Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's get musically present by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. Happy Father's Day to all the fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers who have joined us today here at First Unitarian Society, where independent thinkers gather in a safe nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual, and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud, fatherly member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a special welcome to any guests, visitors, and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, you will find that it's a special place. And if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we conduct a guided tour after the service today, so just gather over here by the windows and we'll take good care of you. Speaking of taking care of each other, this is a perfect time for that familiar and all-important drill to silence those pesky electronic devices that we just will not need for the next hour. And while you're taking care of that, I'll remind you that if you're accompanied by a youngster this morning and you think that youngster would rather experience the service from a more private space, we offer a couple options. One is our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium, and then some comfortable seating right outside the doorway in the commons. The service is brought to us by some volunteers whose names you deserve to hear. Operating the sound system is Maureen Friend. Our lay minister today is Anne Smiley. Thank you, Anne. Special thanks to Jeanine Nussbaum for greeting us upstairs as we entered. Thank you to Allison Brooks and Karen Jaeger for serving as ushers today. Special thank you to Jean Hills for providing the all-important hospitality and coffee a little bit later. Joan Heitman for making sure that the greenery that you see around me is vibrant. And Richard Miller for serving as our tour guide. You'll notice the music is very special today. And as you're enjoying it, remember that you could purchase CDs afterwards in the commons. So with that, I'll just invite you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I heard the nine o'clock and I know that today's service will touch your heart, stir your spirit, and trigger one or two new thoughts, and deepen your appreciation for music. We're glad you're here. The sultry weather is putting you to sleep.  Thank you so much. People sometimes say, what is the sense of our small effort? Well they cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time. We must take one step at a time. Because a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread out in all directions. Each of our thoughts and words and deeds are like that. So no one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless because there's just too much work to be done. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of the chalice. Our words of affirmation are responsive, so if you will join your voices in reading the bolded, italicized sections. We affirm the unfailing renewal of life. We affirm the steady growth of human companionship. We affirm a continuing hope. And now on this fine Father's Day, near the end of June, please turn to your neighbor in exchange with mothers and fathers and children alike a warm greeting. Please be seated. Now it's the time for the message for all ages. So if there are some youngsters who would like to join me in the front of the auditorium, I would welcome your company. I feel like a lovely dad this morning. There we go. Okay, all right, Tom's going to come up. Thank you. Thank you to all ages. The carpet is clean. So sometimes people get kind of sad and discouraged about the world we live in and the problems in it. Maybe not kids your age, but some of us who are older and have been around a while. Because everything seems so kind of big and complicated. We think to ourselves, here are these problems. What can I as one person possibly do to make the world a better place? Now this is a woman named Dorothea Dix. And she's the person I wanted to talk about today. And I imagine that Dorothea felt this way sometimes. It's kind of sad and discouraged about the world. But it never stopped her from doing what she thought she had to do. And Dorothea Dix became one of the best known and most admired women in the 19th century, which was a long, long time ago. And she did some very, very good work, but she would never accept any praise for it and she never would accept any awards for all the work that she did. Because she always said, you know, I loved what I'm doing and so my work is its own reward. And so she kept on working for all the things that she believed in for over 60 years. And she only retired when she was even older than me, 80 years old, a matter of fact. So what did she accomplish? Who was this woman and what did she do? Well Dorothea was born in the year 1802, over 200 years ago. And both her mother and her father were kind of sick when she was growing up. And after a while, they couldn't take care of her. So Dorothea had to go and live with her aunt when she was 12 years old. But she was a very, very smart young woman and by the age of 14, only 14, when most kids are starting to go to high school, Dorothea and one of her friends started their own school and began to teach little kids. And then three years later when she was 17, Dorothea published her first book, which was called Conversations about Common Things. And that book was so popular, written by a 17 year old, that it was over printed 60 times. Lots and lots of copies were printed in this book. Now when she was a couple of years older, at 19, she moved from her aunt's house to Boston, Massachusetts and she began to take some college courses at a very, very famous college called Harvard. And she also started another school where she taught and she discovered something very important, Unitarianism. Now she started going to the Unitarian Church in Boston and the minister of that church at that time was a man named William Ellery Channing. And when William Ellery Channing talked to his congregation, oftentimes he would talk about love and compassion and our need to be really good to people, not just our family members and our neighbors, but people who are having a hard time, people who were poor or people who were suffering from mental emotional illness or people who were in prison. Now Dorothea was very inspired by what she heard from Dr. Channing at that Unitarian Church and so she volunteered to begin teaching a Sunday school class at a local women's prison. But the more she was at that prison teaching, the more upset she got about the conditions that were in that prison. And she just didn't like the way that the inmates were being treated. And she also noticed that not just people who had broken the law were in that prison, but also people who just had something wrong with them that mentally or emotionally, they just were not quite like other people. And she saw that everybody in that prison, whether they had broken the law or whether they were mentally ill, suffered the same way. There was no heat, there was no light, there was no furniture in those small cells and some of the inmates were chained to the wall with collars, iron collars that were around their necks. And Dorothea knew that she had to do something to change all of that. And so she spent a year and a half traveling all around Massachusetts, visiting all the various prisons and talking to people who had been put into those prisons for no reason other than that they were mentally or emotionally ill. And then she went to the governor and she went to the legislature of Massachusetts and she said, you people need to do something about this. This just isn't right. And you know what? Dorothea was very convincing and they listened to her and there were some reforms in those prisons. But she wasn't satisfied with that. She said the same thing is happening in other states. So she went to New Jersey and she went to New York and she went to Connecticut and she went to 30 different states in all, visiting prisons, talking to governors and legislators. And eventually she made some very important changes. In fact, in New Jersey, they established a hospital, the first of its kind, just for people with mental and emotional illness in 1848. And Dorothea called that hospital her first child. Dorothea was not even content to do good work in the United States. After she had gone to 30 states, she went to Canada. And then she went to Europe with the same message, trying to correct the same bad conditions in their prisons. She was able to talk to the Pope in Rome. And after talking to Dorothea, the Pope said, I believe that this Unitarian woman is a 19th century Saint Teresa. So after that, she came back to the United States. But then something really bad happened in our country. A big war broke out called the Civil War. And so Dorothea knew that she had to do something to help during the Civil War. So she wrote to President Lincoln and said, Mr. Lincoln, I am prepared to create a core of nurses who can help the ill and the wounded as a result of the Civil War. And President Lincoln took her up on that offer and she became the superintendent of the entire US Nursing Corps during the Civil War. And she recruited thousands of men and women to serve as nurses, including a very important universalist woman by the name of Clara Barton, who became the co-founder of the American Red Cross. So she did a tremendous amount of good work. But she was worn out and she retired at the age of 80. And she went to live in a small little apartment in back of the New Jersey State Hospital, the first of her children. And she stayed there for six years until she died. And then after she died, there was a funeral service attended by thousands of people, and these words were said at her funeral service. They're very famous words. I was hungry and you gave me meat. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in. I was naked and you clothed me.  I was in prison and you came and you comforted me. So there's very few people in our world that accomplished as much as this Unitarian woman, Dorothea Dix. But her example can inspire us to give ourselves to love in smaller and more modest ways. Because we can all find a child somewhere that we can conceive or we can adopt, just as Dorothea did the many hospitals that she established. And our child could be a forest that we helped to replant trees in. It could be an animal shelter. It could be helping a refugee family. It could just simply be befriending a little boy or girl who's a little different and who actually needs someone to be a good friend of them. It doesn't really matter very much what we do, but for all the gifts that we receive in this rich and abundant world, we owe in return the gift of our own love. So thank you for listening and coming forward so I wasn't lonely up here. And now we're going to invite our children to go to our summer fund program and you know, you guys can go too if you'd like. And we're going to sing you out with our next hymn. Please be seated. We continue with a selection from that 18th century classic by the French writer Voltaire, the book Candide. How many people have read Candide back in your college years? How many people remember what Candide's about? Well, this is a little piece of Candide. 1759. The old scholar whose name was Martin embarked with Candide for Bordeaux. Now both Candide and Martin had seen and suffered much. And if that ship had been scheduled to sail from Suriname to Japan by way of the Cape of Good Hope, they would have had enough to say about moral and physical evil to last the entire voyage. Monsieur Martin, Candide asked, what is your idea about moral and physical evil? Sir, replied Martin, my priests accused me of being a Sosinian. But the truth of the matter is, I am a Manichean. You are making fun of me, said Candide. There are no more Manicheans in the world. There's me, said Martin, and I don't know what to do about it, but I cannot think any other way.  He takes so much in the affairs of the world, said Martin, that I might as well be full of him, just like everything else. But I must admit that when I cast my eyes over the globe, or rather this globule, I think that God has abandoned it to some maleficent being. You see, I've hardly seen any town that did not desire the ruin of its neighboring towns, never a family that did not wish to exterminate some other family. There, as I observe, the weak loathe the powerful before whom they crawl, and the powerful treat them like flocks of wool and flesh that are up for sale. A million regimented assassins ranging from one end of Europe to the other practice murder and brigandage with discipline to earn their bread, because there's no other honest occupations. And in the towns that seem to enjoy peace, the towns where the arts flourish, men are devoured with envy and cares and anxieties more devoured by these than the towns that are under siege. Secret griefs are even more cruel than public miseries. In a word, Martin said, I have seen so much, and I have undergone so much that I am a Manichean. And yet there is some good, said Candide. That may be, Martin replied, but I do not know of it. And the second selection, more recently from 2010, Yifou Toan was a professor of cultural geography at the University of Wisconsin prior to his retirement. This was one of his many open letters to colleagues. A young friend tells me that he has become cynical, a pessimist, which leads me to wonder, what do those words mean? Am I, for example, cynical, a pessimist? If I am, and sometimes I think I am, isn't it because I have extraordinary expectations of myself and others? In other words, I can be cynical only because at bottom I am an irredeemable optimist. We are all such optimists as children. As children we expect perfection in the world. A story by John Updike, in which he tells about his childhood, gives concrete illustration to what I have in mind. Updike, you see, was a precocious child, and he was very close to his mother. The two of them seemed to know and to anticipate each other's intimate needs. One day Updike was finishing a sketch. He brought it to his mother to show her. His mother was reading a book at the time, and rather than putting her book down to admire her child's sketch, his mother looked slightly irritated by the interruption. Not a big deal, you say, but apparently it was a big deal to the boy, so big that Updike, as a grown man and a famous author, still remembered that small incident. Against that one maternal slight, all the attentiveness his mother had bestowed upon him faded into the background. Many of us are still like this as adults. Certainly I am. In the course of an ordinary day, I encounter numerous acts of thoughtfulness, acts of courtesy. Do I feel grateful? Not a bit. I take the world's perfection for granted, and so I feel irritated from the slightest departure from that perfection. The waitress's insincere greeting, the driver's failure to yield, my colleagues perfunctory high. If I grow cynical, it's because I do not meet with perfection at every turn. Now John Updike and I are of the professional middle class. We are spoiled. The poor certainly do not live with such unreal expectations, and yet the poor too are in a sense optimists. They are optimistic in regard to the moment, to what the next half hour might bring. Their optimism is, however, based on a deeply pessimistic view of life, and is the outcome in reverse of what we in the middle class experience. In the life of the poor, which is burdened with all this uncertainty and hardship, it is the small things that stay in the memory and lighten the day. The poor may feel bitter, but not cynical, because they have never been afflicted by middle class illusions of perfection, joining us again and regaling us with their wonderful and inspired music. In my estimation, one of the finest portrayals of cynicism that I'm aware of appeared in the 1960 film Inherit the Wind. Now this film was a fictionalized account of the Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a high school science teacher was prosecuted in the state of Tennessee for teaching the band theory of evolution. Inherit the Wind's cast of characters included a man named E.K. Hornbeck. Hornbeck was a reporter covering this trial for his big city newspaper. Now Hornbeck's sympathies clearly lie with the defendant, and he is alternately amused and disgusted by the retrogressive outlook of, as he put it, the local rubs. But while Hornbeck and the defense attorney Henry Drummond both subscribed to Darwinism and the tenets of modern science, the latter, Drummond, is sanguine about humanity and about its future, but the journalist Hornbeck on the other hand exhibits nothing but contempt. Oh, Henry, he says at one point. Why don't you wake up? Darwin was wrong. Man is still an ape. The cynical Hornbeck continues in the same vein on another occasion. Henry, he says, you think man still has a noble destiny.  Now the character of the attorney Henry Drummond is patterned after the legendary 20th century defense attorney Clarence Darrow, a man who we Unitarians can claim as our own. Hornbeck stands in for a non-Unitarian for the celebrated H. L. Menken, who for many years wrote for the Baltimore Sun. Menken was known for his acerbic wit, and he once defined a cynic as someone who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. Candide's companion, the scholar Martin, is like H. L. Menken, a thoroughgoing cynic. He presents himself to us as a manachian because members of that ancient sect believed that Satan, rather than God, was responsible for the physical creation that we see all around us, which he believes serves to explain why the world is so deeply flawed, so filled with evil, so utterly irredeemable. Manachians believe that trapped in this corruptible body, the kernel of light within us, the image of the divine, yearns for release from these earthly fetters so that it can return to the source of all light and all goodness from which it originally came. Like a cynic, a manachian harbors no hope for this physical world of ours. According to Webster's collegiate dictionary, a cynic is someone who scornfully is distrustful of human nature and human motives. A cynic is someone who has a sneering disbelief in sincerity and nobility. Henry Drummond is a doubter. Henry Drummond is a skeptic, but his faith in humankind and his hope for a better future always remains intact. By contrast, E.K. Hornebeck's world, his world seems bereft of purpose and meaning and any evidence of human worth and dignity. Now, cynicism is not the same thing as pessimism. As Yifou Toine suggested, one can have low expectations of. One can feel uneasy about the future without writing it off completely as cynics are wont to do. Now, we owe our word, our English word, cynic to the ancient Greeks in whose language it literally meant canine, dog.  Diogenes, who lived in the 4th century BCE, was one of the most notable of those ancient cynics. He begged for a living. He slept at night in a large clay urn of the sort that the Greeks used for human burials. In other words, he slept in their version of a coffin. And Diogenes professed indifference to all things, to food, to clothing, to manners, to religious practice. And legend has it that on one occasion, the emperor Alexander came to visit this famous philosopher and he said to Diogenes, Sir, is there anything that I can do for you? Any favor that I can grant you? Because Alexander was testing this man's commitment to austerity. Diogenes looked up at the emperor and said, Yes, please move.  Few ancient cynics lived as humbly as Diogenes. And Bertrand Russell observes in his commentary on the cynics that these individuals were not without values. They were not without a sense of larger purpose. By detaching themselves from the customs and mores of society, they hoped to acquire an elevated sense of personal peace and well-being. The cynics, Russell writes, had an ardent passion for virtue. They sought virtue and moral freedom by liberating themselves to the extent that was possible from all human desire, a little bit like Buddhists in that respect. And those who we so label today hardly resemble these ancient cynics who eschewed luxury, who cared little for reputation or for social approval. These ancient cynics were not so much disillusioned with the world as frustrated by the claims that it placed upon them. Henry David Thoreau would be a closer modern counterpart to these ancients than H. L. Menken, who basically had given up on humankind altogether. Now, in light of what happened in Orlando a week ago, giving up on human nature altogether might seem advisable. It might be understandable if people in the wake of Orlando felt more than a little cynical, especially if you happen to be part of the LBGTQ community, because proportionate to their numbers, more acts of violence, more hate crimes are committed against this particular group of our population than any other. And even though you may now have the right to marry, even though you may enjoy full civil rights, if you are openly gay or trans in this country at this moment in time, you still on a daily basis have to fear for your safety. The victims of the Pulse nightclub shootings were mostly of Latino extraction, an ethnic group that many Anglos have been taught to resent as parties responsible for the decline of their own economic fortunes.  Wouldn't you be a little cynical? And then there's the rest of us who watch with heavy hearts as this now familiar scenario unfolds once again. And we wonder, is there ever going to be a time when our policy makers place a higher value on human life than on the questionable right to own and to use a weapon of mass destruction? Columbine, Aurora, Blacksburg, Tucson, Newtown, Charleston, San Bernardino, Orlando. Another atrocity is committed, Americans ring their hands, the obligatory moment of silence is observed, calls for reform are repeated, and after a couple of weeks, congressmen and the national media turn their attention to other emerging issues. Maybe E.K. Hornbeck understated the case. Maybe human beings are worse than apes. You know, ironically, many of those who purchase those military-style weapons do so because they are deeply cynical. Oftentimes, they look to protect themselves not from common criminals, but from an institution, from the federal government that they believe is power hungry and determined to roll back their rights. One candidate for president recently suggested that Obama himself was in league with ISIS, enabling its terrorist activities. Is it any wonder that thousands line up to purchase AR-15s? Americans in general have become increasingly cynical about our nation's institutions and especially its governing bodies. But in some segments of our society, this has become a disproportionate form of cynicism and it threatens today to undermine our civil order. Cynicism is fed by events like the ones that I enumerated, which cause us to lose confidence in ourselves and in our future. But each of us has also created, at some point in our lives, a master narrative through which these events are filtered. And so if you happen to believe, as the scholar Martin did, that planet Earth is Satan's playground, if you happen to believe this, then you are going to interpret people's behavior very differently than if you are convinced that God designed this creation to be very, very good. The psychologist Martin Seligman calls this our explanatory style, the manner in which we explain to ourselves why events happen as they do. Now the choice should not be a stark one between abject cynicism on the one hand and pan glossy and optimism on the other. The 18th century British philosopher David Hume, he was like Henry Drummond, a thoroughgoing skeptic. He was known for his biting critiques of religion and political systems and social customs. But David Hume was also a remarkably clear-eyed about the world that he lived in and he would reach his conclusions about the world and how it worked through rigorous empirical investigation. Hume was one of those rare individuals who was admirably free of prejudice, his perceptions generally uncontaminated by any particular or personal master narrative. And so as a result, he could look out in the world and he could recognize benevolence, benevolence in families and in friendship and in the social clubs that he frequented. But he was also acutely aware of the human capacity for cruelty and self-centeredness. Hume was skeptical, he was critical, but he also remained throughout his life hopeful. And this is a strategy that we ourselves can adopt when we feel that cynicism rising up inside of us. We can try to drop the narrative, to set aside the preconceptions, to adopt the pose of an empirical investigator because the alternative to cynicism is not necessarily positivity because as Barbara Ehrenreich says, positive thinking can be just as delusional as negative thinking. And so the alternative to both, she says, is to try to get outside of ourselves so that we can see things as they really are as uncolored as possible by our feelings and our fantasies.  This isn't easy, Ehrenreich acknowledges, because we become so deeply invested in these narratives which are often reinforced by the people around us, the people who we have chosen to consort with. Our expectations of others and of ourselves also play a role here. And our expectations may be affected by the degree of entitlement that any one of us enjoys. My late colleague, Forrest Church, served the upscale All Souls Unitarian Church in Upper Manhattan for many years. This was a congregation, being Manhattan, that was filled with successful, urbane, wealthy, and near-wealthy individuals. Now the perspective of most of those people was balanced, basically healthy. But Forrest Church observed that more than a few of his parishioners had succumbed to what he called the sin of cynical chic. They had adopted a dim view of the world and they routinely dismissed all idealism as naive and destined for defeat. Forrest Church would probably have concurred with Yifou Toine and with his analysis of cynicism that cynicism is often a luxury enjoyed by comfortable people who discount their comfort because they harbor these illusions of perfection. Or as my colleague put it, cynical chic can serve as a tombstone for wishful thinkers whose disappointments have left them hopeless. Rebecca Solnit offered similar thoughts in a recent issue of Harper's Magazine. Her beef is with what she calls naive cynics who uphold unrealistic standards. Again, these are people with perfectionist tendencies who will accept nothing less than the best. And so when an individual or an institution comes up short, they dismiss it as inadequate and its efforts without any redeeming value. Scratch a cynic, underneath you'll discover a disillusioned idealist. But such an attitude is, Solnit suggests, horribly disempowering. It bleeds the sense of possibility and the sense of responsibility right out of people. And so Solnit offers the example of Occupy Wall Street, that protest against the so-called 1% and the financial industry, a movement that spread to cities across the United States including to Madison. The movement petered out in a year or two and afterwards many cynical commentators dismissed Occupy Wall Street as misguided, inconsequential. Hey, Occupy Wall Street failed in its audacious attempt to overhaul our entire economic system. And of course it was both naive and cynical to think that it could achieve this. But if you can step outside of yourself and your master narratives, put aside those exaggerated preconceptions, adopt a more empirical approach, we might just have to revise our assessment of Occupy Wall Street. The fruits of OWS are too many to count, Solnit writes. People who are involved with all those local encapments tell me that there are all these thriving offshoots in their community that are still doing good work. Occupy helped to bring politicians like Bernie Sanders and Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren into the mainstream. But cynicism tempts us to turn away from that which is incomplete or always just a little imperfect. Cynicism will not acknowledge small victories and incremental gains. Qualified success, Solnit writes, unsettles those who are locked into those fixed positions, people whose world lacks any gray tones, which is always perceived in the stark colors of black or of white. And so cynicism discourages people from engaging in problem solving or imagining that they might possess some personal agency. Realists like Rebecca Solnit or David Hume, they somehow have managed to step outside themselves and so they can recognize, realistically, that some outcomes are positive, some are negative, some are mixed and some are still a work in progress. And so the trick is to view the world through a lens of possibility, free from those naive expectations that anything will ever approach perfection. History can serve as an important teacher here. Unfortunately, Americans tend to lose track of their past rather quickly. Couple of years ago, Robert Reich, former secretary of labor and now professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, Robert Reich was hearing a lot of discouragement from students who were approaching the end of their undergraduate years, getting ready to go out and join the workforce. And many of these students that he talked to expressed a lot of fear. They thought that they were gonna be helpless to affect any kind of positive change in the face of opposition from these powerful multinational corporations and these deep-pocketed billionaires. And Reich felt moved to respond to their concerns in a blog post. He says, you have no chance if you assume that you have no chance. Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Easy for you to say, Reich's students pushed back at him. Things were different. Things were easier when you graduated from college than you just don't know your history, Reich responded. And so he shared a few of the challenges that his generation faced in 1968 when he received his undergraduate degree. Those of us who remember 1968 remember that that was the year that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. It was the year when there were race riots in many of our largest cities. A year in which 500,000 American soldiers were still bogged down in Southeast Asia. A year in which rivers were clogged with industrial waste and cities were blanketed with smog. It was a year in which an avowed racist, George Wallace, carried five Southern states in the general election. It all seemed pretty hopeless to us back then, Reich says, and I assumed that America was going to hell. It would have seemed beyond possibility, he continues, that a black man, the child of interracial parents, would at one day become president of the United States. That the Cuyahoga River, which used to catch fire regularly, would now support 44 species of fish. Today, yes, we face widening inequality. We face climate change, the corruption of democracy by big money, all of these and more, but I say to you, he says to his students, I understand your cynicism, and it does look pretty hopeless, but believe me, it is not. Not if you all pitch in, not if you pitch in. But first, like Robert Reich, you need to believe. What we do begins with what we believe we can do. Rebecca Solnit writes, and she's merely echoing the philosopher William James, who said much the same thing 120 years ago. In the end, we will only accomplish that, which we believe we can accomplish, and if you are a cynic, that's probably going to be very little. Last week, I listened to a TED talk by a woman named Maya Birdsong. Maya Birdsong has been working for 30 years in underprivileged communities. She's African-American, and she said on that TED talk that everywhere I go, I encounter people who are broke, but not broken. Perhaps, as Yifou Toine suggested, these are folks who have been spared our own middle-class illusions of perfection, and thus they rejoice in the small, but meaningful victories. They rejoice in the partial achievements, knowing that there are going to be more ahead, and although her poor friends know that individually they may not have a whole lot of power, they have learned from their communities and from their experience that when they combine their strength and combine their talents, they can be unstoppable, and perhaps we can be too. If we refuse to succumb to the sad, but seductive song of cynicism, may it be so. And now it is time for the giving and the receiving of our offering, and your gifts today will be used to help support this wonderful institution that we all admire and respect so much. Please be generous. Because a community of memory and of hope, and to this time and place, we bring our whole and sometimes our broken cells. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received, and celebrated, and shared. And we have two joys to share this morning that members put in our little Cures of the Congregation book. Dave Weber and Trudy Carlson are very happy. Thrilled, I would guess, to announce the birth of their grandson, Christoph Weber, to Will and Peggy, their son, and their daughter-in-law. Congratulations. And then a little longer acknowledgement. From Roger Bacchus, Sally Hested, his wife, a UU member here, since childhood, was recently named president of the local organization Women in Focus. Women in Focus is an organization of predominantly African-American women, about 25% white members, that's been in Madison for 34 years, raising money for college scholarships for students of color through the proceeds of the annual I Have a Dream Ball that's held each January, little promotion there. Sally believes in the mission of Women in Focus that through education, we can create a better and more diverse society. So congratulations to Sally now playing that very, very important role. And in addition to those two mentioned, we would acknowledge any other unexpressed joys and sorrows among us. We hold those with equal concern in our hearts. Please join me now in the spirit of meditation. Here in the sanctuary of our dreams, wisdom, and beauty, we come to grow, we come to be healed. We come to stretch minds and hearts to be challenged and renewed, to be supported in our ongoing quest for meaning and love, for help in building a world with more justice and more mercy in it. In the face of brutality and of cynicism around us and within us, we seek to align ourselves with this, a living community of faith that would affirm life rather than deny it, and it would rather think and act than remain passive and inert. Here we invite the spirit of our own humanity to be present with and around us, giving us the nerve and the grace, the toughness and the sensitivity to enable us to serve without fear the cause of justice, to grow in hope and conviction into our full and glorious humanity. May it be so. Amen. And now I would invite you to rise one more time in spirit or in body as we sing our closing hymn, number 170. These closing words are from the Ojibwa Indian tradition. Grandfather, look at our brokenness. We know that in all creation only the human family has strayed from the sacred way. We know that we are the ones who are divided, that we are the ones who must come back together to walk the sacred way. Grandfather, sacred one, teach us love and compassion and honor that we may heal the earth and heal one another. Blessed be, and amen. Please be seated for the postman.


There are three things that you need to know about our NB IoT module, the ST87M01. First, it's small. Second, it's scalable. Our customer can add new features, such as GNSS and new RF modulations to it, without changing the hardware. It brings the concept of an application store to the world of NB IoT. Third, it's developed, produced, manufactured by ST. It comes along with the evalkit ST87M01 that Hervé has used to develop this demo. Thank you, Eric. In this demo, we get temperature and humidity and send them over the 4G network using Vodafone Operator. This technology uses a ridiculous part of the 4G bandwidth. This demo is composed of a common nuclear board, STN32L073, on which we have stacked the evalkit ST87M01, which is the ST brand new NB IoT modem. The mapping of the pins is remarkably simple. To design this demo, we use the well-known QMix to generate the basic framework, and we developed a piece of firmware to handle the buffering of 80 commons of the modem to connect it to the 4G network. Now, when I push the user button, it gets the temperature and it sends it over the cloud. We have configured ST server to display it on a web page. You can see it on the screen below. I could also display it with my smartphone. On the screen, we also show the capabilities of our modem that you can evaluate thanks to a specific GUI, a tool that comes with the modem package. You can display the GNSS Satellite Constellation, the FM RIS, and finally get your position in Google Maps. The GUI logs the modem UART activity in a console. It allows a deep dive into the metrics of the 4G modem connection. It can also provide a means of fast network configuration according to the operator selected making your life easier. If you want to learn more, please check out ST.com. Thank you!


Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to our final green club of the 2022 season. Green club season one I can never like maybe in 2023. I'm going to figure out how to not obstruct my own screen with zoom. Okay, cool. Great. All right, so to cap off our brain club 22 greatest hits will be revisiting one of our favorite things to talk about access needs. And by the way, because I think there's at least one person I haven't met yet. Hi, I'm Mel Hauser I use she they pronounce my executive director here at all brains long. So, if this is your first brain club or even if it's not, we always begin with our introductions and community agreement.  And because safety is really important to us here in addition to affirming all aspects of identity, it's really important that we create a safe space and that end. A few weeks ago our community advisory board created a new community agreement. This is a community education program this is not a medical or therapeutic support group so this is general education about neurodiversity related topics. And we do not have capacity to provide medical advisor therapy so individual traumatic experience are best processed with a trained therapist, not at brain club. We create space and time and environment for people of all ages to participate. We just ask that you use discretion in terms of the language that you're using communicating here at brain club. Okay, last bit of access needs to turn on closed captioning, it is already enabled all you got to do is toggle it on if you'd like to use it, depending on your version of zoom, either the live transcript closed captioning button, or if you don't see that you can use more dot dot dot, and choose subtitles or high subtitles if you'd like to. All right, let a couple of announcements before we get started. This Saturday is our virtual New Year's Eve party Saturday 5 to 730 Eastern. We have a variety of activities for all ages, including a special edition brain club on learning the brain rules of New Year's becoming your authentic self. Amanda Deekman will be returning and will be presenting on that topic we pre recorded it so I can already tell you it's, it's, it's a, it's a pretty awesome conversation that I look forward to sharing with you. And then after that we've got some zoom breakout rooms with a variety of activities and then finally a concert and musical performance by the Misty Bay ramblers. They're a trio that will be playing rock and roll all rock folk covers in addition to originals so I hope you can can join us Oh thanks Sarah thanks for posting the registration link. It is, it is free we'd love everyone to attend. It is also the last day of our reimagining what's possible campaign. And so look how close we are. That's amazing. So we've got four and four days and change so and if you're not already on the all brains belong newsletter. So look forward for posting that if you're, it will have a newsletter going out on Thursday with with with an update on community impact and the campaign and if anyone is able to forward that on to the people in your lives, who might consider supporting the work of trying to make life better for the neurodivergent community we would so appreciate it, because all of our community programs brain club and otherwise are all offered at no cost to participants and we'd love to be able to continue to do that. Lastly, speaking of community programs, one of our volunteers was two of our volunteers worked really hard at at putting together this directory that's now available on the brain club site all brains belong dot org forward slash green dash club. This is a clickable directory with hyperlinks to all of the brain clubs for 12 months. So yeah so this way you don't have to go through and like pick out the topics and register and get all these emails. Thanks to great cost in and Lizzie perette for putting all of this together. So, with that, I'm going to stop sharing and there we go, and we will begin with our topic. We're communicating our access needs. And, Jen, if you can share screen and start the video. That would be awesome. Sit tight, based on feedback that some of the streaming lag. Oh there we go perfect so. So work of media, in addition to producing all of our brain club recordings has made a huge hopefully for those of you who participated in brain club last week. It seemed like really much improved. When you when you take some technological challenge off my hands it's always done better by anything work of media does a million times gazillion times better than I could ever pull off so thank you Jen. If you could hit play and it won't be good to go. So for for a few months now, we have been talking about how, unfortunately, despite there being no default brain. There are a lot of defaults in our society right like defaults of like oh this is how healthcare is delivered this is what it means to like be an adult this is what it means to be a worker this is what it means to be a student anyway. And that's not true, because in fact we all have different brains that do things differently. And what we don't want is we don't want to be in a situation where we are hammering to try to get that square peg to fit into the round hole and like, what happens you destroy the peg, and that is what happens to so many people. So how this connects to access needs are that we all have access needs access needs are anything that is required to meaningfully participate in one's environment or community. And as I said, we all have them. This might be physical access needs emotional communication, you know, like, so all different types of access needs. So, often, we get the message that if we have needs, we are in some way needy, and explicitly or implicitly, sometimes, often people get the message that we shouldn't have needs that it's selfish to have me like that's not a thing. That's a myth. And that is really hard, because when we think about full participation in our world and our lives, the social model disability is about the barriers in the environment between the person and full participation. It's not about there being something wrong with the individual. It's about those barriers being placed. And so we want to have as few barriers to full participation as possible. And when we think about how this how this plays out in interpersonal relationships, I'm going to play a little, I'm going to throw in a little excerpt from a brain club we did in January called everyone flips their leg where, you know, there's things that that make a stress that are going to differ person to person, and like context specific, like, if there's something in the physical environment, like allowed sound, if I'm like well hydrated and well rested, I might not be as stressed as if I'm, you know, haven't done those things, or have like a huge cognitive load or whatever, like with this business of the zoom and the link and the whatever and all the switching between things. If if a motorcycle drives by my house right now I'm going to flip my lid, whereas like I might have been okay a couple hours ago.  We don't get to pick what triggers us. And sometimes we forget that they're that we have interpersonal access needs it's not just about sensory processing or like how we learn it. It's about access needs in a relationship what does it mean for downstairs brain to feel safe. So, when we think about, since we all have access needs, often those access needs conflict with other people, and I might play this clip, I might just come back to it well maybe depends on if I can just on share and reshare. Very God got to share the sound and it's not going to work. Please. Oh, we can invite all 12 of your brothers to stay with us. No, no, no. Of course we have the room. Wait, slow down. No one's brothers are staying here. No one is getting married. Wait, what? May I talk to you please? Alone? No. Whatever you have to say, you can say to both of us. Fine. You can't marry a man you just met. You can if it's true love. I don't know what do you know about true love?  You asked for my blessing, but my answer is no. Now, excuse me. Your Majesty, if I may ease your... No, you may not and I think you should go. The party is over. Close the gates. Yes, Your Majesty. Nelson, no, no. Wait, give me my glove. Nelson, please, please. I can't live like this anymore. Then leave. I'll never do to you. Enough, Anna. No, why?   What are you so afraid of? I said enough. So, here we have a relationship with two people with access needs. One is looking to assert them by taking space. One has foot on the gas with an access need to communicate right here now. Boom. That didn't work out so well. I'm curious. Anybody else ever experienced conflicting access needs in an interpersonal interaction? Relationships are hard. Hi, Matthew. Are you raising your hand to say, yes, I have conflicting access needs in interpersonal interactions or did you want to say something? Yes, no, no. Yes. Yes. Double yes. Yes. Yes, conflicting access needs, but also trying to interpret those needs in a way where the other party makes sense can understand you too as well. It's just it goes both ways. And to understand that together is one way to actually, you know, where the ideas and thoughts of, you know, addressing those access needs. Thank you. Thank you. Totally. And especially when we have not. We're not in it a culture. Where it is. Common for people to actually voice their access needs. Access needs are not. Implied. Because in fact, people are not mind readers. Recently I was talking with some folks. About friendships and how hard it is. To make friends. And that they're constantly worried about the way their friends are going to respond to them and like worried that they're not going to be able to. That they're going to be judged. And that it's like, it's pretty stressful. So I'm wondering, I'm wondering how that, how that resonates with, with others. About worrying. About, about the judgment in social interactions. For me in the family, the way that I returned to regulation. The way that I. And bring my nervous system back into. Reading other people's attunement, reading other people's nervous system, instead of being overwhelmed by my own. Whatever it is. Going on the way that the best way for me to do that is to get down on the ground. Again, this is me and this is experiments of years of knowing how to attune for me. It's, it's, it's squatting down close. It's putting both my hands on the ground for a second, the floor. So I'm, I squat and I'm low. There's something about the proprioceptive work. Like I think because my glutes kick in so much, I'm like, oh, here's my body.  This is my contained little nervous system. Putting my hands on the ground feels strong. I feel like, yep, I am strong. I am a strong person. I can do this. So I'm building from the sensory system back into regulation. And I've practiced it enough over the years that I can do it fairly quickly in my nervous system. Those cues kick in safety for my, for my neuroception. And it's subconscious. It's, it is something our brains are always doing all the time, scanning the environment, scanning the interrelationships, scanning the internal relationship, the internal environment for safety. And we are geared for it. So once we feel it, once we find it, it's, it's what our system wants to go to. That homeostasis is where we want to be a cellular Lee. Right. So for my nervous system, it's that it's getting low. It's getting grounded. It's softening my face. Like actively saying, let your eyes soften. Let your eyes soften. Don't create some expected emotion. So that like that shame fear response might, might create this expected like, Oh, I'm okay. Right. Like everything's fine. Can you tell this isn't really a smile? Like, but it's what we do because it's what we've been socialized to do. So actively neutralizing softening my face. And then like something about the environment for me usually helps find the horizon, look at a tree root, some sort of queue to me that's like, there's no saber tooth tiger here.  And then like, this is solid ground. So you're describing that you begin with a bottom up strategy.  And then you have access to your cortex where you are cordically mediating your limbic response. Now you have access to your cortex because you did that initial bottom up.  I think a lot of people. Skip right to that or they try to skip right to that and they don't have access to their cortex and they, you can't skip it. You have to do something to access your cortex.  You don't, you may not even be able to like metacognitive, metacognitively like zoom out and watch yourself. You just don't have access to that. So it's really just like it's happening.  And it's, it's, it's experimental for a while. It's trial and error to figure out what your physical somatic sensory system responds to. And then once that is kind of, once that's a cue of safety for your physical sensory being, it grows, it gets stronger. And sometimes maybe it needs tweaking, like, you know, when my knees can't squat anymore and hopefully not for another 20 years, I'll have to figure something else out. Great, great. The other thing is that if, if someone knows that they are, if they know that they're not going to be able to go to self reg plan is a top down trying to use their cortex. One thing that I found helpful is to prepare ahead of time. What I'm wanting my cortex to do. Yep. Because if I can. Like ID and motor planet ahead of time, I can access it as like automatic, like automatic loop I can pull in as opposed to trying to use it in the, in the moment, because then it becomes not an a stop, you know, impulse control stop. It's like, don't like, like puts on the gas already. Don't try to step on the break of stop screaming your kid. It's, I'm going to go to my automatic loop. And so for me, that is like the, like I said before, the sort of mantra of like the relationship, the relationship, the relationship is primary. Like whatever that like, like, like a thought I can try, even if I don't have full access to my cortex that I can, I can try that. I mean, it doesn't work maybe, but like it might work a lot better than like, I'm going to talk myself out of how this is not, this is okay. Right. Well, I mean, and this is also gets to some of the course of like there's a number of amounts of different brains. You think when we've talked about this, you think in specific word patterns.  That language space. And I do not. I do pictures and I know which rock. It's at the driveway that I want to drive into. Not where it is on the street in words, ways. So I think that's also just a self awareness piece of what works for your brain and language works for yours. I feel so seen right now. The language doesn't work great in my brain. And so to start to do like an internal talk in the midst of feeling really dysregulated is just like, oh, that's really, that would be too much work. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so it begins with self awareness of like what, what actually calms you and maybe even developing an awareness of like your go to patterns of how you negotiate life, even when you're like generally regulated enough. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. Which then I mean gives you that base of being able to have the space for your family to feel safe and heard and seen. Because I mean, the, the goal is. Acceptance and connection for all of us. And that requires me also having that grace and acceptance of like, yeah, I understand myself sometimes. So Luna and I have been discussing power lately. Because she's five. And she what's modeled for her like in video games or cartoons is like power over people and like power over people feels gross to me as a PDA or like I don't want people. I don't want power over me and I don't want to have power over people because it's gross. So like we watch a lot of my little pony where like the messages are that the people seeking power over they never prosper.  Like it's just anyway. So like we've been talking about like just like the different kinds of power and we're going to get power because I feel like the like transformation from like, you know, like the traumatic transformation toward narcissism.  Like you don't have power. You seek your power. You want to claim your power. And like, if you only know about power over, you go down that train, right? And like, if you don't have connection, like, ah, anyway, like, what do you think about this as a concept? Yeah, I think it really aligns to with the role of punishment in relationships and how power over that the main leverage that you get, if you have power over somebody is both controlling them and punishing them. And I think that like, manipulating their behavior towards your good. And if they aren't aligned with that, then they deserve to be hurt for their transgression.  Like we let literally live in systems built on that. And for our kids, they're, they're trying to make sense of what happens when something is transgressed. Like what do we, what do we do when a line is broken or like within the trust, like trust gets broken or connection gets severed and we make mistakes basically. And so in a power over relationship, what happens around mistakes, small mistakes are punished and in a power with or a power like in a co-regulation relationship where any power doesn't even. The power is in the connection. Right. Totally. And because I feel like I'm like, I'm even hearing language from my five year old, like, like a thing that comes out a lot when like I make a mistake. And then she'll say something like, you know, so like she might like, you know, and she'll be like, that's what you get for acts. And I'm like, where, where did you get?  But like, I don't say that that one doesn't come out. Maybe I think it or like maybe I don't know. I don't even know, like, is it TV? I don't know, I don't know. I don't have the idea. I have no idea what like my husband or like I have no idea. Like if somebody actually says that, but like, I think that it's just the narrative constructed from observations of the world. That's what you get for acts.  Hannah Bloom, who she talks a lot about the, the cycle of repair.   Yeah, absolutely. And the repair with yourself is what I see, especially for my kids that they're externalizing, like, that's what you get for is what they say to themselves too. Like, when they make a mistake, then they're saying, well, of course, your grown up is going to ignore you or yell at you because that's what you get.  And this sense that they deserve punishment is really hard to repair because our world is reinforcing that. And so it's kind of like, that's the cosmic repair work is repairing that relationship with yourself where you have the capacity to say, I'm a person who makes mistakes, and I'm also a person who knows how to make things right. That's our family languages. We all make mistakes, but we know how to make it right. And that helps us to keep coming back to repair rather than choosing what's kind of an easier path, like punishment and isolation is, it's the dominant narrative to step outside that is what's hard. Because like, I think a lot of people who have grown up in a paradigm of like, you do the thing when the people with power over tell you to do the thing. And like, when, when like zoomed out to be like, do you see how that setting people up for like bad dangerous things and they're like, Oh, Oh, no, I never thought about that. Now I thought about that. I'm like, You know, if you're designing a playground, not everybody, you know, needs to go follow the same path, right to get to the top of the hill, but everybody has to have a path to get to the top of the hill when you're when you're designing those things and that that kind of visual because it's such a good visual in my mind for me, at least, and it was really helpful and thinking about everything, you know, you that principle of universal accessibility if I design this meeting workplace playground, so that everybody can access it in some way they don't have to be able to do every year you don't not have a ladder to get to the thing because, you know, some people can't use letters. You know, you just be able to design so everybody had access and and and equitable access right and kind of removing the barriers, the visuals we all use. And as part of that I think neurodiversity was a real big feature to that thinking about how somebody, whether they be, you know, autistic or Asperger's or, or just have sense of light sensitivities or hearing sensitivities or crowd sensitivities, how you can create spaces and places and programs and meetings that allow for that variety. Or how you create a workplace that accommodates the variety and a United Way we really we've tried to to think about what we're doing externally but also thinking about the people who do the work here and supporting them in that journey. Oh, that's so beautiful. And I think that, you know, sometimes people when they have that visual of physical access, you know, as it relates to mobility related disability, visible disabilities. That maybe is, for some people, how they can begin to think about this lens, and then they can maybe take the next step to say, Well, invisible disabilities, it's just as important to think about how everyone has to get to the top of the hill and to have multiple paths to be able to do that. So, you know, it's, it's interesting because a lot of people who struggle in their workplaces, they don't know that they have an invisible disability. So, they don't have language to talk about it, because they don't know that's what's the barrier between them and the top of the hill. They may just know that they're struggling.  If the top down lens isn't, you know, oh, this person has this disability, and they need accommodations, like, if the kind of the flag is not checked, it may not come into the conversation. It might be, you know, some organizations talk about, you know, we have disciplinary problems we have difficult employees or like when I was when I was chief resident or my training, we had, you know, difficult learners, like, but really, this was neurodivergence with barriers to access. And this is how this played out so it's like a total lens shift. And we think about some explanations for why people are struggling, why people are dysregulated, why people are, you know, the conflicting access needs, they are about access needs. And I think it really relates now what I've, from my experience as leader to what I've seen is that it's, it's directly relevant to our convert the way we treat physical health care mental health care. Right, so if you think about physical health care where you, we have access to that, right, we look health insurance. It's not affordable, but it's, but there's there's it's accepted. And it's also not seen as a choice thing, right if you get those type of physical ailments.  Everybody's like, right on good for you. Yeah, rest up heal up. If you are brave enough to say, I need a mental health day. Right, I need my brain needs a break. And that could be whether you have a disability or not. We don't accept that like it's, you know, toughen up right that's that's the American like ideal right is that you brain wise we push through. And because we start with that. So if you start there. And for everybody with privilege and able bodied and, and then you try and add in a disability to that. Well now you're not only going up against accessibility issues, you're going up against cultural norms that are just incredibly difficult to overcome and the disruption to the work environment and the way in which we expect people to show up nine to five Monday through Friday has changed fundamentally. The organizations that have not necessarily adopted that can and have not adopted the flexibility are the ones in many cases, everybody's struggling for workforce but you're compounding that issue by, you know, by not accepting and talking about that but you know you you name the thing which is that in 2022 so many organizations are struggling to fill their open positions and they're struggling to retain their existing workforce and you know I see that and I'm like yeah it's because you're not talking about neurodiversity and access you could do like but, but, but just thoughts about how that's connected from a CEO perspective. Sure, I think that the, you know workforce challenges, some, many of them are rooted in, we still have old structures in terms of our work expectations as a, as a society, right. And it's a not that every other other countries have this perfect and right and many are way worse than we are in terms of accommodating. And it's some of that is cultural and you know examining if we have the space and time capacity to examine what are the systemic barriers that are keeping people from being part of the workforce because we all need to work. I mean not the kids they go to school and you got to. But we all you know we do it's part of society. It's not just a means to an end for myself it's not just how I pay my rent or mortgage or I feed my family. So everybody does that's that's kind of where the whole thing's based on that.  We need for that and it's not always altruistic or rewarding in the same way. But if we think about how do we make it so that people want to work in our environments, whether it's making a thing, right, or it's community building, or it's health care, you know. And when I say health care I mean all of health care mental health care physical health care. And we you know you could probably think about how we're addressing a lot of things and there are so many barriers that keep people in the way of the employee. It's one of the things working bridges works a lot on with the social determinants they get in the way. So you've got childcare housing, you know, transportation, food insecurity, all of these things and wages of course stacked on top of that you then start getting into the issues of, well, what's the barrier in terms of my work environment. And what is expected of me in terms of how I'm showing up to do X thing that you've hired me to do. And so I think it plays a huge role in, you know, those those intersectionality of all of those things are oftentimes what keep people from from being part of the workforce. So much of what you've said is about the way you see the world. And that's what sets the tone of leadership is that you actually believe that we all do things differently and that you can shift the environment around so the people who work for you thrive if you don't have that lens. Nothing you're going to do is going to feel real to your people. But if you start with, we are all human. And, you know, it's my colleagues talk a lot about human centered design in terms of meetings and spaces and doing those things. You get a lot farther. I think you can have a lot, a lot more space and, you know, maybe culturally one of the big things that we miss and we lack in today's day and age is the ability to have a conversation with each other and be a little bit vulnerable on both ends of, I don't know what I don't know. All right, perfect. I actually, I want to respond to a comment Sarah just throughout the chat around cultural norms. I mean that isn't that essentially what we've been talking about all year with brain rules and essentially redefining culture. I mean what is, what is culture, if not the attitudes and practices of a group of people, and we're a group of people. So I think it's got to start somewhere. I'm just reading Matt's comment in the chat. The idea of cultural norms as the barrier so pervasive. This is the way we've always done things. Yeah, right. The real problem is the lack of awareness around the fact that the idea of quote this is the way we've always done it is actually the problem, and not the individual seeking equity. Yeah, I see, I see, I see, I see this is resonating with a lot of folks here. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I can say, you know, personally my own, my own journey in unlearning these principles is very much supported by, by, by this community. Like, it starts with an idea, and you connect about the idea with another person and then it's more people and it's, I think that's what you know it's like Kelly shared about holiday weekend when Kelly when you were able to discern between like I'm home and my access needs are met versus now I'm in a situation where I'm overstimulated like maybe, maybe six months ago you wouldn't have been able to do that. Before you spend time around people and environments where you actually feel like it works at the culture, including attitudes practices vibe energy cultural norms is working for you and meeting your needs. That is what allows you to discern when your needs are not being met. I wonder what people think about that concept. I think that's so true and I think it just takes so much practice, you know, to kind of get to know and notice those signs in yourself about like when something feels good or doesn't feel good. And the more that you practice it, I find that I'm getting better at noticing that and, you know, being able to tweak things accordingly. Kelly. Hello. I just completely forgot what the heck I was going to say because I was so focused on remembering to lower my hand. One of the things that I wanted to say about this is for me it wasn't so much of like recognizing like whoa, this situation is not working.  And so now I'm more able to not only like notice the discomfort in myself, but speak up for it. And that's the part that I think is is the hardest for me because you know somebody mentioned, you know, not wanting to be perceived as high maintenance or needy, and that is exactly how I feel like, like, oh my gosh, I don't want people to think that you know, everybody's going to speak at a volume to like, it's not all the time it's just walking into a house of people at a volume 12 is a lot.  Alright, and I think it's just practice. I mean, I had a conversation with someone earlier today like isn't this like the ultimate experiment, like experimenting with shifting cultural norms, and if it feels safe to advocate for someone else. Then you then you do that and you practice that and that's how you practice that skill, and then in environments where it feels safe to advocate for one of your own needs. And in a way that you know isn't directly challenging someone else's brain rules, maybe, maybe that's what you try on first, and then I think it just grows. Oh, no worries. No, and speaking of practice, you know, with with almost every client I work with and I never really read this in a book in graduate school or anything else it's sort of something that I've just developed on the fly as I've worked with people. Most people are work comes down to one thing and and that is answering the question, what is my relationship to my experience. And, and when you can get in there and mess around and really pull apart, you know, what is others.  What, you know, how it's not what we go through very often it's how we go through what we go through. So, and it's, and at first I think people are are taking a back, but really what I've found is it is it is absolutely the root to empowerment. Because we are all we can control and we can't control all of us all the time, all of ourselves all the time. But what we can do, you know, we should focus on doing and that way we find our strength. And, and, and the ability to inhabit and engage in our experience. That was so beautifully said. So much more elegantly than I could have on. And I think you're, you're exactly right. And I think it's about. Like, like, there's, there's part of the brain rules are what is it that I need to feel good. And, and, and, and being curious about that, too. Because it may not be what you thought, maybe it's that what you were, what many people are seeking is around around what you just said is having having a shift in one's relationship to their own experience. But it's more authentic. Yeah, because very often in childhood, what we learn when we don't have the perspective and the experience. And in childhood, and helps get us through things that we struggle with and the child's brain is a is a brilliant tool in doing that, but very often those adaptations become maladaptive and adulthood, and need to be revisited and and reworked. And so, yeah, what what works for us in in childhood can sometimes become kind of those urges that we experience in adulthood and another thing I talked to clients about is a lot of times when you're feeling an urge to do something. Yep, think about something else. Yeah. And I think this this leads really well into the topic of our, our New Year's Eve brain club. And since since I already know how the, since we pre recorded the first half of it. This topic comes up, which is, it's, you know, all of the brain rules around like reinventing oneself every new year of like, I'm going to be the best version of myself a better version of myself like how about I'm actually going to be an authentic version of myself. Or, or I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, thinking about Kelly's example of self advocacy. Maybe it's not about I need to grow this new skill but maybe I connect with an interdependent group of people that to help address access needs like maybe even the brain rules of self advocacy. Maybe there are other ways of, of, of, of achieving access where actually the last time Amanda Deacon presented at brain club we talked about, is it possible to meet your access needs without imposing new demands on other people. I'm like, what do you mean. And so anyway, just this there's, I think there's so many different things to try on and see what fits. I don't think there's one right way. But inter interdependence is so key. It's, it's, it's a natural part of being human and something that's so demonized on Christmas Eve, my tooth hurt. My dentist is in Williston, and I emailed him, and he, and he was out of second thought he I drove up there, he left his house and his family, he turned on all the lights and the machines and we figured out what was wrong with my tooth. And like, and I texted him afterward and I talked to him about the value of that in my life because I don't know where I'd be today in terms of my pain level or my ability to tolerate, if he hadn't just done that and he said well that's what I'm here for. I'm sorry you had to go through all of that. And I think that's a beautiful story of of of it being okay to be connected to other humans. And to ask for help. Right. Right. So, and I forget who said it in the chat earlier about this, like, it's the messages of childhood that interfere so much I mean that's where a lot of brain rules come from right is like, you're told you know like, be independent you think there's all about fire bootstraps or like, you know, like all the things all the things that are so unhelpful and like harmful. And, and I, I think this is yet another one of those examples. But we, we unlearn, we all learn together so much more valuable in my life in the past 10 years than what I've learned and I've learned a lot of valuable things is is the things that I've unlearned. Totally. Thank you everyone thank you all so much for being here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to post the New Year's thing one more time to support anyone's executive functioning who would benefit to registration link for virtual New Year's. And in a couple days we'll send out the actual schedule with zoom links and all that stuff but we, we hope to see, see you there. And we'll also be sending out hold on Lizzie do you have the registration link for January brain club I wanted to post that before we wrapped up. Are you posting it or you're going to go find it. I think I have it now. Oh sweet. That's awesome. Oh, I got it. Amazing. Thank you for sending my email. All right, cool. All right, great. Oh thank you, Lizzie perfect. So that is the sign up link it's free registration for January brain club life free imagined is our theme. So it's, it's all variations and all the things we keep talking about just at a new level we continue to build on. So we look forward to seeing you next week. Happy New Year everybody.