Pilgrimage Ponderings
All I Need to Know...
...I Learned in Kindergarten is one of my favorite books. Robert Fulghum's simple messages about the importance of sharing, cleaning up your own messes, and the necessity of naptime are just a few of the vignettes I remember (It's been awhile since I read the book!). But I found myself thinking of it recently while reading the book Emotional Intelligence.
This book suggests that the key to being successful in the adult world of working for a living is not, as was once thought, a person's IQ. Studies indicate that far more important than how smart a person might be is that person's self-awareness, capacity to self-monitor, and understanding of how people relate to one another. In some fields, a good IQ might help a person get a job, but her "emotional intelligence" is what equips her to both keep the job and advance her career.
So here's some good news and some bad news. The bad news first: Studies show that as a whole, the collective emotional intelligence of our society is decreasing at a fairly significant rate. In other words, people are less equipped to manage themselves and to navigate people-situations than they once were. The writer points to a general breakdown in family life as one possible reason for this decline.
The good news is that unlike "brain smarts" measured by IQ, emotional intelligence is not primarily dependent on the growth of the brain in childhood and adolescence. It is much more about learning from experience and making choices based on that learning. So while my IQ is likely a pretty fixed number, I will cultivate my emotional intelligence throughout my life, provided I am willing to learn how to reflect on my own situation and experiences and also how to practice making some different choices in how I relate to people.
I can't help but wonder if one reason we as a society are not doing so well in this area is that many of us live pretty isolated lives. We are not always willing to get to know each other well enough to have to manage conflict or negotiate boundaries, for example. We spend a lot of time around other people at the grocery store, the football game, or on the lake. But we spend less time actually with people outside of a tight inner circle, I think.
Sadly, I think this reality may also be present in communities of faith. What might be a healing place to learn a "more excellent way" to practice more intelligent ways of relating or to grow in one's self-awareness often becomes a place of surface relationships where folks spend more effort on the quality of the programming than on the quality of relationships. And when conflict surfaces, it either takes over or is quickly shoved back under the rug.
As I ponder this whole notion, I really don't have any wisdom to shed on the subject or any answers. I just think that we need to be serious about how we relate to one another in and outside the community of faith. If "they'll know we are Christians by our love," then what will "they" know if it looks like we don't know how to get along together through thick and thin?
