Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
August 21st, 2008
n one of those “duh” moments I realized this week that everybody has different models for how people work and interact. It may be as simple as categorizing people by their interests, (Totally Breakfast Club, “You see us as you want to see us… in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.”) Or explaining somebody doing something by their astrological sign, or their Meyers-Briggs profile. Raven explained that he sees people as interacting with others either in a performance mode, an interview mode or an exchange mode, which is a really useful way of explaining why some people are easier or more rewarding to interact with.
So I try doing a theoretical experiment where I don’t use a model for how people are, and it just doesn’t work, to have every interaction as a new experience, not attributing the things I experience to the other person to some degree or another. Ready for the crude metaphor? It seems to me like the model you use for how people are/interact is sort of like a browser window, some explanations work better for some situations than others, sorta like my knowing that my current CSS looks ok with Safari and not so great with other browsers (and that fixing it is on hold while my tech support is absorbed in his paying job.) The thing is that we’re all getting more or less the same content but the model of interaction you use is going to impact how you perceive it. And if you can’t just take people as they are, not classifying them or categorizing them, because our brains just aren’t wired like that, maybe the best you can do is to be aware that you are experiencing interacting with people in this mediated way, and if it’s not working for you with the model you have you might try doing it another way, open up Firefox to look at this situation instead of Safari.
And I have this spiritual struggle with feeling like I am “judging” people when I fit them into my explanations of how we are interact — I think my own model looks at how much we have in shared interests, what needs are being expressed in the interactions (à la Marshall Rosenberg) the self-awareness they demonstrate. In trying to understand myself, what I am feeling and why, I keep being bumped into awareness of what other people are experiencing, an insight I didn’t ask for. It’s uncomfortable when some people seem to be advertising their insecurities by how hard they work to distract you from them. It’s like being a three dimensional person in Flatland, and seeing the insides of people. But that seeing isn’t condescending, because it’s seeing myself too and having a basis for compassion. It’s not being hurt by other people when I see that they are acting according to their own psychological imperatives and not aware that what they are doing could be hurtful. And it turns out that even the “judging” aspect of it doesn’t change my responsibility to treat other people with respect and kindness.
August 17th, 2008
I got a practice mute this week for my violin and viola. Its metal heft perches on the bridge and keeps the voice of my instrument a whisper that only I can hear, so I can practice late at night without disturbing neighbors or children. It surprises me, the need to practice for myself after practicing with all of them.
I am practicing with four boys now, most days. With several weeks when both teachers are on vacation we’ve been missing days here and there, and not beating ourselves up about it, either, even though a little voice in my head nags me about the importance of consistency. Rainer, who is four, just got his tiny violin a few weeks ago, and we squeezed in one lesson before his teacher left for a month’s vacation, so he and I practice rest position and playing position, with more confidence than when I was doing it with any of his older brothers, aware of how many times he has to practice putting the instrument up before we can move on to the next step. We don’t negotiate practice, it’s a fact of life, and I think he feels like it’s a privilege he’s grown into, like his brothers.
I practiced with Aodán, who is eleven, late tonight, after dinner, impressed yet again with how gracefully he accepts my suggestions, wondering how long that will last, how long until he feels like there isn’t room for me in his practice, like I don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t know as much as he does, which is surely inevitable. I may grumble about the time commitment of practicing with each of the four of them, but this can last only a brief time, and it has sweetness. When he went in to get ready for bed, for me to read to him, and I stayed out in my studio where we practice and slipped the mute on and imagined my viola singing out more fully.
A week ago at Bahà’í camp Xander, my nine-year-old son, and I performed a duet in front of 150 people, my first time performing since high school. He had been talking about doing this since the day we got back last year, and I love his eagerness to perform and for him I worked to overcome my ambivalence about performing. I don’t want to pass on all of my baggage, so I try to examine it, my fears of not being good enough, my fear of people appraising, my fear of my own desire for attention. So many days I can feel almost invisible, safe, surely, but it can be its own hell. I can practice with the practice mute, secure in the knowledge that I am not disturbing anyone, and yet there is a creeping awareness that at some point I am going to need to remove the mute, and let my viola sing out. Playing something short and simple in front of the most un-critical and supportive group of people one could ask for was a tiny step, and I still had to spend an hour by myself beforehand thinking the crazy thoughts, got through it by focussing on my amazing kid.
In the collection of paradoxes I treasure and keep at hand there lies this one: humility and confidence nearly always accompany each other, two sides of the same coin. We sort of confuse insecurity with humility, or we have a hard time accepting applause, play a false humility, put ourselves down, pretend like the validation doesn’t feel so good. We have stories of divas and people who are so insecure and broken they seem to live only by performing. I haven’t gotten this one figured out, I think it’s somehow about getting into some sort of proper relation to the self (only I am not sure who is doing the relating then, or whether the self is so simple to talk about) only that the best moments practicing the stuff that isn’t the music falls away. I don’t know how to do that in front of people. But I suspect that true humility comes when we’re finally confident enough to realize that the performance really isn’t about us at all.
August 16th, 2008
Looking for any explanation for having been unable to bring myself to keyboard since I got back from Bahà’í camp a week ago, and they all sound like excuses. Spending a week with a hundred and fifty Bahà’ís and having the kids go off all day to their classes and activities so I had lots of time for prayer and reflection was wonderful, but it’s not what I write about here, I feel completely inadequate to writing about my religious life, and in a society where religion seems to divide people up all the time, where people are prone to shoving their beliefs down other people’s throats, I tend towards caution, wanting you to know that I don’t judge you on your beliefs, that I am going to look for all of the things we have in common rather than the things that divide us. Never mind that that for me is a lot of what being a Bahà’í is about, and there is something peculiar about feeling like my life gets compartmentalized.
There’s reflection, too, on what I am blogging for… a friend is nudging me to write more about parenting and I am wondering if I don’t want a separate, non-personal site for doing that, leaving Oleoptene.com to be all about me, me, me. Or for conversation about things that really aren’t parenting at all. The thing about writing about parenting is trying to imagine a supportive and encouraging tone to take when I believe that any of us could examine the scripts that pop out when we’re under stress, but mostly what any parent needs to hear is “Trust yourself, trust your love for your kid, you’re doing just fine.” What would a parenting blog/forum sound like if it was based on the idea that outside perspective and insight are useful, but every parent is the expert on their own child? I am flattered that this friend believes that there is anything that sets my parenting apart, but am hard pressed to identify what that could be.
So if a friend called this morning and asked what was going on, what would I have to say? Today is a bead on a string with little to set it apart from the bead before, the bead following, but I’m well-content with the shape of the bead, the elements in my days seem more or less in balance, quietly domestic, I hardly feel any urge to leave the house because everything I need and want is already under my roof?
In the cool morning, I write on the back porch, while outside is more pleasant than inside, watch a spider racing on its invisible highway between two chairs, and gently remove the thread from one chair hoping the spider will find somewhere else to be industrious, as everyone else in the house freaks out at spiders. I’ve refilled my coffee cup, checked on the boys, and the most pleasant thing I can imagine doing is trying to count the number of shades and hues of green in the sunlight filtering through the bamboo that borders our yard. Or possibly chasing down the difference in meaning between ’shade’ and ‘hue.’ Or forgiving myself for the various small ignorances that now seem unavoidable, my memory having such limits, my time for reading being, indeed, zero sum, so my best now is to not to pretend to know what I do not, so as to skip the embarrassment of getting caught, worse than the embarrassment of not knowing… (how often have I not lied, exactly, but nodded knowingly because it seemed to be incidental and liable to distract from a telling if I asked for a clarification? And perhaps I made a mental not to myself to look it up later, but of course, forgot to). I keep thinking life is like one of those fantasy books I loved as a preteen where if you keep pausing to go to the glossary and refer to the map, you can so fail to engage that you never get into the book, where as if you nod and move on, immersion and context will be all you need.
I lay on top of the blankets this morning, not looking at the stacks of paper on our bedroom floor, but knowing they were there, and I don’t know if it’s the green humidity and the heat, or just the non-New-Mexican-ness that takes me back to waking up in my grandparents’ house when we would visit them in Connecticut, but I muse on how their lives seemed so much more constrained by rules (papers in the office and not the bedroom, no white after Labor Day, three forks at dinner) that seemed somehow arbitrary but maybe made things more secure, more predictable. I don’t know how much I know about how things actually were and how much is reaching across three decades to an emotional truth, the unchangingness of How Things Were Done in their house, to the more adapting How Will Things Work Best in my own home. There was a ritual to arriving at their house and walking through the house checking that all of the details were just as I remembered them, the angle of the piano to the couch, the small rocking chair, the stack of comic books, the array of coasters. And I see my kids do the same when they arrive at my parents, but would swear I’d inherited from my mother a tendency to move furniture around when other elements in life are not flowing as I think they ought to. Still, right now? Every piece of furniture in the house seems to be just right, and it’s a novel but not surprising feeling.
Picture taken at the Japanese Gardens this week with our friend Todd, who knew us each before we knew each other, with whom reconnecting has been effortless and joyful.
August 2nd, 2008
Gentle Reader,
Or, no, what I mean is, please be gentle and forebearing, reader. Because in the maw of the absent husband and having watched too many TEDTalks yesterday my brain is near-to-bursting with needing to talk and sort out five or six different ideas that may have nothing at all to do with each other, but lying side by side set each other off so prettily.
First I woke this morning to the second-hand drama of the unreliable narrator’s domain name being swiped out from under her, and, while I’m not trying to say that everyone else’s problems are all about ME, I still got lots of musing on “To Blog or not To Blog.” Lots I cannot generalize from: the blogs I love I love better than anything else I read, and even so, what keeping my blog gives me is not symmetrical with what I get from reading blogs. It has made me more comfortable with the terrifying idea of people seeing/reading/judging what I write. That having a blog has allowed for deeper connection than I might get from small-talk: my hypothetical reader is given, yes, a self-selected, picture of who I am, but I imagine it’s still one with more depth than I am capable of in most social situations and it gives me a glimpse of light outside of the imprisoning box of the idea that, subsumed in roles, no one ever really sees me, no one will ever really know me. Unable to see beyond the footlights, I cannot see who exactly is out there and whether or how they are responding except for the hints of site stats and comments, but having it just a little murky is so inexplicably liberating.
And still, for me, blogging has its dark side. I don’t like living my life looking for blog fodder, it feels unnatural, like I am looking past the inherent value of an experience for the secondary value of “and I can write about it!” even if I have principles about not writing exploitatively about people and relationships in my life. I worry that it takes some of the time and energy that I ought to be putting into relationships with the people around me or other sorts of writing. Sometimes I feel like what I need to write, and what is going to bring hits to the site, and what is going to generate an interesting conversation in the comments can be so divergent that I am not sure that blogging is always good for me, or I toy with breaking it into different blogs, only I am worried about what I would learn about myself by which one of those I favored.
Which loosely ties in to another set of ideas bothering me. I get very nervous about the notion of “competing interests.” In recent conversations there has been the idea that the institutions we grew up trusting (medicine, education, law enforcement, and the media primarily, but I can think of countless smaller ones) have become harder to trust when you first have the glimpse of how the interests of the institution are different from your own individual interests. It doesn’t mean you can throw them out wholly, but the experience of realizing that the obstetrician I talked to when I was pregnant the third time was going to do things that might not be in my interests or my baby’s was sort of shocking to me in the way loss of religion could be for someone else. And noticing the damage that our school systems have wrought in people I love, warping their self-images, their value, their self-worth, I have started wondering whose interests schools serve. I grew up with some idealistic notion of schools being identical with universal education and thus the prerequisite of democracy, and I still sort of believe that, but in a tempered “why isn’t it working as well as it could way?” I would no more close all schools than I would go back to trying to deal with a headache with leeches, and yet, I am not sure that either education or medicine always starts with the right question.
So yesterday I watched Susan Blackmore’s TEDTalk entitled Memes and “Temes” and I don’t know if it had much in the way of revolutionary and new ideas, but her main point is that evolution is inevitable in any system where there is replication, selection and variation. These three things will always form a sort of algorithm, design out of chaos without mind (interestingly two days ago I watched Torsten Reil’s TED presentation on using AI to simulate humans in video game design where what they did was really set up replication, selection and variation and let the model evolve on its own). Her notion is that memes, and her coinage of “teme” for a technological meme, are as “selfish” as Dawkins’ Selfish Gene. I browsed the comments and on Blackmore’s presentation and there was lots of fuss about anthropomorphizing and will, but the message I got was that the non-personal, the non-willed, can still have an interest, a self-perpetuation and growth. Which would apply to institutions as well as ideas. (I also wonder about how this fits in with Clay Shirky’s TED presentation on Institutions vs. collaboration).
I don’t doubt that as a model, the analysis of competing interests works. But when I start doing it something funny happens to me, I cannot stop and it occurs to me that I have to weigh the interests of my family against my individual interests, and that if every being, institution, creation, meme, idea, teme, and gene has its own separate interest, that is a lot of divergent interests, a lot of competition. And through these lenses I start seeing us all just using each other and altruism as a fairy tale we tell ourselves so that we don’t have to face harsh meme-eat-meme world we live in… the systems we have built, banking and schools, advertising and publishing, are above everything else, self-perpetuating and the problem isn’t capitalism or socialism or fundamentalism, its the illusion of scarcity and struggle for survival, of our deep separateness (yes I did also watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight, too, the number one most emailed TED Talk where she talks about how we can choose to see the universe as one where we are all connected, why do you ask?) I even wonder what happens when the notion of our connectedness, our unity, our in-fact-more-convergent-than-divergent interests is introduced into the system of memes.
And of course, one of my long-standing themes, is to wonder about the need to model and metaphorize everything, how much choice we have in models and metaphors. What do convergent interests look like? What if there were a dialectic of memetics, that the variation, replication and selection were somehow not just synthetic but — if I say synergistic, does that mean my Santa Fe is showing? Has anybody talked about synergy since 1980? That the success of one could not compete with but inspire and strengthen another? Whenever I find myself with a sort of zero-sum model of how the universe is working, I suspect I have over-simplified, that with two children it’s not that each gets half of the love available, or that when a third sibling is born each must surrender one third of the share he had been getting heretofore. This is a crude metaphor, I guess, for suggesting that when I am happily blogging, I find I have deeper reserves for other writing as well.
Ok, so back to blogging. I haven’t tied all this together as well as I should have liked. I don’t pretend that my blog is some David fighting the Goliath of the institution of traditional publishing, or that I have figured out what moral/aesthetic value “replicability” of the ideas that survive, thrive, become popular has, when history is littered with brilliance faded to obscurity, genius unrecognized in its own lifetime and commercially successful schlock, or whether I think that our native cultural valuing of individuals over institutions means anything at all. I may have to briefly wean myself from TED which seems to have taken the place of the attention span to read a book entire (I do have Holt’s How Children Learn waiting for me!) Actually, when I think about my blog, what pops into my head is one of my favorite picture books that I read with my children, David McPhail’s Mole Music, 
. The story told by the illustrations is totally different from the story in the text, but the basic story is that a mole realizes his underground life is missing something, and then he sees a violinist on television and decides to send away for his own violin and spends years practicing and playing at the end of each day’s tunneling, and one day he’s a little sad that he should never have had the chance to share his music, but laughs it off because of the joy the playing itself gives him. In the illustrations we see his music going up into the world around a tree growing over his hole, and a war stopped and kings and presidents sitting down to listen to the beautiful music.
July 29th, 2008
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized. ~Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
I have a game I play with myself I call perspective: when a problem is bothering me I try to remind myself that five years from now I probably won’t even remember the details of it. That’s a nice, self-help-y sounding start, right? Only, this week I suddenly realized that I don’t get to live five years from now, I get to live right now, and sometimes stuff right now stinks.
So much of parenting in my family right now seems to be meeting my kids melt-downs. They feed and dress themselves and even help out with household chores, and go about the world so autonomously, that the real work of parenting now seems mainly to be catching them when the cannot cope and helping them find means of coping. Sometimes the melt-downs are unexpected or seem disproportionate, and my first instinct is to play the perspective game with them — ‘That? That’s a small problem!’ But there’s a violence in that, a dismissal, a telling them that their feelings are somehow less real, less meaningful.
One of the gifts my kids give me is the un-self-conscious experiencing of what they experience, both their bright eagerness and the seriousness with which they take their problems. And this means acknowledging that their problems are as real as mine, whether they are problems of handling frustration or difficulty in sharing, needing the discipline to get things done or finding quiet space and time for themselves, that I realize that they are developing the same skills to deal that I wish I consistently had in my toolbox. One could pretend adult problems, in perspective, are more serious because the consequences of adult mistakes seems so much more life-altering, but no matter what size we are, we all seem to be struggling for our sense of autonomy and proficiency and self-sufficiency and connection and dignity and the need for loving attention. Those stakes are much more what motivates me than worrying I’ll make a mistake that results in homelessness or destitution.
One of my pet theories is that while reading lots of fiction is great for developing empathy, you risk starting to think of yourself as a literary character, and one aspect of that is that to give books sufficient drama, real heft the stakes characters face are ones of standing in a community or the ability to make a living, love versus alienation, the outcome of nations. So stakes less than that — finding you’re out some essential ingredient for the meal you planned to make, a stain on a new shirt, toys strewn across a room you just straightened — how can they seem so dramatic, how can they throw me so? They arise like symbols of futility and incompetence and unworthiness instead of just being what they are.
The trick with the perspective game is not to use it to invalidate experience. If you’re comforting a friend, the first thing you do is acknowledge her feelings, not try and tell her that her problems are a hill of beans compared with the mountainous real problems out there. Misapplied, the comfort of perspective is a second flogging for feeling bad about something you somehow believe you shouldn’t. When you’re suffering you’re not in any position to figure out the fine line between acknowledging feelings and wallowing in them, and that’s when you need outside perspective.
July 27th, 2008
My baby turned four yesterday, which means he isn’t so much baby anymore. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of time for planning a huge birthday celebration. A week ago we returned from a nice vacation visiting my parents in New Mexico, and this last week has been a busy one with Raven doing OSCON, leaving the house before the kids were up most days and returning after they were in bed. The older boys did the first week of drama camp (Harry Potter!) and loved it, and I spent more time driving than I would choose to.
With little time for shopping or planning, and as I think I’ve mentioned, not being a big fan of elaborate children’s birthday parties, or more, not believing I quite possess the skills required to make it a happy event for birthday child, guests, and parents, even though other people seem to pull it off, I had to find other ways to make the day special for Rainer. We’ve evolved our own tradition of the birthday treasure hunt, and I was inspired watching Rainer and Søren announce themselves future paleontologists after visiting OMSI’s dinosaur exhibit (and also, the previous week the New Mexico Museum of Natural History) so I decided that Rainer’s pre-reading scavenger hunt would be something completely new for us: a dinosaur dig! It took a lot of patience with searching because there are dinosaur pages out there with all sorts of interesting homeschooling-for-religious-reason slants, but I found the cool “dig up dinosaurs” PDF on this page and after the boys went to bed Friday night stayed up until 2 a.m. cutting out cardboard dinosaur bones.
So when he woke up yesterday morning he was handed a bowl of sand and sent outside with it:
In this bowl he carefully searched for “bones”
which were laid out carefully
and he, of course had lots of loving assistance,
but watching I was proud of how his brothers were excited for him and involved but willing to sit back and let him do it himself. I loved how the final assembled dinosaur looked.
And written on its bones were directions for where to look for his gift, a BBC video DVD set entitled “The Ultimate Dinosaur Collection.”
To utterly flog a theme, we then planned on then taking all the boys to the Oregon zoo where they have a dinosaur exhibit. But on arrival at the zoo all of the parking lots were full. The hardest part of zoos for me is people at the zoo, and more of them seemed too much, so we decided to try something else and drove across town to the small Oaks Amusement Park on the banks of the Willamette where, not only was parking impossible, but we could see really long lines waiting for each and every ride. Less fun. And this is where Raven’s genius pokes through — he came up with indoor miniature golf which we had completely to ourselves until the last five minutes or so, because on a beautiful day in Portland there is an unofficial law that people be outside enjoying themselves. And thus no one minded when it took me 11 or 12 strokes to get the ridiculous little ball into the hole. And being downtown, we then walked five blocks to Portland’s best toystore - Finnegan’s, and let Rainer pick out a Playmobil dinosaur set (also: found the very cool Schylling metal potholder weaving loom
that my father had been nostalgically recalling last week!) Then, since Rainer had requested “mango lassi” for his birthday dinner we went to an Indian restuarant for an early dinner so we could race home to set up for the monthly family-friendly werewolf game that we have committed to doing for Aodán and Xander since they love the game so and cannot come to the one held in a bar. And even though I didn’t feel stressed about hosting a “birthday party” it was wonderful to be able to sing “Happy Birthday” to Rainer with some of my favorite people in Portland and have them cheering him on as he blew out the candles
And best of all, our family friends the Burchams stuck around afterwards, and we got to watch the kids play Rock Band.
So by the time Rainer fell asleep hours after any orthodox bedtime, he was a pretty happy child, and we were a happy family.
July 16th, 2008
I have been a little anxious about Soren and Rainer not having learned to swim yet, at three and five, when Aodán and Xander could at these ages. It seems like one of the automatics, good parents get their kids into swimming lessons. But I never get my stuff together enough to sign up for lessons in advance, and am unsure where would be good, and, truthfully, dread, having to figure out what to do with older boys so I can take younger boys to a pool for lessons. Except for music lessons, the activities we do tend to have to be to everyone’s benefit. So, this week, enjoying my parents’ swimming pool, I have felt compelled to do swimming-lesson-like activities, trying to get them to float on their backs with me supporting them and to put their faces in the water which they hate, but because I am asking, they are willing to try. And then when I finish up these activities, they have fun grabbing onto the side of the pool, as they call it, spiderman style, and scooting around. And it turns into laughing and playing with Aodán and Xander, and they are so busy shrieking with delight that they don’t even notice when their faces go under water, and they are kicking and letting their legs float up and pretty much doing the things I thought I was teaching them to do.
Apparently this is a lesson I have to get over and over. My kids will do what they need to do when they are ready to do it. It was true two years ago when Aodán got on a bike without training wheels for the first time ever at the shameful-to-me-age of nine, and just started riding. Because he was ready and he wanted to do it. Also? There’s this difference between when it feels like play and when it feels like diligent striving, that contrary to my Puritan goggles, the learning by playing just seems to be more effective. Finally, I seem to slam into this lesson whenever I am paying more attention to what, in my head, a good mother would be doing for her kids, and less attention to, you know, my kids.
July 11th, 2008
I woke this morning at five a.m. from a dream that didn’t feel like a bad dream — I had been hanging out on the roof of a tall building with a man, just sort of exchanging polite chit-chat and he pointed out a truck leaping off another building, but he pointed out that it was driven by a woman in a mini-skirt — irrefutable dream evidence that it was a sort of performance, and, looking closer, I realized the truck was, indeed suspended from a helicopter. “Come on,” he called out, leaping off the building towards the truck, gesturing we should play too, and so I followed, and only in mid-air realized it was a mistake and that the ground was suddenly rushing up at me. Confronted with the end of my life, I squeezed my eyes closed and prayed, but it wasn’t a prayer of “Save me” so much as praise and gratitude and I wasn’t filled with fear, which actually I think was the thing that surprised me and woke me up. Unless it’s true that somewhere in the fine print you’re never allowed to dream your own death. I never have, anyhow. Or maybe there was fear but it just didn’t matter much, because feeling fear wasn’t going to save me from falling. A few hours can make me such a revisionist of my dreams! Anyway, I dare you to fact-check this one…
Maybe this is what I get for going to bed trying to figure out fear. I was reading Mark Epstein’s Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart and couldn’t decide which parts I most needed to underline because it all seemed so relevant to the conversation going on here and over at the Unreliable Narrator’s about self-improvement and suffering. Epstein is a Buddhist psychotherapist and he points out that the profession of western mental health has pathologized the feeling of emptiness that it turns out almost all human beings are prone to, and this has led to a tendency to try to analyze it and think it away, and, in fact our fear of this feeling of emptiness causes more suffering than the feeling of emptiness itself.
Does everyone periodically make a list of their fears?
I’ve got the obvious, loss of those I love, loss of health and/or faculties for myself/those I love. Loss that I am responsible for: failing to attend to some detail that turns out not to be inconsequential, mold and leaks and cars from nowhere and letters from insurance companies and lumps where lumps ought not to be.
Fear of being the bull in the china shop and helplessly trampling on feelings because of my own inability to do better.
Fear of getting so clench-jawed angry teeth start popping from my head and I scare my children.
Fear of love withdrawn.
Fear of being seen through, of being found out as a fraud.
Fear of being inconsequential.
Fear of being just like everyone else, nothing special.
Fear of being freakishly different from everybody else and never being understood.
Fear of deluding myself.
Is that a map of my vulnerabilities? I am not trying to play word games, but I don’t want to be ruled by fears, and yet acknowledging vulnerability, that feels ok.
I think I finally decided of everything I read last night that I most wanted to highlight the story of when Epstein’s teacher was doing a sesshin and struggling with dismissive responses from the master he was working with to his answers to the koans he was given, and finally he was given a relatively simple koan “How do you manifest the Buddha while chanting a sutra?” which boiled down to being asked to chant/sing a sutra. Only, Epstein’s teacher had spent a lifetime not singing after being told by a teacher in elementary school to just mouth the words, and so he struggled, was anxious, practiced nervously, went before the master and mangled the singing, got words wrong. And the master was delighted, he opened up, “to be: open and vulnerable and insecure, not confident, controlled and coherent.”
Confidence is so sexy. How much of my life have I spent thinking I would be happy if I were just more confident, if I could just speak up for myself. How many times have I been sure I was the only insecure person in the room, my insecurity blinding me to the possibility anyone else feeling insecure. I joke with Jenny that when I don’t call her it’s something wrong with me, and when she doesn’t call me it’s something wrong with me, and I love her because I know she is capable of thinking the same thing and so we’re both responsible for calling each other regularly. It just never occurs to me that other people should have gaping insecurities because I have this model in my head that accomplishment breeds confidence breeds further accomplishment, and it’s easy to see other people’s accomplishments. In fact, the only people who seem to advertise their insecurities are those who are unkind or arrogant — listen to a woman criticizing another woman’s body, particularly a celebrity’s body and I feel an achey compassion for her.
So, playing with the notion that insecurity is not something to be eliminated or covered up, but used as a channel to greater compassion or authenticity?
Maybe where I’ve ended up watching the progression of this discussion on self-improvement is agreeing that the myths of ‘I used to suck and now I’m great,’ of the self-made man, of Cinderella, of the all-better club are no more useful than the myth that everything used to be so great and now it’s all going to Hades in a handbasket. And still I am not going to deny the truths of growth, development and learning, or of recovery — and the profound gratitude I feel for getting to witness my best friend struggling up into sobriety and honesty with herself, how inspired I am by her courage and willingness to do stuff that is just hard. But being essential to her survival, it seems to belong to a category outside of self-improvement. But who among us still fits into a world-view we had ten years ago.
What reading Epstein has reminded me of is that attacking the problem of ‘how can I live my life better?’ from an analytical point of view alone can lead to being trapped into my own cleverness or devolution into blame and fault-finding. And sometimes I have used my morning pages as a tool to attack a problem and then I start to wonder why write? when I can’t identify a problem with myself, my life. I am actually embarrassed that maybe all the times I have asked myself “Am I happy?” if I wasn’t asking the wrong question… not that I have a definite pin on what the right question is, but sometimes it could be “Am I useful?” “Am I eliminating suffering?” or “Am I in harmony with the things going on around me?” Or maybe there is no question to answer?
July 8th, 2008
Still thinking about self-improvement and projects, and the actual conversation going on in the comments of the last post, and even this: improvement is not a bad thing (right?) and I think we do a lot less damage trying to improve ourselves than, say, our significant others and children (reward charts tra la la!). I think that my problem might in fact be that the metaphor for my self-improvement projects is always home improvement. Leaky roofs and gutters needing cleaning, not to mention foundations and things hidden in walls that you don’t realize have problems until there is water damage and the plumber is handing you an ungodly bill.
Our metaphors tend to reflect our preoccupations and the things we are doing and working on. As I knit more, I see the ability to pick up dropped stitches without freaking out as a positive development both literally and metaphorically. Practicing with the kids and seeing the patterns of development and maintenance is giving me a surprising patience and willingness to enjoy the present moment. But it’s true for my kids, too, how their preoccupations will shape their interactions. I am asked to “pause” or “rewind” while reading aloud because they are used to the Tivo. And it is funny to hear my smaller children playing with legos or on the playground and using video game terminology: Ok, now we’re on the next level, let’s play the cut scene (a pre-scripted part of a plotted video game where you cannot control your character). And as much as I have misgivings about how video games can crowd out other, more developmentally appropriate activities in my children’s lives without some thoughtful limits on them, I like the idea of video game metaphor for self-improvement type ideas… Oh, I’m stuck on level 2 with that one, but I think I just need to keep trying. Much more satisfactory than leaks in the roof.
Do I have too much faith in the power of words? Is it, in the end, really just the actions that matter? I turned in a thesis on metaphors in philosophy twelve years ago and am surprised how it continues to hang around my neck. I think about Kepler and his beautiful theory about the platonic solids describing the different orbits of the planets and how he had the courage to throw away the whole theory when it just didn’t work with the most accurate measurements he could get, and wonder if I have such courage. I think I find a metaphor I like and try to make the facts fit the metaphor rather than the other way around.
July 4th, 2008
I am done with self-improvement.
Of course, the marketing forces telling me how many things are wrong with me, and all the things I need to buy in order to at least pass as ok are perhaps more intimidating and pervasive than King George and all of his Red-coats. Those marketing forces wouldn’t have a foothold, of course, but for my long history of being complicit, worrying that I needed to be more critical of myself than anyone else could be, so I could be prepared, could steel myself, before anyone else could point out everything that was wrong with me. My ancient fear that everything that goes wrong in my life can be traced to something wrong with me that everyone else can perceive that I cannot. My history of using commiseration over flaws as a way of bonding, the way women do.
It’s a scary thing to write: done with self-improvement. If I refuse to reinforce the idea there is something wrong with us with my sisters-in-misery, over the size of our butts, the need to have cleaner, more organized houses, or the need to be more patient with our children, will I get stuck with the label of stuck-up that killed my social life in middle school? This arrogance, this chutzpah could end in resentment and alienation, and yet, I want to treat myself with the same gentleness and generosity that I would a friend — there is nothing wrong with you. And there is nothing wrong with me. (Please, listen carefully: I am not saying I am perfect, but I don’t worry about whether you are perfect, I spend a lot more time thinking about the things I love about you. )
I want to declare war on everything telling us we’re not enough. I had thought initially that this was about the body-image struggle that is so on-going, the waters recently stirred by the unreliable narrator’s lovely blog entry revisiting cultural orthorexia and by this stabbing identification when a friend mentioned that looking at photos of a happy time didn’t make her feel happy because all she could see was her body not looking the way she thought her body should look. We got a Wii fit, which exceeded my expectations as something that makes body awareness and exercises with instant feedback fun, and yet when it tells me “visualize your ideal body when you’re exercising” I have to shout back at it “I quite like the body I have, thank you!” which must mean I am making slow progress in this struggle.
It goes deeper. It’s summer guilt at relaxing and reading fluff and just hanging out when I could be filling my own perceived deficits (getting the kids and myself really fluent in a second language! Plant identification! Learning the names of all the stars and constellations! Being able to identify chord progressions in music!) And I finally had this realization that while there is nothing wrong with those things as goals, I am done with perceiving these things as deficits. I have decided I am whole, I am complete, that I have racked up enough small, personal successes in thirty-five years, that setting goals for myself, challenging myself — that’s extra. I am going to acquire virtues rather than eliminate sins.
I finally face the fear that not struggling and striving to improve myself could be the first step into a slow slide into complacency and then apathy. And yet, lately I have been arguing that one doesn’t really improve oneself out of shame and self-loathing or fear, that shame, self-loathing, fear will keep hiding, telling you that everything you have done isn’t enough. And so I am trying to slow down enough to be aware of the little thoughts that come out under stress, and in the stillness here, now, knowing that they will re-emerge, I am arming myself against them. (”One if by shame and two if by self-loathing and three if by fear…”?) But more: that sort of mindfulness? Don’t take it for self-improvement.
