Hope

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I hadn’t given much thought to hope, beyond it being a nice feeling to have, until I heard of CR Snyder’s cognitive model for hope which shed a new light on it for me. He proposed a model of hope where (paraphrasing) an individual may be hopeful if they have:

Goals they desire. If you don’t or can’t picture any future state you’d like then you won’t have a lot of hope.
Pathways. You need to see some ways that you may make step-by-step progress towards a goal.
Willpower or agency. You need to be motivated and believe that you have the ability to succeed at your goal.

With all of these you can imagine feeling hopeful. Without any one of them and you probably won’t so much.

The mountain is the Ogre, a wholly impossible looking peak scaled by Doug Scott and others for which I would have had zero hope to climb (no pathways, no willpower) and yet they remarkably did.

HT once again to Brené Brown in Dare to Lead .

Published 4 Jul 2020

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Second cousins once removed.

The fresh start effect

Even when you’ve figured out how family relations work, families, in just a few generations, can get surprisingly complex. I won’t pretend this one doesn’t require a little study. What is a first, second or third cousin? And what does once or twice removed have to do with anything? One way to think about it is that the first, second or third cousins, have to do with the number of generations you are away from a shared ancestor. So, who you would probably normally call your cousins — your parents brothers or sisters, children — have one generation, your parents generation, before reaching grandparents that are shared by both. If you have children, and your first cousins have children, they will be second cousins to eachother as it’s now two generations to a shared ancestor — their great grandparents in this case. While first, second, or third cousins of eachother are of the same generation, when you are once removed it means you are cousins one generation apart. So, you would be first cousins once removed with your cousin’s children. If you look at the sketch, you’ll actually see that you are second cousins once removed with your parent’s cousin’s grandchildren. Simple ¯_(ツ)_/¯ The sketch gets pretty complicated to see this, and that’s without even showing having more than one sibling, any of the in-law families, or considering divorces, remarries, half-brothers, step mothers and the like. Crikey.…Even when you’ve figured out how family relations work, families, in just a few generations, can get surprisingly complex. I won’t pretend this one doesn’t require a little study. What is a first, second or third cousin? And what does once or twice removed have to do with anything? One way to think about it is that the first, second or third cousins, have to do with the number of generations you are away from a shared ancestor. So, who you would probably normally call your cousins — your parents brothers or sisters, children — have one generation, your parents generation, before reaching grandparents that are shared by both. If you have children, and your first cousins have children, they will be second cousins to eachother as it’s now two generations to a shared ancestor — their great grandparents in this case. While first, second, or third cousins of eachother are of the same generation, when you are once removed it means you are cousins one generation apart. So, you would be first cousins once removed with your cousin’s children. If you look at the sketch, you’ll actually see that you are second cousins once removed with your parent’s cousin’s grandchildren. Simple ¯_(ツ)_/¯ The sketch gets pretty complicated to see this, and that’s without even showing having more than one sibling, any of the in-law families, or considering divorces, remarries, half-brothers, step mothers and the like. Crikey.

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