Friday, October 16, 2026
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
The Window Seat (1901)
A few days ago, while listening to an episode of Interesting Times, I encountered an expression that gave language to something I have witnessed throughout nearly two decades of teaching: the 400-word wall. The episode featured author James Marriott discussing The New Dark Ages, his examination of the declining place of sustained reading in a culture increasingly dominated by images, videos, and abbreviated communication. His larger argument concerned the consequences of losing the intellectual habits cultivated through prolonged engagement with written language. Yet what stayed with me was the image of a reader encountering a wall.
I recognized it immediately. Students begin reading, make their way through a few paragraphs, and gradually disengage. Their eyes wander, their bodies become restless, and the words before them seem to lose their hold. Sometimes they struggle to begin at all. The 400-word wall is not a scientifically established threshold beyond which concentration inevitably fails, but it captures something familiar about the difficulty of sustaining attention when reading requires more effort than a student is accustomed to giving it.
I thought about this when I encountered Sir William Orpen's The Window Seat, painted in 1901. A young woman sits beside a window, a book resting open upon her lap. Her gaze has moved away from the pages toward the landscape beyond the glass. Nothing in her posture suggests particular frustration or urgency. She appears suspended between the activity she has set aside and whatever now occupies her thoughts.
My first impression was that she had reached the wall.
The longer I considered the painting, however, the less certain I became.
The woman is Grace Orpen, the artist's wife, painted during their honeymoon in County Cork, Ireland. Dressed in blue, she occupies a quiet domestic interior where daylight enters through the window. Orpen's composition draws our attention toward the relationship between the open book and the world beyond the room. The book invites sustained engagement with an imagined or written world, while the window offers another kind of experience through light, distance, and observation. Grace occupies the space between them, physically still but seemingly elsewhere in thought.
The painting's history complicates an easy interpretation of boredom. Grace experienced periods of homesickness during the couple's stay in Ireland, and her distant gaze may suggest an emotional life considerably more complex than simple distraction. Perhaps she is remembering home. Perhaps something she has read has awakened a memory. Perhaps she has grown tired of the book and turned toward a more compelling view. Orpen allows us to observe her without granting us access to her thoughts.
That uncertainty is what makes the painting increasingly meaningful to me.
We are accustomed to treating attention as something visible. A person looking at a book appears engaged, while someone gazing through a window appears distracted. Yet the direction of our eyes tells us remarkably little about the movement of our thoughts. A passage may awaken a memory or introduce a question that requires us to look away before returning. Sometimes the deepest engagement with a text occurs after the words have temporarily disappeared from our immediate attention.
Other times, of course, we are simply bored.
Boredom interests me because of its complicated relationship with patience. Contemporary technology provides seemingly endless opportunities to escape moments of inactivity. A pause in conversation, a few minutes in a waiting room, or the interval between activities can be filled almost immediately. We have become remarkably capable of occupying our time without necessarily learning how to inhabit it.
Yet boredom is not inherently virtuous. It may indicate that an activity lacks meaning, that our needs are unmet, or that a task has become inaccessible. It can encourage reflection, but it can also produce frustration and disengagement. Its educational significance lies less in the discomfort itself than in how we learn to respond.
Patience has historically been understood as a virtue cultivated through practice. It requires something more substantial than waiting quietly or enduring inconvenience. Patience involves remaining with a worthwhile activity when its rewards are delayed, tolerating uncertainty, and resisting the assumption that difficulty necessarily requires immediate escape.
Reading provides an especially revealing example. A complex argument may take several paragraphs to develop. A story may withhold its significance until the final pages. Sometimes understanding requires returning to an earlier passage, considering an unfamiliar perspective, or remaining with a question that refuses an immediate answer. Sustained reading asks us to accept that intellectual satisfaction does not always arrive at the moment we desire it.
But patience must not become an excuse for demanding passive endurance. There is a difference between struggling with something worthwhile and being required to persist in an activity that offers no reasonable opportunity for success. Sometimes the appropriate response is to seek assistance, change an approach, or find another way into the material. Learning when to persist is itself part of intellectual development.
These questions have become particularly important in my work as an In-School Detention facilitator.
I understand ISD as an intentional micro-community within the larger high school. Like any classroom, it possesses its own purpose, expectations, and rituals. Students enter because of disciplinary decisions, but those circumstances need not define the entirety of their experience. The day follows a predictable rhythm of academic work, scheduled breaks, and reflection. Within that structure, students are expected to engage in something educationally meaningful.
Many struggle with the quiet. They watch the clock, become restless, and search for ways to occupy themselves. For some, the absence of familiar distractions is among the most uncomfortable aspects of detention. The ordinary opportunities for conversation, movement, and entertainment have been restricted, leaving students to confront stretches of time that can seem remarkably long.
In this setting, boredom is both the punishment and the lesson.
The discomfort is real, and I do not think it serves students to pretend otherwise. But neither do I believe that discomfort automatically produces growth. An afternoon spent staring at the clock may teach little beyond resentment. The educational possibility emerges when students begin discovering that quiet time can be occupied with something meaningful, even when that activity requires patience and effort.
I sometimes think of attention as a muscle students did not know they possessed. When it is first exercised, it hurts. A relatively short reading assignment can feel exhausting. Remaining with a difficult task may seem disproportionate to what is being asked. Yet like physical exercise, the development of attention requires appropriate challenges, opportunities for recovery, and recognition of individual capacities. Simply increasing the difficulty does not guarantee improvement.
That understanding has encouraged me to reconsider the reading materials available in my classroom.
Students are expected to complete their assigned coursework, but they also have opportunities to read a chapter book, choose a comic book, or sketch for an academically relevant purpose. Whatever they do must be connected in some way to school, even if the justification is as thin as the paper they are drawing on.
The expectation remains firm, but the means of engagement are flexible.
After hearing Marriott discuss the 400-word wall, I began exploring additional short-form literature for the room. Comics are already available, but poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and brief essays offer other possibilities. A poem can demand considerable reflection in relatively few words. A comic can require sophisticated interpretation of language, imagery, and narrative sequence. A short story may introduce a reader to another person's experience without immediately presenting the apparent burden of an extended text.
These works are not inferior substitutes for longer reading. They possess intellectual value of their own, while potentially offering approachable opportunities to practice sustained engagement. The objective is not to abandon ambitious expectations, but to recognize that students may require different pathways toward meeting them.
This is where Orpen's painting challenges me most directly.
At first, I identified with Grace as a reader encountering the limits of her attention. But I have begun to recognize something of myself in Orpen instead. I am the observer looking at a subject whose outward behavior invites interpretation. As a teacher, I spend much of my day watching students whose attention appears to wander. I see the open book, the unfinished assignment, the eyes directed toward something beyond the work before them. I recognize the behavior, but I cannot always know what it means.
Orpen could paint Grace's posture, expression, and surroundings. He could arrange the visual elements through which viewers would encounter her. But even his familiarity with his wife could not make her inward experience entirely accessible. What he offers is an interpretation, not a transparent record of thought.
I confront a similar limitation in the classroom. I can observe when a student stops reading, but I cannot always determine whether the student has stopped thinking. I may be witnessing boredom, confusion, fatigue, discouragement, or a moment of genuine reflection. Sometimes several of these experiences occur together. The behavior is visible; its meaning requires greater care.
Perhaps this is another wall we encounter. Students struggle with the demands of sustained attention, while teachers encounter the limits of what observation can reveal. Both require patience, though in different ways.
The philosopher Simone Weil understood attention as something more profound than the outward performance of concentration. In her reflections on education, she emphasized a receptive form of attention, one involving patience and the willingness to remain open to understanding rather than attempting to force it. Her insight challenges the assumption that greater visible effort necessarily produces deeper thought.
This has consequences for how I understand discipline.
I can require students to remain seated, establish expectations for academic work, and limit distractions. But silence is not necessarily attention, just as obedience is not necessarily understanding. A student may sit quietly for an entire afternoon without meaningfully engaging with anything. Another may appear distracted while considering a question raised by something they have read.
Recognizing the difference requires more than enforcing expectations. It requires listening, asking questions, and remaining willing to revise an initial judgment. Unlike Orpen's painted subject, students can speak for themselves. Their explanations may reveal obstacles or possibilities that their outward behavior could never communicate.
The patience I ask of students is also the patience my work asks of me.
This does not mean that every wandering gaze should be celebrated as contemplation. Sometimes students are simply avoiding their work, and part of teaching involves helping them recognize that avoidance. Sustained concentration remains an important intellectual capacity, particularly when reading complex material. The goal is not to excuse distraction but to understand it well enough to respond constructively.
I have become increasingly interested in the idea that attention involves not only the ability to remain with something, but also the ability to return. Our thoughts wander. We become frustrated, bored, curious, or absorbed in unexpected associations. A difficult passage may require a pause. A moment of distraction may require a deliberate decision to begin again.
The important question is what happens next.
For a student encountering the 400-word wall, that moment may involve abandoning the text or discovering a way to continue. Sometimes encouragement is sufficient. Sometimes the student needs instruction, a different reading, or an opportunity to experience success with something more manageable. My responsibility is to preserve the expectation of meaningful engagement while remaining attentive to what makes that engagement possible.
Orpen's painting leaves this question unresolved.
Grace remains beside the window, her book open upon her lap. The light falls across the room, and her gaze carries us toward something beyond the pages. We do not know whether she has lost interest, become absorbed in a memory, or found herself contemplating an idea awakened by the book itself. Her thoughts remain beyond our reach.
I began by seeing a reader who had reached the 400-word wall. I now find myself considering the wall between the observer and the person being observed. The painting has not changed, but my confidence in that first interpretation has.
Perhaps the practice of attention begins there, in recognizing how much we do not yet understand about the person before us.
Grace may return to her reading, or she may continue looking through the window. Orpen does not tell us.
The book remains open.
Monday, October 12, 2026
The Victory of Buddha (1914)
Last week, I found myself sitting with a friend who was speaking enthusiastically about their Christian faith. They were particularly invested in their identity as a Reformed Christian, and I listened as they shared the convictions that gave that identity meaning. There was a time when such a conversation would have awakened something combative in me. I would have listened for theological inconsistencies, assembled counterarguments, and waited for an opportunity to explain why I found the claims of Christianity unpersuasive. I would have wanted to win something, although I am no longer certain what such a victory would have accomplished.
Instead, I simply sat and listened.
I was not suppressing an argument or surrendering my convictions. I felt no particular need to challenge my friend's beliefs, nor any obligation to defend my own. We could understand the world differently and remain entirely at peace with one another. As my brother sometimes says, I had no reason to "yuck their yum." What brought my friend meaning did not need to become an object of criticism simply because I did not share it.
As I sat there, an image came to mind that I had encountered several years earlier: Abanindranath Tagore's The Victory of Buddha (1914). I remembered it from Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists, a collection of religious narratives by Sister Nivedita and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. I had read the book during my own journey away from Christianity, when exploring other religious traditions was becoming an important part of my intellectual life. The painting had remained somewhere in my memory, waiting, perhaps, for an experience that would give it renewed meaning.
Tagore's Buddha is an unusual victor. There are no armies at his feet, no fallen enemies, no banners announcing his triumph. The figure sits quietly against a background of muted gold and blue-gray, his robes dissolving into the atmosphere around him. His face is turned away from the viewer, and his posture suggests neither celebration nor exhaustion. The painting possesses the atmospheric delicacy associated with the Bengal School, of which Tagore was a leading figure. Its restrained palette and softened contours create an impression of stillness that seems to extend beyond the figure into the surrounding space.
The title announces a victory, but the painting withholds almost every conventional symbol of conquest. Whatever struggle preceded this moment has already ended. We are left not with the spectacle of triumph, but with its aftermath.
The book in which I encountered the painting was published in 1914, bringing together stories from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the religious traditions surrounding Krishna, Shiva, and the Buddha. Its authors participated in an intellectual movement concerned with interpreting Indian civilization and recovering the cultural significance of its religious and artistic inheritance. The collection presents mythology as a way of preserving philosophical questions within narrative. Gods intervene in human affairs, heroes confront impossible obligations, and extraordinary beings embody the fears, desires, and aspirations of ordinary humanity.
I have come to approach the Bible in much the same way. It is a collection of writings containing mythology, legend, poetry, law, moral instruction, and theological argument. Its authors and communities used these literary forms to interpret their experiences and communicate what they understood about human existence. I do not regard biblical mythology as inherently more authoritative than the religious narratives of India, nor do I dismiss either tradition because I reject its supernatural claims. Mythology need not be historically literal to remain meaningful. A story can illuminate something important about suffering, love, mortality, or moral responsibility without describing an event that occurred as its believers imagine it.
This understanding has allowed me to continue engaging with religious traditions without accepting their metaphysical foundations. I can appreciate the intellectual and imaginative achievements of Christianity while rejecting its theology. I can find wisdom in Buddhist narratives without accepting rebirth, supernatural beings, or the cosmological world in which those narratives developed. Religious stories remain part of the human conversation about existence, regardless of whether I believe their extraordinary events actually occurred.
Among the stories in Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists is the familiar account of Siddhartha Gautama, the prince who would become the Buddha. Confronted with aging, sickness, and death, Siddhartha recognizes that the comforts of his privileged existence cannot protect him from the conditions shared by all humanity. He abandons his inherited life in search of an answer to suffering, eventually adopting practices of severe asceticism. Yet deprivation brings him close to death without delivering the wisdom he seeks. He finally accepts nourishment and abandons the extremes of indulgence and self-mortification, discovering that liberation requires another path.
I find something compelling in this movement from intensity toward moderation. Siddhartha's renunciation is followed by another kind of relinquishment: the willingness to abandon a struggle that has ceased to be productive. His experience challenges the assumption that perseverance always means continuing along the same path. Sometimes wisdom requires recognizing that the effort itself has become an obstacle.
The central victory represented in Tagore's painting belongs to Siddhartha's confrontation with Māra beneath the Bodhi tree. As Siddhartha approaches enlightenment, Māra attempts to prevent his awakening through temptation, intimidation, and doubt. His armies and challenges embody the forces that perpetuate human suffering: ignorance, fear, craving, and attachment. Yet Siddhartha does not overcome these forces through superior violence. He remains seated, unmoved by the threats before him. When Māra challenges his right to enlightenment, Siddhartha calls upon the earth to bear witness. The confrontation ends not through the destruction of an adversary, but through the failure of that adversary to disturb his awakening.
The supernatural imagery is extraordinary, but its psychological significance interests me more. Māra can be understood as an embodiment of the impulses that govern human behavior when we become attached to our fears, desires, and identities. The story suggests that freedom does not always require defeating the forces that confront us. Sometimes it requires depriving them of their authority over our responses.
I recognize something of my own journey in that lesson.
For many years, questioning Christianity was an important part of establishing my intellectual independence. I had spent so much of my life within the religion that its doctrines continued to occupy a substantial place in my understanding of the world even after I no longer accepted them. Questions about salvation, divine authority, predestination, and the nature of God were never merely academic. They were bound to my history, relationships, and developing sense of identity. Challenging those claims was part of learning to trust my own judgment.
I do not regret that process. There were questions worth asking and arguments worth having. The younger version of myself needed the freedom to challenge inherited authority, particularly when that authority claimed to speak on behalf of ultimate truth. But intellectual independence can become its own form of attachment when we begin defining ourselves primarily through opposition. Eventually, I realized that continuing to argue against beliefs I had already rejected was no longer giving me anything I needed.
One of the most consequential changes in my thinking came when I recognized that my objections were directed toward religious traditions, doctrines, and dogmas rather than the people who believed them.
I have often been told that I cannot judge a perfect God by the behavior of imperfect people. I understand why Christians offer this response, particularly when confronted with religious hypocrisy or institutional failure. But it does not address the substance of my objections. My difficulty with Christianity is not principally that Christians fail to live according to their professed values. My difficulty is with the theological system itself. When subjected to scrutiny, the Christian conception of God does not persuade me. Its claims concerning divine sovereignty, revelation, salvation, suffering, and justice raise questions that I cannot reconcile with my understanding of existence.
The sincerity or moral character of a believer does not resolve those questions. Neither does my rejection of those doctrines diminish the humanity of those who accept them.
Many Christians are thoughtful, compassionate, generous people whose faith provides a meaningful framework for their lives. Their beliefs may contribute profoundly to their identity without becoming the measure by which I judge their worth. I can recognize the value religion brings to their lives without accepting the claims upon which that religion rests.
Perhaps this is difficult to understand from within a religious tradition. Christianity offers an interpretive framework in which belief and unbelief carry consequences extending beyond the present life. Someone who has left the faith may be understood as wandering, wounded, rebellious, or searching, even when that person experiences their departure as the conclusion of sustained inquiry. Having inhabited both perspectives, I understand something of the difficulty. I remember what it meant to believe, but I also know what it means to examine those beliefs and find them unconvincing. My present understanding of existence is not an incomplete version of my former Christianity. It is a worldview I have arrived at through years of reflection.
I would welcome being understood on those terms, but I no longer require that understanding to be at peace.
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur's concept of a second naïveté offers a useful way of considering my continuing relationship with religious mythology. Ricoeur recognized that critical examination changes how we encounter sacred narratives. Once an earlier, unquestioning faith has been subjected to historical and philosophical scrutiny, we cannot simply return to that innocence. Nevertheless, religious symbols may become meaningful again through interpretation. We can recover their significance without abandoning the questions that transformed our understanding of them.
I find this possibility liberating. I cannot return to the Christianity of my youth, nor do I wish to. But I can continue reading its scriptures, appreciating its liturgies, and considering its philosophical traditions. In the same way, I can encounter the Buddhist account of Māra without believing that supernatural armies confronted a historical figure beneath a tree. What matters to me is the human experience illuminated by the story.
This freedom to revisit religious mythology has also changed how I understand the victory that dominated my childhood imagination: the Christian victory of the cross.
Growing up within Christianity, I understood the crucifixion and resurrection as the decisive events in humanity's relationship with God. Christ's death addressed the problem of sin, while his resurrection represented the defeat of death itself. In the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, Paul celebrates this victory with an almost defiant confidence. Death, the apparently inevitable conclusion of human existence, has been deprived of its final authority.
There is a remarkable paradox within this mythology. The cross, an instrument of Roman execution, becomes the central symbol of salvation. Apparent humiliation becomes triumph, and surrender becomes the means through which divine power is revealed. The Christian concept of kenosis, or self-emptying, expressed in the second chapter of Philippians, deepens this paradox. Christ's humility and willingness to relinquish status challenge ordinary assumptions about power, greatness, and victory.
The Christian and Buddhist narratives are not interchangeable. Christianity presents salvation through divine action and reconciliation with God, while Buddhism concerns liberation from ignorance, craving, and the conditions of suffering. Their accounts of human existence and ultimate reality are profoundly different. Yet both reconsider what victory means. At the cross, triumph emerges through apparent defeat and self-giving love. Beneath the Bodhi tree, liberation emerges through the relinquishment of attachment and the cessation of struggle.
I grew up celebrating one of these victories and encountered the other much later in life. Yet I now find that both challenge the human tendency to understand triumph through domination. I can appreciate that wisdom without accepting the supernatural claims through which either tradition expresses it.
Another story from Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists describes the Buddha intervening in a dispute between the Shakyas and the Kolis over the waters of a river. What begins as a conflict over irrigation threatens to become a war. The Buddha asks the opposing parties to consider the value of the water against the value of the lives they are prepared to sacrifice. The narrative exposes the absurdity of allowing the desire to prevail to obscure what matters more.
There is a lesson here about the price of being right. Human beings are remarkably capable of sacrificing relationships, affection, and peace in pursuit of victory. Certainly, some disagreements demand confrontation. Religious doctrines can have real consequences for individuals and communities, and there are circumstances in which criticism becomes a moral responsibility. But not every conversation about religion requires such a confrontation. Sometimes a friend simply wants to share something that brings them comfort, and the value of that relationship exceeds anything I might gain by contesting the claim.
Buddhist teachings about upekkhā, commonly translated as equanimity, help me understand the freedom I have gradually discovered. Equanimity is not indifference, nor does it require abandoning intellectual or moral judgment. It is a cultivated steadiness of mind that allows us to encounter experience without becoming captive to attachment or aversion. We may recognize an impulse without being compelled to act upon it.
This is increasingly how I approach religious conversations. I can hear a theological claim I reject without experiencing it as a challenge to my identity. I can recognize the possibility of an argument without feeling obligated to pursue it. My convictions remain intact, but they no longer require constant defense.
More importantly, I can encounter the person without reducing them to the doctrines they profess.
I do not imagine that I have achieved anything comparable to the enlightenment described in Buddhist tradition. I remain susceptible to frustration, attachment, and the ordinary human desire to be understood. There are still circumstances in which I want to argue, correct, or defend. But I have become better at recognizing those impulses without allowing them to determine my behavior.
Several years ago, I encountered Tagore's painting while reading stories that broadened my understanding of the religious imagination. I appreciated the Buddha's victory as a philosophical idea, an account of liberation from the forces that perpetuate suffering. Sitting with my friend this past week, however, I recognized something of that victory in the ordinary experience of listening.
There had been no decisive argument, no surrender of convictions, no moment when one of us persuaded the other. My friend remained a Christian, and I remained an unbeliever. Nothing needed to be resolved for the encounter to be meaningful.
I return to Tagore's painting and find the Buddha seated in quiet contemplation. The struggle that gives the painting its title is absent from the image itself. There is no adversary left to confront, no audience awaiting an explanation, and no need to announce what has been accomplished. The victory resides in the stillness.
For years, I thought freedom would come from learning how to defeat the beliefs I had left behind. Perhaps the arguments were necessary for a time. But the peace I value most today has little to do with winning. It comes from recognizing that I no longer have to participate in every struggle that presents itself.
Once, I would have wanted the final word.
Now, I am content to sit.
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