thinkfetti

“Interdisciplinary” is a Janus word.

Let’s reach beyond the relatively literal meaning, “between disciplines” (Is there perhaps some implied longing here? As in between meals? Between relationships? Middle Ages? I wonder how many people alive in 1100 C.E. would have thought of themselves as ‘between ages’?)

Like Janus, this word looks both backwards and forwards; it is present at a threshold.

“Interdisciplinary” looks back to a definition – condescendingly bestowed by the “disciplinists” – connoting “not this and not that either.” And it looks forward to an intersubjective (uh oh, the language is circling back on me now…) understanding that my identity depends on – no, IS – the tangle of all the relationships of which I am inseparable part.

My teaching can hardly be called “disciplinary.” In my music courses, I am not preparing students to be future music academics. In my creativity and innovation courses, or in the design and leadership courses I have taught in the chemical engineering department, my teaching does not lend itself to being described as being “within a discipline.” I am not (even?) an engineer.

But let’s transcend the hardly, the not‘s. It’s time for a new story (joined to and enjoying many other concurrent stories).

The blend, the hybrid. Silko’s half-breed Tayo. Risk, leaping the gap. Poetry.

In the the book I’m reading now by Lin Yutang, I see that a sense of humor is a necessary counterbalance to a sense of idealism.

In my working environment – and those of many other people, I’d imagine – it’s all too easy for the wrong kind of humor to develop, though: a cynical, black-ish kind of humor, maybe even graveyard humor. I find Dilbert funny, but I’m sad that I do. In practice, this cynical humor goes beyond counterbalancing idealism, producing demoralized apathy.

Throwing up my hands doesn’t make it easier, for me personally, to go to work. But in the face of problems, I look for a way to navigate between taking them “too seriously” on the one side and cynically giving up trying on the other. An ability to change my focal length can help, and a sense of humor – a forgiving, compassionate-without-being-too-serious-about-being-compassionate sense of humor – is quite possibly an important piece of the internal compass I’ll need to draw on more often.