HANGING THREAD

February 19th, 2019

A good way to think about the process of curiosity is to think of stepping stones.  Each step is a place from which we take in our surrounding situation and then formulate a question.  It is this question, if crafted well enough, if intriguing enough, and perhaps down right annoying enough that propels us from where we are into some unknown direction.  A direction we hypothesize might hold the answer. 

But answers turn out to be elusive creatures.  Sure we might find some kind of short-term answer that technically fulfills our original question, but it often comes with the strange baggage of a new context.  Most often, when our old question is reconsidered in this new context, something is much different: the satisfaction of the answer found is not long lasting.  The new context is akin to a new room with more doors to explore.  Often finding an answer is simply just a short reprieve before another question takes us in a new direction.

Another way to phrase this entire process is to think of the questions that arise as the problems of life that arise.  A bleaker way of looking at the process of living can appear to look like an endless stream of problems we need to solve.

We hear such parlance all the time.  “What’s the problem now?”

Such questions are said as though there will actually be a time when no problems exist. 

This turn for the cynical is only to highlight the former.

Those who enjoy life the most have either mastered a way of relating to life on a moment-to-moment basis as in someone who has mastered mindfulness, or life is composed of a series of interesting questions that engage a sense of wonder and curiosity, and such a person is constantly propelled forward towards a new and ever-growing context.

We might for a moment remind ourselves of children who carry around verbal machine guns fully locked and loaded with magazines full of questions. 

The difference between life as a series of annoying problems and life as a string of interesting questions is essentially a difference of perspective and attention.  And perspective is a function of attention.  More than time, attention forms our one core resource.   How we curate, steer, zoom and relax our attention not only determines to a high degree our success in the eyes of others, but it dictates whether we enjoy our time alive or not – no matter what life we are living or circumstance in which we currently find ourselves.

An annoying problem can become interesting if we pay it more attention and familiarize ourselves with the details.  It’s not that the problem was more interesting than we initially thought, it’s that we became more interested in the subject than we initially predicted.

We can pause at this moment and think about all the people around the planet who will be so glad to get to bed, to escape from the day for some reprieve, from the onslaught and from the exhaustion.

What exactly are all such people really wanting?  Aside from the occasional uncontrolled dream, sleep presents no substantial vacation.  If anything the experience is more like time-travelling forward to the next day without so much as a wink.  And the onslaught and the exhaustion begins once more.

Or does it?

There are people who wake up excited, ready to move forward and get into the day once more.  We imagine such people having thrilling creative work, but regardless of how exciting someone’s profession is, everyone’s experience of the day can fit into one of the two paradigms: either it’s a series of problems to solve or questions from which to jump forward.

Those who can’t wait to get started often bemoan the need to sleep in the first place.  Why?  Because there’s a question lingering.  A new context yet explored.

Like a good movie that cuts short in a power outage, such a person is left wondering what’s next as they try to keep their eyes shut.

If life seems dreary, long and bothersome, we might wonder what kinds of questions we are missing out on. 

Can I ask myself a better question?

This is the only real tool we have in life, and we can use it to carve into our lives, sculpting it into something we find beautiful and fulfilling.  That work is never ending, and when the day comes to an end, our practice with such a tool should leave us in a fresh context, one that evokes wonder and inspires another question.

A hanging thread that we leave for the person we will be tomorrow.  A place to start, something to use to pull ourselves out of bed and towards the future.

This episode references Episode 47: Childish Recursion – The Why-Shovel, and Episode 30: The Only Tool

EVEN KEEL

February 18th, 2019

Nearly all sailboats are equipped with a kind of keel.  Some designs are more effective than others.  The most effective are designed in such a way as to accomplish only one thing: to keep the boat upright and as level as possible.

We have all seen white sails tilting at angles out on the water.  Perhaps we can even remember how startling it can be when a gust comes along and those white sails tilt even more.  We wonder: “are they going to go over?”

For the well-designed boat, this is not an issue.  A boat with a proper keel might get rolled, but will self-right.  This means that no matter what the circumstances, no matter how big the storm, such a boat will always be levelling back to the right position. 

Some boats, on the other hand make a trade-off in design and sacrifice this amazing capability for other things, often these trade-offs are either for more comfort or more speed.  Disconcertingly there are great number of racing sailboats that float very well upside-down.  Their keels work very effectively.. until a point.  Once flipped, they stay flipped.  Regardless of experience on the water, anyone can easily imagine that such a situation is far from desirable.  A self-righting boat, if rolled presents a platform on which to plan and execute a next move in order to survive, even if all the rigging and sails have been torn off the boat.  On the other hand, a boat that is rolled and stays completely upside-down is a far more difficult circumstance.

The images of these designs present an allegory for how we react to the unfortunate circumstances of life. 

When a storm comes along and rolls us, do we always self-right?  Have we trained our mind and designed our thinking so that we are always trending towards a calmer more thoughtful reaction?

Or do we stay toppled?  Do we react emotionally and ineffectively?  And do we continually entertain those first thoughts in reaction to a storm of life in order to continually feed our anger, our sense of unjust treatment and bad luck?

It wasn’t too long ago when the whole notion of physical exercise and training the body was a strange and uncommon practice.  Today a person who is not continually tinkering with their physical regimen is seen as behind the times.

So too will come to pass the same change when it comes to the training and the design of one’s mind.  The design of our mind is much like the design of a sailing vessel.  Instead of physical dimensions and smooth hydrodynamic lines, the design of our mind is a function of the ideas we tinker with, the axioms by which we operate and the training we engage with in order to strengthen connections between different parts.

Indeed, the whole concept of having an even keel is becoming more and more applicable as science delves into the mechanisms of the brain and how different practices effect our brain.  Things like good diet, exercise and meditation have long begun to show their influences on how a mind is reshaped, redesigned, and refit for the sea of life.

We can perpetually wonder: how can I tinker with this design and make it just a little bit better?

This episode builds off of the allegorical image presented in Episode 165: Set Sail

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: TRUCKING ALONG

February 17th, 2019

The horizon was just beginning to split sky and land, glowing blue above and darkening the flat plains.  Lucilius was peddling a bicycle to his own gentle rhythm, having cycled all through the night simply to see the sunrise, after having started several weeks prior.

Lucilius was at a transition in his current life and decided to take a long trip by cycling in a single direction, day after day.

The glowing horizon brightened, growing gold and pushing the blue higher and higher into the starred night sky.  Soon enough the sun pierced the shadow and lit the land, giving form and color to the long road ahead, stripping everything of shadow save for the low and subtle hills that held their short trains of abyss.

Lucilius rode on into the day and the road began to busy.  Occasional cars passed, but mostly huge 18-wheeled long-haulers roared along the road, whipping up powerful backdrafts.  These trucks would often come terrifyingly close as Lucilius rode along the edge of the street, but sometimes, when they had the room, they would give him a wide berth by dipping into the oncoming lane.

During these weeks of riding he had spent a good deal of time thinking about these truckers, men far from home, sitting in a cab, at the wheel for so many hours at a time.  He imagined himself in their position and wondered if they were perhaps lonely.  The thought had lead him to begin waving at all the trucks that came down the road in the opposite direction.  He found out quickly what kind and lonely hearts were travelling these roads as almost every single truck he waved at, he got some kind of response, whether it was a wave back or a short signal with the horn.

Later in the day Lucilius came across another cyclist at a stop consulting a map.  Lucilius stopped as do all cyclists in such circumstances.  The two were going in the same direction and shortly decided to ride together.

That night they camped and cooked steaks over a fire talking about a whole wealth of topics.  And at one point the conversation veered towards the daily travails of riding.

“Those damn trucks,” Lucilius’ friend started.  “They come so close, like they’re trying to see how close they can get.  All I think about is climbing up on their cab with a .357 magnum.”  The man gestured the weight of a gun in his hand while he said it.  “Just give’em a piece of my mind and maybe a little more.”

Lucilius briefly marveled at how much trust he had unconsciously granted all these passing truckers, having not felt any of the fear he was hearing described.

“That’s interesting,” Lucilius said.  “I just wave at all of them that pass by, because I imagine they’re lonely and bored, and I figure that eventually they’ll be coming back the other way, and when they do, maybe they’ll feel just a little bit more, I don’t know, happy and compassionate when they see a cyclist and give that cyclist a bit more room when they pass.  Even if it’s not me, I figure it might help.”

Lucilius’ new friend stared long listening and then turned back to his meal.  “Interesting,” he said.

The next day the two rode together. Lucilius started out trailing.  And when the first truck came rattling down the road, Lucilius noticed his friend raise a hand and wave.

DERAILED

February 16th, 2019

Any day presents the unlimited opportunity for chance to intercede.  This can be good, but we are more likely to notice and remember the times when it’s been bad.  The day is going well and suddenly some occurrence or some news comes rattling down the pipeline.

The whole day and perhaps more can be lost.  We can feel derailed – like a train flung from it’s tracks.

But there is an important mistake in the way we use this word when it comes to our emotional experience and our productivity.

The mistake is the idea there was a track we were on in the first place.

Despite the order we try to haul out of a chaotic existence, we are still subject to that unpredictable future.  And perhaps instead of trying to bolt down more order with reinforced efforts, perhaps we are better off to recalibrate our perspective and think about a strategy with which we can interact with this chaos when it comes up.

Being derailed in the middle of the day is not a matter of trying to turn around and get back to the track we were on.  It’s a matter of seeing what we now have to work with and figuring out where we can go from this new place.

We might imagine being thrown into a new room and turning around to find the door through which we entered no longer exists.  Imagine the disorientation.  It’s not hard since we can all remember such instances in life where this allegory might resonate.

If, however, we keep in mind that we were never on some magical track in the first place, any situation is freed from the laurels of the past.  That good track may have simply been an extended time of stable and predictable emotions.  The days repeat and if it’s in a likeable fashion then we might be able to expect a fairly stable pattern of emotions.  Of course this is a fantasy and we’re more likely to feel derailed sooner or later.

But each time this occurs can be viewed as an opportunity.  Just think for a moment what kind of super power it is to be able to emotionally bootstrap one’s self to a more reliable form every and any time something bad happens.  In fact, we might wonder if there is any other skill with regards to emotions that is more important than this ability.

Cultivating such a skill might sound impossible, like painting the Sistine Chapel, but this is due to our complete lack of technique, skill and most importantly: practice.  Many skills look and sound impossible, but if they are skills, then this means that they’ve been developed and acquired by some other person, and the variance between all of us is refreshingly small, though many might argue.  It boils down to something simple:  what you put your mind to, materializes.  And like anything the results are slow and nearly non-existent in the beginning.

But with consistent effort, a mindfulness can develop, and given enough time, derailments begin to look like interesting detours to a mind curious about the present moment.

This episode references Episode 133: The Right Track and Episode 32: Rear-View

UNIQUE

February 15th, 2019

It should be left to the Pedant to gripe for grammatical reasons about the word ‘unique’ being mutilated by plopping an adverb like ‘very’ in front of it.  As in that’s very unique.

To illustrate why this is a problem from a grammatical standpoint we can swap out the word ‘unique’ for something that is unique and the problem becomes quite clear, for example, imagine someone pointing up at the sky during a clear day and saying that’s very Sun.

This feels awkward in the ear and awkward on the tongue for obvious reasons: any given THING cannot be more or less of the thing it is.  This is what the function of the word ‘unique’ is supposed to embody.

If something is unique, it is one of a kind.  To say that something is VERY one-of-a-kind is like adding 1 to infinity, it’s not only redundant but ineffective.

These are all points that the Pedant would bring up when trying to point out grammatical misuse in the way another person speaks.  Often this is done to simply show-off some minutia of knowledge rather than to assist in some kind of opportunity to learn.

Anyone with a genuine and deep appreciation of language will notice how much language shifts, mutates and morphs over time.  This ability which ultimately annoys the strict grammarian is one of the core mechanisms of language that has enabled it to evolve to the form purportedly held sacred by pedantic grammarians.

While the careless manipulation of language can certainly lead to dystopian paradoxes of Orwellian stature, the vast metastasis of language has for the most part been for the better when it comes to our ability to get a notion from one mind to another.

We might wonder what exactly we are doing when we say something is very unique.  Such a mistake doesn’t seem to occur when speaking of some things that are actually unique.  As mentioned we do not say that’s very Sun, or that’s very Moon.

We do on the other hand modify some unique things in the exact same way.  For example, let’s say we have a friend named Alex who is quite funny, and we find ourselves in the company of mutual friends without Alex and the whole group witnesses something funny that is in line with Alex’s humor.  It’s quite common for someone to make the observation of similarity and say “that’s very Alex.”

Here we have a unique person who is being modified in a way that seems to some how be beyond their own nature.  But of course this is not the case.  The modifying word ‘very’ is being used to approach the unique nature of Alex and his humor. 

To highlight this, we can follow the modifying adverb ‘very’ into some of it’s more traditional territory.

For example, we can say something is bad, but then if it gets worse we’ll change and say that it’s very bad.

For whatever reason there is nothing wrong with this statement, and it may be because we have the word ‘worst’.  So we can suss out a kind of hazy spectrum from this concept.  There’s bad to worse which is very bad and then if things get even worse, it might actually be the worst.

As much as we don’t like the in-between gray spaces between categories and even identities, we need a spectrum of such gray space in order to communicate nuance.

The rise of the tendency to qualify the word ‘unique’ may be due to a need for a spectrum that approaches uniqueness as opposed to the nonsensical hyperbolic implication of something being more unique than unique. 

And what would be the point of such a spectral tool?

Well, to be perfectly pedantic about the word unique would require admitting that absolutely everything is unique.  Even an identical set of mass-produced fidget spinners is a composite of unique items for the simple reason that no two things can occupy the exact same space.  Two fidget spinners sitting side by side have unique orientations relative to the rest of the universe, and merely one differentiating factor qualifies for uniqueness.  What we end up with by investigating the traditional definition of this word is a rather useless concept.  It’s akin to the failure of the self-esteem movement and saying everyone is special, which simply becomes another way of saying no one is special. 

While language certainly has forays into totally grotesque and un-useful areas, these branches collapse with enough time, just as we see in the evolution of species.  For example, we don’t see peacocks with tail feathers that are 35 feet long even though this would certainly be possible, and there have certainly been slight mutations that have resulted in peacocks with feathers that are unusually long – even by peacock’s standards – but at that point the usefulness of looking ostentatious is impinged by fatality since predators have an easier time snagging lunch. 

Language is a similar adaptation that follows similar patterns of expansion and collapse in order to evolve.

While the pedantic grammarian might bask in the self-serving conclusion that people are using the word ‘unique’ incorrectly,

it may simply be evidence that the human mind as a kind of hive is delving into the concept with more nuance and seeking out a gradient that exists between things that are similar and things that are one-of-a-kind.

It might seem dangerously post-modern to put a toe in each mutually-exclusive category, however, unlike most products of post-modernism, this faded border is actually a useful one, even if at first glance it does not seem to be the way people are intending it.

It goes to follow that when we say or hear someone say very unique.  What’s really being indicated is a degree of something being out-of-the-ordinary.

Which is quite necessary in world of patterns where every ordinary thing is inherently unique.