Beyond Rivalry

The question presupposes that you are sane, of course.

My sanity enhancers are:

I work out for 30 minutes almost every day, and I take a 30-minute walk most days

I very rarely weigh myself

I spend time meditating and reflecting

I hang out with my dog a lot

I don't rush

Like Tyler, below, I rarely check my portfolio and I avoid TV ads and commercial radio.

Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution) offers four:

"I try to listen to beautiful music at least once a day, I don't check my portfolio even in the best of times, I hug a loved one at least one more time than was expected (with adaptive expectations this is hard to sustain over time but I have my tricks), and also I avoid television advertisements as much as possible."

You can weigh in at Mindapples (or here of course, in the comments) with your five, and also name 5 famous people you'd like them to pose the question to.

More on the project at the British Psychological Society Research Digest.

From Dave at How to Save the World, this descibes my process much of the time:

"The coined term (by Barbara Ganley) is 'slow blogging', but I much prefer the term my friend Chris Lott uses: 'mindful wandering'. [I like both.] The idea is to see blogging, which is really just a new way of recording your thoughts in a diary, as a meditative practice, taking the time to ponder the meaning of what you're reading, thinking and writing, letting your mind meander in thoughtful and creative ways to 'make sense' of it. I find that some of my best blog posts are those I've stopped and restarted several times, allowing time for thoughts to percolate and new ideas to emerge."

For me, blogging has become primarily a way of seeing and expressing connections among various things I read, think, experience, feel, desire, do.

Malcolm Gladwell writes in the 20 Oct. New Yorker about University of Chicago economist David Galenson's theories of creativity, which Galenson divides into two types, conceptual and experimental. Conceptual geniuses bloom early, experimental geniuses later, not because experimental geniuses are late starters or because they are simply discovered late, but because "they simply aren't much good until late in their careers."

Speaking of Cézanne, the art critic Roger Fry says: "'More happily endowed and more integral personalities have been able to express themselves harmoniously from the very first. But such rich, complex, and conflicting natures as Cézanne’s require a long period of fermentation.' Cézanne was trying something so elusive that he couldn't master it until he'd spent decades practicing."

I think that's me. Not Cézanne, more like Wallace Stevens (49% of whose anthologized poems were written after he was 50), but not that, either. I feel I am practicing something intangible, and creative, sometimes enormously tiring and even monotonous in a certain way, without known product so far. 'Fermenting' and 'elusive' describe it well. Sometimes I feel very frustrated, mostly I feel excited to be part of whatever this experiment is, in some way, and to continue with the brewing metaphor, I feel that this is the vat where I need and want to be, though whether I am the brewer or the brewed (or both -- or neither) is unclear to me most of the time.

Later, in the context of patronage, Gladwell writes, "If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level." Thank God for my patron.

Seems sort of fitting, after thoughts on wanting, to offer (someone else's) thoughts on having. Plus, it showed up in my RSS feeder this morning and I liked it.

At Get Rich Slowly, JD writes an interesting post on having. Having stuff.  A few excerpts:

"'You know why you can't get rid of Stuff, don't you?' Kris had asked.

"'Because I want it,' I said.

"'You think you want it,' she said. 'You like the idea of having certain things, but you don't actually use them. You've got dozens of books stacked in the guest room. They've been there since the last time you purged Stuff a year ago. Have you needed any of those books in that time?'

"'No,' I said.

"After I told my friend Amy Jo about our clutter conversation last week, she shared her own thoughts. 'We each have so many interests, and certain things — like books — keep us connected to those interests, or give us the illusion that they do,' she said.

"'But they also clog up our lives and make us less efficient at doing what we are and what we want to do right now. It's hard to let go of the things that we believe represent parts of ourselves, or we hope represent us. In many cases, these things represent who we were or wished to be at one time — not who we are right now.'"

I've become adept at preventing new Stuff from entering my life, but it's difficult for me to part with the Stuff I already own. This is a very First World problem, and in a way it makes me feel guilty. We're trained not to be wasteful. That’s not a bad thing, but I think it can prevent us from making smart decisions."

And one of the comments, from RDS, echoes this:

"I believe that we are the first generation in the history of the world in which just about every member of our society struggles with managing the vast amount of stuff that we own. Many of us think of all of our stuff as assets. In truth, I suspect that much of it could more accurately be classified as liabilities."

Katherine Kinkade died on 3 July, at age 77 of cancer (some sources says breast, some say bone), at the commune she founded 40 years ago, Twin Oaks, on 123 acres near Charlottesville, Virginia. She sounds like an interesting woman:

"She made enemies. Her impatient style did not always sit well with community members fond of endless discussion and group consensus. Some regarded her as power-hungry and intimidating. In truth, she was more pioneer than hippie, an awkward fit wherever she went, too wayward for conventional society and too managerial for the chaotic 1960s.

 

"'She was a tough cookie,' Leslie Greenwood, a commune member, wrote on a memorial Web site dedicated to Ms. Kinkade. 'She was not fond of group hugs, had no interest in alternative medicine, nature-centered activities or tofu lasagna.'"

In later years, she briefly lived in Boston and worked as a computer programmer there, returned to Twin Oaks, sang in a church choir (though she's an atheist), and in 2000 moved into a house her daughter bought her in Mineral, Va, where "she rescued stray cats and talked to her flowers," among other things.

WaPo obituary.

(Photo credit: Twin Oaks Community)

Some of what moves through us, and how it keeps us moving. 

sunlight, air, water, nutrients, blood, instincts, our neurons' electric spark, sensations, perceptions, information, ideas, conceptions, conversations, emotions, communion...

I like it, and I think I like the colours he uses for the words even more.

--- 

Leroy Sievers (My Cancer) asks how you want people to remember you. My instinctual response is, I don't. Maybe, somehow, in these things Dave Pollard lists, above, that move through us, but without my name attached. Maybe I don't want to be remembered or missed in my absence so much as felt in my presence. Ask me another day and I might respond differently. Sometimes I feel anxious and sad when I think about so much personality and experience (each person's) removed from our midst in an instant, never to be replicated in exactly the same way (or so I believe)  ... Of what use was it all, all this striving, all this becoming, all these relationships, all this unique composition of particles, waves, energy, self? Then I answer myself: of no use. That's a calming thought somehow. 

I like this aspiration, in the comments: "That I went through my bout with cancer with ... a sick sense of humor." Another one says, "Off to get fresh bread for breakfast. Please remember that I did things like that."

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Addicted to grief ... In the journal 10 May 2008 issue of Neurolmage, UCLA scientists report a study of grief that may help explain why some people "grieve and ultimately adapt, while others can't get over the loss of someone held dear." Grief may be an addiction; thinking about the loss may stimulate the reward region of the brain, which provides the griever with a kind of pleasure in the midst of pain. The reveries about the loved one may not be felt as emotionally satisfying, but they may be craved and re-enacted because of the reward response they trigger in the brain.

The lead author of the study, asst. professor of psychiatry Mary-Frances O'Connor, explains:

"'The idea is that when our loved ones are alive, we get a rewarding cue from seeing them or things that remind us of them. ... After the loved one dies, those who adapt to the loss stop getting this neural reward. But those who don't adapt continue to crave it, because each time they do see a cue, they still get that neural reward. Of course, all of this is outside of conscious thought, so there isn't an intention about it.'"

In the study, women whose mothers or sisters had died of breast cancer looked at either a photo of their loved one or a photo of a female stranger while their brains were scanned. They found that while both those with complicated grief (the kind that continues and can be debilitating) and with uncomplicated grief have activity in the pain network of the brain after looking at the photo of the loved one, only those with complicated grief showed significant activation in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain associated with reward.

What this synopsis of the study doesn't say is whether someone is chemically determined to have complicated grief with every loss or only with some losses.

Abstract and link to full report ($) here. 

>> SACRALISING DRESS

This article at Anderson Cooper's 360 Blog by a former female Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint, interested me because it seems to concern sacralising behaviour (related post).

"Women lost a lot of rights in 1953. They no longer had any say in who they could marry nor could they choose how to dress. The way this was spun was that since the community had come through the raid so successfully, it was now ready to practice a higher form of God's law. (God is always the explanation when things get more restrictive; change is presented as a prize for being righteous and faithful. We were always told we were worthy of a higher law.)"

She reiterates the idea a little further down the page:

"The clothing also desexualizes women. Our chests are flattened out and any natural shape is hidden.

"We were always told by Warren Jeffs when the dress and choices became more restrictive that is was a sign that 'God loves you so much he wants you to be more like him.' (We believed Warren received direct revelations from God.) What we were losing were rights and any sense of control over our lives and all individuality."

As mentioned in a study of religious and secular communes in the previous blog post,  the study's authors concluded that "ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community -- what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified."

  

>> LIVING CLOSE TO NATURE = POVERTY AND MISERY, or ENRICHING RELATIONSHIPS with earth and others? Or both?

"Couldn't God Have Designed A Gentler Universe?" by Jesuit astronomer Guy Consolmagno SJ at Thinking Faith: The Online Journal of the British Jesuits got my attention because I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea for a bookgroup, which is about American Greg Mortenson's mission to build schools in Islamic countries (Pakistan and Afghanistan). Twice in that book there's a sort of teaser for a comparison-contrast argument that never actually happens. Early in the book, the question is raised whether the rural mountain town that Greg is so taken with is a paradise, because the people seem happy, they are welcoming, they smile a lot, they are patient and accepting of what happens, they have leisure time, they have close relationships with each other and live intimately with the land and seasons, or a miserable backwater, because the people have high rates of goiters, cataracts, malnutrition and infant mortality, almost no access to health care, live in frigid temperatures for half the year, and work very hard to survive. Later in the book, there is a moment's musing about a 'hard' but 'pure' life of such people, and what Western technological influences like roads, bridges and buildings will do to the close relationship those people have to their land.

Consolmagno's words resonated with that in my mind:

"There's an odd divide in Western culture nowadays. We've become separated from nature. We have air-conditioned homes, air-conditioned cars, air-conditioned offices, air-conditioned lives. [In far northern climes, substitute 'well-heated' for air-conditioned.] We spend most of our lives wrapped in cotton wool. If we feel pain, we want it to stop, now.

"Well-lit streets at night that mean that most people never see the Milky Way -- or at least not until the lights go out. After the Northridge earthquake in southern California in January 1994, the phones at the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles started ringing off the hooks as people wanted to know why the earthquake made the sky look so scary. The earthquake struck at 4:30 a.m., while it was still dark outside. When people rushed through their blacked-out homes to the outdoors, a million people saw something in the skies over Los Angeles they'd never seen before: stars. And they were terrified. ...

I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Africa.I saw there how we used to live, back before flush toilets and neon lights. People lived close to nature, in a way that hardly anyone in America does anymore. And I learned in Africa that there’s a word for people who live close to nature: starving.

Our lifestyle puts a heavy toll on the environment; but so does the lifestyle of the desperate people in Kenya or Haiti, who strip the forests bare in their day-to-day struggle to stay alive. So I don’t necessarily mean to disparage our cotton-swabbed existence. My point is just to point it out, because the shock we experience when a natural disaster hits us is precisely the wrench of being jerked out of our cotton-wool womb and forced to confront nature. Nature can be hostile as well as beautiful; nature gives us food and gives us death."

The rest is worth reading, though no answers are given.

>> Two articles on the HIGH PERCENTAGE OF IMPRISONMENT in the U.S.:

Adam Liptak in the NYT (23 April) writes "Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations'" and Marie Gottschalk writes "Two Separate Societies: One in Prison, One Not" in the WaPo (15 April), both on the same topic.

Gottschalk points to a recent Pew Center study which showed "that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison" and one in every 32 adults is or has either been "incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision." The U.S. incarceration rate "is 5 to 12 times that of other industrialized countries as well as being the highest in the world." The rate is ten times higher for African-American men: One in 9 young black men is imprisoned.

Liptak elaborates on the stats: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes --  from writing bad checks to using drugs --  that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations."

Gottschalk, citing hearings held by Senator James Webb (D-Va) last October, says that the increases in incarceration are not "driven so much by an increase in crime as by the way we chose to respond to crime," with tougher sentencing guidelines. Her main point is that "the leading presidential candidates have not identified mass imprisonment as a central issue, even though it is arguably the country's top civil rights concern."

Liptak points to more reasons than simply tougher sentencing guidelines for the high U.S. incarceration rate (which, he notes, seems to have led to decreases in crime, although Canada's crime has likewise decreased with no concurrent increase in incarceration rates), and he discusses each factor separately:

"Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime [a murder rate 4 times higher than many Western European nations], harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges -- many of whom are elected, another American anomaly -- yield to populist demands for tough justice."

Is this high rate of imprisonment our country's nuanced form of mob justice?

Concerning the factor of "American temperament," Liptak notes that "some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates. 'Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,' wrote Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, in Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective (2007).

"'It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,' Mr. Tonry wrote. 'Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.'"  

>> WHY BOTHER WITH ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY? 

That's what Michael Pollan ask, and answers, in his article titled "Why Bother" in the NYT Magazine (20 April). Pollan examines some of the obstacles and justifications for doing nothing, or very little:

Why bother to take any steps in the direction of reducing my footprint on the Earth "when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit." 

And even if, for the sake of virtue, "I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint?" (Pollan points to studies that show they may not. )

"If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only 'food miles' but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out."

His argument for making our daily, individual lives more sustainable is this: 

"Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: 'Personal choices, no matter how virtuous, ... cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.' So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle -- of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences. "

Pollan cites Wendell Berry, who 30 years ago "was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives -- the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the 'split between what we think and what we do.' For Berry, the 'why bother' question came down to a moral imperative: 'Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.'" 

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Much more to Pollan's article (specialisation, hidden energy costs, why we should take individual steps anyway), but where this last bit leads me is back to a perhaps romantic notion of the 'purity' -- or at least the honesty -- of living life close to the land, and that state of being contrasted to the cultural free-floating angst, the urge to crime and urge to punishment (leading to high rates of incarceration and a punitive justice system), the need to sacralise and the need to artificially create meaning that we find widespread in our culture, where we are so much more likely to be living without integrity, living "the best we can," as Berry says, in at least a veiled awareness of our own complicity in unsustainable living, in an unnecessarily harsh 'justice' system, in the war we are waging and its collateral damage as well as its intended damage to humans, other animals, and the Earth, and so on. We can watch reality TV, and it's an almost-but-not-quite successful effort to screen ourselves from Reality, from "our personal connection to what is wrong."

This series at CNN Money, which presents more than 50 brief, first-person profiles of individuals and families struggling financially with job loss, downsizing, reduced home values, student loans, gas and food prices, etc., is enlightening and disheartening at the same time. I empathised with the stories of many folks; this one really speaks to me.

I really like this interview between teacher, writer, and activist bell hooks and Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön in Shamabala Sun (undated ... timeless?). They speak briefly on many topics: suffering, compassion, hatred and aggression, compassion-fatigue and irritability, dying, blame and accountability, poverty, etc.

It seems fitting at this Martin Luther King time of year to shout a few bits from the rooftops, and into my own ears:

Pema: We may long to end suffering but somehow it paralyzes us if we're too goal-oriented. Do you see the balance there? It's like the teaching that Don Juan gave to Carlos Castenada, where he says that you do everything with your whole heart, as if nothing else matters. You do it impeccably and with your whole heart, but all the while knowing that it actually doesn't matter at all.

bell: Yet it seems very hard for people to fight this racism and sexism without hope for an end to it. There is so much despair and apathy because of the feeling that we've struggled and struggled and not enough has changed.

Pema:  The main issue is aggression. Often if there's too much hope you begin to have a strong sense of enemy. Then the whole process of trying to alleviate suffering actually adds more suffering because of your aggression toward the oppressor.

Pema: Getting stuck in any kind of self-and-other tension seems to cause pain. So if you can keep your heart and your mind open to those people, in other words, work with any tendency to close down towards them, isn't that the way the system of racism and cruelty starts to de-escalate? 

bell: Can you talk about the difference between blame and accountability? Because I feel, like you, that blame isn't very useful. But you have said, for instance in reference to men teachers who abuse their powers, that you feel the issue of accountability is real. How does one maneuver between giving up blame and being able to embrace the idea of accountability?

Pema:  This is the message of the first noble truth. You are willing to see suffering as suffering.

Obviously the less that you are caught in your own hope and fear, the more you can just see suffering very straightforwardly and without aggression. So accountability seems to mean you can be honest, incredibly honest. You see that harm is being done. You see someone harming a child, an animal, another human being. You see that clearly and your strongest wish is to de-escalate that suffering. Then the question is, how do you proceed so that the person you see as the problem becomes accountable, becomes willing to acknowledge what they're doing?

You realize how hard it is for you to acknowledge what you are doing in your own life. You see what it takes to become accountable yourself, and you begin to try to find the skillful means to communicate so that the barriers come down rather than get reinforced. It has everything to do with communication:  how can you communicate so that someone can hear what you're saying and you can also hear what they are saying?

Pema: Accountability, as you're talking about it, is my understanding of the spiritual path. With Trungpa Rinpoche, my feeling was that all he was doing was getting people to take responsibility for themselves, getting them to grow up. He was a master of not confirming. Talking to him was like talking to a huge space where everything bounced back, and you had to be accountable for yourself. 

Pema: There is a famous saying that from great suffering comes great compassion. Well, from great suffering can come great compassion, or from great suffering can come great hatred. ... From great suffering can come great openness of heart, a great sense of kinship with others, or from great suffering can come hatred, resentment and despair. ...

People need a lot of support for suffering to turn into compassion. What usually happens to people when they don't have teachers and guides and the support of people who care is that great suffering leads to more suffering.

Pema: For me the spiritual path has always been learning how to die. That involves not just death at the end of this particular life, but all the falling apart that happens continually. The fear of death -- which is also the fear of groundlessness, of insecurity, of not having it all together -- seems to be the most fundamental thing that we have to work with. ...

We have so much fear of not being in control, of not being able to hold on to things. Yet the true nature of things is that you're never in control. You're never in control. You can never hold on to anything. That's the nature of how things are. But it's almost like it's in the genes of being born human that you can't accept that. You can buy it intellectually, but moment to moment it brings up a lot of panic and fear. So my own path has been training to relax with groundlessness and the panic that accompanies it. ... to stay in the space of uncertainty without trying to reconstruct a reference point. 

Actually, what 50-year-old Eric Zorn, at the Chicago Tribune, has learned in his lifetime. These lists seem hard to write -- first, the expansion bit, i.e., how to recall and bring together a lifetime of lessons, and second, the contraction bit, .i.e., how to sift through it and refine it to a small number? -- so for now I'll just use Zorn's list as a memory jogger and say that these things seem worth saying:

1. It's better to sing off key than not to sing at all.

 

10. Empathy is the greatest virtue. From it, all virtues flow. Without it, all virtues are an act. (q.v. NYT article about lack of empathy among physicians)

 

17. Don't waste your breath proclaiming what's really important to you. How you spend your time says it all.

23. Grudges are poison. The only antidote is to let them go.

39. All the stuff you have lying around that you'll never want, need, wear or look at again? It just makes it harder to find what you do want, need or intend to wear. File it, donate it or throw it out.

Oh, I did read something today that summarises something important, something I'm not sure I've so much learned as learned to recognise when I read it in someone else's words:

"I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow."  - E. L. Konigsburg