Chapter Twelve
MUSCLE MEMORY
On the first day of class, the ceramics teacher divided his students into two different groups. The students on the left would be graded on the quantity of the art they produced. At the end of the semester, the teacher would simply weigh their copious amount of art pieces to determine their grade. The students on the right would be graded on quality. To get an A, they simply had to make one perfect pot.
On the last day of class, the teacher surprised the class by evaluating the quality of work produced by both groups of students. To everyoneâs surprise, the highest quality works were made by students in the quantity group. How did this happen?
âIt seems that while the âquantityâ group was busily churning out piles of workâand learning from their mistakesâthe âqualityâ group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay,â wrote David Bayles and Ted Orland in their book about optimizing artistic creation.1
Students in the quantity group had unknowingly developed creative âmuscles.â They practiced, made intentional decisions that ended up as mistakes, readjusted, created a new plan, and tried again. Students in the quality group were so focused on getting everything right that they had fewer ârepsââand therefore smaller creative muscles.
In essence, what the quality group failed to develop is a kind of muscle memory. Muscle memory is what enables you to get on a bike and ride without thinking; your body just knows what to do. (Like when youâre at a wedding and the Macarena starts playing. Your hips are like, âWe got this!â) However, according to Oxford neuroscientist Ainslie Johnstone, the scientific reality of muscle memory is a little different: âThe processes that are important for learning and memory of new skills occur mainly in the brain, not in the muscles.â2 Put simply, when we train our muscles, we are actually training our brains. The brain, or more specifically the motor cortex, strengthens its connections to the neurons responsible for the motions, learning exactly when each needs to fire. The stronger these connections, the stronger the memory, and the easier it is to access.3
It is these frequent actions that lead to bigger thingsâmuscles. Muscle memory increases the probability that we will be capable of doing even bigger things. When life blocks our path with a chasm that seems too big to cross, we will be ready to leap over it rather than be swallowed up by it. In fact, we may even do something heroic.
If muscle memory is all about training our brains rather than our limbs, maybe we can train ourselves to have selfless muscles. Actually, it turns out this isnât a new idea. The idea has been around since ancient times, when people first started making pots and using crocodile dung as skin cream.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, born in 384 BC, believed that morality was a craft much like art making. People had to learn it, practice it, and get better at it over time. (Think of it as push-ups for principles, burpees for brotherhood, Kegels for consideration.) Morality, Aristotle argued, was about finding a balance between excess and deficiency. (Aristotle came before another philosopher, Goldilocksâknown for her ânot too hot, not too cold, but just rightâ approach to life.) Similar to the way a skilled potter learns through practice to avoid using too much or too little pressure when shaping a pot, Aristotle suggested that his students could be âmorally virtuousâ by learning to find a balance.
In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle told the story of three different people facing a dangerous situation.4 The first, a rash person, declares the ancient Greek equivalent of, âYou only live once,â and does not fear danger. The second, a cowardly person, essentially says, âHeck no!â and runs away. The third, a moral person, courageously decides whether or not the danger is worth facing. Not many of us are born to be like the courageous personâthe Aegean James Bond, if you willâbut we can become more courageous by practicing courage in small ways until it becomes part of us.
Creativity and morality âmusclesâ? Well, if these are possible, how about selflessness muscles? By doing many smaller selfless things, can we get stronger, allowing us to work up to bigger selfless acts? This presumes there are smaller and bigger actsâon a continuum, if you will. Perhaps there are more bite-size or snackable selfless acts. (How did I start with muscles and end up talking about snacks?)
One of my passions is investing in better communities through volunteer work. Itâs something I started doing when I was thirteen, thanks to my parents and mentors. I didnât have selfless muscles back then, just philanthropy flab. Iâve made many mistakes as Iâve embraced learning how to live selflessly. The church camp newsletter I wrote offended campers because of my off-kilter view of church camp. The human trafficking story I wrote failed to adequately consider the fragility of identity exposure of a survivor. The forty-page strategy slide presentation I volunteered to do in my free time (who does that?) was way too long, and I got reprimanded for doing something that wasnât in my job description. These are just a few of the things I didâthinking I was being selflessâthat didnât end well. I had to let these things go.
But Iâll never let go of working on my selfless muscles. You see, exercising these muscles changed everything for me.
The mythology of selflessness often conjures up images of dramatic or extreme proportionâtraveling to another country to build a clinic, rescuing a teen girl from a brothel, helping a homeless person find shelter. These are certainly great outcomes, but the less dramatic moments of altruism are good tooâproviding a meal for a sick friend, buying a coffee for the person in line behind me, asking a person a question that shows I care about them.
It took time for me to open up to that possibility. And when it arrived, it ramped up quickly. My father needed more and more help. From visiting once every three months to three times every month. From cooking and cleaning to showering him, and more. His experience of the devastating impact of Alzheimerâs was making the small bigger.
I was watching my father progressively decline in front of me. My traveling from New York to San Francisco three times a month was a ten-hour door-to-door endeavor. I saw in his smiling face how the disease had taken away a lot of things each month. At one point, he forgot how to shaveâsomething he had previously enjoyed doing. So I became his yeoman barber.
I took out his electric razor and turned it on . . . zzzzzzzz. Even the noise made him smile. Then I put the razor on his face, and he smiled wider. He liked the tickling. A daily onerous chore for many men, this was his happy habit. Each time I shaved his stubble, his eyes opened wide. He stared right at me, grabbed my hand warmly, and squealed with kidlike joy. It was my dad who had first taught me how to shave all those years ago. The role reversal was painful. I squeezed his hand, trying to convey that it was okay. For him and for me.
Shaving didnât slow the disease, nor was it the only personal habit my father now needed help with. âI have to poop,â he said to me after developing a need for adult diapers. Those four words gave me pause each time. Cleaning up my fatherâs poop and helping with diapersânot my idea of a fun Saturday. (It made me nostalgic for the halcyon days of earthquake and tsunami reporting and my coworkerâs tuna microwaving habit.) I canât say I felt selfless. Actor John Wayne is reported to have famously said, âCourage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.â My equivalent of âsaddling upâ was to prepare myself mentally and emotionally.
Eventually, I got used to cleaning his poop, even when he forgot he needed to use his diaper. It never got easy, but I did get used to wanting to help him, no matter what. So as my siblings and I did more of these things for my father, we began to joke around the way we had when we were kids. I started using the poop emoji in our group texts when we took turns watching him.
meant a small bowel movement. A healthy day was
. An above average delivery was
. And
was a five-alarm code brownâtake cover! So went our days caring for our father. âHungry yet?â was our favorite postscript we added to our poop reports. Selfless doesnât mean no laughter.
As the pastor of a Presbyterian church, my father wasnât innately drawn to exuberance. He was a stressed-out guy in his middle-age years. He took home the problems of the people he was trying to help as a social worker and a pastorâso much so that he started to do daily calming exercises, practice meditation, and take medicine to help reduce stress. However, when his Alzheimerâs hit, it took from him his worry and concern for the things of this world. He began to wave and smile at everyone as he told them, âYouâre so good!â
In the middle stages of his disease, children were his weakness. He would innocently wave and be fixated on them, wanting to squeeze their cheeks, even though he was a complete stranger. It seemed as if he wanted to give them something.
If life is a stack of pancakes, Alzheimerâs takes the top pancakes, one by one, until all thatâs left is an empty plate. Even when the disease stripped away many of his memoriesâlike those pancakes, for exampleâthe values he learned and lived as a person of faith stayed strong. He has lived so happily in these later years. The one benefit of the disease is that the worry and stress are now gone.
Iâm no expert. But this âgymâ that my father has brought me into has trained me in profoundly important ways.
HANGING WITH SELFLESS FOLKS
If he were alive today, Benjamin Franklin, one of our most quotable Founding Fathers, would be killing it on Twitter. In 1733, he wrote in Poor Richardâs [no relation] Almanack a message about how friends affect our lives: âHe that lieth down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas.â5 I take his point to be less about avoiding bad company and more about hanging out with those who represent the kind of person you want to be.
As my move toward selflessness evolved over the years, Iâve volunteered to develop my muscularity in each phase. Amazingly, Iâve found community-based organizations (CBOs) everywhere. In fact, some estimates show as many as 7.5 to 9.5 million grassroots CBOs across every state. This includes more than 1.5 million registered nonprofits that represent every sector and service you can imagine.6
Volunteer clearinghouses (somehow that category doesnât quite fit, but you get what I mean) such as VOMO (vomo.org)âthe volunteer scheduling, engagement, and management platformâhave seen recent jumps in people wanting to be selfless by doing something. VOMO founder and CEO Rob Peabody told me in 2020, âEighty-two percent of Americans say they would like to volunteer, but typically only 18 percent of them actually make it from talk to action.â
COVID-19 changed all thatâin a positive way. There was a jump of 12 percentage points to 30 percent of folks wanting to volunteer. âThatâs a huge jump,â Rob said. âRight now, the idea of being selfless is at an all-time high, but we must make it as easy as possible for people to engage with the least number of hurdles to get them into the funnel of service.â
Good news: virtual volunteering is a new SOP (standard operating procedure). Peabody went on to tell me the younger you are, the greater the desire to be selfless and volunteer: 96 percent of millennials say they would like to volunteer. (Shout out to the remaining 4 percent for their honesty.) Looks like the Me Generation is about more âweâ than we might have expected.
When I speak on human trafficking, Iâm sometimes asked how one can pitch in. âShould I drive up and down the streets and look for those who appear to be trafficked and then call the police?â While this may seem like a good idea, tackling human trafficking on your own, especially without safety precautions and training, is dangerous.
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