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You are here: Home / 2014 / Archives for April 2014

Archives for April 2014

SCIENCE: 10 Science-Based Reasons Why Compassion Is Hot

April 1, 2014 By Emma Seppala

Science tells us compassion is good for our health, and we know that helping others makes us feel good, but sometimes it feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. There is so much to do, can I possibly find time to contribute? Yes! In minutes, at no or low cost, and from your desk, you can contribute.

An interesting Buddhist myth compares lunch in heaven to lunch in hell. Both places have the same set-up: large dining tables filled with delicious food. However, the forks are too long and it is impossible for the diners to eat with them. Those who dwell in hell live in eternal frustration and hunger at not being able to eat the delicious food. Those who dwell in heaven, however, simply smile and use the long forks to feed each other. The meaning is simple: The same circumstances can be experienced very differently depending on our attitudes and behavior. Scientific data suggests that compassion is the intelligent way.

1. It makes us happy (as happy as getting money)!
A brain-imaging study headed by neuroscientist Jordan Grafman from the National Institute of Health showed that the “pleasures centers” in the brain, i.e. the parts of our brains that are active when we experience pleasure (like dessert, money, sex) are equally active when we observe someone giving money to charity as when we receive money ourselves

2. In fact, it makes us happier than buying things for ourselves.
Giving to others increases well-being above and beyond spending money on ourselves! In a revealing experiment published in Scienceby Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton, participants received a sum of money. Half of the participants were instructed to spend the money on themselves and the other half were told to spend the money on others. At the end of the study, participants that had spent money on others felt significantly happier than those that had spent money on themselves. This is true even for infants! A recent study by Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues at the University of British Columbia shows that, even in children as young as 2, giving treats to others increases their happiness more than receiving treats themselves.

3. It makes us attractive.
Marketing companies may try to tell us that the secret to finding our soulmate lies in anti-wrinkle chemical peels or muscle-inflating protein powders. However, both men and women agree that a major secret to attractiveness is a kind heart. In a study on dating preferences, researchers found that one trait both genders agreed was important in potential partners kindness.

4. It uplifts everyone around us.

Why are the lives of people like Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu so inspiring? Research by Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia suggests that seeing someone helping another person creates a state of “elevation.” Have you ever been moved to tears by seeing someone’s loving and compassionate behavior? Haidt’s data suggests that it may be this elevation that then inspires us to help others — and it may just be the force behind a chain reaction of giving.

5. It spreads like wildfire.
Social scientists James Fowler of UC San Diego and Nicolas Christakis of Harvard demonstrated that helping is contagious — acts of generosity and kindness beget more generosity in a chain reaction of goodness. You may have seen one of the news reports about chain reactions that occur when someone pays for the coffee of the drivers behind them at a drive-through restaurant or at a highway tollbooth. People keep the generous behavior going for hours. Try this at home.

6. It boosts our health and longevity.
Helping others may lead to health, longevity and happiness. University of Michigan researcher Stephanie Brown, in a study of over 400 elderly people, found that those who helped others more were healthier, happier and lived longer than others. Of course, one reason for these findings may be that people who are healthier have more opportunity to be of help to others. However, data indicates that positive emotions and social connections (both a consequence of helping others) have a positive and protective effect on health that may explain these findings. For example, a study by Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie Mellon University showed that people with more social connections have higher immune function and are les likely to get sick. Another large-scale study showed that the opposite of compassion 
— i.e., not feeling connected to others — is as dangerous for our health as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and lack of exercise.

7. It gets us out of a funk.
Think of a time you were feeling blue and suddenly a close friend or relative called you for urgent help with a problem. All of a sudden your attention was on helping them. Rather than feeling blue, you began to feel energized and before you knew it, you felt great! Research shows that depression and anxiety are linked to a state of self-focus, a preoccupation with “me, myself, and I.” When you do something for someone else, however, that state of self-focus immediately dissolves.

8. It’s the most natural thing.
One reason why compassion might feel so good is that it’s natural to us. Though economists and grumps may ba-humbug, many spiritual traditions teach us that, at our core, we are loving, generous, and kind. Research with infants backs up these claims. Michael Tomasello and other scientists at the Max Planck Institute have found that infants automatically engage in helpful behavior. Dale Miller at the Stanford Business School shows that adults, too, are also automatically driven to help others. The difference between children and adults is that adults will often stop themselves because they worry that others think they are self-interested.

9. It gives us more time.
With hectic modern-day schedules, we are all running out of one basic commodity: time! A recent study, however, suggests that helping others actually helps us feel like we have more time. A recent study by Cassie Mogilner of the Wharton Business School examined the impact of wasting time, spending time on oneself, gaining “free” time, and spending time on others. Mogilner and her colleagues found that spending time of others increased participants’ subjective sense of having more time — yet another way in which giving makes use feel better.

10. It’s good for the environment.
No scientific evidence needed here. Being kind, caring and empathetic to your friends, colleagues, neighbors and strangers on the street just makes sense. It’s not only good for you, its good for our society, community, and the world around us. And since it’s contagious, why not spread it far and wide?

 

Emma Seppala, Ph.D. is the Associate Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. Emma completed her undergraduate degree at Yale University and Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. Her doctoral research focused on interventions to increase compassionate behavior and social connectedness. She completed her post-doctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Dr. Richard Davidson where she evaluated the effects of yoga- and meditation-based interventions for combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Her research fields of expertise include compassion, emotion regulation, happiness, and mind-body interventions for well-being.


Republished with permission from the Huffington Post.

Filed Under: Science

BOOKS: Lovingkindness by Sharon Salzberg

April 1, 2014 By Dent Gitchel

By Dent Gitchel

 Lovingkindness: TheRevolutionary Art of Happiness is a must-read for those interested in well-being and fulfillment. Author and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg explains important Buddhist concepts like compassion (karuna) and lovingkindness (metta). As the body of scientific research on happiness and meditation grows, there is rising interest in contemplative approaches to happiness and self-development. Contemplative practices may seem difficult, but Salzberg helps to make them accessible. Ultimately, lovingkindness is presented not as a concept, but as a precious human experience that we all have and that can be cultivated further. In Salzberg’s own words, lovingkindness is “the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world.” Salzberg gives readers a roadmap to begin a journey into widening the heart.

It may be surprising that when doing lovingkindness meditation, Salzberg recommends that we start with sending good wishes to ourselves. According to Salzberg, “when we do metta practice, we begin by directing metta toward ourselves. This is the essential foundation for being able to offer genuine love to others.” Making ourselves the object of our own love and compassion may seem odd to those raised in modern Western culture. The approach presented in Lovingkindness is that love is in our true nature, but that it cannot be truly directed toward others until it is directed toward ourselves. Salzberg highlights self-kindness as a fundamental step in the development of lovingkindness. 

 A second intriguing aspect of meditation as it is presented in the book is its use of reflection, phraseology, and imagination. One might assume that meditation is a mindless or trance-like state. In Salzberg’s approach, however, reflection is an essential component of meditation. She believes that a key step in developing self-lovingkindness is to reflect on happiness and friendship: what happiness and friendship truly are and how to go about achieving them. Salzberg encourages us to think about the similarity between ourselves and others in respect to these basic human values.

 Though there is currently widespread interest in Buddhism, many of its goals and concepts may be hard to understand. Ideas such as having love or compassion for everyone can be daunting. The roadmap Salzberg presents in this text helps to make such abstract ideas easier to grasp. To enhance the power of reflection, Salzberg emphasizes the use of phrases and imagination. When reflecting on our own goodness and aspiration for happiness, we may offer ourselves phrases such as, “may I be happy” or “may I dwell in peace.” When breaking down barriers between self and others, she recommends phrases such as, “just as I want to be happy, so you want to be happy.” This use of reflection, phraseology, and imagination may help make meditation accessible for beginners. The exercises progress in a systematic manner. Self-lovingkindness is the first step. Gradually, lovingkindness is extended to those near and dear, and then to others who are more difficult. Salzberg then guides us in further widening the circle of compassion to all beings. 

 Many human beings are starved for this type of love. Smothered by the expectations of others and critical minds, experiences of love may be tinged with expectations and attachment. Lovingkindness, on the other hand, is unconditional, without expectations, and free of attachment. To love oneself or another unconditionally is to want and wish the best with no strings attached.

Self-help books and workshops are available to us in dizzying numbers, making it difficult to choose whose advice to follow. If the goal is to be truly humane and to develop our innate capacities for genuine, meaningful lives and communities, this book is an invaluable resource. It offers traditional Buddhist concepts in a manner that is accessible to modern readers and non-Buddhists, and it helps to normalize the process of meditation. What is presented in this book is nothing less than a roadmap to love and compassion, which, to Salzberg, are among the birthrights of being human.

Summary

Title: Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

Author: Sharon Salzberg

Length: 208 pages

List price: $14.95

Published: Shambhala Publications, 1995

 

Dr. Dent Gitchel completed Stanford’s Compassion Cultivation Training in 2012-2013. He teaches Compassion Cultivation Training in Little Rock, Arkansas. He received a PhD in Rehabilitation Education and Research at the University of Arkansas and was a Walton Distinguished Doctoral Fellow. He also worked in the Department of Educational Statistics and Research methods and received Post-Masters certificates in both Education Statistics Research and Educational measurement.

Filed Under: Books

POETRY: Interbeing

April 1, 2014 By Thich Nhat Hanh

This is an excerpt from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book “Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life.”

 

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-“ with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be.If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. Without sunshine, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. The logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.Looking even more deeply, we can see ourselves in this sheet of paper too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, it is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. We cannot point out one thing that is not here – time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up lonely of “non-paper” elements. And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without non-paper elements, like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.” 
Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the best known and most respected Zen masters in the world today. He is also a poet, an advocate for peace, and a human rights activist. You can watch his Conversation on Compassion that took place in October 2013 with Dr. James Doty through the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education.

Filed Under: Poetry

PERSONAL STORY: What It’s Like to Fail

April 1, 2014 By David Raether

This is a personal story from comedy writer David Raether about what he had achieved, what he lost, and what matters in the end. It is also the story of how someone who is wealthy, educated, and successful could end up homeless — and how it is possible to jump back. 

On Christmas Day, 2001, I sat down at my Yamaha G2 grand piano, set up my metronome, and opened up a book of Shostakovich’s “Preludes.” It was late afternoon, and the warm, orange light of the fading day poured into my five-bedroom house — paid for by my $300,000 a year income as a Hollywood comedy writer — in San Marino, California, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. My wife, Marina, was cooking dinner for me and our eight children, and it was as happy a Christmas afternoon as I would ever have.

****

On Christmas morning, 2008, I woke up on the floor of the 1997 Chrysler minivan I lived in, parked behind the Kinko’s just two miles from my old house in San Marino. It was raining, and I was cold, even though I had slept in three layers of clothes. It was one of those blustery storms that regularly whoosh down from the Gulf of Alaska and pummel Los Angeles during the winter. I climbed out of the van and walked to a Starbucks five blocks away. Although I didn’t have any money, I had scavenged the Sunday Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle from another coffeehouse a couple days before. The baristas didn’t mind me sitting quietly for several hours every day to warm up and kill time.

I was neither a drug addict nor an alcoholic, nor was I a criminal. But I had committed one of the more basic of American sins: I had failed. In eight years, my career had vanished, then my savings, and then our home. My family broke apart. I was alone, hungry, and defeated.

Between 2007 and 2011, some five million American families lost their homes to foreclosure. Some of them found alternative housing by renting an apartment or moving in with family members. But not all of them. Many American families broke apart during this time. Mine was one of them. And I was one of the people who ended up homeless. This, however, is not the story of five million American families. This is just my story.

Our family faced the same economic forces that hurt many families, but I don’t blame the banks or politicians or anyone else for what happened to us. I made a thousand decisions, large and small, that seemed reasonable at the time but cumulatively led to our situation. It is tempting to blame external forces for the disasters that befall us, but as Shakespeare wrote in “Julius Ceasar,” the fault for what happens to us “is not in our stars but in ourselves.”

It was Christmas. I stared out the Starbucks window at the rain. God, help me. I had said this prayer a thousand times, and would say it a thousand more. I had to find a way back to my life.

And over the course of the next four years, I would do just that. I would do it with the pure, unquenchable, unrelenting — some might say naïve — belief that things would work out. And I would do it through Craigslist, the omnifariously oddball website that has nearly destroyed the newspaper industry by taking over the classified advertising business. But it would be Craigslist that would help me find my way back.

People say you can find just about anything you need on Craigslist.

You might even find your life again.

***

My fall was all the harder because I had my dream job. You know, the job you dreamt of as a little kid: quarterback in the NFL, supermodel, astronaut… Something crazy and cool that hardly anybody is lucky or talented enough to land.

It all started like this: I was maybe six years old and watching “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Ed Sullivan thanked the last performer and then turned to the audience and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Alan King!” A burly, handsome man walked alone onto the stage in a dark suit and tie and began talking. And he was funny!  And the audience was laughing. I was enthralled.  It seemed like magic. The next morning, I came downstairs for breakfast and told my mother I wanted to write jokes for a living.

“Oh, no, you’re not going to do that!” she said. “That’s just foolishness.”

This convinced me that this was something I absolutely wanted to do with my life.

A couple of decades later, I took time off from my budding career as a newspaper man to travel around Europe. While in Germany, I met a beautiful and mysterious Serbian poet named Marina. We met by accident, but we latched on to each other with a ferocious and unstoppable kind of love. We got married a year later.

Suddenly reality came crashing. I was married and needed a real job. I decided to launch a magazine in Minneapolis with a friend from college. We made two basic mistakes: First, the magazine wasn’t very good, and, second, we didn’t have any money. The second problem seemed solvable. I got a job as a bartender to pay the rent and keep the lights on.

The place I tended bar turned out to be crucial: William’s Pub, in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis. It was a comedy club. I met dozens of young stand-up comics. I learned how to craft jokes and started writing some of my own. Among the people I befriended was a young comic, Tom Arnold, who also worked at William’s. We became fast friends, and wrote together and did comedy bits together and were having the time of our lives until Marina became pregnant.

Okay, I thought, now it’s really time to get a real job. My experience launching the magazine helped me land a job with a trade magazine publishing company that specialized in computer magazines. I left Minneapolis and took a job in their Peterborough, NH, offices.  And that was apparently the end of my career in comedy. I spent the next eight years wearing a suit and being thoroughly respectable. I developed all sorts of useful skills such as how to do market research, how to create financial models on Excel, how to negotiate with vendors, and how to sell. I was so unhappy. And then one day in line at a supermarket I glanced at the tabloids and saw Tom Arnold on the cover with sitcom star Roseanne Barr!

I called him in Los Angeles. He immediately took my call and we talked and talked, and then he told me he wanted to hire me onto the “Roseanne” show but needed a writing sample. He sent me some scripts and asked me to write one of my own to see if I could do the job. Without a clue as to what I was doing, I wrote a script that must have been just good enough for him to justify hiring me. And so Marina, our five children, and I moved to Los Angeles. And voila! I had my dream job doing what I had dreamt of doing since I first saw Alan King telling jokes on the Ed Sullivan show nearly thirty years earlier.

But was it as good as I expected? Are you kidding me? Of course it was! I loved everything about writing for television. I loved sitting in the writing room with twelve other smart and funny people arguing all day about the script. I loved walking down to the stage and seeing our stuff in rehearsals, the taping nights in front of live studio audiences, and seeing great actors saying our jokes and getting laughs from the crowd. I loved the post-taping commiseration sessions at saloons near the studios and I loved the media acclaim.

In the writer’s room of Roseanne during a break.

And I was making great money. Writers/producers typically are paid on a per episode basis. At my level of experience and background in the late 90s, I made between $12,000 and $15,000 per episode for a 22 episode season. In addition, I had certain script guarantees. I received writing credit on at least three episodes per season, which paid another $20,000 per episode. A studio also paid me another $650,000 a year just to come up with ideas for television series. If one of my shows made it on the air and into syndication (endless reruns on afternoon local television), I could make tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.

It was heaven. Except it wasn’t for Marina. Or my family. The working hours were hideous: Most days started at 10 a.m. and ended at 3 a.m. The easy nights were the nights we filmed, when we finished by 10 p.m. I barely saw Marina and the children, except on weekends. Our house was not a home but the place I checked into when I wasn’t working. Marina, meanwhile, struggled to deal with eight children. Both my family and my marriage started to fall apart. My comedy writer skillset  — being a quick-witted wisenheimer who could debate endlessly — didn’t transfer well to a home setting. Whereas I was well-compensated to have a dad in a sitcom make a joke out of his daughter’s emotional crisis, it wasn’t funny with real daughters and real sons and a real wife. It was irritating and provoked resentment.

So I had to make a change. I had to quit my dream job. (And honestly, I probably only had a few more working years left because comedy writers rarely work into their fifties.) I had carefully saved and we had lived well below our means, so I decided to take a couple of years off to devote time to my real job: husband and father.

For the next two years, I did that job full-time. We restored balance to our family life, and I was happy. I decided it was time to return to television.

Television, however, had other ideas. In the interim, reality programming had boomed. It made perfect economic sense: It was cheap to produce and audiences were interested. The number of sitcoms plummeted and so did employment for comedy writers. The fall primetime network schedule in 2002-03 had 43 sitcoms. When I returned in 2004-2005, there were 32. My agent told me there were about half as many jobs available as there were when I left. By 2007-08, there were only 18 sitcoms on the air. I was now nearly 50 years old and had been out of the business for two years. Nobody was going to hire me anymore. My agent told me that I faced a common problem for writers my age: Producers could hire a team of first-time writers for less than the fee they would pay me for my services. But they won’t know what they’re doing, I countered. They don’t care, he responded.

I had prudently saved and invested during my years in television, so I had a $500,000 nest egg between various mutual funds and an annuity I had invested in during my working years. But I was supporting a pretty large infrastructure.

The expensive part of having eight children isn’t the present: feeding and clothing them. The expensive part of having eight children is their future. Good schooling was our priority. But there was no way we could send eight children to private schools, even with an enormous salary. We had to find a great public school system, and we did in San Marino, an old-money suburb near Los Angeles. In 1995, we bought a house there. It was a big one because, well, we needed a big one. And then there are all the other investments you make in their future: piano lessons, club sports fees, tutoring, and so on.

After a year, when it became clear that I could not return to television, I realized that I would have to pursue my old career: magazine publishing. I sent out hundreds of resumes. Nothing. With our savings running down over the next two years, we did what everyone advised in the mid 2000s: take advantage of the soaring equity in our house. We refinanced and refinanced and refinanced again, taking out money for living expenses each time.  This was considered a smart move by many in those years.

But eventually we reached our limits. At one point, the water was shut off for several days when we failed to pay a bill. Under cover of darkness, we hooked up a hose to the outside spigot of our neighbor’s house and ran the hose into our kitchen. We filled pots to cook pasta with and to heat up for sponge baths. It’s amusing to think about now, but at the time it was mortifying. We were stealing water! From the nice old lady who lived next door!

Finally, in 2006, unable to refinance any further, we lost our home to foreclosure. Actually, you don’t lose the house. The house loses you. The house isn’t going anywhere. You and your family are the ones who get lost. In our case, an investor bought the house with the intention of renovating it and flipping it. I hope she made money on it.

The worst moment is the day the sheriff comes. Two armed members of the county sheriff’s department showed up with a locksmith as we were moving out. The investor stood on the opposite side of the street as we packed and loaded a moving van. She watched us load our furniture, which we put into storage because the two bedroom apartment we managed to lease with the help of a friend didn’t have room for 4,000 square feet worth of furniture. The deputies came and talked with us to make sure we really were moving out, and we felt like criminals for spending a final few hours in the house we owned for twelve years.

Over the next couple of years, our economic situation worsened. I couldn’t find any kind of work. When I applied at Trader Joe’s, the manager saw four years of unemployment and twelve years spent writing television comedy. Sir, are you sure you want stack loaves of bread here at Trader Joe’s? Yes, I really do. Well, we’ve decided to hire the 24 year-old woman with purple hair and nose piercings instead.

The Writer’s Guild of America has a term for my situation: They call it “The Gap.” It’s the time period between when your years as a working writer end and your retirement begins. I actually have an excellent pension for when I finally retire. The Guild is a strong union and it has negotiated an excellent pension plan for writers who have more than seven consecutive years of service. When I finally hit 65, my WGA pension combined with Social Security means I should have a comfortable retirement.

I was 46 when I had my last writing job in television. That meant I faced a 19 year Gap. As with other writers facing The Gap, my resume was a problem. I worked as a publishing executive before becoming a writer. I had a nice, solid resume that showed constant forward progress in my publishing career from financial analyst to business manager to circulation director. Which is great… except that progress ended in 1991 and I was applying in 2004.

I sent off resumes and scored occasional interviews. But the interviewers mainly wanted to hear Hollywood stories and then said, “Thanks we’ll be in touch.” I don’t blame them. I’d hire the person currently working in the magazine business instead of the guy who had a lot of amusing stories about comedy writing but hadn’t worked in a publishing environment for more than a decade.

By 2008, with the older children off at college or working and my job prospects bleak, Marina and I decided to separate. She moved to San Francisco with our two youngest daughters and settled in temporarily with two of our oldest daughters who worked there. I could no longer even afford to house myself. I found friends to take in my two remaining high schoolers.

And then I became homeless.

Yes, I, David Raether, the smart and funny guy who graduated with honors from college and read thousands of books and played the piano and went to church and won television awards, was homeless.

What happens when you hit bottom? I can tell you one thing: you don’t bounce back. You crawl back, fighting every step of the way. It isn’t a straight arc back up either; there are dozens of setbacks every step of the way. And the place you land isn’t anywhere near where you were when you slipped off the cliff.

In the first days and weeks after I became homeless, I was in a daze, utterly and completely disoriented. I felt like a boxer staggering around the ring after a rapid series of blows I didn’t see coming. It took me several months to figure it all out.

When you become homeless, you face a number of practical issues. In fact, when you are homeless, all you face are practical issues.

Where am I going to sleep tonight?

What supermarket has the best samples today with the most protein in them?

How am I going to deal with rainstorms dumping water into my usual sleeping spot?

I have a job interview; I have clean clothes, but how can I make sure I don’t smell?

These are the issues you deal with on a daily basis. Dreary, boring, painful issues that relate directly to your body. And that’s because homelessness is a dreary, boring, and often painful condition.

Your days are very long. The rhythm of work followed by home is gone. It’s replaced by long stretches of empty time. No company, no conversation, no deadlines, nothing.

Several years earlier, one of my sons played on a mainly Hispanic soccer team in Bell Gardens, a working class Hispanic suburb of Los Angeles. I got to know one of the fathers quite well. He was from Guatemala City.

“What’s Guatemala City like?” I asked him one day.

“The days are very long in Guatemala City,” he said.

That was all he said about his life there. And that would probably be the best description of life as a homeless person. The days are very long.

In my past life, I spent a typical autumn Saturday reading the paper and drinking several pots of coffee while working two or three crossword puzzles. Around 11 a.m., Marina and I would drive one or two or six of the kids to the farmers’ market in the parking lot at Pasadena High School. Then we would return home and I would come up with an interesting set of reasons for not working in the yard while settling down on the couch to watch college football. Several hours later, I’d pour a glass or two of wine as the day turned into night, watch a movie, and settle into bed. Not much of a day, really. But when I think of those days now, they seem like some kind of lost paradise.

A Saturday during my homelessness went like this.

I would wake up around 4 a.m., brush myself off, and wander around the streets for awhile until Starbucks opened. I’d spend what little money I had on coffee and hope someone left a copy of the Los Angeles Times so I could work the crossword puzzle. I’d wait. And wait. At 10 a.m., the Pasadena Central Library opens. I would walk up there and surf job websites and send off some resumes and read articles online during my allotted time until noon, or, if I was lucky, early afternoon.

That was the hard part of the day. I’d be hungry. Really hungry. A week since I had a real meal hungry. I’d walk over to Whole Foods on the Arroyo Parkway, which has good food samples on Saturdays, grab a cart, and pretend to shop. (It always helps to put some items in the cart to look the part.) The fruits are by the door – I’d grab a bunch of orange slices and watermelon chunks. Next I go upstairs to where the muffin bits and cheese chunks are and gorge as subtly as possible. I’d return the unpurchased items to their places in the store and exit.

By then it would be mid-afternoon. I’d dream of lying on a couch in a warm living room, watching college football. Instead I would walk to another public library to access the Internet. As the sun sets, I’d head to a coffeehouse in South Pasadena called Kaldi where I could find someone to talk with. It wasn’t the company of loved ones, but they were decent people who didn’t ask too many questions about my circumstances.

Night. At 8 p.m. I’d return to the Starbucks. I would find discarded copies of the New York Timesand start working the crossword puzzle. And that was Saturday.

Sundays were the same, and so were Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday. On public holidays, the libraries closed and I needed to find someplace else to spend my days. Only the rare job interview broke the monotony.

Gradually, however, I adjusted. I accepted that I was not going to have a career anytime soon, but I did need a job. I was not going to own a house, but I did need to find a place to live. I couldn’t cook or afford restaurants, but I did need to eat.

After the first few disorienting weeks of homelessness, I got myself up off the canvas and begin to bob and weave and shake my head. I sniffed the ammonia capsule of reality and realized that I was in the biggest battle of my life.

During the nearly 18 months I spent homeless off and on, and during the ensuing years, I learned that I am more resourceful than I ever imagined, less respectable than I ever figured, and, ultimately, braver and more resilient than I ever dreamed. An important tool in my return to life has been Craigslist. It was through Craigslist that I found odd jobs — gigs, they often are called — doing everything from ghost-writing a memoir for a retired Caltech professor who had aphasia to web content writing jobs to actual real jobs with actual real startups.

Real companies advertise career jobs on Craigslist, but gigs were a godsend because they didn’t require five years of similar professional work, recent recommendations, or even a permanent residence. Pay generally ran between $10 to $15 per hour.

The ghost-writing work was the perfect example of a Craigslist gig. I ghost-wrote for a professor in his eighties. He had lived a remarkable life: traveling all over the world, writing dozens of books, and becoming a respected figure in academia. In his late eighties, however, he suffered a stroke as he began to write his memoirs. The stroke afflicted him with aphasia, which basically is an inability to communicate. He couldn’t put together more than a few words at a time, couldn’t type, and couldn’t write. But his mind was still sharp and he could read and edit.

So I sat in his office and took notes as he haltingly described an incident or person he wanted to write about. I would guess at what he was trying to tell me and if I was right, he’d say yes. And then I’d try to renarrate the story back to him to verify it. It was painstaking work, but after two years of occasional afternoons in his office, we produced a book. He died not long after that, and the book was never published.

I worked a number of other gigs: I provided editorial content for a commercial real estate agent’s website, helped high school seniors write college essays, worked as an office equipment mover, and helped reorganize a small warehouse.

I got my first Craigslist gig in early 2009. When I managed to string together a couple of these at the same time, I could save enough money to rent a room for around $500 a month. Craigslist advertises a nearly endless supply of rooms available for rent. The situation is always the same:Hey, we have a roommate who is traveling/away for the semester/in rehab or jail and we need to rent out a room in our apartment to help pay the rent. You don’t need a credit report, three references, and a deposit. All you need, usually, is to show up, look clean, and be willing to move out when the regular tenant returns from Europe/rehab/jail. I was able to rent a room by late winter of 2009 after seven months of homelessness. But I was homeless again by summer until I managed to save enough to rent a room once again in the fall.

These situations can be quite nice, and not too many questions are asked. I once lived in a house owned by a young Pasadena attorney who was on a two-month assignment in New York and needed someone to house sit. Some, however, can be dicey. I came home one day to a ramshackle house in northeast Pasadena and there was a gun on the kitchen counter. I moved out a couple days later, not because I have an intrinsic objection to handguns; I just didn’t want to live in a place where the other residents were better armed than I was.

Losing my career and home changed my economic circumstances and day to day life. But it also upended my priorities. At the peak of my career, I ferociously pursued my goal of creating a hit TV show. It was my greatest ambition – and a lucrative one. But after years of homelessness and isolation, my single greatest desire became company. I wanted to spend more and more time with family and the people I loved. The goal of having a hit television show in syndication seemed so uninteresting compared to sitting across the table from my two daughters in a small apartment that we shared. Family and love became my top priorities. Everything else seemed insignificant. I had lost everything else, but these were still my children and I missed them and they missed me.

This desire led me one of the most remarkable services on Craigslist: Rideshare. Rideshare is a refined form of hitchhiking. Let’s say you want to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco to visit your daughters. On the Rideshare listings you can find someone making that drive who is looking for a rider to pitch in for gas and help with the driving. Or you can post your own ad: “I’m in Pasadena and want to go to Berkeley on Saturday. Flexible on time.”

I traveled between Los Angeles and San Francisco a hundred times and never had a problem. The car could be a bit crowded and the company a bit irritating, but most of the time I met interesting people: engineers, scientists, medical students, writers, artists, gallery owners, and guys like me — traveling to see their families on a budget. Most Rideshares I took cost about $35, which allowed me to see my now separated family far more than I would have otherwise.

In the years since I became homeless, Marina and I split up permanently. As a child, her parents had emigrated from Serbia to Germany, so she holds German citizenship. All of our children do as well. Germany has a stronger social safety net, so she decided to return with our two youngest daughters. They spent their high school years there and received a great education. They are now fluent in German, but will return to the US for college. I managed to find friends to host my children already in high school so they could continue attending the same San Marino school. One of my daughters stayed mostly with one family, but one of my sons lived in fourteen different homes. Still, they graduated from one of the most elite public high schools in California, which prepared them for college. I remained active in their lives by visiting them after school each day, volunteering for school activities, and disguising my homelessness with my “San Marino disguise.” It is a community of professionals: doctors, lawyers, and bankers. So whenever I met my children in a public place, I wore dress slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie. Friends and parents didn’t need to know I was sleeping in parking garages.

The other children have finished college or are nearing completion. Two of them intend to go on to graduate school in the sciences. The rest have decent, solid careers in decent, solid professions such as business administration, nursing, and education. They are all funny and smart and not one of them has expressed an ounce of interest in becoming a television writer. Marina is happy and content in Germany, having fallen in love again there with a pleasant and quiet man.

I now live in Berkeley and have worked for several startups in the Bay Area as a content specialist. I currently blog for Degreed.com, a lifelong learning and self-education website in San Francisco. It keeps the wolf from the door, which is good because it means I actually have a door. I share a cozy house in Berkeley with two housemates.

My economic situation is still unstable; occasionally, I’ll fall behind on rent. But it happens less frequently now and I’ve figured out enough about how to survive that I can recover from small setbacks like that. Since I moved to the Bay Area, I’ve worked on two startups. I had a substantial equity stake in one of them and was promised an equity stake in the other once the next round of financing came through. As I worked on them, I imagined having a full-time job, nice apartment, and good salary until retirement. But neither panned out. I could despair when the startups fail or I fall behind on rent once again, but I just don’t worry about stuff like that anymore. I already know what the worst possible outcome would be — homelessness — and I know I can survive that. So why ruin your day fretting about rent? I’ll figure something out. I know how to take a punch and still keep standing.

So full-time, permanent employment in a real company with actual revenues is still an elusive prey. Life is still perilous for me and blogging is hardly a lucrative profession. But life is good. My emotional, psychological, and spiritual situation is considerably improved. I am close to my children, and I speak to most of them almost every day. I am healthy, strong, and full of hope and ambition again. I have survived failure. I lost my career, my home, all my savings — just about everything that seemed important. But I have held onto what I value much more: my children and their enduring love and affection, my health, and my ambition and self-belief. And in the end, those were the only things worth keeping.

This essay is based on David Raether’s recently published memoir, “Tell Me Something, She Said.” To support David, we encourage you to order his book from Amazon and visit his website.

 

Filed Under: Personal Story

EDUCATION: Theater Encourages Compassion in Children

April 1, 2014 By Blair Howell

By Blair Howell

 Children learn social skills through theater, and the experience gleaned through both performing and attending theater has been likened to a gym for empathy, because it’s a place where muscles of compassion can be strengthened. While performing in plays and skits, children learn to understand and engage with people who are different from them.

The International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People is passionate about enriching the lives of children. Based in Zagreb, Croatia, with a U.S. affiliate in Chicago, the group sponsors World Day of Theatre for Children and Young People every March 20. In recognition of the World Day of Theatre for Children and Younger people, the organization assembled a panel to review the many benefits of theater for young audiences.

The participants in the panel are Penelope Marantz Caywood, University of Utah Youth Theatre artistic director; Ryan Radebaugh, Hale Center Theater Orem theater school director; Kate Rufener, Grand Theatre youth coordinator; Teresa Dayley Love, Brigham Young University Theatre for Young Audiences director/writer/producer; and Clin Eaton, Hale Centre Theatre West Valley youth theater instructor. Their views are below.

What is the importance of theater for young audiences?

Penelope Marantz Caywood: Theater can create a space for people to come together and have a shared community experience. We need as many safe places for this to happen as possible nowadays. Also, theater animates the imagination. It gives our children the skills and the creativity necessary to face the world, to understand it, and perhaps to change it, too.

theater

Clin Eaton: In the theater, children — along with teenagers and adults — learn the importance of sitting down, paying attention (even when it’s a complex or difficult story) and listening to stories of or about people who are very different from themselves.

Kate Rufener: Participating in theater, either as performer or audience, teaches young people empathy and compassion. There are recent studies that show that imagined struggles can be as impactful and growth-inducing as real struggles. Thus, kids who empathize with the characters they play or watch will learn and grow from those imagined struggles. And, unlike all other art forms, there is a unique and vital touch point between live performers and live audience. No television show or movie requires that audiences participate in the experience the way that live theater does.

Teresa Dayley Love: Theater happens right now; the people in the room — performers and audiences — make a real difference to what’s going on. It is a unique, one-moment-in-time experience.  Children can feel that creative energy and really be a part of it, sometimes very literally. They feel the power of creativity to solve problems.  Few “screen” experiences even come close.

How do children benefit personally from theater?

Love: Theater tills the fertile soil that children possess for developing empathy. TYA practitioners believe in children, and they are dedicated to the premise that offering children fine, challenging work — especially designed to serve them while they are young — will help children handle their futures with open minds and hearts, and willingness to work productively with others.

Rufener: Students of theater learn how they fit in the world and how their desires for social changes can be enacted, as well as empathy and the importance of self-expression.

Caywood: Students learn to cultivate their imaginations and curiosity. Students deepen their creative self-expression. Making plays together draws kids out of their shells and helps them learn to socialize in a productive and healthy way. Students learn the value of both teamwork and independent thinking.

Eaton: Theater is important for young audiences in two capacities: First, theater is a performance opportunity. Children are natural performers. Even shy kids enjoy playing make believe and acting out stories with toys or stuffed animals. It helps children work together in a group, learn collaboration and teaches communication skills that come in handy the rest of their lives. Second, theater is important for young audiences because it teaches compassion and empathy.

Radebaugh: Relationships with family and friends are strengthened as a result of being a part of a working cast of players. Students see from the first day that they are in a company of players that will assist and support them in the development of their skills. They find friends who share their same interests and the process of performing on stage together builds a greater sense of confidence. Performing in front of others requires them to walk and talk with a stronger understanding of themselves.

Republished with revisions from Deseret News.

Filed Under: Education

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