"Professor Harry"

My washer (Harry) and I have a unique relationship.  Before I came to Costa Rica, Harry had been sitting outside an apartment unused for a couple of months.  Naturally, I expected him to be thankful and work perfectly when I hauled him up to my brand spanking used little studio apartment.  After the first wash, I figured out I needed to give his agitator a little kickstart to get it going unless I just wanted my clothes to sit in a soapy puddle for half an hour.  After the second or third, I realized the spin cycle was beyond repair.  After the fifth or sixth, I started to get tired of wringing out every pair of socks without the benefit of said spin cycle, and recently I've felt a bit like doing this:

A few days ago, however, Harry taught me something.  As I said, he has a little problem with his agitator.  Usually, my wash pattern was to put in my clothes, turn on the wash cycle, start writing or doing whatever else I was up to, and then walk over to restart the agitator every two minutes or so.  This time, I let the tank fill up, started the agitator, and proceeded to add my laundry piece by piece.  Starting the wash still takes a little effort, but since then I have only had to start it once per cycle.

This is a surprisingly accurate allegory for my attempts to teach music to Costa Rican and Nicaraguan children here in the barrio.  When I came to San José, I looked at my opportunity as their opportunity: the chance to learn how to read, play, think, and feel music from a real life music major.  Someone who understood theory, musicianship, music history, and the beauty in musical complexity.  I couldn't have been more ridiculous if I had tried.  For the first few months, I tried to do exactly that: I taught students about eighth notes, thirds, staves, and clefs.  I tried to convince them of the beauty of harmony by playing and singing it with myself.  Even when they tried (which some of them certainly did), they left the class with very little idea of what had happened and almost no ability to reproduce it.  A few weeks ago, I tried a new approach.  I didn't bring in a handout or draw up a rhythm on the whiteboard or try to teach them a new word.  I just sat down, played, and said "do what I do."  The results were nothing short of incredible.  A percussionist who couldn't follow my pulse to save his life successfully found the backbeat the second he closed his eyes and just listened.  My flautists went from halfway-playing the one song they'd been working on to learning entire songs in a week or two.  My guitarists...well...kept kicking butt.  Why?

I realized that I had been approaching teaching the guitar in the way I've learned to play it here.  I don't think about contrapuntal melodies or even complex harmonies; I focus on playing I-IV-V-I in the absolute best way possible because that's the only thing these songs were meant to be accompanied by.  Really, I hardly think at all.  I feel and I do, though only occasionally in that order.  I focus on the idea happening in the room around me, and let my hands do what they can to join in.  I don't put the clothes in the bottom of the bin and try to start the cycle with my pre-inserted self.  I give the water a little stir, wait for it to get moving, then join the wave.

Sometimes, when we find ourselves outside what we already understand, we ironically try and make up for it with our intellectual power.  Such was my approach to the piano, the recorder, and every other musical effort I made other than the guitar.  Sometimes we're smart enough to fool those around us into thinking we know what we're doing, but in our heart we know there is no substitute for experience and we usually feel intimidated by a lack thereof.

The moral of the story of this is the same one we learn from Peter in Matthew 17: when you don't know how to do something, even and especially if you think you're supposed to, resist the urge to pretend you do.  Wait.  Watch.  Listen.  Trailblazers are only good at what they do when they set out from something they know and understand as a base.  This isn't to say you should always "go with the flow" - rather, before before you go against it, you should ensure you actually understand where it's going.  You might be surprised.

Balance Point

A few days ago, I listened to a Freakonomics podcast on commitment devices.  Essentially, a commitment device is a contract devised by your present self to try and keep your future self from doing something.  Think of Odysseus when he had himself tied up to the mast of his ship so he couldn't give into the Sirens or putting an embarrassing alarm on your refrigerator door - both perfect examples.

The example in the podcast seemed a bit extreme.  A middle aged man decided to give up every food, drink, or activity in his life which he thought had a negative impact, cold turkey.  It was a list of thirty-some activities, which seemed to set him up for failure.  His penalty?  If he messed up and his best friend heard about it, he had been instructed to send a $750 check to someone the giver-upper loathed (Oprah).  In the end, he made it, except for accidentally sipping a coffee with creamer in it (milk was on the list).  I'd call that a win, and so did his friend, but in the end he sent the check in out of guilt.  In the process, he lost some weight and made some significant lifestyle changes, but considered his effort a failure.

So, did it work?  Was it a good thing?  Depends - do you judge by means or by ends?

I was talking to a friend in Costa Rica who is currently in the process of temporarily giving something up, and even though he's stopped enjoying the vacancy in his life (a feeling which seems to have worn off after a week or two), he thinks it's been a good thing because he anticipates his future being brighter than his past.

The real question here is the one I posed to my friend last night: are habitual actions like cruise control or a refrigerator?  Imagine you're driving a car down a highway.  You're speeding by about seven miles per hour.  You know you're breaking the law, doing something you shouldn't be doing, but you feel like you aren't harming anyone around you or yourself.  Then, something happens.  Maybe you see a cop or narrowly miss a stray road cone or see a deer jump across the road in front of you.  You realize that maybe you really are enjoying that speed a little too much and knock down the cruise control a few notches (maybe even all the way down to the actual speed limit).

Refrigerators don't work that way.  If you put a glass of water in a 32 degree refrigerator (or 0 if you're a Celsius person), it won't freeze.  You can't just ease off the warmth - you have to create an environment which is actually colder than your target temperature in order to achieve that new state.

The idea that our existence is some compromise or balance between opposing forces seems like a nearly universal human belief.  Conscience and sinful nature, yin and yang, faith and reason, aesthetics and utility, simplicity and complexity, wave and particulate, war and peace, consistency and change itself.  Both members of each pair will always exist because none can exist in the absence of their partner, which means nothing on that list will ever be eradicated.  This is, admittedly, a more pessimistic (and realistic) worldview than I can ever remember holding.  I have always been an idealist, but somewhere between meeting some very different people, succeeding in certain respects, and dramatically failing in others, I believe I have come for the moment to this conclusion.

On a side note, I think this means that trying to eradicate whatever ideology you oppose is a wildly ineffective way to try and change your world for the better.  Focus instead on shifting the balance.  It's better to lovingly allow someone to freely oppose you than to force them to convert to your own opinion (and it typically results in more converts anyway).

As I think about my experience here in Costa Rica and how I may or may not have changed, this distinction seems important.  The analogy isn't perfect - sometimes we do find ourselves in control of a situation to the point where we can just slow down, but sometimes we don't.  Sometimes I think we need to experience something extreme in order to find our balance point.

Friendship Day

Why can't we be friends?

Very rarely have I had a Valentine for Valentine's day, but this year was sort of on the fence.  I have an incredible girlfriend, but didn't get to spend it with her.  Or so it felt.

In Costa Rica, they call February 14 "dia de la amistad" - literally, "day of (the) friendship" or "friendship day."  This caused a bit of self-reflection.  I have a few fairly good friends here, but as I thought about friendship's role in my life here I realized that almost all of them are gringos (white foreigners) like me.  It isn't that I don't have any Tico/Nica friends, but rather that the only ones I've shared my life with in any meaningful way have been...like me.

Why?  Am I a racist?  A sexist?  An ageist?  Normal?  Just as I was contemplating this apparent problem, something completely unexpected happened.  I made a friend.

Is that seat taken?

Buses in Costa Rica are like more crowded versions of New York subways.  You keep your attention on your headphones and don't talk to anyone at the risk of being glared at or avoided like the creature from the black lagoon.  I didn't know this on coming here, and I made that mistake a solid four or five times before I figured it out.  There's one exception: you are always allowed to ask for directions.  I saw a bunch of people waiting at a bus stop I didn't know existed (really just a patch of dirt next to a highway), asked where it led, and the next thing I knew I was talking to this person for the entire ride into San José and part of my walk to work.  In that hour and a half she got the gist of my life story, and I hers.  I had made my first Costa Rican friend and I was feeling pretty good about myself, but here's the kicker:  she's not Costa Rican.  She's an immigrant like me, from El Salvador, and once that came out we spent quite a bit of the time talking about how hard it was to adjust to living in a new place.

As I kept pondering this question, I realized why an apparently single guy had been casual enough to break the ice and keep a conversation going with a single girl on Valentine's day in a context where he wasn't supposed to talk at all: because he didn't have to.  I had no interest in her beyond making that long, boring bus ride pass a little more quickly.  I didn't try to play things up or lay the foundation for some lasting relationship; I just talked.  And listened.

You see, in the end, a longer-term and longer-distance relationship allowed a new friendship to be formed.  I wasn't interested in this girl (which definitely surprised her) precisely because I am interested in someone else.  I feel lucky; I have come to know that person much more deeply through all this distance and the written word.  I am committed, and in that commitment I am free to let other relationships grow or die organically, without my own exertion.  Think about that...I am committed, therefore I am free.

I know that not all of my readers share my own faith, so I won't go into much theological detail here, but I will say that this notion of commitment leading to freedom is the crux (pun intended) of my own view of Christianity.  By faith(fulness) in and to Christ, we are released from the obligation to atone for our own mistakes and free to love every member of God's creation.  That isn't limited to those who experience the same freedom.  In fact, spreading the good news about that freedom is kind of the point.  Sometimes I really wish God would just rip through the fabric of what I see around me and tell me my human ears who he is, who I am, and what I should believe, but that's not the way he works.  Not today, anyway.  He gives us our powers of observation and reason and respect for the millennia of their precedence in the tradition of our ancestors.  We get to know him through his footprints, whether it be the penmanship of scripture or the brushstrokes of creation.  I don't know how relevant that notion is to your own system of belief, but I'd encourage you to consider it a moment (or a lifetime) before tossing it aside as some Christian dogma.

I never really answered my own question as to why my friends are so "like me," but in the exploration of that problem I found something beautiful.  Should I be frustrated or thrilled?  I'm going to try and focus on the latter and on the newfound appreciation for a couple of specific relationships in my life.  Sometimes they feel a bit like a distance relationship, but maybe that isn't such a bad thing after all.