Books and Reading, observations, paying attention, Teaching

How to Build a Better (Squirrel!!) Trap

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three children looking at a tablet computer

Fall semester has once again begun, and I’m still slogging along –no longer stuck, but moving– on my latest batch of as-yet unjoined essay rambles. And, once again, as sure as the cicadas that start up in July, begins the lament from my students in their first-of-the semester self-assessment papers:

“I used to read all the time, but I got too busy with [sports, extracurriculars, homework, …fill in the blank].”

“I used to write short stories when I was younger. I don’t know why I quit.”

And then comes the sentence that is most telling to me, perhaps answering the questions posed above as to why the change in reading and writing habits: “I guess it all happened when I got a [smartphone or laptop or gaming system].” Few are the students who say it out loud, but I think most of them –and most of us who are out of school– could say similar things.

I’d been meaning to for the last three semesters, but this time, I finally did it. I sent out an email opening up a conversation about why we’re all so prone to distraction and its evil sibling, procrastination. I’m curious to hear, in light of the recent pushback by some members of Gen Z against smartphones, just why they think this is. I don’t think many (any) of my students are in line to trade in their iPhones for flip phones, but I hear an increasing amount of commentary by my students’ generation about the ways that they feel a constant stream (scream?) of notifications is affecting not only their free time, but their mental health.

Toward the end of the email, I painted my students a picture, via statistics:

In 2007, the first iPhone was introduced. If they’re 18 today, they’d have been 2 years old.

In 2009, the Droid came out. They’d have been 4.

In 2010, the iPad was released. They’d have been 5.

I’m 50 years old as I write this. I didn’t own a smartphone until I was 38, and only bought an iPad in 2020 to help with online pandemic teaching.

These are the kids who grew up perhaps handed their parents’ iPad to keep them company during a long road trip. They might have been watching cartoons on their mom’s phone while riding in the cart at the grocery store. They’ve likely not known a world where the only options while waiting in line (or waiting for class to start) are striking up a conversation with the person next to them or just quietly watching the world.

Would Spaceman Spiff (Calvin and Hobbes fans will understand) have existed if Calvin had been given an iPhone? Maybe not. Have our phones stolen from us the art of daydreaming? Maybe so.

There’s a creativity to daydreaming –that other relative of distraction and procrastination– that doesn’t exist in the kind of distraction and procrastination that comes from a screen. Some of us creative weirdos would even say that daydreaming –mental margin, empty time and space to dream– is essential for our creative process. I’m one of those who would claim that. When I lost my two-hour commute to campus, I lost my prime time for mental margin: driving. I’ve since been able to replace that with a superior substitute (walking), but I hadn’t realized what I’d lost until I spent a summer sunk deep into the internet with the worst case of creative block I’d ever experienced. I point the finger of blame solidly at my tendency to scroll rather than type. I’d traded creativity for consumption, and the result was that at the end of the summer, I was exhausted and bored for no reason with nothing written to show for all my hours in the computer chair.

Since that revelation, I’ve tried to be more intentional about leaving some mental margin. I switch off my computer entirely on Saturday night before I go to bed. If I need the internet, I’ll use my iPad, but I take it off the charger. Once the charge is gone, I’m done. On Sundays I generally try (and often fail) to stick to analog: books. Notebooks. Pen and paper. I’ve very, very rarely had email on my phone (only when necessary, when I’m away from my computer and anticipate students who have trouble with an assignment), so this also means I don’t check my email on Sundays. I’ve already alerted my students (those who’ve read the syllabus, that is) that I’m offline on Sundays, so they’re aware. I will still open my email Monday morning to find a couple new emails, but I’ve not yet had a crisis over a Sunday due to abandoning my inbox for a day.

Has it helped? I believe so. Even just having that one day “off” my normal routine of morning writing and grading and taking breaks to scroll news sites or YouTube (I’m still off social media, except for a rare trip into Instagram now and then) has helped as a once-a-week reset.

Reset is an important concept. Reset, and the idea of mental margin. Some seek it by meditation, but I think there are even more possibilities for gaining that sense of openness and quiet in the mind. Prayer, for one. I spent a lot of my time up and down Highway 75 between Luverne and Sioux Center praying in an informal kind of way, just letting my thoughts go in the direction of a conversation with God. Sound weird? Maybe to some, but it’s the primary way I connect with God and find peace in the middle of things I don’t understand or don’t think I can handle. And that kind of prayer happens easily for me when there’s mental margin. It dies out when I’m surrounded by distractions. Prayer’s never been something I’ve struggled with, and I think that’s largely due to the fact that I treasure that mental margin. I notice a lack of peace, a rise of anxiety when it’s disrupted –although sometimes it takes me a whole summer to realize it.

So maybe that’s the center of all of this: mental margin. Learning to daydream again. Turning off the notifications and walking (literally) away from the screens every so often –or regularly. Here’s hoping that a conversation with my class brings about a renewed pursuit of focus –not just by trading in our iPhones for a flip phone or a weekly digital Sabbath, but learning to let ourselves rest as we go, to reclaim those before-class or in-the-hall moments by reconnecting with each other.

Oh, and my latest EDC (everyday carry) includes a flip phone. My daughter has said she gives it 3 months. (Her, in the car, trying to respond to a text while I’m driving: “This thing sucks!!” Me, quietly with an eyeroll: “Yes, that’s the point!”) I’m keeping my deactivated iPhone to use as an iPod (no Spotify on the flip phone), but it’s staying home for the most part. And no, I don’t see this as a short-term experiment. Where do I sign up for the grownup chapter of the Luddite Club?

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*messy first drafts, paying attention, rural life, writey stuff

A Long Winter’s Silence

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photography of leafless tree surrounded by snow

I haven’t seen bare ground anywhere around here since December. It’s been a long, long winter. The last storm that I recall dumping this much snow was April of 2018, and then, we knew that it was likely the last snow of the season.

But when it snowed in December, then a foot or more in early January, I knew we had a long way to go yet. We had a short February thaw, a few days above freezing, enough to melt the ice dams and the gargantuan icicles that had formed on the corner of the parsonage. And now, we’re wearily awaiting the arrival of another foot dump of snow, just when the patio furniture was beginning to emerge from the drift it’s been encased in since New Year’s week.

We attempted a trip to Dell Rapids this morning for my physical therapy appointment to fix my frozen shoulder and abandoned just short of half-way. The first round of snow had already arrived, and visibility was deteriorating. But on the way back from the van, there it was: the clean hush of new-fallen snow. One of my favorite things about first-snows back when I was a child. That, and the way the sky glowed at night, once everything was covered. Out here, the glow isn’t as evident, since we’re no longer in a town, but the silence is still there, perhaps even more intensely.

The silence was a reminder to me that even in the middle of a long, weary winter, there’s still beauty to be found. And it was a reminder to me that the long silence I’ve experienced in my writing life just might have some beauty and wonder behind it as well.

I’m currently in a season of silence, surrender, and listening. Not much else to do, really. I start something, and it circles, wanders, goes back into something I’ve written already about a dozen times. And that’s where I generally quit. It all gets sucked back into the same rut, it seems, with no new epiphanies. So, I’ve held on to that idea of silence all afternoon.

My typical antidote for writer’s block is just doing the next thing, starting somewhere random and running with it, but unfortunately that’s led to about six months of wandering, circling, treading water. Maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention, I’ve thought. Maybe I need more margin in my day. Maybe I need to read more. Yet none of this has really helped me regain momentum. So, today, I’m going to focus on what’s right in front of me: silence. And maybe that’s just what I need, because it’s what I seem to have been delivered in spades.

Today, I’ll write about the silence, I thought. So, here I am. A foot and a half deep in the white, clean hush of winter quiet, listening for what comes through, trying to be patient.

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*messy first drafts, Books and Reading, observations, paying attention, rambles, writey stuff

A Rather Cynical Look at “Writer’s Block”

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silver macbook on white table

Does anyone actually still read books in 2022? Forget books –does anyone even still read blogs in 2022?

Going even further, does anyone read anything longer than a web page in 2022? Maybe that’s the more appropriate question. I started reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows a few weeks ago (spoiler alert/confession: I scanned the final four chapters because I lost interest), and since then I’ve been questioning how much and how permanently not just society’s reading habits have changed, but my own have as well.

Sure, most of us spend multiple hours behind a glowing screen or carry one around with us all day, but does that kind of reading even count? One of Carr’s main arguments is that the convenience and pervasiveness of the internet has harmed our ability to focus on longer, more complex reading tasks. Instead of sitting at the breakfast table behind a newspaper (which is really, I suppose, another type of scan-reading), or instead of reading a book in the recliner on Saturday afternoon or in the evening after supper, we get our hits of information from short bursts of reading. Snatches of ideas. Little snacks of information rather than balanced meals of knowledge that come with reading whole books or reading multiple pieces on a given subject. In addition to losing our collective attention span, what we’ve lost –and what I see as the biggest danger– is context.

And just as deep reading in context is lost, what I see from my own personal internet habits since I’ve returned home for work is the ability to write well. I’ve seemed to forget how writing is HARD. Well, good writing is hard. First-draft blogs like this one are less hard, but even now, I’m realizing that while I started out with a germ of an idea, it’d have been far better to have built even a sketch of an outline. What do I want to say? What’s the point, anyway? I’m not sure I could’ve answered when I typed the tentative title.

I’ve abandoned Facebook for about two years now, but I’ve kept an on-again, off-again Twitter account, and that also is an entirely different sort of first-draft writing. I don’t really feel the need a plan to compose 280 characters or less on what I did last weekend or to blurt out a reaction to the latest outrage trigger. –Of course, I try to avoid the latter. A growing annoyance with contextless outrage posting was the main reason for abandoning Facebook and the reason I have an arms-length, skeptical relationship with my Twitter account. How much can you really change the world for the better with a 280 character post, anyway? I suppose it’s been done, but I struggle to find an example.

While I’ve heard many writers (especially in the early days of Twitter) claim that the 280 character limit is a helpful constraint and good practice at building maximal meaning in a minimum of words, what it’s done for me is far more insidious. I find that after dropping several of the writing habits I kept during my undergraduate classes and my MFA (daily journaling, regular deep reading, revision), I now tend to prefer the lazy route. Most of what I’ve written since May has been half-hearted morning pages every few days when I feel like it and a couple Twitter responses or posts a day. Not surprisingly, writing a longer piece now seems insufferably difficult. I started two pieces in the last few months in the old-fashioned manner, pen and paper to try and get my groove back, and I’m finding that what I end up with is something more like a jumble of disjointed notes than a cohesive first-draft of an actual essay. Things go all over the place. I typically hit my stride (and figure out my “what’s this really about”) around page three, … and then I lose the energy and focus to continue. I leave a bulleted list of possible future paragraph points and I tell myself I’ll come back to it later. And then when I do, I’m so disgusted by my lack of coherence that I abandon what I have and follow a different path.

Some might call this writer’s block. What this ramble is telling me, however, is not that I’m blocked. I’m out of shape.

As to what’s caused that, I’m not certain that I can solely blame the internet. Sure, my habits there don’t help matters at all, but there’s something else going on, and I think the answer lies in a lack of discipline overall. I’ve reestablished the habit of a daily walk, and found I’d forgotten how much the combination of physical activity, getting outdoors, and being able to listen through the noise in my head helps me see things more clearly. I’m forcing myself as I write this to finish my idea, something I rarely do any more through my morning pages. I know that morning pages aren’t supposed to have a point, necessarily, but I’ve been so frustrated with the lack of direction that’s shown up there that I’ve nearly abandoned the practice. It’s not the morning pages, though, just like it wasn’t just the internet or even just social media. It’s a bigger problem of losing the practice of doing deep work. Of paying attention. Of remembering why I do this. Without ideas, writing is pointless, and I think therein lies my problem: good ideas come at a cost. They require focus and discipline and work to wrangle them into words that have power to change things for the good.

At the risk of unwinding my whole point here with cheesy nostalgia, here’s where I insert the clip from my childhood memories of Debbie Allen from Fame since this came to mind, and I’ll end my ramble here for today.

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100 Day Dress Challenge, paying attention, stewardship, Uncategorized

Update on “The Dress,” Day 35: Travel, Creative Constraint, and Who Cares, Anyway?

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I’d fully intended to update a lot earlier, not nearly 5 weeks into this adventure, but honestly? It’s just not been a big deal. At all. Granted, it’s summer, and most days, I’m home, so the only people that really see me in the dress are my family or the handful of people I run into on my errands to the grocery store or the library. After the first couple days, I quickly realized how silly announcing my intentions with The Dress sounded and felt, so I’ve really only mentioned it once …other than here, that is. After all, one of the main points of the experiment is to fully realize just how little what we wear matters to anyone other than ourselves. People just don’t notice, on the whole. Or, if they do, it’s not enough of a pressing matter to mention or question it. Suddenly, all those mornings staring into the abyss of a closet full of dozens of things that no longer fit or that I don’t feel “in the mood” to wear feel downright silly. Dare I say, a waste of time? One of the biggest things I’m enjoying on this adventure is the removal of one of the first decisions of my day. Sure, I can dress things up with a sweater or jewelry or a scarf or shoes or whatever, but it’s incredibly freeing to just wake up, shower, throw on the dress, and be on with my day.

And travel… the other huge benefit. Some might think of this as an obstacle, traveling during the 100 days. How do you manage all of the places and climates and occasions with only one piece of clothing? Carefully, and with a minimum of luggage. Our family traveled to Washington for a niece’s wedding, for example. This was before the current heatwave they’re experiencing, but it was plenty warm nonetheless. Comfortable compared to 112 degrees (F), but warm. I packed along a sweater for the plane and air-conditioned places, but my short-sleeved lightweight wool jersey dress did just fine. I threw a small bottle of Eucalan no-rinse wool wash in my liquids bag and washed the dress in the sink a couple times over the week we were there. Washed it before bed, squeezed out the water, rolled it in a towel, hung it in the shower, and it was usually dry enough to wear by morning. I did pack along a t-shirt (black, the same lightweight wool jersey material) and denim shorts to wear in case of wardrobe malfunction or emergency (one morning the dress wasn’t quite dry enough in the morning). The shorts came in handy when we did a quick hike one evening. I tied up the dress, 80’s t-shirt style, and it was perfectly workable. The t-shirt doubled as pajamas, or, as I discovered a few days in, a way to vary things up –wear the t-shirt over the dress.

Creative constraint is another reason I was attracted to this whole adventure. Example: how do you dress up a solid plain blue knit t-shirt dress enough to wear to a wedding? Solution: I packed along a wrap skirt that’s sat in my closet far too much. It’s made of recycled saris, a mix of blue and pink with some metallic threads woven in. I wore that over the dress, added in a pair of earrings I bought years ago in Peru that I don’t wear much because they’re a little too dangly and fancy for everyday, and it worked fine. Besides, who’s supposed to be looking at me, anyway, right? The objective was to blend in appropriate. Bonus: the skirt is reversible, so I could wear it again for church if I wanted. So with the skirt, I had two options –though on Sunday I chose to pull out one of the two scarves I packed with the sweater. Blue (the color of my dress) harmonizes with all of my shoes and pretty much everything else in my closet, so I have plenty of layering options. As it was, I packed for the whole week in just one large school-sized backpack, with a little room to spare thanks to packing cubes. And no, nobody said anything about the dress the whole week. Pretty sure they noticed the repeat, but nobody said anything (which may or may not say something about how many of my family reads my blog…). So, today is Day 35, and all is going well. The only thing I’m questioning about the whole experiment is whether black would’ve been a little easier to disguise than blue.

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*messy first drafts, Coronavirus Diaries, paying attention

Coronavirus Diaries: Easter Sunday, 2020

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He is risen, the robin sings.

Her song declares the truth of resurrection,

notes carried through the snow-laden wind.

 

A late, April, Easter morning

sheltered together and apart against the virus

we hear the same revelation

and await the emergence

from so many kinds of tombs.

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learning, observations, paying attention

The Week Between

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Somewhere in my travels through books and words I fell upon a two-word combination that’s stuck in my head ever since: liminal spaces. It’s a fancy way of saying the space (or time) between something. A quick glance at my dictionary tells me that it comes from the latin word for “threshold.”

As someone who’s lived through more transitions than I can count, whether that’s between addresses or between seasons or between phases of life, I guess it makes sense that those words would be a little sticky. So when I noticed several people around me mentioning the quality of these days between Christmas and New Years as a sort of liminal space, it made (and still makes) perfect sense to me. I feel it, too, this sort of letting out the breath held during Advent, just before the deep inbreath of New Years and setting back to work in a new year, perhaps with a new mindset and the cleansing feeling of having started anew. Yet, in these days between, there’s a heaviness of the year past, a time when things slow down and quiet and we’re given space to reflect –perhaps moreso, since this is not only the end of a year, but of a decade.

In a Midwestern winter, after a just-barely white Christmas and a few inches of fresh snow in this week between, the outside reflects the inside. Everything stills in the snow, and the bright frigid mornings seem to add to that clean, silent sense of space and openness. Here, there is space to let the weight of a year past settle into memory, and space to walk into the hope of a new year.

Some describe this week between as a letdown, a time when time slows, a time of fatigue and sleeping in and greyness –and I feel that, too. But I wonder whether that reaction is one of our culture, a culture which thrives on noise and busy-ness and fullness. Like nature abhors a vacuum, we resist these times of silent space. We don’t want to make room for silence, let alone have it handed to us in the form of a week with no agenda, with no parties to attend or tasks to accomplish.

But I really think this week-between is a gift. It’s a gift like the silence of snowfall: something that, as adults who see snow and think only of ice scrapers and shovels and snowblowers –who only see the work to be done to clear the way out– we forget. We forget the joy of playing in the snow, of lying on the ground in the middle of a fresh snow angel, listening. We forget when we focus on the past and the future and miss what’s going on in the moment.

Perhaps that’s the lesson of liminal spaces. Liminal spaces in nature are usually times of unusual beauty: sunrise, sunset, rainbows, the clouds building before a thunderstorm. They’re things we miss when we’re not paying attention. So, in this time-between, enjoy the silence. Pay attention, make room, and relearn the gift of the present.

Photo credit: “frosted sunrise” by c thomasson is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0  

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