Month: June 2005

Aging Gracefully

I was in a fast food restaurant tonight and there were a bunch of teenage boys sitting near me, and it gave me pause to realize that though they were talking about parties and drinking and girls, they were chronologically closer to my children’s age than mine.

I just ran across a wonderful archive of old Saturday Morning cartoon theme videos, (via MetaFilter or something) and the vast majority of them are after my time.

A few of them I remembered watching and snagged, including Mighty Orbots, DangerMouse, Dungeons and Dragons, Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, Thundarr the Barbarian, and Count Duckula. They also had Shazam, which either was before my time or I just missed it. Transformers was just barely after my time but I have memorized the theme song so it counts.

9/11 conspiracy theories? That’s so 2002

The Arctic Beacon, of which I’d not heard before, publishes an article about a “former Bush team member” (meaning, apparently, a former chief economist in the Labor Department) who thinks that the Twin Towers were demolished from within.

“First, no steel-framed skyscraper, even engulfed in flames hour after hour, had ever collapsed before. Suddenly, three stunning collapses occur within a few city blocks on the same day, two allegedly hit by aircraft, the third not,” said Reynolds. “These extraordinary collapses after short-duration minor fires made it all the more important to preserve the evidence, mostly steel girders, to study what had happened.

“On fire intensity, consider this benchmark: A 1991 FEMA report on Philadelphia’s Meridian Plaza fire said that the fire was so energetic that ‘beams and girders sagged and twisted, but despite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage.’ Such an intense fire with consequent sagging and twisting steel beams bears no resemblance to what we observed at the WTC.”

The whole thing seems mindbogglingly implausible — it assumes a malice and perhaps more importantly a competence on the part of malign forces within the government that is pretty hard to credit. But if you’re interested in such things this is one of the less obviously nutty presentations thereof. Something to take your mind off Guantanamo and Extraordinary Rendition and all-out assaults on Social Security and permanently exempting the hyper-rich from taxation and extensions of the Patriot Act. Ah, for the good old days when who was responsible for people dying horribly in flaming skyscrapers was all we had to worry about. That was the life.

Linked to from several places of late, like metafilter and Fortean Times.

UPDATE: A big ol’ rambling retrospective blog entry on the whole thing, bristling with links.

Trying To Understand Mindfulnesses

I’ve been reading a couple books by Thich Nhat Hanh, including Being Peace and The Miracle of Mindfulness. I’m trying to sort out what Hanh’s Zen Buddhism means by mindfulness vis-a-vis what Ellen Langer means by mindfulness.

It’s tough, because there is a lot of overlap:

  • mindfulness is the opposite of mindlessness
  • mindfulness involves being present in the moment
  • mindfulness is not about judgment
  • mindfulness means not holding on to theories, preconceptions, doctrines, ideas
  • mindfulness is about focusing on things/activities in themselves rather than as means to ends

There are differences though. The Zen mindfulness thing seems to be about transcending categories altogether, but Langer’s mindfulness is just about letting go of fixed categories; in fact, for her, mindfulness involves constantly being ready to create new categories based on new information, with a recognition that all categories are contextually bound and inadequate to capture reality fully. Hanh has an emphasis on breathing that’s not there in Langer. Hanh also has an emphasis on human connection and compassion that is not obviously there in Langer. The compassion aspects of it remind me of nonviolent communication. Zen mindfulness seems to be assumed to be something you reach in stages through assiduous hard work, while Langer assumes mindfulness is available to everyone and can in fact by elicited in experimental subjects by asking mindful questions.

I think overall I find Langer’s discussions of mindfulness more helpful to me in the context of creativity, but I find Hanh’s more helpful in connection with NVC and emotions and people.

And there’s something important with that breathing thing. Not necessarily the “following a regimen, learning to breathe a special Zen way that’s better than normal breathing” thing, but being in contact with your breathing. Breathing = spirit, literally/etymologically speaking. There is a way in which letting your mind get in touch with your breathing can help you out of being trapped in negative thoughts and feelings and into the present moment. That’s something important I’ve gotten from Hanh.

Despite them both saying they’re against judgment, I get a more nonjudgmental vibe off Langer than Hanh. (Though both are pretty great that way.)

I guess I’m glad I’ve read them both.

I’ll add Hanh to the list of people whose ideas interrelate in complex and interesting ways, including Ellen Langer, Marshall Rosenberg, Carl Rogers, Alfie Kohn, Gerard “Killing Monsters” Jones… that’s all I can think of right now. :)