Ideas I wanted to remember and share.
Some truths I’ve learned about truths:
Do these truths also apply to themselves? (Metametatruths?)
“White segregationists said, ‘We can’t have integrated schools because black and white children might get to know each other and might marry each other and have babies.’ The Civil Rights Movement said, ‘This is not about marriage.’ But the white segregationists were right. You bring people together, they will actually learn to love each other. Some of them will marry and have children. It will actually change the fabric of society. When people worry that having gays in our community will change what marriage really means, actually, they’re right. When people worry that having a lot of Latinos in the United States will change the United States, they are right. We’re constantly making each other. … We’re going to create a bigger ‘we’, a different ‘we’.”
-John Powell (via Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise, p. 119)
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It’s not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
- Marianne Williamson (via Ryan Schoenbeck)
“When you are ready to learn, a teacher will appear.”
-Zen proverb (via David Holzer)
“All [meaningful] change begins with a small group, for the small group is the unit of change. Even a large [gathering] uses small groups to create connection and move the action forward. The small group is the structure that allows every voice to be heard. [It’s irrelevant whether] everything has been said [unless] everyone has said it. ”
-Peter Block (Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community)
“A gathering is hosted; it is the product of an act of hospitality. [In contrast], meetings are called or scheduled. They are intended for production rather than hospitality. They are mostly designed to take the past and will it into the future. So they become one more version of the past. They either review the past or embody the belief that better planning, better managing or more measurement and prediction can create an alternative future.”
-Peter Block (Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community)
It is too difficult and time-consuming to make a “fully rational” voting decision, so we use heuristics (“rules of thumb”). In particular, we use:
The nature of the times heuristic: When times are good, you vote for continuity. When times are bad, you vote for change.
The identification heuristic: You are more likely to vote for people you identify emotionally with, with people who, you sense, “get you.”
–Francisco Toro (via Evangeline White)
“I’ve worked with students who could barely let themselves think, they were so scared of thinking the wrong thing.”
-Eula Biss (via On Being)
“I strongly believe that for all the ways white people benefit materially from racism, that we’re very damaged by it. [Many] poor white people see themselves as white before they understand themselves as poor. There’s a potentially very powerful alliance between poor whites and poor blacks in our country, and that alliance has been undermined. And ultimately, I think, who it benefits is a tiny, tiny little segment of the society — this is another way of talking about the one percent.”
-Eula Biss (via On Being)
I’m starting to understand how the whole concept of willpower is a sham.
It’s sort of funny because I took an entire college course on the psychology of willpower. All sorts of experiments have been conducted on people’s ability to do things like “delaying gratification” (such as looking at but not eating a bowl of cookies) and voluntarily withstanding various types of pain (how long will you immerse your hand in ice water?). There are mathematical models describing how willpower is depleted and renewed and how it relates to the immediacy (or lack thereof) of the anticipated reward.
The first signs of brewing trouble came (for me) in the form of studies showing that diets, exercise programs, and other regimes of “do it because it’s good for you” (including some religious doctrines) generally speaking do not work. They often work in the short term, but in the long term are more likely to leave participants worse off than they were before they started.
Then I began to see that the whole concept of willpower is antithetical to mindfulness, wholeheartedness, integral psychology, Zen, etc. These approaches first and foremost teach us to get out of our heads and tune into the sensations and experience of the body in the present moment. We work to fully experience our feelings, our body’s needs like hunger and movement, and our spiritual needs like connection and compassion. We then try to proceed in life honoring those needs without overriding them with preconceived notions about what’s “right” or “proper” or “civil” or the way to fulfill some other role that we are used to occupying (student, parent, spouse, employee, caretaker, and on and on).
Willpower is forcing oneself to overcome one’s own instincts and needs. Mindfulness is compassionately accepting and integrating our whole self, as it is, right now. These are polar opposites.
Ironically, the creators of the diets and workouts — and the prophets who headline our major religions — most likely were enlightened. That is, in a compassionate and mindful way they discovered methods by which they achieved health and happiness. Then they wrote those methods down for the benefit of the rest of us. And then, the rest of us started trying to force ourselves and each other to do those things.
Clearly there is no intrinsic problem with eating healthy and getting exercise and being honest and treating your neighbor as you would like to be treated. The problem comes when we try to do those things by force of will rather than out of compassion and mindfulness for what our whole self wants and needs.
I say this as someone who has been more or less stuck in my head for my entire adult life and who is at the present moment deeply hungry but putting off getting food because my mind wants to write this article and is afraid of pausing even for a few minutes because the rest of my body might realize that there are other, more pressing needs.
If that’s willpower, I no longer want it.