Meanderings, 4 May 2024

Good morning, friends of this Substack! Our flowers are appearing and some of them — I’m looking at you, Columbines — are not just blooming but spreading. We are seeing first signs of Butterfly Weed and Balloon flowers. We planted our Canna Lillies and are cheering on our decorative grasses, like Gold Bar and Morning Lights.

Photo by M. Dean on Unsplash

Congrats!

CHICAGO - Meet the masters.

They are a local rowing crew made up of women, who range in age from late 40s to late 60s.

Kara Pellaton is a former triathlete and this will be her fourth season with the North Suburban Crew.

"I got into this at the encouragement of one of our teammates here, who I knew through triathlon. My son was a rower in high school and I thought it was a beautiful sport," said Pellaton.

Team member Peg Corboy said they are up before dawn and on the water at the Dammrich Rowing Center, either indoors in a rowing tank or on the water outside under the cover of darkness.

"What keeps us coming back is the camaraderie. There's nothing like being on a team with like-minded people who enjoy working hard, getting dirty, getting up early, rowing in the dark," said Corboy.

The team practices four days a week. However, when they get closer to the race, practices are five days a week. 

"You never kind of blow off rowing because your boats waiting for you, and you can't let the other people down. That's a motivator," said Corboy.

But their season highlights are motivation as well.

"We have the gold medal for our master national championship in our 60-plus age group," said team member Marcia Krause.

Just in case you have not heard.

Love it!

”This is nerve-wracking,” James Canody exclaimed — through an exhale — of his new job as an apprentice at the Denver-based business R&R Head Labs. When speaking with CNN, Canody had been working as an apprentice at the barbershop for 13 days.

Fourteen days ago he had been released from prison, where he served 6 and a half years of an 18-year sentence.

Canody is one of 650,000 people released from prison every year across the United States, according to the Department of Justice. That’s a population of which nearly 75% are still unemployed a year after being released. According to the Brookings Institution, stable employment has been shown to reduce recidivism, but even for those who find a job, earning capacity is likely hindered: Based on a report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, formerly incarcerated people who do find employment after their release tend to earn just 53% of the median US worker’s wage.

Canody is one of eight employees — apprentices, barbers and managers — at R&R Head Labs, a barbershop which opened its doors in February exclusively employing formerly incarcerated and justice-impacted individuals. It aims to address the financial, logistical and emotional inequities associated with their reentry into society.

A good read for your weekend:

I've already written some words about the dissident nature of worship in the book of Revelation and how the nine worship songs that John weaves into the narrative of his vision work to raise their eyes above the empire of Rome and towards the throne of Jesus. We also looked at how it requires that the worshipper turn away from these things and lift up the Christ figure.

But I also believe that there is more to it. These songs are rooted in the heritage of the Jewish people, and John seems to be reframing them for the current generation of Christians living in persecution and oppression under the Roman Empire.

Pastoring during the pandemic years of 2020 - 2022 wreaked havoc on my mental health, and it wasn’t until I suffered a panic attack that I started to reach out for help. One of the gifts that my therapist has given me is the skill of reframing my thoughts more healthily. She taught me how to think differently about my words, my thoughts, and the context in which I live and work to reflect my hopes and joys instead of my struggles and fears. To my surprise, it worked. My fears and negative thoughts became less fatalistic, and slowly I learned to retrain my brain to have fewer toxic thoughts and I slowly built a habit of loving people first instead of judging them. It all had to do with the mindset I cultivated before the thoughts arose within.

How might this connect with what John is doing?

These worship songs that John has interspersed throughout the narrative of Revelation are not original to John. Most seem to come from places like Daniel 7 (like the passage from Revelation 5 we just read), which has its own context completely separate from their own struggles. But also, they were likely songs that they regularly sang. These were likely familiar to them. Some scholars suspect that they are songs that were a part of the rotation of worship liturgy of the seven churches. It is the equivalent of writing a narrative theological story today and having the characters suddenly burst out with a rendition of Amazing Grace, or It Is Well, songs which have their own context but which also have deep meaning to us today.

John is giving them a gift by reframing their familiar old songs and giving them a new mindset in which to sing them.

Your music tastes, when were they formed? Can we say Beach Boys? Beatles? Jan and Dean? Topped off with a little Celine? Does that date me or dignify tastes?

It’s been a musical week in our household, and I’ve spent a significant amount of time being schooled in the history and nuance of the Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and J. Cole feud (here’s a primer for those out of the loop). I very conveniently had access to a teenager to help all of this make sense, and apparently that is key, at least according to a deep dive I ran across that digs into why we stop listening to new music as we get older.

Daniel Parris was inspired to understand why Spotify’s algorithms fed him music from such a limited period. The literature suggests that what we listen to between the years of 13 to 16 is formative for our musical tastes. This bias reaches across all generations, at least according to a YouGov survey on which decade’s music was best (figure below).

Other studies suggest that music discovery peaks around age 24, and that stagnation sets in one’s early 30s. As one ages, less and less time and energy can be devoted to seeking out new music, music plays a different role in the lives of adults than it does for adolescents. Parris goes on to suggest that we reach a point where the “explore-exploit” payoff tips more toward exploit, once you’ve established what you know that you like.

In an algorithmic age, it has been fascinating to see how that teenager mentioned above has developed their own musical tastes. While much has changed since my day, the main route to discovery remains the same — you learn about new music from the people around you, and listen to what your friends are listening to.

And as your friend, I’ll recommend the song that’s been stuck in my head for recent weeks, a favorite from 2023 below. Have a good weekend.

What decade shaped your tastes?

My old editor-friend, Dan Reid, doing a Substack on the China You Never Knew, including this one:

When the Baptist missionary Issachar Roberts fled Nanjing, he declared Hong Xiuquan to be crazy, a lunatic. And the general consensus among missionaries was to measure Hong and his movement by his presumed mental state and character, and the standards of Christian orthodoxy. Given the staggering bloodshed of the civil war that enveloped the Taiping, there seemed to be little motivation to pursue it further. And the missionary entanglements with the inception of the Taiping’s were best forgotten.

However, by the mid-twentieth century, the Chinese Communist Party had embraced Hong Xiuquan as a revolutionary. Mao Zedong found inspiration in Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping. Viewed through a Marxist lens, the Taiping was a revolutionary movement that foreshadowed the Communist takeover. Here was a peasant uprising that had thrown off the shackles of imperial and feudal past and established an egalitarian society. Marx himself had called the Taiping, “the first cry in the creation of a Chinese Republic.” With the religious aspects viewed as incidental accretions, or perhaps demythologized, it was reckoned to be a social revolution all the way down. Communism could learn from the Taiping mistakes and carry out the revolution consistently. Interestingly, even in China’s Republican era, Sun Yatsen and Chiang Kai-shek had variously adopted the mantle of the Taiping. And the study of the Taiping in this revolutionary vein continues on in China today.