Damn Him, that Steven Pinker

You know how, when you’re listening to or reading something, you have a flash of “Why didn’t I think of that?”  Listening to NPR last week was a series of those moments.  I listened to shows about Title IX and how girls are more involved in sports at a young age, but that interest wanes later in the face of the hyper-masculinization of professional sports; how sports cost so much for kids that it is not the great equalizer of race and class that we might have imagined; and how cats have one paw in the household and three out in the wild.  I had Researcher Envy.  Why didn’t I choose to be a sociologist with sports as my focus?  How cool would that be now, with sports the epicenter of conversations about race, class, and gender?  Or maybe I could have been an anthrozoologist, and know why Ozzie refuses to take naps, Silent Bob is, well, silent, and Mama Cass pretends she’s Tony Hawk, zooming across our furniture like she was performing in the X Games?  Thus was the source of my envy.  I love being an educator and educational researcher, but let’s face it:  education is simply not as sexy as sociology and zoology. 

There was another show that stood out: an interview with Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard:  http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/10/02/writing-science-pinker.  He has a new book called The Sense of Style, and it’s about one of my favorite topics, good writing.  In the vein of Strunk and White, Pinker is a minimalist, and says that writing is about the visual as well as the lyrical.  I have no issue with either.  He’s also down with splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions, which we can all be thankful for.   However, he went on to pick on his fellow academics, accusing us of convoluted terminology, excess verbiage, and all-around turgid prose.  Touché, my friend, touché.  As I embark on an exciting research project and counsel novice doctoral students about writing up their research, I realize he has a point.  While I do believe that complex thought and theories may indeed require equally complex writing (Habermas, to take one example), I understand the need for clarity and brevity.

As a language aficionado from way back, I knew about writing bullshit to sound as if I was smart (of course, many of my teachers were onto me and those of my ilk.  Mrs. Parsons was famous for saying, “Yes, but what do dat mean?” whenever I or one of my fellow Honors English students tried it).  Maybe some academics do that as well.  Steven Pinker, an insider, is not about to let us get away with bullshit. 

Despite my loyalty to needing three diverse theories to form a conceptual framework; to digging as deep and long as I can into philosophy and research to frame a literature review; and of course, triangulating my data,  I have decided that October is Haiku Month.  I will dedicate myself to writing, every day, a traditional version of  a haiku:  three lines, 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and then 5 syllables, to hopefully gain an appreciation for clarity and image over an addiction to words with multiple syllables and meanings. 

I invite you to join me.  Share your daily haiku on Facebook, Twitter, or write it in your journal. Maybe the world will become a land of clarity and directness.  And it doesn’t even have to be a haiku.  Any poem format will do.

Here are mine so far, as of Oct. 5:

Oct. 1: Rain

Finally rain. Dull

skies, puddles, damp, sweaty smells

glad plants, grumpy me

Oct. 2: Swans

Swan soundly asleep

orange beak tucked in feathers

partner nibbles fish.

Oct. 3: Reading

Fiction takes away

the blues.  Handsome detective

plus supernatural.

Oct. 4: Loneliness

Nels out of town.  Should

I buy a new stove or fall

wardrobe? Maybe both.

Oct. 5: Sandwiches

Last BLT with

tomatoes from our garden?

Sun promises more.

What's your mantra?

Do you have sayings that you come back to, over and over again?  Words of wisdom from your own intuition (or what Emerson might call the Divine Spark) or from others, who might be friends, teachers, songwriters, or comedians? 

One friend of mine, when she went through a heartwrenching divorce, used the words “grace and dignity” to hold herself together.  I wanted to bang her ex over the head with a snow shovel (one of the old-fashioned ones with a metal scoop, not the new-fangled plastic kind), or at least say nasty things to him.  But she gave me the example of acceptance and moving on, so I felt like I had to as well.

Another friend who took on the huge commitment of a 500 hour yoga teacher training, while being a wife, mom to two pre-K kids, a small business owner, and consultant, used the word “Devotion.”  She even wrote it on her hands during those long weekends so she would not lose her sense of dedication.  It was important to her that she engage in such a life-altering commitment in a full-hearted way. 

Unlike my friends, I have been unable to settle on just one mantra.  These pictures are from around my desk, and I also have what I fondly call “the mantra envelope” where I put old mantras.  I used to type them up in big letters, but now I just scrawl them on orange stickies and tape them to my desk lamp. 

The latest is actually a question.  I was driving to a school to conduct some field observations and it was the first day.  Stuck in traffic on I-195 at 8:30 a.m., I could feel myself getting impatient about being there on time.  I despise being late.  It makes me feel self-conscious and as if I am taking more space than I should.  I have skipped classes as a student and meetings as a grownup because I did not want to walk in late and call attention to myself. 

In the car that day, I heard a voice ask, “Why are you in such a hurry?” 

The other voices in my head could have come up with a million reasons, and then I realized that there was no need to rush, whether in actuality or in my mind.  Having my heart race out of anxiety was not helpful.  I would get there when I got there.  I was not in charge; this was not my show. 

Sure enough, traffic lightened and I was walking up the steps to the school shortly before 9, when I was due to be there.  A couple of students who were just arriving said to me, “Miss, you’re late!”  probably thinking that I was  a teacher.  I signed in, and as I did so, I heard them explain to the office worker that they were late because they had stopped to get a snack.  Luckily, this was not my problem, and I floated down to the classroom where the kids were talking about what it meant to be a warrior.  It was a good morning.

Over the last couple of days, I have asked myself that time and again:  why are you in such a hurry?  When I am eating, working, doing laundry, washing my face, meditating (as if you could rush that), I have paused enough to realize that there is nowhere that important to be, at least not at the expense of my well-being. 

My very first mantra is on display in one of these pictures, but it may not show up because it’s so faded.  I got it from David Robinson, the leader of an NEH Seminar on Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller that I was lucky to attend at Oregon State back in 1998.  We were talking about how to make meaning out of the mundane tasks of life, and I, ever the skeptic, asked how it was possible to not just rush through household tasks, like washing the dishes. 

David said, “Make what is necessary in life fulfilling to do.” 

That blew my mind.  I wrote it down in my notebook, and then later wrote it in black Sharpie and put it on the bulletin board of the dorm room to which I had been assigned.  I brought it with me back to Bloomington and put it up in my office there, and now I have it here, in Bristol. 

We all encounter tasks and people in our lives that feel draining and less than worthwhile.  After spending four hours this afternoon answering email and only getting back to Monday of this week, I can attest to that.  But David’s statement reminds me that it’s up to me to decide that all tasks can have meaning.

I would love to see your own mantras or bulletin board pictures if you care to share.

Narrative Addicts Anonymous

We went to a comedy show with a real live comedian, Amy Schumer, for the first time this weekend.  Well, it was my first time.  Nels had been to comedy shows, and I had been to a few comedy clubs, but it’s not something I normally do.  When we saw David Sedaris, he was reading from his own work, and when we saw Steve Martin, he was being interviewed.  Both made me laugh, but if I ever attend a live recording of a comedy show, they will cut the footage when it comes to me.  I am just not that into it. 

I enjoyed Amy Schumer’s show to some extent, and I appreciated that she did what felt like a mix of extemporaneous work and rehearsed, well-timed jokes.  I am sure there’s a fine line there.  However, appreciating somebody’s talent and laughing so hard I pee a little are two different things. 

The next day, I realized it wasn’t her, it was me.

You see, I am addicted to narrative.  I need stories in my newspaper, comics, poems, conversations, songs, and everything else I read and hear.  The narrative doesn’t even have to be clear, like they taught us in middle school English.  I never could pick out the rising and falling action and the denouement.  I also don’t need a happy ending, or even much of an ending at all—but there has to be a thread to follow.  This is from “The Way It Is” by William Stafford:

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

One of the problems is that, at least for me, I am not always sure what I am holding onto.  That’s why the yogis and Buddhists teach practitioners to let go of the stories in our heads:  the stories about our identities, in which we say to ourselves variations of “I am a good teacher/a lousy runner/impatient/hate sour cream/live in my head.” 

But I must have story.  If I do not, what’s left?  The yogis and Buddhists say, “pure Being.”  That sounds pretty boring to me.  Sure, I have a series of unreliable narrators inside my mind, but it is certainly fascinating to see who is telling the truth and how that truth evolves, and how something seemed to be true at one stage of my life is most certainly not true at some other point.  Of course, this requires seeing the story as a witness, or reader, not as the protagonist.  If I am playing the protagonist, than I am merely, as my friend Chuck Holloway would say, “believing my own shit.” 

Philosopher Evan Thompson addresses this issue by critiquing the idea that the mind is merely inside the brain.  He says that the mind is relational and involves the body as well as outside concepts: “We inhabit a meaningful world because we bring forth or enact meaning.”   Mindfulness is “social, relational, and ethical.” 

However, I do get that there are cultural as well as personal stories that are dangerous.  We may have certain ideas about human beings based on social categories as opposed to who the person is as an individual.  Ian Hacking calls this the “looping effect” and says that when we categorize people, we change them by how we interact with them based on those categories, and how they think of themselves.  This is why so many issues about gender, race, and class continually get reinforced.  I have a lot of respect for people who provide a counter-narrative, breaking up the original story and creating a new one. 

I like to hear stories that offer me a new way of looking at the world, others, and even myself.  I remember when a professor told me that I wasn’t bad at math; I just hadn’t been taught it in a way that was meaningful to me.  I wanted to tell her to put down the crack pipe, as my students said to me when I said something outrageous, but now I wonder.  “Janet the math genius” offers a counter-narrative to my learned helplessness. 

Earlier this week, I dreamed that I lost my shoes at a ski resort when I traded them in for ski boots.  The shoe lady took me down to the basement, and there were lots and lots of shoes, but none of them were mine.  Shoes represent the identity, and the basement the subconscious.  Unlike in the dream, I am in no hurry to find my shoes.  I’ll just root around in the subconscious for a while, enjoying the threads and stories that emerge, and not wait for the “This Is a True Story” sign to pop up.  After all, it’s the reading that’s the best part, not the ending.

Another school year: time to head for the ditch

“It’s not a vocation; I’m more of a worker bee.”  Worker at a state agency, 20 years and counting

“If you do it right, it takes all you have.”  Public advocacy lawyer, 10 years in, looking for other work

I will be starting my 19^th year of teaching shortly, and I’ve vowed this time that I will not be a wrung out, hollow-eyed, sopping mess by the end of it, or even each Friday.  I used to take great pride in my work ethic, in my ability to power through 12 hour days, even though I would be practically sobbing as I left the house.  On the way home, I would be irritable, and then eat way too much, falling into bed with feelings of regret:  “I shouldn’t have said that to that student.  I should have answered more emails.  Why didn’t I do that thing I’ve been meaning to do?  And good God, did I really need that fourth piece of pizza followed by an ice cream chaser?” 

In the past, I’ve been jealous of people like my acquaintance above, a state worker whose vocation is not her job, but her running.  I have zero doubt that she is as conscientious at her job as she is in all other aspects of her life, but it’s clear from her statement that her job is just that: a job.  For a teacher to say that, though, would be anathema.  At the same time, we also have to avoid burnout, like my other acquaintance, the public advocacy lawyer.  Can a person have a vocation, particularly one that witnesses the very personal harm of social inequities day after day, without becoming cynical or burning out?

I freakin’ hope so, or we are all in a lot of trouble.

Mary Rose O’Reilley offers these questions, which I stole and put on my syllabus for student teachers, and yet also resonate for me personally:

Are you eating properly?

Are you exercising?

Are you practicing your art?

Are you involved with communities that love and honor and challenge you?

Do you have someone to talk to about your life?

Those of us who bear witness to suffering—and if you look hard enough, and work with people enough, you know this—need to keep these questions in mind.  If I cannot be whole and present for you because I am tired, upset, and/or have low blood sugar, then I am doing myself and you a grave injustice.  I admire my friends with endless energy and the ability to be social at all times, but that ain’t me.      

“Mind is like a train on rails and the koan knocks out the rails so we can find our true path.”  Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk

Mary Rose O’Reilley writes, “This phrase gives me a conceptual frame inside of which I can choose to not shut down, to not anesthetize myself, to not despair, to not apologize, and to not be ashamed.  Those in my experience, are the traps.  Those are the ways we get stuck in breakdown” (2005, p. 4-5). 

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that a person’s personal koan, or riddle to solve, is to figure out the train that runs on the tracks, because leaving the tracks is liberation.  For me, the train is my identity, and the twin tracks are anxiety and perfectionism.  And that’s why I work beyond my true capacity.  With that, in theory, I get recognition and appreciation, which I seem to crave.  It’s a self-perpetuating thing.  And that’s why work becomes overwhelming with no sense of satisfaction.  I am doing it for false reasons.

 

The thing is, I’ve known that these are my tracks for a while now, but I haven’t understood how to head for the ditch, as Neil Young would say.  However, when I think about it, I realize I actually do have the tools, and they are meditation and yoga.  So I have the way off the tracks, but I’m so attached to the tracks that I fit yoga into my lifestyle instead of the other way around. 

What if yoga came first and work second? 

I’ll just sit with that for a moment. 

It’s not like overworking has done me any good, or really allowed me to accomplish that much.

"'Heart of Gold' put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch." Neil Young

I think I can now accept that life is not about seeking what’s comfortable, but what’s true.  It’s also about service, not overwork.  How much better will it be not only for me, but for others, if I choose genuine, authentic service, instead of the self-service that is simply to soothe my anxieties and perfectionism?  My risk is not jumping off a cliff, but at least heading for the ditch. 

 

     

The Bob Report

“Have you seen the brother?”

Our one goal, after Mr. Spock died a few weeks ago, was to get multiple cats who liked one another.    Mama Cass, Ozzie, and the brother-to-be-named later arrived last Sunday.  They were abandoned in a foreclosure in Fall River, and subsequently fostered by a woman named Deborah.  She lives in a small home with two other cats, so conditions were loving but perhaps a bit crowded.

 Mama Cass, a tuxedo three year old, meowed the entire 30 minute ride, but then started following me all over the house as she soon as she jumped out of the cat carrier.  Ozzie, who has luxurious long black and white fur (it’s even long between his toes, so I sometimes call him Sasquatch), had meowed a few times on the way home, mostly to keep Mama company.  He hid behind the subwoofer for much of the day, but would come out when I talked to him.  The brother cat, a tuxedo like Mama but without her rakish mustache, had curled up in the back of his carrier and didn’t talk at all on the way home.  

The entire day, he stayed at the bottom of the basement stairs.  He let us pet him, but refused to move.

Mama and Ozzie got more comfortable the next day, but the brother simply disappeared.  When we did not find him, we asked our neighbor Julie to help us search, as she has cats, fish, and kids, and we figured she had probably lost one or more of them on multiple occasions.  She couldn’t find him either.  Six hours later, Nels and I were emotionally exhausted, wondering how we were going to call Deborah and let her know that it took us less than 24 hours to lose a cat she had fostered for 18 months. 

Nels found him after some advice from Facebook friends.  “Look high,” several said.  Lo and behold, there he was, tucked away behind boxes of 45’s on a tall shelf of records that reached almost to the ceiling.  Finally the brother had a name: Silent Bob. 

Bob stayed on his perch unless Nels brought him down.  He would play with Ozzie and Mama for a few minutes until he heard a noise, such as a door shutting, the toilet flushing, or someone walking across the floor.  “He’s like a little old lady,” I fumed.  How could this cat not know, not visibly see, that we were the humans of his dreams?  Toys and scratching posts were strategically placed on each floor.  Blankets were washed and furniture vacuumed to remove Spock’s scent.  Two separate feeding stations and brand new litterboxes were on-hand.  The birdfeeder was filled, and a chair placed by the window for premium birdwatching.   

Every hour or two over the next couple of days, Nels would come up from the basement and give me what I started calling The Bob Report.

 “I put treats up on the shelf for him and they were gone!”

  “Somebody’s drinking water out of the water dish in the basement.”

 “Bob’s hanging out with me now.”

 I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to be disturbed when I’m reading a juicy novel.  I was reading a chick lit book titled You Should Have Known about a therapist who (spoiler alert) finds out her husband  of 20 years was having an affair and suspected of murdering his lover and their baby.  To be interrupted to hear about Bob’s less-than-interesting exploits got old.  I was kind of mad at Bob, to tell you the truth. 

Then I remembered how terrifying it was to move to Rhode Island nine years ago.  Nels was traveling for work, so I was alone, unpacking boxes and going to the library to access the internet and my former life in Indiana.  At the corner of Chestnut and highway 136, I only turned left, because Stop and Shop, 1776 Liquors, and Wendy’s were located within a mile.  One time I decided to turn right, but when I got too close to the Mt. Hope Bridge, I was scared that if I crossed over I would not find my way back. 

If you know Bristol, my fear must seem ridiculous.  We live on a 10.1 square mile peninsula.  But my fear wasn’t just about crossing a literal bridge, but the very real and scary bridge between being a doctoral student and professor; between having intimate knowledge of IU and Bloomington as an undergraduate and grad student, and coming, as a newly minted assistant professor, to a college and town I didn’t know existed six months before. 

The book You Should Have Known is as much about the protagonist not knowing herself as it is about not knowing her husband.   I am glad Bob has reminded me to show compassion for myself, for Bob, and for others who are exploring new figured worlds, whether they are physical, social, or emotional.  It takes courage to be present to this, even if that courage means turning left or spending a few hours on a high shelf.    

                                                              Bob off the shelf

Bird Lessons

One of the many benefits of running on the East Bay Bike Path, besides the smooth surface, car-free and flat, friends we see on our daily jaunts, and watching the ships and fishing boats, is the wildlife.  Springtime is the best because there are opportunities to see babies of all kinds, from bunnies to foxes to lambs to many varieties of bird species.  I’ve always been attracted to the bigger, showy birds like the osprey, swans, and especially the egrets and blue herons.  There’s just something about watching an osprey dramatically swoop down, fish in beak, to feed her babies, or a swan use her long, powerful neck to discard some brush and choose other pieces for her nest, much like I imagine an artisan going through an abandoned building and finding treasure among the discarded wood and metal.  I also like watching an egret or heron stalk his fishy prey, sticking his beak in the water with precision and force, and then swallowing the morsel whole with a triumphant gulp.    

Those are the big birds—the obvious ones. But just as my friend Lesley introduced me to the concept that even plants without flowers can be cool, some bike path friends have helped Nels and I recognize and appreciate the smaller, less dramatic birds.  Last fall, a woman who rides her bike regularly, always with binoculars, showed us a night heron, which is smaller and grayer than a blue, but literally has a ponytail.  Rachel, another avid birdwatcher, and Nels spotted a little blue heron, which are apparently somewhat rare, or maybe just difficult to see.   And this week, another woman biker called our

attention to a Virginia Rail and her babies.  This golden-beaked bird skims across the seagrass and mud making a small whistling sound as she calls out to her chicks, which are adorably black and fuzzy. 

The night heron, little blue heron, and Virginia Rail may not have the size and plumage of their spectacular avian cousins, but they are fascinating in their own right.  It reminds me that so much is hidden right in front of us unless we take the time to look, or have a helpful and patient guide to introduce us to subtle features of the landscape, whether in the natural world or in a specific context or person.  When I see something new in a place that I have been through hundreds, if not a thousand times, like the bike path, I wonder what else I’m missing in my everyday landscapes of home, the yard, the neighborhood, my drive to work.  And what am I missing if I don’t take the time to have a real conversation with someone, and pay attention to facial expressions and body language, along with the obvious—the swans of communication—words. 

The smaller birds also remind me of the intrinsic worth of nature.  Places in Bristol, like the Audubon center, along with more cultivated places like Colt State Park, the town beach, and Mt. Hope Farm, are reminders that green space, beach grass and mud, along with open water, are refuges not only for wildlife but for us—for the heart, the spirit, the mind. 

It seems we are in an era where everyone and everything needs to prove that it’s a means to an end, as opposed to being of value in and of itself.  Students—even those whose talents clearly lie in the arts or humanities—are being pushed to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math).  This movement of prioritizing “hard science” is such that a recent graduate of the URI/RIC doctoral program received the University of Rhode Island Graduate School Excellence in Doctoral Research Award (non-STEM).  To categorize winners as STEM and non-STEM devalues this student’s research and more importantly, his contribution to the world through that research.  

The worth of the Virginia Rail and educational research may not be calculated in dollars, but it does not make them any less valuable.  My life is enriched by new discoveries; it is when I get caught up in the day-to-day stuff of email, administrivia, and calculating how to deal with bureaucracy that I feel trapped.  Neil Young had it right when he said, “I’m headed for the ditch.”  Who knows what will be dancing through those high reeds?  I won’t know unless I stop to look. 

Gitali: Knowledge, Wisdom, and Love

“She has had an impact on so many lives and she doesn’t even live here!”

                                                            Bridget, fellow yogi

It’s true.  Gitali never lived here in Bristol, but her presence at Bristol Yoga Studio has been significant from the moment of her arrival several years ago.  On the most surface level, it could be her expertise as a yoga teacher.  Not only does she know a rich repertoire of sequences and poses, everything from restorative to vinyasa and in between; she can also intuit the mood and tone of individuals and the class as a whole to see what is needed.  This last week, her very last class, I made an offhand comment about having a possible injury to my right foot.  Gitali worked a brief self-foot massage into our class.  As all 12 of us were twisting our toes and pressing knuckles into arches, giggling at the tickling, I marveled at her care and attention for me, and for us.  This is just a small example of who she is.  Whether we need calm or playfulness, she offers us healing energy. 

Gitali also provides wisdom.  She never attended the preachy “I know better than you” school of yoga, where yoga teachers try to fix their students.  Instead, she asks us to be attentive and responsible to ourselves.  She also asks us to consider how we are connected to one another and to the divine energy that runs through each of us, connecting us to one another, to nature, and to life itself.  Last week, she asked the class if anyone had a specific intention, and somebody said, “world peace” as the standby joke.  After we laughed a bit, Gitali talked about how she does believe in world peace, but has come to realize that it has to start in her relationships first.  When she experiences negative emotions about somebody, she asks herself how she is contributing to peace in the world if she can’t experience peace in this relationship.  That is an excellent question for all of us.  Peace isn’t some abstraction that lies within the arcane language of international treaties or documents.  It is something we can cultivate within ourselves.

Most of all, Gitali is an embodiment of love.  In her presence, I feel accepted, loved, and honored, no matter how grumpy or upset I may be feeling, no matter what mistakes I made that week, or nasty things I thought or said.  At the end of each class when Gitali says, “The beauty within me, the light within me, recognizes and honors the beauty within you, the light within you,” it is clearly and deeply meant and felt. 

Farewell, my friend.  We at BYS are going to miss you tremendously, but your love and light are with us.  

Listen to Your Body...Unless You Happen to be a Teenager

I finally believe it is spring because we have planted the vegetables and put the down comforters away, replacing them with light summer quilts.  For my friends with teenagers, though, spring has those meanings, but there is also something darker and more troubling going on.  And I’m not talking about zombies.  It was Tennyson who wrote the famous line, “In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love” and proms are now held at this time to honor this fancy.  But it’s not just young men, but young women who also turn to thoughts of love, or at least a cool dress.

As I watch a beautiful young neighbor bask in the attention of her first boyfriend and hear her parents simultaneously fret and enjoy her happiness, I think back to being 16 and my first love.  It felt amazing to make out, coming home with bruised lips and the occasional hickey, and the longing to touch and be touched, definitely over the clothes because things were just too messy and unknown underneath.  There was the knowledge that you liked someone, and there was physical evidence that he liked you back.  It felt powerful that first time, not in a bad way, but in a wow, I had no idea my body could feel so alive and sensitive.  

There was also the emotional part, where every waking moment was spent thinking about the other person with sheer happiness and lightness of being.

Except.

While the story of my first love did not have a happy ending (he was a good kisser but a thief and liar), it does not have to be that way for my neighbor.  I would simply suggest that she ignore yogis and runners, who often advise a person to listen to the body over the mind.

Runners and yogis carefully inventory their bodies for twinges and shadows of previous injuries.  This is where they try to circumvent the pesky ego who often rules the mind and seems to divide messages between “That soreness you feel is imaginary.  Don’t be a fool.  Run fast/do 40 sun salutations and ignore it” and “You’re a fool.  Everybody in this race/class is faster/stronger/more fit/smarter than you.  You’ll probably come in last/be the only one who can’t get into handstand.” 

So, messages from the mind are questioned through the lens of the body.  Research shows that runners’ minds tell them to slow down before they physically need to in a tough race.  And yogic research indicates that if practitioners are patient and soft with their hamstrings, for example, they may actually loosen over the course of a class.  It’s almost like the body needs to trick the mind, but we have been trained to ignore the body’s messages since the ego behaves like that obnoxious bare-chested guy in the stands with a huge sign who is yelling “Look at me!  Look at me!”  In contrast, the body is the woman in the hoodie reading a book in the corner, not hiding exactly, but not asking for attention. 

Unless of course the body is attached to a teenager, in which case, I would suggest listening to the mind instead. The body is saying things in a Yoda-like way, such as “Take off your bra let him” while the mind is still behaving in a logical order, such as “Mom is going to freakin’ kill me and Dad is going to kill him.  And I LOVE him.” 

Those heady feelings and physical sensations are something, all right.  I feel like a little of that magic has spread across the grass from my neighbor and is lighting up the trees and flowers. We can be as cynical as we want about young love, but I say, let them enjoy it.  Let them bask in it, and let’s bask in it as well.  It can be this fun, innocent time, and maybe just for once I don’t have to be critical and think about gender, race, and class and can just enjoy the experience through a picket fence viewfinder. 

Intentional Sauntering: A Lesson from Thoreau

“It is a great art to saunter,” said Henry David Thoreau, according to the magnet on my refrigerator. 

I’ve often envied Thoreau’s schedule of tromping through the woods in the mornings and then writing in the afternoons.  Somewhere in there he hoed a lot of beans and made pencils.  Whatever he did, he focused on what he called “living deliberately.” 

In yoga, we call this intention.  At the beginning of class, yoga teachers will often offer an opportunity for students to have an intention for the class.  This intention is supposed to arise organically.  I have to admit that rarely happens for me.  Usually, the teacher provides an intention if you can’t think of one, but that feels like cheating to me.  So I struggle for a worthwhile intention, and then I just have to attend to what is actually happening, and that creates its own sense of purpose.   

For Thoreau, sauntering was not just physical.  It was also about taking time to read, write, and simply be present in the world instead of rushing around as he saw his fellow Concordians doing.  He was able to live outside of that and observe.  The events, upheavals, and experiences he witnessed back in the early 19^th century certainly resonate with us in the present day, which is probably why his work still strikes a chord. 

Most of the time, I am physically unable to saunter.  I walk fast, with purpose.  I remember going into a store one time to pick up some birthday cards on my way to work.  As I strode up the aisle, the proprietor looked up at the sound of my footsteps and said, “Somebody’s a Type A personality.”  Now, I know Type A personalities and I’m not one of them.  But apparently I walk like one.  That gave me pause (very briefly of course).  Does this reflect how I want to be in the world?  And then I was off again.  

I am also mentally unable to saunter.  My mind usually works quickly and impulsively, such that if I can’t figure a thing out within a short time, I drop it.  This is why I am unable to use any technology to its fullest extent, because it takes time to learn.   Back when I taught high school, we didn’t have bells to change classes, so I was always the one yelling that break time was over and it was time to get back to class.  Since coming to teach at Rhode Island College, I have filled every available space with work.  As a result, I have felt, by turns, oppressed, overworked, trapped.  There is no time for sauntering during the school year, it seems. 

A couple of years ago, my friend and colleague Jenn Cook invited me to participate in the National Day of Writing, sponsored by the National Writing Project and the RI Writing Project.  We and some of our students enjoyed a couple of hours sauntering to different areas on campus and writing in our notebooks, sometimes sharing, sometimes not.  Afterward, breathless and laughing at how much fun we had, Jenn asked, “Why can’t every day on this campus feel like that?” 

Why not, indeed?  Last Friday, we had another writing marathon to celebrate Jenn’s memory by doing what she loved to do best—writing with a community of like-minded folks.  As I sat down on “the waves of learning,” a series of gentle undulations in the grass where we had had that conversation, I realized that I could choose to have this kind of experience every day.  I chose this profession precisely because it offered me freedom and agency—and with that, the opportunity to saunter.  So why did I put myself in a box? 

Lack of intention, I think.  Just as with hard work, creating time and space for sauntering also requires intention and discipline.   

Thoreau, who studied the “Hindoos,” or yogis, somehow understood that the sauntering and the work are both necessary for a rich and full life. 

It’s not as if things happen for a reason, but we can make sense of them the way we need to, to keep going.  That’s why we are capable of reflection.

We don’t have to accept things at face value. 

We can make meaning from them. 

We can be intentional about what we do as a result. 

Running, Fighting, and Writing

A dear friend and colleague, Jenn Cook, was killed on Friday, March 14, 2014 by an 86 year old man driving a Mazda truck.  She was walking with her mom, who was badly hurt but is now recovering.  Jenn was 43.  She was recently and happily married to Moira Collins.  Theirs was the best wedding we have ever been to, Nels and I agreed, even better than our own.  They were still like newlyweds, in that their care and attention for one another was profound and gentle.  Their wedding picture is still on our fridge as a reminder of what my mom would call “a happy day.”    

Jenn was a tireless advocate for teachers and students, someone who constantly stretched her intellectual muscles and those of everyone around her by delving into new ideas as far-ranging as using comic books in the classroom, engaging in research with friends from Great Britain on bringing inquiry into the undergraduate curriculum, and, I just found out, was known as THE person in RI to contact for Connected Learning.  In our last conversation, the week before she died, I was delighted to have convinced her to teach a qualitative research course in the Ph.D. Program in Education.  I also told her to see the movie Nebraska because of her close relationship with her elderly and ailing father.  The care that the son in the movie took with his cranky father was how I imagined Jenn with her dad:  attentive, supportive, and taking great care of his fragilities without being stultifying.   

In short, this world has suffered a huge loss.  I have suffered a huge loss. 

While I have written plenty of wrenching pages in my journal in the last month, I have not shared anything publicly yet, mostly because I want it to be good enough.  But just like the old poets said and Jenn taught, if I wait for that, then I will never send anything out.  I will never be able to fully capture who she was and what she meant, not only to me, but to her friends, colleagues, and students.  But I can still write and share (and so can you).  One blog will never do her justice, nor do justice to the many shades of emotion that I have experienced over the past month.  So, I have decided to write a series, not in the cloying sense of she-was-so-perfect (she wasn’t, and she was okay with that), but in the gritty current reality that all of us who knew and loved her now inhabit. 

 This stark actuality was echoed by one of the survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings.  She said, “You have to come to terms with knowing that your life can change in an instant.”  She lost her leg.  I lost a friend.  I don’t know exactly how my life will change—that’s still evolving and inconsistent.  One day I’m more compassionate and patient.  The next, I want to rip off someone’s head, as I become ever-more aware of that deep reservoir of anger I harbor, similar to Turtle Lake in Diary of a Part-time Indian or how Thoreau describes Walden Pond:  so deep that the bottom can’t be measured, maybe because it reaches the other side of the earth. 

Joey, one of Jenn’s students said, “I want to kill that driver.”  Apparently, I do too.  Last Tuesday was a dark and dreary day, and Nels and I ran our town route to keep close to home in case the rain became unbearable.  I remember being really upset with drivers, thinking that they weren’t stopping or paying enough attention.  Later, Nels told me that I was the aggressive one, practically daring drivers to hit me.  It’s true, I realize now.  I wanted to yell at someone, maybe have an excuse to punch a jaw and feel my fist hurt, hear bone against bone, even though I have no idea what that feels like.  Nels, playing amateur psychologist (ironically, his degree is in psychology), could see what I couldn’t:  that I wanted to punish someone, and since the driver who killed Jenn was unavailable, any other driver would have to do.

Luckily for the drivers in Bristol that day and for me (and for Nels, who would have had to defend me or the unlucky driver), that particular wave of emotion has passed, at least for now.  He didn’t even have to set up the Wii boxing for me to get out my aggressions that way. 

Instead, there will be another, much more appropriate way to honor Jenn this coming week.  On Friday, April 25, from 2-5 p.m., there will be a writing marathon held in her honor, starting at Donovan Dining Hall in the Faculty Center and moving across campus from there. 

If you are unable to attend this event, you can still participate by contributing to the “Who Is Jennifer Cook?” project that three students started.  Write about what Jenn--Dr. Cook--meant to you.

Please send your responses to one of the following:

JNTomich@gmail.com

AHart420@gmail.com

KSawyer.429@gmail.com

Thank you.  Those of us who loved her, or even just knew her, can engage in the healing work of writing, something Jenn believed in wholeheartedly.

This photo is from the RIWP event two years ago.  I'm so delighted that a photographer got this picture of Jenn and me.  

Of Foam Rollers and Chiropractors: A Discourse on Aging

On the occasion of reaching what could only be called my mid-40’s—no more early 40’s, not yet late 40’s—I find it odd to think that, by age, anyway, I’m a grownup.  Often it doesn’t feel that way, when I feel lost or ready to pitch a fit or utterly sad.  Those emotional patterns are embedded, and despite my age, the fact that Nels and I will be married for 20 years this year, and I have worked in a recognizable profession for 19 years, I just have to step back and say, “Seriously?  How did I get here?”  Here could mean the gray hair, less-than-elastic skin around my eyes, mouth, and neck, or knowing that I have to wear a suit for work on occasion (okay, only for interviews so far).   It could also mean living in Rhode Island, being a runner, being a yoga teacher, or being friends with some of the smartest people in the world. 

I can recall at the turn of every decade looking back on the previous ten years with a mixture of remorse and sheepishness, often with a dash of defensiveness thrown in.  When I was around 10, I’d look at my Fisher Price castle with disdain while I played with my Barbie house and wondered why her hair didn’t grow back after I cut it. 

At 20, the insecurities of middle and high school were still very apparent.   My proudest accomplishment up to that time was mowing enough lawns to buy contacts the summer before my sophomore year.  Such a small thing, but my world changed.  At last I had the attention from boys that I craved, and yet somehow, I didn’t feel any better about myself.  Even worse, I didn’t even notice that my level of self-consciousness rocketed up in direct correlation to my plummeting self-esteem.  That was probably what led to dropping out of college after one semester and moving in with a cute guy who rode a Kawasaki motorbike whom I met at a gas station on Coliseum Boulevard on a warm July evening around midnight.   

I could call that interlude of my life a mistake—my parents certainly would—but I don’t.  I learned a lot of important lessons about respecting people from all backgrounds.  I wasn’t doing too much different than what I did in college a little later—drinking beer on Saturday nights, listening to a lot of Eagles and Led Zeppelin—but the context was hugely different.   

  

My mid and later 20’s brought big changes—graduating from IU, getting married, becoming a teacher.  At 30, I looked back and couldn’t believe how long it took me to start living what I had conjectured to be a “normal” lifestyle.  We had bought a house.  I had the most interesting, taxing, and real-life job I will probably ever have (teaching at Aurora), and understood how little I knew, so I entered graduate school. 

In my 30’s, working full-time at IU, being in a doctoral program, I felt like an imposter.  My tasks and colleagues were grownup (although some of them didn’t act like it, for better or worse), and I was sure I would be revealed as the insecure girl who once loved riding on motorcycles but now was pretty happy that her husband was in a band.  Even then, though, I kept feeling like I was inside a box and could only knock it over, but didn’t have the map or the courage to actually get out of it. 

Once we moved to Rhode Island and signed a gigantic mortgage on a normal-size house (par for the course in New England), I became “Dr. Johnson” and my social and intellectual worlds opened even more but I still felt small and insecure.  Then, Nels and I started running, and I began doing yoga.  Running was the replacement for walking when I realized walking wasn’t leading to any real physical fitness.  But yoga?  I was reluctant to try it because as far as I could tell, it didn’t burn many calories and I didn’t see the point of spending 10 bucks on an exercise class that didn’t at least tell me how many calories I burned, like a bike or treadmill.  Somehow, though, it fulfilled something else in me. 

Now, in my solid mid-40’s, I can’t believe it took me so long to start running and to engage in the many practices of yoga—the physical practice, the meditation, the view of the world that starts with ahimsa, or non-harming.  I am a mid-pack runner, I am not particularly strong or flexible in yoga, and I fail at non-harming a minimum of a hundred times a day just with my thoughts.  Somehow, though, I would never go back to the days when I was too naïve to realize how much I never knew.

Most of the time, I’m good with here, although it feels weird to have to use a foam roller to ease aching muscles and visit a chiropractor because C1 and C2 are misaligned from years of tension in my shoulders.   I sure as hell don’t want to go back to any of the previous decades, but I am not sure if I will ever be free of my box.  It remains to be seen what my 50’s will bring; if nothing else, an easier time to qualify for the Boston Marathon.   

Valentine from an Ex-Punk

Love is about all the changes you make and not just three small words.

Now, it’s true that I normally wouldn’t take ideas about love from a British ex-punk who writes songs about being so drunk he doesn’t know where he is when he wakes up; getting tattoos because he’s bored; declaring that God is dead; and has the habit of throwing down  more F-bombs than I do.  (Although to be fair, the word “fuck” sounds naughty as opposed to nasty in a British accent). 

However, the line above struck me when I first listened to it last fall.  As with most concerts, Nels did his homework and prepared us to see Frank Turner at the House of Blues in Boston (for the record, one of the very best shows I have ever seen) by making a mix CD from the set lists from Frank’s U.S. tour.  We had seen Frank at the Folk Festival in August and were blown away by his energy and authenticity, not to mention his funny, insightful, and obscene lyrics. 

I am a sucker for good lines and underline them in student work and anything else I read.  I remember lines from my high school students’ writing, and I left Aurora in 2001.  When students wrote with detail, genuineness, and love, such as Ashley writing about how a caregiver made homemade tortillas; Suellen writing about how her cousin showed her how to just be, Dave writing about tearing bits of paper and letting them fall into the ocean; and Coley talking about how discovering that working out asked her to question what kind of life she wanted to live, well, there is nothing to do but appreciate the wisdom that can come from just one sentence.   

In the song “The Way I Tend to Be,” the narrator laments his tendency to not appreciate the daily stuff of life, and often wishes for time to go faster because it’s troubling and trying and he’s not sure there’s anything worthwhile at the end:

I stand alone in airport bars

And gather thoughts to think

That if all I had was one long road

It could drive a man to drink.

To go with this depressing picture, the narrator sings about trying to compensate for his loneliness by saying “I love you” to the woman of the moment because it seems like the way to heal his spirit, when in fact, it just makes things worse.  However, one lover taught him that the way he tends to be is not the way he has to be:

But then I remember you

And the way you shine like truth in all you do

And if you remembered me

You could save me from the way I tend to be.

Thus, the lover inspired the narrator to break out of who he tends to be, and that love is the source of the narrator’s willingness to change. 

I am not the person I was when I met Nels almost 22 years ago, and we can all be thankful for that.  As writers often say at the beginning of their books, I thank him for all the inspiration, thoughtfulness, and love he has offered, and all mistakes and shortcomings are mine.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Check out the song at:  http://youtu.be/Cf5O2M5GaEA

The Freight of Expectations

When I was in college and going to bars regularly, I liked to people-watch.  When I was single, that was really guy-watching.  As an unapologetic flirt, I was always conscious of a specific Zone of Attractiveness.  I knew not to aim too high (I didn’t want to be turned down), and hoped that the beer goggles wouldn’t set in and I would aim too low (although that happened a time or two). 

I was amazed that many guys did not seem to have this same understanding of the Zone of Attractiveness.  There were a lot of less-than-appealing guys who would try to buy me drinks.  Being the ethical person that I am, I would refuse the drink unless I thought I wanted to talk to him.  One time, against my better judgment, a group of Bloomington townies managed to buy drinks for my group of friends at Jake’s (yes, back when it was Jake’s).  When one of them asked me my major, I told him I was applying to law school.   He started strutting around like a sheriff from Gunsmoke and saying, “I’m a LAWWWWman!”  Naturally, I thought he was an idiot and refused to talk to him the rest of the night.  That was when one of my philosophies of life—as only a person in her 20’s could come up with—arose:  Ugly people don’t know they’re ugly.

Recently, a close friend of mine was upset because the leader of her organization was cancelling appointments, not showing up to ones she had scheduled, and in general, not being very reliable or present.  Because my friend is hyper-responsible, she took the actions of this leader personally, and characterized them as self-indulgent. 

I have been in similar situations when people have not lived up to my expectations.  I have also felt it when I have not lived up to others’ expectations.  It is a hard thing to accept, even if it’s just viscerally, that you are disappointing others.  Not being able to meet your own expectations, or those of others, is a recipe for self-hatred.  Thinking that you “should” be able to do everything to a high standard, by a certain deadline, is the curse of high achievers. As an academic and a runner, I know a lot of them. 

Nels taught me a saying from the business world:  it’s better to under-promise and over-deliver.  The problem is, a lot of us tend to do the opposite.  We are attracted to all that is new and want to be a part of it, even if we already have too much going on.  When we cannot physically or mentally do what we promised, we feel like crap and others lose respect for us.  It’s a lose-lose situation. 

It is difficult to have compassion instead of contempt for those with whom we work who are woefully unequipped for their jobs, because of life circumstance, disposition, lack of required abilities and skills, or all of the above.  With students, my colleagues and I try to gently convince them they don’t belong in the teaching profession, with more or less success, depending on how much time, money, and psychic investment they have devoted to becoming a teacher.  Imagine what happens when somebody is already IN the profession.  That has to be much worse.  Most self-aware people know when they are not doing a good job, and they hate it.  How do they get out of it when it is how they make a living?  And what harm is done?

As a Midwesterner, I’m all about work ethic, but I also have a short attention span when it comes to doing things that don’t interest me.  When I worked for a car rental company, it was my job to add up the receipts at night and make a correct deposit.  For the life of me, I could not reconcile the accounts, so I got creative (not appreciated here, I found out), which the manager had to undo in the morning.  One time, I overheard two employees talking about me.  The guy who washed cars said, “But she has two college degrees!”  The manager replied, “She can’t add worth a shit!”  They were both correct. 

While I understand the ideals behind the Common Core State Standards, in that the developers wanted to ensure that every student has certain skills to graduate, the highly politicized nature of their creation, not to mention that actual teachers were not involved, render them highly suspect.  When my college juniors and seniors were presented with test questions on the literature exam for high school sophomores, they were unable to decipher the questions, much less answer them, and these were English majors.  If these folks were unprepared, how might high school students feel when looking at this test?   Sure, you could take one of my three routes—decide that there was a Zone where you belonged to or not; OR internalize feelings of failure when you could not live up to others’ expectations; OR get creative and make up some bullshit (the faithful go-to of all English majors).  But this teaches—and assesses—nothing about the student’s abilities to analyze literature. 

Having high expectations is fine, but they have to be individualized to the learner.  At the school where I taught, high expectations might mean a paragraph from the kid with dyslexia, or a thoughtful five page paper from the dedicated writer.  As everyone knows, some folks are good at English and bad at math and vice versa.  It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have devoted more time to studying math, but it does mean that connecting my ability to graduate to arbitrary standards on an un-scientifically designed test is beyond wrong.    

It appears that the creators of the Common Core, like those drunk guys who thought they could pick me up, do not have an accurate understanding of the Zone of Authentic Knowledge.  Thus, students are stuck with the freight of unrealistic expectations that do not take into account their cultural and individual circumstances.  It is up to us, educators, parents, and students, to refuse the free drinks and tell the jerks that they are jerks.