Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

Although I often fall short of my own standards I have led a fairly disciplined life. I've tried to keep my body in some kind of reasonable shape. I've acquired skills, studied several academic disciplines, yada yada yada. My leisure activities almost all involve some kind of self-improvement. People who know me sometimes comment that I plan ahead. I don't think that I do much planning. I try to anticipate outcomes that I can foresee and prepare for them, but one thing I've learned over the decades is how unlikely it is that a long-term plan will unfold the way I think it will. Rather I try to anticipate opportunities on my horizon and if I've had success at all it is a measure of my ability to see opportunities, quite often where others don't. For me that is the point of discipline; preparation, both mental and physical, to seize the opportunities that I've been blessed with. They rarely arrive with the skies parting and a dove flying down to the sound of t...

Some years ago, after reading a quote from the classical guitarist Christopher Parkening about being drawn to Christianity as a convert because of his experience with Bach's music, I found out that our university library had a boxed set (many boxes) of all of Bach's music. It took a couple of years but I went through that boxed set disk by disk. I knew of some of Bach's music beforehand; I am a huge fan of his Cello Suites and have many albums of Parkening playing transcriptions for the guitar. I knew going into it that I would not master that huge volume of music; how could I, even if I didn't already have a full life? But I was patient, and disciplined, and after a little more than two years of listening while working in my office I finished. Discipline is the word that appeals to me here; it was with intent from the beginning a spiritual discipline. I had a little familiarity with some of Bach's liturgical music, enjoying a live performance of his Weinachts Orato...

I'm unfazed by a lot of memorials; so many seem to be about remembering the person's name and some very brief reason for remembering them. Some, about famous people, assume you know why to remember the person (I'm looking at you Washington Monument) which seems to miss the point unless the point is a really huge phallic symbol. For me the peak memorial is the Lincoln Memorial, not because of the big seated statue but because of its proximity to inscriptions of the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural address, both classic statements of who we should be as a country. The words have meaning for me and have for most of my life. The inclusion of many more details in the museum underneath the memorial is icing on the cake; the words state a devotion to fundamental decency to all, and are truly inspiring. Others have felt so; Marian Anderson performed there after the Daughters of the American Revolution denied her a venue because of her skin color; MLK's "I Have a...

I am able to foresee the future pretty well about what's going to happen in my vicinity, going out about a half a second.  Further out than that it becomes a matter of subjective estimates of probabilities based on my life experiences. At a certain point in my life I found myself repelled by more and more pundits, for claiming that they knew what was about to happen or could read the minds of people they disagreed with. I just haven't encountered seers or telepaths in my life and assume if they existed they would find a better use for their talents than becoming opinion vendors. I do follow a few pundits; I mostly seek folk who provide context. I think of them more as journalists in that way but their job descriptions often downplay that identity. When folk talk of foreseeing the future they often refer to it in a way that feels disconnected, as if something will happen and nothing we do beforehand is relevant to that happening. Again, that just hasn't been my experience in...

All my life I have been familiar with the concept of a work ethic: a devotion to the successful completion of a set of tasks. My understanding of what that means has evolved based on my experiences but the notion of work ethic makes my life seem to me to be more of a vocation than a set of accidents that happen to me. It wasn't until I was in my thirties that a work colleague, Jim Drummond, introduced me to the notion of a leisure ethic. It clarified for me things I had felt for some time. Leisure, the part of life separate from our work, includes things that strengthen/weaken us, things that heighten/deaden our senses and perspectives, things that lead us to be more/less reflective, the list is endless. What is most important for a leisure ethic is the realization that along many different scales our leisure lifts us up (whatever that means) or helps us to sink (whatever that means). Exercise versus sitting still; seeking new ideas versus reinforcing old assumptions; viewed in the...