Time is sometimes thought of as an arrow. I have often heard time referenced as unidirectional, just like an arrow: it doesn't move back, and nor does it ever stay in one particular place at any given time. At the same time, the image of the arrow denotes acceleration. Let's face it; at various moments in our lives, we become "swept away" by the forces of time, in much the same way that the tides sweep things up into the sea. These moments of being swept away by moments can be valuable meditative experiences, in the sense that they help a person to see the impermanence of all situations, as well as to learn to navigate those moments in a way that does not require completion or perfection.
Why do people often become distressed about time? I think it's because deep down inside, we want to be like the barnacle that clings to the bottom of the ship, and wants to stay there forever. There is a nagging sense of holding onto something, or some piece of security, that makes time seem all the more agonizing when it accelerates into an unknown future. If we don't cling to such notions of self or security, then there is no need to worry, and we can move through different times without feeling the sense that we have lost something or are trying to grab something else.
Navigating time's arrow is a skill, for sure, but it doesn't mean that people shouldn't stop to take a rest. Recently, I have noticed that when I am at work, I get so many interruptions to do new things, that I found myself feeling tired even though the day just started. In those moments, I need to check in with myself to see how I am handling things and what might be a way for me to take on one thing at a time, rather than feeling that I have to do everything at once. While it's good to embrace the challenges of an accelerated work world, equally valuable is the ability to prioritize and rest from the frantic pace.
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Tension in "Team"
The more that I venture on testing systems at work, the more I can appreciate that teamwork is always going to have some kind of tension. That sort of tension doesn't necessarily need to be bad, and there is in fact such a thing as "creative tension", where there ideas evolve due to the differences in people's personalities. The way that a person interprets and understands "difference" can make a big difference (pardon the pun) in how tensions are negotiated. If I see tensions as signs of danger, then I will constantly seek refuge from them, clinging to a false sense of comfort. If, on the other hand, tension is seen as a natural aspect of teamwork, then there is no contradiction between teamwork and tension. The two do go together in a sense, not necessarily in a bad sense.
Another way of looking at it is not to frame tension as something that needs to "snap". Sometimes the metaphor of elasticity is evoked here, to suggest that the only way to resolve tension is by literally "snapping": angrily withdrawing or trying to pull inward, just as an elastic would after it has been snapped violently. But what if tension could be enjoyed in that moment and seen not as duality but as a single moment? I notice in myself that when this happens, I can better observe that the tension fluctuates and often dissolves on its own without anyone forcing it to do so. There is never any time when a person holds tension forever, since tension is always a more or less equal and contradictory balance of forces. More often than not, such a balance changes or shifts toward something else in time, as the two sides are joined or resolved in some ways. But if I am too attached to my one way of being then I am more likely to view differences as threatening, and it's important that I am aware of that tendency without necessarily swinging toward the opposite direction of merely "complying" with everything around me. This balance requires not only an awareness of the other team members' ideas and contributions but also my own energies and ability to sustain ideas or work them into my present situation.
Another way of looking at it is not to frame tension as something that needs to "snap". Sometimes the metaphor of elasticity is evoked here, to suggest that the only way to resolve tension is by literally "snapping": angrily withdrawing or trying to pull inward, just as an elastic would after it has been snapped violently. But what if tension could be enjoyed in that moment and seen not as duality but as a single moment? I notice in myself that when this happens, I can better observe that the tension fluctuates and often dissolves on its own without anyone forcing it to do so. There is never any time when a person holds tension forever, since tension is always a more or less equal and contradictory balance of forces. More often than not, such a balance changes or shifts toward something else in time, as the two sides are joined or resolved in some ways. But if I am too attached to my one way of being then I am more likely to view differences as threatening, and it's important that I am aware of that tendency without necessarily swinging toward the opposite direction of merely "complying" with everything around me. This balance requires not only an awareness of the other team members' ideas and contributions but also my own energies and ability to sustain ideas or work them into my present situation.
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Holistic and Moral /Pastoral Education: How Related?
I have been reading a book by Sally Power called The Pastoral and the Academic (1996) which talks about how different schools in Britain have embraced two sometimes conflicted categories of schooling: one is called "academic", which embraces the traditional subjects of school (reading, geography, etc) while the other is referred to as the "pastoral", and it refers to caring approaches in schools. The latter covers "life skills", moral education, and general education for "goodness" or "virtue". Reading this book has made me reflect on similar experiences I had in grade school and junior high school around the differences between school subjects and so-called "preparation for life", the latter mostly being covered under guidance counselling. Like most students back in the time, I hardly appreciated guidance counselling because there was never a grade attached to it. In addition, there were no particular assignments related to "moral" education or dilemmas in schools, besides the occasional debate in science classes of an ethical nature, or discussion about "family planning" in health class. I sometimes wonder why schools nowadays are reluctant to grade students in these areas, though also sense that it has to do with school as a place where students work out value neutral 'facts' rather than working out an ethical lifestyle or perspective.
Holistic and "spiritual" education might be thought of as a North American equivalent to moral and "pastoral" education in the British context. Both areas focus on educating the "whole child" (Powers, p.45-48), which means not pigeonholing children into streamlined subject areas but trying to educate all of a person's capacities for personhood. I think that unlike traditional moral education, however, holistic education does not approach whole child learning from a strictly moral lens. Instead of indoctrinating children with specific moral perspectives, holistic education focuses on the inherent value of children's experiences. I am almost tempted to refer to David Hume's notion of the moral self as something so natural that we can feel in our bones what are the best social arrangements simply through exposure to them. Rather than learning morals through indoctrination, the holistic approach sees children as inherently good and "moral" but in need of the opportunities to discover these qualities through free play and creative endeavors.
Holistic education is also reluctant to use categories such as "good" and "bad" to relate or understand children's ways of being or experiences. This is because part of what holistic education tries to address and even resist is the tendency to label or constrain children to prejudiced notions of what good and bad are. This isn't necessarily to detour into moral relativism, but it's to say that approaches to living a good life need to be sensitive to the natural discovery and unfolding of a child's abilities and strengths. A child who internalizes the message that they are "bad" for doing certain things does not get a chance to learn what happens inside when they are doing socially inappropriate behavior. Holistic education allows children to reflect on both thinking and feeling sides, thus allowing for a fuller accounting for moral experiences.
The more I think about it,the more reluctant I am to say that both moral and holistic approaches reach for the same thing (that is, the whole child experience). While both approaches depart from subject area specialization as the sole form of education, each has its own unique point of departure. Even though I see connections between the two strands (moral and holistic), I would be cautious to join them together or conflate the two.
Powers, S. (1996). The Pastoral and the Academic: Conflict and Contradiction in the Curriculum. London: Cassell.
Holistic and "spiritual" education might be thought of as a North American equivalent to moral and "pastoral" education in the British context. Both areas focus on educating the "whole child" (Powers, p.45-48), which means not pigeonholing children into streamlined subject areas but trying to educate all of a person's capacities for personhood. I think that unlike traditional moral education, however, holistic education does not approach whole child learning from a strictly moral lens. Instead of indoctrinating children with specific moral perspectives, holistic education focuses on the inherent value of children's experiences. I am almost tempted to refer to David Hume's notion of the moral self as something so natural that we can feel in our bones what are the best social arrangements simply through exposure to them. Rather than learning morals through indoctrination, the holistic approach sees children as inherently good and "moral" but in need of the opportunities to discover these qualities through free play and creative endeavors.
Holistic education is also reluctant to use categories such as "good" and "bad" to relate or understand children's ways of being or experiences. This is because part of what holistic education tries to address and even resist is the tendency to label or constrain children to prejudiced notions of what good and bad are. This isn't necessarily to detour into moral relativism, but it's to say that approaches to living a good life need to be sensitive to the natural discovery and unfolding of a child's abilities and strengths. A child who internalizes the message that they are "bad" for doing certain things does not get a chance to learn what happens inside when they are doing socially inappropriate behavior. Holistic education allows children to reflect on both thinking and feeling sides, thus allowing for a fuller accounting for moral experiences.
The more I think about it,the more reluctant I am to say that both moral and holistic approaches reach for the same thing (that is, the whole child experience). While both approaches depart from subject area specialization as the sole form of education, each has its own unique point of departure. Even though I see connections between the two strands (moral and holistic), I would be cautious to join them together or conflate the two.
Powers, S. (1996). The Pastoral and the Academic: Conflict and Contradiction in the Curriculum. London: Cassell.
Monday, February 19, 2018
The Tension of Knowing and Dreaming
This evening, I had a chance to see a movie called The Greatest Showman, which stars Hugh Jackman and a bunch of other really good actors and actresses. The movie is a very interesting musical which was inspired by the life of P.T. Barnum, and it details how this person rose from being a very poorly treated boy in the lower classes to someone who lived out his dreams through the circus. For me, the movie tells a story about how in fulfilling a dream, there is a temptation to go into other dreams, which fall into the trap of losing the sense of one's innermost dream. I am saying: the dream of sustaining a family and having a home for Barnum's wife and two daughters eventually morphs into something else, namely, the need to address the demons of his past: being treated poorly by an elitist upper class whom he and his father had to serve, and trying to prove oneself to those old ghosts from the past. In the end, Barnum needs to literally and metaphorically "come home" to the people and things he cares about the most, return to the original motives for his circus, and appreciate the relationships that sustain it. One of the most poignant lines in the movie comes from actress Michelle Williams, who plays Barnum's wife, where she remarks something to the effect that being loved and cared for by a few good people is enough; trying to please everyone is impossible. That's a very good point.
I have to admit that the philosophical part of myself kept hearkening back to Rousseau's concept of amour "en soi" and "amour propre" which I described in a previous blog. In fact, this movie's love triangle does remind me of that found in Stendahls' book Red and the Black which was also somehow inspired by Rousseau's philosophy of love. One kind of love is the love that is the key to a person's heart and home; the other kind of love is the key that promises to open the hearts of the whole world. Rousseau (and decidedly this movie's producers and writers) ultimately side with the first kind of love, since it connects with the more authentic parts of our souls, and it brings out the best virtues in a person: love of friends, loved ones and family. The second is more like an impossible dream, which plays out as a wish to heal a wound that never really gets fully healed, and that is the wound of never feeling fully loved by the public or by the "greater social world" (read: upper classes, popular images, stereotypical "normal"), and it often manifests as a desire to be "respected" and accepted without the shadow of hatred or stigma. Barnum (at least in this movie anyway) needs to learn the hard way that this kind of respectability is not worth the ruin of the things that matter the most to his heart and which reflect his true loves, namely family and entertainment. They also don't allow him to be who he truly is, yet another key theme in this movie.
The other philosophical thought I had came from a Buddhist perspective. I begin to reflect that as long as Barnum doesn't realize that he is always in a dream, his desires keep proliferating. It's as though each time he becomes more successful, he is tempted to use that success to fulfill another desire. I think this is somehow the human condition, but this interpretation also makes me reflect that we are always interacting with dreams, and there is never a point where we reach the authentic "me", since these dreams and fantasies are continually changing-much like the kaleidoscopic instrument that projects light images which Barnum gives to his daughter as a birthday gift toward the beginning of the movie. Are we going to turn dreams into nightmares (the way Barnum's nemesis critic does, at least until later when he starts to respect Barnum's visions a little), or do we use dreams to uplift each other and see into our situation as fellow dreamers? This is a question that continues to recur throughout the movie, and it suggests that all dreams are tricks (or "hoodwinks") but they needn't be harmful ones as long as they are benefiting people and making their lives happier and healthier.
I have to admit that the philosophical part of myself kept hearkening back to Rousseau's concept of amour "en soi" and "amour propre" which I described in a previous blog. In fact, this movie's love triangle does remind me of that found in Stendahls' book Red and the Black which was also somehow inspired by Rousseau's philosophy of love. One kind of love is the love that is the key to a person's heart and home; the other kind of love is the key that promises to open the hearts of the whole world. Rousseau (and decidedly this movie's producers and writers) ultimately side with the first kind of love, since it connects with the more authentic parts of our souls, and it brings out the best virtues in a person: love of friends, loved ones and family. The second is more like an impossible dream, which plays out as a wish to heal a wound that never really gets fully healed, and that is the wound of never feeling fully loved by the public or by the "greater social world" (read: upper classes, popular images, stereotypical "normal"), and it often manifests as a desire to be "respected" and accepted without the shadow of hatred or stigma. Barnum (at least in this movie anyway) needs to learn the hard way that this kind of respectability is not worth the ruin of the things that matter the most to his heart and which reflect his true loves, namely family and entertainment. They also don't allow him to be who he truly is, yet another key theme in this movie.
The other philosophical thought I had came from a Buddhist perspective. I begin to reflect that as long as Barnum doesn't realize that he is always in a dream, his desires keep proliferating. It's as though each time he becomes more successful, he is tempted to use that success to fulfill another desire. I think this is somehow the human condition, but this interpretation also makes me reflect that we are always interacting with dreams, and there is never a point where we reach the authentic "me", since these dreams and fantasies are continually changing-much like the kaleidoscopic instrument that projects light images which Barnum gives to his daughter as a birthday gift toward the beginning of the movie. Are we going to turn dreams into nightmares (the way Barnum's nemesis critic does, at least until later when he starts to respect Barnum's visions a little), or do we use dreams to uplift each other and see into our situation as fellow dreamers? This is a question that continues to recur throughout the movie, and it suggests that all dreams are tricks (or "hoodwinks") but they needn't be harmful ones as long as they are benefiting people and making their lives happier and healthier.
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Utopia Continued
Exploring Utopias in grade school and junior high school is obviously not necessarily meant to be applied to real life settings. Rather, they seem to function more as exercises in understanding the kinds of values that matter the most in one's life. Bacon's New Atlantis is an example of a "Utopia" which envisions a just society that is based on the freedom to experiment given shared resources and property. Bacon expounds the many ways that leaders can encourage the free expansion of knowledge by allowing everyone equal share to resources as well as free rein of ideas. Could such a Utopia ever be realized? It may certainly not, but the free range of imagination can allow people to "try on" the kinds of worlds they think they might want to have.
While I say this, however, I am somewhat haunted by my previous blog entry, where I talked about the downside of Utopias. I recall in high school reading William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and being assigned a group project where we are put into groups to design a perfect "island society" based on our different skills and interests. We later had to determine who gets to "stay" on our island and who gets to "leave", faced with shrinking resources . As a seventeen year old at time, I had so much confidence in what had to offer the world, so it never occurred to me that I would be the "one" to be booted off the island. I wasn't this time, and it turned out later that the outcasts formed their own society which invaded the others.
Utopias are fraught with the tension between desire and control. I desire a perfected "free" world that represents all the finest that I can imagine. But in order to sustain such an imagination, I need to control or dampen something else. This kind of tension is what always makes Utopia one step away from the worst hell imaginable.
Perhaps one take home for students when exploring these strange worlds is to recognize that there is a difference between the "perfection" of one's mind and the lived interaction of many minds. It also reminds people that there is a disparity between thinking and living which no Utopian vision quite surmounts. The hard labor that supports the life of the mind is always shrinking in the distance, receding and never quite integrated into the Utopian vision.
While I say this, however, I am somewhat haunted by my previous blog entry, where I talked about the downside of Utopias. I recall in high school reading William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and being assigned a group project where we are put into groups to design a perfect "island society" based on our different skills and interests. We later had to determine who gets to "stay" on our island and who gets to "leave", faced with shrinking resources . As a seventeen year old at time, I had so much confidence in what had to offer the world, so it never occurred to me that I would be the "one" to be booted off the island. I wasn't this time, and it turned out later that the outcasts formed their own society which invaded the others.
Utopias are fraught with the tension between desire and control. I desire a perfected "free" world that represents all the finest that I can imagine. But in order to sustain such an imagination, I need to control or dampen something else. This kind of tension is what always makes Utopia one step away from the worst hell imaginable.
Perhaps one take home for students when exploring these strange worlds is to recognize that there is a difference between the "perfection" of one's mind and the lived interaction of many minds. It also reminds people that there is a disparity between thinking and living which no Utopian vision quite surmounts. The hard labor that supports the life of the mind is always shrinking in the distance, receding and never quite integrated into the Utopian vision.
Friday, February 16, 2018
Reading Utopias
I am preparing a lesson plan for an upcoming Gulliver's Travels class for the Grade 4 students, where I plan to talk about Laputa as a "scientific Utopia" or a model of a society as an operating machine. It seems that this analogy of the social machine rises to prominence in the 1500s and 1600s,with Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and Thomas More's much earlier Utopia as examples of the genre where society is set up as an operational, functioning machinery. I am not so sure if Swift's Gulliver's Travels follows the same pattern, but I suspect that its particular depiction of a futuristic society is more akin to a satire than a literal depiction of the author's social or moral ideals. In presenting a society governed by the less savory extremes of science (including pedantry, animal cruelty, and a tendency to over-abstract to the point of diminishing human contact), Swift seems to warn his readers much more than encouraging them to foster dreams of a future society governed by technology.
I think, from a curriculum perspective, it's important for young learners to play around with these ideas. Part of my fascination with science fiction at a relatively young age is that I was able to step into alternate views of the world, as a way of questioning whether the customs and patterns I enjoy in society today are really the best or most realistic ones. As kids start to get older, I don't know whether they retain the sense of awe or wonder, but at least they do have the habit of considering ideas or proposals from fresh and new angles.
So far, I have not read a single Utopia that doesn't have its downside. For More, it's the slaves who are kept chained in every household. For Plato, perhaps the pessimism was in hiring "outside" mercenaries to do warlike behaviors, thus sparing the lives of those in the state. I wonder if what is implied here is that Utopia doesn't make everyone's lives better, but only shifts the burdens of forced labor or war onto the "others" who are considered less deserving of certain rights. Swift certainly suggests the "downside" literally in his depiction of the island that is below Laputa, as a place where people do the necessary toil to support the flying city. Besides the oblique historical references to Ireland and England (or other forms of political oppression at the time of Swift), I wonder if this section of Gulliver's Travels can invite a wider discussion about what makes a "good" society, and whether the good society always must incorporate or "handle" the downside of people not wanting to perform the necessary services of the social world. Can a Utopia be pleasant for everyone or only for certain entitled, meritorious classes? What happens to the unpleasant tasks used to sustain such a society? These questions might form an inquiry where students reflect on similar experiences in their school.
I think, from a curriculum perspective, it's important for young learners to play around with these ideas. Part of my fascination with science fiction at a relatively young age is that I was able to step into alternate views of the world, as a way of questioning whether the customs and patterns I enjoy in society today are really the best or most realistic ones. As kids start to get older, I don't know whether they retain the sense of awe or wonder, but at least they do have the habit of considering ideas or proposals from fresh and new angles.
So far, I have not read a single Utopia that doesn't have its downside. For More, it's the slaves who are kept chained in every household. For Plato, perhaps the pessimism was in hiring "outside" mercenaries to do warlike behaviors, thus sparing the lives of those in the state. I wonder if what is implied here is that Utopia doesn't make everyone's lives better, but only shifts the burdens of forced labor or war onto the "others" who are considered less deserving of certain rights. Swift certainly suggests the "downside" literally in his depiction of the island that is below Laputa, as a place where people do the necessary toil to support the flying city. Besides the oblique historical references to Ireland and England (or other forms of political oppression at the time of Swift), I wonder if this section of Gulliver's Travels can invite a wider discussion about what makes a "good" society, and whether the good society always must incorporate or "handle" the downside of people not wanting to perform the necessary services of the social world. Can a Utopia be pleasant for everyone or only for certain entitled, meritorious classes? What happens to the unpleasant tasks used to sustain such a society? These questions might form an inquiry where students reflect on similar experiences in their school.
Thursday, February 15, 2018
An Impossible Task
Today, I had some difficulties with system testing at work, especially not knowing how to analyse such a large set of data in little time. The experience reminded me that we process so many bits of information daily, without ever realizing how much is being done behind the scenes to organize one's current world. System "testing" is like challenging the habitual world: it asks that a person not just take things as given, but that one carefully scrutinize a system to see what can be improved and made more efficient. Such a task is not as easy as it seems, because it challenges the tester to try to engage the same data in new ways.
I have found in the past weeks that two approaches have been most helpful in system testing. The first is assume that something is wrong. If everyone just expects the system analysts and IT people to be always right all the time, then there is no purpose in testing, and the business users had might as well sweep the problems under the proverbial rug. The second principle is to try to chunk the data in ways that maximize the effort, given the small time in which a person has to test. This latter principle is actually difficult to put into practice, because it requires a strategy which isn't going to be uniformly applied. One strategy might be to pass over the "perfect" or "near perfect" system matches and focus on more questionable or "deficient" data discrepancies. Another might be the opposite: to look for the chinks in the armor, or focus on data that seems deceptively perfect or good. I am beginning to focus more on the data that is less clean or might need remedial help to become fully cleansed. But this strategy doesn't always necessarily work, and one has to budget according to the needs and profits as well.
When I say "impossible", I mean the metaphor of data testing is something like trying to bite into a cookie the size of a building. It's possible to take a little bit, but that doesn't mean there will be a complete analysis of everything. Sometimes it helps to know that, like a cake, all the ingredients in a data "mixture" are reflected in each tiny piece. It only takes a sharp willingness to look at a small piece to know how the larger piece works. I believe that this is where the Huayen sutra can be helpful in understanding the way parts of data reflect the whole. It can also remind me that an intuitive acquaintance with a small set of data is enough to see the larger picture, in many cases.
I have found in the past weeks that two approaches have been most helpful in system testing. The first is assume that something is wrong. If everyone just expects the system analysts and IT people to be always right all the time, then there is no purpose in testing, and the business users had might as well sweep the problems under the proverbial rug. The second principle is to try to chunk the data in ways that maximize the effort, given the small time in which a person has to test. This latter principle is actually difficult to put into practice, because it requires a strategy which isn't going to be uniformly applied. One strategy might be to pass over the "perfect" or "near perfect" system matches and focus on more questionable or "deficient" data discrepancies. Another might be the opposite: to look for the chinks in the armor, or focus on data that seems deceptively perfect or good. I am beginning to focus more on the data that is less clean or might need remedial help to become fully cleansed. But this strategy doesn't always necessarily work, and one has to budget according to the needs and profits as well.
When I say "impossible", I mean the metaphor of data testing is something like trying to bite into a cookie the size of a building. It's possible to take a little bit, but that doesn't mean there will be a complete analysis of everything. Sometimes it helps to know that, like a cake, all the ingredients in a data "mixture" are reflected in each tiny piece. It only takes a sharp willingness to look at a small piece to know how the larger piece works. I believe that this is where the Huayen sutra can be helpful in understanding the way parts of data reflect the whole. It can also remind me that an intuitive acquaintance with a small set of data is enough to see the larger picture, in many cases.
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