Elegance and Harmony

It is all Brasil, these days. The World Cup matches decide the tempo of my days, and I am happy with that.

Warm and humid Sunday, with no matches I was interested in seeing. Instead, to stay within the Brasilian mood, decided to re-read “Eleven Minutes” by Paulo Cuelho.  I had read “The Alchemist” and then a friend gave me a copy of “Eleven Minutes”. In a funny way, many of the World Cup teams have alchemist players who transform ordinary moments into pure joy and pride. And the overtime play minutes seem to decide the dreams of many a team and player. So, the mood was right for this Brasilian writer to keep me away from the smoldering day near the Atlantic Ocean.

More than a decade has passed since I read “Eleven Minutes” and I delightfully rediscovered most of its uniquely abrasive themes. But, as one sometimes finds in books tucked away, I also found that I had written two quotes on the cover page, one from Cuelho, and one from Coco Chanel! I do not recall when or why I wrote these, but I recognized Coco Chanel’s famous statement that “Fashion fades, only style remains the same.”

The one from Cuelho was more intriguing, as it was about elegance. Given the era (early 1990’s), it did not surprise me that I had kept this quote. This was the decade when I lectured and wrote about elegance in research and methodology. A far cry from the artistic turnery about the definition of elegance, but I think equally needed: science should be as elegant in its inquiry modes as it is convincing in its guidance.

Anyhow, the quote was: “Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony.

The equilibrium and harmony themes have always been central to my outlook. To a student of biology and medicine, a healthy system is simply defined as a system in equilibrium. And harmony is the hope of everyone who understands the laws of physics, hence the universe and its order. Eventually, we bring this understanding inward, and introspectively try to understand who we are and why conflict defines us humans within the context of universal harmony and equilibrium.

Perhaps Bob Marley said it best “Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.”

After all, my blog is about Zen and Harmony. Maybe it is not too pretentious to say that from biology to research methods, from the laws of physics and people’s conflict with order, I have searched for the elegance in celebrating and suffering.

That may not lead to the truth, but has lead to an inner harmony in company of people “worth suffering for”.

June 29, 2014

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2014

Where There is a Bucket, There May Be a River

... It was July 1966 when I watched my first FIFA World Cup. My father, introducing me to the world of football said: “England and West Germany practice with the Mount Olympus football gods—it cannot get better than this!”

Three FIFA World Cup ago, I repeated that sentence to my son, replacing England by Spain, and West Germany by Brasil.  He said “But isn’t Mount Olympus in Greece?”

… I am watching the World Cup again, and cannot dissociate my thoughts from the Amazon River.  In the past 25 years I have seen two of the longest rivers in the world, the Nile and the Amazon. I have taken pictures of families in Paraguay living on small wooden boats on the Rio Paraguay, a tributary of Rio Parana which originates in the Sao Vincente Mountains of Brasil. I have seen the Nile muddy and then in clear waters in Cairo; I have admired the Amazon reflecting the jungle in Peru.

And yet, these majestic rivers have stayed in my memories not because of their waters and size, but for what they represented to the people depending on their waters, silt, inundations, and symbolism.

I was near the Rio Paraguay with an Argentinean colleague. We bought beautifully sewn leather backpacks from the indigenous Guarani and were offered Maté tea. The man pouring the tea said “See, Rio Paraguay is huge, and yet for us it is the drops of water that it gives to our corn that counts. A big river means nothing if it does not care for the little people around it.”

… The drops of water from a large river. The few memories from a life Heraclitus symbolized as a river in which one does not step twice. I watched my first FIFA World Cup in Black and White, on a 1960 21” RCA TV that ran on a vacuum tube, and I thought “it cannot get better than this”.

But it got better. And it got worse. It became life as it is for everyone who likes football or not. I learned that color-screened TVs do not have as many shades of mystery in their pictures; that rivers run South except a very few; and that whenever I stepped in the same waters of a river, it was the river that had changed, not its waters.

And, thinking about the Nile, I continue to smile at Mark Twain’s statement:

                                             Denial ain't just a river in Egypt

June 19, 2014

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2014

Metanoia

While working on a paper about the role of leadership to introducing innovation in healthcare, I came across an article where the nascent state was discussed. Specifically, an Italian sociologist, Francesco Alberoni was mentioned as the one who developed this concept in his book Statu Nascenti, and then made it a world-wide sensation in his 1979 book Falling in Love.

I put down the article and recalled my first impressions after reading that book. I had read the French translation then, and actually had a discussion of this concept in my last book published April 2014. (http://vahezen.blogspot.com/2014/04/this-posting-will-be-different-from-my.html)

So, my mind wanted to go somewhere else, and I let it do so.

… In the opening pages of his book Falling in Love, Alberoni talks about the Weberian charismatic leader as “With his appearance on the scene, this leader breaks with tradition, drags his followers into a heroic adventure, and inspires in the latter the experience of inner rebirth and radical change in outlook of the sort which Saint Paul termed “metanoia”.

It is of course difficult to write about leadership and innovation without making reference to Weber, and since I was in that line of thinking the two concepts came together comfortably. But the nascent state and metanoia?

The nascent state is defined on Wikipedia as “… a psychological process of destructuration-reorganization where the individual becomes capable of merging with other persons and creating a new collectivity with a very high degree of solidarity”. A leader is one who excels in this psychological process.  Alberoni had taken it to yet another level saying that when we fall in love, we actually are in a nascent state, but we only need one other person (instead of the masses for a charismatic leader) to create this new collectivity of extraordinary change and feelings.

Metanoia. Well, I did not know what this was, so I did some reading. It seems that it is a translation from Greek  metanoia but that it has been translated or at least interpreted in more than one way. In religious writings it may be considered to mean “repentance” or a confession of sins, but for sociologists it is more “a change of mind and purpose”.  Given the context of falling in love and creating a new collectivity, my take is that Alberoni approached the definition of metanoia as a sociologist.

… As I was pondering these concepts and definitions, I recalled a moment from my university days when we struggled to remember scientific, and especially medical, terminology. It was during an organic chemistry lab when we were experimenting with aromatic hydrocarbons. The prefixes ortho, meta, and para are used in organic chemistry to indicate the position of some molecules on a hydrocarbon ring. They are of course also derived from Greek where an ortho position means straight; meta connotes the position following ortho; and para describes the position as similar and opposite to ortho.

Somehow, and since we used mnemonics to remember terminology, I asked “if Paranoia is the exhibition of persecutory beliefs such as “Everyone is out to get me”; what would we call someone who believes everyone likes him when no one does?”  And came up with a new term “an Orthonoid!!”

Sadly, the mental health profession never adopted my brilliant new definition, but it helped me remember the position of non-hydrogen attachments on a benzene ring……

….I had to get back to the article I was writing. The charismatic leader was now an individual in a nascent state who was able to promote a change in mind and purpose. Even more, he/she was able to convince others to follow.

But what is the relationship between falling in love and being an orthonoid?

That needs another session of wondering.

June 4, 2014

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2104

This is my 100th posting on this blog which I started on June 19, 2013. I have covered topics of interest to my curiosity and am delighted that readers from different corners of our planet have visited, read and commented. My blog started with an entry called "Celebration" and I am pleased to celebrate the 100th entry with "Metanoia". Who knows what will be next!

About the picture: I took this picture in the Cementerio de la Recoleta (La Recoleta Cemetary) of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Among the notable graves are those of Eva Perón, presidents of Argentina, and a granddaughter of Napoleon Bonaparte.