What Do I Most Commonly Hear?

• TNG: “The TOG never listens to us, they just want to tell us about how things were back in the day”
• TOG: “The TNG just don’t listen to us, see how they aren’t doing it right even after we told them how to do it!”
• TNG: “The TOG is gatekeeping knowledge or access to knowledge”
• TOG: “The TNG isn’t interested in learning, they just want to do things their own way and don’t care about the proper way to do things”
• TOG: “The TNG never asks us the right questions”

A Problem As I See It

One of the problems (notice I said one of and not the only) I observe is a disconnect in the hand-off of knowledge intergenerationally in our community.

Our community is filled with proprietary knowledge like ritual, protocol, and the like that is imbued with personal and historical meaning. This meaning makes this knowledge particularly special to those who possess it and particularly desirable to those who want it.

But this knowledge is not timeless. It’s meaning is contextual to each person and to the time in which that knowledge is consumed, practiced, and passed down.

The meaning of a ritual or protocol or practice today isn’t necessarily going to be that same as it was twenty years ago and may not be the same twenty years from now.

It may not be the same between myself and a person of similar identity in the next room today.

Yet that meaning is often the thing that most attracts us to the knowledge. It transforms it from a skill that anyone can learn into a ritual that only WE do!

The problem is in passing that down, how do you do it?

In my estimation, the physical instantiations of this knowledge are relative but the meaning behind the knowledge is the goal.