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(03/12/20 9:59am)
Yesterday I received an email from the New York Times that said: Day 5. Refresh. Take a Self-Compassion Break. The email suggested that I take a moment to close my eyes and soothe myself by wrapping my arms around my body. I was then given the option to press a button to “mark this task complete.”
Five days ago, I signed up for the Healthy Habits Well Challenge in the wellness section of the New York Times, offering up my email to receive daily “wellness challenges” for 28 days in a row such as Have a Savory Breakfast, Controlled Breathing Exercise, and Phone Free Lunch. The habits suggested in the Well Challenge are extremely accessible; they’re inclusive, casual, and quick. The “mark complete” button caters to our modern obsession with productivity—an obsession potentially exaggerated by the act of scrolling through email. They reminded me of conversations I overhear and often partake in at Midd that almost always link “wellness” with tasks intended to craft a healthier future self.
There is something seductive about adding another box to check at the end of our days, about focusing on some future self who is more-present, more-hydrated, and more-fit, and this challenge plays into that. This is especially true as a senior about to graduate in May—if I don’t know where I’ll be for the next two years, why not just practice deep breathing every day for a few weeks? Or be a little more hydrated? The tendency to do things like signing up for this Wellness Challenge seems to be coming from a need to focus on a small, measured number of future days for which to optimize ourselves. But having these types of declarative conversations and signing up for Wellness Challenges like I am so prone to doing are not habits; they’re tasks.
Habits are difficult to build when you’re as transient as most of us are as Middlebury students. For much of our time here, we are rarely in the same place, sleeping in the same bed, for long. Last year, I was living in an on-campus house in the fall, a different room for J-Term, abroad for the spring, at home for a few days, at an internship elsewhere for the summer, and then back at school in the fall. It is a privilege, of course, to move around in this way, but this also means that my habits are never truly rooted in place. These habits must prevail in different breakfast spots, bedrooms, commutes, food options, friends, weather, time zones, schedules, and spaces. They must be portable and malleable. During my constant movement last year, I made up a habit of rubbing my index finger along my thumb a few times, as a sort of check-in with myself. During my semester abroad living with an Italian host family, unable to decide what, when, and how much food I ate for dinner, I began eating slowly, paying more attention. I clearly haven’t figured all of this out yet—I’m signed up for this wellness challenge, after all, and it’s instructing me to Set an Intention to Connect tomorrow. But those two routines last year felt accessible and real.
What bothers me about the type of self-optimization that this Well Challenge is offering is that it seems superfluous to try “choosing a mantra” on a day when you already feel fine. No one feels great chugging too much lemon water when they’re not even thirsty or “eating a savory breakfast” when they’re perfectly happy with their yogurt. No one feels present and mindful when they write set a task to be more present and mindful. The best “wellness” habits aren’t boxes to check off on a to-do list, but tools to whip out in times of need.
As we wrap our minds around the unknowns of the next few years, maybe it’s all about portable, adaptable, cheap habits that aren’t wrapped up in checking boxes. The two habits that I developed last year, the finger rubbing and the slow eating, were habits that I tried multiple times until I realized that they really worked; they then became tools I could turn to when there was a need rather than a box to check when there wasn’t. The best habits are invented in our own minds and adaptable in any circumstance. They’re simple, barely noticeable; they’re not glamorous proclamations to be shared at lunch, and there’s no flashy language that can package them nicely into daily emails. They’re not dependent on place or productivity; they just carry us through when we’re transient.
I may not build a new habit from this challenge, but I will receive 28 wellness tips, researched and explained, straight to my inbox. I will always read articles and be part of conversations that imitate what this Wellness Challenge represents. That’s fine, but it’s far more practical to turn them from goals into ideas. The first habit of the Well Challenge was to perform a “coffee or tea meditation,” which I never did—I’ve skipped most of them for the very reasons in this article—but today I tried it because I found myself alone with my coffee for a few minutes. It makes sense that, as transient college students who might not know where we’ll be waking up in a few months, we’d want to build habits we can carry with us that will make us feel healthy and grounded. This happens slowly, though, without big proclamations about how great our future selves will be if we just start sleeping more or eating vegetables. Don’t make your to-do list any longer than it needs to be: That’s wellness.
Zoe Harris is a member of the class of 2020.
(11/09/17 12:17am)
Peter Schumer, John C. Baldwin Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, joined Middlebury’s faculty in 1983. He has a deep and long-winded passion for the East Asian board game “Go,” and gave a presentation on its history and the strategy it demands on Friday Nov. 3. Go, as he described at the beginning of the presentation, is an art form as much as a game for sharpening intellect and deductive reasoning skills. He opened the discussion by telling his audience that the package Go comes in reads that the game “takes fifteen minutes to learn, and a lifetime to master.” Schumer added that “both are gross underestimations.”
Interested in the game since he was an undergrad, Schumer now teaches a freshman seminar around the game and has since the 1980s. The Japanese word for the game, Shudon, translates to “hand-talk,” and Schumer emphasized how appropriate this title is. The one-on-one game brings people together, encouraging friendly competition and an artistic, movement-driven “conversation,” talking-between-hands. Really, it’s a way to communicate with another person over the game board, and it ends with mutual agreement; no one wins at Go. Schumer continued to describe the ways in which people read each other and communicate across board, telling us that one can often tell when their opponent is greedy, or timid, or impulsive, by observing their moves.
“Mysteries of psychology often play out in the game,” said Schumer. He continued to explain, however, that the game is thought of as a struggle within yourself, not really against the other person. Players will sometimes think for hours before making a move, constantly asking themselves: “What’s the best that you can do?” It is not regionally or culturally bound, Schumer said. He described his time playing last summer in the Japanese Go Congress, as one of just a few foreigners, playing with Japanese players from all over Japan. It is the grace of movement and skill within the two-person game that Schumer seeks to celebrate in his seminar and in the talk he gave on Friday.
Schumer’s talk sought to give the audience a basic understanding of the game, centering around slides and pictures of the game board in different stages of a typical game. The game features a wooden board and “stones” as the pieces. Originally, the pieces really were stones, though they are now black and white glass and sometimes clam shells. Schumer, in his travels to Japan (he has visited the country 10 times in the last 15 years), often visits the places where they make and sell game pieces. The board and pieces are constructed beautifully and with great care, as much an art form as the game’s graceful strategy. The moves are placed on intersections of the board’s grid rather than the actual squares, and the object of the game is to surround the opponent’s pieces, marking their “territory.” Schumer shared with the audience the different types of math equations to calculate the number of possible places one could move a stone in a given game. With this, Schumer demonstrated the deductive reasoning side of the game, and why he, as a math professor, is so passionate about the specific strategies within it. The end score is based on the space on the board where a player’s stones are not.
“I think this is really interesting, and related to art; how do you use negative space?” Schumer said. He continued on to project traditional Chinese and Japanese prints depicting people playing the game: one of six men playing in a Japanese internment camp, and another of a girl playing with an older man.
“[The game] shows the good will between people,” Schumer said in describing the photographs. The next slide featured a quote from Emmanuel Lasker, a mathematician and avid Go player, that read, “If there are sentient beings on other planets, then they play Go.”
“The game definitely appeals to people who have a problem-solving, math interest,” Schumer said. “But it also appeals to people with an artistic sense. The game is quite unusual, in that intuition and artistic aspects play a very big part in the game, since you can’t really figure everything out.” The game, too, attracts people with a passion for East Asian culture. Schumer, in his presentation, spoke of his love not only for Go but for Japanese gardens, woodblock prints and Sangaku, which are Japanese geometric prints that merge mathematical ratios with graphic, colorful art.
“I think of the course as sort of a window into East Asian culture, especially Japan,” Schumer said, describing what draws students to his freshman seminar. “I have had students who have a special interest or background either in Japanese things, or in other artistic pursuits. I’ve had students go on to be music majors, dance majors, certainly Japanese majors. There aren’t as many math majors as you’d think.”
The seminar is far more intense than others, as Schumer has his students meet around six hours a week rather than the standard three. During a class, students often play a full game, sometimes in teams of two rather than one-on-one. Schumer, in one of the first classes of every semester, plays each person in the class, each of the 16 students at their own board and him walking around making moves on each board. Students then write up their thoughts and do reflective writing exercises on what moves they could’ve played differently. There is a deep level of reflection involved with the game, even at the highest level, so the structure of a writing-heavy freshman seminar is suited to the introspective, artistic game.
Last summer, Professor Schumer was in Osaka, Japan, studying at an international Go camp. There were about 25 people from 14 different countries.
“For me, that’s like, a fun way to spend three or four weeks,” Schumer said. Every day, he plays Go online against the other online players from all over the world and reads about Go from the literature he’s collected on the shelf in his office. He brought his passion for the Game of Go with him in his move to Vermont, and created the Vermont Go club. The group of eight to ten still meets every Wednesday at a cafe in Burlington. He goes to tournaments seven or eight times a year in Boston, New York, and Montreal. The Math department has game nights once a month, where sometimes Professor Schumer teaches the group to play Go. Anyone can email him, he said, or come by his office, and he would be overjoyed to teach anyone interested.
“I’m always encouraging and promoting the game,” Schumer said. Schumer’s presentation emphasized the skills both required for and gained from being a longtime Go player. He projected a long list of them on the wall: problem solving, analysis, intuition, dedication, patience, goodwill, respect. It is, he wrote on the slide, a lifelong pursuit.
(11/01/17 10:45pm)
On Thursday Oct. 26, Laurie Sheck, an author and creative writing professor at the New School in New York City, visited Middlebury to give a multimedia presentation on her newest book, “Island of the Mad”. Sheck presented on the ways she is toying with traditional and, perhaps, sometimes stagnant written forms. When asked how she would describe the style of her latest book, Sheck replied, “we don’t think it’s such a good thing to categorize people, but when it comes to literature, it’s like you have to have a label — your fiction, your poetry.” Sheck’s book merges poetry, prose, and nonfiction, with white space left on the page as a narrative tool. Her relative term for her work, though she feels it cannot be accurately labelled, is “documentary fiction” or “collage fiction.”
Sheck screened a thirty-five minute video she created to encapsulate the story told in the book. Paralleling the structure of her written work, the video was anything but stagnant or straightforward; her voice read excerpts from the book while the screen flipped through photographs of Venice (the book’s setting), pictures of letters, and text from the book that matched her narration. The video ended with images and her voice reading a letter written by Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist Sheck writes about in “Island of the Mad”.
She explained what drove her to lift her ideas of the page and into a multimedia form, despite her lack of experience with video technology.
“I love writing, and I love the page. But what are the ways writing isn’t going to just stay on the page?” she said. Sheck added that the internet provides us with tools for artistic expression and communication and has completely opened up the writing world. The way we skip from one website to another, one screen to another, parallels the way Sheck’s novels switch narrators, settings, form, and space.
Sheck’s 2009 book “A Monster’s Notes,” written with a similar hybrid, documentary-style narrative, was a way to explore what she left out of her previous five books of poetry. She wanted to incorporate her love of research and investigation into her writing and make it accessible. Borrowing the monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and placing him in New York City in the 21st century, Sheck’s book was born out of years of investigations at the MIT artificial intelligence lab, studies on genetic engineering, and archival research on the Shelley papers.
“I think after my years of practice as a poet, I had a very strong sense of structure,” Sheck said “The book came together; I got immense pleasure out of it. I don’t fit anywhere, but so what?”
“Island of the Mad” utilizes the same literary strategy of weaving primary source documents and investigative research into a certain written “documentary.” Sheck uses this genre of writing as a tool to share with her readers the discoveries she makes within her research, and to interact physically with the information.
“I think we have this Western idea of talent, or genius. You sit at a desk, by yourself, and put pressure on your brain, and something is supposed to pop out,” Sheck said. “I don’t think that’s how it works. I think writing is a conversation with the writing that’s come before it, with the writing that’s happening now, and even the writing that hasn’t happened yet. Literature is extremely generous; it is an area of sharing, not of competition.” As a professor, Sheck says she tries to inspire her young writer students. “Writers are outlaws. You have to serve the work. I think writing really stands against perceived structures of power, and if you’re going to censor your own mind and impulses before you even start, you’re then signaling to your reader a kind of enslavement. Writing is really about freeing your mind.”