1. Quibble #1: “successful career women in the U.S. often ascribe” — I think you mean to use the word subscribe, or perhaps give lip service

2. Quibble #2 –count, please. My own observation is that successful career women in my milieu attend to their spiritual needs by denying them or by belonging to the most prestigious church (most wealthy parishioners).

3. Quibble #3–Don’t mix up fitness and spirituality: How is sweating and bending — the level at which many Western people encounter yoga — an evocation of spirituality?

4. Quibble #4 — putting such as Rolf Gates (www.rolfgates.com/pages/bio/index.html), whose claim to fame is that he has a flexible and photogenic body, in the same category as a 30-year monastic such as Ane Pema
(www.gampoabbey.org/ane_pema/), reveals a certain shallowness of perception. I’d say that Chodron was not a popularizer — in the sense of ducking complexity and diluting or simplifying the message — as much as a subtle thinker with a folksy, accessible style. All of her works that I’ve read or listened to have been talks (“sermons” in Christian parlance) to serious students of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and practice. If anybody is a popularizer in that end of the pool, it is Jon Kabat Zinn (www.umassmed.edu/behavmed/faculty/kabat-zinn.cfm)

Grant wrote, ““Yikes, we have created a world of new dynamism. What, systematically, are the problems it creates? What, systematically, are the solutions we require.” No, we make ready often badly and by halves.”

I wonder how much of this make-do, improvisational credo is a product of the improvisation required by the ever-expanding frontier? I wonder, did the folks who craved change and flexibility leave the Old World for the New at any excuse?

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”

I am a child of the West — how much of our tolerance for change, for evanescent towns is a product of the repeated mining frenzies, the gold rushes and the silver booms, where towns bloomed overnight, and faded just as fast.

I’m in Blaine County, Idaho, while I write. At one point in the 1880s, the population of miners was about 3 times what it is today…

And think of the American fascination with duct tape — the force that binds and keeps us:
http://www.octanecreative.com/ducttape/

It is not a material that is designed to last, it is designed to “get ‘er done” — do the job and move on!

But we aren’t willing to admit — or haven’t had to confront — the idea that improvisation and moving on have costs attached to them.

I wonder also if focussing on innovation — the new– distracts us from the more important deal. The traditional way of doing things has the advantage of certainty — little risk of failure. The question is, how did we get the nerve to risk failure, to court failure? Innovation is rarely successful the first time — you have to go through iterations of failure (from total to near-success).

How did we get so tolerant of failure?

The traditional and innovative systems, inside and outside the person, are quite different. That is why, even among educated Americans, things seem so superficial. Visual features and relationships and a comfort with the local geography and expectations has not built up for generations. On the other hand, we ride the changes if not cheerfully, at least reasonably capably.

Why are we willing to do this? Most of us, or our parents or grandetc.parents, came from a social system where they saw the underside of traditional and implacable rules. Even British younger sons. How do we do it? We foster moveable investments, like education, and uniformity, so when we have to move the next place is familiar.

There was a good discussion about rootedness on The Conservative Philosopher before The Founder had a tantrum and closed the comments. There may be a relevant parable there.