Lost on Campus

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When I reached the lofty position of “upperclassman” at the small private college in southwestern Michigan where I attended undergraduate school, I occasionally engaged in “spoofing the freshmen.” I have come to learn that our pranks could not even pretend to reach the level of what is now called “hazing” at the nation’s “white shoes” private institutions. But then we were mostly nerds, intellectuals, and artists at Kalamazoo College. There were no fraternities or sororities, just some “social clubs” the nature of which I have forgotten.  Hence, rather than subjecting the freshmen to strange rituals of questionable taste we would attempt to sell them elevator passes. Our campus, founded in 1833, had at that time, no buildings that sported elevators. We chuckled our sardonic upperclassmen chuckles and meandered off across the brick paths that crisscrossed the shade-dappled quadrangle. 

I have returned several times in the four decades since my graduation. The school remains small - around 1500 students and 100 faculty, a ratio to be devoutly desired among the mega-universities that increasingly define American higher education. But even Kalamazoo College has acquired new elevator-equipped buildings among which I can lose my way. So I tend to linger on the quad and pretend that time has somehow faded back to that more simple time. 

NC State, on the other hand, pushes up new buildings like mushrooms suddenly sprouting after a summer storm. One day there is parking lot or a cluster of picturesque, albeit just a shade shabby, old homes. The next a gaudy new structure of brick and glass complete with name plate and academic affiliation squats in their stead. I am occasionally tempted to peer around the foundations to see it any remnants of the former structures oozed out when the current occupant was suddenly dropped upon the site. One would think I would be used to these phenomena. Apparently not. 

Tonight I drove into campus a bit early for my evening class. I needed to pop into the library to pick up a dvd. I parked in the lot across the street, and jay-walked through traffic to slip down the sidewalk that would funnel me around to the library entrance. I was caught up short by a chain link fence behind which glowered the wide toothed maw of a backhoe on steroids. It was perched atop mounds of asphalt that had previously lined the path that led down to the library. It seemed somehow evil, a primordial carnivore guarding its cache. I don’t know why it bothered me so.  I followed the fence around, hoping to slip through it somehow and regain my intended route. No luck. I was shuttled down the street past a shiny new cluster of campus bus stops. They carried signs not unlike the DC metro: blue line here, B and C route over there. Students strode purposely to their appointed spots. I finally broke free around the far end of the library, but only after peering through a window in a weird shot of deja vu that glimpsed down the basement hallway that had, 39 years ago, led to my first office here at State. 

I secured my dvd and set off back to my car, stopping for a moment to glance at the “natural area” that was once the site of Harrelson Hall, a strange round classroom building. Picture the bottom two floors of the leaning tower of Pisa, but without the 12th century architectural appeal. Now it is an open space awaiting, no doubt, its own giant mushroom. I skirted west around the back side of the library and eventually defeated the fencing and made it back to my car. I drove past two immense new apartment buildings, parked across the street from my office, bought a bagel, and hurried inside. 

I am not sure why the experience set me so on edge. Perhaps it was the notion that while I have grown accustomed to new buildings appearing in the urban equivalent of fallow fields, I was unsettled when places I had previously walked with students, friends and colleagues were ripped open to make way for yet another building. Strange, eh? It was as if I had become enured to the idea that one could “pave paradise to put up a parking lot,” but it bothered me when they tore up “my” parking lot to build another building?  I think, more than that, I resented the fact that places with which I had a past were being destroyed in order to create new structures with which, the inevitability of time decrees, I will have no history.  

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Thoughts on Turning Forty

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Ha! That got your attention, right?  But, no, I am not in the midst of a psychotic break. I do realize that it is my older daughter who will confront that milestone in a couple of years. But in an email and phone conversation with a dear friend who I consider my “non-biological daughter” I have come to realize that there are those among us here on The Wall for whom 40 seems both old, and just a touch scary.

Consider this an post open letter of comfort to them and a gentle reminder for those of us for whom forty is but a shifting memory fading into a distant past:

First, Grasshopper, with luck, you too will come to see forty as a faded photograph whose “certainty” was revised time and time again, passing through many decades to finally arrive at the realization that the best we can hope for is to discern a set of guiding principles that help us through the ever-evolving paths of wonder that come to define our unique life and the mystery of existence.

I have found it helpful to cobble those principles into a kind of aphorism that I confront on a regular basis - the ubiquitous “email sig.” Here in the early years of the 21st century, we all have one. Well, most of us do, and if you are reading this you most likely among the “sigged.”  At the very least you see mine, the “signature” that gets tacked to the end of each email telling you that another edition of Schrag Wall has arrived.  Too often these signatures devolve into ”phatic” communication; a social ritual devoid of any real meaning. For example, we say “Hi there. How’s it going?” expecting to hear “Fine, and you?” To which we will reply “Fine” as we head into Starbucks for our morning jolt of caffeine. We certainly don’t expect a real dissertation on the state of their home life, professional challenges, or god forbid, their philosophy of life.

Yet, often at some time or another - certainly in our personal, as opposed to our professional email - we do give serious consideration to the pithy assertion that accompanies our name on each message that we send whirling off into cyberspace. At one time I used a quote from Thoreau, a writer whose work I admire. But that has been so long ago that I no longer remember exactly which of his delightful insights I borrowed.  

For the last decade or so I have used a “sig” of my own composition that serves as much as a personal reminder of my guiding principles as it is a gentle suggestion to the recipient.  As I said before, you see it at the end of each email that sends you the link for this blog. But since it is always the link and not the sig that is foregrounded, I thought I would take this opportunity to elevate what is usually “the end” of a message to a place of more prominence and talk about it a little, especially for those of you for whom the big “4-0” looms large and potentially disconcerting.

First, the “sig” itself:

“Who we are is a quality of the moment. What we have done in the past cannot be undone, and what we have promised for the future remains but a promise. So live each moment in the awareness that it defines you.”

Three sentences. I think I will start by dissecting the middle one: "What we have done in the past cannot be undone, and what we have promised for the future remains but a promise.”  The first phrase is an affirmation of the notion that life has no rewind button.  We cannot go back and undo that which we have done in the past. It is vital to accept that frustrating reality. The foolish, and sometimes hurtful, things I did 20, 30, 40, - hell, even 50 or 60 years ago, have a way of dive-bombing my consciousness as I pull on my socks or rummage along down the frozen food aisle at the grocery store. Far too often the offended party has left my life, either figuratively or literally, making any realistic attempt at rapprochement both impossible and meaningless. There is no rewind button. Similarly, regarding those who have wounded you, unfairly accused you of nefarious behavior or motIvations; those realities live only in the rear view mirror of your life. Ignore them. The harm lies in letting the anger remain in your heart. So regarding both types of discordances, the lesson is simple: Let them go but - Don’t. Do. That. Again.

Turning to those promises about the future; there is an old Yiddish saying that roughly translates to “Man plans and God laughs.” Neither that, nor the phrase in my sig “what we have promised in the future remains but a promise” should be read as tacit permission to wander through life as a feckless bumpkin whistling tunes from old Disney movies. It suggests that rather than seeing the future as some laser straight, predictable, pathway - point A to point B, zip zip - we should envision it as a fireworks display. Point A to possible points B, C, D, .  .  .  Z.  Oh, and look over there! Points AA, BB, CC, etc. You get the idea, to see only one path forward comes close to guaranteeing that you will miss a turn somewhere in the enchanted forest that is our future.

The two phrases of that middle sentence serve as a bridge between the first and third sentences: “Who we are is a quality of the moment,” and “So live each moment in the awareness that it defines you.”

And what does that mean? Increasing, for me for the past couple of decades - a realization that certainly eluded me in those decades preceding 40 - it means trying to make sure that belief and behavior are firmly linked.  I can recall far too many instances in “my younger days” when I could passionately articulate a personal, social or political belief and yet somehow manage to behave in ways that were, if not clearly contrary to those assertions, certainly sailed close to the wind.

The tricky part of keeping belief and behavior synchronized is, of course, clarifying just what it is that you do believe. And this is where passing the big 4-0 is a milestone devoutly to be wished. Having spent most of my life in classrooms packed with twenty-somethings, I have no doubts regarding the passion of their beliefs in a variety of arenas. But, having maintained contact with a goodly number of them, I am equally assured that those positions do a fair amount of shifting as life unfolds before them. It is a phenomenon not absent from my own history.

However, I can say that the further I get from forty, the shifts in the palette of my beliefs become less dramatic, and the relationship between my beliefs and my behavior becomes more consistent. These days I do my best to behave in ways that manifest the four major tenets of Distilled Harmony, the personal philosophy that has come to guide my life. And to remind us all, those tenets are, in order of salience: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. The tenets, while increasing consistent, are not carved in stone. Let me briefly share, or reaffirm, some current capstone concepts from each.

Foster Harmony - This tenet is first because it is both most important and most difficult. It asks us to be kind and gentle to those with whom we share the planet and our lives. Often the difficulty arises from the fact that “kind and gentle” can look very different through different eyes and lenses. It is only natural to see our own behavior as “kind and gentle” and the behavior of others as sometimes less so. The objective is to keep on trying to reduce the distance between those varying perspectives.

Enable Beauty - Whenever you can. I read a fascinating article recently about examples in nature where the manifestation of beauty held no Darwinian advantage. The beauty did not seduce a mate, or lure a pollinator. It did not attract prey, or bestow advantage upon your progeny. Beauty seemed to be its own endstate, needing no other reason to exist. Being beautiful was enough. I think as we shape our lives, our homes, our walls, our offices, and our environment we should keep that notion in mind. Sometimes just being beautiful, or creating beauty, is enough.

Distill Complexity - There is a sardonic saying in the academic world: If you cannot bowl them over with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. It is an attitude that spreads far beyond the ivory tower. Read any legal agreement you sign. Leaf through the program of a meeting of a professional association. Listen closely to the swiftly read tag at the end of any pharmaceutical product advertised on TV. There may well be brilliance in there somewhere, but it is often hidden beneath a few tons of “baffles.” Einstein is said to have asserted that if you could not explain a concept clearly to a six-year old then you yourself did not fully understand the idea. We need constantly to try to strip the fluff away from both our beliefs and our behavior. As stated above in the second tenet, art is to be profoundly desired. The correllary “artifice is to be avoided at all costs,” is equally germane. We need to become simplistic, childlike, without becoming childish. For a delightfully uncluttered presentation of this tenet I strongly recommend the children’s book Simple Pictures are Best by Nancy Willard, illustrations by Tomis dePaola. 

Oppose Harm - Edmund Burke, reknowned Irish political theorist and philosopher, warned us that “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” A lovely bit of distilled complexity. To gild the lily just a touch, when fostering harmony, enabling beauty and distilling complexity fail to thwart the excesses of individuals, governments or corporations we must actively oppose them. To affirm the unique glory of our nation we need to more clearly recall that the central documents and the better history of the Republic assert that we muster this opposition in respectful public debate, in non-violent protest, in the court of law, or at the ballot box. When we fail in this regard we become a distorted funhouse mirror reflection of that which we seek to oppose.

So Grasshopper, as you can see, manifesting those four tenets to the best of your ability - even figuring out just what the four tenets mean to you individually - is certainly too much to accomplish in the blink of a 4 decade eye. Hence, as you blow out that 40-candle conflagration threatening to melt your cake, whisper a little prayer that you will have at least four more decades ahead of you to get the wonderful challenges of that job done.

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Why Else Would We Call It Enlightenment?

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When I was an undergraduate back in 1968, Carlos Castenadas’s book The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, had just been published and was all the rage on college campuses. Castenadas, a strangely reclusive figure who nonetheless went on to publish 14 more books, proved that the Yaqui way of knowledge was also a yankee way to wealth and fame. The books, which some critics claim were largely fictional, included and glorified a version of shamanism that emphasized physical deprivation and the use of psychotropic plants and herbs to induce a euphoric state. As I recall there was a lot of sweating and throwing up involved.  

I do not understand why, over the centuries and in many different cultures, so many came to believe that the path to enlightenment should be dark. Where did that idea spring from? This notion that the road to nirvana or heaven or wisdom or whatever you choose to call it should be paved with pain? Sackcloth? Horsehair shirts? Tattoos and mutilation? Rituals of deprivation, snakes and strychnine? Hard beds, cold rooms, hot deserts? The belief that we had to abuse our bodies to free our minds? Or that we had to cloud our minds to glimpse the beauty of our souls? I can think of nothing less in tune with the music of the spheres. 

Similarly I am profoundly amazed by our seemingly fearful obsession with how the universe will end. Will all the stars slowly drift apart until unimaginable distances cast existence into static isolation? Or will the opposite be it’s fate? A "reabsorbtion" of all the matter and all the energy of all the universes into an infinitely tiny point that either reignites in a cosmic “do over” or winks out into a chilling darkness beyond all darkness? 

I would assert that neither the dark and painful road to enlightenment nor the tortured tale of the universe's demise will come to pass. Simply because both are discordant. I do not argue with the current insights made possible by the telescopes, satellites and computers of modern cosmology.  We now know more about the structure and nature of the physical universe than ever before and that is awesome. The intellectual retreat advocated by the “flat-earthers” and the “climate-change deniers” would be an unprecedented act of existential cowardice.   

Similarly, I would not gainsay the wisdom enshrined in ancient rituals. However, those rituals were part of a cultural whole and to extract portions of them from that nurturing environment and attempt to transplant them into the strange soil of “apps” and iExistence seems a travesty on a par with the great cultural rapacity of the Anglo expansion across America in the early years of our nation, and similar vainglorious adventures throughout history and around the globe. 

It occurs to me that the simple reality is that in the realms of both these wondrous mysteries - the physical and the metaphysical - we have not yet discerned the answers for which we long, and we grow increasingly impatient. I would counsel patience and a longer view.  After all it took us a long time to realize that we would not sail off the edge of our little speck of rock whipping around our life-giving sun, and even longer to realize that we were on a little speck of rock whipping around that minor star. So I would suggest a refocusing of some of our efforts. 

It occurred to me the other night, well, actually very early the other morning, while musing on the fickle nature of dreams and where they went when I woke up, that the complexity of enlightenment is an optical illusion. You know, like those little books you can buy at the check-out at the grocery store.  There is a picture of an ornate goblet, but if you gaze at it long enough and allow your eyes to defocus just a bit, you see instead the silhouettes of two faces staring at each other. And then, for life of you, you can’t see the goblet anymore. 

We have been staring at the silhouettes for so long that we can no longer see the goblet. The silhouettes have their history in that path to enlightenment that runs through deprivation and pain, through gods and realities that require us to suffer to gain entry to that “better place” that we murmur about at funerals, “s/he is in a better place,” - you know the one.  Perhaps the goblet is a better option. 

The third tenet of Distilled Harmony is “distill complexity.” Most often the tenet gets invoked in the service of the first two - Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty. This is no exception. We need to let our eyes defocus a bit to see through the complexity of painful enlightenment to the more harmonic, simpler enlightenment beyond.   

It would seem that there are a couple of basic concepts that underly the notion of enlightenment. Fundamentally, enlightenment implies an understanding of, and being in harmony with, the nature of existence. The four tenets of Distilled Harmony - foster harmony, enable beauty, distill complexity, and oppose harm - define my understanding of how we can come to live our lives in that enlightened space. However, if we unpack the word a bit further some other issues suggest themselves. And here I freely admit I am stepping outside the boundaries of my good buddy The Oxford English Dictionary.  But think about it for a minute: en-lighten. To make lighter. Perhaps to both make something brighter, more observable, and to make it weigh less, be less cumbersome. 

Back it the 1940s the imminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger, he of the famous cat, had the unmitigated gall to suggest that the second law of thermodynamics, that everything tends toward decay and disorder, may not have gotten it exactly right. In his book What is Life he opines that when it comes to life “We must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it.”  Right on, Erwin! My bias obviously is that everything eventually tends to order and harmony. And, taking the long view, science supports my bias. Every major scientific discovery of the last quarter of a century or so has grown from hypotheses drawn from the notion that "given what we already know, this is how it should be.” Still, we continually look for evidence that Einstein’s notion of an orderly universe might have been wrong. But doggone it, the little guy keeps coming up right! And it might be well to remember that he was the one who wrote, “God does not play dice with the universe.” The more we think the universe is riddled with complexity, the more we run up against the relatively simple E=mc2 - an inscription that makes the task of understanding the universe lighter. 

It does not seem unreasonable to assume a corollary assumption to Einstein’s assertion: the universe does not play dice with god.  If we assume “god” to be that universal, harmonic orderliness of the universe. Why would that orderliness demand that we travel through pain and darkness to observe and understand the light? Why would that orderliness reveal its light to one group of individuals and not to others? Surely that contrary perspective does tend toward decay and disorder. More inviting is an orderliness that advocates that we foster harmony, enable beauty, distill complexity and oppose harm. In following that path we can more easily see, and join in, the harmony of existence. Why else would we call it enlightenment? 

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