Emerging Adulthood, Culture and a Suggestion

There's a lot I could say about the New York Times' most-sent story this weekend, perhaps most-sent because 20-somethings themselves read "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" by Robin Marantz Henig - on their laptops at their parents' house or on their smart phones at a career counselors' office. I read it because I am at the end of that decade, and I work with people who are at the beginning of it. I observe and have been this culture pulverized by choice. I don't know if "Emerging Adults" qualify as a new life stage, but I see it and have been there. In my mid-twenties my life needed a re-boot and I moved back home. Since then, I've moved out, moved cities, found work, married and had a child. At crucial moments, I've been shepherded by men who have helped me take final steps into adulthood, and I acknowledge that I need it still. Or is the growth I still need the normal stuff that's part of the human condition? I don't know.

The article covers valid and interesting economic, social and neurological factors as to why so many of today's young people put off major adult decisions. But Henig barely touches on culture, and I think that is a shame. I mean, we have spent the last five decades glorifying youth - in our art, in our entertainment and in our advertising. Could that at all have any effect on my generation's collective effort to stay young longer? Ever since "Rebel Without a Cause," this youthful rebelliousness, going my way and taking time to figure it out has become an icon. Yes, youth has been a prized character trait in literature - as in so many of Shakespeare's plays, young characters who haven't figured things out are more interesting than old ones who do. But I can't help but think our interest in youth has turned to worship. Watch television for one hour and see which products promise to make you free, which means youth, healthy teeth and endless possibilities. Consider even the twelve pictures that accompany the article. They're lovely. Wherever those young people are, I want to join them, and I want to buy the clothes they're selling. They are icons - thin, good looking, full of possibility. Those photos make my well-trained brain wonder if any of those young people started careers, found spouses and had children, they'd be spoiled. That's not true, and I know it from experience. But the fact that I feel that way confirms that I am, in part, a product of this world around us. Whatever causes this limbo of emerging adulthood, our cultural worship of youth and the accompanying possibility must play a part.

If you are in your twenties and feel like you are caught in possibility limbo, here is advice from someone who knows emerging adulthood very well. Find a church. Find a church that preaches love and grace. Find a church with other emerging adults in the same boat. Find a church with older, loving people who can help you find the courage to commit. It sure helps me.

Our House, for One Night

Tonight, for one night, my wife and I had a house. We were homeowners and American dreamers.

Our daughter had her own room, and she sleeps there peacefully and undisturbed. We ate leftovers, and finished off the wine from a few nights ago - the two bottles re-corked and waiting like gypsy orphans on the china cabinet in our dining room. We watched a movie on our big-screen TV, one of those that hang on the wall, framed like a mural. Those used to be luxury items, the kind we'd see only at our rich friends' home. But it seems like everyone has one these days. Even us, tonight.

My wife baked bread. She could see the big TV from the kitchen so she wouldn't need to miss anything. I sat on the huge rwap around couch with cushy pillows. There was even a dog, who wasn't allowed on the nice red carpet. We stretched out and looked across at all the space, furniture and blessings.

In a few days we'll be back in our little DC apartment, watching movies on our laptop - enjoying the fruits of technology most of the world cannot even touch and about which our ancestors could not even dream. We'll eat like a king and queen of our little space and remember tonight, when we stretched out and played house.

Happiness Producers

Some happiness producers:

1. A delicious pot-roast in a red wine sauce, served with mashed potatoes, squash, carrots and salad. Thank you, mom.
2. A homemade chocolate pound cake that defies all pound cake stereotypes. Thank you, sister.
3. An office, a house, a place to focus (if I can). Thank you, dad.
4. Youtube videos of historic moments and sports glory. Thank you, dad again.
5. A bought and paid-for date with my wife, combined with free babysitting. Thank you, dad and mom.
6. Help being more German in the written word. Thank you, Schaetzle.
7. Happy, funny little sounds well past her bedtime. Thank you, daughter.
8. Depth and beauty. Thank you, Schaetzle again.
9. A birthday vacation, one month early. Thank you everyone.

I'm not thirty yet...

Read My Facebook Profile

I was browsing Justin's Facebook profile the other day when I happened upon a link to Richard MacManus' discovery that Facebook profile pages are becoming irrelevant, at least for his readers. The whole article is an interesting read, but I particularly want to endorse MacManus' lament for the Facebook profile at the end.

Now, I appreciate that Facebook has acted intelligently enough to keep its product from being reduced to the technicolor mess MySpace became. But the hyper-focus on the newsfeed turns Facebook into nothing but a Twitter with more attractive link posts. There's use to that, sure, and perhaps that's the only way to travel with a smart phone, but that's only part of what Facebook does.

I like Facebook, because it gives me a chance to show people things about me they may not learn through regular interaction. This is not just the clever articles I like to post, but my profile, what others say to me, beliefs, background, education, etc. Like any other human being, I want to be known, and Facebook helps with this.

Likewise, I get to know you, too. At least the parts you carefully (or not so) choose to share. I learn things about you, interesting things you wish everyone knew, organized neatly with a pleasant blue background.

So read my Facebook profile. I'll read yours too. It will be a serene break from the world of constant status updates, links and advertisement.

Baby Song

Allow me to brag a little bit.

My daughter sings. She sang to me this afternoon before her nap.

She sang to me while I was watching her, like a hawk. You she, she has a scrape on her face that my wife rubs ointment on and covers with a band-aid - doctor's instructions to pulverize the bacteria and ward off a potential infection. I had to watch my daughter while she was in her swing to make sure she didn't rip the band-aid off her face and devour it, the ointment and the bacteria. Not an easy task, believe me.

She lifted her heavenly-brown eyes to her captor/protector and sang. No words of course, she's just learning her consonants. But her little voice rose and fell, freely skipping along notes she herself picked out for a song that she wrote. The tune fell lightly, like a Rocky Mountain brook, flowing with freedom and logic between rock and stone. It was unmistakably a song.

My mother-in-law observed she loves music, however she perceives it in her little developing mind. I have sang to her since we were first aware of her existence, gently singing hymns through my wife's belly and then, how happy, directly to her face. In the first couple of months, the best way to get her to calm down was to hold her and sing, "Come Thou Found of Every Blessings," tapping her back in rhythm as I walked through our little apartment.

Now, she returns the favor. She looked right at me and sang her song. Unmistakably a song, but unmistakably praise as well. Whether she was aware of it or not, she praised God, joining the trees visible out the window right behind her, and the thunder I hear as I write this. The heavens declare the glory of the Lord, and in her own, little baby way, on this Sunday, she joined in.

I could not help but sing back. I sang a lullaby called "Oh How He Loves You and Me." It goes like this:

Oh how he loves you and me

Oh how he loves you and me

He gave his life, what more could he give?

Oh how he loves you

Oh how he loves me

Oh how he loves you and me

My mother would rock me in a big, leather office chair and sing that song to me. It's among my earliest memories. My mother once told me that my most-requested song during those times was "Away in a Manger." But "Oh How He Loves You and Me" is the one that stuck with me. It took root in the fertile soil of a child's heart and remained. I suspect it was the song God wanted me to remember. I pray that my daughter remembers it too.

Technology and Humanity

I'm a huge technology fan (duh - the blog), and I count myself happy to live in the age of the internet. It's wonderful, and the opportunities of daily exploration are nothing short of miraculous. So I wonder if it's ironic that I resinate so much with Bob Herbert's beautiful column in today's New York Times.

"Tweet Less, Kiss More" caught my attention the day after I opened my first Twitter account, mostly to actually experience how it works. Mr. Herbert reminds us that:

We need to reduce the speed limits of our lives. We need to savor the trip. Leave the cellphone at home every once in awhile. Try kissing more and tweeting less. And stop talking so much.

Listen.

Other people have something to say, too. And when they don’t, that glorious silence that you hear will have more to say to you than you ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your song. That’s when your best thoughts take hold, and you become really you.

Of course, Mr. Herbert is not the first to to point out the dehumanizing effects of technology. Wendell Berry is my favorite critic of blind technological advancement (famous for his essay, "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," yes, more irony, read it on your computer. This link includes the letters to Harpers, I believe, where it was first published, and Mr. Berry's witty response). Bob Herbert's column calls to mind a passage from Jayber Crow, which I read last fall, in which Jayber buys a an automobile (I wanted to quote directly, but I forgot that I had lent my book to a friend). Mr. Berry describes Jayber's growing impatience with anything moving slower than he was, particularly on the road, as he drives the car in post-war rural Kentucky, and this attitude eats away at his moral character. Knowing he does not truly need the car, he eventually gets rid of it. I believe somewhere in Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis is less moralistic, but nonetheless on the same train of thought, where he notes that, being born before the invention of the automobile he could better appreciate the nature in his own limited space.

Of course, this question of technological advancement and morals was around well-before the modern era. The Economist describes this story:

IN 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a Benedictine abbot named Trithemius, living in western Germany, wrote a spirited defence of scribes who tried to impress God’s word most firmly on their minds by copying out texts by hand. To disseminate his own books, though, Trithemius used the revolutionary technology of the day, the printing press.

I can imagine that the scribes of old had a sort of patient, devotional and spiritual experience lost on many of us today by daily copying scripture. But, as we all know, the printing press put eventually put them out of business and brought God's word to everyone else.

The Economist article I linked to reviews a book about troubles with modern technology (social media), and suggests that the answer to troubles with technology is moderation, or "old-fashioned self-restraint." Bob Herbert suggests the same.

One of the essential problems of our society is that we have a tendency, amid all the craziness that surrounds us, to lose sight of what is truly human in ourselves, and that includes our own individual needs — those very special, mostly nonmaterial things that would fulfill us, give meaning to our lives, enlarge us, and enable us to more easily embrace those around us.

One caveat with this sentence. Whenever we talk about "what is truly human in ourselves," we can forget that the opposite of whatever we're talking about may be just as human. Technology enables and is enabled by our drive to achieve, our joy in production, our escapism, our fear that we are missing something, our anxiety that we are not keeping up, our need for connection, our appetite for information. Whatever is positive or negative about these traits, they are fully human, keeping phones and computers within arms reach, wherever we go.

Old-fashioned self-restraint means restraining a very human part of us. If it means closing the laptop to pay attention to my wife or my daughter (more irony: as I write this, they are sitting behind me), it means suffocating a very human part me to allow them (or my friends, or my job, or my church, or a piece of art, or ultimately God Himself) to shape me, and make me a better human.

Understand

Yesterday, I noticed two things about my daughter. First, she was in a fowl mood, which was understandable - our friendly neighborhood doctor had just given her three shots, which means sore legs and antibiotics storming through her young digestive system. Second, she just learned that she can use her lips as annunciation tools, and she's practicing. (As I write this, she's sitting her her swing, chanting, "ma-ma-ma-ba-ba-a-da-ba)"

As I placed her on her changing table to do what was necessary before bedtime, instead of her normal smiles, giggles and goos (which makes changing her diaper one of the surprising pleasures of new fatherhood), her eyes filled with adorably tragic tears, her expressive eyebrows wrinkled up into that same expression utter sadness she inherited from her mother, and she began to cry. She did not want to be put down. She cried while practicing her consonants.

I wanted her to stop. I wanted her to stop so she does not get riled up before bedtime, but I knew she was in a tired, painful, fresh-from-the-doctor-and-I-don't-want-to-talk-so-hold-me place. Tickling and singing, normally two tickets to a sure smile, did not work. So, I began imitating her "ba-ba-ma-ba-ma" crying. She laughed. She calmed down. She was ready for bed.

I am no expert on child psychology, so I cannot be sure what she was thinking. Maybe she simply thought I looked funny. But maybe, just maybe, in her own little baby way, she felt understood.

Terry Gross, the host of NPR's Fresh Air has a great quote on her Website. When talking about giving interviews, she says, "what puts people on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being 'found out.' It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood." It's true. Understand me, and there's very little I won't tell you.

When I know I am understood, I can better accept encouragement, criticism and honesty of all types. For better or worse, I can be found out, because my viewer knows how and why I got there.

Of course, in this "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" environment that our Lord asks us to spread, the onus is on me to understand - my friends, my colleagues, my family, even my enemies. Understanding paves the way for love, even when understanding, in this city of spin and goals, takes up valuable time to achieve. But, if I take the time to understand, I can do my part to see friction between myself and others polished and smoothed to the point of real relationship. I can even, at times, stem the flow of tears. And consonants.