Category: Sabbatical

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Duomo terraces by elevator

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Yesterday, I went up the roof of the Milano’s Duomo for the third time in my life, and this time, I did it by the elevator. The first time, I was travelling alone, so I took the stair’s option. The second time, it was myself, my wife, and our five-year-old daughter. They are both seasoned travellers, so again, we took the stairs. This time, we went together with my parents, and although I think that they are still young, we decided to take the elevator (or the lift, as we say in Europe).

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First of all, the visit to the Duomo’s terraces is the most spectacular part of the cathedral tour in my opinion. Going up there three times is certainly not too many. The atmosphere at the top, the city views are just magical, especially if you catch a sunset on a warm Spring evening.

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Another note is that ascending by lift is a very nice option, even if you are reasonably fit and do not mind climbing some stairs. The lift option offer some unique views from the top, in addition to the ones you would see if you climb on foot. The reason is that the lift is located at the back of the cathedral, and after you take it to the lowest terrace level, you walk along the roof to the place where you climb to the very top together with those people, who climbed the stairs. You get more views of the Corso Vittorio Emmanuelle II and Eastward city views (which are in good light during evening hours).

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Working from home (or not)

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Sabbatical travel gives a unique freedom of choosing how I work every day. Since I have no teaching and administrative obligations, technically, I don’t have to come to the office. I could do nearly all my work, which mostly involves academic writing, from our apartment here in Milan.

However, there is a unique challenge in staying focussed on work, which comes with working from home, even a temporary one. I think there are just too many distractions at home, because I associate too closely with the environment and therefore feel more responsibility for it than, say, an office or a cafe. Hence, the impulse to do “home things” like tidying up, for example, instead of working. Basically, it is easier to procrastinate if I am surrounded by potential tasks that I can rationalize as having a high priority at the moment.

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Regarding the cafes, before coming to Milan, I imagined myself sometimes working at a cafe, in the spirit of varying the working environment. Visualizing this scenario back in Victoria, I thought that it would be very extremely easy to find a cafe do work at in Milan. After all, wouldn’t it be a genuine European experience? As it turns out, this is not such a popular way to work here. At least, it is not as popular as it is in North America, where the image of a writer working away in a corner of a crowded cafe it is a bit over-romanticized.

Indeed, there are cafes here on every corner, but the locals mostly come in to quickly chug a tiny cup of espresso, sometimes without even sitting down. This custom reminds me of Japan, where in front of major train stations, I often saw salarymen devouring ramen while standing around a food stand, sticking their heads through the curtains that separate its interior from the busy street. They quickly empty their bowls, thank the cook, extract their heads from behind the curtain back into the world and go off on their way. It’s efficiency of delivering food to the body taken to a very high level.

Having said this, there are excellent places to sit, eat and relax here in Milan and, of course, in Japan. In fact, I am already looking forward going to Tokyo later this year. And by the way, the ramen that is served in those food stands is excellent!

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Modern art

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My wife and I are getting exposed to some weird modern art through our five-year-old daughter’s interests. Back in Victoria, one of her first lessons at the 4Cats art studio was based on the works of Andy Warhol. I should mention that my wife is not a fan of Warhol, to put in gently, and at some point we used to have heated discussions about whether the world had collectively gone mad in regarding him as a great artist (of course, recent developments in American politics have re-defined the notion of collective delusion and put arguments about art into perspective). Then, our daughter had another series of lessons based on the art of Roy Lichtenstein and Gustav Klimt. To be fair, the curriculum at 4Cats was balanced in that it also had a session on Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt.

Another favourite artist of our daughter’s is Wassily Kandinsky. In her school back in Canada, they used to paint ‘Kandinsky’s circles’ in the art class, so she was delighted to see a reproduction of the ‘Squares with Concentric Circles’ on the wall in our rental apartment here in Milan. When we saw an advertisement that a Kandinsky’s exhibit was coming up at Museo delle Culture, she was really looking forward to it.

It is fascinating, how some information about the artists and their styles of work trickles down into a five-year-old’s mind. To go to the Kandisky’s exhibit, our daughter wanted to wear her brightest-coloured dress. Quite appropriate.

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I studied art history when I was in school, but Kandinsky’s art has never been my interest. Now, because of my daughter’s fascination with his bright colours and stylized figures, I am re-acuanting myself with his work. It is also insightful to learn about the strong influence of Kandinsky’s Russian roots on his art through the prism of our own Russian heritage. Although my daughter and I look at it from two very different perspectives, both in terms of our age and our exposure to the culture, it is something that binds us. I hope that she sees it when she grows up, as I see it now.

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Kandinsky’s late work is sometimes jokingly described as child-like. I remember a scene from “Double Jeopardy”, where Tommy Lee Jone’s character, Travis Lehman, asks, pointing at a Kandinsky’s painting: “Those are nice pictures there. Did your kids do them?” When I look at my daughter’s drawings inspired by it, I can see why this is a cliche. The apparent similarity is a perfect illustration of the process of deliberate simplification that great artists like Kandinsky or Picasso go through. They converged on “child-like’ expressions not because they lack technical prowess, but because they eliminated all unnecessary elements in their art. In the case of a child, the process is very different, even if the results appears similar. She lacks the ability to include everything that she would like in her drawings and therefore settles only on the essentials. In other words, a five-year-old is limited by her technique, while the masters have come full circle to transcend the technique.

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Hedonic adaptation to sabbatical

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The human ability to quickly become used to dynamically changing surrounding conditions, which is known as Hedonic adaptation, is extremely useful in the evolutionary sense. It makes us resilient to adversity. On the other hand, it can easily rob us of enjoying the positive experiences.

Here is how Hedonic adaptation works, step-by-step, in the case of enjoying (or not) an academic sabbatical:

  1. My last class is over. I have no teaching or administrative commitments for the entire year. I can chose exactly what I will work on every day. It’s positively fantastic!
  2.  Things get even better: I travel to Milan, together with my family, for the second half of the sabbatical. “Wow, six-months in Italy! Sounds like something straight out of a romantic novel!”, says an acquaintance, and I agree. Milan is a beautiful city. There is a lot see and do in addition to all the exciting work I get to do with my Italian colleagues.
  3. After a couple of months, things get better still: We discover more places to see and things to do, as we explore Milan and its surroundings.
  4. And here comes the catch: the sabbatical itself, the freedom to do whatever I wanted every day that initially excited me so much, is not so exciting anymore. It becomes an expectation, something that is taken for granted. What is enjoyable now are all the things that are bundled on top of the sabbatical: delicious Italian food, museums, La Scala, the lakes, the mountains,..

I notice that Hedonic adaptation happens with nearly everything that we do. It is particularly devastating when accomplishment comes into play, when achieving a certain result becomes the expectation.

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I watch my five-years-old daughter learning to draw, and I see the tremendous excitement of just being able to express herself on paper: “I can draw anything I want! And I can use whatever colours I want, because it is my drawing!” Then, at some point as we mature, we learn too draw better: “Great! Now, not only I can draw whatever I want, but I can draw it in a way that it actually looks like the object I wanted to draw!” Then, things get better yet: “I can draw things in a way that other people like them! (I must really be an artist now!!)” And here is the trap: it’s no longer the drawing itself that is enjoyable, but the external approval that comes with it…

So, what do we do? Is the trap of Hedonic adaptation unavoidable?

Perhaps, some people are in more danger of falling into it than others. It is easy to become used to a nice environment, develop expensive or extravagant tastes, become addicted to approval… I think that our ability to resist Hedonic adaptation comes down to awareness. In any case, appreciating our current life situation, whatever it happens to be on the absolute scale of “niceness”, and being conscious about the effects of Hedonic adaptation is a healthy practice.

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Using colours

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My daughter likes drawing. We brought her colored pencils, markers, crayons and watercolors with us to Milan, and she has been using it gen at every opportunity. She even sketched sculptures in museums and churches. My wife and I are both delighted and a bit surprised, because this kind of drawing requires genuine concentration, which we don’t generally expect from a five-year-old.

Naturally, we are encouraging her interest as much as we can. In fact, it is easy to do, because there is a nice confluence between her and my interests. Lately, I also have been working on getting back to drawing – I use sketching as a memory-training exercise.

I have my own set of pencils and greyscale markers, and my daughter is always delighted when she gets to borrow them. However, grey is not a very useful colour, when one’s main subjects are princesses and unicorns. Still, she naturally wants to reciprocate and always asks if I would like to borrow her colourful markers.

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This past Sunday, she offered her markers again, and she also said that it would make her particularly happy if I used as many of the colours as possible. My initial impulse was to say “Thanks, but no thanks”, but then I decided to consider this as a creative challenge. In fact, using as many colours as possible is the opposite to restricting one’s palette, which is a common creative technique.

So, as a reference for my sketch, I chose a photo that I took the day before at the Carnival Ambrosiana. On it, my daughter is throwing a handful of confetti into the air. Here is the result – I satisfied the condition of using a whole bunch of colours in a single drawing!

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Urban transportation

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It has been two months since I have driven a car. This is probably my longest non-driving stretch in the last twenty years.

Our priority for choosing an apartment in Milan during the sabbatical was proximity to our daughter’s school. We wanted to be within walking distance from it, because that is where we would need to go twice every day – to drop her off in the morning and to pick her up in the afternoon. By all accounts, driving in Milan is not fun. It is not so much the driving itself that is stressful – it is not being able to avoid fines for obscure violations like illegal parking or inadvertently crossing a bus lane.

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The first apartment we chose was literally within steps of the school, but we had to move to another accommodation because of a formality related to our registration with Italian authorities – the apartment was slightly too small to legally accommodate our family. The new apartment is much nicer: it is more spacious and bright. The location is also better in all but one aspect – it is twice as far as the first place from our daughter’s school.

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Now, instead of walking, our daughter commutes to school on a bicycle, while my wife and I walk. The bicycle belongs to the son of my colleague. The boy has outgrown it, so he lent the bike to us for the time of our stay in Milan. It became our daughter’s daily transport. It takes about three adult-sized steps to cover the same distance that she travels in one revolution of her bike pedals. I would say, it is fair – at least, we can travel wherever we want at a reasonable pace (sometimes, a bit too briskly for true comfort). In fact, Google predicts that it should take eighteen minutes to walk from our apartment to the school, but we regularly make it there in ten.

Night ride
Night ride

Besides the daily commute to and from school, our favourite route for biking, walking and jogging is a footpath that starts near our apartment and follows a canal (Naviglio Martesana), crossing railroad tracks and busy streets in graffiti-covered underpasses. The canal, the path, and the many parks along it are a welcome retreat from the hectic city life surrounding them. Along the canal, there are several picturesque houses that I keep snapping pictures of, to use as references for future sketches.

Canal house
Canal house
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Sketching as memory training

At the park.
At the park.
One of the nice things of being on sabbatical is that I can try new things and new ways of doing old things without the fear of missing out on productivity. My rationalization is that since I am operating in a new environment anyway, it makes sense to let go of the daily routines, on which I typically depend.

A new thing that I am experimenting with now, while leaving in Milan, is sketching. This is not an entirely new activity for me, because I have been drawing and painting various things on and off for the past few years and I studied art during my school years.

This time, I am doing it in a more deliberate way. To be more precise, what I am doing is purposeful practice, in Anders Ericsson’s sense of the term. Deliberate practice would have included feedback from a teacher, whom I don’t have. Specifically, I am working on sharpening my observational skills, both in terms of the speed of capturing the salient features of the subject and in terms of the depth of observation.

Not to compare myself to Leonardo da Vinci, but Milan once was his stomping ground. He even put “draw Milan” in his now-famous to-do list. Also, Leonardo was arguably the most keen observer, who has ever lived. So I thought it would be a shame not to use the opportunity to follow in his footsteps.

First, I started sketching by using my photographs as references. My goal was to focus on a particular aspect of the photo and to capture the mood of the scene. I’ve done this type of drawing before, both digitally and using physical media, so I my goal was just to get into the habit of drawing regularly.

At the park.
At the park.
Last Sunday, I tried something different. I took my sketchbook to the park, where my daughter went to play on a sunny afternoon. At the park, I sat on the bench and sketched the parents, who were watching their children, talking on their phones, chatting to each other, etc. I wanted to capture the gestures, without focussing on the proportions, lighting, composition, etc. I found that it was quite easy to sketch people, who were just standing and sitting around, even though they periodically changed their poses. On the other hand, I had a hard time sketching people, who were walking by or cycling past me. There was just not enough time to capture the essential elements of their poses, before they were gone.

I think the speed of gathering the essential visual information is a trainable skill, though. My hypothesis is that the challenge is related to the limited capacity of our short-term memory. A visual image of a human figure, particularly in motion, contains a lot of information: proportions (e.g. width to height) of the body, relative angles of the shoulders, ribcage, pelvis, positions of the hands and feet, silhouette (including elements of clothing), lighting/shadows, etc. We can capture all of this information in one glance (probably, in less than two seconds), but cannot recall it when we need to reference it during actual drawing. On the other hand, the capacity of human long-term memory is nearly unlimited. In any case, it is certainly trainable. The limitation is that information cannot be committed to the long-term memory quickly. In my particular case of sketching passer-bys, my subjects were leaving the scene before I could memorize their poses.

Napoleon.
Napoleon.
So, my plan of improving the speed of observation is to follow a particular pattern when looking at the subjects:
1. Width-to-height ratio of the body.
2. Body angle.
3. Position of the limbs.
4. Silhouette.
5. Shadows.

Then, when sketching, I would follow the same pattern to recall this information.

Hopefully, with some training, I would be able to scan through the elements 1 – 5 more than once. This should enable me to account for the changing scene, lighting and poses. Actually, cycling through a pre-defined sequence of elements of the scene is an established attention-aid technique. It is used in teaching defensive driving by continuously going through a sequence of actions abbreviated as a mnemonic “SIPDE” – Scan, Identify, Predict, Decide and Execute.

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Duomo
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MUBA – experiencing the world first-hand

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We thought that Milan children’s museum (Museo dei bambini – MUBA) would be a good place to visit as a change of pace from more conventional museums we’ve been to in the past couple of weeks.

The MUBA is a neat place. The building itself stands in the middle of a garden, enclosed by a hexagonal baroque colonnade, Rotonda della Besana, which used to be a cemetery. It has multiple gates, but only one of them was open, so the inner courtyard was like a quiet oasis in the middle of a busy neighbourhood. Groups of teenagers were sitting on the steps of the colonnade, listening to music, hanging around, chatting, doing nothing. There was also a playground for small kids, but no-one was there, so our daughter had it all for herself, until she became cold, and we moved on.

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I realized that we’ve been pre-conditioned by our North American lifestyle to view teenagers hanging around as kind of delinquents by default – “Don’t they have anything better to do?” If there would be a bunch of 5-year-olds running around the playground, this would be another story – they would be playing, and playing is what 5-year-olds do. It is their job. They learn about the world through play.

I think this is not fair to the teens, though. Actually, hanging around in groups is what teenagers are supposed to do too. This is social networking in the best sense of the word. Teen years is when people learn to interact within the social groups, so hanging around together is, in fact, the best thing those guys and girls could do with their time. They were also learning about the world.

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The MUBA concept itself reminded me of Montessori system of education – the kids get to touch, scratch, push, kick everything, and through all this get some sort of educational input. The show, if it is the right term, that we went to was called “Forbidden not to touch”. It was design to showcase the ideas of tactile and kinesthetic learning developed by Bruno Minari, an artist and inventor, who was a native of Milan.

The museum website implied that it would be well suited to English speakers, but it turned out to be almost entirely in Italian. That was not a problem, though. The nature of the activities the kids were doing and the body language of the group leader were so self-explanatory that our daughter had no trouble following along with the group. That in itself was an impressive illustration of Munari’s concept with its departure from the conventional instructional mode.

Initially, our daughter was missing the group leader’s feedback. In fact, the leader was encouraging the kids to share their impressions after exploring each station. At that point, she did realized that our daughter did not understand Italian and switched to English with her.

To be fair, the crawling-touching-rubbing nature of the activities gave plenty of tactile feedback. It was certainly fun to watch, photograph and videotape (does anyone actually use tape anymore?). Incidentally, each child has to accompanied by an adult in these shows and vice versa – an adult is admitted only with a child.

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One serious drawback of this hands-on group activity is that it is a very efficient way for kids to contract and spread viruses. In fact, our daughter came down with a nasty stomach bug the next day after the visit to the museum. We even had to call a doctor for her. A home visit from a pediatrician is a luxury that doesn’t exist in Canada, so we were pleasantly surprised by how smooth and ‘human’ this experience had been.

It does put things in perspective when I think about he quality of life in Europe and Canada.

There is no way to say which place is better for living in the most general sense. The dottoressa, who treated our daughter was very nice and caring (and did I mention she came to our home right away?!)

That is all very nice, but the doctor said that the winter is not a good time for kids in Milan. The pollution is so high, that she said she always suggests leaving the city and going to the lakes “to breathe fresh air” at every opportunity. There is certainly a nasty flu going around the city. The doctor said the things would improve by March, when the weather changes. There is no ignoring the fact that we now live in a large, noisy, crowded, polluted city. The contrast with Victoria is particularly striking. Over there, we take the cleanliness of the air and the streets for granted.

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Drinking water is another thing that is very different here. A waitress asked us after learning that we were from Canada: “Is it true that the water in BC is so delicious that you can drink it right from the tap?” Yes, you actually can. Here in Milan, this is an impossibility. No restaurant serves tap water, and people use enormous numbers of plastic. Empty plastic bottles is the main material that children use for DIY projects in our daughter’s school.

It is a curious disbalance: the European lifestyle is distinctly more progressive, socially responsible, cultured and sustainable than the North American one in some respects, while distinctly backward in others. Some of the details that make up the country’s way of life are impossible to notice during a short visit. It takes living here over a substantial time period to start interacting with the place in more meaningful ways: finding were to buy good food, how to get plain point A to point B efficiently, how to call a doctor and where to go with a child on a rainy weekend.

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Favourite colours

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Our daughter has been attending a new school while we are in Milan. They asked the children to bring their own sets of coloured pencils to be used in art classes.

Here is the state of our daughter’s set after one month of use. I thought that the remaining length of the pencils is a nice visual representations of which colours she favours and by how much.

I wanted to take this picture, because it seems to me straight out of “The Day the Crayons Quit” by Drew Daywalt, and illustrated by the great Oliver Jeffers. Our daughter received this book as a birthday present, but I might have enjoyed it even more than she did.

Not to over-analyze our daughter, but I think the picture shows that she prefer bright colours overall. The exceptions are the white, which is not a very practical colour for drawing on white paper anyway, and the dark yellow, which is a bit redundant, given the that there are two other yellow pencils in this set, both of them well-used. And of course, pink is still the strong favourite.

Incidentally, I once heard in popular science television show in Japan that there was a correlation between the preference for pink colour and health of middle-aged and elderly women. The hypothesis was that liking the pink colour, which is traditionally associated with youth, encourages women to maintain a youthful state of mind, which in turn leads to better health.

Even if there no causation here, I am glad that our daughter sees the world mostly in bright colours. I hope this trend continues as she grows up, and her brightly-coloured pencils and crayons will always be stubby.

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Sabbatical as an intermediate disturbance

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I am not going to say that going on sabbatical in Milan for half a year with my family is not a great opportunity. I fully realize that, relatively speaking, it’s a privilege, and I do value it. Without exception, everyone we know, who heard about our travel for the first time, said that something ranging from “I wish I could go with you” to “It sounds like something out of a romantic novel”.

Having said this, my subjective view of the experience has been evolving from the the excitement of the initial planning, through the realization that it would take a substantial logistical effort to move the household to the stress of settling in the new town.

After everything is said and done, I absolutely think that coming here was worth the effort. Just as a note, I am writing this after living in Milan for three weeks. I will keep you updated as my opinion changes or reaffirms.

Here is one reason why academic sabbaticals are perfect mechanisms of promoting creativity and enabling a variety of viewpoints on familiar issues.

I recently read about the seminal work of Joseph Connell, a biologist, who established a framework for the so-called “intermediate disturbance hypothesis”. The idea is that in order to allow biodiversity in a certain geographical region, this area needs to be exposed to a periodic disturbance of a medium strength, like a tall tree that sometimes falls in the middle of a forest or a storm that rips through a coral reef once in a few years. The disturbance temporarily dislodges a dominant species in that area and allows other species to compete for resources (e.g. sunlight).

There are two key factors in this concept:

1. A significant disturbance is necessary for diversity (otherwise, one species would croud out the others).
2. The disturbance should not be too harsh or too frequent (otherwise, only the hardiest species would be able to survive).

Since Connell’s discovery in the 1950’s, people have drawn parallels between the intermediate disturbance hypothesis applied to biology and its apparent validity in other areas. In fact, I learned about it in Charles Duhigg’s book “Smarter Faster Better”, where he argues that it applies to a generalized creative process.

I think that an academic sabbatical, which, in the case of my university, can be taken once in every seven years, is a perfect example of a medium disturbance to the dominant modes of thinking and of dealing with everyday problems that we all have a tendency to develop and follow. Specifically, I think that travelling to a foreign country and collaborating with colleagues by physically joining their research group satisfies the key requirements of a medium disturbance.

First, going on sabbatical is undoubtedly stressful, notwithstanding all the romantic concepts of travelling to Italy or another location with an exotic flair. We are forced to adapt to the foreign customs and to learn the logistics of living in a new city. Also, joining another research group and the closeness of collaboration with other researchers compels us to internalize their viewpoints and and ways of approaching problems.

Second, the stress of sabbatical travel is not so severe that it forces us to completely uproot your way of life. Also, the sabbaticals, don’t happen too often to completely prevent routine and procedures from taking root.

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I really hope that this year’s trip will provide just enough disturbance to broaden my, and my family’s view of the world and our own life. Incidentally, I an noticing that our five-year-old daughter is definitely more adaptable to the transition to the new place than I am. For example, I am sure that if the word “stress” was in her vocabulary, she would not have chosen it to describe her initial experience here in Milan. This is the evidence that a child’s outlook to the world is inherently more diverse that that of an adult. Somewhere, along the way of growing up, one way of thinking crowds out the alternatives, just like a dominant species of plants in an Australian forest steals the sunlight from the other plants, and it takes some uprooting to open one’s mind to creative possibilities.

People in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
People in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.