk of that, as well.

Speaking is strange. Not untypically I and those with whom I've discussed this have a parallel conversation going on in their minds ... well, maybe not exactly parallel to the conversation at hand. Like right now, I am thinking, paraphrasing an old song: 'The Autumn leaves upon my lawn ... the Autumn leaves ... need be raked' (I could go on ... I'll resist the temptation). But back to the feelings of alienation.

This AM it occurs to me that while this sense of not being comfortably situated in a group is, indeed, typical in the high school years, I see it more and more among my confreres in the Fourth Quarter. Someone (Erik Erikson) said that if one fails to feel a sense of giving back in the 60-Death years, the result is despair. I don't recall how old he was when he wrote about these stages of being that he described ... each stage potentially dominated by a central conflict, but it occurs to me more powerfully than before that these conflicts are present at every such stage (Erikson agreed but it hits me more so as I negotiate his Last stage).

Maybe I'll list all the conflicts he postulated when I write next and think about how each new one brings the older ones along. (Parallel conversation? thinking, at the moment of his early childhood conflict: 'Trust vs. Mistrust' as I say, for today ...)

Bye.