So my daughter started school this year and she loves math. She’ll tell anybody.

Mostly people say “Good for her! Math is important for girls.”

And I cringe a little. There is a huge SHOULD in this. There is a historic should coming from the cold war era, that America needs mathematicians to have primacy on the global arena. There is a more recent should, that females should be encouraged in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) so that gender imbalances and misogyny can be diminished.

She’s only in kindergarten. I want her to like what she likes. I wonder how she interprets these well-intentioned responses to her love of math.

She’s doing well in school, but I’m a little worried about how they are teaching reading. It doesn’t make sense to her or me. She reads fine for her age, but I want her to feel confident about what she’s doing when she reads.

I love her teacher, she’s great. But teachers don’t know everything. And I think my daughter needs more than what she’s getting.

I remember struggling with certain parts of reading. I remember so well. I remember a lot of things, and other things I forget.

I have had this box of old notebooks I needed to sort through. Some of the things in the notebooks were worth keeping, and some were not. Time to render down the pile.

I always keep notebooks. I write down grocery lists and phone numbers. I also write out my big projects plans. And poems and journal entries. I wanted to keep the big stuff.

And of course it brings me back to the times when those things were happening. I found letters I’d written but never sent to Chris when we were first dating. Oh! The agony of fresh love.

I was younger, for sure. I hesitate to say I was young. 27 years old and seen a bit of life.

I kept running across this idea in what I was writing to Chris, “I want you to hear my ideas and tell me what they mean.”

I was so sure that there was meaning. I didn’t know the meaning and I was looking outside myself for the answer. I was very confident that most people–well, the smart people that I liked and respected–would know more than I did, and could crack the puzzle box of my mind.

As a child I had heard so often that I should listen to my betters, and I had learned it. When I grew up I still clung to this idea that someone else knew better than I did and could explain it to me.

Waving my hand high, “Teacher! Teacher! I have a question.”

It is a nice dream to think that the answer to all my questions was so close by. That someone with the answer book was right there to help me.

So, when I first met Chris I put him on that pedestal. I wanted him to be the one with all the answers. Bless him; he didn’t take advantage of my insecurity. He was patient, and never pushed me into what I didn’t want

Our relationship has come past that immature expectation I had. Looking back at my old notebooks I see it now and realize I have changed.

And still, I have not changed that much. I can see a lot of ways that I still give away my authority to know.

It was only a couple of years ago that a teacher told me “All your empowerment comes from inside of you.”

When I heard it, it gonged my bones and I knew it was true. I still had to work hard to find a way to practice it. I’m still working on it. I have a feeling that I am going to want someone else to tell me the answer my whole life.

I also know that when it comes down to it, I am the one who has to figure it out. Especially when it is a question of something original- a new idea or a work of art. I’m the only one who can tell if it’s right because I’m the only one who thought of it.

Life doesn’t have letter grades. It is only attendance.

I’m going to go meta. It used to be called navel-gazing. But I want to talk a little about what I’m doing with this weekly wonder thing.
I started my blog in 2002. Thirteen lucky years ago Chris told me about web logs. “They are called blogs.”I was intrigued.

“If the name Wonderblog is available, I’m doing it.” It was and I did.  From blogger, to typepad to wordpress I’ve been writing on it ever since.

Experiences, thoughts and musings. I have written the way I want want, not giving in to formulas.

I’ve tried to improve what I write over time. Right around the time that facebook gained ascendancy, I learned that people couldn’t be bothered to go to my website anymore. I created the Weekly Wonder as an email to send my blog to your inboxes.

When I started the Weekly Wonder, I felt a sense of embarrassment. I figured I should up my game a bit. Chicken scratches weren’t enough anymore. I was pushing this onto people. The least I could do was spell check. And maybe I could try to have a point.

I think I have gotten better at whatever this is I’m doing. I hope to keep that trend going.

This week I signed up for an online course. Kevin Alison, the incomparable founder of the very not-safe-for-work storytelling podcast Risk! created a course called “Storytelling for Business”.

This ain’t exactly business, but I figured I’d learn something. In lecture two, Kevin describes that stories for business require a point, a take-away, what used to be called a ‘moral.’

The constructed story. The crafted story. You know that part of the movie, whatever movie, where the music swells because of some emotion? My eyes get wet, just as they are meant to.

And I get so angry. I blink at the tears and resent the hell out of these movie makers playing me like  harp.  Don’t tell me what’s cute or worthwhile. I get to decide. I am the one in the drivers seat.

If I’m going to cry, I don’t want it to be when the music swells. I don’t want it to be a forgone conclusion.

So. Stories have a moral. O yes they do, and they are rigidly required. The good guy wins, the bad guys get theirs in the end. The immoral woman is severely punishes (always and forever), and the world is in the order it should be.

Except not in all stories.

And particularly, not in mine. My meta story, what I strive for, is to create something my audience does not expect. Red rose in an orange pot? Beautiful. The wonder and the glory of the filthy and sublime. The ordinary and the divine and all the ways that everything is both.

That’s my story, and that’s what I wonder. Not just weekly. Daily, minute by minute. If it catches my ideas, hooks my attention it is worth sharing. The moral is not always clear. But the wonder shimmers through it all.

Talking to Veronica this morning:

“Remember Uncle Mark? He went to Disneyland with us.”

“Uh huh. I want to go to Disneyland again!”

“We will go again sometime. Uncle Mark went to China to be a teacher. Right around the same time you started kindergarten. But he doesn’t teach kindergarten. He teaches grownups.”

She nods.

“He got sick and he is in the hospital right now. That is what daddy and I have been talking about.”

“But what is he sick with?”

“He has a cough.”

“I have a cough.”

“yes, you have a cough. You are getting better. Uncle Mark needed help getting better so he’s in the hospital.”

“I want to go to China.”

Se we got out her National Geographic Animal Atlas. I showed her where we are, which she already knew. And then I showed her where China is.

“Look! That’s where Pandas live. They don’t live in the cities though. They are not near Uncle Mark.”

She recently had to do a research project for school (THE THINGS THEY MAKE KINDERGARTNERS DO!!!). We had to research a zoo animal, and she picked tigers. She had to write where tigers live, what they eat and an interesting fact about about them. I helped her find out from wikipedia that tigers live in Asia, they eat buffaloes and deer, and that the are disappearing. There are a lot fewer of them than there used to be.

So I went on. “Oh! China is in Asia. There are tigers there, remember? Maybe the tigers eat the pandas.”

She was horrified. “Mommy! Tigers don’t eat pandas! Tigers eat people!”

At my last job, I went down to shoot the breeze with a colleague at work. We had some work things to talk about, but mostly I just wanted a break and a chance to vent. He happened to be African American, and had expressed his dislike of Africa. I was giving him a hard time about it, going on about how Africa is a continent not a country and many parts of it are magnificent. We had been talking for more than a half hour, when the person in the cube next to us joined it.

She had been listening to us for the whole time. We were ignorantly tossing around opinions about Africa. It turns out she had been to African frequently, her husband was from Ghana. She actually had first hand knowledge to share. But she couldn’t join in our conversation until her official break. She had a headset, and was part of the call center.

Me and my friend, in the council of ignorance, didn’t have that kind of restriction. We didn’t have timed breaks, or a computer keeping track of our productivity.

This woman did. She shared her experience with us and I learned more about modern Ghana. I also learned more about what kind of privilege I’d been enjoying so effortlessly in my career.

I’ve never had to do that kind of job. I would have a lot of trouble in that kind of tight control where I couldn’t make my own decisions about when to move around.

I remember my dad telling me is about Henry Ford and how he came up with the assembly line, and what a champion of the worker he was. “He paid his workers enough so that they could afford to buy one of the cars they were manufacturing.” The implication was that he wanted the cars to be for the common man, and he wanted the common man to do well.

Such a very American idea. America was founded on equality, all men (whoops…not women quite yet!) are created equal. If we are all equal we are all the same. Except we are not all exactly the same.

Women are only the most obvious example of those excluded. We are equal with lots of differences. And the work we do is part of the differences.

It wasn’t until I started reading David Halberstam’s The Reckoning a few years ago that I learned another part of the story. The highly paid Ford assembly line workers? They were miserable. He hired the best mechanics to turn widgets like machines all day. Very little skill was required and none of the genius that had turned them into the best mechanics so desired by Ford. The inhuman work conditions required high pay to keep people from leaving. And even so these engineering types would still leave, to have an opportunity to use the skills they had worked to achieve.

All this flashes through my mind as I talk to this woman at work about Ghana. She spent her 10-minute break talking to us, headset around her neck. Not getting coffee or visiting the bathroom as I was free to do at any moment of the day.

I think of all the choices I have, and the choices I didn’t have. The risks I took, and paths I didn’t take. The schools I went to and the ones I didn’t.

My daughter is in school now. We planned for her school since before she was born. My husband went to this same public school. It’s so different from the one I went to.

Mercedes, BMWs and Teslas drive through the unloading areas. Other cars too. But the affluence is intimidating. There is a friendly man who holds the stop sign in the crosswalk to keep the kids safe. Sometimes he is in cargo shorts and flip flops, sometimes in a suit. Turns out he is Executive Vice President for a national enterprise of something. Other moms and dads of similar employment volunteer at the school in a flood of community involvement.

I don’t think they have timed breaks on their jobs. Then again, I wonder how many have been to Ghana. I hear it’s beautiful.

Talking to Veronica this morning:

“Remember Uncle Mark? He went to Disneyland with us.”

“Uh huh. I want to go to Disneyland again!”

“We will go again sometime. Uncle Mark went to China to be a teacher. Right around the same time you started kindergarten. But he doesn’t teach kindergarten. He teaches grownups.”

She nods.

“He got sick and he is in the hospital right now. That is what daddy and I have been talking about.”

“But what is he sick with?”

“He has a cough.”

“I have a cough.”

“yes, you have a cough. You are getting better. Uncle Mark needed help getting better so he’s in the hospital.”

“I want to go to China.”

Se we got out her National Geographic Animal Atlas. I showed her where we are, which she already knew. And then I showed her where China is.

“Look! That’s where Pandas live. They don’t live in the cities though. They are not near Uncle Mark.”

She recently had to do a research project for school (THE THINGS THEY MAKE KINDERGARTNERS DO!!!). We had to research a zoo animal, and she picked tigers. She had to write where tigers live, what they eat and an interesting fact about about them. I helped her find out from wikipedia that tigers live in Asia, they eat buffaloes and deer, and that the are disappearing. There are a lot fewer of them than there used to be.

So I went on. “Oh! China is in Asia. There are tigers there, remember? Maybe the tigers eat the pandas.”

She was horrified. “Mommy! Tigers don’t eat pandas! Tigers eat people!”

I know I’m doing it. Every single time.

I run in the morning, and I love the feeling of movement. My own power, nothing stopping me, GO. It’s pure freedome until I get to Arrow highway.

Going up the hill, I always break the law and jaywalk. I’m careful! I look both ways, and when there are no cars coming both directions, I RUN across and keep going. What this means is I get to keep moving.

But what goes up must come down. I am more tired when I come down. I stare at that stoplight the whole way.

It’s red. Then green. Are there cars coming by? Will there be a break?

There’s a name for this: a known unknown.

Donald Rumsfeld made this idea famous, but I have been familiar with it from my job for a long time. It has to do with assessing risk when you are planning to get things done. When I am making a plan of action, I have to remember to put my time and attention on what can be done, not on what I don’t know.

It is a big trap to base my actions on incomplete knowledge.  I can’t know. I know I can’t know. And I still try to know.

I know that stoplight is coming. It looms for blocks as I run towards it. I don’t know whether I will be able to cross the street by the time I reach it.

I slow my pace, trying to time my arrival at the corner to coincide with the green light. I cannot.

I fall into the trap every time. I want to be certain what my next step is. I want control.

My favorite physicist, the amazing Richard Feynman, wrote about this idea:

“People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.”

It’s a lie and a trap to think I know, or to think I have control over what I don’t. I want to learn to stare down that light and run without second-guessing. I have to have faith.

There is always a light looming.

So I’m guest blogging on Lillian Csernica’s blog today

Guest Blog: The Writer’s Path by Murphy Daley

Day before yesterday, Chris and and I were watching twelve o ‘clock high. I hadn’t seen this war movie before.

Gregory Peck was in England during WW2. So it was raining. It’s always raining in England.

I looked over at Chris and said, “Do you think it will ever rain here again?”

“What?”

“It’s just that it is always so dry here. I miss the rain.”

It rained the next day. And the day after the mountain were covered in white white white snow.

And it kept raining.

I think I feel magical.

“Mommy, I know what’s making me cough. It’s my mouth water. My spit.”

She probably means her throat, or maybe post-nasal drip. She’d been coughing all night–a dry little barky cough that meant she had a touch of something and that no one was going to sleep much that night.

So I got out of bed at 6. When I heard her coughing again at 6:15, I said she could get up and watch some TV.

All this is so fantastically ordinary. For the next banal drama, should she stay home from school?

I did not want her to stay home from school. I was very very eager for her to go back to school. She’s had a three day weekend and I was tired of the age-typical games of “I am the boss of you, mommy, and you must do everything I say while I criticize and berate you. It’s pretend!”

Get out of my house. Go somewhere safe and beneficial and let me get something important done.

So I left her to have my morning run, enjoying apple juice and streamed PBS programming.

As I pushed my legs up the hill just like every morning, I felt guilt that I wanted to get away from her. I thought about the horrible TV show I just watched, a period piece, where the little daughter suddenly caught sick and even more suddenly died. How horrified and angry I was and still am at the moralistic tone. The TV mom took a moment for herself while the kid was with the grandparents, but because she didn’t drive the nails HARD ENOUGH to keep her securely on her crucifix she killed her daughter by her sin of trying to have a her own life.

It’s not fair!

It’s also not fair that this run that I do every day isn’t easier. Shouldn’t it count that I run these steps every morning? I’m still the same slow I’ve been since I started.

My daughter is not going to die. As I try to take longer or faster strides up this hill, I try to lay my mother fears to rest. Yes, children do die of illness. It is rare in my time and place, thank God, and highly unlikely. I can lay that worry down. It’s not helpful. I can trust my child’s attentive and caring teacher to notice and send her home if it is serious.

I may not get to that tree much faster than I do every day. Or maybe I did get there faster today. Is this the part of my playlist that is usually playing? Maybe I am a little faster today.

It’s only 15 minutes of running. I spent the same amount of time reading my emails and Facebook before I rousted myself to put the workout clothes on.

Ow. My knee has a crick. Keep running. It will work itself out.

I had just read on my computer yet another one of the free downloads for success at one of my projects. Yet another. Something about this one was kinda different though.

Was it really that easy? Could I just churn it out, like that?

Maybe success–or its synonym, progress–really is yeoman’s work. I keep wanting a jetpack, but it’s not like that. Maybe it is just one thing after the other, lifting my knees up the hill.

Lifting my knees even though there is a screaming banshee in my head of all the other things that I could be doing better or different.

I could do it better, I’m sure. But doing it at all is the real marker of progress. There will always be a banshee. The trick is not to mind.

When I got back home, I took my daughter’s temperature. She’s normal. No mercy, kid. Sorry you have a cough, but you gotta go to school. There’s the life lesson. Show up.

“I can’t believe they pay me to do this!” My computer genius friend from college had come down to Silicon Valley, with hundreds of others just like him. The nerds converged there to get paid. Paid to do what they used to pay universities to let them do!

They worked long hours, not leaving for meals and sleeping in their cubes when the deadlines loomed.

Heady times.

I never slept in my cube. And I knew the lure. I felt the headwind of push and rush and look what I can do!

I can do all this! Amazing–to do something I never dreamed I could. I made that! I made that happen! I can do it again.

Until I am doing it and not doing anything else. Twelve hours a day and still behind schedule.

But look at what I am doing! I am so good at this! I am doing what I never dreamed I could!

In our dreams we all know we can fly. And in my waking hours I flew. Until I woke up to realize I couldn’t. Not like this.

I saw the ground coming up at me. I had to make a landing as soon as I could.

It was my fault. Except I had plenty of help to self-destruct.

What am I talking about? It was just a job.

People say it all the time: You can’t let a job be that important.
They don’t know what they are talking about. This job gave me wings! I could fly when I got there.

Like my friend said, those twenty years ago. I can’t believe they pay me for this.

They do. They do and they never stop asking for what I can give. Somehow, they don’t care about the sustainability of the flying I do for them.

I am an exploitable commodity. I forget that in the intoxication of my own possibilities.

Maybe those cautionaries do know what they are talking about when they say don’t let it get so important.

This career landscape is where I learned what I was capable of. My first. I won’t forget my first time stretching to do more than I thought possible.

It was me, though, not the environment. I did that. I know how. When I remember that, the job can be a lot less important. What I love about my job is really what I love about me.

I figured it out. I will always know how to fly.

[the events this article alludes to are fictionalized in The Parable of Miriam the Camel Driver. Download the story today!]http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B005O54AS4/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1430433151&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70&keywords=the+parable+of+miriam+the+ca