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Embracing the Interrogative

This is the full version of a blog post that was commissioned by Books@Work and published on their blog in a condensed form.

The interrogative is a dying form - not only of grammatical expression but of life.  At a time when efficiency and productivity seem the driving forces of culture, it makes sense that emphasis should lie on the generation of answers rather than the formulation of questions.  Answers, after all, mean closure - answers grant one permission to put one thing to rest and move on to the next, and that seems the very definition of progress.  Questions, on the other hand, are messy, imprecise things that tend toward the propagation of their own kind, leading ad-infinitum to heaven knows where.  

 Contrary, however, to the common association of questions with innocence, the posture of inquiry is a sophisticated one.  The asker of questions has already committed - or is on the verge of committing - to a laborious, time-consuming, possibly futile, and inevitably frustrating program of observation and analysis.  This commitment to a journey without a definite goal is anathema to the current cultural climate.  It is a throwback to an earlier time when the cultivation of the intellect was allowed to constitute an end in itself.   In the late 1860s, the English writer Matthew Arnold defined "curiosity" as: "a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are, - which is, in an intelligent being, natural and laudable. ... [T]he very desire to see things as they are implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we blame curiosity."  Writing at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Arnold was already feeling the pressures of an increasingly relentless drive toward progress, and his argument for the life of the mind was simultaneously a plea for the preservation of humanity, insofar as that term might be associated with qualities of moral sympathy and an openness to communion with creatures and conditions not lying immediately within one's own frames of reference.

 It is difficult not to see the relevance of Arnold's words for our present moment when the forces of standardization are effectively eliminating the interrogative from our schools and eviscerating children of their natural and healthy curiosity.  At least from middle school onward - if not earlier - children are taught to answer questions, not to ask them; to see closure at all costs as the means to success in life.  And success, more often than not, for schoolchildren to college graduates, is proscribed by a limited pallet ranging from A to E, where "all of the above" indicates vague possibilities too tedious to spell out.   Interestingly, however, when I talk to eople who are - by others' estimation as well as their own - "successful" in their careers, the common factor in their accounts of what they most enjoy about their vocations is the challenge of formulating questions.  My friend the veterinarian who cares for some of the top race and competition horses in the country must string together symptoms with sets of branching questions in order to reach any diagnosis or prescribe treatment.   My friend the commercial photographer spends his days wrestling with questions of space and lighting in order to capture the beauty of his subjects.   And my former college roommate who is now a theoretical astrophysicist poses questions about the universe in terms that exceed my knowledge of the English language. Questions make us vulnerable. They bring us face-to-face with our own ignorance and invite us to step beyond the safety of ready-made answers and assumptions.  If we accept the invitation, they can open us up to the the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, and, occasionally, the wonderful.

 If you are a fan of National Public Radio, you have no doubt listened to Terry Gross interview guests on Fresh Air, a show that seems to have hosted every notable person of the past generation and the present.  Ms Gross lives her life in the interrogative mode, and to listen to her in conversation with her guests is to experience a sense of both intimacy and possibility rarely achievable in the rush of daily living.  What sets Ms Gross apart from the other capable hosts on NPR is a passionately genuine curiosity about the lives of her guests and about the worlds in which they live.  She boldly, fearlessly, pursues this curiosity, at times trespassing beyond the boundaries of what others might deem appropriate.

 In a recent interview with Joel Grey - the 82-year-old father of actress Jennifer Grey and a Broadway star in his own right - Ms Gross found herself addressing Mr Grey's sexuality. He had come out as a gay man only two years previously at the age of 80.  "I don't know how - this might be too personal, and I'm not quite sure how to put it," Ms Gross begins, her hesitation as apparent as her curiosity. "But you ended up coming out at a time in life when people are typically less sexually active because of how the body ages.  Did you feel bad that it was at that stage of life - it was only at that stage of life that you were able to be open?"  Now, asking an octogenarian about his sex life has got to be one of the more uncomfortable moments for a journalist.  To do so, as Ms Gross did, in a way that not only avoids offending the guest but further reinforces intimacy in an explicitly public context is a function of faith in the honesty of inquiry as well as in the safety of the space that has been created by the preceding conversation. "Safety" is a term that has been bandied about and politicized of late, especially in academic institutions, such that the very definition of the term - already one harnessed to subjectivity - has come under question.  But what Ms Gross's interviews make clear is that "safe spaces" are predicated upon a recognition of shared vulnerability. She exposes to her guests the risk she takes in posing the hard questions, and it is in the space of this mutual vulnerability that the most poignant moments of her show take place.

 This, it seems to me, is one of the greatest challenges in leading a successful Books@Work session - how to get a group of strangers, many of whom do not consider themselves "readers" and for whom being in a room with an English professor evokes unpleasant classroom memories - to embrace their vulnerabilities and enter into an interrogative mindset.  Because the goal of these sessions, as I see them, is not to offer answers on the text at hand but to create an environment where participants feel comfortable enough to pose their own questions - not just about the text but about their own perspectives and assumptions.  Being able to create such an environment requires a certain understanding of the stakes involved for the participants, and for many in a workplace setting, in the company of colleagues, what is at stake is often nothing less than the integrity of their professional identities.

 The challenges - as well as potential gains - involved in assuming the interrogative stance in a work environment were made apparent to me in a recent session at a company where I have been facilitating Books@Work discussions over the past year.  I was asked to lead several groups in reading William Carlos Williams' classic short story "The Use of Force" as part of the company's annual safety protocols initiative.  As it turned out, my sessions were slotted after a talk by one of the plant managers on the dangers of laceration and accidental amputation in the factory and warehouse locations.  My first group - which included several regulars from my previous book discussion groups - easily made the transition from the practical considerations of physical safety to Williams' more abstract presentation of the term and jumped right into discussing the different motivations of the characters and their conflicting perceptions of danger.   The last group of the day consisted almost exclusively of "shop" employees, none of whom had heard about Books@Work and all of whom made it clear from the get-go that they had better things to do than talk with me about a story they found boring and pointless.  Several of them sat with their arms folded tightly across their chests, their copies of the story conspicuously absent or pointedly discarded on the ground at their feet.  The wariness with which they regarded me beautifully and ironically replicated the central dilemma of the story, which is about the distrust of a poor family toward the doctor they have called in to examine their sick child.

 "The kid is just a brat," someone in the group muttered, referring to the child's refusal to be examined by the doctor.  The others in the group nodded assent.  A conclusion had been drawn.   End of conversation.

 "You think?" I said.  Busting through this kind of resistance can feel like trying to pry open the lid of a rusted paint can with the flat end of a screwdriver.

 Long silence.

 "She just dirty," someone finally said.

 "Dirty?" I repeated.  it was not a word that had come up in previous discussions of the story and my interest was piqued. "Dirty how?"

 "She just dirty. Filthy.  They don't want nobody seeing how dirty they are."

 "Yeah," someone else chimed in.  "They trying to hide that from the doctor from the start" (referring to the mother's embarrassment about the conditions of the house when the doctor first arrives).  "He probably think they the ones that started the sickness" (referring to the fact that other children in the school also have a similar bacterial infection).

 And then, the first man who had spoken - the one who first brought up the issue of dirt - looked me straight in the eye and said, "They don't want some doctor coming in there, passing judgment on their lives, talking shit they don't understand, and telling them what to do."

 I let that settle on all of us for a minute.  Sometimes the honesty of a statement can resonate more loudly than anyone had expected or intended, and I think all of us in the group lost our footing for a moment.

 "That must feel a lot like an invasion," I said after a bit.  "A violation."

 Which is, of course, what the doctor in the story does in a visceral way, forcing his instrument down the child's throat, despite her violent protests and finally securing the diagnosis he had suspected.  But instead of giving him satisfaction and closure, the affirmation of his knowledge leaves the doctor questioning his actions and motives, transforming what should have been a clear-cut case of diagnostic protocol into a story about the complexities of power and authority.  As much as anything, the story is about the inadequacy of answers.

 Was I able, in the course of that hour, to break down the wall of resistance in that group? No.  But if I see my work as helping people inch closer to the boundaries of the familiar where their understanding of the world and of themselves is momentarily destabilized and expanded, then that session was a qualified success.  More than anything, difficult sessions like this reinforce my conviction in the power of literature to allow us to enter those vulnerable spaces without sacrificing the illusory but entirely necessary shell of our identities; to ask of ourselves and of each other the tough questions while at the same time offering the safety of a graceful closure.  When the session is over, we close our books, toss out our photocopies, and leave each other's company.  But the best of the stories remain with us and within us; their questions linger, continuing to pry open the edges of our existence, insisting on the suspension of closure.

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Wanderlust

Wanderlust, I think, must be genetic.  My mother’s father was born to a poor peasant family in Fujian Province on China’s southern coast.  As a child, he was struck down with polio and lived for many years as a cripple, supporting his withered legs with canes.  I think the experience must have made him restless for movement because in 1935, he came to the US and graduated three years later with his Ph.D. in history from Harvard.  He met my grandmother (also a Chinese ex-pat) when she was studying at the University of Pennsylvania.  They traveled to Paris afterward to study and married in a small stone church nestled in the Swiss countryside before returning to China, where their four daughters and five grandchildren were born.

  My mother came to the States on a scholarship to study at Wellesley College when she was in her early thirties.  Two years later, when I was 6 years old, I left my grandparents’ house in Beijing to join her.  I spent the first three years of my life in this country roaming – largely unsupervised – around one of the most beautiful college campuses on the east coast.  After some hardscrabble years of working, going to school full time and single parenting, my mother completed her degree and was finally able to afford us the gift of resuming our wandering ways.  I remember New Year’s Eve beneath the Eiffel Tower; galloping through fields at the foot of the Swiss Alps on horses borrowed from a hotel bellboy; returning to China having forgotten the language and being unable to communicate with my family there.  I think I realized, even at 12, that finding a way home can sometimes be as difficult as leaving in the first place.

 But maybe this sense of estrangement from the familiar is part of the allure of travel.  Maybe the desire to be lost; to exist outside the boundaries that define daily existence; to seek some form of self-definition in the negative spaces – maybe these things, for some of us at least, are as vital as the need for shelter, safety, and a sense of belonging.

I was reminded of this recently when I went on a short trip after a year and half of staying close to home.  Walking the streets of an unfamiliar town, absorbing the rhythms and energies of new places, I felt something akin to pitching backward in a free fall that was at once frightening and exhilarating.  For a few days, I was not a mother, teacher, scholar or barn girl – those trusty pins that secure me to the four corners of the known world.

  It’s funny - when you are in a place where nobody knows or expects anything of you, the outlines of yourself can become more fluid, expanding and contracting into shapes you might never have imagined possible in your ordinary life.  I tend to think that is the essence of wanderlust – the desire to spin out the infinite possibilities of one’s self and one’s relation to the world; the stubborn refusal to accept stasis; the belief that even the idea of home is not fixed in time or place or situation but is forever created and rediscovered through the kaleidoscope of our wanderings.

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Fall

Fall, for me, has always been a season of fresh beginnings and expansive possibilities.  On those cool September nights that the newscasters call “good sleeping weather,” I can barely lie still for the ideas and projects knocking around in my head.  I went straight from high school to college, college to graduate school, and graduate school to teaching, so every September for the past 30-some-odd years has come with shopping for school supplies, stepping into new classrooms, and making first impressions.  I vividly remember lining up on the playground tarmac at the start of third grade, nervous about having homework for the first time; sitting in my first college classroom (Intensive Greek!) and feeling incredibly grown up; walking to the classroom to teach my first graduate class and having to wipe my sweaty, shaky hands on the strap of my leather schoolbag.  For a lot of my friends, returning to school from summer vacation was like being sentenced back to prison for long-forgotten crimes.  But fall for me has always brought excitement, redemption, and the promise of another chance.

 This year, however, things are a little bit different.  I’m still excited about the items on my ever-growing fall to-do list, but I also realize I’ve come to the end of the time I’d allotted myself to accomplish many now unaccomplished things.  When my sabbatical started in January, I ambitiously but confidently set myself a list of tasks to be completed by September.  I was going to move both of my horses up to Prelim.  I was going to make significant progress on three book projects.  I was going to become a more patient, attentive, and disciplined mother.  I was going to purge all the negative energy lingering from my divorce and become a model of tea-sipping Zen calmness.

 Alas.

 If there’s one thing this sabbatical has taught me, it’s that very few things – and least of all horses, writing, and emotional recovery – want to be wrestled into strict timeframes.  Most things, for better or for worse, like to unfold at their own pace, allowing for detours into revelations, surprises, and disappointments (otherwise known as “learning opportunities”).

 So instead of sitting here on this September afternoon and recording the accomplishments of the past nine months, I’m thinking about this process of unfolding and counting up the little things that will hopefully, someday, add up to bigger things:  Goldie and I went from routinely getting eliminated before the first novice stadium fence to jumping pretty confidently over a couple large training-level courses.  I learned to sit up more in the saddle.  I finished a handful of articles and added more ideas to my list of writing projects.  I grew a lot closer to my son and have learned to appreciate the gifts of being a single parent as well as cope better with the challenges.

 And Zen calm? Lord, that will never be me, no matter how much chamomile tea I drink.  The closest I get is finding, occasionally, that perfect balance and rhythm on a horse that lets the world fall away for a moment or two.  And, for now, that’s close enough for me.

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On Idols and the Art of Teaching

When I was in my early teens, I went through a series of what my mother called "infatuations."  I'm not sure if obsessions with role models constitute a rite-of-passage for every adolescent, but I do believe mine were of a more intense variety than those of my peers, whose respect for the adults around them never seemed to ignite into the all-consuming passions that beset me.  I remember being entranced for a period of two years by a young art teacher at my school who seemed to me the epitome of beauty and talent.  Tall, graceful, soft-spoken, musically and artistically gifted, frequently splotched with dried paint and smelling faintly of clay, she embodied everything I wanted to be but was not and feared I could never become.  

 I'm sure a large part of my hunger for idols came from the fact that in the suburbs of Boston in the 1980s, there were very few positive role models for Chinese girls who loved horses and American country music and harbored a weakness for Jewish boys.  And I'm sure the urgency of my worship was due to the sizable gap I knew to exist between who I wanted to be (a carefree, guitar-playing, artist / novelist / cowgirl) and who I was destined to become (a nerdy, overly self-conscious, high-achieving standard-bearer for the model minority).

 A quarter century later, I'm not yet a novelist, artist, or cowgirl, and I no longer believe in any one person's ability to achieve perfection.  But I still find myself drawn to certain aspects and qualities in people who can momentarily return me to the state of wonder that I experienced in my adolescence.  There are some young riders out there, for instance, whom I've known since they were bumping around on their first ponies and who are now - just a few years later - confidently competing at levels that paralyze me with fear.  The subtle, swift acquisition of grace astounds me, and I frequently find myself thinking, "Geez, I want to be like that kid when I grow up."

But I think the quality that most attracts me now is one that I would not have been able to appreciate fully when I was younger, and that is generosity of spirit.  I don't just mean generosity in terms of donating to charity or the occasional sympathetic gesture but a deeply held conviction that the greatest sense of self-fulfillment comes from the giving of one's time, energy, and knowledge to those who hunger for it.  I am lucky now to have trainers and mentors who possess this quality in abundance, supporting and encouraging me as I fumble doggedly toward my goals.  Coming from a family that understood little about my passions and pursuits, I am humbled every day by the knowledge that people who have reached the top of my sport have invested in my progress. 

I remember vividly the first time I realized I might really want to be a teacher.  I was in my third year of graduate school and had come to accept that a career of reading and writing about literature was an inherently self-indulgent, isolated and isolating activity that had very little impact on the real world outside of academia.  I was partially resigned to a life where teaching was just the price you had to pay in exchange for the space and time to do your research and writing.  Then a friend prompted me to volunteer for a literacy outreach program that connected Penn students with kids at a high school in North Philadelphia.  It was the first time in my short, sheltered life that I had been inside a school with steel bars on the windows, security guards with metal detectors at the front door, and hallways seemingly filled with pregnant girls who still looked like children themselves.  I spent two years working with high school students here - two years of reading, writing, and sharing ideas that I'm sure taught me a lot more than I taught the kids.

I learned that one of the most important things a teacher can do is believe in a kid when he lacks belief in himself and maintain a clear, unwavering faith in the learning process and the worthiness of the end goal.  Another is being willing to let go of one's own comfortable assumptions to understand alternate perspectives and appreciate the fears they might generate.   As I prepare to go back to school after almost nine months away, it is useful to keep these things in mind.

Thankfully, my trainers have been here, coaching me through the ups and downs of my riding, reminding me of these things every day.

[eventwriter]

Balance

One of the things I feel I am constantly working on in my riding is balance: finding the perfect, uphill, balanced canter to a jump; adjusting my balance to compensate for a crookedness in my horse; staying balanced in my own center of gravity so I don’t interfere with my horse’s movement.  Sometimes balancing requires real focus, and other times the work happens without my even knowing it.   This past week, for instance, the left side of my lower back started feeling tight and sore – to the point where I was taking several Motrin every morning just to be functional.  At first I thought it was because I was sleeping funny or had twisted something while running, even though I couldn’t recall a particular moment of injury.  Then one afternoon, I was up in the ring on a horse that was a new ride for me, and the pain in my back started pulsing through the worn-out glaze of painkillers, and I realized it was resulting from my body impulsively trying to balance the horse, who was very stiff going to the left.  It also occurred to me that we – humans, animals – are always striving for balance even when we are not consciously thinking about it.

 “Balanced” is not the word that comes most immediately to mind when describing myself.  Close friends have been heard to call me something quite the opposite.  Understandably so.  My life is usually a hectic blur of riding, barn chores, caring for my son, teaching, schoolwork, freelance work, research, writing, and trying to find time to cultivate my hobbies (music, art, creative writing) and personal relationships in the heady midst of it all.  The fact that I’ve been genetically implanted with a hyper-reactive sensitivity chip means that I’m pretty defenseless against the onslaught of excitement and anxiety associated with my various activities and am thus frequently hurtling between euphoric optimism and crushing despair.  My friends who lead lives with far fewer tracks – so to speak – see mine as a frightening, spinning thing constantly threatening to fall off-kilter.

 But here’s something I realized the other day – if it’s true that everything is always striving for balance, I think it’s also true that different beings find that balance at different speeds.  I think about my two horses, for instance.  Goldie (the warmblood) has this immense, lofty stride that seems to float dreamily along, even when she is galloping across country.  In order to achieve that same kind of balanced energy (physically and mentally), Rocky (the thoroughbred) has to move a little quicker.  He’s your typical Type A – sensitive, impatient, self-motivated, and on-the-go versus Goldie’s more relaxed, Type B, laissez-faire approach to life.  If Goldie were a human being, she would be the neo-hippie chick with the bandana in her hair and the gypsy skirt, strumming her guitar for coins on the sidewalk even though she could get a scholarship to Harvard.  Meanwhile, Rocky would be carrying a coarse overload, pulling all-nighters in the library at a third-tier college, working part-time at the local Starbucks, and dutifully emailing his mom every Sunday. 

 I’ve always identified more with the Rockys of the world.  Having nothing to do makes me nervous.  The other day, I came home from the barn utterly wiped.  After I put my son to bed, I collapsed on the couch and waited for sleep to overtake me.  It didn’t.  Instead, the chords of the new song I’m learning started reverberating in my brain, and I had to take out my guitar.  I ended up tinkering with it late into the night, and by the time my head hit the pillows around 1am, the music had already restored my energy.  What I realized was that the fatigue I’d felt wasn’t so much exhaustion per se as lack of balance.  I’d spent a long stretch of time taking care of others – other animals, other people, obligations to work - and the tiredness was my body telling me I was out of balance.  As soon as I did something that was purely for myself, something that allowed me to withdraw completely into my own creativity - balance was restored, and I felt refreshed.

 What I realized through that experience and through riding every day is that balance is not always achieved as a result of conscious effort.  Things naturally try to find their balance.  Things happen, people enter or exit your life, you experience yearnings or impulses for reasons that are not immediately perceptible or altogether rational but that guide you toward correcting an imbalance somewhere.  And accepting that balance is both natural and inevitable is maybe the first step to finding it.

[eventwriter]

Witness

Something happened yesterday that made me both sad and angry.  Driving out to dinner through Lancaster county, I passed an Amish family rolling by in the opposite direction through slow moving traffic.  I drive in Lancaster a lot, and the Amish are part of the landscape.  But no matter how many Amish buggies I pass, I always look with interest at the horse, noting its breed, color, condition and wondering what it might have done in its past life.  Some are clearly bred to race in harness, their high-stepping feet flashing their history past corn fields and laundry lines.  Others have just as clearly come from or are shortly headed for the sales. 

 Anyway, yesterday was no different, and as I watched in my rearview mirror, I saw the horse collapse and fall to the pavement, its front and hind legs splaying gumby-like on either side of its body in a way I didn't think was physically possible for a horse.  There was a clatter of metal shoes on asphalt as the horse tried to stand, but after struggling unsuccessfully for several attempts, it simply lay still on the road.

 At this point, I had pulled my car to a complete stop and was blocking traffic on the narrow, two-lane road, so I drove forward and parked in the nearest driveway and ran back to the cart, where the horse was still on the ground.  Two of the eight people in the cart had gotten out - a father and his teenage son by their looks.  The son was yanking on the reins so hard the bit was hanging halfway out of the horse's mouth and the father, unbelievably, was whipping the poor animal's wasted flanks.  The horse was a tiny little thing - way too small to be pulling a large cart with eight people in it - and it was in horrible shape.  Its spine rose up sharp and ridged across its back; its body was covered with sweat and rain rot so bad I couldn't tell what color its coat was; behind the heavy black leather blinkers, its eyes were wide with fear. 

 I asked the father if we could unhook the cart from the harness to give the horse a better chance of righting itself.  I took one side of the cart and he the other, and we rolled it out of the loops in the harness and off the horse's back.  The horse still didn't move.  It always terrifies me a little when a horse falls and stops trying to get up.  The father resumed whipping the poor animal with a piece of leather from the harness, and I had to restrain myself from grabbing the strap and belting him with it.  Instead, I asked politely that he stop hitting his horse, then turned back to patting the animal's head.

 I must have been a sight, standing in the middle of the road, cradling the head of a collapsed horse, dressed in my dinner clothes and platform heels.  The Amish girls in the cart were amused - giggling and pointing at me, and I wanted to march up to them and ask them why they weren't down here helping.  I wanted to ask them how they could laugh and chat when their horse had just collapsed beneath them - a collapse caused, as far as I could tell - from overwork and lack of proper care.  As I looked into those scared, blinkered eyes, I thought about my own horses, whose weight, health, and exercise are so carefully measured and monitored, and I wondered that two such different conditions could exist in the same universe much less within ten miles of one another.  I remembered coming out to Lancaster as a child with my parents and being impressed with the simple, old-fashioned lifestyle of the Amish.  I remembered enjoying a buggy ride.  Standing there in the middle of the road yesterday, I thought of humanity and how its loss can be overlooked - even justified - by the show of simplicity and quaintness.

 The horse eventually did stand up, and I was dismissed, my assistance no longer needed.  I went on my way, and they went on theirs, no doubt forming as many judgments about me as I had about them.  But Ghandi - I think it was Ghandi - said something like "the nature of a society and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."  I believe that to be true, and the story that horse had to tell about its people was an ugly one that I won't soon forget.

[eventwriter]

Failure

I'm teaching an online class this summer called "Business Writing."  It's one of the writing intensive electives offered through the English department as a gateway course into non-academic writing, and it's my first experience teaching through an entirely online format.  About a week and a half into the course, I received an email from a student berating me for giving her a (well deserved) poor grade on an assignment.  The gist of her message to me was that this was "only" a college course ( I can only assume she meant that the course did not rise to the level of what she experiences as real life) and that my job was to encourage her with my grading.

 In the 18 years I've been teaching at the college level, I've not had an undergraduate student lecture me about my job, and I was somewhat taken aback.  Perhaps the online format encourages a certain testing of boundaries whereby, because I am invisible and essentially anonymous to the students, they feel more at liberty to challenge not only my authority but the entire legitimacy of the academic endeavor.  In any case, I stood my ground: her performance on the assignment was abysmal, indicating a poor understanding of the unit lecture and skill sets.  I could not, in good conscience, raise her grade, not even for the sake of warm-hearted encouragement.

 But her email did get me thinking about the culture of affirmation that has sprung up around education in this country.  While I certainly believe in the powers of positive reinforcement, I was also raised in an environment that does not condone praising children for fear of giving them bloated egos and fostering complacency; where good is never good enough and perfect is always two steps farther than where you are.  And while I certainly do not aspire to be a "tiger mother" either to my own child or to my students, there is something important to be said about sticking to high standards and being able to look failure in the eye.

 Event riders are probably the finest example of this idea.  No rider worth her salt would say she has never fallen off or failed in some epic way.  It's a fact of a rider's life that in order to be good, you need to be bad - a lot.  No rider I know wants to be mollycoddled by her trainer and told positive, affirming things about herself all the time (or even half the time).  If I'm schooling for an event and I'm doing something wrong, I expect my trainer to tell me so I don't make a costly mistake in competition.  It would be unimaginable to me to tell my trainer that this is "only" a lesson and she is not doing a good job of affirming my capabilities.

 I wish this same idea could be carried over to our education system where, currently, students' fear of failure actually gets in the way of their ability to learn and grow.  I can't quite imagine how that might happen in any kind of systematic way.  So my next best wish is that everyone might participate in a sport where failure is understood to be an essential part of the process rather than an end; where teachers are the ones you expect to push you beyond the limits you set for yourself; where achievement is measured by the ability to change and grow rather than affirmed by the status quo.

[eventwriter]

Fear

I’ve been thinking lately about fear – both the long-range, abstract kind (I am being a bad parent and therefore my child will grow up to become a social abomination) and the concrete, immediate kind (my horse will refuse to jump that giant brush and I will crash into it and die).  In my sport – and I can only assume in many others as well – fear is not necessarily a positive emotion.  It can paralyze you, impede your progress, and seriously get in the way of teaching your horse to do its job. 

 A sports psychologist once suggested that I come up with a playlist of fight songs to listen to before a competition to ward off that nauseating feeling I get when I walk a cross-country course and every jump looks damn near impossible.  I did try blasting Sara Bareilles’s song “Brave” repeatedly while driving to an event once, and it didn’t really help, just FYI.  Maybe I should have tried something more aggressive.

But, at least biologically speaking, fear is an entirely necessary, life-preserving emotion.  All those chemicals responsible for nausea and paralysis are the same ones that prepare you for survival against an assortment of dangers.  In a sport like eventing, which I would argue is continually challenging a normal human being's and horse's sense of what constitutes safety, one of the biggest difficulties - at least for me - is not the hard work of training but the struggle against biology.

 The other morning, I confessed to my partner that more days than not, I wake up with at least one or two fears taking up room in my head – fears about personal or professional confrontations that need to be dealt with; fears that I won’t be able to give my horses strong, positive rides; sometimes a general fear that I won’t have the energy to get through my day.  My partner – who is about the least fearful individual I have ever met – was mildly appalled and implied there was something disturbing and abnormal about my daily struggle with fear.  Rising to my own defense, I came up with an on-the-spot argument that I have since actually started to believe.

 What I said to him was that fear is a gift, and I’m lucky to live the kind of life that challenges me every single day.  It’s a life I’ve chosen for myself, perhaps because I cannot imagine feeling alive any other way.  Every day, I walk out the door carrying my little case of fears, and every day, I come home having at least unpacked if not discarded them.  Sure, some of my fears end up coming true (I fall off or don’t do my best and let myself down), but I rarely let fear stop me from trying, and on the worst days, that’s at least a corner to hold onto.

 One of my biggest fears for this past weekend’s event was the “beefy brush” jump on the cross-country course.  (You know when the event organizers call a jump "beefy," it's something you should be afraid of.)  Neither of my horses has jumped that kind of obstacle before (at least with me), and that jump just tortured my head all week.  Galloping down to it yesterday, I had the fleeting thought that I could just pull up, but instead, I put my leg on and both my horses jumped that freaking brush better than any other jump on course – in perfect rhythm and with a foot to spare over the top.   I think it’s safe to say that the two moments of landing from that jump were the highlights of my month, and I was just flooded with gratitude for my horses, whose bravery so many times exceeds my own.

 So maybe that’s why I’ve chosen a life where fear is as much of a fixture as saddles and bridles.  Fear allows you to be brave and honestly, how do you even define bravery or strength in the absence of fear?  Fear creates those moments of partnership with your horse when you each contribute your share of adrenaline and go-get-em-ness to complete the course.  And that experience of creating bravery together adds up after a while and can carry you through for the next time.

[eventwriter]

The first post

When I was little, I would pretend I owned a barnful of horses, and the horses would take turns galloping next to me wherever I went.  Sometimes, I would hop on one of them bareback, and we would leap over obstacles in our path (branches, benches, rocks), and I would adopt the half skipping, uneven run characteristic of all little girls prone to imagining their bottom half is equine.  But owning a stableful of horses is about as unrealistic a life as one can dream up for the child of a single, Chinese mother, and for every hour I spent mucking stalls for free rides on other people's ponies, there were ten more of chasing the immigrant dream: academic excellence; an Ivy League education; a job one's parents can brag about to their friends. 

 I was thinking about this yesterday as I was driving home from a horse trials (a 5-hour round trip journey gives you lots of thinking time).  Stopping for gas in Lisbon, Maryland, I went around to check on the trailer, and the sight of my two horses looking back at me - curious about where we were stopping, trusting me to get them home safely - made my eyes sting and my throat close up a little.  Owning two horses and getting to spend half my life riding is a dream I never really believed would come true.  Sure, it took me thirty years to get to this point, and yeah, it might take me twice or three times as long to move up the levels as everyone else in the world (at least it feels that way sometimes!), but every day, in the moments between the chaos of balancing horses, work, and parenting, I do realize I'm living my dream and try to remind myself to enjoy every minute of it.

 I'm starting this blog because I want to make more time for those moments; to reflect on the challenges as I pursue my riding (and other) goals and hopefully document the successes; to remind myself to enjoy the journey as much as the destination.  I'll also be sharing my thoughts on education because, after all, that is the profession for which I was trained.  I think there are some interesting connections to be made between a life with horses and a life in academia (as polar opposite as those things might seem on the surface).

 I hope you'll enjoy reading this blog, and I always welcome comments and opinions.