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When Am I?

Posted by :James Howden On : December 13, 2010
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Category: At First Glance

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I commonly ask myself – usually when China has smacked me in the mouth or tickled my perspective – where AM I? But we’re well into our second year here now, and I’m beginning to accept the fact of my geography. It’s time, it’s “for everything there is a season”, that makes me wonder these days.

Thanksgivings come and go, and the Chinese New Year sparkles and bangs memories of January football Bowl games and Dick Clark into oblivion. That’s okay with me. But now it’s December, another December, but I’m far out at sea about what that means anymore. Oh, there are occasional sightings of a Santa Claus taped up by a shopkeeper who doesn’t know who he is (or what he sure as Jesus isn’t), and the foreigner-friendly restaurants have visions of sugarplums dancing over their cash registers, I’m sure. But my life here mainly revolves around Monday-to-Thursday, and then Friday-to-Sunday axis. When I have occasion to label when I am as December, it’s a head-shaker.

Until this morning, there was no snow. (And the Dalian-deranging white dust on the ground barely qualifies as snow to this chauvinistic Canuck, though I was pleased to see it anyway.) While I am a teacher here, as I mainly am back home, there is no two-week holiday bliss awaiting me. (And no pre-holiday basketball tournaments. No parties. No Turtles. Ah, Turtles…) There will be no family reunions, no homes with bright lights, no crèches, no Christmas eve candlelight service, no plum pudding. Here in Dalian, the only shadows cast by Christmas are the commercial ones, and even they are rather muted in the ex-pat-free zone that we mainly live and breathe in. And my bride’s birthday, traditionally lamented as being overshadowed by Christmas – it’s the 23rd, if you were planning to send a card – is in danger of being neglected when my main seasonal reminders are absent.

But at 7 a.m., my house was filled with the whoops and thunder-footed galumphing of 10-year-old bliss. My little snow goon remembered skiing and snow forts and toboggans. He hasn’t yet remembered that he likely won’t have any of those here, so he was joy en-boyed. He was as thrilled as the year when his southern Ontario father, at about the same age, acculturated into bitter laments over the dead grass of a late December, was transported into delight and renewed belief in the goodness of the Universe: I woke up one Christmas Eve morning to find snow, beautiful snow, covering every tree and house and disappointment. I’d been dreaming of a white Christmas, and apparently Sam had been hoping for a snowball December, too.

In our little nuclear unit, we didn’t make too much of a fuss over Christmas back home, but I still loved many of the feelings of that season. Those cultural warm blankets are harder to come by here. But listen, if you like non-stop fireworks in February, this is absolutely the place to be! (We’re going to Vietnam.)

In the Arena

Posted by :James Howden On : November 22, 2010
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Category: At First Glance

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I am a peaceful man, and a pretty obscure one, but I have always wanted to be on the “front lines” of life. The heat and the totality of athletic competition, even when it was just my small-town team against the runty evil empire on the other side of the county, helped me to feel that way. Being in China, with its astonishing pace of growth and change (constructive and sometimes not-so), its relentless shouldering into the fast lanes of life on Earth, reminds me of hearing the reports of war correspondents from mysterious locales. (Except that it’s me and I’m there, and it’s still too much to grasp.) And when I sometimes come nearer an understanding the vision and the work of the Baha’i community in the world, well, that feels like being an advance guard for a new kind of humanity — not out of any sense of deserving, but simply through having stumbled upon a spiritual revolution and, occasionally, acting like it.

I teach some of the speeches of President Obama in my English and Western Culture classes at the Dalian University of Technology. Today, thinking about this “front lines” mentality, I’m inclined to add parts of this one, by the 26th American President, Theodore Roosevelt.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Superb, yes? Roosevelt said this in a speech called “Citizenship in a Republic”, which he gave in Paris in 1910. The sporting undertones of his “man in the arena” metaphor no doubt contribute to the strong impact it has on me, and its exclusive language is only an arti, fact of its time. The women are in the arena, and challenging the men to share it with them.

 

Theodore Roosevelt (on deeds-not-words, on *Jihad*)

Posted by :James Howden On : November 10, 2010
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Category: He Said/She Said

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* In the Islamophobic (and Islam-ignorant) West, we tend to have a hostile perspective on the Muslim concept of jihad, often translated as “holy war”; we think of burning towers, violent coercion and hate. I’m no Islamic scholar, but I think Roosevelt’s famed “Man in the Arena” speech, quoted partially below, is actually a pretty good description of the highest meaning of jihad, as I have come to understand it. I wrote about my efforts in understanding Islam here, plus two other posts that immediately followed. The particular discussion of jihad is in the second one. Roosevelt was talking, in gritty and athletic terms, about citizenship, and I’m fairly sure he wasn’t thinking of jihad at all! It fits, though, and here is part of what he said, the most often-quoted and beloved bit. I love this:

“It is not the critic who counts,…the man who points out how the strong man stumbles….The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,… who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions,…so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt, from a speech titled “CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC”, given at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910. A fuller quotation of this part of the speech, along with my commentary about it,  can be found in an entry in the “On First Glance” section of JH.com, November 22, 2010.

Happy November

Posted by :James Howden On : November 1, 2010
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Category: At First Glance

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It’s a great day for Catholics to remember and revere their preferred holy souls. It’s great for everybody, I say. All Saints Day (once called “All Hallows” day), was the original churchly stimulus for the dark and tricksy slant to the “All Hallows E(v)en(ing)” preceding it, which has grown into the tooth-rotting cuteness of the North American Hallowe’en. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except when high schoolers exulting in their sexuality and maturity also want to swipe the free candy that should go to small children. And to me.)

Coincidentally, it also was a day for me to repair a rather ragged piece that I had (prematurely) posted to the right in the It’s All About Sports! section. I had never suitably commemorated a passing that I’d been anticipating for years: the death of John Wooden last June. Coach Wooden was the closest thing to a saint that we’re likely to see in the world of sports, a coaching genius and an old-fashioned Christian gentleman and a great and enduring hero of mine since I was 16.

And did you know that National Novel Writing Month started today? It began as a lark by a few friends in San Francisco, California, and now a few hundred thousand people worldwide are going to try to write a 50,000-word novel this month. Tens of thousands will use the month as a carefree, quantity-not-quality way to be able to say: “I wrote a novel!”

‘Abdu’l-Baha (on human greatness and happiness)

Posted by :James Howden On : October 25, 2010
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“[T]he happiness and greatness, the rank and station, the pleasure and peace of an individual have never consisted in his personal wealth, but rather in his excellent character, his high resolve, the breadth of his learning, and his ability to solve difficult problems.”

                                                ‘Abdu’l-Baha Abbas, The Secret of Divine Civilization, an indispensable and criminally little-known 19th-century guide to the building of enlightened, progressive and sustainable societies. 

John Wooden, In My Dreams

Posted by :James Howden On : October 25, 2010
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Category: All About Sports

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The “Indiana Rubber Band Man” died, aged 99, no longer bounding up from his relentless defending of Hoosier hardwood floors. But this was back in June. He still bounces furiously into my hoop crazy mind, though all recent images and tributes to him call him venerable, gentle, wise, even saintly. I think he was. But I also think he was a burning man with the wit and the training not to blow himself up, to take that rage for perfection and goodness and actually do good with it.

I have been a basketball coach, and I have meant to write about him for months. Then, last night, Johnny Wooden came into my dreams for the first time I can remember, though his example and his words are in heavy rotation in my mental play-by-playlist. If you get anywhere near sports, you probably heard: Legendary Coach Dies; He Was the Best Coach Ever, and a Better Man; We Shall Not See His Like Again. And so on.

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Robert Frost (on (not)thinking)

Posted by :James Howden On : October 18, 2010
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.“

Robert Frost, 1874-1963, American poet, in a quote I’ve saved for years.* It makes for a fine back-to-the-future companion to my own, decidedly-less-concise March ’13 ramblings about the nature of thinking and not-thinking, here. I fear that our predominant culture — infotainment, media saturation, the obsession with the unimportant — makes the mature arts of reflection and profound knowing ever more difficult to cultivate. The Baha’is are doing some wonderful grassroots work to counter this tendency. The more I think about it, the more revolutionary, counter-cultural and necessary it appears. I don’t know much about the great Frost’s spiritual inclinations, but I think he’d dig the methodology, the “promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep”.

* Faithful readers of this site may have noticed that I’m gradually re-posting quotes that appeared over the years on the earlier incarnation of JH.com, and we’re up to 2010 already as of March 9, 2013. Hurray!

Are You Thinking Yet?

Posted by :James Howden On : October 18, 2010
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Category: At First Glance

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How do we know when we’re actually thinking? Someone once said that if you don’t know a second language, you can never know whether you are thinking or simply replaying a skull-encased recording of other people’s views, Coke jingles, cultural driftwood and stale tales that pass from gossip to “common sense”. But I speak a second language and shards of other ones, and while I love to find the way another coding system expresses an idea or an action, I don’t think that mental access to another manner of speaking is any guarantee of thought, either.

All this in light of the Robert Frost quote I recently found — “to learn to write is to learn to have ideas” — and use in every class and in my own auto-peptalks. Sometimes — I think — I come closest to genuine thinking when I’m writing. How can I know what I think ’til I see what I’ve said? (Somebody. Another orphan quote.) And maybe the repeated citation of other people’s bons mots is also a sure way to avoid original thought. But I doubt that. (!)

Antonio Gramsci (on life in centuries that start with 2)

Posted by :James Howden On : October 11, 2010
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.“

Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937, Italian philosopher and political theorist. I love this: it is brief and full of meaning. We have lost our childish imaginings, many of them, anyway, in the last 150 years or so. The price, unhappily, is that many of us have also lost faith, hope and amazement. (And Gramsci didn’t see WWII, or Watergate, or 9-11, or reality TV. What do you think?

Tim Jackson (on consumerism, in a nutshell)

Posted by :James Howden On : October 4, 2010
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Category: He Said/She Said

“We are encouraged to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that don’t last, on people we don’t care about.”

Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity Without Growth – Economics for a Finite Planet. He was speaking at the United Nations in New York, possibly in 2009. I believe he has absolutely nailed modern consumer culture.