The case for nerds

I like nerds.  I must like nerds or risk self-loathing.  I’m not sure if I can claim full-nerd status, as I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons and was more of an invisible/trouble-maker/outsider in high school (I secretly wanted to run with the nerds, only I was too insecure about my smarts to believe they’d accept me) but at this point in my life I’m at least half-nerd.

While I’m partial to nerds and non-nerds alike and strive to love the world in all its diversity, I’d like to make the case for being a nerd—not as a kid, that’s the luck of the draw—but as parents.  A good parent benefits from getting in touch with their inner nerd, so here’s a challenge to any hipsters who happen across these words on their way to lunch with the in-crowd or whatever it is that cool people do:  let the nerd out of the box—dare to be kind, and smart and interested in whatever weird little uncool things you happen to be interested in, and taste the secret power of the nerds who just are who they are.

Tough Love, effective love and just plain love

In a recent article in The Guardian about “Tough Love” (http://tiny.cc/7TYmU) it was found that both laissez-faire and authoritarian approaches to parenting fell significantly short of “Tough Love,” for raising well-adjusted kids.  However, the version outlined by the researchers of “tough love” seemed to mean engaged parenting and appropriate limit-setting.  Now when I think “tough love” I think about neon-lit parents taking a hard line in verité kitchen sink realism as Drs. Phil and Laura shout at them after kids have gotten into trouble with drugs or the law; now maybe that’s just my “Think that I saw it on Mulberry Street” imagination running away again, but it did make me wonder how many modern progressive parents might turn off a the phrase “tough love” and miss the larger point.

So while “tough love” might be a problematic phrase, I think many parents would respond to the notion that kids do well under engaged parenting with good limit-setting by saying, “Duh.”  The point of posting on this topic is to underscore that what the researchers seemed to mean by “tough,” I (and I suspect many of my fellow-parents) would simply call engaged parenting with healthy limits and boundary setting.  The article made it sound to me like we’ve come to calling the setting and holding of appropriate boundaries “tough love.”  I’m also concerned that the word “tough” may intimidate some parents who were raised in such a harsh manner that they want nothing “tough” to hurt their kids, and then inadvertently hurt them by being too soft.  This lack of parental spine is what hurts kids, the laissez-faire that reads to kids as “we don’t care.”

Anne

I came home from the memorial service and the sudden ability to stop moving forward allowed the gloom of death to penetrate the surreal veil that had hung over the day up until that moment.  A fast-falling dusk descended like a shroud over Los Angeles and my heart.

I lay in bed and yearned to nap, to escape the truth of a boy who’d valiantly said good-bye to his mother; to a noble man who spoke of a marriage, a profound love and the blessing of a sparkling child in terms of borrowed time, for she’d nearly died twenty-four years earlier and, upon coming out of a coma, pulled an about-face on marriage and family and jumped in with both feet.

Couch koans

We really don’t do our kids homework for them, but we do generally try to be sounding boards and impromptu teachers when they need, and we are able—and this usually distills down to sitting with them as they re-confront the question at hand and try to puzzle through (and how quickly they get to things we’ve either entirely forgotten or never knew in the first place).

Recently my twelve-year-old, who was studying Buddhism that week, had an assignment that perplexed him.  He was to find a quiet place, read a “koan” or paradoxical Zen short story, and then contemplate a series of seemingly nonsensical questions.  He had done the steps, but had no idea how to answer the nonsensical questions.

I’ll share the koan first:

You’re glowing. Literally… So be sure to shine on your kids

A recent study by several Japanese scientists found that, “The human body literally glimmers.”  It turns out that the light the body gives off is of 1000 times lower intensity than the sensitivity of our naked eyes. They found this by making a rather fancy camera that could pick up the bioluminescence of the body—a process similar to that seen in fireflies and certain jellyfish.  To check out the study by Kobayashi, Kikuchi and Okamura see: http://tiny.cc/6bR3e.

As a mindfulness-oriented parent (and person) this research caught my eye because of the subtle implications that fired my imagination.  Some claim able to see auras, I believe that women glow when they are first pregnant and some people seem to glimmer when in love; maybe these ways of talking about extra life-energy have a physical (i.e. not just metaphorical or metaphysical) reality?

Another intriguing finding of this research project was that the level of bioluminescence varied with the metabolism of the subjects.  As cortisol levels dropped during sleep, the luminescence increased.  One way of thinking about this could be that when we are calm, we glow.  Cortisol relates to adrenaline and stress, so becoming Zen helps us reduce risk of heart disease, improves immune functioning and makes us better parents at the behavioral level (i.e. not shouting); maybe it also makes us more radiant, which might help our kids shine too.

Fool’s Gold

Parenting is great because it often challenges us to take an interest in what we do not feel consciously interested in (i.e. violent video games, baseball, Pokémon, elaborate and interminable board-games, etc.).  Part of me feels such things are a waste of time, and part of me feels like there’s just not enough time while another part of me feels Einstein and Buddha were both right in their own way—that time is an illusion by which we live, not a truth in which we dwell.

When it comes to the arcane art of waking up, parenting is to consciousness as is the Shaolin Temple to Bruce Lee—a place of deepening spirit and focusing power—a place to evolve.

While I might rather watch art films, or read, with a fifteen-year-old and a media precocious thirteen-year-old, the line on “appropriate” content has shifted drastically as of late… and so I’ve been catching up on the first seasons of “Entourage” with my boys.

GABA GABA Hey, do a little yoga today

While I have personally found that yoga is a great way to be a better parent—gaining a sense of community, enhanced calmness, focus and overall well-being, there is a growing body of evidence to support the use of yoga for relief of depression, anxiety, insomnia and overall stress reduction.  In the November issue of Monitor on Psychology there is an overview by Amy Novotney of the latest research emerging to support yoga for a range of psychological issues (http://tiny.cc/Knm4A).

GABA is a neurotransmitter, a brain chemical that acts like a brake to check over-excitement, and thus reduce or counteract anxiety.  In a 2007 study in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (Vol. 13, No. 4), it turned out that after an hour of yoga there was a 27% increase in GABA levels compared with an hour of reading which had no effect on the GABA levels.

What does it really mean to be “Passive-Aggressive?”

The term “passive aggressive” seems to be used more often than it’s clearly understood.  One way to think about someone being passive aggressive is when the other may appear to be polite and non-confrontational, but they at the same time somehow provoke us and push our buttons and we find ourselves getting very angry.  With passive aggressive people, it often turns out that when there are being yelled at they appear calm, and even somewhat gratified.  So what’s up with that?  And worse yet, does it remind you of your kid sometimes?

Ants

While helping behavior in animals is well documented, actual rescue behavior is extremely rare.  Instances of rescue in dolphins (helping distressed others to the surface to breathe) and one incident involving capuchin monkeys just about totals out the observed instances… that is until several scientists working in collaboration were able to document rescue behavior in ants.  Researchers Nowbahari, Scohier, Durand and Hollis found that an ant caught in a snare calls out for help and gets rescued by her sisters who bite through a filament trapping her.  (for the study itself see: http://tiny.cc/SkMoA).

Beyond pheromones, the researchers marveled at how such tiny-brained creatures could pull off tactically complex operations—recognizing distress and working collectively to free one of their own.  While they do not speculate on the mind of the colony, it brings to my mind numerous fairytales in which a humble hero, on the quest for love and glory, is kind to ants in peril (and/or bees, fish, orphaned birds, etc.) when no one else could care less about their plight, but later on the ants come to the would-be hero’s rescue (for example, helping gather up grains of barely off the grass before the sunrise to complete a supposedly impossible task) and prove pivotal to his (it’s usually a would-be prince in search of his princess) success.  The moral lesson of these stories may be that it’s those who care about the underserved and powerless who the forces of nature ultimately favor.  Amongst the most ancient shamans, the buzzing bees were associated with vision quests, transcendent journeys and supreme wisdom. 

Drizzly November in the soul

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”  Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

Happy November… and not so happy November.  As we blog our way more deeply into fall, I thought that it might worthwhile to honor melancholy as something that we can all relate to, at least on some days, and also to differentiate this from true depression.

It is common for us to say, “I’m depressed,” when what we mean is that we feel sad.  Depression is a serious problem, and it is different from just feeling sad.  In fact, our difficulties in actually experiencing our feelings, containing them and trusting that they will pass (and even teach us) sometimes block us from our happiness.  After all, the concept of happiness depends upon its relativistic opposite, unhappiness, to have any meaning.