On Being Disciplined About Blogging

Aware that I have not been blogging as much lately, for a lot of complex reasons (never mind the name of my blog! You'd think that would inspire me to use the blog to process said complexity!), I've wondered how much blogging should be subject to inspiration (being led by the spirit), and how much it should be a matter of discipline, intentionality, commitment. For example, I am inspired by the regularity of Johan Maurer's blog, ("published every Thursday (mostly)," as he says on his site).

So, I've started experimenting with being more disciplined about my own blogging -- not here, but on Bible Wonderings (a posting every Sunday), and a new blog I've created, A Query a Day (every day).

I haven't announced this yet here, until now, because I wanted to try it for a couple of weeks to see if I could really sustain it. I'm still not sure. But I am finding it interesting to try! A Query a Day seemed simple and excellent at first, and then I went through grave doubts for a few days, feeling a bit burdened and trying to avoid the temptation of becoming frantically random just to keep it up. Then suddenly during a late evening when I had almost forgotten to post something and was frantically looking for something (forcing myself nonetheless to follow all of my "rules" of the new posting not being too similar to the one before, and from a different Yearly Meeting, and yet reflecting authentically something meaningful to me in my own life at the moment), I realized that this was good for me. It was good for me to be honest with myself about what's real in my own life, and to try to take that from being just about me to presenting it in a way that maybe others might find value in as well. I have no idea whether anyone is reading that blog at all. It may not ever be something that would be meaningful to anyone else. But I love queries, and I realized in that moment that this has become a new and important spiritual discipline for me -- to consider and post one per day that helps me to keep focused in my life on the values and reflection-questions that matter most to me.

At Meeting yesterday I discerned that it was time for me to start writing my own queries. I'll still draw from the ones from various Yearly Meetings (and other Quakerly sources) I have collected as well. It still feels experimental to me. I feel led, at the moment, to continue to be disciplined about this! But if I should stop feeling so led, I will let this go.

Bible Wonderings is something I feel led to continue no matter how long it takes! Slowly I make my way through. I've started Kings now. The weekly discipline of this is good for me and interesting. Doing it weekly helps me not lose the thread and forget where we were. What sometimes stalls me is that I don't always know what to say. Sometimes I'm very dismayed by the stories. I'm certainly getting tired of all of the violence and all of God's anger, and how the rulers who should know better by now keep making the same mistakes. It's hard to keep track of who everyone is.

Yet, through all of that, I am actually utterly fascinated. I am in awe of the fact that we have access to these ancient documents. I am moved by the struggle of the authors to make sense of what to them must have been a bewildering history: a history never fully arriving at the state of peace and reverence that they expected, or at least not for very long. Reading straight through like this is giving me a new perspective on a tradition and a heritage that includes you and me but that I, for one, realize I hardly know at all. For all the difficulty of these writings, they have meant a lot to a lot of people and have shaped our ways of thinking much more profoundly than most of us realize. (Even those who do not identify themselves with these traditions cannot help but be affected by them at least to some extent in today's world.)

So, for now, I will try to keep a disciplined approach to blogging in those two blogs, but will save this one, Embracing Complexity, my very first, for what I feel moved to write, when I feel so moved.

No Longer Chair

As of today, I am officially no longer the Chair of the Philosophy Department!

Surprisingly, I am feeling a bit blue about that.

But it is a good development in my life. It frees me to devote more time to my research and writing. After being chair longer than not being chair in my academic career so far, I have been ready to let it go for quite some time. And I'm in the wonderful situation of being very happy about who is now becoming chair.

I am still Program Coordinator of Peace Studies. So my administrative life is not over -- just more manageable, at last.

Despite the fact that I never wanted to be chair, I am glad I did it. I learned a lot, and even grew to like it in many ways. There were a lot of challenges. But there were also wonderful creative opportunities. I feel good about where the department is these days.

And I'm feeling ready to focus my energies more specifically and more fully in other directions now.

More on Mediation

I continue to think a lot about all that I learned in the recent mediation training I attended.

We learned that good mediation requires discipline. The particular kind of discipline it requires is that you have to get out of the way. The version of mediation we learned in a kind in which the mediator is not supposed to interject his or her own suggestions or opinions. This is because this version of mediation is one whose purpose is to empower the participants. But there is also a pragmatic consideration. If the participants start looking to the mediator as an authority or expert, or begin to think that they need, to some extent, to please the mediator, not only is their confidence in themselves diminished, but they become less likely to take full responsibility for the agreement reached, since it was not their own agreement, but something borrowed from someone else's suggestion. They don't feel a full sense of ownership. Thus they are not as inclined to invest themselves fully into it. If it goes wrong, they can blame somebody else (the mediator).

But if the mediator is not making suggestions or offering advice, what is the mediator's role? It is primarily to listen well: to listen through emotional and often harsh language to the underlying issues and needs, and reflect those back in neutral language. First the mediator lets the participants vent (while still ensuring all participants' protection). Throughout, the mediator listens carefully to what issues and needs emerge. Then the mediator frames the issues and needs in neutral, non-blaming language, always checking with the participants to make sure she or he is hearing them correctly. Finally, the mediator frames good clear questions of how each issue can be solved in a way that addresses Participant 1's need for X and Participant 2's need for Y. It's up to the participants to actually answer these questions by brainstorming possible solutions, and finally selecting one.

Does the process work? Often it does. Sometimes there is an impasse. But the person who facilitated our training has a lot of confidence in the process if the mediator stays disciplined and focused on letting the participants find their own solutions. In fact, he suggested that an impasse is when the participants do not find the mediator's own secret preferred solution!

How much are we willing to really trust others? How capable are we of letting go of the need to control everything ourselves?

These strike me as very important questions.

Mediation Training

I attended an intensive mediation training program over the weekend (32 hours of training in 4 days!). It was an amazing experience. I know that mediation is hard work. I also knew that this training would involve role playing and other experiential exercises. So I was terrified, to be honest. Half of my fear was that I would find it overwhelming. The other half of my fear was that I would find the training disappointing in some way. But it turned out that it went way above and beyond even my most hopeful expectations.

I found the training to be an excellent blend of explaining and discussion followed by well-designed exercises that did help us integrate what we had learned. The exercises were followed by excellent personalized feedback and high-quality large-group debriefing. Not only did I learn a lot about mediation, I also learned a lot about teaching.

The most liberating part of the training was learning that it is not our job to calm people down or get them to "play nice." Instead, as mediators, we ride their energy. We let them use their own language. We let them have their own emotions. We don't try to control any of this. We don't judge. We just listen to understand, and in trying to understand, we calmly re-frame the loaded language into unloaded language until everyone naturally becomes calmer and more focused and ready to start thinking more creatively about the issues.

There's a lot more to be said than this, but this piece in particular was powerful for me, because I am on a journey of learning not to be so afraid of conflict and strong emotion. It is amazingly empowering to learn (experientially) that when we meet conflict and strong emotion with a compassionate desire to understand what it means and where it comes from, we participate in transforming this energy into something more positive and productive.

Anyone who is serious about peacemaking should go through a training like this.

Research In the Age of the Internet

In my previous post, I talked about what library research was like before the age of the Internet. Things are different now. You can search for sources of all kinds from computers. You no longer rely on how others organize information (pre-defined subject categories, for example), since "keyword" searches are now possible, plus full-text searches. And many of the materials you use can be accessed directly from the computer: many journal articles, for example. Interlibrary loan requests can be made directly from the computer, too. More and more, historical sources are being scanned and made more widely available through web-based digital collections, as well.

I have to confess that I do appreciate how interlinked computers have made some dimensions of research easier. But I still do use books in my library too. I appreciate the opportunity to get up and stroll among the stacks. I like scanning the books on the shelf and finding related books that I might not have otherwise learned about. I like reading journal articles from bound volumes, and then skimming the rest of the bound volume to see what other articles that journal published. While I'm there, I scan recent issues of other journals I like as well.

I don't use notecards anymore, and I feel some nostalgic regret about this. Instead I use "OneNote," a Microsoft product that lets you organize information very flexibly. I do really enjoy this system as well. It's the electronic equivalent to notecards -- or, at least, I use it like that. Well, kind of. I don't separate out topics on separate cards (or "pages") since searching helps me to compile information on a single topic from many sources. But I do set up separate pages for notes from each source. And at the top of each, I write out the full bibliographic information and "tag" it with "biblio" so that I can collect all of my bibliographical information on one page.

(Recently I discovered Zotero. This is a web-based bibliographical database. While I am searching for sources, I can instantly copy the bibliographical information into Zotero and organize it in multiple ways. I can then collect the relevant sources and produce bibliographies from them when it comes time to produce my bibliography. Now I'm trying to figure out how better to integrate this with my use of OneNote.)

What amazes me the most about OneNote is the ability to capture pieces of electronic sources and copy them directly into your "notebook." You can also cross-reference your own notes using hyperlinks. So I can, for example, copy the digital image of a facsimile page of a historical source, paste it onto a page of my OneNote notebook (and OneNote automatically adds a "citation" to the original source), and then mark that image or type notes along the side. None of this damages the original. And, these digital images themselves become searchable!

So computers and the Internet not only provide access to a lot of sources much more easily, but also offer new possibilities for keeping information organized.

But there are new challenges as well. There is so much information out there, that it can be difficult to find exactly what you wish to find. And there is so much storage space on our own computers that it can be hard to keep our information well-organized, because we think it will be easy to find anything and so we might not always organize it as well as we should. In practice, I am surprised at how hard it can be to find a particular document I know I have through searching. If I have my documents well-organized, it's much easier to find it by navigating through my electronic filing system than by searching.

And I miss the special pleasure of reading through notecards by hand, and arranging them on my desk or even on the floor. Sometimes when I get stuck, I do print things out, cut them apart with scissors, and return to the process of using physical space to re-arrange my thoughts.

But, all in all, I am really glad to have lived in a timespan when I could experience this change in how library research is done. I have been able to experience the advantages of each new development while retaining the wisdom of older ways.

Research Before the Age of the Internet

Research has really changed since I first learned research skills in middle school. I still remember being impressed at the systematic orderliness of the notecard technique. One color of cards was for our sources. They were each given a unique code. White cards were for taking notes on sources, and were cross-referenced to the relevant sources. Each card (or set of cards) was supposed to contain notes on only one topic from one source. You could then arrange the cards, grouping together those on a shared topic but from different sources. You would lay out your paper visually by arranging the note cards on your desk. Then you would write out your text by hand, integrating your research into a (hopefully) coherent narrative. In the end, you would type it all up on a manual typewriter. The end result was very satisfying.

The research phase itself involved finding sources, which meant going to the library, leafing through the card catalog (not always easy, especially when the cards were too tightly placed), and writing down call numbers on scraps of papers. You could look up sources by author, title, or subject. Subject-headings were pre-defined. There were huge volumes you could browse through that described the Library of Congress subject headings. Serious research required examining these to be sure you were not overlooking important possibilities in your research.

For journal articles, we would go to the bound periodical indexes. I remember marveling at the thought that somewhere there was a team of people reading through all periodicals and extracting information and putting it in alphabetical order and publishing these periodical indexes. They probably used notecards.

We'd go to the library shelves and pull the books or journals off the shelves to read them and take notes. Cutting-edge technology was "microfilm." But we quaked in dread when we saw that that was the only way to find a given source. While there were several machines for reading microfilm, it seemed that there was only ever one that actually worked. Yet its ways were mysterious. We always needed to ask for help to get it to work. The print was often hard to read, and the mechanics of reading and taking notes was often awkward -- the huge machines took up a lot of space, which left little room for easy note-taking.

Sometimes the library did not have a given source. But there was Interlibrary Loan. Using it involved going to the front desk to get complicated request forms that we had to fill out in detail by hand. Then we had to wait a long time for the source to arrive. And then we would only have it for a few days, unless it was a photocopied journal article. We would get to keep those, and that was nice, because the bound periodicals are bound so tightly that they are often hard to read. For that matter, the copies from Interlibrary Loan were often copied badly -- the middle section black because the tight binding of the journal made it too hard to flatten enough to photocopy clearly. Or a page would be missing. Or one inch of the text would be cut off.

And our teachers back then had no tolerance for delays, or for typographical errors, or bad grammar. Their response was always the same: "You should have given yourself more time, to ensure that you could take care of all of this by the deadline." And we knew they were right about this. It didn't occur to us to complain about how hard and complicated all of this was. That was simply a given. The task was to meet those challenges.

Now everything is different. (Stay tuned for the next installment: "Research In the Age of the Internet.")

End of Semester Updates

I got my grades in (a little early this time!) and now am feeling the usual post-grading anxiety. Will some students be disappointed in their grades? Will they complain? Will administrators think my grades are too high?

Just as it is impossible to drive the "right" speed (because there is no speed that is fast enough for the traffic that doesn't exceed the legal speed limit), so too is it impossible to have the "right" grade distribution ("too high" according to administrators is still "too low" for the students and their parents).

I must just sigh and resign myself to disappointment on all sides.

But I am relieved that I actually did make it all the way through the semester! I had feared that the level of busyness was approaching burnout level again, but the busyness fell just short of that danger.

And I received unexpected good news that I may not have to continue as department chair next year after all! It is amazing to me how things can be unrelenting for a long time, and then suddenly and inexplicably reverse.

But the community contra dance band I was in no longer exists. We were doing fine for a few months. But our over-committed leader decided this was too much for her. I think she hoped one of us would take over. That may yet happen. I'm a little disappointed, but mostly relieved. I would prefer to participate in a seisiún (if only someone would start a regular one in our area), or be part of a serious and committed group of musicians who play at my level and enjoy switching back and forth between early music and Celtic traditional music.

Meanwhile, I'm really glad to have arrived at the start of summer break! I now have a carrel to myself in the library, and look forward to working full-time on my research and writing!