Our men were not allowed to be alone. They needed to be bodily escorted by at least three of us in order to interact with anyone outside the tribe. We did not touch people outside the tribe and we did not make eye contact with them. Simple rules. We all understood the rules. 

The problem came when we got together with them. The other tribe crashed into our space, shouting greetings and opening their arms to give hugs that we shrank away from. They attempted to corner us one-on-one with eye-gazing intensity, while we scurried around in a mild panic trying to keep the requisite 3 female chaperones with each male. We were in such a frenzy and they were so confused that no one got around to the simple negotiation we were supposed to be having. 

The tribes were fake but the frenzy & confusion were real. This was a game we played 20 years ago on my study abroad and I still remember my consternation as I chased my-tribe Zachary across the floor while trying to duck a hug from other-tribe Eric. After about 10 minutes, our wise instructor ended the chaos and we all sat down with stunned looks on our faces. The impact of these two vastly different ways of framing the world was striking. 

And of course, just because no one engineers seeing-the-frame exercises for you in real life doesn’t mean they’re not there. 

A real-life tribal frame tripped me like invisible wire a few weeks ago. My family’s special spot is my grandma’s lake house in New Hampshire, and my daughter and I were visiting like we do every summer. One evening, I picked up the milk and heard a very shallow slosh. Not a good discovery, because my kiddo needs milk in the a.m. and I need milk in my coffee and I NEED my coffee. 

The grocery store is a good drive away, so I said to my mom, “I’m going next door to ask if I can borrow a cup of milk.” 

You’d have thought I said I was going next door in my birthday suit to ask if I could borrow a bikini. “Oh no honey,” my mom said, recoiling and shaking her head, “oh no. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

The upshot is after extended negotiations I made a grumpy, nonsensical nighttime milk run. It was grumpy and nonsensical because for the life of me, I didn’t understand why the next-door’s would mind a quick knock on the door with a neighborly request behind it. My mom, however, felt uncomfortable about such an ask, even if made by me. To her, it carried an unwelcome weight of bothering others, asking for a small kindness we hadn’t earned that would somehow need to be repaid. 

On my longish bitter drive to grocery store, I realized this whole incident had a bite to it because once upon a time, I saw the world that way too. My growing-up frame included a dose of self-reliance on steroids, and the message my mom and I projected was something like, “We’ll do it all ourselves, we’ll handle it ourselves, we’re fine. Thank you! Is there anything we can help you with?”

My adult years gradually shifted my outlook, from struggling to be a self-sufficient little island, to getting my heart into the ebb and flow of life as part of a community. Which means, among other things, if you want to borrow my bug spray, have at it. You can be a complete stranger to me and that’s cool – no need to sit there hosting a mosquito banquet when you can see the Off! poking out of my mom-purse. If someone on the street asks me for a dollar, I’ll give it to them. If friends are struggling with something, I will listen. It also means when I am struggling with something, I reach out to my trusted ones for help. It’s not an easy reach, but I’m learning it. And if it’s 8 pm and you’ve got milk at your house and I don’t at mine, get your pouring arm ready. 

I don’t mean to knock my mom, because some of her frames – like knowing that a mother’s love for her children trumps everything on earth – still fit me today, and I hope to pass them on to my kiddo. But the whole Milkgate incident got me thinking….do we even think about the power of our frameworks on the world, and what ones are and are not serving us in our daily lives? And for the parentals among us, what do you want to pass on to your kids? What perspectives do you want to give them to help make sense of, well, everything?

One of the frames I’m trying to give my daughter is that everyone is a child of God….or, a child of the sacred divine, for my folks who aren’t feeling the omnipotent-being-in-the-sky thing. Even when someone’s ugliness is lashing all over. Even when your ugliness is lashing all over – the beauty is there, in them and in you.

Another one is, don’t be looking to the rest of the world to tell you who you are and how well or not-well you’re doing. Those messages are only real when they come from inside.

And in a twist on Kurt Vonnegut – the way things are now is only one moment and one possibility. We don’t have to keep going this way if we don’t want to. 

Which I take to mean, if someone else’s frames on life don’t work for you, there are infinitely more ways of looking at the universe and approaching the world. If one doesn’t feel right to you, make like Elsa and let it go.