FORTUNE'S PIROUETTE

December 31st, 2019

Change is the only constant.  As much as this somewhat guarantees good times to come, it’s also reason to know how to remember the exact opposite of a situation.

Say it’s a nerve racking day.  You get into your car to go to the doctor to talk about a biopsy, and lo and behold the “check engine” lights up the dashboard. 

What else can go wrong?  Right?

When it rains it pours and when things don’t feel as they are going well it’s almost as if we brace as we turn corners in life, expecting impact.

But then it turns out the biopsy was totally normal.  What a relief.  You start up your car and notice the check engine light isn’t lighting up anymore.

What good fortune.  But how long does it last?  It’s not just beneficial to remember how things will eventually turn good during bad times, but also the opposite. 

This may at first seem like a negative thing to do.  Why ruin the mood when things are going so well?  We can explore the reason with a question:

Is the point of life simply to achieve as many peak positive experiences as possible?

If we remember the good during bad times and try to forget the bad times when things are good, then the answer to this question is yes.

But regard this question in isolation and perhaps yes isn’t the ideal answer.  Answering yes makes a person a slave to desire, forever chasing what feels good.

What about a broader perspective?  What about trying to experience life fully no matter what is happening?

What is better?  To have our emotions jerked around by the whims of fortune?  Or would it be better to achieve a kind of reliable equanimity no matter what is happening?  Might we even be able to enjoy the negative experiences that befall us in some way?

Many aspects of art and culture certainly point at our ability to find sustenance in the negative and the positive.  Movies, plays, songs, all of these deal with both the positive and the negative.  Why go to a sad movie about a depressing topic?  Why would such a thing exist if we weren’t capable of finding some kind of appreciation for the experience?  With a movie, or a song, it’s very intuitive.  It makes us feel alive in some way.

And yet when misfortune befalls our own person, do we have the same reaction?  Do we mindfully zoom out from our own situation and marvel somewhat at the grist of life that we seem to be riding?

Or do we make the mistake of identifying too tightly with the situation pitying ourselves and looking for escape?

Fortune will always continue to turn.  We often act as though the point of life is to chase the pirouette round and round for only the good.  But we miss out with this strategy.  A deeper appreciation for life is possible, if we can muster the skill to pause and marvel at our own experience, no matter how good or bad we might call it.

SIT WITH IT

December 30th, 2019

It’s rather remarkable how much stress we can generate for ourselves given things that don’t actually threaten us physically.  Sitting down for the first time to try and take a crack at a big complex subject, like coding, or taxes, or any number of things that might make us feel inadequate or like a forgone failure.

Such feelings can be so overwhelming that we are rendered nearly paralyzed.  And it’s for two reasons:

Lack of Exposure

and

No clear first chunk to start with.

And these two need to be dealt with in order.  Lack of exposure means that anything upon first exposure is going to be a fairly intense experience.  Think of our iconic character who has been locked away in a dark prison and then finally gets free and walks into the light only to be blinded.  But given a few minutes and eyes start to adjust.  It’s this initial shock of feeling and emotion that we simply need to sit with, and endure.  Feelings, particularly the negative ones, just don’t have too much longevity built into them.  Just think about how much energy it requires to stay really angry for any length of time.  Something like fear, and even anxiety, if we can mindfully sit with them for a long enough period will dissipate after time.

If it’s connected with a particular task or activity, then our first aim for progress shouldn’t necessarily be anything that looks like progress.  It’s fine just to pull out the tax forms or the blank page, or the instructions or the recipe, and just sit with it and do nothing.  For some things the feeling of trepidation can be so strong that just spending this sort of time can be a good thing. 

Once the emotion lets up, its as though our eyes have adjusted to the bright new world, and we can begin to see how things might fit together, and from that we can zoom in on a smaller chunk of the subject and then finally start with that.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SHADOW RUNNING

December 29th, 2019

Lucilius leaned out the window into the hot stinging air, looking back at the brown storm as it pulsed with flashes of lightning, rising higher and higher into the stratosphere beyond his black paneled trailer that bumped along.  He pressed the pedal more, hearing the electric whine as he turned back and studied the land ahead, the dry and arid ground crumbling and lifting to dust beneath the wheels of his steel truck.  A tiny red light he’d mounted to the top of the busted flat monitor in the center of the dashboard began to blink.  Lucilius stared at it.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

It was the only indication he had of a low battery, the other systems, the autopilot, the navigation, those had all gone offline long before the monitor stopped working.  He’d wired up the tiny red light crudely as a last resort.  He looked back through the cab window into the pickup’s vault to see that the plug from the trailer had come lose.

Quickly he took a length of wood from a slot he’d duct taped to the back of the driver’s seat and wedged the pedal down.  He clipped safety lines to the steering wheel, fitted his goggles over his eyes and then began to climb out of the window of the speeding truck, grabbing crude handles he’d wielded to the angular steel skin of the truck.  The speeding air cuffed his exposed wrists, ankles, and his neck with a hot sting.  He maneuvered over the gear boxes bolted into the truck’s vault as the rig bumped up and down over the sandy land.  The trailer in tow was a black capsule covered in mismatched solar panels.  The storm had not yet blotted out the sun and he was still ahead of it.  He grabbed the rattling plug and pushed it back into the outlet, linking the truck’s battery with the array of panels on the trailer.  If he couldn’t stay ahead of the storm his speed would die and he’d be buried in minutes.  He trained his goggles on the rising tumult of sand, toggling buttons on the side for a distance reading.  It was still gaining.

Lucilius opened a gear box and pulled out a nearly exhausted roll of duct tape and wrapped the plug to keep it from coming loose again.  Then he began the climb back to the driver’s window, clutching the welded handles as the truck sped along, jolting over the land.

The red light was still blinking when he looked back to see the far panels on his trailer begin to blur in the wall of sand as it began to overtake him.

*           *           *

Days later Lucilius saw a bright reflection in the distance.  It took hardly an hour before the glare of light began to resolve and he could see a huge array of solar panels clustered in the shape of a dome.  The array was haphazard, composed of all sorts of different panels.  Thousands, that had been mounted to a rudimentary scaffolding. There on the outskirts he could see children peering out from between the panels. 

He rolled up and parked his rig next to the black dome, the kids venturing out to look at his truck and trailer.  Lucilius got out and the kids silently stared at him, whispering to one another, a few of them running back into the dome.   Before he could follow the kids into the dome two men emerged to size up Lucilius.  One of them indicated the two pistols he had mounted to the side of his thigh. 

“Can’t bring that in here.”

Lucilius could tell what sort of people these were just by the children.  He unclipped his rig belt with the two pistols and his knives.

“Here ya go,” he said as he handed them the mess of leather and tools and walked past them into the dome.

Inside was an entire community of people.  The scaffolding had been reinforced with cement pillars, and quickly Lucilius found himself being ferried to one of the hovels by the children.  Adults emerged from their shanties and eyed him before resting easy at the sight of the two men who’d taken his weapons following him.

As was customary among the peaceful, Lucilius and the leader of this group shared a meal, eating algae cakes that had been harvested on the coast.

And then they spoke.

“Lot of people you have here, this kind of exposure can be pretty dangerous.”

“We have agreements among the local wartribes.”

“That couldn’t have been easy.”

The man sighed.  “No, it wasn’t.”

“I’ve had a few run-ins.  Still lucky, I guess.  What’d you offer them.”

“Different for each tribe.”

“Explain.”

“I’ve promised the most powerful local chief that his tribe can come with us, and that’s done a lot to ensure our safety from the others.”

“Go with you where?”

“There’s a tanker on the coast that they are helping us guard and ready.  We plan to sail south.”

Lucilius was confused.  “You are going to sail a tanker?  With all these people and a war clan?”

“Yes, once we have enough oil.”

“Oil?”  Lucilius asked, looking at the man as though he were deranged.

The leader smiled and motioned Lucilius to stand with him.  He opened a window in his shanty that looked down a rough corridor to the center of the dome.  There, the old dipping neck of an oil well churned, nodding it’s rusty head to the ground and then back up high into the space within the dome. 

“You’re using solar to power an oil well?”

The leader smiled.  “Yes.  Once we have enough, we’ll sail from this awful place and find a better one.”

For the briefest moment, Lucilius regretted that he never wore any rings.  He launched that back of his hand and knocked the leader of these people off his feet, and walked out.

“Morons,” he muttered to himself.

DESIGN THE PROBLEM

December 28th, 2019

We can boil down the human life to an endless series of problem solving.  Every issue that arises, either at work or in relationships is a little puzzle and problem that needs solving.  We seem hardwired to do this even when we think we hate it.

Many problems we try to solve don’t even warrant the effort and would resolve without our efforts.

Picking which problem to work on is a skill that has very little active teaching behind it.

Indeed this is the initial problem to solve:  where should I direct my time and energy?

Freedom of choice is not limited to the choices on hand.

The most underrated gift of the modern age is that we can invent our own work. 

At first pass this might sound like creating problems for the sake of solving them, but it’s best to relax the definition of what problem means in this sense.

Tinkered Thinking didn’t exist a couple years ago, but now, everyday, the problem arises: what to write about?

This is an invented problem that yields something that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

The problem becomes a means to an end, but in the process it has also become an end unto itself.

Given just a little available free time, we are all free to invent a juicy and productive problem for our minds to chew on.

It’s something that’s best discovered as opposed to decided.

It begins by asking:

what if I did….?

PROPORTIONAL MANIPULATION

December 27th, 2019

Losing a sense of proportion makes navigating incredibly difficult.  To get a sense of this, just think about the person who draws a map of your town or city.  Imagine if that person had drawn the map in accordance to their experience of the place.  Their own home would probably be quite big, and the route between that home and where that person works would be prominent and detailed, and perhaps a few hangouts and houses of friends would also be large, but what about all the places our cartographer hadn’t been?  These might only get the most cursory treatment, if any at all.  Now how useful would this map be for a tourist?

It’d be terrible, and potentially even useless.

The structure of the brain demonstrates a similar distortion with the somatosensory cortex and the motor cortex.  These are the parts of our brain that register sensations, physical orientation and movement.  In the fields of study that involve these brain regions a distorted homunculus is used to illustrate the proportional attention our own brain pays the body.

These homunculi look like action figures whose bodies are tiny, but equipped with gargantuan hands, huge heads and budging mouths, lips and tongues.

The motor cortex in particular devotes an absolutely enormous amount of real estate to the hands.  And this makes sense if you consider how drastically humans have altered the natural environment, and you realize that this has been accomplished almost exclusively through our use of our invaluable little platoon of fingers and opposable thumbs.  More brain space is devoted to a single hand than the rest of the body below the neck and wrists.  This distortion is useful since it’s far more important to have an accurate idea of what’s going on with your hands than it is say, a random patch of skin on the side of your thigh.

We all have an intuitive sense of this – just think of all the movies where a character takes a moment to realize they have a wound in their midsection or leg, as opposed to the instances when you get a tiny paper cut on the tip of your finger. 

The sliced finger registers a lot more pain because in some sense it’s a more important part of the body from a utility standpoint.  We don’t use a random patch of skin on the side of our thigh all the much when it comes to getting a sense of the physical world around us.  Our hands, however, are vital.

We experience a similar and far less valuable distortion.  Given all the topics that we think about, or might think about, each one registers some sort of emotion.  Some emotions are fairly insignificant, and then there’s other topics that trigger an immense emotional balloon that can expand to overwhelm our sense of reality. 

Most modern experiences of fear fall into this second category.  We feel enormous amounts of fear that eventually prove to be fairly useless.  Often we look back and think

“why was I so scared?  It didn’t matter anyway..”

This is an emotional distortion, and it’s part of an emotional system that’s most likely outdated and ill-fitted to it’s modern context.  While fear may have been very useful 100,000 years ago, it functions now, primarily as a maladaptation that hampers creativity and potential.

Things like jealousy and anger, which are perhaps a subset of fear probably also qualify as a maladaptation in today’s world.  The behavior that we partake in when anger or jealous almost never registers a positive change in our life, while in past millennia, these probably had important, if not vital roles in survival.  Regardless of the details of the past, it’s easy to see the relative uselessness of such emotions today.

Our emotional homunculi is an awkward creature in a society full of creature comforts.

But luckily, unlike our somatosensory cortex or a our motor cortex, the emotional distortions and proportions upon which most of our behaviors springs can be drastically edited.

The mere awareness of an emotion is enough to get a handle on its out grown proportion.  With a mindfulness practice, our perspective gains an ability to toggle the size of the context.

When something triggers an emotion to suddenly spike out of proportion with the situation, our perspective can “zoom-out” in a sense, counteracting the distorting view of reality created by a lens of emotion.