What Training My Chaotic Dog Taught Me About Power, Control — and Human Beings. “As any parent of a toddler knows, being morally liable for something that is incapable of moral liability is a fraught and stressful business.”
This video from Kurzgesagt is a great little primer on how the human brain stores memories.
Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revisit experiences from years ago. But memories are not always recordings of reality. In fact, every time a memory comes under the spotlight of your attention, it can melt and change a tiny bit.
What exactly is a memory, how is a moment in time stored inside your brain, and why does remembering something slowly rewrite the story of your life?
A List of 59 Sexually and Physically Abusive ICE and Border Agents
“But we have no way of knowing the full extent of the problem, because the agency doesn’t even look at family court records. What we do know is that ICE and Border Patrol agents have a disturbing track record of sexually and violently abusing women and children, including members of their own families. These are not people who should be given guns and free rein to roam U.S. communities. Their job is to enforce civil laws, but they act like they live in the wild west, and are killing people in our streets.
Congress has to stop writing blank checks to these agencies and start enforcing order and accountability.” The report documents 59 cases of violent and/or sexual criminal acts by DHS employees, primarily carried out against women and children. It puts the criminal behavior of these agents in context with the agencies’ cultures, as well as recent policy changes that bode dangerously for public safety. DHS has further loosened agent vetting, hiring, and training standards, eliminated accountability, and expanded the types of dangerous tactics agents are authorized to use in the enforcement of civil immigration laws.
“The exponential growth of immigrant deaths in detention — and the opening up of a new killing field, deaths of civilians on U.S. streets — is directly related to all of these factors,” said Tramonte. The OIA report calls on Congress to freeze the ICE and Border Patrol budgets; legislate real vetting and accountability measures; and create an immigration enforcement system that operates civilly, rather than chaotically, quasi-criminally, and with deadly outcomes…”
Want to Find Inner Peace? Be Quiet
As happens for many people, my 30s were a decade of belated culminations: marriage, children, professional achievement (for me, the publication of novels and a teaching job). However, it all refused to settle into place. My wife and I struggled to get along. Parenthood was sometimes “all joy and no fun.” The novels received critical praise but sold modestly, and the teaching job was 1,500 miles from where my wife wanted, and continued, to live.
I didn’t know what would help, but I knew what wouldn’t: talking about it.
I had spent two decades in and out of therapy, to some insight but little transformation. Ditto for the couples therapy my wife and I had undertaken. I also felt like I’d been talking nonstop since immigrating as a child from the Soviet Union. In America, English became a dangerous tool to persuade elite institutions to give me the things that my elders had said mattered: approval, access, funding, employment. My Soviet-child shyness turned into garrulousness, then logorrhea. I chattered, people clapped, the doors to opportunity opened. I rarely felt at home on the inside but I enjoyed a superficial sense of arrival.
Then there was the noise of just being American. (There was virtually no commercial advertising in the Soviet Union. Think about that for a minute.) Social media exists to terrify us of quiet and solitude. My phone had become a postmodern crack pipe: I knew it was killing me, yet I couldn’t put it down. I felt ill from talking and noise. But that’s all I knew how to do.
So when, two years ago, an acquaintance mentioned to me an annual visit she made to a silent retreat, I cautiously probed for details. Was it a wellness-type thing? Was there yoga? It was the antithesis of luxury, she said: an ecumenical contemplative Christian community in the middle of Georgia, with monastic quarters, silent meals and daily prayer, for $60 a night. It didn’t even have a website.
I’m not a Christian, but I was desperate. I wrote to Oliver Ferrari, a monastic brother in the community, and we settled on several days that December. As the date approached, my thrill at the prospect of unspecified liberation turned to terror. I had never been alone with myself for that long.
The retreat had been started in 1987 by two friends: Fay Key, a civil-rights advocate who longed to enact Jesus’ command to “come away to a lonely place and pray,” and Steve Bullington, a Methodist pastor. I arrived to find a chapel and several modest residences bordered by fields for soybeans and hay. It’s the kind of place where the shower doesn’t shoot straight and the communal jar of almond butter has marks from every spoon that has used it, a sanctuary as plain as its setting. “No majestic mountains, no roaring sea,” as Fay once wrote in a memoir. “I sometimes say there is nothing here but God.”
I was placed in a one-room cottage flanked by a statue of St. Francis and a lowland of sweet gums and broomsedge. It had a twin bed, a wall-mounted propane heater and a compost toilet. The only sound came from pecans thumping the roof. I handed over my laptop and phone and, suddenly, there was nothing to do. I decided to go outside and, Georgia weather being generous even in winter, walk the soybean field. After I circled it, I kept going. I wanted to feel more of the soil and the sun, so I took off my shoes and shirt. Perhaps because I had finally stopped talking, I heard the call of birds. At one point, I stood on an oak uprooted by Hurricane Helene, its bark like the scales of a prehistoric animal, and just surveyed existence.
I was rediscovering the physical world — so this is what all those people meant by being present. No object was too humble to convey the glory of its existence. Passing an ancient Toyota Corolla, I thought, “That steering wheel is solid and true.” The last time I thought such a thing, I was a very stoned undergraduate — that is, more open to the essence of things. I remembered why I was always telling my students that concreteness was sacred in fiction. That week, I sat with myself, in silence, far longer than I imagined I could. “The law of growth is rest,” as the British ecclesiastical artist Caryll Houselander once wrote.
Out in the world, I was always focused on the next move. Here, so little was necessary to feel not only content but ecstatic: simple meals that concluded with prayer and readings; fields to walk in the quiet and warmth; sincerity in the way I was asked after; acceptance when I dared to answer honestly. (At the retreat, meals are largely silent — quiet is the default — but communication isn’t forbidden.) Between the sometimes transactional nature of my professional life and how busy we all seem to be, it had been a long time since anyone had looked me directly in the eyes, as Fay, Steve and Oliver did.
