paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- tangled up in genes I�m not certain that, for me, there is a more reflective time than Sunday evenings in the early weeks of the year. The world is cold and quiet, people around me seem a bit tired from the excesses of the holidays and the media is full of stories about improvement. Now is the time to start the diet, clean the closets, make the changes that we all put off for �the right time.� I could flip through every channel at ten o�clock this evening and have someone with the most amazingly stiff hair and boring suit inform me �guess what�the time has arrived.� I�ve heard that song before. Sometimes it feels that Time is a stranger in dark glasses riding a bicycle the wrong way down a one-way street that for some reason I care about. Sometimes it is the stranger I want to befriend the most, hopping on a bicycle in pursuit. Other times I am content to let the stranger ride. There is so little I can do whether I chase Time or not that I like to find my own pace. The universe is so vast, and the idea of time is so confining and human. But we need something to remind us to keep moving forward. When I was an adolescent big things happened over summers. In my college years, big things happened over weekends at one extreme and entire years at the other. What ever the measurement, the pace slows down for accomplishments (no matter the scale) and quickens in memory. Last year is such a blur I have to find landmarks to distinguish it from the year before now that it is over. But I remember struggling through some incredibly tedious times that seemed to go on far longer than is reasonable or logical. This morning I was getting excited about my upcoming semester thinking that I will complete a graduate degree I started six years ago. At work I am just pushing through an optional insurance policy for experiential education that students can purchase for $17/year, available on all four campuses. This has taken months and a great deal of good will. I have no idea whether it will be welcomed or even used, or whether the incredible hikes in tuition will make its presence kindling for some greater fire. As the months go by I find it increasingly difficult and increasingly necessary to trust that the energy I put into the program will make a difference in ten years or so. My area of work, institutional change, is what some cunning professor termed �decades work.� Decades or not, results are needed yesterday. So I think about the elastic nature of time every day. The way it can stretch and stretch and stretch, like a sunset that almost reaches around the earth and touches itself. (But watch out when the elastic snaps back.) A few months back someone told me that a project I spent a year of my life on in my former job was actually living up to my vision for it. That it was a movement in one of the two states. Tens and tens of thousands of copies of it were published and it was going into another printing. That moment was a professional highlight for me. My boss at the time had wanted me to stamp our office all over it and I resisted saying that for something like this to work it has to be organic and spontaneous, like a big green and slightly damp lawn in the early summer. The kind of lawn that one cannot help but go stretch out in and take a nap with the warm sun. And it is all good. And people tend the lawn on their own. At some point the change or development has to be more important than the credit. A prominent local funder rejected the program I am working on saying that it was like planting an acorn and watching a tree grow and he wanted to just plant a whole big forest. I�ve been worrying that I have inherited my father�s �eccentricities� � I�ll use this term politely. He is a constant unresolved problem in my life � it is difficult to ignore him because he has tremendous personal power. I don�t want to delve into his whole situation at the moment. I�ve been reconnecting with his side of my family lately because I felt an absence being distanced from them because of difficulties with my father. I don�t want to be him. At the same time, I fear we are alike. I fear we are unalterably alike, so I do everything I can resist this and to develop myself into the person I want to be. I also work to make certain that it is his younger sister I am most alike. My father used to disappear and would end up having lived through some great trial somewhere away from home and at times without a temporary one. The guilt I had as a young child for having a nice dinner and laying awake in a warm bed worrying about my father out there somewhere without one ...having food every day while my father has spent most of his life eating every other day from lack of money.... At some point I had to set it aside and learn to live life accepting his way and not feeling badly about the advantages around me. It is intriguing to me how much alike people can be who are directly related but not necessarily environmentally related. One of my thoughts while cleaning was related to the tired nature versus nurture debate and our relationship to our brain as the locus of thought (the ghost in the machine). I read Daniel Smith�s wonderful review of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker in the Boston Globe (sometimes it is enough to read the reviews of some of the �big books.�). I�m going to do something that is academically unwise, but this is just my journal�.Smith quotes the following piece from Pinker�s book: "Cooler heads could have explained that the discoveries were irrelevant to the political ideals of equal opportunity and equal rights, which are moral doctrines on how we ought to treat people rather than scientific hypotheses about what people are like. [But] rather than detach the moral doctrines from the scientific ones many intellectuals, including some of the world's most famous scientists, made every effort to connect the two." Isn�t this an interesting tendency? Are we really capable of differentiating science about behavior from moral doctrine? Isn�t it part of the necessary environment of moral doctrine that it seem as natural as science? That somewhere the distinction has to be blurred between who we are and how we act for any hope of living in a society�. Or does it? I�ve put this book on my list of books to read which is embarrassingly long. But it made me think about the entanglement theory. Could moral doctrine and scientific hypotheses about human nature be like those two particles that were created from one, which subsequently have shot off in opposite directions but are still connected. So entangled that even though they are at opposite edges of the universe, if something happens to one it inspires an immediate change in the other. But for the immediate changing particle to know about what happened could take as long as the universe has existed. If thoughts have any parallels with particles, perhaps after a long time we will understand how one changes the other. 9:38 p.m. - 2003-01-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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