"Modern" life: slowing down and considering the lilies

Is it comforting or unsettling:
That we've been discussing this topic for nearly 150 years and that we're still worried about it?
That we have always idealized the past, while simultaneously accepting and adapting to the newest technology?

I recommend the full xkcd (bigger and easier to read) with mouseover: http://xkcd.com/1227/

I really liked this xkcd post. It comforted me that humans (Americans?) have always been fighting against, or at least cognizant of, our inability and unwillingness to slow down and have real conversations with people. However, it disappointed me that although our Luddite rantings about bicycles, tricycles, trains, boats, and telegrams existed, we now have technology like those ridiculous Google glasses, cell phones, smartphones, and email. 

Were these arguments raised to fight back against technology? Or were they raised simply to state a point: that technology is ruining our ability to communicate and think effectively? I also wonder what these authors did in their spare time. Did they ride their bike anyways? Did they give in to their mentioned technology after a few years? I'm sure they said "it can't get any worse". Were these articles warnings or admonitions to society? 

Brave New World here we come...?

Highs and Lows: Starting with a blank book

I just spent over an hour getting sucked into this blog instead of doing the other things I meant to be doing. It is so wonderful to read what you are all thinking and finding interesting, and I wish that I had been more regularly involved with reading, commenting, and posting. I miss you all. I miss Colby less and less as I carve out places for myself elsewhere, but I still miss all of you lots.
__________________
Last you all heard from me here was that I was embarking on a crazy cross country trip with no real destination. Really observant/devoted TDT contributors may have noticed a post I started that has languished in the drafts section of this blog since December, unfinished. That trip started out so buoyant with excitement and promise that didn't even last me through the Rockies. It turns out that traveling alone--driving 6,300 miles in about a month--without a set plan, objective, or idea of where I was going, was really really really really hard. Had I thought about it more, that would have been an obvious conclusion, but I was so excited to get out of the rut I was feeling in Boston and NH and to go on this adventure that it never occurred to me to stop and say "why yes, Emma, of course driving across the country by yourself with minimal planning is going to get lonely, boring, and discouraging REALLY fast." That's not to say in any way that the trip was a total loss or that I didn't have any fun. 'Cause it wasn't, I did, and it was fantastic to see so many of my scattered friends along the way. I'm glad I went, and had I realized how hard it was going to be before I left, I may never have done it.

My last journal entry from that trip was written late at night on November 25th while curled up on Isaac's couch in Palo Alto, mind whirring and stressing and definitely not sleeping. It was less than a week before I got the call from Snowmass that they wanted to interview me; I was hired and off to Oregon and then to my new job by December 1st. But that night, watching headlights sweep across the darkened living room, I didn't know that yet. That journal entry is full of pain and confusion. I was so lost and alone. Yes, I could find myself on a map, and throwing things at Isaac down the hall would have given me a (sleepy, slightly grumpy, but awake) companion, but my loss and loneliness was on a different scale. It's a sloppy (I can barely read my own handwriting) rant about my previous years' failed relationships, lack of community, lack of purpose, inability to get the type of job I wanted or figure out where I wanted to live/what I wanted to do, and uncertainty about what I was doing and who I wanted to be. I ended by saying "basically, I'm not happy, don't know what I need to do to become happy, and should probably stop whining to myself and go to sleep."

This past six months have been a study in figuring out what makes me happy, becoming stronger and more stable, and not writing in my journal almost at all. I've realized that when I'm busy and happy, I don't write. For me, writing is a way to channel stress and uncertainty, to process and reflect what's going on around me. That's not to say that I don't enjoy writing--I do, very much so, but the moments that bring pen to paper are the ones where I am lost, confused, lonely, and have too much time on my hands to ponder. As you may imagine, this means that my journal is usually a dark and depressing story. In fact, when I unpacked it from the box of books that came home with me from Colorado this spring, the last thing written there was the command to myself to go to sleep. I ended up sitting there and reading the journal, which starts in May 2011 and goes until November 2011, cover to cover and deciding that, despite the clump of blank pages still left at the end of it, it was time to start over, to start fresh. I wrote a brief concluding entry: basically, that I moved to CO soon after the last entry was written, that I found a job that I love (for now), a place with friends, coworkers, and a boyfriend who are great, and that I am about to go back to the huts (which, of course, I love) in a new role and feel like a better, stronger, more stable version of myself. With that, I closed the journal and stuck it on the bookshelf of the room that I grew up in but barely live in anymore.

I have a new journal, sitting on my bed at 4,220 ft on Mt. Lafayette. In it, I've reflected on what it's been like to have a formal leadership role in my hut, made lists of things to talk about with my croo, realized just how much I miss my friends in Colorado and how quickly I made strong ties there, commented on the changing social dynamic of a hut system with 28 new croo members this year (as opposed to the usual 7-9 per year), and much more. To be honest, my journal still gets a bit whiny and ranty at times, but that's because writing is still the most effective tool I've found for processing things that I'm struggling with (second only to whining incessantly at anyone who'll listen, which is an absolutely terrible processing tool that I went cold turkey on at some point in middle school. Or maybe not cold turkey, but I significantly scaled back its usage.) Aside from the fact that I am now so much happier than I was then, the difference with this journal is a new tradition that I started with myself on a rainy day during huts training when everyone was playing a game that I couldn't play 'cause of a partially torn MCL and recent tonsillectomy: as part of each entry, I add a highlights section. Sometimes, the highlights are simple, short comments ("going out to sunset rocks with Nick before dinner" or "Johannes' bacon tree joke is really terrible"), but there are other times when writing the highlights of my day leads me to explain it more, and then to elaborate on it and think more about what made the specific moment or exchange so special.


By forcing myself to write about highlights, I have found myself appreciating and processing the positives in life as much as I do the negatives. Yes, things that we struggle with demand our attention and focus, but all too often they monopolize our attentions, making it so much harder to give the same priority to the things that make us happy. As you all know, I've always been an optimist, a silver linings type of person. Recognizing the highlights as well as the lowlights has helped me to bring that optimism inside my own head in an much more intentional and focused way. In lives as busy as chaotic as ours, taking a few minutes to reflect on the positives in our lives is so rewarding and can teach us so much about ourselves and what makes--and keeps--us happy. So give it a try, whether it be here in a plink or a post, in a secret word document on your computer, or in fountain pen in a handmade journal: set aside time to reflect on the positives. You never know where it might take you. 


Love and miss you all. Come visit me in NH this summer or CO starting this fall. My couch/floor are always yours.

Is this real life?

Two things happened today that have continued to nag at me:

1. Ma and I were at an ATM, and she was depositing some checks. Our ATM in town doesn't work, so we go out of town and inevitably have more than one to deposit at a time. And yes, it takes some time to go through the works. By 'time' I mean 5 minutes or so. Maybe 7. No possible way more than 10. So, a car pulls up to behind us at the drive-through ATM as she's depositing the first of two checks. Within a minute, the car behind us is YELLING out his window. The person using the ATM in that car was actually waiting outside the car, in front of the car (it was hot, he was sitting on the passenger side, so I guess he just figured he'd do the ATM thing standing up instead of sharing his password with the driver of the car). After the yelling continues for a few full seconds, I turn around to see man-outside-car telling man-inside-car to calm down, but he's laughing and thinking the yelling is funny. Then man-inside-car starts beeping. We're finishing up deposit number two at this point. Maybe a full minute and a half has elapsed since their car pulled up. So I told my mom I would deposit my check after we pulled around and got back in line so impatient man-inside-car could have his friend, man-outside-car do whatever he had to at the ATM. As she takes the car out of park and takes her card from the ATM, he starts clapping. Clapping with his hands out the window. And the yelling continues. Really? Man-outside-car just laughs, never reprimands or says anything to him. It's all a joke. Being rude is funny, right? Making mountains of molehills is useful, right? Have we really become so impatient in our immediate-gratification filled world, that we have forgotten what common courtesy is? You wait your turn in line. It's normal, and everyone has to do it. If  you're running late, you should have left earlier.

2. We're backing out of a parking spot at the mall, and as we go to turn right (to go towards the road which is on our right, at the end of the aisle), we're inevitably going to be on the left side of the aisle for a moment. At that moment, wonderfully enough, a wonderful ass of a teen-aged girl comes flying around the corner in her white 2011 Audi, slams on the breaks to avoid coming head-on with us, and begins screaming at us to "get on the right side of the road" (her statements were a bit more colorful). As we get out of her way, she notices that I'm looking at her. I don't know why I did, but I did, and we made eye contact. You would have thought I threw a racist slur and some spit in her face. She continued screaming, except this time her whole body was getting into it. Were the cars not moving, I'm pretty sure she would have gotten out. I have no way of knowing, but dear lord was this girl upset.

These aren't even the only two times I've experience things like this in CT/RI. It hasn't been often, but considering this never ever happened in the past five years of my life, I'm actually shaken. Are people really this mean? Is this real? Is this what America is heading to? My children will grow up in more of this? What happened to patience and kindness and understanding?

I'm genuinely horrified.

What is "God?"

Suppose, for a second, that you were asked to describe a powerful thing/force/being that created the every living thing around us. One that created a diverse array of living creatures: everything from Golden Retrievers to E. Coli bacteria to Redwood trees. This thing made us look, act, and feel the way we do. What’s more, it gave us the concept of self-consciousness, the ability to think, and the power of love. It even helped form our moral principles and was a major influence in shaping how we set up our society. How then, would you describe this?

I ask because I would describe this thing as a type of “God.” The above list seems to describe everything that I think a “God” would do and, in essence, describes what “God” is. Others seem to feel the same way; a definition I found described god as “the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority.”

And yet the force I described above was not my description of the Christian God (or G-d or Allah for that matter). Instead, I was describing the force of evolution, as presented in a book called “The Moral Animal.” The book talked about how many evolutionary psychologists believe evolution created not only the way we look, but also the way we feel and act. The arguments are long and complex (and I think fascinating), but the basic idea is that everything from our hands to our moral system of beliefs evolved through a process of natural selection. A parent’s love for their children, for example, evolved as a way to make the parents willing sacrifice everything to help their children survive and thus pass on their genes.

At first this thought scared me. It almost made me feel “fake,” like my love for my parents (and all of you) wasn’t real and instead just a way of my genes “tricking” me. I was fine with the idea that proto-humans evolved millennia ago and weren’t just abracadabra-ed to existence by a God 6,000 years ago. But I always took comfort in the fact that there seemed to be space for some other power (God) to enter somewhere: how else would you explain morals or altruism or love? Yet here was an explanation laid out in front of me… it was all the same force and a brutal, cold-hearted, unthinking force at that… it was all evolution.

But then I stepped back and looked at it in a different way, which, I should add, I was only able to do after Gwen nudged me that way. I spent the entire book looking for a place to insert “God” into the story, but what if “God” was already there, staring me in the face the whole time? What if the evolutionary force is “God?”

When it comes to religion, I’m not certain of much. But one thing I am certain of is that God is not some guy who looks like Dumbledore and sits on a cloud. I think “God” is not a “he,” nor is it a “she,” nor, do I think, is it something that we would generally think of as being an “it.” In my mind, “God” is something that we won’t, or even can’t, fully understand; just an unknowable force that shapes our world. And the more I learn, the more that evolution seems to fit that definition perfectly.

An all-powerful force that created love, morals, and friendship? Sounds like a "God" to me. Unfortunately, it also sounds like evolution. But maybe, just maybe, that isn't the contradiction that it at first seemed. Plus, just think how deliciously ironic the religious right's campaign to keep evolution(God?) out of the the schools would then be.

More thoughts, which are all even less well developed than my undeveloped thought above.

• I’ve also thought that you could also tell a story where there is a higher power than evolution somewhere. After all, who’s to say a “random” gene mutation that would create a feeling of love between a father and son is actually random. Maybe it’s a careful manipulation by a higher power, but because we could never understand the higher power, we just chalk up to “randomness.” In that case, maybe “God” did create love and morals and creatures everywhere and used the might of evolution as the path with which to implement “its” creations.
• Evolution does some fucked up things. I still have a tough time thinking of the evolutionary force as “god” because I have a tough time thinking about a “god” that would do evil things. But maybe there’s no getting around that.
• The related thing that bothers me a bit is that humans seemingly have controlled, or at least influenced, evolution in the past by breeding only the best animals, sowing the best seeds, etc. and genetically modified products are basically a souped-up version of that. Clearly, I can't believe that we've managed to control "God." But maybe that's just me being anthropocentric. I guess you could argue that domesticated plants and animals made us evolve (by moving to cities, which changes what the "best" genetic traits are) just as much as we made them evolve (by selectively breeding/sowing them). Or, in this line of thinking, neither one caused the other to evolve, but the power of "God" caused them both, with the interaction between the two only enforcing its power.