Using fiction and science, the New Yorker considers where we’re at:

“And though history has made us self-conscious in order to enhance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the river. I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.”

“Moreover, Harold had the sense that he had been trained to react in all sorts of stupid ways. He had been trained, as a guy, to be self-contained and smart and rational, and to avoid sentimentality. Yet maybe sentiments were at the core of everything. He’d been taught to think vertically, moving ever upward, whereas maybe the most productive connections were horizontal, with peers. He’d been taught that intelligence was the most important trait. There weren’t even words for the traits that matter most—having a sense of the contours of reality, being aware of how things flow, having the ability to read situations the way a master seaman reads the rhythm of the ocean. Harold concluded that it might be time for a revolution in his own consciousness—time to take the proto-conversations that had been shoved to the periphery of life and put them back in the center. Maybe it was time to use this science to cultivate an entirely different viewpoint.

I think this is the most powerful point of this article:

“There weren’t even words for the traits that matter most—having a sense of the contours of reality, being aware of how things flow, having the ability to read situations the way a master seaman reads the rhythm of the ocean.”

Two things come to my mind.  First, what is it that we give value to?  When I teach, do I center in on the students decision making, their ability to understand themselves, read others, read his surroundings and find a meaningful way to connect with their surroundings?

Secondly, what if we don’t have the words to name the kind of talents we need and that some of us have and some of us may not. The spaces in language reflect our limitations.

That is where fiction enters the conversation and gives us a complicated more nuanced way to see ourselves and a way to develop our thinking.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks#ixzz1E2aGy2ya

15 Feb This entry was published on February 15, 2011 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Writings by Other Authors. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.