Both the Protagonist and the Antagonist

My family enjoyed being conned by Doris Payne. She charmed us into rooting for her from the safety of our theater seats as we watched the documentary about her life at the Cleveland International Film Festival. People she burned along the way were less entertained. 

Doris Payne lived large. She traveled abroad. She stayed in luxury hotels. She hung out with interesting characters. But she funded all her adventures by fencing the diamonds she lifted from high-end jewelers around the world. She was a remarkably successful thief with an impressive criminal career that spanned decades. But time, age, and technology finally caught up with her in recent years.   

The skills she honed to pull off her schemes illustrate the neutrality of attentional skills.

Doris Payne had a high degree of concentration power. She experienced the benefits of focused observation from an early age and she created numerous opportunities to exercise this ability.

She could intentionally decide what to pay attention to when entering a store. She could learned what to allow to operate in the background of her awareness without letting it through her off her primary focus. Like any good illusionist, she refined her ability to direct another person's attention away from where the real action was happening.   

She was a gifted student of observation and displayed a kind of fluency with the elements of experience. There is plenty of evidence suggesting that she was able to see through the illusion of  a fixed personal identity. But instead of cultivating resilience, she exploited this insight to manipulate and exploit situations and people. She developed a charming and bold persona to distance herself emotionally from her behaviors. She toyed with the boundaries of ethics, emotions, and logic in attempt to evade consequences.

Doris also demonstrated professional-grade equanimity—the ability to stay to go along with the flow of of her thoughts and feelings—even when her emotions intensified. When the stakes were high, she refrained from wrestling against the aspects of experience that were outside of her control.

When accused of suspicious behavior, she relied on manners. 

"I can't dictate how the officer will come at me, but I can decide to give him more respect than he is due."

This makes a fitting analogy for having equanimity with unpleasant physical and emotional sensations. Instead of getting defensive and fighting with them, it's much more effective to learn how to turn toward them with openness—even welcoming them to perform their jobs. 

Watching Doris work her magic while revealing her tricks, reminded me how important it is to be intentional about how we use our attentional skills. There is a parallel with physical fitness. Exercising develops the body. What we do with the energy and vitality is a separate but important matter.

Likewise, we can employ our strengthened attentional skills to distract people while we break the rules, or we can put them to work cultivating a sense of feeling more at home in our lives.

While I make it a point not to prescribe a specific set of guidelines for ethical behavior, I do encourage people to explore a framework they find compelling and challenging.    

According to Eunetta Boone, a screenwriter who has been developing a biopic based on Doris Payne's life, Doris has been both the antagonist and the protagonist in the screenplay of her own life that she has been writing every day.

This observation has me thinking about how true this is for all of us. Each of us must negotiate conflicting drives that compete for control. There's the part of me who wants to take the high road when dealing with difficult people versus the part of me who would prefer to get a taste of revenge. The part of me who sees the benefit of discipline and consistent effort has to contend with another part that is often too tired to follow through with the specific tasks and challenges I've set for myself. 

It's easy to focus on the outcomes that we want from life, but difficult to act consistently in ways that will move us down the road toward reaching them. We are seduced by shortcuts. The devil whispering into our ear invariably has better marketing than the angel quietly building a case for wisdom and maturity. We inadvertently substitute identification for cultivation, but ultimately, it isn't possible to escape the character we create through the accumulation of our actions. This is the actual definition of karma. 

Doris Payne evaded capture. She felt powerful. She deceived countless people. In spite of all this, her escapades are fun to watch. We even feel sorry for her when she loses. She does not voice any regrets about this, yet what does she have to show from the life she's lived?

She has entertaining stories. She crossed international borders with diamonds sewn into her underwear. She tasted power and vengeance. She never had to take a boring job  to make a living. She played by her own rules. But her tale is ultimately cautionary. She dodged and distorted the basic guidelines of civility. She lived only for herself. Her character cannot be untangled from the life she built almost entirely on lies. And the person she has tricked most effectively throughout, is the part of herself that knew the difference between right and wrong all along.

As with each of us, she has been her own worst antagonist. 

The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne Trailer from Kirk Marcolina on Vimeo.

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See also:

• "Exploring Religious Ethics in Daily Life" from Gellman, M., & Hartman, T. (2002). Religion for dummies. New York: Wiley Pub. 
• Practical Ethics taught by Peter Singer from Princeton Univeristy through Coursera 
• "Using and Abusing Karma" from The Naked Monk

Equanimity in Action

Moonwalk from Bryan Smith on Vimeo.

The ultimate full moon shot. Dean Potter walks a highline at Cathedral Peak as the sun sets and the moon rises. Shot from over 1 mile away with a Canon 800mm and 2X by Michael Schaefer. 

This shot was part of a bigger project for National Geographic called The Man Who Can Fly.  

Music track is from Will Bolton.

The Value of Concentration

Excerpt from "The Power of Concentration," by Maria Konnikova, The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2012:

Meditation and mindfulness: the words conjure images of yoga retreats and Buddhist monks. But perhaps they should evoke a very different picture: a man in a deerstalker, puffing away at a curved pipe, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself. The world’s greatest fictional detective is someone who knows the value of concentration, of “throwing his brain out of action,” as Dr. Watson puts it. He is the quintessential unitasker in a multitasking world.

More often than not, when a new case is presented, Holmes does nothing more than sit back in his leather chair, close his eyes and put together his long-fingered hands in an attitude that begs silence. He may be the most inactive active detective out there. His approach to thought captures the very thing that cognitive psychologists mean when they say mindfulness...

In recent years, mindfulness has been shown to improve connectivity inside our brain’s attentional networks, as well as between attentional and medial frontal regions — changes that save us from distraction. Mindfulness, in other words, helps our attention networks communicate better and with fewer interruptions than they otherwise would.

In a 2012 study at Emory University, increased meditation practice was associated with enhanced connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in attention monitoring and working memory, and the right insula, an area that is associated with how well we can monitor our own feelings and thoughts and that is considered a key waypoint between our two major attention networks, the default and the executive.

Not only could this increased connectivity make us better able to switch between tasks and monitor our own attention, but it is indicative of more effective overall management of our finite attentional resources.

Mindfulness training has even been shown to affect the brain’s default network — the network of connections that remains active when we are in a so-called resting state — with regular meditators exhibiting increased resting-state functional connectivity and increased connectivity generally. After a dose of mindfulness, the default network has greater consistent access to information about our internal states and an enhanced ability to monitor the surrounding environment.

These effects make sense: the core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention. That’s exactly what Holmes does when he taps together the tips of his fingers, or exhales a fine cloud of smoke. He is centering his attention on a single element. And somehow, despite the seeming pause in activity, he emerges, time and time again, far ahead of his energetic colleagues. In the time it takes old detective Mac to traipse around all those country towns in search of a missing bicyclist in “The Valley of Fear,” Holmes solves the entire crime without leaving the room where the murder occurred. That’s the thing about mindfulness. It seems to slow you down, but it actually gives you the resources you need to speed up your thinking.  

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See also:

• Konnikova, M. (2013). Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes. New York: Viking Adult. 
• "How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: Lessons in Mindfulness and Creativity from the Great Detective," book review by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, Jan. 7, 2013

As If The Intention Of What You Are Doing Has Left

Make-up artist Lois Burwell, on the process of transforming Daniel Day Lewis into Abraham Lincoln (The Business, December 10, 2012): 

"Part of the process we used is called stretch and stipple. You actually need four hands, not two, because you want to hold the skin, paint it, and then use a blow dryer -- on cool so you don't bake him -- to speed up the process. But you actually need four hands. But also you make it efficient and speedy, but we had to learn how to do it together so that there wasn't a feeling of two hands on the face moving separately from each other rather than in conjunction.

If you think of the difference between a massage and two people having a go separately, how that would feel. That's really distracting. So we actually practiced. It's rather like some strange, hip-hop handshake is the only way I can describe it. Doing a make-up simultaneously.

And of course we were in silence, so we mouthed to each other -- eyes, mouth -- you know, just mouthing it...To be perfectly honest, I actually quite like making up people in silence, if I'm really truthful. And fortunately, with Daniel, that is what he liked. So we dovetailed. I don't want to sound pretentious, but the only way I can describe it, is when your hands are working on a face, after a period of time, it's as if the intention of what you're doing has left you -- and the thought process -- and the hands [are] doing it by themselves. So you lose yourself in it. So someone asks you a question, you're sort of broken from it. And it's really hard then to find where you were and begin again. "

Room to Breathe

Room to Breathe Official Trailer from Russell Long on Vimeo.

Excerpt from "Meditation Creates a Little Breathing Space for San Francisco Students," by Richard Schiffman, Huffington Post, October 19, 2012:

There are two jobs that have become a lot more difficult in recent years. One is being a teacher, which was never easy at the best of times. But in an age of virtually unlimited opportunities for distraction and rapidly shrinking attention spans getting kids to focus on their schoolwork can be (with apologies to dentists) like pulling teeth. 

I know: As a former school aide working with young children, it was often all that I could manage just to break up fights and keep the decibel level below that at an international airport. Any "education" that actually took place in such an environment was a small miracle.

The other job that has become a whole lot harder, of course, is being a student. Believe me, I sympathize with their plight too! Today's kids are weaned on electronic devices where they move between one website, text-message, or video game and the next at lightning speed. Where does a child learn how to direct their attention to just one math problem or reading assignment when there are so many distractions a click away?

Yet recently I watched a deeply moving and inspiring film that gave me hope. Room to Breath, by director Russell Long was filmed in a public school in San Francisco. The Marina Middle School with 900 students is one of the largest in the Bay Area, and it has the dubious distinction of having the highest suspension rate in the city.

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