It's a Problem

"Dad, tell me what you are doing. "

I'm fixing something, probably a computer glitch, and my daughter, who is blind, is wanting to know the details of what I m doing so that if and when this problem happens again she will be able to do the fix.

It is not a problem that she is blind and I am sighted. The problem is me. The problem is my ways of handling any task. Information comes to me in clumps which are primarily conceptual and not sensory (taste, touch, sight, hearing, smell). I call it mosaic thinking. She understands this because it is a strong component of her information input.

The difficulty comes as I translate this clump into my decision making processes which tend to be rational, not relational. My preference is to make binary decisions (right/wrong, black/white, smooth/rough, night/day, standard/non-standard). So when she asks me to tell her what I'm doing, she is asking me to interrupt the whole process going on in my head and interpret for her, which takes a whole different set of skills. Most importantly, to stop and deploy this different set of skills risks losing the thread of solving the problem at hand.

Seventy-five percent of the population prefers to receive their information with a sensory filter. Not only does this type of filter use the five senses, but it is present or past oriented so that it draws on similar "experiences" of information gathered in the past and how that information is similar to today's information.

I, on the other twenty-five percent side of the statistics, am intuitively oriented when it comes to information input. I see the forest, but have to really focus to see the trees that make up the forest. Plus, my information gathering takes a future cast. I am trying to see how this information will be useful in the future. So, I get clumpy info. This is good when you are trying to help others think out side the (their) box, but difficult to give a running translation of a problem solving activity.

Then, I have to feed this clumpy information into my rational information processing self. Fifty percent of the population are Thinking (rational) type and fifty percent are Feeling (relational) type. There is always a translation from information gathering to information processing. However, some translations go smoother. Sensory gathering is a better match with rational processing, but this doesn't guarantee a better result, just an easier translation. Intuitive information gathering is also a better match with relational processing, but, again, doesn't guarantee a better result.

So, this is the situation I often find myself in. My daughter wants a moment by moment commentary on what I am doing to her prized computer and I can't provide that commentary without interrupting the process that enables me to solve the problem.

Life is a grand adventure.