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itsbetterthananal · 7 years

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a bunch of you said you would be interested in hearing about some of the things i do to take notes and study in college so i thought i’d put together a little something. i cant emphasize enough how these are just things that work for me and aren’t guaranteed to help you and im not saying these are necessarily better ways to study because i know some of you wont find these helpful to your situation but this is just my way

Note-Taking

1. Buy a 5 subject notebook. 3 subject and single subject also work but I prefer a 5 subject because then I can just have one (or 2) notebooks that I throw in my backpack every day. That way, im much less likely to forget my notebook like I would if im having to switch out notebooks every day, and I wont have disjointed notes

2. Have proper supplies for taking notes. For me, these means a pencil, a notebook, and an array of different colored highlighters. For others, pens or other utensils may help, but I find them extra. For each class i only bring a single pencil and a single highlighter (different color for each class)

3. Determine if your professor is a powerpoint kinda person (those who put most of the information in words on the slides) or a lecture kinda person (those who put few words on a slide or have no powerpoint at all). In my experience most professors will put a lot of information on the slides, but some dont.

if they do put most words on a slide, write it down in full if you can. I know they say you shouldnt write everything on a slide but if its new information it will make more sense to you written in a full sentence when you read it back while studying. If you arent given enough time to write it all down, skim for bullet points, or if you have the opportunity to go back on the slides later, make a note to come back to that section and copy it down. If you’re in a slump that day in class and have access to the powerpoint at home, listen and go back later to copy down the information you missed.

(example of writing things down in full or nearly full sentences, usually verbatim from slide)

If they dont put words on a slide, you have to do a bit more work. If the professor just puts up the headers of what theyre gonna talk about, just write down the first one before continuing. that way, you have room to put down the information under the first header. To understand when the professor is moving on to a new subject, listen out for indicating words, such as next, however, etc. start a new header. Leave an extra line or two around this section of information, as professors without information written out will often forget certain points and come back to it when they remember. If you miss any information, simply move on. Dont miss information because you’re trying to copy someone elses notes immediately.

4. Spaces and indents. Im pretty inconsistent with my spacing and indentation within my notes, but there are some rules that i follow to keep organization. When a subject changes, or I think a subject is changing as the professor goes along, skip a line and start a new section. This is usually indicated easily on a slide, but if listening listen for a new definition having nothing to do with the past information. Having chunks within the notes allows your brain to separate the information and begin chunking it, which means you will start to associate the information to do with that one subject. If you accidentally create a new chunk when the subject is the same, just indicate in the margin that it is a continuation of the subject, or a subsection. That way when you come back to it you can go aha, yes, this is actually all just one big thing of information.

Indentation is another thing im inconsistent with stylistically, but important. Always always always indent if the information is a subsection of what you are talking about, or describing the thing above it. Even if you have to indent 4 times within one chunk. this indicates to your eyes that there is information within the subject that needs to be remembered, and again your brain can begin chunking it. theres no specific type of mark i make for indentation, i consistently switch between dashes and bullet points, making sure not to use one under the other to confuse myself.

(ex. of indentation and chunking. i switch between dashes and bullet points to indicate information within information)

5. Highlighting. important to understand how, when, and where. Highlighters are my biggest helpful tool when it comes to studying. Firstly, i get a different colored highlighter for each subject, so that I dont have to get confused when going back to study on where i need to go. Then, as the lecture goes on, I highlight all the opening headers or information that I think will be of importance/what most of the examples are about. This is easy when professors have words bolded in their powerpoints, but sometimes you have to be more active in listening if the professor doesnt use a powerpoint. you can always go back to highlight stuff, so dont go overboard. If you are unsure on whether something or not should be highlighted, wait and highlight whats important later once the professor has gone over the information. The reason i do this is so when im going back to study, my eye will immediately be drawn to information that I need to know and understand, rather than being overwhelmed by a whole page of text or cluttered examples with no indicators. Dont worry too much about going overboard with the highlighter at this point, sometimes you feel like long sentences are meant to be important and can highlight the whole thing. This will be fixed when you come back around to study. Please note that other tools such as colored pens or underlining can be used for this but highlighters work better for me, underlining makes more clutter.

(ex. of using highlighter to draw the eye to things of importance. This was important in my statistics class because theres a lot of cluttered numbers and examples in my statistics notes that ended up not being important but just classwork)

6. You gotta pay attention. even if that means you gotta take breaks. sometimes in class you’re burnt out and cant fathom even writing stuff down. just listening will never do you any harm. sometimes I have to check social media for a few minutes before tuning back into the lecture just to give my brain a second to breathe. videos are a good time to do this. try your best to find a way to concentrate for the most amount of time. that doesnt mean you have to concentrate the entire time. many times in class i have stopped taking notes and just listened while playing games on my phone, because sometimes thats what you need. but try your best not to unfocus from whats being talked about. Better to have 80% of the information received by your brain and let 20% not make its way through than to half ass it and only have some of the information stored.

Studying

1. Find your prime studying environment. This could be in silence (the library), with some background noise, with tons of noise, with music, outside, or any other kind of environment. Where you study and under what conditions make a difference in how well you proceed. For me, my prime study environment is either in silence or with some background noise, but i absolutely cannot focus if people are extremely loud or there is music playing. I often will sit at the desk in my room with an old lets play playing in the background, similar to leaving the tv on something you dont really care for. This keeps my brain from getting completely bored and burnt out, which can happen when im studying in silence. Pick a place where you know someone wont come up to distract you. we all know our brains will do anything to get out of studying

2. Have another smaller notebook/section dedicated to studying. A lot of my studying involves rewriting information. you will need some sheets of paper, and having a notebook or a section of a notebook will help you not forget your stuff when you go out to study. I usually will just use a single notebook or a section of a notebook that was not filled up from the previous semester.

3. Condensing. a.k.a the actual studying part. Condensing involves taking the information you wrote down in your notes and condensing it down into much smaller chunks. By doing this, you are forcing your brain to a) reread over the information, b) determine what from that information is important and connected to your chunk, and c) rewrite the information in a way that is better understood by you. This starts by rereading the first chunk of information and writing down the subject and key words/phrases from the sentences you wrote. Basically instead of writing “when first observing a crime scene, the first responder must be attentive to all details of the home inside and out. they must also be careful to not to contaminate any possible evidence that may be there” you write “observe scene - attentive, dont contam”. Its the same information, just condensed, and since you already read the full sentence to get the words, the condensed bullet point makes sense to you. This is where you take those highlighted parts of your notes and break them down to their basic information. Also, if an area of text isnt highlighted, more than likely the information in there is extra and wont necessarily be in the test. Better to concentrate on what you /know/ will be important because the professor bolded it on the presentation, and leave those areas unless you know you are certain you know the skeleton of the subject.

(an ex. of condensing information. this put about 5 pages of notes into one page. highlighter while studying is optional because it can get messy and cluttered, but i continue to highlight each term/section i need to know just to reemphasize it in my brain)

this can get messy if you’re not careful. Keep the indentation from your original notes. arrows are a great way to show a progression of steps or information in a short manner. If you dont understand something or are missing a bit of information, put a question mark next to it in your study guide to indicate you either need to go back to your notes or ask a professor/google what tf is going on there.

This is a lot of work. it is time consuming. you have to rewrite a lot of stuff. sometimes you may not be able to condense all your notes before an exam. Sometimes you may only get through a few pages before quitting. thats okay. even doing this for some of the info you learned can help you learn it a little better. when rereading the information it can go in one ear and out the other but rewriting the information forces you to focus on it.

4. Diagrams. usually best in science related classes for me, and often provided in a powerpoint slide. I use diagrams and drawings frequently in my biology notes to make sense of something. For instance, when I was in my cell biology class, I drew out the processes of the citric acid cycle rather than just writing the progression in bullet points, because it helped me understand what was going on with all the chemicals and such. Drawings of processes can help you envision the process which can help recall when it comes to tests

(ex. of a diagram that was provided in my human factors psychology class. placing information like this can help those who are picture oriented when it comes to learning)

5. Allow yourself breaks. after youve been going for a while your brain can whine and go no more!!! so go get some food. or take a shower. or watch a yt video. or check your social media. your mental health should not be ignored. plan certain times to study in the future and stick with them. after 15 minutes come back and see if you can still focus. sometimes a quick break is all you need. offer yourself an award if you get through a certain amount. after finishing studying for my midterms i would always go and buy myself a starbucks frappucino.

thats about it really. I hope some of these tips can help some people. for me condensing and rewriting has gotten me all A’s for the past 3 semesters. your brain loves some solid chunks of information. feel free to reblog for reference if youd like! and let me know if you want me to make more education related posts

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chocolate-brownies · 6 years

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In the weeks leading up to the third annual Women’s March this weekend, I got to speak to ten of the leading women in the mindfulness movement and find out what’s on their minds.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the women leaders in the mindfulness space—there are many more amazing women leaders, and we’ll be profiling as many of them as we can over the next year. These ten women were chosen based on recommendations from their peers. They come from across the country and across the movement, they’re engaged in research, teaching, writing, and speaking about mindfulness both at home and around the world.

These women bring the diversity of their experiences in the world at large and in the mindfulness movement to bear in their work, and in these conversations. Despite their differences, many echoed similar themes: kindness is necessary, trust yourself, find your community, meet yourself with warmth. It feels like good advice for this weekend—and well beyond.

1) Keep listening and find your community

Mirabai Bush

Mirabai Bush has watched the mindfulness world change gradually over her almost-fifty years as a leader in the field. She’s a long-time activist, co-founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind and Society, a key contributor to Google’s Search Inside Yourself Program, author of many books including Compassion in Action, Working with Mindfulness, and more.

From her earliest days as a young meditation student in India, encountering monasteries full of men, and all-male meditation teachers, to her experience as a woman in business, asked by men who’d stop by her trade show booth if she could get them a coffee while they talked shop with her male business partner, to her experiences as a young mother, and now as a grandmother.

“Let us just say that many of the barriers to women leading a really fulfilled life and making the best contribution they can in all areas of life, they’re there for women teaching mindfulness, too. Patriarchy is really deeply embedded in our culture. Things are changing, but it sure was difficult in the beginning.”

“We can’t do it alone. We really need each other. Our lives are busy and full, yet we’re still struggling with the individualism that’s promoted through capitalism.”

Bush thinks back to those early days as a student of male teachers and notes, “we didn’t see any models of how you brought a female awareness into how you’d do these practices.” Such an awareness is crucial, of course, “in order to bring these teachings into everyday life.” For Bush, the change came when she had children. “For me that was my biggest growth—being pregnant and then being a young mother. There was nothing like it for keeping you in the moment, without judgment, in a loving way. And being a mindful grandmother is so cool, really knowing how to listen, and tuning in to those little open minds.”

There’s something to those intergenerational female relationships, Bush believes. We have to look for ways to be women in community. “We can’t do it alone. We really need each other. Our lives are busy and full, yet we’re still struggling with the individualism that’s promoted through capitalism. There aren’t as many structures for us to even find community.” Bush adds, sometimes all it takes to make a profound change in your sense of community is one good friend “with whom you can talk about what you’re learning and what you’re struggling with.”

2) Love your imperfect self

Kristin Neff

Kristin Neff has been thinking a lot about traditional gender roles, and how they can block self-compassion. Neff is a professor of human development and culture at the University of Texas and the world’s foremost research expert on self-compassion. Men think self-compassion is about being soft and nurturing, and that it’s something that will “undermine your strength,” says Neff. “For women, we have a little less self-compassion than men do.” Women think self-compassion is about being selfish. “Women are always supposed to focus on others, be kind to others, take care of others, and it just feels selfish to do it for ourselves.”

So these days, Neff is thinking more in terms of balance. “In some ways masculine and feminine don’t really mean that much, they’re constructs. But there’s something they point to—the nurturing, the tenderness, the openness.” That’s the feminine side. “The protection, mama bear energy, fierce compassion.” That’s the masculine side. “Everyone needs both,” says Neff.

“Women are not really allowed to be fierce, we’re not allowed to be so active, and men are not allowed to be tender and warm with themselves. So the next phase of my work will be about how to help people integrate.”

The next phase of Neff’s work is focussed on integration. “Women are not really allowed to be fierce, we’re not allowed to be so active, and men are not allowed to be tender and warm with themselves. So the next phase of my work will be about how to help people integrate.” It feels to her like urgent work these days.

Part of the challenge is shifting the capitalist narrative of “perfection” that keeps people from loving their imperfect selves. “Self-compassion is such a perfect alternative to self-esteem. You don’t have to feel special, you don’t have to feel better than other people, you don’t have to get it right, you just have to be a flawed human being like everyone else. It’s just a more stable source of self-worth and a more stable way of coping with difficulty.”

3) Unbrainwash yourself

Helen Weng

For Helen Weng, her work as a neuroscientist, her lived experience as the child of Taiwanese immigrants, and her mindfulness practice are inseparable. Weng has spent the last 7 years investigating the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness meditation. What she’s observed as a racialized person in mindfulness circles has made her want to do things differently—and help to change the conversation for other minorities who meditate.

Weng learned how to use her own mindfulness practice to navigate the dynamics she observed in academia. “Every time I have to assert my own voice, the white people around me are very surprised, there’s a lot of resistance, or they make assumptions that my work is owed to them. I had to learn how to keep my presence of mind when someone is arguing with me in front of a big group just to establish social dominance.” Weng also made it part of her practice to be more vocal more often, so that others who were racialized wouldn’t feel so isolated. “It’s easy to internalize for minorities that there’s something wrong with them. I thought I couldn’t trust my own voice because people were always arguing against me.”

And Weng acknowledges her own privilege and its accompanying fragility, in her work as a clinical psychologist with transgender clients. “Gender norms are so deeply socialized,” she says, I had to do my own personal work around some issues, and used compassion and mindfulness to help me. It was uncomfortable. Realizing where you have privilege and breaking down your ego, it can feel uncomfortable and dysregulating. It’s not the job of minorities to help you navigate your fragility. Often the minority person will say things to help the majority person feel better, to ease their fragility. That dynamic is even more harming.”

Weng’s personal mindfulness practice allowed her to approach the issue of fragility in a couple of ways. One, she names and describes fragility, for those who may be unsure about the term. “When I feel my own fragility getting activated I feel like I’m going to throw up, and like I’m falling down. When you connect it to what it feels like, people get it and recognize it for themselves.” She says when people don’t recognize that what they’re feeling is their fragility, their impulse is to reset the power dynamic. “I’m the one in charge, is what the ego is saying—usually not consciously—I’m uncomfortable because I’m supposed to be in charge, so I’m going to reset the power dynamic.”

“Trust your body and psyche more and more and that’s how you’ll gain your power. It’s a process of un-brainwashing yourself.”

Weng’s other approach is to bring minority and marginalized communities into her research projects. She says not only are scientists largely homogenously white men, so are their study participants. Weng approached the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, CA, which offers mindfulness practices to people of color, queer people, people with disabilities and more. They collaborated on designing studies that are culturally sensitive to people from different groups. “Once you make procedures more sensitive for diverse people it actually makes it more sensitive for everyone,” Weng says. “So I’ll use these procedures as my baseline now.”

Weng knows her diversity initiatives are good not only for the communities they serve, but also for herself. “If you actually embrace the fragility and discomfort, it enriches everything. My work is enriched, and I’m enriched as a person. There’s so much more spaciousness and openness and connection at the end.”

Finally, Weng says, she’s learned to make mindfulness practices her own. “It’s trial and error to find what works for you, but listen deeply to your body to see what gives you more vitality and makes you more connected to yourself and others, and feel free to adapt or change anything. I love music, so I listen to music while I’m more present with myself. Some would tell me that’s not meditation, but they’re wrong. Trust your body and psyche more and more and that’s how you’ll gain your power. It’s a process of un-brainwashing yourself.”

4) To be alive as a human being is to have inherited much

Rhonda Magee

For Rhonda Magee, practicing law and practicing mindfulness go hand in hand. “Lawyers have to struggle with ethical questions of right and wrong,” she notes. “Lawyers are called in when there are high stakes—somebody is threatened with loss of freedom or the right to be in this country, custody over children. Lawyers are called in when those who call are suffering.”

“If we can engage mindfulness, we can manage stress and support ourselves in the practical aspects of what we’re trying to do while also deepening our capacity to serve in ways that minimize the harm we do along the way.”

For Magee, that understanding of harm includes her own experience “as a woman of color in a society and a world that wasn’t necessarily created for a person like me to thrive.” She talks about the surplus suffering “that comes with the way our different identities and our embodiments in the world are met with preconceptions and stereotypes,” and the opportunity she has to meet that suffering with mindfulness.

“Through my life, I’ve had the opportunity to become more aware of the subtle ways identity may be showing up—what is the rightful place of a woman, or a black person in a group?—by seeing how we’re all caught up in making meaning and perceiving each other through lenses shaped by a culture that has made all these identities relevant to us.”

“There are particular ways that we know something about suffering, that has an extra dimension tied to the way we’re met in the world as women.”

Mindfulness is the balm for what Magee calls “that extra layer of suffering, wounding and harm that we may be experiencing or causing others.” And she feels fortunate to have the opportunity to support others in exploring that. “Bringing mindfulness to our social identities and the challenges we face simply because of the way we’re packaged has been healing for me. Bringing mindfulness to bear on these aspects of our experiences in the world is a very rich path, a door into mindfulness as robust and rich as any other doorway.”

It’s a door Magee believes more women should walk through. “There are particular ways that we know something about suffering, that has an extra dimension tied to the way we’re met in the world as women. Knowing the great richness that comes with vulnerability and living compassionately, understanding empathy and the joy that can come from connection, means that we have a lot to offer the mindfulness movement.”

Magee speaks from the experience of a 51-year-old cis-gendered racialized black woman in America—and that informs what she is able to offer. “I really just believe that if we’re willing to look at our own experiences carefully, we have unlimited capacity to help transform the world. So we should be encouraged to be our beautiful unique selves and know that our voices are incredibly needed in the world at this time.”

5) Trust your own experience

Willoughby Britton

Willoughby Britton sees a lot of parallels between the world of mindfulness and the women’s movement. As a clinical psychologist and research scientist at Brown University Medical School, Britton has been studying the effects of mindfulness on mood and anxiety and is one of the few researchers looking into the potential negative psychological effects of meditation.

Her first inkling that her personal experiences might be marginalized by the larger mindfulness community came when her own meditation efforts, and those of many she knew, “did not conform to the dominant narrative of stability, clarity and calm. We all figured we just needed to try harder,” she says. “When I was working at in patient hospital during my residency, there were two meditators who became psychotic while on a retreat. Thinking that two in one year was a lot, I asked some meditation teachers if they had ever seen such meditation-related difficulties before and most reluctantly admitted that they had.”

Enter the first parallel. “What I discovered through the “Varieties of Contemplative Experience” research study, was that the mindfulness movement has a lot of parallels with the women’s movement where the dominant narrative was not only omitting but also—through repetition—actively silencing other, less desirable narratives.”

The mindfulness movement has a lot of parallels with the women’s movement where the dominant narrative was not only omitting but also—through repetition—actively silencing other, less desirable narratives.”

Throughout her career, as a neuroscientist, and in meditation, Britton has observed the power dynamics that influence systems, organizations, and society. “Part of my practice and research is to watch how these dynamics play out in the mindfulness world. The examples are numerous: the tendency to dismiss my own experience and yield to authority figures; the tendency to speak or act in ways that will be socially rewarded, such as reporting only the positive meditation effects or narratives, while omitting the negative ones. I can see in myself how easy it is to perpetuate unhealthy power dynamics and how vigilant and committed I have to be to counteract those default tendencies.”

That commitment, Britton believes, is what will bring progress. “Women and other marginalized groups have learned that positive change depends on giving voice to previously silenced narratives, so that a fuller, more accurate picture of reality, history—or meditation practice—can have an equal seat at the table.” So Britton prioritizes representing and documenting marginalized voices and alternative narratives in her research.

At the same time, Britton’s keenly aware of the dangers of confirmation bias. “My mindfulness practice has taught me how easy it is to deceive myself and to reinforce what I already think, so I have to keep asking: What am I missing? What are my potential blind spots? Who could help point out what I am overlooking?”

Still, she returns to a simple—though not necessarily easy—ethos: “Trust your own experience, speak your truth, find allies.”

6) #whogets2bewell

Angela Rose Black

For Angela Rose Black, PhD, founder and CEO of Mindfulness for the People, mindfulness presented itself as a matter of life and death. As a child in Indianapolis, she spent time at Flanner House, a multipurpose center that offered services to kids, seniors, and more. There, Black met Frances Malone, who was the director of Flanner House’s child development center.

“Among many things, she prioritized reminding us to pay attention to our surroundings; to walk and sit with dignity; to savor our food as we nourished our bodies. I don’t think she called it ‘mindfulness’ but rather emphasized ‘awareness’ as critical to our survival as Black children in a racist society,” Black says.

As Black moved through an academic career in which she studied health disparities, with research focused on black women’s health and stress, she herself suffered from stress and sought relief in meditation and mindfulness. There too, however, she found stressors. “My very existence in a given mindfulness space is oftentimes disruptive. Opening my mouth to ask ‘who gets to be well’ is resonant for some and triggering for others. The very breath we are invited to focus on is valued in some bodies while not in others.” For Black, navigating the mostly white world of mindfulness means that “on a daily basis I am building my capacity to be with my own suffering, the suffering of racial injustice in our own backyards, while disrupting these same injustices.” And that, she says, “is an emotional, physical, and energetic workout!”

“My very existence in a given mindfulness space is oftentimes disruptive. Opening my mouth to ask ‘who gets to be well’ is resonant for some and triggering for others. The very breath we are invited to focus on is valued in some bodies while not in others.”

Black was compelled to work for change—to truly disrupt the racial injustice she saw in the mindfulness world. “Honestly, my fatigue with people of color being under-considered and undervalued in all things mindfulness research, teaching, and practice—despite our deep historical roots of engaging in mindful practices—propelled me to unapologetically create Mindfulness for the People.”

Mindfulness for the People offers a variety of courses, including mind-body training for People of Color in search of compassionate ways to address Racial Battle Fatigue, and for White people to recognize and respond to White Fragility with compassion.

While the material Mindfulness for the People teaches may be challenging to some, Black’s parting words are simple. “To women of color reading this: I see you. To white women reading this: do you see us?”

7) Un-hijack your nervous system

Susan Kaiser Greenland

Susan Kaiser Greenland found her way to mindfulness through the panicked haze of a family health crisis. She became obsessed by the idea the food her family was eating was poisoning them, and as she was frantically pitching anything in their tiny New York City kitchen that contained sugar. Her husband intervened and suggested she learn to meditate. Will it solve the health crisis, she eagerly asked. “He said, ‘no, it’s for you. You’re driving me crazy.’”

A high-powered lawyer for a national television network, co-founder of the Inner Kids Foundation, author of multiple books on mindfulness, and a mother of two, Kaiser Greenland recognizes that mindfulness has been a lifeline for her. “I truly believe mindfulness-based self-regulation strategies are crucial at all ages, to give people the bandwidth to have open minds so they can learn and listen,” she says. She’s motivated by the change she’s seen mindfulness bring to people’s lives. “Once people recognize their nervous systems are getting overly burdened and they can dial that back, the worldview piece comes into place.”

“The situation we’re in now keeps me up at night. No one’s talking to each other, they’re talking past each other, hand-wringing and finger-pointing. Everyone’s nervous system is jacked up, everything they do jacks it up further.”

But, she believes, there’s still plenty of work to be done on the listening and learning front. “The situation we’re in now keeps me up at night. No one’s talking to each other, they’re talking past each other, hand-wringing and finger-pointing. Everyone’s nervous system is jacked up, everything they do jacks it up further.”

She recognizes that in her own past, even with the benefit of her mindfulness practice. “The generation of women who were coming up through the corporate world when I was there, in order to get where we were going, you had to take on a lot of male characteristics. I used to come home like the terminator,” she recalls. “I know mindfulness has helped me soften that edge and be more confident, but that was a price of trying to break through to certain jobs that just weren’t open to women at the time—you had to develop a male way to navigate.” Now, Kaiser Greenland knows “there’s a different way to navigate, kinder, more compassionate, more effective—and women have an easier time getting that than men.”

8) Be clear on what you want and find allies

Amishi Jha

Amishi Jha knew she needed help when her toddler looked up at her during storytime and asked what a “Womp” was. Jha had read this same book to her son dozens of times, and had been truly looking forward to spending this time with him. “What is he talking about?” she remembers thinking, realizing she didn’t have a clue—though she’d been reading about Womps for several pages, and had over successive nights. She was in her second year as an assistant professor, her husband was starting grad school, and she’d lost the feeling in her teeth from grinding them so ferociously. “I was at the point of quitting. I needed to do something that felt more manageable to me.”

To Jha’s surprise, meditation turned out to the answer. She’d been raised by Hindu parents who both meditated daily. But Jha was a scientist. “A rational person. I do things that are evidence-based,” she remembers thinking. She happened to hear Richard Davidson talk at the University of Pennsylvania. “He showed these brain images, one a brain induced into a negative mood, and one a brain induced into a positive mood. I asked him how do you get that negative brain to look positive, and he said mediation.” Jha was shocked, but she wanted that positive brain, so she bought Jack Kornfield’s Meditation for Beginners, and within a few weeks had noticed a difference in herself—and also found a new area of research for her neuroscience lab. “I got really interested in how we can offer these practices to other people who have extremely demanding high-stress jobs, medical and nursing professionals, active duty military personnel and spouses.”

“Hearing about meditation from a western-trained Indian scientist really got those women empowered to say ‘I can have this practice available to me day-to-day while managing my kids, my family, my profession.”

Jha’s work on the science of mindfulness took her to India to present her research at the Mind and Life Institute. While there, she was able to visit the town where she’d been born, where excited relatives quickly organized a public talk for her at a local studio. The room was full—mainly of young, professional women with families. But during the Q&A session, a man stood up and asked: “Why are you coming here, as a westerner, to tell us about these practices that we developed in this country? We’ve had meditation retreats in the mountains forever.” This was a question Jha had been dreading. But then a woman spoke up.

“One of the women in the room raised her hand and said ‘yes, but we’re working moms, and we want to know how to do this every day. We can’t go away to a hilltop meditation retreat!’” For Jha, it was a full-circle moment. “Hearing about meditation from a western-trained Indian scientist really got those women empowered to say ‘I can have this practice available to me day-to-day while managing my kids, my family, my profession.’”

For Jha, what empowers her is supporting—and being supported by—other women. “Be clear on what you want to achieve, and find allies,” she says. “That sense of being supported and acknowledged and valued is so important.”

9) Make America kind again

Shelly Tygielski

Shelly Tygielski has been working hard to bring more men—especially young men and boys—into the mindfulness movement, where most of her colleagues are women. “On the one hand that’s lovely, because it’s a safe space, and we have the ability to have this collective experience and to discuss things that are sometimes challenging or difficult to discuss when there are men in the room.” On the other hand, Tygielski, who launched America Meditates workshops in cities across the country, and also staged the first mass meditation at a sporting event, with Miami Heat Nation Meditation, knows that if real change is going to come, it’s going to happen when more of us are rowing in the same direction—and that has to include men and boys.

She thinks back to her twenty years in the corporate world, where she ended her career as president of a company with 2,400 employees. “I was usually the only woman in the room. and being mindful or being emotional is seen as a weakness, instead of a strength. So, for me, bringing the conversation into the boardrooms, into congress, into politics, around our dining room tables with the men in our lives, is crucial if we want to create this paradigm shift to make the world a kinder place.”

“Activism burnout is a real thing, compassion fatigue is a very real thing, secondary trauma is a very real thing, and I think that as women, in general, we’re raised to be really great caretakers, but we’re horrible self-caretakers.”

To that end, she’ll be taking her sixteen-year-old son and some of his friends with her to the Women’s March in Washington this weekend, and she hopes more men show up. “I want men to support women, not just by saying, ‘oh honey you should go,’ but actually by physically being there and being just as equally outraged by what’s happening and what’s going on in our political system today. Until all women are equal, with equal pay, equal access to rights, to healthcare, to speak up, no man is equal. There’s got to be that authenticity, and that authenticity means having to show up.”

And to the women who have been showing up, Tygielski has this to say: “Activism burnout is a real thing, compassion fatigue is a very real thing, secondary trauma is a very real thing, and I think that as women, in general, we’re raised to be really great caretakers, but we’re horrible self-caretakers.” Tygielski sees strength in numbers—and advocates a move from self-care to communities of care. And, she says, mindfulness is at the core of that. “Movements are about sustainability and about being able to create consistency in being able to show up. To really show up, not just show up to a meeting and your mind is somewhere else, but be able to show up fully, as the best version of yourself. Mindfulness has really helped me create that sustainability and center myself so that I could show up for the things I feel are larger than myself, and also make a much bigger impact.”

10) Believe yourself

Sharon Salzberg

For Sharon Salzberg, world-renowned meditation teacher, bestselling author of Real Happiness and nine other books, it all comes down to advice her teacher gave her in Calcutta, India, in 1974. “‘You really understand suffering, that’s why you should teach,” Dipa Ma told Salzberg, then a young adult with every intention of living in India forever, and remaining a life-long student. “I had a very tumultuous difficult childhood,” Salzberg says, “and that was the first time I ever thought about it as a potential credential for anything.”

Salzberg began as a reluctant teacher of mediation, and soon founded, along with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein, the Insight Meditation Society. Back then, she remembers, the main concern was understanding emptiness. But during a sojourn to Burma (now Myanmar) in the mid-eighties she was introduced to loving-kindness practices. The practices resonated hard with Salzberg, and she brought what she had learned back to the US, eventually writing a book called Lovingkindness. It was not met with open-arms in the meditation world.

“People said loving-kindness wasn’t an insight technique. They said, ‘it’s just a feel-good practice.’ But I had had a very powerful transformative experience with loving-kindness practice, so I just kept on teaching it.”

“It was a rough go,” she says. “Mindfulness was gaining popularity, scholarly research was beginning.” But loving-kindness was ahead of its time. “People said loving-kindness wasn’t an insight technique. They said, ‘it’s just a feel-good practice.’ But I had had a very powerful transformative experience with loving-kindness practice, so I just kept on teaching it.”

She discovered that a practice some of her peers wrote off as “just” a feel-good practice actually resonated hard with others, as well. “It’s very gratifying now that the pendulum has swung the other way,” she says, “that people are realizing compassion is the thing that was missing from mindfulness.”

She credits the kind words of her teacher, all those years ago in India, for helping her maintain her loving-kindess practice when others viewed it as frivolous. “Dipa Ma said to me: ‘You can do anything you want to do, it’s just you thinking you can’t do it that will stop you.’”

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The Five Rules for Self-Care in Politically Charged Times

Being whole and meeting our own emotional and physical needs first, is the only way we will build the world we want to see in the future. Read More

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January 9, 2019

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We’ve gathered 10 mindfulness practices created by women to help you live a generous, compassionate, healthy life. Read More

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Why Women Should Embrace Their Anger

A new book argues that rage could help women to improve their psychological health and move society forward. Read More

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‘None of the old rules apply’: Dave Eggers travels through post-election America

From dazed election night revellers in Washington DC to a gay Trump voter in Detroit to kids in Kentucky … The US writer gauges the mood of a divided nation

The word surreal is overused and often wrongly used, but in the case of the Washington Post Election Night Live party, the word was apt. First of all, it was a disco. There was a DJ playing a frenetic mix of contemporary Top 40 and pointedly apropos songs such as Pat Benatars Hit Me With Your Best Shot (Youre a real tough cookie with a long history ). Behind the DJ there were dozens of screens showing various television networks coverage of the election. The screens were so bright and so huge, and the colours so primary and vivid, that the experience was like being trapped inside an enormous jar of jelly beans.

Women dressed like Vegas showgirls made their way through the crowd with towering tiered hats adorned with chocolates from one of the evenings sponsors. The chocolates, round and the size of strawberries, were offered in pairs, enclosed in loose plastic sacks a bizarre but perhaps intentionally lewd optic? The bartenders were setting out Campari Americanos by the dozens. The food was by chefs Jos Andrs and the brothers Voltaggio. The Washington Post has a right to celebrate the paper is thriving and its political coverage extraordinary but this felt like Rome before the fall.

At some point early on, the music was turned down for 20 minutes so Karen Attiah of the Post could moderate a live conversation between the current German ambassador, Peter Wittig, and former Mexican ambassador Arturo Sarukhan. The talk was serious and enlightening, but the ambassadors seemed baffled by the nightclub atmosphere, and besides, few people were listening. The party was about the party.

And everyone expected Hillary Clinton to win. The attendees were largely Washington insiders lobbyists, staffers, legislative aides, pundits and producers. Most were liberal and most were confident. The nights only potential for suspense centred around whether or not Clinton would take some of the toss-up states, like Florida and North Carolina. When she was declared the winner which was expected before the partys scheduled end-time of 10 oclock there would be talk of who would be appointed what, with a not-insignificant portion of the partygoers in line for positions in the new administration.

Thus the mood was ebullient at seven oclock, when the event started, and was electric by eight. Kentucky and Indiana were announced for Donald Trump and that news was met with a shrug. More scantily clad women walked through the rooms serving hors doeuvres, and soon there were at least three showgirls wearing hats of towering testicle-chocolates. Young Washingtonians swayed to the music. Drinks were set under chairs and spilled. A young girl in a beautiful party dress walked through the drunken partygoers looking for her parents.

Then nine oclock came around and the party began to turn. Most of the states thus far had gone for Trump. None of these victories was unexpected, but the reddening of the national map was disheartening, and the margins in those states were often greater than expected. He took Texas, North Dakota, Kansas, Mississippi. Not a problem for the crowd, but by 9.30, people were panicking. Trump was leading in Florida and North Carolina. Nate Silver, the statistics shaman who had been roundly criticised for overestimating Trumps chances, now posted that a Trump victory was likely. Ohio was in the bag, Pennsylvania was trending toward him, and it looked like he could win Wisconsin and Michigan. A hundred guests turned their attention from the big screens to their little screens. They paced and made calls. The party emptied and we all spilled into the streets. Beyond the Washington Post building and beyond DC, the country had been swamped by a white tsunami few saw coming.

Election night at The Washington Post. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

For a few hours, the city had the feeling of a disaster movie. People scurried this way and that. Some wandered around dazed. Following the returns, we travelled from restaurant to bar to home, and the Somali and Ethiopian cabbies were stunned, worried less about Trump than about the prospect of Rudy Giuliani serving in the cabinet in any capacity. We all talked about where we will move: Belize; New Zealand; Canada. We no longer knew our own country. In Columbia Heights, when the election was settled, a young woman biking up the hill stopped, threw her bike into the middle of the road, sat on a kerb and began weeping. No no no no, she wailed.

The omens were there if you looked. A month before the election, Id driven from Pittsburgh to the Philadelphia suburbs and saw nothing but Trump/Pence signs. In three days I covered about 1,200 miles of back roads and highway some of the prettiest country you can find on this continent and saw not one sign, large or small, in support of Clinton. The only time any mention of her was made at all was on an enormous billboard bearing her face with a Pinocchio nose.

I did see Confederate flags. James Carville, the political strategist, recently quipped that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between, and there is some truth to that. There are a lot of men in camouflage jackets. There are a lot of men out of work. When you stop at gas stations, the magazine sections are overwhelmed by periodicals devoted to guns, hunting and survival. Then there are the tidy farms and rolling hills, the equestrian centres with their white fences, the wide swaths of Amish and Mennonites and Quakers.

I was in rural Pennsylvania to see the United 93 National Memorial in Shanksville a monument to the 40 passengers and crew who died in a windswept field on 9/11. The day I visited was bright and clear. The surrounding country was alive with autumn colours and, far on distant ridgelines, white windmills turned slowly. Just off the parking lot, a park ranger in forest green was standing before a diverse group of middle school students, admonishing them. Boys and girls. Boys and girls, he said. Youre standing here where people died. There are still human remains here. Youre goofing around and laughing, and I shouldnt have to tell you to be respectful. They deserve that. They quieted for a moment before one of the boys nudged another, and the giggling began again.

Trump supporters rally in Oceanside, California. Photograph: Bill Wechter/AFP/Getty Images

The memorial is beautifully constructed and devastating in its emotional punch. Visitors can walk the flightpath of the plane, a gently sloping route down to the crash site, which is separated from the footpath by a low wall. Its a grave, another ranger explained. So we dont walk there. Higher on the hill, there is an indoor visitor centre that recreates every moment of the day in excruciating detail. There are video loops of the Twin Towers being destroyed, fragments of the plane, pictures and bios of every passenger, details about the calls they made from the plane once they knew they would die. It is shattering.

Leaving the museum, a man in front of me, young and built like a weightlifter, couldnt push the door open. I reached over him to help and he turned to thank me. His face was soaked with tears. I got into my car, shaken but heartened by the courage of the 40 humans who had realised what was happening that they were passengers on a missile headed for the White House or Capitol building and had sacrificed their lives to save untold numbers in Washington DC. The American passengers of United 93 were from 35 different cities in 11 different states, but they died together to save the capital from incalculable loss of lives and what might have been a crippling blow to the nations psyche.

I left the memorial and turned on to a two-lane road, part of the Lincoln Highway that runs through the state part of the first coast-to-coast highway in the United States. Just beyond a sign advertising home-grown sweetcorn, there was a residential home, the first house anyone might encounter when leaving the United Memorial, and on this home, there is a vast Confederate flag draped over the front porch.

Its important to note that this was the Lincoln Highway. And that the civil war ended 160 years ago. And that Pennsylvania was not a state in the Confederacy. So to see this, an enormous Confederate flag in a Union state, a mile from a symbol of national tragedy and shared sacrifice, was an indicator that there was something very unusual in the mood of the country. Ancient hatreds had resurfaced. Strange alliances had been formed. None of the old rules applied.

The Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Mark Makela/Reuters

Steven McManus has come out of the closet twice. First as a gay man, then as a Trump supporter. We were sitting at a coffee shop in Detroits Eastern Market neighbourhood, and McManus was almost vibrating. This was two days after Trumps election, and McManus was elated about the victory, yes, but more personally, about the fact that after Trumps election, hed had the courage to post a message on social media declaring his support of the president-elect.

I lived a lot of my life as a closeted guy, McManus said, and the liberation I felt as a man coming out was similar to how I felt coming out for Trump. You really truly think youre the only one who has these feelings. Its liberating. I felt it was time to come out again.

McManus is a thin man in his late 30s, bald and bespectacled, with a close-cropped beard. He grew up in the part of the Detroit suburbs known as Downriver. Many of the areas residents had come from the American south in the 1940s to work in the auto factories, and the area still retains a southern feel. His father was a salesman who brokered space on trucking lines. Looking back on it now, McManus appreciated the fact that his parents could raise five children on one salesmans salary. But then came the Nafta, and the gutting of much of the Detroit auto manufacturing base. McManus watched as Detroit and Flint hollowed out and caved in.

Trump was the only candidate talking about the trade imbalance, McManus said. Being a businessman, a successful businessman, he understood why business decision-makers, at the highest levels of their companies, move their production overseas. McManus was angry when auto companies, after receiving bailouts from the US government in 2009, continued to move production to Mexico. In Detroit, we gave America the middle class. But this is now a false economy. The housing market is decimated, and the middle class is shrinking. I want someone to shake it up. Lets move the whole country forward.

McManus is not blind to the rareness of an openly gay man supporting Trump. But I dont have to vote a certain way based on my sexuality. In my mind weve moved beyond having to vote Democrat just because youre gay. And hes not worried about a reversal of the hard-fought right to marriage gays just achieved. Weve got our rights now, he said. Its settled. McManus and his husband got married three years ago in New York, before the supreme court decision legalised gay marriage nationwide, and it was in his new place of domestic tranquillity that McManus watched the Republican national convention. Two moments affected him profoundly. First was the appearance of Peter Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal, who was given a prime speakers spot and said from the stage, Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.

McManus was moved then, but he was even more affected by an unscripted part of Trumps speech. It was shortly after the Orlando massacre, and for the first time in my life, a Republican candidate for president said things like, forty-nine wonderful Americans, or beautiful Americans or whatever he said, were savagely murdered. And he said, I will protect gay and lesbian individuals. Some people at the convention cheered and some people didnt cheer. And then Trump said, off the cuff and off the teleprompter, he said, For those of you who cheered, I thank you. And I cried. I cried.

McManuss husband works for the army, as an IT specialist, and they both became bothered by Clintons email setup. If my husband had done the same thing, hed be fired. And its pretty hard to get fired from a government job. McManus began to follow Trump more closely, and found that he was agreeing with most of hispositions on trade, immigration and national security. I began to realise that Im more conservative than I thought. But he couldnt reveal this. He lives in Detroit, a liberal city, and works in the restaurant industry in town, where left-leaning politics dominate. But after coming out as a Trump supporter, he is finding himself emboldened. The day after the election, McManus saw his doctor, who is Muslim, and he mentioned that hed voted for Trump.

I just wanted to get it off my chest. I was feeling a little McManus sits up in his chair, to indicate the new confidence he felt that day. I told him, I came out as a Trump supporter today. And he went off for 15 minutes to the point where I almost walked out. He was impassioned about how he felt that Trump was disenfranchising Muslim-Americans. But our present state of terrorism does have a religious undertone to it. Finally I managed to get something off my chest. I cant remember who said this to me, either my husband or my ex, but I said to my doctor, You know, it wasnt a group of Catholic nuns that flew planes into the World Trade Center.

Proud to be a Republican Peter Thiel. Photograph: ddp USA/REX/Shutterstock

Later that night in Detroit, I ran into Rob Mickey, a professor of political science. He grew up in Texas, but has spent about 10 years teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. We were at a party benefiting an educational nonprofit. Doing something concrete and positive felt good, and being around kids felt good, but everyone was exhausted no one had slept since the election and 30 seconds into every conversation it turned to Trump, Clinton, what had gone wrong and what would happen next. One of the events attendees had been living in a central American cloud forest for years, and there was much talk about following her down there.

I told Mickey about McManus, and to him, the story of the gay Trump supporter was both surprising and unsurprising. Everything about 2016 was upside down. Parts of Michigan who had voted twice for Obama had turned to Trump. Rob and his wife Jenny had gone canvassing for Clinton on the Sunday before the election, and the reception they received was not warm.

I would say it was hostile, he said.

They had gone to Milan, Michigan, an overwhelmingly white town 50 miles southwest of Detroit. Its spelled like the Italian town, but pronounced MY-lan, Rob pointed out. The Clinton campaign had given Rob and Jenny a list of names and addresses of white working-class residents who had registered as Democrats but were labelled sporadic voters. Milan had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and winning towns such as Milan was key to delivering a Clinton victory in Michigan.

The homes they visited were run-down, with No Soliciting placards on every door. They saw no Clinton signs on anyones lawn. There were Trump signs scattered around town, but most of the residents they met were disgusted by the entire election. One woman said, I dont want to have nothing to do with that, Mickeyrecalled. Another said, I hate them both, including that guy of yours. When I pointed out that our candidate was a woman, she said, Whatever and slammed the door.

One house with a Bernie Sanders sign on the lawn looked promising. Mickey knocked on the door. A white man with a US ARMY shirt answered. He was missing an arm. Mickey introduced himself as a Clinton canvasser, and told the man he had supported Sanders, too, during the primary. Thats great, the man said, and closed the door.

The people we met that day were straight out of central casting, if you were making a movie about the disaffected white working class, Mickey said. Between 55 and 65, without college degrees. You could see that Lena Dunham and Katy Perry were not going to do anything to form a bridge to these people. If I hadnt read any polls, and I was basing it just on the people I met, I would have thought, boy, Clintons going to get wiped out.

It was different in 2008. Knowing that Michigan was securely in Obamas column and Ohio was on the bubble, Rob and Jenny went to Toledo to knock on doors in trailer parks and housing projects. Foreclosure signs were common. When they introduced themselves as canvassers for Obama, the residents, all of them white, were welcoming and chatty. The interactions were long, Mickey said. The people were worried and they wanted to talk. Ohios 18 electoral votes went to Obama in 2008 and 2012.

This campaign wore a lot of people down, Mickey said. The state was bombarded by pro-Clinton ads, but she failed to offer any sustained and coherent economic message. She said, Im not crazy and Im not a sexist racist pig, but for working class whites thats not enough. I would say that of the people who slammed their doors on me, most of them didnt vote for either candidate.

A Hillary Clinton supporter applauds her televised concession speech. Photograph: Steven Senne/AP

In fact, an unprecedented number of Michigan voters cast ballots without choosing either Clinton or Trump. This kind of voting happens every election where voters make their preferences known down-ballot but dont mark anyone for president but never in such numbers. In 2012, there were 50,000 Michigan voters who declined to choose any presidential candidate. In 2016, there were 110,000.

Clinton lost Michigan by 13,107 votes.

The week after the election, the business of the United States went on. Schools and banks were open. The stock market plummeted and rose to a new high. Commuters commuted, and I was headed from Detroit to Kentucky. All of this was travel planned months before, and none of it had anything to do with the election, but it felt like I was making my way, intentionally, into the heart of Trump country.

At Detroit airport it was impossible not to feel the tragedy of Tuesday as having realigned our relationships with each other. Because the voting had split so dramatically along racial lines, how could an African-American or Latino pass a white person on the street, or at baggage claim, and not wonder, Which side are you on?

The emergence of safety pins to symbolise support for Clinton (and equality and inclusion) was inevitable it fulfilled a need, particularly on the part of white Americans, to signal where they stand. Otherwise all iconography is subject to misinterpretation. At the airport, I found an older white man staring at me. His eyes narrowed to slits. I was baffled until I realised he was looking at my baseball hat, which bore the logo and name of a Costa Rican beer called Imperial. Was this man a Clinton supporter who suspected me of being a white nationalist? Was the word Imperial sending a Ku Klux Klan/Third Reich signal to him?

Anyway, I was in the wrong terminal. I was in danger of missing a flight to Louisville, so I left and poked my head into a Hertz bus and asked the driver if he would be stopping near Delta anytime soon. He paused for a moment.

Yeah, Ill take you, he said.

His name was Carl. He was a lanky African-American man in his 60s, and we rode alone, just me and him in this enormous bus, for a time. He asked how I was doing. I told him I was terrible. I was feeling terrible, but I also wanted him to know which side I was on. He laughed.

A traveller in Detroit airport. Photograph: Jim Young/REUTERS

Yeah, I was surprised on Tuesday, too, he said. But I almost feel sorry for Trump. I dont think he thought hed actually win. You see him sitting next to Obama at the Oval Office? He looked like a child.

In Louisville, three days after the election, I sat with 32 students at Fern Creek high school. This was supposed to be a regular classroom visit by someone passing through, but the atmosphere was different now. The students at Fern Creek are from 28 countries. They speak 41 languages. There are refugees from Syria, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. We sat in an oval and ate samosas. Nepalese samosas, I was told. Three of the students in the class were from Nepal, and had a particular recipe. The food was extraordinary.

I told these students, three girls still learning English, that Id always wanted to go to Nepal, and asked them to write down some places theyd recommend. They wrote Jhapa, Damak (Refugee camp). They were from Bhutan and had grown up in a UNHCR camp in eastern Nepal. A young man to my left had come from Iraq two years earlier.

Their teachers, Joseph Franzen and Brent Peters, guided the conversation through topics of creativity, social justice and empathy. The students were without exception thoughtful, attentive and respectful of each others opinions. Every time a student finished a statement, the rest of the class snapped, Beat-style, in appreciation. We didnt talk politics. For the time being, the students had had enough of politics. The day after the election, theyd had a charged discussion about the results, and, still feeling raw, they had written about the discussion the next day.

The thing I didnt say yesterday was that Muslims scare me. The thing with Isis is out of control and I dont trust them at all and I dont get why Mexicans cant take the test to become legal? Are they lazy?

The election didnt really bother me even with the outcome, I didnt support Trump. The main reason I cared about Clinton winning was cause I didnt want my family to be affected. My mom is gay and married to a woman.

As a Muslim female in high school its hard to deal with this and let it sink in. But I know Trump doesnt have full power of his actions. So I feel like even if hes president, everything will be the same.

I was downright disappointed in the country. Because Trump won, racism, sexism, misogyny and xenophobia won. It goes to show what our country values now. Either this is what we value, or this is what the majority is OK with.

I feel like everything said yesterday doesnt even matter anymore. We as American citizens cant change whats been decided. Not everybody gets what they want. Thats what life is. Trump will be our new president and we cant change that. WE need to make America great again, NOT Trump. Thats our job as people.

I think Trump and Hillary are both crazy and Im kind of eager to see how trump runs this b—h.

And so we see how differently we express ourselves on paper. The students, sitting in their oval with the smell of Nepalese samosas filling the room, were unfailingly kind to each other. But on paper, other selves were unleashed. Despite the many international students, the schools population is mostly American-born, 48% white and 38% black, and it was easy to see how Trump could bring dormant grievances to the fore, could give licence to reactionary theories and kneejerk assumptions. The students had witnessed eight years of exquisite presidential self-control and dignity, and now there would be a 70-year-old man in the White House whose feelings were easily hurt, who called people names, and who tweeted his complaints at all hours, with rampant misspellings and exclamation marks. Our only hope will be that the 100 million or so young people in American schools behave better than the president. A president who has not read a book since he was last required to. Think of it.

After the class, a tall African-American student named Devin approached me. Hed introduced himself before the class, and had asked some very sophisticated questions about using imagery to convey meaning in his poetry. He was a wide receiver on the schools football team, he said, but he was also a writer. He handed me a loose-leaf piece of paper, and on it was a prose-poem he wanted me to look at.

We sat on top of my house, laying back, looking at the stars, the stars shining, waving back at us. They told us hello. Time froze. I turned my head to look at you. Still fixated on the stars, you paid me no mind. I studied you. This was the true face of beauty. Your royal blue eyes, the brown polka dots on your face. Your smile making the moon envious because it could not compare in light. I reached out to grab your hand. You turned your eyes to look at me. Our hands intersected and we both smiled. I told you you were were beautiful.

Below the piece, Devin wrote, in red ink, Do I have something here? Should I continue?

Anti-Trump Protesters march through Los Angeles on 12 November. Photograph: UPI / Barcroft Images

That night in Louisville there was another benefit event, this one for an organisation called Teach Kentucky, which recruits high-achieving college graduates to come to the state to teach in the public schools. Joe Franzen and Brent Peters are among Teach Kentuckys recruits, and if they are any indication of the quality of humans the organisation is attracting, the programme is a runaway success.

At the event, Franzen and Peters spoke about their craft, and about making sure their students felt they had a place at the table. There was much talk about their classrooms as families, of meals shared by all, of mutual respect. It was very calm and heartening, but there was also a moment where the audience was encouraged to let out a primal scream (my idea, I admit it), and 200 people did that, screamed, exorcising our election-week demons. Later on, Jim James Louisville resident and leader of the rock band My Morning Jacket performed a medley of songs, from Leonard Cohen to All You Need Is Love and Blowin in the Wind. And then everyone got drunk.

There was good bourbon. It was called brown water by the locals, and after stomachs were full, we all vacillated between despair and measured hope. But the questions loomed over the night like the shadow of a Nazi zeppelin. Would he really try to build a wall? Would he really try to exclude all Muslims? Would he actually appoint a white nationalist as his chief of staff? And did 42% of American women really vote for a man who threatened to overturn Roe v Wade and who bragged about grabbing them by the pussy? Did the white working class really elect a man whose most famous catchphrase was Youre fired? Like a teenager with poor self-esteem, the American people had chosen the flashy and abusive boyfriend over the steady, boring one. Weve had enough decency for one decade, the electorate decided. Give us chaos.

It is not easy to get a ticket to Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. This is the newest museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and its design, by the Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, is so successful, at once immediately iconic and bold but also somehow blending into the low-slung surrounding architecture, that it has become the most talked-about building in the United States.

Admission is free, but there is a six-month wait for passes, and the passes are timed. If you get a pass, you must enter at the assigned hour or wait another six months. I had gotten such a timed pass, and it so happened that the pass was for the day after the election. That morning, I had the choice between staying in bed, forgoing my one chance at seeing the building in 2016, or rising on three hours sleep and keeping the appointment. Like millions of others, I did not want the day to begin. If I woke up, I would check the news, and if I checked the news, there would be confirmation of what I had remembered foggily from the night before that the people of America had elected a reality television host as their president. I closed my eyes, wanting sleep.

Then I remembered the Gazans.

Back in April, I had been in the Gaza Strip and had met a married couple, Mahmoud and Miriam, journalists and activists who badly wanted to leave Gaza. I had e-introduced them to an asylum lawyer in San Francisco, but from 7,000 miles away, she couldnt do much to help. The impossible thing was that they actually had a visa. A real visa issued by the American state department. All they had to do was get out of Gaza. But permissions were needed from the Israelis or Egyptians, and they were having no luck with either. Finally, one day in October, an email arrived. Mahmoud and Miriam were in Brooklyn. Theyd bribed an Egyptian guard at the Rafah gate and had made their way on a 14hour journey through Sinai.

National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photograph: Michael Barnes/Smithsonian Insitution

So on a lark I told them to meet me in DC. Frederick Douglass had said, after all, that every American should visit the nations capital at least once. And given they would soon be Americans, wouldnt it be good to do that duty right away, and do it the day after the first woman had been elected president? (We had made the plans a week before.)

So they had planned to meet me at this museum celebrating African-American history in the shadow of the obelisk dedicated to George Washington, great man and also slaveowner. The morning was clear and cool. A small line had formed outside the museum before the doors were to open. I looked around, and didnt see them. Then I did.

They were aglow. Theyd spent their lives in an open-air prison of 141 square miles, and now they were here. They could move about freely, could decide one day to go to the capital of the United States and be there a few hours later. No checkpoints, no bribes, no Hamas secret police. Id seen Miriam suffer in Gaza because she refused to wear the hijab and favoured western clothes. In Gaza City, she was yelled at, cursed. I hope your parents are proud! people yelled to her. Now she was herself, uncovered, dressing as she chose. H

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/10/21/none-of-the-old-rules-apply-dave-eggers-travels-through-post-election-america/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/10/21/none-of-the-old-rules-apply-dave-eggers-travels-through-post-election-america/

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tricityrevivals · 8 years

Photo

(Pictured: Our booth in our first and second flea & a photo of me Luke snapped on the ride home from our frustrating second flea market)

Blog

Chapter 1.2: It’s called a Flea Market..not a Free Market

Flea Markets. Walking around a usually big lot looking for bargains. The good ones sell mostly antiques, salvage items, or collectibles. Others now have turned into a mall of sorts. You have food, games, desserts, retail clothing, electronics, bedding, fragrances, supplements, music, and almost always that one stand with a person just selling their services through brochures. On the upside, Flea Markets have now turned into a family outting and I’m all for the youth of America learning the worth of a dollar and deal. Most of you would consider antiquing or attending flea markets a weekend hobby. We even enjoy attending flea markets as well, but now I’m going to give our take on the other side of the table. The vendors.

Vending at a flea market can be challenging, fun, or frustrating depending how much cash you come home with that day. It also depends on your expectations going into the day, and ultimately what type of buyers you have attending that day. Of course before you even step foot on the property you are paying whatever company is running the flea market a fee to be there. You should take this into account when choosing one. Fees Range from approximately $25 to as high as $200 per 10x10 space depending the location. Also you have to factor in gas and mileage you’re using to get there, as well as if you need to rent a truck or trailer for transport of your items. Most professionals usually have trucks or trailers already.

Now back to the buyers. Most of the pros will be there (if allowed) while your just pulling up and starting to unload. They want to be the first one to see everything available to them. This happened to us at our first flea. New to this area we turned around and asked the guy

“Can we help you?”

As he was standing over our shoulders looking in our trucks to see what we had.

“Just seeing what you have” he replied

He saw two stained glass windows we had for sale and asked

“How much?”

“150 for the pair”

“Ok I’ll take em”

Boom. First sale and we literally just pulled up two minutes ago. We looked at each other with the same idea in our heads- wow this is easy. We hadn’t even set up tables yet and were making sales.

The Tri-State area has some of the top rated Flea Markets in the Country. If you are a serious buyer you should attend these. To name a some - The Elephants Trunk in New Milford Connecticut, The Brimfield Antique Show in Brimfield Massachusetts, Golden Nugget Antique Market in Lambertville NJ, as well as about 3-4 in NYC and Brooklyn. If you are interested and seriously want to buy something Antique or Collectible you will find it here. You won’t find socks or cheap knockoffs here.

Back to our first flea. We decided to bring Courtney, Lukes Girlfriend of 9 years with us. We felt she would give off a good vibe and would make buyers feel comfortable talking and negotiating. She added a woman’s touch and had a good visual eye on where to place items to make it appealing for potential customers. We wanted them to see everything and need to come in and check our stuff out. Sometimes we can give off this mean vibe just by standing there and not even saying a word. We don’t get it, but for some reason we look intimidating to some. Admittedly, we aren’t the most outgoing people either. Courtney walked away from us turned around and looked at us and our space. She wwalked back over.

“Smile. You guys are mean muggin everyone who walks by’”

Oh great. Now that we know for sure we’re intimidating people away from our space we both put on the awkward 2nd grade fake smile when the photographer comes for school pictures. We weren’t intending on doing that I honestly think we just had soooo much stuff and there were influxes of people we were getting a little overwhelmed. That and we didn’t want to get anything stolen, we put a lot of time in selecting every single piece to bring that day. That obstacle was early on and we hurdled it pretty quickly.

After the first few hours it became slow. The big groups were disappearing and we had a lot of time to kill. At this point we made some money but nothing like we thought we’d make. We each took turns going for a walk and scouring the other booths to see what we were up against, and talk to the other vendors about how they’re doing. I am probably bias in saying this but I thought that our booth had the best stuff in this small flea market. I didn’t understand why we weren’t selling more. Everyone who came in our booth had the same reaction to how cool it was and what unique items we had. While walking around I ran into an elderly gentleman who had a sign right in front of his booth “It’s called a Flea Market not a Free Market”. I told him how I liked his sign and I was a vendor a few rows over. We started conversating about the crowd that day.

“These people think I’m just supposed to give this stuff away”

He showed me around his booth and showed me a few cool items with stories. I wasn’t interested in buying them but that didn’t stop him from trying to sell them to me. His prices were fair for a flea market but for me as a reseller there was no margin for money to be made. As I was walking away he said

“Listen, I’ve been doing this for over 40 years, it’s good for a few hundred bucks in your pocket every weekend but there’s no way to make a living doing this”

I heard him loud and clear. Although the day was still young and I still had hope, I wasn’t going to forget the words of a man who had this type of experience in these things.

When I got back to our booth, we had a conversation and decided lets start slashing prices. For most of the items we cut the price in half. Even with the prices slashed we could still make a great profit. That’s the art of picking. About 3-4 items we found in a dollar bin at a prior flea market we sold for $15-20 each. Those items true value is $15-20. We went out and dug through everything to find them, so we put in the legwork, knew what we could sell them for based off of research, and completed that job. If you think its just lucky or a risk to make a profit you’re wrong. If you learn more and more each day you can’t fail.

As the day continued the large groups started making more appearances. A lot of the stuff we were selling was free (given by my parents) or just stuff we’ve had laying around our houses for a while. In particular we has 2 pieces everyone would come up and rave over. 2 dressers, one was mine one was Luke’s we restored from the craigslist free curbside pickup. Everyone loved them, but there was one problem. Who the hell wants to buy a dresser and lug it home from a flea market? By the end of the day we got tons of compliments, but no cash in our pockets for them, thus we had to load em up and lug em back home.

The last hour finished and the final rush was over. We had a wad of cash and counted it. We made around $400. Not bad for our fist time. The guy 2 booths over said he made around $200 and next to him made around $150. I thought that was pretty impressive. We took this day as a start, something we could get better and better at. An overall success, but we werent happy. We had to do better.

Flash forward 3 weeks there was another flea in the same place. We said, ok lets go again, no bigger itema. We had just finished our first real pick so we had tons of inventory. Small and medium items worth a good amount. We packed up and headed back down. This time we were on a roll, we were getting better at this. Repeat customers were showing up and buying more things, asking for our business cards, and talking with us. We were developing relationships and Selling almost every time people came in our booth. There were no window shoppers this time around. Around 11am and only 3 hours in we saw some other vendors start packing up there booths.

“What’s going on?

“I dont know”

We went over to our friend vendor from the last flea

“Hey man why are you packing up everything ok?”

“Yeah, the rains coming, mine as well call it a day. No one comes out in the rain”

Shit. We decided were riding it out. Lets see how it plays out. Nonetheless, after about an hour and us being the only booth still stocked and ready to go, we realized, he was right. No one was coming. Time to call it a day. We made $450 surpassing what we did in a full day 3 weeks ago. We were bummed. It was such a good start, and such an abrupt end. Rain was not in the forcast that day. We packed up, soaked and miserable at a missed opportunity.

The hour ride home was silent for the first 20 minutes. Not a word said to each other. Upset, pissed off, and confused about why this happened. It wasn’t a waste of a day, but in a sense it was. Without any words spoken I know what we were both thinking. This isnt it. The old mans wise words were right. It’s a weekend gig. It’s a hobby. It’s an entire lot of lowballers. Its bargains. This is not us. This is not what we wanted for our future. Haggling, and explaining to someone the importance and story of an item to have them say “cool”, than walk away. Now trying doing that 20x in the same day. We had retail worthy items. We had stuff if we had a storefront that we could sell for triple what we were asking at that flea market. This wasn’t it, but as we’ve always said, this didn’t stop us going forward. There’s always another way. We had to figure out another way.

In the end, it was fun and it was an experience. We learned a lot and were able to meet and talk with some cool people. We hope the people who bought our stuff that day will enjoy it and pass on the story because that’s what its all about to us. Unfortunately though, as a vendor in a flea market, most people could care less about that story and let the price tag consume them. It’s not about that to us, and that’s why we haven’t set up shop at one since. Maybe in the future we will go back, and try another location, who knows, but for now we are sticking with our private buyers who enjoy our items much more.

#tricityrevivals #fleamarket #allairestatepark #nj #pickers #vendors

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