Hastings Street
In 1943 a black man who had been homeschooled in Tutwiler, Mississippi relocated to Detroit and took a job with the Ford Motor Company. For the next five years, he worked by day at the factory, and by night he immersed himself in the heart of the black entertainment district on Hastings Street, located on the east side of the city. Over the course of time he realized that his acoustic guitar was not loud enough to be heard among the common pianos at the blues bars. So he bought an electric one.
In September of 1948, the man was invited into United Sound Studios to record a semi-autobiographical song that he had written after overhearing a conversation between his mother and stepfather. The essence of the interaction was his stepfather encouraging his mother to accept the fact that their son had an innate love and desire for musical expression.
Without any other musicians, he recorded the song with that electric guitar, his voice and a microphone placed in a pallet to pick up his foot stomps. The input was then fed to a speaker that had been placed in a toilet so as to produce an echo effect. After three takes, the song was finally recorded. Released in November of that year, it caught the ear of a disc jockey in Memphis named BB King and went on to become the first down-home blues song to reach number one on the R&B charts.
We’ll come back to this in a bit…
Parallel one way streets
We have within the map of our lives innumerable streets of disposition that intersect with one another. Love and Adventure intersect on romantic getaways. Stubborn and Independence intersect when we refuse to read the furniture assembly manual. (#piecesleftover) Fly into the beautiful city of Chicago at night and you’ll get a wonderful representation of the matrixed grid that are formed by these intersections.
But some dispositions don’t intersect. Geometry tells us that they must therefore run in parallel. Tradition and Imagination are two such dispositions, which run in parallel on one way streets that go in opposite directions. They don’t (easily) intersect, nor do they go in the same direction.
Hum or Huh?
Function junctions
Over two million people each year explore their personality types with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, known more commonly as the MBTI. Statistics tell us that about 12% of these people discover themselves to be Extroverted-Sensing-Feeling-Judging types, which means we have another 240,000 ESFJ’s identified on the planet. Regrettably, across all the sixteen types, only a subset come to more fully understand the tool in terms of their functions. This deeper dive allows MBTI participants to recognize the developmental basis for the tool and see themselves as forever being works in progress, with some things coming naturally to them and others being less automated.
The exploration of these functions leads to certain junctions, but the two in focus here are better described in terms of the roadways above – parallel and going in opposite directions. These functions, Introverted Sensing (Si) and Extroverted Intuition (Ne), when interfaced across family members and generations, can make for some disconnectedness; some in-junctions. Before we get back to Hastings Street, let’s explore this a bit.
Introverted Sensing and Tradition
For people whose MBTI types are ISFJ or ISTJ, their dominant function is Introverted Sensing (Si). A core construct to this function is a preference for sourcing the past as a blueprint for the future. Si people commonly adhere to tradition across facets in their lives, from ethnic culture to family values and the doctrines of their faith. They prefer tried and true over any flavor of the month. In this way, they can be remarkable torchbearers of tradition to their families, their communities of faith and their workplaces.
Extroverted Intuition and Imagination
Opposite to Introverted Sensing is the Extroverted Intuition (Ne) function, which is the primary function for ENFP and ENTP types. Their temporal orientation is most commonly directed toward the future, with a preference for new models, new ideas and things imagined. The blueprint for that future is less crafted from past establishments and more sourced from their desire to generate and galvanize others around new concepts. Ne types can contribute both vision and innovation to their personal, professional and faith spheres.
Where the past can meet the future
More than one coming of age movie has been crafted around the dynamic that can eventuate when a parent has imprinted their preference for Introverted Sensing on family values and a child has a preference for Extroverted Intuition. The resulting differential transcends the tropes of:
- What do you mean you’re not going to stay and help run the family business?!!?
- No you are not going to homecoming wearing that!
The traditionalist parent sees the daughter or son as wayward, while she/he sees the parent as stultifying, and this differential can span family norms, academic pursuits, and religious faith to name just a few life domains. Repercussions can continue for years into adulthood for the child and into empty-nester years for the parent.
While they stare off in opposing temporal orientations that seem as though they will never intersect, the Si parent and the Ne daughter/son can wind up having something in common. Guilt. The parent feels as though they have not sufficiently carried forward the archetypes of the past and have therefore underequipped their daughter/son with guideposts for the future. The daughter/son feels as though their future-focusing is an abandonment of their parent, which leaves that natural inclination to feel like a betrayal – something that perhaps should not be trusted.
Appreciation begins with understanding
Now all of this is not to suggest that such a type preference differential across generations is predetermined to be problematic. The point here is not to find fault with either preference, but rather to validate them both. To know your MBTI type is to understand that you’ve come to the world with certain hardwired preferences. And while, through the course of your life, you will augment and offset those preferences, those things that are most natural to you will remain as such. These preferences are mutable, but not reversible.
For some people, that which is most natural directs their gaze to the past, which informs and structures their life. They appreciate that what has happened can be known and used as a roadmap for what is still to come.
For others, that which is most natural has them looking toward the future, which is place where ideas belong. Their minds are constantly seeking new possibilities, which may only partially be informed by past precedent.
Where Introverted Sensing and Extroverted Intuition can productively intersect is at the point of understanding of their differences and appreciation for the gifts of the other. Because these preferences are innate, they are authentic; they transcend marketing messages, peer pressure, and other social environment factors. They will endure (and evolve) across fads and FOMOs.
A central gift to the MBTI is its capacity to deepen people’s understanding of their core selves. A central challenge to those who engage in it is to recognize the legitimacy of the preferential differences across people, including those in one’s own family. It can be hard to strip away judgment from differentials, but the MBTI educates us that our type preferences should not be subject to Yelp reviews.
It’s in him, and it’s gotta come out
While its musical style became seminal for innumerable blues artists who followed, Boogie Chillun was in its own way also an inspiration to generations of kids who would wonder about how to reconcile the blueprinting of the past with the possibilities of the future. Its three verses beautifully articulate this in vernacular prose:
Well my mama she didn’t ‘low me
Just to stay out all night long, oh Lord
Well my mama didn’t ‘low me
Just to stay out all night long
I didn’t care what she didn’t ‘low
I would boogie-woogie anyhow
When I first came to town people
I was walkin’ down Hastings Street
Everybody was talkin’ about the Henry Swing Club
I decided I drop in there that night
When I got there, I say, “Yes, people”
They was really havin’ a ball!
Yes, I know
Boogie Chillin
One night I was layin’ down
I heard mama ‘n papa talkin’
I heard papa tell mama
Let that boy boogie-woogie
It’s in him, and it got to come out
And I felt so good
Went on boogie’n just the same
And there it is. From homeschooled by his mama to his legacy as a seminal blues musician, John Lee Hooker gave testament to the challenge of trying to hold on to the ways of the past while seeking uncharted domains in the future. In doing so, he listened to what seemed counter to his upbringing, but what was nevertheless intrinsically inside him. If you’ve never heard the song, you should. If you’ve heard it, you should listen to it again.
And so we find…
It may seem a stretch to draw a line of continuity from a 75 year old delta blues song to an understanding of yourself through MBTI functions, but the throughline is there. It is invaluable to know in the present how informed you are by the past, or how focused you are on the future. Your temporal orientation is hugely impactful to your life and how you interact with others. To understand that is core to finding your hum. Maybe even your boogie.
