Running Thoughts
Does Quiet Un-Nerve Us? A Muse on Tinker Tailor Soldier…
January 8th, 2012
First one, then another… at the showing of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that I attended last weekend, numerous people walked out of the movie. By the third or fourth exodus, I noticed that viewers were exiting in the film’s most still moments: when the camera lingers on retired spy George Smiley, pensively sitting alone in a pub or when he gives a long, tipsy monologue about his encounter with Russia’s top spymaster. The action had slowed, the hunt had paused – and some voted with their feet.
It’s intriguing that this complex remake of John Le Carre’s classic thriller seems to divide us. Critics, as far as I can see, are mostly laudatory – extolling the cinematography, superb acting, the complex story line. But we, the viewers, seem to love or hate the film; only two of 34 reader-reviewers on The New York Times.com give the movie a score of three out of five. Most rate the movie one/two or a four/five, detesting the film as “slow” and “sluggish” or praising it as “brilliant” and “engaging” – and the naysayers outnumber the fans.
Writes marsacademy: “This film may not find a huge audience, because it has a quality of watchful stillness at its core, which is very unlike what the public expects of a ‘spy film.’ It is not an ‘action’ movie.”
Well put. I think that’s precisely why people were walking out. It’s just a movie of course, and excitement is subjective; your terrifying Ferris Wheel ride could be my aerial nap. But it’s perhaps a mark of our times that people could line up so vehemently in opposite corners over action vs. stillness. Although many of us increasingly battle for calm, we’re still surrounded by – and strongly influenced by – a culture of the quick hit, push-button, the ever-rising tide of busy-ness. After all, adrenaline is as addictive as drugs, studies show.
We may be so shaped by the gadget as appendage, tv as white noise and chit-chat as interaction that it seems stifling to be confronted by stillness. If so, we will surely miss out on the second and third layers of life, or the mysteries that perhaps even our best spymasters may never solve. Hurry past quiet, and we cease to see, as Seamus Heaney once wrote, “allegory hard as a figured shield … polished until its undersurface surfaced, like peat smoke mulling through Byzantium.”
In life as in movies, we have to pause to see what’s beneath the polish.
Family Life as a Landscape – A Zen Thought for 2012
January 1st, 2012
Heading toward the often stressful, overly complicated, ironically fatiguing holiday season, I had a small epiphany. I’d been trying once again to figure out how to be zen about the big family get-togethers that can fray even the most solid nerves.
Dynamics are never easy in any household, much less a series of households brought together as much through blood as love. And I have many weaknesses in such situations: a sensitivity to pick up on the pettiness that a less-observant person doesn’t see, an amateur anthropologists’ tendency to analyze things, an idealistic notion that conversation should be a back-and-forth, not a monologue.
But this year I took a page from landscape painting, and learned a simple, perhaps obvious lesson: what not to focus on. Intriguingly, the genre of landscape painting that we know so well – the Hudson River school, Canaletto’s Venetian scenes – did not exist in full bloom before the 18th century. Pre-Enlightenment, artists typically depicted a landscape as a backdrop to a religious scene or a portrait. A natural scene was not the main subject of a canvas. Why?
People saw themselves within the land; they were farmers, landowners, conquerors. But they did not see themselves stepping back and viewing the land and their surroundings. Once we could view nature as a landscape, we could see it with fresh eyes.
The lesson here in some ways is the art of focus. Sometimes one needs to focus on a troubling relationship, certainly. But at other times, perhaps it’s best to take a step back and put a relationship in wider perspective. Chances are, you’ll see new facets of the situation by seeing the big picture – and you’ll realize that petty differences are unimportant.
Try it: picture your family as a landscape. It could be a grand canyon, or a churning sea, or a dramatic series of mountain peaks. View each person as just one wave, hill or chasm. Suddenly, you’re able to focus on the larger, beautiful, frail, wondrous fuller scene of life. And you’ll maybe learn something new about family dynamics. Ah, zen!
These Great Sorrows
November 11th, 2011
Is hyper-busyness a form of sloth? It seems beyond paradoxical to consider our efficient, connected, mobile days even remotely… lazy. But both medieval philosophers and early Buddhist practitioners warned of restlessness and busyness as slothful, because amidst such hyper-ness we tend to avoid what’s deep and important.
Think about it. Madly ticking items off our agenda, we easily avoid depth of thought, the discomfort of ambiguity, or the type of thought-experiments that Einstein undertook. Look around – isn’t our addiction to gadgets perhaps a form of avoidance not only to what’s concretely going on around us, but to the deeper bigger issues going on around us?
Taming busyness, we can begin to confront … the blank page. Or we can turn and face our fears, rather than fleeing once again at the sight of them. I’m not advocating navel-gazing, or wallowing in grief or thought without action. But since avoidance of pain, discomfort, difficulty seems to be a specialty of our times, I do believe that a little confrontation with the deeper issues is medicine we could all use.
Here are some thoughts on the subject by the German poet Rilke, as he advises a young protege to be patient with a sad time in his life.
“Do consider whether these great sorrows might not have passed through your very center? Whether much inside you has not been transformed, whether you did not change in some part of your being during those periods of sorrow?”
He goes on to say that moments of sorrow perhaps should be welcomed, “For those are the moments when something new centers into us, something unfamiliar; our feelings grow more out of shy diffidence; everything in us pulls back, a stillness descends and the new that no one knows stands mutely amidst all this.”
Those are words that I wished I’d been able to call forth when, in a recent time of deep sorrow, I was so quickly advised to get on pills or find a shrink. All well-meaning advice. But I couldn’t help thinking that this advice came from a wish to muffle or abolish my pain, rather than an acceptance of my right to listen within, and hear out my pain, and grow stronger as a result.
Sometimes when others are grieving, the best thing we can do is accept their right to be in pain. Instead of saying so quickly, “Get over it. Move on. Get fixed.”
Social Media: Good, Bad and Surprising, brought to you by CNN
October 15th, 2011
“Take some time to just be human, off-line.” Those were the parting words of musician Pete Wentz – 2 million Twitter followers! – at the close of last Thursday’s CNN Dialogue, a community discussion at Morehouse College in Atlanta. The topic: Social Media: The Good, the Bad and the Surprising. My fellow panelists were Wentz, comedian Baratunde Thurston, and TwitChange founder Shaun King, plus the moderator, CNN anchor Don Lemon, all sharp, thoughtful and wholly steeped in the online world. There was so much texting, tweeting and continuous partial attention going on backstage before the talk that I felt too sheepish to pull out work on a mere piece of paper, or … sit and daydream.
When the Dialogue began, there was a fair bit of oohing and aahing at the whiz-bang beauty of it all – we can change the world, I’m in touch with everybody, always, we’re all happier now. But to my delight, there was candor too, and realism, underscoring my view that the level of discussion around technology is maturing, albeit slowly.
We talked about proliferating weak ties, and their limits. In job hunts, weak ties – our acquaintances, friends of friends etc. – can provide information, but little more. Socially, our online friendships strain the definition of the word; a third of Facebook “friends” are strangers or people with whom we have dormant relations. And yet, as Shaun pointed out, he sometimes feels closer to an online stranger-turned-friend across the country than he does to his own family. Social media is powerfully connective.
What’s the impact on strong ties? I pointed out the corrosive nature of punctured presence. When we’re all in the same room, are we having a rich, textured conversation or are we sated by disjointed, fragmented talk? One eye on the gadget, one eye on our flesh-and-blood friend or colleague, we divide ourselves in pieces. The rise of the “blackberry orphan” says a lot. I used to hide my parent’s cigarettes, now kids hide their mom’s pda – or just stay glued to their own.
Shaun told of a “humiliating” moment when his elderly neighbor knocked on his door – her husband had just died – and Shaun couldn’t think of his name. We are islands, despite all our hyper-connectivity, Baratunde said. “Nobody cares about you!,” he said, half-jokingly – and the audience clapped. Shaun worried about the effect of living virtually on the social skills of his four children. Pete told of the many fans who approach him, knowing so little of his music, but expecting a piece of him.
One last scene from the evening: an English major in a jacket and tie asked about the “attachment” people have for their gadgets. His friends tremble if their batteries die, he said. “I never let my batteries die,” said Shaun, to laughter. I talked about the digital detox – a 24-hour mandatory detox from media – that I witnessed at the U.Maryland – and the angst so many students felt when the plug was pulled. Do we have time to listen to the depths of our inner selves anymore?
In witnessing such extraordinary connectivity throbbing around me, I sensed a paradox – a time of heady excitement and creeping unease, of deepening insecurity and the thrill of the hunt. Being steeped in the Net entails keeping up, keeping up, with it all. But are we better people as a result? I agree with Pete: we need to step back, pause and remind ourselves more often simply to be human.
Storytelling in Medicine – Practical Wisdom for a Beleaguered Profession
October 13th, 2011
For Aristotle, practical wisdom was a key to the good life. He believed in flexibility in thought and in learning from experience, not in cold calculations or in rigid rules. Someone who tries to live their life by applying unbending rules to situations of uncertainty or conflict is like an architect who tries to measure a fluted column with a straight ruler, he wrote. Aristotle taught us to be “ready for surprise” and “prepared to see,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum says.
Could story-telling help give today’s beleaguered doctors the gift of Aristotle’s practical wisdom? Could simply sharing tales from the trenches help them become more flexible thinkers?
I recently visited with a young family doctor who sees storytelling as a way to push back on the relentless, dehumanizing emphasis on efficiency in health care. Storytelling allows doctors to pause, “make peace with bad outcomes, honor patient relationships, and process the meaning in our work,” says Hugh Silk, associate professor of family medicine and community health at UMass Medical School in Worcester. He didn’t mention Aristotle, but the parallels are striking to me. Our narratives are a living form of practical wisdom that highlights the particular, the unique, the mutable in life. They both reflect and cultivate the kind of nimble, responsive knowledge that we need in a time of overload, speed and tech-centrism.
Weaving storytelling into the fabric of doctoring isn’t easy. When Silk began sharing around stories and poems by family medicine and community health staff, there was some initial grumbling. Although patient identities are hidden, some feared that lawyers would scour the often raw, candid pieces for potential lawsuit fodder. Others feared that the stories contravene patient privacy. But now the “Thursday Morning Memo” listserv is read by 450 people in the department and beyond. And the idea is being adopted by three other UMass primary care specialties, an expansion celebrated October 5 with a reading and reception. As well, the school’s family medicine residents now are given time several times a year to reflect, and assigned two reflective essays, based on home visits to patients.
Is this worthwhile? Perhaps it’s a mistake to expect neat metrics from a part of life so achingly mysterious and immeasurable. It is interesting that Silk’s efforts fall at the crossroads of two swelling movements in medicine. “Narrative medicine,” pioneered by Columbia’s Rita Charon, links the study of literature with stories from the medical front, mainly to inspire practitioners to listen attentively to their patients. At the same time, medical educators are becoming more interested in reflective writing as a means of inspiring their students to pause, digest and better understand their learning. Again, there are skeptics, yet both movements show intriguing gains: more empathy, better diagnostic skill, less burnout – more joy.
And the stories? Let them speak for themselves. If you can, take a minute and read “Primary Care Ride,” the story of a family doctor who, upon learning of the death of his 10-month-old patient, was torn deeply between doing his bureaucratic duty and listening to his heart. It’s a story of practiced wisdom, flowering within one of life’s darkest moments.
Blink or Think?
July 14th, 2011
In our rising push for speedy and computational decision-making, we tend to worship “blink” – the power of “thinking without thinking,” as popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. We want the fast answer, the magic bullet. Push, click, fix.
Now, it’s great that intuition has been brought in from the dustbin of psychology. For so long, rational, analytic thinking took precedence in most walks of life, and intuition was disparaged as a women’s trait. (In the 19th-century, women weren’t thought capable of higher forms of thinking, such as analysis and logic.)
And certainly, gut instincts can be accurate, especially if we have some expertise with the question we’re mulling and when the environment in question is relatively predictable. Those are some of the guidelines offered by Nobel-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and pioneering decision-making researcher Gary Klein.
But read the literature closely and you’ll find that our faddish worship of “blink” is as off-kilter as our previous tendency to ignore intuition. Blink and Think go hand in hand.
Consider this. A veteran firefighter confronted with a blaze will take a look, and intuitively sense a way to fight the fire. His intuition is actually a form of pattern recognition, based on his long experience. What’s going on with this fire? Bingo – this blaze is an explosive gas fire needing x,y,z. He intuitively senses a solution – then evaluates the option, mentally turning it over to see if it works, Klein’s decades of work has found.
Or what about the creator who sees a new way to look at the world? She might open up the aperture of her thoughts, exploring all options, until intuitively struck by a new way to frame the question. At this point, reflection is needed to shape this fuzzy intuitive way forward.
These two types of intuition – holistic and inferential, in the words of researcher Jean Pretz – work closely with reflective analysis. We need to reflect in action – in the moment. And we need to reflect back on our actions, as Donald Schon once wrote. Blink alone can’t be the end of the story.
As well, reflection can help us uncover our hazy, subtle, potentially important intuitions, ensuring that we have more “data” – explicit and tacit – at our fingertips, says researcher Erik Dane. The Rice business school assistant professor is studying whether mindful attention can boost awareness of intuitive judgements. If you are highly attentive to changes in your inner and external environment, you’re likely more nimble and a better decision-maker, Dane is discovering in field studies.
If intuition was scorned as women’s work and rational reflection was revered as a male sport, perhaps we need a more androgynous approach to thought? Or at the very least, let’s start to appreciate that our decision-making is quite often a marriage of our own minds.
One is Enough: A Talk By Donald Keene
June 19th, 2011
Ever since I lived in Japan for a few years in my 20s, I have been fascinated by that country’s Living National Treasures, Ningen Kokuho. They are extraordinary craftsmen or performers honored by the government for preserving the country’s traditional arts, from swordmaking to Kabuki theater. But these artists aren’t just looking backwards or preserving the status quo. They embody a national aesthetic that values hard work for the common good and a deep spiritual respect for the act of creativity. They “insist that even the most perfect technique will fail unless it springs from deep feeling,” write Sheila Hamanaka and Ayano Ohmi in their book on the institution, In Search of the Spirit.
Recently, I had two encounters with Americans who seem to me to be national treasures of our own land, given their gentle, tenacious, courageous efforts to change the world. Here are a few thoughts on Donald Keene, and, in my next blog, on Mary Catherine Bateson.
At the kind invitation of my friend Michiko Iwahara, I heard the eminent Columbia University scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene speak last week at the Japan Society, in what was likely his last public US talk before moving to Japan and assuming Japanese citizenship. He is a spry 89-year-old with a steeltrap memory and an endearing humility spiced by candor. He stood indefatigably at the post-talk reception, surrounded by a throng of young students. Apparently, he still works seven days a week.
Mostly, he talked informally about his life: the fortuitous accidents of befriending a Chinese student and then being invited to study Japanese; his WWII work translating blood-stained diaries saved from the bodies of Japanese soldiers; his ties to Columbia, where he studied and taught for 73 years; and his deep love of Japanese literature, which he introduced to the world. Despite his Western background, Keene never felt anything but a deep immediate connection to Japan’s literature. No “us” vs “them” sentiment colored his views, he said. He seemed to have become at one with the works that he translated or critiqued.
Two highlights of the evening for me:
Keene told of showing up for one of his first classes in Japanese studies at Columbia in the late 1930s, only to find that he was the only student. That’s okay, professor Ryusaku Tsunoda said, “One is enough.” In an age of rabid friending and following, that’s a conviction to consider. If we teach or love well, one is enough. In that classroom so long ago, who was the one who sat ready to learn? Donald Keene, who would go on to bring Japan’s literature to the world’s attention. And who was the one so willing to give his all to a single pupil? Tsunoda, the father of Japanese studies at Columbia, and a lifelong mentor to Keene.
This summer, Keene will be taking Japanese citizenship and moving permanently to Japan, a decision he made last winter while hospitalized with a serious illness. His choice comes as many foreigners are leaving Japan in the wake of the recent disasters. But the tragedies made Keene all the more determined to make the move, in part to show solidarity for Japan’s people.
At the Japan Society, Keene recalled that many Japanese people have told him that his decision has given them courage. He spoke in response to the evening’s last question, from Reuters Television correspondent and former Keene student Fred Katayama. If I can give someone courage, that’s a good thing, Keene said. His simple, remarkable words lingered in silence for a moment, before the audience stood to applaud him.
One is enough.
Next week: A talk with Mary Catherine Bateson on the gift of our longer lives.
The Expansion of Experience – The Home/Work Blur Today
June 4th, 2011
Just got back from the Business Marketing Association’s annual conference in Chicago, where I spoke on a general session panel entitled “The @Work State of Mind.” Rick Segal, president of the ad firm GyroHSR, moderated.
The boundaries between home and work are gone – that’s not news. But we’re still dealing with the fallout. At BMA, I noted that the division between these spheres was a short-lived Industrial Age experiment. Remember, the weekend and the vacation are recent (and fading) inventions.
But that doesn’t mean that we’re returning to an agrarian past. In the pre-Industrial past, the work-life blend stemmed from a restriction of human experience. People were rooted, and hewn to biological or cultural time flows. Now, work-life integration is due to an expansion of experience – a collapse of distance and a rush past the shackles of the clock. We’re free-floaters, for both better and worse.
We’re in constant “on” mode, a tempo that is inspiring and exhausting. Fellow panelist Eduardo Conrado, chief marketing officer at Motorola Solutions, told of being home, yet “snacking” on information all the time. A new study reports that 30 percent of mobile workers wake up at night to check email. (A blurring of sleep and wake?)
We’re having trouble finding the time and resources to pay attention deeply. Dalton Conley of NYU pointed out research showing that multitasking affects memory. When we juggle while trying to learn, we can’t recall the newly learned information deeply, and so cannot transfer this shallow learning to new situations. The opportunity is squandered.
Three-quarters of workers say they don’t have enough time with their children, even while studies show that parental time spent on childcare is at record highs. Why the disconnect? Multitasking. People feel time-starved, because they’re with their children, yet mentally away. As panelist Johnna Torsone, HR director at Pitney Bowes, pointed out, we have wonderful new ways to connect; she skypes with her West Coast grandson. But we can’t nurture deep relations without face time, and without at least sometimes preserving what I call the integrity of the moment. It’s essential to our humanity.
The implications for marketers? First, nurture ways to step in and out of the flow. Being immersed, hurried, interrupted and reactive is antithetical to deep thought and relations – and informed decision-making. Second, highlight stories. Narrative is more important than ever as essential form of meaning-making in a complex society. It’s a terra firma in this free-floating world. As Jerome Bruner notes, stories are mankind’s way of wresting meaning from surprise – from the times when something went awry.
Gyro kindly bought 100 copies of Distracted as a giveaway. As I signed them, people expressed their concern again and again for their children’s future. A world without deep focus is untenable, and we know it.
Sculpting The Second Half of Life
May 22nd, 2011
I recently attended an intriguing dinner in Brooklyn Heights, initially set up to talk about the gift and burden of our longer lives.
The impetus was a visit by Jay Goldfarb, an American who runs a healing therapies retreat centerin Switzerland. (As we nibbled on cheese and crackers, we talked about the last brown bear left in his part of the Alps.) Goldfarb recently created the Legacy of Wisdom project, an online compendium of video interviews with important thinkers from Mary Catherine Bateson to Ram Dass.
Goldfarb’s mission is age-old: preserving knowledge for future generations. But our new longevity now colors this quest. So many more of us will live to 80, 90 or 100 in good health. How can we collectively and individually harness the power of these added years? How can we ensure that the second half of life is meaningful, giving and “worthwhile” – by whatever definition we give to that term?
As I look around, I see many in my 50-something generation peering into the future, and seeing a frightening void, not a gift. They see a society that still does not value older minds. They feel economically insecure, and worry how they will support themselves with dignity during multiple future decades. Tackling these fears will be part of the challenge of cultivating the newly elongated second half of life.
The delicious grilled fish dinner was generously hosted by Mary and Tom Rothschild at their apartment overlooking the East River. As the founder of the non-profit Healthy Media Choices, Mary does pioneering work helping families, children and educators become more intentional about their use of media. Her husband Tom, a Quaker, is a mediation attorney who has written thoughtfully about the importance of silence.
Richard Lewis attended, too. He is a gentle poet and teacher whom I’ve long wanted to meet. Through his Touchstone Center, he’s spent decades helping children connect to their imaginations, through nature. We looked at one of the tiny seashells that Lewis uses in his work. Each child becomes a caretaker of this visitor from the sea; the shell is a jumping off point from which he/she can imagine worlds beyond their own. The essence of Lewis’ wide-ranging work, it seems to me, is reuniting children with a sense of possibility.
I didn’t take notes, but the memory of this dinner lingers. The hurried, pressured, test-driven nature of schooling today concerned us all. Do children have time to daydream and play, spend time outdoors and chase a stray thought? Mary raised my use of the term “dark age” in the subtitle of Distracted, meaning an era that often is technologically inventive, but leads to cultural losses over time. I spoke of technology as potentially dehumanizing, and Jay pressed me to articulate what I meant. I responded that we are patterning ourselves after the machine, prizing point-and-click, easy answers and shallow communications. “We are not gadgets,” to paraphrase Jaron Lanier.
Into the evening, we talked about the astonishing scientific potential within our grasp. What could and should be passed on to future generations? What is wisdom? At one compelling point in the evening, Richard Lewis told us that his 18-year-old daughter recently had promised to carry on his decades-long work via the Touchstone Center.
A timely book inspired me to blog about this spring dinner. In Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Father Richard Rohr writes about finding our way in later life. In the first half, we are preoccupied with achievement and performance – and finding our identity. Later, we need to find the task within the task – to understand why we’re doing what we do. In particular, we grow by tapping our failings, a challenge that many people refuse to face. “We are a ‘first-half-of-life culture,’ largely concerned about surviving successfully,” he writes. His message originates in a Christian perspective, yet serves us all, I believe. Remember this, Rohr writes, “your second journey is yours to walk or to avoid.”
Let’s get walking. Are you game?
Rebutting a Call for Shorter Attention Spans
May 21st, 2011
Last week, theater critic Terry Teachout at the Wall Street Journal wrote a column, “Get to the Good Part” – arguing that shorter attention spans would lead to more concise art. I wrote a letter in reply.
Here’s the full letter, which was cut down a bit on the paper:
Terry Teachout is mistaken. Shortened attention spans have nothing to do with the production of succinct, well-conceived, well-paced entertainment.
Ask any neuroscientist or psychologist – or writer. If you are attention-deficient, you’re more likely to fall prey to distraction and the tangential. You’re more impulsive and less able to plan ahead. You tend to hopscotch through life, and often are unable to follow the trail of a thought or idea, pin it down and painstakingly turn that thought into a creative breakthrough. As a creator or critic or spectator of the arts, you’re too often stuck on the surface of life – if you have too short an attention span.
Teachout rightly advocates for succinct, well-thought artworks. No one, in the past or in our era, wants wooden, dull entertainment or literature. Humans have always aspired to cut the fat from our creations, and tell stories so riveting that they stop time and grab others’ focus.
But it’s wrong to imply that anything quick and brief is smart, while anything slow and lengthy is dumb. Older sitcoms, classic plays, and discursive masterworks take time to imbibe and digest – and perhaps offer a depth and nuance that our adrenaline-infused, briefer forms of entertainment cannot. The point is, we need both – and we especially need to be able to focus deeply in order to create and enjoy such slower, longer fare. Attention unlocks the door to the world beyond the fast and brief. It gives us the ability to get past digressions and superfluity.
Our impatient age seeks to cut to the chase, but in so doing, we too often miss out on the journey that is life and art. A deeper, longer attention span allows us the clarity to grasp the beauty of the fast and the slow, the brief and the long-lasting.