You Are Changing the World, with David LaMotte
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You Are Changing the World, with David LaMotte
BY KIM ADAMS
Click “+” below for detailed show notes and full text transcript. Scroll down for the blog post.
Sometimes we lose track of how we impact those around us. Recognizing our power to effect change can be very uplifting. David says,
“Thinking you can fix the world is totally naive. But it’s not naive to think you can change it. We change it all the time, whether we like it or not.”
Then it’s up to us to know when and how to engage with others who hold vastly different viewpoints.
In this episode we talk about
and so much more.
RESOURCES mentioned in the episode:
David’s Patreon community is where he shares music each week and hosts monthly gatherings online. This is a great way to support his work and get regular inspiration.
At DavidLaMotte.com you can find out what David’s up to these days, his TedTalk: Music Can Help Us Understand Peace and Conflict, his book WorldChanging 101, and so much more.
Note: Music and books are most helpfully bought from DavidLaMotte.com.
LetsBeNeighbors.org has signs, banners and stories related to building community and stepping across dividing lines.
Kim is hosting a “Book Club” discussion group for international schools teachers / staff and parents. Sign up here.
RATHER READ? I’ve got you covered with a transcript and blog post below.
ENJOYED THIS EPISODE?
ABOUT TODAY’S GUESTS:
David LaMotte is a songwriter, author, speaker, and activist with over 3000 shows on five continents to his credit. He is also the co-founder of a non-profit organization that works with schools and libraries in Guatemala, and a husband and father. His passions include conversation, photography, peace work, music, poetry, and the Appalachian mountains, where he lives with his wife Deanna and son Mason. David is a Rotary Peace fellow with a masters in Peace and Conflict Resolution from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and is the former Clerk (Chair) of the AFSC Nobel Peace Prize Nominating Task Group. His books include Worldchanging 101: Challenging the Myth of Powerlessness, and White Flour, a children’s book inspired by the true story of a Klan rally that was subverted by a clown rally. He has traveled extensively and lived for a time in France, Australia and India.
CONNECT WITH David LaMotte:
Website DavidLaMotte.com
LetsBeNeighbors.org signs, banners and stories
ABOUT YOUR HOST:
Kim Adams is an American raising three daughters along with her math-teaching husband of 20 years. She loves photography, reading, thunderstorms, walking on the beach, camping where there are no bugs, and has a weakness for mint chocolate chip ice cream.
CONNECT WITH KIM:
Learn more about my Coaching & Mentoring services. I’d love to help guide you in your expat life journey.
Live Q&A’s in my free Facebook Community for international school teachers & parents
Resilient Expats LLC website
ENJOYED THIS EPISODE?
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ABOUT YOUR HOST:
Kim Adams is an American raising three daughters along with her math-teaching husband of 20 years. She loves photography, reading, thunderstorms, walking on the beach, camping where there are no bugs, and has a weakness for mint chocolate chip ice cream.
CONNECT WITH KIM:
Learn more about my Coaching & Mentoring services. I’d love to help guide you in your expat life journey.
Live Q&A’s in my free Facebook Community for international school teachers & parents
Instagram | Resilient Expats LLC website | Facebook page
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This episode is about … having conversations … is what it boils down to. An activity we engage in every day, in person and online. But despite all that practice, it can be a challenge. A lot of what David shares today, I’ve heard from him before, but they’re so profound that I need to hear them over and over again; they feel fresh to me every time. And while a lot of this is pretty high level, philosophical ideas, which I love to contemplate, they’re deeply practical too, for all sorts of situations.
Maybe you’re repatriating or getting ready for a season in your “home” country.
Maybe you’re watching the current politics in your country and feeling like you want to contribute to better conversations, but aren’t sure how.
Maybe you’re in a context where you sometimes don’t agree with the people around you, and don’t know how to move forward from that.
Maybe you’re wanting to teach your kids about healthy dialogue and public discourse, whether that’s in their school building or through their social media accounts, or with extended family, or with the wider world.
Maybe you tend to be confrontational and recognize that it can be counterproductive.
Maybe you’re super anti-confrontational, like me, and need to learn that some forms of conflict can be constructive.
If you resonate with any of those, you’re in for a treat.
Now, we talk a lot about word definitions, but also about identity, and having patience for the time it takes to share ourselves with others when we’re coming from different perspectives.
Kim: Today I have David LaMotte with me, and this is a real pleasure for me, a bucket list item for my podcast, which I hope that doesn’t make you feel strange when I say that, but
David: Happy to be in your bucket.
Kim: oh yes. Thank you. So I first came across you David, um, at our university and David was a traveling singer song writer who came through quite a few times. Not only does he deliver fantastic music. He’s a wonderful storyteller. And that really adds to the experience that goes with the music.
David: Thank you.
Kim: Yeah. Yeah.
There are a few stories that I remember in particular, but one just stands out in my mind and has played. It just rings in my mind. And it has for years. On one of your trips, um, you were meeting with an older couple. After hours and they were talking about how they were so happy to be [00:01:00] retired and able to travel.
And you were kind of thinking to yourself about how you had already been traveling as a young person and feeling so lucky and fortunate to be able to do that and kind of thinking, gosh, I’m so glad I didn’t have to wait. And they, at some stage said, now, wait a minute. You’re you’re doing all this traveling, but you do it alone.
You could tell that they were kind of thinking, gosh, we’re so lucky that we get to do it together. And this poor guy is having all these adventures, but he’s alone. I think for Jon and I, that was one piece of the inspiration. I mean, there were many, many pieces of inspiration for us that led us to go overseas, but we do feel very fortunate to be adventuring together.
David: Yeah, it’s a beautiful thing. That was a humbling moment. It’s a true story. Um, I was traveling out in Oregon and, uh, met that couple in a little hotel. I was humbled in that moment for sure. Um, in that conversation. [00:02:00] And I’ve gotten to share in recent years, that same joy that you have with John in terms of traveling with Deanna in Australia and India and various places.
And it’s been, it’s a whole different thing to be on that adventure together.
Kim: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Another message that you gave. You probably give this message every time you talk anywhere and I’m not spoiling anything because it’s on the cover of your book. But, um, you know, just that idea that you are changing the world, whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not. That every choice you make, even if you think you’re not making a choice, if you’re being completely passive, that that is impacting the world around you.
So that was another piece that was really inspiring to us. It’s very empowering.
David: Well, I think sometimes we, we talk about, you know, the phrase changing the world sounds naive. It sounds like something that. You [00:03:00] know, folks who don’t know much about the world talk about, and then you get out there. I think our cultural narrative is that you start out hopeful and thinking you can have an impact.
And then you experience how difficult the world is and you give up on some of that hope and, and I, that narrative popular as it is relies on a really thin definition of the word. Hope. Um, because in my view, some of my favorite words in the English language were spoken by a non-native English speaker, but, uh, Václav Havel, who was the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first of the Czech Republic, um, dissident, playwright and artist, uh, and poet said, “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit.”
And. Those words are really significant to me. They’re kind of thick. I have to sit with them a bit, but. You know, hope isn’t prediction. It’s not optimism. It’s not what [00:04:00] you think is going to happen. It’s not keeping a rosy outlook. It’s about where you point your life.
And when I look at that cultural narrative, that that hope is kind of naive and it wears off as you experienced the big, bad world, I have to then look at history and my favorite hope mongers. Right. And, and I look at, you know, folks like Nelson Mandela and Dr. King. These folks were not hopeful because they did not understand how cruel the world can be.
Right.
Kim: Yeah.
David: That, that narrative doesn’t hold up. These are folks who lived in hope because they understood that there was light through the darkness and the human beings have capacity to do all of it. Right. And I also think that we can’t have a purity narrative that says that we can only have positive impact and never have negative impact.
It’s messy to be human and to be in relationship. I could never be a [00:05:00] doctor because I can’t take the Hippocratic oath because the whole do no harm philosophy to me seems rather limiting. I think, I think if we are in relationship as hard as we try. We’re going to do some harm. It’s, you know, anybody who’s ever been married knows that though this may be the best thing that ever happened to you.
It’s also the hardest thing, right? It’s it’s just difficult to be in relationship and we always are going to hurt each other a little bit. So yes, we want to minimize the harm, but I think kind of all or nothing standards are really toxic to deep relationship. You know, the only way to do no harm is to have no relationship.
And even then I think we do harm because there are people who miss out on relationships that we could be having. So that whole change the world thing. We equate, “change the world” with “fix” the world or “save” the world. And those are really different concepts. If you think you can fix the world, that is naive.
It’s totally naive to think you can fix the world, but it’s not naive to think you can change it. We change it all the time, whether we like it or not. So part of the goal for me is just to be conscious of what changes I’m making, as conscious as I can. I’m always going to miss some of it, but to pay more attention to the impact that I’m having and try to be intentional about what love looks like in the world.
Kim: Yes. Yes. That’s beautiful.
David: Thank you. It’s early morning here. And so, um, I may be a little rambly.
Kim: That’s okay. Yeah, as you were talking there, I was thinking about how, how complex the world is. And you, when you live in another country, you get to understand that on another level. We’re [00:07:00] both Americans and American culture is rather complex. It’s a huge country. There are a lot of different people, a lot of different backgrounds and experiences.
And yeah, it’s, there’s still kind of a unified view of the world. Um, and then when you step out into another culture, you kind of get thrown off a bit at how different things are. In other places.
David: I went on some church trips when I was a teenager, but my first time really living overseas was in college. I did a semester in Paris and it was a beautiful experience for me. And one of the things I was conscious of at the time and perhaps more conscious in years after looking back on it was that when you remove yourself from your native culture and put yourself somewhere else, you have an opportunity to figure out,
to sort of parse out which parts of me are actually inherently me and which parts of me are, are really [00:08:00] just a reflection of my culture. When you can see: these things stay constant and these things shifted, then that helps you parse out where the edges of you are. Which I guess is a lifelong process. It certainly starts as an infant.
But, but that was a big milestone for me, living in Europe for awhile, for those, you know, half a year, those few months really gave me a sense of me that I did not have before.
Kim: That’s very interesting. I know that you have spent time in other countries throughout your life, different projects and initiatives and travels and spending more significant time in some places. And I’m curious how have those experiences, that, that time in other countries, how has that changed you and how has that changed the way you, um, interact with people around you?
David: I think the easiest way to typecast other [00:09:00] people is to not know them. Right. So, um, it is easy when you are young and have lived in one place for awhile and that’s the place that you know, it’s really easy to make assumptions about other cultures or write people off or decide that you know how they are.
And the only cure for that that is really effective is to know them. You know, human relationship is the best way to dismantle our bigotry, which is inherent. Everybody’s got some right. I grew up in Florida, which is arguably south enough to be north again, where I was living on, on the coastal part of Florida, lots of folks retire there from all over the country.
So it was a pretty broad spread, but both of my parents come from small Southern towns, pretty deep south. [00:10:00] And so. People would use the phrase. He’s a good Christian man.
Kim: Mmm-hmm.
David: It really, those first two words were redundant because Christian was the definition of good in, in my small town context. And not knowing many people who weren’t Christian, I didn’t really question that.
Right. These are values that I subscribed to and isn’t that great, you know? But then when I came to know people who were Jewish and Muslim, and I had very close friends who were Jewish when I was little. And so I had to check that out, like, okay, well, these are really good people. So what’s that about?
Here’s another perspective. And later on when I made Muslim friends and Hindu friends and Buddhist friends and Unitarian friends and atheist friends, and all of that, I came to understand that these are separate ideas. You know, that, that these are lenses on the light and people can have the light, [00:11:00] through a lot of different, can see the light through a lot of different lenses.
And so that, that experience of being overseas has been profound for me. And it led me to question a lot of national narratives. I grew up in the eighties when Russians were the bad guys and, and it wasn’t limited to the Russian government. I mean, people really believed
Kim: Right.
David: the Russians were bad people, right?
They Sting had this song in the eighties that he, uh, put out: If the Russians love their children too. And it was really a critique of the mutually assured destruction, nuclear policy, where we were just building up and building up and building up nuclear arms. And the argument from voices, powerful voices within the, within the U S government was yep.
The more of these weapons we have, the less likely we are to use them. Which their own acronym that they came up with themselves was mutually assured destruction, which spells [00:12:00] MAD. Right. Which I think was, it was a mad policy. But I had a friend in high school who utterly missed the irony in Sting’s song and really thought that Sting was questioning whether Russians love their children,
Kim: Oh,
David: which is just staggering to me, you know. And I had done enough travel and have been exposed to enough things, even in high school that I was shocked by this.
But I do think the more we know each other, the more we have the capacity to love and understand each other. And that broadens all of us. That’s, that’s healthy for me. Not just, not just sparing people my bigotry, um, doing less damage in the world, but opening my own heart, which is a good thing. I want to be all the way alive while I’m here.
Kim: Yeah.
Yeah.
I love how you said that. Hmm. So I know [00:13:00] that you have gone off to study peace studies. The idea of peacemaking and peace studies really intrigued me. And I don’t exactly know what peacemaking is to you, but.
As I have considered the way I have been changed living overseas, what I feel is this conflict between the new me, the me that has been changed by these experiences, and not necessarily the old me, but, but all the people I left behind or the people who haven’t had these same experiences,
can’t relate to the ways that I have changed. And, and so for me, I kind of think of peacemaking as like bridging that gap between. Because if I have gone off and changed me and I bring nothing of that back to the people I love back home, and my country and all of this, then it feels rather selfish. So I guess that’s the track I go down when I think about that. But I’m [00:14:00] curious, what is peacemaking for you?
David: So, yeah, I guess within the field, there’s lots of discussion of the nomenclature. So. Peacemaking and peace building and peace keeping. And these are all different ideas, but just to say, peacemaking as a sort of catchall term for all of that, I think it’s hugely misunderstood in American culture. And I think probably in other cultures as well, peace work is generally understood as
uh, avoiding conflict or quelling conflict. Or, you know, the, these are the, this is the contrast. We have peace and conflict as the contrast. But in fact, that’s not my understanding of peace work at all. I, my understanding of peace work is moving toward conflict in ways that are constructive rather than destructive.
Of course, the great irony there is that you’re moving toward conflict, not away from it. And I [00:15:00] think a lot of people do understand peace work as, as moving away from conflict. A lot of folks see it as conflict avoidance in fact. Um, and, and see nonviolence as simply not being violent, which of course is not what it is.
There’s a fascinating insight that my dad gave me a few years ago that’s rooted in the etymology of some common words when you’re talking about peace building and peacemaking. So the word pacifist and the word passive actually have no common root words. It’s an accident of language that they sound anything alike.
So passus is the Latin, which means to suffer or to endure. And that’s the root of the word passive. When you’re passive, you tend to suffer. Right. But, but pacifist is rooted in two words, pax, which is Latin for peace and facere, which [00:16:00] is the fundamental action verb of Latin. It’s like hacer in Spanish or faire in French, it’s the, it’s the fundamental it’s to do or to make.
Right. So to be a pacifist, literally means, etymologically means, to be a peace maker or a peace doer. Right. It’s so you have to be active in order to be a pacifist. You cannot live. You literally cannot simultaneously be a pacifist and be passive. Right? So to be a pacifist means to be a peace maker, which means you have to be actively engaged
in the work of creating peace. And often we think of peace as the lack of something, the lack of violence or the lack of conflict, et cetera. But actually it’s quite, there’s some interesting research being done now on how we define peace and how we can quantify it in different countries. There’s an organization called, uh, [00:17:00] IEP, the Institute for Economics and Peace. And they are studying they’ve they’ve found.
Imperfect, of course, it’s a developing field and it’s a social science, so it’s hard to have precise metrics, but they’ve developed a metric system to, uh, to study peace in different countries around the world, and also watch the trend lines within those countries and within the world at large, as peace
waxes and wanes in different countries. And it’s fascinating to look at that. Um, and, and to understand that peace is the presence of justice and freedom. These are things that a healthy society is a peaceful society, but so often in, in circles that I run in folks who are working on social justice stuff, people often set up peace and justice as
contrasting values, right? Um, we say, no justice, no peace at the [00:18:00] rallies. Right. But I think that’s again, using fairly thin definitions of the word. That’s peace as calm.
Kim: Right, right.
David: And I think the deepest definitions of peace and justice include each other. There really can be no justice in a society that is not peaceful.
And there cannot be peace, real peace, in a society that does not have justice. Right.
Kim: That’s a lot to take in. Because it really does challenge conventional or lay person’s understanding of these things. And I think it explains an awful lot of the conflict that we see in public discourse.
David: Yeah, I think it’s interesting that these words that we throw around a lot in our conversations with the assumption that we mean the same thing, when we’re using these words. These words [00:19:00] really spending some time on the definitions of the words we use, the really common ones like justice and peace – and love for that matter.
I think it’s really important to spend a little time saying, what exactly do you mean when you use that word? Because they have so many different definitions and some of them are very, very thin definitions and some of them are very thick definitions. That’s the way I think about it. Or you could say shallow or dee., um, Because justice can mean retribution, you know, for a lot of people, justice means punishing the bad guys. And for others, justice means fairness.
It means equity means that people have the same opportunities to try things. Right. And likewise, as we said before, peace can mean calm and placidity, or it can mean right relationship and wholeness and justice and healthy society. Right? [00:20:00] So these are very different things.
Kim: Yeah. Hmm. So who defines justice?
David: Well, this is the trick of being human and being in relationship because we all get to define it. So the, the trick for me is trying to communicate with folks in ways that are productive, in ways that are healthy. And that when I say communicate, I don’t just mean talking to people and having them understand me. I mean that I understand them.
Right. And human communication is just messy. Even one-on-one human communication is a challenge. It is not a miracle that we sometimes misunderstand each other. It’s a miracle that we ever understand each other at all. Right. I mean, when you think about what’s happening, it’s not just definitions of words, but right now, I am, At least theoretically, having thoughts in my brain, which are chemical and electrical signals that are encoded [00:21:00] into language in my brain and then sent through my nervous system. And my lungs contract in a very particular rate in order to blow up just enough air over my vocal folds, which are just little flaps of skin that are vibrating around and making patterns of pressure in the air.
Which, even if we leave the microphones and the fact that our conversation is going to space in between you and me to satellites through our computers, even if we leave all that part out, even if we were in the same room together, those little air pattern, pressure patterns, then hit your ear and are decoded back into sounds, which are encoded into language, words, and syntax.
And that’s decoded into thoughts. How does that ever work? Right. So I think it’s very important that we be intentional about communicating with each other [00:22:00] and explaining what we mean by the words that we’re using. In a book that I wrote a few years ago, I actually spent the whole first section of the book defining really common terms like hope and justice and peace, et cetera, in the hopes that folks could understand what I was trying to get at.
Kim: Yeah.
it sounds like such hard work to me because in order to really be able to explain what you mean by something, it has to be very crystallized in your mind. I notice, you know, when I try to communicate with my husband, a lot of times he’ll ask me to clarify something and it’s really hard for me to clarify because I communicate
more on my intuition, or like I have a feeling and then I go, I go based on the feeling. But it’s not something that’s easy to kind of parse out and lay out and explain clearly. So,
David: I agree.
Kim: and then to find [00:23:00] out what someone else means, you have to question them. And it can be hard to question people in a way that doesn’t make them feel defensive or maybe they’re feeling the same thing I feel like. “I don’t know how to explain that. I had this thought I had this feeling, but I don’t really know how to say it any more clearly.”
David: Yeah, I absolutely agree with you that it is really hard. Yeah. Human relationship is perhaps the hardest work. And yet I think there’s so much benefit in that clarifying and asking people, saying, “I want to be sure I understand what you mean and I’m not sure I’m getting it entirely.” You know, um. “What you’re saying matters to me and I want to understand. Can you tell me what you mean by this word
when you say it.” Or, “When you said that, did you mean this or did you mean that or something else?” I think there are ways to communicate that that are compassionate, but yes, it is also threatening. Sometimes when somebody asks you to explain something and you don’t have that explanation in [00:24:00] the moment, the beauty, I think the gift, in that is that generally when I find myself in that position, then I go home and think about it all night.
And maybe over time come to some clarity, which helps me understand who I am and who I want to be.
Kim: Yeah. Hmm. In your work in the field of peace studies, have you come up with a few practical helps? You know, some tips for those of us who want to have deeper conversations with people around us, who we think we disagree with, or we know we fundamentally disagree with. Or who, we’re just not sure if we’re totally on the same page and we want to try to clarify that, and aren’t really sure how to do that in a, as you said, a compassionate way.
David: Yeah, I think there are different approaches depending on our context. So a public conversation for instance, is very different from a private conversation. [00:25:00] If the Klan marches in Black Mountain, I’m going to go stand in the way and interrupt that however I can. Right. That’s a public conversation and I do not want that message to be amplified without resistance.
I don’t want to be amplified at all, but if it’s going to be amplified, I don’t want that message to stand without resistance. However, a few years ago, a prominent, local white supremacist, he calls himself a white separatist, asked me lunch. And I went. And I, I listened to him, although not without challenge, but what I have found and what I have been taught, which it really bears out in my experience is that people are not open to listening until they feel heard.
Kim: Yeah. Yep.
David: So I will listen to things in a private conversation and reflect that I hear them, even if I disagree, [00:26:00] in a way that I would not in a public conversation. Because that’s a question of what you’re amplifying. The things that I try to remember are that there’s always the conversation and the meta conversation, right?
The conversation about the conversation. How are we going to have this conversation is an important question. So when things get nasty on my Facebook wall, which they have, and even just the last 24 hours, I invite people into private conversation. Can we, can we catch up about this? Um, if it’s a local friend, I’ll say, can we have a cup of tea?
Because there are tiers of effectiveness of communication, depending on your context. And face-to-face is our best bet. It’s not necessarily going to be great even then, but, it’s our best. And I would say social media is probably our least productive context in which to disagree, um, in my, in [00:27:00] my experience.
So it’s still sometimes important to put out an idea on social media, even if it, you know, it’s going to push some people’s buttons, but I mostly want to use that as an invitation into deeper and more productive conversation.
Kim: So this, um, how are we going to have the conversation, the conversation about the conversation.
Is that something that you embark on explicitly with someone?
David: Often. Yeah, I, sometimes I really do. And again, I did this within the last 24 hours on Facebook and said to a friend, if you’d like to chat about this, I’d love to talk to you on the phone. Said that on Facebook, because she objected to something that I had said. And then I made a couple of points because I felt like this is a public conversation and it’s important to
represent my thinking on this, here, because this is the messy work of democracy. Right? We’ve got to share some ideas in order [00:28:00] to make decisions together. We don’t have to agree. And we very seldom argue each other into agreement. Right? People shift – all of us shift – when we feel heard and we feel loved and we feel like our values are respected, then we’re open to other ideas.
If we don’t feel heard, we don’t feel loved. We don’t feel respected. Then we’re not. We’re going to dig in and defend right where we are. My friend, Daniel Buttrey is a peacemaker who’s been working in the American Baptist denomination for many years, recently retired. And he said that we often think about the national discourse like a football game. And an in a football game
I win by defeating the other team. And he said, it’s just not a good metaphor for our national discourse. We need to think about our national discourse more like a marriage.
Kim: Mmmmm.
David: You do not win at a marriage by defeating your partner, [00:29:00] by arguing your partner into a corner. That just doesn’t help. Like we’ve, you’ve got to listen to each other.
Even when the things being said are damaging, when are hurtful, we’ve got to find ways to listen to each other in private conversations in order to have some possibility of hearing each other and making decisions together. But again, peace work doesn’t mean that we agree. It means that we can disagree and still move forward together.
Kim: Yeah.
David: One of the most memorable conversations of my whole life was a conversation I had with John Lewis, the civil rights hero, what, eight term Congressman, something like that from Georgia, who died a couple of years ago. And John Lewis was just an extraordinarily lovely and generous man and courageous and a person of incredible integrity and somebody I deeply admire.
And I got to spend about 45 minutes chatting with him on one-on-one. [00:30:00] Which was extraordinary for me, needless to say. And in that conversation, we were talking about this perception, this misperception of peace work in the public narrative that it’s about avoiding conflict. And he said to me, In this one-on-one conversation.
“Yes. Dr. King used to say to me,” that’s like, wait, what is happening? Um, he, he said, “Dr. King used to say to me, sometimes you have to turn the world upside down in order to set it right. Conflict is very often necessary on the way to justice.” So there are times to stand in the way. Right? That peace without justice is not peace.
It’s just placidity. And that’s really a lot to swallow as a peacemaker. I want everybody to be okay and to calm down, but that’s really not what peacemaking is.
Kim: Okay. How is all of this [00:31:00] conversation related to identity and belonging?
David: So I think there’s a lot of sense of identity that is rooted in oppositional thinking like, “who am I not?” Right. “I am this because I am not that.”
Kim: That’s true. We do tend to define ourselves based on, I’m not part of that group. I’m not part of that group. Therefore, that’s already enough said.
David: Right. And, and I think that’s somewhat limiting. Right. And, and, and as we get to know people and love people and hear people who are in that not group, and hear their humanity, then I think we can grow into a deeper sense of belonging that is broader. So I like to think of myself as a human being … and nobody’s left out of that
who is a human being, right? That’s the broadest context. But of course we [00:32:00] all grow up with understandings of our identity that are exclusive. And part of the process of maturation, I think, is growing past those, to the degree that we’re able to, in our years that we’re given. Again, I return to the story I told earlier about my faith identity as a child and, and thinking that Christian meant good.
And I’ve now experienced that there’s a lot of good that isn’t Christian. And also there’s some Christian that is profoundly toxic, right? So these things are, those are not synonyms, right. And I’ve remained in that faith track. That’s still where I am now. I have dear friends who I love that a lot of their identity is being post-Christian.
They grew up in toxic church environments that they’ve hooked away from. And that’s a deep root of their identity now, is [00:33:00] being not that. So I have folks in both of those, on both sides of that dividing line, who I love deeply and totally admire and respect, and I get where they’re coming from. And I think in terms of national identity, I feel really grateful to have come to know and love people from many countries,
and to no longer have my identity so deeply rooted in being an American as much as being a human. But of course I am an American. I’m deeply shaped by my own culture. And I think it’s important again, coming back to word definitions, to delineate between patriotism and nationalism. So patriotism means loving
your people, right. Where you came from. And I do love my people. Nationalism means thinking your people are better or more important than other people. And I don’t, um, I [00:34:00] simply don’t.
Kim: That’s a good distinction because those do get kind of mixed together in my mind and in what I see around me a lot.
David: Yeah. Yeah. And it has massive far reaching effects if you make that shift because in war, for instance, in the, in the early days of the Iraq war, I noted that in us media, we constantly listed the numbers of us soldiers who had died. And so seldom mentioned the massive multiplication of casualties of people who were killed on the other side.
Kim: Yep.
David: And to me, those people matter just as much, people I don’t know from another country to me, as much as people I don’t know from my country. And for some people [00:35:00] that is blasphemous, but for me, it’s an article of faith. It actually comes down to my faith, right. That one of the fundamental verses in my faith is starts out for God
so loved the world, right? It’s not the Americans or the Democrats or the white people or, you know, it’s, it’s not any of those things. It’s the world. And I think any, any line that I draw that separates me from people in the world is a line that I need to step across.
Kim: How do you step across it?
David: Well, I think we step across it through relationship. By knowing each other. And extending ourselves, holding each other up. So the big divide, I think in, well there’s several, I guess, but. One of the big divides in the United States right now is a left-right divide, right? It’s a, it’s a conservative, liberal divide, and people are having a [00:36:00] really hard time hearing each other.
I have in my neighborhood where I live in North Carolina um, I am on the dividing line. I have a couple of neighbors who are pretty far right. Really far right. And quite a few neighbors on the other side of the house who were pretty far left. And I guess as a peacemaker, my house is right where it should be.
But. But I have a sign that’s out front of my house that I put on my house right after the 2016 election that encourages my neighbors to be neighbors to each other. Right. And, and sorta makes a promise for me and my house that we’ll be here for you. If your car battery is dead, you can come knock on my door.
I will jump your car, right, and get your battery going. That’s who I want to be in the world. I’m not going to check and see who you voted for before I extend myself. Right?
Kim: Yeah.
David: I guess I think that’s the starting place. People are very seldom [00:37:00] rejected. In my experience, people are very seldom rejected into making more compassionate decisions.
Kim: Yeah.
David: We shift, we change – all of us – through relationship, but the relationship comes first. So you can’t say, I will know and love you if you, you subscribe to these things and otherwise I won’t. First, it has to be, I’d like to know you. And at the point where you feel heard and trust me, and I feel like you have heard me a little bit, might trust me, then we can have some conversation about harder things. But there’s really no point in having
conversation about hard things with people you don’t respect. Like how are you going to learn from that? So we got to know each other first and then have the conversations, if we hope for the conversations to be productive.
Kim: I notice some things in American culture, a little bit more easily having stepped out or [00:38:00] stepped further away in some ways. But I see some conversations online. This is mostly on social media, which is not a great place to make observations and judgements, but you do see some patterns. And I notice how there are words.
I don’t even want to use the word political because that’s a whole other conversation, but you know, you can, somebody can use just one word that represents a massive ideology position, political stance. And, um, yeah, it becomes very difficult to have a conversation if you don’t know which words are the hot button words
of the current situation. And after stepping out, then I lose track of the evolution of the vocabulary. And I feel like I kind of step in the middle of, you know, there’s a lot of landmines sitting around that I didn’t even know were there.
David: There are. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, you mentioned the word political as being in and of [00:39:00] itself a charged word.
Kim: Right. Because I know that’s in your book is kind of discussing what, what does politics even mean? Again, it’s another one of those words where we have that conventional understanding or the lay person’s understanding. But if you really look at the definition, you could have a much richer, different understanding.
David: And of course, you know, looking at the etymology of that word politics. Poly meaning many and tics being blood-sucking parasites. No, I’m just kidding. Um, actually, uh, you know, I’m joking about that. But I actually want to push back on that narrative too, because there is this anti government sentiment in the United States that sort of assumes that people who work for the government are out to get you.
And again, that just hasn’t been my experience. I know some politicians at various levels of society, many of whom are really trying to serve the world. And it’s not a fun job a lot of the time. [00:40:00] And, um, they’ve stepped into it because they’re trying to be faithful to their own beliefs and to the people around them.
And, you know, I just, I just want to ask people, do you know the folks who work at the post office, do you think they’re all right? Because they’re government employees. You know? Nova and Tim who work up in Montreat at the post office, they’re really sweet people. They help me out a lot, and that’s the government, right.
I don’t want to, uh, with my humor feed into that narrative, but, but I do think right, the word politics can mean one of two things. Most of the time, I think we use it in one sense or the other. One of those definitions is the mud fight between the political parties. And the other, the deeper definition of the word, is any system by which a group of people
makes decisions about who matters, what matters, and what we’re going to do together and what we’re not going to do together. That’s a broader understanding of what the word politics means. [00:41:00] So I think we have a duty to subvert the oversimplification of the mud fight between the parties. And I think we have a definition to show up for making decisions together as a culture, it’s kind of the rent we pay for our oxygen to be involved in society and to show up for those conversations.
It’s difficult. I don’t like it much a lot of the time, but, but then there are those moments when you feel heard and somebody else feels heard. And I, I really love the, the friendships that I have across those political lines. Um, really treasure them.
Kim: Do you have any advice or words of wisdom or suggestions for people who have not lived in the U S for quite awhile and are coming to live in the United States?
David: Yeah. So I guess I can’t speak from any academic context or anything like that on this question. All I can speak from is my own personal experience. [00:42:00] My own experience of coming back from being overseas is, that that’s the hard part, right? The culture shock isn’t when you go there, it’s when you come back. Because you have changed.
And the world here has changed in the time that you’ve been gone. So to some degree, the person who’s been overseas is still relating to something that isn’t here anymore. And vice versa. The people that you meet, who knew you before are relating to an old you and you’re different now. And s. That’s just gonna be a little bit rocky.
I think, I think there’s no way that that’s not going to be difficult as you get reacquainted and come to know each other as who you are now. What I try to remember in that kind of context, is that not everybody’s ready to hear what I have to say. When people ask me, how was your time in Oman? [00:43:00] Right. I need to pay attention to the meta conversation. And have the conversation about the conversation and say, well, I can give you a short answer or a really long answer.
Um, if you want to have tea sometime, um, we could have a talk and I’d be happy to talk to you about that. And really interested to hear your perspectives on how life has been since I left. How have the last few years been for you here? And, what do you know about Oman? And what are you, what’s your perspective on that?
And what are your questions? You know, sometimes I think there’s a gift in letting people ask you questions. What would you like to know about? What interests you about this? And the truth is some people don’t have bandwidth there really. They’re not ready for the long answer. And so there’s no point in giving it really, because they’re not going to hear it. But if you can have the meta conversation and try to determine how much of a conversation do we really want to have, and do we want to have it now, or another time? That’s [00:44:00] useful to me to kind of navigate how and when we’re going to have these conversations.
But I also think there’s just a lot of listening that has to happen. Even as you try to answer those questions to sort of see where folks are and how much they’re ready to hear. Because we can only meet people where they are. To throw too much at people, or it’s something that’s going to be too hard for them to take in,
isn’t productive. It just wounds the relationship. And that’s really difficult. When you’re coming back with a heart and a mind that are really full of profound experiences and insights, to keep silence with those and to sit with them and see how they influence your perspective on what’s happening around you is hard work. But sometimes it’s, what’s called for.
Kim: Yeah, it takes a lot of patience. Patience with yourself and patience with other people to let it take the time that needs to take.
David: [00:45:00] Yeah, agreed. Agreed. And I also think you’re doing something brilliant by creating a podcast that lays it with folks. If they want to really know more, I’ve been doing this podcast. If you want to check it out, feel free. Um, you know, you might want to listen to this particular episode or whatever, and, and then if you want to get together for tea, let’s do it.
People who really want to know have a way to go find out.
Kim: I have really enjoyed this conversation. You’ve given me a lot to think about as usual.
David: I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the conversation as well, Kim, thank you. I don’t, I don’t think I have anything to add, except my gratitude for you being interested in what I’m thinking about. So thanks for kicking things around with me. And you’re helping me crystallize what I believe in understand as well. I very much appreciate the time.
Kim: If people want to read more, hear more from you and see what you’re up to, where should they find you and what should they look for?
David: Great. Well, um, yep. You can always Google me. [00:46:00] There’s stuff out there. There’s a Ted talk. There’s there’s all that. Um, the, the main place is DavidLaMotte.com. That’s just my website. And, um, if you can spell LaMotte you can get there. The other thing of course is Patreon, which is this online community that’s developed. Serendipitously,
I launched it four months before the pandemic began. And I’m so thrilled that you’re a part of that community. It’s really lovely to have you there. But that’s kind of my online community that I have interactive time with from time to time, and I send people music every week and do different things like that.
And so folks want to know more about Patreon they can check that out too.
Kim: Okay. Great. Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it.
David: Thanks Kim. Blessings.
David LaMotte came to my university multiple times as a traveling musician. His poignant storytelling between songs is both captivating and inspiring. Over the years he’s expanded his work into several arenas: speaking, workshops and retreats, activism, interfaith work. For an expanded introduction to his inspiring work, check out his book WorldChanging 101.
David’s work in peacemaking is attractive to me as I live across cultures and between cultures. My own perspectives have changed and broadened; I see people with fewer categories and boxes.
How can I bridge the gap between who I used to be and who I’ve become as a result of living abroad? As my family prepares for re-entry, the task of finding common ground looms large. David has several helpful things to say for those who wish to engage in conversation with people who hold different views and perspectives.
David says our cultural narrative about “changing the world” is naive. We expect that hope naturally wears off with more experience in the big, bad world. But remember that every choice you make is impacting the world around you … even your choice to be passive.
We equate “change the world” with “fix the world” or “save the world,” but those are really different concepts. Thinking you can fix the world is totally naive. But it’s not naive to think you can change it. We change it all the time, whether we like it or not.
So part of the goal for me is just to be conscious of what changes I’m making. (As conscious as I can; I’m always going to miss some.) I try to pay more attention to the impact I’m having, and try to be intentional about what love looks like in the world.
David says being overseas led him to question a lot of national narratives. When you live in another country, you get to understand on another level how complex the world is. When you step into another culture, you get thrown off a bit at how different things are in other places. You also get to see yourself in new ways.
When you remove yourself from your native culture and put yourself somewhere else, you have an opportunity to figure out, to parse out, which parts of me are actually inherently “ME,” and which parts of me are really just a reflection of my culture. When you can see which things stay constant and which things shifted, then that helps you parse out where the edges of you are.
In our conversations, we throw words around and assume we understand them the same way. But it’s worth saying, “What exactly do you mean when you use that word?”
Because words have so many different definitions; some are very “thin” definitions and some are very “thick” definitions, or you could say shallow and deep.
For example, justice can mean retribution. For a lot of people, justice means punishing the bad guys. For others, justice means fairness. It means equity. It means people have the same opportunities to try things. Peace can mean calm and placidity. Or peace can mean right relationship, wholeness, justice, and healthy society. These are very different things.
There’s so much benefit in explaining what we mean by the words we use. We can clarify and ask:
Peacemaking, peace building, peace keeping, these are all different ideas. But peacemaking (to use a catchall term) is hugely misunderstood.
Peace work is generally understood as avoiding conflict or quelling conflict. We contrast peace and conflict. But in fact, peace work is moving toward conflict in ways that are constructive rather than destructive.
It’s an accident of language that the words pacifist and passive sound anything alike, because they have no common root words. The Latin root of passive is passus, which means to suffer or to endure. When you’re passive, you tend to suffer. The Latin root of pacifist is pax, for peace, and facere, which is the fundamental action verb. So to be a pacifist, literally, etymologically, means to be a peace maker or a peace do-er. To be a pacifist means you have to be actively engaged in the work of creating peace.
In social justice circles, people often set up peace and justice as contrasting values. We say, “No justice, no peace!” at rallies. But that’s peace as calm.
I think the deepest definitions of peace and justice include each other. There really can be no justice in a society that is not peaceful. And there cannot be real peace in a society that does not have justice.
The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) is studying how we define peace and how we can quantify it. They’ve developed a metric to watch the trend lines as peace waxes and wanes in different countries around the world. This helps us understand that peace is the presence of justice and freedom. A healthy society is a peaceful society.
ABOUT HOST
Hi there! I’m Kim Adams, member of Expat Coach Coalition and licensed practitioner for Adapt and Succeed Abroad. I’m an American raising three daughters along with my math teaching husband of 20+ years, currently in Oman.
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Thinking you can fix the world is totally naive. But it’s not naive to think you can change it. We change it all the time, whether we like it or not.
How can we have deeper conversations with people we disagree with, in a compassionate way? David reminds us to pay attention to the context as we choose our approach.
In a public setting it’s a question of what you’re amplifying. While in a private setting, people aren’t open to listening until they feel heard. So I will listen to things in a private conversation and reflect that I hear them (even if I disagree) in a way I wouldn’t in a public conversation.
If the Ku Klux Klan marches in my town, I’m going to go stand in the way and interrupt that however I can. That’s a public conversation and I do not want that message to be amplified. Nor do I want it to stand without resistance.
However, a few years ago, a prominent, local white supremacist asked me lunch. And I went. I listened to him, although not without challenge.
Remember there’s always the conversation and the meta conversation (the conversation about the conversation). “How are we going to have this conversation?” is an important question.
When things get nasty on my Facebook wall, I invite people into private conversation.
“Can we catch up about this?” If it’s a local friend, I’ll say, “Can we have a cup of tea?”
There are tiers of effectiveness in communication, depending on your context. Face-to-face is best (though that doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily be great). Social media is probably our least productive context in which to disagree.
It’s still sometimes important to put out an idea on social media, because that is a public space. But that can be mostly used as an invitation into deeper, more productive conversation offline.
Peace work doesn’t mean we agree. It means we can disagree and still move forward together.
We very seldom argue each other into agreement.
Daniel Buttry, a recently retired peacemaker, said that we often think about the national discourse like a football game. In a football game, I win by defeating the other team. That’s just not a good metaphor for our national discourse.
He said we need to think about our national discourse more like a marriage. You do not win at a marriage by defeating your partner, by arguing your partner into a corner. That just doesn’t help.
You’ve got to listen to each other. Even when the things being said are damaging or hurtful, we’ve got to find ways to listen to each other in private conversations in order to have some possibility of hearing each other and making decisions together.
The more we know each other, the more we have the capacity to love and understand each other. The easiest way to typecast other people is to not know them, and the only effective cure for that is to know them. Human relationship is the best way to dismantle our bigotry.
Where I grew up people would use the phrase, “He’s a good Christian man.” Christian was the definition of good in my small town context. And not knowing many people who weren’t Christian, I didn’t really question that.
When I came to know and made Jewish friends and Muslim friends and Hindu friends and Buddhist friends and Unitarian friends and atheist friends, and all of that, I came to understand that these are separate ideas. These are lenses on the light, and people can see the light through a lot of different lenses.
A lot of our sense of identity is rooted in oppositional thinking: “Who am I not?” … “I am this because I am not that.” or “I belong to this group because I’m not in that group.”
In terms of national identity, I feel really grateful to have come to know and love people from many countries, and to no longer have my identity so deeply rooted in being an American as much as being a human. But of course I am an American. I’m deeply shaped by my own culture.
Coming back to word definitions again, it’s important to delineate between patriotism and nationalism.
Patriotism means loving your people, where you came from. And I do love my people. Nationalism means thinking your people are better or more important than other people. And I don’t. I simply don’t.
Knowing each other; extending ourselves; holding each other up… that’s how we step across dividing lines.
That’s who I want to be in the world. I’m not going to check and see who you voted for before I extend myself.
I think that’s the starting place.
We can’t say, I will know and love you if you subscribe to these things and otherwise I won’t.
There’s really no point in having conversation about hard things with people you don’t respect. How are you going to learn from that? We’ve got to know each other first and then have the conversations, if we hope for the conversations to be productive.
It’s commonly said that returning from overseas is the hardest move of all. I think this has to do with our expectations that we “know” a place and the people, but then we’re confronted by all the ways we’ve changed, they’ve changed, and the place has changed.
To some degree, the person who’s been overseas is still relating to something that isn’t here anymore. And vice versa. The people who knew you before are relating to an old you and you’re different now. That’s just gonna be a little bit rocky. There’s no way that’s not going to be difficult as you get reacquainted and come to know each other as who you are now.
I try to remember not everybody’s ready to hear what I have to say. The truth is some people don’t have bandwidth, really. They’re not ready for the long answer. So there’s no point in giving it, because they’re not going to hear it.
But the same tips as above will help to navigate this dynamic. Having the “meta” conversation to find out how much conversation people want, and when, will be really useful.
When people ask me, “How was your time in Oman?“ I could say,
This all takes a lot of patience – patience with yourself, and patience with other people.
There’s a lot of listening that has to happen. Even as you try to answer their questions, you’re still listening to see how much they’re ready to hear. Because we can only meet people where they are. To throw too much at people, or it’s something that’s going to be too hard for them to take in, isn’t productive. It just wounds the relationship.
And that’s really difficult. When you’re coming back with a heart and a mind that are really full of profound experiences and insights, to keep silence with those and to sit with them and see how they influence your perspective on what’s happening around you is hard work. But sometimes it’s what’s called for.
Find out what David LaMotte is up to at his website DavidLaMotte.com. There you can find a few samples of his speaking engagements, including his TedTalk: Music Can Help Us Understand Peace and Conflict, his books, music albums, and so much more. He also has a Patreon community, where he shares music each week and hosts monthly gatherings online.
MORE EPISODES
Sometimes we lose track of how we impact those around us. Recognizing our power to effect change can be very uplifting. David says, “Thinking you can fix the world is totally naive. But it’s not naive to think you can change it. We change it all the time, whether we like it or not.” Then it’s up to us to know when and how to engage with others who hold vastly different viewpoints.
Do you like the idea of built-in community and connection combined with plenty of privacy? Do you wish your children had freedom to play outside and with neighborhood friends at any time? Do you want to retire in a country with low cost of living, gorgeous weather and deliciously fresh, healthy food? Then it’s worth your time to learn more about Greek Village Cohousing and why it’s great for families. “It’s really for anyone who is drawn to community. That’s what it comes down to.”
As TCKs (and adults) work through the complex issues of identity, place and belonging, it can be really hard to express what’s going on inside. We may need an expanded vocabulary. We may need permission to be outside of prescribed standards. “When we use creativity and tell our stories in creative ways, it opens up a different way of processing. It helps us to get past the expectations we have for ourselves.”
Saying goodbye is unfortunately a staple of expat life. Here are some of my tips for those who resist goodbyes … relevant for adults and kids; leavers and stayers.
Kim Adams is an American raising three daughters along with her math teaching husband of 20+ years. She loves photography, reading, thunderstorms, walking on the beach, camping where there are no bugs, and has a weakness for mint chocolate chip ice cream.
As a member of Expat Coach Coalition, Kim is a licensed practitioner for Adapt and Succeed Abroad, a tested and proven program that helps you do just that: adapt, and succeed, no matter where you are.
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