Bionic Teutonic

I’ve started reading a really interesting book called Pink Brain, Blue Brain about childhood development and gender-based differences. It’s kind of a fascinating look at the whole nature vs. nurture thing. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot with a son on the way and Ariel’s horror at the idea of anything truck or sports themed in our child’s life. The book really points out how little we know about what makes a boy a boy, and a girl a girl. The author points to studies done where for attributes that we think of as distinctly male or female, the differences in average scores between the sexes are really, really small when compared to the range of differences within each sex. Culture obviously has a huge impact on how these traits express themselves as well, including the ways in which we as adults (unconsciously most of the time) allow certain behaviors to flourish in one gender but not the other. The author is a neuroscience professor in Chicago who specializes in something called neuroplasticity, basically the idea that those traits which are used and encouraged flourish while those that don’t, well, don’t. One thing she talks about in the book is that how, even though by all measures the gaps in gender-based achievements have been getting smaller and smaller, at the same time people’s perception of the differences between the genders has been getting bigger and bigger. So while in the 70’s, men and women were more objectively different in terms of developed abilities (mostly due to cultural factors) than they are today, they saw themselves as much less different than a similar sampling of men and women do today. This has been really interested stuff for me. I’ve always really balked at any sort of forced segregation by gender or assigning certain behaviors as distinctly male or female. It just seems so simplistic, and while our brains love putting things in to neat little categories, it seems like there has to be better ways of celebrating certain attributes or ways that we experience the world without putting people into boxes. I’m not done with the book, and I’m hoping that there are a lot of lessons in it about how to help develop a really well rounded kid fingers crossed. Also interesting is that (according to the author) the differences in gender can be more pronounced in toddlers than at any other point in life (which is sort of scary to me – I immediately imagine having a crazy out of control boy running around destroying everything) and that certain differences seem to express themselves early in life and then fade, while others don’t seem to express themselves until later in life. I’m sure people have all sorts of thoughts about this, it certainly is interesting stuff to think about.

This last weekend, Ariel and I and a bunch of friends went up to Shambhala, a music festival in Canada that in past years has been one of our favorite weekends. I didn’t go last year because of work, but was excited to get back. Our friend Dawn got there before us and had set up camp. She was travelling with some hippie friends of her boyfriend and by the time we got there, she was already feeling overwhelmed. We set up camp and wandered around the first day. My immediate impression was that the festival had skewed significantly younger since I was last there. Way less people who felt like peers and way more really, really young kids. It’s always hard to be objective about things like that (am I just getting older), but it just felt different this year. After about 36 hours at the festival, Ariel and I were getting ready to take a nap. “I’d really love to be in this environment without all the noise and cracked out kids” Ariel put in. “Fuck it. Let’s go camping” I said. Within an hour, Ariel and I were packed and on the road. I think in years past I would have stayed out of a sense that if I wasn’t enjoying myself, there was something wrong with me (I just need a different attitude, etc.). The second half of our Canada trip turned out to be great. We stayed a night in Nelson, then headed up to Ainsworth Hot Springs, then on to a night of camping in the Kootenays. I feel like it’s a good sign of maturity that I can recognize when something which has traditionally been so enjoyable is no longer working and let it go. I hope that I can continue to cultivate non-attachment in similar ways and that it pays off like it did this past weekend.

Last night Ariel and I tried to go to the Raphael Saddiq show at the Showbox. We haven’t been going out the last few years much. I usually find myself fairly uninterested in clubs or bars these days, but both Ariel and I are big Saddiq fans, so we decided to go. When I went to go buy tickets online, Ticketmaster was charging $8.50 per ticket on a $20 ticket. That’s almost half again as much! What the hell? I actually balked at that and got all worked up (’monopoly’, ‘gauging’, ‘evil’, etc) and didn’t buy the ticket. We didn’t think the show would sell out anyway, and that we’d just go down there early and get tickets. We got all dressed up fancy for the show, drove down, parked the car, walked up to the Showbox in the cold, only to find a big ‘SOLD OUT’ sign on the door. Bummer. Seriously though, something about Ticketmaster is just wrong. How can they charge almost half again as much as the full ticket price? Of course, me getting worked up about it meant that I didn’t get see the show, so I sort of shot myself in the foot, but it still irks me. We need a revolution.

I just finished the final weekend of my teacher training. Well, almost. We still have a retreat we need to do to finish our hours, but we had our final test yesterday and – no more homework! It was an amazing experience and I’m both sad and happy to be done. Sad because it’s been so enriching and I looked forward to these weekends with a lot of anticipation every month. I’ve made some fantastic friends and feel like I have a real community that has come out of this. Happy because I feel like I’ve gotten this great base of knowledge for my future and it’s nice to feel like while I will continue to learn and grow with yoga (my whole life hopefully), I also know that I’ve gone through a program that gives me the grounding to feel like I can do this.

It’s been interesting both teaching in real life and coming in for teaching practice over the months. Sometimes I come in and feel like I’m really starting to get it, and other times (like yesterday) I sort of lose the plot and stumble around a bit, but I learn a lot both ways. As one of my teachers put it yesterday, the places where things fall apart are really the most valuable. But through both of those I feel like I’ve grown immensely and have also discovered the love of teaching. I think I always knew I would enjoy it, but I’ve never really explored it much. It really forces you to be very conscious of whatever it is you are teaching and I think it’s about the best way to learn anything.

I’m really trying to make sure that I maintain the community I’ve found through this. I have several projects going with various fellow student/teachers and am going to try and figure out how to maintain a community group or list so that we can all stay in touch going forward. It’s great to see so many people making transformations in their lives and really trying to live consciously and with a lot of intent and I like having more of that in my life.

So, it’s bittersweet. But I can honestly say this has been one of the best things I’ve ever chosen to do and am looking forward to whatever next steps there are to take.

I just finished a book I really enjoyed and thought I would share. Not sure everbody would like it as much as I did, but it combines two of my favorite things: travel and history. It’s written by a Polish journalist with the awesome name of Ryszard Kapuscinski. The book is called Travels with Herodotus. When he was just starting out, he was given a copy of Herodotus’ The Histories, which I now feel compelled to read. Half of the book is his musings on his own travels and attempts to get to the essence of the places he is assigned to and the events which he is reporting on, and half is recounting and mulling over The Histories. Herodotus was born in Halicarnasus, (in modern day Turkey) 2,500 years ago, and set out to capture the combined knowledge of the world. So in a sense he was one of the first known reporters. He gathers stories from the people he meets and tries to piece together knowledge about various events and places. Ryszard carries the book with him wherever he goes and Herodotus is his constant companion. The language used in the book is beautiful and it is full of unanswered questions, posed and then left for the reader to ponder, which I love in a book.

After 15 years, I’ve decided that I am going to try not being a vegan for a while. I have though very long and hard about this and feel like this is the right decision for me (for now). A decision that has scared me oddly (even writing this post scares me), but I think that fear reinforces for me my feeling that I’ve become too attached to veganism as an identity and that I should back off for a while and figure out my relationship to it and reexamine my original intentions. A sort of vegan Rumspringa as it were.

A bit of history. I’d grown up eating meat (in Montana, Iowa, and Germany – all very meat heavy places). Even vegetarianism wasn’t much on my radar. At one point the girlfriend of my step-brother’s dad was a vegetarian and would eat tofu burgers, which my brother and I found completely baffling and would make fun of in a “can you believe what she is eating” sort of a way. Neither of us could really wrap our heads around it. The very concept was funny because it seemed so outlandish.

When I was in high school, I was pretty active in a variety of environmental causes and groups and I started to be around more vegetarians and even a few vegans, which also was a new concept. But at least I started to get it. Eating lower on the trophic pyramid means less land used to feed us means less deforestation. I could wrap my head around it and even began to contemplate it. Then one summer, some friends of the family (who were my age and vegan) from Germany came and stayed with my mom, Susan and I. So while they were with us, we made sure that the food we made was vegan and they did a fair amount of cooking as well. After the month they spent with us, I realized I had pretty much been vegan the whole time and it didn’t feel that difficult and I felt good.

Over the next couple of years, I really dove in. Reading as much as I could, experimenting with different diets and foods. And I was pretty dogmatic about things for the first several years. I was fully in it to win it and I’m sure was probably quite annoying about it at times. But I really connected with it and brought a lot of awareness and attention to what I was doing.

Now, 15 years later, I’m feeling a bit like I’m vegan by default. I don’t pay a ton of attention to my diet these days, which especially as I’ve become increasingly active is not a good thing. I know that I’m not getting enough of certain things in my diet and also don’t really have the motivation to really step up and do the nutritional research and experimentation to develop a good vegan diet for my athletic performance needs. Just to be clear, I’m fully aware that you can be very active on a vegan diet. There are vegan iron man competitors who are much, much more active than I, but it requires a level of attention that I have not had the motivation for lately.

Another thing that has been on my mind as I’ve been considering this is the idea of attachment and identity. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and studying of the yoga sutras lately. The yoga sutras say that the cause of suffering is “the association or identification of the seer with the seen”. Being vegan is one of the biggest identities that I have taken on over the years as who I am. Of course, it’s not who I am, but I’ve associated with it to a degree that I feel is a little too unquestioning at this point in time. It can make us a little bit too dogmatic when we claim an identity. And eventually it means that we have a set of rules that guide our behavior that don’t need to think about anymore. We don’t look for circumstances where those guidelines may not be the best thing for us. We can just sort of cruise by on autopilot and that’s what I feel like I’m doing right now with my veganism.

None of this means that I won’t be back to a vegan lifestyle in a couple of months, a year, or however long it lasts, but I think I need a reexamination. I’m going to have to go pretty slowly introducing dairy into the diet so my stomach doesn’t hate me. So we shall see how this experiment goes. I could hate it and come running back quickly, I could stay away forever. I’m really trying to be as receptive and attentive as possible and examine with an open heart and open mind. Here goes.