Savvy Women

This video reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a fellow academic, someone who teaches at AUC but in a different department than the one I work in. She is at least ten years younger than I am and thus at a different point in her teaching career. We were talking about how things were going, and she reported that she was really busy with all sorts of stuff, mostly consisting of projects she was doing to (and now I’m quoting her) “score some CV points.” Because of all these activities she was involved in, she rarely saw her husband, felt exhausted all the time, and talked about herself in such a way that I sensed she was being swept along by forces she had very little control over. I remember feeling a little sad as she told me her story.

I guess my colleague is proof positive that Dr. Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, is on to something. Youth is a time of great stress. It’s a period when ambition sometimes gets us looking way out there, into the distant future, so that we often miss what’s right under our noses.

This video also surprised me. Before watching it, I, too, would have guessed that younger people are happier than their elders. As a matter of fact, I’m still not entirely convinced by what Carstensen says. She makes the point that youth is a time of great uncertainty. But aren’t all people, of every age group, uncertain, especially given the times we live in?

Anyway, she’s got me curious, so much so that I’m bound and determined to conduct my own experiment. I’m going to ask everyone I come in contact with if they agree with Carstensen’s conclusion. I’m truly interested in hearing what people have to say about this issue.

If she’s right, it’s certainly good news for someone like me. Actually, it’s good news for all of us.

This week I used the link I included in my last blog to locate another Tara Stiles video that I felt deserved a bit of commentary. This one is Stiles giving a mini-lesson on meditation, a subject, like yoga, I’m deeply interested in.

Stiles introduces meditation as a method of simultaneously gaining deeper awareness (of the self and things going on in one’s immediate surroundings) and tuning out annoyances, which sounds a bit like a contradiction. How, the viewer wonders, can one take note of noises and sensations and whatnot while meditating without having those things become a distraction?

I think Stiles would answer my question this way: Observing things, taking note of what is happening and then pushing those sensations into the background of one’s consciousness, is a way of becoming disciplined. She points out that we shouldn’t try to ignore the world when we meditate, nor should we fixate on it. Inner peace can only be achieved when we recognize that distractions exist without being upset by them.

One of the things I really like about this video is hearing Stiles de-emphasize the importance of thinking. Because I think for a living and have been given the mission of helping others become better, more critical thinkers, I tend to be a brain-centric person. Shutting my mind down is something I’m often not very good at, and as a result, I frequently suffer from niggling maladies, like insomnia, which occur when my rogue brain begins running amuck at the precise moment I turn off all the lights and then crawl between the sheets.

If meditating could help me learn to get a little quieter on the inside, I wouldn’t care at all about how loud the outside world got.

This week I’m looking at young American women, the choices they make about how they are going to live their lives, and the role older female mentors can play in helping youngsters make good decisions. I’ve included two CNN videos that work very nicely together. The first one describes a number of societal problems facing young women today, and the second one, which profiles a wonderful woman named Consuelo Castillo Kickbusch, shows how role models can help girls overcome many of the difficulties that they face.

Just a little to set up the first video: Mike Galanos, of CNN, is shown discussing the problem of teen pregnancy at Robeson High School in Chicago with two experts–Dr. Brenda Wade, a clinical psychologist, and Lauren Lake, attorney and co-founder of Women in Entertainment Empowerment Network. The video provides no justification for why CNN chose to focus on this particular school. Anyway, as you’ll see when you watch the video, the numbers of pregnant girls at RHS is indeed high. What I most like about the video is that the experts actually focus their discussion on the larger issue–why so many young women are making so many bad choices, decisions that are likely to limit their abilities to reach their full potential as human beings.

For me, the most telling comment came right toward the end of clip when Ms. Lake asked the following question (I’m paraphrasing): Why don’t we celebrate more people for being intelligent? She then goes on to say that we worship those with sex appeal but show limited appreciation for those who use their brains.

Now, on to video two, which presents a possible solution to the problems we’ve been discussing.

The thing that makes Ms. Kickbusch’s message so persuasive is that it comes out of her ethos, her credibility, as a speaker. She understands her audience and can speak to them with great power because she was among them at one point in her life.

Being an educator and thus someone who has thought long and hard about the larger implications of my work, I can assure you that there is nothing more important to a nation’s security than making sure its young women are well educated and empowered.