I read a sign in the Baker Wetlands about how this kind of terrain serves as a natural filtration system, burying and breaking down pollutants from air and water. Naturally, I thought that taking a walk there does the same for my psychic toxins.
Meditation is also a filtration system. It doesn't make life problems go away, but it certainly cleanses the mind, making trivial problems less bothersome.
Meeting with my full professor mentor group also works in this way. By venting to one another we get relief, much in the way that we can air out a room by opening the windows.
Sleeping and dreaming also filters the mind. I don't feel rested until I get my REM sleep. Even when my dreams are psychically taxing, they have this cathartic function.
On the other hand, being on facebook, reading student papers, or attending a department meeting has the opposite effect.
5 comments:
How amusing, a full professor support group. What are the particular stressors?
Venting and meditating, that is interesting. I don't like to vent, I find it tiring / upsetting. I do like to name malaise, so as to get a distance / perspective on it, but I find venting anti-meditational or something.
We have peer mentoring groups for all levels here. I have been in one each year for the past while. I still need mentoring because I am still growing as a professional.
With venting, mileage varies depending on the individual. I would not like it if every filtration system were a vehicle of complaint or venting, and our group does not do this alone.
I don't like mentors because they are designed to keep you in your place, and gate-keep theirs. The authoritarianism of it all is so stifling. I'm against dissertation directors and things like that too, and directors of graduate studies, I think people should be crowned as free agents much earlier than they are.
I am trying to create an un-mentoring network here, so people can have wise friends but that won't report them or sabotage them, and nobody understands that people who could use a mentor don't need them because they are deficient or ignorant. For instance, it is strongly believed that faculty of color do not understand tenure requirements and need a mentor to enforce them at the individual level, explaining them slowly, in easier words.
One of the main things I dislike about academics is the complaining WITHOUT a desire for a solution. They *do not* want the problem solved, they are in love with the problems they have and with "venting" about them, it is how they bond and live. It took me three years or so of frustration to understand this, when I became a professor, and it is one of the important reasons I don't fit in / do not find myself suited to this profession and should be in business / engineering / politics or something like that, due to not being in love with suffering / "venting."
I like "unmentoring" as a concept. My best ever group was a kind of tertulia, that eventually broke up because too many many people had left town.
The people with the best ideas are never the ones assigned. I'm a great one but only because I don't think the mentee is a savage I am supposed to tame. The more research and writing I do the better I will become. F*** the mentoring workshops. For me good ones are those able to cut through political b.s., not repeat it, and most mentoring is exactly that, the repetition of political b.s.
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