A study I am currently involved in had two chapters that intrigued me in their juxtaposition. The first was Obedience and the second was Stability. As an engineer I saw their relationship similar to two courses that weeded out the wanna-be engineers and the real engineers: Statics and Dynamics.

Stability is the Static portion that forms the basis for your calculations and Dynamics is the Obedience portion that evaluates the moving portion of daily life.

Stability/Statics provide a foundation for us on a day-to-day basis. This does not mean that we are unchanging however. Where we are today is affected by what we did all the yesterdays before. The foundation is only as good as the sum of all of the yesterdays. If there were pieces that were left out in our development, their absence will impact our ability to perform today.

For example, you are out sick on a given day from school. The material that was covered that day will still be on the test, even though you were absent. So you borrow notes from your classmates, and study extra hard in that area since you missed the benefit of the class work on that day. Or you pray it will not be on the test and just ignore it. Sometimes it is not a very significant piece that only will be covered once, or sometimes it could be an introduction to a major new subject area like the principles of long division where you will get a lot of continuing education.

Either way you will have a problem. You will have to deal with the shortfall at some point so that it will not continue to affect your learning skills.

Obedience/Dynamics is the movement from day-to-day. There are totally different sets of rules and analyses used in Dynamics from those used in Statics. Similarly, there are different sets of rules and analyses for Obedience vis-à-vis Stability.

Obedience is a word with such negative connotations attached. I grew up in the 60’s when obedience took on new meaning. It was the transition from the culture of the government of the 30’s and 40’s of the Depression and World War II to the Viet Nam era when being obedient to the government was seen from a different view. The military was trapped in a conflict controlled by the enemy which was totally new and the younger generation was paying a severe price for what was happening with no obvious end.

We ended up with three equally bad scenarios: dependence, license, and domination. None of these provides a healthy basis for obedience. Each involves the ego and how it is manipulating a situation. The first two are established by the ego of the individual and the last is established by the ego of an outside authority.

Dependence and license are opposites. In the former, the individual gives up all right to affect the outcome of a given situation. In the latter, the individual demands complete autonomy to do whatever they want. One difficult aspect is that the individual rarely has all of the information required to make a fully-informed decision.

Page 1 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next