Goodbye Equilibrium. Hello Crisis.

Since we were asked to take stock of our "life course," I'd like to start out with some happy nostalgia. I was born in the 70s, a child of the 80s, and came of age in the 90s. There were so many great things about all of these eras and there's a thousand blogs out there dedicated to each one of them, so I'll limit my nostalgia to a few fond memories. 

One of the biggest influences  on my childhood was the rise of the home computer. My father was an early adopter, so we had one of the first Macintosh PCs. He was a teacher and used it for different aspects of course planning and management. I used it mostly to play games. I don’t remember most of the games now, although I can recall what some of the screens looked like. I do remember Print Shop, which I loved…I used to make up signs, like “happy birthday” flanked on either side by a very pixelated looking birthday cake, and then I’d print it out on our very loud and slow dot matrix printer with the perforated paper. It annoyed everyone in the house and wasted tons of paper, but I loved it.

I also have fond memories of the computer lab in my elementary school. We played all sorts of educational games. One that I do remember was called Number Munchers and Word Munchers where you solved math or word problems to avoid the Troggle monsters. There was also a program where you developed simple code that programmed the computer to create very basic line drawings. It involved all sorts of math to get the code right so that it would draw exactly what you wanted it to. I actually won an award for my interpretation of the Charlotte’s Web book cover…ultimately a pig, a web, and a spider. That was my first and last foray into computer programming. I wish I could remember the name of that program. My Internet searches have failed to produce it.

Anywho, thinking back on my childhood, adolescence, and more recent life course and comparing it to my parents’ was fun, nostalgic, and actually quite painful. The readings we’re using in this course and some of our discussions are hitting extremely close to home. I will use this blog to unpack some of that, since it’s so prominent in my mind, but I’ll try limit the time spent at the pity party.

So, my life is in crisis and has been for several years now. I keep getting hit with one bad thing after another and I’m just trying to keep my head above water. My father died in September 2014, which is not an unusual thing to happen, but it did occur “off-time,” if you will. My marriage crumbled soon after and I was divorced by October 2015. Now I’m dealing with a ridiculous court case that is the aftermath of having a very unstable person live in my home for a brief period of time. As someone who has always been a happy and hopeful person, I find myself in a completely foreign place of pain, constant stress and anxiety, and mourning for my father and for the life I thought I would have with my now ex husband. Lots of darkness these days in a once very sunny, optimistic life.

Reading Chapter 4, from Tennant & Pogson, brought out all kinds of nasty and unwelcomed introspection for me. They introduce Riegel’s work on page 14 of the PDF (can’t see the actual book page numbers) where they describe his view that: “The individual is considered a changing person in a changing world. Human development is conceived as moving along at least four dimensions:

1. The inner-biological dimension – maturation, health

2. The individual-psychological dimension – self-concept, self-esteem ideal self

3. The cultural-sociological dimension – social organization, rules, regulations, rituals

4. The outer-physical dimension – natural catastrophe, economic conditions

In this scenario, stable periods of equilibrium and balance are the exception rather than the rule. When any two of the dimensions are in conflict, a crisis with the potential to generate developmental change may occur.”

And there you have it! My individual-psychological and cultural-sociological dimensions are out of whack, and given that all of this happened alongside the Great Recession, one might argue that the outer-physical dimension is also in flux, I guess I have some serious developmental changes to look forward to then. I must say I am not excited about this. I should probably be looking for a therapist.

Tennant & Pogson go on to say:

“Plateaus of balance, stability, and equilibrium occur when the developmental or historical task is completed. But developmental and historical tasks are never completed. At the very moment when completion seems to be achieved, new questions and doubts arise in the individual and in society. The organism, the individual, society, and even outer nature are never at rest, and in their restlessness they are rarely in perfect harmony” (pg 15 in the PDF).

Regardless of my own woes, this idea strikes me as the most accurate of all the models we read about in Lesson 3. I believe this is an accurate description of how the world works and how we work within it. We are always in flux – mentally, physically, socially, naturally…the most constant thing in this life is change, is it not?

I have more to say on this, but I'm stopping for the moment. I will follow up with more thoughts about the life course as a social construct.