If only I could speak the Truth with the accuracy and pathos of an Irish poet.
As I pursued my vocations of teaching and writing, friends and relatives occasionally suggested that what I was doing for a living could not be considered really “working,” as if the label “work” could only be applied to activities involving intense physical efforts that literally produce callouses and sweat-soaked shirts. Even today, in the minds of some folks, the appellation “work” is associated only with physical labor.
My father sold life insurance and went to the “office” to do his job every day. However, I grew up knowing that he worked, even if there were no half-moon sweat stains on the armpits of his shirts. As an adult I also have worked in a similar way, expending my efforts dealing with abstractions. I confess that it is sometimes difficult for me to see what I do as ‘worthy’ because my job is not concrete and has few results that are measurable at the end of the day.
Consequently, I was glad to read in the blog of Silas House (http://silashouseblog.blogspot.com), a fellow Kentuckian, teacher, and writer, Seamus Heaney’s poem that gave me an insight into (and modicum of solace about) how to view my chosen work even as I observe others laboring in more traditional ways. I almost envy Heaney’s father who digs a row from ‘here to there,’ creating piles of potatoes and sod.
Seamus Heaney (1939-)
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade, Just like his old man.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, digging down and down For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.
To the following words and terms assembled by a college group in Michigan for the years 2012 and 2013, I would add a couple of my favorites: play at the next level, or play or compete at a higher level. And, going viral. How about dude and yo? And, I still see and hear comments being made about thinking outside the box and getting traction..
Then there is like. In a conversation with a very intelligent and well-educated college graduate the other day, in the course of five minutes while discussing a serious topic, I heard her like use the word like at least like 100 times like automatically, like you know! So how about you know itself?
The following lists are fun and can be the beginning of like a like curated collection if you like choose to like create one of like your own. Or you can, like, eliminate them all from your working vocabulary and communicate on a higher level. Like, you know.
2012 has been an interesting time in the life of our lexicon. From new coinages to new usages, English has had a nice growth spurt. Some neologisms quickly outgrow their usefulness, or through overuse, they become meaningless, like an overplayed song on the radio. Here are a few terms that many people have grown tired of in 2012.
Fiscal Cliff — the most-used term in 2012 politics.
This phrase rose to prominence when Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, used it in a speech in February. “Fiscal cliff” is meant to describe what will happen to America’s tax policy and spending plan in 2013 if Congress fails to address certain plans that are already in motion.
Is it actually a cliff? Not really. In fact, as the deadline draws nearer, it has been more accurately described as a “fiscal slope.”
Selfie — a picture you take of yourself by holding the camera at arm’s length, recognizable by the fact that your arm is in the picture.
Epic — hyperbolic synonym for incredible, great, important.
This word is so overused that it has been on banished word lists three years running. But epic refuses to be banished.
Humblebrag — using humility to cover up the fact that you’re actually bragging. This technique often backfires, making the brag worse, i.e. “People just won’t stop texting me, you’re lucky you have so much time to yourself.”
To curate – to organize information on a web page or other non-museum entity.
Museums have curators, galleries have curators–are you a curator because you found 10 cute puppy photos and posted them on your wall? Probably not. Did we just curate this banished words list? We’d rather not say.
Bubble — used as a suffix to describe any group or community. . .ever.
The college bubble, the liberal bubble, the conservative bubble, the California bubble, the American bubble…if we get to the “Earth bubble” something is going to pop.
Hashtag — a Twitter symbol that has grown into an orthographic monster.
What began as a “pound sign” or “number sign” and became a method for Twitter users to search tweets with common topics has morphed into the new URL. (Wondering what “URL” stands for? Watch the computer terms slideshow.) See our thorough discussion of the hashtag–and its real name–here.
To reach across the aisle –– an attempt at bipartisan politics in the United States Congress.
What separates Democrats from Republicans? Is it fiscal policy? Social issues? No, it’s the aisle! Our legislators need only to reach across that small span of carpet to govern cooperatively, but once that gap is breached, what do they do? Perhaps they lightly drop an olive branch on the opposing party’s desk, or yank them back to their side by the lapel. We don’t know–the term only goes to the aisle.
Hipster — the flannel-wearing, liberal arts-educated, indie music-listening, director name-dropping, craft beer-drinking, 20-or-30-something dude or dudette that you’ve definitely seen.
Since the early aughts, the word “hipster” has become more and more prevalent and simultaneously more and more annoying to many English speakers. According to the Google Ngram Viewer, use of the word “hipster” spiked in 1961, dropped by over half in the mid 80s and clawed its way back to prominence in the new millennium.
YOLO – acronym for “You Only Live Once.”
Thanks Drake. Thanks a lot. The fun catch phrase born in the rapper’s single “The Motto” has spread like a forest fire through the vocabularies of what feels like every English speaker under 25, and now the term is just an excuse for teenagers to act like idiots. Sure, go ahead and YOLO. As far as science can tell us, you do only live once. But before you eat that live tarantula, take a minute and think about how long you want to be YOLOing for.
Last week, we discussed the Worst Words of 2012. We were originally inspired by past lists from Lake Superior State University in Michigan. Every year they compile words that were misused, overused, and abused, and this week they released their list for 2013, which included some choice words that we had overlooked:
Kick the can down the road Double down Job creators Passion/passionate Spoiler alert Bucket List Superfood Guru
These kinds of lists are designed to capture an ort of our collective unconscious: the words that have become so a part of our temporary lexicon that we – newscasters, television writers, sports announcers, bloggers – cannot help but use them. Many of our fans did not like the idea of censoring any word use or diction, but of course we’re not talking about removing words or actually censoring select words. (Read our discussion of when words are removed from other dictionaries here.)
Many of you also understood where the impetus of the list was coming from and suggested additional words to banish like:
Wrecking ball
Going forward
Debunking
Channeling
Skin in the game
Gift (as a verb)
Conversation
Slippery slope
Game changer
What others would you include? And what less-used words would you suggest that people replace the banished terms with? Let us know.
This is a really interesting article that tries to inject some sense into the ‘gun ownership and control’ controversy that is roiling around in the Congress and among various easily spooked citizens throughout the country these days. I am particularly impressed with the article’s assertion that there is “an alternative to blood, force, and suffering. It’s called democracy.” Why? Because I am equally disturbed by the hysteria and paranoia being generated by the NRA and other spokespeople from the Right who employ effective, but deceptive rhetoric that is intent on engendering fear in the citizenry.Yes, some of us have “lost our minds” to assertions that try to make us believe “as real and possible” that a revolution is pending in the streets, that government collection, confiscation, and prohibition of all firearms is on the verge of happening, and that we need to arm ourselves with automatic weapons to protect hearth and home on a daily basis against impending invasion!As for me, I’d prefer a more democratic approach to issues that avoids armed revolution by pursuing rational and civil discussion and compromise to settle issues before we need an AR-15 or Bushmaster ACR in every home in the land. The question for me now is whether our politicians are noble enough–embued with sufficient old fashioned statesmanship–to put public policy ahead of seeking partisan gain with every issue that arises.
We were struck this week by one response to our broadcast last week on gun violence and the Newtown school killings. A visitor to the website wrote, “It is interesting to me that Bill Moyers, who every week describes the massive levels of corruption in our government… [and] the advocates for gun control don’t understand that we who own guns in part own them to be sure that when our government becomes so corrupt we have guns to do something about it.”
About the same time that man’s post showed up on the web, we saw the startling survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind polling organization, the one finding that nearly three in ten registered voters agree with the statement: “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties.” Three out of ten! That includes 44 percent of Republicans, 27 percent of independents and 18 percent of Democrats.
That poll also noted that a quarter of Americans think that facts about the Newtown shootings “are being hidden,” and an additional 11 percent “are unsure.” As Sahil Kapur wrote at Talking Points Memo:
“The eye-opening findings serve as a reminder that Americans’ deeply held beliefs about gun rights have a tendency to cross over into outright conspiracy theories about a nefarious government seeking to trample their constitutional rights — paranoia that pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association have at times helped stoke.”
Paranoia and just plain meanness. On May 8, Christina Wilkie reported in The Huffington Post that Connecticut Carry, a pro-gun lobbying group, had issued a press release detailing the arrest record and financial difficulties of Neil Heslin, father of one of the children murdered at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School. Connecticut Carry accused him of “profiting off of the tragedy.” Their release read, in part, “Mr. Heslin has found the employment he has needed for so long lobbying against the rights of the citizens of Connecticut and the rest of the country,” and the group implied that Heslin had received payment from Mike Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which adamantly denies anything of the sort. Similar smears have been attempted against other Newtown parents.
This hate in our country — egged on by fervid ideologues and profiteering fearmongers — is palpable, stirred by years of irresponsible invective against public officials and agencies. Gun sales are going through the roof. In a sense, so much anger and so much disillusionment are understandable in a country where the gap between rich and poor is so vast that an environment is created in which brooding resentment is easily hatched. Sure, there is corruption in government and business — crony capitalism is the offspring of it — and when the public sees plutocrats who regard politicians as the hired help, and Washington as the feeding trough, it’s natural to fear that we are becoming vassals; subjects rather than citizens.
But a violent uprising, with all the bloodshed and chaos that would follow? Armed revolt is when people are so desperate they kill and are killed. Who would wash the blood from the streets, restore order after the chaos and bury the dead? Have we lost our minds?
There is an alternative to force, blood, and suffering. It’s called democracy. Yes, there is plenty of injustice, greed and sheer wickedness. But don’t mourn the fact — organize. Stop wringing your hands and berating real and imaginary foes. Join up with others, stand up to the exploiters, throw the rascals out. If Congress and the White House are crooked and out of touch, come Election Day, you make sure they lose. And on all the other days, when you can, you work for change and demand a say.
It’s not easy, but slow, hard and demanding – it takes long and patient activism to make democracy work. But with committed people organized and united toward common goals of social justice and accountability, victories are possible. Drop your weapons and celebrate that we live in a country where peaceful change is still possible. Make democracy work.
Witness, accept, love, and know thyself. Life boiled right down to its essence.
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Paths Are Made By Walking
[Offbeat Graduation Speech Gets Standing Ovation:2012’s Baccalaureate speaker at the University of Pennsylvania was an unconventional choice for an Ivy League school. To address their newly-minted graduates, aspiring to dazzling careers, they picked a man who has never in his adult life, applied for a job. A man who hasn’t worked for pay in nearly a decade, and whose self-stated mission is simply “to bring smiles to the world and stillness to my heart”. This off-the-radar speaker launched his address with a startling piece of advice. Following up with four key insights gleaned from a radical 1000 km walking pilgrimage through the villages of India. As he closed his one-of-a-kind Graduation Day speech, the sea of cap and gowned students rose to their feet for a standing ovation. What follows is the full transcript of the talk by Nipun Mehta. –DailyGood Editors]
Thank you to my distinguished friends, President Amy Gutmann, Provost Vincent Price and Rev. Charles Howard for inviting me to share a few reflections on this joyous occasion. It is an honor and privilege to congratulate you — UPenn’s class of 2012.
Right now each one of you is sitting on the runway of life primed for takeoff. You are some of the world’s most gifted, elite, and driven college graduates – and you are undeniably ready to fly. So what I’m about to say next may sound a bit crazy. I want to urge you, not to fly, but to – walk. Four years ago, you walked into this marvelous laboratory of higher learning. Today, heads held high, you walk to receive your diplomas. Tomorrow, you will walk into a world of infinite possibilities.
But walking, in our high-speed world, has unfortunately fallen out of favor. The word “pedestrian” itself is used to describe something ordinary and commonplace. Yet, walking with intention has deep roots. Australia’s aboriginal youth go on walkabouts as a rite of passage; Native American tribes conduct vision quests in the wilderness; in Europe, for centuries, people have walked the Camino de Santiago, which spans the breadth of Spain. Such pilgrims place one foot firmly in front of the other, to fall in step with the rhythms of the universe and the cadence of their own hearts.
Back in 2005, six months into our marriage, my wife and I decided to “step it up” ourselves and go on a walking pilgrimage. At the peak of our efforts with ServiceSpace, we wondered if we had the capacity to put aside our worldly success and seek higher truths. Have you ever thought of something and then just known that it had to happen? It was one of those things. So we sold all our major belongings, and bought a one-way ticket to India. Our plan was to head to Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, since he had always been an inspiration to us, and then walk South. Between the two of us, we budgeted a dollar a day, mostly for incidentals — which meant that for our survival we had to depend utterly on the kindness of strangers. We ate whatever food was offered and slept wherever place was offered.
Now, I do have to say, such ideas come with a warning: do not try this at home, because your partner might not exactly welcome this kind of honeymoon. 🙂
For us, this walk was a pilgrimage — and our goal was simply to be in a space larger than our egos, and to allow that compassion to guide us in unscripted acts of service along the way. Stripped entirely of our comfort zone and accustomed identities, could we still “keep it real”? That was our challenge.
We ended up walking 1000 kilometers over three months. In that period, we encountered the very best and the very worst of human nature — not just in others, but also within ourselves.
Soon after we ended the pilgrimage, my uncle casually popped the million dollar question at the dinner table: “So, Nipun, what did you learn from this walk?” I didn’t know where to begin. But quite spontaneously, an acronym — W-A-L-K — came to mind, which encompassed the key lessons we had learned, and continue to relearn, even to this day. As you start the next phase of your journey, I want to share those nuggets with the hope that it might illuminate your path in some small way too.
The W in WALK stands for Witness. When you walk, you quite literally see more. Your field of vision is nearly 180 degrees, compared to 40 degrees when you’re traveling at 62 mph. Higher speeds smudge our peripheral vision, whereas walking actually broadens your canvas and dramatically shifts the objects of your attention. For instance, on our pilgrimage, we would notice the sunrise everyday, and how, at sunset, the birds would congregate for a little party of their own. Instead of adding Facebook friends online, we were actually making friends in person, often over a cup of hot “chai”. Life around us came alive in a new way.
A walking pace is the speed of community. Where high speeds facilitate separation, a slower pace gifts us an opportunity to commune.
As we traversed rural India at the speed of a couple of miles per hour, it became clear how much we could learn simply by bearing witness to the villagers’ way of life. Their entire mental model is different — the multiplication of wants is replaced by the basic fulfillment of human needs.When you are no longer preoccupied with asking for more and more stuff; then you just take what is given and give what is taken. Life is simple again. A farmer explained it to us this way: “You cannot make the clouds rain more, you cannot make the sun shine less. They are just nature’s gifts — take it or leave it.”
When the things around you are seen as gifts, they are no longer a means to an end; they are the means and the end. And thus, a cow-herder will tend to his animals with the compassion of a father, a village woman will wait 3 hours for a delayed bus without a trace of anger, a child will spend countless hours fascinated by stars in the galaxy, and finding his place in the vast cosmos.
So with today’s modernized tools at your ready disposal, don’t let yourself zoom obliviously from point A to point B on the highways of life; try walking the backroads of the world, where you will witness a profoundly inextricable connection with all living things.
The A in WALK stands for Accept. When walking in this way, you place yourself in the palm of the universe, and face its realities head on. We walked at the peak of summer, in merciless temperatures hovering above 120 degrees. Sometimes we were hungry, exhausted and even frustrated. Our bodies ached for just that extra drink of water, a few more moments in the shade, or just that little spark of human kindness. Many times we received that extra bit, and our hearts would overflow with gratitude. But sometimes we were abruptly refused, and we had to cultivate the capacity to accept the gifts hidden in even the most challenging of moments.
I remember one such day, when we approached a rest house along a barren highway. As heavy trucks whizzed past, we saw a sign, announcing that guests were hosted at no charge. “Ah, our lucky day,” we thought in delight. I stepped inside eagerly. The man behind the desk looked up and asked sharply, “Are you here to see the temple?” A simple yes from my lips would have instantly granted us a full meal and a room for the night. But it wouldn’t have been the truth. So instead, I said, “Well, technically, no sir. We’re on a walking pilgrimage to become better people. But we would be glad to visit the temple.” Rather abruptly, he retorted: “Um, sorry, we can’t host you.” Something about his curt arrogance triggered a slew of negative emotions. I wanted to make a snide remark in return and slam the door on my way out. Instead, I held my raging ego in check. In that state of physical and mental exhaustion, it felt like a Herculean task– but through the inner turmoil a voice surfaced within, telling me to accept the reality of this moment.
There was a quiet metamorphosis in me. I humbly let go of my defenses, accepted my fate that day, and turned to leave without a murmur. Perhaps the man behind the counter sensed this shift in me, because he yelled out just then, “So what exactly are you doing again?” After my brief explanation he said, “Look, I can’t feed you or host you, because rules are rules. But there are restrooms out in the back. You could sleep outside the male restroom and your wife can sleep outside the female restroom.” Though he was being kind, his offer felt like salt in my wounds. We had no choice but to accept.
That day we fasted and that night, we slept by the bathrooms. A small lie could’ve bought us an upgrade, but that would’ve been no pilgrimage. As I went to sleep with a wall separating me from my wife, I had this beautiful, unbidden vision of a couple climbing to the top of a mountain from two different sides. Midway through this difficult ascent, as the man contemplated giving up, a small sparrow flew by with this counsel, “Don’t quit now, friend. Your wife is eager to see you at the top.” He kept climbing. A few days later, when the wife found herself on the brink of quitting, the little sparrow showed up with the same message. Step by step, their love sustained their journey all the way to the mountaintop. Visited by the timely grace of this vision, I shed a few grateful tears — and this story became a touchstone not only in our relationship, but many other noble friendships as well.
So I encourage you to cultivate equanimity and accept whatever life tosses into your laps — when you do that, you will be blessed with the insight of an inner transformation that is yours to keep for all of time.
The L in WALK stands for Love. The more we learned from nature, and built a kind of inner resilience to external circumstances, the more we fell into our natural state — which was to be loving. In our dominant paradigm, Hollywood has insidiously co-opted the word, but the love I’m talking about here is the kind of love that only knows one thing — to give with no strings attached. Purely. Selflessly.
Most of us believe that to give, we first need to have something to give. The trouble with that is, that when we are taking stock of what we have, we almost always make accounting errors. Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Now-a-days, people know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” We have forgotten how to value things without a price tag. Hence, when we get to our most abundant gifts — like attention, insight, compassion — we confuse their worth because they’re, well, priceless.
On our walking pilgrimage, we noticed that those who had the least were most readily equipped to honor the priceless. In urban cities, the people we encountered began with an unspoken wariness: “Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?” In the countryside, on the other hand, villagers almost always met us with an open-hearted curiosity launching straight in with: “Hey buddy, you don’t look local. What’s your story?”
In the villages, your worth wasn’t assessed by your business card, professional network or your salary. That innate simplicity allowed them to love life and cherish all its connections.
Extremely poor villagers, who couldn’t even afford their own meals, would often borrow food from their neighbors to feed us. When we tried to refuse, they would simply explain: “To us, the guest is God. This is our offering to the divine in you that connects us to each other.” Now, how could one refuse that? Street vendorsoften gifted us vegetables; in a very touching moment, an armless fruit-seller once insisted on giving us a slice of watermelon. Everyone, no matter how old, would be overjoyed to give us directions, even when they weren’t fully sure of them. 🙂 And I still remember the woman who generously gave us water when we were extremely thirsty — only to later discover that she had to walk 10 kilometers at 4AM to get that one bucket of water. These people knew how to give, not because they had a lot, but because they knew how to love life. They didn’t need any credit or assurance that you would ever return to pay them back. Rather, they just trusted in the pay-it-forward circle of giving.
When you come alive in this way, you’ll realize that true generosity doesn’t start when you have some thing to give, but rather when there’s nothing in you that’s trying to take. So I hope that you will make all your precious moments an expression of loving life.
And lastly, the K in WALK stands for Know Thyself.
Sages have long informed us that when we serve others unconditionally, we shift from the me-to-the-we and connect more deeply with the other. That matrix of inter-connections allows for a profound quality of mental quietude. Like a still lake undisturbed by waves or ripples, we are then able to see clearly into who we are and how we can live in deep harmony with the environment around us.
When one foot walks, the other rests. Doing and being have to be in balance.
Our rational mind wants to rightfully ensure progress, but our intuitive mind also needs space for the emergent, unknown and unplanned to arise. Doing is certainly important, but when we aren’t aware of our internal ecosystem, we get so vested in our plans and actions, that we don’t notice the buildup of mental residue. Over time, that unconscious internal noise starts polluting our motivations, our ethics and our spirit. And so, it is critical to still the mind. A melody, after all, can only be created with the silence in between the notes.
As we walked — witnessed, accepted, loved — our vision of the world indeed grew clearer. That clarity, paradoxically enough, blurred our previous distinctions between me versus we, inner transformation versus external impact, and selfishness versus selflessness. They were inextricably connected. When a poor farmer gave me a tomato as a parting gift, with tears rolling down his eyes, was I receiving or giving? When sat for hours in silent meditation, was the benefit solely mine or would it ripple out into the world? When I lifted the haystack off an old man’s head and carried it for a kilometer, was I serving him or serving myself?
Which is to say, don’t just go through life — grow through life. It will be easy and tempting for you to arrive at reflexive answers — but make it a point, instead, to acknowledge mystery and welcome rich questions … questions that nudge you towards a greater understanding of this world and your place in it.
That’s W-A-L-K. And today, at this momentous milestone of your life, you came in walking and you will go out walking. As you walk on into a world that is increasingly aiming to move beyond the speed of thought, I hope you will each remember the importance of traveling at the speed of thoughtfulness. I hope that you will take time to witness our magnificent interconnections. That you will accept the beautiful gifts of life even when they aren’t pretty, that you will practice loving selflessly and strive to know your deepest nature.
I want to close with a story about my great grandfather. He was a man of little wealth who still managed to give every single day of his life. Each morning, he had a ritual of going on a walk — and as he walked, he diligently fed the ant hills along his path with small pinches of wheat flour. Now that is an act of micro generosity so small that it might seem utterly negligible, in the grand scheme of the universe. How does it matter? It matters in that it changed him inside. And my great grandfather’s goodness shaped the worldview of my grandparents who in turn influenced that of their children — my parents. Today those ants and the ant hills are gone, but my great grandpa’s spirit is very much embedded in all my actions and their future ripples. It is precisely these small, often invisible, acts of inner transformation that mold the stuff of our being, and bend the arc of our shared destiny.
On your walk, today and always, I wish you the eyes to see the anthills and the heart to feed them with joy.
May you be blessed. Change yourself — change the world.
This is a transcript of the Baccalaureate address to UPenn’s graduating class of 2012, delivered by Nipun Mehta. Nipun is the founder of ServiceSpace.org, a nonprofit that works at the intersection of gift-economy, technology and volunteerism. His popular TED talk Designing for Generosity provides an overview of their work and guiding principles.
As you must know by now, America’s foremost movie critic, Roger Ebert, passed away last week. I had read a few of his reviews over the years but knew little/nothing about him as a man. As it turns out, I wish I had known him. As part of the commemoration of his life which I read somewhere on the Internet, I ran across this blog of his written four years go. At that point he was suffering with thyroid cancer and the treatments that subsequently removed part of his jaw. In the midst of his trials and tribulations and pain–never mind the embarrassment he must have felt with his appearance and inability to talk–he penned this essay for his blog.
As I read Ebert’s words, I felt like I was reading my own mind–his thoughts and feelings so closely mirrored my own. This was a surprise because I had never really talked very much to anyone else about what I thought about my own death, probably because my ego is so invested in being alive forever (so to speak) that it (ego) was incapable of contemplating its own demise or non-existence.
Thinking about death for me is scary. What am I scared of, you ask. As Ebert suggests, it’s the “approach path” more than the fact itself. His final remarks about kindness sum up a lot of what has been my conscious rationale for living. Add to “kindness” my desire to make people laugh, to do what I could to relieve pain and suffering in the world, and to help folks discover how to use their minds to grow intellectually, spiritually, and to cultivate their dreams. Maybe this is “what it all means!”
(For additional pleasure you might want to read Ebert’s last blog: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/a-leave-of-presence) Also, you might find the “quiz” Ebert mentions in the last paragraph (see link) stimulating for your self-understanding as well. I did. I just received a copy of Ebert’s book, Life Itself, which also bears mention. The chapters are relatively short, first person, and confessional. Bedtime reading for me.
GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT by Roger Ebert
I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.
I don’t expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. “Ask someone how they feel about death,” he said, “and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you’re really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don’t really exist and I might be gone at any given second.”
Me too, but I hope not. I have plans. Still, this blog has led me resolutely toward the contemplation of death. In the beginning I found myself drawn toward writing about my life. Everyone’s life story is awaiting only the final page. Then I began writing on the subject of evolution, that most consoling of all the sciences, and was engulfed in an unforeseen discussion about God, the afterlife, and religion.
When I began this blog I thought if there was one thing I’d never write about, it would be religion. But you, my readers, have wanted to write about it. In thousands of messages. Half a million words. Life, science, belief, gods, evolution, intelligent design, the afterlife, reincarnation, the nature of reality, what came before the Big Bang, what waits after final entropy, the nature of intelligence, the reality of the self, death, death, death. This dialog still continues. The thread beneath the evolution entry, posted Dec. 3, has drawn nearly 1,900 comments, some of them longer than the entry, and it is still active. How did I find a group of readers with so many metaphysicians?
This has been an education for me. No one will read all the comments except me, but if you did, you could learn all a layman should be expected to understand about the quantum level. You would discover a defender of Intelligent Design so articulate that when he was away for a couple of days, the Darwinians began to fret and miss him. You would have the mathematical theory of infinity explained so that, while you will still be unable to conceive of infinity, you will understand the thinking involved.
My opinions have been challenged. I had to defend what I believed. I did some more reading. I discovered fractals and Strange Attractors. I wrote an entry about the way I believe in God, which is to say that I do not. Not, at least, in the God that most people mean when they say God. I grant you that if the universe was Caused, there might have been a Causer. But that entity, or force, must by definition be outside space and time; beyond all categories of thought, or non-thought; transcending existence, or non-existence. What is the utility of arguing our “beliefs” about it? What about the awesome possibility that there was no Cause? What if everything…just happened?
I was told that I was an atheist. Or an agnostic. Or a deist. I refused all labels. It is too easy for others to pin one on me, and believe they understand me. I am still working on understanding myself.
To explain myself, I turn to Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
So do we all. How sad if our freedom to think about the immensity of time and space could be defined by what someone informs us that we believe.
But certainly, some readers have informed me, it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I relate it to the horror of the hero of Poe’s The Premature Burial. To be in your grave and know it! Ah, but I am told, the afterlife does not involve time at all. In that case, how can it be eternal? Eternity is only thinkable in a universe that contains time. If I had but world enough, and time, I could spend time pondering a world without end.
That whole discussion has been forging ahead on one hand. On the other hand, we have been puzzling over quantum mechanics, which suggests the possibility of instantaneous communication between two entangled particles, even if they are at opposite ends of the universe (not that the universe has ends). This happens independently of time and space. They’ve proven it in their labs! If the scientists are correct, everything everywhere is, in some sense, the same thing, in the same place–or it might as well be. That, too, is small consolation.
All I can do is think with my mind. All I can be is who I seem to myself. I can only be where it seems that I am. Time seems to move quickly or slowly, but it is time all the same; my wristwatch proves it. I believe my wristwatch exists, and even when I am unconscious, it is ticking all the same. You have to start somewhere. It is within these assumptions that I must live. Even if everything everywhere is the same, I must eat an orange or I will die of scurvy.
So within that reality, someday I will certainly die. I am 66, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. When I read about the nature of life from Camus, the odds were that he would die sooner than me. Thomas Wolfe, who wrote about a wind-grieved ghost, was already dead. Cormac McCarthy will probably live longer than me. And there is Shakespeare, who came as close as any man to immortality. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, I say: Look for me in the weather reports.
Raised as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades me. I wrote about that, too. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart. All I require of a religion is that it not insist I believe in it. I know a priest, a lovely man, whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”
What I expect will most probably happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. Perhaps I have been infertile. If I discover that somewhere along the way I conceived a child, let that child step forward and he or she will behold a happy man. Through my wife, I have had stepchildren and grandchildren, and I love them unconditionally, which is the only kind of love worth bothering with.
I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés, that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and happily torturing people with my jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all eventually die as well, but so it goes.
I drank for many years in a tavern that had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:
I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and the old men and old women warmer in winter and happier in summer.
For 57 words, that does a pretty good job of summing it up. “Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
In a moment or a few years, maybe several, I will encounter what Henry James called, on his deathbed, “the Distinguished Thing.” I may not be conscious of the moment of passing. I have already been declared dead. It wasn’t so bad. After a ruptured artery following my first cancer surgery, the doctors thought I was finished. My wife Chaz said she sensed that I was still alive, and communicating to her that I wasn’t finished yet. She said hearts were beating in unison, although my heartbeat couldn’t be discovered. She told the doctors I was alive, they did what doctors do, and here I am, alive.
Do I believe her? Absolutely. I believe her literally–not symbolically, figuratively or spiritually. I believe she was actually aware of my call, and that she sensed my heartbeat. I believe she did it in the real, physical world I have described, the one I live in with my wristwatch. I see no reason why such communication could not take place. I’m not talking about telepathy, psychic phenomenon or a miracle. The only miracle is that she was there when it happened, as she was for many long days and nights. I’m talking about her standing there and knowingsomething. Haven’t many of us experienced that? Come on, haven’t you? I admire Skeptic magazine, but I’m not interested in their explanation or debunking of this event. What goes on happens at a level not accessible to scientists, theologians, mystics, physicists, philosophers or psychiatrists. It’s a human kind of a thing.
Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. Still, as I wrote today to a woman I have known since she was six: “You’d better cry at my memorial service.”
I have been corresponding with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. In 1988 he made a luminous documentary named “Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh.” Today Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself “a simple worshiper of the external Buddha.” Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:
Thank you, good Paul. I think that is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably not have to go on foot. Or, as the little dog Milou says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, pas à pied, j’espère!
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Footnote: At the urging of a reader, I took this quiz. It evaluated my replies and, from a list of 27 religions or belief systems, informed me that my top five categories were: 1. Secular Humanism (100%); 2. Unitarian Universalism (92%); 3. Liberal Quakers (80%); 4. Nontheist (73%); 5. Theravada Buddhism (71%). That was sort of what I expected.
Oh, but this struck me as a message worth me hearing and repeating. What I do every day in the name of efficiency, convenience, and security–not so much profitability–is astonishing, even sickening. This article from one of my favorite magazines, Orion (great writing, no ads), is a more than gentle reminder of some basic lapses in my daily pursuit of what’s important, what makes a difference, what’s right. Shape up, Mark. Back to basics.
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF MY APOCALYPSE are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our lives and expand our horizons.
I’m listening to a man on the radio describe how great it is that there are websites where musicians who have never met or conversed or had any contact at all can lay down tracks together to make songs. While the experiment sounds interesting, the assumption sounds scary—that the complex personal, creative, and cultural collaborations of music-making could be unnecessary and you just need the digital conjunction of some skill sets. The speaker seems to believe that the sole goal is the production of songs, sundered from the production of social ties and social pleasure. But music has always been an occasion for people to get together—in rehearsals, nightclubs, parties, festivals, park band-shells, parades, and other social spaces. It is often the soundtrack to bodies in conjunction, whether marching or making love.
Ensemble music made in solitude is a very different thing; as a norm it signifies a loss. The loss is subtle and hard to describe, especially compared to the wonders of what can be uploaded, downloaded, and Googled, and the convenience and safety of never leaving your house or never meeting a stranger. The radio rave comes a few days after I talk to a book editor who’s trying to articulate what goes missing when you go to Amazon.com for books: the absence of the opportunities for browsing, for finding what you don’t know you’re looking for or can’t describe in a key-word search. A digital storefront can lead you to your goal if you know exactly how to spell it, but it shows you next to nothing on the way; it prevents your world from getting significantly or surprisingly larger. The virtual version rips out the heart of the thing, shrink-wraps it, sticks a barcode on, and throws the rest away. This horseman is called Efficiency. He is followed by the horseman called Profitability. Along with Convenience, they trample underfoot the subtle encounters that suffuse a life with meaning.
The problem is partly one of language. The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures. It weighs the obvious against what in its terms are incomprehensible. When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous—and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It’s exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout. It’s myriad little epiphanies and encounters that knit me more tightly into my place and maybe enhance the place overall. The carbon emissions are essentially nil. Many more benefits are more subjective, more ethereal—and more wordy. You can’t describe them in a few familiar phrases; and if you’re not practiced at describing them, you may not be able to articulate them at all. It is difficult to value what cannot be named. Since someone makes money every time you buy a car or fill it up, there’s a whole commercial language built around getting us to drive; there’s little or no language promoting the free act of walking. Have you not driven a Ford lately?
Even the idea of security illustrates the constant conflict between the familiar and the intricate. When I drive, I have a large steel and glass carapace wrapped around me and my contact with other human beings is largely limited to colliding with their large metal carapaces at various speeds or their unbuffered bodies in crosswalks. Fifty thousand or so people a year are killed by cars in this country, but its citizens officially believe that safety lies in the lack of contact that cars offer. Walkers make a place safer for the whole community—what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street”—and in turn become more street-smart themselves. Too, safety is a reductive term for what being at home in the world or the neighborhood can provide. This is a more nebulous kind of security, but a deeper and broader one. It is marked by expansiveness, not defensiveness.
Walking versus driving is an easy setup, but the same problem applies to most of the technological changes we embrace and many of the material and spatial ones. The gains are simple and we know the adjectives: convenient, efficient, safe, fast, predictable, productive. All good things for a machine, but lost in the list is the language to argue that we are not machines and our lives include all sorts of subtleties—epiphanies, alliances, associations, meanings, purposes, pleasures—that engineers cannot design, factories cannot build, computers cannot measure, and marketers will not sell. What we cannot describe vanishes into the ether, and so what begins as a problem of language ends as one of the broadest tragedies of our lives.
This is most manifest in the life of the suburban commuter who weekly spends a dozen or more hours on the road between the putative dream house and the workplace, caught in the gridlock of tens of thousands likewise trying to move from the residential-warehousing periphery to the economically productive inner rings. Space is quantifiable and we are constantly taught to covet it (though leisure is advertised too—mostly as vacation packages). You can own those two thousand square feet including two-car garage, and it is literally real, the real in real estate. But to have this space you give up time, the time that you might be spending with the kids who are housed in the image of domestic tranquility but not actually particularly well nurtured by their absentee parents, or time spent immersed in community life or making things with your own hands or doing nothing at all—a lost art. You give up time, and you often give up the far more than two thousand square feet that you don’t own but get to enjoy when you live in, say, a rented apartment in a neighborhood full of amenities nobody advertised to you, because you don’t have to buy the public pool or playground that your kids don’t need to be driven to. The language of real-estate ownership is loud, clear, and drilled into us daily; the language of public life and leisure time is rarer and more complex.
People elsewhere are better at this language. At a certain fork in the road of automatization, Europeans chose to have more time, and they work far less than we do and get much longer vacations. We chose to have more stuff, the stuff sold to us through those beckoning adjectives—bigger, better, faster: Jet Skis, extra cars, second homes, motor homes, towering slab TVs, if not the time to enjoy them or to enjoy less commodified pleasures. These may be the wages of inarticulateness.
The conundrum is that the language to describe the ineffable splendors and possibilities of our lives takes time to master, takes a certain unhurried engagement with the tasks of description, assessment, critique, and conversation; that to speak this slow language you must slow down, and to slow down you must have some inkling of what you will gain by doing so. It’s not an elite language; nomadic and remote tribal peoples are now quite good at picking and choosing from development’s cascade of new toys, and so are some of the cash-poor, culture-rich people in places like Louisiana. Poetry is good training in speaking it, and skepticism is helpful in rejecting the four horsemen of this apocalypse, but they both require a mind that likes to roam around and the time in which to do it.
Ultimately, I believe that slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don’t get measured and can’t be bought.
Yesterday, one of my earliest heroes died. Van Cliburn was the youngest person (age 23) ever to win the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, the same year I graduated from college. This was the year I also listened to Saint Saens Third Symphony for Orchestra and Organ for the first time and wept copious tears for its sheer beauty (the piece was later a favorite of my former parents-in-law). And 1958 was just a three years after I was first swept away by the last movement of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, once again attended by tears.
Maybe what moved me so much was that I was roughly the same age as Van Cliburn when he won the prize–as an American (for the first time) and as the youngest pianist ever, in 1958. I was finishing college; he had accomplished a miracle. I was humbled by his feat, awed by his talent and self-discipline, and vaguely jealous of his popularity and almost “rock star” fame. At the time, I saw what an incredible distance there was between what he had already accomplished and what might be possible for me…ever…in any field.
This gave me food for thought for a lot of years. Now, as I read of his death, I have grown beyond youthful envy: he’s gone, I’m not, and there is much more left for me to do, but probably not at the keyboard. My life performance has been played at a different tempo from his, in different keys, and in wildly different concert halls with mixed reviews, and no prizes yet. But I plan to play on in my own way, trying new melodies, techniques and venues, driven no more by envy or despair–but only by hope and love for those around me.
Here are two selections of music you might enjoy, the pieces Van Cliburn played at the competition. The first is Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto played by the master himself; the second piece he also played at the competition, Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. However, this rendition is performed by Olga Kern, whose playing was introduced to me by Elizabeth Van Ingen. Van Cliburn would certainly have approved of the way Kern plays from her soul with passion and deep feeling. I think she’s great.
Just click on the photo.
Mark Johnson has shared a video with you on YouTube
It’s about time, I’d say. I can’t describe the amount of time I’ve wasted trying to figure out the CAPTCHA in order to send a poem or interesting article to a friend or two. Good riddance I’d say.
However, I’m not sure the replacement is a whole lot better. I don’t know about you, but after the last election campaign–in fact, well before that–I have become sickened with advertising in general and especially with ads that are intrusive and virtually mandatory. For example, when I go to Yahoo to check out an article–perhaps one about the budget or war–I am subjected first to a 30 second ad for a new car, lite beer, or a remedy for erectile dysfunction, delivered at increased volume, before I can even begin to view the site I’m interested in and make a decision about whether it’s worth my time or not. That means listening to 30 seconds of nonsense as a requirement to make a five second decision. And there’s no way I know of to bypass or squelch those ads. If I want to evaluate the news site, I have to listen first to an ad. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
New online security checks will be simpler than the prior CAPTCHA system that …
If you’ve submitted a comment, signed up for a newsletter, or uploaded a photo to the Internet at any point in the past five years, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the CAPTCHA system. CAPTCHAs are the annoying little verification windows that pop up, asking you to decipher a nearly unrecognizable series of letters or words, and Web users have hated them for years. But if these silly security systems make you want to bust your keyboard in half, you’ll be happy to hear that we may very well be seeing the last days of the obnoxious, text-based CAPTCHA system, and the next verification system you see online may make you happy to view advertisements for the first time ever.
Rather than taking just a mere glance to figure out, recent studies show that a typical CAPTCHA takes, on average, 14 seconds to solve, with some taking much, much longer. Multiply that by the millions and millions of verifications per day, and Web users as a whole are wasting years and years of their lives just trying to prove they’re not actually computers. This has led many companies to abandon the age-old system in favor of something not only more secure, but also easier to use for your average Webgoer: Ad-based verification, which can actually cut the time it takes to complete the task in half.
Now when performing a Web task, such as purchasing event tickets fromTicketmaster, for example, you may no longer be met with a swirling mix of letters and numbers, but instead by an advertisement or common brand logo. Rather than demanding that you decipher a completely pointless combination of fuzzy words, you could simply be asked to recite a well-known company slogan. The security pop-up might even ask you to view an ad image and then type the company’s name.
The new system is turning out to be a big time saver for just about everyone, and Web users are typically able to confirm their humanity much faster than with the standard verification tool. New York-based Solve Media—one of the leaders of the ad-based verification revolution—claims the ads it uses for user confirmation take about seven seconds to complete, cutting wasted time in half.
But ad-based verification isn’t the only revolutionary idea looking to usurp the standard CAPTCHA’s throne. Both puzzle and math-based variations on the tool have also started to gain traction. Puzzle versions of the tool ask you to perform a simple task, like draw a circle around a specific object in an image, while the mathematical option requests that you solve some simple arithmetic. Both of these variants allow you to confirm your humanity without deciphering a garbled string of text, but they lack the revenue-generating capability of the ad-based method. And because of this added monetary bonus of the commercial model, both the puzzle and math verification tools have less of a chance of becoming commonplace.
CAPTCHA—which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”—first gained prominence in the early 2000s as a way to keep Web forms from being spammed by computer bots. It’s impossible to tell how much time Web users as a whole have wasted as a result of the increasingly difficult text strings, but with much simpler alternatives finally beginning to catch on, it appears that the fuzzy text nonsense is finally meeting its end. Advertisements in general are usually seen as a hindrance to daily life, but in this case, ads will actually make your life easier. What a novel concept!
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2012 has been an interesting time in the life of our lexicon. From new coinages to new usages, English has had a nice growth spurt. Some neologisms quickly outgrow their usefulness, or through overuse, they become meaningless, like an overplayed song on the radio. Here are a few terms that many people have grown tired of in 2012.
Last week, we 
the words that have become so a part of our temporary lexicon that we – newscasters, television writers, sports announcers, bloggers – cannot help but use them. Many of our fans did not like the idea of 
Thank you to my distinguished friends, President Amy Gutmann, Provost Vincent Price and Rev. Charles Howard for inviting me to share a few reflections on this joyous occasion. It is an honor and privilege to congratulate you — UPenn’s class of 2012. 
When the things around you are seen as gifts, they are no longer a means to an end; they are the means and the end. And thus, a cow-herder will tend to his animals with the compassion of a father, a village woman will wait 3 hours for a delayed bus without a trace of anger, a child will spend countless hours fascinated by stars in the galaxy, and finding his place in the vast cosmos.
That day we fasted and that night, we slept by the bathrooms. A small lie could’ve bought us an upgrade, but that would’ve been no pilgrimage. As I went to sleep with a wall separating me from my wife, I had this beautiful, unbidden vision of a couple climbing to the top of a mountain from two different sides. Midway through this difficult ascent, as the man contemplated giving up, a small sparrow flew by with this counsel, “Don’t quit now, friend. Your wife is eager to see you at the top.” He kept climbing. A few days later, when the wife found herself on the brink of quitting, the little sparrow showed up with the same message. Step by step, their love sustained their journey all the way to the mountaintop. Visited by the timely grace of this vision, I shed a few grateful tears — and this story became a touchstone not only in our relationship, but many other noble friendships as well.
Extremely poor villagers, who couldn’t even afford their own meals, would often 
