Learning As I Go
The first, from an emotional, Buddhist perspective, and the second, from the productive academic’s perspective. Both emphasize being mindful of when you’re in the state of boredom and how to use that as a cue to put the mind in a more curious, awake state.
I like Jonathan’s summation of the problem:
Boredom is like pain, it tells us that something is wrong and requires a change.
I’m currently writing a final paper for my Chekhov class (which has been WONDERFUL). My teacher and I agreed that it would be a good exercise for me to dig really deep into a single story rather than try to survey a batch of stories to prove some conjecture or other. As a writer of fiction myself, I was more interested in reverse-engineering a story to see how Chekhov constructed it.
I chose a story we had not read called “On Official Business” (Garnett translation). On the surface, it’s a story in which nothing happens except that people wind up as depressed and miserable as when they started. But on really picking the story apart to see how Chekhov wrote it — the narrative techniques he uses, his deployment of imagery, sound, and repeated phrases — well, it became a rather rich stew.
I thought, aha!, I will now be able to get this paper off my plate early and not have to worry about it late in the semester. Ha-ha! Not so! My first priority was to distribute a questionnaire to my neighborhood as part of my master’s project, and the logistics of that proved surprisingly overwhelming. (As with almost all master’s work, it isn’t hard, it just takes lots of time.)
I started making notes per my favorite writing book, Thinking on Paper, and quickly had 8 pages. [1] Then I floundered around looking for some sort of structure that I could slot my ideas into, looking for headings that were “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive,” but found that approach just generated more text.
At this point (last night, in fact) I decided it was time to stem the flow and remind myself of some writing truths I picked up from here and there:
The blog Stupid Motivational Tricks has really smart, tough advice on the business of academic writing. One post very cogently said that you don’t write a paper, you write for an hour. Just focus on this piece or this point for an hour or so, get that done, and then move to the next.
For this morning’s writing session, I want to focus on the character Lzyhin and draw together some of the criticism related to his epiphany. In other writing sessions, I want to tackle the secondary characters, Chekhov’s use of imagery and sound to create a netting that holds the story together, and the circularity of the story’s beginning and ending. That’s all way too much to write about in a short paper, even given 8 uninterrupted hours. But I can get each piece done and, as Jonathan Mayhew points out, even a mediocre week of writing ends in getting some writing done, and that’s the bottom line.
[1] I created a PDF summarizing the book — and other bits of writing advice — in my first class at SILS in 2006. That historical provenance out of the way, here’s a link to the PDF.
Alex has a wonderful essay up this week on the unexamined life vs the unlived life. I recognized so much of myself in his description of his early college self. And i would say it’s only been fairly recently that I’ve decided to bias myself towards action — even fidgety action — over excessive rumination. (Just look up what “brown study” means.)
I think had Alex pushed farther, he would have probably detected fear prompting the defensive thinking posture he (we) adopted. Fear of rejection, fear of not being good enough, fear of not being perfect, fear of not being loved. There are damn few Socrates in the world whose motivations are not based on fear; for the rest of us, I think we adopt that intellectual camouflage and hope for the best.
And I loved this description of one of the risks we run by overindulging our penchant for thinking over a livelier balance between thought and action:
Believing advice is the greatest help we can provide others who are suffering. It’s not. The greatest gift we can provide others who are suffering is encouragement—encouragement that draws its power from our having experienced similar sufferings that we’ve overcome ourselves.
Anyway, his post reminded me for some reason of this wonderful Alexander Theroux quote from his novel Laura Warholic:
I decided at one point in my life that I never wanted to be anything that would not allow me to be anything else I wanted to be … I ended up being nothing that I can currently identify, which I suppose means I got my wish.
Here’s a quote from Stephen Fry’s novel Making History, one of the few passages that struck me as admirable in that lamentably bad book.
If there is a word to describe our age, it must be Security, or to put it another way, Insecurity. From the neurotic insecurity of Freud, by the way of the insecurities of the Kaiser, the Fuhrer, Eisenhower, and Stalin, right up to the terrors of the citizens of the modern world –
THEY ARE OUT THERE
The enemy. They will break into your car, burgle your house, molest your children, consign you to hellfire, murder you for drug money, force you to face Mecca, infect your blood, outlaw your sexual preferences, erode your pension, pollute your beaches, censor your thoughts, steal your ideas, poison your air, threaten your values, use foul language on your television, destroy your security. Keep them away! Lock them out! Hide them from sight! Bury them!
Attended a career fair for master’s and PhD students yesterday. I haven’t been to such a thing in a long time and it was personally instructive, even though it may not turn out to be professionally lucrative.
There were two facing rows of tables lining a long lobby, with tchotchkes and mini-candy bars available occasionally, big poster displays, modest table displays, handouts, and many young people dressed up and with up-to-date resumes.
As I wandered through, it reminded me of some speed-networking events I’ve been to, modeled on the speed-dating event. I methodically (which is what I am) walked down the east row of tables first, talked to a few people, judged within a few seconds whether they were interested in what I had to sell or whether I had a chance at all of impressing the company or organization rep, and then made my way down the west row of tables. Along the way, I eavesdropped, picked up literature (when did that sacred word become so devalued as to refer to company-shilling handout sheets?), and weighed whether it was worth it to me or to them for me to stand in line and make a pitch.
In truth, many of the vendors were after hard-science skills or hard-core qualitative research skills, and I have neither of those. I was surprised to find that I was able to talk to about 3 vendors who I think I could help and whose mission I felt meshed with my skills and background. I had gone in expecting not to stay long, and I was out within an hour. Still, I needed some event to get the ball rolling — update the resume, clarify what I want, start calling on my network — and this more than served that purpose.