Archives for 2013

The One In/One Out Method of Achieving Goals (and Progress on NY Goals, Week 4)

BEFORE (on Jan 14)

AFTER (Jan 20) — Roy tidied it by removing lots of stuff

So I’ve spent some time browsing around my blogosphere and social media world to ferret out my friends’ most common New Year’s resolutions.

And they are: Exercise more, read more, write more, be more organized.

Hmm. Eerily familiar.

* * *

What’s the common denominator in these?

More.

Exercising more, reading more, writing more, decluttering more will all take MORE time.

But our time remains stuck and unbudging at 168 hours a week.

So for all these excellent habits to come in—exercising, reading, writing, being organized—something has to go.

What?

Every I Will Do resolution must include a I Won’t Do or I Don’t Do resolution or it will be doomed to failure. For every hour we plan to spend reading, writing or exercising, we must subtract an hour from ?? TV, the black hole of the internet? Repetitive home-tidying? [Read more…]

When People Mess up the Story of your Life, but God Edits it Beautifully

By Anita Mathias

The Flight into Egypt and the Triumph of the Innocents (William Holman Hunt)

I read Matthew 2 as I blog through the Bible, and realize how much sheer misery and hassle and stress Joseph and Mary and Jesus had to endure for no sin or mistake of their own—but purely because of their destiny, purely because of other people’s jealousy. [Read more…]

Some DVDs I’ve enjoyed: The King’s Speech, Life of Pi, and The Hobbit

By Anita Mathias

The King’s Speech—I loved it. Partly because my father had immigrated to England in the forties and fifties when George VI was King. My father was imaginative, and read the newspapers like a novel, and made the events of the forties as real to us as the plot of any story he told us.

After many abortive attempts at therapy with high-society therapists, the Duke of York forges a relationship of trust and affection with Lionel Logue, an Australian, and in this context, overcomes his debilitating stammer.

Logue, a failed actor, drifted into speech therapy as he dealt with the shell-shocked victims of the First World War who returned to Australia barely able to speak.

“My job was to give them faith in their own voice,” Logue says. And that involved revisiting the scene of the trauma, bringing it to the light where all the darkness, spider-webs and bats-wings associated with it lost their terror.

* * *

Going back to the great theme of love, what separates one professional from another is his ability to “love” his clients. I wonder if it is this quality more than skill that makes a superb psychotherapist, hair-dresser, speech-therapist, life-coach, writing teacher, Oxbridge don…

In fact, I am so convinced of it that I will not closely work with anyone, a personal trainer, say, a therapist, an agent, an editor, a spiritual director, or even a regular hair-dresser unless I like them and they like me.

It was the personal affection between the men, and Logue’s insistence on uncovering the roots of the stammer in fear, dread and trauma that ultimately enabled George VI’s stammer to virtually disappear.

The King’s Speech on Amazon.com and The King’s Speech on Amazon.co.uk

* * *

As a writer, I loved this film about finding your own voice. You find your own voice when you face the fears which make you “stammer”. You find your own voice when you stop worrying about what your voice sounds like. You find your voice when you write about what was taboo. You find your voice when you just speak, and let the chips fall as they may. You find your voice when you are willing to fail.

* * *

The Life of Pi—Stunning cinematography again. I first watched it in 3D like the Hobbit. I think the temptation of 3D is to overemphasize visual special effects to the detriment of the old-fashioned movie elements—the screenplay, the acting, you know…

The Indian scenes were absolutely charming, and the scenes in the lifeboat anguished, especially when the dying tiger, Richard Parker, permits Pi to place its noble head on his lap.

What struck me: Caring for the tiger, Richard Parker kept Pi alive. Love kept him alive.

Pi proved unable to resist the appeal in the tiger’s eyes as he tried to clamber onto the life-boat, and being busy about finding food and water for Richard Parker saves him from succumbing to despair.

Was the fanciful story of the tiger, the hyena, the baboon and the zebra true, or the story of the cook, the sailor and his mother? The insurance adjusters chose the former because it was a better story.

And that is why one might choose to believe in God, Pi says.

The Life of Pi on Amazon.com and Life of Pi on Amazon.co.uk

* * *

The Hobbit: The cinematography was stunning, and I enjoyed re-meeting Tolkien’s characters: Bilbo Baggins, the honourable and blinkered Thorin Oakenshield, quirky Gandalf, the ethereal Lady of Lorien, and the beautiful, noble elves.

So Bilbo leaves the comforts of his cosy hobbit hole, cluttered with the accretions of sentimental inheritances (much like many Oxford homes) for the wild and adventure.

A crazy choice—and the right one. Had he not journeyed, he would have been the same content Hobbit all his life. Circumscribed by his small comfortable pleasures. Stuck.

By accepting challenge and journeying, he changes, becomes wiser, more open-eyed, more experienced, different.

Sacrificing comfort, safety and the predictable is the price he pays for experience, maturity and hard-won wisdom.

We encounter the choice all too often. A spirit-breathed challenge and adventure is probably the better choice. After all, your hobbit hole will still be waiting for you when you return.

The Hobbit on Amazon.com and The Hobbit on Amazon.co.uk

In Praise of Gardening

By Anita Mathias

(A hellebore from my garden on Easter Sunday last year)

Here’s a lyrical passage from Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Gardening provides rewards far beyond the vegetable paycheck. It gets a body outside for some part of every day to work the heart, lungs, and muscles you wouldn’t believe existed, providing a healthy balance to desk jobs that might otherwise render us chair potatoes. Instead of needing to drive to the gym, we walk up the hill to do pitchfork free weights, weed-pull yoga and Hoe Master.

It is also noiseless in the garden: phoneless, meditative, and beautiful. Nothing is more therapeutic than to walk up there and disappear into the yellow-green smell of the tomato rows for an hour. I inhale the oxygen of their thanks.

Like my friend, David, who meditates on Creation while cultivating, I feel lucky to do work that lets me listen to distant thunder and watch a nest of baby chickadees fledge from their hoe in the fencepost. Even the smallest backyard garden offers emotional rewards in the domain of the little miracle.

Every gardener I know is a junkie for the experience of being out there in the mud and fresh green growth.

Funny, gardening used to be a deep joy at the centre of my life when I lived in America. Gardening–even more than writing which then had anxiety and uncertainty and worry associated with it.

I have never really got into gardening in England. Part of it is that I moved from a good-sized plot in America—half an acre to a massive garden: 1.5 acre. In the US, I could look and tend everything I planted in an hour. Here, it’s not possible. Here, my garden feels overwhelming.

And England is more fertile than Virginia, and everything goes feral in spring and summer, and keeping up seems a forlorn hope.

And, so the garden has become more Roy’s than mine, and when I go out, I gulp. His idea of gardening is getting things to grow. Mine is getting things to grow, but a garden as pretty as a National Trust garden.

However, the real reason I have stopped gardening is that I don’t have a slot in my schedule for it. Leo Babuata of Zen Habits says that when it comes to forming a new habit, it’s important to find a trigger. Do it just before something. Something that reminds you that it is time to practice your new habit. I haven’t yet found a slot for gardening.

England’s going through a cold snap now, so I am going to tell myself that if I do it just once or twice a week, it will be better than not at all!

Never be Shamed or Humiliated by How Other People Treat You

By Anita Mathias

Malala

Tarquin rapes the innocent Lucretia. Lucretia kills herself.

She becomes the prototype of people who feel shamed because of things done to them, shamed to the point of death, as we read in media account of Indian girls or their fathers who commit suicide after gang-rape.

Listen up: I tell myself, and I would wish to tell them if I dared intrude upon this grief-unto-death: Never allow yourself to feel shame for what is done to you. For how you are treated.

It is legitimate to feel ashamed of our own shameful actions—and, sadly, we all have our share of them.

But for that, there is forgiveness in God. Always has been. For that we revere him.

* * *

My first time in therapy, in America, the therapist asked, “Have you ever experienced racism?”

Well, I’ve lived in lovely sophisticated cities, Oxford, Minneapolis, Williamsburg, Virginia. So I answered, “Well, I have experienced rudeness, of course. But I can never be sure if it was because of my honey-coloured skin or because they were jerks.”

“I decided that if rudeness did not affect me, it was their problem. If, however, it affected me—I was denied something I wanted or needed or justice—then it was my problem, and I would have to figure out what I could do about it.

He thought about it, nodded, and said, “That’s a good answer.”

* * *

Internalizing the shame of another’s evil–shame after rape is not confined to Asian women, of course. A contemporary of mine at Somerville College, Oxford was raped in a dark Oxford street past midnight, and the trauma froze her. I know two writers, both American, who write and write and write their way to healing, years after the horrors of rape.

* * *

Here are lengthy excerpts from an amazing account of surviving rape, by an Indian Muslim woman, Sohaila Abdulali. I love her title.

I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t

THIRTY-TWO years ago, when I was 17 and living in Bombay, I was gang raped and nearly killed.

At 17, I was just a child. Life rewarded me richly for surviving. I stumbled home, wounded and traumatized, to a fabulous family. With them on my side, so much came my way. I found true love. I wrote books. I saw a kangaroo in the wild. I caught buses and missed trains. I had a shining child. The century changed. My first gray hair appeared.

Too many others will never experience that. They will not see that it gets better, that the day comes when one incident is no longer the central focus of your life. One day you find you are no longer looking behind you, expecting every group of men to attack. One day you wind a scarf around your throat without having a flashback to being choked. One day you are not frightened anymore.

Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the heads of Indian women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared, someone else takes control of your body and hurts you in the most intimate way. It is not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your father and your brother are dishonored. I reject the notion that my virtue is located in my vagina, just as I reject the notion that men’s brains are in their genitals.

If we take honor out of the equation, rape will still be horrible, but it will be a personal, and not a societal, horror. We will be able to give women who have been assaulted what they truly need: not a load of rubbish about how they should feel guilty or ashamed, but empathy for going through a terrible trauma.

The week after I was attacked, I heard the story of a woman who was raped in a nearby suburb. She came home, went into the kitchen, set herself on fire and died. The person who told me the story was full of admiration for her selflessness in preserving her husband’s honor. Thanks to my parents, I never did understand this.

The law has to provide real penalties for rapists and protection for victims, but only families and communities can provide this empathy and support. How will a teenager participate in the prosecution of her rapist if her family isn’t behind her? How will a wife charge her assailant if her husband thinks the attack was more of an affront to him than a violation of her?

At 17, I thought the scariest thing that could happen in my life was being hurt and humiliated in such a painful way. At 49, I know I was wrong: the scariest thing is imagining my 11-year-old child being hurt and humiliated. Not because of my family’s honor, but because she trusts the world and it is infinitely painful to think of her losing that trust. When I look back, it is not the 17-year-old me I want to comfort, but my parents. They had the job of picking up the pieces.

This is where our work lies, with those of us who are raising the next generation. It lies in teaching our sons and daughters to become liberated, respectful adults who know that men who hurt women are making a choice, and will be punished.

When I was 17, I could not have imagined thousands of people marching against rape in India, as we have seen these past few weeks. And yet there is still work to be done.

We have spent generations constructing elaborate systems of patriarchy, caste and social and sexual inequality that allow abuse to flourish.

But rape is not inevitable, like the weather. We need to shelve all the gibberish about honor and virtue and did-she-lead-him-on and could-he-help-himself. We need to put responsibility where it lies: on men who violate women, and on all of us who let them get away with it while we point accusing fingers at their victims.

Sohaila Abdulali is the author of the novel “Year of the Tiger.”

An Immensely Abundant Universe. Seeds as a Solution to World Hunger

By Anita Mathias

Abundance (credit)

Barbara Kingsolver’s describes her marvellously productive garden in her memoir of a gardening year, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

We spent the July 4^th weekend applying rock lime to the beans and eggplants to discourage beetles, and tying up the waist-high tomato vines to four-foot cages and stakes.

In February, each of these plants had been a seed the size of this o.

In Mary, we’d set them into the ground as seedlings smaller than my hand.

In another month, they would be taller than me, doubled back and pouring like Niagara over their cages, loaded down with fifty or more pounds of ripening fruit per plant.

This is why we do it all again every year. It’s the visible daily growth, the marvellous and unaccountable accumulation of biomass that makes for the hallelujah of a July garden.

Fuelled only by the stuff they drink from air and earth, the bush beans full out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt.

Cucumber and melon plants begin their lives with suburban reserve, posted discreetly apart from one another like houses in a new subdivision, but under summer’s heat they sprawl from their foundations into disreputable leafy communes.

The days of plenty suddenly fell upon us.”|

What an amazing description of abundance, fuelled by…nothing really, seed, soil, water, air…

Can anyone read this and doubt we live in an abundant universe, a benevolent universe blessed by God?

* * *

And yet, eighteen people die of starvation each minute, eighteen while I have written and you have read this.

Large-scale systemic failures, war and corruption, environmental plunder, degradation and collapse all play a role in this.

* * *

Our friends who worked with Heidi Baker described the widespread hunger in Mozambique.

Yet Mozambique, according to my research has rich and extensive natural resources, five rivers, heavy rainfall.

My friends described going through the bush with trucks of food, and people fighting like wolves for the food.

Would it not have been more effective to also distribute seeds?

Seeds: would that solve the problem of hunger on the micro-level, despite systemic problems of distribution, environmental degradation and global warming?

“Whoever could make two ears of corn grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together,” Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver’s Travels.

I do believe it.

I believe with Heidi Baker that there is always enough, both for the reasons she gives, and because of the abundance God has encoded in seeds: dozens of tomatoes, thousands of apples over generations from a single seed.

Vegetables can be grown in plastic bags or plastic bottles, or using hydroponics in minimal soil.

Teaching people to grow vegetables: on a micro-level, could this be a simple, overlooked solution to world hunger?

From Babel to Pentecost: God Thwarts Self-Sufficiency Which Excludes Him (but Blesses Leaning)

By Anita Mathias

Tower of Babel (Breughel)

Genesis 11

So men decide to build a ziggurat, “with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.” (Gen. 11:4)

And God thwarts their ambition. Their confident, well-coordinated, carefully-worked-out, imaginative, forward-looking plans.

If they continued to function in this way, these steady, methodical visionaries, making bricks, baking them, using tar for mortar, building a city and a tower, then, “Nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them,” (Gen 11:6) God says.

But would this Godless city bring joy or peace or rest to its inhabitants or to the world?

So God confounds them. Confuses their language, and scatters them all over the earth.

* * *

It was sad. They had everything going for them, had a good plan and the intelligence and ability to execute it—and yet were thwarted

It’s a consistent Old Testament curse, “You have planted much, but harvested little. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.”

“You expected much, but see, it turned out to be little. What you brought home, I blew away.” (Haggai 1).

* * *

It resonates with me, painfully. I see myself in my twenties, and thirties and early forties, a young woman, then a woman no longer that young–determined to succeed as a writer. I see all that education; all that training; all that practice; all that reading and deep love for books; the drive; the hungry assimilation of the whole world and everything it, and, yeah, natural talent even, a gift of writing that had been early and consistently recognised.

But distraction, lack of discipline, prolonged marital conflict, prolonged depressions after each rejection of a book manuscript, and it all came to nothing. I had the uneasy sense that perhaps I was not operating under the blessing of God. That He was thwarting my tower of Babel.

* * *

Why was it not blessed? Well, I was doing it entirely with my own strength. I chose my path and asked God to bless it. I sacrificed for it: time with my spouse, children, friends, service at church, domestic duties… but these were not necessarily sacrifices God asked me to make. Well, I wouldn’t know; I never asked.

I was on a treadmill, desperate to validate myself, to have something glittery to say when people asked what I did. My husband was a Maths professor; I believed I was just as clever as he was. I resented being stuck with the dishes, laundry, cooking and childcare, while he lived in the ivory towers of stimulation.

And so I wore myself out. I gave up more and more to finish the manuscript, eventually even giving up the saturation reading which helps you work with words swiftly and magically.

I deeply exhausted myself, and ultimately lacked energy and spirit to revise my gargantuan manuscript in line with the agents and editor’s suggestions. My tower of Babel remained incomplete.

* * *

Fortunately, another theme runs through the Bible: God reverses curses. His judgements are temporary. His rods and staffs force us back to him.

God sees that if the men of Babel continue as they had begun then “Nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” But those dreams would, in Matthew Arnold’s words, bring them “neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”

God, the original dreamer, the original visionary, who, in Genesis 1, dreams the world into being, loves to see our dreams come true, but he wants us to pursue them in step with him, wearing his easy yoke, asking him for the power to make our dreams come through.

Jesus reverses the curse of Babel when he says, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, nothing will be impossible for you.” Through him, and in him, and with him.

* * *

The men of Babel say, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.”

I suspect it is not the making a name for themselves that God disapproves of.

We are the beloved. God did not make any of us insignificant. Listen to the ambition of kindergarteners—they want to be movie stars, Presidents, astronauts, ballerinas, writers, soccer players. None of them wants to be insignificant—and God does not want them to be so either.

In certain fields, writing or blogging or publishing, let’s say, it is necessary to “make a name for yourself,” to get your work out there, to get your work read.

The 80/20 rule applies in the blogosphere. My husband, the mathematician did a quick analysis of my list of leading bloggers and, sure enough, the top 20 in the list had 69% of the readers. Visibility brings a readership.

* * *

So go off and build a tower?

No, but if it takes visibility to get your work read, ask God for a readership. Or ask God for ideas on how to get a readership.

There was nothing wrong with the desire of the men of Babel not to be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

Unfortunately, they did it without God, assuming that God was their enemy out to thwart them, so it led to much wasted, inefficient, scattershot effort.

Look at the unnecessary complexity with which they hoped to achieve their hope of staying together. “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.”

Why not just ask God not to let them be scattered, rather than make bricks, and bake them, and build a city and tower and make a name for themselves?

* * *

Trying to do things yourself just adds extra, unnecessary steps. Asking God, however, often provides a solution with streamlined elegance.

When I was a very new Christian, I said to the woman who was mentoring me, “I want to marry X (who wasn’t a Christian) because he will earn enough for both of us, and I will be able to stay home and become a writer

She said, “Why not just pray that you can stay home and become a writer?”

I stared. Hadn’t occurred to me!

Asking God for his guidance will always give us the simplest, most elegant, efficient and imaginative way of doing things.

* * *

Gradually, I learned to lean. Without any business experience, without, even, as I supposed, the temperament of a businesswoman, I founded a business which supports our family. I had to lean and pray, lean and pray, for it to work.

And then I began to blog. There are tens of thousands of Christian blogs worldwide. How can one’s voice be heard?

Leaning. Leaning. Asking God’s creative spirit to flow through you and give you ideas and tell you what to say and how to say it. Asking him for favour and breakthroughs—so much more efficient that any scattershot networking one might do.

* * *

In God, curses are reversed.

Pride brings division in Babel. People speak in many tongues, and they cannot understand each other.

But when the Spirit comes, in the great era inaugurated at Pentecost, he helps us sing a new song, speak in elegant, exuberant new languages that cannot help but charm, and be understood by those who also have the same spirit and so hear us tell, in our new spirit-inspired language, the wonderful works of God.

Pareto’s Law, The 80/20 Rule (and My Progress in New Year’s Goals)

By Anita Mathias

AFTER My book shelf, Jan 7, after housework.

BEFORE My bookshelf, Jan 1.

I am reading Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week with absolute fascination, partly because Roy and I have independently stumbled upon and are practicing many of Ferriss’s ideas and principles. (I plan to review the book later.)

Ferris discusses Pareto’s Law or the 80/20 principle.

Pareto, an Italian economist (1848 to 1923), realized that, in virtually every area of life: business, investing, creative work, social life, gardening, 80 % of benefits will come from 20 % of one’s time and efforts.

And conversely, 80% of one’s unhappiness or unproductive activity or self-thwarting will come from 20% of one’s actions.

Some applications of 80/20 or “The Vital Few and The Trivial Many.” [Read more…]

Archives for 2013

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