Monthly Archive for March, 2006

A Satisfying Change of Location

Published on March 21, 2006 in ego and observation. 0 Comments

This summer I went a little crazy with organization. I read the excellent David Allen book “Getting Things Done,” and I went out and got lots of file folders and a label maker from Staples, managed to finagle a massive green filing cabinet out of Dad’s office (they were going to throw it away, and I really wanted one so…), and started to collect all the crap in my life that had accumulated and I didn’t want to throw away. And I went through it all, deciding how to categorize all my stuff. It’s an amazingly satisfying experience, in and of itself, and I highly recommend it to anyone.

One of the continually surprising observations from this process was how many bloody crosswords I had kept over the years. I made a label that said “Crosswords” and started throwing them in as they surfaced in the ever-smaller pile. I soon noticed that there were two varieties of crosswords that I had kept: completed puzzles that were absolute labors of love, creativity, and full use of “the attic,”* and then puzzles I’d started, never finished, but just couldn’t quite throw away. They just seemed so tantalizingly close. So I printed a few new labels: “Incomplete” and another “Crosswords” and “Complete.” (Yes, by the way, I’m a bloody geek. But where are the programs from your sister’s last four voice concerts? Mine are in my “Amy” file. So there.) I then sorted out the crosswords I’d already filed into “Complete” and “Incomplete.”

It occured to me that this was great, that I had both a spot for keeping some fine intellectual achievements, and right next to it a spot for keeping those that required ever greater intellectual achievement. If I ever had a few minutes, I could just pull from this pile and see how much my brain had evolved and (hopefully) improved. Over time, the puzzles would move from “Incomplete” to “Complete” in a steady stream of accomplished tidying up. That was the idea.

In general, though, on many of the incomplete puzzles I’d only made marginal improvements. Seems there was a good reason I didn’t finish a lot of those. A dark voice in my head started exploring the possibilities that this was it: I’d never be smarter than I am right now, I’ll never really learn all that much more than I know now, etc. etc. This theory is utter bull, and I know it, but I have to admit this part of me is there and occasionally rather vocal.

So last month, on the morning after Amy’s birthday party (Thursday, March 9th), I got a paper and started the puzzle. I was cruising, for the most part. There was that exhilirating feeling I get when I know I’m clicking, that things are running together beautifully. It’s only really comparable to that feeling I get when I’m engaged in a real good debate with a worthy competitor. I worked on the puzzle for a few minutes at a time, and just kept stuffing it back in my bag. I quickly got about 80% of it done, but the lower right-hand corner was just not working. I couldn’t get it. It was one of those major crises in confidence that pop up in crosswords, where you start doubting things that should be undoubtable: Baseball player Willy, 4 letters, you have M_ _ S. This is a certainty, but I was so freaked out by this whole region that I started to doubt even that. This is the one that really threw me for a loop though:
42 Down: Very dry. 7-letters. I had “aran” at the end, and was starting to feel sort of confident about the other clues that made it up. I couldn’t get anything across the top, though. Those first three letters, those three blank spots, soon came to be the most visible things on the whole puzzle. Every time I pulled out the piece of paper, I’d make a little more progress on the rest of the square. A minor epiphany led me to remember that there was some association between “brilliance” and the word “eclat,” which solved 11 down.

Time went on. I just couldn’t think of what word connoting dryness ended in “aran.” I don’t know about you, but I’m relatively strict about my rules for doing crosswords: I don’t google answers, I only ask very close friends and family members for help once in a while. I accept help if it’s offered, out of the blue, like the girl in my geology class that whispered in my ear “Nine across is ‘radiant’”, which actually came off as almost a pick-up line, the way she said it. Anyway, the point is that I couldn’t just do a “define: dry” google search and be done with it. That’d be cheating, and unsatisfying.

Time went on. The puzzle got put in my “incomplete” folder, but left a bad taste in my mouth that wouldn’t go away. I kept thinking about it, whenever I saw a newspaper or started another puzzle. “Very dry.”

Now here’s where I had an experience that really reinforced an underlying ideology of mine: God loves us and wants us to be happy, and, to make sure that’s so, sometimes he just helps us out. I was walking out of Wilson Hall after my PS139 class, and there was a poster on the wall for some forum that was going to look at health infrastructure or something like that in Sub-Saharan Africa. I never even look at these things, they’re always crap advertisements for summer programs at places like Harvard, Columbia and Wheaton College. The Harvard ones in particular are as arrogant and condescending as Harvard Presidents. But this time, I glanced. Just a small, unnecessary twist of the neck. And I stopped, forcing the two Asian kids behind me to reel around me and up the stairs. “SAHARAN!” I yelled out, raising my arms. The Asian kids looked back and then picked up the speed with which they were climbing the stairs.

I went home immediately after class and broke out my “Crosswords Incomplete” folder. I wrote in “S A H”, and then put the pen down. I stared at the puzzle for a minute, checked every single square to make sure it was all done, admired my many “writing over writings” in dark black ink, then took out my “Crosswords Complete” folder. I opened it up, placed the puzzle inside, put the folders back in their spot, and closed the drawer of my filing cabinet with a resounding metallic rush. It had moved, the completed puzzle, and was now right where it should be, right where I’d dreamed about it being.
What a satisfying change of location.

Simplicity & The Right Side of History

Published on March 7, 2006 in ego. 0 Comments

For me, I’ve come to see it as an inherent attribute of studying the world in depth at a place like Brown that the more I internalize my motivating principles the more subtlety I see in their potential ramifications. To change the world on the scale I’d like will require a great and intuitive grasp of these subtleties, not just by me but by the American and world public at large. Our media networks are just not set up, currently, to present this kind of subtlety. Politicians, who cannot ignore the state of the media, thus cater their message and platform to be more media-friendly. I can’t truly blame them for this, it’s just an unfortunate sign of the times, but in general I think we’ve all become inherently disappointed yet un-fazed by our lowest-common denominator public discourse. I can’t help but look at otherwise great people and wish that they were working in a system that better deserved them, where they could fully explain who they are, what they believe in, and how they’re going to make things right. But alas, we don’t live in that system, I tell myself, and I’m just going to have to embrace that and look past the systemic disappointment…
And then, once in a while, someone will come along and simply strike a chord. They will blast through my glazed-over contemporary perception of politics and remind me why I’m an American again. One such example is the speech that follows, given by freshman Virginia Delegate David Englin, in his third day on the job. It’s a simple speech, with a simple point. It’s unembellished. Delegate Englin just looked at an issue and said “This is wrong.” In a world of complexity and challenge and gray areas, I cannot tell you how refreshing it was for me to read such a short speech have new life breathed into the tenets of my faith in America: justice can be simple, people can be good, and that, fundamentally, democracy means treating people with dignity.
Here’s the original introduction from Raising Kaine, the “Voice of Progressive Virginia“:

This speech, by freshman Virginia Del. David Englin (D-45), is so good it deserves to be broadcast all over the Commonwealth. For that matter, David Englins’ words deserve to be distributed anywhere state or national legislatures are discussing “defense of marriage” measures. In reality, as we all know, these are nothing but pandering to homophobic bigotry and far right-wing social “conservatives ” (aka, the bedroom police). Here, Del. Englin – a strong Progressive and “fighting Dem” if I’ve ever met one – takes it right to the hypocrites and moral cowards. Good for you, David. I’m proud that I worked to help send you to Richmond; you ROCK! Now here’s the speech (bolding added for emphasis):

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this resolution. I’m not going to talk about same-sex marriage. I’m no fool — although others might make a different judgement about a freshman delegate rising in this chamber on the third day of session. But I understand that on the issue of marriage, I’m in the minority, perhaps even in my own caucus. I also sleep very well at night knowing that at some point in the future of this great Commonwealth, those of us of my opinion will be judged to have been on the right side of history. But let’s for a moment forget about the question of same-sex marriage, because this amendment addresses much more than that. We need to be clear and honest: This amendment also outlaws civil unions and domestic partnerships and other similar private legal arrangements.

Continue reading ‘Simplicity & The Right Side of History’

The Eye of God

Published on March 1, 2006 in ego, india and mwt. 0 Comments

We were 12000 feet up, and we were freezing. Everyone slept fully clothed inside their sleeping bags, and we all huddled together on the beds for collective warmth. The first hint of morning was a very slow and subtle change in the glow filtering in through the open, barred windows low on the wall from black to the darkest of blues. I remember thinking of how amazing it was that that relatively small elevation in energy, between none and a barely measureable some, made such a palpable difference. Where previously had stood a squarish orange outline now stood a wooden door with latches on the side faintly aglow, its perimeter still haloed in shabby electric light from down the hall.

We rose, creakily, the temperature making everything brittle and difficult. The air, though quite cold, had a brisk and clean quality to it that is unique to the mountains. Certainly thus far in India, it was the cleanest air I’d breathed, and a welcome relief.
I heard the monks up in the temple stirring, clinking, chanting. There it was again: that feeling you sometimes get in India that you are connected to a human ritual that has gone on for thousands of years without you, and will continue on for thousands more after you’re gone. We were in the tiny village that had grown up around one of the most ancient temples in Hinduism, way up in the Central Himalayas. We’d climbed to the summit of the mountain the previous day, but had been teased and taunted by high, fast-moving, occasionally all-enveloping clouds. The monks, and our Principal-Ji, had noted that the best time for a good view was sunrise. Feeling ambitious (perhaps brought on by the mild effects of oxygen deprivation), we had decided the previous evening to
rise before the sun did and re-complete the last stage of our trek.

We set off in the rising blue glow, now notable enough for us to not require flashlights or anything like that to find the path. The path set out rather south-east, towards the south-facing, nearly sheer cliff wall of the mountain. It hugged a well-trodden path above this dropoff as it turned more directly east and up.

The path itself was a miraculous thing: it was assembled by thousands of pilgrims to this holy spot over thousands of years. Stones of mixed sizes and shapes all elaborately placed together and cemented in with mud and gravel. In some places the winter had obviously washed away parts of the path, and we walked in the beds of what must have been the ad hoc streams of the metling snows earlier that year.

The path zig-zagged for, to guesstimate, a thousand feet up the steep side of the mountain, hard grasses and snaggled, tough-looking shrubbery on all sides. Up and up, back and forth across the mountain-face we went. It was notably easier than the previous day, perhaps because we’d just slept a bit and hadn’t had to climb the whole rest of the mountain that morning. There was a section, closer to the top, that was a slight plateau, a respite before the last leg. From down below, the plateau looked decievingly like the top. The realization that another few hundred feet lay beyond and above the plateau was not a welcome one.

A holy man sat on a mat in his bright orange robes, his hair silver and gray and partially dreaded, in his hand a lit and lightly fuming opium pipe. From his neck hung necklaces and medallions. He was very still, sitting there with his pipe idling away. He moved then, very deliberately as if in a Noh drama, and put the pipe to his mouth, inhaled and put it back down where it had been. He looked at me as I passed him, and he nodded. I thought I saw a crease of a smile, but if I did it was soon gone and he was looking back across the valley behind me.

I turned, after I’d passed him, and looked out at the massive valley behind me and the glorious, snow top peaks that passed away to the north and northwest. We’d seen basically none of this the previous day, due to the clouds, fog and light rain you commonly get at that altitude. It was a tremendous sight to behold.
Just near the top there was a kind of out-cropping beyond which I could not see. Where the side had previously been steep but not vertical, here it went basically straight up, the shrubbery boldly daring to grow out of the side of the exposed rock. The path straightened, cutting through the vertical out-cropping, then turned to the north. Up I climbed, quite winded and starting to question how wise this whole endeavor had been.
And then I saw God.
I stopped in my tracks and felt as if my body were inconsequential, that I, me, this, the element, did truly, unquestionably, exist and was part of something larger and more beautiful, something that far escaped my ability to describe it. There, atop an ancient and holy mountain, at just the moment the sun leapt from behind the far mountains to attain its own whole, I looked into the Eye of God. It was overwhelmingly, shockingly powerful. I just stood there, taking it all in. The sun, the sun, the sun, brilliant and whole, warming in every sense, lit the whole world. The peak felt like an altar, and appropriately so, because for the first time in my life I deeply understood what it was that made men worship God or Allah or Yahweh or Vishnu or Buddha or whomever. A creation of that beauty, power and magnitude deserved acclaim and praise and absolute humility before it.

I stumbled forward to where my friends, similarly stunned, were gathering, near the eastern edge of the peak. We just stood there for a while, just taking it in as a collective experience. Someone would occasionally get out a “Wow…” and trail off. We could see the opposite range of peaks, some many, many miles away from us. (Principal-ji had told us the day before that those peaks were so far away that most of them were actually in China. So, though I’ve never been to China, I can claim to have seen it with my own eyes.)

We stayed there for a great part of that morning. It was unbelievable and I could never describe it all. What I can say is this: the experience of living in India connected me, I believe, to many of the extremes of human experience. I came away knowing what the human extremes of misery, poverty, cruelty, corruption, humility, charity, tolerance, peace, beauty, and faith all look like. I cannot say that I felt and experienced many of these personally, and I am thankful for it. But the extreme that will perhaps be the most lasting, and is perhaps most important, I touched directly: the human existential experience itself. The experience of truly being human.
That is perhaps the best thing I can say about my time in India: I went there merely breathing. I came back alive.

An image from the top