New Paradigm Explained Further...

A Paradigm is a pattern, usually of behavior. A Paradigm serves as model and is perpetuated through systems. It defines a system or community with a flow and direction.

An example of a Paradigm, and my innocent innate need to live beyond a pre-existing Paradigm, occurred when I was four years old. We lived in a terrific cul-de-sac neighborhood in New Jersey. There were many children the ages of me, my brother, and my sister. We created a lot of games that were reflections of the mindset of the  mid 1960s. One of these games was called Monster. In this game the girls would stroll along in oblivion only to be startled by an attack of the boys as Monsters. The girls would screech and run, succumbing finally to the aggressiveness of the boy Monsters.  Each run of this game lasted maybe four minutes. The game was a Paradigm. Patterns and beliefs were used as a model of the gender roles of us neighborhood children. This game bored me and did not make any sense.

One day I decided I would suggest some magnificent changes. This was my presenting a Paradigm Shift to my friends.

I interrupted the boys who were, as always, planning the start of the Monster run. In doing so I already began shifting the Paradigm by causing a change in the usual pattern of what we did.

Then I made my suggestion out loud to the entire group. I simply said that I had an idea that would make the game more fun, more fair, and last longer. No one seemed interested, but I continued. So, I would be the Doctor. Here we see that I introduced a new character into the story. The Paradigm would have to shift if there was a doctor involved. The Old Paradigm had "girls" and "monsters". The New Paradigm would have "girls", "monsters", and "a doctor". I also suggested a nurse, who in my mind was going to be a girl. So now I was shifting the Paradigm to take two "girls" out of the screeching and running group and give them separate titles. On a larger scale, I was challenging the gender Paradigm of that time by suggesting that I, a girl, would be a doctor. WOAH!!! And then suggest that a girl be MY nurse. Gender roles AND assumed gender identity! Everyone had been programmed from the adult world that handsome male doctors had sexy female nurses and that somehow there was a flirtatious thing going on there.

So, I was standing in front of the Power of the Boy Monsters and the submissiveness of the Girl Victims, declaring that I knew how to make our game Paradigm much better. My idea was that when the Monsters came out of nowhere to attack the girls, the injured girls could come see me, the Doctor, along with my beautiful female nurse, and we would fix them up. We would make them so strong and efficient that they would return to the streets. In their healed and strengthened selves they could conquer the Monsters, or at least send them back from whence they came.

Bravo, Aileen!! Brilliant!! Superb!!! Common Sense! Accolades!!

Actually, as we all know, I was told that that was the stupidest idea ever. If I wanted to play with them I had to play their way. They were not going to change the game.

 Of course I would not play their game. Once I had realized what was going on, I no longer could participate. The moment I recognized a new way to play the game, I had already left their Paradigm. My idea of changes and my commitment to those changes created a New Paradigm. I presented them with the ideas, the opportunity and first shift into a New Paradigm, but they refused. I was then in a New Paradigm. If other children had joined me or after the game finished come to tell me that my idea was better and perhaps we could play that way, then we would have started a Counter Culture. If I truly want the New Paradigm to stay...if I really believed in the new game, then I would never choose to go back and play the old game in the Old Paradigm. The group of us who only now played in the new way would have began a New Paradigm with a counter culture.

There are many beliefs and systems that shift. They shift because someone speaks up, or something happens.

In my last blog I used the Vietnam War and the experimentation of drugs from the 60s and 70s as the example of a major shift in the Old Paradigm into this New Paradigm, even if it took 50 years to begin to truly see an established new counterculture to gender roles and gender identity for example.

I seemed to have entered this world with a keen sense of doing, or wanting to do things differently. My parents individually tell the story that happened two days or so after I was born. I was born in a hospital in Washington D.C. At that time babies were generally kept in another room while the mother was recuperating. (from being knocked out and awakened to her new baby!) My parents were walking down the hallway to the big window of the nursery. There was a noisy crowd and photographers. People were pointing and talking about one baby in particular. My parents assumed it was the baby of a senator that was born in the same time frame as I was in that hospital.

When they arrived at the nursery window they heard people asking, "Who's baby is that?!". They looked and saw what the commotion was about. Among the swaddled babies lying on their backs with eyes closed, there was one baby who had unwrapped herself, some how flipped over, and was up on her elbows looking out at the people looking in. I doubted my parents rendition of this story until my father, who never would fancy himself a braggart when it came to his children, asserted that this, in fact, was true.

In my first week of life I began to shift two paradigms: new born babies born in a U.S. hospital lay on their backs swaddled, and babies of a higher social class get more attention. My parents expected everyone was talking about the U.S. Senator's baby because, for social class reasons, this baby must be worth talking about. I, on the other hand, a scraggly 6 pound 6 ouncer from nondescript parents who rented an apartment, was not worth talking about.

We have an OLD PARADIGM that is about things like, the Old Boy's Network, women getting paid less

for the same exact job as a man, women unhire-able after they raised children, a whole lotta isms, indigenous marginalization, and status symbols. Competition, greed, scarcity, and criminal fraudulent behaviors such as those by Enron, http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/enron.asp, have been a primary foundational pattern of the Old Paradigm.

Relate all of this back to my original story of boy Monsters versus girl Victims. Why did all the neighborhood children want to continue with this game? It satisfied something within them. It aided in their sense of knowing what to do...do what the tribe around you does, even if it may hurt you or cause you to live a life that is a lie.

What if someone is like me and can't live a life that is unauthentic? Regardless of the social norms and rules? What if happiness and the pursuit of happiness means that they have to leave the Paradigm that exists and create their own New Paradigm? And what if others follow and create a subculture in this New Paradigm? What if the New Paradigm was created because humanity needs to survive? People need to individually survive and therefore collectively we must ignore and leave the Old Paradigm patterns in order to find truth and happiness in a New Paradigm.

We do not want that Old Paradigm. None of us really do. It was an Old Paradigm of "keeping up with the Joneses", "Don't hang out your dirty laundry", and so many other approval based lies and omissions of who we are. People are dying because of the Patterns we established in the Old Paradigm. People are dying from suicides due to war, bullying, and non-acceptance as gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender, and questioning.  People are dying from discrimination, poverty, lack of medical care, ignorance, marginalization, and oppression. All because of an old set of patterns that we perpetuated. WE have the power to speak up. We can assert how we want to play the games, and if "they" won't listen, we walk away and do our own thing. WE begin the NEW PARADIGM. In fact, we already have.

May today be a First Day to Begin to know who we really are. May today be a First Day to Begin the courage to step into who we really are and change the outdated patterns that hurt us and others. May we all make this a First Day to Begin our commitment to this NEW PARADIGM so that we all may be happy, valued, thrive, and live a life of LOVE.