Weekly #6: An Extinct Profession, Resilience, and a Self-Reflection Example
What We're Growing On This Week
Each week, something for your curiosity and something to inspire you to grow.
The currency of sacrifice
Rafting is one of the traditional professions in the Black Forest, which went extinct over a hundred years ago. Very specifically, in 1894.
I learnt a lot about it at the yearly festival of the Rafters of Schiltach two weekends ago.
Rafting wasn’t just a navigating sport. It meant building the raft, loading it with goods, and navigating it down the mountain stream, into the larger river all the way to the Rhine at Strasbourg.
The raft was the means of transport AND a product to sell itself. It was made of thick evergreen trunks, fastened with wooden nails and rope made of hazel twigs. The Dutch were keen to get this wood, as they were building the city of Amsterdam, including piers, or the foundations of the royal palace. A significant part of Amsterdam’s infrastructure seems to have been built with wood from the Black Forest. Incidentally, Amsterdam is the largest urban settlement built on stilts.
The trade was so flourishing, starting as early as the 14th century, that fir trees with a diameter of at least 48 cm at 18 metres height were called (and still are) Holländer (Dutchmen). One Dutchman was sold for an amount equivalent to a teacher’s yearly salary.
The complete raft was typically made up of up to 50 (!) smaller rafts tied together like a train, thus turning into a floating snake that could get 600 metres long. One man was steering at the front, while others steered at every joint along the length. Teamwork avant la lettre was indispensable: steering needed to be synced, for example, if the front carrier hit a rock and the remaining ones had to be brought to a halt just in time to avoid collision.
Rafting was a breakneck game. Rolling the raft down mountain streams, steering clear of rocks or bushy banks, meant that sometimes men crashed between the carriers or slid off the raft and broke skulls or backbones.
While the farmers made a good living selling their wood, the rafters themselves, if mere hired hands, were poor souls.
But why did the profession cease to exist so specifically in 1894?
The railway was introduced in the Black Forest. With it, rafting had become inefficient and redundant.
The Rafters Club set up last decade in this quaint little town with a strong rafting tradition keeps the memory of the rafters navigating rocky shallow mountain waters alive. Once a year, their festival is a celebration of community, tradition, pride, and of course, an opportunity to show rafting in action.
And the reflection is…?
The obvious point would be: the history bulldozer rolls on, mercilessly erasing livelihoods, turning the wheel on once flourishing trades (and their skillsets), only to crush them into irrelevance.
But that’s not my point.
All the little lives that made that trade work, the anonymous, insignificant heroes, the men who laboured to deliver one more raft into the Dutchmen’s hands!
From the comfort of our modern life, any sacrifice seems a risk to be taken only reluctantly, if not dismissed right away. But our civilization was built with sacrifice that was accepted as a matter of course, as the only known way to live, or make a living.
When such community memories as the risky and highly-skilled craft of rafting come alive, I often wonder:
What would I do if I had to make a living risking my life? Getting my body to learn and adjust to the unforgiving challenge?
What is my level of readiness to sacrifice (part of) the quality of my life? And what would I find easier, or hardest, to do without?
If our life expectancy now counts quite a few decades more than a hundred years ago, for example, thanks to the blandness of the work we have to do, what am I making of it? What can I gain that people back then couldn’t even hope to get? What can – or should – I do to celebrate my almost double time on this earth?
What do you build – or feed – your resilience on?
Wearing the “resilience glasses” was the topic of an interview I read recently with the Director of the Resilience and Society department at the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research.
Resilience, the ability to sustain mental well-being in critical times, feeds on both internal and external resources.
The internal resources typically include problem-solving skills, self-esteem, and the belief that we can take action to make an impact, and this way, for instance, achieve goals, satisfy needs, or change unfavourable circumstances.
The interview dealt with building kids’ resilience in the school system, where the external resources are things like equitable access to education in the first place, school facilities, the competence of the teaching and support staff.
And what pedagogical strategies can teachers use to build kids’ internal resilience resources? They need to look for the can-do, instead of the deficits, for starters, and give praise for what the kids already know.
Other strategies include keeping behaviour apart from the kids’ identities: what you do is wrong, instead of who you are is wrong. This can smoothly combine with a dynamic mindset, pointing to the behaviour or performance that might be inadequate now, but can be improved with more practice.
As a former teacher, these things are nothing new to me. We called that simply “good” pedagogy, as opposed to the old-school method based on authority and inflexible discipline.
But what struck me as new, reading this interview, is how kids’ mental well-being has become so central. In the past, these strategies were mainly motivational. Now they seem to be critical for the kids’ future lives.
The rationale for praising the can-do was to encourage the student to continue to develop their potential; now it is important in order to equip them with survival skills.
We used to give feedback pointing to future development, so they are motivated and happy to continue learning. Now this is necessary if we want them to “stay with us”, in the classroom.
Some might claim that we’ve become such Warmduscher — the German for someone only taking showers with warm water, namely, who’s not tough enough for life.
Others may simply observe this evolution and conclude that our societies are going through structural crises that threaten the welfare of their individuals over long windows of time.
So what can we reflect on?
Turning back to you and me, I’m wondering what your resources for resilience are. Is it a specific person, or a group (family?)? A hobby that is safe from many societal storms? A ritual that gives you energy, or balance?
And then, how dependent are we on these resources? Is it safe for us to depend on them, or maybe we should create for ourselves an extra niche, an extra refuge?
Turning to internal resources – our problem-solving, self-esteem, and self-reliance – which one is your strength? Which one is weaker – and would you consider doing something to improve it?
Mindful living also means we say what we do, and we do what we say
Since I started Mentatrix 3 months ago, I’ve been going through a continuous process of thinking and re-thinking about what I do here. You will have noticed that, too: changes after changes after changes — to the type and frequency of the emails you get, or to the type of posts I publish (although I do stick to the same themes and to the fundamentals of creative writing).
Over these 3 months I’ve stopped several times and thought, “Wait! Remind me please why I’m writing on Substack.” I’ve done this in the past few weeks even more.
The answer is: I started this Substack to gradually build an audience for the books I’m planning to publish. The first one has long been lying on a shelf and I’m getting eager to put it out.
I did NOT start this Substack to write a Substack – you know what I mean? This blog is not an end in itself, more of a means.
While posting here, I saw that I may not build an audience, not that quickly before a book launch, but I will definitely have a lot to learn and gain through the contact with this community. I will also develop a writing routine and improve my writing skills.
So, the goal I set myself in spring — or the primary one — may not be the same now, but the question why am I doing this? helped me reconsider my approach to Substack-ing.
The result is: I want to declutter and give this Substack its place as a means, and not an end in itself. I want to focus on editing my novel, Lili Comes to Herself, and put together the mindfulness / personal growth books I’d like to publish in a near future.
As a result, I’m making another change, which I think will be here to stay longer than the others so far.
If lately I have published two or three times a week, I’ve decided I’m only going to post once a week (Sundays). The Weekly will stop being a weekly, because it will alternate with the posts in the categories of Fiction and Creative Nonfiction. I’m merging these three categories once again together, to align even further with the desire to simplify. This means you will start getting all the posts, no matter their category, but you will only get one post a week.
I’m re-naming Weekly as Mentatrixes (no brainer!), and so I am making a three-pronged offering:
Fiction: short stories, novel excerpts, mostly about characters growing, searching, and sometimes finding their true selves
Creative nonfiction on personal growth and landscape & culture
Mentatrixes as reflection prompts, building on both self-reflection (personal growth) and landscape & culture (Germany, Black Forest)
This is one of the ways I try to keep living mindfully:
I say / write / reflect on what I do — for instance, asking myself again and again why I’m blogging, and what I want to get out of it; and then formulating an answer in a form definite enough that I can commit to it in front of you.
And I do what I say — living mindfully, that is. I write about it, and prompt you to reflect on, say, mindfulness myths, the deeper significance of an event; but I also try to practise it, as my own way of living.
My week in writing
Last week I published Mindfulness Myth #6, where the Self is trying to make sense of the (puzzling) slogan listen to your heart. Why the heart and not the — wait, what, the head? what does each stand for in this analogy? and of all the discord of voices getting loud in our “hearts”, which exactly should we follow?
The Self needs to make a decision and she is torn between conflicting messages.
Look Who's Talking
The Self is clutching the pen and stares at the blank paper. She has to decide whether to move to the coast, leaving her childhood village behind. She’s been to the Coach’s place, but on the door there was a note for her: I’ll be gone for a while, but you can write to me.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for staying with me!
Loved learning about rafting and where you took this.
Thanks, Jill!