Choosing failure

As a language learner, I actually have a sick love of learning grammar and vocabulary. The first language I studied from scratch was Latin which was partly awesome because I didn't have to speak it...until I did. You see I went to a Latin summer camp, and we had a class in spoken Latin. Oh my. Here I was, a super Latin dork, and I couldn't string sentences together for the life of me. I learned a few stock phrases and stuck with them. No matter, it's not like I was ever going to run into a native Latin speaker.

But then I studied Russian. Same thing--learned boat loads of grammar--but this time I went to Russia and worked at a children's hospital where everyone was a Russian speaking monolingual. My speaking abilities were dreadful. Pretty much the only people I could chat up were the kids who all had psychiatric or developmental problems. For all the grammar and linguistics I knew, I could not hold a coherent conversation with adults. Agh.

To get over my grammar hangup, I developed this strategy: each day I would pick one grammatical feature and try to use that correctly. For example, everything else could fall by the wayside, but I would form the past tense correctly. I'm pretty sure that the first weeks of this I was still pretty unintelligible to the other hospital workers, but as time passed I increased my vocabulary and I got more and more comfortable with different grammatical features. 18 months later when I moved to Kazakhstan, I was pretty comfortable working in Russian and even studied Kazakh with a tutor that only spoke Russian and Kazakh. (Learning to recite math equations in Kazakh through Russian explanations was exhausting.)

I don't know if it's a Western thing or a life thing, but I find myself often inundated with "how things should be done"; 10 steps to a being a better Christian, 7 highly effective habits of a healthy marriage, how to write a dissertation in 15 minutes a day. And the thing is I actually think a lot of the advice given has merit, but there is no way for me to implement all of it now. So I choose failure in almost everything so that I can practice one thing. My "one things"right now are:

1) Pray scripture. I haven't done this in a while and I'm finding it refreshing.
2) Tell N when he pisses me off instead of stuffing it inside.
3) Touch the dissertation everyday Monday through Saturday.

So forgive me if my life looks a little herky-jerky from your end, but I just don't have it together and I can only focus on so much at any one point in time.

If you're looking for a "one thing" for yourself, I offer you this verse from my childhood:

Psalm 100

1Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.

2Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.

3Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

4Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

5For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

At least their name isn't Nimrod

On gratitude:

Last weekend, a bunch of us grad students were talking about weird names so of course the names got weirder and weirder. But at some point, someone said, "At least their name isn't Nimrod." To which someone responded, "Um, you know your name is pretty bad when the only name worse is Nimrod." And that's definitely one way to look at things, but I'm wondering if gratitude hanging even on the slimmest of slivers is worth having.

The past few weeks I've been really stressed out, at an anxiety level that I haven't been in for a long time. Life just seemed like a noose getting tighter and tighter. I was juggling more than I knew how to handle when I was thrown a lifeline in this reminder:

Gratitude is attentive. When we are inwardly dissipated through busyness, obsession, addiction, mindlessness, and preoccupation with television, sports, gossip, movies and shallow reading, and so forth, we cannot be attentive to the gifts that arrive each day.
~ Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust

When I am stressed, I self-medicate by surfing the web to the point where I've read everything and I don't know what else to read. It's like a merry-go-round I don't know how to get off of. Manning suggests that gratitude is what throws the switch.

Honestly, I do have a lot on my plate. I do have to prepare for a conference in Denmark, but that conference is being funded by departments and divisions in a time of budget cuts. And I get to go with friends I like. Yes, I do have to edit my book chapters, but hey I have book chapters that are going to be in press and on shelves in a year. And yes, I am doing "spring" cleaning, but it's because I live in a world of plenty and have a vibrant life of the mind that spawns paper like magic dust bunnies. There are many, many uncertainties about the future, but I get to face them with a really great husband.

So for all my myopic moping of the last few weeks, I don't even have to resort to a comparative "At least my name isn't Nimrod." There's a wealth of wonder here already if I'd only pull my head out of my butt.

There is a way that seems right

In 7th grade, in my last year at a private Christian school, we had to memorize Proverbs 14:12

There is a way that seems right to a man,
but in the end it leads to death.

Off and on this has stuck with me as a reminder that our best intuitions and habits might not get us where we want to go.

I was reminded of this recently at my swim practice*. At every practice, a coach tells us how far to swim and how fast. Even though I'm in the slow lane, I often struggle to make the time goals, particularly as I get more tired and the times get shorter. In the middle of a set last week, the coach hovered over the edge and said, "Watch your arm on your left side. It's crossing midline and that will tweak your shoulder." Well, actually my shoulder is already tweaked and that's probably why it keeps crossing midline. But I figured that he was the coach and I'd try it and forget about swimming fast.

Focusing on not crossing midline with my left arm was hard. I had swum miles with an arm that crossed over, and this was my first 50 m doing something new. I also noticably didn't have much muscle strength where I needed it. But amazingly, that 50 was faster than any of the "fast 50s" I had tried to swim earlier.

I wonder how often God directly or indirectly gives us coaching. And I wonder how often we resist because it requires us to give up the way we think is right, leads us down a harder path, or doesn't get us to our goals--as we see them. And then I wonder how often we'd find that submitting to the coaching is more than worth the effort if only we'd try.



* I recently joined the Southern California Aquatics in the slow lane.