Month: October 2018

A good friend enjoys researching family trees. A while back, she urged Judy to let her go to work on the Barker and Strobel families of Southeast Missouri, the clans of Judy’s biological parents.  Along the way, our friend has uncovered lots of interesting connections, names, and relatives, including a common ancestor for Judy and a friend of our friend’s daughter, back six generations ago.

Another noteworthy discovery was that, through the Barker side, Judy has lineage back to the second sailing of the Mayflower to America in the 17^th century.  That has given me a target for when our friend began my family tree; find blood kin of mine on that voyage or, even better, on the ship’s first trip to the New World.

I’m sure I will finish out my time on earth content even if I can’t establish any link with the Plymouth Colony of 1621. It’s just fun to think that, for this particular dancing with the souls on Dia de Los Muertos, there might be a few more folks I can call kin.

Note: On the first voyage of the Mayflower was a family named White whose son, Peregrine, was the first English male known to be born in America. Peregrine married Sarah.  Their first born was named…Daniel!

My friend has traced my family to Maryland, early 19^th century.  Now, if I can just find the link between then and 17^th century Massachusetts…

I have a different heritage tree, too, as do we all.  Recently, in the course of helping to write a history of the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools on the occasion of its 50^th anniversary, I was engaged in conversation with two people who are prominent limbs on my heritage tree.

One was instrumental in my becoming involved with school accreditation.  Because of that work, I met the second person, who was the catalyst for our moving to Hawaii in the first place and the matchmaker who put us together with the fellow working hard to get an independent school going in Kapolei. Needless to say, I am grateful to them both.

Driving home from that conversation, I thought about who preceded those two on my tree, and what effect I have subsequently had on the trees of others. I was in the position to become involved in accreditation because I was head of a school.  I was head because another friend suggested to the appropriate powers-that-were that I should be the head. I was at the school and a colleague of my friend because of a chance conversation on an elevator in Los Angeles several years before.

Island Pacific Academy, the previously referenced school in Kapolei, was one of several projects in which my catalyst-friend got me involved. There were academic programs at UH resulting from our professional collaboration and important work within the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools that followed. In every one of those projects, there were other professionals whose lives engaged with mine and for whom I am likely a branch on their professional heritage tree.

It is fair to say that few, if any, of the branches and limbs on my tree extending backward and forward in time could have been predicted.

People of a Certain Age, have you ever taken some time to think about your professional heritage tree? You have probably had more to say about who is on that tree, as opposed to your family tree, because none of us can choose our parents, and all of us have made choices about what to do in our lives and when. Who could have guessed, though, that, in my case, a chance conversation in an elevator in December, 1978 would have been directly linked to Island Pacific Academy or the seven cohorts of students (about 160 people) I’ve helped to educate in the M.Ed in Private School Leadership at UH Manoa?

Those branches of my professional tree who have left this world are hereby invited to join this year’s dancing of the souls on Dia de Los Muertos. They are family, too, in a way.

Many of you, like Judy and me, are fans of the PBS show “Finding Your Roots.” Henry Louis Gates has turned family histories of famous people into moments of real discovery, sometimes of notable heritage, sometimes of blood lines leading to less praiseworthy relatives.  We’ve become attuned to the value of DNA as a scientific method of establishing family connections.

What’s the DNA of your professional heritage tree? Are there branches or even limbs you would just as soon have lopped off? How much and in what ways are the people on your tree responsible for the arc of your life?

Dia de Los Muertos is an annual reminder that we are not of completely our own making. To those who see themselves as self-made, this might come as a surprise. To those of us who take pride in being a part of an ever-growing tree and treasure our lineage, it is a welcome reason for dancing.

Daniel E. White

October 29, 2018, the 98^th anniversary of my Mother’s birth

We saw the documentary “Three Identical Strangers.” A young man goes off to college and encounters students who welcome him back, even though he has never been there. Soon, they all learn that the young man has an identical twin about whom he had never known, and they meet.

Their story makes the newspapers. A reader notices how much the young men look like someone he knows. Before long, the triplets meet for the first time and begin a short period of sustained happiness in each other’s company.

Rent the movie if you are interested in knowing more. What comes out is an awful truth. The boys were intentionally separated at birth as part of a research project trying to determine whether “nature” or “nurture” was the more dominant factor in the arc of one’s life. Compounding the horror to our sensibilities is that these experiments began in the same decade as Nazi experiments on human subjects and were conducted by men and women whose families had been touched by the Holocaust.

In a recent edition of The Week, Adam Sternbergh details an actual course in the Psychology Department at Yale (Psych 157; Psychology and the Good Life) that has overflow enrollment because students view the course as lessons in how to be happy.

Professor Laurie Santos says she invented the course because “I think we really have a crisis writ large at colleges in how students are doing in terms of self-care and mental health.” Then she adds, “Sadly, I don’t think it’s just in colleges.”

In the course, Professor Santos shares the scholarship of a current University of California, Riverside professor, Sonja Lyubomirsky, who studies what factors affect happiness. Professor Lyubomirsky asserts, based on her experiments, that 50% of happiness is determined by our genes. 10% results from circumstance. The remaining “40% is determined by your thoughts, actions, and attitudes.”

So, if the professor is right, 50% is beyond your control and 40% is completely within your control. You might be in charge of the remaining 10% as well if it involves changing particular circumstances.

Imagine that! Another either-or proposition (nature versus nurture) might actually be a both-and one (nature and nurture). It might be tempting to say that the nature-nurture matter is neither black nor white but some shade of gray. I prefer a different mix, the one on Holstein cows, Dalmatian dogs, and leopards. Splotches and spots highlight the presence of more than one color without either losing its brilliance.

People of a Certain Age, when you reached that certain age, didn’t you already know that nature is not destiny? How many stories can you cite that tell about people whose lives far outdistance those of their progenitors? Likewise, how many stories are there about individuals born into awful circumstances who rise above those circumstances to accomplish significant things?

Or vice versa. How many children of smart people or affluent people crash and burn in their own lives?

Assume that Professor Lyubomirsky is right. Whether you are happy or not is 50% a function of your family’s genes. If your lineage is genetically gloomy, would you just stop trying to be happy? Perhaps, if being unhappy makes you, perversely, happy. I know a few people who seem delighted to be persistently negative, pessimistic, unhappy. I don’t spend much time in their company.

By avoiding pessimists, I have begun building support for either the 10% somewhat in my control (changing circumstances) or the 40% completely in my control.

Given that my life to this point suggests that my 50% factor was positive, building such support is expanding my happiness potential.

Does it matter whether nature or nurture is the more important factor in one’s life? In the middle of living an actual life, does anyone step back to ask that question?

If you are so inclined, you could look back in history to the writings of John Locke and other philosophers who theorized about such questions. The question has been around for hundreds of years, and the social sciences, when they formed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, readily picked up questions like this for academic study.

I am a fan of academic study. I have studied, academically speaking. We have learned many things through the rigorous and disciplined processes of academic research. What Lyubormirsky has written intrigues me. Yet, I can imagine that a person working on a farm or in a factory from dawn until dusk doesn’t care a bit about what social science research says he or she should be thinking or feeling.

I think Professor Lyubomirsky would advise her readers that, while you inherit factors from your family, your life is influenced by your attitudes and actions. Any of us can be happy despite, or even because of, hard work required of us each day or the bumps we encounter in life.

Professor Santos’ class seems predicated on the understanding that actions and attitudes matter. I think she would be satisfied if her students left her class saying, “I choose to be happy.”

Happily, I don’t think I need to take that class.

Daniel E. White

October 16, 2018