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.