All of Us Know-It-Alls

Very often, people think that they know everything. They believe they know all about who they are and what their purpose in life is and argue that they know more than anybody else in whatever it is that they do. The truth is these people are confused and tricked into believing what is right by their cultural myths.

I love these lines, the introduction to an essay handed in by one of my students. The assignment was in partial response to an article called “Critical Thinking, Challenging Cultural Myths.” He goes on to imply that critical thinking and challenging cultural myths can cure us of thinking we know everything. It’s no wonder we don’t want to think critically. Nothing is more annoying than others who think they know everything, but when it’s me, it’s hard to let go of what I think I know. However, this desire for quick and easy answers is a dangerous characteristic of the United States today, and it shows up when you look at political campaigns. It even shows up in the literature I receive from my favorite political party. I think they are trying to come up with some easy answers to win back government. They need that confident swagger that comes from knowing everything.

Proud to Be Me

I was driving down Cleveland Road today with Phil. He saw a sign that said, “I’m proud to be an American.”

“Why do people do that?” he asked.

For a minute, I couldn’t think of a reason. “I guess they feel under siege,” I finally said, and he agreed that might be the reason. Yet, if I felt under siege in my personal life, I would not go around saying things like, “I’m proud to be me,” “I’m number one,” “Support me,” or “God bless me.” Why is a certain amount of humility required on a personal level but considered unpatriotic on a national level?

Walking

Parker Palmer, writer and teacher, writes of enduring a long, serious depression where he struggled to keep alive. He saw his depression as an enemy. His therapist surprised him by asking, “You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to ground on which it is safe to stand?” At first he was offended with this idea, but eventually, he saw that it held a key for him. As an academic, he lived too much in his head. Even his religious life was abstract and heady. He needed to be pushed down to the safety of the ground. I’ve never experienced the despair described by Palmer, but I relate to his metaphor. Walking is a voluntary decision to touch the ground. I remember telling a colleague at school that I walked the eight-mile round trip to work once a week. “You must be very mentally healthy,” he commented. I make no claims to exceptional mental health, but I know on emotionally ragged days, walking calms and soothes me. Over and over, I touch my feet to the ground where it is safe to stand (Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer, 66).

Civilization

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable…
(from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, 197)

More About the Soft Heart

Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, speaks of a state of being that Buddhists call Bodhichitta. She says it means “completely open heart” and is also “called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound.” After spending the summer watching death, this speaks to me, and I have noticed often that my feelings are tender, and that seems a sweet place to be.

On the other hand, there are things that frustrate or anger or hurt me that I am not tender about. I try to separate myself from them. I resist the open heart. I love what Chodron says about those walls of separation that seems to come from nowhere:

Rather than going after those walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We begin a process of acknowledging our aversions and our cravings…We start to get curious about what’s going on…We can observe ourselves with humor, not getting overly serious, moralistic, or uptight about this investigation.

Some days, I can’t muster up the distance to observe myself like this, but when I can, it feels good. It’s fun.

(The Places That Scare You by Pema Chodron, 4-11)

What Do We Do?

What can the living do in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, where loss has greeted us twice on a national scale in such a short span of years?…You are in your kitchen or your backyard or stuck on an endless elevator ride. You are sitting with a book in the park. Perhaps it is an image you remember having seen…Whatever it is that comes to you in three months, six months, a year or more, don't turn the page of your book and forget, don't stab the elevator button trying to hurry up the trip. Stop.

These tragedies, it's worth remembering, grant us an opportunity to understand what is perhaps our finest raw material: our humanity. The way we at our best treat one another. The way we listen to one another. The way we grieve…

So grieve for the particular lives that come to you….Let them guide you to understand that it is our absolute vulnerability that provides our greatest chance to be human.

This passage is from this morning’s New York Times, “Living With the Dead” by Alice Sebold (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/opinion/11sebold.html)


There is not much to add to this, though I have one comment. Both of my parents died this year. One thing good that has come from this is that I feel it has left me with a soft heart, maybe what Sebold would call a vulnerable heart. I treasure this softness.

Give Peace a Chance

I’m reading “An African-American Appeal for Peace” by Walter Mosley. It originally appeared in The Nation (1/27/03) and now appears in the anthology I use in my composition class. It’s a hard article because I keep looking for the answer to what can we do? and it doesn’t exactly appear. He says, “we must make a commitment to peace,” but it’s hard to know what that means. What he does remind me of is that we have lots of glorious war stories and few glorious peace stories. The Civil Rights Movement is, however, mostly a peace story, and we often forget that there are many more glorious stories than Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaiming, “I have a dream.” We need to promote those and all the peace stories we can find.

Mosley also says that after 9/11/01, many Americans have been shocked that others could hate us so much. African Americans, he says, “know how to live with hatred.” We can all learn from a people who have struggled, on various levels and to various degrees, with hatred. Being committed to peace isn’t easy. Mostly, I’m busy with my job, my house, my family, and my friends. Mosley’s article reminds me not to forget about peace.

Radical Acceptance

Ann Lamott says,
I have grown old enough to develop radical acceptance. I insist on the right to swim in warm water at every opportunity, no matter how I look, no matter how young and gorgeous the other people on the beach are. I don’t think that if I live to be eighty, I’m going to wish I’d spend more hours in the gym or kept my house a lot cleaner. I’m going to wish I had swum more unashamedly, made more mistakes, spaced out more, rested. On the day I die, I want to have had dessert. So this informs how I live now. (plan b, 174)

I’ve been thinking lately of what I want to do before I’m eighty. I won’t regret it if I don’t go to the gym more, but I go to the gym the way Lamott swims in warm water. It’s my way of enjoying and showing my appreciation for my body. When I’m eighty, I want to be through with resentment, anger and disappointment. How realistic is that?

Ideological Hostility

On the lack of preparedness for Katrina, Paul Krugman sums it up like this:

But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming? ("Killed by Contempt" by Paul Krugman, NYTimes, 9/5/05)

Spreading Discord

Harry Potter and his friends Ron and Hermione were quarreling about how to deal with their enemy Voldemort. Hermione reminds them of Dumbledore's warning. "About you-Know-Who. [Dumbledore] said, 'His gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust--'" (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling, 223)

Timely Comment

In the new Atlantic Monthly(10/05), the Frenchman Bernard-Henri Levy writes the fourth in his series "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville." He makes this comment about the way we in the United States look at Mother Nature:

But there is also, anchored deep in the mentality of the country, a magical, semi-superstitious retlationship to what Americans, even the secular ones, are prone to call Mother Nature. As if their omnipotence found its limits there, reached its rational confines there. As if the Promethean will to get the better of things and all people imposed on itself a limit of principle and wisdom in their relationshiip to the elements. No pity for our enemies, the American of the twenty-first centrue seems to be saying; no mercy for terroists, certainly, or even for opponents of the country's economic supremacy. But we'll let nature take her best shot. (96)

Written before Katrina, it describes an attitude that partly explains our present mess.