I went for a walk with Gordy last spring and met an oral historian. I was impressed; I studied history at university, but it was “traditional” history – reading texts and crafting narratives which attempted to weave a credible story of how it is that events in the past came to happen, with the goal more broadly of understanding the process by which events unfold at any time, including our own, including tomorrow. Oral history was mentioned peripherally – mostly in discussions on historiography, the study of history as a discipline – but it was almost casual. Meeting a real, live oral historian was pretty cool, and meeting one with a dog and a child who lived in Maine was mind-blowing; it was like hearing rumors for years that a famous movie star lived in your town, and then you run into Bill Murray and it turns out he hangs out at the dog park, too. Or to put it in my son’s terms, who’s now reading Harry Potter, it’s like being a muggle but finally getting to meet a wizard and realizing that yes, there are places like Hogwarts where it’s normal to be one. (Not that that in any way means he’s getting the Hogwarts Castle Lego set for Christmas, mind you.) Continue reading “Orality and history”
Thanksgiving
I took my son to his second favorite steakhouse for dinner on Monday. His favorite steakhouse shares a name with the neighbour who lived behind my apartment several years ago, when I first moved back to Seattle from London. The neighbor was a poor gentleman with a history of drug problems; he had dealt with them, mostly, and was a wonderful partner. My son thought he was terrific, and he watched over him (the neighbor watched my son, that is) several times. The steakhouse was over the lake on the east side of King County and the cheapest steak they served was roughly a hundred dollars a plate. For my birthday one year, I took the backyard neighbor, my upstairs neighbor, and my son for dinner at the steakhouse. It was a glorious meal and reminded me that the United States was only slightly less racist than it was in 1876. But my backyard neighbor got an amazing steak, with sides, and we all got the opportunity to tweak management. It was a good day, although I still feel awkward about it. The backyard neighbor wasn’t comfortable, even though he felt kind of amazing being able to invade the land of white privilege. The idea of it was, though, that white privelege would have been comfortable with the backyard neighbor. I was wrong, and that still kind of bothers me.
Trading partners
I’ve been thinking a lot about international trade recently. For those of you who don’t know me well, this requires some explanation. First off, I’m a nerd, and thinking about complex issues makes me happy, and reading and writing about them, modelling them, solving out equations which express them – yep, all of that makes me happy. Giggly, actually. Second, trade has been in the news a lot lately, what with tariffs and the like being strewn about willy-nilly, so to the extent my nerdish pondering at any moment is driven somewhat by what’s in the news, trade would naturally occupy some sort of a place (on that note, I’m also thinking a lot about pumpkin recipes). Third, and perhaps most importantly, international trade – and its counterparts in international finance and immigration – impacts me really personally. I worked outside the US for almost seven years and harbor deep hopes that I will do so again someday – but the general trends and operating mechanics which enable and restrict flows of capital, labor, and goods between countries will play a big role in deciding whether or not I’ll have an opportunity to do that. So the recent eruption of a good old fashioned 19th century tariff war, combined with increasingly strident tones about people who “Aren’t From Here”, has me thinking a lot.
Wet Wisdom
Learning how to swim well is good analogy for learning how to live well. In both, every part of your body has to move ‘just right’ to go through the water – or through the essence of water – as efficiently as possible. In that sense, swimming well is much more complex than I initially thought. But it is very rewarding!
First, if you refuse to swim, if you don’t move at all, chances are that you will drown under your own weight. If you move a little bit, chances are that you will stay afloat and drift with the water’s current. But to move as little as is required to survive is not really swimming; just like existing is not quite living. In both cases, if you dare to choose a direction, chances are you will get there eventually: but maybe not before you exert yourself past your physical limit and stamina.
In learning how to swim, you have to recognize what is going on; you have to be aware of your body and how it is positioned in the water. The water is the force resisting you, the force which you must harness to move forward. You make yourself healthy and svelte; so that your mass of flesh – your embodied intentions – is as dynamic as possible. You lengthen your movements; so that with every stroke, you reach as far as you possibly can. And you don’t reach only with your arms, but also with your shoulders and torso. And you can’t forget your legs, which must continue to paddle while you focus elsewhere; each part of your body obeying a different rhythm and yet acting all at once.
In swimming, you want to stay centered – mindful – and perfectly aligned with your chosen direction: for every movement that is even slightly misaligned is a waste of energy. To counteract a misstep, you end up flailing: your correcting movements straying further and further from your natural stoke. If you find yourself lost in this loop of over-compensating moves, you are better off slowing down, find your inner axis, and aligned yourself with where you want to go. Then move afresh as you naturally would.
To learn how to swim is also an intense breathing exercise. In other sports, you’re told to focus on breathing to make sure that your muscles have enough oxygen for their tasks. In swimming, you must plan ahead every breath simply to avoid choking yourself! But even something as essential as breathing can unbalance you. For when I breath, I sometimes get off-kilter. After three strokes, there is still too much air in my lungs and I need to exhale and then inhale, which takes way too long ! And by the time I am done, my arms and head are in the wrong spots. And I’m flailing again.
When that happens, it is tempting to simply stop. Chances are that the water is shallow enough to just stand in place. At last, you can take deep breaths and let the water massage your skin. There is no shame in standing still. But that is not exercise. That is not swimming. That is not living to the fullest.
In swimming, success or failure is not black-or-white. To be sure, if you get to where you want to go, then you certainly achieved your goal. It might not be the goal you ‘ought’ to have pursued, but that is a different question altogether. You can also be successful if you swim faster than you could before; the few shaved seconds proving that you have learned something new about yourself. Any knowledge gained is worthy too. If you are Micheal Phelps, you won the genetic lottery. His success is not so much all the gold medals that he earned, but the fact that he was smart enough to find out what he was best suited for, and training hard to become all that he could be. But if you too are swimming to the best of your abilities, putting as much stamina in each stoke as you have in you to give, then your swimming is a success. In both swimming and living, success is to make the most of the body and energy we have to work with.
I enjoy being in the water because of how it makes me feel: calm and serene. Like in my mother’s womb, I can feel my body’s weightlessness and yet I know that I am surrounded by resistance. I start where the water ends, and I end where the water starts. I know that I am not of the same essence as the water, because I need the air and the land above it to live. Yet the endless repetition of movements creates within me a deep meditation: my mind wanders but can’t act because my body is already busy with its swimming. So the mind wavers between focus on the task at hand – the body, the water, the movement, the direction – and random thoughts emerging from pure unconsciousness.
For a few months now, I’m working on swimming well. I share a coach with other drop-ins at the Aquatic center. I like when Jim explains swimming to me. When I change a movement and it makes other muscles hurt, then I know that I getting better. He likes to teach me because I am able to intellectually ‘see’ what my movements should be. And I am mindful enough to embody his advice, in my arms and legs and lungs…
Learning how to swim well is not done instantaneously, but Jim is a patient coach. So once a week, Jim drills me – and my fellow ‘retirees’ – to expand our energy as efficiently as possible. What Jim values most is consistency: swimming the last 50m with as much heart as the first. So I keep going back: to learn how to swim well and to do more with the body and the time I have on this Earth. Because, with a good technique, a commitment to be mindful of both what you do and what you should do, and a sustainable pace, one can get very far indeed!
On striving
To live is not like walking through a field
I like to run. Not as fast as I used to, but even a modest challenge to heart, lungs and muscles still feels good. In London I run on Hackney Marshes: there are no cars, not many other runners or cyclists competing for space, and badly-behaved dogs are a rare annoyance. (To be fair, it’s generally the owners whose behaviour demands censure for their failure to control; the dogs’ exuberance is only natural). Hackney Marshes has good pathways, a mix of tarmac and hardened earth, which are useable all year unless there is ice.
By contrast, when I’m at my house on the west coast of Ireland, I run on a beach, around 2.5km in length and generally deserted. If the tide is out, the sand near the water, beautifully flat and compact, is as springy as a modern athletic track, and a joy to run on. When the tide is in, I am forced to run nearer the dunes on the soft sand, which is more forgiving for my knee and ankle joints, but much more demanding of my leg muscles. Progress is slow and, when there’s a strong westerly wind, wearying.
Yesterday the autumn sun was bright in an almost cloudless sky, the wind was calm, the temperature mild for November, the tide was low and the sand firm. Running was exhilarating. I have no complaint. It was an hour well spent. But on other days, when dark clouds are streaming in from the Atlantic, when the wind is strong and the rain near horizontal, and the waves are lapping at the foot of the dunes, then I know I will have to work my muscles hard, every step of the way. Perhaps I should defer exercise until tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, when conditions have improved?
This question is very familiar to me, and not just because of the average annual rainfall in County Donegal. For it is a question both about running but also about living: do I wait for low tide or will I brave the soft sand?
“To live is not like walking through a field”. I came across this Russian proverb while reading some of Pasternak’s poetry, skilfully woven into his reflections on the burden of living dutifully in difficult times. The immediately preceding line reads: “Alone. / Now is the time of Pharisees.” (From: “Hamlet”). For Pasternak, as for many other Russian writers, composers and painters, the 1930s, 40s and 50s were bleak, risky years. To stay loyal to one’s vocation as an artist, to speak with a true, untimid voice, carried a high price, for oneself and for one’s family and friends. Something was very rotten in the state of the soviets.
I am fortunate not to have lived in that place at that time. I have no reason to fear that what I write today, in this post, will put my life in danger, nor that of my family, nor will I be sent into internal exile. The situation in Russia has improved since Pasternak’s time, but is by no measure as safe as Western Europe. Poets are no longer the principal victims of today’s Pharisees, who have turned their attention to journalists and dissidents in exile. Now it is those who report facts who face the gravest threat, rather than those who offer meanings.
And yet, however much freedom we enjoy in the wealthy countries of Europe, North America and Australasia, however easy it is to secure a reasonable standard of life, with more than sufficient food, shelter, warmth and leisure, it remains the case that to live is not like walking through a field. Because living is more than subsisting. For Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak’s great fictional creation, the Russian Revolution and the early years of the Bolshevik government provided the tumultuous context in which he lived, worked and wrote. But the great questions he asked – What is love? What is duty? Why are certain places important to us? How and where is happiness to be found? What does it mean, for me, to live a good life? – are real and difficult, resisting easy answers in all times and in all places.
Perhaps it is true that when life is precarious, these existential questions of meaning and purpose become more evident. When the threat of arbitrary arrest, of punishment, exile and death are ever present, when simply keeping alive is the hardest of work, then we are more attuned to the consequences of not attending closely to questions of ultimate value. Harshness breeds sharpness. The converse, that the comfortable consumerism of the richer nations leads to sloppy thinking about what the real point of living might be, seems also to be true. Jaded appetites tend to moral apathy.
As our material lives continue to improve – and for almost everyone in the world they have continued to improve significantly over the past two or three decades, whether we notice or not – the risk is that we increasingly forego the soft sand. In our material summertime, the living is easy. However, the great questions – about love, duty, place, happiness and goodness – are always hard to answer honestly. And as we grope towards answers, whoever and wherever we are, they make great demands upon us, which are often not easily satisfied. Every affirmative answer is always, at the same time, a rejection of other options. Every yes implies many noes.
For me the need to confront these questions, regularly and genuinely, without self-deception or bad faith, is what it means to strive. It is not that I choose a hard way in life for its own sake, as if difficulty is its own reward. Rather, it is that some days if you want to run, the only option is the soft sand; and if you want to live well, the only answers to awkward questions are tough, demanding, chastening.
If a good life matters, then strive we must. Not just for the pleasure of upsetting the Pharisees – although that matters too and brings its own reward – but because there is so much less of lasting value to be found along the easy way, the comfortable life, along which progress can be quick, but is achieved without attaining any deep sense of purposefulness.