Author: Jeff
Beckoning
I walked through Boston’s Public Garden on Friday on my way to a lunchtime meeting in Cambridge at MIT.
I hardly noticed the stunningly beautiful fall day. Through most of my stroll through the garden, I was silently lecturing someone who had pissed me off that morning.
A man playing an erhu snapped me out of it. The sound of that Chinese string instrument is haunting, almost agitating, yet eerily beautiful. And the sound beckoned me back — back to the moment, back to the wondrous day that it was.
I had never seen this musician before — not anyone playing the erhu — in nearly two decades of walking this path.
I passed through the Public Garden again on my way back from Cambridge, this time silently lecturing someone who had pissed me off the day before.
Until I heard that sounds again.
How tempting the catnip. How wonderfully, strangely, reliably we’re beckoned back . . .
The end of moral superiority?
It’s getting harder and harder to be a self-righteous curmudgeon.
For years I’ve congratulated myself on being physically active – getting regular exercise and standing, rather than sitting, at work – and been mildly, privately critical of those who let themselves go entirely.
Mountains of data confirm that our bodies evolved to move and that the sedentary lifestyle so prevalent in, and, increasingly, beyond, the west is sapping our personal health and vitality. (The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, and Live Longer by Gretchen Reynolds, the fitness writer at The New York Times, provides a very good, very accessible survey of the research, if you’re interested.) The body is a temple, after all. Treating it like a clothes rack will be the ruin of our healthcare systems, and so our economies.
Turns out there’s a genetic component to liking exercise: there’s a gene that influences how we respond to fatigue, and one that affects how easy and rewarding exercises feels, and one that influences how the body regulates energy. Etc.
It’s still quite possible to acquire the taste. Once you do, you won’t want to stop. The problem is, starting is harder for people whose genes don’t predispose them to enjoy, or at least better tolerate, the work required to become and remain fit.
I don’t know whether I have any of these “exercise genes,” but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn I do. Regardless, the exercise gene notion has bucked me right off my high horse.
There is, of course, at least a partial genetic component to many forms of addiction, from alcoholism to overeating. I suppose that makes it hard for one to be too snooty about being moderate.
There’s no single gene for anything, as Richard Dawkins, the famous biologist and atheist, rightly reminds us, but genes apparently have a big influence on many of one’s dispositions and behaviors.
Here’s one that completely blows me away: our genes significantly influence whether we are conservative or liberal! You heard it: that idiot, _____________ [Obama or Romney, Maddow or Limbaugh], may view the world the way he or she does at least partially because of his or her genetic makeup. Same with you, oh you-who-fills-in-blanks.
A handful of important values undergird our social landscape, each of which has an opposite: caring/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. Conservatives actually are tuned to give each of the positive values their due, whereas liberals tend to pay heed mostly to just two of them (caring and fairness).
(As for me, I’ve long been center-left – a compassionate moderate, if I do say so myself – and so I feel well justified in continuing to feel better than the remaining 94% of us – that’s 47% + 47% – who are hopeless ideologues.)
I learned about the genetic basis of our morals while reading a fabulous new book by my favorite social scientist, Jonathan Haidt, whose academic research on the psychology of morality I’ve tracked for 15+ years. It’s called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Haidt actually is pretty convinced that moral righteousness isn’t going away anytime soon, and he successfully (in my non-expert estimation) shows how it’s essential to our survival to this point in history and our continuing evolution. He recognizes the need for people of different orientations/perspectives to be able to talk to one another civilly and work together productively, and the ultimate goal of his book is to help us do just that.
I can’t recommend Haidt’s book highly enough. It’s easily the most important book I’ve read in, well, since I last declared a book “most important” (which I probably do every few years). You absolutely must read it. If want one very open-minded, big-hearted, incredibly creative social scientist’s view of what it is to be evolved members of our interdependent physical and social environments, you’ll be well rewarded for reading this short, engaging, insightful book.
And if you don’t read it, there can be no excuse. You’re clearly an apathetic misanthrope.
There’s surely no genetic profile for that, is there? 🙂
From the mouths of babes
This morning our 4-year old, Carys, who has always had this amazing, reverent, wonder-struck orientation to life, half-asked, half-declared, “What if everything in the world was connected to everything in the world?”
“Look, Ma: No hands!”: Technique and No Technique in Zazen
We just removed the training wheels from my son’s bike. He’s still more than a bit wobbly, but he’s making progress.
For many reasons, learning to ride a bike is a terrible analogy for learning to mediate. Among other problems, it suggests that there are those who are proficient at it, and those who are not; that there are novices and adepts.
Our son is an expert at wobbly bike riding. His wobbly bike riding is perfect just as it is.
And, yet, his bike riding form is changing, and changing in a way we recognize as progress, as part of a natural progression in bike riding. His training wheel-free bike riding likely will become less wobbly; or, rather, the wobbles will become less pronounced. His instinctive recovery from an endless string of little wobbles will be almost imperceptible to him and to others, and he’ll recover more easily from the less frequent, bigger wobbles.
(Except when he doesn’t.)
Meditation practice tends to follow a progression, as well. In our little branch of the Zen family, those new to meditation practice are encouraged initially to use one’s breath as a sort of stabilizing device.
The basic instruction for meditation practice, as James Ford is fond of saying, is simply to “sit down, shut up, and pay attention.” Doing that for 25 minutes can be surprisingly difficult as one takes up this practice.
Paying attention suggests paying attention to something, and, for most of us, ordinary “paying attention mode” tends to require a focal point something. A something we attempt to attend to continuously, or at least that we return to when we feel our attention has drifted.
I pay attention to the ball in soccer.
I pay attention to the words on the page as I read.
I pay attention to you when we’re conversing.
Enter the breath in early meditation practice. We’re not encouraged to concentrate on it, to dissect and discern all its subtle features, but it serves as a point of reference to which we can return when we seem to be drifting away from other features of our experience.
(In some Buddhist traditions, one attends to one’s posture, or to the rising and falling of one’s diaphragm with the breath, or to something different still. Same idea.)
Initially, we invite people to count each breath gently until one has counted to ten, and then to repeat. One might then count only in-breaths for some number of months, and then switch to out-breaths.
Eventually one drops the counting altogether. We’re invited to give up this attentiveness to one’s breath entirely, and not to fill in the blank with some other reference point.
To push the bike riding analogy a bit further before exhausting its usefulness, we might think of this transition not as dropping the training wheels, but as letting go of the handlebar. Letting go of the handlebar, we’re no longer capable of steering toward or away from something with the same decisiveness and agility. Bike riding becomes a less directed experience, in which we’re more vulnerable to what may come, even if we feel a paradoxical sense of stability poised upright on the seat.
Shikintaza, or “just sitting,” as this later approach to meditation is known, is the practice to which one typically progresses within BoWZ and some other Zen streams. One way to think of it is as meditation without the steering mechanism – or, better yet, meditation without a preference for steering or not steering.
Shikintaza is not a technique. Oh, I suppose there are elements of technique in this practice, but the technique is very spare, and very practical.
As with counting-the-breath practice, one sits in a stable position (normally on a meditation cushion, though a chair also is fine, as is standing). One remains reasonably still. Eyes are open – mainly so we’re not closing that window on the world, as closing ourselves to the world is the antithesis of what we’re doing in meditation – but one doesn’t look around.
That’s pretty much it for technique.
So, what if one’s mind drifts while “just sitting”?
Well, for starters, now we know we’re human.
But, what should one do about it?
There’s no need to do anything. We’re not seeking any particular experience in shikintaza – certainly not an experience of “25 minutes in which my mind doesn’t wander,” as if that were possible, and not even some experience of “not seeking any particular experience.”
Noticing our attention was “there” and now it’s “here,” we don’t bring ourselves back to anywhere or anything in particular. The noticing, and whatever follows it, and whatever follows that: that’s it.
The rain falls.
The baby cries.
The mind wanders.
Life.
Here is all there is. Here isn’t some void we need to fill in anxiously. (The void is full, in case one hasn’t noticed.) Even when we’re in “fill in anxiously mode,” we don’t need to overwrite that.
Shikintaza, just sitting, is simply being here, now. Our breath is part of what’s here now, but we don’t privilege it in shikintaza.
Shikintaza is simply letting one’s experience be its own reference point – trusting this, wobbles and all.
There are wobbles after we let go of the handlebars.
And even the wobbles are rock solid.
Another lovely obituary . . .
maggie and milly and molly and may
Rilke, Rumi, cummings, Mary Oliver . . .
So many poems are wonderful teishos.
I’ve been reading poetry to Carys, our four-year old, at bedtime lately.
Rediscovering poems I loved as a child.
Like this one by e.e. cummings:
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find at the sea
Mourning the loss of a master of the middle way
We have lost a true master of the middle way — not of meditation (as far as I know), but of mediation.
I am incredibly fortunate to have known and learned from Roger. He was one of a small handful of people who inspired me to devote two graduate degree programs (one at Harvard Divinity School and the other at Harvard Law School) to the study of conflict resolution. When I began teaching in the field at the law school, I first co-taught with Roger.
Roger was wise, gracious, and incredibly big-hearted. He had an irrepressibly positive, “can do” orientation that enabled him to walk into many of the most desperate situations of his era and help create an aire of possibility that, more often than not, made the seemingly impossible happen.
Roger was a generous mentor to scores of younger people who are carrying on his work around the world.
Thank you, Roger.
Roger D. Fisher, Expert at ‘Getting to Yes,’ Dies at 90
Harvard Law School Prof. Roger D. Fisher often told his students, “Peace is not a piece of paper, but a way of dealing with conflict when it arises.”
Published: August 27, 2012
Roger D. Fisher, a Harvard law professor who was a co-author of the 1981 best seller “Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In” and whose expertise in resolving conflicts led to a role in drafting the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel and in ending apartheid in South Africa, died on Saturday in Hanover, N.H. He was 90.
The cause was complications of dementia, his son Elliott said.
Over his career, Professor Fisher eagerly brought his optimistic can-do brand of problem solving to a broad array of conflicts across the globe, from the hostage crisis in Iran to the civil war in El Salvador. His emphasis was always on addressing the mutual interests of the disputing parties instead of what separated them. As he would tell his students, “Peace is not a piece of paper, but a way of dealing with conflict when it arises.”
It did not matter to Professor Fisher whether the warring parties reached out to him or not; he would assume they needed his help. “Most of the time he was not invited. He would invite himself,” Elliott Fisher said. “Our sense growing up was that he would read the newspaper and think, ‘Oh, shoot, there is something to fix.’ ”
For example, when a rebel group took hostages at the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru, in 1997, his son recalled, Professor Fisher found a way to contact the president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, and gave him suggestions for how to dampen the sense of crisis, including restoration of the power and water in the embassy. This strategy won the freedom of the majority of the hostages. In the end, however, Peruvian forces stormed the embassy, killing all 14 of the rebels and rescuing all but one of the 72 remaining hostages.
Professor Fisher is credited with helping initiate the summit meeting between the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan in 1985, convincing Reagan staff members that just meeting to brainstorm and build relations was more important than settling a specific agenda.
In 1979, Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance went to Professor Fisher’s house on Martha’s Vineyard before the meeting at Camp David that would lead to a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. Professor Fisher suggested to Mr. Vance the “single negotiating text” method that was used to bring the parties together, said Bruce M. Patton, who wrote “Getting to Yes” with Professor Fisher and worked on many diplomatic projects with him. The strategy involved having President Jimmy Carter alone be responsible for writing solutions and letting the other leaders shape the treaty through a back-and-forth critiquing process.
In 1991 in South Africa, Professor Fisher and former students led workshops with both the Afrikaner cabinet and the African National Congress negotiating committee leading into talks to end apartheid and to establish a new constitution.
His upbeat approach to some of the world’s most intractable problems led some critics to assert that he was unrealistic. But Mr. Patton said Professor Fisher recognized and relished the “complexity and irrationality” of the situations he addressed.
Although Professor Fisher mostly worked behind the scenes, he did create and moderate a series on public television called “The Advocates.” A court-style program that took on one policy issue at a time and examined it in detail from different perspectives, it ran for several years on PBS and won a Peabody Award.
“Getting to Yes,” which he wrote with Mr. Patton and William Ury, has sold millions of copies and been translated into 36 languages, and has been used by leaders in business and government. Professor Fisher also wrote other books and co-founded the Harvard Negotiation Project, which teaches conflict resolution skills to students and to international parties in the midst of a dispute.
Roger Dummer Fisher was born May 28, 1922, in Winnetka, Ill. His mother, Katharine Dummer Fisher, had relatives who had ridden the law circuit with Abraham Lincoln; his father, William T. Fisher, a lawyer, was the son of Walter L. Fisher, secretary of the interior in the Taft administration.
On the eve of World War II, Professor Fisher attended Harvard University. Upon graduating he volunteered for the Army, where he served from 1942 to 1946 doing weather reconnaissance in both the North Atlantic and Pacific theaters. Four of his eight college roommates died in combat; that, as well as seeing the aftermath of battle, persuaded him to dedicate his life to helping avoid war.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1948, he served on the Marshall Plan staff and as assistant to the solicitor general in the Eisenhower administration before joining the Harvard law faculty in 1960.
In addition to his son Elliott, Professor Fisher is survived by another son, Peter; two brothers, John and Frank; and five grandchildren. His wife of 62 years, the former Caroline Speer, died two years ago.
Professor Fisher stayed active in advising diplomats until about seven years ago, when illness made him too weak. His constant advocacy was a force many of his friends found comforting.
His family recalled that when Professor Fisher celebrated his 80th birthday, his colleague John Kenneth Galbraith toasted him by saying, “Whenever I thought, ‘Someone should do something about this,’ it eased my conscience to learn that Roger was already working on it.”
A version of this article appeared in print on August 28, 2012, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Roger D. Fisher, Expert at ‘Getting to Yes,’ Dies at 90.
Zen metaphysics
This koan (case 29 in The Blue Cliff Record) comes about as close to expressing a Zen metaphysics as anything I’ve seen or heard:
A monk said to Dasui, “When the thousands of universes are altogether and utterly destroyed in the kalpa fire—I wonder whether this perishes or not.”
“This perishes,” said Dasui.
“If so,” persisted the monk, “does it follow the other?”
“It follows the other,” said Dasui.
Enough said.
Taking flight
An image of a monarch taking flight captured with my iPhone 4’s little camera. Look closely (in two places).
Turning Words 