Sleeping With Books

When I was an undergraduate students I lived off campus in a house with 17 young women; we actually called ourselves girls at that point in time. I shared a small room with a friend, and we slept in bunk beds with me on the top bunk. I often slept with all my books in bed with me. When I was conscious of the fact that the books were in bed with me, I would move them to my desk or the floor. When I was unconscious of their presence, I just slept with them until I needed them. My roommate and friends thought it odd, sometimes there was little room for me, but I laughed it off and continued with my strange and sharp edged bed mates. Then I graduated and totally forgot that I slept with textbooks most of my college years.

Now as an adult, married with three grown children, I again fall asleep with books; books are on my night stand and on the floor on my side of the bed. I often read more than one book at the same time. One book is my public transportation book, small and light, easy to stop and start without forgetting the plot line. Another is usually a work book, a bit heavier physically and intellectually. Another if often some gardening or household project book as I try to maintain our ever demanding old house. I am a frequenter of my public library as well as new and more likely used bookstores, reading for profession and pleasure.

As a doctoral student writing general comprehensive examination questions, I immediately went to the library and electronically ordered the books I thought I would need. I ordered books from all over the state and waited for them to arrive. I was a bit anxious about all the reading and writing required to adequately answer my question. My question was dense and intellectually challenging and, if I am honest, a bit intimidating. I never had a philosophy course, and was worried about the amount of time I would need to get a rudimentary understanding of the material. I was also reading translations of German works and uncomfortable that the translations might be missing some essence that I would need to really grasp the material. After all this background work would I have time to answer the questions?

I spent a few sleepless or almost sleepless nights when I realized the books were slowly creeping into my bed. I was carrying them to and fro without every really reading them. I would try, but at that moment it would all seem too deep for me. I continued carrying and paging, skimming prefaces and indexes, or just browsing at charts and graphic depictions of something. But almost unbeknown to me something very strange was happening.With only a few months left to do the work I became less anxious. Even as time was slipping away and my deadline loomed before me, I got more confident as I paged and dozed with my books. So here are my thoughts.

Relationships are important, even relationship with things. Not as things but as what they represent and what they connect us to. Establishing a relationship with books allows me to recognize something as accessible if I take the time to get at it or get to know it. During my comprehensive exams, becoming familiar with the weight, literally and figuratively, of the book gave me the confidence to struggle with the content; to question, to build on, to link to other material. My relationship with books during this process reminded me how to read, not in the linear way of cover to cover, but in the multi-spacial way linking concepts and ideas from all kinds of books, to experience, to conversations over and over again. Ultimately all this lead to the printed page and I got it down on paper.

As I look back over time and trace moments of learning that propel me forward or give me the energy or courage to begin something very new, this process seems to begin with sleeping with books.

There are many ways to access knowledge and for each person the means of access can be different. We don’t really know all we need to know about how people learn. We get information from all kinds of sources and who is to say that information is not moving from books to us, that at some point the very act of carrying and being with books doesn’t constitute some active pursuit that we haven’t yet identified.

Perhaps I am trying to tap into some collective unconscious and because someone else has done all the work for me, the author or even previous readers, and gives it as some great gift, through the books around me. Maybe I can use that information and move beyond what the sender was able to do at the moment in time. Perhaps this will become accepted practice in the future, and while not everyone will sleep with books, they will find some other way to jump start their personal learning treks into new territory. Maybe this is part of an emergence process and all we have to do is open our self to the possibilities and the future unfolds.

Of course It could also be that I got tired of carrying all those books around (life before Kindle) and thought, “Get it over with! Read and write and be done with it!”

Or maybe I am just a goof.

Learning by Doing Nothing

There is a difference between being a good student and being a good learner. They are not mutually exclusive, but one does not automatically lead to the other. A student is busy, engaged in the "important" activities identified by a teacher or the school or program. A learner is equally busy, engaged in many complex activities, but they are often internal and you not see them.

Learning can be anything from difficult and lonely to exciting and energizing, depending on the task and your perspective. Either way, difficult or exciting, some of the learning time must be spent alone, processing information and figuring out how this new skill or knowledge fits with what you already know. For this reason, time to think about what it is you have just learned and how it fits within your own framework of knowledge is very important. I think we must spend more time doing nothing while we learn. Learning by doing nothing is currently not a popular educational philosophy, but one, I feel, that is significant for integrating and appreciating a certain depth of learning.

My own experience with learning tells me that time alone studying, or familiarizing myself with information and then talking about it with others who have some understating of the topic and materials, is important. And, at this point, I do know something. I have learned. But to take learning to the next level, to make it mine and to be able to use it when I need it or to see that it has application or relevance in other settings, takes more time. Time for doing nothing, nothing but thinking about it on a conscious and unconscious level, is absolutely necessary.

Some of my best "integration" time comes when i am sitting around doing nothing, just thinking. Or, I can be engaged in some mundane and dreary activity, doing laundry, washing a floor, painting a room, making lunches, pulling weeds in the garden, when I have a revelation and see some connection between what I have learned and some other aspect of my life. I can be horseback riding, usually focused on staying on or practicing some particular skill with the horse, and with the intense energy focused on my own survival, I realize later, as i am cooling down or grooming the horse, that I have had some great insight and again something I have learned has taken on new meaning and greater depth.

When one of my children was a seventh grader she came home from school to report herself before her teacher could call and report her. She had gotten in trouble in language arts for not paying attention. When I asked more about what she was doing she said, "Oh, I was just day dreaming." And when I asked for a bit more detail she said she was thinking about time. Apparently she had come from her science class into language arts and still had a few thoughts about what they had been talking about in science. When I asked her what she had decided about time, she responded, "I didn't get very far, I had to read something in the language arts book."

Now perhaps she was just day dreaming and without a doubt she was not paying attention to the teacher, and there is also a strong possibility that she was just fooling around. But, just maybe, she was on the verge of answering some important personal question, or posing some new personal question that would be with her for a while, or maybe she was posing some important question that all of us might benefit from. We will never know because the moment was lost for her. The transition from one subject to the next without time for thought and integration is difficult, more for some than others, but it also leads to a superficial understanding and knowledge of the topic.

So from the time we are small children we are told that daydreaming or doing nothing is not only wrong, but it is wasteful. We are wasting time. We must be engaged in productive activity all the time. Our measure of success is what we produce and this must be tangible. You cannot always see thoughts or the efforts of your thought. And, we often give up for a variety of reasons, before we have fully explored a topic. Rote learning appears to be satisfactory because in the end we do have a product; we can recite something or complete some arbitrary assignment. But the question of what we have learned, what we take form there and how we use it again, or where that knowledge takes us next is not answered. How that learning moves us out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary is not even asked.

Our pragmatism, the need to be productive and to demonstrate our productivity continuously, does not always allow for hanging out and just thinking. Doing nothing, as I like to call it, is actually not nothing at all. It is an action packed internal life that keeps us moving along the path of learning and self knowledge. This time for reflection, done in many ways by different people, allows time for enjoying the fruit of our work and appreciating it on another level.

I have often that that as a student in any given quarter or semester or year, regardless of the discipline, you should study the same topic. That is, look at he same topic from different angles and begin to appreciate the multifacetedness of the topic. You would not need to move from language arts to science as my daughter did, but would study a concept, maybe even time, in everything you did that semester, even language arts and science. Perhaps this could even incorporate some doing nothing time.

The question of what is nothing is critical to this discussion. Nothing may look like no productive activity with no visible outcome, but nothing is really very active and full of potentially explosive things getting ready to bloom in the right conditions. The outcomes of learning by doing nothing don't need to be applicable to everyone, but to the specific learner this nothing has meaning.

There is an element of trust here that may not be obvious. You must trust in the process; trust that learning is a process and that you will begin to understand your own twist on the learning process. You will figure out the best ways of doing nothing for you. Trust that the process is enough of a reward, that you don't always need to have some other end result - there is not need for a product every time. Things really are cumulative and you may not see results for a while. But trust; things are happening under cover, unseen to the naked eye.

I look at gardening as a model for the learning process. Those long winters look like nothing is going on but lots of stuff is happening to allow for spring and all that new and returning growth. While planting and weeding and watering are necessary for growth, the winter and the apparent dormant period are also essential to the vibrancy of the garden. The doing nothing period is the time that precedes the emerge of the garden. That new garden is often just a little bit different: bulbs split and spread, the movement of the seed via the winds and rains and critters allows for different fertilization opportunities, the preparation of the garden for the winter of nothing through mulching and feeding, all affects the new spring garden.

Doing nothing as we learn forces us to move away from the linear mode of thinking and learning. It allows us to free our minds from the clutter of the required and assigned and allows us to think about the what if's and is that so's and the would it be funny if's. It forces us to look at what we want from learning and what we get from learning in other ways. It may not be for everybody, although it is accessible to everyone. We all have the potential to do nothing and learn from it. We just may not choose to take the opportunity or the chance.

Thoughts on doors and life

Traveling to a new place always triggers a combination of excitement and anxiety for me, and oddly enough often for the exact same reasons: the wonders of the new and unknown and the horrors of the new and unknown. I revel in the opportunity for change, a break from routine and the ordinary, an opportunity to expand my teaching practice and to gain more international experience in my discipline. Yet I always hope that there will be enough things that are the same, and that those things be the ones that are most important to me. For me the sights and sounds are important but smell is the most heightened sense; the sense that reminds me I have moved beyond my comfort zone.

It is hard to describe to someone who has not traveled alone the energy it takes to participate in public life in another country and culture. The big things are assumed and you prepare for them, but for me at least it is the little things that can put me over the edge. I expect not to be able to communicate easily, although I have to say that with some creativity you can in fact communicate in another language. You have to have the time and be willing to look foolish and to be misunderstood and to be persistent in your commitment to making yourself understood. But little things you might not expect to be different can be the things that can put you over the edge.

Take for example the doors in Sarajevo. First of all most of them are always closed. Office doors remain closed even when occupied and when not occupied closed and locked, even if you have just walked down the hall. The etiquette seems to be knock and then barge in where you will be told to enter and sit down or that it is a bad time and try again later. If you are having trouble opening the door it complicates things exponentially.

When I lived in Sarajevo I found myself consistently pushing or pulling the wrong way in almost every encounter with a door. As I approached the entrance to my apartment I insert the key and pushed, meeting resistance and realizing once again that I must pull. At the US Embassy offices for the cultural affairs, where I went to the Office for Public Affairs to use the computer and ask questions related to daily life, for security purposes the doors are very heavy. These metal doors have all kinds of buttons and key pads and are an excellent replacement for weight training if opened and closed on a daily basis. Again, I would push and push again thinking that I am not physically up to the task of opening the door, only to realize that I should be pulling. And the hard part here is that you are under constant observations as you struggled with the doors. Police or security guards observed from glass enclosed cages; in fact some of the doors required that they hit a buzzer so you could begin your work out.

Doors in restaurants were a totally different matter. They appeared to be disguised as windows and it was impossible to tell where to enter many establishments. In the nice weather it was a bit easier as doors were usually left open, but as the weather is got cooler it was more difficult to tell how to enter. These doors were often electronic and as you stood in front of them they opened automatically, but of course you had to approach them head-on or they wouldn’t work. Some days I was just not up to the task of finding the door and so went hungry.

Such was the case with the restaurant in my apartment building. It was on the first (read ground) floor at the western end of the building. I lived in the middle of the building on the third (read fourth) floor. And on first sighting of the restaurant I thought, How convenient. I always try to be active in my neighborhood where ever I live, making every effort to shop and locally. I shopped at our local green market and purchased veggies and fruit. I found the bakery my landlady said was the best in the area and I did agree with her. I found the local cheeses and yogurts to be divine. And, the small house around the corner that grilled chickens on a spit in the porch area for you to purchase and bring home to eat was in fact the best chicken I have ever eaten anywhere. The local wines were not only a dream but inexpensive.

But, on occasion I didn't want to feed myself; I wanted to go out to eat. I wanted to order a dinner of something I never had before, try a new wine and see who goes out to eat in the local restaurant. I thought it would be perfect to develop a relationship with the restaurant in my building...convenient, local and not touristy, mentioned as a nice restaurant by several colleagues; if I could only figure out how to get in.

I did in fact crack the code for most doors that weren't disguised as windows, the apartment and most other buildings. I realized why I was so confused. Opening doors is not something we give much thought to; we do it on an unconscious level. The doors of Sarajevo had a piece of molding that was in fact connected to the door, not the door frame. In the US that piece of molding is part of the whole door frame, not the individual door. So when I see a door, unconsciously note the molding and believe I should be pushing away from that, not pulling the whole thing to me. Once I saw this difference it was much easier to interpret each door, at least those that weren't disguised as windows.

Truly all of this is a metaphor for change on many levels. We often prepare our self for the big stuff, or assume the big stuff is what we need to address in order to move forward, individually or collectively. But in fact it is the little stuff, those underlying assumptions that are so ingrained in our psyche that they are unconscious, that can do us in and get us into trouble. Those things that we don't see as different and are can lead to frustration and misunderstanding on a grand scale, even though they are very small things, like doors.

Whenever I am preparing to do something slightly new or different, teaching a new course, traveling to a new place, meeting new students, anything that isn’t routine, I think about the doors of Sarajevo. I am hoping my experience with those doors will help me look at my own assumptions with a more critical eye. Something as basic but as ingrained as whether to push or pull at doors can remind us that our assumptions are only that…our assumptions.

Each of us has learned to open doors within a culture context, and while that provides us with some grounding, it can also limit our vision. Taking a moment to think about how we open doors, and welcoming other ways to open doors, makes us better travelers, literally and metaphorically.

Personal Economic Indicators

Here is my own fancy economic indicator assessment for a country. I developed these 30 years ago when I backpacked through Europe with a friend. I used in the early 90’s when I went to Poland during the Solidarity movement. And, again I used it in Bosnia as Fulbright Teaching Scholar in 2005. Now I am thinking I need to use it in the US as we face our own economic resurgence.

I always begin by checking to see if there are ice cream shops all over the place and if there are multiple flavors of ice cream. Do the bakeries have many varieties of bread, or is it just plain old, delicious but basic, peasant style loaves? Are there cakes and cookies with delicately decorated tops, sometimes prettier than they are tasty! Are there hypermarkets that look a lot like Costco or Sam’s Club with all kinds of fat free or skim milk or gluten free labeled foods?

But along with all the choices and options and more westernized grand scale shopping options are there are also places where skinned lambs, or ducks, or pig heads, are hanging on hooks, not refrigerated? Are these meats soon to be sold or even roasted in some big glass furnace-like thing right on the street? Are there still the small farm stands with older women and men, who probably aren’t as old as you think or are far older than you could even guess, selling just enough for dinner tonight? Are these options all together within walking distance from each other or are the neighborhoods very separate?

Are fancy cakes and sweets and hypermarkets in the neighborhoods for tourists or expats living abroad or the upwardly mobile of that city? Are these the neighborhoods around the city centers or out in emerging neighborhoods or in exclusive city enclaves? Clearly there is the possibility that both kinds of shops can coexist but I think it requires a bit of deliberation that often isn’t considered until it might be too late.

I judge a city’s economic health by access to thrift stores with second hand clothing, furniture and household good. You have to have some disposable income if you can dispose of your “goods” to these shops or if you can afford to purchase someone else’s “goods”. If my experience is at all indicative of an economic emerging process then the first step is that much of this second hand thrift, used clothing and other stuff, comes from somewhere else; because the country doesn’t have enough to give away or is steeped in an ethic that uses something until it is unusable.

In Poland and Bosnia, Germany was the source of the original “thrift” sold in these stores. While this second hand or thrift market is emerging for the average working family, at the same time the group who seems to have much of the disposable income is the teen market. Now just after the emerge of the thrift market, we can see things like the British shop Miss Selfridges, United Colors of Benetton’s and many high end Italian fashion boutiques, comparable to the kinds of shops you would see in Lincoln Park or Woodfield Mall in the Chicago area. So there an emerging market economy and some retail industry emerging even as unemployment is still very high.

These are the indicators I use when I am traveling and they have in fact served me well as very quick and albeit general snapshot of life in a particular location.

But as the US faces its own very serious economic downturn can I use the same indicators to judge our movement upward? Is the variety of ice cream or bakery goods the right indicator, or might it be the number of people who now shop at those thrift or second hand stores. Could it be the escalating prices in the thrift stores as they become the first stop on any shopping spree? Is the movement back to shopping locally and getting just enough for dinner tonight a move that helps us keep track of our spending but also supports our neighbors and friends?

I am still working on the answers to this question, and will keep you posted.

Thoughts on Green

I have been revisiting some of my notes from my time in Sarajevo and thought I would post that which I think stand the test of a bit of time. This posting reminds me of the differences in perception that you can have based on differences in previous experiences. Right this moment I am in the North Woods of Wisconsin in the Chequamegon Nicolet National Forest and to me it is green green green. And yet some of the locals are talking about how the drought has changed the color of the season. It reminded me .....

Hi all, This has been a lovely weekend, warm and sunny and I got a chance to spend lots of time outside, doing my errands and just walking. When I tell anyone from Sarajevo that I live in Grbavice (grh bah veet sah) they say "oh how wonderful there is so much green space." And I have been thinking boy that is not my first impression...but after this weekend and all the walking my thoughts have changed...

Green Space of Grbavice

Green space that while green is also rich with colorful graffiti and just bad scribbling on walls

Green space that has playground equipment that is always in use and grounds that are spotted with long standing litter

Green space that has many brown spots and weedy patches though also green

Green space that has lots of dirty and pock marked concrete structures that children play tennis around or soccer over or just sit on to talk to each other

Green space that requires visitors to stand as many of the wooden seats of the benches are missing while the iron ends remain

Green space that is surrounded by burned out buildings that almost look like ancient cathedrals with empty arched windows and missing roofs and trees sprouting to the light

Green space, littered, graffiti-ed, and dis-repaired as it is, represents an unexplainable freedom just because children can be outside fearing only the routine playground hazards