The Only Thing I Know Is We Have to Be Kind

Pro Tip: Cracked eggs cook much more quickly than whole ones, so, generalizing that experience into a problem-solving philosophy for life, if you're in a hurry to get a thing done you should start by breaking it.

Unfortunately, that might be my only original thought this post. What follows is a pretty random assortment of thoughts and ideas that have caught my attention the past month-ish, without a unifying theme or introduction.

This really resonates with me, right from the start. I have never felt the need to have a clear picture about my goals for the future, just the orientation I want to take forward into it.

What Monastic Mystics Got Right About Life

You should not have your future all figured out. Not now, and not later. We learn this from the 13th-century Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart. He taught that we should “live without a why” (sunder warumbe in Middle High German). By this, he did not at all mean that we should be directionless or that life is meaningless. On the contrary, no one was more steadfast than Eckhart in teaching what the ultimate objective of life should be: to act in a spirit of pure love before all else, and not to let worldly aims of money, power, and prestige distract us from this objective.

By all means, we should have goals in life. But they should be intentions to give us direction. They should not be attachments, so that the priority of loving others can always take precedence.

This might sound heretical in our ambitious culture (in his time, Eckhart himself was periodically accused of heresy). But modern social science suggests that it is outstanding advice—and quite easy to follow. Social psychologists have long shown that people are happiest and most productive when they make progress toward ordinary goals for themselves in school, work, and life. To set goals such as getting a decent grade, graduating from college, finding a full-time job, and saving to buy a house is perfectly healthy.

What is not healthy is to be attached to worldly goals in such a way that your happiness depends on them. This leads to the so-called arrival fallacy, in which you believe that bliss attends hitting your goal, a belief that almost invariably leads to frustration and disappointment.

If you are at loose ends right now, and unsure about your future, that’s just fine. It means you are fit to serve the highest good as you find it on your journey. Go ahead and set a career goal, but always resolve not to let it distract you from love and service. And that way, you also stay open to finding yourself on another, better path. . . . 

The people who are happiest with their lives encounter plenty of suffering too. They don’t seek it, but they also do not consider it to be some sort of sickness; nor are they afraid of it. On the contrary, they know that suffering is necessary to learn and grow. Research shows that experiences of sadness can improve memory, judgment, motivation, and goodness toward others.

Similarly, fear is an essential part of the human experience because it is how we learn and develop psychological courage, which is core to our well-being. Negative or unpleasant emotions and experiences give us the resistance we need to get stronger. A strategy of evading sources of suffering is no way to live fully. Even if it were possible, it would stunt our development as human beings and lower our satisfaction with life. . . . 

Suffering per se is not evidence that you are broken; it is evidence that you are a living human, experiencing a full range of emotions. If, like Rose, you accept your suffering, that challenge can be a key part of your path to success in life. . . . 

Aquinas teaches, only one true and divine truth exists--an ineffable mystery that we can’t fully attain on Earth. But possessing that ultimate truth is not the point; what matters for your progress toward happiness is to approach it with an open heart and an open mind. . . . 

You will notice that all of the modern untruths I’ve identified have one big thing in common: They say you should focus on yourself--your future, your career, your discomfort, your truth. All moral teaching aside, how boring is that? I can think of no better way to miss the awesome majesty of life than to focus egotistically on a psychodrama in which you are the star.

Happy people can zoom out to see and fully enjoy the world around them. But that means standing up to the lie that you are the center of things. That is the essence of humility and a great secret to happiness. We could add one more affirmation to complete the list above: I will focus today on the miraculous world outside myself.

I will focus today on the miraculous world outside myself.

Not everyone looks for fun reading in the linguistics section, but I have good luck there quite often. A book I recently enjoyed reading is Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women's Words by Jenni Nuttall. Here's my review:

Enlightening and entertaining.

The author biographical statement on the back flap of the jacket says that Nuttall has "had a lot of practice at making old words interesting," and it shows. I'd dare say reading this was even fun, along with being fascinating and very pointedly feminist. In this book, she explores the history of English words relating to women, to their bodies, social roles, and more. Specifically, she explores how our language has been shaped by patriarchal attitudes and has in turn worked to reinforce sexism.

Chapter topics include:
- Words for Female Anatomy
- Menstrual Language
- Sex and its Terms
- The Womb's Words
- The Language of Care
- Working Words
- Words for Ages and Stages
- Naming Male Violence
- Finding Feminism's Vocabulary

In writing about how the words hysteria and hysterical have been used to dismiss and punish the emotions of women, Nuttall proposes the word "testerical, meaning 'driven by testes and/or testosterone'" to give equal treatment to male emotions. She calls male misunderstandings of women's bodies and capabilities "logical phallusies." Here are some longer examples:

The history of the word clitoris shows us that its function was more or less understood from antiquity, though medical men were not always able to put their finger quite on the part itself. According to a dictionary of rare Greek words made by a grammarian in Alexandria in the fifth century AD, kleitoris referred to the skin covering female genitals--roughly in the right area if not exactly on the spot.

-----

Violence within marriage was acknowledged to be sexual as well as physical. During most of the history of English, being married created an ongoing, irreversible implied consent (a loathsome phrase) to sex. Appalling, and yet not some ancient common-law principle long since disowned. This legal opinion stayed with us, at least in theory, until it was finally overturned in Britain by the Sexual Offences Act of 2003. A husband couldn't (according to the law) rape his wife. Generally hidden from sight, marital rape thus appears in the oldest English only in the darkest hints. One medieval medical book describes what we would call birth injuries in labour. Women suffering from prolapses, where organs in the pelvis bulge into the vagina, often can't bear to have penetrative sex. But, says the writer, 'summe tyme they be constreyned to suffer, wyl they nyl they'. Sometimes they'll be forced to endure sex whether they want to or not. Likewise, the twelfth-century pamphlet written to put girls off getting married so that they might consider becomeing religious recluses says that a wife must put up with whatever a husband wants to do in bed 'wulle ha, nulle ha', will she, nill she, whether she wants to or not. Willy-nilly (as that little bit of rhyming grammar becomes in Modern English), a married woman's non-consent counts for nothing.

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By the time of the medieval and Renaissance English Bibles, translators had settled on the more familiar help or helper to describe Eve's purpose in life. But in the middle of the seventeenth century, Eve gets rebranded as Adam's helpmeet, that sickly-sweet description used for the ideal Protestant wife and mother, a handy appliance which every Early Modern home should have. It turns out that helpmeet is a grammatical misunderstanding, a word which was never meant to be. Helpmeet is spawned by English translations of the Bible verse in Genesis Chapter 2 which say that God made Adam 'a help meet for him'. Meet in this sense means 'fitting' or 'suitable', i.e. she's an appropriate assistant. The phrase got sandwiched into a single word by the addition of a wayward hyphen, a help-meet becoming a helpmeet. Whatever its origins, helpmeet made it clear that women were supposedly intended to be ancillary, not the boss but the assistant, not centre-stage star but supporting actress. And, after Adam and Eve's disobedience in eating the apple, God said that husbands should have power over their wives by way of punishment for Eve. Women were not only helpers but subordinates.

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In 1798, in her anonymously published Appeal to the Men of Britain, Mary Hays said with uncompromising candour that the gendered socialisation which shapes women's minds and controls their behaviour was 'perhaps the most completely absurd' system which human nature had dreamt up in a moment of madness, 'if indeed a bundle of contradictions and absurdities may be called a system'. Such glorious snark, giving patriarchy's dangly bits more and more of a well-deserved kicking.

Enlightening and entertaining.

"Language is fossil poetry," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote.

The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other.

This book is a wonderful way to reflect on all of the forgotten and implied meanings to the words we use every day relating to women.

It's thoroughly, enjoyably enlightening and entertaining.

This really resonates with me not in terms of my recent experience with universities, but in my library system. It provides language for things I've been trying to articulate for years.

No One Knows What Universities Are For

Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. . . . 

Administrative growth isn’t unique to Pomona. In 2014, the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, in which he bemoaned the multi-decade expansion of “administrative blight.” From the early 1990s to 2009, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. . . . 

Many of these jobs have a reputation for producing little outside of meeting invites. “I often ask myself, 'What do these people actually do?,'” Ginsberg told me last week. “I think they spend much of their day living in an alternate universe called Meeting World. I think if you took every third person with vice associate or assistant in their title, and they disappeared, nobody would notice.” . . . 

Bureaucratic growth has a shadow self: mandate inflation. More college bureaucrats lead to new mandates for the organization, such as developing new technology in tech-transfer offices, advancing diversity in humanities classes through DEI offices, and ensuring inclusive living standards through student-affairs offices. As these missions become more important to the organization, they require more hires. Over time, new hires may request more responsibility and create new subgroups, which create even more mandates. Before long, a once-focused organization becomes anything but.

In sociology, this sort of muddle has a name. It is goal ambiguity--a state of confusion, or conflicting expectations, for what an organization should do or be. The modern university now has so many different jobs to do that it can be hard to tell what its priorities are, Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at UCLA, told me. “For example, what is UCLA’s mission?” he said. “Research? Undergraduate teaching? Graduate teaching? Health care? Patents? Development? For a slightly simpler question, what about individual faculty? When I get back to my office, what should I spend my time on: my next article, editing my lecture notes, doing a peer review, doing service, or advancing diversity? Who knows.”

We've all felt goal ambiguity about our work for a long while and every day I see so many colleagues who spend the majority of their time in meetings talking to each other, not our patrons. So much time and work that doesn't feel entirely relevant or meaningful to me.

A poem:

Nancy Miller Gomez

RESURRECTION

When I was five my brother convinced me

to perform mouth to mouth on a catfish

floating belly up in the scum that gathered

in the lake behind our house. He said I had the power

 

to bring it back, though it was my choice.

I followed his directions, leaned over the dock,

pressed my lips against the stiff ridge of its mouth

(while keeping its bloated body submerged

 

beneath the oily sheen) and began to breathe in

and out as I opened and closed the bony folds

of its gills. At first, my brother held my ankles, to steady me

so I wouldn’t fall off the dock. I kept breathing

 

in through my nose­—­sting of creosote and pond rot—

and out through my mouth—a soft exhale of prayer.

You already know I did not bring the fish back to life,

though it wasn’t for lack of trying. I kept breathing

 

into that dark opening long after my brother said to quit,

long after he got bored and wandered off,

and the setting sun bathed the brackish water in gold.

I kept breathing in and out, long after the night cooled,

 

and the stars rose, and my mother found me asleep

on the dock, her voice calling me back from that place,

where the fish turned its rapturous eyes away from the moon,

and dove back to its sanctuary of darkness.

 

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024

An unusual experience wonderfully described.

This is interesting.

Is It Better to Live in ‘Clock Time’ or ‘Event Time’?

When it comes to how you would ideally plan your days, the research suggests that people differ, with some more drawn to clock time and some more to event time. ‘We’re all born with a tendency to be one more than the other,’ Avnet says. This relationship with the clock affects more than just your to-do list; it may also be connected to how you experience your agency in the world and your emotional experiences in the moment. . . . 

One way of managing your time is not necessarily better than the other, but there are differences associated with each. Efficiency drives clock people, meaning they say their goal is to complete tasks in a set amount of time, and they say they value getting it done. If a clock-timer gives themselves two hours to finish a task, when the two hours are over, the work is over. For an event-timer, effectiveness is more the stated goal: they will finish working on a task when it feels like it’s completed. They value doing the job well, not finishing it at a certain point. . . . 

When a person relies heavily on the clock to determine what to do and when to stop, research suggests they might also have a looser relationship with their own sense of control. This is because they look towards an external cue to guide their actions, according to Sellier, and that external cue, rather than something within them, is what seems to control the world around them. Event-time people appear to believe, more than clock-time people do, that their actions make a meaningful difference in determining what happens to them.

Using the clock to guide what one does has also been linked to a lower inclination to savour positive feelings such as joy, gratitude and excitement. Avnet and Sellier have even found that clock-timers rely more on external cues (such as calories) for deciding what to eat, compared with event-timers. Avnet says this is probably because clock-timers look outward to understand what to do next, and so aren’t as tuned in to their inner feelings. . . . 

In event time, ‘you feel more harmony with the world around you,’ Sellier says. You are likely to be more deeply engaged with what you are experiencing if you’re not regularly looking to the clock to see if ‘time is up’.

I'm definitely an "event time" person.

I agree.

The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens

I am a developmental psychologist, and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.

Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. . . . 

The reality is that correlational studies to date have generated a mix of small, conflicting, and often confounded associations between social-media use and adolescents’ mental health. The overwhelming majority of them offer no way to sort out cause and effect. . . . 

Shockingly few experimental studies have specifically tried to test whether reducing social-media use improves mental health. . . . 

These results do not negate the very real fears that people—including the young people that we study—have about social media, nor do they negate the reality that many young people struggle with mental-health problems. Taking a safety-first approach to kids and social media is perfectly reasonable. . . . 

We should not send the message to families—and to teens—that social-media use, which is common among adolescents and helpful in many cases, is inherently damaging, shameful, and harmful. It’s not. What my fellow researchers and I see when we connect with adolescents is young people going online to do regular adolescent stuff. They connect with peers from their offline life, consume music and media, and play games with friends. Spending time on YouTube remains the most frequent online activity for U.S. adolescents. Adolescents also go online to seek information about health, and this is especially true if they also report experiencing psychological distress themselves or encounter barriers to finding help offline. Many adolescents report finding spaces of refuge online, especially when they have marginalized identities or lack support in their family and school. Adolescents also report wanting, but often not being able to access, online mental-health services and supports.

All adolescents will eventually need to know how to safely navigate online spaces, so shutting off or restricting access to smartphones and social media is unlikely to work in the long term. In many instances, doing so could backfire: Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces, and we should not give them additional reasons to feel alienated from the adults in their lives.

People adopt changes for reasons, and it doesn't help to try to negate their reasons.

I want to mention the book Lying by Sam Harris not for the book itself, but some excerpts I like. First, my review:

An interesting and engaging little manifesto advocating for complete honesty. I say "little," because this is more a hard-bound essay than proper book, fleshed out with two Q&A sections that are longer than the body of the text itself. I like Harris' ideas and basically agree with him, but find him too strident, absolute, and insular. A good read, but not one to take as seriously as Harris would, I assume, like us to. 

And the quotes:

Research indicates that liars trust those they deceive less than they otherwise might--and the more damaging their lies, the less they trust, or even like, their victims. It seems that in protecting their egos and interpreting their own behavior as justified, liars tend to deprecate the people they lie to.

-----

Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled by sustained lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption--even murder and genocide--generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie.

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.

By lying, we deny others our view of the world. And our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make--in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to.

By lying to one person, we potentially spread falsehoods to many others--even to whole societies. We also force upon ourselves subsequent choices--to maintain the deception or not--than can complicate our lives. In this way, every lie haunts our future. We can't tell when or how it might collide with reality, requiring further maintenance. The truth never needs to be tended like this. It can simply be reiterated.

The lies of the powerful lead us to distrust governments and corporations. The lies of the weak make us callous toward the suffering of others. The lies of conspiracy theorists raise doubts about the honesty of whistle-blowers, even when they are telling the truth. Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.

I do like his general premise and stance.

Our ten-year-old son has been very proud of something he wrote this semester for a school assignment. We finally got to read it last week.

Moonlight Ride

As the sun sets on the horizon and the moon starts to rise

I set off on my moonlight ride.

With the wind rushing through my hair

and as the forest grows closer

my heart starts to beat faster

I set off in the moonlight.

As I enter the forest

I see shadows in the the dark

And as the moonlight streams down through the forest

I hear the hoot of the owls.

And the click of my horse’s hooves

echoing through the night

As I set off through the moonlight.

When I’ve been riding for a while

I break through to a clearing.

And as the moonlight comes down on my face

I find myself by a lake.

And as it starts to get darker

the fireflies come out.

As they fly by the lake

they look like tiny fairies in the night.

When they graze the water

little droplets fly up

like miniature disco balls magnifying the light.

And I set off in the moonlight.

As I set off through the forest

the fireflies start to leave

And as the moon starts to rise higher

I hear the howling of a wolf.

But it is not the sound of terror

the stories would have us believe.

But I hear it

as I set off in the moonlight.

As I ride out of the forest

and I leave the creeping shadows behind

the moon hit’s it’s highest point

and my face starts to shine

As the moonlight paves a path

as I set off in the moonlight.

As the street lights start to dim

And the moon starts it’s slow descent to the the ground

I being to move faster

with the sounds of the forest

slowly fading away

as I ride off in the moonlight.

As my pace starts to slow

I see the reflection of a stream

and I stop to take a drink.

As the wind blows in my hair

I feel that something is not right

as I sit their in the moonlight.

As I slowly turn around

I see a bear right by my head

With blood red eyes and razor sharp teeth.

But in It’s eyes I don’t see murder

I see fear in it’s eyes

As I sit there in the moonlight.

As I start to get up

the bear starts to walks towards me

and I see what it is after.

A berry bush behind me.

And I jump on my steed

And then ride off in the moonlight.

As the moon starts to go down

I see the first glimmer of sunlight

and I start to make my way home.

And as I see the first light in the village

I write of the night

when I set off in the moonlight.

The assignment was to write a story with at least ten occurrences of words with "oo," and this is how he interpreted it.

Speaking of [Older], this happened last week, too:

A proud parenting moment for us today.

Our elementary school (the Bulldogs) puts special emphasis on developing character and kindness. Each quarter, three students are chosen from among the student body to receive the "Bulldog of Excellence" award for "going above and beyond when following the expectations" of the school. This morning, [Older] was given the award for the third and fourth graders. His teacher's nomination read:

"[Older] is a very hard worker. I appreciate how he strives to do his best on all his work no matter the topic. He is a great team player. He always tries to include others in the discussion and the group work. At recess he is always playing soccer with his peers. He tries to include everyone in the game and shares the ball equally. He works hard to include everyone as much as possible."

[Spouse] and I were snuck into the school and kept out of sight until his name was announced. The first thing he did after winning was run over to give us hugs. The first thing he said, to express his surprise, was, "I thought if anyone would get this award it would be [Younger]."

Heading into the future with the right orientation.

Like many, I loved the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. All of it. One scene really stood out to me that I've been waiting for the right context to share. I'm tired of waiting, so here it is.

Though it's really two scenes, different versions of the same characters in different realities, woven together, alternating back and forth. Spoken by the protagonist's husband, as copied from this script I found:

You think I’m weak don’t you?

When we first fell in love all of those years ago, your father would say I was too sweet for my own good. Maybe he was right.

Please! Can we just stop fighting!

You tell me that it's a cruel world and we're all just running around in circles. I know that. I've been on this earth just as many days as you.

I know you are all fighting because you are scared and confused.

I'm confused too. One moment I am here. The next moment I am there. I still haven't seen any raccoons. All day, I don't know what the heck is going on. But somehow it feels like this is my fault. I don’t know. The only thing I do know is we have to be kind. Be kind. Especially, when we don't know what's going on.

When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naïve. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything.

I know you go through life with your fists held tight. You see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself

as one too. This is how I fight.

So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say . . . In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.

I remember as a young adult articulating to myself that exact choice to be strategically naïve. 

Heading into the future with the right orientation.

I will focus today on the miraculous world outside myself.