Balance—that ever so elusive goal. I struggle with overwork and overcorrect into laziness. I accept criticism that I am too opinionated and overcorrect into having no opinions about anything. The pendulum swings from talking too much to not talking at all, from being independent to being overly dependent, from too open to too aloof. Exhausted, I glare at the gauntlet of teeter-totters and wonder why it’s so hard.
A friend suggested that the secret isn’t balance at all. It’s alignment. When working on a balance pose in yoga, I choose a mark in the room to focus on: a drishti. The fixed point doesn’t move as I bob around like a weeble-wobble. As I focus on the drishti, I become more balanced, steadier, even stable. When I aim for balance itself, I fall, but when I focus on something that never wavers, it creates alignment in me, and I become balanced. Instead of trying to hover between overwork and laziness, I could focus on the only One is permanent and unchanging. For a while, I was satisfied with my friend’s idea. Alignment sounds saner than balance. But it still leaves a remarkably heavy burden on my shoulders. And as I fail at aligning myself with Him just as much as I fail at balance, I find myself toying with another idea coalescing from many books I happened to be reading simultaneously. We all are made with different fundamental temperaments, grow up in different home cultures, and are the products of different larger cultures, so it is no wonder that parts of Scripture resonate with some of us more than others. Collin Hansen, the author of Blind Spots, says that is how we react to Christ as well. Some of us love the Christ who is compassionate; others are strengthened by His courage; others are consumed by His commission. At first, I cataloged this as another area in which I needed to seek balance, almost missing the author’s point. But then Jen Wilkin reminded me in None Like Him that I am not omniscient; my mind has limits. I cannot successfully always remember that my Messiah is both courageous and compassionate, let alone always remember also that He commissioned His followers to a great work. In Misreading the Scripture through Western Eyes, the authors remind us that for generations, reading the Scriptures was primarily a community or family activity, not the private, solitary activity it is today. That reminder nudged me to think about the community’s role in my balance or alignment. In both Blind Spots and Misreading the Scriptures, the authors encourage us to remember other ways of thinking through interacting with others. Instead of surrounding myself with only close friends who see the compassionate Western Christ, which reinforces that skew, I could engage with friends who see His courage, embrace His commission, and understand what the Scriptures look like in another culture. This idea especially reinforces Drs. Cloud and Townsend’s premise that having multiple strong relationships is key to being healthy and forming new relationships. One good friend cannot give me all the perspective missing from my view. One good friend is just as limited as I in maintaining balance and remembering the manifold wisdom of God. There’s an interesting study by Wenger on memories of couples in close relationships. Over time, in the relationship, the couple divide the labor of remembering in the same way they divide household chores, except this division is done tacitly. The result of the study demonstrated that this transactive memory “is greater than either of the individual memories.” With transactive memory, members of a group do not need to remember every detail. The husband and wife do not both need to save in their memory which cupboard the Windex is in, which road the doctor’s office is on, or the details of that funny story that eases awkward moments at dinner parties. Transactive memory is reminiscent of Paul’s analogy of the Body. As the Hands appeal to the group about a need, a way to show His love to others, the Mind considers the cost, the Mouth shares Truth, the Muscles give strength and courage. The Hands don’t carry the burden of all the great work; the Hands do what Hands do. We use that analogy when it comes to actual service at church: who should teach, who should greet, who should never help in the nursery. But what if transactive memory is how the Body is supposed to work with knowledge as well? As we come together, we each bring the part of the Scripture that resonates with us, that has become engrafted and in coming together, we remind each other of the parts we forget. We each have something to offer and something to receive. What if the answer isn’t a never-ending struggle for internal alignment or personal balance? Maybe the answer is honest, loving connection to a varied group, a Body. Alone, I will forget parts of Who He is and what He asks of me. Together, we can remember far more and do what He asks of us.
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I love reading. Books, advertisements, cereal boxes—you name, I read it. During one of my moves to a new apartment, my love of reading was very obvious to the men from church and school who were helping with the heavy lifting. With my usual thorough organization, I had the boxes labeled with a number and a color. The men quickly learned that the small green-labeled boxes were heavy. After a few more loads up to our new third-floor apartment, they discerned that these heavy boxes were books and that there were still many more of them in the truck. Setting down a couple of boxes, one of the men jokingly asked, “Did you know that they make electronic books?”
Of course, I knew that, but e-readers do not have that wonderful book smell or feel. Now, living overseas with my books packed away in, yes, green-labeled boxes, I have resigned myself to trying to read e-books. I think the designers perhaps don’t share my love of reading everything. Every time I open a book, the reader skips directly to the first page of the first chapter. This completely ignores wonderful nuggets in the copyright page and the dedication page and the forward. I know I’m not the only one who reads the dedication page: there’s a book out there entirely about book dedications (Once Again, for Zelda). Reading the dedications is like getting a small piece of hard candy that I enjoy slowly, especially as dedications can link to others. There’s the pleasant surprise when you see that a beloved author dedicated his novel to another of your beloved authors. I love that “huh!” moment when the dedication hints at a whole story behind the book I’m about to read. If I ever manage to finish and publish a novel and dedicate it to someone important in my writing life, then I would hope that my readers would honor that someone and read the dedication. And I can’t be the only who reads the copyright page for hidden treasure, otherwise authors like Lemony Snicket wouldn’t put gems in there. And those gems are worth countless dull copyright pages for the handful of laughs they hold. I have this same view on movie credits, a treasure trove of interesting information and names. Having worked in various crews for stage performances, I know the amount of unseen work that goes into making a play come alive. So, I watch movie credits, noting who the gaffer and the best-boy grip are and who provided craft services (and wondering what exactly a “best-boy grip” is). Long after the theatre is empty, I still sit reading the credits, laughing at awesome names, and pointing out interesting tidbits to my patient friends. In America, this was merely eccentric behavior. Now, overseas, I think I’m confusing local people when I go to the theatre. They all leave as soon as the last line is finished. But then some of them notice those foreigners sitting there (because my friends learned that I watch the whole movie, including ending credits); some of them will sit back down, thinking that the foreigners must know something about the foreign film that they don’t know. Perhaps they wonder why Americans read the credits. Recently, one of my friends saw a new release and messaged me that I should go see it. “You’ll enjoy the credits,” he assured me. He was right: they were awesome. Startled by the ending of the recent film The Circle, I read some reviews to see what others thought. Naturally, one amateur reviewer led with “the book was better.” Now I want to read the book, which I didn’t know existed, not because it supposedly is better, but because I thought the story was intriguing enough to want to interact with it in a different medium.
As an English teacher, I love books. They are friends and teachers in ways that movies cannot be. But I tire of hearing the cop-out criticism: the book was better. Of course, it was! Film and print are different media with different strengths, limitations, and purposes. No one looking at a photograph of Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel would think of saying, “The Sistine Chapel is better.” Most of us cannot spend hours staring at Michelangelo’s work on the ceiling; the photographs are as close as we get to his work and allow us to see in greater detail than were we awkwardly craning our necks far below his painting. Similarly, movies based on books are retellings focused on parts of the story. I cannot begrudge a movie for not being a book. And a movie adaptation can complement its parent-book. That complementary relationship is why I love both the book and movie The Phantom of the Opera. The movie shows the kaleidoscopic whirl and grandeur of the opera house; the book explores the lonely torment of the phantom and lonely naivete of Christine. The film and movie do, in fact, tell different stories, but those differences enhance the essence of the narrative. I enjoy the film’s final musical conflict between the phantom and Raoul just as much as I enjoy the book’s climax with Christine’s dilemma in saving or destroying the theatre’s audience. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (the first movie and book) is another complementary pair. The movie contains significant, but necessary, changes in the plot. Honestly, Lena’s introspective conflict in the book works only in print; introspection seems lifeless on film, so her story had to change for a different medium. Her character’s essence, however, is unchanged. And her story which left me unmoved in the book made me cry in the movie. In the opposite way, I cried through Tibby’s grief in the book (the first time I cried for a book), but I mirrored her deadness in the movie and remained empathetically detached. And then, there are the movies that are—dare I say it?—better than the book. I love teaching Little Women in my unit on Transcendental writers, but in the book, the differences in the March family are camouflaged by the more obvious differences of the era. The movie, crafted for a modern audience, captures what living based on Transcendental tenants looks like in a way that my students can grasp without my interrupting every chapter to give important information about the era. Certainly, some film adaptations are sloppy and add nothing to the narrative. Knowing this, my students goad me by praising the great movies Percy Jackson and Ender’s Game in the hopes that I will digress from our regularly scheduled activities to enumerate the movies’ flaws. But even when I bite their bait, we discuss not that the book was better, but how or whether the movie could include elements we thought were essential to the story. One of my favorite movies from my childhood is His Girl Friday, a fast-paced “jabberwocky” movie according to my mother. It’s a completely frivolous comedy, but one serious idea in it has gotten stuck in my mind this week. The patsy character in it shares about a soapbox speech he heard about production for use.
As I’ve been watching commercials—I mean, tv this week, I was struck with a glaring omission in soap commercials. These various products promise to energize our senses, beautify our skin, nourish, revive, rejuvenate, firm, comfort, and moisturize. Do you notice what these products don’t claim to do? Clean. The focus of the advertisements is so much on the add-ons, the extra features of the product, that the main purpose is completely overlooked. Is our purpose in buying soap to revive ourselves or to clean ourselves? I had the same problem when I started car shopping. A car is produced for a specific use—to get from point A to point B. And the salesman kept highlighting the extra features—a built-in vacuum, a built-in cooler, and heated/cooled seats—as though those features were going to help me get from point A to point B any faster. Those are just a basic features; there were even more features that seemed like the salesman thought that I would be living in the car more than in my apartment. (If it isn’t obvious that I’m an old soul, yes, I have the same argument with cell phone salesmen. I’m buying a phone to talk to people, not a pocket-sized computer.) Like my favorite children’s literature character Clementine, I have astoundishing ideas sproing into my head all the time. Fortunately, unlike Clementine, my mouth usually doesn’t surprise me by blurting out these ideas, but sometimes, I feel sorry my astoundishing ideas because I can’t use them, but someone should. So, if any of you want to adopt any ideas, I have some that need a good home.
One idea in particular has been weighing on my mind for a while. I was minding my own business watching tv, and during the commercials, an idea sproinged into my head (this is a frequent side-effect of commercial-watching for me. I have decided that if I ever become a sociologist, my main subject of inquiry will be commercials.). Here was a poor man with a pained smile yelling a phone number at the screen while walking awkwardly through a used car lot. Although annoyed by his yelling at me, I felt sorrow for him because someone convinced him that this commercial was a good idea. I also feel sorry for the lady in the commercial at the competing car lot: she has to talk to a cartoon smiley face. I understand why her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. So, since Americans love their reality tv and their make-over shows, I thought: what if we combined those two loves to rid the world of sad local commercials? It’s pretty much two rights cancelling out a really big wrong. The first step would be to nominate terribly made local commercials. The commercials with the most votes each week would be chosen to be made-over. The make-over teams would be composed of film students, acting students, marketing students, etc. These are people who are studying the field and could use some hands-on experience. Each week as these teams are given new challenges, they would build skills they need for their future careers. Naturally, this show would need an element of drama in it, so each week one of the teams would be eliminated (someone else can figure out how). And they would have normal challenges thrown at them like non-existent budgets, local actors, and equipment failure. Each week would also have a different theme like “The Holiday Season,” “Going Retro,” “Talking Animals” (scratch that last one—there is no need ever for talking animals in commercials). This astoundishing idea is free for the taking because it is too good of an idea to keep to myself. Clementine would say that this is Being Responsible. Oh, and if you haven’t read any of the Clementine books yet, you really should. That idea is free, too. For a while now, when I’ve recommended a book to a friend, I describe it with a food analogy. “It was an entertaining story,” I say when describing a light-hearted fantasy I’ve just finished, “but it’s really just candy.” Or perhaps, I say, “This is a great book; it will make you do some mental chewing, though, kind of like carrots.” (To clarify the analogy, I like carrots when they actually are sweet and taste like carrots; I don’t, however, like carrots when they taste like dirt. At any rate, whether sweet or dirt-flavor, carrots require a lot of chewing.) After hearing this for a bit, my friends have now started reciprocating with their own food-themed analogies, letting me borrow candy books, steak books, and salad books.
Wouldn’t it be convenient if books came with nutritional content labels like cereal boxes do? Instead of reading some other writer’s one-sentence cliché review on the back of the book (do publishers know how annoying those are?), we could get a label breaking down different mental skills that the book will require us to us. In this world, we pick up a potential read and find out before reading The Hunger Games that it will (i.e. should) challenge our ideas of entertainment, government, responsibility to mankind, and such like, and that we can reasonably expect to use our ability to juxtapose these fictional events with history and our potential future, to judge what is right in dealing with government and rebellion, to empathize with characters caught on both sides of the conflict, and to question our choices in entertainment. Of course, different people may see this book requiring other mental skills. Many consider The Hunger Games an engaging story about a love triangle and rebellion against corrupt government that resonates with their own feelings of being neglected and oppressed. Perhaps instead of categorizing books by genre, we could put them into food groups based on their actual value to the mind. Fiction genres are rather wishy-washy at best. This summer I invented a game that my students now play in which they get points for arguing how a given book could fit into as many genres as possible. (Yes, we conclude by agreeing on which one fits the book best before shelving it in our new library.) Other than letting us know whether we are getting wizards or aliens, historical figures or ordinary people, broad genres don’t communicate how vastly different a sci-fi steak book like Ender’s Game is from a sci-fi candy book like Cinder. The one challenges our ideas about war, its causes, its training, the Self, the Other, and so many other ideas that can resonate with the reader long after the book has been re-shelved. The other is a retelling of Cinderella and, while having the potential to challenge our ideas about humanity, the tug-of-war between public responsibility and personal inclinations, the story is merely an entertaining fairy-tale-turned-sci-fi novel. Lately, I’ve been contemplating cultural trends. Not surprisingly, these contemplations arise during two activities: watching commercials on TV and driving through traffic. While I’ve read some studies about the role that movies and shows have played in the critical literacy of our nation’s youth, only one theorist has addressed the role of commercials in society. (Neil Postman’s The End of Education includes an interesting discussion of commercials as parables, for example, “Parable of the Person with Rotten Breath.”)
What I’ve been noticing in commercials is their shift towards slogans that promote competition and getting product at the expense of others, as though we are experiencing a shortage on anything in America (although we do have a shortage of businesses that develop film with matte finish or meat counters with actual meat slicers, but that’s a different sort of shortage). One particularly awful commercial a few years ago showed a couple pull up to their home and start stripping in a frenzied race to be the first one to get to use the new showerhead because apparently life is not worth living if someone else gets what you want first. I see this same trend in traffic. My city is known for its bad drivers. I’ve lived here long enough that I’m no longer surprised when someone in the far right lane turns left in front of two other lanes of traffic or when someone jaywalks across four lanes of heavy traffic after dark. Last week on my way to work, I pulled up to the intersection and got behind a car in the right turn-lane. The light turned green. The car in front of me didn’t go. I waited a few beats, then beeped the horn (yes, my horn beeps just slightly more assertively than the roadrunner’s “Meep!”). The driver didn’t move, turn on hazard lights, wave me on—nothing. We waited through the entire light. When the left turn-lane turned green, the car turned left, cutting off the person in that lane. Has our culture become that averse to admitting that we made a mistake and accept the consequence of that mistake? In the grand scheme of things, getting in the wrong traffic lane is a small mistake that is easily fixed by turning around at the next intersection. Instead of doing that, a driver stays in the wrong lane but goes the “right” direction, backing up a lane of traffic and almost side-swiping another car. If we aren’t willing to accept the consequences of small mistakes, how will we become equipped to handle the consequences of larger mistakes? About three years ago, a friend made me watch Susan Cain’s Ted Talk “The Power of Introverts.” That was a first time that I heard someone specifically advocating for the need for the quiet (and the quiet people) that our culture drowns out. While Cain’s ideas resonated with me, I lacked the time to read her book Quiet until just this spring. Having studied temperaments and personality types a bit, I did not expect to learn anything earth-shattering, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn more about myself than I had expected. In a culture that blaringly promotes the need to “be yourself,” I frequently feel that “being yourself” is acceptable only when it means being the brash, bombastic, enthusiastic, bubbly, eccentric nonconformists sharing that message in the media. In the same movies and shows that claim to appreciate people being themselves, the quiet characters are marginalized, mocked, or perhaps pitied. We have allowed the fictional version of our culture reframe our view of reality. So many of us now live fictionalized versions of ourselves. Recently, some colleagues invited me over for dinner and games. I have been interacting with them in this setting enough to feel none of my usual qualms until I showed up. The colleague I feel most comfortable around (a bubbly, vivacious woman) hadn’t come. When I asked about her absence, I was told that she doesn’t like crowds. Though disappointed at her absence (especially since no one had warned me that our social group that night would triple in size), I was thrilled: I had found another closet introvert. And that’s what I am: a closet introvert. My acting experience allows me to blend in with the loud world we live in. Even at church, the one place I should be allowed to be the temperament God made me, I flit about as the social butterfly that I am not, cringing at the partly self-imposed pressure to be what I’m not. No, having a quiet temperament does not give me an excuse to be rude, nor does it mean that I don’t like people. (As anyone who has gotten me on the right topic can tell you: I love a good conversation. Many introverts do, as Susan Cain explains.) What overwhelms many introverts, according to Cain, is not people but stimuli of any kind. That idea has allowed me to reframe my ideas about myself and my interaction with people. I’ve been perplexed at what I perceived as inconsistencies in my behavior because I still viewed introversion and extroversion as a spectrum of whether people drained me or energized me. When I get into a good conversation (particularly a sobremesa), I can be engaged for hours and walk away reluctantly. On the other hand, I feel exhausted after an hour of a meet-and-greet at work. The answer, Cain suggests, is how much and how much new stimuli is in each situation. Knowing that has allowed me to make better choices in which social invitations I accept and which I decline. And, having read Quiet, I’ve given myself permission to stop being a social butterfly unless the situation truly demands it. At church yesterday, I engaged in conversation with only two people during the greeting time in the service (I’m convinced an extreme extrovert invented that concept), and instead of the usual feeling of being incredibly alone after that, I felt refreshed, connected, and part of the group. |
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