Reliving India
Last night, I emerged from a small airplane into a familiar atmosphere of warmth and humidity. After a whirlwind six weeks in India and a few days spent in England to decompress and reacclimatize to Western culture, I was back with my friends and family in Florida. I woke up yesterday morning, and before I even opened my eyes my first thought was "where I am going to day and how am I getting there?" Then I remembered that I was at home and in my own bed. My family was in the next room with a pot of freshly-brewed coffee. It was a wonderful, wonderful feeling. I am honestly still a bit numb, and the knowledge that I am actually home with my family is still sinking in.
For the record, Oxford was a wonderful place to decompress. As a fan of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the filmed adapations of Harry Potter, several days in a city with such a rich literary history and a dozens of recognizable movie locations provided several days of diversion that I needed to return home to the family as something other than an edgy, coarse-mannered mess. I also had the opportunity to see good friends, new and old, even getting the chance to meet Andy Proper, an Oxford photographer with whom I have corresponded on Facebook for the last two years. The only drawback to my time in England was that something in the water disagreed with my stomach in the strongest possible terms. After six weeks in India with no lasting damage, a glass of UK tap water was enough to give me gold-medal stomach cramps and runs. It's a funny world.
Apart from my long walks through the ancient "city of the dreaming spires," I also had time to reflect.
In the third-floor loft graciously provided for me by friends in Oxford, I spent several mornings staring out the open window, racking my brain in an effort to digest and make sense of everything I saw and experienced in India. My friends whom I stayed with have both participated extensively in missions, and we spoke extensively on the subject of service in other countries. With their counsel I came to the following conclusions:
- I don't need to rush to find a resolution at the end of the trip, or expect God to rush in with one as I seek to boil down my experiences to a cohesive, single "lesson."
- I shouldn't assume that the experience should be measured by how much change I consciously caused. I should look also at the changes caused in me.
- There might not be any single, unified final conclusion at which to arrive.
So, for now, I'm not even going to try. Instead, during this week, I am going to relax, start the photo editing process and relive the journey image by image. You, dear readers, will relive the journey with me as I post my photos as a daily journal, covering the events my journey from days one through forty. I dumped four camera cards and my iPhone yesterday for a grand total of 5,643 image and video files, and I cannot wait to start curating, separating and processing them. I humbly invite you to follow this blog closely, because I guarantee you that it will stay interesting for a long time to come. In addition to the photographs, the written recap will capture my own personal revelations as each photograph triggers a fresh memory. As I articulate them for readers, I will be better able to make sense of the trip myself.
Was the trip a powerful experience?
Yes.
What made it powerful?
Everything.
Can I name individual elements of the trip that made it powerful?
No.
But I can still quote Tom Wilkinson:
“The light, colors, the smiles, it teaches me something.”
India is coming to this blog, but I won't challenge you like a big shot to "be ready," because I'm not sure that I am.
Oscar Wilde, the Numa Numa Kid, and Undergraduate Celebrity
I was thinking about Oscar Wilde the other day.
Years ago, I heard Stephen Fry give a wonderful tribute to Wilde’s skill as a writer, but Wilde’s influence began long before his celebrated literary career. In short-form, Wilde was a public figure as early as his college days. In 1878, the year he graduated, his poem “Ravenna” won the Newdigate Prize for “best English verse composition,” but even more than his academic achievements, he was known for his personality. Wilde was a pioneer of the Aesthetic Movement; known far and wide for his wit and unique style of dress. Gilbert and Sullivan even wrote a satiric operetta in response to to the Aesthetics, basing the character of Bunthorne on Wilde himself. Wilde, honestly, was the original collegiate non-conformist; a well-known personality before he ever left college. Once again, Stephen Fry said it best:
He became a famous undergraduate. Internationally famous. It’s an extraordinary idea, isn’t it? Even in the days of Web 2.0...I don’t think there’d been cartoons of undergraduates or skits or lampooning essays in Punch as there were of Wilde.
Being well-known simply for being himself makes Wilde remarkable, both for his day and in modern remembrance. In all seriousness, if you contrast the limitations of mass communication in the Victorian era against the present day's instantaneous transit of images and sounds via the internet, it’s astounding. Wilde didn’t lip-sync a Romanian love song in a cry for attention; he was a scholar who explored ideas of beauty and philosophy in both theory and practice, while still finding the time to distinguish himself academically. Wilde makes me wonder: do students revolutionize the world with their ideas any more?
Culturally, the latest trend in spreading ideas seems to be crowd campaigning, for "Arab spring” movements which celebrate the power of group activity. And to be fair, this method is not without merit. But the problem with collective ideas that lack designated leaders (and go out of their way not to have them), is that their true intentions risk never being communicated clearly and succinctly for the benefit of others. The power of the masses cannot be denied, but when individual voices are exchanged for communal shouts of protest, even the most powerful and eloquent communicator can be drowned out by the louder voice of the village fool.
The modern achievements of young individuals seem easier to find in the realm of business. Every couple of years, a student drops out of an ivy league school to pursue an idea with the goal of making a profit. These ideas tend to become startups which makes headlines for a year or two before being absorbed into golems like Facebook and Google, for obscene dollar amounts. These young idea people might be billionaires before they can legally purchase alcohol, but in the wake of their earnings, will they be remembered for their personalities or the strength of their principles? I doubt it. I suspect that they will be remembered as names and salaries on boards of directors; because, in the end, they have not fostered any lasting ideas; they capitalized on an idea and pocketed their returns.
I recently graduated college. I didn’t distinguish myself at school as anything beyond being a student. I kept good grades and earned scholarships on my ability to use my skills outside of the classroom (and write compelling letters about my experiences to the board)...but I never wrote a “Ravenna,” and I can’t recall anyone else who did, at my school or anywhere else.
Do college students still change the world, or have they settled for making grades and earning their awards within the tedium of academia?
In an era when “mass communication” meant “book” or “printed leaflet,” Oscar Wilde set trends and broke molds. He grasped the helm of the Aesthetic Movement against the uniformity and lack of edification provided by the culture of Victorian establishment. And by proxy, Wilde and his fellow aesthetes took a stance against industrialism. In Wilde’s own words concerning the values of the movement: “the mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.” Wilde said this not long after a famous American writer who said that “there is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide."
Whether he was much aware of Emerson and the American Transcendentalists or not, Wilde embraced that philosophy as a personal credo. Wilde’s was lifestyle which bucked black-clad Victorian sameness and obstinately refused to imitate that which was modeled for him. In a famous quote, which is incredibly profound despite its frequent reduction to a Monday morning hurrah on Facebook, Wilde summed up his life in a single sentence: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
To be fair to my modern counterparts, it was much easier for Wilde to stand out in the Victorian era of blacks, pinstripes and class constructs. A wardrobe of colored satins and a devotion to art for its own sake would create much more of a sensation when they represented the exception to the norm. Today, it is much harder to be different, even for those of creative, non-conformist or artistic temperaments. It seems that, with no Aesthetic Movement to speak for them, it is the burden of the artist carry on the mission of beauty in the world for its own value.
Wilde could be identified in a crowd for his unconventional clothing, much like the artists of today. But while Wilde’s fashion sense was wholly new at the time, there is a stigma of tiresome sameness associated with artists who, for all practical purposes, look like artists in their stained, shabby clothing, vintage eyeglasses and tendency to worship at the literary altars of Kerouac and Bukowski. For all practical purposes, in their headlong attempts to be different, many self-proclaimed artists end up looking alike, and are grouped in with other subcultures which the mainstream loves to make fun of, like hipsters or Trekkies.
But this is unfair. Legitimate artists, those who actively work to pass on a reflection of themselves or society through the creation of something new, are often identifiable by a nebulous, uncertain quality. Tempura-stained clothes and unwashed hair aside, expressive artists have often known some form of personal hardship in life, and the resulting awareness of the contrast between happiness and sadness, difficulty and ease, gives them a unique perspective on the world. This is a strictly personal observation, but I have always seen a marked physical difference between the eyes of artists and those of the people around them. In the eyes of artists I’ve spoken to, from my hometown to Germany and back again, there is clarity, a capacity to perceive and interpret detail. This trait is foreign and sometimes unsettling to the rest of us.
The position of the true artist in a society is sadly undermined by imitators who undertake art for selfish reasons. In one of his podcasts (the exact episode escapes me), Stephen Tobolowsky remarked that the problem for artists is that many people want to identify themselves as “artists,” but do not generate the creative output necessary to validate their claims. As a result, the value of true artists and their contributions to society are cheapened by those apply the title of “artist” to themselves.
This brings us back to the question pondered by Mr. Fry:
Do college students become famous or change the world any more?
Is it possible for anyone to be unique when being a non-conformist is automatically perceived as conforming to a type?
Oscar Wilde set an uncomfortable precedent. Whenever I read about his life or his accomplishments made as an undergraduate student, I am unsettled. In 2009, I watched on television as Juan Martín del Potro defeated Roger Federer in the US Open at the age of twenty. I was about to turn twenty at the time, and I remember updating my Facebook status that afternoon to say “Juan Martín del Potro just defeated Roger Federer at the age of twenty. I turn twenty in three weeks. I better get busy.”
Wait..did I just stumble over my generation’s problem?
Potro’s athletic win was not in a college environment. His accomplishment was totally different than those of Oscar Wilde, but was nonetheless achieved early in life and to international fame. Outside of college, Potro set a goal, and through blood, sweat and tears, he won. Maybe it’s the college environment that has changed. It was my experience that college set its agenda for my personal time as well as my academic time, and instead of having the space to create ideas, I was forever trapped within the processes necessary to parroting lecture notes back to my instructors. Not being a complete slacker, it crossed my mind several times to attempt standout achievements, but I was always hampered by thoughts of "if I do "A" for me, that will leave me without time to do "B" for school, and if I fail to accomplish "B," I’ll lose my grade and my scholarship.
In the end, I would just shrug it off and tweet cleverly about being busy.
And that’s my generation. We are typified by expressing outrage on Facebook until enough people with signs start running in the same direction. Then we join the mob.
Sorry, Oscar, but you set the bar just a little too high.
The M&M's website is not safe for kids!
I told them I was eleven.
While researching material for the fitness ebook I am currently writing for Kindle, I pulled up the M&M's company website a minute ago to check some nutrition information. To my surprise, it has an age lock!
On a hunch, I screencapped the page. Then I put in my date of birth, but changed the year. According to the Mars Corporation, I was an eleven year-old boy. As such, I was too young to be a participant in their "responsible marketing" of sugar-coated sugar to American youth via "toys and games."
Between HBO's Weight of the Nation ringing its bell and Mayor Bloomberg capitalizing on the publicity with the NYC ban on large sodas, the entire snack food industry is on edge right now.
Heck, even Alec Baldwin is weighing in on the fun,
I didn't intend to post a second entry today, but I just found this little tidbit way too entertaining not to share. I don't generally follow the news, but I am writing about health and fitness a lot these days and the fact that it took a well-publicized documentary to kickstart this sudden hysteria interests me greatly.
I had a film teacher in college who talked about working for the California Department of Transportation in the 1960s (yeah, he was old). His job was to assist in filming informational shorts about automobile safety.
Every film included elaborately staged crash tests in which dummies were mercilessly hurled through windshields and slammed into steering wheels. The air was thick with statistics and numbers, chosen specifically for their capacity to frighten viewers into wearing seat belts and stopping completely at every intersection.
"But," Dr. Karimi said, with an air of disbelief which had not waned in fifty years, "no matter how much damn information we threw at them, the statistics never changed! People still got into accidents and acted stupid all over the highway." He took a deep breath and looked up at the class again. "I learned...one thing...from that experience. You can't sell safety. You can tell people how bad something is and show them exactly what will happen, but people will still do whatever they want to do."
You can't sell safety. And you can't sell health. Government initiatives can throw as much money as they want at the issues of obesity and public health consciousness, but people will continue to eat whatever makes them feel good. And, to stir the pot even more, America is built on the ideals of free enterprise. What happens to other laws when a mayor can ban something as insignificant as a soda cup? I don't want to veer into a slippery slope fallacy, but laws do set legal precedents...
If people want it, companies will make it. If companies make it before the people think of it, people want it all the more. It's an interesting cycle that is very telling about our culture.
On that note, there are some excellent blog entries which I would like to recommend. I don't know if the moon is full or not, but today was a great day for paleo bloggers.
I wrote a few lines ago that people will eat what they want to eat. J. Stanton's latest post on Gnolls.org, beautifully titled Why Are We Here, And What Are We Looking For? Food Associations And The Pitfalls Of The Search For Novelty helps illuminate exactly why we become so attached to certain foods, good for us or not.
Concluding our contemplation of the government's attempting a nationwide stomach-stapling through "reform," Richard NIkoley (whose book I recently reviewed) just blogged about how the government is not great hope for our nation's health--healthy people are. He also included a superb video. Check it out at Free the Animal: Paleos & Primals: YOU are the Key, not Disney or Michelle Obama
Be healthy. Be blessed.
Fear of the Void, Frasier’s Waistline, and the Art of Reduction
Lately, a recurring theme in my thoughts and conversations has been reduction.
By “reduction,” I refer to it less as a reference to quantity or chemistry, but as an idea. More specifically, the common idea of “cutting back” on specific elements of daily life in order to improve its overall quality. If someone talks about "cutting back, it is usually means that they are reducing some form of expenditure or consumption to see an increase in some other area of life. At a basic level, it's the most sensible way to streamline and improve life: to have extra time, you must do less. To have more money, spend less money. To improve your weight, eat less.
What I find interesting about reduction in practice is the way in which people often miss the point of the concept entirely, confusing reduction with exchange, or even addition. Sometimes people have such unquestioned assumptions or misconceptions that they actually add elements to their lives in misguided attempts to achieve some form of minimalism. You don't have to look any further than people's smart phones for proof of this point--how many separate "productivity" apps can one person use before the returns become diminished to nil?
My favorite example of the reduction-through-addition confusion is in a classic episode of Frasier. In the episode “Frasier-Lite,” Frasier and his coworkers at the radio station enter a group weight loss competition. At their second weigh-in, they discover that their team is heavier than when they started. Frasier, with his ever-present glass of sherry and penchant for gourmet cooking, is identified as the weak leak.
“How can that be?” Frasier sputters in indignant disbelief, “I added a salad to every meal!”
That scene makes me laugh just by writing it out, because Frasier’s glaring misconception sums up many of the innate confusions people operate by on a daily basis. It is my belief that true reduction is hard for many people to understand because it is simple in theory, but uncomfortable in practice. It is easy to say that something needs to be given up. Actually giving something up is much harder. I think this has to do with the human fear of change, but I think it can also be defined a more specifically as fear of a void.
We are confronted every day by choices. It doesn’t matter if we want something to eat, watch, buy or do; we can be guaranteed of multiple options to choose from. For a culture, this is a double-edged sword. Positively, it is an indicator of wealth and success. Negatively, it betrays an entire culture’s over-reliance on material elements at the expense of objectivity, critical thinking and spiritual fulfillment.
Why else would weight loss or budgeting be so complicated? At their core, they both concepts can be condensed to a single sentence apiece: Spend less. Eat less. Entire bookstore shelves could be replaced by single placards if a perceived need to fill all empty spaces did not exist. If the basic concepts were better understood, individuals' methods of implementing them would cease to be a reliant on the systems and advice of others, and would instead be expressions of personality.
This is extremely apparent when I listen to people talk about time management, then watch how they go about doing it. Everyone wants more time, but as soon as they liberate some space in their schedules, they immediately seek out something new to fill the void. After striving and cutting back activities to have "a moment's peace," the reality of being alone with one's own thoughts is suddenly too terrible to bear, and the void must needs be filled. Western cultures in particular often perceive voids as a symptom of idleness or of having a lack of constructive activities. In reality, extra time for one’s own self can be a wellspring of creativity to benefit the areas in life where meeting goals and fulfilling obligations is important. Creative people find creative ways of dealing with problems. They are valuable no matter where they work or what they do. And yet we deny ourselves the ability to be comfortable in silence or solitude.
We need to be comfortable with margins. We need to embrace the void.
This same concept applies to weight loss, the area in which many people, like Frasier, often choose what they think is the "least worst" option when, just maybe, the best option was never even thought of. As such, reduction inadvertently becomes addition.
“I added a salad to every meal!”
“Yes, but you didn’t decrease the size of your meals!”
This is a personal theory, but I firmly believe that the United States labors under culture-wide acceptance of false dilemmas. In situations where the individual must choose between a set of options, they often forget to check and see if they have to choose one of those options at all. Perhaps there is another option that they haven’t been shown yet. Or, perhaps the situation is not so dire that they have to choose anything at all, and can safely reject what they are offered and create their own paradigm for better living.
Easy example:
“Plain chips, or sour cream and onion?”
“No chips for me, thanks.”
Another:
“Regular or diet?”
“Water.”
One more:
“Let’s not spend too much on food; which is cheaper: Joe’s or Charlie’s?”
“Why don’t we just eat at home?”
Not every void must necessarily be filled.
Choosing the “least worst” option is not the same as reducing consumption.
Choosing only from the palette of options offered to you by others is never the same as making your own decisions.
Don’t be coerced. Don’t be fooled.
Let your decisions always be your own, and don't be afraid of a void. Learn the Art of Reduction.
New Hub: "All Natural," and other grocery store misnomers.
If you are a Starbucks fan, you will enjoy this post.
Today's entry links to an article I published on HubPages. The subject is food marketing and its use of vague terms like "fortified" and "all natural" to promote some foods over others. What do these terms even mean?
Is "all natural" really natural, or just a game of semantics?
Are whole grains and multi grains are really as healthy as they are purported as being? And what about fiber? And is a "healthy" smoothie really better than something from Starbucks?
The article is a bit lengthy at about 1,500 words, plus links to supplementary sources and supplementary material, but if you are interested in nutrition and its relationship to culture, you will enjoy it.