If you have great air conditioning and aren’t afraid to spend the money to keep it constantly running, good for you. This article is for everyone else. The temperatures are now in the 90’s in LA, and it is getting difficult to stay cool. To compound this matter further, many of the cool-air escapes we’re all used to using in varying degrees this time of year are no longer available. Public libraries, cafes, swimming pools, malls, movie theaters, churches, and restaurants are understandably closed and we are pretty much stuck with our homes. We need to make do with the heat right where we are. One way many of my fellow Angelenos tend to cope with this time of year is to eat a good deal of ice cream and other frozen treats. It works for cooling a body down, but isn’t great for keeping that body healthy. Fortunately, there are some great alternatives to ice cream. Bananas freeze nicely and while I enjoy them as they are that way, they also blend really well. Smoothies are both wonderfully nutritious and wonderfully cold. They’re also incredibly versatile, accepting a wide range of ingredients to allow you to mix it up. The best way to stay cool, though, is to drink lots of water. Keep a pitcher in the fridge and refill it often. Eight cups a day is a good start, but not sufficient for most people. To calculate how much water your body needs, take your weight in pounds and divide it by two. That’s how many ounces you need each day as a minimum before factoring in lots of exercise or the crushing heat. There are a lot of great apps out there to help you calculate and track this, but if counting isn’t for you, here are some questions to ask yourself: Am I thirsty? Is my urine yellow or darker? Do I feel unreasonably hungry for the time of day? Did I just exercise? Am I sweating? Did I just sing or speak for more than half an hour straight? Are my lips chapped? Did I just wake up? If the answers to any of these questions is “yes,” get yourself some water. As you slowly build up your body’s hydration levels, you will notice a number of pleasant side effects, from fewer headaches to clearer skin. While there is no silver bullet cure to all of life’s troubles, water is probably the closest thing to one that exists in nature. That said, if you suddenly increase your water intake a good deal, you may want to throw a little more salt in your food to compensate. The reasons for this are too complicated for me to explain well, but I know experientially that this is important—especially if you sweat a good deal and have a tendency towards very low blood pressure. If you do not enjoy water, but want to stay hydrated, there are a lot of things that can be done to water to make it more interesting. If you want to get fancy, you can cut up cucumbers or various kinds of fruit to flavor it up, but I have a simpler way of doing it. I use herbal teas. Herbal teas like chamomile, mint, lemon ginger, or various fruit teas do a great job of jazzing up plain water without detracting from its hydrating usefulness. Icing them or leaving them in the refrigerator also makes them cool and refreshing. Of course, the ordinary way of making tea just makes your kitchen hotter than it needs to be. While boiling water makes the most potent tea, recently I’ve been enjoying the new hobby of making sun tea. Sun tea is made by putting your water and tea bag in a glass container in the sun and waiting for it to do the work. I have a great windowsill for this where the greenhouse effect really works well, but you can use any outdoor area the sun hits or even just the hottest part of your house. The heat’s got to be good for something, right? Caffeinated tea and coffee are not without their merits, but need to be enjoyed very moderately. Some green tea or iced coffee can be very refreshing, but too much of it will mess with you in other ways. Generally, it’s a good idea not to drink anything with caffeine in it after 2 pm (or noon if you’re especially sensitive to its effects) and to avoid dependency. The good thing about both coffee and tea in their purest forms is that they are calorie-free, and you can control how much fat and sugar you add to them. Do not resort to soda for your hydration, though. Sodas are a great dessert once in a while and can be refreshing when used sparingly. However, consuming them regularly is a great way to ingest way too much sugar (most often in the form of corn syrup, which is worse than real sugar), take the enamel off your teeth (some of the dark brown sodas, especially Coca-Cola), and ingest more caffeine than your body is designed to handle comfortably. Beyond that, a great way to keep your domicile cool is to be smart about when and how you cook. Take care of your heat-intensive tasks first thing in the morning, before things have a chance to heat up. Make large batches, so that you can just pop meal-sized portions into the microwave in the hotter parts of the day. Explore the wonderful worlds of salads, sandwiches, and other no-heat foods. The less you have to use your oven and gas range this time of year, the better. Don’t forget to ventilate your home properly during the precious cool hours of the morning. You need that fresh air, even if you turn on air conditioning later in the day. A good soak in cool water can also work wonders for the heat-exhausted soul. Just sticking your feet into a tub of cool water can make a huge difference. If you still need to turn on air conditioning after all of this, there’s no shame in that, either. It’s important to start with the natural means of cooling down because our bodies need them. However, our bodies also reasonably expect not to be baked in their skins, either. A combination of the above will be more effective than any one method on its own. Stay cool!
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While I was getting ready for Sabbath school this weekend, I happened upon an insightful article, well worth sharing here. It can be found at:
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video-chats-are-so-exhausting I think this article struck me because it articulates the exhaustion many of us feel after videoconferencing but can’t exactly put a finger on. These meetings drain us more than face-to-face ones do because of that feeling of being watched, of being “on” in a way that we aren’t if we’re quietly listening in a face-to-face venue. I had an old-fashioned teleconference (no cameras) on Friday and was astonished by how much less energy it cost me than sitting in a Zoom meeting, not saying anything. With so many of us suddenly having no choice but to conduct work, school, and a portion of our social lives by videoconference, no wonder we’re so tired. Even as someone who is accustomed to public speaking in front of hundreds, I can tell you that doing the exact same thing in front of a camera only for a camera wears me out much more. We can’t entirely avoid the cameras, but when they’re off, we can control what we do. When the cameras are off, be off. Let me explain. Perhaps the most physically grueling thing about camera work in all of its forms is how it limits one’s range of motion. When the camera is off, move around, and enjoy the range of motion the camera does not allow. Fidget. Sit in an unflattering pose. Exercise! Wiggle. Your body is made for movement, not for sitting in a perfect frame. Be off. The part of camera work that can really get into my head as a woman is its overemphasis on appearance. This doesn’t bug me so much with Zoom meetings as it does with things that are recorded and disseminated (like our church service and the 100 Days of Prayer), but there is this nervous notion of being compared to the broadcast beauties most people are accustomed to watching on television. Of course, I have to make an effort to look my best, but that effort can be really exhausting. To counterbalance that, if you’re not on camera on a given day, let it go. Wear sweatpants and T-shirts. Ditch the makeup. (I actually keep mine at the church so that I don’t have to think about it on the days I’m not doing recorded camera work.) Let your hair be comfortably messy. Wear comfy shoes or no shoes at all. Take a shower for your own good, but let the grinding grooming regimens for the public eye go. Be off. Another stress of being on camera is the performance nature of it all—the sense that you have to maintain a certain range of facial expressions to fit the medium. We all do this to some extent in face-to-face interactions as well, but there’s more wiggle room in those situations for the flick of an eyebrow, the acknowledgement of a distraction, or even an honest boredom. When you’re off, take that off, too. Let yourself experience your emotions honestly. Don’t let them get out of hand—be mindful of where they’re coming from and why they’re there—but don’t put yourself through the rigors of maintaining an even, broadcast-worthy smile when you’re bored, tired, exhausted, or frustrated off camera. Be kind to your housemates and don’t take your irritation out on them, but give yourself room to not reduce yourself to a caricature of the real thing. Be off, and be real. Finally, don’t dwell on the mistakes you make on camera. Whether it’s being cranky towards colleagues on a Zoom meeting or an oven beeping during a home broadcast, give yourself room to be human. Note briefly what you can fix for next time and move on. Don’t carry it with you. If you happen to hurt someone with a mistake, apologize the next time you see them, but if it’s a technical matter, leave it behind at the “off” switch. When the cameras are off, be off. And if, while you’re off, you happen to see someone else on camera who’s “on” make a mistake, be kind to them and smile a little. It’s a sign of your shared humanity. A real person makes mistakes, looks bad from time to time, has a range of unphotogenic emotions, and needs to move around. This does not make them a bad person, but a human person. Jesus Himself got tired, did the occasional impolitic thing, and had a truly wide range of emotions. Can we really expect ourselves to do any better than the Son of God? Nah. He knew how to be “off,” so we should try it, too. Comedy is serious business. That may sound like an oxymoron, but hear me out: laughter is a potent weapon. It has the power to make scary things less frightening, to dispel a dark mood, and even to convey empathy and understanding. In times like these, we need it more than ever.
On one level, we need laughter for its physiological benefits. Laughter reduces stress and gives our abdominal muscles a good workout. A good belly laugh is worthwhile in and of itself, if only for the cardiovascular exercise. For this reason alone, it’s worth it to keep handy a stash of things that make you laugh. Note this, however: cynical laughter doesn’t produce the same benefits as genuine laughter. Think about it: can you really get more than a small chortle from cynicism? It may be a good emotional release, but it won’t help you out physically. That brings me to emotional release. Much good comedy rests on the ability to tell the emotional truth about a situation. If you’re in a dark mood and can find a way of laughing at your angst, you’re doing two great things: you’re acknowledging the angst and defanging it at the same time. By saying to yourself something along the lines of, “Wow, I’m moodier than a teenager going through their first break-up,” you’re both being honest about how you feel and how, perhaps, you don’t need to get quite so worked up. If you’ve ever wondered why so many great comedians have turned out to be secret sufferers of serious depression (rest in peace, Robin Williams), it’s likely because they got into it to combat their symptoms. The ability to laugh and to make others laugh is a wonderful dose of pleasure to counteract what can be a very painful existence. This is risky business because of the subtle difference between making people laugh with you vs. at you (the latter is very taxing), but it makes sense that some of the greatest practitioners of the craft have suffered the most. One of my favorite forms of comedy lampoons the everyday absurdities of life. If he hadn’t been so serious when he said it, the president’s comment last week about using disinfecting cleaning chemicals to get rid of the virus would have been hilarious. It is, after all, kind of darkly funny that the chemicals we use to disinfect surfaces—thus keeping us safe—would kill us if we drank them. While there are lines not to be crossed—never make a coronavirus joke at a funeral of someone who died from it—but finding these absurdities and appreciating them can make a bad situation more bearable. For example, wartime violence is legitimately terrible, but some great comedy has been made about it. Charlie Chaplain’s mocking depiction of Hitler is still pretty good stuff. All four of the major German officer roles in Hogan’s Heroes are played by Jews, some of whom lost family members in the Holocaust, and the actor who plays the French prisoner LeBeau had actually lived in a concentration camp for three years and had the tattoo to prove it. They all took on the project to have the last laugh over their oppressors. Mel Brooks. . . went way farther with that sort of thing than anyone else could ever get away with. It does not trivialize a situation to find the humor in it, just as a playful pattern on a homemade cloth mask doesn’t dilute its usefulness. In both cases, it helps with morale. With all of our social gatherings missing, morale is something we desperately need. So, do yourself a favor and find something to laugh at! Even if it’s yourself. (Especially if it’s yourself.) You need it. I have written about distractions at length before, but even the best of these can get boring after a certain point. Two of my long-haul distractions (that I take in small chunks) are working on an afghan and watching through Stargate: SG-1, which ran for 10 seasons and has more than 200 episodes. Both are great for filling time (when I have it; I’ve been surprisingly busy), but because they’re so long, they have the potential to become just as boring as everything else we get a little too used to over time.
Now that the major changes have been around for a while, the kind of boredom we have to fight isn’t merely the boredom of time to fill, but the boredom of unrelenting sameness. I felt this very keenly a week or two ago because I chose my profession, in part, for the variety it usually has to offer. As a pastor, every day is different. If there’s a routine, it’s on more of a weekly basis than a daily one, and there’s even a good deal of variety from week to week. As stressful as the emotional whiplash of going straight from a deathbed to a party can be, it certainly keeps you on your toes. I lost a lot of that with these social distancing measures. The delightful variety of pastoral ministry has been reduced to names and faces on a screen on mind-numbingly regular schedules. I felt a twinge of guilt for the enjoyment I got out of an actual, honest-to-God, pastor-requiring crisis that arose outside of normal hours one weekend. The rest of this time has run the risk of being very humdrum and boring. If you’re feeling this kind of boredom, there are two things you can do about it. First of all, thank God for it. It’s only possible to get this bored when things are stable enough to support this much sameness. If the boredom is killing you right now, it may be helpful to reflect on the early days of these measures when you had to restructure your entire life overnight and people were panic-buying everything. Praise the Lord that this nonsense has finally slowed down and there’s more available at the stores than there was early on. Secondly, shake it up! A few weeks ago, I saw a delightful little news story (found here: sg.news.yahoo.com/videos-chores-wedding-dress-ballgown-coronavirus-130051875.html) about some women in England who were wearing their wedding dresses to do household chores and posting pictures of themselves doing it. Others followed their example, going about their day in evening wear just to do something different. Without necessarily getting that drastic, try small changes to your daily routine. Telecommute from a different part of your house. Dance when no one’s watching. Play Chopped with the random ingredients in your cupboard you haven’t touched in a while. Pick up a different book, watch a movie from a genre a little outside your comfort zone, or just wear a different color. Make bad art (or good art!). Write a bad poem (or a good one!); April is National Poetry month, after all. Routine can be good and comforting, and we need it. But we also need just enough variety not to go nuts. Some of the people in your house might think you’ve gone nuts if you start wearing evening wear around the house, but in reality, you might actually be keeping yourself sane. If it doesn’t harm anyone, why not do something a little silly to keep things interesting? And if you live alone, who’s there to make fun of you for it? If you’re feeling brave, post it! It’ll help break up everyone else’s tedium, too. What was your last taste of life unfettered by COVID-19 concerns? Do you remember? Because there was such a sudden change to the way we do everything (whispers of that possibility notwithstanding), you probably didn’t think at the time, “This is the last chance I get to do this for a really long time.” For me, it was a spiritual retreat for pastors.
The 2020 Spiritual Retreat for SCC Pastors at Pine Springs Ranch on March 1-3 explored the complex competing forces in pastors’ lives while offering an opportunity for pastors to connect before an unexpected season of social distancing. The theme, “Quest,” was about the search for the elusive balance of work, marriage, parenting, spirituality, and physical and mental health. We had no idea then how much more important this balance would become. Every year, I look forward to this retreat because it’s the only time that my fellow pastors and I gather as a conference without discussing business. At this retreat, we put aside the copious amounts of information from our workers meetings. We have no cell phone reception to enable us to be concerned with the pile of work waiting for us in our local contexts and at home. Also, because it’s required, there’s no guilt involved in putting these things on pause. We spend these precious few days reconnecting with each other as people and with God as the foundation for everything else we do. It’s hard to say what I enjoyed more this year: reconnecting with my colleagues who live on the other side of the conference or absorbing the messages by our speaker, Roger Hernandez. In retrospect, the most poignant message he gave was on the need for casual friendships outside of our work contexts. That’s always hard for pastors, but right now it’s hard for everyone. Hernandez and his wife also spoke at length about marriage and parenting. As Celeste Harrison put it a week later, “We all ended this retreat really wanting to see our spouses.” My favorite insight was that while some would consider the absence of divorce a sign of a marriage’s success, we can do better than mere marriage survival. Hernandez’s wife talked about moving from “beige” dates (for most people, dinner and a movie) to more creative dates so as to strengthen the marriage. That was already hard. It’s harder now. When I think about this retreat now, I get a little nostalgic, even though it was less than two months ago. The excellent content would be possible, of course, with the technologies we are all using to keep our churches open, but the sweetest part of the retreat every year is not the content. It’s the people. It’s those lingering meals in the cafeteria playfully ranging from serious theological debate to punching food. (Yes, this is a thing.) It’s those long walks during the free time when we enter into each other’s lives in a deeper way than we can in the usual course of business. It’s those evenings with our room mates and the conversations in the hallways that reveal what incredible people we work with and how blessed we are to be on the same team. Originally, this article was supposed to be tailored and destined for the Pacific Union Recorder, but the present crisis has rendered the story less important to the general public than all the various ways we have been scrambling to keep our churches together. I believe this is a good set of priorities, but I also believe that for those who were on the retreat, we can’t afford to forget what we had a mere week and a half before the world went crazy. Those precious days in March were all about the core important stuff of our existence—our families, our friendships, and our God. I bring this precious last memory of normality before a larger readership because I would like to invite you to consider two things: What was your last joyous memory of normal before all of this? How can you use that memory to keep moving forward? For my part, it acts as a compass. The kind of community we experience each year at this retreat (that is provided each year as a sacrificial act of love by a donor who just really cares about her pastors) is what I desire for believers everywhere. It’s a glimpse of Jesus with His disciples at the Last Supper. It’s a glimpse of the early church in Acts. It’s a taste of the unfettered joy we will experience someday when Jesus returns and we are reunited with everyone we love, with no sickness to separate us. This Sabbath, I invite you to think back and remember the last time you enjoyed that kind of closeness with people outside your house. I invite you also to look forward to when you can enjoy it again. In the meantime, let’s continue our quest to live in the best way we can until things get better. That’s harder to do than it was two months ago, but that is all the more reason to keep aiming higher. If we quest for the stars, we may not reach them—but we might just get to the moon, which would be incredible enough on its own. Let memory move you forward. We all know that eating is a very emotional endeavor. When we talk about “emotional eating,” we ordinarily mean eating more when we’re upset, bored, or stressed. These are worthy matters to discuss, but today I would like to talk about the way food emotionally connects us to the past.
One of the Audible books I’m listening to these days, The Golden Orchard, approaches time travel in a unique way. Instead of boarding a time machine or fiddling with an artifact, a grandmother makes traditional Korean dishes and the flavor pulls her and her granddaughter back to a point in the past in which that dish was previously enjoyed. While it’s a fantastical tale, I think the premise is spot-on with one of the most enduring truths about food and memory: food has the power to connect us to the past. As I have been listening to this book, I’ve thought about the dishes that connect me to the past. The most obvious one, of course, is the taco salad my parents make that I associate with pleasant warm evenings at home after a good day’s work at school. The traditional Ukrainian foods my grandmother and aunt make don’t just connect me to prior memories with them, but with the feisty great-grandmother who illegally immigrated from Canada and taught her daughter and granddaughter how to prepare these foods. These are trying times, and in the crisis of the present moment it can be hard to remember that things weren’t always like this. It can even get easier to forget the people we love that we no longer have access to because of these circumstances. For this reason, I would like to challenge you: find one thing to eat this week that connects you to a good memory or a person you miss. Some of your first thoughts on this may not be worth pursuing, of course. Every October 1, I deliberately find one of my brother’s favorite things to enjoy. For a long time, it was either a caramel macchiato from Starbucks or a white mocha. One year, I forgot to order the coffee decaf, and because my body wasn’t used to caffeine anymore, I ended up a jittery mess. I actually thought you had to be on controlled substances to feel so terrible. The last two years, I have pursued a safer course that accomplish the same thing. I get Coldstone ice cream in memory of the times my brother and I would go there, just the two of us, while on our way to do whatever our parents had actually asked us to do. Even better, I’ve had the pleasure of doing this with one of my brother’s best friends growing up. It’s easy to think of the more elaborate special occasion foods. The Walla Walla loaf from my college graduation party. The Mother Lode cake from Claim Jumper on my 18th birthday right before leaving for PUC. Grandma Anabel’s white chocolate almond bark each Christmas. Grandma Spencer’s Thanksgiving stuffing. The paella the cafeteria served every Sunday in Spain, which I considered the one excellent meal they were capable of making. (Spanish food in general is fairly delicious, but this cafeteria is infamously bad.) There are two problems with these foods: they tend to be more elaborate than you can prepare on your own and they tend to be somewhat unhealthy to eat more often than on special occasions. Because of this, I invite you to dig deeper into the more prosaic stuff of daily life with people you miss. In college, my friends and I brought in the Sabbath each Friday with a shared bar of good chocolate and a bottle of Martinelli’s. Easy, but special. At Camp Wawona, I tried going vegan for a while and discovered the joys of oatmeal and peanut butter. I eat that nearly every day now, and nearly every day I remember the wry humor of one of my co-workers when she first saw me do that: “Are you pregnant or something?” Various kinds of popcorn bring me back to different people. One of the kids in my junior high Bible class really loves my kettle corn, and I think of him every time I make it. Movie theater popcorn is all about my parents and me enjoying a rare Sunday off. Air popped popcorn with nutritional yeast transports me to Saturday nights with my in-laws who so quickly and lovingly welcomed me into the family. Food tells a story. The black tea I’m drinking in fancy china as I write this is now associated with a lovely conversation I had with an old friend several weeks ago. We had to cancel an outing to the Huntington Library, so I did this set-up instead. I may not think about that conversation explicitly while I’m drinking it, but it’s there in the background as I write, quietly making me smile. We all need more excuses to smile. Find a good food memory, and enjoy it. One of the most overlooked areas of observation is the study of the self. By this, I’m not talking about narcissistically preening in front of a mirror. In fact, I believe there is too much emphasis in our culture on the awareness of physical appearance. I’m talking about becoming aware of the contents of one’s own heart and mind.
Just as an audit of receipts reveals our financial priorities, an audit of one’s emotions reveals what really matters to us. They reveal our thoughts. Emotions never exist in a vacuum, but always arise from the context of our mental and physical landscape. When we have a hard time seeing that landscape, our emotions do a good job of giving us clues to find out what’s going on. Everyone has emotions. They’re built into our physiology. Some of them even register as physical pain in their more intense forms. The basic emotions of happiness, sadness, and fear all have very important roles to play in our survival. Most of us want to spend as much time as possible experiencing the various forms of happiness, but the emotions more often classified as negative—the various forms of sadness and fear—are also rather important because they act as indicators of what’s important to us in a more acute way than happiness does. We like living in a state of happiness because that emotion is designed to indicate that things are going well. The various shades of happiness range from contentment to euphoria with many shades in between. Euphoria, while deeply enjoyable, is unsustainable because it’s sort of built for those exceptional occasions in which things are truly going amazingly, swimmingly well. I’m guessing that the only people experiencing euphoria right now are those who are either on drugs (a way of tricking the body’s internal logic), suffering from bipolar disorder (a mental illness that also messes with the body’s internal logic in some fascinating ways), or are celebrating a truly major milestone like an engagement or the birth of a child. Contentment, on the other hand, can be achieved simply by getting one’s thoughts and beliefs in line and can be experienced in some of the harshest corners of the human condition. “Simply” may be the wrong word to describe that process. It’s the work of a lifetime to organize one’s thoughts and beliefs in such a manner that one can be content in all circumstances. There’s a practice called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that revolves around this issue, and the book describing how to do it is hundreds of pages thick. It’s a good read, though, and well worth the trouble if, like me, you naturally spend a lot of time in the other two primary emotions: sadness and fear. Sadness has a range from mild disappointment to full-blown depression. Somewhere in between, often mixed with fear, is anger. This classification of emotion is about loss. The bigger the loss, the bigger the emotion. If you are feeling sadder than usual right now, it’s only to be expected. You’ve lost some things that are kind of important to being human, like regular social contact with people you don’t live with and the ability to come and go as you please. The amount of sadness you’re experiencing right now is directly related to how much you valued what’s been lost. The bigger the loss, the more of a grieving process you have to go through to reach contentment again. Sometimes, when the sadness of the loss is really strong, we try to shortcut that grieving process by clinging to the things that make us happy. This can be important to do if the pain of the sadness might otherwise be strong enough to kill or debilitate you, but it tends to postpone, not cancel out, the work of grieving that still needs to happen. The work of grieving involves acknowledging the loss and learning how to live in a world without the person or thing we loved. For a smaller loss, like a canceled walk with a friend, this goes by quickly: “I’ll miss seeing so-and-so. We’ll try again in a few months!” You find something else to do with the time, and you move on. When you lose something as big as a person you love, though, it’s a far lengthier and more complex process that will require some measure of your attention here or there for years—possibly the rest of your life. Fortunately, if you are intentional about the grieving process, the sadness will grow less intense as time goes by and you will come to the point where you can remember what you lost with fond nostalgia, rather than heart-rending pain. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is all about the possibility of loss. It ranges from mild jitters to abject, heart-stopping terror. Anger, as a hybrid emotion, also has its place here. Fear exists to make us careful, but more than the other primary emotions, fear tends to shortcut our rationality. There’s a good reason for this: fear exists to protect us from danger of various kinds. God in His mercy designed us with fear to keep us from destroying ourselves too easily. Unfortunately, because this particular emotion is so sensitive, most of us are afraid of things that wouldn’t actually hurt us very much. For example, I am afraid of objects flying near my face. I’ve never had great hand-eye coordination, and am not confident of my catching skills on any level. My depth perception isn’t great, either. PE was terrifying for me growing up not because I lacked athleticism—on school breaks I would do some truly impressive hikes with my aunt and uncle—but because most PE classes are actually about team sports that tend to revolve around flying objects. Baseball season was the worst. Eventually my PE teacher gave up trying to work with me on it and let me get more exercise than the rest of the class by walking laps around the field while they were playing. Is that a life-threatening situation? No. Was there the potential for injury there? Sure, but no more than some of the risky outdoor sports I engaged in during my free time. I genuinely would have preferred to jump out of a plane than play baseball. My mind was simply more scared of the known potential injury of being hit in the face than actual mortal peril. I took time to write about that because so much of what we fear is not actually that dangerous. The degree to which we fear things is not about the actual danger, but how we perceive danger. I’m guessing that my fear of flying objects was almost as much about the fear of being laughed at by classmates as it was about physical injury. I was actually capable of playing catch with people I trusted out of sight of the known bullies in my class. When we experience fear, it can be important to consider what we’re perceiving as danger, and why. By noticing these emotions as they go by and sorting out what they mean, we can make better choices. Rightly calibrated, our emotions give us good cues about our environment, but they easily drift out of whack with reality. We need to pay attention to that so as to bring them back into their rightful place. We can’t know if the signal lights are broken if we aren’t even looking at them in the first place. Take a few moments each day to reflect on and name the emotions you’ve experienced. If something seems out of place, ask yourself why. You might be amazed what you discover. Thus far I have talked about observation and learning in terms of the need to do it in general. The greatest tragedy is to have this big, beautiful world to see and learn about, yet not take an interest in any of it. There is beauty in learning for the sake of learning and in thoroughly exploring whatever happens to interest you at the time. Falling down the Wikipedia hole is a great way to learn random stuff and open up new horizons. Checking out random but interesting nonfiction books from the library can be an amazing way of learning not just interesting, but occasionally useful information as well.
And yet. . . Random learning is beautiful and good, but like most good, beautiful things it can be taken to excess. Most of my posts so far have been targeted at an audience that I assume to struggle to find the motivation to go learn things; this post is for those of us who love it so much that it leads to other problems. Learning addicts would do well to consider a few questions every once in a while: Question 1: How does this knowledge improve my life? It’s OK to learn things just for entertainment value, but if you’re only learning it for entertainment value, you need to stay aware of that fact so you can treat it with the same considerations as entertainment. Even with more practical kinds of knowledge, it can be easy to get so caught up in the accumulation of new input that you never actually put it into practice. Question 2: Is the amount of time I’m spending learning this thing preventing me from learning other things I need to know more about? Again, it’s OK to learn things just for entertainment value, but it needs to be balanced. I realized at the end of last year that my random nonfiction reading was out of control and decided that for every random library book I checked out, I needed to read something in my existing library—which mostly consists of theological books and other pastor-y things. This had a dual advantage: I gained more knowledge and skills for my job, and I chose my library books more carefully because I no longer permitted myself to go on what I can only describe as a library bender of checking out, say, 12 books at a time. There are some learning pursuits that after a certain point can only properly be described as a waste of time, like becoming fluent in fictitious languages like Klingon or Quenya (Elvish). A few words for entertainment value are sufficient. Question 3: Is learning about this thing hurting me in any way? This may seem like an odd question to ask, but there are some topics that can be damaging to spend too much time studying. I worry a little bit, for example, about fans of true crime murder books. Unless you are professionally in law enforcement or a writer for a police procedural, it’s not healthy to spend the majority of your reading time with the darkest parts of human nature. Knowledge is power, and you need to know yourself well enough to assess whether or not you can trust yourself with the power you’re acquiring. In a somewhat different vein than true crime, a fascination with human sexuality can either come from a place of childlike curiosity for a truly complex topic or it can be an unhealthy outlet for unmet needs. Sometimes it’s both. The purpose of this question is to pause every once in a while and assess whether it’s really healthy to keep going on your current train of thought. Question 4: Is it dangerous for me to be learning about this thing on my own without the guidance of an expert? This is more of an issue for knowledge you actually intend to use, but there are a number of fields in which it’s easy to learn just enough to be dangerous. Sometimes that danger comes in the form of annoying actual professionals by thinking that you fully understand their profession from your hobby learning. Knock it off! A casual glance at an interlinear Bible does not make you a Bible scholar, a weekend course in programming does not mean you will understand how long things take to program, and even a robust knowledge of therapy techniques does not qualify you for the delicate task of providing therapy without the battle-tested hours of observed clinical practice actual therapists have to go through. It’s even more dangerous when you go forth into the world trying to do some of these things without proper guidance. There’s a reason why it’s illegal to practice medicine without a license. You can do real harm without the balance and nuance of a more focused education. Question 5: Are my sources of information trustworthy? This matters on a number of levels, some more obvious than others. Most obviously, you don’t want to be reading deliberate lies. You also don’t want to be reading someone blustering on about stuff they don’t actually understand. Less obviously, even experts are sometimes wrong because of the assumptions with which they approach things. For example, the reason there are so many different denominations of Christianity that all claim the Bible as the foundation for faith isn’t because there are different Bibles, but because there are different approaches to the Bible. Every area of study has internal discussions and debates that are frequently hard for outsiders to detect. Sometimes they’re so subtle that you will not see them without formal schooling, but they will influence what you’re seeing. This kind of bias is so woven into the fabric of our society that you see different items in a search engine depending on what computer you’re using. Because it’s so impossible to root out all of the bias in what you learn, it’s healthy to acknowledge that there’s always room for error. Humility is key here. The sorts of people who need to read this article tend to experience the dark side of being naturally curious: the accolades of being seen as smart. If you love learning, try to avoid being sidetracked by the perils of being praised for it. Many otherwise brilliant people have fallen into all kinds of traps by forgetting that the world is too vast and complicated to become a true expert on any part of it because, at the end of the day, the part is tied to the whole. The moment you think you’ve arrived, you’ve lost. There’s always more out there and at the end of the day, you simply don’t know everything. Stay curious, stay humble, stay balanced, and you’ll get a lot farther than even the brightest who think they’ve learned it all. Last week, there were several topics that felt too large for just one post. This week, I’d like to expand on a few of those, beginning with observation. In the course of writing “The Art of Observation” I realized that the topic could easily be its own blog because at its core, observation is a kind of learning. Learning is such an involved matter that here in the US, it’s the law that you have to soak up a sizable portion of your developmental years doing it.
Because most people think of learning in terms of school, it’s kind of a dirty word in some circles. Even those of us who are more academically inclined likely suffered through more than one class that we did not enjoy. The very word “learning” can conjure up PTSD of late nights writing papers, physical headaches trying to bend one’s mind around developmentally inappropriate math, sleepily trying to stay awake through lectures by the sorts of professors who only read their PowerPoint, or suffering the defeat of a failed class. I find it tragic that this is the case. There are a number of good reasons why school is compulsory. There are certain skills that everyone needs to master up to a point, like reading, writing, and just enough math to understand one’s finances. These three skills alone are worth the trouble. I would also throw in there enough of a working knowledge of history and government to make well-reasoned choices while voting and enough of a knowledge of human physiology not to make dangerous mistakes with one’s health. On the other hand, making it compulsory can make it harder for some kids to keep their natural curiosity alive. Every child is born curious; their baby brains take in vast amounts of information, learning the world. A child’s brain is a marvel; it soaks up so much more information so much more quickly than an adult’s with only its lack of prior knowledge getting in the way. In the arms race for structured academic achievement, it’s easy to miss the miracle and, in some cases, to shut it down. For curiosity to flourish, it needs to be encouraged. Because everyone is motivated by different things, that encouragement looks different for each person. The traditional academic setup, by its very nature, has to be standardized to some degree even when that standardization can leave some kids to fall between the cracks. To catch those kids, more help is needed. Moving all of this stuff online in our current crisis uncovers some of the systemic issues with formalized learning. Because I am the daughter and grand-daughter of teachers, I’m in a unique place to see what the classroom can and cannot do. I have watched the multigenerational struggle to provide a good learning environment for all students even as all students do not easily fit into an assembly line model. The current situation only exacerbates it: there is a greater touch of individualized humanity in a classroom than behind a computer screen. I have nothing bad to say about the teachers who are heroically trying to do their jobs with one arm tied behind their backs or the parents who are desperately trying to fit in full time work and supervising their kids’ education into the narrow confines of the day. This is a difficult time for all parties involved, including the children whose brains simply aren’t built to learn this way. “It takes a village to raise a child.” Outside the formal school setting, there is so much that others who are not professional educators can do to keep a child’s natural curiosity alive. Even patiently answering a child’s questions about the world, occasionally admitting that you don’t know the answer, can make a huge difference. Even better, tell them that while you don’t know, there are places they can look to find out. It has never been easier for a naturally curious person to learn things if they have a good guide to help them use and sort it all out. Informal learning is just as important as what our (legitimately heroic) professional educators teach. Classrooms favor certain kinds of learners no matter how hard the teachers work to overcome the limitations of the format. I once tutored someone who could barely string a coherent sentence together, yet managed to produce a commercially viable documentary before finishing undergrad. Given the state of his writing skills at that stage, I can only imagine how terrible his grades were growing up. Somewhere, someone had taught him enough curiosity and given him the right tools to thrive at a skill set that is too far off the beaten track to be taught at that level in a standardized classroom. Meanwhile, no one formally taught preaching or how to do ministry in school per se, but a collection of adults—youth pastors, mostly—informally taught me vital skills that are now the backbone of my current profession. A good deal of what I know about event planning wasn’t even from them, but from listening to my dad process his own slate of school activities to put together. It interested me, so he fed that interest. With formal education moving online, such relationships matter more now than ever. Even if you don’t have any contact with children because of the unique circumstances, there is still something you can do: rekindle your own curiosity. If you are, in fact, carrying PTSD from your own school experience, find just one thing you’re interested in and learn about it. Observe and experiment. When this season of social distancing thaws and you can see the kids again, you’ll have so much more to share. |
AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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