The Open Hand: Arguing as an Art of Peace

5. Bowing Out

DOI: 10.7330_9780874219203.c005 5 B o w i n g O ut In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. Shunryu Suzuki (1904–1971) Over the five semesters that I taught the course, Arguing as an Art of Peace was an ongoing experiment, an effort to find better ways to incorporate three modalities of learning—contemplative, kinesthetic, and conceptual-procedural—into a course structured around a series of projects, each affiliated with a different tactic for arguing with an open hand. In the preceding chapters, I’ve focused on those projects— deliberative, conciliatory, and integrative—and the associated tactics of reframing, attentive listening, and mediating. Although I’ve considered the learning modalities throughout my discussion, in this final chapter I want to structure my review around them, highlighting their centrality to the course. I have described the course as a series of conventional classes punctuated by weekly lab sessions devoted to contemplative as well as kinesthetic learning. Most of those sessions took place in a regular classroom, transformed into a lab only by moving the chairs to the walls to clear a space for activities in the center—sometimes sitting in meditation, sometimes performing movements associated with tai chi or aikido. In one special session, described in the previous chapter, I set up a calligraphy station to give students the experience of brush meditation. When conditions permitted, we went outside to practice some of our movement patterns on a patio next to the classroom building. And once, typically toward the end of the semester, we left campus for a short field trip, a fifteen-minute walk across the Lehigh River into the city of Bethlehem, to visit a Japanese garden, the “Garden of Serenity.”1 Our purpose was to visit a site designed to foster contemplation through its arrangement of boulders, plants, structures, waterway, and raked gravel path. When we reached our destination, the class gathered on a circle of benches outside the garden area, where we talked about the fact that we were not merely visitors because we had brought with us a capacity for meditative Bowing Out    115 awareness and a recognition that this garden was meant to support mindfulness. At the same time, we were not quite prepared to be inside participants either, reinforced by the fact we had to view the garden from outside a low fence, which restricted access but did not interfere with a full view of the enclosed area. For me, these visits were a reminder that all of us were in a liminal space between outside and inside perspectives , between observer and participant roles, separated by a physical and cultural fence from getting inside, yet with a greater proximity than we would have had without the experience of contemplative practice.2 I asked students to find a place to stand along the fence and, from that perspective, to focus on a feature that caught the eye, holding it in attention for a sustained period. I rang the meditation bell to begin the activity and rang it again, ten minutes later, to signal the conclusion. After the second bell, we gathered again on the benches. Because the field trip usually took place in late fall, there was often a chill in the air, so we couldn’t linger long. I brought cookies and thermos bottles of hot tea, and while students warmed up, I asked them to write for a few minutes , recording reflections they posted later in their notebooks. Many wrote that the trip provided an opportunity to be “centered and present in the moment,” allowing one student to state she felt “more mindful than [she had] been in several weeks” and another to say she had attained a degree of “mindfulness unlike what [she had] experienced so far during this course.” The Contempl ati ve Mo dali t y Most of the students in Arguing as an Art of Peace responded positively to meditation, mindfulness, and activities such as slowly eating a raisin , painting a circle in a single breath, and visiting a Japanese garden. Nevertheless, the contemplative component was the most unconventional aspect of the course and the one with the least straightforward connections to argument. I was not too surprised, therefore, to find that some students were uncertain, sometimes even skeptical, about the relevance of the contemplative practices for arguing. One reason for their uncertainty, I suspect, is that the connections are subtle and indirect— and in that respect different from the clearer and more straightforward applications...