A stunning visual display of the changes we might anticipate in the next few years:
Digital Life: Today & Tomorrow from Neo Labels on Vimeo.
Jim Gilliam – “The Internet Is My Religion.” “Growing up I had two loves: Jesus and the internet. . . .”
From Henri Nouwen’s journal:
You must believe in the yes that comes back when you ask, “Do you love me?” You must choose this yes even when you do not experience it.
You feel overwhelmed by distractions, fantasies, the disturbing desire to throw yourself into the world of pleasure. But you know already that you will not find there an answer to your deepest question. Nor does the answer lie in rehashing old events, or in guilt or shame. All of that makes you dissipate yourself and leave the rock on which your house is built.
You have to trust the place that is solid, the place where you can say yes to God’s love even when you do not feel it. Right now you feel nothing except emptiness and the lack of strength to choose. But keep saying, “God loves me, and God’s love is enough.” You have to choose the solid place over and over again and return to it after every failure.
See also the Charter for Compassion.
A bit of prose (from his novel Hannah Coulter
“Most people now are looking for ‘a better place,’ which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no ‘better place’ than this one, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”
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When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
As I’ve mentioned, one of my favorite young writers is Rachel Held Evans. Her most recent blog post, “In Search of a Better Conversation About Biblical Womanhood,” includes these thought-provoking paragraphs:
And yet “biblical womanhood” hangs so heavy over the heads of Christian women that many live in nearly constant fear of disappointing their husbands, their children, or their God.
At the root of the problem is the fact that we have grown accustomed to using the word “biblical” prescriptively (to mean, “what God wants”) rather than descriptively (to mean, “that which is found in the Bible”). We have forgotten that behind every claim to a biblical lifestyle or ideology lies a complex set of assumptions regarding interpretation and application.
When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick in front of another loaded word (like “womanhood,” “politics,” “economics,” and “marriage”) more often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says.
You can find the full post here.
In the first post focused on The Invisible Gorilla
But what about our memories? Surely they aren’t an illusion, right?
As they discuss “the illusion of memory,” the authors point out that memory does not work like a video recording. Our memories are not objective recordings of WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. Very often—and they substantiate this with one study after another—what we think we remember is quite different from what actually took place.
Several years ago, some psychotherapists had a boom business with supposed “recovered memories.” The idea was that trauma—usually sexual trauma, and quite often the trauma of incest—could be called forth with the right kind of therapy. Many families were needlessly destroyed as vulnerable people, often with the suggestive guidance of friends who had “remembered,” made accusations against their family members. (Of course, this isn’t to say that such accusations were never true.)
But memories are unreliable: they can be confused, they can be borrowed, and they can be created.
Example: Three months after 9/11, President Bush said that just before he went into an elementary classroom in Florida to read to the children, he had seen a video of a plane hitting one of the towers. The problem is that when he entered that room, only one plane had crashed, and the video of that accident wasn’t available until later.
The President could not have been right. He couldn’t have seen a video that wasn’t yet available.
Unless—and this is the stuff conspiracy theory is made of—he had something to do with the crash and had seen a secret video never made available to the public.
But as the authors point out, the much simpler explanation is that President Bush’s memory was wrong. It’s what he thought he remembered. It’s how he made sense of that tumultuous time.
Often people “remember” seeing something that wasn’t there. But, again, it’s how they make sense of the event. They “remember” something they expected to be there.
This likely explains some of the plagiarism that is discovered. No question about it: there is such a thing as unintentional plagiarism. “When we retrieve a memory, we can falsely believe that we are fetching a record of something that happened to us rather than someone else.” We can tell a story so many times, that it becomes “our” memory. It’s so familiar that we insert ourselves into it. We read an illustration, a thought, an idea, and we absorb it. Eventually we forget the true source as we “remember” it as our own.
Sometimes memories are right. But sometimes they’re just too good to be true!
The memoir I’ve written called Megan’s Secrets: What My Mentally Disabled Daughter Taught Me About Life is now officially out.
Our first book signing was at Highland (May 1), the second was at the Pepperdine lectures, and the third will be this Saturday at Midnight Oil in Searcy (9:00 – 10:30).
The book is available through Amazon (link: Megan’s Secrets
While I’m queasy about self-promoting, I did promise my publisher I’d do my part to help get word out. So . . . any way you can spread the word (blog, Facebook, Twitter, forehead tattoos) I’d appreciate it. It would help if you’d ask your bookstore to carry it, if you’d write a review when you’ve read it, if you’d recommend it to a friend who may be battling life’s losses and disappointments. Thanks so much for your help!
From John O’Donohue’s poem “On the Death of the Beloved” (quoted in its entirety in the book with permission):
Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.
When orchids brighten the earth,
Darkest winter has turned to spring;
May this dark grief flower with hope
In ever heart that loves you.
May you continue to inspire us:
To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again.
By now most people have seen the video. (If you haven’t seen the video where you count the number of time one team passes the ball, watch this clip before going on.)
I’ve been reading The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, the experimental psychologists who originally conducted the gorilla experiment. The book is full of our illusions—our confident sense that we see and remember all the stuff around us.
The first illusion they cover is the illusion of attention. The truth is that “we experience far less of our visual world than we think we do.” We suffer from inattentional blindness. We tend to see that which we expect to see; but we are perfectly capable of missing that which is outside our experience or expectations.
Which means that the driver who said, “I looked in the rearview mirror before I turned but didn’t see the motorcycle” may well be telling the truth. He didn’t see it because he wasn’t expecting to see it. As a cyclist, this is a bit alarming: I’d be a lot safer riding my bike in, say, Boulder, where there are bikes everywhere (and where automobile drivers, are therefore, expecting them) than I am here in West Texas. The authors note that conspicuous clothing and blinking lights help some—but mostly with those drivers who are looking for you.
It also means that the teen who says she didn’t pick up the mess on the kitchen floor because she didn’t see it may well have been telling the truth, even though she basically stepped over it. She didn’t “see” it because of attentional blindness.
They talk about the illusions we live with, such as the illusion that if we’ll move from handheld cell phones to handsfree phones in our vehicles, we’ll be safer drivers. Studies show that’s clearly not the case. Because the problem isn’t our eyes or our hands (who usually drives with two hands anyway?). The problem is the limits we have with attention and awareness. “Driving a car and having a conversation on a cell phone, despite being well-practiced and seemingly effortless tasks, both draw upon the mind’s limited stock of attention resources. They require multitasking, and despite what you may have heard or may think, the more attention-demanding tasks you brain does, the worse it does each one.”
Related to attentional blindness is attentional deafness. We tend not to hear what we weren’t expecting to hear. Just because sound waves were in the air (“Honey, would you come in here a minute?”) doesn’t mean those waves are “heard.”
An example they point to is the infamous subway experiment with virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell. You’ve probably seen the video clip:
Gene Weingarten, a writer for the Washington Post, conducted the experiment to see if people could detect and appreciate true beauty. Did the average person know the difference between Joshua Bell and the average street musician?
Very few stopped to listen, despite the beautiful music Bell was playing on his $3,000,000 Stradivarius. So Weingarten, and then many others, concluded that we just don’t appreciate true beauty.
But Chabris and Simons note that this is the wrong conclusion. People didn’t stop to listen because they didn’t really hear Joshua Bell playing. They were focused on getting to work, they were going through their routine, and a concert violinist is not part of that routine. So they were deaf to the music. Had it really sunk in, many more would (in all likelihood) have stopped.
“Only becoming aware of the illusion of attention can help us to take steps to avoid missing what we need to see [or hear].” But even those steps won’t make everyone see the gorilla in our midst!
1500 yard swim.
24.1 mile bike.
6.2 mile run.
I’ve now done four triathlons in the past eight months, but this was the first olympic length one. The earlier ones were sprint triathlons (300 yard . . . 12 mile . . . 3.1 mile), and the swim portion was in a pool.
So when I got out into Ray Roberts lake in the TexasMan Olympic Tri, the first question was, Where are the black lines on the bottom so you know which way to swim? “Just swim out to the orange buoys,” they said. But I don’t have correction lenses in my swimming goggles, so I couldn’t SEE the orange buoys. Which meant I had to just trust people around me. And yes, it’s hard to trust people who are kicking you in the head as you try to swim in a lake! I figure that in that 1500 yard swim, I covered about 1750 yards, weaving from right to left.
Miss those black lines at the bottom of the pool!
I’ve enjoyed this last year of training and competing. Love being out on a TX road on my Specialized road bike!
One advantage is that you learn to appreciate your next birthday. Triathlon age is what you will be at the end of the year. And this year that put me into a new age category. Love being older.
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A great moment from a recent Paul Simon concert. If you tell you that him learned to play guitar with one of his songs, you’d better mean it! (So . . . in your fantasy . . . who calls you up on stage to play/sing . . . and you pull it off as well as she does in this clip?)
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Some possible riffs for the on-stage fantasy:
