You are told to take off your watch and turn off your cell phone and put them into a locker, along with everything else you brought along – backpack, jacket, bike helmet, all of it, except for your driver’s license, which you have to take out of your wallet and hand to the attendant. The attendant locks the door and notes your locker number on a clipboard.
You are instructed to place your bottle of water into a plastic box, and to store your Luna bar and pear on a shelf. The paper towel that you had used to wrap up your pear must be thrown out and replaced with a baggie that they provide.
When you ask if you can keep the paper towel to use as a tissue, the answer is no, they will provide you with that item if needed.
Next you are commanded to turn out your pockets, all five of them, even the teeny coin pocket you hadn’t even noticed was in this pair of jeans. Satisfied that all pockets are empty, the attendant hands you the license and two cards, one with your cubicle number printed on it, the other with the locker letter, and gives you precise directions for how these three items are to be displayed next to your computer.
Another attendant hands you a clipboard and indicates the place for your signature, compares it to the signature on your driver’s license, and closely scrutinizes the picture to make sure it looks like the person standing in front of her. Finally everything is done and it’s time to go into The Room …
… for a CIA interrogation?
… for a meeting with the President?
… for a stay in the slammer?
None of the above. You are here to take your GRE, the Graduate Record Exam required for your application to a master’s program.
For several years I’ve been hearing about the dreaded GRE from applicants to the department where I work, and knew that there were major – and well-founded – concerns about fraud in the test-taking process. Now I was experiencing the result of those concerns first-hand. It’s positively surreal. When you leave The Room for a break (which is only allowed at a specific time regardless of what your bladder would prefer) you have to do the sign-the-log-and-show-your-license routine again. When break time is over, you repeat the process, plus turn out your pockets, again. At the end of the test you go through the whole song and dance, pockets and all, one last time before they return your license and allow you to reclaim your belongings and get out of Dodge.
The Kaplan GRE practice book advises test-takers to keep their composure through the exam, to not panic and rush through the questions for fear of running out of time. It should also say to stay calm and un-intimidated during this intense and somewhat invasive security preparation. The least it could do is advise wearing pocketless pants!
Composure in the days preceding the exam wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. Better than having pre-GRE jitters that shut down your brain. Here’s a short list of items that I lost during the last few days as testing day approached. (I’ll just tell you about the major episodes!)
First I discovered my university ID card was no longer hooked to my key ring because its plastic holder had broken. After calling two stores and driving to every other place I’d gone recently, I found the card on the floor of the car, right under my foot, near the gas pedal.
Meanwhile, though, I had discovered that my backpack hadn’t come home with me, and had rushed off to work hoping I’d left it under my desk and not on the sidewalk next to the bike rack. Hooray, it was safely ensconced in my office. Another near disaster averted.
The next day I couldn’t find my entire set of keys, along with my I-card that was now attached via a new holder, and all that would be a major chore to replace. It includes my house key, two keys for locking my bike, three keys to the Bahá'í Center, and six keys to my office, one of which is the key to our box of keys. Truth!
Since I made this latest loss discovery while rushing to get out the door for an appointment, I had to wait till I came back home to check the shed and see if I’d somehow put my keys in there when I locked up my bike after work. Yup, that’s where I found them, an hour later, sitting safely in my bike basket. Another disaster averted.
Then there was the Case of the Lost Earring.
Earlier that day, when I arrived at work I’d discovered that my right ear lobe was naked. The missing earring was the “dangle” type that can accidentally fall out or be pulled out, so I searched all around my desk and inside my jacket and retraced my path into the building hoping to find it. Nothing. Nowhere. Must have gone to the lost earring room, which is located next door to the room full of one-of-a-pair socks.
A little while later I was talking to a co-worker when she stopped in mid-sentence to ask why I was wearing two earrings in my left ear!
Clearly the prospect of taking the dreaded GRE was deranging what was left of my brain after several days of cramming for the exam. I’d been studying for weeks, but during the last few days had moved that study to the top of my “to do” list, and had been spending every spare minute frantically taking practice verbal tests and reviewing a plethora of vocabulary words – while completely ignoring the preparatory exercises for the quantitative part of the exam.
Why bother? When it comes to algebra and calculus and geometry, not only can I not decipher the answers, I don’t even understand the questions! So I had decided to spend all my study time on the verbal test, where I had a chance to get a decent grade. After all, why should a Master’s program in creative writing care about a silly old math score? Anyway, that’s my reasoning and I hope it’s accurate, because yesterday I sailed through the quantitative section of the exam at the speed of light. Easy to do if you’re not even reading most of the questions!
The computer-based GRE gives you the verbal and quantitative scores immediately upon completion of the exam. For the writing score, which involves actual human beings grading your two essays, you have to wait a couple weeks, so I don’t have my complete results yet, but am happy to report that my verbal score was 660 (out of 800) and my quantitative score was 340. I see applicant GRE scores all the time in my work, so I know that 660 is respectable and 340 is amazing -- for complete guesswork!
Anyway, that hurdle is past now and I can get on to finishing my application, which involves making sure my recommenders get their letters posted well before the deadline, writing a cogent and convincing personal statement about my reasons for applying, preparing an appropriate resumé, and deciding what writing samples to provide that will prove I’m clearly ready to become the Grandma Moses of literature.
(I also plan to write a statement highlighting the fact that my GPA for the courses I’ve taken since 2001 is 3.67 and making a hopefully effective case for ignoring my overall GPA which includes all the courses I took in the 1960’s. It’s a pretty sad GPA. It’s beyond sad. We don’t want even to talk about it!)
In my job I’ve been known to rail against students who start their on-line applications early in the admission season but don’t submit them until the deadline day, when about 75% of all the applications and supporting materials land on my desk. Applications and materials I could have been leisurely preparing for faculty review if they had arrived bit by bit during the last several weeks, but that I now have to rush to completion so those oh-so-eager reviewers – some of them metaphorically sitting on my shoulders as I work – can start evaluating them.
But I’m a reformed woman now. I’ve seen the light and I will never rail again, because now I understand. Finishing the application is scary. Once you hit the submit button, you’re done. Finis. Kaput. For better or worse, you’ve pinned yourself to the wall and there's nothing else you can do to convince your proposed department to accept you as a student. So you put that moment off for as long as possible, and keep the application open and available while you consider whether to change this part or add to that part or delete some other part in order to make it as perfect an application as possible.
But I don’t want some other harried and frantic admissions processor railing against me, so I’m aiming to finish and submit in the next few weeks, at least a month before the deadline. And I promise you, this is the last you’ll have to read about the whole subject until I receive my decision, whatever it is.
And next week I’ll get back to those skating stories. You know, the ones about fire on ice, etc.? Promise.
- 30 -
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
The Accidental Athlete, Part 2
Let’s see, where were we? Oh yeah, you wanted to know how skating has come back into my life? Haven’t slept a wink since reading last week’s blog? Had this day circled in bright red on your calendar? Riiiight! Ah, the overwhelming humility of the blog writer!
OK, so since you asked … it started about four years ago, when I looked at the campus rink schedule and saw that there were lunch hour sessions every weekday. I work fairly close to the rink, so this seemed like a good way to get used to being on the ice again. But there were a couple of unexpected problems.
The first was that I could barely manage to get my skates on and tie them properly. I’d been seriously overweight when I first skated but was much more so now, and those additional pounds were getting in the way. Literally.
Skating boots need to be tied tightly, and there are three ways to accomplish that task. I could sit in a bench and put my foot on the floor and bend down to it. Mmmmmph! Unhhh! No good, couldn’t reach that far. Or I could put my foot up on the bench and lean forward and – no way! Or I could stand up and face the bench and put my foot on said surface and lean over my leg to reach my foot. Ouch!
It took quite a while but somehow I managed, with a lot embarrassing grunts and groans, to get my boots tied somewhat less than snugly. However, after maybe 20 minutes of barely moving on the ice (I seem to have forgotten it all and was back to The Wall), it also became clear that the tops of the boots were too tight for comfort on my pudgy legs, and when I removed them I found a nasty looking abrasion on one calf. That was scary for a diabetic who has to be careful about foot and leg injuries so I took the skates home and put them back in the closet to wait for the abrasion to heal before trying again.
And there they sat, forlorn and forgotten, until last year around this time. Because in the interim, I discovered my gallbladder was harboring cancer, and that some of it was sneaking out into surrounding tissue. Surgery and chemo and radiation followed, and while all that was going on my daughter (Remember her? The instigator of this whole skating saga?) was reading books about cancer and nutrition and urging me to consider making some major nutrition changes.
I tried to read a couple of those books along with her, really, I did, but could just never finish them. Too technical. Boring. Lazy brain syndrome, as in “you read them and tell me what they say.” Finally she secured my agreement to read Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and more specifically to read it cover to cover before making any judgments or decisions about what it recommended. OK, OK, I promise already. She’s still relentless, but manages it with more diplomacy than when she was six.
Plus she knew that in addition to needing to minimize the possibility of recurring cancer, I had another major challenge: discontent about having to add insulin to my diabetic medications. It had happened several months earlier. When my doctor said that dreaded word “insulin,” I felt like a failure. After all, I was a Type II diabetic who could, at least theoretically, control the disease with a healthy diet.
Which is what I was trying to do. Or at least, I was trying not to have an unhealthy diet according to commonly accepted standards. Very little red meat. “Sugar-free” snacks. That kind of thing. Yet my weight and my blood sugar numbers had continued to move up until insulin became a necessity. And a little insulin now was likely to become larger and larger doses in the years ahead, with increasingly higher chances of diabetic complications.
Eat to Live is billed as a weight loss book, which it is, but its larger purpose is weight loss through lifelong nutritional changes in order to correct and forestall major health problems such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Bingo, two out of three. I definitely belonged to the book’s target audience. Because of that, and because Furhman’s writing style is conversational and easy to follow and entertaining even when he’s getting into technical details about complicated research studies, I actually read the whole book during one weekend.
About halfway through I was convinced that his advice was sound and do-able and worth trying, but I’d promised you-know-who so dutifully continued reading right through to the last page. Then I got to work. Figured out a basic eating plan. Rid my kitchen of meat and dairy products. Became a regular at the Farmers’ Market, dragging home sacks full of more vegetables than I’d ever thought existed. And cut way back on bread, which was relatively easy since so much of my cheese consumption had been tied to bread and crackers. Because of the cancer I also traded artificially sweetened products for others that were naturally sweetened with agave or fruit juice, for example, and bought mostly organic foods. I’d had enough chemicals squirted into my body in the past few months, thank you.
(About now you are probably wondering whether I have forgotten that this blog is supposed to be about ice skating. Have patience, dear friends, it will all come together. Soon. Promise.)
I was happily surprised to discover that I didn’t miss cheese, formerly one of my staples, and that it was easy to make plant-based meals. I’ve never been much of a cook, more of a put-together-er – open a can of this, stir up a box of that, voila, a meal! Now it was chop a bunch of this, steam a pile of that, mix it all together and dive in.
Within a couple days of filling my body with vegetables and fruits and brown rice instead of bread and cheese and turkey and malitol-filled cookies, I was able to stop taking insulin. This is not an exaggeration. A couple days. Before this diet change my other diabetic medications had no longer been able to control my blood sugar by themselves. Now they could.
Within a few more days my weight started to drop. One pound. Then another. Two more. Could this actually be happening? It could! The scale was telling me a story I had never expected to see again in this life. My weight loss didn’t break any speed records, but it was steady and kept going and going and going until a little more than a year later I was wearing size 10-12 instead of size 22. Which is where I am now. And let me assure you, I’m lovin’ it!
I’m also loving the fact that instead of taking four diabetes pills and a daily insulin injection I’m down to one half of one pill, with blood sugar numbers that make my internist smile.
Meanwhile, back at the ice rink... Bet you thought we’d never get there. Go ahead, admit it!
OK, so last September I returned for another of those noon skates. What a difference! I could actually bend down and properly tie my boots in any of the three positions mentioned above, plus my feet and legs fit the skates better. No more abrasions.
What hadn’t changed, though, was that I still couldn’t skate. My body, vegan diet notwithstanding, had forgotten everything it used to know
Re-learning something is sort of better and sort of worse than learning the same thing from scratch. Unlike my Learn-to-Skate classmates, I am assured that I can do the basic moves because I have done them, to musical accompaniment even, albeit over 20 years ago. This knowledge is a source of both confidence in the future and frustration in the present, but the silver lining is that, with the help of a great coach who has infinite patience, I now have improved on those basics. I have straighter posture and better body awareness, and as I regain my former level I’ll be able to execute maneuvers with more skill and control.
Which is very important, because the way the skaters you watch on TV learned to fly through the air and spin like a top, the way for anyone to learn figure skating at any level, is a very step-by-step process. Each skill, from a lowly one-foot glide to a quadruple axel, builds on skills learned previously, and each is a building block to the next, so it’s important to learn each one well and properly before moving on. Getting to the day when you can figure skate with ease and some element of grace is a slow, laborious process.
Which brings me back to my original question: why am I doing it? There is nothing practical about a sport that requires unique equipment and an artificially created surface, that is an activity most of us can barely manage to approximate when we first try it, and that can only be practiced at specific times which often don’t fit well into work or school or family schedules.
And there’s nothing logical about an accidental athlete in her sixth decade with a lifelong, history of physical cowardice, aspiring to relearn how to spin and jump – teeny tiny half-jumps, but definitely manuevers that involve both feet leaving the ice.
I wonder if a review of skating adventures past will offer some clarity. Adventures like the housekeeper-mouse routine. Or the fire episode. Or the bunny hop that flopped. Or …
To be continued. (Since you asked.)
OK, so since you asked … it started about four years ago, when I looked at the campus rink schedule and saw that there were lunch hour sessions every weekday. I work fairly close to the rink, so this seemed like a good way to get used to being on the ice again. But there were a couple of unexpected problems.
The first was that I could barely manage to get my skates on and tie them properly. I’d been seriously overweight when I first skated but was much more so now, and those additional pounds were getting in the way. Literally.
Skating boots need to be tied tightly, and there are three ways to accomplish that task. I could sit in a bench and put my foot on the floor and bend down to it. Mmmmmph! Unhhh! No good, couldn’t reach that far. Or I could put my foot up on the bench and lean forward and – no way! Or I could stand up and face the bench and put my foot on said surface and lean over my leg to reach my foot. Ouch!
It took quite a while but somehow I managed, with a lot embarrassing grunts and groans, to get my boots tied somewhat less than snugly. However, after maybe 20 minutes of barely moving on the ice (I seem to have forgotten it all and was back to The Wall), it also became clear that the tops of the boots were too tight for comfort on my pudgy legs, and when I removed them I found a nasty looking abrasion on one calf. That was scary for a diabetic who has to be careful about foot and leg injuries so I took the skates home and put them back in the closet to wait for the abrasion to heal before trying again.
And there they sat, forlorn and forgotten, until last year around this time. Because in the interim, I discovered my gallbladder was harboring cancer, and that some of it was sneaking out into surrounding tissue. Surgery and chemo and radiation followed, and while all that was going on my daughter (Remember her? The instigator of this whole skating saga?) was reading books about cancer and nutrition and urging me to consider making some major nutrition changes.
I tried to read a couple of those books along with her, really, I did, but could just never finish them. Too technical. Boring. Lazy brain syndrome, as in “you read them and tell me what they say.” Finally she secured my agreement to read Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and more specifically to read it cover to cover before making any judgments or decisions about what it recommended. OK, OK, I promise already. She’s still relentless, but manages it with more diplomacy than when she was six.
Plus she knew that in addition to needing to minimize the possibility of recurring cancer, I had another major challenge: discontent about having to add insulin to my diabetic medications. It had happened several months earlier. When my doctor said that dreaded word “insulin,” I felt like a failure. After all, I was a Type II diabetic who could, at least theoretically, control the disease with a healthy diet.
Which is what I was trying to do. Or at least, I was trying not to have an unhealthy diet according to commonly accepted standards. Very little red meat. “Sugar-free” snacks. That kind of thing. Yet my weight and my blood sugar numbers had continued to move up until insulin became a necessity. And a little insulin now was likely to become larger and larger doses in the years ahead, with increasingly higher chances of diabetic complications.
Eat to Live is billed as a weight loss book, which it is, but its larger purpose is weight loss through lifelong nutritional changes in order to correct and forestall major health problems such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Bingo, two out of three. I definitely belonged to the book’s target audience. Because of that, and because Furhman’s writing style is conversational and easy to follow and entertaining even when he’s getting into technical details about complicated research studies, I actually read the whole book during one weekend.
About halfway through I was convinced that his advice was sound and do-able and worth trying, but I’d promised you-know-who so dutifully continued reading right through to the last page. Then I got to work. Figured out a basic eating plan. Rid my kitchen of meat and dairy products. Became a regular at the Farmers’ Market, dragging home sacks full of more vegetables than I’d ever thought existed. And cut way back on bread, which was relatively easy since so much of my cheese consumption had been tied to bread and crackers. Because of the cancer I also traded artificially sweetened products for others that were naturally sweetened with agave or fruit juice, for example, and bought mostly organic foods. I’d had enough chemicals squirted into my body in the past few months, thank you.
(About now you are probably wondering whether I have forgotten that this blog is supposed to be about ice skating. Have patience, dear friends, it will all come together. Soon. Promise.)
I was happily surprised to discover that I didn’t miss cheese, formerly one of my staples, and that it was easy to make plant-based meals. I’ve never been much of a cook, more of a put-together-er – open a can of this, stir up a box of that, voila, a meal! Now it was chop a bunch of this, steam a pile of that, mix it all together and dive in.
Within a couple days of filling my body with vegetables and fruits and brown rice instead of bread and cheese and turkey and malitol-filled cookies, I was able to stop taking insulin. This is not an exaggeration. A couple days. Before this diet change my other diabetic medications had no longer been able to control my blood sugar by themselves. Now they could.
Within a few more days my weight started to drop. One pound. Then another. Two more. Could this actually be happening? It could! The scale was telling me a story I had never expected to see again in this life. My weight loss didn’t break any speed records, but it was steady and kept going and going and going until a little more than a year later I was wearing size 10-12 instead of size 22. Which is where I am now. And let me assure you, I’m lovin’ it!
I’m also loving the fact that instead of taking four diabetes pills and a daily insulin injection I’m down to one half of one pill, with blood sugar numbers that make my internist smile.
Meanwhile, back at the ice rink... Bet you thought we’d never get there. Go ahead, admit it!
OK, so last September I returned for another of those noon skates. What a difference! I could actually bend down and properly tie my boots in any of the three positions mentioned above, plus my feet and legs fit the skates better. No more abrasions.
What hadn’t changed, though, was that I still couldn’t skate. My body, vegan diet notwithstanding, had forgotten everything it used to know
Re-learning something is sort of better and sort of worse than learning the same thing from scratch. Unlike my Learn-to-Skate classmates, I am assured that I can do the basic moves because I have done them, to musical accompaniment even, albeit over 20 years ago. This knowledge is a source of both confidence in the future and frustration in the present, but the silver lining is that, with the help of a great coach who has infinite patience, I now have improved on those basics. I have straighter posture and better body awareness, and as I regain my former level I’ll be able to execute maneuvers with more skill and control.
Which is very important, because the way the skaters you watch on TV learned to fly through the air and spin like a top, the way for anyone to learn figure skating at any level, is a very step-by-step process. Each skill, from a lowly one-foot glide to a quadruple axel, builds on skills learned previously, and each is a building block to the next, so it’s important to learn each one well and properly before moving on. Getting to the day when you can figure skate with ease and some element of grace is a slow, laborious process.
Which brings me back to my original question: why am I doing it? There is nothing practical about a sport that requires unique equipment and an artificially created surface, that is an activity most of us can barely manage to approximate when we first try it, and that can only be practiced at specific times which often don’t fit well into work or school or family schedules.
And there’s nothing logical about an accidental athlete in her sixth decade with a lifelong, history of physical cowardice, aspiring to relearn how to spin and jump – teeny tiny half-jumps, but definitely manuevers that involve both feet leaving the ice.
I wonder if a review of skating adventures past will offer some clarity. Adventures like the housekeeper-mouse routine. Or the fire episode. Or the bunny hop that flopped. Or …
To be continued. (Since you asked.)
Monday, October 5, 2009
The Accidental Athlete
I started life as the kid who runs away when the ball comes toward her. Who can’t learn to swim because she doesn’t like to get her face wet (but goes to the pool anyway because BOYS are there). Who didn’t learn to ride a bike until she was nine years old, and then rode it infrequently. Who was always chosen last in gym class – or rather, was reluctantly accepted when there was no one else to choose. After all, no self-respecting and victory-hopeful captain wants the kid who thinks the baseball is her enemy and never manages to touch a racket to a badminton birdie.
With that kind of history, how did I become a senior citizen athlete? Running in 5Ks and even a half-marathon (always coming in last, but finishing every time), biking in long group rides, and now ice skating. Again.
Since you asked, I’ll tell you.
Biking and running started as practical pursuits. During times when I didn’t own a car, either from necessity or by choice, the bicycle became my main mode of transportation, then morphed into a recreational sport a few years ago when I joined a local bike club.
I started running in 1984 – on October 31, to be exact. I know the date because it was the day after I quit smoking. Or rather, the day after the last time I quit smoking. I had quit a few other times but always started again. This time I was quitting with the help of a smoking cessation clinic and wanted it to take, so decided to start running in order to have a new healthy habit that would be jeopardized if I returned to the old unhealthy one.
Although maybe running isn’t quite the right word for what I did that first day. I couldn’t even make it around the block. My friend who lived in the apartment building next to ours said she heard someone wheezing beneath her window that morning, and was amazed when she looked outside and saw it was me laboring to get to the corner. Persistence paid off, however. Eventually I could run for a whole block, then two or three, then a half-mile … etc., etc., etc., to quote the king And participating in 5k events, complements of my employer who sponsored staff teams, also helped the habit replacement theory become reality.
So. Two practical sports, right?
Then there’s ice skating. Once upon a time, in parts of what is now Europe, skating was a way to get from place to place along a frozen river or lake. Now it’s a way to go around and around and around and around an indoor rink. In other words, to go nowhere, while wearing heavy boots connected to a thin middle-of-the-foot blade and attempting to stay balanced on a cold, wet, slippery surface. This was not an activity that appealed to me, and definitely not practical. So how did it become a major hobby? Actually pretty much of an obsession?
Since you asked, I’ll tell you.
It started the weekend my then six-year-old daughter attended her first (and last) Brownie Scout meeting at another’s Scout’s home and left with a pair of ice skates. The host mother had taken one look at my tiny-for-her-age kid, dived into the closet to find the skates her own kid had recently outgrown, and offered them to mine. Which is as much as I know about that meeting, since all I heard afterwards were whenarewegoingskating and canwegotoday and pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease!
Ignoring her didn’t work. Promising we’d go “someday” didn’t work. She was relentless. So the next afternoon found us at the local rink, accompanied by her dad and our neighbor and her son. Dad and neighbor both told me it would be OK, they knew how to skate and would help me.
Notice I wasn’t worried about whether my six-year-old would be OK, I was only worried about me.
And I was right to be worried. Because the minute we all set rental blades to ice, it became clear that neither dad nor neighbor could help anyone. They could barely hold themselves up, but could skate just enough to get from point A to point B and leave me in the dust, or rather the ice vapor. Meanwhile our kids had attacked the ice with innocent, if totally unwarranted, confidence. So there I was, all alone. Just me and the wall.
Ah yes, the wall. You see them at every public skating session, the wall skaters. Clinging desperately to the ledge that holds up the Plexiglas. Mincing carefully along at the speed of a snail. Looking down the whole time to make sure their feet are in constant contact with the ice. Hooray for the wall.
Muttering to myself about the ingratitude of daughters who first badger their mothers into attempting this insane sport and then abandon them, and about the duplicity of husbands and friends who make promises they can’t keep, I managed, with the help of the wall, to get around the near end of the rink, inch by terrifying inch, and to the other end.
Almost.
Because all of a sudden there was no wall. Or rather, the wall was no longer available. Seems some treacherous rink worker had decided to take the hockey teams’ pictures during that particular Sunday public session, and had used a line of orange plastic cones to demarcate a “no skating” zone. And the wall, my lifeline, my savior, my only hope for survival, was in that zone.
Now comes one of the defining moments of my life. How was I going to get off the ice and back to the relative safety of the lobby? My choices were: (a) to wait until husband or friend came by and insist they hold my hand and lead me to the other side of the rink and to the door; (b) get down on all fours and crawl across the ice; (c) stay right where I was for the rest of the public session, another 90 minutes or so, and THEN crawl away; (d) bawl like a baby; or (e) let go of the wall and skate to the other side.
(a) didn’t sound like a very good idea since either of them trying to lead me would probably end with both of us lying on the ice in a tangled heap of bruises and potentially broken bones. (b) didn’t seem a much safer alternative, given the crowd of skaters whizzing by who would be likely to trip over me, or worse, on me. (c) and (d) would only forestall the inevitable. After all, I had to get to other side … someday.
Which left (e). Somehow I gathered up enough courage to remove my hand from that blasted wall and very-carefully-oh-so-slowly-omigod-I’m-actually-doing-it get across the ice, past the cones and the hockey team, and back to the wall on the opposite side. Just me, by myself.
I made it! In one piece!! Without the wall!!! I do believe in miracles, I do, I do, I do.
There was actually one more alternative. (f) I could have asked a skating guard for help. But thank goodness (f) never crossed my mind, because I credit that thousand-mile wall-less trip across the rink, and the surprisingly exhilarating feeling of accomplishment that it engendered, with the decision to register both my daughter and myself for skating classes starting the next week. And in no time flat, we were hooked. For the next several years we took more classes as well as private lessons, performed in local ice shows, and skated in competitions as soloists and on precision teams. And for a couple of those years figure skating, when the above-mentioned dad also became a serious student of the sport, was a total family hobby.
When my daughter reached adolescence her interest in skating withered, and by then husband had also stopped hitting the ice on a regular basis. I kept at it for another year or so, then quit as well. One major reason was money. I just couldn’t afford to keep practicing this relatively expensive sport. Never had been able to afford it actually, just did it anyway. Because it became, as I might have mentioned above, an obsession.
As obsessions go, I suppose this one was relatively healthy and constructive. Daughter, who is now four years older than I was on that history-making Sunday afternoon, says that growing up on ice was one of the better influences in her life. And for me, the accidental athlete, learning one sport at what I thought of then as an advanced age (mid-thirties? riiiiight!) gave me the impetus to try others. (Nothing involving balls, though. Let’s keep some perspective here.)
In the 20-plus years since I stopped skating, there have been many moments when I missed it intensely and thought about starting again, but with money or time concerns, or more urgent priorities (like taking classes to complete my bachelor’s degree), it didn’t seem like the right time. Someday, I’d say. One of these days.
So how did “one of these days” become here and now? Since you asked, I’ll tell you.
Next week.
-30-
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Staying connected
What is our purpose for existence? Why are we here, alive, functioning (sometimes), moving along the path from infancy to old age (most of us), reproducing ourselves (some of us) -- and how does our purpose, as each of us understands it, affect what we choose to do in our lives?
I’ve been thinking about prayer and meditation, and that too little of it was a major factor in the crashing I wrote about last week. Yes, I was very busy for a couple of weeks, and yes, everything in my life just seemed to come together at the same time, and certainly most of my available hours were filled up and overflowing with to-do lists and post-it notes and necessary e-mails, etc., etc., etc. But I’m convinced I would have handled it all much better and more serenely – and more energetically – if I hadn’t stinted on my usual prayer time.
Especially since I don’t spend hours and hours praying every day or every week. More like 30 minutes, max, of spiritually focused quiet time spread throughout the day. As focused as I can manage, anyway.
I wasn’t raised in a religious tradition that included an emphasis on personal prayer, and a few months before I heard about the Bahá'í Faith I came to the conclusion that prayer was silly. After all, God – if there was a God – knew what I wanted so why should He need me to ask him for anything?
Clearly I had a very simplistic idea of the nature of prayer. And it’s taken me many years to get closer to understanding prayer as Bahá’u’lláh defines it: a way to clean the dust and dross of daily life from the soul, like polishing a dusty mirror so it can better reflect sunlight. My understanding is still pretty rudimentary, but at least now I can sometimes tell the difference in my life and my serenity, or lack thereof, according to whether I do or don’t remember to polish the mirror of my own soul.
It’s so easy to do, and also so easy to forget, because I’m definitely inclined more toward doing than being. I put a lot of time and energy into eating right, exercising, working on my various projects, serving the Bahá'í community, helping with my grandsons (my daughter calls it “Grandma Duty”). Shouldn’t all that be enough? Not according to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
"The body without spirit is not capable of real accomplishment. Although it may be in the utmost condition of beauty and excellence, it is, nevertheless, in need of the spirit. The chimney of the lamp, no matter how polished and perfect it be, is in need of the light. Without the light, the lamp or candle is not illuminating. Without the spirit, the body is not productive."
So along with everything else, or more accurately, before everything else, I have to make room in my life for a little soul polishing. Have a bit of conversation with God. Get some spiritual nourishment. Slow down. Look inward. Be.
Which is why my cancer adventure was such a wonderful gift. It forced me stop, not just for a few minutes but for six months, all the while not knowing whether this was a hiatus from my regular life or preparation for the end of it. So like many others, I found a great blessing in an experience usually perceived as negative, sad, often unfair -- the blessing of realignment of priorities, of acceptance, of stronger faith, of a better understanding of my purpose.
Now the challenge is to keep and increase the measure of serenity achieved during that time, even in the midst of all my current “doings.” Sometimes, as a way to focus my meditation, I picture a butterfly dancing through space, free, happy, the way I imagine my soul will dance when it is liberated from connection with this body. Because the butterfly, changed so radically from its original state when it emerges from its cocoon, seems a perfect symbol of our own human transformation, and helps me remember that life extends far beyond the initial training-wheel phase of physical existence. That there will be so much more to learn, to do, to be.
One day during surgery recovery, before I knew whether my first post-surgical scan would reveal any new cancer sites, I wrote something that I recently re-discovered and am going to be careful never to lose again. It helps me remember that one day, for at least a few minutes, I understood my purpose.
I am tied to this world, not with thick rope that binds me to it, that would tear off chunks of me as I leave it, but rather with gossamer threads, light and soft as cobweb string, that holds me while I am here and lets me float away in complete freedom when it’s time to go.
-30-
I’ve been thinking about prayer and meditation, and that too little of it was a major factor in the crashing I wrote about last week. Yes, I was very busy for a couple of weeks, and yes, everything in my life just seemed to come together at the same time, and certainly most of my available hours were filled up and overflowing with to-do lists and post-it notes and necessary e-mails, etc., etc., etc. But I’m convinced I would have handled it all much better and more serenely – and more energetically – if I hadn’t stinted on my usual prayer time.
Especially since I don’t spend hours and hours praying every day or every week. More like 30 minutes, max, of spiritually focused quiet time spread throughout the day. As focused as I can manage, anyway.
I wasn’t raised in a religious tradition that included an emphasis on personal prayer, and a few months before I heard about the Bahá'í Faith I came to the conclusion that prayer was silly. After all, God – if there was a God – knew what I wanted so why should He need me to ask him for anything?
Clearly I had a very simplistic idea of the nature of prayer. And it’s taken me many years to get closer to understanding prayer as Bahá’u’lláh defines it: a way to clean the dust and dross of daily life from the soul, like polishing a dusty mirror so it can better reflect sunlight. My understanding is still pretty rudimentary, but at least now I can sometimes tell the difference in my life and my serenity, or lack thereof, according to whether I do or don’t remember to polish the mirror of my own soul.
It’s so easy to do, and also so easy to forget, because I’m definitely inclined more toward doing than being. I put a lot of time and energy into eating right, exercising, working on my various projects, serving the Bahá'í community, helping with my grandsons (my daughter calls it “Grandma Duty”). Shouldn’t all that be enough? Not according to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
"The body without spirit is not capable of real accomplishment. Although it may be in the utmost condition of beauty and excellence, it is, nevertheless, in need of the spirit. The chimney of the lamp, no matter how polished and perfect it be, is in need of the light. Without the light, the lamp or candle is not illuminating. Without the spirit, the body is not productive."
So along with everything else, or more accurately, before everything else, I have to make room in my life for a little soul polishing. Have a bit of conversation with God. Get some spiritual nourishment. Slow down. Look inward. Be.
Which is why my cancer adventure was such a wonderful gift. It forced me stop, not just for a few minutes but for six months, all the while not knowing whether this was a hiatus from my regular life or preparation for the end of it. So like many others, I found a great blessing in an experience usually perceived as negative, sad, often unfair -- the blessing of realignment of priorities, of acceptance, of stronger faith, of a better understanding of my purpose.
Now the challenge is to keep and increase the measure of serenity achieved during that time, even in the midst of all my current “doings.” Sometimes, as a way to focus my meditation, I picture a butterfly dancing through space, free, happy, the way I imagine my soul will dance when it is liberated from connection with this body. Because the butterfly, changed so radically from its original state when it emerges from its cocoon, seems a perfect symbol of our own human transformation, and helps me remember that life extends far beyond the initial training-wheel phase of physical existence. That there will be so much more to learn, to do, to be.
One day during surgery recovery, before I knew whether my first post-surgical scan would reveal any new cancer sites, I wrote something that I recently re-discovered and am going to be careful never to lose again. It helps me remember that one day, for at least a few minutes, I understood my purpose.
I am tied to this world, not with thick rope that binds me to it, that would tear off chunks of me as I leave it, but rather with gossamer threads, light and soft as cobweb string, that holds me while I am here and lets me float away in complete freedom when it’s time to go.
-30-
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Crash!
What is your activity threshold?
Now you’re probably asking me, what exactly do I mean by activity threshold? OK, maybe I should make it sound a little more scientific, something like Maximal Level of Active Involvement in Voluntary Commitments? (See what I’ve learned from all the doctoral dissertation titles I see in my job!)
MLAIVC = how much can you stuff into your life before you crash?
I can handle quite a lot so long as there are spaces for physical rest, mental recess, and ordinary tasks such as laundry and grocery shopping. Which means that in any given string of evenings or weekend days I need one or two that are free and clear, with no commitment to anyone for anything.
Years ago, for example, I learned that having two jobs, if one of them is full-time, just doesn’t work for me. I manage for while – a couple of months maybe – and then the part-time job has to go. Unfortunately there have been a couple times where it went pretty much immediately, no two weeks’ or even two days’ notice. Unhappy bosses. Uncomfortable conscience. Not a good feeling.
And there have also been times when I simply overcommitted myself to this task force and that project and such-and-such volunteer service until those spaces mentioned above just plain disappeared. And meeting all my promises became a matter of dogged perseverance with a lot of moaning and groaning and sighing thrown in.
About that time the Human Spousal Activity Barometer, better known as my husband, would say, “You’ve done it again!” Like I really needed him to tell me what I already knew.
OK, maybe I didn’t always know. But I’ve learned. Over time, I’ve become much better at respecting my threshold and avoiding over-commitment. A couple years ago, when my cancer was discovered, I experienced something relatively new. It’s called Doing Nothing. Or at least, nothing extra. For the six months from diagnosis, through surgery, and until completion of chemo and radiation, my whole focus was on just existing. No committee meetings. No volunteering. No big or little projects, personal or otherwise. At some point during that time I was able to once again attend meetings of the Urbana Spiritual Assembly and somewhat resume my duties as secretary, but that was pretty much it.
Basically my calendar was: get up, go to work, go to the cancer center, go home, go to the sofa, stay there until bedtime. Pretty strenuous, huh? Actually, yes, it was!
So when the treatment period ended and my energy level slowly started rising again, I found myself in the interesting position of having one free night after another, all week. It was kind of nice, actually. But little by little, as I felt better, I once again Became Involved. But carefully. Made sure those above-mentioned spaces were included every couple days.
It’s a matter of prioritizing, I think. You have to know – that is, I have to know, you might already have this well understood – how to distinguish what I really want or need to do from what is less important. Or, to paraphrase ‘Abdu’l-Baha, I have to be willing to put the most important ahead of the merely important. After all, sometimes everything durned idea or project or activity that pops up can seem, and actually be, important.
So I’ve been doing pretty well on the MLAIVC barometer. Until along comes a 10-day stretch when somehow almost everything I’m currently doing comes together at the same time. It started nearly two weeks ago. On every single week night and weekend day I was committed to do or help do something really important and/or necessary that just happened to be scheduled during that period: significant Bahá'í events, tasks for the children’s theatre project my daughter and I are developing, the annual new-school-year party at work, Interfaith Alliance meetings, a campus lecture I’d been waiting for two months to attend, and (as they always say in advertisements) much more! Including getting a flu shot before work one day, taking advantage of the free galley giveaway at the campus children’s book center after work another day, and lunch hours commitments such as prayers with a friend and ice skating practice and going to the Registrar’s Office to get my transcript. Plus some exercise time and some GRE study and … oh never mind, that’s about enough of that!
All good stuff. All very important. Much of it unavoidable and unchangeable to other days or other weeks. And lumped together, all too much!
So Thursday, I crashed. Actually Wednesday but the physical act of crashing had to wait until Thursday. Called in sick that morning. Spent all day on the sofa. Still felt kind of punky on Friday, like some bug was trying to get me, and went home from work early. And all the time worried that I might have to stand up a friend and miss participating in a special bike ride planned for Saturday. 42 miles through Amish countryside in the Arthur, Illinois area. Also known to our highly experienced bike club president as “Tour de Manure.”
By Saturday morning, after as much rest and sleep as possible, I felt fine. Able to get up and go by 6:45 a.m., lunch packed, bike tires properly inflated. Ready for a long, happy day.
The weather was perfect, the conversation-while-biking was interesting and fun, the wind was vigorously challenging in many spots, the scenery was beautiful, the haunted cave at Rockhome Gardens was satisfyingly scary, the other riders were friendly, the peek into Amish culture was fascinating. (Check out the picture of horses having a nice chat while they wait for their people to return.) Plus a very cool t-shirt.
All in all, a great day. And exhausting. So when it was over and I came home … you guessed it.
Crash!
-30-
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Decision time
How do you make important decisions?
Do you make lists, putting the benefits in one column and the costs in the other? Do you call a dozen of your closest friends to get their opinions, well-considered or otherwise? Do you flip a coin? Do you pray?
I’ve tried all of these methods at one time or another. (OK, maybe not the dozen friends, but at least two or three.) The benefit/cost list idea actually appeals to me most, since I like to think of myself as a rational, methodical thinker.
I like to think of myself that way. Unfortunately, it ain’t so. That system only works for decisive people, which group does not include me. It’s not my fault. As you might remember from a previous story, I put all the blame for my indecisive nature on the time I was born. (See the August 16 blog, if you’re curious.)
Here’s what happens when I try to use the list method. First I put fact #1 in the benefits column. Then I think, hmmm, well, of course, in such-and-such a situation or for this-or-that reason it could actually be a cost, so I move it to the other column. But on the other hand, it could be both, better put it in a third column for “not sure.” After repeating this wishy-washy shuffling of the various other facts, I end up going back to fact #1 (and 2 and 3, etc.) and putting them back in their original column, thus spending most of my decision-making time on this completely unproductive process and just about zilch on actually making a decision. Which is really OK, because I probably wouldn’t be able to stick to a decision if I did make one!
Consulting friends works out a little better – after all, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá told us that we should consult on all matters. (Don’t ask me where he said that, just trust me, he did. Somewhere.) And talking it over with a friend or two often helps, except what I really want my friend to do is make the decision for me and tell me what it is. And at the same time, what I really don’t want my friend to do is make the decision for me and tell me what it is, because I’d never listen anyway.
So scratch that system, at least as the main one.
As for flipping a coin … someone recently suggested a method she’d heard about, where you flip a coin and if you don’t like the answer, pick the other one. Let’s see, do you think that would work for me? Sure. Right. I’d be flipping that coin until it disintegrated.
So now we get to prayer. And very specifically to what I call the Five Steps of Decision Making and what the book calls “Dynamics of Prayer.” The particular book referenced here is “Principles of Bahá'í Administration,” and the specific passage is in the Appendix and is attributed to Shoghi Effendi, guardian of the Bahá'í Faith from 1921-1957, although it’s noted that the attribution has never been authenticated. Personally, I don’t care if it’s authentic or not. It works!
According to the text, Ruth Moffat, an early American Bahá'í, reported that Shoghi Effendi told her the first step to solving any problem is to pray and meditate. Second, “arrive at a decision and hold this” even if it seems “almost impossible of accomplishment.” You asked, you got an answer, don’t quibble, trust it!
Third, “have determination to carry the decision through” and “immediately take the next step.” Fourth, be confident that this is the correct answer and that the reason will become clear. And finally, “ACT … as though it had all been answered ... until you become an unobstructed channel for the Divine Power to flow through you.”
In the 40-plus years since I became a Baha’i, I’ve followed this guidance several times, and have always found it to be effective. Sometimes I’ve experienced a very strong sense of what I should do, and not always what I thought the answer would be. The most explicit example of that happened in October of 1969. At the time I was trying to decide whether to return to Illinois State University the next Fall to continue my undergraduate education, or to stay in the Chicago area and keep working full-time as a secretary.
I picked an evening when neither of my apartment mates were home and tried my best to buckle down and just plain pray, without distraction, and with focus on the question at hand. And I got an answer, loud and clear. Not something I heard, exactly. I don’t know how to describe the sensation. It just seemed to be there, in an almost physical sense. When I tried to deny it as not being logical, I felt like a wall had plunked itself down next to me and was not allowing me to move to any other mental position.
The answer that I felt so strongly was, yes, go back to school, but no, not next Fall. Now. Meaning in January, when the Spring term would start. It didn’t make sense because I had a lease, and to leave the Chicago area and move back downstate in January would involve either finding someone to replace me or paying my apartment mates for the remainder of the lease term. And I really didn’t want to have to deal with either option.
But I’d started this prayer process with the inherent promise to complete it, and completing it meant accepting the answer, etc., so come January I was back on campus. Now here’s the moral of the story: if I hadn’t listened to whatever or whoever was giving me instruction, I wouldn’t have married my husband less than a year later and that means our daughter would not have been born. Due to specific circumstances in his life, and the fact that I came back in January instead of the next September, the two of us became good friends and then engaged. That exact situation would not have existed in September.
Which is not to say I wouldn’t have married eventually, and maybe even to the same man, or that I wouldn’t have had other children, but not this child, this particular combination of genetic traits who has become a particular adult who does so much good for so many people that I really believe she was the reason for the answer that came that evening. Because I also believe that praying for answers, and especially in the systematic way Shoghi Effendi is purported to have explained, gives us access to information beyond what we can acquire with our brains. Someone out there knows stuff about us that we don’t know, and when we pray we open the channels for them to tell us what we need to do for reasons we don’t yet comprehend.
OK, so that was, at least to my mind, a dramatic result of using this Five Step process. However, when I used it last Monday, I didn’t get a resounding “DO THIS” kind of answer. It was more like, yup, you know what to do, don’t deny it, just go for it already. Sort of a warm, soothing sauna rather than a wake-up-or-else cold shower.
And what was I trying to decide? Whether to apply to the master’s program in creative writing. The consulting-with-friends method of decision making also played a big part in this one, because so many of you sent me such wonderful kind and supportive comments on my last blog – on the blog itself, in Facebook, and via email – that the whoever or whatever was listening to my prayer didn’t have to give me much more than a gentle nudge.
Shoghi Effendi, or rather Ruth Moffat’s memory of Shoghi Effendi, doesn’t seem to be guaranteeing that the answer that comes will necessarily be the final answer, but instead that this is the answer you need. “Have faith and confidence that … the right way will appear, the door will open, the right thought, the right message, the right principle or the right book will be given you.” So I don’t know if I’m supposed to go ahead with this application because I really might get accepted, or because applying is a necessary route to some other important place in my life, or because there’s something I need to learn from the process. All I know is I must do it, for whatever reason, and that I must do it with “the determination to carry the decision through.”
So since the book says to immediately take the next step, as soon as my prayer time ended I went straight to the computer and registered for a date to take the dreaded GRE exam.
October 19. 12:30 p.m.
Pray for me. PLEASE!
-30-
Do you make lists, putting the benefits in one column and the costs in the other? Do you call a dozen of your closest friends to get their opinions, well-considered or otherwise? Do you flip a coin? Do you pray?
I’ve tried all of these methods at one time or another. (OK, maybe not the dozen friends, but at least two or three.) The benefit/cost list idea actually appeals to me most, since I like to think of myself as a rational, methodical thinker.
I like to think of myself that way. Unfortunately, it ain’t so. That system only works for decisive people, which group does not include me. It’s not my fault. As you might remember from a previous story, I put all the blame for my indecisive nature on the time I was born. (See the August 16 blog, if you’re curious.)
Here’s what happens when I try to use the list method. First I put fact #1 in the benefits column. Then I think, hmmm, well, of course, in such-and-such a situation or for this-or-that reason it could actually be a cost, so I move it to the other column. But on the other hand, it could be both, better put it in a third column for “not sure.” After repeating this wishy-washy shuffling of the various other facts, I end up going back to fact #1 (and 2 and 3, etc.) and putting them back in their original column, thus spending most of my decision-making time on this completely unproductive process and just about zilch on actually making a decision. Which is really OK, because I probably wouldn’t be able to stick to a decision if I did make one!
Consulting friends works out a little better – after all, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá told us that we should consult on all matters. (Don’t ask me where he said that, just trust me, he did. Somewhere.) And talking it over with a friend or two often helps, except what I really want my friend to do is make the decision for me and tell me what it is. And at the same time, what I really don’t want my friend to do is make the decision for me and tell me what it is, because I’d never listen anyway.
So scratch that system, at least as the main one.
As for flipping a coin … someone recently suggested a method she’d heard about, where you flip a coin and if you don’t like the answer, pick the other one. Let’s see, do you think that would work for me? Sure. Right. I’d be flipping that coin until it disintegrated.
So now we get to prayer. And very specifically to what I call the Five Steps of Decision Making and what the book calls “Dynamics of Prayer.” The particular book referenced here is “Principles of Bahá'í Administration,” and the specific passage is in the Appendix and is attributed to Shoghi Effendi, guardian of the Bahá'í Faith from 1921-1957, although it’s noted that the attribution has never been authenticated. Personally, I don’t care if it’s authentic or not. It works!
According to the text, Ruth Moffat, an early American Bahá'í, reported that Shoghi Effendi told her the first step to solving any problem is to pray and meditate. Second, “arrive at a decision and hold this” even if it seems “almost impossible of accomplishment.” You asked, you got an answer, don’t quibble, trust it!
Third, “have determination to carry the decision through” and “immediately take the next step.” Fourth, be confident that this is the correct answer and that the reason will become clear. And finally, “ACT … as though it had all been answered ... until you become an unobstructed channel for the Divine Power to flow through you.”
In the 40-plus years since I became a Baha’i, I’ve followed this guidance several times, and have always found it to be effective. Sometimes I’ve experienced a very strong sense of what I should do, and not always what I thought the answer would be. The most explicit example of that happened in October of 1969. At the time I was trying to decide whether to return to Illinois State University the next Fall to continue my undergraduate education, or to stay in the Chicago area and keep working full-time as a secretary.
I picked an evening when neither of my apartment mates were home and tried my best to buckle down and just plain pray, without distraction, and with focus on the question at hand. And I got an answer, loud and clear. Not something I heard, exactly. I don’t know how to describe the sensation. It just seemed to be there, in an almost physical sense. When I tried to deny it as not being logical, I felt like a wall had plunked itself down next to me and was not allowing me to move to any other mental position.
The answer that I felt so strongly was, yes, go back to school, but no, not next Fall. Now. Meaning in January, when the Spring term would start. It didn’t make sense because I had a lease, and to leave the Chicago area and move back downstate in January would involve either finding someone to replace me or paying my apartment mates for the remainder of the lease term. And I really didn’t want to have to deal with either option.
But I’d started this prayer process with the inherent promise to complete it, and completing it meant accepting the answer, etc., so come January I was back on campus. Now here’s the moral of the story: if I hadn’t listened to whatever or whoever was giving me instruction, I wouldn’t have married my husband less than a year later and that means our daughter would not have been born. Due to specific circumstances in his life, and the fact that I came back in January instead of the next September, the two of us became good friends and then engaged. That exact situation would not have existed in September.
Which is not to say I wouldn’t have married eventually, and maybe even to the same man, or that I wouldn’t have had other children, but not this child, this particular combination of genetic traits who has become a particular adult who does so much good for so many people that I really believe she was the reason for the answer that came that evening. Because I also believe that praying for answers, and especially in the systematic way Shoghi Effendi is purported to have explained, gives us access to information beyond what we can acquire with our brains. Someone out there knows stuff about us that we don’t know, and when we pray we open the channels for them to tell us what we need to do for reasons we don’t yet comprehend.
OK, so that was, at least to my mind, a dramatic result of using this Five Step process. However, when I used it last Monday, I didn’t get a resounding “DO THIS” kind of answer. It was more like, yup, you know what to do, don’t deny it, just go for it already. Sort of a warm, soothing sauna rather than a wake-up-or-else cold shower.
And what was I trying to decide? Whether to apply to the master’s program in creative writing. The consulting-with-friends method of decision making also played a big part in this one, because so many of you sent me such wonderful kind and supportive comments on my last blog – on the blog itself, in Facebook, and via email – that the whoever or whatever was listening to my prayer didn’t have to give me much more than a gentle nudge.
Shoghi Effendi, or rather Ruth Moffat’s memory of Shoghi Effendi, doesn’t seem to be guaranteeing that the answer that comes will necessarily be the final answer, but instead that this is the answer you need. “Have faith and confidence that … the right way will appear, the door will open, the right thought, the right message, the right principle or the right book will be given you.” So I don’t know if I’m supposed to go ahead with this application because I really might get accepted, or because applying is a necessary route to some other important place in my life, or because there’s something I need to learn from the process. All I know is I must do it, for whatever reason, and that I must do it with “the determination to carry the decision through.”
So since the book says to immediately take the next step, as soon as my prayer time ended I went straight to the computer and registered for a date to take the dreaded GRE exam.
October 19. 12:30 p.m.
Pray for me. PLEASE!
-30-
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Gimme a G, gimme a R ...
Sometimes it doesn’t pay to know too much.
And after eight years of coordinating student admissions for a graduate department, I certainly know a lot about the challenges and difficulties involved in applying for grad school. So the idea of doing it myself is daunting, to say the least.
But there it is, and it doesn’t seem to want to go away.
The idea is this: to get a Master’s of Fine Arts in creative writing, in the English Department of the University of Illinois, where I received a bachelor’s in the same subject two years ago. An undergrad program, by the way, that I started in 1963 and finished in 2007. 44 years, with a mere 31-year break when completing my degree program was the farthest thing from my mind.
And still was when I signed up for a Social Issues acting class in 2001, just a few weeks after starting my new job at the university. The class was free -- a lovely fringe benefit -- met right after work just a couple blocks away from my office, and was really more of a repertoire company than a standard class. No homework. No exams. Each semester the students put together productions that explored topics such as racism or sexual abuse and present performances followed by discussion in various venues around campus. It was a great class and gave me the chance to work with some very talented young actors, none of them theatre majors, and a teacher whose low key directing style is amazingly powerful in pulling all the elements of production together to create effective and high-quality performances.
I received one college credit hour for that first class, and two more when I took it again the next semester. And that got me wondering. How many other classes would I need to take to finish my degree requirements? What classes would they have to be?
Thanks to a dedicated and hard-working undergrad advisor in the English department, and an equally conscientious admissions coordinator in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I eventually learned that it would take 10 more classes to fulfill the requirements that were in effect when I first started as a freshman.
Of course, two of those classes would have to be general education physical science – Chemistry 101 or some such impossible thing – so I put that out of my mind and started on the fun part of the list. Literature classes. Fiction and non-fiction creative writing classes. Three other acting classes for a partial theatre minor.
Enrolling in just one class per semester, with my work schedule and lunch hours adjusted since these classes all met during the day, it seemed like a very, very long journey to the end of this program. But taking classes became a routine – and very stimulating -- part of my life, and when the day came that I found that all I had left was the dreaded science requirement, time seemed to have flown by to get me to this point.
So there I was, in late August of 2006, sitting in a lecture hall, surrounded as usual by students 40-plus years younger than me --15 years younger than my daughter, for heaven’s sake! – attempting to understand the first lecture in basic astronomy. And pretty darned worried that I wouldn’t grasp a word of it.
I was right to be worried. The subject matter throughout that semester, while interesting, and apparently pretty simple for most of the other students, was light years out of my comfort zone, not to mention my actual capacities of comprehension. Studying for that class took a myriad of hours of puzzling (or just outright memorizing) my way through the textbook and lecture notes as well lots of time spent in the office of the teaching assistant, who probably should get some sort of commendation for helping me. Here was a guy who had been in love with astronomy since he was a little boy, and whose brain wrapped itself around the subject as comfortably as a cat curled up on a pillow, struggling to find new ways to demonstrate the most basic – and to him, obvious -- concepts to someone who had once taken a college aptitude test and scored in the 9-10 range in language and social studies and 1-2 in math and science.
But pass that course I did. And with a B. Can you believe it?
In order to apply to graduate school, I have to take the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE. And because of my job, I already know a lot about that. I know it’s a very tough test. I know that students usually study for months to prepare for it, and I’ll have to take it in a few weeks. I’ve seen the modest scores of applicants with near perfect undergrad GPAs, whereas my overall GPA, even with the mostly As and a couple Bs that I earned since 2001, is still in the low C range. I know that one section of the exam is quantitative, i.e., math. And you know, from the astronomy story, how well I’m likely to do on that.
Yep, I definitely know too much.
OK, let’s look at this whole subject logically. Calmly. One step at a time. Application to master’s program: GRE. GPA. Personal statement. Recommendation letters. (Yikes, what if my recent undergrad instructors don’t recommend me? Heck, what if they don’t remember me?) And to up the ante a bit more, I want to specialize in an area that the U of I program doesn’t officially offer, so I’d have to be submit a sample of performance writing rather than the more usual narrative fiction.
But on the other hand, the young woman who directs the MFA program met with me this week for almost an hour and listened to my story, my aspirations, my misgivings. We had already emailed a bit, and while she was kind enough to give me some time during her office hours, I fully expected her to conclude the discussion by telling me that the whole idea was impossible. Forget it. No way.
Instead she encouraged me to apply. Not because she thinks I’ll be accepted, she has no way to assess that yet, but because she thinks it’s possible. Or at least, not impossible.
So I’m thinking.
My daughter wants me to go for it. Apply. See what happens. What would be worse, she says, trying and not being accepted or not trying? A very unfair question, to my mind.
I have to decide quickly in order to have a chance of finding a GRE exam in my part of the world that still has some empty seats. Gads, there it is again. GRE. Scariest three letters in the alphabet at this moment.
But then, I passed astronomy, didn’t I?
And after eight years of coordinating student admissions for a graduate department, I certainly know a lot about the challenges and difficulties involved in applying for grad school. So the idea of doing it myself is daunting, to say the least.
But there it is, and it doesn’t seem to want to go away.
The idea is this: to get a Master’s of Fine Arts in creative writing, in the English Department of the University of Illinois, where I received a bachelor’s in the same subject two years ago. An undergrad program, by the way, that I started in 1963 and finished in 2007. 44 years, with a mere 31-year break when completing my degree program was the farthest thing from my mind.
And still was when I signed up for a Social Issues acting class in 2001, just a few weeks after starting my new job at the university. The class was free -- a lovely fringe benefit -- met right after work just a couple blocks away from my office, and was really more of a repertoire company than a standard class. No homework. No exams. Each semester the students put together productions that explored topics such as racism or sexual abuse and present performances followed by discussion in various venues around campus. It was a great class and gave me the chance to work with some very talented young actors, none of them theatre majors, and a teacher whose low key directing style is amazingly powerful in pulling all the elements of production together to create effective and high-quality performances.
I received one college credit hour for that first class, and two more when I took it again the next semester. And that got me wondering. How many other classes would I need to take to finish my degree requirements? What classes would they have to be?
Thanks to a dedicated and hard-working undergrad advisor in the English department, and an equally conscientious admissions coordinator in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I eventually learned that it would take 10 more classes to fulfill the requirements that were in effect when I first started as a freshman.
Of course, two of those classes would have to be general education physical science – Chemistry 101 or some such impossible thing – so I put that out of my mind and started on the fun part of the list. Literature classes. Fiction and non-fiction creative writing classes. Three other acting classes for a partial theatre minor.
Enrolling in just one class per semester, with my work schedule and lunch hours adjusted since these classes all met during the day, it seemed like a very, very long journey to the end of this program. But taking classes became a routine – and very stimulating -- part of my life, and when the day came that I found that all I had left was the dreaded science requirement, time seemed to have flown by to get me to this point.
So there I was, in late August of 2006, sitting in a lecture hall, surrounded as usual by students 40-plus years younger than me --15 years younger than my daughter, for heaven’s sake! – attempting to understand the first lecture in basic astronomy. And pretty darned worried that I wouldn’t grasp a word of it.
I was right to be worried. The subject matter throughout that semester, while interesting, and apparently pretty simple for most of the other students, was light years out of my comfort zone, not to mention my actual capacities of comprehension. Studying for that class took a myriad of hours of puzzling (or just outright memorizing) my way through the textbook and lecture notes as well lots of time spent in the office of the teaching assistant, who probably should get some sort of commendation for helping me. Here was a guy who had been in love with astronomy since he was a little boy, and whose brain wrapped itself around the subject as comfortably as a cat curled up on a pillow, struggling to find new ways to demonstrate the most basic – and to him, obvious -- concepts to someone who had once taken a college aptitude test and scored in the 9-10 range in language and social studies and 1-2 in math and science.
But pass that course I did. And with a B. Can you believe it?
In order to apply to graduate school, I have to take the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE. And because of my job, I already know a lot about that. I know it’s a very tough test. I know that students usually study for months to prepare for it, and I’ll have to take it in a few weeks. I’ve seen the modest scores of applicants with near perfect undergrad GPAs, whereas my overall GPA, even with the mostly As and a couple Bs that I earned since 2001, is still in the low C range. I know that one section of the exam is quantitative, i.e., math. And you know, from the astronomy story, how well I’m likely to do on that.
Yep, I definitely know too much.
OK, let’s look at this whole subject logically. Calmly. One step at a time. Application to master’s program: GRE. GPA. Personal statement. Recommendation letters. (Yikes, what if my recent undergrad instructors don’t recommend me? Heck, what if they don’t remember me?) And to up the ante a bit more, I want to specialize in an area that the U of I program doesn’t officially offer, so I’d have to be submit a sample of performance writing rather than the more usual narrative fiction.
But on the other hand, the young woman who directs the MFA program met with me this week for almost an hour and listened to my story, my aspirations, my misgivings. We had already emailed a bit, and while she was kind enough to give me some time during her office hours, I fully expected her to conclude the discussion by telling me that the whole idea was impossible. Forget it. No way.
Instead she encouraged me to apply. Not because she thinks I’ll be accepted, she has no way to assess that yet, but because she thinks it’s possible. Or at least, not impossible.
So I’m thinking.
My daughter wants me to go for it. Apply. See what happens. What would be worse, she says, trying and not being accepted or not trying? A very unfair question, to my mind.
I have to decide quickly in order to have a chance of finding a GRE exam in my part of the world that still has some empty seats. Gads, there it is again. GRE. Scariest three letters in the alphabet at this moment.
But then, I passed astronomy, didn’t I?
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