Control

Yesterday, I came home with a headache.  It was a slow throb at the top of my head, almost like the bone of my skull hurt.  I laid in bed to read; I tried to nap but struggled.  I hoped that I was not getting sick.  Brooke asked me if she could get me a glass of water.

“No.”  I said.  “I can get one.”

“I know you can.  But do you want me to get you one?’

I looked at her, perplexed.

Later in the afternoon, I sat down with our computer: we’ve had trouble loading certain internet pages.  I don’t know if this is because our computer is old, or whether it has some sort of virus, or if our internet isn’t working properly.  I know relatively little about computers, at least compared to my friends, which is generally how I measure whether I know much or little.

After an hour or so of working, and searching various help pages, I shut the computer in frustration.  It still did not work quite correctly.  It was like running with a limp: technically, it could do many things online, but not everything.  It limped.

Brooke needed me to go to the store to pick up some food, and I left.  Inside, I was seething.  The computer did not do what I wanted it to: I could not control it; I could not coerce or convince it to load my email properly.  As I pulled out of our neighborhood, I told myself to calm down (which always works).

But this time, I saw a connection.  I thought of how Brooke asked me if I wanted something and I said no; I thought of how I became angry when I could not get the computer working.  This small word, control, sat at the root of it all.

In Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert says the only two questions that humans have ever fought over are: How much do you love me? and Who’s in charge? I think of this need we have for control, and how it proliferates my life.

Sometimes, the need for control is so deep, that I cannot even accept a glass of water from my wife.

I drove to the store, telling myself that I could not fix the computer.  We need to take it to the Apple store, and see if it is repairable or simply too old.  I told myself I couldn’t do it: I didn’t have control.  I drove reminding myself that I need to accept glasses of water from my wife.  I drove as the sun set over the wine-colored mountains and cars turned their lights on, and small dots of light appeared in the darkness.

Conversation

Where you are understood, you are home.

John O’Donohue

John O’Donohue was an Irish poet who wrote about beauty, spirituality, and imagination.  Central to these ideas is the theme of connection.  Beauty connects us to something larger than ourselves; there is a transcendent element.  Spirituality could be said as the search for this connection to the transcendent.  And imagination is also an enlarging act: we learn to see with others’ eyes, to experience what others have experienced.  This, too, is an act of connection.

I have been thinking about this idea of connection as it relates to conversation.  Too often, conversations linger at the mere point of communication, rather than striking through the surface to a point of connection.  We have all felt this.  It may have been during a banal conversation regarding the weather, or a moment when we shared something about which we care deeply, only to be met with a blank face.

Sometimes, however, when we are fortunate, we find real conversation, real connection.  Communication comes from our souls, not just our heads.  The topic matters much less that what’s said underneath the topic.  We can connect while talking about sports; we can connect while talking about religion, or love, or pain.  Underneath the topic is the knowing nod, the piercing eye contact.  This connection is more felt than observed.  This connection is the realization: “What I am saying this person has felt.”

So rarely do we function at that level.

We rarely bring conversations to that level, and our friends rarely do, either.  I can count on my hands the conversations I’ve had at that level in the last months, the level where I am sharing feelings and thoughts I could not articulate before I opened my mouth, the level where the person across from me smiles broader with each sentence that I speak.  I have had the most with my wife.  A few, I’ve had with other friends.

Most of the time, I don’t care about going to that level.  I don’t think about it.

Yet, if John O’Donohue is right, and I think he is, I ought to go to that level again and again.  For when I am truly understood: when I say things that I didn’t know I thought until I had the freedom to say them; when I find true connection with the person across the table, then I am home.

Home is a place of freedom, of connection, of reality, of beauty.  Home is a spiritual place.

May we, today, work to find that place of home with another.

Originality

Even in literature or art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

C.S. Lewis

Often, in the writing world, or in the art world, we hear about originality.  Books and songs and movies are judged by their originality: by the idea that no one has done something like this before.  We love this idea of being original, both in ourselves and in the work we value most highly.

The problem is twofold.  First, the reality is that so very little of what we value is actually original.  In writing, sometimes avant-garde techniques such as adding a recipe to a poem or musical notation to a book seem terribly original.  And, this has been done before, really for hundreds of years before (read Tristram Shandy).  Or, musically we think that adding a new twist to an old song is making it original, when people have been copying and adapting similar melodies and harmonies for hundreds of years.

The second problem with originality is that it doesn’t necessarily translate to merit.  For example, think of your favorite movie.  Do you like it because it was original.  Or, do you like it because it portrayed truth in a beautiful and moving way?  Take the Tristram  Shandy example.  My guess is few readers of this blog have read the book, because beyond its originality, it really has little going for it.

And so we have this quote.  The reality of the quote is this: you are original.  Though you have felt the same things and seen the same things that thousands of others have felt, your specific way of seeing and feeling is original.  This is not feel-good hogwash; this is necessary for creation.  Otherwise, new art would have ceased long, long ago.  The important part is to describe the world, through writing or painting or directing or sculpting or gardening, the specific way that you see it: not the way you’ve been told to see it by your favorite movie or book or person.  Sure, others have discovered a similar truth, but they would not or do not communicate it in the same manner.

And this is how to be original.  Above all, tell the truth as you see it.

A Moment of Unproductivity

Tintagel, England. A beautiful spot on the Cornish coast.

“Keep something beautiful in your mind.”  - Blaise Pascal

Too often, over the past week and the past few weeks, I strove only for productivity.  I taught classes and created lesson plans and graded tests and papers; I read books to review them; I did daily chores: I took out the garbage and helped with the dishes and folded laundry.  We all have myriad tasks which fill our days, some that we like, some that we don’t.

But, I found myself, even during moments of rest thinking: What can I do next?

So today, I became unproductive.  I watched football.  I listened to a podcast.  I played guitar.  I paid attention to the wind in the tree outside my window, and the cerulean reservoir beyond it.  It was beautiful.

John O’Donahue, an Irish poet, reminds us that beauty makes us feel more alive in its presence.

Too often, I do not see its presence.  This is because, in the hustle of productivity, there is little room for beauty.  Beauty is aesthetic.  It brings us to the foot of Imagination and Wonder — two very unproductive activities.

Too often, I do not feel alive.

Yet today, I was reminded of this need for beauty, from a view I have seen hundreds or thousands of times.  I was reminded of this need for life.  And, for a few moments at least, I paid attention to it.

An Evening

Thursday night I slept little.

When I woke on Friday, I had that sleepy headache that we all get: a dull throb at the base of my skull.  Coffee did not cure it, nor the drive to work, nor a morning of teaching.  I smiled and spent my patience.  Students only had half a day, and I left work soon after them.  I was supposed to stay all day, but could not concentrate on anything significant.

My wife, Brooke, was surprised to see me.  I told her how tired I was, which she knew.  So, she took my daughter and they ran errands all afternoon.  I laid on the couch and fell asleep to the television, which I love to do.  I can rarely nap for longer than twenty minutes.  I slept for an hour or so.  I woke to commentators talking about some unimportant aspect of professional football.  I woke slowly, with no regard to time.  I flicked aimlessly through the channels.  It felt wonderful.

Brooke came home with Ellis.  They had gone to Babies R’ Us and gotten an assortment of items: clothes and a container for dirty diapers.  Brooke handed Ellis to me and made dinner.  She said she was going to make spaghetti and meatballs.  I turned on some music and bounced Ellis on my knee.  Brooke and I talked while she cooked.  We laughed, and told each other about our days.  Together, we sang to the music during lulls in the conversation.  Ellis smiled and laughed.  She loved the music.

We ate spaghetti and meatballs while Ellis sucked on a fake plastic keychain.  She burbled and cooed.  We ate the spaghetti, and the garlic toast, and a salad with peppers and avocados.  I was hungry.  We talked and watched Ellis.  I do not remember what we talked about.

After dinner, I turned the music back on.  Van Morrison.  Brooke was tired and laid on the couch.  I danced with Ellis, bouncing her to the music.  Brooke smiled.  Ellis smiled and laughed.  Then, I swung Ellis down, close to Brooke.  She laughed and laughed.  I swung her again.  And again.  Each time, she laughed harder.  I bounced her and swung her in rhythm to the music.  There we were, in the living room, enjoying the night.

The Comedian

Friday night, I watched Jerry Seinfeld do stand-up comedy.  My parents took my wife and I, and we watched as Jerry entertained us for an hour and a half, in the truest sense of the word.  At times, we all had tears gathering in our eyes; we all spoke about how our stomachs and cheeks ached afterwards.  Seinfeld touched on a variety of topics — from drug commercials to parenting — and astonished us.

I’ve seen, on DVD, Seinfeld do stand-up comedy before.  Many of us have seen it in the opening sequences of the hit show that bears his name.  Yet, the experience of interacting with a comic in his element and watching it on television is akin to reading about Africa or actually going there.  Live shows — comic, theater, or otherwise — bring a relationship that doesn’t exist on the television.  For one, we were a part of what Jerry did: our laughs fed his energy, and his energy fed our laughs.  Or again: the experience of seeing someone live engaged me in a way that television could not.  In a darkened theater, there are no other distractions.  In a darkened house, there are countless distractions.

Even more, I believe there is something in us that craves human-to-human interaction.  Live performances give us this human-to-human interaction.  Movies do not.  Sitcoms do not.  DVDs do not.  For myriad reasons, we humans like to hear what other humans have to say, and we like it even more when the other humans are actually present.

But even more than the experience of the night, I could not stop thinking about the performance of the night.  Jerry’s jokes were polished.  He knew where to pause, and where to rush.  He knew when to speak high, and when to speak low.  In this way, there is almost a music to good stand-up comedy.  Timing.  Rhythm.  Cadence.  Timbre.  Pitch.

Comedy is an art.

Seinfeld, as he describes his art, says that it takes at least half a year to hone a routine into a finished product.  Think of this, the next time you come up with a funny joke.  Hold onto for half a year, trying it out with different rhythms and varying pitch in your voice.  Re-think it.  Polish it.  Then, you may be ready, if you’re also blessed with great talent, to try it out on someone else.

Seinfeld also asserts that “laughs contain thought.”  Though he doesn’t care much for what motivates great comics, he does define comedy as “an exploration into the self” that requires hyper-detailed awareness.  Comedy, for Seinfeld, is a serious enterprise.  It requires thought and work and discipline.  It requires a certain sell of the setup, as the audience needs to believe the beginning of the joke, without ever glimpsing the end.

I’m grateful for last Friday.  I’m grateful for laughing harder than I have in a long, long time.  I’m grateful for the experience.  And, I’m grateful for the chance to see such hard work and polish, and to enjoy it so deeply.

A Quote

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 19 August 1851

I think of this, at the end of a day.  I feel the fuzz of tiredness behind my eyes.  I think of my day: a chance to watch a football game, the laughter of my daughter, a drive with my wife.  My brother called, twice.

I think of the desire to write.  Or, for others, the desire simply to create.  We create the most when we stand up to live.  This does not always mean experiencing more, but always means seeing more.  It means seeing the mystery in my daughter’s laugh, and the thrill of it.  It means wondering at my cat as he runs back and forth in the house, meowing with abandon.  It means noticing what I eat, or the silliness of commercials, or how my body feels as it settles into the couch.

Creating, whether writing or painting or gardening, is about noticing.  This is part of what Thoreau meant when he wrote that we must stand up and live.  Noticing, whether at Walden Pond or in Aurora, Colorado, brings with it deliberation.  When I notice the pleasures and see the trials as opportunities, I live deliberately.

So, I write tonight, even for a moment.  I write so that I will notice, and I write because I notice.

May you as well, in your creative endeavor, stand up to live.  May you have long talks on the porch and great dinners and hear your daughter laugh today.  May this living vivify your prayers, your thoughts, your creativity.  May you learn from a man who wrote in his journal over 150 years ago, yet his life and thoughts were so powerful, are so powerful, that we remember them today.

Now for Something Completely Different…

A little snippet from the NYTimes regarding multitasking.  It turns out that those who consistently multitask are consistently bad at…multitasking.

Read it and gloat. Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask…

“Multitaskers were just lousy at everything,” said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford and one of the study’s investigators. “It was a complete and total shock to me.”

Apparently trying to do everything actually means you end up doing nothing well.  Who knew?

May we all practice the ancient art of being present today, of being in one place with one thought, and may we find peace, beauty, and simplicity in it.

Imagination

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute.

Franklin P. Adams (newspaper columnist)

On writing: how often I have sat with a paragraph, or a sentence, or a word, and struggled to capture the ethereal thought in my head.  Or, how often I have simply sat, imagining what it might be like to walk a dusty road in Africa, or what a marriage ceremony looked like between a certain man and a woman, or conjured up a character’s relations, from father and mother and sister, to grandparents and great-grandparents that will never even step near the actual story.

In writing, good imagination brings depth and reality and freshness.  A good imagination will make a character seem real and true.  A good imagination will capture the most mundane and banal of activities and drench it with significance and make it, well, novel.  A good imagination can make a walk to the mailbox or a dinner alone suddenly interesting, when the reader sees more and more of the character who does it, when the reader suddenly sees these banal activities in new ways, with fresh facets.

Yet, a good imagination does not only make writing stronger (and longer).  All art is affected in the same way: I can draw a chair in a moment or over days and weeks: either one is a chair but only one has made it interesting, or something more than a chair.  And then, if this is true, it is true in all creative endeavors outside of so-called art, those of gardening or business or teaching or…

So may you see imagination and the blessings of it not as something that brings speed, but brings depth and novelty.  These always take time.  And may you bring your imagination to that which you are most passionate, never finishing shortly, but methodically and intentionally.

The End of a Classic

Early on the morning of February 5th, my pregnant wife struggled to breathe.  She woke me, and we walked or waddled downstairs and sat on the couch together.  It was sometime around 3 am.  I rubbed her back.  Her breathing slowed and became normal again; I moved to the chair so she could lie down.  We turned on the television, but kept the volume low because it was early in the morning.  For some unknown reason, we ended up watching PBS.  Reading Rainbow came on, a show we both watched as children.  Maybe we watched it for a strange comfortable nostalgia, in the midst of a stressful night.

I remember thinking, about my daughter who was still in the womb and thirty weeks along: she will be born into a world where children still watch Reading Rainbow.  I watched Reading Rainbow.  In this I found comfort.  Connection.

Roughly twenty hours later, after fitful sleep and a visit to the doctor and emergency drive to the hospital and a battery of tests, my daughter was born at 11:23 pm.  She was ten weeks early.  Yet, she was born into a world where children still watched Reading Rainbow.

And so yesterday, I took note on my drive into work.  Reading Rainbow, after a 26-year run, was ending.  No one wanted to fund it anymore.  Research has passed it by, someone said.  Now, experts realize that television shows must teach phonics and decoding, not like Reading Rainbow.  You see, the television show about reading that I grew up with, that I watched on the day my daughter was born, taught a love for books.  Not phonics.  Not decoding.  Love.

I almost laughed out loud as experts debated the best way that television could teach literacy.  I spoke to the radio, alone in the car: television can’t teach literacy.  Parents and teachers teach literacy, not television.

I know I am biased.  But I wonder about the ending of this show, and what it means for our culture at large.  This decision stresses function, or perceived function, over love.  How often we do this at all levels of education.  In graduate school classes, we analyze and critique books, and forget to tell what we love about them.  We examine history and its interpretations, we analyze holy texts and their veracity, we deconstruct political performances.

Yet, beneath all this, there is a human heart that wants connection and passion and adventure.  We love history for the imagination of it, or holy texts for the truth and mysticism in them, or political performances for their hope.  We love books for their stories, for the swirl and rush of words, for their unraveling of human hurts and hopes.  Yes, this love brings about study and deconstruction and analyzation.  But, we mustn’t forget the love.  We mustn’t forget to love.

The end of Reading Rainbow, for me, is about a small loss of connection with my past and with my daughter.  I hope that it is not about a large loss of love for many, many more.