This is the 50th and final interview for this year and the 160th interview overall for A Community Thread. I owe a huge thank you to Leslie as it is unlikely I would have met Tyler without her. I first met Tyler, who is Leslie's husband, when I showed up at their house to interview Leslie earlier this year and that was the beginning of what has turned out to be a very lovely friendship with both of them. Tyler and I have spent many hours on many occasions in genuine conversation over the course of this year and I have come to value his opinion and outlook and admire him as a man and caring human. Because of our time together and what I have come to know of Tyler, I invited him to be the final interview for this year. So, a big thank you and a big hug to him for graciously accepting. I am honored to introduce him to you here and hope that you will not only find our conversation uplifting but also a catalyst for changes big and small in your own daily practices.
I have been churning out interviews weekly for three years now and I have done so without taking a break to significantly evaluate any effect this is having. In mid-stride, I have been thinking and analyzing and questioning and have accordingly made some tweaks to the questions and some adjustments to my general practices, but I have come to understand that I need to take a little space to not only better analyze my desired outcomes and how to have a greater effect, but also to better understand how to digest all of this information personally. While there may be a lull in posts for a period of time, much will be happening behind the scenes and more will come soon. With all of that said and without further ado, here is Tyler Graham.
PS. Tyler has a very soothing voice and we go off on some tangents, so I'd listen to this one if you can build it into your schedule.
TG: I'm Tyler Graham. I'm the father of a 27-year-old daughter; husband to a fantastic wife, Leslie Graham; an Oregonian by spending most of my life in this state, but born in Washington, so a Northwesterner, for sure. Having had the opportunity to be a lot of other places, I definitely would come back over and over again — and have done that. Other than that, I'd just say I think of myself as a diverse and open-minded progressive individual.
ACT: What concerns you about the state of the world and humanity? What affects you personally?
TG: I think I understand the interest of keeping it personal there. Yet, even thinking it through as you spoke, I feel a challenge to keep it from being something bigger than that. The first things that come to mind on the small scale are, What raises my ire? What do I react to? What do I respond to that I see or hear or feel going on? It's probably two things: it's really mostly how we treat each other or how I see other people treat others even more so than how I myself am treated. Because I'm a white guy; I'm educated; I came from a family with parents that are still together, both college educated, etc. So, I know that even if I try to peel back layers and try to see it from other people's perspective that I've got a long ways to go to get there. And I know that I don't get treated the way I see other people get treated. So, it's often more about how I see other people responding or reacting to each other and learning about those... coupled with how we treat the Earth — the world that we live in.
Again, those are in some ways big, grandiose things — I realize that. Trying to honor your question, those are also, though, the things that make react. Those are the things that I respond to. Those are the things that make me happy or sad or upset during the day or spend time pondering, What could I do to change either who I am or where I live and the things that I see going on around me that are part of that? In terms of the burr under my saddle blanket, it's those two sorts of things if I boiled it down, more than anything else.
As you framed up the question, though, I was thinking globalization is the problem that bothers me the most because it's what's depersonalized and it's what's commoditized and everything else. But that, to me, would be the grandiose extension of, What do I think is wrong with the world around us?
I think specifically it's just that interaction mode of people. You certainly nailed a few of the things that we see in the headlines — human trafficking or disparity or inequality in things. When I boil it down because of some of my interests and the reading that I've done, it looks like and is a lot closer to the very localist examples of that. For example, a good one for me is living throughout the States and watching traffic and watching people allow other people to merge and seeing that in Oregon — it's something that sometimes almost makes me feel proud to be an Oregonian. I literally watch people get surprised when somebody else lets them in traffic. That's how we treat each other. Then I extrapolate from there, and I think sometimes I probably make a big deal out of nothing, but that makes me feel good when somebody lets me in and I might carry that at least a couple of intersections or a couple of traffic interactions further down the road. And maybe when I let somebody else in, that gives them a smile when they were having a grey or down day of some some sort. That's about as personal as I guess I can think of it — in simple, daily interactions like that.
ACT: What inspires or motivates you to do something about these things that bother you?
TG: I try to really think about motivation turning into action more than just thinking or superficial reactions or responses. I think probably two things come out of that. One that is probably the most prevalent is having knowledge about things that other people have done as sort of a success story, in a sense. But people that are doing good things about this sort of thing is not necessarily a success story. It's an attempt; it's a trial. It could be an organization that somebody's launched. It could be an idea that somebody's come up with.
A simple example for me in terms of how we treat the Earth would be some of the inventions and, most recently, it's been fairly young people coming up with them — how to solve some of these problems like plastics in the ocean and some of the simple devices to try to approach doing something about that. That inspires me. I see or I read or I hear about something like that and it makes me feel like, Right, there's one person at a fairly low-dollar entry point that's done something about it and it looks like it can be effective. That inspires me. That motivates me.
And sometimes it's a small reaction that I have. Maybe it just makes me a stronger participant in recycling or something like that, but it affects me and it gives me a little bit of energy to spend thinking about how I can make a difference, too. It certainly reaffirms that idea that each one of us can make a difference. Because there's plenty of things else going on that might make me feel like we don't have that ability to make a difference ourselves as much as we'd like to or as much as the story that I heard when I was a kid about how we can all make a difference and things like that. That's probably the strongest motivator — not necessarily the example of others, but sometimes just a principle that somebody's published or shared a story about or shared an experience about.
And then I think second to that is probably when I have done something. And it can be pretty small. The idea of mentoring, sharing experiences.... being able to put some of those things that I've learned into action. And maybe having the freedom to act in some cases, too. Not being burdened or not being preoccupied or, conversely, sometimes having a few dollars to spend on something and do what I feel is right in even the smallest ways. So, acting or reacting is another way to boil those two things down. I get motivated in reaction to other things and I feel more motivated, potentially, by acting myself.
ACT: It's interesting what you said about it making you feel good when someone allows you to enter traffic or it makes you feel good to do the same for someone else and how that ties into the Golden Rule or the Platinum Rule. But the source of my frustration is when that doesn't happen and you can extrapolate that into the larger issues. Do you want to be persecuted for your thoughts or your beliefs? Do you want to not be allowed into traffic? Do you want to be yelled at? Do you want to be abused? Unless there is some sort of significant anomaly, the answer is likely to be no. But all the negative stuff is happening, so somehow enough people aren't paying attention to what makes them feel good. Is it so simple as that — do what you want to have done to you? Be kind?
TG: I think that's a real challenge. It's been a long time and I don't remember which book, but there was some book out there, way back, that inspired that thought process of anarchy versus a rule set. What really happens if we don't have rules? Will people act in reasonable ways? Will they treat each other reasonably? And I tend to believe no. At the same time, I really hesitate to want to lump that into this human nature thing and if we're all allowed to act the way we want to, some of it's gonna look pretty bad. At the same time, I don't know how else to explain things like slavery or human trafficking or some of the other stuff that happens. Because it seems to me that the people that could do something better, didn't always do something better. People that had the power to be "in charge", they did some pretty horrible things. The majority direction doesn't flow towards the greater good always — it sure doesn't seem that way.
I'm trying to think if there's another good traffic analogy. I've driven a lot. I've moved across the States multiple times, so I've spent a lot of time in cars. It's not something I love doing necessarily, but I certainly do some good thinking spending time in cars and driving around. Maybe what's relevant here for me is this idea of perspective.
I remember when I was younger, I was living in the DC Metro area... and traffic was pretty bad. What I didn't know then that I know now is there's a scientific study that says waiting to the last minute to merge when you've got a lane ending is the most efficient zipper technique. But when I was younger, I used to get really frustrated by the people that would come up alongside me or keep pushing it to the end. My whole perspective on that has changed. Information is a perspective and how does that affect whether things are going better on the whole or worse on the whole? Something like that can make a huge difference. But I think there's a lot of other challenges with it, too, right? I had to be open enough to one, believe in science and read it, find it, or it found it's way to me; or accept it, maybe experience it in a few ways; and allow it to change my mind about the way I had perceived something for years. I had been an adult driver for probably twentyish years, maybe more, when I learned that. And I'd been pretty frustrated and pretty mad a few times with people. And now I have a totally different attitude about it.
But I wonder when I'm doing it now — because I practice it sometimes now on purpose, thoughtfully — what the people in the lane next to me are thinking and feeling. And I'm concerned about that. Are they gonna be bothered? Are they upset? Do some of them know about the zipper concept? Or not? And how's that going to affect the whole thing that's happening in that chain of traffic in that moment and the few moments after? Sometimes I feel like it's not a good idea to do it even though I know scientifically it's the right thing to do...
Is it mostly good with a few bad? I don't know. I'd like to think that's a trend that changes back and forth and has probably over time changed back and forth around the world. I'll go back to that human nature perspective there. If we didn't have some rules and we let people be people and we watched what happened, I am pretty convinced it wouldn't all be good.
ACT: What do people mean to you?
TG: Yeah, that's an interesting one — even having had time to consider it. I kind of want to say people are the cement — we're this live layer operating around the globe that represent what's above and what's below in some ways. And I don't mean that spiritually specifically at all. We represent the food chain in the food that we eat and the waste stream that we create. Those are both things that are human-created or human-generated.
And then the relationship layer that's on top of that. What are people in terms of the catalyst for feeling good or feeling bad? The layer that I recognize the most in terms of family and a sense of place. People help me identify who I am. I look at other people and think about how I might want to be more like them or less like them. Not a sounding board, exactly, and not a crucible in the sense that it's all about other people that have made me who I am, necessarily. Not even a mirror, exactly, 'cause it's certainly not looking quite at yourself when you look at other people. But that sense of looking out there and seeing maybe in a sense what bounces off or what sticks to me. The plane of evolution related to people. I look at history and think about the people that came before us and wonder about the people that are going to come after us and what that's going to look like.
So, it's really a meter. What's the trend today versus what was the trend before TV or before social media? Are we operating in little microcosms of our community locally? Are we operating in a different type of community that's much broader than that because of whatever medium it's in? Through my life, there's been times that I've wondered what was it like to be a person and what were people like before print? If we were all writing on stone tablets, the sense of people and what we do and how we operate is significantly different than it is today where we can type on a keyboard and broadcast what we think or what we've written or even in audio or video — how we can get that around and what distribution looks like as opposed to at some other time.
I wasn't thinking this through when I started to answer this question, but this idea now that we really are this layer — almost like part of the stratosphere — because we're really linked around the Earth now in ways that we never have been before. I think back at historical different periods of time and things could be very isolated microcosms either geographically or just from a community basis. And I don't think that's so true anymore.
Not really the glue, but maybe some of those graphic representations of populations. We're very much a linked layer of what life in the world's about.
ACT: I've defined community as our relationships with each other and the world we live in. And most people seem to place their relationships as paramount. But we aren't treating each other very well. There seems to be some kind of inability to consider others. Why do you think we are struggling so much in that regard — to be kind or to be equitable or to be fair?
TG: Wow, yes, it would be nice to have some simple answers to that. I can think of some ideas that come to mind, but I think we'd be grasping for a while to really pin it down and make it stick. Is it time? And that may be a really convenient explanation that we hear and read in different formats — how busy everyone is.
And for a minute, I thought it was a different answer to say it's the attention span question that's been bantered around for a while — this idea that we have this short attention span now because of media and the way things are presented to us and how many different visions and views we have to have throughout our day to keep up with the pace of change. Screen-time related, mostly. The idea of the same time application doesn't really fit for parts of the world or cultures that aren't spending as much time looking at screens of some sort or another. But those are both time related. Do I have time to even know who you are? To have enough perspective? To think about how you might be different than me or have different needs than me or be operating at a different pace than I am or coming from a different place than I am?
Is it consideration? It's not really time 'cause time's the same for everybody. Time's relative and everybody's got to some degree the same amount. Time moves at the same pace for all of us. Just because I'm busier than you are, because I can run faster or type faster or speak faster, doesn't make the time that I have to be considerate really that much different.
Maybe it's principle-based as much as anything else. I want to be considerate. I want to take things into consideration. Now we could argue if I can think faster maybe I can take more variables into consideration and be more considerate on different layers or levels or realms than you or somebody else. Keep digging with that. Is that emotion? Is consideration just a thought or is it a choice that we're making to take the time to be considerate and not say, I'm too busy to possibly observe... ? What does it take to be considerate? Why are some people more considerate than others? Where has all the ability to be considerate gone? I guess it's really about principles or morals, maybe.
And it's pretty easy for me to flip that into choice. It's a choice we make. I would argue that more of us could be considerate than are being considerate. So, that suggests choice. More of us know what it means to be considerate. We've had people be considerate of us at some point in our lives — not everybody and certainly not on an equal scale at all, but most people have experienced consideration at some point or another in their life. They've seen it and they know what it feels like. Maybe if they were really rushed or really harried, they didn't have time to absorb that and process that's what it was that they were experiencing or how it benefitted them. To me, that leads to choice. How do I take all that into what I'm going to do next or what I'm not going to do? And if I am just steamrolling over everything around me — either literally or figuratively; if I'm just pushing out the jungle because I want more space to build or I don't care about eliminating some species because I don't think they're significant or I'm polluting because I don't think the damage is gonna be that long-term or whatever it is — if I'm just rolling through all those decisions and not really being considerate or I think I've got a better way of evaluating it to know that the long-term good is okay for the harms that I'm creating... those are all choices that I'm making based on some framework that I think I have and/or I'm in a privileged position to operate from, as well.
There's an interesting challenge there, too. Are we a blank slate or how much of how we act and operate is an effect from our environment? I often go to, What would children do? How do they treat each other? What do we see in those behaviors about being good to each other versus not being good to each other? Does that apply the same to cultural values? In a group behavioral situation left without some of the rules and before we've got all these cognitive boundaries that have been set by what we've been taught, how would we treat each other? It makes me curious.
ACT: Here, from 37:50 through 47:50, we go into a ten-minute chat that I found difficult to transcribe but will be well-worth your listen. As a teaser, we explore making kindness and empathy and compassion popular, turning the other cheek for the greater good, discomfort and suffering, and living with spiders as an allegory for tolerance.
ACT: Instead of having hope for a better future, which seems to imply some wishing and ensuing magical action, do you have hope that we will accept responsibility and take action to work toward a better future?
TG: When I was a young teen, in some pretty dark space sometimes, having read those stories [of resistance], that probably gave me hope then and made me really believe that it just about doesn't matter how crappy people treat each other and how bad things are, there is another part of human nature that is... resilient isn't quite the right word for it... but we don't quit and we don't give up. And that's not any given group of people around the world; it's happened over and over again in all kinds of different communities and societies and organizations. It's demonstrated in some sci-fi movies, obviously, too. I want to believe that's real.
If I really need hope, I think about people that have survived solitary confinement and I think about resistance organizations in repressed countries. People come through. How is that we haven't learned from history? How is it that history's gonna repeat itself again? I see it happening. We're doing it somehow or another again. When I really get to that space, I go, Yup, people will resist. People will come back. To turn it into nature, after an apocalyptic fire or when there's a volcano and serious devastation, things come back. Somehow we see things starting over or some thing survives, usually. So, that's it, I guess. The idea is that I know humans can persevere. I just believe that firmly. And I don't think that's anything that I was taught. I don't think that came from the way I was brought up, necessarily. I don't think it's something I learned in school — this idea — I think that's something that I grasped at innately. I think it's there and that maybe just perpetuates it for me, too. I don't think I'm the only one. I think there's other people around that must feel that way, too. And some of those people somewhere are probably struggling right now and there's a resistance going on somewhere right now that costs a lot for whoever's involved in it, but they're still doing it. They're not giving up.
Some of the fluffier thinking along there was sort of making jokes about manifestation boards and can't we just put a picture on the wall and think about it and it will happen? And, arguably, there's some metaphysics behind that idea and putting energy into it, but no, I think we have to act. Things that I've seen work well, they didn't necessarily look pretty at the beginning. Or people weren't happy with the way something started, but you can see success stories when people persisted. It's more acting than it is thinking and, arguably, leading by example. And that doesn't necessarily mean a leader leading by example, but doing those things.
I do believe a lot in that — putting energy into it. So, joking aside, doing it is more than thinking about it, but also the idea that just you doing it isn't more than thinking about it for anybody else. They might see you doing it, but you didn't make them do it, too, or you're not twisting their arm or you're not giving them any other motivation than doing it yourself. And that becomes thinking for them. So, is that groundswell? Is that grassroots? I'm pretty skeptical about that sometimes, but I also believe there's something very real to it, as well.
Back to the first example, letting people in in traffic — I want to think that if I let somebody in, they're gonna let somebody else in... today or tomorrow or some other time when that clicks into their head — Hey, somebody just did me a courtesy. I love that idea of somebody paying at a tollbooth for the person behind them. I think that's a great thing and I like to believe somebody doing it and somebody else seeing that, somebody else experiencing it, would lead to somebody else potentially putting that foot in the water and doing it, too. Sure, I feel like that's maybe oversimplifying it, but I like to think about it being that way and taking off.
ACT: Do you have a sense of purpose? Or a compulsion or a value system or something that you find difficult to explain but somehow guides you?
TG: I would say yes to that. I think there's something. There's a motivation or there's a value system. There's something going on. I think that's why, from a philosophical perspective, that's why we want to be here; why we look forward to the future. Because there's something in us that makes us keep going and thinking and believing in... that we've got a role or a part and we're here for a reason. I don't have a reason that I think I'm here. It's more of a subconscious thing. And I've looked for it or I've tried to see it. I've wanted to be able to explain it in more specific terms than I can, but that's what I usually come back to is, Yeah, it's a thing. It's like a magnetic attraction. There's something going on and I believe in it and I think that for me, very specifically or personally, the sense is that I participate in society, I participate in my community or my relationships... yeah, I'm here for a reason and I have something to contribute and I'm trying to give back. And I don't mean that in some big, grandiose sense either, necessarily. Underneath it all, I definitely believe we'e here for a reason and we've got a purpose. There's a part to it... a part for us of being here.
ACT: Do you have any closing thoughts?
TG: Yeah, actually, I do. This idea of not specifically what to do next, but what to do more? Certainly talking about it.... and you're obviously doing something about it in a big way by putting this together and putting this out there and inviting the conversation with people. But what do we do even more about it? Let's say I want to be responsible and I do what I think is responsible and I'm acting in responsible ways and I'm being considerate — some of the stuff we talked about — but I don't really think that's enough. I'm not suggesting at all that I put all of my time into this. Certainly, it's easier to think about it than it is to put more time into it. But there's got to be more. What is that? What does that look like? And is it something that's fostered from more conversations and more uncomfortable Q & A? Is Q & A what it's all about?
When I studied Arabic and learned more about the Middle Eastern culture, the idea of coffee shop conversations and socializing in groups and being out in small gatherings and having meaningful conversations meant a lot to me. And it didn't resonate with me that we do a lot of it here in the United States. I'm sure we could come up with arguments where we do... but I haven't been experiencing it in any meaningful way where conversation was leading towards this... this idea of how can we do more and how can we make it better? Conversations have to be part of it because that's where it starts. If they're not going on and more of us aren't participating then we aren't leading to action. I'd like to see ways for more of us to interact and then be active together. I believe in individual action, I sure do, but collective is definitely more powerful and effective than individual.