Higher Education – Kitty Wheater

Welcome to the Guesthouse

This piece was first posted as the MindLetter for Welcome Week from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. You can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

They’re here!

Music thumps joyfully from open windows. Cars filled with suitcases and duvets have descended on Newington. On the Meadows, small gaggles peer at iPhones. ‘I have no idea where we are,’ says a girl in a cropped top, braving an Edinburgh autumn. ‘I think Marchmont is this way.’

If it is you with the iPhone, the duvet, the joy: you have travelled a long road to get here. Over the past six months, your education was profoundly disrupted. Your plans were so thrown into the air, you may have thought twice about coming to university at all. Perhaps you were one of many thousands whose grades were affected by the A Level debacle, and you tossed and turned for sleepless nights before your place here was confirmed. And – bigger, deeper, more visceral than these – you or your family may have been unwell, and suffered great losses.

Welcome. We’re so glad to see you.

If it is you, returning, with your University of Edinburgh hoodie that says ‘I’ve been here before’, and your vocabulary that is fluent in King’s Buildings, EUSA, and George Square: things are going to be a little different this year. You learned a lot, in spring and summer, about yourself and how you work. Lockdown may have suited you: with less travel time and social pressure, it may have given you a strange and unlikely freedom. Or it may have pushed you to your limits. Perhaps loved ones felt far way, and ennui, procrastination, and imposter syndrome flourished in isolation.

Welcome back. Let’s be COVID-weary together.

The word ‘welcome’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘wilcuma’, which means desired guest. Every summer, the guesthouse of the University empties, shuffles around the room allocations, and prepares to refill. To feed the hungry minds about to descend, we re-plan lectures, rebuild bookings systems, catch up on new research, tot up finance, rethink courses, streamline admin chains. We brush off old ideas and assess them for waterproofing. At some point, exhausted, we take a holiday. And then we cancel the autoreply, and open the front doors.

This year we have done much more than that. Our staff and students have responded to the COVID crisis with extraordinary dedication and perseverance, often during considerable personal struggle. They have thought out, in microscopic detail, every implication of what it means to run a hybrid class, and have a certain flow of people through a particular corridor, and determine that those living, working, and studying in our buildings will be safe, and ensure that amidst the greatest public health challenge in a century, ideas, debate, and excellence can thrive.

This is because you are desired guests. You come under our roof, for a year or three, and we give you a home base to venture into new worlds: Shakespeare, the Scottish philosophers, the poverty of historicism, nanotechnologies, postcolonialism, the best of the worst political orders, the ethical turn in anthropology, biomarkers for dementia, the quirks of the quark, and, just maybe, emerging zoonotic diseases.

You will talk, and write, and argue, and forge intellectual alliances. Your presence is very much desired – in part, because we know that you are with us only for a short time. While you are here, we want to give you opportunities of mind that you will carry with you when you go, that will nourish your curiosity in dark times, and expand your sense of what’s possible in the good.

And – here is something else about guests. Sometimes they are unexpected.

‘This being human is a guesthouse,’ wrote the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi:

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

It happened in the thirteenth century, and, particularly in these new circumstances, it may happen now. You open your suitcase when you arrive or come back, and discover that nestled alongside your Tefal pan and Bluetooth speaker, there is trepidation; loneliness; doubt, and self-doubt; there are a million questions, rolling through your mind like beads from a broken string.

And if you are the steward of the guesthouse, with your pre-recorded lectures, and vast spreadsheet of contingency plans, and dizzying list of Zoom links, and fluorescent ‘keep your distance’ signs flashing before your eyes when you close them to sleep at night – you may be disappointed, weary, self-critical.

Guest and steward alike may wonder: how do I respond to these guests?

This is what Rumi suggested:

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

Now, neither ResLife nor the Estates Furniture Store will be thrilled if guests start flinging furniture around. But sometimes, Rumi seems to say, there are some really fine sofas waiting in the wings – and things get uncomfortable first. The chair breaks beneath you, and those beads from the broken string turn up in your socks.

‘Be grateful for whoever comes,’ writes Rumi, ‘because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.’

The loneliness lurking in the suitcase, painful though it is, is doing something important. Things are, after all, not quite as you wished them to be. Acknowledge that; mourn it a little. Let it move through you, so that after a while, you can sit up, and blink, and start to sense this community as it is, alive and thrumming. Connection is in the fabric of a university; it has been carefully built, not just over a summer, not just to meet the challenges of COVID, but over decades and centuries. So don’t dwell in your loneliness for too long. You are our desired guest, and there is a seat at the table for you.

And when you are the steward, and you are weary – your weariness is welcome. Make space for it. Lie low, where you can, and replenish; take a breathing space, over and over, if you need. Then, delight in the curiosity and energy of our guests. Alongside the tiredness, and the shiny fluorescent signs that say ‘keep your distance’, and the million questions rolling like beads all over the floor, we are so pleased to see them.

Welcome, whatever you carry in your suitcase at the start of this semester. It’s going to be an adventure, and there will be some Fawlty Towers moments. But we have strong foundations, exceptional people, and great scenery. The front doors are open. See you soon.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Against Productivity in a Pandemic

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy.

How should we use our time in this strange era?

As the lockdown continues, two different approaches have appeared. One we might term mission productivity. Nick Martin pastiches this in his article for The New Republic, ‘Against Productivity in a Pandemic.’ ‘Did you know Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was quarantined during the plague? Have you tried baking as a form of corona therapy? How about turning your living room into a home gym using soup cans for hand weights?’

We have all this free time now, we think. We must optimise it, and ourselves. During this pandemic we can master Collaborate, write more papers, develop COVID-19-relevant syllabuses, and ‘sprinkle COVID-dust’ on our grant proposals. On the side, we might become better bakers and level up in Duolingo Italian.

But, Martin goes on, ‘This piece, the one you’re reading right now, took roughly an hour longer for me to write than it normally would have because I am currently sitting in my New York apartment thinking about a million different things: Are all my grandparents properly secluded? Is my extended family taking this seriously enough? Should I rent a car and drive home and get away from the city before it all really goes to hell? Are rental car companies going to be price gouging? When will the money from my cancelled vacation return to my account? Did I order enough cat food? Do I have enough food? What will things look like two weeks from now? A year from now?’

It turns out that time is not a zero-sum game. Albeit you may be working remotely, so your commute has disappeared; perhaps we spend less time around the biscuit tin in the common room or the work kitchen. But when the world turns upside down, fears and worries infuse our time with their frenetic tug. There are the logistics of managing the roof over your head, food, healthcare, looking after vulnerable family or neighbours. For many in our University, time demands are increasing, not diminishing. Work requires more phone calls, exam revision needs more chasing emails, or there are small children at home to care for.

And, in the end, life is more than 2 + 2 = 4. The disappeared moments of connection or humour do not add up to an extra half hour of ‘free time’, tidily re-allocated. Meanwhile, at the heart of many fears and worries are important questions: what might the future hold? How do we want to inhabit it – personally, institutionally, and societally? To tend our worries, and use our fear wisely, we need time and space irreducible to the metrics of productivity.

And so another approach has taken shape. In her article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aisha S. Ahmad lays out beautifully ‘Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure.’ Ahmad is assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and she speaks from first-hand experience of crisis, having conducted fieldwork in war zones across the world.

Ahmad shows how beneath the drive for productivity is an assumption that all this is temporary; that we can ‘buckle down for a short stint until things get back to normal’. We see this as an interruption of ordinary business, a lacuna to be plugged according to the usual rules. We wait for the clock to begin to tick again, as it always has. So we bust a gut to produce, or beat ourselves up because we’re too distressed, exhausted, or beset by small crawling people to do so.

But in times of global crisis, Ahmad writes, ‘All of that is noise – denial and delusion. Denial only serves to delay the essential process of acceptance, which will allow us to reimagine ourselves in this new reality.’ So honour your straitened circumstances, she says. Attribute value to the care you give yourself and your loved ones. Once you have recaptured some sense of security and stability in your circumstances under lockdown, ‘The emotionally and spiritually sane response is to prepare to be forever changed.’ And to undergo change, we need a fundamental shift in how we think about productivity and time.

With this in mind, this week’s suggested practice is a twenty-minute sitting meditation in which you can simply sit, be, and allow your mind to be as it will. We need not ‘achieve’ anything in meditation. There are no targets, and no spreadsheets to track our progress. Mindfulness is only ever about gentle, curious awareness of what is actually here. We don’t need to clear the mind, or become calm; we need simply honour things as they are, moment by moment. So acknowledge your mind’s sense of busyness and urgency, see it clearly, know that it’s understandable, and come back to the breath; note your fears and preoccupations, with gentleness. Listen to sounds, the chatter of your own mind, the landscape of sensation in the body. Attend to what is really here, and in so doing, know that this is not ducking out of reality, but rather turning towards it.

When we turn towards what is real and present, we move forward on solid ground. So this week, begin to make mental space around the edges of your to-do list. Notice when you are lost in mission productivity, and begin to experiment with something a little different.

To finish with Ahmad, ‘Be slow. Let this distract you. Let it change how you think and how you see the world. Because the world is our work.’

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

‘Have You Finished Yet?’ What Not To Say To A PhD Student

It’s been two years since I submitted my DPhil (PhD) thesis. It was – I do not overstate this – the happiest day of my life. But when I remember the last stretch, and its unrelenting endlessness, and the unwavering resources of energy, commitment, and faith that it demanded, I think of the very particular question that acquaintances would ask.

‘Have you finished yet?’

This question – voiced in meetings, cafés, and supermarkets – came in two flavours.

The first was pert, chirpy, and casual. In its off-handed delivery there was little sense of what ‘finishing’ meant, nor the fact that ‘finishing’ was inevitably tied to conceiving and making and rigorously intellectually-triangulating, and then doubting and re-conceiving and re-making and re-triangulating (repeat) an enormous work of scholarship, pretty much written in my own blood.

Willingly. But still: blood.

Mostly, the question was well-meant, its utterer blissfully unaware of its potency. Occasionally, it was clear to me that the asker knew that my answer would be ‘no’, and that what they wanted was to make me feel small, even if only in some fleeting way whose motivation was unaccounted for even to themselves.

Either way, I felt tired when I heard it. There was the work and then there was managing others’ impressions of the work, and towards the end, I only wanted to do one of these.

There was a second way the question emerged, however, and this one was tentative, quiet. The asker might screw up their face as if in pre-emptive apology. I sensed that they were already allowing me to shake my head ruefully, and say, ‘no, not yet,’ if that’s what I had to say.

When I did, they nodded in response. My answer was not unexpected, and yet, we mutually understood, this was nothing to do with me. It was simply about the gargantuan nature of the task, and how it typically ends not with a bang, but with a whimper, and how that whimpering phase is – well – long.

(Until, that is, the real end, when there will be a really banging and absolutely insane couple of weeks where you don’t sleep or eat. But that’s for another time.)

Usually, this questioner had completed something big themselves: a PhD, a book, a project – some multi-year edifice of skill and doggedness, vision and courage. The subtext of their inquiry was ‘It will end. I promise.’ There was still a gulf between us, because after all, I was on one side and they were on the other, but they were smiling back at me and I could just about see that there might be a rope bridge from here to there, and that helped.

It helped even more when people didn’t ask the question, when instead they simply said, ‘you’re doing so well,’ and ‘how are you?’ and ‘let me know when it’s done and I’ll take you out for lunch.’

So say those things, friends and acquaintances and loved ones of PhD students who are in the end times but not quite at the end. Swallow ‘have you finished yet?’.

And then: buy their coffee, or their groceries. Their funding has run out. They will appreciate it.