Pontoon

Pontoon is the latest Lake Wobegon book by Garrison Keillor. I won’t be giving anything away when I tell you that the most winning character in the book, probably in the entire town, dies in the first sentence. Fortunately, it is a calm death. No unnecessary violence. No real arguing. Death comes. Death leaves. And a small town is even smaller.

Losing the best character in the opening chapter doesn’t seem like a promising way to start, but she’s not really gone, she’s just out of sight. We have her letters. And memories, memories, memories of all who (thought they) knew her. It’s enough.

I received Pontoon as a Christmas gift, amid a pile of books, and quickly set to reading. Before long, I was done. Yet another group of Lake W. stories tucked away about those people that I have never met, and – to tell the truth here – would probably never choose to meet, but who have managed to exert a curious fascination over me for two decades and more.

I just can’t help myself. I look forward to learning who in the fictional town “that time forgot” is on the way up, who is on the way down, who is coming back, and who is moving out, even though I know that these motions, up, down, in, out, have always, and will always, repeat themselves endlessly. The trials and tribulations of the Lake Wobegonians (Wobegonites?) are as steady and reliable as the Earth turning on its axis and yet they are never boring.

I’ll let you in on a secret – there’s a second Lake W. book in my Christmas stack. I bought it for myself, used, at Multnomah Library’s Title Wave used bookstore for a pittance. I’m saving it for some time when imagination and joy have run dry. Then I’ll haul it out and start picking once again over the lives of these “friends” of mine. And smile.

Can you succeed in school without really trying?

The Premise. Many people subscribe to the idea that being successful in school, i.e., being ’smart’, is a gift. You might be lucky and be born with ’smarts’, but whether you were born this way or not, there’s no point in trying to do anything about it. Hard work. Applying yourself. These things are not going to help you succeed in school. In fact, hard work could hurt. Dozens of teachers have warned me about the horrible effects of “drill and kill”. Scores of teachers and parents have told me that a good school is one that nurtures self-esteem, discovery, and creativity, and avoids any activity that looks like work or effort or carries the least possibility of failure. In their minds, the ideal school is one where children learn without realizing that they are learning.

My Response. There may be something to the notion of being “born smart”. No two people are exactly the same, so it stands to reason that no two brains will perform exactly the same. However, the possible value of a good brain does not rule out the value of hard work. Effortless learning may be pleasurable, but learning that is entirely effortless is not ideal.

It is easy to find examples of learning that is based on work. Learning to walk. Learning to talk. To read. And count. All of these basic lessons require effort, by which I mean, the lessons involve repetition driven by a desire to succeed. Babies fall down when they try to walk the first time. Children practice singing the alphabet and sounding out words. If these activities aren’t forms of effort, what are they?

Mature learners rely on effort too. Thomas Edison did not discover a working light bulb under his pillow one morning. Watson and Crick endured strong criticism from their colleagues before they hit upon the structure of DNA. Einstein labored unsuccessfully for years to find a unified field theory.

There are, in fact, countless examples, large and small, linking learning with effort, and yet this link doesn’t seem to exist in the American mindset. I have met many financially successful, college-educated parents who reject any connection between learning and work as inappropriate for their children. Why?

Part of the problem may be that we do not reward ourselves for hard academic work. When we learn something easily in school, we feel wonderful. When we hit a difficult subject, however, even though we may ultimately overcome our difficulties, we frequently harbor some resentment about the experience and we turn our interests and appreciation towards other subjects. Worse still, we run down anyone who is still making an effort. “She’s such a grind.” “He isn’t that smart. He just gets good grades because he works so hard.” By failing to appreciate our hard-won successes, whether they be partial or complete, we encourage the growth of some screwy notions about what works in our own lives and then generalize these ideas to our children’s school environment.

The Antidote. It is time to recognize that hard work is valuable and important. Not just for building houses and hospitals, but also for learning. Schools should promote hard work as a tool that is available to everyone and should teach students to identify, enjoy, and take pride in accomplishments that are based on effort. To help inspire this point of view, I have created a list of news bulletins that testify to the value of hard work in an intellectual setting:

1. Science, Sept 21, 2007, 317 (5845), p. 1657 [Random Samples] – Chess for Drudges? Psychologists at Oxford tested the chess playing skills of youngsters, and looked for correlations between skill, IQ, and practice time. “Although years of experience and IQ correlated with chess skills, the researchers found that the highest correlation was with the number of hours a day the children spent playing or studying the game.” [DOI: 10.1126/science.317.5845.1657d]

A Path with Heart

A Path with Heart is a heart-provoking book by Jack Kornfield, psychologist, author, and teacher/co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Center located in Woodacre, Marin Country, California. The book is wise, warm, funny, inspiring, occasionally frustrating, but it can grab hold of your heart and penetrate right to the core. That said, I had to read the book ever-so-slowly over several months (fortunately, my public library let me renew it several times) and I was tempted more than once to put the book aside and return it to the library unfinished.

Finding the book. I started the book almost by accident. I toyed around with meditation last summer and slowly getting more serious with the encouragement of close friends. One conversation led me to say, half-jokingly, that I didn’t need to get involved with Buddhism (or any other religion) if the main outcome was simply to replace the rituals and constraints of Judaism (which I was comfortable with, but no longer interested in) with another set of rituals and constraints. To which my friend replied, check out Jack Kornfield.

That advice was enough to send me over to Buddhist shelf at the New Renaissance Bookshop. Sitting on the shelf was a copy of Meditation for Beginners with CD inside containing several guided meditations. I took this home, opened the CD right away, and started listening/practicing. Less than one minute into the first session, Kornfield had his group convulsing with laughter over the difference (there is a difference!) between sleeping and meditating. I was hooked. I’ve practiced with the help of this CD on many occasions, but I still haven’t read the book.

So, persuaded that Kornfield might be worthy of a deeper look, I found myself a week or two later looking up his books at the local library. They had several, but A Path with Heart seemed like the one that was best suited for me. After all, here I am trying to practice meditation without a teacher, without a clear sense of my goals, and without any genuine understanding of what returns I could expect. A book that subtitle’s itself A Guide through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life should be just the ticket, right?

Getting started. The preface, A Beginning, pulled me right in. Kornfield tells how, after becoming a Buddhist monk in southeast Asia, he returns to the US in 1972 and, wearing full monk regalia, he meets up with his sister-in-law at an upscale beauty salon in Manhattan. Mr. Shaved Head, please meet Mrs. Curlers.

The next set of chapters, The Fundamentals, explores how meditation can unlock many of the emotional problems that we carry, either knowingly or unknowingly, and how skillful understanding of these problems can free us so that we may experience more love, understanding, and compassion, into our lives.

Losing interest. After racing through the first section, I started getting bogged down in the two lengthy sections that followed, Promises and Perils and Widening Our Circle. I think much of this material deals with promises/perils that arise only after one had been meditating for a fairly long time (or intensively). I don’t think my daily 20 minute sessions will get me into either of these realms any time soon. Faced with 200 pages of this material, I began to slow down, leave the book on the shelf, and find other things to do.

I should also mention another problem that I encountered at this point. Many (but certainly not all) of the Promises and Perils involved esoteric spiritual phenomena like “dissolving the body into light”, “experiencing past lives”, and “telekinesis”. Since I am by nature, and by training, hyperskeptical of such claims, I began to think that Buddhist meditation was not the right direction for me after all. Why sit each day if the only goal is to become transformed into something that I consider delusional?

Interest restored. Fortunately, just when all seemed lost and I was on the verge of returning the book to the library, Kornfield turned the wheel again. The ultimate goal of meditation, if I understand him correctly, is not to hunt for esoteric experience but to move one’s awareness of love, compassion, and understanding from the meditation cushion into the world. Many of the chapters in Widening the Circle, and the final section, Spiritual Maturity, deal with this topic, and I would have happily read more material in this vein.

One of the truly lovely things in the book are the instructions for meditations that are inserted throughout the book. They usually appear at the end of a chapter, and they remind me of the end-of-chapter exercises one finds in a science textbook.

Although Kornfield provides many references to Buddhism, its teachers, its writings, and its legends, this is not a book about Buddhism. In fact, there is no formal presentation of religion at all. Kornfield dips frequently into the writings of non-Buddhists: Gandhi, Rumi, various poets and politicians, Mullah Nasrudin, Thomas Merton, Hasidic sages, and on and on. Kornfield insists that every religion, at its best, enables its followers to discover their ability to understand, show compassion, and ultimately love, others. Every religion provides a spiritual path. Two quotes from the final page:

To live a path with heart, a life committed to awakening, we, too, must care for whatever we encounter, however difficult or beautiful, and bring to it our presence, our heart, in a great intimacy.

I hope that this book and the practice of wakefulness, compassion, and intimacy in it will bring blessings to your life, that you will have silence as a blessing, understanding as a blessing, forgiveness as a blessing, and that you, too, will bring your heart and your hands to bless all around you.