We May Be In a Neurological Mismatch with Our Tech-Driven World

January 29, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Everyday on the news I hear stories about the disproportionately negative impact that some event, disease, or change in the weather has had on a particular group.

It’s social media’s disproportionate harming of teenage girls. How Covid-19 is more lethal for men in their 80’s than women. That communities of color bear more of the consequences of climate change, of poor health care or of having fewer engaged police.

I often have the radio on when I’m working, and these kinds of “slicing and dicing of injuries” are a fairly regular drumbeat, whatever “news outlet” I happen to be listening to.

Reporting like this almost always strikes me as “likely to be true”—but only up to a point. With some stories, it depends on the initial data the storyteller has consulted. For example, if you set out to prove that one group is more oppressed than another, you start your inquiry with data from the supposedly oppressed group. But I find myself asking more and more: what if the storyteller started out with broader data sets?

Is the real story that the coronovirus or climate change or disengaged police are more lethal to (pick your victims by age, race or gender) or that all of these harms impact poor people far more negatively than rich people, or people who live in rural communities more than in urban communities, or Albanians more than, say, Americans?

Other times, the class of sufferers has to do with whether there is enough data in the first place. Do more teenage girls (than say, boys) suffer from social media’s consequences, or does the singular focus on girls have more to do with it being easier for researchers to pin-point the onset of puberty (that first period) in girls than its onset in boys, and therefore a more precise way to measure the time-frame of suffering?

Given these variables, why insist upon picking out a select-few to be victims when, in truth, there are (as often as not) many more sufferers who are likely to be out there?

So when I’m listening to a news reporter or researcher or non-resident expert tell me about a new harm and exactly who’s suffering its consequences, I often talk back to the radio saying: Really? What about all these people, or those? Aren’t they negatively impacted too?

That’s what happened when I was listening to Matt Richtel being interviewed on Fresh Air recently. But given the extraordinary care he took in explaining how teenage girls are disproportionately suffering from mental distress, illness and suicidal ideation given the daily assaults on their still-developing brains, it seemed pretty clear that he didn’t have a political agenda behind his reporting. And while credentials are rarely dispositive they still make a difference to me. (Richtel is not only a long-time reporter for the New York Times on its technology and health beat, he has also won a Pulitizer Prize for some of that reporting.) Hearing him I also liked the way he chose his words and put himself behind them, so I was inclined to believe in what he was saying. Maybe he wasn’t trying to exclude teenage boys, or, for that matter, the rest of us from the scope of his reported concerns.

But throughout that lengthy interview—and in others of his that I’ve listened to since or in his other stories on this topic—I kept coming back to the broader impacts that seemed likely: So maybe teenage girls are more negatively impacted “by how things are today” than others (who are neither girls nor teenagers), but to some fairly significant extent, isn’t ALMOST EVERYBODY in the U.S (and certainly in other places too) suffering from at least some of the same mental distress, illness and suicidal ideation as the fairly circumscribed group of victims that you’ve examined?

In other words, while Richtel has clearly found a story in this subset of “more susceptible” young girls, isn’t there a bigger and more profound story that he’s not telling (and almost no one is telling) about how living today, amidst the assault of (let’s call it) “modern life,” damages almost all of us because none of our brains are wired to withstand the bombardments we’re confronting today?

_{Taking a day off from it all, in an alternate reality}.

This is where I should probably account for my own storytelling biases.

It’s January after all, the middle of winter here in Philly, grey on many days, chilly to cold on nearly all of them, and Spring’s bees and flowers are more than two months off.

I’ve also been “under the weather” for longer than I’d like with one of the bad bugs going around, from damage to the real estate here from all the freezing and thawing, and because Wally (the dog)’s been ailing from his own stubborn maladies, so maybe I’m more inclined than usual to see my world’s clouds than their rosier lining.

But at the same time, it also seems true that without “all the hard data” easily in hand, there’s no sad story being told today about the depressing state of almost everyone’s sanity, as the rest of us suffer from corrosion and damage that feels a lot like what Richtel describes.

Now I suppose that my disquiets and seasonal-affective-disorders could just be angling to give my misery more company (and maybe I am more susceptible to short circuits like these)—but then again, maybe not. . . .

For some reason, this also seems the right time to say a few words about the photos this week and my rationale for including them, depicting as they do a ritual I previously knew nothing about.

Silvesterklaus are masked revelers who take part in Saint Sylvester’s Day festivities in the hamlets of Appenzell, Switzerland on the last day of each passing year. These New Year’s mummers (no doubt an inspiration for our annual celebrants here) put on strange costumes, with huge ringing bells, before walking from house to house, “singing a very slow yodel,” and wishing their neighbors the best in the coming year. (The last two pictures appearing here come to you care of photographer Markus Bollmann. I don’t know who snapped the one up top.)

In addition to occurring just before our current month got underway, the Silvesterklausen tradition is also (clearly) a form of escape into an alternative reality, which is something I’d often like to do when confronted with the apparent mismatch between my neurological wiring and the assaultive realities being inflicted upon it. So these pictures seemed apt today.

That mismatch is the breakdown Matt Richtel is about to tell us more about and that perhaps should be diagnosed in many more of us as we move deeper into the perils of 2023.

_{Horns and tusks (and whatever that is on the nose and cheeks) may be required.}

Over the past year, Richtel has been interviewing American teens, their families and health care providers (usually overwhelmed and under-qualified pediatricians) about the mental health crisis impacting those teens as well as drawing conclusions from what he’s discovered. His reporting has been gathered by the Times under an umbrella that Richtel and his newspaper calls “The Inner Pandemic.”

Instead of blaming the usual culprit—social media—he includes it as a subset of a greater environmental challenge that’s overwhelming teenage brains at a time when they’re hungry for more social information (to discover their places in the world), but also at a time when their brains are simply not developed enough to be able to process the volume and velocity of inputs that are coming their way.

It’s really a much broader technological shift that delivers information not just directly to the kids, but to the kids through their parents, who are also on media all the time. Their parents may be talking about the state of the world, or what they heard, or academic competition, [or] what’s happening well beyond the walls of their community. So this is a much broader shift into a technologically fast-paced environment. That’s the environmental side that we’re all in.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the damage to teenage mental health coincides with the increasing availability of smartphones and other devices that only fairly recently have become widely available and integral parts of our daily lives. Says Richtel:

If you look at, say, an episode of major depression [among teens], it has risen 60% since 2007. The suicide rate, which had been stable from 2000 to 2007, goes up 60% after 2007 to 2018. And among Black adolescents, we see suicide attempts leaping 80%, outpacing every other ethnic group.

(In my counseling work with local pre-teens who’d lost their caregivers I’ve seen several of these meltdowns and felt some of the pain that even younger kids in this City have been buffeted by.) But the parts of young brains that can make at least some sense out of this information barrage have simply not developed at the pace that our tech-driven environments are confronting them with new and often destabilizing information. This is the “mismatch” that Richtel identifies.

The best explanation I’ve heard – and it is hypothesized, not proven but based on some really good science – is that young people are grappling with a neurological mismatch between what their brains are capable of right now and the level of information and the noisy environment they confront. …The part of their brains that makes sense of all this information is still moving at the pace it always has [when they were younger. So while] they’re awake to [this new firehose of] information, they’re not able to make sense of it.

To make matters worse, the mental health system (as it was in 2007 and remains today) is ill-equipped to handle the volume of teenage distress, depression and suicidal behaviors that it’s confronting. To the extent there are any frontline first-responders to this crisis, they tend to be pediatricians who are rarely trained to provide their patients with mental health care. Moreover, the drug treatment therapies that are available are often ineffective and frequently harmful. “The Inner Pandemic” is both the rise in casualties and the lack of a health care system that’s equipped to treat them.

Interestingly, to help his listeners and readers understand the new categories of harms that are visiting young people, Richtel mentions the stresses that also impact the rest of us these days.

So I know that for me, when things get overwhelming, I can feel paralyzed at times. I can feel really profound anxiety. Which of these difficult choices am I going to make when there’s job issues? Where should the family live? Where should the kids go to school? Now take that level of complexity and choice and layer it onto a brain that is reaching puberty early, is awake to all this stuff, [but] can’t make sense of it.

And that was the second or third time it hit me. While Richtel’s story is about one tragically challenged cohort—and there is no denying the enormity of the dilemma for teens—isn’t this story also about the rest of us as we struggle to respond to the same “noisy,” tech-amped environment? Even with our “fully-developed, adult brains” (whatever that means), how much less susceptible are the rest of us to the same kinds of neurological mismatch and distress?

In other words, aren’t all people (including you and me) at least somewhat susceptible to the damages caused by this brave new world that we suddenly find ourselves in?

Reading and hearing Richtel’s reportage over the past few weeks was not the first time that I’ve asked this question. Sometime “tech humanist” and long-time technology commentator Tristan Harris talked about the “misalignment” of our emotions, institutions and devices in an op-ed he wrote in 2019 called “Our Brains Are No Match for Our Technology,” and I worried about it at the time in a post called “Finding the Will to Protect Our Humanity.” In his essay, Harris noted that:

[O]ur Paleolithic brains aren’t build for omniscient awareness of the world’s suffering. Our online news feeds aggregate all the world’s pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn’t humane….Simply put, technology has outmatched our brains, diminishing our capacity to address the world’s most pressing challenges….[As a result,] the attention [and distraction] economy has turned us into a civilization [that is] maladapted for its own survival.

In other words, Harris argued that we’re so overwhelmed by “the world’s” 24/7 wars, genocide, oppression, environmental catastrophe and political chaos that we’re rendered “helpless” by the over-load, while, at the same time, the technology that brings it to us leaves us high-and-dry instead of providing us with the means (or “agency”) to feel that we could ever make a difference against even a fraction of what besets us. And as if that isn’t enough, don’t our adult brains also have to process all of the tech-driven peer pressures that teenagers do?

Matt Richtel and his examination of our “too loud and insistent” environment adds grist to Harris’s mill (albeit through his limited category of witnesses) while also advising us about the tragic range of the mental health meltdown they’re suffering and the equally tragic lack of a health care infrastructure to either stop or repair the resulting damage. By doing so, Richtel provides a kind of bridge between the “brain mismatch” that both he and Harris identify and Harris’s sobering conclusion that we may be finding ourselves “maladapted for our own survival” without a lot more insulation than we have now from the invasively harmful world we’ve created.

For all kinds of personal reasons—and maybe some less subjective ones too—I’m feeling their sense of futility too this week.

This post was adapted from my January 22, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Reading Last Year and This Year

January 12, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s been a busy week for me, and not in a good way.

It was probably RSV that took down the first three days of it in a torrent of congestion and runny nose, until I felt my old self begin to return on Thursday, only to discover while heading out for necessities, that the rapid thaw had burst two pipes in our carriage house (which holds both car and office) so I ended up spending all of my relief mopping, moving, drying and hoping that my plumber would come to the rescue.

By Friday I was tired, back to recovering and not yet relieved again, but Andrew the unflappable pipe fixer had come and gone and it now appears that I’ll finally be getting rid of the old computer equipment that’s been gathering out there because I never got around to removing “the sensitive bits” before it’s composting until now.

If all of this has to happen, it might as well be in this dangling participle of a week, lodged between a culmination of sorts (on Christmas) and a new beginning (today, on New Years). While I was casting about for a headline image this morning, it seemed to me that the one above is either about capturing the last or the first light, and therefore, just that kind of inbetweeness. (Photographer Sasha Elage gets my thanks for it.)

In a similar vein, this is also a time of year for looking back on some of its high points and maybe anticipating some new ones. I covered some of the songs that held my ear in 2022 last week, and today it’s a short dash through things I’ve read that have left their mark on me this year and might do the same for you.

However, before turning to my short list of books, essays and stories, a observation about the current state of our literacy (more generally) from, of all people, Henry Kissinger. Nixon’s Secretary of State is 100 years old now and looking a bit like Stephen Hawking while he retreats into his business suit at gatherings, but God-Bless-Him the man is still raising concerns and speaking out about them given his undiminished sense of public duty. It’s remarkable, but also invaluable—especially because so few of our “public figures” work up the gumption to do so today.

_{Henry Kissinger as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future.}

Above everything, Kissinger is concerned that our culture is losing the academic-and-life-long commitments to “deep literacy” that its road warriors seemed to have earlier in his career. That is: To know what our greatest minds are thinking about, to be able to talk about those things too, and most importantly, to discern the most telling insights in this cultural conversation and apply them to how we live and work, govern ourselves and interact with strangers. He believes that there used to be more public-spirited individuals with a deep understanding of history, world affairs and human interaction (from literature, among other sources) who were prepared to lead their communities or countries.

Kissinger fears we are losing the farm teams and even the starting benches of leadership that our civilization once depended on because the men and women who are drawn to public service no longer bring “the deep literacy” that our colleges and universities once fostered. There are lots of reasons for this of course, including an emphasis on “vocational” education (or only-study-now-what-you-can-get-paid-to-do-later) and on the STEM disciplines (given remarkable advances in science and technology and the high-paying jobs that accompany them).

But Kissinger cites two other culprits, both related to the growing dominance of electronic communication today. Increasingly, “we gain what we know” from pictures or tweets instead of from reading about something (anythng) in any greater depth. A constant barrage of brief impressions has caused us to have shorter attention spans and made us less likely to take any kind of dive (let alone a deep one) into complicated subject matter. Kissinger fears that our leaders and “the educated strata” in our societies that once produced their brain trusts are becoming increasingly “less literate,” with consequences that we can unfortunately see all around us.

It’s a point that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also made this year in an Atlantic article called “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anticipating Kissinger’s alarm, this article was already “one of the year’s best reads” and the subject of my Divided We Fall post six months ago. Haidt argues that social media, and its appeal to emotion instead of reason, has increased our civic illiteracy, making it harder to safeguard the institutions and commitments we profess to hold in common. While, like many of you, I was briefly heartened by the U.S. mid-term elections in November, the coming year is likely to remind those of us in the US (with our new Congress) and elsewhere (given widening conflicts and fresh horrors) just how fleeting that “good news” really was.

Today’s undermining of literacy is not somebody else’s problem. I know only too well how much “easier” it is for me to scroll through photo or video-sharing sites or watch “what Netflix recommends for me next” than to commit to a lengthy essay or a new book. So I sense the cognitive degrading in and around me too, a lassitude that the pandemic and other travails has only amplified, and I actively try to vote against it—although not as much as I’d like.

So with that somewhat sobering preface, allow me to share my other favorite “reads” of the year and hopefully an occasion or two for you to cast your own votes for “deeper literacy” over easier diversions.

_{(photo by Leo Berne)}

2 MORE ESSAYS AND ONE STORY

– Eula Biss, “The Theft of the Commons,” in The New Yorker, June 8, 2022. I have one of you to thank for this one (“Happy New Year, Tedd!”) This essay is about private property versus the land as well as the other privileges and freedoms that we still hold “in common.” It turns on the author’s visit to the farming community of Lawton in rural England where the common resources that everyone depends on have somehow resisted the private interests that keep wanting to gobble them up.

Laxton has a tight center where the farmers all live within walking distance of the pub. This makes it distinct from all the rural places I have known. Standing at the center of the village, I had the feeling that I was standing inside an idea, an idea about how to live in relationships of necessity with other people. I felt at home in the idea, and I puzzled over this for a moment, feeling held close by the tight center of a village where I had never been, wondering if I was making myself at home in my own imagination.

It’s imagination that we need now in places like the unclaimed oceans and polar regions, the Amazon and Congo River basins, the rainforests and coral reefs, and where the water flows down the Colorado and towards an American desert that tries to sustain more people than it ever expected.

– Lucas Mann, “An Essay About Watching Brad Pitt Eat That is Really About My Own Shit,” at Hobartpulp.com, August 16, 2022. From its title, you might be wondering what this could possibly have to do with “making the world a better place” at the humanities end of the pool. Well I wouldn’t have found out either if I hadn’t already been thinking about Brad Pitt’s screen persona and the impact that seeing somebody like him over and over might have on an even mildly susceptible person.

Pitt has never chosen to not be Brad Pitt in the image on-screen. Even as he’s taken strange, anti-careerist roles, earned that character-actor-trapped-in-a-leading-man cliché, each performance comes attached to the promise of Brad Pitt’s body. He may have done a wacky Irish Traveler accent in Snatch, but he was still a boxer, and there was a slow-motion break in the movie’s frantic comedy to watch him pull off his shirt. It’s almost as if he’s set himself a lifelong artistic challenge — I can believably be anybody, even when I look like this. Or there’s that lingering, glorious possibility that he hasn’t considered his body enough to wonder whether it’s a gift or a hindrance. Or maybe it’s a moral decision, honoring what has always been the money-maker, refusing to take on that greatest and easiest bit of artifice, the physical kind, even in a profession all about playing pretend.

By getting an imprint like this into the right author’s head, great literature (and this comes close) can change the way that you see the world. Mann confronts the shame of his personal cravings around food, his tendency to be overweight, and his desire that his new daughter be free of these burdens in the shadow of Pitt’s treating food like another accessory to his preternatural good looks. Above even Mann’s powers of observation and serious writing chops, this autobiographical tour-de-force is about how “what we see” might never stop affecting “who we are” once “it gets under our skin.”

“Watching Brad Pitt Eat” is another cautionary note in an era that’s full to the gills with damaging, media-driven impressions, and not just the ones that are made on vulnerable, 13-year-old girls (although in my post next week, called Watching in 2022, one of my favorites was a advertisement for Dove soap that showed “the nearly parental effect” that Instagram or TikTok can have when it’s urging these same 13-year olds to strive for greater beauty.)

– Alyssa Harad, “To Live in the Ending,” in Kenyon Review, July-August, 2022.

When you live in a time that can feel almost apocalyptic you deeply appreciate new ways to frame “the imminent threats” you’re constantly facing. In gorgeous “braids” of storytelling, Harad manages to do just this by weaving several endings in her own life with the “end times” stories that echo around her in order to make more manageable sense out of the harrowing times in which we live. For example, the voice of an environmentalist that she’s followed:

offers a way to think about the end of the world not as a singular explosive event—something true only from the long view of geological time—but as a Chinese box or a matryoshka doll. In a time of climate emergency we live in a series of nested crises. When we emerge from one, the larger one is always there waiting for us. And inside the big troubles—the global rise of fascism, a kleptocratic presidency, white supremacist police violence, concentration camps on our southern border, a pandemic—the smaller crises of ordinary human life continue—a broken heart, a sick child, the rent falling due—all of it framed, structured, intensified, and continually interrupted by the ongoing alarm of the climate crisis.

So how does nesting these crises cushion their blows? Because doing so allows us to acknowledge the occasional victories that occur within them and, when that happens, to feel their respites (if only briefly).

The rolling flow of Harad’s narrative allows us to experience what she means by this: the epiphany of blue flowers in a dying lakebed or of the heroism of a public defender who works “within but against a violent system, quietly, in an obscurity that makes the work possible, trading purity for efficacy, jimmying open the places where the edges don’t quite come together, to make room for a few more people to breathe.”

_{Shadow & light packets.}

BOOKS

– I have piles of unread books, but not a finished one that’s worth sharing since I extolled the virtues of a slim volume about effective writing and a short memoir by “one of our great innovators in modern autobiographical writing” over the summer. In a post called The Relaxing Curiosity That Is Also August, I have more to say about Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “Several Short Sentences About Writing” and Margot Jefferson’s “Constructing a Nervous System: a Memoir.” (Both of them are still sending me reminders.) You’ll find quotes, links to reviews and other impressions that I had about them in that post.

– I follow the second half of the year-in-books quite closely, in particular the National Book Award finalists and longlist for American writers, the same winnowing down for the Booker Prize given to a book that’s written in English this year, and the “notable” and “best” books according to book editors at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other literary arbiters. I do it because I want to know what I should be reading next.

One compilation of note came via a daily post from the publishing industry—a kind of compilation of compilations for the year’s fiction and non-fiction books and “the 10 Very Best Books for 2022 Overall” when the categories are combined. This is how Publisher’s Lunch (yes, it conveniently drops at lunchtime everyday) describes the operation of this remarkable annual service:

Below as usual are our top 10s for the year — based on 61 ‘votes’ from a variety of highly selective lists from critics and reviewers, award nominees, bookseller and librarian picks, book club selections and more.

(“And more!”) You see, they’re aiming to measure quality here, not the quantity of books sold. So in the coming year, if you’re looking for a book to read that comes highly recommended by (apparently) all the right people, their “10 Very Best Books for 2022 Overall” are as follows:

_{1. Trust, Hernan Diaz
2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
3. Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng
4. If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery
An Immense World, Ed Yong
6. The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty
I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy
8. Babel, R.F. Kuang
Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews.}

(I am at a loss as to why there are 11 books on their top 10 list. It must be the “ties” at #8 that are responsible.)

– And last but hardly least, here are the 3 books that I’m currently standing-in-line to take out of my local library. One I was after long before I saw the list above (Ed Yong’s “Immense World” about the infinite varieties of living experience that are flourishing around us but that we know so little about).

A second is also on the list, but I only got interested in it after the buzz from delighted readers I trust gradually became so deafening that I felt like I’d be missing out otherwise (Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” about the origin story of video games and how friendships can sometimes be “as complicated, perplexing and rewarding as a great love story.”)

Finally, a book that came to my attention outside of any list (Claire Keegan’s “Foster,” set in rural Ireland and full of the rich details of daily life, but composed with an artfulness that promises to linger and gnaw. What I know of the plot—about a temporarily-loved girl—has shown me more than enough about why this just might be true.)

If these three live up to their evangelists, I may be writing to you about them here in coming months too.

In the meantime, to you and your loved ones, I wish you all the best in the coming year. Keep in touch and may the wind be at our backs in the months ahead.

This post was adapted from my January 1, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

A Time for Repair, for Wintering

December 13, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I live on a ridge that shoots in from the City boundaries in the northwest and descends, first gradually and then by leaps and bounds, as it reaches towards sea level in the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers.

At our point in this descent, a downward-sloping wind tunnel has been created so that the “weather” coming in from Canada and the Mid-West barrels through it, two or more times each year, snapping trees in its wake like match sticks.

In recent years, two of our trees have borne the brunt. A much-loved magnolia was simply uprooted in one barrage and, a winter or so later, the maple that had been its closest companion was essentially sheered in half.

Since what remained of the maple was pretty ungainly, I could have had it removed but then the most treasured trees on this plot of land—a huge American chestnut, a 200-year-old tulip poplar, and a previously-admired gingko—would have been totally exposed to the gale-force winds.

To begin to rectify the situation, I planted a hardy young silver linden near the spot where the magnolia had fallen, but it will be years before it provides much of a windbreak. So I’m also counting on the half-maple to do what it can, and I’ve been watching it closely–for several months now—as it works to repair and rebalance itself. Among other things, I’ve been surprised at how its “wounds” have closed, where it has decided to sprout new growth, and how it’s been “filling itself back in” from the half arm and lopsided “Y’ of a trunk that remained.

Despite a hard couple of years, there’s been something assessing and almost deliberate about its healing– like a self-powered erector set of verticals, horizontals and angles reaching again for the sky.

My maple-watching preoccupation probably explains my eagerness to read “Trees Don’t Rush to Heal from Trauma and Neither Should We” when this explainer of an article popped into my Short List on Twitter this week.

I wasn’t drawn to the take-aways that trees might be sharing with us (because I’m fairly certain that they don’t think about us enough to offer us much advice), but because of the title’s suggestion that trees decide not to rush when they’re recovering from calamity, that they take their time because they need to get it right. I wanted to know more about that particular drive.

The author, it said, was a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, more specifically of microbiology and molecular plant genetics, which made the piece even more promising. I was even undaunted when I learned that she’d written a book that someone at her publisher had decided to call Lessons From Plants, as if readers needed to be told about “what’s in it for them” in order to pick up this book. I would have gone with The Amazing Ways That Trees Survive and Even Heal From Trauma as a title—less anthropomorphic and more to the point—but anyway, the author’s name is Beronda Montgomery and she managed to pack several interesting insights into her fairly short piece.

Montgomery began by noting how the period of late fall and into winter may be the best time of year to observe the ways that our trees are resting up and recovering before launching a new season of growth in the spring. Particularly in deciduous trees—like our maple—“the carefully orchestrated process of leaf senescence begins [and] the hidden structures of trees emerge” during the late-fall and winter months. She continued:

During the autumnal senescence, the tree suspends active growth and recovers the nutrients of its leaves. This process occurs first by degrading the green chlorophylls that drive photosynthesis – the means by which plants harness light energy – and then converting complex compounds into soluble sugars and amino acids, which are banked over winter for use by the tree in the following spring. Once the nutrients are resorbed [I never heard that word before either, but it says exactly what it means], the tree begins to drop its leaves.

Once a tree loses its leaves (and the leaves of nearby trees are no longer cloaking it in shadow), tree-observers can also see how a tree has been faring in previous months from the abundance (or lack) of winter buds that have appeared, the proliferation of new branches, and whether the wounds that the tree trunks have suffered seem to be healing.

Montgomery says that the wound healing process, in particular, happens in two stages: “an initial, rapid chemical phase, followed by a slower, long-term physical adaptation.” In the first stage, trees produce phytochemicals with antimicrobial/antifungal properties that prevent disease from entering trees through open wounds, leading to eventual decay. After these defenses are mounted, trees begin to produce a soft tissue “callus” that hardens gradually over time. This several-month process keeps the wound free from infection while promoting oxygenation before it produces long-term, protective scar tissue.

It’s the slowness of the second-half of this healing process–all the time that the tree needs–that is most noteworthy to Montgomery:

Covering a wound prematurely simply to keep the damage out of sight, without attention to openly dealing with it through cleansing and therapeutic care, can lead to a festering of issues rather than a healthy progression towards healing, reformulation, growth and thriving.

That progression includes the slow restoration “of sugar-transporting phloem tissues and water-passing xylem structures” that allow a tree to continue to pursue its core purpose of photosynthesis while it accommodates environmental factors like the availability of sunlight, neighboring trees that are competing or cooperating with it, the available nutrients in the soil, and the other threats (like insect pests) that it faces.

You might call this progression “healing fast and slow,” the opposite of a band-aid over an injury before quickly moving on. In Montgomery’s “wound-healing paradigm,” while infection threats have to be countered quickly, repair needs to happen through cleansing flows of oxygen over extended periods of time, the very slow hardening of initially porous scar tissue, and the even slower re-building of core infrastructure.

Yes, it’s the horizontal, vertical and angling branches I could see in September but it’s also the slowly revitalizing engines of the tree trunks that are far more visible to the roving eye in the months of December, January and February.

There is a necessary time for repair, and in a tree it is measured slowly or the repairs won’t succeed at all.

Unlike plants teaching us lessons, perhaps the seasons and how we can learn adapt to them actually do.

On the backcover of Katherine May’s 2020 book, which is called Wintering, she conjures not the season but a kind of “respite” and “recuperative states of mind” that the season of winter teaches us something about.

For her, “to winter” is to learn how to flourish in lean times, when we not longer have the spring’s freshness, the summer’s warmth or the autumn’s harvest to fall back on—when we’ve been stripped down to the basics and must re-charge our flickering batteries. May writes:

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting…

On the other hand, enabling healing and repair in ourselves can be easier said than done. Unlike a wounded maple tree that “knows” what to do “first” and then “more slowly and continuously” over time, we often seem to lack the evolutionary roadmap that can enable us to confront, repair and recover—that is, to make something that’s harder, stronger and more resilient than we had before in the “crucible” that May identifies.

For her, wisdom about wintering didn’t come because she chose to encounter it one day. “However it arrives,” May writes, “wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.” In her own life, she needed to learn how to cope and then recover after waves of disruption roiled the core of her existence. (Her husband fell ill and nearly died. Her own health declined to the point that she could no longer work. Her 6-year old son became too anxious to go to school. Many of the things that May had counted on as a partner, as a professional and as a mother now felt “provisional and unsettled.”) In her “fallow season,” May had to learn to admit the extent of her disorientation and unhappiness, and that validating these feelings neither encouraged them nor made them worse. Instead, by making a place for her desolation she began to learn how “to winter” through it, something that the natural world already knows instinctively.

May’s notion of “wintering through”—which she never tires of visualizing with the range of her poet’s eye—is what’s most remarkable about her book. The grounding metaphor not only separates a time of injury, respite and repair from healthier and happier times—a liminal season that’s entirely apart from the fatter ones that came before—but also activates the transformational qualities of inhabiting (and even mastering) the challenges of a place that’s as hard as this, at least when we refuse to deny its harsh realities by blaming ourselves for its challenges or attempting to sedate them away.

We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.

For this very wise person, wintering is a state where all of us will find ourselves eventually, and more than that, where all of us need to find ourselves from time to time in order to discover the native resourcefulness that we have to repair ourselves, to recover our footing and to evolve.

Wintering may be something we need to give ourselves now, when the ground outside is hard and the trees bare, or at some other time of the calendar year, but it can be confronted with greater hope given the familiarity and color that’s imparted in Katherine May’s deeply compassionate book.

Here is a link if you’re interested in a thoroughly enjoyable, hour-long conversation with May about the thoughts and experiences behind Wintering. And if you find yourself hooked, you can also listen regularly to her “Wintering Sessions” podcast. I think that you’ll find her voice to be a consolation worth marshaling for this time and for any difficult time ahead.

This post was adapted from my February 6, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Last weekend, on December 11, 2022, my weekly post revisited this discussion about “wintering” and added to it. If you’re interested, it’s called: “A Calendar with 52 Seasons.”

The Surprising Effects of Saying the Right Words Out Loud

November 16, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

A lot of people seem depressed to me. It’s particularly disheartening when their rage against the machine casts a pall over the smiles and chat that they’re aiming in my direction.

We all process life’s traumas differently of course, but many of us do so by burying them. it’s just not far enough down to hold our game faces in front of anyone who’s paying attention.

We get depressed for some of the same reasons that we suffer from PTSD.

During America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and given the unrepaired damage that lingered from Vietnam 30-plus years before—there was a growing acknowledgement of PTSD (or post-traumatic stress disorder) and, more importantly, how to enable soldiers who had internalized the traumas of these battlefields to reach a kind of armistice with them so they could begin to heal as they made their transitions home.

Two books have changed my thinking about this healing process, and both suggest paths for recovering from traumas that have been branded on our psyches by war or by simply growing up in damaged families and communities. The first, about warriors struggling to find their ways back from war (and so much more), is “The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (2015) by David Morris. The second, about recovering from traumatic experiences more generally, is called “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma” (2016) by Besel van der Kolk. (It’s telling, I think, that Van der Kolk’s important book is still a top-10, best-selling non-fiction title six years after it was first published.)

Both books are beautifully written and conceived, and both authors observe how pre-modern societies (unlike our own) enabled trauma survivors to recover through community-sponsored, participatory events. For instance, Morris talks at length about the role that performances of Greek tragedies (and the on-stage choruses that echoed audience reactions) had in finally bringing their returning soldiers back into their communities. Van der Kolk devotes some of his most powerful chapters to programs that teach victims how to “perform” their ways through the kinds of traumatic events that have been holding them hostage.

So I found a recent podcast about the healing that can come from reciting carefully-chosen speeches from Shakespeare’s plays to be yet another way to bring “what’s been damaged” out into the open—to give it both a deep breath and a plaintive voice—in an effort to weaken trauma’s hold on how we are and appear to our families and neighbors.

I wondered whether speaking famous lines from a make-shift stage could actually help those who are shadowed by trauma to heal the wounds that still haunt them and are impossible to hide.

Since I spend a lot of time writing, it’s hard to avoid “the slap to the side of my head” that at exactly the same time I’m grinding out another paragraph, fewer and fewer readers are actually reading anything more than the wordstreams that keep flashing across the surfaces of their phones. Maybe a podcast story like this one “about the healing power of literature” can help to reverse the TikTok-ing of our attention spans so that there will be somebody left with the bandwidth to read any book (and mine in particular) someday.

Of course that reversal will happen, I say to myself. It has to.

But whether it’s a book to read or a speech to recite, whenever advice is involved it also depends on “the quality of the uplift” that follows your words on the page or the ones that you’re delivering to an audience.

– So could learning to deliver, say, Gloucester’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard III (the one that begins: “This is the winter of our discontent”), really help to counteract the conflict and darkness–and more importantly, the buried anger about that conflict and darkness–more effectively than either the “Can’t-you-just-get-over-it” advice or the anti-depressants that our culture keeps prescribing?

– Is Shakespeare’s poetry really that much fuller and more resonant with what we’ve actually been feeling and living than the clinical jargon that gestures “in the direction of” but fails to capture the full dimensions of our discontents?

– Is there also something about the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s lines that can fall into sync with our natural body rhythms, thereby slowing us down and calming us in spite of everything that was destabilizing us before?

A recent episode of The Pulse, “a podcast with stories at the heart of health, science, and innovation,” was posing all of these questions and making me wonder about the recognitions that the right words might invite and the healing power of their bodily cadences when we turn them into personal testimony in front of an audience.

– Could transforming Gloucester’s speech or Lady Macbeth’s “Out, Damned Spot” monologue into ones own witnessing about trauma actually relieve some of the pain that’s under the surface but still leaching out?

– Could aspects of “a cure like this” be bottled and taken home for medicinal purposes, effectively turning our living rooms into mini-Globe theaters, instead of venting our inner demons whenever we scream at customer service representatives over the phone, assault flight attendants while we’re traveling, threaten poll workers when it’s time to vote, or lash out at our spouses?

– Could “magical words, passionately spoken” offer any kind of pressure-relief valve for what’s plainly ailing so many of us?

At least until now, the program that was profiled onThe Pulse has been limited to trauma survivors-–both war veterans and others—who voluntarily come together for a kind of group therapy to (1) chronicle their particular injuries; (2) identify the Shakespearean passages that best reflect those injuries; (3) get some distance from the damage that’s been done by enlisting another group member for a dress rehearsal of those theatrical lines; and (4) learn how to sync breathing with delivery to present what amounts to “their own testimony about personal traumas” in front of the group.

The amount of healing that occurs in those who follow this arc was measured and found to be substantial.

According to Stephan Wolfert, the program’s founder, the support of similar group members is essential for trauma-sufferers to begin to heal. As comfort levels grow, participants create an inventory of their past injuries, including insomnia, occasions for shame and guilt, or when they’ve felt betrayed and abandoned. From reading excerpts of Shakespeare’s plays, they notice that some of his characters seem to be tortured by the same experiences. According to an article about Wolfert: participants who had felt “stupid” reading these plays in high school “entered the world of Shakespeare’s verse” as they began to feel a kinship between themselves and these characters.

An early challenge involved matching participant traumas with monologues in particular plays. Wolfert worked with Alisha Ali, who was part of a research team in applied psychology at NYU, to create an algorithm that could help with those matches. For example, someone with recurrent nightmares would be given the lines of a character with tormented sleep. With a “good-fitting” speech in hand, participants then hand off their “personal trauma monologues” to a trusted group member to rehearse and perform, gaining from it:

an ‘aesthetic distance’ from his or her own trauma, and from that distance, being able to feel empathy toward the [other] veteran who is performing [your] monologue. For veterans who are unable to forgive themselves for some wartime trauma, such as the death of a fellow soldier, this distance can provide the veteran with a new self-awareness and a path to self-forgiveness.

Because performing Shakespeare is a physical act that requires training, members of the group then turn to improving breath control for delivering lines that are written in iambic pentameter and, as such, have their own unique stops, starts and rhythms. Through his work with Ali, Wolfert began to notice how closely “the beat” in Shakespeare’s verse echoes the rhythms of the human heart, and how encouraging performers to breathe around each line can reduce “heart rate variability”—a regulator of stress in PTSD sufferers—as well as deepening their appreciation of what they’ve been feeling while reciting them.

In the podcast, one group participant described how this breath-work around Shakespeare’s lines worked for him. By alternating each line with a breath, he noticed that:

it softens, just that breathing between each line, it softens the reading so that the lines almost melt into your breath, ‘cause you’re inhaling and exhaling while you read, almost like you’re not reading it but breathing it, and that’s when the meaning of the words comes in.

At first, the rush of “his sense of aloneness from all directions” overwhelmed him to such a degree that he broke down. These kinds of recognitions and releases of pent-up emotions continued for all participants as they delivered their final testimonies using Shakespeare’s words.

All the while, Ali used scientific measures to document health improvements in the group’s participants. She noticed how “immersion” in the verse and “feeling” its rhymes and rhythms through intermittent breathing counteracts the kind of “shallow breathing” that is common when someone is in a near-constant state of fight and flight, which many PTSD sufferers are. At the same time, she noticed how a new sense of calm enabled participants to hold their traumas in a somewhat safer place.

Ali also noted how this kind of play-acting produces “significant increases in self-efficacy,” with participants gaining a greater belief in their own abilities and competencies by owning and performing their experiences and, therefore, building confidence that they can hold jobs and socialize more effectively in spite of their injuries once they leave the group. Ali went on to record “significant improvements” in heart-rate variabilities and in “EEG” measurements that are associated with improved brain functioning among the program’s participants.

There seems little doubt that these men and women were more prepared to enter their new worlds by gaining a greater measure of control over old world traumas.

_{Another night’s entertainment.}

Below is the front-end of Gloucester’s famous speech from Shakespeare’s Richard III (For its entirety, the last 13 stanzas can be found here.) If you’d like to “make a go” at it, try breathing “in” before and “out” as you recite each line—even if the only one who’s there to hear your testifying is a trusted pet. Notice how surrounding each line with breath deepens your appreciation of the words and how they resonate with your experience. And if you’re not feeling disconnections like these already, try to imagine how it might feel if you were fresh from a battlefield and returning to the supposed relief of an alien world that feels as misaligned as this one does.

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Maybe you don’t have PTSD today, but are merely suffering the after-effects of lesser traumas in a world that’s still alarming and frequently destabilizing.

Maybe taking a breath–and cushioning the words for such traumas in the moment that you exhale them–can soften the daily body blows, deepen your breathing and slow a racing heart.

Maybe it’s worth it to keep finding “the words” for the traumas around “just plain living and working,” and that one of the best reasons to read may be how books, plays and poems—particularly great ones—can give us more evocative words than we have already to move us from alienation today to a more comfortable world tomorrow. “The right words” can help us to breathe our sufferings in and then out in an effort to move beyond them.

(In the meantime, your captive audience may not always know what’s going on when the stage lights dim and the costumes come out, but hopefully will join you in feeling the air get a little bit lighter after each performance.)

+ + +

This post was adapted from my November 13, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Sparks That Fly When Work Becomes Play

October 19, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m probably more driven than you imagine. Which is why it was so healthy for me to get down on the floor the other day and get lost in some play with a simpler version of myself.

I use cut outs with different colors and patterns to make larger canvasses by moving them around and swapping them out. Think of building a quilt with a big dose of randomness so that something unexpected might begin to emerge from the associations you’re making.

If you’ve got enough cut-outs and the right unusual ones, the exercise is totally immersive. You forget where you are in the dexterity of moving these puzzle pieces around. And sometimes you end up with something that almost looks like art.

So it was serendipitous this week to stumble on an interview with a cartoonist (an artist, really), teacher and writer who’s made a career out of this kind of playfulness. I’ll introduce her properly in a minute. In the interview, she was saying something about her grad students (“These are people at the top of their games [with] this laser focus on getting one thing done” in their areas of study) and how much they need little kids to show them how to relax their relentless quests enough for insight and creativity. She was talking about how 3- and 4-year olds approach problem-solving in tactile, immersive and playful ways and how she regularly invites them into the classroom to play with her big kids.

[M]y students had to be on the floor with them working together. They had to try to get into their mind-set. It’s hard to explain, but it changes you. After you spend about 90 minutes with them, you just find that something has loosened up. You get away from that laser-focused, worrisome way of being.
When you’re an adult watching a kid playing with a little toy, you just think that kid’s doing that and there’s nothing else to it. But from the kid’s perspective that toy is playing with them. It’s interactive.” (I added the emphasis here.)

When the value of this mutual encounter penetrates, at least some of her grad students have a second option. Their scholarship is no longer just about the push to shape their field of study, get their book published and find tenure someplace. All of a sudden, their chosen field can be equally involved in pulling them into it and shaping them back, like that child’s toy.

By breaking some of the earnestness down, there’s finally enough freedom for some magic to happen.

This ever-present chance to be taken out of my driven self is one of the great things about having Wally around. There is nothing—nothing—that he wants to do more than play. When I get down on the floor with him and grab a ball he knows what’s coming, because he’s up on his hind legs dancing with delight and purring with expectation. The sad part, I realized after reading this interview, is that I don’t get down on the floor with him enough.

But between the cut-outs the other day and this chance interview encounter, I’m realizing that it’s irresponsible for me NOT to open that space on a regular basis. As this wise woman said, it’s not for everyone (like the chronically under-wired) so this kind of play won’t have:

saving qualities for people who don’t need it. It’s like, some people can’t digest milk, you know? But a lot of people can.

I don’t post on Instagram anymore, but I visit regularly and have been captivated by the short videos posted by a former Philly guy (and current New Yorker) who identifies himself as @TheDogist He wanders around the city in his shorts with his camera and whenever he sees an owner with her dog stops, asks if he can take the dog’s picture, interacts with it for a bit, and starts snapping or filming (actually, an invisible assistant does the filming).

His encounters are often magical—like getting down on the ground with a 3- or 4-year old. He has a way with dogs, a dog-oriented gift for gab, and a pocketful of treats at the ready to move each dog’s full attention onto this total surprise of a stranger. I’ve found that @TheDogist’s dog portraits and filmed interactions often perfectly capture their mutual delight.

The pictures of dog’s noses here also capture that curious and playful spirit, I think, which brings me back to Lynda Barry. The interview with her (it’s all great, by the way) appeared a few weeks ago in The New York Times Magazine. She’s best known for a weekly comic strip called Ernie Pook’s Comeek, which I never recall seeing in any of my newspapers. (Interestingly, it was first published in a student newspaper, without her knowledge, by fellow cartoonist Matt Groening, whom you may know from his Simpsons fame in later years.) When Barry’s not drawing, she’s teaching “interdisciplinary creativity” at the University of Wisconsin. It was also telling that she’s living not very far from the place where she was born and clearly belongs.

Over the years, Barry has written (and drawn) several books, including the award-winning, 2008 graphic novel “What It Is,” a hat trick of sorts that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook counseling readers on how to make a space for their own creativity. One of my favorite things about Barry is that she won a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called genius grant) a couple of years ago, when she was already well into her sixties.

It would not be wrong to say that building playfulness into her life and work has given her access to a kind of fountain of youth.

These days, I treat my time on social media and streaming platforms like Netflix almost like a timed dessert. For example, I only look at Instagram when I’m close to falling asleep, and limit myself to the day’s postings from the few posters that I follow. I also try to take my “other screen diversions” in similarly pre-measured doses because I know they’re like sugar: something I crave but also know are less-than-deadly-for-me ONLY when consumed in small amounts.

YouTube, Twitter, IG. Screen diversions that are always waiting to take you away from reality are addictive: a kind of Mind Candy. These interfaces “know” you well enough to call to you and suck you in like play, but have little-to-none of play’s interactive and real-world upsides. Most of the time, all they are is an escape from reality, especially the reality of your own life and work.

Of course, Barry understands the difference between genuine play and the faux-playfulness of screen time as well as anyone, including in this parable of sorts, where she tells us:

I have I have a friend who’s a writer. No matter what we’re doing or whom he’s around, he’s on his phone. We were sitting out in a parking lot, and there was a guy who came out who was in this full orc costume with a shield. I thought, I’m not going to say anything. Let’s see if my friend looks up. The guy passed right by him and — it was outside a hotel — tried to get through a revolving door. There’s all this bump ba bump ba bump, and if my friend would have looked up, he would have seen an orc [fighting with the revolving door and then] go by! But he never looked up! Then later I told him, and he’s like, ‘That didn’t happen!’ [But] it totally did happen! So something that closes you off to the world that you’re in — I mean, I could be on TikTok all night long. I keep deleting that app because I love it so much. But something that takes you out of your environment, you pay a high price. You miss the orc.

As if she needs to, Barry drives home her point even further:

The main thing about the phone is that you’re no longer where you are. You’re no longer in the room. You’re no longer anywhere. The opportunities to have an interaction with the things [and the people] around you are taken away. I just see the world as richer without the phone.” (my emphases again)

Your alternative focus doesn’t have to be violence on the streets, Vladimir Putin, North Korea, girls cutting off their hair in Iran, babies starving in Pakistan, babies starving in the Horn of Africa, “disturbing images in this video,” rainforests being cut down, a politicized Supreme Court, mass shootings in our schools, smaller containers of coffee for the same price at the grocery store—because those things are only a small part of our daily realities and their din (because that’s what it is) can be escaped with equally small doses of social media time.

For the rest of our lives and our work, playful interaction with the world around us might be a whole lot healthier.

_{My favorite nose.}

The picture of the dog up top was taken by one of the ”teachers” at our favorite day care center @phillydogschoolfairmount The second one is care of @odzi.and.elza, also on IG, and the third from the Dog School folks again on a particularly “nosy” day. I took the last one myself, this morning.

This post was adapted from my October 9, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.