I've been enjoying taking bite-sized intellectual chunks out of The Book of Life for the last few weeks. Here's how they describe themselves: WHAT IS THE BOOK OF LIFE[?] That's pretty stankin' ambitious. I like it. It's an easy "food for thought" source for when I'm hungry for thought-food. And although I may not agree at times, I enjoy it. Most appealing to me at this moment is their advocacy for what they call "The Melancholy Position" in relationships. On their entry for "Loyalty and Adultery," they write, There is in a sense only one answer of sorts, and it can be called the Melancholy Position because it confronts the sad truth that in certain key areas of human existence, there simply are no good solutions. If we embraced the Melancholy Position from the start, we would need new, sadder, vows to exchange with our partners in order to stand a sincere chance of mutual fidelity over a lifetime. Certainly something far more cautionary and downbeat than the usual platitudes would be in order – for example: ‘I promise to be disappointed by you and you alone. I promise to make you the sole repository of my regrets, rather than to distribute them widely through multiple affairs and a life of sexual Don Juanism. I have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is you I have chosen to commit myself to.’ These are the sorts of generously pessimistic and kindly unromantic promises that couples should make to each other at the altar. This is something I can connect with a little. I understand that "there are no good solutions." I have meandered through a few of these this year where I've encountered, enabled, and instigated problems that cause heartbreak all round, where no solution brings anybody out on top. And week after week I find myself more and more resolved to Melancholy because none of the other solutions look particularly appealing. If there was a good solution for my problems, I'd embrace it. But there isn't one.
As I take responsibility for the social and mental places I've put myself, my desire to make music and art has plummeted. Perhaps if I can embrace the Melancholy Position, I can rebuild my relationships with my partner, my friends, my self. I know that some artists have been able to embrace the heartbreak and change in their lives to create something beautiful. I'm not a romantic. I don't revel in my sadness and heartbreak. Even when I stumble into sulkiness, I don't do it as a personal expression in order to show people how sad I am. But as a non-romantic, perhaps I can jive with my musical side again if I can just embrace the Melancholy and build from there, to build from a place where I know that things won't change that much, where a singular step forward is always a comparatively important one. But I can't fully embrace the Melancholy Position yet. I still have a bunch of self-help and psychology to get through and I'd like to get through all of this in as methodically as I possibly can.
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On Thursday evening, I attended a little conversation/meetup where people discussed "Balance." In that context, we talked about how to keep our lives balanced/keep balance in our lives despite the many different pressures we face from self, relationships, work, and family. Many people echoed the sorts of things I've been learning from Nonviolent Communication, my readings about trauma, as well as my work with counsellors and a psychologist. It felt good to hear how other people deal with balance in their own lives, especially since I feel as if I've done a terrible job at keeping balance in my own life. As I listened, I thought a little about choice and agency, and I suggested that I feel balanced when I feel I have the agency to say "yes" or "no" to a given situation. It's hard to feel balanced when somebody or something forces my hand, so agency, as a measure of balance, made sense to me. The conversation bounced around on the "agency" theme for a bit and people fleshed it out far better than I ever could. At some point, one group member mentioned Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs. I perked up because I'm quite familiar with the model from University and because I've used it in a few different contexts over the years. When we tried homeschooling our eldest daughter in kindergarten, for example, we had her make her own hierarchy of what her values were, based on the pyramid. I, for one, have no interest in ever using models the way they're supposed to be used, so applying the Hierarchy to kindergarten or to overall life "balance" is perfectly acceptable to me, as long as it sort-of works. And I got a little bit of a brainstorm, something obvious I'd never considered before: Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs is shaped like a pyramid for a reason: The larger section at the bottom holds the rest of it up. The upper portions don't need to be so big, but they need a solid foundation for support. If something gets taken out of the lower sections, the upper sections will suffer; if something gets taken out of the upper sections, parts of the lower section aren't doing as much work as they could. And a poorly designed pyramid can lead to ugly results, like what happened to the Bent Pyramid at Dashur. I remember a professor suggesting to me that Maslow did not think everybody could get to the top of the pyramid, to the level of self-actualization. I, however, think we can all get there in our own ways and that it's hard to have a healthy, balanced life if we don't have access to at least part of the tip of the pyramid. A person who can't self-actualize, in my opinion, will feel incomplete. So if I treat the Maslow Pyramid as a picture of the complete self, as a "whole" person, we can squeeze lots of things into our personal needs pyramids. Some relationships might take part in all the levels, and some might just fit into one of the levels. What matters is that we don't either undermine our support by taking a bite out of a lower level, or trying to squeeze so much into an upper level that the lower levels can't support it. Balance, baby. But the idea of taking bites out of the pyramid also got me thinking about something else: Jenga. Jenga is a balancing game as well. Let's say we're each a Jenga tower. As stresses hit our lives, we can easily "take a block from the bottom and put it on top." This is normative: it's rare to not have a few stresses here and there; it's boring to have a complete, hole-less Jenga tower. However, the higher our Jenga tower is, the more holes it has, the less balanced it is, the more likely it is to topple over. A tall, hole-y Jenga tower might stand tall, but it's more likely to topple, either when the wrong block gets removed, or when an outside force shakes it. In my Jenga metaphor, we aim to be as balanced as possible, so I have to stray from traditional Jenga rules a little: when a stress passes by, you can take blocks from the top and put them back into the bottom. For example. within the next week I might b able to put some of the "Master's Project" blocks from the top of my tower back to the bottom. I will likely feel more balanced when that Master's project isn't on my plate anymore. It's unlikely that you'll ever have a stress-free life, so you'll always have a few holes in the tower and a few blocks on top. I like this metaphor because it doesn't necessarily prioritize as much as the Maslow one does. Neither are perfect metaphors, but I look forward to playing with them a little. Here are the two ugly diagrams I made for my notes while I was listening: Obviously, those diagrams suck and don't really say anything. But when I get back over to the Mainland, maybe I'll make a video with Jenga blocks.
Two interesting academic articles I've discovered in my studies: Smith (2000) and Gordon (2000).3/23/2016
I am looking forward to being finished this Master's; all the joy that academia has given me over the years has faded into futility and frustration. However, over my Master's I've been drawn to a few academic papers despite my disillusionment. I'll share a couple of them here today.
I won't mind returning to either of these are papers even after I take a break from my life as an attempted academic. INTERESTING ACADEMIC PAPER #1: Does the 'New Economy' Measure up to the Great Inventions of the past? (Gordon 2000)
Today, after listening to the most recent episode of Freakonomics, I found my way to Robert J. Gordon's "Does the 'New Economy' Measure up to the Great Inventions of the past?" It's long and I haven't read it in detail, but it's nonetheless readable and full of little nuggets of insight and interesting data.
I appreciate how Gordon takes the time to question the Internet's self-importance. Just because something is more technological doesn't necessarily mean it's more influential. Here's one of my favorite passages:
I'm looking forward to replacing my smartphone, but I know that they've only had tweaks here and there since the iPhone, and really they're just computers you can carry around. Although the online economy has made some things more convenient, we still need shipping, drainage, and sanitation. The online economy is an extraneous one and I appreciate the way Gordon has questioned it.
INTERESTING ACADEMIC PAPER #2: The Specific Challenges of Globalization for Teaching and Vice Versa (Smith 2000)
David Geoffrey's Smith's "The Specific Challenges of GLobalization for Teaching and Vice Versa" describes the alienation teachers feel as they are pressured to fill out various mandates in the name of progress. I think Smith does a good job at pointing out how many of the advances we perceive in education are merely the colonization of education by corporate values.
Here's my favorite passage:
I'm still editing my paper, so I don't want to use up much more brainspace for this blog, but there's a little food for thought, a couple passages that perked my brain towards new ways of thinking.
Twitter lets me post 30-second videos from my phone. These are nice because I can speak way more in 30 seconds than I can in Twitter's 140-character limit.
I passed by a church that was butchering "Be Thou My Vision." This prompted two video responses.
I often listen to podcasts while I walk. One podcast made me reflect on the following:
So we're driving more, and that's ultimately what's causing the accidents. Distracted driving is certainly a problem, but the fact that we're driving more than we have before is what correlates with vehicle deaths. Here a visualization of the data from the article. What does this mean for me? Nothing, really. What it means is that I don't need to feel so bad if I change songs on my phone while it's playing through the Bluetooth speakers in the car. If I behave in a safe manner, my distracted driving on my phone should cause an equivalent amount of distraction as eating a breakfast sandwich while driving.
The other thing I take from this is that I'm not the only person who's spending too much time in the car. I often feel some guilt about the amount of time I spend driving; however, it appears I'm not alone in my iniquity. |
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April 2024
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