Transactional Verses Transformational?
When the boy first came to me, he had the proverbial fear of his shadow in him. Sitting on the divan, staring at his folded hands, while the mother bossed around a semi-willing fellah helping them move in. I sensed that he was one of an unfortunate (for both the boy and the mother) collection. How many places had the boy lived in his six years? How many semi-willing wannabees in the mother’s life had made those places something less than home? You might think I am criticizing the mother here, but you would be wrong. If she had some small part of the talent she possessed with the boy that could have been diverted towards the selection of these numbskulls who fed off of her goodwill at both the boy and her expense, they would have been just fine. It is neither in me or useful to search out every last why or what for about it, but a mother’s talent cannot make up for what is not whole in their lives.
Change? The boy knew change in spades. It was the root of the problem, not the source of a solution. From park bullies, to landlords, to jobs that came and went and didn’t pay the bills when they were there, to teachers who thought he was stupid (don’t even get me started on that one), the boy should have been a poster child to the glories of change, rather than a continuous rehearsal for some future postal poster.
I am told that we are hard wired for change: a classic case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. We are hard wired to look for difference at the edges of a static world. That was the experience of our ancestors. We are hardwired to walk through the woods and detect the predator’s motion between and amongst the stationary trees. When the path we are on shifts beneath our feet and the trees are themselves continuously in motion, where is that difference that defines potential danger. The bank overwhelms us with information and then says it’s your own fault that you are up to your eyeballs in fees that any rational individual would define as stealing rather than their due. Change is the weapon of the predator, not the shield protecting you from him.
So the boy comes up to me that very evening while I sit at the kitchen table, a spectator to the circus performance taking place in my home, and stares at the cornet beside me on the table. I tell him to go ahead and pick it up. I am ashamed of myself for not seeing that he was meant to hold it that very moment. It would be months before I would make the obvious connection. It would not be change that would chase away the fear of his shadow, but holding in his hands that good thing that would never change, once held. I know all too well what he felt when his warm breath took the chill out of the brass and made it one with himself. Bring the bullies on, let the landlord go screw himself, it would still be a little while before the real change of nothing changing again would be real, but his little six year old mind understood something about it that evening he first came to live with me.
So my grandson gets me this yearly subscription to a magazine called The Nation. There is this discussion in it about the difference between transactional verses transformational. Who the hell talks like that I wonder? Let me make it simple for you. Transactional are all those bank fees that are the weapon of the predator in an ever changing world. Transformational is holding a horn to your lips and playing a good note that will be good today at the age of fourteen for the boy and every bit as good should he someday live to be my age and put it to his lips at ninety-three. Transformational is forcing the path to stop shifting and perform its role as a path, and to tell the trees to stop moving about and perform their roles as trees, so just maybe we will see that difference at the edge of a static world and be able once again to identify it as the predator that it is.
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