More Magic

We've had more magical days since coming here than we've had in a long time, but, that seems to be par for the course for when listening to anxiety (aka, our perception of new possibility, aka, our perception of a new life on divine offer). Our two most significant concerns since before coming here were (1) finding a place to live, and (2) finding a good school for Ben. Since we don't have a car, (2) needs to be close to (1). That dramatically limits our options.

Months before ever coming to Oxford, Ana and I found one school in particular that we really wanted to enroll Ben in. Of all the public schools in Oxford, it seems like one of the only that actually teaches good Theology. But in England, you don't really get to choose where to send your child (unless you send them to private school). Rather, you submit a form to the city council with your child's name, and they assign a school to your child within your "catchment area", or, within a two mile radius from your house (sometimes further).

Well, the miracle house we found is also in the catchment area of the school in which we want to send Ben. That's not exactly a surprise, as we were looking pretty closely for houses near this school (of course the way it happened was quite a surprise). But living near a school guarantees nothing here. We heard some semi-horror stories about this process from local moms, such as one family applying for schools (any school!) in January, and not hearing about their child's placement until June. One mom applied for the particular school we're looking at but there were no spots open. That's another thing: the likelihood that our preferred school would have an opening after school starts (our current scenario) decreases even more. Well, once we signed the contracts on our house we almost immediately applied Ben to the City Council for a school placement. Based on what I read on the City Council website, and from other sites about this process, it looked like the earliest Ben could possibly start school (any school) was end of October, more likely some time in November. That would mean he would miss almost half of his whole grade. We've been told by several residents to just keep at it with the City Council; to keep following up, keep pressing the school your want for your child, etc. A lot of work, and a long process.

This morning, however, we decided to just go and visit this school. We arrived and were told we needed an appointment, which they arranged for us for later in the day. In the meantime, I hoofed it on my bike to meet someone from whom I had arranged to buy a bike helmet. We met in the city center, and she brought a friend along. Turns out she studies Theology here, and the friend she brought is Brazilian! The latter offered to introduce us to the Brazilian community here.

I then hoofed it to meet Ana, Ben, and Ellie back at the school for our appointment. We talked with the headmaster (principal) for a while, and were so convinced this was the right school for Ben that I had goosebumps. The headmaster then asked us, "So when would you like your son to start? Next week?" At first I thought he was joking. But it turns out they have a single spot open in his grade, and they offered to work directly with the City Council on our behalf. They've already emailed me since meeting with them and everything is all secured, Ben will start next Monday. From what I know so far, this is all quite out of the ordinary.

The way Ben's school placement worked out was just like our house: both seem to have been reserved for us, and just waiting for us to accept them. It's very bizarre. But neither is it the first time this sort of thing has happened in the midst of anxiety. Just more fodder for my MPhil thesis on anxiety!

Puzzle Piece

It looks like we've secured ourselves a house here, and, while the way it happened isn't quite as bizarre as how I got into Oxford, it has a similar fragrance.

Ana and I had been looking at houses online since before we arrived, and we noticed how quickly properties entered the market and left. Good houses showed up one day and were gone the next. Once we got here, all that was left from the summer market were the dregs: bland apartment complexes isolated from the city. Most places we looked at online had bedrooms just big enough to fit a bed - sometimes only a twin bed. We found a really pretty - though really expensive - house online and immediately called about it, only to find an offer had been placed on it just 20 minutes prior to my call. A first-world problem, to be sure, but thus was the nature of the market here.

Then we noticed a house that had been on the market for over a month, which is bizarre enough all by itself. We scheduled a meeting with the 'letting agency' to see it. We arrived early that day to scope out the area. We quickly recognized that it's in one of the most popular (and expensive) areas in Oxford. It's a quick stroll to the city centre. It's also one block from my college, and just several blocks from two of the schools in which we're hoping to enroll Ben. One of the most interesting things about its location is how quiet the neighborhood is, even though the hustle and bustle of Oxford is just a few blocks away. So we waited outside and marveled at the location. Then the church bells - from the church about 30 feet away from our house on the other side of the street - began chiming. It turns out this church actually owns the house.

The letting agent arrived and opened the door, and we knew immediately this place had somehow been reserved for us. It is an old, beautiful house with tons of charm. It has a little backyard (rare in our search), a "conservatory" (a room with a glass ceiling and glass windows) leading to the backyard. And the bedrooms are huge! Even more bizarre, it was one of the cheapest properties we'd found.

So I had to ask the letting agent, "Ok, so what's the catch. Why has this place been on the market so long?"
"Oh, there have been plenty of offers. But for whatever reason, the church just didn't really respond to the offers, and eventually the tenants moved on."

Well, we placed an offer on the place the night we saw it, and by the time we woke up the next morning, the church had accepted our offer. This place is essentially the only place left in Oxford, it is the most perfect place for us, and it is just out there waiting. Of course it's my interpretation, but it's hard not to feel like this place was being held just for us.

Oh, and this pub (to the right) is also on the other side of the street from the house. (danger!)

European Vacation

Today Ben and I had our first Griswold European Vacation experience. You remember the impossibly polite British character(s) from the movie, right? Ben and I met one of them today.

Now that Ben's got his own bike here, I've also been looking for a bike so I can keep up with him. I found somebody selling a used bike online, and he happened to live just a street away. Ben rode his new bike over and I walked. The house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a loose-gravel driveway in which were two parked cars. The gentleman was extraordinarily cordial, and we got to talking a little while Ben rode his bike around in the street.

As we're talking, I see Ben entering the far edge of my field of vision, moving at an incredible rate.. He rockets past the two of us, bulldozes through the gravelly driveway, crashes hard head-on to the gentleman's front hood, and flies over his handlebars and lands square on the hood of his car.

"Whoah, that was fun."
"Oh goodness! Are you alright? Are you alright?" the man runs over to Ben, not knowing what I know (that it takes a lot more than that for Ben to get hurt). I hide my face, which is slowly turning purple, as I notice that Ben has clearly scratched the front bumper of the gentleman's car.

"Oh-my-goodness.. I'm so sorry sir! Please let me pay for the damages," I beg.
"Don't be silly! There's no damage a'tall!"
"But sir, he clearly scratched your car here.."
"Oh don't give it a moment's notice! I was just going to take it in for service anyway, see these other scratches on it?"
"Are you sure I can't pay for this? Would you please let me know if you find any other damage?"
"Oh it's nothing a'tall!"

Rather than accept compensation for his loss, the gentleman instead asks to see Ben's bike. He notices the brakes are pretty poor, so he then tells us he used to work on bikes for a living, and offers to fix Ben's bike, "Otherwise, you might go around town running into the fronts of cars!" He ended up installing new brake lines and performing a general tuning on Ben's bike.

Hi, I'm Clark W. Griswold; we're the grand prize Pig-In-A-Poke.

Parks

Ben & a random friend off together, bottom-right

Two things about parks here: (1) they have things in them that would attract lawsuits in the US like white on rice, and (2) I rarely see parents at the park on their phones. I'm not trying to dog the US - I miss it incredibly; but these things just pop out at me while at the park.

Ben has been having the time of his life on a 100-foot zip line (which I also had & loved at a park in my hometown in Texas), and this insane giant, twirly swing thing that fires kids off in a corkscrew fashion around a telephone-sized-pole at incredible speeds. Pictures to follow later!

Oxford - Portland

Leaving Portland was really, really hard for me. In fact, it was excruciating. Ana had a single emotional moment when we left our house, but other than that she and Ben are truly operating only within the present moment. I asked Ben last night how he felt about the fact that we're living in England now rather than Portland, "Pretty cool!" My emotions, on the other hand, are all over the place, and many of these come from consideration of the past and future. I'm sad, excited, disoriented, intimidated, grateful, adventurous, homesick, and all sorts of other things at the same time. I've read that with a big move, one's memories of their current life become rosy, and memories of their life to come become dreary. So I watched with amusement as our departure date drew near, sure enough, my memories of Portland became extremely rosy (impossibly pristine), and my daydreams of Oxford became gloomy. As it seems that all our emotions exist for some purpose, it will be interesting to figure out why our emotions do this to our memories during a move.

Today the four of us ventured around the neighborhood we're temporarily in, called Headington. We found the most charming McDonald's we've ever seen, and found a seriously impressive park, with a zip-line, a crazy twirling swing, and (reassuringly) lots of kids.

Oxford

Well hello there! It's been some time since I posted on this blog, but it appears it's time to get it geared up again.. I recently got accepted to study Philosophical Theology at the University of Oxford, so we're moving to England! The story of how this happened is pretty interesting (so I think, anyway) and intertwined, and for those curious, I'll tell it below.

I Meet Anxiety

One afternoon in 2005, I experienced a panic attack. I’d felt something like it a few times in my life before, but I never knew what it was. I only figured something was very wrong with me. They always came out of the blue, but the reverberations of this particular panic attack were different. I was older (28), and therefore more able to dwell (obsess) on it. I couldn’t shake it, and I began having panic attacks every few hours. That first nightmare of a day stretched into two, then into a week, then into a month.. Then into two years. Any one of these days was the worst day of my life. It was a living nightmare, in the truest sense of the phrase: I was daily waiting to wake up. I turned to my primary source of knowledge at the time for answers, which was science. I gained some interesting insights into potential evolutionary explanations of anxiety, some cognitive behavioral techniques that helped a little, but none seemed to come even close to whatever root problem existed. Everything science offered seemed to be a band-aid. For the first time in my life, I wondered if any of the world religions had any answers. I set out on an adventure to examine each world religion in turn, abandoning any that failed certain criteria I held (mostly, no contradicting science, no contradicting logic).

I only had one day of relief in those two years, and it came while I was getting into Judaism. While reading the book of Isaiah one day, I came to Isaiah 11:6, where I read that some day, a wise person will come, restoring peace to life somehow. The picture that is painted is that of a lion laying peacefully with a lamb. The moment I read this, my anxiety dissipated for the first time in a year or so. That was a huge deal for me. It was one of only a few true moments in the past year in which I didn't feel like I was on a bad acid trip. I spent the rest of the day meditating on Isaiah 11:6 and a mental image of a lion and lamb resting together. This also marked the day that I had scheduled an appointment with a counselor – also no small feat for me. I spent most of my life viewing counselors as witch-doctors, at best. But I finally arrived to a point of desperation: I needed serious help. I was barely able to function at work anymore, I hadn't had an appetite in a year, my stomach was a mess, I was shaking most of the time, etc. I drove almost an hour to the counselor’s office, all the while meditating on Isaiah 11:6, and the lion and the lamb. I entered the counselor’s waiting room, which were four white walls, some chairs, and a single, large cross-stitching on one of the walls. I turned white when I noticed the cross-stitching was that of a lion laying next to a lamb, and a quote underneath it, of Isaiah 11:6. While I found this highly strange, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. My complete release of this anxiety wouldn’t come for another year.

Fast forward to 2007: two years after my first panic attack. One day while at work I stumbled upon a shocking discovery: my (now) ex-wife had been having an affair: for two years. The moment I discovered this, the phone range, and it was my (then) wife. I confronted her about my discovery, and she admitted everything. As she confirmed my discovery, I physically felt the anxiety leave my body. Strangely, it was one of the greatest moments of my life: I felt like myself again for the first time in two years. But things took an even more incredible turn. I later discovered that her affair began the day that my first panic attack began, and, of course, ended on the day of discovery. So far as I could see it, either I had ESP, or something or someone had been providing me with extremely important information. ESP seemed far too wacky to me from the get-go, so I merely left the latter option open.

I Meet Ana

My wife subsequently filed for divorce, and I moved back to Houston, where my family, childhood friends, and familiar locales were. Though shocked at the life that had been destroyed, I at least was somehow free of the anxiety and panic attacks. I couldn't even conjure a panic attack or anxiety if I wanted to. 

However after about a year in Houston, to my horror, the same panic attacks returned. Every three hours. Yet this time, I knew there must be information to which I ought to be attending. I had the sense at this point that anxiety precedes a major life change, though I didn’t know why. Nonetheless, I began imagining different changes I could make in my life. Perhaps I’d meet someone else? This only raised my anxiety. Perhaps I could buy a house in Houston. No avail. Then somehow, an idea got into my mind about throwing my religion and philosophy books into my car, and camping out around the US for three months, from Houston to Portland. When I considered this idea, the anxiety vanished.

I sat on this for a while. But the longer I delayed, the more acute – and often – were my panic attacks and anxiety. It got to the point that I almost had no choice but to lean into this idea of a three month solo camping trip. I planned for months the route I would take, where I would stay, etc. Most of my family and friends thought I’d lost it. But it was the only action that made any sense – it would have been horribly unhealthy for me not to do it. Once again, the day I left, the anxiety vanished. And about an hour after I arrived at my last stop, in Portland, Oregon, I met Ana, my future wife.

I Meet Kierkegaard

I didn’t experience this anxiety again after meeting Ana. She and I traveled the world, visiting almost 30 countries. During this time, I met the writings of Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. In his The Concept of Anxiety, he lays out his thesis that, for the first time, made sense of my anxiety with stunning accuracy: while fear is the perception of something actual (ie, a bear), anxiety is the perception of possibility (what the bear “might” do). And when God offers a person a new life, that new life brings with it an explosion of new possibilities. When one stands at the edge of a cliff, looking out over an abyss of new possibilities, one experiences dizziness. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” Kierkegaard wrote. One can recoil in horror from these possibilities – and become lost in life, or one can “leap” into the abyss of possibilities – and gain everything: a relationship with God, a new life. The anxiety will remain, however, until one does the right thing. It is in this way that Kierkegaard thought “anxiety is our greatest teacher.” Kierkegaard’s book seemed to have been written expressly for me. He could not have been more accurate in what I had experienced.

Being Jewish, I came to fall in love with the Tanakh, and received so much direction for my life that had been missing. But I came to find the New Testament to be the culmination of the Tanakh. I found in Christianity the story of divine, perfect logic (the “logos”, cf John 1) entering history as a human person – the same person promised in Isaiah 11:6. Even better, I found that the whole religion is falsifiable, founded on a single, historic event (the resurrection).

We continued our travels. I became a Christian on a train in Italy. We got married in Jerusalem, and later had our first child, Ben. I pursued a Masters in Science and Religion, all the while researching the relationship between anxiety and God. My anxiety was gone. It had been for seven years. 

Until October 2015. Boom: it was back again. But I had a much different interpretation of anxiety now. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is the meeting point between man and God. It is therefore the “mark of perfection” in a person. As Kierkegaard notes, he who has been rightly instructed in anxiety will dance when anxiety strikes up the music. When anxiety beckons, one’s job is to introspect, to discover the new life God is offering you.

I Meet Oxford

I began employing the same method as before: introspecting, imagining what new life might be on offer to me. Somehow, the idea of applying to a specific program at Oxford entered my head. When I dwelled on this idea, my anxiety dissipated. Just as before, it was the only idea that quelled my anxiety. But, Oxford?! I had absolutely no chance at being accepted. Those that enter have both undergrads and masters in philosophy from Ivy League schools, have been presidents of philosophy clubs, have publications, conference presentations, and much more. I had none of the above. In fact, it seemed my undergrad GPA would disqualify me outright!

I met with a friend one night – both a Christian and a (now) PhD in philosophy, and asked what he thought about this idea of mine. He merely prayed Matthew 11:28 for me: Come to me all you who are wary and burdened, and I will give you rest. In other words, if I follow God, he will remove my anxiety. But how would I procure publications and conference presentations – the only things that could possibly help my entrance? It’s not like one can hop over to the store and pick a few of those up. These things typically take years to come to fruition.

However, the following morning, I decided to begin leaning into the idea of applying to Oxford. And the more I did, the more the anxiety dissipated. I had a meeting schedule with Fr. David from our church, to see what he thought about all of this. He suggested we meet at a cafe which I had not yet visited, called Taborspace. On the way there, I marveled at how my anxiety was dissipating the more I thought about uprooting our lives and moving to Oxford. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?! Shouldn't uprooting our lives bombard me with anxiety? But once again, it was the only thing that made sense – the only thing that dissipated the anxiety. I meditated on Matthew 11:28 my whole drive over to Taborspace - Come to me all you who are wary and burdend, and I will give you rest. It was very reminiscent of my Isaiah 11:6 experience, in that a single verse was transforming my anxiety. 

When I entered Taborspace, I was quite taken aback at how much it resembled an Oxford reading room! The cafe sits inside a 19th century church building, with stained-glass windows encircling the room. Each table sits next to a stained-glass window with a bank lamp on it – as do many reading rooms at Oxford. This, along with Matthew 11:28 still rolling around in my head, had a dizzying effect. Then I noticed there were a few words underneath each picture on the stained-glass window. Then I noticed that the words from one window combine with the words on the next window. Then I realized each window made up a single sentence. Then I noticed what all the windows said together: Come to me all you who are wary and burdened, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28).

The message seemed clear. I would follow this flight of fancy, ridiculous as it sounded. I sent out several papers I’d written during my Masters, and within a couple months, I had five invitations to present papers at conferences, and two publications. So far as I know, this is rare (according to some professors I met with at these conferences, it's almost unheard of). The icing on the cake was a sixth conference invitation: to present my work on anxiety: at Oxford. While at that conference, an idea popped into my head that would become my first major publication.

After graduating from my MA in Science in Religion, I applied to the MPhil in Philosophical Theology at Oxford, knowing that they have applicants from all over the world, and that they only accept four or five people a year. As Fr. David said during our meeting, “Well, the odds of getting accepted to Oxford are like winning the lottery. So if you’re accepted to Oxford, you’ll have to good reason to think it was from God!” But I also knew the meaning behind my anxiety. I didn’t even apply to any other program. I was this certain of what the anxiety meant.

On March 21st of this year, I got the email from Oxford: I have been accepted to the program, and I will be focusing my research on the connection between anxiety and God!

Masters

Over the past 5 years, every major life event of mine coincides with a significant date. I have no idea what that means. But, I applied nearly 9 months ago to do a Masters program at a theological school in California. I'd been waiting to hear back ever since on whether I would be accepted. Finally, on Ben's first birthday while in Brazil, I got an answer: we're moving to California!