How do you feel when there is snow all over? I feel like, as the snow settles, the world gets muted; the ground is accepting the coldness with dignity and embracing the new reality. What else does snow symbolize? Hibernation, putting things on the back burner, putting a hold onto things until it is not covered up anymore. Virginia is not used to snow, so every-time it snows, we get days off.
Ankara, where I studied, gets a lot of 'snow, ice and coldness' in general, but we would get our butties up under a thick coat and still go to school. Back in the days, I was not smart enough to get comfortable inside clothes that I could wear under the coat. I remember sitting in the pretty warm classroom with my huge coat. Sometimes, I lend my brain to other things I suppose. Another thing I remember about my life in Ankara is that, I was almost always broke. My parents would send me 35 TL from the PTT and I would finish it very quickly and be broke again. One thing I really enjoyed was getting a bar of chocolate with my very limited money. Another limiting thing was my credit on the mobile phone. Each letter counted and we had to get rid of all vowels and find shorter ways to say things. I also had a walkman. I would buy cassettes or record them and listen on my walkman until the battery died. As the battery got lower, the person would start sounding very funny.
Having days off at home with kids allowed me to again “binge study” High Dimensional Data Analysis. I got to 54%. This course is teaching dimension reduction, clusters and heat maps. So far, I am truly enjoying the learning process. Well, I am a learner after all.
I got to read one more chapter from Think Again:
Chapter 5
What are advantageous methods in a "debate" scenario? How can we convince an opponent, how can we bring the crowd to our side? The answer is: "Dancing". Similar to a dancer, someone good at convincing others would be flexible, move back and forth. The action items are like "finding common ground", focusing on limited number of reasons with extended rationale (not flooding with reasons), asking questions at the end to allow others to reason for themselves. This was how a world known debate champion knocked out artificial intelligence as well.
I have been in a debate only once in high school. The only reason they picked me was because my English was good. I remember ending my sentences with “right?”. This sounds similar to the advice above, helped us win the debate; though in my case also led to other students to keep bullying me “right? right?”later on. 😂😂 Debate stage is definitely not a place I belong to.
How to deal with a hostile interruptor? Dance to the side, focus on feelings, discuss in isolation, ask what evidence would change your mind? Hopefully, we are not dealing with hostile behavior daily, but would never hurt to improve emotional intelligence by learning these techniques.
Snow also has a forgiving nature, that would bury the differences, make everybody the same. At that level, we may find ourselves to be questioning, "what was it that really we were fighting about"? Like Elsa sings and I had surely been overexposed, let it go, let it snow and let us all be the same. Let's hibernate and forget what was so damn wrong.
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