Resolutions: Reading and Remembering
Happy New Year! As we all do around this time of year, I have been thinking about changes I want to make for 2023: what to take up, and what to let go of. I'm trying to listen better to the realities of my life and the lives around me, seeking whether, where, and how I might make course corrections.
Wise ones remind us that small, consistent efforts are how changes happen and how they become enduring. Small consistencies are the great levers of the mind, heart, and body. We all start small. We practice words and steps, and these become big activities for our whole life: reading, writing, narrating, or walking, and running. Small is big.
Over the last five years, I have seen for myself that small, often hidden and quiet practices are immensely powerful. Whether it's a thing I'm thrilled that I'm cultivating, some good new practice that I'm seeking to establish, or some private affliction or maladaptive quirk, the quiet, hidden actions of our ordinary days shape us as surely as water cuts through rock. What we practice is who we are becoming.
Practice is how we become who we are.
It's very easy to admire those who do great, big, talented things. It's hard, but not impossible, to do the small actions that are where those big things begin. The great musician practiced her scales long years before her transcendent performance on the stage. On cold mornings, far from the roar of the crowd, Olympic athletes put strokes in the pool, or laced up on cold mornings, long before they sprint across the water or the track in view of a cheering public.
It's true for what we call disordered living too, good things that have become suffocatingly big in life. These also start small. All kinds of addictions -- social media addictions, workaholism, chronic procrastination, and so on -- emerge from small and easy actions, or inactions, of thought, word, and deed. These habits form and bind, not with increasing capacity but with robbing incapacity. Repeated actions, mere consistencies, can be quite pernicious and weedy.
It's good to be more aware of what habits we are actually practicing and, despite the reality of failure, to still attempt course corrections. Long ago I read Paul Tournier's The Adventure of Living and found his take immensely helpful. There are reliable arcs of adventure that are common to human life. It matters that we keep risking, moving, trying, and even practicing the effort of evaluating and aspiring to new things. Although it's easy to dismiss the earnestness of New Year's resolutions (... and I have! "I mean, seriously, a January gym membership? Cliché of the century..."), they point to a spark of life within us.
Or, as Matt Crummy put it in a beautiful meditation, "A Thousand Sunsets":
Each January, I see articles and social media posts pushing me away from resolutions. They're probably right to do so. But I still like resolutions because they're a way of telling myself I'm not dead. I think there is something good about how people grope for a fresh start, even if it means failure will be part of the story. Our need for newness is central to the very story of our salvation. There are notes of the Gospel in this wine.
Do go and read the whole blessed essay, and then subscribe to his writing.
I'm not going to post my resolutions here. In truth, I don't have a bulleted list of actions, but I do have a stated intention for the year ahead, some sketches of course corrections that I plan to flesh out more fully, and practices that I plan to keep working on. (See, esp., the poem below by Barbara Crooker.)
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Recently, I've been meditating about reading and remembering. I heard a podcast interview with the psychologist and educator Maryanne Wolf on reading and "the reading brain." Wolf joins others in expressing concern about how the internet is shaping the actual architecture of our brains, and the growing attention to what we have lost amid the real gain of digital convenience and efficiency. Maryanne Wolf is concerned that we are failing to see what we are losing in the midst of those gains. She beckons: "Reader, come home."
Reading and remembering are integrally related. As a Christian, I am part of a line of a biblical people -- "biblical" meaning "of the Book." Reading is an inescapable part of being a follower of the Word, and in forming people who are on the Way, which is a truth my friend Chris Smith has written about and practiced in community for many years. Reading is how we remember too. God commands the Israelites to re-tell stories, re-read stories, re-enact in all sorts of ways (in food! in calendar rhythms!), as a way of re-membering: shaping people, individually and collectively. (It is safe to say, God is a neuroscientific genius.)
When Maryanne Wolf fears the loss of the skill and practice of reading, deep, immersive, sustained reading, it is also true that she fears the loss of something greater still: the loss of memory itself. What's lovely and hopeful is that often we can recover and regain lost skills, and even practice skills that serve remembering itself.
Over a decade ago, the CEO of a senior living foundation learned that his mother, Wendy, was showing signs of impaired brain functioning that are quite common in aging. She repeated stories and would get disoriented in narratives and in familiar physical spaces. It was especially worrying when she couldn't recognize where she was when she was behind the wheel of her car. This CEO did a deep dive into learning about cognitive decline and the possibility of rebuilding cognitive functioning. That research grew into a program called StrongerMemory that commends three small (powerful!) daily exercises: 1) Reading Out Loud, 2) Handwriting, and 3) Math Done Quickly.
Wendy was game to try the program, and she found that after 30 days of practicing consistently, she was becoming more aware of how she repeated stories, and found that she was remembering things better. Having practiced these exercises over a decade now, she knows deeply and confidently, that they have profoundly shaped her well-being. She has even become a facilitator of these exercises for others. She has learned a lot about bad brain habits -- like "multi-tasking" -- that are terrible for our minds, dissipating our thoughts and memories rather that strengthening and serving them.
I've been talking about this program to lots of people recently, and I downloaded the workbook and signed up for their 30 days of emailed tips. Our growing (in)capacity for sustained attention, contemplation, and narrative participation isn't just a problem for older people, but for every one of us in this information-saturated age. It's a small reality that has had enormously powerful influence on how we re-member ourselves and others, how we pass along what is good, true, right, and worthy of human life. I've got more to say about this, but that's enough for now.
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If any of you are hankering to read the Bible this year, may I recommend trying out this bubble chart? It's the "unplanned plan" that works for me, but not for everyone.
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What's caught my attention and sparked joy:
Andrea Büttner, "All Art is Close to Shame" (video)
(a little more: "Andrea Büttner: Camcorders, convents, collectivism and confession")
Barbara Crooker's "The New Year," Whale Road Review
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Good books:
Celebrating Andrew DeCort's latest book, Flourishing on the Edge of Faith (BitterSweetBooks)
On reading, Jessica Hooten Wilson's Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice is a critical new book on reading.
Very excited for Jen Pollock Michel's upcoming Rule of Life workshop. Don't miss her In Good Time book!
(These links are affiliate links, and I'll get a teeny tiny commission if you click through and buy something from an independent bookseller. No pressure.)