An Awesome Table

January 7, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Awe can be expected, but never planned because there’s always an element of surprise—before being floored.

You can set the table for surprise, but never serve it to yourself.

For me, Rome is one of the world’s most splendid tables—and once again, it didn’t disappoint.

Work Life Rewards

When you’re open enough to be surprised by a human touch or the meaning below the surface, the relief of them is like water on dry ground. They enable the next effort and opportunity. They’re how what’s brown becomes green.

But however much we try to sustain ourselves and resist the tug of preoccupation, these recognitions about life tend to slip away, and the doors that let in the fresh or even fragrant air are opened less frequently.

Life and work begin to seem petty, predictable and ungrateful; the political discourse nothing more than coarse, small and insulting, with nary a grace note. Of course, you shut yourself in, but it’s barren and unrelieved with too little life.

Making yourself available to awe flings open the doors and windows.

Aren’t vacations for letting the amazing pull you out of your rut and catapult you towards heaven?

Looking up into the dome of Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

“Beam Me Up, Scottie”

Even the best trans-Atlantic flights leave you disoriented on arrival. Little did I know that my imbalance was about to enter the spin cycle on the cab ride from Fiumicino to my hotel.

The mom of a high-school son and college daughter who drove me immediately talked about her 12 shifts on/2 off, back and forth at 48E, for those arriving in Rome or departing at very high speeds through its swirl of traffic. I asked: “So what do you do when you’re not working?” and she said matter-of-factly: “Defensive shooting.” As it was dawning on me that this was “using a gun to protect yourself” she was fastening her iPhone to a dashboard mount and launching videos of her darting through an obstacle course, firing at random shapes as they emerged from behind trees or around corners. Something like the FBI training center at Quantico.

“Who took these?” I asked. “Oh, my coach gets a keek out of me,” she said (which I rapidly translated from the Italian) “so he is always taking them.” He must have had a crush on her, and I could certainly see why as she whipped through an intersection at an impossible speed and I gave myself over to the ride. “Do Italian men like their women to use guns?” I couldn’t translate what she said in response, but some of it was “there are not too many of us,” and the rest of it was something other than “No.” Doors that had been closed were already opening, and I’d barely just gotten there.

We talked about ancient pissoirs we were passing, the easiest way to get an audience with the pope, the visiting time with the best weather and fewest tourists (before Easter), hand gun regulations in the EU, a particularly egregious assault on a woman she seemed to know, something about “immigrants from the south,” how guns are treated unfairly and knives are not, what was most exceptional about her son, and where she liked to travel most (the Middle East). Like Bernini’s David whom I met a few days later, I was fully locked and loaded by the time I got out of her cab and dove into my first afternoon.

Ciao Roma!

Santa Prassede

Between the jet lag and the cab ride, I was primed for awe but never realized how much until afterwards.

Rome’s seven hills make it anything but flat, so it was down to Barberini Plaza from the hotel and up to the intersection of two narrow streets where, in each direction, there’s a clear view of the obelisks and monuments of four distant plazas (“a masterpiece of Baroque city planning”) if you can brave looking amidst the racing traffic.

I was headed towards Santa Maria Majore, a 4^th Century basilica that was another down-then-up walk away. It felt good to get the blood flowing.

The basilica was vast, golden and humming with a life that included stand-up confessions being heard from open windows in the side aisles and the murmurs of afternoon mass from a hidden chapel. The pictures I’d seen in art class now had a context. I could appreciate the distinctiveness of the church’s soaring, rectangular space and spiraling, cosmatesque floors. I’d finally stopped for long enough to realize that this wasn’t Kansas anymore.

I knew there was another ancient church nearby and got directions. As I approached Santa Prassede, I might have seen the chance of being thunderstruck if I’d been thinking about anything other than finding my way to its simple doorway in the suddenly fading light. The place announces itself so softly, you barely know that it’s there.

You cross into St. Prassede from the side, expecting a similarly modest vestibule within. At first, it is hard to tell. There is more light from its candles than its electricity and it takes time for my eyes to realize how much it soars. There are mosaics on every surface of the apse that looms to the right behind the main altar, their tiny squares of gold and glaze not quite resolving into pictures in the half-light.

This space is also a hive of visitors, but here they’re more hushed and reverential as they cluster in groups or wander into alcoves. Their reserve tells me to approach more gingerly this time, and I sit in a pew to figure out how. An organ below the altar begins to trumpet through the gorgeous fragments of an unfamiliar hymn. He’s practicing I realize, and his repetitions and variations cushion us all with sound as the shadows lengthen and the sun sets. The dusk is rarely as hopeful as the dawn, and more mysterious.

Roman churches are often dark when you enter them, particularly on late fall afternoons, but a euro in a light box can usually be counted on to illuminate the Caravaggio painting or Bernini sculpture that you’ve come to see. You pay as you go when lighting candles as well. I had noticed such a box with its 1E sign in the front as I looked around but didn’t know what it would light.

A young man and woman came in just after me. As I watched them, she seemed tentative and stood off to the side, but he was more purposeful, kneeling and crossing himself at various stations before lying prostrate on the floor before the main altar for 30 seconds or maybe a minute. My own reasons for being there seemed inadequate in the face of his, but then he walked to the light box.

I took in a breath the way you do when the water suddenly goes over your head. The room had changed that much. Everyone looked towards the light with hungry eyes including the young man, his arms stretched out in an embrace. The volume of space, the envelope of music, and how we shared them were so ravishing as to be unnerving. This picture only gestures towards its suddenness and three-dimensionality.

Awe overtakes and sometimes overwhelms you. You feel you know something bigger and truer without being sure of exactly what it is. It engages your head but also your heart. You might also call it delight, amazement or wonder. It’s a channel that suddenly opens and disrupts you with a sense of deeper possibilities.

And I’d found it on my first day away.

The Bonus Round

As I’m writing this post, there’s a knock at my door and it’s a neighbor with cookies. Our friendship goes back decades to when her marketing company designed a logo for a company I was starting. Our work together made her friend as well as colleague.

She said this will be her happiest Christmas in years. She’d had a child 40 years ago as a college freshman, gave him up for adoption, had gone on to marry and have a family, and in September this son had found her, after searching for more than five years.

He is “amazing, successful, handsome, writes beautifully, is insightful, has his own beautiful children” and now has returned to her, a gift she’d never expected. He became a surgeon but could never have known that he came from a long line of doctors and surgeons, including her father and his grandfather.

The wonder of it was all over her face. She didn’t know she could still be this surprised. She was lit from inside with awe, and it had changed everything.

The Shortest Day of the Year

Last Thursday was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. From here on, every day until the summer solstice (6 months from now) is longer and a little brighter. It’s the backstory of the season’s holidays. These are the days for new beginnings and for miracles like Christmas.

The authors of our calendars knew what they were doing when they began each year with a measure of awe.

Note to readers: in a different form, this content was included in my December 24, 2017 Newsletter, the second of what turned into three posts about awe.

An Antidote is Awe

January 7, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m about to fly out to a place that filled me with awe before, both as a teenager and as a parent. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that mix of wonder and apprehension that you only feel when you face something that’s exponentially vaster and less comprehensible than the realities you struggle to manage every day.

As much as I’ve poked fun at friends this year that “Your sky is not falling Chicken Little,” it seems undeniable that we’re in the most unsettled time since the early Seventies when I first took this trip. So once again I’ve been thinking about antidotes like awe (and its sidekicks beauty and timelessness). As the following observations attest, you don’t necessarily need a plane to get there.

Awe Can Come From the Sounds of the Words

As part of his project “to re-wild” our language, one of Robert MacFarlane’s recent “words of the day” on Twitter was “roke,” for the thick morning mist that rises like smoke from the ground and water. This picture of it was taken by John & Rosamund MacFarlane

Robert MacFarlane is a naturalist and the author of a new children’s book called The Lost Words.

The book is his and illustrator Jackie Morris’ response to a controversy that, at first, sounds peculiarly British. In 2007, the kid’s version of the Oxford English Dictionary announced that it was adding words like “broadband” to its new edition while removing a host of other words that it found to be “less in use.” Many of those words—including acorn, blackberry and bluebell—put names to things that are experienced in the natural world. Did their removal from the dictionary signal a deeper loss about what we know and don’t know?

Philosopher A.J. Ayres has argued that without a word for something, you are unable to conceive of it. Your imagination, your ability to conceptualize, and your vocabulary are closely intertwined. As a word like “acorn” departs the lexicon, it becomes harder for you to imagine that nut which falls out of oak trees to the delight of squirrels and other managers of their winter stores. Surely, the dictionary’s culling would contribute to these words’ disuse and eventual oblivion.

In the controversy that followed, MacFarlane, Morris and others wrote an open letter to the dictionary’s editors that stated in part:

“There is a shocking, proven connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing.”

The editorial changes marked a alarming shift from the natural playground outside to the screen-centered world inside. To repair some of the broken connections, MacFarlane and Morris decided to collaborate on The Lost Words, each one of which had been removed from the dictionary.

With gorgeous illustrations and poems that are meant to be read by children or to them out loud, The Lost Words is intended to operate like a “spell”—as in leaving you spellbound or in awe of a word and where your imagination takes it.

These are some of MacFarlane’s poetic conjurings around the lost word “otter”:

Otter enters river without falter—what a supple slider out of holt and into water.

This shape-shifter’s a sheer breath-taker, a sure heart-stopper—but you’ll only ever spot a shadow-flutter, bubble-skein and never (almost never) actual otter….

In one interview, MacFarlane said:

We wanted to make a spell-book in two senses—in that children spelt these words but that there was also this great sense of enchantment; that old magic of speaking things aloud.

MacFarlane is often asked whether he is hopeful about the future. “The bigger picture is dismal,” he says, mentioning plastic pollution, climate change and extreme weather events. But he’s also concerned about feeling paralyzed in the face of it.

Small acts of care are crucial—grass-roots charities, individuals, books, words, [all] are doing magic work—so to say there’s no point is an abandonment of everything. Hope is a greater agent for change than despair.

You can follow his hopeful words on Twitter too @RobGMacFarlane

Great Teachers Share Their Awe

The shortest path to continuous learning comes from cultivating the desire to be surprised and amazed. The best teachers have this desire, and their life’s work is sharing their intoxication with others who want to have it too. For them, it’s an essential part of completing who you are.

A teacher can stimulate a compulsive kind of curiosity by recounting how a book, an experiment, a theory or an equation is still exciting to him or continues to affect her. “Thrilling.” “Gorgeous.” “Amazing.” “It can still send shivers down my spine.” Students can always follow scents of engagement like this because they can feel how they bring their teacher to life.

Why math, history, chemistry or English actually matter requires witnesses who have already been convinced and can share their belief. For teachers like this, the goal is not to transfer content into rows of empty boxes but to foster “a quality of mind” that inspires students to pursue their own questions while showing them how to satisfy their thirst for knowledge. It’s releasing the intrinsic sense of wonder in every learner instead diverting it into the extrinsic search for grades or the approval of others.

On the most basic level, infectious curiosity becomes a part of every learner’s agency. You complete yourself by your continuing willingness to be surprised and amazed.

To be awestruck.

Awe Follows Invitations to Get Lost in Something Bigger Than Yourself

I recommend Casper Henderson’s A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels. It’s a rambling, lively and insightful discourse on the wonders that are all around us.

Like MacFarlane (another Brit), Henderson is careful with his words. “I prefer the term ‘wonder’ to ‘awe,’ he writes in a short essay about his new book in The Guardian:

For me, awe, even in its everyday clothes, is redolent of something that almost overwhelms us. Wonder, by contrast, is a state in which we remain in possession of our intellectual faculties as well as feel emotionally elevated. It has much in common with awe, but it also overlaps with curiosity. ‘When experiencing wonder,’ writes the scholar Matthew Bevis, ‘it feels as if we know something without quite being sure of what we know.’

Wonder is a state of deep attention in which we feel good and think clearly, and connect to phenomena beyond ourselves.

For me, whether you’re mindful or just about to lose it, what’s interesting about these phenomena is not just the mental focus they invite but also the unconstrained emotions they unleash.

For example, when considering rainbows, full-moons and meteor showers, Henderson notes how little the scientific explanations for these occurrences interrupt our experience of their majesty. Whatever our minds tell us, we are still delighted, amazed and almost lost to reverie when we see them.

There is also tremendous emotional gravity around our knowledge that world leaders in America, Russia and even North Korea have the power to launch a nuclear attack. Musing about a president’s access to the nuclear codes, Henderson manages to co-mingle our consideration of this awesome destructive power in his hands with its tragic and very human consequences by citing a jaw-dropping proposal that was made early in the Cold War:

[I]nstead of having launch codes in an attaché case carried by a young officer constantly at the President’s side, the codes [could] be surgically implanted in a capsule beneath the officer’s heart. Then if the President decided that the murder of tens of millions of people was necessary, he would himself have to access the codes by using a butcher’s knife to gouge out the young man’s heart.

For me, anyway, the wonders (like this) that Henderson describes are always on the cusp of lapsing into deep and uncontrollable awe. While becoming more mindful of the wonders around you may be exactly what you need to counter your screens’ addictive attractions, what makes his book so fascinating is its many invitations to get lost in contemplations that are so much bigger than yourself.

The Awesome Edge

Some really interesting things can happen when you leave the familiar behind and inhabit—if only in your mind for a limited time—what lies beyond it.

Victor Turner called this a liminal space, where the reality between the familiar and the unfamiliar tend to blur. From looking at rites of passage or transition rituals in many cultures—such as transforming a boy into man—Turner believed that when you are at the tipping point between one state and another, the dividing line between your individuality and a wider sense of shared meaning gets blurred. You are not only a boy, but also a vital part of a tribe. Not one organism, but united with the entire natural world.

It’s very trippy stuff, but Turner also argues that liminal spaces provide access to thoughts and emotions that can’t be accessed in any other way.

I had one of those experiences several years ago, when I left my freshman year in college for bootcamp in the Coast Guard. One of the short stories in my book describes the edge of my known world this way:

The Coast Guard’s training center juts into the Atlantic churn at the tip of New Jersey, and its southwest watch station sits on a ghostly beachhead whose brow meets the whitecaps when the moon is out. The watcher’s charge is to look out for anyone who is trying to infiltrate our clambake (or escape from it) when a gate of sorts opens between the fence that extends to the high water mark and the retreating tide.

During my duties at this station during “the mid-watch” from 2-6 a.m. one February morning, I could see:

the stern markers of passing trawlers, somebody on watch there too. There were buoys in the straits, candles that I’d learn to keep to my right when following a channel. Under the torn up dark there were even planes on their way to Newark or Philly, their taillights dipping beneath the clouds and their pilots looking down to see where the water turned to land.

I was sick, sleep deprived, feeling sorry for myself, 19 and wondering what I had to hold onto. I knew where I was coming from, but not what I wanted to go back to.

You have to go out—sometimes very far out—and experience something like awe before you can come back in to reassemble the pieces. It may be the only way to refresh what’s really important.

Place Settings for Awe

Shortly after this post, I am flying out for a week in Rome.

I’ve experienced place-induced awe more than once when travelling.

Looking out over the rooftops in East Jerusalem, descending the slick rocks behind a waterfall in Venezuela, drowning in the flower clogged prairie of western Colorado in late June. I’ve also experienced it in Rome. Like Jerusalem, it’s a place where one layer of history is piled on top of another while at the same time it is intensely lived in—through daily use—by everyone who’s there now.

Because they are living so hard and so well, no one in Rome is interested in turning the city into a theme park, so the immensity of time and lived experience is almost everywhere.

I can’t believe how much I’m looking forward to the pageant of it, the food, and the vistas that keep opening up and down its seven famous hills. When the jet lag has been slept away, or maybe while I’m still in its hazy focus, I might even feel its special kind of awe again.

Note to readers: in a slightly different form, this content was included in my December 10, 2017 Newsletter, the first of what turned into three posts about awe.

Doing is Learning

August 27, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I come from a world of careful preparation.

Dot was an anesthesiologist who knew that you always got 8 things ready before you did the 9^th thing, even when it was going to the beach. Frank was an engineer who was carefree to the point of irresponsibility in his off-duty life, but methodical in his professional one. I don’t remember my parents throwing themselves into projects and learning while they went along. Not even once.

Sometimes, though, preparation can be an impediment, even an excuse to avoid jumping in and figuring out how it all fits together.

Judging when you’re ready to “just do it” is part science and part art. The art is in knowing when jumping in could be good for you—that you’re talented and resilient enough to profit from the experience. It comes from the suspicion that learning it while you’re doing it will get you where you’re going a whole lot faster. So whether you take this advice also has to do with self-confidence, or your lack of it.

I don’t know whether Frank Wilczek knew that he was headed for a Nobel Prize when he took his leap from mathematics to physics with little of the necessary groundwork, but he certainly wanted to get someplace in a hurry. This is what he said about jumping into his new discipline in a recent essay:

“My approach was different. I hadn’t taken many physics courses, so my preparation had gaping holes. I could manipulate the physics equations as abstract mathematical symbols, but I often had only vague notions about what the symbols meant. Conversely, if you told me about a situation in the physical world, I might have trouble figuring out which equations applied.

Nevertheless, I resolved to leap right to the frontiers of research. I found a great thesis advisor… and an important problem, and I went for it. I picked a subject area where nobody really knew what they were doing, so I didn’t start so far behind. I learned or improvised what I needed as I went along, made lots of mistakes –and got my thesis done quickly.” (emphasis added)

Wilczek didn’t recklessly jump off a cliff, but hedged his bets in a new area “where nobody really knew what they were doing” so he wouldn’t be so far behind. (That kind of judgment is pure art.) He also jumped because he didn’t know about either the meaning or the application of what he did know already, and that more preparation wasn’t going to solve either problem. (That kind of feeling seems more like instinct.) Wilczek sensed that what your actions mean and how your knowledge can be applied will only be learned by doing it.

In 2004, Wilczek won physics highest prize for a subject I can name—asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction—but not describe. When it may have counted most, his talent and ambition were undeterred by his lack of preparation for achieving it.

Sometimes you write to yourself as much as to others.

I’ve often risked the death of a good idea by over-preparing instead of just grabbing it and running as fast as I could for the horizon. I call it the eat-first-jump-later phenomenon, because the eating almost always makes you too full to jump. I’ll do it later, after a nap and a walk with the dog, even though I know that it’s better to jump on an empty stomach.

So I’ve often been over-prepared and under-experienced, like I suspect many introverts are. Too much time spent in our heads and not enough outside of them.

There’s fear in over-preparers too, of course. What if I get it all wrong? (Nobody gets everything wrong.) What if I embarrass myself? (What, in front of the bystanders who aren’t risking much of anything?) I mean: what if ALL I show is how much I don’t know? (Well that dimension of embarrassment can spur your effort to avoid more of the same the next time around.)

Little experience jumping into action can also make you oblivious to the likely consequences when you finally do have the impulse or summon the courage. You’ve simply never learned how it’s best to feel and act in the heat of the moment.

Many years ago, I remember tripping and falling on an uneven sidewalk at the Penn campus. A group of West Philly teenagers watched me fall, and one started shrieking with laughter. I got up, approached, and with the side of my shoe upper cut her ample butt saying: “What’s wrong with you?” Of course, it was about what was wrong with me, but I couldn’t help myself. How much better if I’d been able to go over and thank her for giving me the best reason yet to watch where I was going. It would have demonstrated my self-control, and probably startled her more than I did with the bounce of my foot.

Mistakes are not excuses for your anger or confrontation. Instead, they’re lessons (gifts really) to learn from. I could merely have said, “Thank you young lady,” if I’d had more experience, on the ground, both making mistakes and handling their consequences.

So I’ve come to appreciate that the best antidote for the over-preparers and under-experienced is practice in taking those first steps into the relative unknown. Each time is an occasion to trust that your instincts, know-how and better angels will help you make it to the other end.

Just like learning how to cook one simple meal instead of learning “how to cook,” the first step can be a simple one and, by hedging your bets, you can improve your chances of building self-confidence and overcoming your fears when the next opportunity beckons.

As a line from one of our Nobel laureate’s fortune cookies famously said: “The work will teach you how to do it”—in ways that preparation never can.

Your Upbringing Always Affects Your Principles

August 20, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Chris Arnade may have returned to the roots of what has always been most important to him.

He grew up hardscrabble middle-class, where the choices were between new clothes and car repairs on the one hand, and a good education, on the other. He went on to become a successful Wall Street trader, but in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash left that career behind to try and capture the stories of downtrodden but hopeful men and women across America.

I’m not saying that this was courageous or that his life today is exemplary. (You can draw your own conclusions about that.) But there may be ties between where he came from, how he climbed so far up the ladder, what he realized once he got there, and how he’s chosen to live and work ever since. The moral arc we’ve taken since childhood is worth considering—particularly its pull on us to return.

When I came upon Arnade’s story recently, the facts of his past seemed to make powerful suggestions about the ways he’s decided to set his priorities today. Of course, it’s always perilous to select and then connect up the historical dots to your current realities, because hindsight can prove almost anything when it tries hard enough. But the values that you acted on as a child are always in dialogue with your current priorities, and it seems to me that Arnade’s story demonstrates the gravitational forces that are always at play in this kind of correspondence.

Arnade’s family stuck out in its corner of the rural South because of its well-known views on civil rights. His father was a Jewish academic who had fled Nazi Germany, while his mom was a socialist activist. Arnade played sports in high school and learned how to handle a gun, but recalls being ridiculed as a n—lover. Unlike the world of his family, is hometown of San Antonio, Florida was conservative, Catholic and a bit more down-on-its-luck.

Arnade photo of pawn shop in San Antonio Florida

His parents raised him along with six other siblings. While neither big families nor limited possessions were unusual in San Antonio, the Arnades used their limited resources to take their kids on far-flung research trips that opened them up to the wider world and ultimately to send all seven to college—opportunities that were almost unheard of in their community.

Beyond his family’s politics and commitment to education, Arnade’s upbringing made him something of an outsider in another way. He was neither his family’s youngest nor its oldest child. As he said later:

“Being caught in the middle you end up something of a watcher. You never fit in entirely.”

Another Arnade photo, of a Quik Mart in San Antonio

It was almost like being an immigrant, caught between his old country and his new one.

Arnade went to college at Johns Hopkins and ended up getting a doctorate in particle physics. He parleyed his comfort with numbers into a Wall Street job, selling emerging market bonds. Arnade made a lot of money and for the first time had a comfortable life, but several disruptions were soon to follow.

In the years between 2008 and 2012, the stock market crashed, the banks that lost billions for regular people were bailed out by the federal government, his mom (who had her own views about his career) died of cancer, his proprietary trading desk was closed under new regulations, and his fellow traders were complaining that Obamacare had raised their taxes.

It rankled Arnade, and during this time, he seemed torn to his co-workers. One reported that he’d leave work to take half-day walks, reporting back later that he’d taken pictures of poor people and those who had recently arrived in America. This is how Arnade describes that transitional time in a piece he wrote for Quartz:

“I had a very good life. So did the people around me. . .

We were the front-row kids, and we felt we had done everything right. We had studied hard and gone to good schools. Most of us had parents who supported us. Our schooling got us good jobs that allowed us to live in nice neighborhoods.

Many of us were geeks, educated in the sciences, and steeped in clever rational arguments. With a PhD in physics, I was part of the wave of rocket scientists that changed Wall Street.

Buttressed by our math, our spreadsheets, our data, and our obsession with the rational, we had a confidence that grew into hubris as we entered and changed more and more industries, from baseball to finance, politics and journalism.

That hubris should have dissolved following the financial crisis in 2008. Our unchecked faith in numbers, and in ourselves, had proved disastrous. We should have admitted guilt and rethought the things we were certain about. Instead we focused on bailing ourselves out and moved along as if little had happened.

It was during this time that I started photographing New York City. I would go on long walks to escape the stress of my job in the aftermath of the crisis. I started letting my decisions be guided by unquantifiable things like empathy and curiosity rather than probability.”

When I confronted a similar career pivot, I had a refuge in the Coast Guard that was as far away for me as Arnade’s poor and immigrant sidewalks were from Wall Street. I thought about everything that was wrong with where I’d been, but never trusted enough to let my empathy or curiosity play much of a role.

With “big firm lawyer” behind me, I tried to plan my way to the future. (How much does my next job have to pay so I can cover my expenses? What values are most important to me? What do I want to be when I grow up?) My sense is that Arnade never analyzed the particles in his physics like I tried to do; his was more of a backward drift in the direction of his heart.

The job that gradually emerged for him was documenting the stories of poverty, addiction and finally, wherever there was a forgotten corner of America struggling for dignity. To find these stories Arnade travels the back roads, sleeping in his van or cheap motels. His wife was alarmed at first by his change of focus and loss of income, but she became his collaborator as he posts his visual chronicles on his Flikr account, in essays created for The Atlantic, or in videos about the aspirations of Trump voters.

Arnade seemed to be looking for the truths that had been masked by his upscale life.

In a 2013 interview on NPR, he recounts how one homeless junkie told him that do-gooders often “offer to buy me lunch. But very rarely does anybody ever ask me who I am.” So Arnade started asking.

After one conversation, he asked the call girl how she wanted him to describe her in the picture he had taken. “As who I am,” she said. “A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.” Encounters like this challenged his outlook. “I naively thought that I would see the same cynicism towards faith that I had, and I saw the exact opposite,” he said. Since their optimism seemed revelatory, he thought that it might say something to others too.

Arnade picture of Jose Villa in La Villita, New Mexico after Villa shared his American Dream: “To live a successful life on your terms, to be accepted by others on your terms, and to accept others on their terms.”

According to The Wall Street Journal story where I first learned about him, Arnade’s new career “is an attempt to reconcile his multiple identities.” Maybe. But it certainly includes a return to what he thought was most important to him as a kid. In that NPR interview about his new job, Arnade says: “This is more comfortable to me. This is what I grew up with.” And in what was described as a view from the back row interview, he had this to say:

“I often use my favorite example, which is McDonald’s. I grew up in a white working-class town, so for me, it’s kind of rediscovering what I already knew. But McDonald’s, which is viewed with contempt [by the front row], is actually a center of community, it’s where people gather. McDonald’s is not a joke.”

Of course, his kind of route is never a full circle. Everyone changes along the way, and the back row isn’t known for writing in The Atlantic, The Guardian, or being interviewed and profiled as often as he is. But Arnade has become a kind of megaphone for the values of his heartland, where residuals of respect, reverence, and outrage over injustice remain. It’s not only what he knew and felt was important back then, but his processing of it by that outsider’s perspective in all the years since.

Moral foundations are first established in childhood. They don’t determine what follows, but are always a part of the continuing conversation that conscience plays inside our heads.

Most people find it hard to look at themselves from a critical distance, decide what they should or should not do, and go on to act accordingly. What does my basic decency require me to do here, they wonder. One way to liberate the conversation from the confusion that surrounds it is to ask: what would the child in me do?

—just like Chris Arnade might be asking.

How Slowing Down Your Judgments Lets in Some Light

July 30, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When it comes to morality—is something right or wrong—you have a trigger finger. Everybody does.

However open-minded you think you are, the closed-minded parts of you are likely to beat you to the punch every – single – time. These mind-closers include your emotions, hopes, habits, beliefs, prejudices and instincts (like that reptilian fight or flight). These sub-conscious drives literally make you jump to conclusions. It’s as if something fundamental in you were threatened.

A quick Q&A so you’re with me so far:

The next time politics comes up in conversation, how long does it take you to decide that what you’re hearing is right or wrong (2 seconds, 10 seconds, until the person has stopped talking)?
On a social issue you know little about, will you give someone you view as religious the benefit of the doubt or be skeptical right away?
If you color your politics blue, how open to persuasion are you when you hear a red perspective? Same question if your color is red and you’re hearing a blue perspective (Not open at all, tune out most of it, will hear them out, will actually talk to them some more about it)?
Which hat are you wearing right now?

Your moral judgments are likely to be rendered before you’ve “thought about it” at all. (Your “reasons” for them come afterwards, that is, when you bother to come up with them at all.) And as the “religion” question suggests, your subconscious may have judged what someone will be saying before they’ve even opened their mouths.

So if our unthinking selves are leading us “by the nose,” is it inevitable for the conversation to break down in almost every area where we share things in common?

Actually, it’s not.

But let’s begin by reiterating that your moral judgments—the decisions made in the light of your values—are the most powerful motivators in your life.

I’m writing about “following your values to a good life at work” because of how your jobs can empower you when they are aligned with this evolutionary flow.

However, reconciling what’s rational and deliberate (your work) with what’s subconscious and intuitive (your values) requires you to take one key step. Because moral judgments happen so quickly, it almost always helps when you slow them down.

Why? (1) because you can, and (2) because your reasoning faculties—some of the better angels of your nature—have a chance to inform your moral judgments, making those judgments more nuanced and constructive without losing any of their primal force.

In his groundbreaking Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel Prize winning economist) made much the same point, arguing, among many other things, that when we “slow down” the “fast process” of moral judgment, there is an opportunity to introduce some reason into it. Indeed, many thought that Kahneman’s book was so important when it came out in 2011 that they made animated summaries of it. Here’s one of them that amusingly illustrates the downsides of too-fast thinking in several contexts, including making judgments about almost everything you value.

Two new studies, out this week, got me thinking again about not being so knee-jerk (and predictable) myself. Moral fervor grounds good work but it’s also the seedbed for dogmatism.

Based on surveys of more than 900 people, the researchers behind these studies found some important similarities between the religious and the non-religious people they tested. The most dogmatic believers said their convictions were based on empathy while the most committed nonbelievers claimed to be fact-based analyzers. But in fact, the opposite was true. In both groups, the most certain were less adept at either analytical thinking or the ability to look at issues from another’s perspective.

So where you fall on this spectrum matters.

In his book The Righteous Mind, self-described liberal Jonathan Haidt surveyed 2000 Americans and reported finding that those identifying themselves as liberal were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. “Liberals don’t understand conservative values,” he wrote. “And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.”

Dogmatic. Predictable. But, in fairness, almost everyone with a moral perspective sits on a high horse.

Haidt argues persuasively that your values or “moral intuitions” guide your behavior long before you can give your reasons for what you said or did. But he also argues for the effort to become more open to opposing views, to pause and reflect before reacting, and to break up your ideological segregation by seeking out different perspectives. (Haidt talks more about why good people are divided by politics and religion in this video clip of him speaking to Google employees.)

There are several reasons for a deeper consideration of the role that’s played by your values —including your better life and work. But for now, it may be enough to reflect on becoming less dogmatic and predictable whenever your values come racing to your defense.

An Awesome Table

An Antidote is Awe

Doing is Learning

Your Upbringing Always Affects Your Principles

How Slowing Down Your Judgments Lets in Some Light

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