Warning: This entry goes on way too long and gets a bit too academic-y near the end. Just thought you should know. My apologies in advance.
There’s this great little pizza joint just down the street from where my wife and I live. On first sight, it looks pretty much like any other neighbourhood pizza place. It’s in a non-descript grey boxy building with one of those standard plastic signs over the door lit from behind with long fluorescent bulbs. Inside there are a few tables and chairs scattered around, but you can tell that it’s mainly a take-out place. There’s a big L-shaped counter that dominates the space, and there’s a big oven in the corner, right next to the deep fryer.
Tired of paying for delivery from chain pizza places, Julie-Ann and I eventually decided to try this place – The Hungry Hut – just to see. The pizza was great: their “works” pizza rivals any I’ve had. Since then, we’ve always ordered our pizza from them for pick-up. As a result, the folks who own and run the place have gotten to recognize me, both in person and on the phone. We have great little chats, and every time I walk past the storefront, they always give a wave. It’s a real community pizza place with lovely owners – the kind of place I’d keep going to even if something cheaper opened up next door.
The last time I was in there, the guy who owns the joint asked me about running. He and his wife always see me running past the store, and they were wondering how often I run. Pretty much every day, I told them. The guy shook his head – non-runners always seem struck either with amazement or suspicion (or both) when they find out how much we runners actually run. He asked how long I run. It varies, I told him, depending on the purpose of the day’s run, but my longest is generally around 3 hours. His eyes widened a bit, and his wife (who’d just joined the conversation) congratulated me on all the running. At this point, they both lamented about how they should do a bit of running and how they’ve done a bit in the past but not kept it up. And they both related traumatic tales from their childhoods about running in gym class (I think that tale is pretty much universal).
I wasn’t sure if they were serious when they expressed interest in running, but I tried to impart some beginner’s wisdom nonetheless. I told them a bit about my own story: how I was overweight and couldn’t run for more than 15 minutes at a time when I started. I told them that most people try to do too much when they begin – that’s one of the major reasons why so many don’t keep up with it. The best approach is to listen to your body and not expect too much. Even if you can only run a minute or less at a time, you have to start with what you have and then build slowly, methodically, and persistently.
I imagine that neither will take up running, that they were simply being polite – and that’s fine. But the conversation got me thinking about just how trainable and adaptable the human body really is. In fact, the guy who owns the Hut has had some experience with this: he lifts weights and has the pipes to show for it. Weightlifting is all about slow, methodical progression – there’s no other way to transform (for example) your biceps from skinny little wires that tremble curling 5 lbs to hulking pythons that can curl a small bus. The metamorphoses that training can produce are darn near miraculous.
My own experience with metamorphosis has been fascinating. I’ve dissolved pounds, made inches vanish – I look and feel different from how I looked and felt 6 years ago. There are large parts of “me” that no longer exist – I am not the same. Through a progressive and disciplined training program my body has gained the capacity to move much more quickly through the gravitational pull of space and time. My muscles have changed, my cells have changed, my metabolism has changed – even my cardiovascular system has changed. My heart beats significantly slower; I breathe more deeply into clearer lungs.
The human body is malleable. Certainly, the possibilities are not endless – there are limits to how much we can change. But those limits are much wider than we generally think. The only way to test them, though, is through disciplined training.
These kinds of thoughts about training were rolling around my mind as I was leaving the pizza place with a medium works. Walking home, I found myself contemplating the relationship between training and other aspects of my life. In acquiring any skill, we generally recognize the importance of training. The workers converting the old Greenvale School into loft apartments across the street needed to be trained in carpentry, masonry, and so forth in order to do the job. The same goes for the intellect. All of my university training exercised that part of my mind – the part that reads and writes and thinks critically.
For almost every aspect of life, we go through a disciplined progression of training – we don’t assume that things will simply come “naturally.” But it struck me that there is one glaring area where we do not extend this wisdom about training – moral behaviour.
I guess I shouldn’t use the collective “we” in this discussion because I don’t actually know about everyone else, but I can say from my own experience that I’ve never really practiced doing “good” things. In school, in Sunday school, in books, in parental admonitions, I’ve learned the cultural norms about right and wrong – but this is simply training the intellect, and it would be naive to believe that the intellect is fully in control of behaviour… or that it even should be. As a kid, getting in trouble was one way of learning what the boundaries between good and bad behaviour were – but this is not the same as actively practicing doing good things. I was given the rules; I was shown the consequences of breaking them; but the rest was left to chance and nature. It was as if someone showed me how to run and then expected me to race at the peak of my potential the very same day.
Perhaps my running and training analogy is a false one – perhaps people are simply born with a tendency towards “bad” or “good” behaviour or born into a set of circumstances that leans them one way or another. But what if moral behaviour is trainable, what if it’s something you have to work at persistently?
I know, I know – this is all a little more complicated than I’m making it out to be. Perhaps these issues are a bit too broad for a blog entry. I mean, I’m whimsically ignoring questions like what is and is not “good” behaviour and who gets to decide what good and bad really are anyway? Oh well… not everything has to be decided today in this blog.
I guess what I’m wondering is why we don’t train for things like generosity or compassion or kindness or patience or tolerance – types of behaviour that are pretty much universally accepted as “good.” For example, “by nature” I’m not a particularly generous person, but I value generosity. There is a disconnect between my intellectual understanding of morality and my actual behaviour. So how do I mend that disconnect? Simply resolving in my mind to be more generous has yielded no fruit. I tell myself to be more generous, and I agree with myself wholeheartedly, but nothing changes. If this were a running problem – like I want to run 10k in under 36 minutes – I would never simply tell myself to run faster. I would back the desire with training. But is there such a thing as generosity training?
I suspect there is. In fact, I imagine most religions outline some kind of behavioural training, although I never really experienced that when I went to Church – I was given the rules but no training program. However, in my reading about Buddhism, I’ve discovered that many Buddhist monastic traditions are all about training. They (and I’m grossly oversimplifying here, of course) do not assume that the mind and body are already prepared for the enlightenment experience; rather, they develop long-term training programs to strengthen the body, settle the mind, and develop what they’ve traditionally defined as morally good behaviours. What Buddhists have recognized is that being “good” isn’t something you do just because – rather, being good helps to create the physical, emotional, and mental conditions required for enlightenment – and it takes practice. For example, the disciplined practice of selfless giving and all the experiences it evokes is preparatory for both giver and receiver on their paths to enlightenment. What this means is that Buddhist monks are trained to act like enlightened beings on their way to actually becoming enlightened beings. To me, this all sounds like progressive training – to me, Buddhist teachers sound a lot like coaches.
The image of behavioural change that I’m more used to is what might be called the “sudden” or “dramatic” change. Take Ebenezer Scrooge for example. His selfish, mean-spirited, narrow-minded, hard-hearted, miserly ways magically vanish into the cold Christmas air after just one night and three visitations. His moral conversion hangs simply on his sudden intellectual and emotional realization that not only will he die miserable and alone but that he is, in fact, an ass. Pop. That’s all it takes for his heart to melt with sympathy and for the good behaviours to flow.
The academic in me wonders if this idea comes from the notion of spiritual conversion or new birth that was first made popular in 17th- and 18th-century Protestant movements such as Puritanism, Methodism, and Baptism. Simply put, in these traditions, you go through a period of morbid introspection where you become aware not only of your mortality but of your unavoidably sinful state. The key here is anxiety: you’re going to die and there’s no way to avoid the fires of hell… unless. But the way out is not to see a spiritual coach and draw up a training schedule to amend bad behaviours. No way – your inherently sinful nature makes this route pointless. Rather, at some point, your anxiety reaches a kind of tipping point when you realize your utter dependence on the saving power of Jesus and throw yourself on his mercy. If you're one of the lucky ones, your anxiety will suddenly flow away under the cooling waters of redemptive grace (more or less). Pop. You’re saved and your behaviour will automatically change.
This may be a long stretch, but it seems to me that this pattern of sudden conversion is the same kind of pattern common to sit coms and popular dramas on TV. Someone’s acting like an ass – they don’t know why – over the course of the show, the source of the ass-like behaviour is revealed – and all is resolved. It’s like a mini conversion: all that’s required is some kind of psychoanalytic-like penetrating insight and the rest will follow naturally.
But does it really? How often has a sudden epiphany resulted in long-term behavioural change? I really can’t say. I’m sure it does sometimes, but I’ve revealed to other people all sorts of penetrating insights about themselves… and it never goes like it does on TV. Funny that.
Basically, the idea I’m batting around here is that body and mind and behaviour are all malleable and trainable – and perhaps the best tool for change is training. If you want to become faster, you train to become faster. If you want to become smarter, you train to become smarter. But for some reason, this logic doesn’t always get extended into the realm of moral behaviour. And part of me agrees – it does seem a little inauthentic to practice goodness – but how else are we to become “better” people?
Boy, this blog really went much further than I’d intended. I’m a long way from the pizza joint and I’m not sure how to tie it all together. Oh well, like running on a new trail, I just wanted to see where these reflections were going. My hope is that these thoughts will inspire me to undertake some disciplined training when it comes to good behaviour – I won’t hold my breath, though. It’s easy to think about, but who actually wants to do it??
