Degrees
of Freedom
New Life Story Seeds # 14
Dear Friends,
Autumn is coming to New York. The
purple loosestrife that blooms so
extravagantly along the ditches and roadsides of New York has faded, and
the trees have already begun to turn red and gold. The nights grow
cooler, and soup weather is upon us. It's that nostalgic time, when
memories of school days past rise up to comfort and haunt.
The newsletter continues to grow, with over 900 subscribers.
Thanks
to all of you who spread the word and forward newsletters to your
friends and family. My newest goal
is to publish shorter newsletters
more often. Stay tuned for changes.
Wishing you wonderful new life stories, as much or as little learning as
you desire, and all the degrees of freedom you need,
Ellen Moore
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In This Issue
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A Thoughtful Quotation
Juicy Questions
Hearth and Soul
Books/Links/Resources
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A Thoughtful Quotation
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"to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and
day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any
human being can fight, and never stop fighting"
e. e. cummings
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Juicy Questions
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What does it mean to you to be yourself?
Who are you, and how free are you to be yourself?
How do you know what your real self is?
What are the penalties and rewards when you remain true to yourself?
To what extent do you listen to the promptings that come from your core
self?
How was that core self formed?
When and how have you ever reinvented yourself?
How and to what extent has the world tried to make you like everyone
else?
What battles have you fought?
How could you find ways to remain yourself without battles?
What keeps you going?
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Hearth and Soul
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Degrees of Freedom
Thursday, August 24, 2000
Late afternoon, the waning of summer. The
Adirondack chair on the patio
fits my back perfectly, and I prop my feet against the slatted foot rest
as I sip from the tall mug of tea on the table beside me.
My favorite
season approaches, and yet, there is a certain wistfulness in this time
of beginnings and endings. Yes, I
am looking forward to the new
semester, but given my deteriorating physical condition, there is an
undercurrent of anxiety and uncertainty about how long I will have the
energy to continue teaching. I've
not fully recovered from the previous
semester, and I am exquisitely aware of the clock ticking away toward
August 28.
As I close my eyes and lean back into the chair, the whirring song of
the cicadas takes me back in time, and suddenly I am a five-year-old
wiggling my first loose tooth: In a
few days, I will run and skip the
half block to the one-room school to begin first grade.
I admire my new
loafers from Vincent's; Daddy has surprised me with a red plaid Howdy
Doody book satchel; and Grammie has bought yards and yards of dark
cotton prints and plaids for the new school dresses she will sew for me.
Mamma cuts off my long braids, and Grandpa ties rubber bands around the
tops of them, stuffing the big envelope labeled "Ellen's Braids" into
a
pigeonhole in the walnut drop-leaf secretary that once belonged to his
father.
I'm so excited I can hardly breathe. It
seems I have waited for school
all my life, for the beginning of my freedom in a larger world.
When I
ask what will be expected of me in first grade, my mother tells me,
"Just be yourself and you'll be fine." That's what she always says.
I interrupt my reverie to return to the task at hand. It's time. With
a shiver of anticipation, I pick up David Myers' textbook, Psychology.
I've lugged it with me to the patio, marveling at its heft.
Must weigh
at least ten pounds. I take a deep breath and plunge into the book.
"To be human is to be curious about ourselves and the world around
us,"
I read on page two. "Psychology's
ancestors therefore date to the
world's early writings." A
mention of Aristotle's theories about
learning, memory, motivation, emotion, perception, and personality.
On
the facing page, a historical timeline and ancient photographs of
several of psychology's pioneers, including Wundt, Freud, James, Pavlov,
Watson.
The second paragraph continues: "Philosophers'
thinking about thinking
continued until the birth of psychology as we know it, on a December day
in 1879. In a small room on the
third floor of a shabby building at
Germany's University of Leipzig, two young men were helping a long-
faced, austere, middle-age professor, Wilhelm Wundt, create an
experimental apparatus."
With a jolt, my mind propels me back to my first Experimental Psychology
class so many years ago. I've
written extensively about it over time,
but I remember one particular musing a couple of years ago.
Yes, here's
the entry from my 1998 journal:
Thursday, October 1, 1998
It's been many years, but I still remember how I gasped at my first
glimpse of Sam, thinking my grandfather had somehow come back to life
and materialized before my eyes. It
wasn't the physical appearance,
the gaunt frame, the craggy face under a thatch of white-blond hair.
It was the twinkle, that ebullience, that joyful laugh, a certain
intensity. Meeting him in the hallway was a collision with a lightning
bolt just before it snakes across the sky.
The only way I can describe him is that he was always so much himself,
so alive. So spontaneous and
studied at the same time. Part
scientist
and lover of truth and beauty, part Mississippi farm boy.
When he
walked he almost danced; when he talked he almost laughed; and when he
lectured, I didn't breathe.
On the first day of Experimental Psychology, he drew a horizontal line
on the chalkboard and wrote Wilhelm Wundt's name on it to begin a
diagram. The Wundt who began the
first-ever-in-the-world psychological
laboratory in Leipzig, 1879. Wundt
had a student by the name of Edward
Titchener.
"You all know Titchener, the Structuralist who went from Leipzig to
Cornell and developed the core-context theory of meaning.
Well,
Titchener had a student named Guilford, who..."
He chalked on down the board, writing names on horizontal lines, drawing
vertical lines to connect the horizontal ones, emphasizing that
psychology was so much more than just a body of knowledge, more than
books, more than experimental studies. That
scientific curiosity and
certain ways of thinking were passed down from teacher to student in an
apprenticeship system. That through
a personal relationship between
mentor and mentee, values, attitudes, and methods were transmitted.
That the mentee could draw on the mentor's portion of the "biological
library."
A second vertical line began with William James, then continued with
Edward Thorndike at Columbia. The
two vertical lines converged at Ohio
State University, where Sam's major professors were D. D. Wickens, a
"descendent" of Wundt, and Tupes, descended from the line of William
James.
With a flourish, Sam wrote his name on a line beneath Wickens and Tupes,
then drew another horizontal line beneath his own. After a pause, he
said, "If you choose, you may write your own name here."
Goose bumps. A direct line to the
first psychological laboratory in the
world. A direct line to William James who wrote that the greatest
discovery of our age is that we can change our lives by changing our
minds.
A long series of mentoring relationships, an unbroken line.
A light
passed on to each succeeding generation. The
torch has just been put in
my hand, and I'd better not drop it. I
was a late bloomer, a forty-
something returnee who had just resigned a successful career of several
years, so I wasn't easily impressed. My
cynicism, both natural and
acquired, seldom allowed me the luxury of awe, but for once, I was
enthralled.
To be in the presence of such a "body electric," to be given an open
door to know what Sam knew, to be given an invitation into the circle of
those who search for the truths of the human mind! It was an adventure
far beyond mere mountain climbing.
It has been said that teaching is the act of carrying on one's education
in public, and that was exactly what Sam did.
When he conducted class,
he continually surprised himself in his thinking aloud.
He'd stop with
a look of amazement on his face, saying, "I never quite thought of it in
just that way, but it occurs to me that..."
Oh, he was demanding, of course. But
statistics and the scientific
method were about finding the truth, about scrutinizing competing ideas
with skepticism and humility. "If
you would be a real seeker after
truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far
as possible, all things," wrote Descartes. Sam taught us that with
every breath.
It was a heady trip for us all. When
he expounded on the statistical
concept of degrees of freedom, I thought the term had a magnificent
sound. I determined to use it as
one of my guiding principles, so in
every situation, I ask myself how I can increase the degrees of freedom
for myself and for others.
I remember how Sam would gaze with reverence and wonder at an Analysis
of Variance on the blackboard as if it were the Venus de Milo.
"Isn't
that beautiful!" he would exclaim. How
it all added up horizontally and
vertically. How simple numbers
could render the truth of a chaotic mass
of data.
And above all, I remember that characteristic gesture of his.
A gleeful
clap of his hands and a simultaneous snapping of the fingers of both
hands high above his head. A look
that seemed to say, "How could you
possibly imagine any more fun than this present moment?" And he
demonstrated daily to us that indeed, he was having the time of his
life.
I chose to put my name on that line below Sam's, and he became my major
professor, advisor, mentor, role model, and friend. Every Thursday at
noon, I strode past the big bronze lion--the university's symbol--to
meet him for lunch and conversation: science,
art, books, poetry,
music, the human condition.
Sam rarely talked about himself, but through the years, I heard rumors
about him; about his years in
Intelligence, that he'd been a prisoner
of war in World War II, that he had designed bombers and test-flown them
for the Air Force, that he had taught fighter pilots at the Air Force
Academy, that he slept only four hours a night, how he'd helped to
create statistical processes (which I'm now using) at the Rand think
tank, how as an industrial psychologist he'd used the JND, the "just
noticeable difference" to make a gradual alteration in the fragrance of
Life Buoy Soap so customers wouldn't notice the change.
I learned so much from Sam.
"We catch courage from others," suggested Carolyn Heilbrun, and I
certainly caught courage from Sam, along with a host of other qualities.
When students got upset with his high standards, he would chuckle,
"Well, get in line--take a number." Then he would launch into a
disquisition about how he could only make one person happy, and that was
himself. His feathers never seemed ruffled, and he treated everyone with
respect, no matter how they treated him.
The printed bookplate in all his books was a quotation from Shakespeare:
"...tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,
and good in everything." Indeed,
he taught me to find the gifts in
adversity.
Sam taught me to slow down. Taught
me to think before I acted, taught
me to buy time. He gave us a
training question from his Air Force
Academy days: You've just lifted
your B52 off the runway, and your
instruments tell you your number two engine is on fire.
What should you
do first? (a) radio the tower for
instructions, (b) shut down engine
number two, (c) send a mayday signal, (d) ask for a cup of coffee.
Although it's important to shut down engine number two to cut off its
fuel supply, it would be a tragedy if you looked at that huge control
panel with all the blinking lights and shut down the wrong engine.
Better to take a minute to clear your head first, so the correct answer
is to ask for a cup of coffee. Many
times I've reminded myself to slow
down and "ask for a cup of coffee."
Just watching Sam stand, walk, listen, and react to people was an
education. There were deep lessons
of respect, compassion, depth. He
exemplified Hermann Hesse's suggestion: "To
hold our tongues when
everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and
institutions; to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with
more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work; to
show greater patience; to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from
mockery and criticism; all these are things we can do."
One day Sam announced his retirement. We
held a farewell dinner for
him; and he moved to San Antonio.
Sam and I kept in touch, although I was lax about writing and calling
him. On one of my visits, I took my
son along, and he and Sam, both
fliers, talked pilot talk. It was
on then that I finally heard how he'd
been shot down in the war over occupied France. He parachuted out of
his burning plane--leather jacket and face on fire--into the middle of a
Panzer division. The Germans rolled
him in the dirt to put out the
fire, gave him water from their canteens, and drove him to a hospital.
When he regained consciousness, he made friends with the French
orderlies and convinced them to smuggle him out in a laundry cart--just
like the movies. Only one of a
thousand "Sam stories."
Lately, Sam's been busy writing himself a new life story for himself
after the death of his beloved wife of 48 years. He tours and cruises,
competes in the Senior Olympics in both bicycling and poetry, and last
summer at the age of 78, he biked coast-to-coast from Oregon to
Virginia. He takes in symphony
concerts, a rodeo or two, and even takes
bike racing lessons.
"I'm learning to use the momentum of the downhill to power me back up
the hill," he says.
"Just like life," I observe. And
we both laugh.
And just this week, I am nearing the end of my many-year-long academic
journey. Sam has been a wonderful mentor, even at a distance.
Last
week, he finished reading and critiquing my dissertation, said it was
"grand," sent me a card to say so. And on the front of the card, a
lioness
with one paw protectively around her cub.
Monday, August 28, 2000
School starts today, and I'm prepared except for one last detail.
I call
Sam early this morning to make sure I have the genealogy correct.
I
catch him just before he leaves for his daily 60-mile bike ride.
We
reminisce about our long connection, our shared heritage, the
"biological library," and the whole idea of intellectual genealogy.
As
we talk, I visualize the final scene of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451--a
vivid representation of the living library.
So now I am ready. It's time.
My black canvas briefcase bulges; my
mind and heart brim with information and alacrity; my wavering energy
level pulses as strongly as inspired memory, a handful of vitamins, and
two mugs of vanilla maple tea can boost it.
I will ask my students to turn to pages two and three in their text.
On
the chalkboard, I will write the names of Wilhelm Wundt and William
James. I will draw the horizontal
lines and add the remaining names. I
will chalk the vertical lines that connect them. I will write my name
below the name of my mentor: Samuel
Warren Cochran. Beneath my name, I
will draw another horizontal line. After
a pause, I will say, "If you
choose, you may write your own name here."
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Books/Links/Resources
==========================================
WRITING THE WAVE
Writing the Wave: Inspired Rides for Aspiring Writers.
Author Elizabeth
Ayres says, "Imagine a writer, pen poised above the page. As words pour
forth at breakneck speed, the writer seems master of the moment. Ideas,
feelings, images, and scenes tumble out in a breathtaking, inspired
flow, which seems effortless but requires years of toil to achieve. The
writer finishes the work with a flourish. What a ride!"
From the Barnes
& Noble website: "Writing
the Wave is unique because it breaks the
writing process down into basic elements, then recombines those elements
in progressive stages corresponding to beginning, intermediate, and
advanced levels of writing. It shows writers how to work past
inhibitions and damaging perfectionism to find a wealth of wisdom and
unique perspectives within themselves. While readers are safely
shepherded through writing wilds, they also learn the important skills
that give them the confidence and knowledge they need to keep on writing
after they finish the book."
http://bn.bfast.com/booklink/click?
sourceid=1342882&ISBN=0399525777
GEMTACTICS
Catherine Ednie's back online! If you were a dedicated addict of
Vestinambula (as I was), you'll want to bookmark her website.
Here's
what I said a few months ago: Her
writing is--how can I describe it?--
audacious, trenchant, avant garde, poetic, both spiritual and
unconventionally theological, searingly honest, experimental, hopeful,
and hopelessly beautiful. In the past year, she's undertaken a series of
revisions and is writing a whole new life story. I almost always feel as
if I've been punched in the solar plexus, and I hold my breath in
suspense. Visit Catherine's journal at: http://www.gemtactics.net/
INNERVOICE
"Instead of searching in an outward direction to find the answers, all
you really need is the ability to pause for a moment and look inside
yourself to discover true peace and abundance," writes Dr. Ronald
Bissell. He has developed a series
of step-by-step books and an amazing
audio cassette that can take you on this wonderful journey to find
'life's path' thus allowing you to speak to your Inner Voice and
discover the true meaning of life. Dr.
Bissell also offers Compass
Points, a free weekly commentary of insights and life experiences.
http://www.innervoice.com/
JIM HENRY
Singer/Songwriter/Psychologist Jim Henry presents his art for the human
journey. On his website, you'll
find resources, readings, and
information about his workshops. Check
out his book (The Privilege of a
Lifetime) and CD's (Catch the Breeze from Heaven and Looking for the
Human Heart). According to Jim,
"Life's secrets do not unfold because
of what we do, where we go, what we achieve, or what we own.
They
unfold as we become ourselves."
http://www.henryjim.com/index.html
AMALTHEA
The Amalthea Literature list is a forum for authors to share their
poetry and fiction. Interesting essays, etc. are also welcome. As long
as it's an original work, anything goes! All members are encouraged to
send in their work. To subscribe to
Amalthea Literature, send a blank
e-mail to mailto:amalthea-subscribe@topica.com or visit:
http://www.topica.com/lists/amalthea/subscribe
JOYFUL SOARING
The Joyful Soaring Tips newsletter is offered to assist readers in
lightening their load and helping their life flight be Joyful. Coach
Barbara Luther offers upbeat information, ideas, book reviews, and
useful tips for those who consciously choose to focus on the positive.
Send an email to: mailto:JoyfulSoaringTips-ON@lists.webvalence.com. Please
Note: You may type an "x" in the subject or the body if your e-mail
program requires it. You will receive an opt-in confirmation request.
WRITERS DAILY QUOTE
Pithy sayings and advice from the masters:
http://www.barbarabretton.com/
LITERARY TIMES
Submit your writing to one of the best upcoming literary magazines on the
web! The Literary Times (http://www.literarytimes.com/) publishes short
fiction, essays, short stories, and poetry.
Submit your work to:
mailto:literarytimes@yahoo.com
HER PROMISE
HerPromise.com is a volunteer and giving resource site of
the HerPlanet.com network. HerPromise.com
is looking for articles in
any of the areas listed below.
* Caregiving and Caregivers for the adult population
* Local Heroes or Heroines who have started and maintained
community service projects to help people in need
* Non-profits who may be looking for help in the following
interest areas:
* Shopping to support a non-profit
* Donation of large item real property (houses, cars, etc.)
* Environmental concerns
* Insights into Grief and Loss
* Practicing Gratitude in daily life
Contact: Lael Johnson <mailto:lael4@gte.net>
Managing Editor, HerPromise.com
http://www.herpromise.com/
INSCRIPTIONS
A free weekly e-zine for professional writers. Get publishing
news, articles, reviews, and writing jobs delivered to your
electronic doorstep each Monday. Don't forget to visit the
Inscriptions Magazine website for fun, facts, and info on
other writing resources.
http://www.inscriptionsmagazine.com/
INTENSIVE JOURNAL
"The difficulties we encounter in our life are like logs," wrote depth
psychologist Ira Progoff, "Our inner life is like a flame. What we need
is a safe way to burn the logs." "Just bring your life," he said.
http://www.intensivejournal.org/
ROSE'S CORNER
This site is an ever-changing "work-in-progress". Watch this space for
information about Rose, her friends, Women's Spirituality, Domestic
Violence, and Abuse Survivor information, among other things.
http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/3445/index.html
I N T I M A C Y T O D A Y
O N L I N E
Welcome to the online edition of Intimacy Today. In keeping with the
mission of helping people create healthy, loving, intimate
relationships, you'll find great tips and links for singles, couples and
parents, as well as updates on interesting ideas in the world of
relationships.
http://www.relationship-institute.com/creatinglifelonglovingrelationships.cfm
DAILY AFFIRMATIONS
Jeanie Marshall's DailyAffirm Process is designed to support you moment
by moment, day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year.
Each month she focuses on a different theme with five different types of
affirmations. The daily messages
include suggestions for you to work
with the affirmations. The WWW
alternative is available at
http://www.mhmail.com/today.html
WRITE READ
A major new portal for writers, WriteRead.com
offers articles, books, software, courses, market
connections, publishing and other resources.
WriteRead promises to bring writers the resources
they need to be more successful in their work.
http://www.writeread.com/
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