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REPAUSE
A meditation app is forthcoming. Stay Tuned.
A LUCILIUS PARABLE: REUNION
May 10th, 2020
This episode is dedicated to Dr. David Sinclair. Check out his book entitled Lifespan to get a glimpse of what our future healthspan might look like.
This parable is now published in the second volume of Lucilius Parables. Click on the book below to visit the store to consider purchasing.
Several decades into the twenty-second century, the theory of Information Aging finally began to yield fruit, and shortly after, people began perfect maintenance of their bodies. Many used such regenerative techniques to reverse their biological age back in time. There was much experimenting, and strangely it turned out that people preferred to have their body at the age they were when they were most satisfied with life. The range of distribution wasn’t much of a surprise, but there was still a range. Not everyone was happy during their late teenage years and early twenties.
After some initial laziness about getting on board with the whole program, Lucilius finally felt enough pressure from his insurance company to start with his own regenerative program. Exponentially increasing costs, was the new phrase that insurance companies were using to goad people in the direction of the new therapies.
Lucilius had been around for quite a while at this point and was already well-read on the science and had plans for the perks the medicine would allow. His hearing had been rather poor for a while and it would be nice to get that low-grade ringing out of his skull. His current projects came to a nice breakpoint and so he took the dive.
Within a month his body was as it had been at age twenty-five. Lucilius felt great. But there were all sorts of other things attached to the new phase of living that he hadn’t anticipated. New kinds of social groups were forming as identities became compounded with old abilities regained.
Lucilius was vaguely surfing one of these forums which curated all these new groups and came across one that peaked his interest.
High School.
Lucilius expanded the link and discovered that there were groups of people who had regenerated their bodies back to high school age and then recreated their high school life from scratch, building a perfect replica of the school and even whole towns so that these people could live in a state of perpetual summer break.
Curious, Lucilius looked up his old high school and his year of graduation, and found that a number of the students had done just this – recreated the circumstances of that idyllic time.
Anyone was free to join the community for any length of time. The only requirements was that one actually did attend the school and that they now possessed a body regenerated back to one of those late teenage years.
Lucilius had decided to take off some time before starting his next project, and figured this would be as interesting as any other vacation he could think of.
He set the dial on his system for regenerative medicine and within a week he was back to the state he’d been at eighteen, just in time for his arrival.
The place was exactly the same. He was astonished at the detail. Each day was a repetition of the last day of school before summer vacation, and he walked into the high school just as the last bell was ringing. Everyone was there, as missing people were filled in with AI generated holograms, recreated from the communal memories of every real person who was taking part.
An old friend saw him and raised a hand for a high-five.
“You made it.”
“Thought I’d visit.”
“Careful, it’s a lot more fun second time around with a little life under your belt.”
“Yea, I bet.”
The two chatted, throwing around the usual dialogue to catch up on decades, when the rhythmic clack of a pair of Mary Jane’s tapped out the stretch of distance. Lucilius looked, as the two kept talking, and between the fluttering gaps of people in the hall Lucilius could see the figure of a girl he’d once had a crush on. The young woman pushed open a door, walking out of the school, sunshine spilling over her, and she was gone.
Lucilius smiled at the old feelings that suddenly rushed up within him. He felt the heat of blush in his face, and laughed a bit.
“What’s funny,” his old buddy asked.
“Nothing, just so weird to be back here, like this. So what are we doing?”
“Party. You know how the school year ends, always.”
And then in unison, the two said “Miller’s parents always go away.” The two laughed and took off to find some beers and catch up with a night on the town before things got under way.
Later that night the two were in the roil of the party, laughing as one of the class clowns had finally passed out after holding court, standing atop a keg. Lucilius could barely breathe, he hadn’t laughed so hard in so long, and it was as though all the life he had lived since were but a mere dream and he were back to who he’d been in this place.
“You,” he suddenly heard.
Lucilius looked to find the girl from before, the young woman he’d spent so many sleepless teenage nights thinking about.
“Finally decided to show up?” she said, an eyebrow raising.
Lucilius shrugged. “Figured I’d check it out. See who’s here.”
She reached out a hand to him. Lucilius was puzzled. He slowly reached out, unsure what she wanted. She grasped his hand and tugged him to stand.
“You know,” she said, “after the neural privacy laws were passed it was impossible to look you up.”
Lucilius was a little confused as she went on.
“I’ve been here at this stupid school, waiting for three years.”
By now the rest of the room had grown quiet, curious as the prom queen spoke.
“and, finally, you decide to show up.”
Lucilius looked merely perplexed. The girl rolled her eyes. “You dummy,” she said. She gently grabbed the front of his shirt and slowly curled her fist for a grip as she bit her lower lip.
“I’ve had a crush on you for almost a century.”
Then she pulled Lucilius toward her and kissed him.
GRASPING NOTHING
May 9th, 2020
Much of our day, perhaps all of it in many cases, and much of our life is spent grasping for something new, something different, something other than what we currently have. We find ourselves overcome with an unpleasant feeling so we reach for comfort food, or perhaps we reach for the gym bag. Both, regardless of how effective they are in the short term or long term are strategies for dealing with the present, a present that we often find ourselves trying to escape.
When sitting down the the aim of being more present, we apply the same tactic. We try to grasp for something. But what is the present, and how does one touch it?
At once it’s always with us and yet always seems to be receding.
Trying to grasp the present is much like cupping hands and scooping some water out of a swift river. Did you end up with that part of the river? Or is that spot suddenly overrun with more water from upstream? Does the pocket of water from which the hands took not rush off downstream, as though into the past? What exactly do we end up with in our hands if not just a memory of trying to grasp something that eludes our touch?
All of our grasping, reaching and yearning happens inside of the present. To grasp at it is like trying to shade one’s eyes in order to get a better view of the sun- it is what allows us to see everything else, and to look directly at the sun, we have to do something counter-intuitive, we have to put a special set of filters in the way. The present requires a similar sort of counter-intuitive approach.
In order to touch the present, we must let everything else be at rest. Let the memory of that event yesterday fade, let the monologue fizzle, let the hopes and dreams of the future dissolve, and then for a moment, we sense the present reaching for our mind. Some sort of glimmer, something both new, fresh, and very old seems to occur. Then we are lost to the handsy whims of the mind picking up some new source of attention, be it that thing you forgot to do or the breakfast you can’t wait to have.
The only way to hold on to the present moment is to let go of everything else.
FROWN
May 8th, 2020
Given a sea of smilie faces, and one frown, we will pick up on that frown far faster than if the situation were reversed and there were one smilie face in a sea of frowns.
Why?
Evolution has primed us to be concerned with threats. Those who weren’t concerned with threats, and who weren’t quick to pick up on them didn’t make it.
And thus, we are left with an obnoxious ability to focus unnecessarily on the negative. This might seem like just bad luck, but as it has served us before, it still serves us. We developed this tendency in order to learn. There is more to learn from the bad than there is the good. This extends far beyond threats to our survival.
It’s far easier to figure out what’s wrong with something you’ve built than to suss out why it’s working well. A broken down car has a finite set of problems, but once fixed, the reasons why it charges forward are myriad and intensely complicated compared to a few problems where the whole process gets hung up.
As much as we fear and spurn criticism, it contains the kernel for our most important and our most efficient way of improving.
Our aim isn’t so much to create things that receive no criticism as it is to become comfortable and welcoming of such criticism.
HOW TO USE A THESAURUS
May 7th, 2020
Most decent writers will tell you that if your using a thesaurus, you’re doing it wrong. The sentiment is that one is trying to plump up their own writing, as though substituting a few words in a sentence of a paragraph will suddenly make it bedazzled enough to be special. In short it seems at first to be a tactic for masking a lack of substance.
So if the thesaurus has such a bad rap, why do we have them? Are they just an obligation of our cataloging nature?
No. The most important use of the thesaurus is actually an inversion of the way amateur writers use it. The thesaurus comes in handy when a writer has a concept on the tip of their mind and it splinters into a variety of ways to be expressed, but there’s one missing – the most appropriate way to capture that meaning. It’s best used when there’s a word on the tip of your tongue, or you sense that there’s a nuanced flavor of the meaning you’re trying to express that you sense is captured by a word you know, or know of.
This is the reason why a wood worker or a mechanic or a hobbyist goes to a hardware store. They’re working on a project and come across a situation where a specific tool would come in handy. The writer goes to the thesaurus just as the hobbyist goes in search of that one particular tool they saw once. In short, to use a thesaurus well means to already be well acquainted with the realm you enter.
But given no rush, what does the woodworker or hobbyist do at the hardware store? Well it’s like a kid in a candystore. You just have to meander, browse and wander around and take a look at everything else that’s available. It’s in this way that the thesaurus then begins to inhabit a spectrum of use that stretches in the direction of the amateur writer.
The amateur writer usually has an innate sense that their writing isn’t worded as well as it could be. The only way to get better is to get better acquainted with the tools available, and a thesaurus is a far more efficient way of doing this than a dictionary, but only when it is used in conjunction with a dictionary.
The thesaurus groups things vaguely, dictionaries highlight individual nuance.
We learn by association. The thesaurus is most closely related to this, but we understand deeply only through detail, and this is the dictionary. Both are important tools. And just as a beautiful woodshop is just a room full of tools without a woodworker, dictionaries, the thesaurus, and the words they contain are meaningless without the people who use them.
WANDER
May 6th, 2020
Conscious aimlessness is a form of courage. Another way to phrase this is to describe how it begins. For many people it would mean being bored and simply immersing one’s self in the experience. Boredom is aimlessness without movement.
Given enough time the imagination begins to move and that aimlessness is cut down from all possible directions to an actual handful.
One of the purposes of civilization, perhaps even the main purpose, is to make things more predictable. No one wants to be subjected to the chaos of being hunted by unknown beasts that lurk around every corner. Being lost is a stressful and dangerous predicament, and modern society creates an order that allows for far more fidelity between what we expect to happen and what actually does happen. Though the pendulum on this gift has perhaps swung so far in it’s own direction that it’s hitched itself up in some corner of it’s own cage, and now, the benefits of the unpredictable only leak in by chance. We have set things up in a way that does not allow many of us to wander safely and productively. We can only traverse set and decided channels.
But such avenues can only lead to places that we already know about. These pathways not only maintain the status quo, they are the status quo. And who is happy with the status quo? Few if any.
So we must ask, what is required to find something new? Is it possible to find something new by travelling the same tried and true avenues that we have previously carved out? Or are we required to venture into the unknown in order to find the new? Perhaps there are undiscovered niches hidden within the circuits of our system that can be found if we wander the well beaten paths with a curious eye.
No discussion of wandering would be complete without highlighting the popular quote:
All who wander are not lost.
But where do such wanderers end up? To be lost is to have no bearings about where you are. Of course this doesn’t necessarily mean a person can’t figure out which direction might be most promising given the information available in the situation at hand.
We might not know where we are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t figure out which way to go.
What this means is that conscious aimlessness is a form of courage. It’s difficult and stressful to leave the predictable and venture out in new directions. There’s simply no telling what you’ll come across. It could be terrible, but it could also be good beyond your wildest dreams. The reason being of course that our dreams are often based on what we think is possible, and what we think is possible is highly informed by what we’ve seen done. It’s a true act of imagination to envision something that’s possible but which has never been done. The path towards such an accomplishment is never known because by default that path has never been travelled before.
The discovery of something new will always look like wandering before it is found.
What’s important to note is that there’s a difference between wandering aimlessly and wandering purposefully. In both cases one is bound to come across the unexpected, and that unexpected might be a useful treasure. But the second is the adventure of the true imagination, one that reads the echoes of reality and surmises that there may be a real place that has yet to be discovered.
Perhaps such purposeful wandering is simply what we call exploration.