Category: misc/personal

Slow Thinking

Anna Badkhen: “In the face of ‘too much’ we gradually become dry, our hearts get tired, our energies become spare,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estés, poet and trauma counselor. I had hoped to rarify input. On and off, for a year, I herded cattle with a family of Fulani cowboys, who spend their lives ambulating the semiarid grasslands between the Sahara and the tropics and inhabit a very modest pre-monetary and pre-modern culture. I was researching a book about transience, and I had thought that, perhaps, in the course of my work I could learn whether and how life in sparse environments helps us slow down.

Scientists say busy minds make us sad and less alert. This holds true for me. What causes my cognitive overload is probably what causes yours: deadlines, ambitions, chores, parenting worries, and how all of these often seem impossible to juggle. When my mind is crowded in this way I fail to notice the beauty that nurtures it. A cardinal’s enchanted scarlet flight on a monochrome winter run in Philadelphia. The hollow flutter of a moth wrestling out of a cage of agave. The unfathomable embrace of the universe that accommodates tigerfish teeth and the electromagnetic song of the comet 67P both. A friend’s kindness. I grow too hard-pressed to be astonished by the ineffable in the world, my well-being withers, and I become terribly blue, sometimes for days, for weeks.

[…] Part of the correlation between open space and slowing down is evolutionary: Humans were born in the savannah. Our feet are built to walk on hot, dry soil, our brains are built to endure in boundless expanses. The sheer volume of lucid air fills the mind, the distant skyline paces off a spirit level of calm. Research shows that people draw jagged, pointed shapes when asked to draw representations of anger, and horizontal lines to illustrate peacefulness. More here.

When Breath Becomes Air: A Young Neurosurgeon Examines the Meaning of Life as He Faces His Death

Paul Kalanithi: What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain. Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values… Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life. […] I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans — i.e., “human relationality” — that undergirded meaning.

three year ago

this was three years ago, when i joined a u of r class called “theatre in england”: 25 plays in london (mostly) and its environs in 3 weeks, which i got to spend in the center of the city. here i am standing with the legendary dr russell peck, who designed this brilliant course decades earlier, and his beautiful wife ruth peck, a superb pianist who played all the classical music for the film “A Thin Wall.” two of my favorite human beings on the planet.

mara ahmed with ruth and russell peck
mara ahmed with ruth and russell peck

The limits of words

Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life. (Rilke)

Welcome 2016

In my childhood, I was convinced that everything that went astray on earth ended up on the moon. But the astronauts found no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises or hopes betrayed. If not on the moon, where might they be? Perhaps they were never misplaced. Perhaps they are in hiding here on earth. Waiting. (Eduardo Galeano)

To a better world – happy new year everyone!