Hello again from the really incredible place of Montserrat. I’m running out of superlative adjectives to describe this place. I took a hike this morning further up into the surrounding mountains, and met an American who was rock climbing. He said, “Everywhere you look around here, it looks like a postcard.” That has definitely been my experience.
My hike this morning was fairly rigorous. I knew there were some trails around here, but didn’t want to just set out without knowing anything about them. So I went to the information office in this little monastery/village, where an adept English speaker pulled out a map and showed me several options. I fancy myself to be in better shape than most (at least for an hombre of a certain age), but perhaps I don’t give off that vibe to others. I had seen that the trail to the highest elevation said to expect about an hour and a half to get there. But after my information officer took a look up and down me, she said I should plan on two hours. Ouch! But I did it in an hour and twenty minutes, thank you very much (I have been training for such things!).
The route was a lot of concrete steps, which made me wonder how they got all that concrete up there. I wouldn’t say that I’m scared of heights, but I at least have a slight nervousness about them. And there were a few places that I had to coax myself into believing that it really was OK. Actually, I don’t think you can make yourself believe something by sheer force of will, but you can force yourself to act in certain ways, and I think that can often result in belief (that’s called being a doxastastic involuntarist in the philosophical literature). So I chose to keep walking up the mountain, and I came to believe that it was a really, really cool experience.
In all, it was about 7 miles, and 1800 feet change in elevation. I got back to my room and did a lot of downward facing dog and a few other yoga poses that we’ve learned from “yoga for hikers” videos. I also thought it would be good to ice my knees, but you may remember from yesterday’s post that the only thing in my mini-fridge freezer compartment is half a pint of squishy Ben & Jerry’s.
Speaking of food, the downside of grocery shopping to cook your own meals in a place where you’re only going to be a few days, is that you can’t really buy groceries for single servings. So, instead of buying more groceries for a different dinner, I used the leftover ingredients and had the exact same dinner tonight as I did last night (and I expect to have it one more time tomorrow). That’s fine. It still tasted pretty good.
Also my apartment doesn’t come stocked with any of the staples, like dish soap. So I had to wash last night’s dishes with the little bar of soap in my toiletry bag (it was either that or toothpaste). And I kept wondering if that slightly different flavor tonight was the lard and perfumes from my bar of soap.
Not wanting to move around much more today after my hike, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon in my room reading and thinking more about this book I’m trying to write. Because I fancy myself an adept at multi-tasking (as we all do, and we’re all wrong about that according to the studies that have been done on it!), I also had the little TV (think the size of the first flatscreen computer monitors) on. I think I came to a realization about the rest of the world and sports: I’ve always heard it said that America is something of an anomaly in that we have quite a few very high profile sporting leagues: basketball, football, baseball, hockey; and add to that college basketball and football; whereas the rest of the world pretty much just has soccer at that high of a level. Well here’s my realization after an afternoon flipping between the two sports channels my monastery apartment provides me with: maybe only soccer is really popular here, because the other sports are just weird. These two sports networks today (a Saturday afternoon, which you’d think would be prime time for popular sports) showed:
rhythmic gymnastics — which I remember seeing the in the Olympics, where girls dance around on the floor exercise space with a giant ribbon, or a ball, or a hula hoop.
motorcycle racing — the kind on a closed asphalt racetrack, which as a motor sport could be pretty popular with a certain kind of person, and they go really fast. But not once did I ever see one pass another… they just got into a line and kept that line the whole time.
Roller skate hockey — I’m not joking. They were in a drained hockey rink (I assume the same problem with freezing things I’ve encountered elsewhere in this country) on roller skates.
Scooter street — like the skateboard competitions in a park with rails and jumps and things, but they were on the kind of scooters that had a handle.
My reading today, which was more interesting than the sports, was continuing in Robin Dunbar’s book I got on Kindle, How Religion Evolved. A major part of the argument so far has to do with what has made Dunbar famous (at least as famous as academics can get): Dunbar’s Number. This is a really interesting finding that our brains have evolved to the point where we can keep about 150 relationships with other people at any given time. Of course we might know more people than this (on average there are about 1500 people that we know), but maintaining a relationship requires a bit more. There was a really interesting chapter about this and the concentric circles of relationships we have with people from our inner circle (about 5 people), to our best friends (about 15), to our good friends (about 50), to our 150 people we’d call current friends. These track pretty well to the how much we have communication with them, how much we perceive an emotional bond to them, and how much we’d be willing to do for them. And these numbers are remarkably consistent across cultures.
That got me curious: who are my 150? And who are my 5, 15, and 50? So I started making a list. The first 5 were easy. And the 15 were also pretty quick (the 15 include the 5 from the first circle, by the way). Those 15 might have been different by 5 or 6 people if I had made the list a few years ago. But now I’m struggling with the 35 beyond the 15 to make up my circle of 50 close friends. I wonder how much COVID has affected this? I’m not sure how much an electronic relationship counts. I scrolled through the 1,113 Facebook “friends” I have… most of them didn’t make the cut. But it also made me wonder whether I should be more intentional in cultivating people for these various friend levels. E.g., I’d like for that person to be in my group of 50, so I should really do more to cultivate that friendship. Also, I wondered how much of these relationships are reciprocal: if I have that person in my 15, I wonder if I’m in theirs?? Anyway, it was kind of a fascinating exercise, and no, I won’t be publishing my list.
I’m about to head to bed a little earlier than I did last night. That’s because this place I’m staying is a working monastery. That means there are bells. They start at 4:00am, which I assume is calling the monks to one of those very early Benedictine offices. I’ve stayed at other Benedictine monasteries where we civilians were able to go to all of the services, and I think I remember correctly that I made it to that one. Here, though, we’re only invited to Lauds at 7:30am, and Vespers at 6:45pm. I was planning to go to Lauds this morning, but after the bells woke me up at 4 (and then if I remember correctly, quite a few more times while it was still dark), I was trying to sleep and didn’t want to get up at 7:30.
After yesterday’s experience with the two very loud bells at the top of Sagrada Familia, I’m starting to have an aversion to them. That’s a little unexpected, because I got on the COVID bandwagon of people reading Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Bell, which I really enjoyed. It too was set in a Benedictine community, whose bell tower has lost its bell, which is probably a metaphor for their spirituality, or belief in God. They’re trying to bring a new one, but maybe the old one is still around somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered.
Anyway, these bells this morning were about to make me want to lose my own spirituality. So I devised a plan to deal with them tomorrow morning. I’m going to count them, and keep track of how many tolls there are. Now, you might be suspicious that I can really keep an accurate count in the wee hours of the morning, and you’ll remember from a couple of days ago that I have no pen. I wondered about etching scratch marks into the wall, like I’m a prisoner or castaway trying to keep track of days. But I figured that the people at my monastery wouldn’t really appreciate the vandalism. So I’ve discovered that the there’s an app for that. I’ve downloaded the Thing Counter app, and all I’ll have to do is tap the screen of my phone every time a bell rings.
I do all this with the belief (of a doxastic involuntarist) that if I force myself to do something interesting with the bells, I just may come to believe that they’re not that bad. Tomorrow I’ll let you know the results.