Monthly Archives: February 2016

From What Life Were you Reincarnated?

A wise friend recently posed a question to a group that I belong to that has been sort of plaguing me: if, he asked, reincarnation is true and if, according to some tenets of the Buddhist faith, it is designed to offer us lessons not learned in past lifetimes, then what must our last lifetime have been like?

reincarnation

I imagine that the way people answer this question will be telling.  Some may adopt a binary response with either “I must have been terrible before to deserve this life” or “I’m closer to Nirvana than ever before!”  Others, such as the equally wise partner of the question’s originator, might re-frame the question to “what are the lessons I am supposed to be confronting with this particular life?”

Please know that I am not an advocate for literal reincarnation, but I like the opportunity to speculate about the lessons I might have been meant to learn along the present path:

  1.  People are kind and generous.  I know that there is evil in the world and that evil usually manifests itself in excessive self-focus.  But more generally I find people to be empathic, helpful, and downright lovely.  At least the people I run into boast these characteristics.
  2. There is a fundamental need for beauty.  I listened to a TED talk the other day (Denis Dutton: biologically hard-wired for beauty) and marveled at how, well, marvelous works of art, theater, literature, dance are and how crucial they are to positive existence.  I love living in the age of Instagram, where I can daily see the sunrise from my friend’s woodland home, witness the smile on a former student’s new baby, and see the first blooms of the season peek out from their wintery slumber.
  3. Skepticism beats gullibility any day.  Had to learn that one the hard way but it stuck good and hard.
  4. Disappointment is disappointing. But everyone confronts it, I imagine, and I have had my share.  I’ve done my best, I hope, to pick myself up and make the best of a disappointing situation.  I’m fairly sure there will be more of it along the way…
  5. Speaking truth to power is hard…and often has consequences.  If I was supposed to learn how to stop doing that I failed!

I know there are more, but these stand out to me as lessons I continue to confront.  What about you?  What lessons were you meant to learn from this turn around the wheel?

 

Blog Lull

This blog endeavor was supposed to be about my scholarship and teaching (“with occasional forays into knitting and audio books”) but this semester my teaching load does not lend itself to inspired posts.  I am teaching Research Methods and Statistics (twice) and I supervise Senior Project (16 of them this semester).  Although *I* find the two domains interesting I am not convinced that the students do, nor any readership I may have garnered.

And the place I am at with my scholarship/research is the tedious place endemic to all scientific endeavor…I am slowly, oh-so-slowly, plodding through data analysis on just about all my current projects.  Readers are unlikely to care that one must use Menchley’s Test of Sphericity in a within-subjects ANOVA to correct for any lack of homogeneity of variance across repeated measures conditions.   I can barely believe I just typed that and knew what it meant!

I’m knitting up a storm, but I’m always knitting up a storm…nothing exciting to share on that front.  And my current audio book is a non-fiction exploration of the latest nutrition science on the best ways to decrease obesity.  Unlike other “diet” books I have read I actually believe this author (a leading obesity researcher and endocrinologist, I believe) is relying on good science and I am likely to attempt some of his suggests: Always Hungry (an unfortunate title, in my opinion) by David Ludwig, M.D.

I guess all blog posts can’t be inspired or coherent.  Sorry…let’s just call this a blog “check in”!