Leaving Redondo Union High School’s auditorium on Friday night, I could hardly keep up with my thoughts, which roved erratically between subjects like transgender health and gardening and listening and digital music sharing and the role stress plays in my own life.
I’d just been to a TEDx event, a phenomenal and thought-provoking evening comprised of vegan fare (courtesy of Sacks on the Beach) and TED talks – four live and two pre-recorded – arranged and curated by the local TEDxRedondoBeach chapter.
Local businessman Christian Anthony Horvath emceed the event, which he has been curating for over five months, introducing the speakers as “people I’ve been blessed to meet along my personal journey.” The central theme connecting their speaking topics was the exploration of new paradigms and new ways of perceiving the world.
First up was Alex Charfen, an entrepreneur and business owner who spoke about stress, something he became acutely familiar with when he invested his life’s savings into the real estate market in 2007 and it crashed a year later.
The collapse of the housing market catapulted Charfen and his wife into bankruptcy and a whirlwind of stress. At some point, though, they began to change the way they perceived stress.
“Every night before we fell asleep, [my wife and I] had to tell each other three things we were grateful for, even though the world around us was falling apart,” Charfen said. “So often we can’t change what’s going on, but we can change our perception.”
He floated the idea that stress in our society is “overmarketed” and that perhaps it can be harnessed as a positive force.
“At the gym what do you do when you get strong? You add more weight… if our bodies react that way, so do our minds,” he said, noting that too much stress can burn a person out, but that the amount can propel a person into productivity.
“The amount of stress we are able to deal with in our lives is directly proportionate to the legacy we leave,” he suggested, suggesting a direct correlation between productivity and legacy.
Next up was Dr. Maddie Deutsch, the clinical lead at the UC San Francisco Center of Excellence for Transgender Health and director of the Transgender Health Program at the LA Gay & Lesbian Center. Deutsch is the only medical school faculty member in the country who is both transgender and providing and researching transgender medical care.
Her talk focused on fork-in-the-road life decisions, which are often scary and new, but most of the time, worth making. She spoke of being evicted from her apartment on “trumped-up, false allegations,” an unfair situation she could have protested but didn’t because it became an impetus for a change in her life.
“Sometimes it’s best to heed some of those eviction notices life tosses you,” Deutsch said of her decision to change her career’s trajectory after she’d already finished medical school and her residency.
“Sometimes you just feel unsettled. There’s something that’s not right. You need to make a change but you can’t really figure out what it is,” she said.
Here Deutsch segued into a conversation about gender, sex, and sexual orientation, which she joked was a bit of a mind-boggle for Redondo Beach.
She explained that gender is a spectrum and encompasses a great deal of gray area.
“I think there’s an idea out there that transgender people are kind of like… I was a lumberjack and now I’m a…flight attendant,” she joked, noting that women can be “tomboys” and men can be “feminine.”
“It was tough to explain in 1995 [when I was coming out], because it’s still tough to explain in 2013,” she said.
Disillusioned with her medical career, Deutsch decided that transgender research and health were her foremost passions. She learned that 60 percent of transgender people have to teach their healthcare provider what it means to be transgender and 40 percent delay seeking healthcare for that very reason – realizations that compelled her to leap into her calling, which continues to be both a challenge and a source of satisfaction.
“It’s tough. I’m really happy. You have to make changes in your life sometimes… and sometimes it’s not the easiest thing to do but when you go with it, it just lines up…. Sometimes you have to make the decision that makes you happy even if it’s not the easiest,” she said.
Following Deutsch were two pre-recorded TED talks from a self-described “guerrilla gardener” and a musician.
Ron Finley, the “gangsta gardener,” spoke of his mission to plant vegetables on vacant city-owned property in South Central Los Angeles as a means to combat both obesity and poverty.
The City of Los Angeles, he said, owns 26 square miles of vacant land, or enough area for 725 million tomato plants. Initially the city resisted his initiative, but he circulated a petition that garnered 900 signatures, and began to talk publicly about his vision.
“What I’m talking about is putting people to work and getting kids off the street… gangsta gardening. If you ain’t a gardener, you ain’t a gangsta,” he said.
The idea, he said, is to teach kids about gardening and nutrition – “if kids grow kale, kids eat kale” – and about taking the reins of their community and their lives.
“To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil. We are the soil,” Finley said. “You’d be surprised how kids are affected by this. Gardening is the most therapeutic and defining act you can do, especially in the inner city. Plus, you get strawberries.”
Musician Amanda Palmer followed Finley. She spoke of her connection with her fans and the vulnerable act of asking them to trust her and support her.
“After all of our shows we would sign autographs and hug fans and hang out and talk to people and we made an art out of asking people to help us and join us,” she said. “…And then Twitter came along and made things even more magic because I could ask instantly for anything anywhere.”
She recounted the time a family of poor Honduran immigrants invited her in, and offered to her and her band their beds and their food because their music made the family’s teenaged daughter happy. It is this sense of connection, Palmer said, that sustains her and keeps her close and true to her fan base.
“My music career has been spent trying to encounter people on the internet…blogging, tweeting, not just tour dates and our video but our work and our art and our fears and our hangovers our mistakes and we see each other and I think when we really see each other we want to help each other,” she said.
The intimate connection she felt with her fans inspired her to give away her music for free on the Internet, and to trust that they would reciprocate with favors and money and respect.
“I didn’t make them [pay for my music]; I asked them and from the very act of asking from people I connected with them and when you connect with them people want to help you,” she said.
“I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is how do we make people pay for our music? What if we started asking how do we let people pay for music?”
The next live speaker to take the stage was Ruth Beaglehole, founder and director of Echo Parenting & Education in Echo Park, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting parents, teachers, and caregivers to break the cycle of family violence.
“I grew up a statistic,” Beaglehold began. “I grew up violated – my heart, my body, my mind. I grew up shamed, I grew up learning that I needed to struggle with life with some really sad coping strategies.”
She moved from her native New Zealand to the United States during the women’s movement, which afforded her a new perspective and the chance to connect with other women who were harnessing a newfound power by speaking out against violence and shame.
She, like many other women at the time, made a conscious decision to break the cycle.
“It was through support, it was through breaking through cultural messages… It was breaking through shame, it was moving to vulnerability that we set out to raise our children differently,” she said.
She chose not to punish or threaten or shame her children, and spurned the idea of false and empty praise and accolades.
“Imagine if every time we did something right we got a gold star… Why don’t we treat children the way we want to be treated?” she implored.
She spoke about the need for parents to establish meaningful connections with their children – a smooth segue into the next speaker, Leon Berg of the Ojai Foundation, who explored the idea of listening. He spoke about how the modern concept of “council” derives from the ancient art of storytelling, how both are based on the “practice of listening and speaking from the heart” and how both are absolutely necessary for emotional and physical health.
“It’s this devout listening that helps us develop empathy or heart thinking… [which is] so closely related to the art of emotional intelligence,” he said.
Berg talked of his experience providing council for Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews in Israel.
“Very often I would start a Jewish-Arab council by asking them to say their name, where they were born, what their lineage was – track it back as far as they could go – and then tell a story about one of their ancestors,” he said. “Whenever an Israeli Arab or Palestinian would speak, there was invariably a story about… a time during Israeli War in 1948 when 700,000 Palestinians were [killed].
“So often when a Jewish participant would speak, there would be a story about family members in the Holocaust, at which point the grief and loss of both peoples is right there in the center of the circle.”
Only then could the participants “move beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing” and connect and reflect and relate and listen to each other, he said.
“I’m trying to imagine a world where listening is highly valued, where we take the time to meet with and listen to those we care about – our partners, our children, our parents, friends, colleagues, and especially our enemies. Allowing our selves to enter that vulnerable place is the beginning of listening and our future might well depend upon it,” he said.
For upcoming TEDxRedondoBeach events, visit http://tedxredondobeach.com/events/upcomingevents/ and subscribe to the mailing list.
