Tag Archives: Stress

A view from behind a church on the Greek island of Santorini.

On Simplicity

On Simplicity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:Photo by Elizabeth Duke.[1] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, trans. Peter Bien, (Simon and Schuster, 1946, 2014), 81.[2] “Elephant Tails,” Wednesday Blog 5.24.[3] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.[4] “On Political Violence,” Wednesday Blog 5.17.
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This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.

Over the last several weeks I’ve written about forms of knowledge and knowledge collecting. Knowledge is easier to identify, as it is empirical in its core. Yet on a scale even beyond knowledge lies wisdom, the cumulative sum of humanity’s understanding of the underlying character of human nature. It’s very easy for me to get bogged down in words, words, words and tie myself in knots which I find nigh unbreakable and even more undecipherable. Yet amid all those layers of paint there are often gems which merely need good editing to illuminate. This is what fills my days today, a big edit which I hope will signal the beginning of the end of my years of doctoral study.

In these years, while I’ve devoted my days to reading histories of the Renaissance intersections between the Americas and France, I’ve made a point of reading for fun all the same. I need to read things not related to my research for the escape they provide. At times these fun readings have been more thoroughly connected to my research, as in my recent choice of Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing, yet in Binghamton I spent many happy evening hours reading Star Trek anthologies and novels while returning to my vocation each day. Of the stories that I’m drawn to, I enjoy reading books and watching films with characters that embody a certain lived experience that begats wisdom. Recently, this desire for such a character led me to read Peter Bien’s new translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba. This is phronesis. Zorba’s wisdom is one that’s been gathered over the sixty years of his life and funneled toward living a good life as he sees fit. His is a simple wisdom which recognizes the physical limitations of the body in opposition to the limitless potential of the soul. I loved the first dance scene in Zorba the Greek in which the old miner erupted upward from his dinner and began to leap about. Kazantzakis describes it as though his soul could not be contained by his body and that it was that spiritual essence which spoke so fervently and wordlessly of its own joy. Kazantzakis can make even the simplest of scenes appear elegant and luminous. His description of the passage of time on the Mediterranean reaching up from Africa to the southern shore of Crete is one of my favorites. Here, I quote from Bien’s translation with the affection that beautiful prose deserves:

“The immense sea reached African shores. Every so often a warm southwest wind blew from distant red-hot deserts. In the morning the sea smelled like watermelons; at midday it vented haze, surged upward discharging miniature unripe breasts; in the evening, rose pink, wine red, eggplant mauve, dark blue, it kept continuously sighing.”[1]

The wisdom inherent in Kazantzakis’s prose lies in his ability to evoke the variable texture of nature, the changing face of it with the passage of the day. I remember once in Binghamton I have the idea to take a selfie once an hour throughout the day to see how my face, hair, stubble, and what not changed as the hours passed. I know for instance that if I want to have a lower register in my recordings of this Wednesday Blog that I need to record first thing in the morning when my tenor is closer to a baritone. This week, owing to a general sense of exhaustion, I haven’t gotten around to writing this essay until nearly 90 minutes before when the podcast normally publishes. Rather than force myself to write something earlier in the day I waited and gave myself the time to think of something good.

Wisdom is knowing that worrying won’t get you anywhere; it lies in the peace of mind and heart that keeps us happy and healthy. This evening, while I was having dinner with one of my best friends and his wife and young son, I brought up my particular conundrum of the day. Jokingly, the suggestion that I write about simplicity was made. I shrugged, thinking of William of Ockham, one of Bill Nye’s favorite history of science examples to use, and decided to run with it. After all, often the wisest people that I’ve met are the ones who embrace the simplicity of living a life embracing their own nature. The wise know that they are going to grow old and die and don’t worry about it. I find myself thinking of this as I watch without much resource as my hair recedes. I’ve joked that my particularly follicly impaired genes may require an eventual investment in a variety of hairpieces for different degrees of formality. I’ve grown in my own comfort with taking care of myself, applying sunscreen before going out on walks around the neighborhood now to mitigate the inevitable that comes from having largely Irish genes and living in the far sunnier Midwestern climate than my ancestors’ rain soaked home soil in Mayo. In his Saint’s Life, Alexis Zorba often doesn’t worry about these things and expresses frustration and even anger when the narrator, his boss, frets about the things he cannot control. I’m better at this than I have been, which is reassuring in some ways of looking at things, yet I still have room to grow.

Wisdom is trusting the people around you to do what they feel is best. If the simplest solution is often the best, then why aim to make things overly complex? Complexity requires forethought, or sometimes is the result of a lack of forethought. Last summer I delighted in writing several essays for the Wednesday Blog attempting to adapt chaos theory to explain human behavior.[2] We need both complexity and simplicity to understand ourselves and the world in which we live. Think about it: we cannot narrow things down to binary options. More often, the binary is one of a series of binaries which together form a logical thought or series. I marvel at the fact that computers most fundamentally work in the binary language of 1s and 0s, and that in this manner language and thought are boiled down to so rudimentary an interpretation. It’s for this reason that while I’m concerned by the rise and development of artificial intelligence and its misuse, I feel a sense of assurance that it is still limited by its basic functions and limited by the abilities of its artifice.[3] The human brain is a wonderous and ever complicated organ which evolved to fulfill its own very particular needs. On the simplest level the brain thinks, it sends directions to the rest of the body to keep the body operating. In a theological framework, I’ve argued that the brain may be the seat of the soul, the consciousness that is at the core of our thought. My earliest memory that I’ve written about here was the first time I recognized that particular voice of my own consciousness, which occurred sometime when I was 3 years old.[4]

Wisdom is intangible, it’s something that you have to learn to recognize. This is perhaps the most complex tenant that represents something simple. In order to truly become wise, one must understand that wisdom isn’t something you can buy off the shelf or write your way into. For all the words which Zorba’s boss writes, allowing them to consume him, he remains feeling unfulfilled in life. It’s why the narrator of the novel struck out from his books and sought to live among ordinary people, buying a stake in a lignite mine on the southern shore of Crete. On his way there in the Piraeus he met Zorba, the man who within a few pages became his foreman and the one who’d realize his idea of finding wisdom in the living world. The simplest explanations are often best. Zorba lives to enjoy the life he has, and when things go wrong––as they often do––he finds something to build upon and start over again.

A couple of months from now I’m going to be contributing my own experiences to a tacit knowledge panel at the History of Science Society’s conference in New Orleans about how I’ve been able to maintain a full research load and writing all year round with hardly any funding at all. I recognize that the circumstances of these past few years have been marked by my own poor decisions and mistakes that I’ve made along the way. Yet in spite of those, and bad luck in many respects, I’ve been able to continue with my work and to produce historical studies that are beginning to make a decent contribution to the history of science in the Renaissance and specifically to the history of animals in that same period. I’m looking forward to that panel, and to the two papers I’m presenting during the same weekend. Maybe, like Zorba, when things feel like they are about to go well I’ll feel the need to rise to my feet and leap into the air as though my soul were attempting to escape from my body. Simply put, for all the trouble that life has brought, joy is overpowering when pure.

[1] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, trans. Peter Bien, (Simon and Schuster, 1946, 2014), 81.

[2] “Elephant Tails,” Wednesday Blog 5.24.

[3] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.

[4] “On Political Violence,” Wednesday Blog 5.17.

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The Luxury of Stress, or the Adrenaline Rush of Fear

2020 began for me with a long drive east: Kansas City to Pittsburgh to New York. I drove the first leg in 15 hours, arriving just before midnight on a Friday, and spent the next day wandering through the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History in Downtown Pittsburgh, which was the main reason for that particular stopover. That Sunday however was characteristic of how the year that this would become. I woke up around 4 am on Sunday, early enough that I hoped I could be in Manhattan for lunch. As I made a quick donut stop near Pittsburgh Airport, I checked the travel updates for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and was shocked to discover that it was blocked in both directions just east of Pittsburgh due to a fatal multi-vehicle accident that had happened about an hour before. So, realizing that I’d have to take an alternate route, I plugged one into the navigation system in my car and made my way into one of the most eventful days of driving in my lifetime.

The route on that snowy Sunday morning in January

For the first 3 hours of the 6 that I’d have to drive that day, I was largely on US-22, a smaller rural highway, which heads east out of Pittsburgh across Pennsylvania toward the Jersey Shore. Normally I prefer to stick to the interstates for the lack of stoplights, and at that hour of the night for the lack of traffic. In this instance though I quickly found myself crawling my way across the Appalachians in a blizzard with next to no visibility. I passed semitrucks that were sliding backwards down the inclines on this normally reasonable, yet now snow-packed, highway. I’m pretty sure I passed a plow or two even, continuing onward, only really able to see where I was going thanks to the car’s navigation. Only after 7:30 am or so did the snow clear and I was able to enjoy an otherwise uneventful drive to the long-term parking garage that I frequent near Newark Airport when I drive to New York City.

Like the rest of 2020, thus far, I was nearly stressed to my limit in the early hours of that morning. This year has been one for the record books, a right old annus horibilis to borrow a term from the Queen. At the same time that I was dodging stuck semis in the Pennsylvania mountains, this country’s leaders were saber-rattling and threatening war with Iran. We were lucky to have missed that cataclysmic fiasco of a war, though I doubt we’ll know the full details of how we missed it for a few years to come. Since then we’ve seen the rise of the greatest pandemic in a century, a near economic depression, irate armed citizens occupying government buildings over their economic and social fears, the murders of many other citizens of this country by authorities, and the largest protests this country has seen in a long time. Throughout all of this, the response of those in charge hasn’t helped to ease tensions one bit, both publicly and privately for a great many of us.

Yet unlike that early morning in January, I now feel like I have the luxury to think about it, and to stress about it. That morning, I did not have that luxury, or perhaps I had too strong of a fear-driven adrenaline rush to stress about it. After all, if I thought too hard about how terrifying of a situation I was in, I would’ve made a mistake and gone off the side of the road, not knowing what that’d bring: a field, a hill, a house, the edge of one of the mountains? If I’d let my stress take over then, I can’t be sure I’d be able to write this today. Yet in the months since I’ve been largely secluded from the world, first in my apartment in Binghamton, NY, and for the last two months in my parents’ house in Kansas City, MO. Like all of us, I’ve had a lot of extra time on my hands to think, to consider how I want my life to go forward, and to stress and worry about our world, and how it’ll either improve or wreck our future.

The stress has certainly got to me, and there have been more occasions than usual of late where I’ve had real trouble working through it. It’s left me irritable, quick to anger, and generally in a sour temper. I could probably take all this sour stress and make one of those sourdough starters that so many people started doing this Spring. I’ve always found it hard to hear the memories and feel the emotions of the best days of my life over the obnoxious clamoring of the worst memories. Lately it’s been harder than ever, but I’ve tried my best to cherish the best moments of my life and my time at home. 

This past weekend in particular had so many wonderful moments. On Friday, the executives at my Mom’s company decided to give all of their employees Juneteenth off. So, that morning for the first time in at least 21 years my parents and I together went to the Zoo. When I was little, I loved going to the Brookfield Zoo near our home in suburban Chicagoland with them and have cherished those memories ever since. Now, after living in Kansas City for 21 years, we finally went as a family to the Kansas City Zoo, a place that I usually visit at least once a week on my own when I’m home. We didn’t see everything we wanted to see, but we left truly happy. 

The Kansas City Zoo’s new Elephant Expedition Enclosure. The photo is my own.

Later that evening after dinner we drove up to my alma mater Rockhurst University at 52nd & Troost and took part in the Juneteenth Prayer Service that stretched for 10 miles all along Troost. This was a prayer service like no other, less silent meditation, or communal rosary, and more a celebration of the hope that our community on both sides of the dividing line feels that change is in the air. I sat there on a stone wall for an hour and watched as countless cars drove by, their drivers honking their horns, people waving, children singing from the back windows.

On Saturday we went to one of my aunt’s houses for a small backyard gathering. I always treasure the times that I have with my family, the whole crowd. Just sitting there with people whose company I enjoy, people who I’ve known my whole life, and experiencing the madness of our current world from the perspectives of their stories, jokes, and worries made everything seem better for a little bit. Sunday was similar, Father’s Day, a quiet celebration this year at home with my parents. My Mom and I made brunch for the three of us, brioche French toast and eggs, before spending the afternoon watching soccer and reading June’s National Geographic. This was followed by a quiet small gathering in Roanoke Park.

I was reminded of all of this, and in particular of that terrifying snowy morning on US-22 east of Pittsburgh on Sunday evening when we watched last year’s release A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, starring Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers. In part, the film’s Pittsburgh setting triggered those memories, and my thoughts on that January Saturday evening that I’d live in Pittsburgh if I got a job there, and how much fun I had at the Carnegie Museums. Yet more than that, the kindness which Mr. Rogers exuded in his life and work reminded me that this stress doesn’t have to be permanent, and that the best of memories should be the ones I treasure. I can still vaguely remember seeing him on WTTW in Chicago in the ’90s, and even a little bit on KCPT after we moved here to KC at the turn of the millennium. At the time I don’t really remember knowing what to make of the guy. Yet today, as an adult with far more responsibility to my community, our future, and to myself, I feel like if I were to try to learn from anyone in my own work as an educator, it’d be him.