“Just as people now see
the value of exercising the body consistently and for the rest of their life,
it’s similar with emotional skills.”
-- Richard Davidson, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin
Something is wrong with American education, and that
something has everything to do with
America’s definition of success. I’m just home from a trip to Harvard University, where I gave a talk about the half-life of eating disorders – the half that so frequently persists after people recover from the physical symptoms of anorexia and bulimia. Gaining a full life, I told the audience of mostly female students, requires honesty, intimacy, trust, and joy, and a level of self-awareness and acceptance that can reduce the anxiety that, among those prone to eating disorders, will otherwise cause us to minimize our lives.
My remarks were met with a silence as profound as the quiet I had noticed across this Ivy League campus ever since my arrival a day earlier. Admittedly, this was finals week – I was lucky to have any audience at all, and I did consider the nearly full lecture hall an important sign of the hunger among students for my perspective – but the temperature had just leapt into the eighties for the first time all spring, and I could not help thinking back to the tenor on campus during any spring week in the 60s and early 70s, when I was in school. At my alma mater, Yale, the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin would throb from open dormitory windows. Whenever the sun came out, so did students, to study on the grass or toss Frisbees across the courtyard. Dormitory entryways rang with talk and laughter at all hours. By contrast, Winthrop House, where I had been staying at Harvard, rang with about as much noise as a retirement home.
I wish I could blame the shift in noise level on the advent of iPods, but even if that were the case, and the public silence were equaled by the volume of music in private earpieces, I wouldn’t enjoy the shift. The sharing of music in those ancient days cheered even the most driven, introverted student (as I was then) walking across the quad. It acted as a reassuring bulletin: life is not all work or discipline; rhythm counts; dancing matters; at least in celebration, we’re all in this together.
After I mentioned this contrast in my talk, linking it to the restriction of purpose and identity that fosters eating disorders, the room was so still I thought we were going to end without a single question. But slowly the hands began to rise. How responsible did I think our culture was for the tendency of women to minimize themselves? What role did parenting play? Could medication offer a solution? Then one young woman asked, “Could you say more about the after eating disorders part?”
Perhaps I misunderstood, but I interpreted this to mean, could I say more about what a full life is like.
“Well,” I stalled… “Life after real and complete recovery is normal -- healthy. You feel that you are in control of your own life. You make choices out of curiosity and passion and joy rather than fear. You are able to love fully and be loved, to feel compassion for yourself and others. You define yourself by what you do and feel instead of by how you look, how much money or grades you make, or how someone else judges you.”
Answering that question shook me for a reason that I didn’t quite grasp until today, when I received this note from another student in the audience: “There were many points in your talk when I was brought to tears, in part I think because it was so special - and rare, here, too - to hear someone share her pain, experience, and joy so openly. I have found Harvard to be a place filled with amazing people who possess an overwhelming aversion to vulnerability, especially emotional vulnerability.”
Vulnerability lay at the heart of that question about life after eating disorders, for vulnerability, the essence of emotion, is vital not just for recovery but for human life to be experienced and expressed to its fullest – in other words, for emotional success. This assembly took place in the wake of the starkest possible reminder of what can happen when emotion does not succeed: just ten days earlier at Virginia Tech, Seung-Hui Cho had massacred thirty-two of his fellow students and faculty members. Perhaps that tragedy, too, echoed in the silence I noticed at Harvard.
Buddhist monk and French geneticist Mattieu Ricard makes an eloquent case for education and practice in empathy and compassion as well as scholarship. “You can retain inner strength and well-being in very difficult situations, and you can be totally a wreck where apparently everything seems perfect,” he tells Sharon Begley in her remarkable new book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. “That’s what mental training is about, trying to find antidotes to suffering and to afflictive mental states – antidotes that let you deal with the arising of hatred, for example, to dissolve it before it triggers a chain reaction… Mental training is the process of becoming a better human being for your own sake and for the sake of others.”
At 6am the morning after my talk, I watched several crews of students rowing in unison up a placid Charles River. The discipline of those crews was keen, yet I found myself wondering if they were as adept at exercising their emotional as their physical skills. I also wondered if the university powers would ever sanction a program of mental training for emotional fitness as robust as crew is for physical fitness. If not, all the academic and athletic intensity that they so clearly did endorse might not hold the weight that mattered most.
Reminder to anyone who lives in or near Los Angeles:
I'd love to meet you at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend. I'll be signing on Saturday at the Angel City Press -- Booth 332 -- at 11am, and I'll be speaking on Sunday afternoon on a panel called Memoir: Lessons Learned with Arianna Huffington, Jessica Hendra, Karen Stabiner, Hope Edelman, and Amy Alkon. We'll be starting at 3pm in Haines Hall 39. Visit www.latimes.com/festivalofbooks for more details. Hope to see you there!
