It's Not Language that Governs the Connection Between People

Bérénice Bejo and Tahar Rahim in The Past (Photo by Carole Bethuel, Sony Pictures Classics)

Excerpts from "Oscar-Winning Filmmaker Asghar Farhadi on Making Movies in Iran," KCRW's The Business, Dec. 23, 2013:

Kim Masters: The film is almost entirely in French. How did you manage that [since you don't speak French]?  

Asghar Farhadi: I moved with my family and we lived in France for two years. I set aside a great deal of time to become acquainted with the melodies of the French language. I tried to become familiar with the daily details of life there, with the way people behave. I had numerous French friends and they were invaluable. But what helped me the most was the fact that the story I had was one that was structured on the basis of the similarities of our cultures, not the differences...

I had several people who acted as my voice. There was one of them who accompanied me constantly, who not only interpreted the words I spoke, but who shadowed me in gesture. When I would move my hands, he would also do the same thing. When I raised my voice, he too would raise his voice. Gradually I began to feel that he was my voice. He was closer to who I was. I remember the day when I said something and then I walked over to the table to pick up a cigarette, and he started interpreting and walked over to the table and picked up a cigarette...

But after a while, I discovered that it's not language that governs the connection between people to the extent that we imagine it does. When people grow close to each other—through their eyes, through a kind of an exchange of energy—they can grasp a great deal about each other.

With Bérénice, with those children, I discussed matters of great delicacy and intricacy that even in Persian would be difficult to convey.   

Attention Training

Daniel Goleman from "Is Attention the Secret to Emotional Intelligence?" by Jason Marsh, Greater Good: Mind & Body, Nov. 14, 2013:

 “The Card Players” by Paul CézanneI think attentional skills are fundamentally under siege today. Never before in human history have there been so many seductive distractors in a person’s day, in a given hour, or in ten minutes. There are pingings and pop-ups and all kinds of sensory impingements on our attention that want to pull us away from what we’re trying to focus on.

So I think that a book on focus is all the more timely, particularly in helping us understand why it matters that we’re not able to sustain focus for as long as used to be the case, either on what it is we’re supposed to be doing or on the person we’re with.

Being able to focus on the other person rather than the text you just received has become the new fundamental requirement for having a relationship with that person. If you go to a restaurant these days, for instance, you see people sitting together, at the same table, staring at their video screens, their phone, their iPad, or whatever it may be—and not talking to each other. That’s become the new norm. And what it means is that the connection is being damaged to some extent—threatened by the fact that we’re together, but we’re not together. We’re alone together.

And I think this is another reason to develop a meta-awareness about where our attention has gone. I think we need to make more effort and cultivate more strength to detach [our attention] from that thing that is so tempting over there, and bring it back to the person in front of us.

I’m terribly worried about us as a species—particularly the young people who are growing up with this norm as the baseline. I don’t know what the consequence will be, but I can’t imagine it will be wonderful. We all have the potential to get better resisting, but we’ve never as a whole had to do this—never had to summon up the effort it takes.

For example, meditation is, from a cognitive science point of view, the retraining of attention—a bulking up of the neural circuitry that allows you to detach from where your mind has wandered, bring it back to the point of focus, and keep it there. That is the basic repetition of the mind in any kind of meditation. And that’s also what builds up the willpower to resist the pull of electronics and stay with the human world.

We’ve always had the capacity for this, but it’s also always been something that only a small minority of people bothered to do. I’m actually now in favor of making it part of the curriculum so every kid learns it. But I wouldn’t call it meditation; I would say “attention training.” It’s actually a very mundane application of what we’re learning in the science of attention about how to pay better attention—how to focus with more strength.

Read the rest of the interview...

---

See also:

• Goleman, D. (2013). Focus: The hidden driver of excellence. [Amazon, library]
• Our Attention Is Under Siege "The Energy Project's CEO, Tony Schwartz, sits down with thought leader Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence) to discuss the impact of technology on our ability to focus, and how training attention can positively influence both our performance and our relationships."

We Are Fundamentally Peers

Excerpt from "You Don't Need a King to Empower You," by Brian Robertson, Big Think: In Their Own Words, May 21, 2013: 

"I think a lot of the cries today are for better leaders, better heroic leaders, better parental figures that will lead us better and I think the interesting power shift that this method I use points to is what happens when we stop asking for better heroic leaders and we put in place a system that distributes power, so that we don’t need heroic leaders to save us, rather so that each of us shows up not as an employee subject to the whims of the broader employer and the leader and the boss, but shows up with our own voice and our own power and our own integrity.

If you’re that leader you can show up and say it’s not my job to process your tensions, it’s not my job to heroically step in and save you, I'm going to process my own tensions as best I can and we’re in an environment where we are fundamentally peers even as we take on different roles and those roles have different authorities.  We can still show up as humans together in a way that owns our reality where nobody is a victim. It takes a power structure to do it in the same way that we shift from our monarchies and feudal empires where there is a clear top-down component into our modern democracies where you don’t need an empowering king."

Read more...

See also: Holacracy

Where the Action Is

Great Blue Heron egg shell

Excerpt from Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life by Rabbi Irwin Kula: 

[Maybe] it was actually an act of love and mercy to disperse the people of Babel. The hope now was that, rather than destroying each other for the sake of being one, human beings could thrive, unfold, create breathtaking poetry in thousands of tongues, and spread light all over the earth. Rather than only One, there now would be an infinite number of ways to interpret and understand life.

One of the first nursery rhymes we recite to our children isn't so different from that biblical allegory. "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again." It's an edgy tale, even for grownups. From a young age, our deepest fear is that we're Humpty Dumpty, that we'll fall and shatter into so many pieces that no one will be abe to put us back together again; that we'll be dipspersed across the face of the earth and be alone in our brokenness. The story makes us wonder if we haven't already fallen and become irreparably splintered. The ditty makes light of that very real fear and helps soften it.

But what if we taught this story differently? Maybe Humpty Dumpty jumped. Maybe he was stuck in his own Tower of Babel on top of that wall and wanted desperately to get down. Maybe the "great fall" was actually a deepening and expansion of his own consciousness—a startling vision of his many selves. What if Humpty didn't want to be what the king wanted him to be? He didn't want to be put back together again; to be an egg so full of promise of life but giving birth to nothing. He didn't want to reach for the heavens; he waned to be down on earth where the action is. What if what realy happened is that he hatched? 

---

See also: 

• Relentless Search for the Next Magical Something
• Feeling Slightly Out of It Most of the Time
• A Marriage of Marriages

Other Possibilities

Parque del Retiro, Madrid, August 2, 2012

Excerpt from "Eckhart Tolle, Meditation and the Meaning and Benefits of Inner Peace," by Hugh Byrne, The Washington Post, October 4, 2012:

Have you ever been caught up in a wave of anger, craving or worry where you felt the emotion carry you away like a wild horse you could not control?  Most of us have experienced the strength of these energies and wondered how to work with rather than be ruled by them.

Have you felt such a wave of unruly emotion but been able to bring awareness to it and observe it instead? An important shift takes place: the awareness creates space and allows us to see other possibilities than just acting out whatever we are feeling. This is more akin to riding a horse we have begun to train...

...For over 2,000 years, Buddhism and other wisdom traditions have taught that there is a way out of the stress and suffering that can fill our lives, and a possibility of living a life free of suffering. Mindfulness, the practice of opening fully to our experience in this moment—the joys and sorrows; the good, the bad, and the ugly—is the gateway to this deep freedom of the heart.

In recent years, the wisdom of these ancient teachings has been confirmed by scientific studies, which demonstrate that we can train our minds, change our brains, increase our well-being, and radically lessen such afflictive states of mind as anxiety and depression.

One recent study showed that the structure of the brains of participants in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program changed with an average of just 27 minutes of meditation a day. Results from brain scans revealed an increase in gray-matter density in areas of the brain associated with memory, self-awareness, compassion and introspection, and a decrease in density of gray matter in areas associated with stress and anxiety. 

Other studies have shown that meditation may lower blood pressure, slow the progression of HIV, reduce pain help break addictions, and even ward off the effects of aging.

More...