When we were travelling this summer, my son asked me an interesting question. "What are the five most important things in life?" he said. I was floored momentarily. We have not had many serious conversations since he turned 14! But I tried to answer as we buzzed along I-85 in North Carolina.
First, I said, is Love. Not romance, or cuddly-love, but the kind of love that lasts. The love that cleans up vomit in the middle of the night, and changes diapers, and provides a shoulder to cry on even when we're busy. The love that endures slights, and bad days, and the friction of living with people for years. The love that celebrates others' successes, and wishes the world well, and sacrifices in the name of all that is good and great.
Next, I said, is Loyalty. Loyalty is akin to love, but not the same thing. It is the essence of friendship and partnership and family and community. Loyalty is the will to stand by someone even when that person is in trouble, or being disagreeable, or suffering. Loyalty is believing enough in someone or something to act on their/its behalf without regard for one's own comfort. Loyalty is stick-to-it-ness, and it nurtures relationships and principles and values.
After that, I thought, would come Virtue. Virtue is the will to do good in every situation. What can I do that will make this situation even better? How can I act in a positive way? What would be the loving and kind and caring thing to do? Virtue improves the person who exercises it, and improves the world around those people.
Then, I said, we need Pleasure. Pleasure is the spring of all human action. I suppose that I could use the word Joy here, but I don't want to leave the body out of the discussion. Physical pleasures are important too. We need to touch and to be touched. We need to eat and drink, and to enjoy sustaining the life that beats within us. We need to feel the sensations of the world around us. These pleasures are vital. But we also need to find pleasure in good ideas, in good work, in doing good. Pleasure gives us hope, and makes belief possible. Pleasure engages our attention, and makes great work possible. When we learn to take pleasure in virtue, and loyalty, and lasting love, we harness the greatest force of our life in the service of all that's good.
And finally, to be able to enjoy the benefits of the first four things, and to cultivate them, we need Patience. Life doesn't give us what we want when we want it. Life doesn't make things easy, or quick, or painless. Relationships are slow work. Teaching and learning are slow work. Building a community, or a house, or a new way of life, is slow work. Patience is walking one step at a time, keeping attention on the work at hand. Patience is stopping work long enough to relax and renew one's will to go on. Patience is not straining to finish, but finding satisfaction in each little success along the way. Patience is letting time do its work rather than trying to outrace time itself.
So those were the five things, I thought. Five most important things. Five of many, of course.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Friday, August 10, 2007
Fact, Fiction, and Lived Experience
As I'm reading Morris Berman's Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West, I am continually struck by moments of keen insight and wisdom. A good book is that way, isn't it? Chords are sounded, and notes are rung true on the scale of human experience.
Berman makes the point that what we consider objectivity, and "hard" science, and fact, are really only the remains of a process that began as movement and interaction and gradual realization. The shells and tools and implements of war that remain behind long ages after living creatures inhabited the earth are not the essence of what those creatures were. They were thinking, singing, making love, arguing, imagining, looking, sensing, wishing, yearning . . . They were more than tool-makers and war-makers. Yet we have no lasting evidence of the "soft" side of their experience. Only cave paintings and works of art and literature. And those don't last long enough to help us enter the world of the primeval man that we wish to know better.
The process of making, and the experience of living, are lost in the flow of time. All that remains are the products of the work. Like Shelley's Ozymandias, whose statue proclaims its omnipotence even as the king himself has disappeared into the sands of the desert. The king's lived experience has vanished. The sculptor's has nearly vanished as well. All we have is the sculptor's interpretation of the king and our interpretation of the stone that remains.
For me, fiction and poetry are important because they (can) capture(s) lived experience in all its richness and complexity. They do not (at their best) reduce life to facts and products. Instead, they encourage us to attend to processes, moments, and meanings as they emerge from lived experience. They provide us with an extension of our own lived experience--a broader world that we can enter with complete engagement, not as scientists uncovering fossils but as new inhabitants of a living fictional world. Lived experience, and the sharing of lived experience, and the broader understanding of lived experience, are what liberal arts education should be all about.
Berman makes the point that what we consider objectivity, and "hard" science, and fact, are really only the remains of a process that began as movement and interaction and gradual realization. The shells and tools and implements of war that remain behind long ages after living creatures inhabited the earth are not the essence of what those creatures were. They were thinking, singing, making love, arguing, imagining, looking, sensing, wishing, yearning . . . They were more than tool-makers and war-makers. Yet we have no lasting evidence of the "soft" side of their experience. Only cave paintings and works of art and literature. And those don't last long enough to help us enter the world of the primeval man that we wish to know better.
The process of making, and the experience of living, are lost in the flow of time. All that remains are the products of the work. Like Shelley's Ozymandias, whose statue proclaims its omnipotence even as the king himself has disappeared into the sands of the desert. The king's lived experience has vanished. The sculptor's has nearly vanished as well. All we have is the sculptor's interpretation of the king and our interpretation of the stone that remains.
For me, fiction and poetry are important because they (can) capture(s) lived experience in all its richness and complexity. They do not (at their best) reduce life to facts and products. Instead, they encourage us to attend to processes, moments, and meanings as they emerge from lived experience. They provide us with an extension of our own lived experience--a broader world that we can enter with complete engagement, not as scientists uncovering fossils but as new inhabitants of a living fictional world. Lived experience, and the sharing of lived experience, and the broader understanding of lived experience, are what liberal arts education should be all about.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
On (Not) Finishing
As I sit to write this post, I am already thinking about the day ahead. What needs to be done? The floor needs more work, and I've got some errands to run, and the kids need something to do, and . . . I guess I'd better finish this post quickly, so I can get on to the next thing that needs to be done!
Hmmm.
Does this sound familiar? We seem to be obsessed in western culture with finishing, with results, with filling our "bag of achievements" as fast as possible. We like closure. And that is perfectly normal, I think. But only to enjoy moments of completion, and finishing, and achievement, is a kind of addiction. The rush of pleasure that accompanies a "big moment" is too much to expect from every moment. The irritated "well I've gotten that done" that accompanies little completions (I've written all the bills, or I've done the laundry, or I've run today's errands) is not much of a way to live each moment either. Why can't we simply DO and BE rather than worrying about what we'll do next?
As I watched my daughter work on her floor yesterday, I learned patience again. She was trying to put each new board in the connecting track, learning how to balance the board and to keep it straight, how to work it so the seam softened enough for the board to snug up to the last row of boards, how to help me hammer each board into position after laying it flat. When she was working, I thought of each step, and the care and precision required. I thought of her excitement building as we put her new floor in, board by board. I watched her own patience as she started over again and again until she got it right. I was completely involved in the work of placing each board, from a new point of view. Looking back, I can see how significant my own labor is--not just in terms of finishing the project, but in terms of the state of mind that one cultivates when working on one board at a time. I understand that I was becoming impatient because I was becoming hurried, trying to finish each row--to finish the floor--rather than trying to lay each board well. And I can see that I am not as gentle with myself--with my mistakes, with the boards that don't quite snug in as well as I want them to, with the difficulties of levering end board into place against a crumbly drywall base--as I was with my daughter. And I should be! The work is good, and there's no hurry beyond the mental press I put on myself. I'll aim to be more like her when I get to work later today. One board at a time.
Hmmm.
Does this sound familiar? We seem to be obsessed in western culture with finishing, with results, with filling our "bag of achievements" as fast as possible. We like closure. And that is perfectly normal, I think. But only to enjoy moments of completion, and finishing, and achievement, is a kind of addiction. The rush of pleasure that accompanies a "big moment" is too much to expect from every moment. The irritated "well I've gotten that done" that accompanies little completions (I've written all the bills, or I've done the laundry, or I've run today's errands) is not much of a way to live each moment either. Why can't we simply DO and BE rather than worrying about what we'll do next?
As I watched my daughter work on her floor yesterday, I learned patience again. She was trying to put each new board in the connecting track, learning how to balance the board and to keep it straight, how to work it so the seam softened enough for the board to snug up to the last row of boards, how to help me hammer each board into position after laying it flat. When she was working, I thought of each step, and the care and precision required. I thought of her excitement building as we put her new floor in, board by board. I watched her own patience as she started over again and again until she got it right. I was completely involved in the work of placing each board, from a new point of view. Looking back, I can see how significant my own labor is--not just in terms of finishing the project, but in terms of the state of mind that one cultivates when working on one board at a time. I understand that I was becoming impatient because I was becoming hurried, trying to finish each row--to finish the floor--rather than trying to lay each board well. And I can see that I am not as gentle with myself--with my mistakes, with the boards that don't quite snug in as well as I want them to, with the difficulties of levering end board into place against a crumbly drywall base--as I was with my daughter. And I should be! The work is good, and there's no hurry beyond the mental press I put on myself. I'll aim to be more like her when I get to work later today. One board at a time.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Frames and States of Mind/Body
Why is it that when I am under the pressure of creative deadlines, my body starts to act up? Why is my mind clearer and more focused after I work out? Why do we insist that mind and body are separate entities, anyway?
Morris Berman, in Coming to our Senses (1988), claims that human beings experience two births--the birth of the body and the birth of the body image (self-consciousness). The former separates us from our mother, the latter separates us from ourselves. We are divided, alienated, jarred loose from the at-one-ness that we experienced before we saw ourselves as fundamentally separated from everything we experience. True enough. Our culture certainly disposes us to live this way. But the at-one-ness, as he recounts in his "somatic history," has not ALWAYS been lost and CAN be re-found. The key, as Zen masters insist, is complete immersion in the work at hand. Meditative practice is seen by many westerners as something interesting but fundamentally time-wasting. What's the point of turning off our multi-tasking, entangled mental processes and focusing on the somatic input of THIS moment?We might lose our way and get stuck in the present!
Wordsworth insisted that we can cultivate a "wise passiveness" (I'd prefer "wise attentiveness" since even this is purposeful and "active" in important ways) which connects us to the possibilities that surround us. When sitting and trying to attain inner silence, when washing the dishes, when interacting with others, we can cultivate a stance of listening and involvement rather than separation and judgment. But it takes real effort to do so. The practice of focusing our minds and involving ourselves patiently in work that may never end is renewing and revitalizing. That is why many people work out, or run, or walk. Why they need quiet space. Why they enjoy building and making things and doing things with full involvement.
Our body state effects our mental capacity and the quality of our ideation. Our mental frames and states of mind effect our bodies. Where does one end and the other begin, anyway?
Morris Berman, in Coming to our Senses (1988), claims that human beings experience two births--the birth of the body and the birth of the body image (self-consciousness). The former separates us from our mother, the latter separates us from ourselves. We are divided, alienated, jarred loose from the at-one-ness that we experienced before we saw ourselves as fundamentally separated from everything we experience. True enough. Our culture certainly disposes us to live this way. But the at-one-ness, as he recounts in his "somatic history," has not ALWAYS been lost and CAN be re-found. The key, as Zen masters insist, is complete immersion in the work at hand. Meditative practice is seen by many westerners as something interesting but fundamentally time-wasting. What's the point of turning off our multi-tasking, entangled mental processes and focusing on the somatic input of THIS moment?We might lose our way and get stuck in the present!
Wordsworth insisted that we can cultivate a "wise passiveness" (I'd prefer "wise attentiveness" since even this is purposeful and "active" in important ways) which connects us to the possibilities that surround us. When sitting and trying to attain inner silence, when washing the dishes, when interacting with others, we can cultivate a stance of listening and involvement rather than separation and judgment. But it takes real effort to do so. The practice of focusing our minds and involving ourselves patiently in work that may never end is renewing and revitalizing. That is why many people work out, or run, or walk. Why they need quiet space. Why they enjoy building and making things and doing things with full involvement.
Our body state effects our mental capacity and the quality of our ideation. Our mental frames and states of mind effect our bodies. Where does one end and the other begin, anyway?
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Attention!
The real miracle of mindfulness is the merging that takes place when focused attention is at work. Not thinking, but engaging in the dance of mindfulness. When we read a great novel, we forget we are sitting in a chair or lying on a bed in a room full of other potential inputs. We enter the world of the text and experience that world in a timeless state. Sometimes hours can pass without any awareness of the passage of time. When we are playing a sport, running the floor with teammates, reacting to their movements and anticipating their new positions moment by moment, we do not "think." To "think" is too slow, too unwieldy, too self-conscious. That's why they call timeouts in football to make the opposing kicker "think about it." Thinking re-directs attention inward, and we lose our vital focus.
When we write, when we make love, when we play an instrument--all of these are moments when total, focused attention can be attained. But it is not easy these days. We are living in a world in which "multi-tasking" is expected (read: fragmented and divided attention). The result is a cheapening of everything we do. Only with focused energy and attention do we reach the state of creative mindfulness that makes satisfying activity possible. So we are unhappy, hurrying from one task to another, thinking of what we should have done yesterday or ought to finish today or could be doing tomorrow if we just FINISH whatever we are working on now. What is the big deal about FINISHING? As soon as we finish, we start again. As I tell my wife when she is frustrated with the chaos created by our kids, we clean up so we can make a new mess to clean up again. So what's so special about that one moment when a project is done and another one can begin. Aren't all the moments of work in our lives equally satisfying (or boring, if we are not paying attention and making meaning in the work)?
So today I resolve to pay attention to everything I do, to everything my kids say, and to my own rhythms. We'll think about tomorrow later . . . :-)
When we write, when we make love, when we play an instrument--all of these are moments when total, focused attention can be attained. But it is not easy these days. We are living in a world in which "multi-tasking" is expected (read: fragmented and divided attention). The result is a cheapening of everything we do. Only with focused energy and attention do we reach the state of creative mindfulness that makes satisfying activity possible. So we are unhappy, hurrying from one task to another, thinking of what we should have done yesterday or ought to finish today or could be doing tomorrow if we just FINISH whatever we are working on now. What is the big deal about FINISHING? As soon as we finish, we start again. As I tell my wife when she is frustrated with the chaos created by our kids, we clean up so we can make a new mess to clean up again. So what's so special about that one moment when a project is done and another one can begin. Aren't all the moments of work in our lives equally satisfying (or boring, if we are not paying attention and making meaning in the work)?
So today I resolve to pay attention to everything I do, to everything my kids say, and to my own rhythms. We'll think about tomorrow later . . . :-)
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Initial Thoughts
Writing and thinking are both processes. This blog will give me an opportunity to work out some ideas informally even as I share them with others. I like that idea. I am learning as I go, which is also exciting. How is blogging like other kinds of writing? What kinds of interaction does it facilitate? How do my stories shape me as I create them? How might they offer meaning to readers? I am curious.
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