Department Of Belated Holiday Greetings
Moiself be typing this on July 4. [1] And I am typiing this at a time when most if not all of my fellow villagers are heading to procure their seats for Manzanita’s annual 4th of July parade. As close friends and family know, I am a notorious Parade Loather. ® Even as a child, I found parades boring, not to mention downright confusing. Why are a bunch of people sitting on either side of a street, watching other people walk down the middle of the street? But the small-town-ness of Manzanita’s parade has a certain charm, I was told. Still, after watching it once to confirm that bit o’charm, I found that once was enough.
In 2018 I devised a way to tolerate the parade, and that was by walking in it. [2] Since I find parades to be nonsensical, a non sequitur outfit and ITAL raison d’etre seemed appropriate, and the legend of Orange Hat Woman With Spatulas ® was born.
For the years after that, when the pandemic forced the cancellation of the parade, on the 4th of July 4 I donned my OHWWS outfit and accoutrements, and marched in a circle in the street outside our house while MH played Stars and Stripes Forever [3] from our house’s stereo speakers and neighbors tossed paper airplanes across the street. [4]
Someone who knows I was in the 2018 parade asked if I was going to this year’s parade. I told them the unvarnished truth: “(IMO), parades are still inane; they’re only not inane when I’m marching in them; thus, this year’s parade will, once again, be inane.”
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Department Of Quote Of The Week
“When people are in a mindless state, they’re typically in error but rarely in doubt.”
That quote comes from a recent People I Mostly Admire podcast, wherein host Steve Levitt says about his guest, “I cannot think of an academic whose research findings have more consistently surprised me than my guest today.”
That guest (from PIMA’s episode, Pay Attention! (your body will thank you) was Ellen Langer, the psychologist and researcher who studies the mind-body connection. As per the Harvard Department of Psychology’s website, Langer “…is considered the mother of mindfulness…
Listen to your mother.
…and has written five books on the topic…. The Langer Lab conducts research on health, happiness, decision- making, education, business and culture all through the lens of mindfulness.”
Langer told the following story while talking with Levitt about the studies involving the alignment of Western scientific perspective with the eastern Buddhist perspective
Langer:
“Someone once called me, someone doing her PhD, and wanted to know, was mindfulness a fad?… I said, ‘OK, let’s say you burn your toast every morning. And then somebody comes along and shows you that all you need to do is turn the dial down a slight bit and then the toast is no longer going to burn. Is it a fad?’ I mean you’re not going to go back to burning your toast unless you prefer it that way.
It (mindfulness) is not just paying attention. Because although attention is necessary, it’s not sufficient. There has to be the activity of coming to understand something that is novel, something that is new.
When I started to paint, prior to that, if someone had asked me what color are leaves, I would have said – mindlessly forgetting about the fall when leaves change colors – that leaves are green. Then I start painting, and I start seeing more. You look at trees, and there are hundreds of different color greens that change as the sun changes in the sky, changes in the seasons and so on. Once you wake up, there’s just so much more. Everything feels new and potentially exciting.”
Moiself loves that sentiment. A long-time Oregonian, I thought I knew green colors. Then I traveled to Ireland, and saw in the land and flora a panoply of greens I didn’t know existed.
No picture can do it justice.
Even more thought-provoking was Langer’s response to Levitt’s question about the process of opening people up to the state of taking a mindfulness approach to life. She listed three key steps:
(1) The respect for uncertainty ( as in, nobody knows everything for certain
thus, everything is there to be found out);
(2) Noticing new things, particularly regarding surroundings and people you think
you are familiar with (e.g., notice three new things about the person you live with;
three different ways of doing whatever you’re doing. Look for multiple answers
to any question that you’re asked….)
Langer’s third suggestion is the most intriguing, and most problematic for all of us, I’d guess. It has to do with trying to learn conditionally and to *not* learn how we have been taught to learn – with absolutes, and with memorizing what we are told are unalterable facts. The “fact” is that even facts are context dependent. Any first grader will tell you that one plus one equals two. Langer points out (my emphases) that one and one may be two, but if you’re using a base-two number system one plus one is written as 10. And if you have one pile of sand and add all of that pile of sand to another pile of sand, you don’t have two piles of sand, you have one.
Langer:
“How much is one plus one?… If you add one wad of chewing gum plus one wad of chewing gum, one plus one equals one. So now you have one plus one can be one, can be two, can be 10. ….
Imagine a teacher asks young students, ‘How much is one plus one?’ And little Stevie says, ‘One.’ What’s going to happen? In most classrooms, a teacher is going to try not to look at you like you’re stupid. You’re going to feel uncomfortable, and possibly set the stage for a lifetime of feeling stupid. Where if the teacher were mindful, the teacher would say, ‘Little Stevie, how did you come to that?’ And then you’d say, ‘If you add one pile of sand to one pile of sand, one plus one is one.’ And now everybody would have learned something.
So everything we’re learning as absolutes makes us think we know, and we don’t know. And when you think you know, you no longer pay any attention. It makes us evaluative of other people who may see a different world.
Wait; if I combine these two bowls of guacamole I end up with only one bowl of guacamole?
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Department Of More Podcast Jewels
Sub-Department Of You’re Not The Only One This Happens To
In the most recent Hidden Brain podcast, Befriending Your Inner Voice, host Shankar Vedantam discusses with his guest, Psychologist Ethan Kross, that most human of conditions: the annoying, negative voice that goes round and round in your head. That voice, which Kross calls chatter, is the one that keeps you up and night and makes it difficult to think of anything else once it gets switched on
Vedantam:
“…the phenomenon of self-doubt (which) in some ways that is also connected to chatter, the ways in which people who are actually very good at doing some things can start to second guess themselves. You tell the story of Mr. Rogers, on TV he came across as serenely self-confident, but behind the scenes it was another picture altogether?”
Kross:
“Yeah, there’s this wonderful chatter artifact of sorts that the New York times published several years ago. Fred Rogers had gone on a sabbatical a while from his show, and when he came back, he was filled with self-doubt, about whether he’d be able to perform at the same level that he did prior to taking this break. And in this letter he writes to himself, he very, very candidly expresses that vulnerability. He writes, ‘Am I kidding myself that I am able to write a script again? I wonder. Why don’t I trust myself? After all these years, it is just as bad as ever. I wonder if every creative artist goes through the torture of the damned trying to create? Oh well; the hour cometh, and now *is* when I’ve got to do it. Get to it, Fred; get to it.’
So, this is really remarkable to me…we’re talking about Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers helped teach *me,* and countless other kids and adults too, how to manage my emotions growing up…and yet here we see him admitting to struggling with his own self-doubt at times…. This is such an important message to convey…it really says, ‘Hey, if you’ve ever experienced chatter; if you’ve ever experienced self-doubt, welcome to the human condition.’ “
“Please won’t you be my human condition neighbors, boys and girls?”
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Department of Employee Of The Month
It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself. Again. The need for which I wrote about here. [5]
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [6]
* * *
Parting Shot: I love it when/I hate it when…
I hate it when those whose rhetoric and actions indicate that they know almost nothing [7] convince their followers that they know everything.
* * *
May we recognize when one plus one equals something other than two;
May you pay attention to that which you think you know all about;
May you appreciate the piccolos’ part in arguably the best march ever written; [8]
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] y’all be reading this on the 5th or later. Thus, belated.
[2] Manzanita allows basically anyone to walk in the parade, by showing up at an assembly point for walkers (as opposed to those riding in vehicles or performing with groups)
[3] I hate parades, but I LOVE Stars and Stripes Forever.
[4] the latter in place of the Oregon Air National Guard, which, on that day, does a flyby over as many of Oregon’s July 4 parade towns as they can.
[5] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg. Until I did.
One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens. No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.
[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
[7] Or that if they don’t know something, that something must not be worth knowing.
[8] All together now: in Stars and Stripes Forever!
