Lift Up Your Hearts!

Simplicity Parenting:  Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids by Kim John Payne with Lisa M. Ross (Ballantine Books, 2009)

This review was interrupted so that I could write the Things Dr. Spock Won't Tell You post, simply so I could reference it here.  When I get around to updating my list of favorite childrearing books, Simplicity Parenting will be there.

Insert here the usual disclaimer:  I don't agree with all the author says.  But there is so much of value here; I'd recommend it to all parents and parents-to-be.  Grandparents, too, and even those without children in their lives.  Because the book is as much about simplicity as it is about parenting.

I won't be able to do justice to the content of the book—and I sent it back to the library in part because I knew that if I had it I'd take too much time trying to do just that.  But I'll attempt a one-line summary:  There are incalculable advantages to a child's well-being to be found in simplicity, rhythm, and clutter-free living. 

Most of the ideas in the book are not new to me.  Perhaps one reason I like it so much is that it resonates well with theories I'd already encountered (and appreciated) over the last thirty-odd years.  Simplicity Parenting connects the dots, and its strength lies in its comprehensiveness, its gentle encouragment, and above all in its practical suggestions.  No matter how hurried, harried, stressed, and cluttered your world is, Kim John Payne convinces you that the benefits of simplicity are possible, taken in small steps and beginning exactly where you are.

When I return a book to the library with the review not yet written, you get more quotations, because I have to transcribe them all, not knowing which I will want for the review.  And once they've been typed ... generally they get included.

First, the table of contents:

• Why Simplify?
• Soul Fever
• Environment
• Rhythm
• Schedules
• Filtering Out the Adult World
• Simplicity Parenting to Go

In terms of areas to change I usually see two categories:  what is important, and what is doable.  What seems the most important is usually not; what is most doable is the place to begin.  If you do enough that is doable, you will get to the important, and your motivation will be fueled by your success. [emphasis mine]

The above are probably my absolute favorite lines in the book; if there's a mantra to protect the overwhelmed from paralyzing depression, this is it.

Simplification is a process; a pebble dropped in the waters of a family’s daily life.  It inspires changes that expand throughout the home, touching each member of the family and their relationships.

It takes time to reduce, to say “no thanks” and mean it, to the distractions and excesses that have overwhelmed our daily lives.  And changing a family’s direction isn’t easy, especially when life feels like a cyclone. … The process of simplification—a shifting of a family’s core axis—is usually driven by a parent’s simple desire to protect the ease and wonder of their children’s early years.  I’ve seen the wisdom of starting small, of beginning with the possible, relishing the results, and allowing success to then fuel the process.  I’ve found that what works best is to simplify the child’s life first:  to declutter their overloaded rooms, diets, and schedules, and to increase the rhythm and regularity of the home.

There is a period of adjustment to a more rhythmic, less frenzied lifestyle, which will be longer the older your kids are. … Your quiet unwillingness to back down will help ease this transition toward a new and usually appreciated family norm.

More effective discipline is invariably an outgrowth of the simplification process.

More often than not, the author's first recommendation to the parents who come to him for help (one of his many hats is that of family counselor) is to radically reduce the number of toys available to the child.  He recommends first getting rid of everything that is broken, missing important pieces, unloved, or otherwise not a "good toy."  He gives examples of what makes a toy good, and does allow one exception:  If it was given by a person who will likely notice and be offended by its absence, tuck it away somewhere and bring it out when the person comes to visit.  I see some wisdom in this strategy, but two faults:  (1) I should think most gift-givers would like to know if a gift is unwelcome, so as not to continue wasting time and money on something that is seen as a burden, and (2) eventually one of the children will say something like, "I'm glad you're here Grandma; we only get to play with X when you come to visit."  Chances are that even after radical reduction, a modern child will still have more toys than Payne recommends; these go into a "toy library" and are brought out on a one-in, one-out basis.  The same procedure is applied to books.

Our purpose here [in drastically reducing the number of books readily available to a child at any given time] is not to discourage reading, but to allow the child to really concentrate on, and revel in, whatever they are reading (or doing) at any given time.

Parents are often surprised by the power of less as it relates to everyday choices.  We live in a country and era that equate “choice” with “freedom.”  Yet for young children, “freedom of choice” about every small detail in their day—everything they eat, wear, or do—can be a paralyzing burden.

Only with less can a child learn what it is that they do like, and what speaks to them.  When their expectations are always met—even anticipated—their will is left flaccid and weak.

Yes, yes, I know; that's a painful sentence, especially since it could have been fixed simply by casting the whole thing in the plural. 

This or that remarkable new toy will not make  your child more creative, socially adept, or smarter, despite all the claims its manufacturer makes. … If you feel pressured as a parent to buy a toy because you fear that without it your child will “fall behind” or not “measure up” to other kids his or her age, chances are it is not a toy you want to buy.  I’m not suggesting that such a toy might be harmful; I’m suggesting that thinking about toys in this way can be.

Although on the surface the book comes across as negative about "educational toys," I think the author and I are not so far apart on this as it appears at first.  It’s true that when I consider toys one of my first concerns is always its educational value.  All toys teach.  The question is, what are they teaching?  I’m fairly certain Payne would not approve of the PowerPoint shows I make for our grandkids; after all, they’re basically high-tech flash cards, and flash cards are for crazy parents who want to make their kids into baby valedictorians, right?  Well, no.  I see these shows as much more as homemade books that are not only educational but fun, and if they’re not as good as reading with a grandchild in my lap, they’re the best I can do when the closest grandkids are over 1000 miles away.  They also work great when repeated reading requests have completely worn out my voice….  But whether or not Payne would buy that argument, we certainly agree on a preference for simple toys that encourage creativity, over noisy, flashing electronics, even if to me the issue is primarily one of educational value.

I think it is important that, whenever possible, what a child touches be real.  A plastic hammer has no solidity, no weight or heft in the hands of a five-year-old.  Even small versions of real tools are preferable to such blatantly false imitations.  Granted, a child must be taught how to use real tools, and monitored for a time.  But with such play comes the bonus of genuine involvement and mastery.  A small worktable or bench [or kitchen counter!], preferably right alongside the larger one used by Mom or Dad, can involve a child to lesser and greater degrees over many years.

By keeping [toy storage] low—at a child’s level—and movable (that is, in baskets or carts that can be pulled out), you are inviting a child’s participation in cleanup.  If the bin or toy chest is unmovable, a child will usually clean up … one … item … at … a … time.  First they’ll bring this one over to dump in the bin, then they’ll go back for this very interesting one, which really needs to be looked at more carefully, because really, when it is connected with this one over here.… The child is fully involved again, but not in cleaning up.  If the basket can be slid to the child, then he or she can use both hands to tidy up staying right there, engaged, until the task is done.

By displaying and playing from one basket at a time, a child is better able to focus while playing, and to clean up.  Upending huge bins of toys sometimes seems like a bonanza, a luxury of possibilities.  In daily life terms, however, doing so just creates, and re-creates, chaos.  Areas of clutter around the house tend to be hot spots for difficulties with transitions and discipline.  The forces of time and space naturally collide where there is too little time and too much stuff.  Kids tend to spin out in response to too many things, making cleanup and transitions even more problematic.

How many toys can your child (depending on their age) put away, by themselves, in five minutes?  Let that be your guide.  Reinforce the notion by storing most toys out of view and by saying, when necessary:  “That’s enough toys out now.”

Kids don’t need many toys to play, or any particular one.  What they need most of all is unstructured time.

Time, the rhythms of daily life, and "decluttering" family activities are the focus of a goodly section of the book.  What struck me immediately—which will surprise not one of my readers—is that, in all the author's suggestions for redeeming a family's time, the eight hours or so given over each day to school is never questioned.  When we made the decision to abandon that rat race, time figured in many of our "Fifty Reasons for Homeschooling," and almost a quarter-century later, I'd give it even more prominence.

Time, which can seem like an unpredictable tyrant, pulling and pushing a child through the day, is tamed and tied down with family dinners, reading before bed, with chores and unscheduled play, and the “compass kisses” (north, south, east, and west) bestowed before they head out the door.  Only with regularity can the joy of the unexpected and the luxury of the unplanned find a place in the home, too.  [emphasis mine]

Life today for most families is characterized more by randomness and improvisation than rhythm.  Tuesday wash day?  Cookies and milk after school?  Sunday roast beef dinner? … Whenever I ask a mother or father to describe for me a “typical day” in their home, nine times out of ten they begin by saying there is no “typical.”

Increasing the rhythm of your home life is one of the most powerful ways of simplifying your children’s lives. … It will also simplify—not complicate—yours.  And it can be done.

Rhythm calms and secures children, grounding them in the earth of family so they can branch out and grow.  The implication of rhythms is that there is an “author” behind how we do things as a family.  Parental authority is strengthened by rhythms; and “authority” is established that is gentle and understandable.  “This is what we do” also says, “There is order here, and safety.”

For parents, the advantages of rhythm are equally pronounced.  Rhythm carves the necessary channels for discipline, making it more intrinsic than imposed.  Where well-established rhythms exist, there is much less parental verbiage, less effort, and fewer problems around transitions.

Parents also suffer the effects of a chaotic, arrhythmic home life.  When life is a series of improvisations and emergencies, each day different from the next, children don’t know if they’re coming or going.  As parents, at least you know.  You know that you are coming and going at the same time, crazy busy, and no matter how adept you may be at “multitasking,” you feel stressed by it all.  Beaten down, mentally and physically.  Yes, rhythm makes children feel more secure.  Absolutely.  But a sense of rhythm makes adults calmer, too, and less plagued by parental craziness.  With consistent structures in place, you’ll feel less like a Border collie, constantly nipping at your children’s heels.

When we open up our child’s schedules, we make room for anticipation.  Just as it’s hard to cherish a toy that’s buried in the middle of a pile, it is hard to anticipate something when we’re always busy, or when we’re trying to do everything now.

One of the simplest, purest forms of stability or predictability in daily life is politeness.  It is a level of communication and interaction that can be counted on, that builds trust.  When you ask me for something, you say “please”; when I respond to your request, you say “thank you,” and I say “you’re welcome.” What could be more predictable?  In the flow of the day’s words, noises, shouts, and various utterances, this polite exchange stands out for children like a nursery rhyme, secure and familiar.  It is also a code.  In its regularity, politeness affirms and reaffirms our connection; the way we treat each other.

Some people may feel that politeness, especially for young children, is a form of blind obedience, or enforced conformity.  I take a different view.  Politeness is one of the simplest ways to establish a base beat of predictability in the home. … Politeness practiced in the home is a very basic, simple way to give children deep feelings of safety.

 A third area of major concern is too much adult information, whether from the media or from careless adult conversation.  (I would add, from other children who have been exposed to TMAI.)

Banning the television … while the kids are very young is the most controversial of my recommendations for simplifying screens.  I have seen firsthand how remarkably effective it can be in honoring the tremendous growth and creativity of early childhood, as well as its simpler, slower pace.  My experience has left me no doubt that for most families, the benefits of this step far outweigh its difficulty.  I would also recommend that children under seven not spend their time on computers, video games, or handheld electronic devices.

Obviously, I would not agree with the all-out ban-till-seven rule.  But my support of some "screen time" comes with the requirement that the quantity be a very small percentage of the child's play time, and the subject something that is better accomplished with the electronic device than without.  (As an example, a video can provide theater performances to children who would otherwise, for reasons of expense or attention span, miss out. In our case, it was Gilbert & Sullivan.)  It goes without saying that the adults in the family should be good models in this regard.

I am suggesting … that parents consciously say no thanks to media overexposure [for themselves].  Limit or cut your use of those media that alarm rather than inform.  It can make a dramatic difference in your emotional life, and the emotional climate of your home, when you refuse to allow your fear to be provoked, stoked, and incited several times a day. … [Many] parents today are better “informed” than their parents were, but they’re also much more nervous.  Their emotional well-being is being eroded by media that, if allowed, can easily saturate their lives.  Media that exploit our deepest, most primal urge to protect our children.   Yet, as parents, we need to be more than just our desire to protect, no matter how noble and important that is.  We need to live with confidence, to parent with a sense of strength and openness, and perhaps most of all, a sense of humor.

[A]dult anxieties and concerns should not be the atmosphere, a haze of too much information, that [our children] breathe.  Children need to know that theirs is a good world.  They need to feel that, sheltered by those they love, they are where they should be.  They have a place, in a time and a world of hope and promise.

[W]hat children mainly hear, in your wash of words, is the current of emotion running through them.  And what they understand, more than the details, or any words we could possibly use are our actions.  When we speak of others with respect—whether it’s our mother, bus driver, the president, or the man at the checkout stand—no explanations or distinctions are necessary.

Do you love the times you live in?  We project a general sense of optimism to children when we talk less (with them) about things they may not understand and definitely have no pwer to affect.  The details are often lost on them, but the way we move in the world determines their view.  We may not be crazy about this or that politician, or the politics in our workplace, but as adults we know things change.  We know we have the recourse of our actions and our vote.

When we talk less, we convey a sense of confidence and competence in the world, a world where people strive to be just.  There’s less need to explain, expound, justify, clarify, or qualify—and our meaning is clearer—when we pay more attention (as children do) to the tone of our words and our actions.  When I remind myself about ‘talking less,” I sometimes think of the character Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.  In the midst of a difficult, even scary situation, it was his calm and consistent manner more than his words that spoke to his children.  Such security is priceless.  It is a solid foundation.  It helps a child through those dark nights when, in your ham costume, you can’t see clearly.

One of the best filters I know for talking less has been attributed to [many sources]. …  It’s easier to remember than to put into practice.  I find this filter works wonders for parents, wherever and whenever they remember to use it, in helping them speak less, and more consciously:

Before you say something, ask yourself these three questions:  Is it true?  Is it kind?  Is it necessary?

I don’t take necessary to mean that everything we say has to be instructive, or have some larger educational or inspirational purpose.  Instead, I take necessary to mean “more important than silence.” What enables us to read a word is the white space all around it, and without some intervening quiet we couldn’t hear a thing.  Silence is important, especially in a noisy family in a noisy world.  And noise is self-perpetuating, so if your kids grow accustomed to a “noisy norm” they will always try to create and maintain that level of clamor.  [Now that's a scary thought.]

And a few more quotations, on random topics:

Requests may seem like “gentler” forms of communication [than straightforward instructions], but with so many of them they’re very easy to ignore, and their uniformity makes it hard for a child to know what’s really important.  They invite response, but not really, so the overall effect is one of background noise.  “So Ben, what do you think?  Wanna get ready for bed now?  Brush your teeth, buddy, okay?”  [versus]  “Bedtime, Ben.  You know what to do.”

[Journalist Sharon Begley] describes how neurologists have been astounded by the measurable, replicable effects of meditation practice on the mind and brain.  Their brain scan evidence showed that the neural activity of highly trained monks was “off the charts” (in relation to standard measures and in relation to the neural activity of more novice monks), even when they were not meditating.  The areas of the brain where such emotional complexities as maternal love and empathy are believed to be centered (caudate and right insula), and feelings of joy and happiness (left prefrontal cortex), were actually anatomically enlarged, structurally altered by virtue of the monks’ lives and their meditation practices.

Kids are not monks who can meditate for hours a day, but they do the equivalent when they are involved in play, in deep, uninterrupted play. 

Alas, the author does not provide a reference for this.  It makes sense—not only for children at play but for anyone allowed to work with intense focus, and without interruption, at an interesting and pleasurable activity.  But I’d like to see some documentation.

The long process toward a baby’s first steps is driven by her desire to see and experience more of the world.  From turning her head to the side, to pushing up on her elbows while lying on her belly, and eventually to rolling over, each phase requires repetitive trial and error, and great effort. … [H]uman development takes time, even if most infants manage it within a year and a half or so.  It requires many hours of “floor time,” of stretching, scooching, and crawling about.

There has been a dramatic rise in “sensory integration” therapy in the past ten years, which strives to build neural connections and pathways that were not established naturally through these early childhood activities.  In our hurry to have our children walk or in our anxiousness to serve them, we may cause them to skip stages essential for neural development. 

The developmental purpose of adolescence’s polarities is a zig-zaggedy path toward self-regulation.  We now know the brain is still developing during these years, particularly those sections that are critical for judgment and reason.

The book mentions several times the “normal” instability and contrariness of teenagers, and certainly we hear the same refrain in the news:  Teens can't be expected to control themselves; that part of the brain isn't well-formed yet.  Teens can't be expected to think logically, react politely, or even to get out of bed on time, because that's just the way they're wired.  What I want to know is, if these brain differences are real, what is cause, and what is effect?  In the past, teens did adult work and took on adult responsibilities.  Many of my ancestors were married in their teen years, and raised successful families.  Children were crowned kings, and though they had regents who held the real power, the monarchs often took matters into their own hands at sixteen or so.  David Farragut commanded a ship at age 12.  Is it possible that brains develop faster when more is expected of them?

A wonderful counterbalance to “entertaining” children is to involve them in a task, in the “work” of family life.  Home is the environment a child will know best, and they need to affect their environment through their own efforts.  As small beings they can feel like inferior, passive observers of all that happens around them.  A sense of industry—of busyness and purpose—counteracts feelings of overwhelm. … Children who grow up as little doers, making Christmas breakfast and participating in the chores of daily life, will already have an inner gesture, a posture toward competency, activity, and autonomy.

Stories affect the way children learn to narrate their own lives, and influence the stories they will tell themselves.  Einstein once said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.  If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”  It is all there, in fairy tales:  truth, beauty, goodness, struggles and second chances, mistakes, conflicts, promises, and magic; archetypal lessons for a lifetime.

Finally, the last word:

Is there a step in the process of simplification that seems absolutely doable, something you know is possible now, in your own home?  This is your starting point, the trailhead of your path toward the larger changes you envision.  Once you have a clear image of this task—what you need to do and what your daily life will look like when it is done—get started.  Step into that picture. … Begin.

There's almost nothing in Simplicity Parenting for which I can't see some application in my own life, grandmother that I am.  I hope to incorporate several of its ideas in my Foundations 2013 program.  Indeed, some are there already, for as I said at the beginning of this post, the book is not so much new as it is comprehensive, inspirational, and practical.

Guitar Zero:  The Science of Becoming Musical at Any Age by Gary Marcus (Penguin Books, 2012)

Hooray for our library for ordering this book after I requested it!  Janet has written a great review already (which is why I wanted to read Guitar Zero in the first place), so this will be short.  For what the book's really about, read what she has to say; I'll just mention a few of my impressions.  I have 36 Post-It flags marking sections that especially interested me, but have neither time nor energy to type out more than a few.

Guitar Zero is a much better book than Kluge, also by Gary Marcus.  A bit of the professional arrogance I talked about in my review of that book comes through here when he's talking about the brain, but it's much less, and I might not even have noticed it had I read this one first.  Now I understand why Janet perceived him as very humble:  His first serious attempts to tackle playing the guitar, at nearly 40 years old, with no musical background except listening, and the handicap of an extremely poor sense of rhythm, took place during a two-week stay at the family's summer cottage, where he practiced for several hours each day, for two weeks, where not only his wife but also his in-laws could hear every painful note of his miserable beginnings.  To me, who with few exceptions won't sing or play a note unless I'm completely alone in the house, Marcus's behavior speaks of humility at a level I can't even imagine.  He also makes no attempt to hide his musical ignorance, though his musical learning is very impressive.

It was fascinating, in reading, to learn just how vastly ignorant I am of the kind of music most people love and know best.  I've kept myself consciously and deliberately ignorant of rock 'n' roll and its spawn, ever since my sixth-grade art teacher inflicted on us every day in class the music of an oddly-named British group called the Beatles.  So it was with a kind of perverse delight that I read Marcus's careful, meticulous explanation of the parts of music I've known since elementary school while tossing around names of bands and singers and musical techniques with the assumption that of course they needed no explanation.

Just a few quotes:

By around six or seven months, infants start to become sensitive to the shapes of melodies.  Given enough exposure, they can detect when a note has changed, recognize a short melody even when it has been transposed upward or downward in pitch, and sometimes remember melodies for weeks.

And maybe even younger.  I think of two different instances I've read about:  one where the sibling of a young Suzuki violin student clearly recognized, after birth, the Vivaldi concerto she had heard her brother practicing during the previous nine months; the other the newborn baby of a professional cellist, who responded similarly to the works her mother had practiced while pregnant.

The process of forming chords [on the guitar] is further complicated by the fact that one's fingers don't naturally move independently.  (Try, for example, to bring all of your fingers together, with your palm facing down, and then slowly move your pinkie back and forth; your ring finger, and possibly your thumb, will be tempted to go along for the ride.)

I have no trouble doing this, but it's easier with my left hand than with my right, the legacy of my very-long-ago violin playing in school and some teenaged efforts on folk guitar.  I never got above the barely-capable level of playing, but the circuits for the necessary independent finger movement are still imprinted on my brain.

Marcus spends a lot of time analyzing the differences and similarities between music and language.  Most of it makes sense, but I do quarrel with some of his reasoning.  He makes much of the fact that nearly every child learns to speak, and easily, whereas music is difficult to learn, not natural.  My point is that children are naturally and constantly exposed to language from before birth, have great incentive to learn to talk, and are constantly encouraged in their efforts.  What if they were similarly exposed and encouraged in music?

[Speaking of a master teacher] The single point that Michele was most adamant about was a rule for when parents should correct a child's mistake:  never, ever until the child had made that error at least three times.  [P]arents who corrected their children could easily wind up destroying their kids' motivation.

Many people probably imagine that kids are simply quicker learners, but laboratory research suggests otherwise.  In the few direct comparisons of "procedural" learning in children and college-aged adults, adults actually tend to be quicker learners than children. ... If kids outshine adults, it's probably not because they are quicker to learn but simply because they are more persistent; the same drive that can lead them to watch the same episode of a TV show five days in a row without any signs of losing interest can lead a child who aspires to play an instrument to practice the same riff over and over again.

I figured out one of the reasons why music had always been such a struggle for me:  rhythm turns out to be deeply tied to the balance-tracking vestibular system.  Since I was a child, my vestibular system has been lousy.  I could never bear to ride on a swing, despised being bounced up and down, routinely became nauseated when sitting in the back of the car, and opted out of roller coasters altogether.  A new study showed that electrical stimulation of the vestibular system can directly affect rhythmic perceptions, and in retrospect it is easy to see why rhythm has always posed a challenge for me.  It's a pretty safe bet that Jimi Hendrix enjoyed being bounced as a baby a lot more than I did.

Guitar Zero is almost enough to make me pick up an instrument again ... if only I could be humble enough to let someone hear me.  And who am I kidding?  Marcus proved (as John Holt did before him) that it's never too late to learn, what would I give up in order to find the hours and hours I'd need to practice?

Here are a few more quotes I pulled from Half the Sky before relinquishing it to the library.

Rape has become endemic in South Africa, so a medical technician named Sonette Ehlers developed a product that immediately grabbed national attention there. ... [The Rapex] resembles a tube, with barbs inside.  The woman inserts it like a tampon, with an applicator, and any man who tries to rape the woman impales himself on the barbs and must go to to an emergency room to have the Rapex removed.  When critics complained that it was a medieval punishment, Ehlers responded tersely:  "A medieval device for a medieval deed."

There's a certain poetic justice in the device, for sure, though I believe the inventor is slandering the medieval era.  One can only hope the women survive the mens' reactions.  Though rape is famously the "fate worse than death," I'm not sure the victims in Darfur would agree.

In Darfur, after interviewing several women who told of having been raped when leaving their camps to get firewood, we asked the obvious question:  "If women are raped when they get firewood, then why don't they stay in the camps?  Why don't the men collect firewood?"

"When men leave the camp, they're shot dead," one of the women explained patiently.  "When the women leave they're only raped."  In almost every conflict, mortality is disporportionately male.  Bult whereas men are the normal victims of war, women have become a weapon of war—meant to be disfigured or tortured to terrorize the rest of the population.

There are good practical as well as cultural reasons for women to accept abuse rather than fight back and risk being killed.  But the reality is that as long as women and girls allow themselves to be prostituted and beaten, the abuse will continue.  When more girls scream and protest, when they run away from the brothels, then the business model of trafficking will be undermined.

The response of an Indian border guard, when asked why they were making no effort to stop the trafficking of Nepalese girls to prostitution in India:

The intelligence officer laughed genially and threw up his hands.  "Prostitution is inevitable."  He chuckled.  "There has always been prostitution in every country.  And what's a young man going to do from the time when he turns eighteen until when he gets married at thirty?"

"Well, is the best solution really to kidnap Nepali girls and imprison them in Indian brothels?"

The officer shrugged, unperturbed.  "It's unfortunate," he agreed.  "These girls are sacrificed so that we can have harmony in society.  So that good girls can be safe."

But many of the Nepali girls being trafficked are good girls, too."

"Oh, yes, but those are peasant girls.  They can't even read.  They're from the countryside.  The good Indian middle-class girls are safe. ...

"I've got it!  You know, in the United States we have a lot of problem with harmony in society.  So we should start kidnapping Indian middle-class girls and forcing them to work in brothels in the United States. Then young American men could have fun, too, don't you think?  That would improve our harmony in society!"

There was an ominous silence, but finally the police officer roared with laughter.

"You are joking!" the officer said, beaming.  "That's very funny!"

In 2000, the Netherlands formally legalized prostitution (which had always been tolerated) in the belief that it would then be easier to provide health and labor checks to prostitutes, and to keep minors and trafficking victims from taking up the trade.  In 1999, Sweden took the opposite approach, criminalizing the purchase of sexual services, but not the sale of them by prostututes; a man caught paying for sex is fined (in theory, he can be imprisoned for up to six months), while the prostitute is not punished.  This reflected the view that the prostitute is more a victim than a criminal.

A decade later, Sweden's crackdown seems to have been more successful in reducing trafficking and forced prostitution.  The number of prostitutes in Sweden dropped by 41 percent in the first five years, according to one count, and the price of sex dropped, too—a pretty good indication that demand was down. ... [T]hat decline has made Sweden a less attractive destination for traffickers ... [the girls are] taken to Holland instead.  In the Netherlands, legalization has facilitated health checkups ... but there's no evidence that sexually transmitted diseases ... or HIV has declined.  Pimps in the Netherlands still offer underage girls, and trafficking and forced prostitution continue. ... Customers can easily find an underage Eastern European girl working as a prostitute in Amsterdam, but not in Stockholm.

[P]ast attempts to assist girls have sometimes backfired.  In 1993, Senator Tom Harkin wanted to help Bangladeshi girls laboring in sweatshops, so he introduced legislation that would have banned imports made by workers under the age of fourteen.  Bangladeshi factories promptly fired tens of thouseands of these young girls, and many of them ended up in brothels and are presumably now dead of AIDS.

The economic explosion in Asia was, in large part, an outgrowth of the economic empowerment of women.  "They have smaller fingers, so they're better at stitching," the manager of a purse factory explained to us.  "They're obedient and work harder than men," said the head of a toy factory.  "And we can pay them less."

Implicit in what we're saying about China is something that sounds shocking to many Americans: Sweatshops have given women a boost. ... In poor countries, women don't have many job options.  In agriculture,for example, women typically aren't as strong as men and thus are paid less.  Yet in the manufacturing workd, it's the opposite. ... So the rise of manufacturing has generally raised the opportunities and status of women.

Microfinance has done more to bolster the status of women, and to protect them from abuse, than any laws could accomplish.  Capitalism, it turns out, can achieve what charity and good intentions sometimes cannot.

Alasdair Neale guest conductor
Sarah Chang, violin

Gioachino Rossini:  Semiramide:  Overture
Samuel Barber: Concerto for Violin, op. 14
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E minor, op. 64

As much as I like music, it's not often a "happiness moment" coincides with a concert.  (Mostly because the particular kind of happiness I'm documenting is rare.)  But Sunday was a bright exception.  I had been particularly looking forward to the afternoon concert, because we've loved Sarah Chang's violin playing since she was playing on a quarter-sized violin.  But Ms. Chang's lovely performance was not the most memorable event of the concert.

Wow.

How often does the orchestra outshine the soloist?

We love the Barber Violin Concerto and we love Sarah Chang.

But hands down the best of the concert was the Tchaikovsky.  Porter called it, "possibly the best I've ever heard the Orlando Philharmonic play."  I don't care much for the modern habit of giving standing ovations so often that ordinary applause makes musicians think, "What did we do wrong?"  But this one was truly well-deserved.  The music came alive, it was meaningful, it was powerful—and what's more, it looked as if the musicians were enjoying themselves.  This is hardly an obscure piece—and yet I can say that I've never heard a performance of Tchaikovsky 5 that moved me more.

Plus, it really helped that the concert was at 3 p.m.  I'm far from my best and most appreciative when I'm struggling to stay awake.  Not to mention the earlier time is safer for the drive home.  :)

You may wonder, considering how disappointed I was by Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, why we decided to go see The Hobbit Saturday night.  But we had a free movie pass that was about to expire; moreover, I was feeling more kindly toward the LOTR movies, having watched my nephew spend much of his Christmas vacation devouring the books—which I doubt he would have done without having been inspired by the movies.  So last night we ventured into our local theater for the first time in nearly five years.

Yes, we were disappointed.  Peter Jackson is consistent, and so am I.  I could very nearly simply quote my review of The Fellowship of the Ring for The Hobbit.  I fault it for the same lack of attention to the basic nature of the characters (though not as badly as in LOTR), the same gratuitous rewriting and addition of scenes, the same modern-action-film-with-swords emphasis on battles and chase scenes.  In the middle of a fight that wouldn't end, Porter and I looked at each other and said, "b-o-o-o-r-i-n-g."  So sad to feel that way about a movie made to honor one of my very favorite books, one I can read over and over again without coming close to boredom.

I'd read that The Hobbit movie was not intended to simply tell the story in the book, but would have some scenes added to include some of the backstory and tie it in more directly with LOTR, and I was okay with that.  That's not at all the same thing as directly contradicting the book, which, for example, the eagle rescue scene does in spades.

As in the previous movies, this one does hobbits and the Shire best:  believable, beautiful, noble, inspirational.  The other races are more caricatures and too alien.  The character of the dwarves (that's the way the word is spelled in the book, complete with explanation) is downright maligned.  Radagast is played as a drug-crazed hippie; elves are wrongly cast as vegetarians.  The trolls, goblins, orcs, and wargs are over-the-top in their ugliness and puerility, so that they come across as more disgusting than evil.  On the other hand, Gollum, though not the character as I imagined him, is very well conceived and acted (as he was in the other films).

There are some good lines, and some funny ones, though too much of the humor is of the snot-in-the-soup kind.

I've said before that an important key to good fantasy is that if you want the audience to accept an outlandish premise (e.g. magic), the rest of the story must be down-to-earth and believable (minus the magic, Hogwarts is a normal English boarding school).  Watching the credits, I commented that it sure takes a lot of people to make a movie.  With all those folks, couldn't they have sprung for two more?  A physicist and an EMT come to mind.  When big things fall or are thrown they look too much like models (with modern CGI there's no excuse for not doing better), and even dwarfs, to be at all "realistic," can't fall a few hundred feet, have massive timbers land on top of them, then get up and go about their business with no more than a brief groan.

Would I recommend The Hobbit movie?  Only for those who aren't likely ever to read the book.  I definitely wouldn't recommend it for grandchildren.  The PG-13 rating is well deserved (and frankly I don't think anyone, of any age, can benefit from so much violence).

Still, it has its good points, and I have to keep in mind how much stronger it is, even in its weaknesses, than most contemporary fare.

The best of the movie?  Bilbo and the Shire, the music (though it owes a lot to Braveheart), and the awesome New Zealand scenery.

Half the Sky:  Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

Inspired by the PBS documentary and the recommendation of a friend, I put myself on the library waiting list for Half the Sky.  As usually happens, it became available at an inconvenient time, and I had to return it to the library in a hurry.  That was back in October, so I'm trying to craft this review from my hastily-scribbled (typed) notes and quotes.

The book is better than the television show, if only because it features fewer American pop-culture icons and more real people.  It also, of course, gives more detail, though there is something to be said for the visceral effects of seeing and hearing the people behind the words.  Both left me with two distinct reactions, neither of which is probably what the authors had in mind.

When reading (or watching) these stories of unbelieveable brutality and oppression of women, the first, and no doubt intended, reaction is, "What are we doing to our women and girls, to the majority of the population of the world, to half of the very image of God?"  Particularly since the authors relate all these horrors while barely touching on the problem of sex-selective abortion.  And yet my lasting impression followed almost immediately:  What have we done to our men and boys?  Not everyone will agree, but I say that there is something even worse than the atrocities committed upon these women, and that is being the kind of person who commits such acts.  Ultimately, no solution to the problem of violence against women will succeed unless the rehabilitation of men is also addressed.

Not that women, as a sex, are innocent:

In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains.  But it's not true.  Granted, men are often brutal to women.  Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughters' genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take thieir sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination.  One study suggests that women perpetrators were involved, along with men, in one quarter of the gang rapes in the Sierra Leone civil war.

But by and large, men have the power, and they use that power in ways that hurt women, even their own wives and daughters.

Some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes, but also by unwise spending—by men.  it is not uncommon to stumble across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito net and then find the child's father at a bar, where he spends $5 each week. ... Roughly 7 percent of the total spending of the poorest people in Indias's Maharashtra State went to sugar. ... [I]n much of the world even some of the poorest young men, both single and married, spend considerable sums on prostitutes. ... [A]t least in Udaipur, the malnutrition could in most cases be eliminated if families bought less sugar and tobacco. ... If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do in beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries.  Girls ... would be the biggest beneficiaries.

Or, as my son-in-law succinctly put it, "Men can't be trusted to bring home the bacon rather than eating it on the way home."

Why not?  Why is it that when women in poor countries get jobs, they use the money to feed and educate their children, but men spend their incomes (and their wives', if the money isn't hidden from them) on beer, cigarettes, and prostitutes?  It was (is) not always thus:  men used to be proud to support their families, and many still are.  Perhaps in this country one can cast some blame on feminism, which robbed men of the assurance that their own sacrifices were essential to their families' survival.  But in many poor countries little of the bread ever made it to the children's mouths until their mothers began earning it.  Here's one theory:

[Quoting David Landes, the eminent Harvard historian] The economic implications of gender discriminaion are most serious.  To deny women is to deprive a country of labor and talent, but—even worse—to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men.  One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment.

(On a side note, while I applaud the movement in some Christian circles to encourage boys and men in chivalry, graciousness, and love, I cringe when I see how often this is taught through the idea that boys are superior to girls—sometimes even to the extent of being stronger and wiser than their mothers!  As Landes said, this is not only harmful to their mothers and sisters, and future wives and daughters, but to the boys themselves.  Here's an article I ran into recently that addresses a related problem, and has the lovely title, Why You Should Stop Treating Your Husband Like a Toddler, and ACTUALLY Respect Him.)

On the bright side, as men see the economic potential and power of their wives, they often come to respect them more, and then see the value in educating their daughters.  On the other hand, there's a clear risk that they will only see the economic value, and women will find themselves further enslaved, working at a job, running the household as usual, and funding their husbands' bad habits as well.

Half the Sky rightly celebrates the efforts of women worldwide to address the problem of their own oppression, but it will take both men and women, working together, to address the heart of the tragedy.

I'll leave my second, and quite different, take-away from Half the Sky for another post.  I was going to add some more quotes, but as they, too, are on a different subject, so that will make a third post—a record for one book review, I think.

Kluge:  The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, by Gary Marcus (Mariner Books, 2008)

After reading Kluge, which only made my reading list because the author's Guitar Zero was unavailable, I'm all the more anxious to read the book that so impressed my daughter, because I found this one decidedly unimpressive.

I'll admit my prejudice up front:  Unless I've chosen a book for it's religious content, I don't like books that wear their faith ostentatiously.  Example:  A robust and glorious Christian faith shines better through every corner of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, without any direct mention of God, than the in-your-face faith of much of the "contemporary Christian fiction" genre.  Kluge makes this error loudly and heavily, and if it hadn't been for Janet's enthusiasm for Guitar Zero, I might have given up on Kluge.  To be honest, though, I have a terrible time dropping a book even if I've determined it isn't worth my time, on the thought that despite all appearances, the book just might get better.  And I'm glad I stuck with Kluge.

It's best, I think, to think of it as two parallel books.  One is Marcus's attempts to explain the quirks, foibles, imperfections, and out-and-out breakdowns of human mental systems, as failures of evolution.  Simply put, evolutionary processes, although able to produce remarkably functional, successful, and even beautiful organisms, usually stop short of the best.  With evolution, "good enough is better than perfect," and if a system works well enough to give a reproductive advantage, eons of selection are not likely to be unravelled even if a future organism would do better with a fresh start.  Thus as life evolves, new systems are layered on old ones, and the layers do not always interact in the most efficient manner.  The human brain is a "kluge," cobbled together from from parts as old as life and as recent as yesterday, and in human behavior, the rational, thinking part of the brain is often overruled by more primitive reactions.  I'm not doing justice to his thesis, but that's the gist.  This is the book I thought I was going to be reading, and like Made to Stick, is a good look at why we're not as rational as we think, how this weakness can be used by others to our detriment, and what we can do to mitigate the situation.

The second "book" is a fascinating view into the mind of a materialist.  I don't mean "materialist" in the sense of "consumerist," one who is driven by material desires, but one whose world-view is materialism ("a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter").  This is the in-your-face religion that I object to, and it begins in the second paragraph of the first page:

If mankind were the product of some intelligent, compassionate designer, our thoughts would be rational, our logic impeccable.  Our memory would be robust, our recollections reliable.  Our sentences would be crisp, our words precise, our languages systematic and regular....

And in the penultimate chapter:

It seems safe to say that no intelligent and compassionate designer would have built the human mind to be quite as vulnerable as it is.  Our mental fragility provides yet another reason to doubt that we are the product of deliberate design rather than chance and evolution.

This theme is repeated ad nauseam throughout the book:  If I were creating the world, I would have done X; since what I observe is Y, then there is no design and no designer (with or without evolution as part of the process).  Naturally, I rattled off several alternatives to his "my way or no way" argument with almost no thought at all.  (The world was created by a designer whose idea of the best design is different from his; the design was initially perfect but was later marred by other forces; there is/was a designer, but one who is not compassionate; it shouldn't be hard to come up with others.)

As put off as I initially was, this is actually as interesting as the other part of the book.  It was fascinating to see the world through the mind of one for whom evolution is not merely a mechanism, but a religion.  In many ways, Kluge is a remarkable attempt to make evolution answer the question that all religions and philosophies must wrestle with:  sin.  Of course Marcus does not call sin by that name, but that's what he's dealing with nonetheless.

To be human is to fight a lifelong uphill battle for self-control.  Why?  Because evolution left us clever enough to set reasonable goals but without the willpower to see them through.

In fact, Marcus deals with many of the great questions of mankind, and I find that commendable, even if some of his attempts to force answers out of evolution seem to me as stretched as the ancients' adding sphere upon sphere and complication upon complication in order to account for the motions of the heavenly bodies without considering that the earth might revolve around the sun.  Marcus wants a consistent, definitively explainable system—a desire as old as Job.

As interesting as his theories are, I don't like Marcus's ideal world.  He's much too enamored of computers, and repeatedly asserts that our minds are obviously defective because they don't work the way he would design them—like computers.  I like that our language is sometimes ambiguous, irregular, and unsystematic.  I'm glad I'm human, and not Vulcan.

Most of all, there seems to be no place in his ideal creation for free will (another difficult concept for any religion), which I believe explains much of the gulf between the intelligent, compassionate creator and the all-too-visible faults of the world we know.  It is also the capacity which—more than toolmaking, more than language, more than intelligence and the ability to reason—makes us truly human.

One thing that had impressed Janet with Guitar Zero was Marcus's humility.  Since I didn't notice that at all—"God should have done things the way I would have" is not exactly a humble attitude, and neither is "if you don't agree with me, there's something wrong with your brain"—I'm left wondering if it's a matter of personal growth over time (Kluge is the earlier book by four years), or the difference between his attitude toward something he knows he knows nothing about (music) and that toward his field of expertise (psychology).  Certainly Kluge has one significant mark of humility in my mind:  On the cover of the book the author is identified as simply "Gary Marcus."  I am not impressed by the habit of many authors of putting all possible letters prominently after their names:  John Doe, Phd, MD, LLD, etc.  Credentials are a good thing (Marcus is identified on the back cover as "a professor of psychology at New York University and the director of the NYU Child Language Center"), but I see no useful purpose in boasting about one's degrees on the front cover.

A couple of random quotes:

[Humans tend] to believe that what is familiar is good.  Take, for example, an odd phenomenon known as the "mere familiarity" effect:  if you ask people to rate things like the characters in Chinese writing, they tend to prefer those that they have seen before to those they haven't.  Another study, replicated in at least 12 different languages, showed that people have a surprising attachment to the letters found in their own names, preferring words that contain those letters to words that don't.  One colleague of mine has even suggested, somewhat scandalously, that people may love famous paintings as much for their familiarity as for their beauty.

Scandalously?  Not at all.  I thought it was obvious, and in large part a good thing, that familiarity with a subject increases appreciation which increases the desire to learn more which in turn increases familiarity.  It's a blessed cycle, unless there's something bad about the subject itself.  Isn't that a great deal of what parenting is all about, helping our children become familiar with, and thus inclining their hearts toward, the good, the true, and the beautiful?

Pay special attention ... to what some economists call "opportunity costs"; whenever you make an investment, financial or otherwise, ponder what else you might be doing instead.  If you're doing one thing, you can't do another—a fact that we often forget.  Say, for example, that people are trying to decide whether it makes sense to invest $100 million in public funds in a baseball stadium.  That $100 million may well bring some benefits, but few people evaluate such projects in the context of what else that money might do, what opportunities (such as paying down the debt to reduce future interest payments or building three new elementary schools) must be foresworn in order to make that stadium happen.  Because such costs don't come with a readily visible price tag, we often ignore them.  On a personal level, taking opportunity costs into account means realizing that whenever we make a choice to do something, such as watch television, we are using time that could be spent in other ways, like cooking a nice meal or taking a bike ride with our kids.

There's a lot more in Kluge I could talk about, but I'm thinking about opportunity costs now, so I'll stop here.

Manalive, by G. K. Chesterton (Dover, 2000, originally published in 1912 by the John Lane Company)

Orion is upside down.

My first view of the Southern Hemisphere sky; floating above a seemingly infinite abyss while snorkeling through crystal-clear water; reading C.K. Chesterton’s Manalive.   Awestruck, weak-kneed, disoriented, and just on the edge of fear.  How can I review a book that reviews me?

Reading Chesterton can be a lot like trying to drink from a waterfall.  I know I’m in the presence of a mind and a spirit much greater than my own.  There’s wordplay and swordplay; there are twists in the logic and logic in the twists.  It’s like riding a well-designed roller coaster, or skiing down a slope that’s just beyond your skill level.

I hear you muttering through your clenched teeth:  “Get on with it!  What is the book about?”  In a phrase:  the joy of being alive.

Okay, okay.  From the back cover:

Innocent Smith … is taken up by a fierce wind one day and dropped on the lawn of a boardinghouse inhabited by a group of disillusioned young people. … In the course of the book, Smith courts and remarries his wife repeatedly, lives in various houses, which all turn out to be his own, and attempts murder, but only succeeds in firing life into his victims. … Manalive is full of high-spirited nonsense expressing important ideas:  life is worth living, one can break with convention and still maintain moral and ethical standards, and much of the behavior that civilized man has been led to believe is wrong, isn’t wrong at all.

That’s about as good a summary as you’re going to get, though it is rather like trying to learn what a roller coaster is by consulting Merriam-Webster:  an elevated railway …  constructed with sharp curves and steep inclines on which cars roll.

You have to brave the ride.

Drive:  The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink (Riverhead Books, 2009)

Drive is yet another book I read because it was on my son-in-law's Amazon wish list.  We gave it to him for Christmas, and I hope he reads it soon so my daughter can read it, too.  Although the focus of the book is on motivation in business, the material is widely applicable, and I find it exciting.

I had barely begun the book when I exclaimed to myself, "Published in 2009?  This is news?  It sounds exactly like what we learned a decade ago from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan."  That was at a University of Rochester "Meliora Weekend" of lectures and seminars.  I looked up my journal entry from the time, to be certain:

Our next stop was the chapel, for “Your Personal Freedom” with Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, U of R psychology professors who are world renowned experts on autonomy and human motivation.  I found them fascinating, much more so than I’d expected.  From them I heard what I’d only heard before in Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, that rewards as well as punishments destroy intrinsic motivation.  They cited one experiment in which people were paid to do what they enjoyed doing, and were doing without pay, but then stopped doing once the pay stopped.  I spoke with them afterwards about Punished by Rewards, which they said is based on their research, only is a bit too polemic, too one-sided, missing out on the positive values of encouragement, but otherwise true.  I surprised myself by having the courage to speak up during the question and answer session.  They had talked a lot about motivation in schools, but never mentioned homeschooling.  Since I’m convinced that one of the best things about homeschooling is that so many home educated children develop strong intrinsic motivation, and a great love of learning, it seems to me an important phenomenon to investigate.  To my surprise, they have not studied it at all, and while they seemed to agree with me about the intrinsic motivation of homeschoolers, they were very cautious and seemed hesitant to appear to endorse homeschooling in any way.

I was so impressed, in fact, that I later bought Deci's book for laymen, Why We Do What We Do.

Sure enough, Pink quotes and references Deci and Ryan, Alfie Kohn, and others whose research was done even earlier.  But Drive is invaluable not only because he ties all the research together and extends it, but because despite the very clear and well-established case for the superiority of intrinsic motivation and the negative effect of "carrots and sticks" on motivation, engagement, and especially creativity,  no one is listening.  Well, not no one, but very few.  Pink sites some encouraging news from forward-thinking businesses, and he does not neglect the example of homeschoolers, particularly their unschooling subset.

The only thing I found annoying about Drive was Pink's repeated use of the phrase,  "The science says..." in exactly the same manner some people aver, "The Bible says...."  Overdone, either weakens the case being made.

Other than that, I have nothing negative to say.  It's a great book, full of even greater ideas.  I wish there were more practical examples in non-business areas (homemaking, childrearing, homeschooling), but that's not the book Pink was writing.  There may be more online if I dig a bit.

I read the book in a hurry, so there are no quotations for you this time.  Perhaps the above-mentioned son-in-law will come through; he does a better job with that than I do, anyway.  Here, however, is a Dan Pink TED talk to get you started:

Mea culpa!  It's been nearly a year since my post about Stephan's Dots book (numbers in four languages), and I never did update it with Joseph's response.  It was an immediate hit, and is still one of Joseph's very favorite books.

Here are a few videos showing Joseph and the book in action:

The book arrives!

The book has proved very durable under heavy use, and if the $70 cost seems extravagant, I'd say Joseph has definitely gotten his parents' money's worth already.

Update 10/16/19:  As has happened with several old posts containing videos, I'm pretty sure a chunck of the post between the video and the final sentence was accidentally removed in the process that switched the videos from Flash to <iframe>.  Someday I may try to recover them ... but realistically, probably not.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years:  What I Learned by Editing My Life by Donald Miller (Thomas Nelson, 2009)

I started (mentally) writing this review when only a few pages into the book.  The review began something like this:

Given which of us is the famous author and which is not, it would not be wise to say Donald Miller can't write.  But what is definitively true is that, whether he can or not, he doesn't write in a style that I enjoy reading.  It's narcissistic, informal bordering on stream-of-consciousness and slangy bordering on vulgar.  Considering the endorsements from big-name Christians (Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Gary Haugen, Max Lucado) I was expecting a little less nonchalance about casual sex, drug use, smoking, and nihilism.  And it jumps around like one of those modern movies where you don't know what's real and what's not, what's then and what's now.

Before I met the filmmaker guys, I didn't know very much about making movies.  You don't think about it when you're watching a movie, but there's a whole world of work involved in making the thing happen.  People have to write the story, which can take years; then raise a bunch of money, hire some actors, get a caterer so everybody can eat, rent a million miles of extension cords, and shoot the thing.  Then it usually goes straight to DVD.  It's a crap job....

But I like movies.  There's something about a good story that helps me escape.  I used to go to movies all the time just to clear my head.  If it was a good movie, the experience felt like somebody was resetting a compass in my brain so I could feel what was important in life and what wasn't.  I'd sit about ten rows back, in the middle, and shovel sugar into my mouth until my brain went numb....

I'd go to the movies because for an hour or so I could forget about real life.  In a movie, the world faded away and all that mattered was whether the hobbit destroyed the ring or the dog made it home before the circus people could use him as a horse for their abusive monkey.

Really, how much of that can a reader be expected to take?  But there's a reason I finish a book before publishing the review.  It gets much better, mostly because Miller eventually starts focusing on things other than himself.

The change in Miller's life came when two filmmakers approached him with the idea of making a movie of his best-selling memoir, Blue Like Jazz.  (Here's the movie's trailer, which reminds me of why I don't usually watch movies.)  Miller is not happy to discover how much his life must be changed to make a good film.

"[W]hat is wrong with the Don in the book?" The question came out of my mouth more personally than I wanted.

Steve sat thoughtfully and collected his ideas. ... “In a pure story,” he said like a professor, “there is a purpose in every scene, in every line of dialogue. A movie is going somewhere.”

That last line rang in my ear like an accusation. I felt defensive, as though the scenes in my life weren’t going anywhere. I mean, I knew they weren’t going anywhere, but it didn’t seem okay for someone else to say it.

In the process of discovering what makes a good story for a movie, Miller has a revelation:  What makes a good story for a movie, makes a good story for a life.  I'm not at all sure I agree—I've said many times that romantic tragedy makes for great opera but a lousy life—but when he begins to consider his actions in light of the question, "Is this part of a good story?" Miller turns his aimless life around.  He goes hiking in Peru, finds the father he hasn't seen in 30 years, rides his bike across America, and founds The Mentoring Project, which works with churches to provide mentors for fatherless (and effectively fatherless) children.

I was haunted by a feeling of familiarity—with negative connotations—as I read this book, and I finally realized that the style reminds me of Confessions and Reflections of a Traveler.  What saves A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is that, despite my comments above, Miller writes better than Brett McLean.

It's not my kind of book.  I can't say that it makes me want to ride my bike across America or to (personally) drill wells in Africa, but it does make me want to learn more about the art of telling a story.  And viewing life as a story is a fascinating thought.

[Quoting storytelling expert Robert McKee]  "Writing a story isn't about making your peaceful fantasies come true.  The whole point of the story is the character arc.  You didn't think joy could change a person, did you?  Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over.  But it's conflict that changes a person." His voice was like thunder now.  "You put your characters through hell.  You put them through hell.  That's the only way we change."

I think joy does change a person; plenty of growth comes through real joy.  But the story arc analogy puts a different perspective on the age-old problem of pain.

[Reflecting on a tragic story of terrorism]  When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it.  Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in.  We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.

The belief that we enjoy seeing characters "put through hell" may explain why there are so many movies I don't want to watch.  I love stories of life and growth through the sweet joys and minor tragedies of ordinary life, such as Miss Read's (Dora Jesse Saint) Thrush Green and Fairacre books.  One of my favorite scenes in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the ordinary dinner at the Beavers' house.  Likewise in J.R.R. Tolkien's epic books, it's the meals, the conversations, and the everyday parts of life that really capture my attention.

In the end, Miller acknowledges that a "good story" life is not all epic adventures.

It's interesting that in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the only practical advice given about living a meaningful life is to find a job you like, enjoy your marriage, and obey God.  It's as though God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help.

I've over 20 post-it notes adorning the pages of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, but on reflection I'll skip the rest and quote a longer section that is perhaps my favorite.  It's about Miller's first encounter with Bob Goff and his family, while kayaking in British Columbia.  Bob is a real person, and not the local politician of the same name who handed Heather her diploma when she graduated from high school.  His life is the kind of story that makes you remember not all lawyers deserve the opprobrium many have earned.

We broke camp, packed our boats, and began paddling for home.  But before crossing the inlet, our guide wanted to show us a lodge a man had built the previous year, a massive house set on a ledge just off the water.  i thought it was odd that anybody would build a house back there, since you could only get to the place by seaplane or boat.  But indeed, a home had been built.  And it was an enormous and beautiful place, snug against the gray cliff of the mountain, with decks cascading down to the waterfront where there was a dock and some boats and a plane.  The man was a lawyer, one of my friends said, who lived in San Diego but had a law firm in Seattle.  He was also the American consul to Uganda.  He gives most of his money away, my friend said.  He'd actually bought five thousand acres in the area to save the trees and preserve the beauty.  We were only going to paddle by and take a look at the house; but as we got closer, we saw a man coming down the steps to the dock.  "That must be him," my friend said.  "That must be Bob. ...

He walked down the stairs to the dock and smiled and pulled his gray hair back and waved at us in large, graceful swings.  He waved at us then with both hands to call us closer to the dock. ...

"Are you hungry?" we heard Bob shout. ...

Bob got down on his knees and helped us out [of our boats] as though he'd been waiting a week for our arrival.  "We saw you coming, and Sweet Maria put fruit out on the table," he said.  "There's plenty.  And she made lemonade too.  Let's go up to the house and get you guys fed."  At first I thought Sweet Maria was the maid or something, but it turns out Sweet Maria is Bob's wife. ...

For the better part of an hour, they asked where we'd come from and what we did back home. ... I asked Bob how he'd come to build a lodge sixty miles from the nearest road, and he told us he'd grown up going to the Young Life camp nearby and always loved the place.   He said the real reason for the lodge was to host leaders from foreign countries and talk about peace, to talk about how leaders can bring peace to their countries.

I was curious about how he got world leaders to fly into the middle of nowhere to talk about peace.  Bob smiled and looked at his wife and said, "Well, now, that's an interesting story.  I suppose we stumbled into that one, didn't we?" ...

When his children were young, he told us, he was spending time in Uganda, helping the government work through some legislation, and they asked him if he would be willing to serve as the American consul, essentially Uganda's official American lawyer.  Bob agreed; but while he was a good lawyer, he'd never had to interact with diplomats.

On the flight home, he wondered what he'd say if he had to meet with the president of South Africa or the ambassador from France.  When his kids asked how the trip went, he told them he'd been asked to serve as Uganda's official lawyer, and he was a little nervous to meet the dignitaries.  So Bob asked the kids what they would say if they had to meet with the leader of a foreign country.  Adam, the youngest, said he'd ask them if they wanted to sleep over.  Bob said that was a terrific idea, because when people sleep over you get to know them really well.  Lindsey said she'd want to ask them what they put their hope in, and Bob and Maria agreed that was a beautiful and important question.  Richard, the oldest, who had recently been given a video camera, said he'd want to record the interviews so he could make a movie.  Bob and Maria thought that was a terrific idea, too.  Bob said that if he ever met with a foreign leader, he'd remember their suggestions.  But after thinking about it, Bob decided that the suggestions were too good to risk to chance.

"Let's write letters," Bob said.  The kids wondered what their dad was suggesting.  "I'm serious," Bob said.  "Let's write all the leaders in the world and ask if they want to come over for a sleepover, and if we can interview them and ask what they hope in." The kids got very excited.  Maria smiled and loved the idea.  Bob told the kids that if any of the world leaders said yes to the interview, even if they couldn't come for a sleepover, he'd fly them to that country and they could video tape Lindsey asking what they hope in.

Bob didn't expect anybody to write back, so he brought home more than a thousand pieces of stationery and the kids researched world leaders and came up with more than twelve hundred addresses for heads of state and assistants.  For a while they heard nothing, and Bob confessed he was relieved, but then a single letter came in, and a few days after, another.  Both of them granting an interview.  And then another letter, until in all twenty-nine world leaders contacted the Goffs instructing them on how to make arrangements to interview their countries [sic] leader.  ...

[Bob] put his family on planes, flying them all over the world.  The kids' teachers were furious, saying that he was harming his children by taking them out of school.  But Bob convinced them that his children might learn more interviewing the president of Paraguay than by reading a book about him. ...

Bob said the world leaders fell in love with his kids.  He said there was no way he could have received as much hospitality on his own. ... At the end of each interview, Adam presented the world leader with a box that had a key in it, explaining that the key was an actual key to their family home in San Diego.  He said they sometimes lock the door when they go to the store, but that he could just let himself in, and that if he ever wanted to have a sleepover, he was welcome in their home.

The relationships the family began that year would sustain.  The world leaders wrote the children letters, and the children wrote back.  And one world leader even came to San Diego and used his key and stayed over with the Goff family.

That year Bob said he learned that people are just people, even if they are world leaders.  He said most people want what's best for their friends and their families, and if they are given the opportunity to talk out their differences, they will.  And so when the law firm did very well one year, he bought the land around the lodge and built a place for world leaders to come and have a sleepover.

"And they come?" I asked.

"We've had a few," Bob said.  "I hang their flags from the banister, and we sit and eat and talk.  We explore the inlet on the boats and usually do a little cliff jumping."

I tried to imagine a foreign diplomat jumping from one of the cliffs around the inlet. ... Bob said that before the dignitaries leave, they sit and write a peace treaty, just some informal language that commits to making the world a better place, about how they will live sacrificially and try to do things for others as often as possible.  He said each of the leaders signs the treaty and takes a copy home to remember their [sic] time at the lodge.

Bob and Maria's kids, now grown and in high school and college, each have a quiet dignity and confidence.  They also have an informal charm, as though they just know they would like us if we'd take the time to get to know each other.  It is obvious they'd played the roles in the story their family was living, the roles of foreign dignitaries, traveling with their parents on the important assignment of asking world leaders what they hope in.  Their story had given them their character.

Happier at Home:  Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life by Gretchen Rubin (Crown Archetype, 2012)

Before I finished The Happiness Project, I knew I wanted to read its sequel.  You have to admire a person who can spend a year concentrating on her own happiness and then write a best-selling book about it.  Twice.  Seriously, I do admire Gretchen Rubin, whose simple-yet-profound ideas are inspirational and potentially life-changing, as I've found those of Don Aslett, Stephen Covey, Malcolm Gladwell, Mary Pride, David Allen, Marla Cilley, John Holt, Glenn Doman and others in my eclectic tribe of inspirational writers.  If you're looking for formulas and specific techniques, however, you won't find them here.  I read books like this for ideas and inspiration, preferring to throw them all into the mix of my thoughts and see what precipitates.  As Rubin herself says, just because something is fun for someone else doesn’t mean it’s fun for you.  But behind her approach to maximizing happiness are principles that are as universal as her applications are specific.

Enough review; on to the quotes!

As I thought about ways to cultivate a loving atmosphere at home, I reflected on my own childhood.  One important element:  My parents had never permitted unkind teasing in the form of mockery, name-calling, or put-downs—even when done in a joking way. ... Teasing ... has more negative weight than many people assume. ... Although the teaser believes he or she is conveying a spirit of warmth and playfulness, to the one being teased, the teasing seems more annoying and mean-spirited. ... True, some skillful people use teasing to help people feel closer to one another, to praise, or to broach a difficult subject. ... More commonly, however, I see people wince at teasing comments, or I hear teasers excuse rude remarks by claiming they're "just joking." But the test of whether I'm being funny is if someone else finds me funny; the test of whether my teasing is friendly is whether the teased person finds it friendly.

Finally, someone puts into print the way I feel about teasing, and especially mockery and put-downs.

If I hadn't already liked Gretchen Rubin from her previous book, she'd have won me over simply for articulating a story that could almost have been taken from my diary.  People will cheerfully confess to all sorts of proclivities, but who will admit to being afraid to drive?  That's positively un-American!  I'm many years further on my phobia-fighting journey than she is, but it's still comforting to find a kindred spirit.

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been scared to drive. ... I postponed taking my driver's test until I'd already been sixteen for a few months—a shocking delay for a Midwesterner.  When I lived in Missouri and in Washington, D.C., I did drive every day, but I was a nervous driver.  Once I moved to New York City, I practically quit driving altogether; in fact, easy public transportation is one of my favorite things about living here.  In New York City, having a car is a real luxury, so we're very lucky to have a car to drive, but I made Jamie do all the driving. ... I'm not a particularly fearful person.  Flying doesn't bother me.  I don't carry germ-fighting hand sanitizer in my bag.  I don't worry about child abduction.  I took the subway right after September 11, without even thinking about it.  but driving!  ... I'd adjusted to my fear of driving, but I knew that it cramped my sense of freedom and possibility. ... And although my fear of driving was very personal, it felt like a weight on my marriage, because it loaded too much responsibility on Jamie.  Anytime we had to go anywhere in a car, and even when he was feeling sleepy or needed to take a work call, he had to do all the driving.  To his great credit, he never once complained about it; he never reproached me for feeling scared or not doing my share, and on the few occasions when I did drive, he was encouraging and reminded me that I was a perfectly good driver.  Which I was.

Rubin also understands my obsession with working, the oppression (pleasant as it paradoxically is, sometimes) of a burgeoning to-do list and an increasing sense of mortality.  Perhaps both that and a driving phobia are more common than I think, but few that I know of will admit to either.

I always have the feeling that I should be working.  I always feel pressed for time, as if someone were shoving a pistol in my back and muttering "Move, move, move!" ... I love all this work, and I look forward to working.  But my feeling that I should be working, or my choice to work instead of doing other things that are also important, sometimes interferes with my long-term happiness.  Because I feel this perpetual pull toward my desk, there has always been a tension between my work and other parts of my life. ...

More important than the particular activity ... was the decision to set aside a specific time to be together [with my daughter].  It would be hard for me to give up those prime work hours ... because I always wanted to work.  I wanted more time to think, read, and write—or at least to answer a few emails.  I itched to be reunited with my laptop.  But I knew that looking aback, years from now, these hours would be far more memorable and meaningful if I spent them on an adventure with [my daughter].

I adopted a resolution suggested by a reader who wrote from a research ship in Antarctica.  Her team leader, she reported, had urged them to "Underreact to problems":  not to ignore or minimize problems, but just to underreact to them.  And surely the problems in my apartment were more deserving of underreaction than the problems arising on a ship in the Antarctic.  By "underreacting to problems," and acting in a serene and unflappable way, I'd help myself cultivate a calm attitude. ...

Now, on the spectrum of problems [mine were] very minor. ... Nevertheless, underreaction was a real challenge. ... I didn't successfully manage to avoid a massive overreaction to the computer glitch [that cost me two full days of work].

I'm pretty much an underreactor when it comes to normal computer frustrations, but I don't even want to think about the loss of two days of work.

I considered the three major types of happiness leeches:  The grouches, who are chronically unhappy, pessimistic, anxious, irritable, or needy. ... The jerks, who show no respect for others, who constantly challenge or find fault, behave rudely or cruelly, spread malicious gossip, embarrass others, indulge in mean teasing or pranks, boss others around, unfairly claim credit, withhold necessary information or dominate the conversation. ... The slackers, who don't do their fair share of the work. ... Not only do happiness leeches behave badly themselves, but they also spread their bad behavior. ... [W]hen we see others act like grouches, jerks, or slackers, we're more likely to imitate them. ... In my experience, the grouch is the most common form of happiness leech.

Of course, it's not always possible to avoid a particular happiness leech. ... I came up with a list [of strategies to use as protection against a person who is a constant negative influence]:

• Avoid being alone with the happiness leech.  The presence of other people often dilutes his or her power.
• Communicate through email, if possible.  I find it much harder to control my emotional reactions to people when I'm face-too-face with them.  Email allows me to react more calmly.
• Keep a sense of humor.  Over and over, I see that levity helps diffuse practically any difficult situation—which is too bad for me, because my sense of humor is the first thing that deserts me in a trying situation.
• Instead of contradicting pessimistic or negative statements, acknowledge them.  Happiness leeches are often less emphatic when they feel that others recognize their views.
• Act the way I want to feel; behave the way I want to behave.  Too often, when I find myself around a happiness leech, I ape that behavior—complaining more, making sharper criticisms.  I want to live up to my own standards.
• Most important:  Mind my own business.  It's tempting to try to cheer up a grouch, but instead of trying to fix someone else's mood, I [remind myself] I can't make someone be happy.

Psychologist Robert Levine calculated the "pace of life" in many American cities by considering factors such as walking speed, bank teller speed, and speed of speech, and he found that the more hurried the pace of life, the less helpful people were apt to be:  They were less likely to perform courtesies such as returning a pen that a researcher "accidentally" dropped or giving change for a quarter.  New York City ranked as the third fastest city (after Boston and Buffalo) and the least helpful.

I get New York City, and maybe Boston, though in my experience New Yorkers walk faster than anyone.  But Buffalo?  Maybe they're walking fast in order to keep warm....

Someone else told me of the following e-mail strategy; forgive me, but I don't remember who.  I have that problem a lot, now that there are so many sources of information in my life.  The other day I eagerly told Jon about something that he gently pointed out I had read on his blog....

One friend told me he didn't answer email on the weekend.  "But on Monday morning, how do you face the huge buildup you've accumulated?"  I asked.  "I check my email constantly, just to stay on top of it." ... "Actually," he confided, "I do read and answer email but my emails don't get sent out until Monday morning.  That way, I enforce the expectation that I won't be answering email, and I don't get into back-and-forth exchanges over the weekend."

Brilliant!

The sheer numbers of hours of deliberate training is the factor that distinguishes elite from lesser performers.  Persistence is more important to mastery than innate ability, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is the willingness to practice, and while you can make a child practice, you can't make a child want to practice.

When I marvel at Joseph's ability, at 28 months, to count to 100 (and beyond) in four languages, or by twos, or by sixes, Janet reminds me that in his mind, numbers are a full-time job.  When I visit Heather's kids, I'm constantly being asked to read books (which of course I love to do).  Joseph, although he enjoys stories, is more likely to want to count with me.  (At this point I'm probably too boring for mere counting, since he already can count in English.  Grossvater scores by knowing Russian.)  When Jonathan marvelled at Joseph's ability, I told him that if he thought as much about numbers as Joseph does, he'd probably be doing 10th grade math next year—and that's close to true.

On the flip side, although we often enjoy activities more when we're good at them, facility doesn't guarantee enjoyment, whether in work or play.  In fact, being good at something can sometimes mask the fact that it's not enjoyable.  I was very good at lawyerly work, which I suspect delayed my realization that I wanted a different career.

I can identify with that.  I started college as a physics major, because the heroes of my favorite books were scientists, and I did well in physics in high school.  (I did well in chemistry and biology, too, but physics was the last high school science course I took.  Heather says her favorite color is green because her "favorite color" was always the color of the bulb in her night light, and green happened to be the color when she gave up using a night light.  Like mother, like daughter, I guess.)  It wasn't until my junior year, when the classes got a lot harder, that I realized that not only did I not understand physics, I didn't actually like it enough to put the necessary time into it.  I had only enjoyed it in high school because it had come easily to me.

In his book The Relationship Cure, relationship expert John Gottman emphasizes the importance of responding to "bids"; when someone makes an attempt to connect with a touch, question, gesture, comment, or look, we should answer with a comment, a laugh, or some kind of acknowledgment.  To be attentive and playful is best; to be nonresponsive, critical, or sarcastic is hurtful.

When I was writing my biography of John Kennedy, I'd been struck by a remark that he made to his aide Dave Powers:  "So much depends on my actions, so I am seeing fewer people, simplifying my life, organizing it so that I am not always on the edge of irritability." I hadn't just been elected president, but I also often found myself on the edge of irritability, and I, too, wanted more tools for self-mastery.

Every once in a while, I spend the day without stepping foot outside our apartment, and I consider it a great treat.

One of Rubin's resolutions was "Embrace good smells."  Her research led her to Demeter Fragrance Library.

I was intrigued by a reference I'd seen in Rachel Herz's fascinating book The Scent of Desire, where Herz mentioned the naturalistic, unusual scents created by Demeter Fragrance.  I looked up Demeter Fragrance online and was staggered by its offerings.  Bamboo.  Clean Windows.  Dust.  Bourbon.  Snow.  Grass.  Laundromat.  Lilac.  Frozen Pond.  Gardenia.  New Zealand.  Steam Room.  At first I thought wistfully, "I wish I could smell some of these myself." Then I realized—I could!  As an under-buyer [someone who hates to shop and tends to buy less than is optimal for her situation], I have to remind myself that, yes, I can buy things. ... I started putting scents in my online shopping cart:  Bonfire, Pure Soap, Salt Air.  Bulgarian Rose, because I love the smell of roses....  And I had to order Paperback.

I could so do that.  I know this sounds weird and out of character to anyone who knows me.  I don't wear perfume, and I don't like smelling perfume on someone else.  I've never been into scented candles.  Or incense—except in church and for a brief teenaged fling in the 60's.  Even when it wasn't masking the smell of marijuana (which in my case, trust me, it wasn't), incense was the thing.  But I do love natural scents—lilac, roses, gardenias, garden soil, fresh-baked bread, newborn baby, the air after a storm—and, like Rubin, I find odors to be strongly evocative of memories.  The Demeter scents I would love to try include, but are by no means limited to, Gardenia, Wet Garden, Vanilla Cake Batter, Tomato (more the scent of tomato leaves on your hands than the fruit itself), Thunderstorm, Salt Air, Snow, Holy Water, Ginger Cookie, and Earthworm.  However, I will pass on Mildew, and Turpentine.  

I looked for ... ways to cultivate a thankful frame of mind—for instance, about money.  Money, like health, affects happiness mostly in the negative:  It's easy to take it for granted unless you don't have it, and then it can become a major source of unhappiness.  We had enough money to feel safe ... and this feeling of security was one of the greatest luxuries that money could buy.  To remember this major contributor to my daily happiness, every time I sat down for another session with my checkbook and a big stack of household bills, I thought, "How happy I am to be able to pay these bills," instead of thinking, "What a drag to sit down to pay bills."

Now is the time ... to be happier—not once I've finished my manuscript, not once I've caught up on my email.  Elias Canetti observed, "One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past." If there's not time now to decorate graham cracker houses, or to kiss Jamie good-bye, or to visit the Eleusis panel at the Metropolitan Museum, I must make time.

Earthen Vessels:  Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith by Matthew Lee Anderson (Bethany House, 2011)

It took me much too long to read this book, especially considering I had been looking forward to it.  Because the Incarnation—the taking on of human flesh by God, the creator and sustainer of the universe—Christmas!—is a critical distinctive of Christianity, our human bodies should matter to our faith.  The Church must not dishonor that which God himself honors so highly.  Yet it is all too easy to fall into the common belief that who we "really" are is something unrelated to our physical form.  Thus a particularly Christian look at the body should make an instructive and informative book.

Unfortunately, Anderson does not deliver, at least not for me.    I was expecting a book that would address the Church as a whole, but Earthen Vessels is specifically aimed at a very narrowly-defined Evangelical (uppercase E), American subdivision.  Rather than being a book for all Christians, much too much ink is spent trying to reassure those whom "talking about Lent, Advent, and other seasons makes ... nervous."  For them, there is much of substance in Anderson's work.  But I imagine Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, mainline Presbyterians, and many others gritting their teeth and saying, "All right, already!  Can we get past Step 1, please?"  This is particularly frustrating because the other major flaw of the book is its attempt to cover too much ground.  Consumerism, sexuality, tattoos, cremation, vampires, the Sabbath, worship, yoga ... it's too much.  Especially for a book of only 231 pages.

On top of it all, I'm always frustrated with writers who assume their readers are conversant with what's shown on television.  "We are a nation of people who want to be vampires like Edward Cullen."  [Anderson does have the courtesy to explain that Edward Cullen is a character on an American TV show called Twilight.]  Excuse me?  Never in my weirdest dreams have I desired to be a vampire.  I know nothing about the "zombie apocalypse" and care less.  My car does not feature "Counting Crows blaring on the radio."  Until I looked it up, I had no idea whether Counting Crows was a music group, a song, or a talk-show host.  Assumptions such as these lead me to wonder if Earthen Vessels has anything at all to say to me:  If his diagnosis is so obviously wrong, why should I trust his prescription?

And why, I wonder, do I find more that speaks to me in books written 50, 100, 500, or 2000 years ago than I do in many of today's writings?

My own dissatisfaction, however, should not condemn the book in the eyes of those who like to count crows, believe in the undead, and/or are made nervous by the mention of Lent.  Anderson's logic is not always clear, let alone faultless, but he has some good ideas and puts many interesting and important points on the table for discussion.

Moreover, one cannot totally fault someone who quotes G. K. Chesterton more than John Piper, and a plethora of sticky notes festoon my book. Here are a few of the passage that struck me one way or another.

The tools we use, the words we hear, the images we see—each of them shapes our inner lives in ways that we do not always understand.

Young men [today] see more images of beautiful women in a single day than an average man might have seen in a lifetime 200 years ago. ...

[Quoting Hollywood publicist Michael Levine] The strange thing is, being bombarded with visions of beautiful women ... doesn't make us think our partners are less physically attractive.  It doesn't change our perception of our partner.  Instead, by some sleight of mind, it distorts our idea of the pool of possibilities.  These images make us think there's a huge field of alternatives.  It changes our estimate of the number of people who are available to us as potential mates.  In changing our sense of the possibilities, it prods us to believe we could always to better, keeping us continually unsatisfied.

The promise of technological mediation is that we can control how our external lives appear to others.  We choose when we want to update our statuses and what we want to say.  We are not present online—we present ourselves.  But in a mediated world, presentation will constantly threaten to overwhelm our bodily presence, invariably pushing the body to the margins.  When humans gather face-to-face, we take emotional (and sometimes physical) risks.  Yet in a mediated world, those risks either go away or are significantly curtailed.

I absolutely agree with Anderson on the importance of personal, physical, bodily presence.  But as one whose friends and family members are spread all over the world, I'm grateful for the technology that allows us to see and hear, if not touch and hold, those far away in body.

The longing for stability and significance isn't unique to younger evangelicals.  It is a distinctly human need.  We internalize the events that happen to us and incorporate them into our understanding of the world around us, organize them into a coherent pattern, and externalize the meaning through speech, poetry, painting, and other forms of cultural creation.  it is how we make sense of ourselves, how we develop our sense of what it means to be a specific person before God.  Yet before the past twenty years, evangelicals would have never thought to express that self-understanding by marking their bodies.  With all the possible options for organizing and expressing our self-understanding, my question is simply, "Why are tattoos now being embraced?" Something has changed that has made them a plausible option.

If there were a sexual arms race, the evangelicals would be winning. ... Evangelical Christianity has undergone in the past three decades what is tantamount to its own sexual revolution ... [maintaining] a profound focus on maximizing pleasure between the sheets—or wherever else we happen to be when inspiration strikes. ... The implicit—and occasionally explicit—argument is that because God designed sex to be kept within marriage, Christians should be having belter and more frequent sex than anyone else.  Or, as two scholars who analyzed evangelical sex manuals in the early 1980's put it, we are apparently "God's chosen people in matters of sexuality." The increasingly common challenges from evangelical pulpits to have daily sex suggests the calling is irrevocable. ...

The loud arguments from evangelicalism that pleasure is good border on defensively shouting, "Hey, we've got pleasure, too!" in a world that cares about little else.  Evangelicals can and should win the pleasure war but not on the same terms as the world.  And judging by our literature and manner of life, we are closer to treating sexual pleasure as an idol than we have ever been to treating is as a curse.

Most evangelical churches are wary of single male pastors (especially young ones).  The belief is that single men are incapable either of controlling themselves sexually, or of counseling married couples on the dynamics of human sexuality.  This basic inhospitality toward single people in church leadership suggests, i suspect, a tacit commitment to standards of sexuality that are taken less from Scripture and more from the world around us. ...

The idea of a vocation—or a calling—to lifelong celibacy for the kingdom of God does not minimize the importance of marriage.  Each calling bears witness to different aspects of our world. ...

The possibility of finding full human flourishing without sex stands in stark contrast to one of the most prevalent notions of sexuality both inside and outside the church:  Thanks in part to Sigmund Freud and Abraham Maslow, sex has been transformed from an expression of our humanity to a physiological or psychological need that is essential to our human flourishing. ...

The teaching that our wholeness depends upon sexual fulfillment lies behind many of the problems in evangelical teaching about sex.  We implicitly convey to young people that sex is a need by marginalizing those who are single or cordoning them off in singles groups so that they hopefully will get married.  Then we expect them to live some of the most sexually charged years of their lives without yielding to temptation.  No wonder young people struggle to stay sexually pure:  either sex is essential to their flourishing as humans or it isn't.  And if everyone who is married thinks it is, then young people will too—regardless of whatever else we tell them.

[T]he objectification of women—or men—in pornography depends upon a prior objectification of our own bodies.  When we turn people into sexual objects so we can have an artificial sense of connection with them, we treat our bodies as machines meant to maximize our experience of pleasure.  It is fundamentally depersonalizing for everyone involved—for the viewer and the viewed.  Wendell Berry writes, "Our 'sexual revolution' is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as an idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of 'freeing' natural pleasure from natural consequence."

[L]abeling oneself gay or lesbian treats sexual orientation as a core part of one's identity as human persons.  Unfortunately, this narrative of sexual identity stops any dialogue about the morality of same-sex desires and practices before it can even begin; any disagreement goes against the core of the other person's identity. ... This means that as long as those with same-sex orientations treat the fulfillment of their sexual desires as a necessary part of their identity, the most sensitive traditional responses to same-sex attraction and acts will inevitably be reduced to bigotry.  The possibility of real conversation is over before it begins.

But what of the log in our own eye?  The language of "sexual identity" (rather than attraction or desire) glorifies sexual expression by establishing it as necessary to our humanity. ... [I]t is heterosexuals who first took this step and made sexual expression a "need" on which human flourishing depends. ... [T]he gay and lesbian communities have simply followed our lead, using the language of sexual fulfillment and identity that heterosexuals have been using since at least Freud.

[T]he path to closing [the gap between our lives now and the life to which we are called] may not always seem straight, especially as same-sex relationships become more embedded in the structures of American life.  For instance, what would happen ten or twenty years from now if an atheist lesbian couple and their eight-year-old adopted daughter became Christians and affirmed traditional sexual morality?  Should the home be broken up so the child can have a father?  Should the couple live together as celibates so the child's stability is preserved?  And do the answers change if the child is six—or sixteen?  The questions are but variations on a theme:  How does the gospel pervade cultural institutions that are inhospitable to its presence?  Does Paul's suggestion in 1 Corinthians 7 that each person should "remain in the condition in which they were called" provide a template for a sensitive pastoral response, one akin to that which some missionaries have taken in polygamous cultures?

The danger of turning worship of the living God into theater isn't limited to any denomination.  The evangelical liturgy—welcome, worship, announcements, worship, prayer, giving, reading, sermon, worship—has just as much room for becoming theater as the "highest" liturgical church.

Well, duh.  I would say more so—because traditional liturgical worship doesn't look at all like the "theater" of today, whereas many modern church formats do, with some even being nearly indistinguishable from rock concerts.  And I certainly agree with him on this point:

A practical place to start ... would be to turn down the volume.

We're now into the fourth season of Murdoch Mysteries, and I'm sorry that will be our last season for a while, unless we move to Costa Rica, Papua New Guinea, or some other place in DVD Region Code Four.  (I've been an anti-fan of region codes since 2006, when we discovered we couldn't watch our Japanese copy of Swing Girls.)

My new respect for Murdoch Mysteries may have something to do with my disappointment on Except the Dying, the first book of the series on which the TV show is based.  Now that I know I like the show's characters and approach better than the book's, I'm happier with it.  But it's also true that Season Four toned down the love affair, and though the 21st century social attitudes are still there, so far they haven't been as in-your-face.  Most of all, either it has taken a less-serious turn, or I have finally recognized that it's not intended to be an accurate portrayal of late nineteenth century Toronto—or anyplace else.  In its use of of modern technology it is more like the old TV show The Wild, Wild West, or maybe A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, though it's been a long time since I've seen the one or read the other, so my memory may not be quite accurate.

In any case, I'm finding easier to take the show for what it is, and enjoy it.  Especially the way it laughs at its own anticipate-the-future tricks.  While Murdoch invents gadgets to help catch criminals, George Crabtree—still my favorite character by far—is always seeing a different side.  Murdoch builds a complicated house model to help him picture the movements of the suspects, complete with conservatory, library, hall, potential weapons, and a token for each person.  All he sees is the crime, but Crabtree recognizes the potential for a great new board game.

Scaling Down:  Living Large in a Smaller Space by Judi Culbertson and Marj Decker (Rodale, 2005)

Prepare NOW; don't let the headache of dealing with your estate be your children's last, vivid, and painful memory of their parents.

A good friend has recently been embroiled in our generation's nightmare:  moving her widowed mother out of her house-of-many-years and into assisted living, then having to clear out the house and sell it.  (Thank you, Dad, for having made the process as easy as it gets, and to all my siblings for staying friends and even having some fun through it all.)  Scaling Down is one of two books she recommended; it was available in our library, so I decided to check it out.

I wasn't expecting much, having already dealt with that heart- and headache.  And if you're like me, you'll almost give up in the first chapter, where you're asked to write a "mission statement."  But hang in there; the book's about a lot more than selling the old homestead, and you can easily ignore the annoying bits.  Anyone who is merging two households, moving into a smaller space—or moving, period—fending off sibling rivalry over Grandpa's Kitchenaid mixer, or simply feeling overwhelmed by "stuff," can benefit from the book's suggestions.

One thing that differentiates Scaling Down from other decluttering books is the authors' sympathy for the emotional complications attached to our belongings. Although they are very practical and sometimes in my judgement a little too harsh in their methods, they do provide some helpful ideas for keeping the feeling and/or memory without keeping everything.  Collectors, for example, are not asked to give up their collections, but to be wiser in their collecting:  financing quality by selling off quantity.

The chapter headings:

• How Did We Get Here?
• I Need to Do This But...
• But Aunt Winnie Gave It to Me!
• Collaring the Paper Tiger
• The Tyranny of Collections
• The Secret Live of Clothing
• Clearing Out Your Family Home
• Your Cuisinart or Mine?
• Moving in a Hurry
• The Saga of the Rain Bonnets
• Finding Good Homes [for your stuff]
• "This is Your Life!"
• Shop Till You Drop ... Out
• How to Keep from Cluttering Your New Place
• Starting a New Adventure
• Using Your Space for You

Did you catch "How to Keep from Cluttering Your New Place"?  I know from painful experience that without the exercise of an iron will, bigger refrigerators, bigger closets, and bigger homes all soon become just as crowded as the smaller counterparts they replaced.

Another surprising, but potentially life-changing idea is expressed by the last chapter:  Using your space for you.  Actually, it's a major theme throughout the book:  You stuff, from clothes to cupboards to collectibles, should be what pleases you, what makes you feel comfortable and happy, what works for the vision you have of what your home should be.  Quantity rarely provides that, but we keep buying things for all the wrong reasons, having never taken the time and effort to discover what we really like.  I suppose that seems obvious, but there are a lot of things I keep for no reason other than that I have them, and they work.  We still have the kitchen wallpaper that was there when we moved in, even though I'd never have chosen it out of a wallpaper book.  I don't think that's all bad—and I still dread the idea of even looking through a wallpaper book, let alone tearing up my kitchen—but the authors do have a point.  And I do like their answer to this objection:

"I don't want to make any changes that would hurt my home's resale value."

This statement strikes us as sad.  It is similar to someone buying a new car, then saying, "I'm only going to drive it when my other car is in the shop, because I want to keep the mileage low for the trade-in." That attitude makes you the caretaker of the property, keeping it nice for some future owner, instead of behaving like it's yours.  If you've always dreamed of a vaulted-ceiling library, and your garage is the perfect place to create one, why not do so?  You'll have years of pleasure, and if you or your heirs get a little less because it's too nice to park a car in, your satisfaction is worth the difference.  Most of the time individualizing a space actually adds to the selling price.  But even if it doesn't, don't sell yourself short.

I won't be buying the book, at least not yet.  But I'll keep it in the back of my mind, and might get it out again when I need to be re-inspired.  Not only is an organized, uncluttered home one of the best legacies we can leave our heirs, it also makes life a lot nicer in the meantime.