Fitter, Happier. .

For the third year in a row, my annual physical revealed a vitamin D deficiency, with this year's number lower than ever.  This is somewhat ironic, given that the other predictable pronouncement by the nurse practitioner is that I am dangerously fair-skinned (fairer skin being linked to relative ease at vitamin D absorption from the sun).  I blame this unlikely dual misfortune on my scrupulous sunscreen habit, which the N.P. assures me I should continue in order to protect myself from the likelihood of skin cancer.  In the meantime, however, she has finally prescribed me a ridiculously high vitamin D dosage in hopes that I'll finally stop blowing off her advice to take a supplement. So far the added seriousness of having a prescription has worked, and whereas I used to diligently take my OTC-level dosage of vitamin D for only a couple of days before succumbing to the suspicion that it didn't really matter that much, I've now been going strong for five weeks.

Beyond the prescription, my dedication was in large part fueled by my internet reading on vitamin D, which lists the symptoms and complications of a deficiency as including everything from increased risk of cancer (this time NOT skin cancer--you can't win) and osteoporosis to difficulty sleeping, depression, and even weight gain.  I relish the thought of the effortlessness of popping a pill resulting, potentially, in being thinner, more cheerful, and more energized.  Articulating this fantasy to myself evoked the Radiohead song "Fitter, Happier"  Yep, that joyless song probably accurately captures the likelihood of finding such an easy fix.  Oh, well.  Here's hoping for the placebo effect.  That's a thing, right?

Thinking about God

At the moment, I'm reading Blake Ostler's Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes of God, which addresses Mormon theology and how it fits in with other Christian theologies.  Mormonism has some striking differences with traditional Christianity--the emphatic way we highlight that the trinity consists of three separate personages, the inclusion of the Book of Mormon in the scriptural canon, the historical practice of polygamy, and the (currently not widely professed) view that human beings have the potential to become as gods.

Before this I had read virtually no theology; while I had read some of Augustine's Confessions and excerpts of Aquinas in college, in the context of my class we were viewing the texts more for how they approached the ineffable than for any theological conclusions.




As I was reading Ostler, at first I found I was distracted by the impression that he was trying too hard to invent a systematic theology where no such thing existed.  For example, he acknowledges the widely documented Mormon view that God did NOT create ex nihilo ("out of nothing"), but simply organized matter that already existed and that therefore he cannot force separate "intelligences" (which can refer to either individual people or even to matter) to act in any particular way--therefore they have free will, separate from God's ability to act upon them.  He then attempts to reconcile this with seemingly contradictory scriptures like D&C 88:47--"God hath given a law to all things by which they move" (implying that God is the ultimate cause behind all other events brought about by other agents)--by stating intelligences have power to cause certain events to take place, but that God must lend them his power for this to occur.  The intelligences therefore can act as free agents, but only with God lending his power simultaneously--something Ostler calls "concurrence".  An interesting and creative conclusion to be sure, but definitely not something that must be universally arrived at, since it is not at all clear if this is what is meant by Mormon scripture or if it is what Mormon prophets had meant to convey.  While one could argue that God may reveal truths without the complete understanding of his mouthpieces, there remains the question of whether this is even God's intended conclusion from combined Mormon discourses and scriptures.  In other words, all interesting ideas, but not necessarily convincing and certainly not conclusive.

But then I realized that this systematizing of unsystematic utterances about God into a coherent theology is itself the discipline of theology, which is what Augustine and Aquinas and all the other theologians were up to themselves, taking biblical record, some of which is clearly self-contradictory, and trying to reconcile it with logic and what was known of science and philosophy.  On the whole, Mormons have not always been friendly to such attempts, perceiving efforts to define theology from non-prophetic sources as inevitably tainted by human interference . Certainly the task theologians undertake is audacious--but is it worth doing? Does it add anything to the spiritual life?

My own thought is that reading arguments about the nature of God seems to do little to convince me about one view or another.  I'm honestly really unsure about things like whether God is ultimately infinitely omnipotent or if such a thing is even possible (or desirable) and he is instead "maximally potent"; the more I read, the more I find new questions arising.  But I've decided that I like reading theology because the way I experience the world and discover my beliefs is not just through inspired feeling, but by reasoned thinking and analytic reflection.  In years past when I ignored difficult and thorny theological questions, it essentially meant that I was shutting off an important part of myself to God--and therefore my relationship with him felt boring and stagnant.  And writing that feels blasphemous, for I cannot believe that God himself is either of those things.  So while I am very unsure if I agree with Ostler's conclusions about what Mormon theology is--or even what it should be--I'm very much appreciative of the exercise of considering these questions. Thinking about God turns out to be a devotional activity for me in much the same way that prayer and church attendance are; I'm turning my mind towards him in the same way I've always known to turn my heart.

Fear

Fear.  Oh, I hate it so.  It has both kept me awake and haunted my sleep.  I have missed out on what should have been fun or exciting moments because of worry, distress, anxiety--all words to describe subtle variations of fear.

November, 2002.  When the NATO conference came to Prague, our language school, across the street from the US Embassy, closed for the week.  A friend and I decided to go to Krakow. Despite a long delay while changing trains near the border, it was a pleasant journey. The city itself was breathtaking, not too full of tourists because of the chilly time of year. On the first night, we finished dinner fairly late and headed back to our hostel on the outskirts of town past the Vistula River.  It was a weeknight in a mostly uninhabited part of the city, and the streets were dark and deserted.  We were talking and laughing when we noticed two men in the distance heading our direction on the opposite side of the street.  My friend made a comment about feeling nervous, and while I'm not normally easily spooked, I clenched my bag tighter.  As they drew nearer, they suddenly changed direction and started crossing the street as if to confront us directly.  I couldn't speak and I couldn't react--I found myself suddenly unable to move at all, with a desperate prayer in my throat--"Please, please, please don't let them come too near--don't let them touch us.  And if they do, please let it be just our money they want."  They grew closer, they were near, and without a word, they passed silently by.  My friend let out a relieved laugh.  "I really thought they were going to attack us!"--but I couldn't speak.  We got back to the hostel, and I was too stiff with fear to even make my bed--my hands were useless.  I had to just sit for 15 minutes or so while the adrenaline finished its rush through my body.  It was an odd overreaction--I'm not exactly sure why I had become so terrified, although maybe the experience really was as menacing as it seemed.  More than ten years after the fact, my memory is not so clear.

Most disturbingly, my own body had betrayed me.  I couldn't have run, I couldn't have fought--I had frozen.  I was useless--worse than useless--at defending myself.  In nightmares, I have felt my legs turn sluggish while trying to run away, as if moving through jello.  But at least I could move--here I had become totally helpless, and I couldn't consciously will myself back into control.  I don't fully understand why that happened, but the two or three times that I've been truly fearful in my life have all had the same result.  I have heard of fight or flight--but freeze?  What on earth could be the biological explanation for the usefulness of that?  According to wikipedia, "many animals freeze or play dead when touched in the hope that the predator will lose interest".*  Yikes.  I don't like to consider my survival prospects if I ever encountered real danger; fortunately, my few scary moments have always turned out to be false alarms.

(*Another source suggests that "tonic immobility may be useful when additional attacks are provoked by movement or when immobility may increase the chance of escaping, such as when a predator believes its prey to be dead and releases it."  So maybe my body just knows I'm a crappy runner and an even crappier fighter and thinks, "eh--playing dead is the best defense I've got." )

The Impossible

I recently watched "The Impossible" while struggling to get through a red eye flight (why do I keep booking these?  I can't seem to remember that I can NEVER sleep on planes and that it's routinely a miserable experience.  Here's hoping that writing and publishing this will strengthen my resolve not to do it again).


The movie was--well, moving.  Sitting on a dark plane surrounded by hundreds of sleeping strangers in the early hours of the morning, I found myself weeping for the dead and the anguish of the survivors and shuddering at the horrors of extensive injuries.  I can point out what I think are some flaws in tone or story-telling, but I thought that the acting was great and the portrayal of the catastrophic tsunami was pretty amazing. I came home and looked it up on wikipedia and imdb and was unsurprised to see that the reviews were mostly good, but that it received some criticism for "white-washing", or telling a story affecting people of minority ethnic or racial groups with white actors to appeal to a mainstream white audience. It caused me to reflect on my impression of the movie and ask myself if I agreed; while I determined that I did not, I found this argument to be compelling and worth addressing.

I asked myself, what if the movie went about telling a story of a Thai, or Sri Lankan, or Indonesian family who suffered loss and injury in the tsunami?  For starters, the essential nature of the film would be different.  The exposition would require more detail to give the western audience the necessary background to understand something about the lives of the characters, leaving less time to explore the nature of the catastrophe and its aftermath.  The filmmakers would also need to find a way to hook the audience into relating to people whose lives are so different.  The movie would then shift in tone from being about the tsunami's destruction and the fragility of human life, and become an exploration of how we are somehow unable to feel the same compassion for people we identify as different (dare we admit that in the unexamined parts of our consciousness, we even consider inferior?) from us.

We would be forced to face our own assumption that when people in the developing world, who don't have our same conveniences and cultural norms suffer, that it is less meaningful, less real, less important.  This is a difficult truth.  It is worth asking hard questions about why these films don't get made--why we as consumers don't want to consume them, really, since I'm sure that the studios would be happy to produce something sure to be lucrative.  And while we probably know--or have a good sense for-- the answer to that question (art that is hard on its audience is not generally popular for mass consumption), we should be asking ourselves what can be done to change that--even in small ways.

But in the end, "The Impossible" is telling one story, based on true events suffered by a real family. While it does portray a disaster that disproportionately affected southeast Asians, and not European tourists, we should be outraged at our failure as a society to want to tell--or more importantly, to want to see--such stories rather than at how "The Impossible" cannot tell every story, or convey every political and social message that we believe should be out there.  We should look closely at how we view tragedy, and if and why we may feel greater shock and sadness when people who look more like us--whether because they are white, middle-class, from the developed world, English-speaking, etc.--are harmed or killed or suffer than when people who are different endure the same.  But it seems unfair to penalize one film, written and produced to tell one specific story, for failing to address all these collective wrongs.

Reasons to Run

I am not much of an athlete.  Naturally mediocre in both strength and speed, I don't do myself any favors with my lack of discipline and dislike of physical discomfort.  But even with my limitations, I have found exercise to be both pleasurable and healing over the years, although in different phases of life, it has had different purposes.

As a child, I loved the idea of being fast.  I read every Marguerite Henry book I could get my hands on and became obsessed with horses, a creature built for speed.  I would run everywhere and imagine I was Florence Griffith Joyner (I actually think the cheesy music on that link perfectly describes the soundtrack in my 10 year-old brain as I would run).  Schoolyard games always included running: various forms of tag, butt's up (which, ever the good Mormon girl, I dutifully referred to as "bum's up"), and imaginary games that always involved running--we were unicorns, we were riding horses, we were running from the bad guys, we were flying through the air. My mother loves to tell about how she would pick me up from school and I would be completely disheveled: clothes dirty, hair escaping my pony tail and plastered to my sweaty forehead.

It was in high school that I objectively learned that I was an above-average high school runner, and nothing more.  There's nothing like a stop watch for forcing you to face reality.  I was disappointed, but by that time my identity as a bookwormish nerd was set, so it wasn't as devastating as it might have been.  I enjoyed running and winning races (which happened rarely once I transitioned from junior varsity to varsity), but it really was more about the world of track--the friends, the meets, and the pleasure that came from watching people who WERE really great.  I came to love the sport, and I will still yell myself hoarse at a high school track meet.

In my twenties, I almost never ran.  When I started college, hurdling and sprinting were no longer practical exercise options and I had long decided that I was uninterested in longer distances.  I also had noted, in chagrin, the superficiality that strangely runs through certain subcultures of BYU, my undergraduate university, and in rebellion I stopped wearing make-up and refused to work out because it seemed like many women's motivation was solely to make themselves attractive enough to be considered dateable.  As a result, while I always loved walking everywhere I could, the habit for regular exercise was completely gone for the better part of a decade. 

 Finally, at about 30, I started running because I could feel my body settling into middle age, and I wanted to fight it.  Unfortunately, I never shed the pounds that I imagined would melt away as soon as I was into a running routine, but I did finally find what it felt like to be in shape and able to run several miles comfortably.  What I learned was that while my body didn't physically change as much as I would have liked, as I grew stronger, I began to see my body as a tool, not an object.  It felt wonderful to feel my calves contracting as they left the pavement, my arms pumping, my abdominal muscles tight in supporting my form. That being said, I am not fast: my limited ability as a high school athlete was in hurdles and jumping, and I tend to be even more mediocre in endurance than in power.

Now I run as a prescription for an ailing and troubled soul.  I wake in the middle of the night and feel panic at what I have not yet achieved.  I feel fear that it is too late to make something meaningful of my life--that I've botched it irreparably.  I worry about things I've said, things I should have done but didn't, perceived or real offenses, professional inadequacy, and the fact that in worrying, I am missing valuable sleep and therefore less likely to accomplish all those things I feel I should.  For whatever reason, I find that running can somewhat mitigate that paralyzing rushing in my brain.  I don't know if it's the endorphins, the rhythmic pounding, the transfer of mental to physical pain, but it can bring momentary, sweet relief.  So for now, when I don't want to go I remind myself that it is my prescription.  Running: drug without side-effects?

Kafkaesque

Until this week, I had never read any Kafka.  Any.  Ever.  I had lived in Prague, Kafka's home town, almost daily walking past the apartment where he was born and the building where he had attended school, both ostentatiously advertised by historical markers, and yet I had only read a few pages of one story before deciding I found his work unsavory.   I finally read a collection of his stories this week, including famous works like "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony", "The Judgment", and perhaps less famous, but what ended up being my favorite group of stories, "The Hunger Artist."  I was surprised to find that this time, I not only liked Kafka--I liked him a lot.  I concluded this with a sense of relief because so many writers and thinkers I had long admired held Kafka in near reverence (I regretfully admit that I find I want to have similar opinions to people I admire).  In what way had I changed since my last attempt?  I'm not entirely sure, but for some reason I found the ambiguity, the darkness, the nightmarish strangeness, the abrupt non sequiturs in conversation, to no longer be off-putting and pointlessly bleak, but rather a powerful and uniquely bold manner of portraying what it means to be human--the alienation, loneliness, despair, hope, doubt--by abandoning realism as inadequate to the task.  With relief, now that I've actually read (some of) his work, I can finally wrap my head somewhat around the word "Kafkaesque".  Confronting what I bad previously dismissed as "unsavory" about human character, including my own (and there is something deeply ironic and self-mocking in his stuff), is no longer so daunting, although it has not ceased to be disturbing. 

Red or Blue

When I was a child of four or five, red was my favorite color.  I was even Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween one year in a nod to my enthusiasm for all things red.  One day, I asked my mother what her favorite color was.  To my chagrin, she explained that she really like many colors, but that her favorite was probably blue.  I was devastated.  I couldn't articulate it at the time, but I felt that our different opinions divided us somehow--that our inability to agree on what was most beautiful in color drove a wedge between us.



As I grew older, having the same opinions about things as arbitrary as colors became less and less important. Having friends with some divergent ideas became interesting.  But there is still something important about how we connect and feel tied to one another based on similarities of opinion: Our good friends like the same music or books we do, and it confirms a pleasurable feeling in our gut that this person is a good match for us--hence the expression "something in common", which describes that feeling of recognition you get when you find you have the right combination of similarities, like you're home, understood, and somehow not really totally alone.

A recent email conversation with a friend remind me of this recently with the Supreme Court's rulings on DOMA and Proposition 8.  People I love and care about are on both sides of the issue--and I feel a sadness over how divisive this has become.  Of course it is connected to something much more sensitive and profound than colors; those on one side feel a religious duty to protect the notion of marriage and society they believe is ordained by God, and those on the other side feel compelled to protect a marginalized group from injustice and discrimination.  It's hard--perhaps impossible--to reconcile the openly moral judgment of the former against the latter's stance that they deserve the same rights and freedoms.  But I still can't help feeling like there could possibly be some middle ground where the conversation should be somehow safer and more accepting of difference.  I don't think opponents of proposition 8 could entirely escape the hurt and anger they might feel, but perhaps they could see that the intent of all proponents of prop 8 wasn't necessarily discrimination based only on fear, and acknowledge that even those supporting it might feel conflicted.  Likewise, perhaps the proponents of proposition 8 could openly admit understanding for why the other side is so offended, explaining that the response would be justifiable when looking at homosexuality from a completely different stance.  (Because opposition to gay marriage is becoming increasingly unpopular, I actually feel like this second scenario is currently more common, not because of any inherent moral superiority on the side of the pro-prop 8 faction, but simply due to their situation as being in the minority).  This would buck the current cultural trend of bitterly divided political discourse, but how healthy and powerful would it be to actually talk to each other with the intent to understand; so much of public discourse now is merely posturing for one's own supporters--we love hearing our own opinions echoed in the most eloquent discourse, in a more articulate or artistic voice.

Back to the colors of my childhood--I gradually stopped loving red.  Feeling that the red/blue disagreement was an insurmountable obstacle to having a deep connection with my mother, I promptly convinced myself that I liked blue better.  I was so successful that to this day I prefer blue to red.  And I sometimes still wonder how many of my opinions I have arrived at because I have sacrificed, consciously or not, ideas I have arrived at independently for those of the people I most admire and love--not to impress them, exactly, but in order to feel like we are one, and that I am not alone.