Character: Passport to Destiny

English: Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus...
English: Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus, Octavia, and Livia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve read a lot of books across the years, not surprising I suppose for someone who’s invested more than forty-years in academia.  Of those many books, there are a chosen few I’d take with me into island exile.  Let me list them.  I’d add some poets, too, but not right now:

David Copperfield
Walden
The Varieties of Religious Experience
On Liberty.
Mill’s Autobiography
The Odyssey
To Have or To Be
How to Find Freedom in an Unfree World
Ulysses
The Aeneid

I fashioned this list in less than a minute, since each of the items triggers easily recalled memories of excited discovery, awe, and insight.  David Copperfield, for example, I read in eighth grade. From the very beginning I loved it, identifying with David, whose childhood, in good measure, mirrored my own as well as that of Dickens.

Walden, with its eloquence, gave sanctuary not only in wilderness, but in its verbal tranquility.

And there’s John Stuart Mill, that proverbial “saint of rationalism,” two of his books here.  On Liberty taught me to hold out against censorship for the rest of my days; how to discern between just and unjust laws; the importance of protecting minority voices in a democratic society.

His Autobiography demonstrated a first rate humanity, a life of balanced thought and feeling, a passion for social justice. There isn’t any person I’d like to imitate more.

I could go on about the remaining works, too, as each of them has constituted a grace upon my life–a favoring of wisdom and influence.  Of all of them, the one I esteem most is surely Vergil‘s The Aeneid, which I chose to teach in my literature classes for a good many years.

Now I’m not about to launch a book review here.  I simply offer that this ancient, extended poem, ostensibly a tribute to his patron, Augustus Octavian, whom some historians rank as among the wisest of rulers, ultimately deals with what the Romans regarded as pietas, or the ability to rule one’s passions.  As such it mirrors the civic code for good leaders everywhere, sadly forfeited by most.

But The Aeneid is good for you and me as well in its call for balanced living in the stasis of mind and heart, thought and emotion, logos and pathos.  To conquer yourself is to conquer a world.

When I studied in Europe on two occasions, England and France, I came upon an important word, character, something I find rarely talked about in America.  Europeans would often talk of someone’s character, encompassing integrity markers like dependability, perseverance, equanimity, fairness, empathy, all adding up to a fundamental decency. It’s what Vergil advocated. It’s what Mill is all about. It’s what I’d like, when all things are said and done, people to say of me:  “I like his character.”  I think it’s what you want too.

Our schools need to inculcate character along with academics. What helps assure success isn’t so much raw intelligence or mastery of a discipline, but the ability to govern oneself exemplified in channeling our emotions into riverbeds of altruism that foster others even as it nurtures our best selves in well-doing.

I like how Daniel Goleman summed it up in his best selling Emotional Intelligence (1995):

Much evidence testifies that people who are emotionally adept–who know and manage their own feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people’s feelings–are at an advantage in any domain of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organizational politics.  People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that foster their own productivity (p. 36).

Life doesn’t just happen.  We make it happen, for good or bad. We do it best when we learn pietas, or character, with its legacy of decency and discipline fostering empowerment and destiny..

Be well,

rj

The Smile that Hides the Soul

I have a number of books that supposedly clue you into discerning the personalities of people based on their physical gestures, things like hands on hips,  the turned up corners of the mouth, the wrinkling of the forehead or lifting of the eyebrows,  etc.  The problem is that body language can differ from one culture to another.  While close spatial contact with lots of touching may convey caring in, say, a Hispanic culture, it’s apt to raise the specter of territorial invasion among white North Americans.  I know families, for example, that simply don’t touch.

My take on kinetics, or body language, is to approach the subject with caution.  But it’s more than this, too.  I’m simply suspicious of reductionist approaches that promise us a mirroring of the human psyche and, often as not, a means to its manipulation, if we just read the body cues right and fine-tune our approach.

No, we humans are offspring of eons of evolutionary survival stratagems that camouflage thoughts, and with good reason in a world that often cannot tolerate a baring of the soul with its sonar witness to salient distress as a life component we’re uncomfortable  acknowledging.  We feel safer behind walls.

Thus we’re prone to exercising considerable dissembling skills to avoid alienating our fellows and exacerbating our isolation, for no matter what form physical pain, anguish, and grief assume, there’s always the immense individuality of suffering which even the greatest empathy cannot transcend.

Emily Dickinson, like all gifted poets grounded in sensory acuity, knew this well, typically drawing upon Nature for analogies of  concealment, undermining the conflation of appearance with reality in “The Wounded Deer Leaps Highest” with its successive examples of a deer’s leap, a gashed rock, a sprung trap, and, in the human realm, flushed cheeks and even laughter, suggesting a dynamism masking covert wounding:

A wounded deer leaps highest
I’ve hunter the hunter tell;
Tis but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is still.

The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs;
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!

Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it caution arms
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “You’re hurt exclaim.

As the closing stanza poignantly bears witness, we put on a brave act hiding our grief, as though expressing it were a weakness, with resulting pity simply reinforcing our isolated fate.  Culture has insisted men, in particular, should be very good at this.

We are complex in our emotions and body language.  In the space of three years, Dickinson  would lose 26 friends and relatives to death; but she also knew that life goes on and the game must still be played.

–rj

 
   
   
   
   
   
 

A Ph. D. Confesses to Education Gaps

indexI have a lot of catch-up work to do when it comes to my education.  This may sound surprising for someone to say with a Ph. D. from a good university, but it’s true.  Because of my specialization in English literature I know a lot about books and poetry and have a smattering of know-how when it comes to literary criticism.  When it comes to the social sciences like history, I do pretty well, probably because I keep up on current events and have always been a history buff.  I hold my own in the behavioral sciences when it comes to psychology and sociology.  I falter, however, in the natural and physical sciences, simply because I avoided subjects like biology, chemistry and physics, perhaps triggered by my apprehensions about the foundational math.

There isn’t a whole lot I can do about it now, given my age.  It’s just that if I could do my education over I would do better on filling the gaps.

You might say, “no big deal” and you’d probably be right.  I’ve had a successful career in my chosen vocation.  Still, I recognize we can get along even without our lower limbs, but how much better if we had them.

We need a core curriculum more than ever, not only to provide academic balance, but as means to social cohesion in a vast, growing population of diverse background.  While our national model may nobly be e pluribus unum (one out of many), we may be undermining assimilation by featuring cafeteria approaches to education that fragment cohesion.  Our nation’s unity is not only fostered by speaking English, but through the sharing of cultural experience.

Cultural informants change like language itself; still, there are essentials like grammar, syntax and spelling that keep it stable and facilitate communication.  Similarly, there are essentials that comprise the bedrock of our nation; for example, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation; the Constitution;  political stalwarts like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR; citizen advocates like Dr. Martin Luther King. Such elements and emissaries have provided the brick and mortar building our nation and forming its consensus.

Meanwhile, I wonder if today’s students can identify the following:

The Korean War

Date of the American Civil War

Walt Whitman

Davy Crockett

The Vice President of the USA

The two presidents during WWII

 I’ve deliberately chosen the non-science area.  I suspect it gets worse with the sciences, and we’re paying for that with the failure to produce the expertise needed to sustain our technology that empowers our economic prosperity.  Despite our many and varied attempts at educational reform across the years, we’re still lacking, and things may be getting even worse.

It’s dismaying that the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test (2011) that compared progress by fourth and eighth graders in twenty-one large cities showed little progress over a decade, despite billions invested.  Black and Hispanic students remain hugely behind White students who, in turn, are low science achievers in comparison to Asian students.  It doesn’t help when 22% of our students live in poverty.  Poverty means not only poor nutrition, but cultural segregation and thus lower achievement.

According to Sol Stern, New York Daily News (Dec. 9, 2011), the answer to improving scores is “more likely to be found in a group of 10 elementary schools participating in a pilot program testing the efficacy of the Core Knowledge reading program pioneered by the scholar and cognitive scientist E.D. Hirsch.

“Over a three-year period, the students in the schools using the Hirsch program outperformed their peers from a control group by a huge margin on K-2 reading tests. Amazingly, though the DOE conducted the Core Knowledge reading study, it has not moved to spread this success to other schools.”

As for me, I’ll just plod along with maybe just a bit more off-the-track reading so I can get-in on the conversation.  Maybe then I’ll at least know what thermodynamics is all about at long last; or understand better the changing chemistry of our oceans and its effects on all life; or the relationship of sugar maintenance to good health; or what makes my computer go and how to make it go better.  Just maybe I can then beat my wife at Trivial Pursuit.

Be well,

rj

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Exploring the motives behind the Boston bombings

In Kentucky, this week brought news of a prisoner at the Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex dead of stab wounds to his neck inflicted by another inmate.  Authorities are presently still investigating the incident, but what baffles even more is learning that the perpetrator was up for parole this June, or just two months from now.  Once again, human motives entice with their mystery and form the bedrock of modern psychology.

It was my wife who brought this anomaly to my attention, and I replied that maybe it was poor impulse control, which some experts have suggested lies behind a great deal of violence and criminality.  Having worked with juvenile youth in trouble with the law, I find much to support this view.  I also know that people, any of us, have different thresholds or breaking points, for acting out unconscious motives.

This leads to the great question as to whether human beings are fundamentally rational creatures.  The great Irish writer, Jonathan Swift, apparently didn’t think so, writing Gullivers Travels to debunk such pretense.  You’ll remember that in this precursor to Planet of the Apes,  the horses are invested with rationality in contrast to the Yahoos, or human kind, swayed by their passions.  Voltaire wasn’t far behind Swift in harboring a similar view in Candide, in which humanity’s misdeeds obliterate any claim to rationality.

In modern literature, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, and Golding’s Lord of the Flies continue in the same vein.  You might say it’s Thomas Hobbes’ philosophical dismissal of Man put to fiction:  “The source of every crime is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions.”

Freud and Jung, though perhaps relegated to the back burner these days, established that there lies in all of us powerful, unconscious dynamics motivating our behavior.  We are not always who we seem to be and, thus, may not always comprehend our own motivations.

Last week began with terror in Boston instigated by two brothers supposedly in their embrace of a militant, or jihadist, Islam.  I would quarrel with this, for their motives may again lie deeper in the quagmire of the psychological.  After their violence, the younger brother returned to campus and gave a lift in his car to another student.  Neighbors have commented on their surprise that these two could commit such mayhem.  The wife and in-laws of the older brother have expressed shock.

I think we’ve all seen this script before.  People can be masters of disguise, fooling neighbors, families and friends.  Now comes word from the New York police commissioner that the brothers may have been planning on skipping down to New York to party in the aftermath.  Such callousness, of course, reflects a total lack of conscience that made their savagery possible.

My point is that they may have been in denial of their true motivation, rooted in envy and personal ineffectuality and living primarily on welfare. Now the survivor is offering the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as shallow justification, not radicalization by foreign sources.  More likely, in my mind, they were out to make headlines, buoying up their low self-esteem.  Humans, however, are frequently unable to deal with dissonant truths about themselves and thus will resort to rationalization.  As Sir Walter Scott aptly put it in Marmion, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

I haven’t read him, but Dr. Mark Leary of Duke University has written richly on the subject of motivation, twelve books in all.  One of the biggest motivators, according to Leary, seems to be our need to impress our fellows.  This helps explain the lust for social status–the big house, luxurious car, making big bucks, obtaining power.  But for those who can’t find entry, low self esteem may result in a murderous spite bent on inflicting pain.  Misdeeds like those of Aurora,  Virginia Tech,  or Newtown and, now Boston, are  wrought by losers seeking to get even.  As such, they will always constitute a clear and present danger.

Come to think of it, it was the Tsarnaev uncle in Maryland who publicly called his nephews “losers. ” He got that right!

–rj

Of Emily Dickinson and Spring Blooms

Foxgloves in the Homestead garden
Foxgloves in the Homestead garden

The opening and the Close Of Being, are alike
Or differ, if they do,
As Bloom upon a Stalk–(1089)

I’ve always liked Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  She has this pithy way of putting things in a few, well-chosen words; a prism mind that turns things over for a thorough look; a quiet defiance that goes its own way with surprisingly modern skepticism;  a willingness to break free from fettering meter; best, a probing of the human heart in its pangs of love and grief.  I admire her honest wrestlings with God and matters of eternity.  She wanted to believe, but not by forfeiting her intelligence.

I  like how nature finds its way into virtually all the nearly 1800 poems she largely wrote in her upstairs bedroom at the Homestead, looking out on the main street of Amherst.  Every sort of plant and creature seemingly populates her poetry, including not only birds, flowers, butterflies and bees, but caterpillars and even snakes.  She kept an album of pressed plants and often slipped a flower in with her many letters.  While few Amherst villagers may have known the woman in white was a consummate poet, everyone knew she kept a great garden.

A holdout in that era’s high tide of Christian belief, she adopted her garden as her daily church, a  place of intimacy with the divinity of life:

Some keep the Sabbath going to church__
I keep it staying at home
With a Bobolink for a Chorister–
And an Orchard for a Dome–

Some keep the Sabbath in surplice–
I, just wear my Wings–
And insterad of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton–sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman–
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last–
I’m going, all along (236)

That garden and its seedlings had disappeared by 1915, when the Homestead’s attached conservatory, her father’s gift, was also dismantled.  Fortunately, beginning with 2005, that garden has been lovingly restored, based on diligent research, to its likely layout and, along with the Homestead, is now owned by Amherst College.

I bring up the subject of gardens because gardening is something I’m fond of as well. Every spring I re-thumb my garden magazines and books, looking for new ways to retool bloom and beauty.  This year, I thought of Emily Dickinson and my several visits to the Homestead.  Since it’s rare I can get back to Amherst in my birth state of Massachusetts, why not the next best thing and find room for a Dickinson look-a-like in my backyard, a space swimming in the flowers that Emily loved like violets and arbutus, daffodils, tulips and crocuses, daisies and roses.

Flowers, “Nature’s sentinels” (912), launched meditative moods in Dickinson, who drew upon metaphysical poets like Herbert and Vaughan for nuances of the Infinite.

For her, nature’s seasonal rounds resonated life’s own temporal rhythms with its undulations of joy and sadness; the immediacy of nowness and the anguish of letting go; the fact of mortality, and yet hints of something more.  That works for me as well. –rj

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A thing of beauty: turning your sentences into art

Keats said it famously, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” But just what is beauty anyway? Asking this question, as so many have, implies we can reduce beauty to formula. I don’t think we can, at least I hope this is so, for I suspect the best part of beauty lies in its infinitude, or variation, providing a brew sure to meet all palates.

I see beauty as something creatively special, or set apart, often complex in its composite underpinnings, yet rendered with simplicity, observing that best maxim that good art conceals itself.

Having said that, I retain my own credos, while humbly aware they don’t exclude others. Take writing for an example.

I taught the how of it for a good many years and I think I know the good from the bad, the one able to convey, the other to obscure; the one saturated in the sensory; the other, vague, encumbered in the web of abstraction, generalization, platitude and cliche .

Good writing possesses a clarity about it, achieved through economy, a phrase for a sentence, a word replacing a phrase.

Good writing exhibits creativity: what’s been said often perhaps, but in a new way, making us stop, look, and listen again: the sparking word, unanticipated metaphor, the phrase that gets it just right.

Yet without style, it’s still not beauty and lacks artistry if it’s not bathed in rhythm or swathed in cadence. Good sentences start like seeds, followed by shoots, stems, nodes, leaves, then–bang!–you’ve got bloom. Good sentences don’t just happen. Each is a bonsai waiting its shaping.

I love you

more than words can say,

more like a cool mountain stream,

unceasingly,

by day or by night.

Again, notice the simplicity of it.   Let’s try another:

You bring me joy,

like opening a gift,

surprised,

wondering how you knew,

  this and not that,

but it’s

what I like best

about love,

that intimacy which knows.

You can learn the crafting of the masterful sentence by imitating successful writers. Let me resort to Hemingway, one of the best, and his opening sentence to A Farewell to Arms:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.

Can you find the kernel (the subject-verb of a main clause), or seed element, germinating the sentence’s embellishments? It’s important for it’s here artists commence their tapestry. It’s so tiny you might miss it.

If you selected “we lived” you got it right.

Can you identify Hemingway’s principal method, or syntactical embellishment, one for which he’s renowned?

If you answered, prepositional phrase, then you’re right once more and on your way!

Let’s try leveling again, this time using numbers to separate out different grammatical structures, with 1 representing the sentence seed or kernel; 2, the prepositional phrases; and 3, the sentence’s lone relative clause:

2 In the late summer

2 of that year

1 we lived

2 in a house

2 in a village

3 that looked

2 across the river and the plain

2 to the mountains

Hemingway wrote this way not simply for the allure of its rhythm, but to achieve a panning effect like that of a cameraman wanting a panoramic view. An outdoorsman, he loved nature, all of it, and the pauses created by each prepositional phrase reveal his sweeping, sensate passion for it. It’s artistry at its best: creative, sensory, rhythmic.

It’s dawn’s first light outside my bedroom window, as I’ve been laboring in the atier of the night’s tranquil solace.

I am

like a warbler,

filled with song,

sounding reveille

for a new day,

abundant in sun and seed and shade.

Be well,

rj

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Overthrowing the tyranny of custom

I have always cared a great deal about animals.  I don’t know where it comes from, but I remember as a child wanting to take in every stray dog.  In 1996, I adopted a vegetarian diet to align my lifestyle with my conscience.  I wish I had done so much earlier but, for too many years, I had simply subscribed unquestionably to a pervasive culture.

The role of culture, often reinforced by religion, makes for an interesting study, since it may well be the primary instigator of human behavior and, unfortunately, a seminal source for a myriad repertoire of injustice, malice and cruelty practiced by humanity pervasively across the centuries.  As moderns, while we’ve made progress, we’re still on a steep climb.

In India, a land bound by tradition much like other Southeast Asian nations, practices sanctioning discrimination inherent with an age old caste system fell with the birth of an independent India in 1947, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and led by its first prime minister, Jawarharlal Nehru.  There are no more Untouchables, a formidable achievement that hints humanity can often mend its ways.

Earlier, in the United States, slavery was abolished through the courageous intervention of Abraham Lincoln, though it took a civil war, 600,000 deaths, and Lincoln’s own life.  Not long after, in 1867, Tsar Alexander III emancipated Russia’s serfs.

Not long ago, but only in 1920 under the 19th Amendment, did women achieve the right to vote in the United States.  It was as late as 1971 before women could vote in progressive Switzerland in national elections and not until 1991 that they could vote on local issues in all cantons.  At last, conservative Saudi Arabia will allow women to vote, beginning in 2015.  They’re still, however, prohibited from driving cars under penalty of imprisonment and/or flogging.  Disenfranchisement of women extends to many orthodox synagogues and Roman Catholic constituencies as well, barring leadership and voting privileges.  Catholic women cannot become priests, bishops or cardinals, the latter obviously eliminating their inclusion in selecting a pope.

In my lifetime we’ve made considerable inroads against the weight of traditional custom that forbade birth control, abortion and equal employment opportunity.  I grew-up seeing the last vestiges of segregation fall before activist resistance and court decree.  Currently, gays and lesbians are on the threshold of gaining their own civil liberties that include same sex marriage and adoption rights.  Looking back to a little more than a century ago, it seems incredulous that someone like writer Oscar Wilde would be tried in court and sentenced to a multiple year jail term, which ultimately broke the man.

I first became aware of the role of culturally sanctioned wrong doing in preparing to teach Voltaire’s satirical parody of custom in Candide, which I heartily recommend if you haven’t read it.  Slavery, militarism, the abuse of women, the hypocrisy of religion, they all receive their fair share of Voltaire’s scorn.  What really opened my eyes, however, was Voltaire’s taking on the scourge of war that continues to plague mankind, often buttressed with the sanctimonious verbiage of patriotic shibboleths and conferment of divine blessing.  As Voltaire astutely observed in one of his many letters, wars kill and maim far more than all our natural disasters.

As I’ve said, fighting to undo custom is still a steep climb, or hard sell. That’s what makes custom such an insidious threat: “But we’ve always done it this way!”  Like morning oatmeal, we imbibe the prejudices of our parents, who learned them from theirs.  Unquestioning, we adopt the status quo invested by time and institutions. Our brains dulled by habit, we believe what we’re told by our informed guardians: the government and press.  We find fact in the textbooks of our schools, oblivious to their omissions.  We like sameness.  We grow accustomed to our chains.

I give thanks to the avatars that make custom tremble by engendering new ways of thinking rooted in compassion:  the sanctity of animal as well as human life; the right to individuality; the implementing of economic equality; the elimination of political and religious oppression; the accessibility of universal health care; the end of pejorative labeling of the mentally distressed; the right to death with dignity; the healing of a wounded, dying Earth;  the elimination of the scourge of war.

They crowd into my mind:  Gandhi, Nehru, Lincoln, Goldman, Sinclair, Baldwin, Friedan, Sanger, Carson, Singer, Mandela, King, Mill, Voltaire– and so many more–emissaries of Light, their torches lifted high, showing the way to a better world.

I dream most of all of that day when it will truly “be on earth as it is in heaven,” and “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (Isaiah 2:4 [KJV:  Cambridge ed.]).

–rj

Finding serenity

I mentioned in a recent post how I’ve been reading Natame Soseki’s The Gate. I’m nearing the end now and just came upon the protagonist, Sosuke, ruminating that “he must find a way to attain serenity in life, given his many troubles and high anxiety.”

Serenity, I had almost forgotten this word I used to bounce around in my thoughts like a rubber ball.  I think it a beautiful word, right up there with love, compassion, empathy, and the like.

But what is it really?

I’m not a religious person, but one of the best definitions comes from the Bible which speaks of “the peace that passes understanding.”

Similarly, theologian Richard Niebuhr said it exceptionally well in a prayer he devised that later became popular and is sometimes erroneously attributed to St. Francis of Assisi.

Its beginning goes like this:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Alcoholics Anonymous has liked it so much that they recite it at the opening of their Twelve Step sessions.

Danger lurks, however, when we conflate serenity with passivity.  As the news media confirm daily, we live in a world of virtually palpable wrongdoing and robust evil, sometimes beyond words.   All good people must wage the fight, since indifference or passivity surely contributes to their dominion.

Serenity comes from accepting we may not realize our most ardent desires, even those bathed in love and compassion for those who suffer.  Paradoxically,  accepting our often ineffectuality makes room for serenity’s defining characteristic, transcendence.  I like how Bishop Desmond Tutu put it at a time of failing health:

I don’t think I’ve ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

The way of serenity isn’t any sudden showering of the gods, for it necessitates self-emptying, or the surrendering of Ego that fosters our suffering with its myriad desires and its denial of our mortality.  Paradoxically, when we do so, it promotes our healing, or as Victor Frankyl expessed it, “The more one forgets himself–by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love–the more he actualizes himself.”

The good news is that we can cultivate serenity by pursuing several avenues that unlock bad habits, replacing them with alternatives promoting our well-being.  Here are some that help me:

Cognitive:  Change the way you respond to things that happen to you.  Do you act or react?  Why let someone’s curt remark destroy your day?  Are there positive alternatives to the negative way you’re interpreting things?  Negative thoughts produce emotional distress.  Pluck them by the root.

Music:  Shakespeare once famously said, “Music  hath charms to soothe a savage  breast.”  Avoid the frenetic.  Indulge the soothing.  Music reduces stress levels by 61%.

Exercise:   Physical activity relieves stress, besides being good for your health, giving you less to worry about.  You may want to add restorative yoga or Tai Chi, which have proven their worth over several millennia and are endorsesd by today’s medical community.

Interests:  Find something you like to do such as gardening, hiking, volunteering.

Friends:  Cultivate relationships with positive people.  Establish a support network.

Humor:   Laughter is its own medicine.  Research indicates it can promote blood flow, boost the immune system, and promote sound sleep.

Reading:  There are many fine reads out there written by experts on reducing stress.  Reading reduces stress by 68% according to cognitive neuropsychologist, Dr. David Lewis.  Reading works because it takes us out of ourselves which, of course, fosters serenity.

Eating:  Certain foods like blueberries, almonds, whole grains, and veggies can improve your mood and reduce stress.  You might like to peruse Elizabeth Somer’s thorough study, Food and Mood.

Organizing:  For some of us, including myself, neatness affords me a sense of being on top of things, and is thus its own tranquilizer.

Sleep:  Establish a regular schedule and keep to it.  Avoid stressful activities or exercise three hours before bedtime; same for intense mental activity.

Nature:  It isn’t accidental that nature inspires a lot of poetry or that many people opt for remote vacations away from our noisy world.  Nature enhances sensory awareness, and with it, provides relief from daily stress.  It’s as close as keeping a garden, taking a walk, and cutting the grass.  You can enhance your experience by learning the names of common trees, flowers and birds.  For me, it’s become synonymous with sanctuary.

Meditation:  I like this one best for its quick returns, especially mindfulness meditation.  (See my essay in Recent Posts, “Mindfuness and the recovery….”).  Breathing and focusing can produce immediate relief and the ability to let go of negative thoughts.  Combined with yoga or Tai Chi, you’ve a double whammy against anxiety.

In all honesty, I’ve not gotten there yet, but I’m trying, remembering that the longest journey begins with the first step.  Serenity comes down to doing what I can, subtracting the difference.

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Baseball fever!

The crack of the bat; the thud in the mitt; smells of peanuts and cracker jacks; mustarded hot dogs washed down with cold beers.  The fever of it!  Baseball, America’s brain child, after a long winter, true harbinger of Spring, you’re back and I’m a young boy again, with dawn’s early light, heading for alleys, looking for buddies, looking for game.

Like eating Cheerios, I fed on baseball, the daily radio broadcasts pouring out their litany in days when TV was but a rumor.  Pa, ensconced in his leather chair, two virtues in exchange for his addiction to booze, a love for the game and a love for the news, rituals of redemption taking root in his child.

Growing-up in Philly’s waterfront Fishtown, tedious streets of inert row houses and white stoops; scarcely a tree, never a park, we gave it no thought,  adopting stick ball and banging our hits off factory facades, in the same way Ruth and Gehrig began their own long journey, Boys of Summer, with every stroke, tapping our dreams of something better than asphalt heat and danger-laden streets.

Philly sported two teams then, the A’s and Phillies.  I knew the player names readily, reiterated by baseball cards we’d get with our bubblegum and trade with each other, sitting on stoops on sultry summer evenings.

I remember the Whiz Kids winning the pennant in 1950, the euphoria sweeping Philly like an exuberant wind.  They played the World Series afternoons back then.

When I was twelve, I learned how to take the El and find my way to Shibe Park to watch the A’s play and usually lose.  After the game, I’d linger around the gate for autographs and recall, as if yesterday, wide-eyed like a boy hooking his first trout, the  thrill of Dave Philley being my first and, crazy kid that I was, grabbing his arm to touch one of the gods.

Baseball had an innocence back then–an absence of big money, drugs, and player mobility.  It was everything good that we’d like to be good again.  I liked the high mounds, the pitchers around for most of the game, so different from the formula of 100 pitches in vogue today.  It’s hard to win twenty games now, and we’ll never see 30 wins again.  Back then, teams like the Yankees sometimes sported three pitchers with twenty wins by season end.

Ted Williams batted 406 in 1941.  He did it without the sacrifice fly added later, which means he batted for an even higher average, going by today’s rules.

I remember Jackie Robinson’s coming into baseball and democratizing the game.

With sadness now, there’s been a sharp decline, after the long struggle, in African-American players these days.  Thank goodness for the Caribbean ball players who keep baseball from reverting to a white man’s game.

But there are changes that have made baseball better such as the playoffs and, in my opinion, the designated hitter.

What keeps my loyalty is the nature of the skills baseball demands.  Every position features its own requisites not easily acquired.  Baseball has few prodigies ready right out of high school.  Generally you hone your skills over several  seasons, playing college or minor league ball.  You learn by doing to play the game well.

If every position has its own repertoire, no less challenging is swinging the bat, with fast balls clocking 90 mph and more, mixed with curves, sliders and off speed pitches.  There are eight players in front of you and you need to hit the ball where they aren’t, a tall order  the very best players achieve only a third of the time.

What I like better than anything else is the stardom in reach for any player in any game at any moment:  the clutch hit, the stolen base, the home run, the pitcher’s shutout, the fielding gem; the sheer democracy of it, unlike any other sport I know.

Every at bat is the old West renewed, batter against pitcher, in strategy based on probability.

I relish the end game with its relief scenario.  Can the “fireman” put out the fire and save the game?  A duel indeed.  Good relievers require ice in their veins.

Baseball, more than any other sport, comes down to numbers, or record-keeping, with the Hall of Fame a pantheon of its greatest, and a way of measuring.

Football and basketball, today’s popular action sports, may enjoy the public eye but, for me, I revel in baseball’s ritual, the mindness in it, the individuality of it; the the crack of the bat, the thud in the mitt; smells of peanuts and crackerjacks, mustarded hot dogs washed down with cold beers. The sheer Americana of it!

–rj

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My passion for reading

I’m always on the look out for a good read, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s fact or fiction.  Biographies, memoirs, diaries, you name it.  But science fiction, romance, adventure, I like these, too.  And then there are the how-to books from zen to gardening, take your pick.

I probably read from 15 to 20 books yearly, not any record-setting pace, but I think a fair number.  I’ve many interests like gardening and studying Spanish, but I try never to crowd out a daily dose of a good book, investing at least an hour every day.

There are a lot of talented writers and engaging topics out there, so sometimes I find it hard to choose, since obviously you can’t read everything.  Book lists come in handy, but I tend to avoid the more popular ones like those in the New York Times or Amazon.  Sometimes I check-in with Publisher’s Weekly.  I’ll also look at the National Book Awards and Booker Prize listings online.  Occasionally, I’ll pick up a choice item on the recommendation of Fareed Zakaria, who always closes his GPS show with a super read.  And then there’s The New York Review of Books, which has never steered me wrong.

In a post I wrote just a few days ago, I mentioned I’d taken-up Mindfulness Meditation. As one of its weekly exercises, they ask you to break out of your habit modes by altering a specific routine; for example, change where you sit at the table at home.  The idea is to get you in-touch with your senses and stimulate awareness that can help you catch destructive thought patterns.  I’ve extended this habit-breaking strategy to my reading, exploring new vistas.  (By the way, novelty has a way of recharging brain cells, warding off dementia.)

It isn’t often I read a book originally written in a language other than English, the exceptions being classics such as The Divine Comedy,  Les Miserables, Anna Karenina and the like.  I know this is very parochial, since there are many exceptional reads not written by Anglos.  And so I opted for a different pathway a few days ago, downloading Natsume Sodeki’s The Gate (New York Review Books Classics).  Turns out, I made a wise choice.  I had never heard of Sodeki, nor ever read a Japanese novel.  Sodeki happens to be Japan’s most revered modern novelist, something I didn’t know, but now understand.  Discovering a game-changer, I want to read more works by Sodeki and others outside the groove.

I’m optimistic about the future of reading, despite the closing of many bookstores, the precarious profit margins for publishers, and the plethora of community budget woes putting the  squeeze on one of America’s unique treasures: the public library.  Last year more titles were published than ever, though not necessarily in traditional book format, since the times are a changing.  Like most everything else, books evolve with adaptation a corollary for survival.  Electronic books are here to stay and publishers who don’t render increased access to this new format are unlikely to survive.

A uniquely human endeavor, reading will endure.  A few years ago, it was widely forecast that the DVD would close movie theaters and end the big screen tradition.  Well, that hadn’t happened when last I looked and, similarly, TV never replaced the radio, witness the popularity of 24/7 radio talk shows or stations with dedicated music genres and their many listeners

But why this passion in me for reading? I read to be entertained, informed, inspired and, yes, sometimes to be chastised into seeing a new way of thinking.  But mostly, at least with regard to literary texts, I read to engage my feelings through their imaging in metaphor and articulation, often eloquently, into the truths of human experience.  It’s then I know I’m not alone, but linked with others in that existential quest for meaning and affirmation.  As such, reading grows my empathy and compels my compassion. What more could I ask?