Day 3 Fin

The last session of the day was Creative Storytelling. As usual, they roll out the energizing, fun sessions at the end of the day. I wasn’t inspired at first, but the presenter, who did not use PowerPoint (he’s my new hero), won me over with his techniques. They could probably transfer to the classroom provided the story you're telling has a point related to the training, but it is a good life-skill. I thought my wife, who practices improv, would have really appreciated the session.

In the evening I took a hunted bus tour of San Diego. The guides knew how to tell a story. They must have attended the same session I did. By their own admission, they injected a certain amount of drama into their presentations, but it’s kind of hard not to inject drama into your story when you’re driving around in a purple and neon-green bus in which the interior is done-up to look like the inside of a coffin.

The question on the discussion boards this week concerns when we learn. As adult, do we learn only when we have to? I answered, of course not. We learn all the time. Case in point: Tonight I learned the origins of the word “wake”. We know a wake as a presentation of the body for family and friends before burial. Ghoulish enough. In the old days, doctors really didn’t have good methods for knowing if someone was dead or not. They may have simply slipped into a coma, or unconsciousness. The doctor would press his ear against the victim’s chest, not wanting to get too close to the victim's mouth if he or she died of TB, and if he didn’t detect a heartbeat, he was pronounced dead. As a result, a lot of people were buried, well, shall we say, prematurely. Officials came up a with concept of a “wake” whereby the body was laid out for several days until putrification set in proving the poor victim was indeed dead and finally buried. The bodies were surrounded by flowers to mask the scent of the rotting body. Just to be on the safe side, bodies were sometimes buried with a string tied around their finger. The string was attached to a bell above ground. If they woke up, they can frantically ring the bell, thus being "saved by the bell".

If you doubted we only learn when we have to, you just learned something by reading the last paragraph and you didn’t have to. It just happened.