As a parent (and former youth for that matter), it continues to intrigue and concern me the paths people have out of their older youth into adulthood, including my own kids, Emma now 21 and Eric 24. This developmental phase is obviously awash with cultural expectations and normative behavior for the transitioning youth, their parents and larger family circle. These expectations are interwoven with Calvinist, materialist and social-engineering threads in our cultural zeitgeist, along with the emerging economic realities. What is intriguing (and of concern) is that my own kids and much of their circle are not going with the conventional program, but may be going with the new flow.

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Yesterday was a multifaceted milestone for my family and me. It was our daughter Emma’s 21st birthday (her brother Eric is 24). Both our kids are now (by most every standard) officially adults (though still not at the age 25 threshold that will allow them to rent cars and be adult counselors at Unitarian-Universalist youth community events). And since they both have their health, reasonably good jobs, a supportive circle of friends and paths forward for their lives, looks like they have both now survived their “childhood” and “adolescence”, those two iconic labels (fraught with ambivalent connotations) for phases of ones life that are not so idyllic for kids today (particularly urban kids).

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So should Abby Sunderland have attempted to sail around the world? Should her parents have let her? I’m sure plenty of people will argue endlessly, many on camera for news shows seeking high viewership ratings, of the particulars of this case of Abby’s age, her judgment, her family’s judgment, and her parents’ responsibility in their role as stewards.

I am more concerned about the “spin”, and the reinforcement of the prevailing conventional wisdom about the limits of the agency of youth and the responsibility of parents and other stewards of those youth to restrain and constrain the more prodigious among them from pursuing their dreams and strutting their stuff.

I guess the facts of this particular anecdote and the decisions that were made by Sunderland and her family are arguable. Maybe getting delayed and having to do the treacherous Cape navigation in the southern hemisphere winter was bad judgment. Maybe being driven by the notoriety of a place in the record books is not the best reason for launching an adventure. Maybe older youths should have significant limits imposed on them beyond what they would choose to impose on themselves.

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On the 200th anniversary of her birth, Unitarian-Universalists are rediscovering and celebrating one of the giants of their movement, Margaret Fuller. She is acknowledged in the recent UU World article as one of the trio of key thinkers that defined the philosophy of Transcendentalism that emerged in the mid 19th Century as a challenge to the prevailing patriarchal “command and control” paradigm of the emerging capitalism, industrialism, and the related social engineering that was popular in mainstream progressive Protestant denominations, including mainstream Unitarianism.

Obscured in history, perhaps because of her gender, Fuller may in fact have played the critical role (as what some call America’s first public intellectual) in putting forward the Transcendentalist ideas of a more humanistic self-directed vision of human progress. Maybe more so than her colleagues Emerson and Thoreau, she championed those ideas in American popular cultural to counter the prevailing top-down model of social development.

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I like each day I live to have a little bit of adventure in it, and today was a perfect example of making that so. In fact I am writing this piece on a bus headed down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, doing exactly what I would want to be doing at this moment, but not what I expected or planned to be doing at this time.

We had an offsite gathering for my work down in Irvine today, about 50 miles south of my work site in Burbank. They scheduled a bus from our office to the site and back, but the return would get us back to the office at around 4:30pm, way too late for me to hop my 222 bus to Hollywood and then the 2 bus to the Palisades. Initially I had resigned myself to forgoing my normal Thursday ritual of having dinner with Sally and her folks at their house in the Palisades.

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This is a reprint of the initial post in my chronology. Thought those who had not seen it before might enjoy it while I am busy with my work week and not putting out new stuff…

As I get older, I am more and more amazed about the story of how my mother, Jane Roberts, decided to go to Ann Arbor. An unlikely odyssey in 1946 for a single young woman of 23, but one that started a chain of events that led to my birth. Thirty-two years later in 1978, I would embark on my own odyssey to Los Angeles, coincidentally at age 23 as well.

Based on her telling, Jane had had a childhood mixing idyllic joys and adventures with some difficult family relationships, particularly with her mother Caroline. Jane was the first of three children, her brother John just two years younger and her sister Pat born to an entirely different generation 14 years later.

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Taking off from James Bond’s iconic instructions for every martini he orders (“Shaken… not stirred”) I have had quite the adventure with the whole sequence of my bicycle accident, later loss of function on my left side, emergency cranial surgery to remove a large blood clot, and the subsequent recovery, a midlife crisis manifest, and a “reboot” of sort. As I learned time after time from my dad, life at its best is an adventure, not always fun, not always happy, but a compelling narrative worth living and sharing with others. I have been both “shaken” and “stirred”. (more…)

In June of 1977 (when I was 22), my mom and dad, who had been divorced for twelve years, decided to re-marry each other. My mom would be moving from our rented house in Ann Arbor down to Dayton Ohio to live with our dad there. My younger brother Peter, who was going to school in Chicago, would move down to Dayton with them for the summer, and then return to Chicago in the fall. I was a year away from completing school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, so had no wish to leave my home town, at least at this point. For the first time in my life, I was looking at being completely on my own, including having to find myself a new place to live. (more…)

My (mostly) solo ten-week backpacking trip through Europe in the fall of 1973 (at age 18) was an adventure, not always happy, not always fun, but a compelling developmental journey. One memorable day began before sunrise in Trier Germany and ended finally at 4am the next morning in Brussels Belgium, with four cities and six trains in between. (more…)

An update for everyone… As a late emerging issue from my bicycle crash in November, I apparently developed a blood vessel bleed in my brain after CAT scan and MRI which had been clear. It developed into a hematoma which was finally detected by another CAT scan on Feb 1.

Immediately after the scan I had successful surgery on Monday, February 1, to remove an inch and a half hematoma (blood clot) from the right side of my skull which was putting increasing pressure on my brain and could have soon led to brain damage and death. I spent the next five days in the ICU at Kaiser Woodland Hills while they drained excess fluid out of my brain and monitored my initial recovery. I was very relieved to be sent home on Saturday to begin a two to three month convalescence while my brain slowly returns to its proper position where it had been displaced by the blood clot. The recovery process is particularly challenging for me because my (hopefully temporary) disability is focused on my fine motor coordination in my left hand (I’m left-handed), making it difficult for me to write or type. (I am writing this with somedifficulty!) (more…)