Video/Writing Project 1 - Meaningless - Andy's Version

1. What have you included in this video?
This video has footage of four aspects of my life. You see me in my sun and jellyfish protective swimming gear at Brighton Beach. There is video of my friend Heather and her mom Carole and I talking at my apartment. There is the kind of strange looking footage of me reading student work on the computer in my classroom. And finally there is a brief excerpt of a lesson on revelation that I offered to some of my favorite students in last year’s Revelation course.


2. Which parts of the video related to relatively meaningful aspects of your life? Which parts related to relatively meaningless aspects of your life?
All four parts of the video related to meaningful aspects of my life.

Swimming has been a big part of my life for the past year. I’ve been learning to swim well using an approach called “Total Immersion”. And for me swimming in the ocean is particularly meaningful. The ocean has been big for me my whole life – growing up in SW Florida and now living in NYC. It makes me smile when a seagull flies over me when I’m swimming backstroke.

I have lived together with Heather for more than 10 years. My chance to be friends with her and enjoy her is one of the most meaningful aspects of my life. Her mom Carole, who I also care a lot about, has recently moved to the apartment downstairs of us in Brooklyn so we have been able to share more family experiences here.

The internet is both a blessing and a curse for my life. The video shows me reading student work – this has made it possible for me to evolve a new kind of teaching in which work continues to belong to the student rather than be “handed in” to the teacher and for students to learn from each other more easily. And in general I’ve learned a lot from the internet. But the internet also represents one of the biggest pits of relative meaninglessness in my life – thousands of hours wasted on endless games of chess & go, stupid staring at the New York Times, reading forums about folding bikes, etc. I’ve tried repeatedly to reorient myself back away from the virtual and to the real, but success has been limited and intermittent.

My teaching has been one of the aspects of my life that I’ve devoted the most time, thought, and energy towards. I feel a sense of pleasure and meaningfulness in helping students to reach deeper insights about the world and themselves and the relationship between the world and themselves. I feel that I’ve been given some important gifts that teaching helps me to share. On the other hand sometimes it feels like my energy is being wasted in a factory system in which most people are just pretending, just going through the motions.


3. What would you have liked to have included but weren’t able to?
I would have liked to include footage of our plots in the Brooklyn College Community Garden since that would highlight another aspect of what I find meaningful – working with the Earth, learning how to feed ourselves, understanding our physical reality more deeply.


aspects of a life - andy from juggleandhope on Vimeo.




Analytical:
4. What seem to be some of the main criteria you use (emotionally +/or mentally) to assess how meaningful an aspect of your life is?
If something feels meaningful I usually think of it as meaningful. But what makes it feel meaningful? Situations that relate to love and beauty seem meaningful to me. Love can be in the masks of solidarity, passion, belonging, or responsibility. Beauty can be in the masks of excellence, coherence, truth, and virtue.

5. Is there a pattern in what you find meaningful or meaningless? What are some of the elements in that pattern?
I find situations meaningful that engage my senses of beauty and love. These tend to be situations that are exceptions to the mass mediocrity I feel myself to be surrounded with. Situations in which people are honestly and thoughtfully relating to each other or when people are honestly and feelingly relating to the larger world around us – the air we breath, the plants we eat, the water we swim in. Those are the sorts of situations I try to create in my life – either when swimming or living with my friend or doing my Right Livelihood of helping people gain insight.

So it seems the elements in the pattern of what I find meaningful are connection and resistance to mediocrity and both of those elements require the element of truth.

6. Looking at the video as a whole – is it a fairly honest/accurate depiction of your life? Does it make you seem interesting/special/exciting?
This video doesn’t show me irritated or impatient or in many of the other moods that tend to blow across my emotional sky. But other than that, it does seem fairly accurate and honest.

I do think the video depicts me as someone special but more as a counter-cultural type than someone “cool”. To me the feeling that comes from the video is one of relative peacefulness, of someone who makes a point to swim at the beach and doesn’t mind wearing tights to protect against the jellyfish, of someone who makes time for loved ones, and who tries hard to contribute intelligently to the well-being of people I am responsible for. I don’t think I’m very “dashing” in the video – more “thoughtful and a little goofy”.

7. Does your life seem meaningful from an outside perspective? Is it from an inside perspective? Why?
The video does make my life seem meaningful to an outsider – if the outsider has my standards of meaning. I would look at this video, if it were of someone else (and to some extent it is), as showing a person aware of beauty, experiencing nature, practicing excellence, contributing his talents to others, and doing what he finds worthwhile.

And from the inside it feels the same way.

8. What questions do you have about living a meaningful life at this point?
Why don’t we make our whole lives meaningful? Why do we spend more time than we want on situations we find relatively meaningless? Is conscious/loving engagement with nature necessary for a meaningful life?