Thanking is thinking.
This past summer has been very full and gratifying, and profoundly challenging and stretching - almost, but not quite, a breaking season. Whether it is breaking open or breaking down depends somewhat on my perspective, but my perspective alone doesn't determine it. My perspective often governs my response to what is happening, which influences and impinges on what happens. Life is really happening all around me - milkweed buds are splitting open and putting out their cottony seeds; ruby-throated hummingbirds are gorging on nectar from our feeder outside; our kids keep growing, asking questions, experiencing things, learning stuff; and a world of wonder and need and joy and heartache is happening everywhere. Whether I pay attention and think about these happenings certainly matters. How I pay attention to it also discloses what I see and how I think and what I do.
In the last reflection I wrote in June, I wrote about running backwards: how an experienced runner discovered that by running "backwards," he was able to keep running and avoid injuries that he had sustained in "forwards" running, or running of the usual kind. Running backwards not only changed the direction he faced, but it also changed how he thought about running too. By running backwards, he could keep doing what he loved and avoid further injury. And even more, he found he could pay attention to where he had been, and he found himself returning to some essentials: competing with himself, not just against other competitors. That is the essence of the growth mindset, I think. In a way, he moved from a more calculating mode of running and thinking to a more meditative mode. The injury was the catalyst for change. Even though the injury was a painful crisis, it propelled him into discovering new channels of hope, growth, purpose, perspective, and meaning.
I'm going to attempt to run backwards a bit here, looking back, taking in where I've been, paying attention, and shepherding my thinking by thanking.
One of my big study focuses in recent weeks has been on the subject of phenomenology, an intimidating philosophic term I first heard in college from friends that had taken higher level philosophy classes. My political philosophy classes did not introduce me to that way of thinking or its main contributors at all. When I was writing my memoir on Bonhoeffer, I had a few folks mention that word again to me because they thought it described my pattern of thinking. I tried but never wrapped my head around it well then either.
In one of my big, critical "aha" moments of this past summer, in which I despaired (yet again) to my advisor on Zoom of ever being able to write another word or think another thought, in that fiery crucible where I was very tempted to quit, I said to him at last, "Ok, this is what I really think!" I then sketched a very different kind of argument than he had heard me make before. It wasn't a breakthrough, per se, but it felt like I was saying, more authentically, what I actually saw and thus actually knew. I wasn't just trying to jam what I knew into what I perceived as "the rules of being smart."
He replied, "What you just sketched is far more interesting than what I've heard from you before. There have been times in our conversations when I've thought you were starting to take on a phenomenological approach in your thinking, but now I really hear you making your case firmly within that tradition. I didn't want to impose on you, I wanted to make sure. But what you just said is decidedly there." Honestly, I felt so relieved that he didn't say, "Well, Laura, you have confirmed for me that you are officially nuts, and I wish you a nice life." It felt like a moment of crisis, like running on broken legs. I truly felt pain in my despair and wrestling and confusion. I was wrestling with knowing my own knowing, and it wasn't easy to do. Yet the crisis and the pain pushed me -- I might even say, throttled me -- into new arenas of risk and thus into greater freedoms.
With freedom comes responsibility, always! But it's also not entirely just about self-determination either. Within a day or so, my advisor sent me a pile of articles and book recommendations to plunge me into phenomenology and how it relates to political science and political theory. Refreshed by sheer relief that he had hope for me in my plodding despair, I started reading the articles and filling out InterLibrary Loan (ILL) requests for some of the very obscure academic books. A new wave of despair crashed over me. These articles were HARD. They presumed a level of knowledge, a field of thinkers and arguments, and whole vocabularies that required more running, more struggling. I am not done struggling, inasmuch as I am never done learning. But it's important to say here that I have learned that so much of my intellectual labors have been, at the same time, emotional ones too: re-reading to see if I could improve my understanding, trying to get up again after falling off the bicycle of comprehension, or refusing to give up by trying another approach when the pedals of my mind simply wouldn't turn.
In a world in which knowing and not knowing is fairly close to power -- being powerful or feeling powerless -- not knowing and not understanding puts one into a profoundly vulnerable, at times even shamefully vulnerable place. It feels like exclusion! You think, I must be stupid! Why is this so hard? Truly, I have had to battle with myself to keep trying, or knowing when to set things down for a time and give my brain a rest. It's been a huge season in learning how to learn, and learning how to know: how to guide myself through the shoals of reading and thinking and writing, often getting stuck, and then trying again. The wisest teachers know that the most potent forms of learning happen largely through failure and setbacks. I have had many wise teachers, and I want to become a wise teacher too. Much of learning happens with the sensation that one is running backwards, eyes closed, bumping into things. It involves some "unlearning." It all lies pretty close to what we might describe as suffering, and refusing to give up on the possibility -- the hope! -- that there can be and actually is real purpose behind the suffering. That there is freedom on the other side.
Phenomenology? I owe at least one friend a simple definition of it, and I have a host of other friends who could give a better one than I could. I linked to the Wikipedia article above about it that attempts it. For now, I think I'll conclude by recounting a story that I learned from one of my readings in Phenomenology and the Political (look at that sticker price; definitely an ILL borrow!).
In his article, a philosophy professor S. West Gurley recounts teaching Martin Heidegger's Memorial Address to students. Heidegger was a German philosopher -- a phenomenologist, in fact -- and terribly, regrettably enthusiastic card-carrying Nazi Party member who also happened to deeply influence equally significant Jewish students like Hannah Arendt. Intelligent and influential, he was also an ordinarily morally confused and compromised human being. His reputation as such soured his career, and I think it's important to keep his manifest foolishness in mind when considering his wisdom. Heidegger was invited to give a talk on the 150th anniversary of the German composer Conradin Kreutzer's birthday (I had never heard of him...), and in the address, which he titled "Memorial Address," Heidegger says a few lines about Kreutzer himself, but mostly then doesn't say a blessed thing about him at all. Mainly, he pivots to saying that if one really wants to memorialize someone, one must think back; must truly think. And then he talks about how we ten to think, how we avoid thinking (he actually says we largely "flee from thinking"), and why that's dangerous to the task of being human. The professor says, for Heidegger, thanking is thinking.
The professor mentions that, reliably, when he teaches this text, his students get really frustrated with Heidegger, as if he has played a trick on them and his listeners, for failing to talk about the composer and instead waxing on about thinking. The professor notes that the students themselves have been "caught" in the exactly the type of thinking that Heidegger wants to bring forward and expose. Heidegger warns that our age is one that prizes calculative thinking over meditative thinking, privileges technological approaches over other ones, and that we are tempted to think that calculative thinking is the only kind of thinking there is. The students get caught by the title -- and assume they know what's coming, what should come next, and thus stop thinking. That's almost exactly what Heidegger was trying to uproot.
Perhaps another way to say it is, we come to think that running only means -- only can mean -- running forward, caught up in competition alone. Running only in that way might actually bring us to injury, and it is important that we know there are other ways of running, and other ways of thinking: calculative and meditative.
When I stop calculating about what's ahead for me, ruminating on the "if only" and "what if" questions -- which are good and useful questions, but not the only good and true ones! -- and meditate in gratitude, when I turn around, run backwards, and really see where I've been, I can see that while the crisis throttled me, I was never alone. Never. My husband and children have been immensely supportive of my work, sacrificially so. My advisor patiently served as a midwife to me through many, many months of bewilderment. I have received so much from people near and far in abundance to help me. None of it alleviated me of my burdens, but these big and small investments of encouragement, hope, good cheer, and practical help enabled me to endure a little longer through what was at times truly painful stuff! Thinking backwards, like running backwards, puts me immediately on a pathway of gratitude -- not avoiding what's been happening in a kind of Pollyanna-like, suffocating optimism, but in taking in all that's been difficult and yet what's also been good and growing in the midst of it. Basically, gratitude is one of the more reliable avenues into human sanity that I know. To thank is to think, and when we begin thanking, we begin to discover just how accompanied we are, how much we have received, how often we ourselves have been endured, patiently, by others. When we are in seasons that push us to a breaking point, ingratitude breaks us "down," whereas gratitude holds out hope that we might break "open" into a new freedom, out of falseness, delusions, and into a fuller experience of our life, the people in it, and our world.
If you are a praying person, I would be very thankful to be remembered in your prayers as I travel to Belgium for my doctoral oral exams next week. If you need a prayer-form to try out, may I suggest this Psalm?