Monthly Archives: April 2017

Priming

Posted on by

I’ve been reading a book called Counterclockwise, written a few years ago by Ellen J. Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and an award-winning social psychologist. Its theme is “Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility,” and it’s a heartening book for seniors to read. For now I just want to make a note of one chapter. It’s about “priming” older adults with either positive or negative aging stereotypes and how this can affect their morale and even their health.

Quoting a study by psychologist Becca Levy and her colleagues in which two groups of women were subliminally “primed” with separate lists of words about aging, here are the words on the negative list: Alzheimer’s, confused, decline, decrepit, dementia, dependent, diseases, dying, forgets, incompetent, misplaced, and senile.

And here is the other list, the positive one: accomplished, advise, alert, astute, creative, enlightened, guidance, improving, insightful, sage, and wise.

Did it make a difference in the study, being primed with words that make people feel helpless and useless versus being primed with words that give them a sense of wisdom and self-respect and having a lot to offer? Yes, it did, and I think I’ll post that good list where I can see it now and then.

Ellen Langer has written other books and is highly thought of for her work in the field of psychology. Right now I’m also reading the 25th Anniversary Edition of her book Mindfulness, written in 1989 and updated in a long preface to the new edition. Her use of the title word has little to do with its association today with meditation; she’s more about learning to trust and respect your own mind rather than believing everything you’re told, even by experts. I didn’t read the original edition but I’m learning a lot from this one. This has been more of a reading week than a writing one.

Side Time

Posted on by

I would like to talk to young wives and mothers about what I call “side time,” meaning the times in their day when they can pay attention to things other than their mandated work schedule. I would like to talk about how crucial this is to human relations, to raising children, to creativity, to health. About how allowing for it in their lives is not laziness or shirking but a human necessity, and about how much is being lost for lack of it.

But then, I expect they already know what I want to say because they think about it themselves.

It’s frustrating when I read a book that I know my adult daughters would love and maybe need, and they don’t have time to read it. It isn’t just that I want to share it with them. It’s that they can’t have the experience of reading it, or anything like it. They’re preoccupied with the necessities that surround their full-time, hard and demanding outside jobs or careers. Their evenings and weekends are spent on the laundry, the grocery shopping, the maintenance of house, car, everyone’s health, the errands and appointments. They have little or no energy left for reading, thinking, conversation, or family life, let alone for projects of their own. Week after week, month after month, year after year.

This is not a life that suits them. It’s survival mode. They need more.

I , being old, of course can remember when it was one person’s job in a family to take care of the family’s home life. That person wasn’t expected to earn money too. In addition to the chores mentioned above, she had time to listen, help with problems, make family occasions special and family crises manageable, join with schools and the community to enrich life for everybody’s children, and even to have creative projects of her own. In short, she made a home.

Many of us felt constrained by that arrangement, maybe even demeaned. Long before today’s generation of young women came of age, women advanced into the working world with careers of their own, and there were corresponding changes in the family dynamic. Then technology revolutionized work, the economy, and social norms in unforeseen ways. Nothing and nobody ever took the place of that stay-at-home mother.

Of all the many factors that have changed our way of life so much in the space of a couple of generations, it seems to me that the cruelest effect has been robbing women, and families, of free time. So much more expectation is piled on every able adult in the job world that leisure isn’t even in the equation any more.

I don’t see any lack in my loved ones; they are doing magnificently. I just see the lack in their lives of a dimension families used to be entitled to, that everybody needs and that I think they would love to have. I just hope they will always accept every possible opportunity for a measure of freedom and leisure, as a priority and without apology.

I wish them, and everyone, more side time in their lives.

What I Think About the Singularity

Posted on by

“The Singularity” means different things to different science-minded people, but the definition most familiar to me is something like “the point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and takes over.”

And I say that’ll be the day. If the “intelligence” of computers were that impressive, surely some of it would have trickled down to the technology we’re all stuck with every day, that can’t respond to the ambiguity in almost all human interactions.

But then, maybe it isn’t intelligence that will be taking over. Maybe computers will succeed in negating so much of our intelligence that humankind will function like a cheap toy robot and nobody will mind. Look how much of our common sense we have already had to abandon to computers as we try to get a question answered or a mistake corrected or an appointment changed.

We humans were doing fairly well in the old days, with reading and writing and math, tools and machines and ideas. Brains and talent were the abilities we prized. We expected our exchanges to make sense. We expected questions to be understood and answered and for the answers to match the questions, because human brains were in charge and that’s just how they work. We were making a lot of mistakes but we were building something; we were learning.

But when technology advanced to the point where computers with their speed and memory capacity could be programmed to do many things faster and better than humans can do them, they began to seem like more than machines. Innovators’ respect for them went wild, and to make the most of what computers could do, they willingly ignored the fact that the devices couldn’t understand a word anyone said, let alone any nuances of anyone’s words, unless they had been specifically programmed to react (not respond) to them. We—all of us—have now had to make accommodations to those limits. The work world changed, human interaction and its satisfactions were largely phased out along with many human habits and skills, and a new set of standards and priorities took precedence—along with new generations. It’s no wonder that, in some minds, as the possibilities progressed, the idea of a superhuman kind of creature—sort of an Artificial Intelligence monster— began to haunt imaginations. Would it take over the world?

Of course we don’t need to worry about computers being smarter than we are. Computers can be taught to do all kinds of things, but whatever they’re doing, it isn’t thinking. They weren’t ready to run things and they never will be. A computer can’t really answer a question, understand a train of thought, or make a decision; a computer has no intelligence. All it can do is elaborate on its own human-generated abilities, making them more and more complicated but never providing a new insight. A puppy has more talent. Computers lack interest, intuition, empathy, and maybe most revealing of all, a sense of humor—all components of human intelligence.

I know it’s a different world now, but I’m homesick for the one we’ve lost. I just wish we could find a way to slow down, continue to develop our own brains, learn somehow to manage our conflicts, and face what it will take to keep us from destroying ourselves.

Easter

Posted on by

(written several years ago)

I grew up in an era when the churches on Sundays were full of believers. Easter meant new clothes and white shoes, getting picture cards of Jesus in Sunday School and singing while the sunlight streamed through stained glass windows. I took the Easter story to heart, as I did the Christmas story and everything in between, and I thought the whole world pretty much did the same.

In my teens I began to question. I struggled to keep believing and sought reassurance everywhere for my growing doubts. I read The Robe and The Big Fisherman. I tried going to different churches. Nobody else seemed much concerned about the questions that troubled me. My parents and friends seemed puzzled when I asked them what they thought. And after a lifetime of Sunday School and church, I wasn’t ready to give up the beauty and safety of it all,

The first year my husband and I were married, we sponsored the youth group in our church. I remember helping the teenagers put on an Easter sunrise service and breakfast for the congregation. One by one, the kids stood up at the lectern in front of the sanctuary and read the Easter story from the Bible, or their poems or meditations, and led the singing. Then everyone went to the church basement, where some of the parents were cooking bacon and eggs, and I had decorated the white paper table covers with little nests of colored coconut and jellybeans.

But we had to move away, and my doubts continued. In our first home away from our home town I read A Man Called Peter and Mr. Jones, Meet the Master and The Prayers of Peter Marshall and was deeply and desperately moved. That was the April my husband got drafted. It was peacetime, but serving time in the military was still the obligation of every young man unless he had a deferment for college or family reasons.

When he was sent overseas a few months later, I moved to the city, got a job, haunted the library, and read and read and read. I read things I had never heard of before, things I would have been reading in college had my life gone in that direction. I read, and learned, and thought, and realized.

Then it was spring and Easter time again, and my husband came home, and soon we started our family. When we began going to church, and I sought an adult form of my childhood beliefs there and couldn’t find it, my faith finished falling apart.

For awhile, I lived with the bleakness of not believing in anything. My intellectual integrity would not allow me to deny all that I had learned. Too many wise writers had convinced me that religion consisted of myths humanity had created to explain the world and make it bearable. There was no God, no afterlife, nobody looking out for us or paying any attention to us at all. I had to acknowledge and accept this.

But I had small children, and I distinctly remember the night I was watching them in the bathtub and suddenly knew, knew, that all those writers were wrong. There was just more to it than that. Love was real, and none of the wise writers had explained it away. It didn’t mean that all my childhood beliefs were true, but it did mean that there was something more than that bleak darkness. And it meant that I had learned something, within myself, that nobody had taught me and nobody could take away.

When they were old enough, I took my small daughters to Sunday school. I have snapshots taken of them in their pastel Easter dresses, their white shoes and little white flower-trimmed hats. My younger brother was in college then, majoring in religious studies. He steered me to new books and ideas, among them John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God, which offered new interpretations for people like me who had grown up with the old beliefs and now could no longer stand by them. Something called the “new theology” was burgeoning in those tumultuous days of the sixties, and before long it was reflected in a new curriculum set forth for the denomination I belonged to. I found hope in these new materials, and for a long time I stuck it out in the church.

But the “new theology” and the new curriculum were soundly criticized and rejected by the congregation of the church I attended. There was bitter controversy over the issues of the day: Vietnam, poverty, civil rights. By the time our third child was old enough to start Sunday School, I was so appalled at the way the church was going, and the nonsense I heard children being told, that I decided my children were better off staying away than having to unlearn all of that someday.

So we drifted away from the church. Easter became a pleasant, pagan festival of egg coloring and Easter baskets, presents and candy, just as Christmas seemed to unhook itself from its connections with the Christ child, even though it retained its meaning as a time of peace and good will. There was never any guilt. If anything, there was relief at being freed of the hypocrisy and sentimentality that religious occasions demanded.

My husband died, much too young. The children grew up and one by one left home. My parents died. One Easter my state of mind was such that renting the Monty Python satire of Christianity, The Life of Brian, and watching it by myself seemed the perfect observance of the day.

But my source of joy, strength, comfort and fulfillment has never failed me, and that is the people I love and who love me. My daughters have stayed close, to me and to each other, as they have married and had children of their own, the grandchildren who delight me beyond words.

I don’t need the church, don’t miss it and can’t pretend I do. But I do need my family, the caring, the connection in mind and heart, the gatherings, the beloved traditions and rituals, the shared familiarity and pride and humor, that confirm the truth I learned so long ago watching my children in the bathtub: love is the only thing that matters. I do need my religion.