Picasso: Absinthe Drinker, 1902. “My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso". *
LOVE DOES THAT
All day long a little donkey labors, sometimes
with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries
about things that bother only
donkeys.
And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting
than physical labor.
Once in a while a kind monk comes
to her stable and brings
a pear, but more
than that,
he looks into the donkey’s eyes and touches her ears
and for a few seconds the donkey is free
and even seems to laugh,
because love does
that.
Love Frees.
~ Meister Eckhart
*
Let me quote again the delightful second part:
Once in a while a kind monk comes
to her stable and brings
a pear, but more
than that,
he looks into the donkey’s eyes and touches her ears
and for a few seconds the donkey is free
and even seems to laugh,
because love does
that.
Love Frees.
*
A friend made me aware that there is a movie by Robert Bresson, Au Hazard Balthazar, showing the life of a donkey. Some people abuse him, others treat him kindly, even lovingly. It seems mainly a matter of chance (hazard in French; “au hazard” means “at random”)
~ “Now here is the essential part. Bresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does. Because we can think and reason, we believe we can figure a way out, find a solution, get the answer. But intelligence gives us the ability to comprehend our fate without the power to control it. Still, Bresson does not leave us empty-handed. He offers us the suggestion of empathy. If we will extend ourselves to sympathize with how others feel, we can find the consolation of sharing human experience, instead of the loneliness of enduring it alone.
This is the cinema of empathy.
The final scene of "Au Hasard Balthazar" makes that argument in a beautiful way. The donkey is old and near death, and wanders into a herd of sheep--as, indeed, it began its life in such a herd. The other animals come and go, sometimes nuzzling up against it, taking little notice, accepting this fellow animal, sharing the meadow and the sunshine. Balthazar lies down and eventually dies, as the sheep continue about their business. He has at last found a place where the other creatures think as he does.” ~
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-au-hasard-balthazar-1966
The Eternal Feminine: A Ukrainian woman with a chick*
Earliest known image of Nativity, 4th century; Milano, Sant’Ambroggio. Note the cow and the donkey — but no parents!*
BERTRAND RUSSELL: HOW TO GROW OLD WITHOUT FEAR OF DEATH
~ “The proper recipe for remaining young,” Russell says, came to him from the example of a maternal grandmother, who was so absorbed in her life, “I do not believe she ever had time to notice she was growing old.”
~ The best way to overcome the fear of death—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done. ~ Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old
http://www.openculture.com/2018/12/bertrand-russells-advice-for-how-not-to-grow-old.html
Oriana:
Having wide interests (or even not so wide) is I think a form of love — you pay intense attention to something outside yourself. And, as Russell also said, “Love is wise and hatred foolish.” Having enough love in your life is probably more important than diet and exercise when it comes to health in general, and healthy older age in particular.
But we shouldn’t be obsessed with mere longevity. I knew a man who came from a family of near-centenarians, and who did indeed made it into the early nineties without any fitness or diet regimens (those are usually ineffective anyway; lots of “health nuts” end up dying rather young) — but he was domineering and downright abusive, and his old age was miserable.
His widow, by contrast, is a loving person with a strong creative bent. She loves her children and grandchildren and great-grands, but it seems to me that what really keeps her alive (she’s 92) and happy is her love of poetry, beauty, and nature. She keeps going to workshops and other poetry events, still publishes, still gives readings. True, she needs more and more assistance, but because of her sweetness, there are always people willing to help. They realize how extraordinary she is.
As for pursuing your passions, I love what Rilke said: “To work is to live without dying.”
*
“THOSE WHO NEED A LIGHT FOR THE NIGHT”: HEMINGWAY’S STRUGGLE AGAINST DESPAIR
~ “I am of those who like to stay late at the café," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."
"I want to go home and into bed."
"We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café."
"Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long."
"You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves."
"Good night," said the younger waiter.
"Good night," the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity
although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too.
It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.” ~ Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
Oriana:
Hemingway is usually discussed as an example of machismo and a certain kind of stoicism. But it might be more interesting to talk about his alcoholic desperation and nihilism, propped with principles like “grace under pressure” to substitute for genuine moral values. Thus, the place needs to be clean and well lighted. Granted, here at least we have some empathy for those who “need a light for the night” — but on the whole, one gets the impression that Hemingway is afraid of showing any kind of softer, more loving side of himself.
Moral values, my parents taught me, are about how you treat others. They have nothing to do with your bullfighting style, and everything to do with kindness, respect, a nurturing attitude toward the young and old — anyone in need of help. Courage, yes, in the face of true evil like the Nazis, not recklessness for the fun of it. Not senseless stubbornness, as when the Old Man ends up destroying a beautiful fish to prove how tough he is.
Granted, in this story (A Clean, Well-Lighted Place) at least we have some empathy for those who “need a light for the night” — but on the whole, in much of his work, one gets the impression that Hemingway is afraid of showing any kind of softer, more loving side of himself. (For one thing, he had his own literary legend to live up to: tough, macho.) Still, the older waiter does show empathy. What the old alcoholic needs is affection, and the older waiter gives him something like affection in the form of not trying to make him leave the premises.
Hematite “Iron Rose,” SpainIt seems to me that what we need much more than “a clean, well lighted place” is, very simply, each other. Meister Eckhart’s parable of the monk and the donkey lays it out simply and perfectly...a moment of true attention, the kindness of touch. That is the miracle, the sweetness of redemption, the gesture of understanding, of empathy... Love. Not a bright and empty room with one inhabitant, preoccupied with his own concerns, certain of his own importance, his “genius.” That is a barren picture of isolation and egoism. I think you could starve there, could spend a lot of time wrestling with despair.
Why is it so hard to see our salvation lies in each other?? Love, empathy, connection, attention focused outward, toward the other, toward all the splendid wonders and mysteries of the world — kindness, curiosity, work that we love — these are redemptive, this is where you find freedom and create meaning. In these you are not self-conscious, self-absorbed, suffering the existential loneliness of the isolated eternally separate individual, but a partner in experience and understanding, sharing a world that is not empty, not cold, not indifferent: in fact, a world you are continually creating in the very act of your attention.
And this is not a huge and impossible task. It may be as small as that pear given to the donkey, as small as that gentle touch on the donkey's ear. For some, hell may be other people, but those others are also our best chance at heaven, maybe the only real one we ever get.
Oriana: NO SELF, NO PROBLEM
I’ve often wondered why it is so easy to love animals, and so difficult to relate to other people in a truly rewarding way. Humans may be too complex for their own good, and too divided along the lines of politics and religion, different philosophies of life, different preferences in music and art, and endless idiosyncratic opinions on just about everything. Add to this temperamental differences: the loud extravert versus the quiet introvert, for instance. When Adrienne Rich says, “Two people together is a miracle,” I instantly know what she means.
Yet this maddening complexity also means that practically every human being is fascinating. I discovered that a writer’s attitude — what makes this person tick? — keeps me from the instant intense dislike that used to plague my younger years. Curiosity rather than judgment, listening rather than “listening to yourself talk” — these are elements of maturity. When we listen, we discover points of common humanity, and empathy tends to be increase.
It is indeed the external focus that guards us against preoccupation with our faults, illnesses, fears and worries. Funny: I used to escape into my rich inner life to get away from the oppressive externals. Now I’ve learned to escape into the external — which can be as simple as looking out the window, “gazing at the world” — to get away from oppressive preoccupation with the self.
This key was formulated by a Buddhist sage who said: “No self, no problem.” Every woman should have that taped to her mirror, since women have been brainwashed to think they need to spend hours perfecting their appearance. The beauty of young women is indeed part of the beauty of the world, but pity the woman (and an occasional man) who hasn’t developed in other ways.
But external focus is broader than human interaction. Affection is very important — or, if affection is too difficult, just close listening — but thank goodness there is also work. Our salvation lies both in work AND affection. As Freud said, when asked what’s most important in life: “Love and work.”
Magritte: The Lovers, 1928. We can never fully know another person, but . . . long live the mystery.
*
But the minimalism in Hemingway’s short stories, wow, the influence of that.
HIS GREATNESS LIES IN HIS STORIES
~ “Reviewing the 1977 film version of Islands in the Stream, Pauline Kael wrote, “There may be a time for a Hemingway revival, but this isn’t it. His themes don’t link with our preoccupations and… the movie version of his posthumous novel seems to belong to another age.” Kael was right, but she missed something: Another age is precisely why many still read Hemingway.
In the ’80s, writes Mary Dearborn in her richly detailed biography, “Hemingway and his place in the Western literary tradition came under full-on attack, as readers, scholars, urgently questioned what ‘dead white males’ like Hemingway have to say to us in a multicultural era that no longer accords them automatic priority. The so-called Hemingway code—a tough, stoic approach to life that seemingly substitutes physical courage … for other forms of accomplishments—increasingly looked insular and tiresomely macho.”
In the 21st century, thanks to movies, his image is more with us than ever. In Midnight in Paris (2011) Corey Stoll conjures an uncanny likeness of the mid-’20s Hemingway with a boost from Woody Allen’s spot-on dialogue: “It was a good book because it was an honest book, and that’s what war does to men. There’s nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And then it’s not only noble but brave.”
And: “No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”
The next year HBO aired Philip Kaufman’s Hemingway and Gellhorn, about Papa’s tempestuous relationship with his third wife, the journalist and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Nicole Kidman gives a powerhouse performance as the only one of Hemingway’s four wives who was a match for him in intelligence and temperament, and Clive Owen is the most complete and nuanced of the numerous cinematic Hemingways (though Dominic West delivers a vivid cameo in Genius, a film bio of the remarkable editor Max Perkins).
Martha Gellhorn thought, “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.”
Did—does—Hemingway qualify as a genius? He certainly thought he did. But perhaps his greatest lie was to himself. In a letter to one of his editors, he wrote that if writing was boxing, he had a chance to beat “Mr. Tolstoy,” and “I fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal …” I saw those fights and Stendhal won two unanimous decisions and Tolstoy by a third round KO.
His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), still reads with the freshness of an open wound (when I say first, I’m excluding the unreadable The Torrents of Spring). But it’s tough to read the big books on which Hemingway’s reputation has so long rested—A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)—without noticing how stagey and melodramatic they seem.
Surely it’s his short stories that will keep Hemingway’s literary reputation alive. Even his severest critics concede a value in the stories lacking in the novels. Nabokov told an interviewer, “I read him for the first time in the early ‘40s, something about bells, balls and bulls …” Nabokov considered Hemingway and Joseph Conrad “writers of books for boys.” But Hemingway was better than Conrad: “He has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story ‘The Killers.’” He also thought that the “description of the iridescent fish and its rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb.” Go fish, Dwight Macdonald.
One of the conceits that holds up is his comparison of himself to Cezanne. In the introduction to the recent Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, his grandson Sean writes, “My grandfather liked to compare his writing to Cezanne’s painting. He said that he learned how to write landscapes from Cezanne, whose work he saw in Paris as a young man.”
And, pretty much, he’s right. This edition offers multiple drafts (from the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston) that show how the author polished his jewels. He learned from many sources, from the great and underrated Ring Lardner (whose name he adopted for his high school newspaper), Stein, Ezra Pound (who, Dearborn says, “taught him to be leery of adjectives, a mistrust that would become an essential part of the Hemingway style”), and not the least, from the style manual he learned as a reporter for the Kansas City Star—use short sentences, use short first paragraphs, use vigorous English. Also, and surely one of few rules he and Nabokov both adhered to, avoid words that end in “ly.”
In an early draft of "Big Two-Hearted River," he pays homage to Cezanne: “He wanted to write like Cezanne painted.” But he excised that sentence from his final version. In his early stories he succeeded in capturing the literary quality of Cezanne’s technique of focusing on background, subordinating central objects and outlines to detail.
The art of Hemingway, the innovation that marked him—along with Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, and other post-World War I modernists—is to be found in his stories, not in the increasingly archaic-seeming novels. Hemingway subscribed to the “iceberg principle” of writing: “The dignity of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” As Sean Hemingway notes, “Big Two-Hearted River” is a story about World War I in which the war is never mentioned.
Applying it to fiction, he meant that an author must keep his narrative short as the very nature of the medium dictated compression. In his Poetry Notebook, Clive James found from a lifetime of studying poetry “the intensity of language that marked the real difference between poetry and prose.” Open one of Hemingway’s novels just about anywhere and you will find language that is flowery and overwritten; flip to any pages in one of his great short stories and find poetry (much better poetry than Hemingway managed in his verse).
Yeats liked to quote a remark attributed to John Stewart Mill: “Rhetoric is heard. Poetry is overheard.” Hemingway’s stories seem overheard. You can see this demonstrated in the versions reprinted in the Short Stories, where each draft becomes more concise and better as he revises.
It’s time to acknowledge that Fitzgerald came nearer to greatness as a novelist than Hemingway, and that Hemingway never wrote a novel as good as The Great Gatsby (which T.S. Eliot thought was “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James”). Hemingway ended his career as he had begun, as an inspired adolescent. He burned with a hard gemlike flame for perhaps ten years, roughly from 1925 to the mid-1930s, and what he wrote after that coasted on the momentum of his extravagant influence. Is it even possible to imagine Faulkner doing an endorsement for Ballantine Ale, as Hemingway did in 1952?
But I also know that there’s an art in Hemingway’s stories that surpasses the novels, one that can’t be explained simply by reciting influences like Stein, the KC Star Style Manual, or even Cezanne. In his stories, Hemingway lit a torch to the path of literary modernism. As a novelist, his attitudes were those of an earlier time. Like a beefy, bearded Janus, his image will always stand at the crossroads of 19th and 20th century American literature.” ~
https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-the-hell-are-we-still-reading-ernest-hemingway?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
Oriana:
The fishing stories didn't interest me, but a few others did. And yes, the minimalist style, the influence of journalism. I too learned about short sentences and short paragraphs from journalism. Copy editing was by far the most useful class I ever took.
The Sun Also Rises was one of those novels that was an experience to read. Not a pleasant experience, but a compelling one. Again, alcoholism that grasps at the straws of principles, e.g. being a “good drunk.” Being a good drunk is certainly better than being a bad drunk, but it’s still no substitute for having a genuine moral compass.
Nevertheless, when dealing with writers, we must remember that ultimately they will be remembered (IF they are remembered) for their best work, and not for the mediocre work that may have made them famous while they were alive. And Hemingway did say a few things worth remembering:
“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
Remedios Varo: The Troubadour*
PORN, VIDEO GAMES, AND MALE ALIENATION
~ “There has been a lot of recent research on how online porn and video games are helping to inculcate alienation and destructive patterns in boys and young men. Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo's book Man (Dis)Connected): How Technology has Sabotaged What it Means to be Male provides insight onto how Homo Obnoxious gets his brain wired.
Zimbardo discusses how young male brains can become shaped at a cellular level in ways that inhibit their social development through excessive time spent on gaming and porn, even losing their ability to read the social cues of face-to-face contact. Many, he points out, are drawn to these realms as a seemingly safe and easy way to gain a sense of achievement that may not be available in the winner-take-all competition of school and the workforce. These virtual worlds are tailored to provide an addictive system of goals and rewards that produce guys who are afraid of intimacy. They end up eschewing real-world experiments that might result in rejection, and real-time spontaneity that leaves them disoriented and frightened. Drained of self-confidence, they search for narratives of manhood that provide at least the simulacrum of power and dignity.” ~
http://www.alternet.org/culture/homo-obnoxious-toxic-masculinity-really-taking-over-country
Boy angel at La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires*
~ “While on assignment for Der Spiegel, we made a road trip through Syria to document the current situation in major cities. When I first entered the Khalidiya district in Homs, I was shocked. I hadn’t seen such large-scale destruction before, and I had been to many destroyed cities. The area around the Khalidiya district was extremely quiet. No city sounds, cars—nothing. Only the chirping of swallows and the wind. We walked down the streets of Khalidiya, but the destruction was so widespread that you couldn’t get the big picture from the street—you could only manage it with a view from above. To make this image, I asked a Syrian soldier in charge of the area if I could climb onto a ruin. The soldier agreed, allowing me to climb at my own risk. I climbed up the ruins of a former house—which was full of improvised explosive devices—and took the picture. I was very lucky to take the picture when I was on the rooftop. Without any sign of life, it would have been a dead picture. I can recall the memory vividly.” ~ Christian Werner
*THE BATTLE OF VERDUN, FEBRUARY 21-DECEMBER 18, 1916
The Battle of Verdun remains one of the deadliest confrontations in the annals of warfare, producing crippling losses on both sides of the battlefield.
The battle was the brainchild of General Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the Imperial German General Staff. He believed that Germany could win the war if it could smash France’s army in one massive confrontation. He chose Verdun as the place to “bleed it white” both because its location in northeastern France made it susceptible to mass artillery fire and because as one of France’s major citadels its loss would crush French morale.
Early fighting went as Falkenhayn had hoped. German forces took several French forts and came within two miles of the center of Verdun. By July, however, the German advance had bogged down. With the British having launched a separate offensive against German troops at the Somme at the start of July, Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed Falkenhayn as chief of staff.
The French army slowly began to push the Germans back. By the time the fighting halted in December, the two armies had returned to nearly the same lines they had held at the start of the year. In the meantime, they had each suffered more than 330,000 casualties.
Verdun: Military Cemetery and Ossuary*
Let’s detox with this story:
~ “I grew up on farms and still miss horses so much that it actually causes me pain. I watched my teeny 5 foot nothing mother calm the meanest stallions just by simply walking towards them talking in her soothing tone and holding a carrot. One day a man showed up at the farm hauling a trailer and we could hear an angry horse screaming in it. All these men yelling and trying to get it out....my mother appeared on the porch the second the owner took a whip to the backside of the horse yelling horrible things at it in an attempt to get it out of the trailer. First time I ever saw my mother lose her temper, and since we were McMahon's her temper was fierce. She marched up to that man, yanked the whip from him and proceeded to repeatedly hit him in the face with it. Shoved him back and firmly said "Now watch how it is SUPPOSED to be done" and vanished into the trailer. The men are yelling the horse is a killer...then they fell silent. Mother was in there crooning to the horse, who was literally crying, stroking its neck and looking it in the eyes..she's crying with the horse. Backed him gentle like out of the trailer and led him to the barn. Walked past our landlord and told him "If I see that man step one foot on this property again I will shoot him dead. This horse is no longer his." I was staring in astonishment at this horse...it was HUGE...20 hands easily. And it was following my mother like a pussy cat. The man never came back...and that horse was the best friend a girl could ever have.” ~ Jana Bramble, Facebook
*
~ “In a book titled Virtuous Violence by Tage Rai and Alan Fiske, the authors claim that violence is mostly morally driven. People are violent because of their morality, not in spite of it.
Moral Violence
As they put it, “When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.”
They go on to write, “The perpetrator is violent to make the relationship right—to make the relationship what it ought to be according to his or her cultural implementations of universal relational moral principles. That is, most violence is morally motivated. Morality is about regulating social relationships, and violence is one way to regulate relationships.”
Plainly, perpetrators believe a social relationship has somehow gone wrong, and are morally motivated to put it right. This can drive them to do violence.
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister discusses a related idea. In his book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Baumeister reviews scientific and historical texts.
He concludes that for the most part, people who commit violence view themselves as victims and their targets as moral wrongdoers. Again, for the perpetrators violence is morally motivated.
No one is the bad guy in their own movie.
THE TWO FACES OF OXYTOCIN
Researchers have proposed that the biological prototype for all sociality among mammals can be found in mother-infant interactions. Evolution co-opted the parts of our brain that engage during these early interactions and use them for the rest of our social relationships.
But the love molecule is not always so lovely. Studies have found that oxytocin can increase aggression and hostility to those perceived as threats.
As Matthew Lieberman puts it, “In nonprimates, oxytocin leads individuals to see all outsiders as possible threats, thus enhancing aggression toward them.”
And administering oxytocin to humans “facilitates caregiving toward both liked groups and strangers, but it promotes hostility toward members of disliked groups.”
suggests we can’t have strong commitment without a greater risk of violence. Put differently, we can’t reduce violence without weakening commitment.
If people are not so committed in a relationship, that means the relationship isn’t very important. And if a relationship is unimportant, people are less likely to risk using violence.
More choices→ lower likelihood of commitment
Less commitment→ lower likelihood of violence
Fewer choices→ higher likelihood of commitment
Higher commitment→ higher likelihood of violence
The idea that morality motivates violence, or that violence occurs more frequently in important relationships seems counterintuitive. But a crucial point emphasized in Virtuous Violence and Evil is that understanding the roots of violence can help us to reduce it.” ~
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201812/the-seeds-love-contain-the-roots-hate
*
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” ~ Samuel Johnson
Remedios Varo: Embroidering the Earth's Mantle (I realize that the reader is expecting an image of Samuel Johnson here, but this is so much more pleasing)
*
THE CASE FOR A 6-HOUR WORKDAY
~ “The eight-hour workday harkens back to 19-century socialism. When there was no upper limit to the hours that organizations could demand of factory workers, and the industrial revolution saw children as young as six-years-old working the coal mines, American labor unions fought hard to instill a 40-hour work week, eventually ratifying it as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
So much has changed since then. The internet fundamentally changed the way we live, work, and play, and the nature of work itself has transitioned in large part from algorithmic tasks to heuristic ones that require critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.
Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, says that “the more complex and creative jobs are, the less it makes sense to pay attention to hours at all.” Yet despite all of this, the eight-hour workday still reigns supreme. “Like most humans,” Grant says, “leaders are remarkably good at anchoring on the past even when it’s irrelevant to the present.”
Heuristic work requires people to get into the physiological state of flow, coined by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975. Flow refers to the state of full immersion in an activity, and you might know it best as “the zone.” A 10-year McKinsey study on flow found that top executives are up to 500% more productive when they’re in a state of flow.
Many of today’s organizations sabotage flow by setting counter-productive expectations on availability, responsiveness, and meeting attendance, with research by Adobe finding that employees spend an average of six hours per day on email. Another study found that the average employee checks email 74 times a day, while people touch their smartphones 2,617 times a day. Employees are in a constant state of distraction and hyper-responsiveness.
Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp and author of It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, said on my podcast, Future Squared, that for creative jobs such as programming and writing, people need time to truly think about the work that they’re doing. “If you asked them when the last time they had a chance to really think at work was, most people would tell you they haven’t had a chance to think in quite a long time, which is really unfortunate.”
“People waste a lot of time at work,” according to Grant. “I’d be willing to bet that in most jobs, people would get more done in six focused hours than eight unfocused hours.”
Cal Newport, best-selling author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, echoes Grant’s sentiments, saying that “three to four hours of continuous, undisturbed deep work each day is all it takes to see a transformational change in our productivity and our lives.”
Fried agreed, saying that he gets into flow for about half the day. “If you don’t get a good four hours of flow to yourself a day, putting more hours in isn’t going to make up for it. It’s just not true that if you stay at the office longer you get more work done.”
I conducted a two-week, six-hour workday experiment with my team at Collective Campus, an innovation accelerator based in Melbourne, Australia. The shorter workday forced the team to prioritize effectively, limit interruptions, and operate at a much more deliberate level for the first few hours of the day. The team maintained, and in some cases increased, its quantity and quality of work, with people reporting an improved mental state, and that they had more time for rest, family, friends, and other endeavors.
When I announced the experiment on LinkedIn, a connection responded with: “It’s nice in theory, but I can’t finish all of my tasks in six hours!” — as if all tasks were created equally. The law of nature that is the Pareto principle stipulates that about 20% of your tasks will create about 80% of the value, so it’s about focusing on those high-value tasks.
Make it okay for employees to not be in a hyper-responsive state and schedule uninterrupted time to get into a state of flow. Similarly, make it not okay to be interrupting people on a whim. My team has a simple rule; if a team member has their headphones in, you are not to disturb them unless it absolutely, positively can’t wait (which is hardly ever, by the way). Doing so has been shown to decrease workplace stress, according to research by Gloria Mark at the University of California, which found that stress levels declined when email was taken away from U.S. Army civilian employees for five days, because they felt more in control of their working lives.
By cultivating a flow-friendly workplace and introducing a shorter workday, you’re setting the scene not only for higher productivity and better outcomes, but for more motivated and less-stressed employees, improved rates of employee acquisition and retention, and more time for all that fun stuff that goes on outside of office walls, otherwise known as life.” ~
https://hbr.org/2018/12/the-case-for-the-6-hour-workday
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“When someone asks you what country you are from, never say that you are Athenian or Corinthian, but rather that you are a citizen of the world [kosmios]” ~ Epictetus, Discourses 1.9
Oriana:
I love "Kosmios" -- it makes me think of the cosmos as the universe, and of course in the largest sense we are the children of the universe -- every atom inside us was once inside a star.
JESUS AS THE CRITIC OF RELIGION
~ “Has it ever occurred to you how fundamentally iconoclastic Jesus really was? How bitterly anti-establishment he was? He had exactly zero qualms about questioning every single thing the religious people around him believed.
Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. And in vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” (Mark 7:6-7)
Granted, he had his inconsistencies like most other composite characters in works of dubious historical accuracy. Serious scholars of every stripe have long admitted to seeing multiple competing layers of tradition in the stories and sayings of Jesus we find in the canonical gospels.
But no matter what the comparative authenticity of those disparate layers, there is one thing about which we can be relatively certain, namely that the version(s) of Jesus we find in the Bible today preserve for us the very ideas which, if carried to their logical conclusions, will lead any serious follower to be critical of the religious apparatus that today represents the faith he was supposed to have founded.
Jesus, the Critic of Religion
Whether or not you are convinced he actually existed, Jesus rightly belongs to a prophetic tradition within the Jewish faith that was always calling out its leaders for allowing the religion to major on obsessions which benefit no one save those at the top of the religious order.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are…
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. ‘
I submerged myself into the life and teachings of Jesus many years ago, and if I took away nothing else, it was that the most Jesus-like thing you could do is to critically analyze what you’ve been taught to believe in order to sift and sort out the man-made stuff from the authentic roots of your belief system.
Consider how many times in his famous “Sermon on the Mount” Jesus quoted the Hebrew scriptures only to turn around and disagree with it!
“You have heard it said…but I say to you..”
That takes a lot of nerve, you know? Interpreters today seem content with a facile dismissal of this tendency because, hey, it’s Jesus, right? I mean surely he enjoys a special privilege because of who he is, and he had no intention of teaching us to do the same things he did, right?
I find that intellectually lazy. And the thing is…once you get started on this project, you may find that pulling on that thread soon leads to the whole fabric coming undone. So be it. Your journey may not take you that far, but mine did.
In Mark’s gospel (we literally have no idea who wrote this despite what you may have heard) we read Jesus asking why ceremonial prayers (whoops, I mean washings) before meals would have any effect at all on the holiness of the food. Jesus thinks out loud for us, modeling the kinds of critical thinking skills he wants his listeners to emulate:
“Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing which enters a person from the outside can defile them? It doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.”
(In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean)
Do you see what Jesus just did? He used logic to deconstruct a religious belief and threw it right back in the faces of the men who stood to gain from preserving the traditions people had been following for centuries, never questioning anything because they were taught that doing so was bad form. And yet here is Jesus, modeling the whole process himself. According to the Bible itself here, the man just called into question all of the kosher food laws of his family’s religion.
My point is that Jesus got me started on the road to questioning what I believe. I find that deliciously ironic since I only listened to what he had to say because the people whose authority he taught me to question never seemed to realize how much what he had to say was undermining their authority.
At the end of one of the passages I quoted above, Jesus says:
Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.
Much has been said about this cryptic statement, and about what this “key to knowledge” must have signified. Personally, I feel it’s possible he meant that critical thinking skills would have enabled the people of Israel to evaluate what they had been taught but that trust in authority had divested them of that capability.” ~
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2017/11/25/bible-helped-become-atheist/?fbclid=IwAR1I_vwEqVDNa_moDeHAjcZ6mWzNvAa99sZA920vONa6pPRbxEWBGzzLDjQ#srcu6pKFASMoVT3w.01
SHOULD WE WORRY ABOUT THE DECLINE IN GRIP STRENGTH?
~ “When she was a practicing occupational therapist, Elizabeth Fain started noticing something odd in her clinic: Her patients were weak. More specifically, their grip strengths, recorded via a hand-held dynamometer, were “not anywhere close to the norms” that had been established back in the 1980s.
Fain knew that physical activity levels and hand-use patterns had changed a lot since then. Jobs had become increasingly automated, the professional and service sectors had grown, all sorts of measures of physical activity (like the likelihood that a child walks to school) had declined, and the personal computer age had dawned. But to see the numbers decline so steeply and quickly was still a surprise, and not just to her.
Even taking into account the cautionary statistical notes—that the sample sizes of the 1980s studies were not huge, that Fain’s study was mostly college students—the idea of a loss in human strength, expressed through a statistical measure hardly anyone had previously heard of, seemed to hint at some latter-day version of degeneration. It’s easy to be troubled by a nearly 20 percent decrease in grip strength, especially given that it happened in one generation.
That message was reinforced by the sheer predictive power of grip strength. In a study published in 2015 in The Lancet, the health outcomes of nearly 140,000 people across 17 countries were tracked over four years, via a variety of measures—including grip strength.3 Grip strength was not only “inversely associated with all-cause mortality”—every 5 kilogram (kg) decrement in grip strength was associated with a 17 percent risk increase—but as the team, led by McMaster University professor of medicine Darryl Leong, noted: “Grip strength was a stronger predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure.”
The argument seemed to line up neatly. We are raising a generation of weaklings, more prone to everything from premature aging to mental disorders. Or is the opposite true? Is this just the latest step in the age-old weakening of our species as we emerged from the trees and built up civilization?
Pound per pound, babies are remarkably strong. The parent learns this the first time they proffer their finger. In a famous series of experiments in the late 19th century—of the sort one can scarcely imagine today—Louis Robinson, a surgeon at a children’s hospital in England, tested some 60 infants—many within an hour of birth—by having them hang from a suspended “walking stick.” With only two exceptions, according to one report, the infants were able to hang on, sustaining “the weight of their body for at least ten seconds.” Many could do it for upward of a minute. In a later-published photograph, Robinson swapped out the bar for a tree branch, to bring home his whole point: Our “arboreal ancestry.”
The last 10 years have also seen a dramatic increase in myopia, most likely because we spend more time indoors and because of the type of work we do. But should we stop reading? Should we swing from the trees to get our grip strength back? Even if we got our paleo hands back, what good would they do us in the modern world?
And if a measure like grip strength were truly so robust a health indicator, shouldn’t life spans be declining as (and if) grip strength was? Bohannon warns me, “I would not interpret small declines in grip strength as indicative of decreasing health.” As he notes, you have to get pretty low in the statistical profile—“in the lowest quartile or tertile or below the median of a tested population”—before you start to get into increased mortality risk territory.
Despite all these caveats, there is a larger narrative into which declining grip strength fits neatly. Daniel Lieberman, Harvard University paleoanthropologist, and author of The Story of the Human Body, tells me that “overall strength and fitness are declining in the post-industrial world, and the epidemiological transition is increasing lifespan.” But, he noted, “those two trends are occurring for totally different reasons.”
We tend to fixate on the measure of lifespan, but overlook morbidity. Here, Lieberman says, the data are unequivocal. “As we are living longer,” he says, people “are also suffering from much longer periods of chronic illness as they age.” People may be living longer, due to advances in pharmaceuticals or medical care, but as he asks, “is she/he healthy?” Health, he says, “is not just life expectancy.”
Our weakening grips are, if nothing else, a corollary of an increasingly sick population. So, by all means, go to the gym, not to turn back the evolutionary tide, but for your own well-being. Evolution, as Lieberman reminds us in The Story of the Human Body, is just about passing your genes, not ensuring a long and healthy life. “From an evolutionary perspective, there is no such thing as optimal health.” Creating that definition is up to you.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/raising-the-american-weakling-1601106883
ending on beauty:
I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men's hands even at the height
of their arc of rage
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh
we can wound
and it is our
Beloved’s.
~ Hafiz, I Have Come into This World to See This
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