Friday, July 23, 2010

Three Movements

I struggled with whether to write a post this week. I decided to because the witness of my readers helps move my thinking forward.

My beloved father has been in the hospital with pneumonia that may be an indication of a more serious problem. Daddy has been in remission for almost 20 years from prostate cancer that had metastasized. His doctor 19 years ago, described the cancer as being “all over him.” Through the miracle of chemo by mouth, the cancer was arrested. Now it may be back. Or not. We’re waiting to hear the lab results. We do know that one of his lungs is not expanding because of a hard mass.

Despite the cancer, until recently Daddy experienced fairly good health except for low back pain due to a growth near his spine. He has lived to watch my children grow up and attend university and to meet his first great-grandchild. Until the pneumonia he daily took walks, read two newspapers and enjoyed a cold beer. He also traveled to family reunions, tended his tiny garden, attended jazz festivals and watched my brother, a blues musician, perform.

We have had him with us far longer than any one could have expected. Still I‘m reluctant to think about letting him go. He has told me several times in the past months, “I can’t live forever. I’ve got to go sometime. I’m 80 years old. I’m tired.” And well he should be.

Daddy was born in Jim Crow-era Newnan, Georgia, to a sharecropper father whom he watched cheated repeatedly as he sold his cotton to the powers that were. A leader in his community, my grandfather was reduced to less than less-than. He dared not protest nor hint at any anger for fear of losing his life as well as his livelihood. Unfortunately he turned his rage on his family. When my father was a teenager, my grandmother, tired of being battered, walked to the train station and headed north. Her six children soon followed.

My father didn’t find the North much friendlier. After serving in the Marines, he worked in Ohio steel mills. Black men received the worst jobs in the mills; Daddy worked in the lowest, hottest parts. Workers were frequently laid-off which made it difficult to pay the mortgage on our little house. During the off-times he worked at a car wash to support us. Other times, he worked as much overtime as he could. He often worked seven days a week to help pay for my university tuition and extras like a short trip abroad.

Despite his hard work, Daddy was not afforded the dignity he should have received. Bankers refused to cash his paycheck—even though it was drawn on their bank. Toward the latter part of his work life, when he drove red-hot steel on tractor-trailers between mills, his loads were often refused at the gate. He would have to wait 8 hours or more to unload and reload; paid by the load, this cut into his pay. And when he had to take disability retirement because of the cancer, he was denied one of his pensions.

If anyone deserves rest, it is he.

Because summer is almost over and it’s almost time to move again, I have slowly begun moving small loads into my new apartment. It’s a beautiful place with views of the Potomac. In the winter I’ll be able to see the Washington Monument and the Kennedy Center clearly from my windows. At first I wasn’t sure about moving to this particular place, but after seeing it I know it’s the right place for me.

Moving now holds more emotional urgency because of my father’s situation. I’ve already moved into a place of gratitude for the gift of time I’ve had with Daddy. Most of his brothers are gone, and, as he recently told me, “All the guys my age are dead.” I know when I see him tomorrow I’ll have to move to a place of acceptance: of his fragility, his suffering and his refusal to be treated for certain conditions. When I protest, my friends remind me to ask him what he wants. It is his life and he can live it—or not—as he will. I have to remind myself of what I’ve told others, “People choose the time of their death.” That could be 10 years away. Still when the end does come as Daddy so often reminds me that it will, I imagine my final movement will have to be to a place of grace beyond imagining.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

What is Noise

Despite last week’s post, I received a message from the universe that I hadn’t gone far enough.

I was walking at the edge of campus in the shade while reading the latest news on my Blackberry. I was so absorbed I didn’t look up until someone tried to pass me. Then I heard a voice saying, “Vikki, didn’t you hear me calling you? I’ve been calling you and calling you.” And she didn’t mean on my phone.

It was my program director. Apparently she had been following me trying to get my attention. I had no inkling that she had been behind me. I neither heard nor felt her presence, so absorbed was I by the tiny screen in my hand. I was stunned.

Last week several articles popped up online (where else?) about people’s absorption with technology and how it affects their quality of life. One of the articles included a sidebar with a test for internet addiction. Of course, I took it, and, I’m embarrassed to say, I passed (or would that be flunked?). As someone who prides herself in getting through the 60s and 70s without imbibing in anything, I was undone.

I talked with my spiritual director about it, and she asked, “Do you think you are?” I responded with the classic addict’s line, “I can stop anytime.” She, a recovered alcoholic, gently laughed and said, “For a good week, and then you’ll start again.”

During our weekly Benedictine Life and Prayer meeting, we talked about our attachment to technology. Fearless Facilitator Greg explained that he refuses to engage with anything electronic before his morning prayers: no TV, radio, internet or iPhone (lucky guy). I knew he had refused to join Twitter (he’s the one who gently guided me toward blogging rather than tweeting) and has consciously disengaged from Facebook. I also know him to be someone who very carefully guards his time, and I understand completely why he does.

I used to be more like Greg. My daughter, Fod, who works for Verizon Wireless, decided when we switched to her company that I should get a Blackberry. I hated it but found that it made it very easy to read the news or check my email on the run. Slowly and insidiously it worked its way into my life. Now I understand why people have nicknamed it the Crackberry (likening it to the highly addictive form of cocaine, called crack, that plagued the inner city in the 80s). Before I began using it, I used to laugh at people hunched over their phones everywhere. Then I became one of them.

I’ve since realized that receiving input at all times of the day is antithetical to the life I want to lead. It is noise, to use a communication term. In this context noise is not just sound; it is anything that interferes with a person’s ability to listen. Noise can be visual—such as the bright beckoning screens of electronica.

What Greg does—and what I used to do better—is to reduce the noise. When I do I can more clearly listen for God and to God. Checking my emails, text messages or the news first thing often sends me in a direction I don’t want to go. By the time I sit to listen, my mind is often so crowded with the day’s tasks that it’s hard to be still and acknowledge what God might have to say to me or even what emerges from my best self. And those are the two reasons why I joined this life of radical balance.

Obviously, I won’t stop using technology; I can however put it in its proper place. It’s a struggle, but I have been experimenting with different ways of dealing with it: Recharging the phone across the room instead of near my bed, using a dead PDA for my alarm, forcing the Blackberry back into my pocket or bag when I’m tempted to read while walking, or simply just saying No to the little red stars that pop up on my screen all day.

Benedict did not have technology to contend with, but he did make provision in his Rule for the many interruptions that life would bring. He emphasizes that when the bell rings for daily prayers (seven times a day!), the monk should “immediately set aside what [is] in hand … ” because “… nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God.” (The Rule of Saint Benedict 43:3)

Certainly not a 2.44 inch screen.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Ear-ily Familiar

Last week I took some long-neglected hearing tests. My children had complained that I couldn’t hear them. Fod had gotten so frustrated she told to me that she didn’t like talking to me on the phone anymore—which is one of the main ways we communicate since she lives in another state. Fyd got tired of having to repeat herself. Finally, last fall as the classroom became nightmarish when too many students spoke at once, I asked for a hearing exam.

What could be the cause? I wondered. I didn’t use ear buds or headphones. (Someone had told me when I lived in Japan in the age of the original Walkman I was not the kind of person who should use it out and about. I would get too lost in the music to function safely.) I didn’t go to loud concerts in my youth (my older brother practicing with his band in the basement excepted). I had suffered through a couple of sinus infections throughout the cold months that seemed to go straight to my ears, but still.

The audiologist remarked that I had tiny ear canals so she used pediatric ear buds for my tests. (When she took them out after the final test, I wanted to take a fork to them, my ears itched so badly.) That explained the impactions I had endured as a child.

"Your hearing is excellent. It’s like a 10-year-old's," she announced. “Then why can’t I hear?” I practically sputtered. “It could be that you have a lot going on or you’re easily distracted. If you’re not getting enough sleep or under a lot of stress your hearing may suffer,” she replied.

That explains it. I've said I haven’t seen my bedtime for the past four years. Due to my chaplaincy duties I am often up past 10 p.m. which is my optimal bedtime. Even when I don’t have those duties, I have gotten into a bad habit of going to bed late. And when I do get to sleep, I am easily awakened—no doubt also due to my excellent hearing. Who knew? Add that to my peripatetic life—teaching here, on-call there, meeting somewhere else, maintaining up to 6 email accounts. Yes, I had a lot to be distracted by, and, especially last fall, I was carrying a load of poorly managed stress.

I started thinking about what I teach students in my Communication classes: Hearing is involuntary and physiological; listening is voluntary and psychological. Listening takes more energy than hearing. So I was hearing people—that’s why I was so easily awakened—but because of my reduced energy from lack of sleep and rushing about the city, maybe at times I wasn’t able to fully listen.

And what was the first word of the Rule of St. Benedict again? Not hear, but “Listen.”

As usual when I have self-diagnosed an ill, I had looked up the treatment. Over and over the advice to people who are hard of hearing (or who think they are) was: pay attention.

The latest iteration of my personal rule includes something about rest and, more specifically, sleep. Sister Joan in her commentary on the Rule seems to be writing just for me, “Pay attention to the instructions in [your] rule and attend to the important things in life.” (The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages, Sister Joan Chittister, OSB, p. 19)