December 6, 2015
Matt Alspaugh
Reading: “Expectation (The Eighth Deadly Sin) by Kiana
The only trouble with expectation is,
it crawls invisibly into your skull and
paints vivid pictures in your brain and
promises your heart happiness and
gets you to actually trust someone and
makes you wait for something
you should be able to give yourself (but can’t) and
snakes around your chest and
crushes you with its full weight when
it
doesn’t
happen
oops, did I say ‘only’?
I. Holiday Expectations
It’s the holiday season. Our minds turn to many popular stories of the season, “The Grinch that Stole Christmas”, “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “A Christmas Carol”. Ah, A Christmas Carol, that story of greed and selfishness, of Scrooge becoming gentler and generous. It’s almost a Unitarian story. That might be because Charles Dickens hung around a lot of Unitarians in his day. In fact, Dickens visited America, and met many Unitarian writers and theologians, possibly including William Ellery Channing himself, the leading Unitarian light of the time. Returning to England, Dickens attended Unitarian churches, but never actually joined one.[1]
Dickens’ writing is full of Unitarian themes. His serialized novel, Great Expectations, is a story of class, and striving. The title itself is a play on the phrase “to have expectations”, which in Dickens’ England, meant one expected to inherit wealth from a relative. But Dickens paints all that inherited wealth in the most negative light possible, with Miss Havisham the very definition of crazy money. The protagonist Pip inherits, but that leads to no good. And the striving after money leads to a raft of lies, broken relationships, and violence. Nothing new here.
What I find interesting, and maybe too Unitarian, is that Dickens first ending of this story was a huge downer. After Dickens sent the last chapters to the printer, he had a moment of doubt, so he showed those chapters to a successful novelist friend. The friend strongly urged Dickens to write a more upbeat ending, which he did.[2] But even the new ending is not all roses and wedding bells for Pip and Estella, just suitably ambiguous, maybe positive, maybe neutral, but at least not full of sadness. And the book was a commercial success — perhaps in part because readers got the reasonably happy ending they expected.
It is the holiday season — a time of great expectations. The Christmas machine is cranking away with the full force of the world economy behind it — what with black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Green Tuesday, Giving Tuesday, Camo Thursday, Magenta Monday.[3] We all get amped up in a frenzy of expectations for the season — how will this year be better than the last?
Our kids get sucked into the Christmas machine, with their own great expectations for the day. I recall when I was a kid, how the weeks and days leading up to Christmas morning were filled with the anxiety of anticipation. The day couldn’t come soon enough. I could give myself a stomachache with the stress of this waiting, this wanting.
And so I — and perhaps you too — learned to expect gifts, and love, and success, and all the rest. We learned to paint vivid pictures in our brains, and promise our hearts happiness. We learned to put the responsibility for that happiness outside ourselves, and we were crushed when we didn’t get what we expected in life.
Reading: “Do Not Just Long for Change” by Bashyam Narayanan
Nothing is permanent
Except the change
Change is a necessary phenomenon
In an active system
Changelessness is deadly
Change is continuous
Steady and driven by a cause
Nature and extent of change
Depend on
Nature and extent of cause
We all look for
And indeed long for a change
And we have specifications
Many a time
The occurring change is
Not the change we were
Looking or longing for
We turn excited or sad
Because of the change
Many a time we are
Unprepared for the change
Though we were longing for it
Often we find it difficult
To accommodate and
Accept the change
Nothing wrong
Longing for a change
But desiring itself not enough
We need to create such
Causes that will lead
To the change we look for
Many a time these causes
Are not totally under our control
So, it is well-advised
To be prepared for the
Deviations from your specifications
Then you will find yourself
In a position to accept
The change whole-heartedly
Long for a change,
Plan actions accordingly,
Execute and wait
Change has to come
But, again be prepared
To accept the change
Despite its falling short
Or exceeding your
Specifications
II. Mindset – 1180
In her book “Mindset, the New Psychology Of Success”, researcher Carol Dweck talks about the role of expectation, what she calls mindset, in our lives. Dweck tells us we take on one of two mindsets — fixed or growth — in various areas of our life. If you hold the fixed mindset, you believe that your talents and abilities are constant, immutable, and consequently you must work to look smart and talented. If you hold the growth mindset, however, you see the possibility of improving your talents and abilities through work, over time.
My Mindsets
I was stunned at the simple clarity of Dweck’s theory. Her explanation rang true for me, as I thought about the fixed and growth mindset situations in my life. I regret to say that I heard plenty fixed mindset messages when I was growing up. “You’re so smart, so intelligent”, I was told. I didn’t have to struggle to learn. Schoolwork was easy for me, and I rejoiced in not having to study like the rest of the kids.
But there was always that shadow fear that someone would realize the truth, that I wasn’t that smart. And sure enough, this whole fixed mindset persona came crashing down in college, when I found myself around equally smart people. I learned the hard way that doing my calculus homework while drinking beer just wasn’t going to work. I recall that hard conversation with my dad about the F on my calculus midterm exam. On the other hand, my happiest times were when my growth mindset was engaged in those rare college classes far removed from my engineering focus, on subjects like American History or Political Science.
Learning the Growth Mindset
What does this growth mindset look like? Carol Dweck tells us, these are people, who when faced with a challenge, say, “This is hard, that’s great — what will I learn from this?” instead of the fixed mindset, saying “This is hard, I might fail, or look foolish!”
She tells us that we can learn the growth mindset, through practice. She suggests that when our fixed mindset voice speaks up in our minds, we talk back to it.[4]
So, if you hear “Are you sure you can do it? Maybe you don’t have the talent.” then answer, “I’m not sure I can do it now, but I think I can learn to with time and effort.”
Or if you hear, “What if you fail—you’ll be a failure,” then answer, “Most successful people had failures along the way.”
Or as you face criticism, your mind says, “It’s not my fault. It was … someone else’s fault.” then answer, “If I don’t take responsibility, I can’t fix it. Let me listen—however painful it is– and learn whatever I can.”
Dantzig’s Story
Now, taken to an extreme, applying a growth mindset might appear like the story of the mathematician George Dantzig. As a graduate student, Dantzig was late for a class. Before Dantzig showed up, the professor had written two famously unsolved statistics problems on the blackboard. When Dantzig arrived, he assumed that the two problems were a homework assignment and jotted them down. Dantzig, noted the problems “seemed to be a little harder than usual”, but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for the two problems, still believing that they were homework.
Some weeks later, Dantzig found his professor at his door, eager to tell him that the homework problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics.[5] Later, when Dantzig was looking for a PhD thesis topic, his professor told him to just wrap those two problems in a binder, and he would accept them as the thesis.
This story, suitably embellished, has become a trope for the power of positive thinking. Robert Schuller, the pastor at the Crystal Cathedral, used the story in a sermon, the moral of which was, “if [Dantzig] knew the problems were unsolved problems rather than merely homework problems, he would have not thought positively, become discouraged, and never have solved them.”[6]
The Growth Mindset Culture
But I think there is more to the growth mindset than just thinking positively. We can’t just will a growth mindset. We have to learn it, and practice it. We can do this individually, but it’s better done with others.
Becky mentioned an NPR program which offered a vivid example of how the fixed mindset can be taught.[7] I quote from this show.
“In 1979, Jim Stigler … went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth-grade math class.
“The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper,” Stigler explains, “and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, ‘Why don’t you go put yours on the board?’ So right there I thought, ‘That’s interesting! …
Stigler knew that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class who was invited to the board. And so he watched with interest as the Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but still couldn’t complete the cube. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And as the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he — Stigler — was getting more and more anxious.
“I realized that I was sitting there starting to perspire,” he says, “because I was really empathizing with this kid. I thought, ‘This kid is going to break into tears!’ “
But the kid didn’t break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity. “And at the end of the class, he did make his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, ‘How does that look, class?’ And they all looked up and said, ‘He did it!’ And they broke into applause.” The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself.
Stigler noticed in himself the feelings arising from a fixed mindset, the anxiety and fear of looking dumb in front of everyone. But in this different culture, the goal was not looking smart, but doing the work, persevering, persisting despite the challenges. That’s what gets celebrated.
Comparing Cultures
Stigler described an experiment he did to compare the cultures.
“We did a study many years ago with first-grade students,” … “We decided to go out and give the students an impossible math problem to work on, and then we would measure how long they worked on it before they gave up.”
The American students “worked on it less than 30 seconds on average and then they basically looked at us and said, ‘We haven’t had this,’ ” he says.
But the Japanese students worked for the entire hour on the impossible problem. “And finally we had to stop the session because the hour was up. …
“Think about that [kind of behavior] spread over a lifetime,” [Stigler] says. “That’s a big difference.”
Reading: “The Turtle” by Mary Oliver
The Turtle
breaks from the blue-black
skin of the water, dragging her shell
with its mossy scutes
across the shallows and through the rushes
and over the mudflats, to the uprise,
to the yellow sand,
to dig with her ungainly feet
a nest, and hunker there spewing
her white eggs down
into the darkness, and you think
of her patience, her fortitude,
her determination to complete
what she was born to do—-
and then you realize a greater thing—-
she doesn’t consider
what she was born to do.
She’s only filled
with an old blind wish.
It isn’t even hers but came to her
in the rain or the soft wind
which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.
She can’t see
herself apart from the rest of the world
or the world from what she must do
every spring.
Crawling up the high hill,
luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin,
she doesn’t dream
she knows
she is a part of the pond she lives in,
the tall trees are her children,
the birds that swim above her
are tied to her by an unbreakable string.
III. Our Vision Widens
If we practice the fixed mindset culture, we’re eager to divide people into groups, the smart and competent, and the not-so-smart or competent. And each of us is eager to be identified as among the smart and competent — even if we have to cheat a little, which people will do. The culture becomes very anxious, risk-averse, competitive, hostile, like many corporate cultures, and even like our political culture today.
A recent Dilbert cartoon puts it clearly. The pointy haired boss is lecturing Dilbert, saying: “My job is to create an environment where employees feel safe taking risks. My other job is punishing employees who make any kind of mistake. My point is that I’m glad I don’t have your job.”
If we practice the growth mindset, as a culture, we try to encourage everyone to work to get better. There is no judgment about people’s skills or experience. Ok, maybe there might be a little judgment about those who, claiming they are smart and competent, quit too soon, but that judgment is directed toward nurturing the growth mindset in everyone. We try things out, we experiment, and if things fail, we come around to try something else.
Think now of a community, a culture, in which the growth mindset is taught and learned, in which we honor people for trying, persevering, persisting, experimenting, risking, even failing. Think of a community that works together, and celebrates being on the forming edge of new and uncertain things.
What would happen if we were able to create a culture in which we encourage a growth mindset? If, for example, in this church, we had all of our various groups and teams welcoming and encouraging people to, quite simply, become better people? If we recognized that each of us brings differing gifts and talents, and we created a safe place for each of us to try new things and grow?
Well, now we may run up against is the possibility that we have different expectations — often unspoken — for our direction, what we want the future to look like. To encourage the growth mindset, we might need to agree on a shared vision of the future to work toward.
Vision is something deeper than expectation, or selfish desire, it is that old blind wish that we have to discover and raise up into words. Vision connects us with others, and links our efforts so they point generally in the same direction, toward the same goal. Like the turtle, with vision, we don’t dream, we know, and we act on that knowing.
There’s a Buddhist vow that goes:
Sentient beings are numberless – I vow to save them all.
Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.
The teachings are infinite – I vow to learn them all.
The Buddha Way is unsurpassed, I vow to attain it. [8]
In each line of that vow is a sacred commitment to complete an impossible task. The vow reminds us that our work requires a growth mindset, for it needs fortitude and determination, effort and grit. We are humbled by the reality that we will still fail. Or maybe that failure doesn’t matter.
We do the work. We make our contribution. We get greater clarity, and we know we are part of everything, the all that is tied to us by an unbreakable string. We are part of the web of existence, and we are called to let go of selfish desires and individual expectations, those not-so-great expectations, and contribute individually toward a shared vision, a great expectation for all beings.
Notes:
1 http://www.uubedford.org/spirituality/sermons/899-qon-belonging-to-the-faith-charles-dickens-and-unitarianismq.html
2 http://exec.typepad.com/greatexpectations/the-two-endings.html
3 http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/11/black_friday_over_try_cyber_mo.html
4 http://mindsetonline.com/changeyourmindset/firststeps/
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig
6 http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp
7 http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/11/12/164793058/struggle-for-smarts-how-eastern-and-western-cultures-tackle-learning
8 http://zendoe.net/2011/10/23/the-impossible-four-great-vows/