All in the Same Boat

This post is inspired by a marathon, a conference, the election season, and a statement from my brilliant mentor who says "we're all basically on the same side, rowing the boat together" in a post from Constructing the Academy that you can read here. 

Last weekend, in what proved to be great timing, I flew back east to run in the D.C. Marine Corps Marathon. This was my first marathon, so I did not really know what to expect. I had heard the cheering crowds were amazing at this event, and despite the weather courtesy of Sandy, they did indeed turn out in droves. Whether holding up signs or holding out cups of water, people lined the 26 mile route through the capital to cheer us on. Other than two people, I did not know a soul among the thousands running with me, but the sense of camaraderie as we all struggled together toward the same goal was a good feeling indeed. 

I flew back just in time to attend a small conference of the top Victorian Poetry scholars hosted by the Armstrong Browning Library in honor of Robert Browning's 200th birthday. I have been to conferences before where, when the bigwigs are involved, things get nasty. Between territorial tiffs, self-righteous claims to being right, and the need to carve out a space for your own argument, academics can be quite nasty to one another. At this conference, however, I witnessed the best that can happen when great minds come together. We posed intellectual problems, pondered over possible solutions, shared helpful advice, and humbly asked for advice. The veteran and newly minted academics, honored professors and graduate students, all ate together, rode buses together, and participated in lively discussions together. There were even some Brits yee-hawing and swing dancing.

My mentor's statement points to an important truth: we are all in this business of being human together. Whether you are republican or democrat, sub-3 hour runner or marathon walker, a poetry or novel person, we are all rowing together. I am saddened, and often downright disgusted, at the way we talk to one another, across the political aisle, the department aisle, or even the grocery story aisle. My experiences of the past week in both the marathon and the Browning conference showed me what happens when we stop trying to row against one another and instead realize we can only experience the high seas if we row together. 

Then Sings My Soul

Cool mornings
Grounders fielded
Football sundays
Potluck feasts
Fall break
Grace
Al fresco dining
Pears and peaches
Pool volleyball
Summer solstice
Laughter
Grill smoke
Long sleeves
Longer walks
Season premieres
Fresh starts
Good friends
Grass cut
Corn maize
Small triumphs
Quiet moments
Open windows
Open hearts

The Slow Movement

I wish I could say I chose to wash the dishes by hand out of some romantic “back in the day” nostalgia, or out of some perfectionist sense of immediately drying them so there were no water marks, or out of an industrious impulse to not let a machine do my work for me. But really I washed the dishes by hand last night because I bought the wrong soap for the dishwasher (I also wish I could say I realized that before trying to use it, but this was a mistake learned after the fact unfortunately).

It takes a long time to wash the equivalent of a full load of dishwasher dishes, but because this was not a normal activity it had the feel of a special occasion, or the freshness of something new or different so that I actually quite enjoyed it. But I think I enjoyed it for two other very important reasons as well: 1) using my hands and 2) slowing down.

I equate this to one of my favorite activities, cutting up vegetables. For those of you who know me this will be shocking because I am often too vocal about both my distaste for and discomfort with cooking.  But because I love cutting up vegetables I will cook almost anything that requires me to cut up 3 or more vegetables. I love pulling out the cutting board, laying out the freshly washed vegetables in a row at the top, and then meticulously choosing each vegetable one at a time to either dice or cube or slice or mince.

I love the way the cutting board looks with the remains of vegetable skins and ends on one side and the rainbow array of the innards piled up ready for the pan or pot. I love the feel of holding each vegetable in my hand, the perfect balance of the knife stretched end to end from my hand to the cutting board, the methodical rhythmic action of lifting the knife up and down as it moves along the vegetable.

Despite the inefficiency of it, I never have another part of the meal going while I chop vegetables. This sacred rite of preparation is something I do first, before anything else begins and while nothing else is going on. This way, I do not have to keep track of anything else and I can just lose myself in the methodical slowness of cutting vegetables.

Washing dishes, I discovered, created the same space, and while my hands worked my mind wandered. Not in the frantic way it often does during the day when I’m trying to get five things done at once, but in a meandering, lumbering way. I began to wonder how many other machines have taken away tasks that would allow us to slow down and let our minds wander.

I don’t think I’m advocating a return to the days where we wash our clothes down by the creek (although, wouldn’t this be fun to try one week?). But cutting vegetables and handwashing dishes made me aware once again of the value of slowing down, and how, because of technology, we may need to become more intentional about creating spaces for slowing down.

In a wonderful TED talk by Carl Honre he explores two questions: What made us speed up? And is it possible and even desirable to slow down? His answer in part about why we are such a fast paced culture is profoundly revealing: “speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions, we fill our heads with distractions and busyness so we don’t have to ask…” and here you can fill in any of the big “life” questions or any of the niggling, nagging questions of your own life that you continue to ignore.

My own slowing down experiment over Lent, to sit for one hour a week and do nothing, was a miserable failure. It seems absurd, doesn’t it, that I could not find one hour in 168 to do nothing? With all of the research out now about the benefits of slowing down, including, ironically, increased productivity, better health, better relationships, even better sex, you would think we would all be rushing to slow down.

But, as Honre points out, slow is a dirty word in our culture, synonymous with lazy or stupid. I hope we can begin to change that by having reasonable work hours, by making, or even better yet growing, our own food, by taking time with tasks rather than always multi-tasking.

This is revolutionary concept; it will change how we think about time, how we define success, how we interact with others, and how we look at ourselves. It will, in short, change how we think.

I hope you will take some time today to think about slowness and the ways you might incorporate a good kind of slow in your individual life and start letting the individual choices you make shape the larger culture around you.

On Not Sharing

 

I have recently joined the ranks of tweeters and instagramers, to add to my resume of Facebook and blogs. (This resume, by the way, proves that I am not old. A vital point to make post-July 5^th)

It was a coincidence of fortune that I started using twitter and instagram when summer began. This enabled me to be part of my sister’s trip to Hawaii, friends’ trips to L.A., Connecticut, Wilmington, Galvaston, D.C., and just ordinary summertime events like festivals and cookouts. The immediacy of seeing pictures from trips and activities as they are happening makes me feel connected to people’s lives in a way that I would not if I just heard about it the next time I saw them.

Even the somewhat ordinary, but just surprising enough to share, pictures from daily life keep me feeling connected to people; it reminds me of the difference between being roommates and seeing someone once a week. It’s the sharing in life’s everyday happenings that creates community between people, and for me this is what twitter and instagram can foster.

Looking for the next picture or link to post also keeps me interested in what is happening around me, a way of going through the day with the expectation that life will have something beautiful, funny, surprising, maddening, enlightening, or moving that will be worth sharing with others. This anticipatory outlook makes me feel more alive, and for me this is what twitter and instagram can foster.

But turning life’s passing moments into permanent and orchestrated pictures can come with a certain amount of pressure, and for this reason I have on occasion decided not to share. And I think in doing so I discovered the merits of not sharing. Putting aside every directive we heard as young kids about how important it is to share, I want to extol the virtues of not sharing. In our culture, we tend to over-share #understatement. For that reason, I think there is now something very cathartic about keeping something to yourself.

While being connected to a community is a necessary and vital part of being human, it’s also important that I remember how to stand on my own two feet, to breathe by myself, to be content with only myself for company. You see, the flip side to sharing everything all the time is that you never really have to dwell with your own response to something or think about how that article or picture impacts you. Sharing immediately makes us think about how others will react and how others will be affected, and that’s important too. But there are merits to being solitary, and not sharing something you experienced can be a form of solitude.

There are two things that I have seen while walking through downtown in recent months that I did not share. They moved me deeply for different reasons, so deeply in fact that I felt compelled to keep them as my secret. And for some reason, because I did so, these scenes will occasionally come to mind again and I will dwell on what they teach me about being human, about the world around me, and just simply about me. Because these images never made their debut on twitter or instagram, they are somehow more firmly embedded in my mind.

You should try it. The next time you stumble across a beautiful or funny image, just enjoy the moment without trying to think of a witty hashtag or decide on the best filter. See what it feels like to carry this carefully wrapped secret close to you and know that no one else in the entire world saw or experienced that moment quite like you did, and no one else will ever know about it.

PS: I am now going to share these thoughts with everyone on my blog. And I will probably tweet about it and post a link on Facebook. 

Defining Success Part Three (and Final)

I am not sure if it's just coincidence or not that as I thought about my own struggles with success this past week I kept coming across articles and conversations that only added more twists and turns to the complicated issue of how we define success as a culture and what it means for me personally.

I wanted to create some very pragmatic steps for defining success successfully (ha ha), but realized this is an impossible task because no equation will work for more than one person, let alone a whole slew of blog readers. What I have to offer instead are three principles that I think are crucial to add into your equation for defining success.

“Practical” things I do to define success:

1) clearly articulate my goals to myself and keep these distinct from what my employer stipulates as goals.

This doesn't mean you don't work hard to achieve the kind of goals laid out by your employer, because you probably won't keep your job if you aren't meeting those goals of course. It just means you don't use those goals to define yourself as successful because they’re someone else's goals and not yours. Sometimes the goals that define your job will align with your personal goals, and in fact if too often they do not it probably means you are in the wrong field. But it is good, I believe, to keep in mind that your employer’s goals have to do with making the company successful on its terms, not with making you successful on your terms.

2) ask myself often why I am doing this job

You might say this is a “getting back to the basics” practice, but I have found that one good way to accurately define success for myself is to stay in touch with some of my original reasons for getting on a particular career path. In my case, I really do love to read and to talk about what I read with others. I am in love with learning, and crave any environment that gets its vibe from pursuing ideas. These “whys” mean that I should be defining success by how often I get to talk about books and whether I am connected or not to an intellectual community. That’s stripping it down to the bare bones of course, but sometimes I think we need to do that when talking about something as abstract and lofty as “success.”

3) Recognize your life connects to others

Sometimes the best success stories come at a cost to other people. As much as I may try to convince myself of the lone wolf myth, my success not only depends on others but it also affects others.  It’s vital to check in with the people who are involved in your life and ask them how your personal goals are touching their lives, for good or bad. In my single-minded pursuit of a graduate degree and a job I rarely did this, and it means you can be left staring at the idol of your achievement and yet feeling like something is not quite right. I think our definitions of success need to become more communal. For me this means that success as an academic involves my life outside the ivory towers just as much as my teaching and research inside those towers. 

Defining Success Part Two

So this is my third installment of a series I"m doing that reflects on my first year as a tenure-track professor. The third installment has turned into a series of its own about how we define success. The first post in this series about success attempted to get you thinking about your own definition of success and the costs of how we approach it. My final post, next week, will share some of my own personal and specific definitions and practices of success. This post will briefly touch on an extremely compelling article by Anne-Marie Slaughter (professor at Princeton, director of policy planning in the State Department for two years) in The Atlantic Monthly entitled "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." Slaughter's article addresses some personal concerns for me, as a woman in a professional career field, but her solutions to the obstacles women face are in some ways gender neutral (if there is such a thing) because they are focused on revising many of our notions of "work" and "success." It's well worth the read.


Aside from my dismay that women are the only ones that outwardly struggle with the difficulty of balancing work and family (and indeed are almost expected to struggle with this or something must wrong with them, despite the fact that men are also part of a family), Slaughter does make some refreshing points in that she does not solely focus on what how women need to change their approach to careers, but rather on what we all need to change about the system of work in America. The main problem Slaughter identifies with our work culture today, what she calls "The culture of time macho,” is the theory that work must be done in the office and that the sign of a good worker is one who is in the office all day. That this myth still holds so strongly today is a rather depressing fact for Slaughter: "a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today." Slaughter's solution is to begin changing the perception that work must be done in the office and in person. 


Another major problem is the hypocrisy of claiming to value families in this country when in reality family is considered a liability in the workplace. She provides two amazing examples comparing the perception of a marathon runner and a parent and someone who strictly observes time off for religious reasons and someone who tries to do the same to spend time with their family (I encourage you to read this section, "revaluing family values," for a fuller account of these examples)


And finally, the last and perhaps most provocative problem she identifies is the singular narrative we have for the arc of the successful career path, which entails staying with the same company (or University) and climbing the hierarchical ladder of rank steadily and quickly. Slaughter suggests that in today's culture of 1) switching jobs, 2) starting a family in your mid to late 30's instead of early 20's, and 3) working well into your 70's, we need to "think about the climb to leadership not in terms of a straight upward slope, but as irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips)."


Slaughter's article, in conjunction with the spirit of the Olympics this summer (which I'm obsessed with) has really gotten me thinking about our maniacal pursuit of success, a success defined by climbing in an upwards (rather than say lateral) direction and measured in how many hours we put into the job. Did Ahab and his whale teach us nothing? 


At the same time, I am deeply moved when I watch an Olympic athlete, who has devoted years of her life to pursing nothing but the dream of a gold medal in a specific sport that requires a very specific set of skills. Why is that kind of dedication so moving? And is that the same kind of dedication we should pour forth in our careers, or is the cost of such dedication that at the end of our life we only wish we hadn't worked so much? (Slaughter cites this from Bronnie Ware's book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, in which she found the second-most-common regret was “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”)


I think success and hard work go hand in hand, and I think hard work is admirable. But have we somehow fooled ourselves into thinking that hard work has to displace other important values? In my final post I will look at my own struggle to achieve success in my first year at tenure track while also having a life outside the walls of the ivory tower. 

Defining Success Part One

I am finally getting around to writing the third post in my series reflecting on my first year as a tenure-track assistant professor. This post was a little long in coming partly because I’ve been on some whirlwind travels (yay summer!) and partly because I wasn’t sure what to say (or, more likely, how to say what I wanted to say).

At one point on my whirlwind travels I found myself at the Cheesman Reservoir, the area of the Hayman fire in Deckers, Colorado ten years ago. We were actually there two days after the ten-year anniversary. There is no way to describe this area in words, and really the picture I’ve included doesn’t capture it either. As we hiked through the area, surrounded by the craggy peaks of the Rocky Mountains and the steep canyon walls down to the river, all I could see were burnt trees everywhere. It was a sobering hike indeed, especially knowing at that moment a new fire was burning 15 miles northwest of Fort Collins, creating another desolate area like the one we were currently hiking through.

During one of our rest stops on the hike (trust me, you need them for this landscape), Justin and I just stood there quietly for several minutes. I could almost feel the weight of the area’s trauma sinking into me, filling me with the kind of quiet and respectful sadness you get at funerals. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I heard a bird call. Then another. Then a butterfly flitted past my line of sight. Then another. A bee swirled around my elbow and two birds hopped along the log in front of me.

The desolate landscape and oppressive silence magically came alive with wildlife and sounds in a matter of minutes. But it took standing still and being quiet to bear witness to this life, where I had thought there was only death moments before.

And this is my problem with our notions of “success.” It often seems to me that to be successful, in just about any career really, you have to be constantly in motion (insert any number of metaphors here: duck paddling like hell under the water, hamster on a wheel, running like a chicken with its head cut off, etc. etc.) I do not think we consider the cost of success; a cost that I would say includes missing life in the way that, if I had not stopped long enough on my hike through the Hayman forest, I would have known only bleakness. I would have missed the life that existed there.

Everything worth having involves some cost; to say that success comes at a cost is not to say, then, that success is necessarily bad. It does mean, however, that we need to be aware of that cost, we need to constantly measure it and reevaluate our success in the face of the cost. My good friend and colleague Melissa asked me to write about balancing life and career in this post, and strangely enough that is exactly what I found myself wanting to discuss in this post about “success.”

Too often I have heard in various new faculty gatherings that you have to work like crazy until you get tenure, but then it gets a little better. Seems like I heard the same thing about graduate school – you have to work like crazy until you get a job, but then it gets a little better. Well let’s see, on average graduate school can take around 7 years and it takes around 5 years to get tenure. Now I know I’m an English major, but by my count that’s 12 years of “working like crazy” to get to some point where I might not have to be so crazy. But most of the tenured professors I see still work like crazy (or they just are crazy J). And who really wants to waste 12 years of their life doing nothing but work, especially 12 years that tend to fall during what should be the best, most active, most free time of someone’s life?

The balancing act of life and work is hard enough, but within the working life of an academic we must also play the balancing act between research, teaching, and service. It would seem, then, that we would define success as someone who excels in all three and has found a way to balance all three. And I’m sure no one would disagree that such a person is successful. But I get the feeling that isn’t what we, or at least universities, mean by “success.” Tenure has come to be defined almost solely by publishing record at research institutions. And at many teaching institutions, the service requirements often prevent professors from giving adequate attention to their teaching.

It’s hard to feel successful when you are fed one line (all three of the triad described above are equally important) but when in reality you are only measured by whatever element that particular institution stresses the most. I wish that institutions would drop the façade of caring about all three and just forthrightly claim what will make you successful. How about lines like “just publish, and so long as we don’t get too many complaints from students don’t worry about your teaching,” or “don’t even think about trying to publish anything, we have way to much committee work for you,” or “we are going to need you to teach 4 classes, so when we say we are a teaching school we mean we need you to teach a lot of students, not that we value teaching over research. But I hope you don’t think you’ll have time to research, because of course you won’t.”

That may be a teensy cynical sounding, but I hope the extreme nature of such statements make my point. Clear, well-defined goals make it a lot easier to understand what counts as success in your job.

Not only do institutions need to more clearly communicate their view of success, but I think we as individuals need to be honest with ourselves about what we personally desire from our jobs as academics. Are you fulfilled by making a name for yourself through publishing in your field? Do you enjoy feeling part of a community that comes from working closely with others in committees? Do you want to work with students beyond the classroom in close mentoring relationships? Does lecturing in front of a huge crowd inspire you, or do you find small group discussions exhilarating?

And, finally, can you count the cost of each those paths? Because each one will bring a different amount of craziness and stress, and each one has losses and gains.

This post on success is going to require some follow-up posts with some more specific and practical points (or you can see this excellent post from Tonya on the possibility and merits of a true 40-hour work week for academics), so this week I just want to get you thinking about how you personally define success as an academic, what are the costs of achieving that success, and what sort of institutions will best match up with your definition of success. My own goal for this kind of reflection is to find a way to define success that includes an abundant life, the kind of life that can only find me when I'm still long enough.

Old Dogs Do Learn New Tricks

I am postponing my last reflection on my first year as a tenure-track professor in which I plan to talk about how we define success in the field of academia (or life in general). I hope to have that post ready next week. If anyone has comments they would like me to think about or address or include in my post, I'd love to hear from you. just write your suggestions and ideas in the comments to this post.

For now, I want to share a way of doing research that has really worked for me. You'd think after nearly a decade of doing this kind of work that I would have figured out an effective method of reading, taking notes, and transferring what I learn from all that into papers. But I haven't really developed a system I like, until now.

I had two weeks to research and write a conference paper, and the research involved an area I was not terribly familiar with. This required me to work my way through half a century of criticism, an impossible sounding task to me given the time constraints. For starters I followed the method my good friend Matt Mullins suggests in his post here.

Usually when I am reading a book or an article I have my computer right next to me and whenever I come across a passage I may want to quote in the future, or every time I needed to summarize the points made, or every time the reading made me think of an idea, I would stop and type it up. I thought this was the most efficient way to do it, but I began to suspect that my inability to grasp the larger picture of the article's or book's argument was due to the interrupted nature of my reading. Plus, it seemed to take me forever to get through even a short article.

So for this conference paper I have switched things up a bit. The first step was going to Target to buy a packet of those slim little tab sticky notes. I must admit this was at first slightly motivated out of a desire to be cool. Some people I highly respect and think are intelligent (and pretty cool) use them, so I thought maybe I'd become smarter by using them too. Aside from this initially vain motive, however, the tabs are saving my life for this paper.

The next step involves choosing about 3 or 4 books I plan to read that day (its summer, so I have 3-4 hours to devote to uninterrupted reading a day). I read straight through without stopping, using my tabs to indicate passages I want to return to. Either later that afternoon or the next day I devote about an hour to revisiting those books and typing up all the notes and ideas that the tabs direct me to.

I don't know how to explain it, but in 10 days I have gotten through about 2 shelves worth of books using this method. I'm sure some people can get through 10 books in a day, but for me this was record-breaking (not all English majors are fast readers. And some of us suck at scrabble by the way). And in comparing my notes from this method to the quality of notes from my old method, I do not really detect a difference.

The only thing I would like to add to this method would be to write a quick 3-4 sentence summary of the overall aims and arguments of the piece. For some reason that always takes the mental energy I just don't have when I finish reading something, but I do think it would really help capture the "big picture" when I have the whole work freshest in my mind.

So here's to learning how to do things in a new way, nearly a decade later.

It's More Than a Job

Part Two of my series reflecting on my first year as tenure-track professor focuses on what has surprised me. I tried really hard to come up with three things because for some reason to put things in three makes it seem so balanced (thanks either to the trinity or the rhetorical triangle, not sure which really). But I could only think of two substantial things that surprised me.

The first has something to do with the location of my office. And no, its not the fact that I'm in one of the "least desirable" offices since its on the fourth floor and only has a skylight. I expected the new kid on the block to get the last choice of office (which, consequently, seems like a penthouse to me after either being in a room full of cubicles and sharing that cubicle with two other people, or being in an office the size of a closet that I shared with 3 other people).

My office is located across the hall from the room that houses all of the graduate student TA's. What surprised me about this was my reaction, which first entailed deep nostalgia for that time in my life, a community which I am only removed from by about a year and half but which I spent 5 years being part of. I love listening to their chatter, their rants, their drama. When I hear them sharing about their teaching ideas or their research ideas I long to run across the hallway and join them.

Connected to my surprise at how much I would long to be a graduate student again (if you are still a graduate student, please don't hate me at this point. I recognize this is nostalgia and often disappears around the first of every month when I get an actual paycheck), but connected to this desire is another source of surprise - that faculty do not share ideas and work in the same way. Sure, there are formal settings for it, but not those wonderful informal hallway/cubicle conversations. My guess is because while the institution gives lip service to teaching, its really the research they care about. This means, pre-tenure, its what we have to care about. So nobody has time to sit around and chat about their teaching. And I suppose we don't talk about our research informally as much because we don't share the common bond of being in a classroom setting together.

So I am surprised by how much I miss being a graduate student, which is connected to how much I miss informal conversations about teaching and research where people are truly engaged and willing to learn from one another.

The other thing I've been surprised by has nothing to do with the job, and this is why its surprising. How many years of my life have I devoted to this one pursuit - getting a tenure-track job? Especially those last 6 months. Literally every waking moment, and really every sleep(less) moment, was preoccupied with getting a job. How surprising, then, when I get out here to discover that what really matters is everything that is not the job. The place where that job takes you will really matter. The kind of people you find there will really matter. What the community has to offer will really matter.

I find it nearly pointless to say this, because the state of Academia right now funnels us into a cattle chute where we grab at the first real job that comes along and go wherever it takes us (for some this cattle chute leads to their dream jobs, others maybe not. its still a cattle chute. just go to MLA and you'll know what I mean). So to some degree all the context surrounding the job (I believe this is called "life") doesn't matter at all, because you'll take the job anyways.

But this post was about what has surprised me this year, and so I'm just telling you, this surprised me. We spend so much time consumed with getting the job, and so much time on the job, that's its easy to forget how much all the other stuff (I believe this is called "life") will matter. So part of what I've done this year is not only learn how to be a professor for the first time at a new school, I've also learned how to live in a new place and meet new people and find new favorite running trails and eating spots. And honestly, this part called "life" has been the hardest part of it all.

Baylor Bears Baseball

around Waco, on a run

Waco Downtown Farmers Market