{"id":357,"date":"2014-07-09T11:22:21","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T18:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/?p=357"},"modified":"2014-07-09T11:22:21","modified_gmt":"2014-07-09T18:22:21","slug":"a-badge-of-honor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/2014\/07\/09\/a-badge-of-honor\/","title":{"rendered":"A Badge of Honor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>NY Times, March 23, 2014: &#8220;In an industry in which grueling schedules are embraced as a badge of honor, efforts to promote work-life balance reflect a significant change in corporate culture.&#8221; <a title=\"Banks Urge Young Analysts to Take Time Off | NY Times, March 23, 2014\" href=\"http:\/\/nyti.ms\/1dDWpfA\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/nyti.ms\/1dDWpfA<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>A close friend, a NY Times subscriber, periodically sends me &#8216;teasers&#8217; about articles in the paper. When this one arrived in late March, I immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion. After all, after several months of patient, painstaking work, my thesis students had just emerged from Spring Break in full-blown panic mode. It was go-go-go: finish your experiments and calculations, prepare and deliver your public seminar, write-format-defend your thesis. <em>Go!<\/em> At the same time, the juniors in our department had begun a group anxiety attack: the Qual. Faculty like me, caught between senior angst and the administration of a record number of junior quals, were having attacks of our own. Work was everywhere. Sleep? Rest? Not to be found. Thus, when the Times email appeared, I paused for a brief moment and asked myself, had the nation&#8217;s Paper of Record become concerned about the over-the-top, caffeine-supercharged lifestyles of the Reed community?<\/p>\n<p>That thought lasted only a moment. The next flicker of thought reminded me that modern society is filled with workers who believe they can&#8217;t stop working. Workers who wear supercharged lifestyles as a proof of self-worth, as a badge of honor. The article could have been about academics, but surely the Times was writing about some other career?<\/p>\n<p>All of which brings me to meditation. There is no work &#8216;product&#8217; in mindfulness meditation. No doing. No honor. No badge. Just being aware. This sitting we do is completely subversive.<\/p>\n<p>Subvert the Dominant Paradigm! Meditate!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NY Times, March 23, 2014: &#8220;In an industry in which grueling schedules are embraced as a badge of honor, efforts to promote work-life balance reflect a significant change in corporate culture.&#8221; http:\/\/nyti.ms\/1dDWpfA A close friend, a NY Times subscriber, periodically sends me &#8216;teasers&#8217; about articles in the paper. When this one arrived in late March, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":358,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions\/358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/meditation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}