EMBRYO

June 11th, 2020

What is the character of passion?  What are its mechanics?  How does it start?  Does it grow?  Does it ebb and flow? Does passion ever die?

We tend to think of passion like talent, or beginner’s luck.  It’s something that somehow seems fully formed from the start, as though it’s something your born with.  Much the same way talent is regarded.  This is a lazy farce.  It’s a story we tell ourselves to let ourselves off the hook.  The story allows us to believe that if we aren’t gripped by incredible feelings to pursue some specific goal, then we simply don’t have a passion, or that talent.  We have trained ourselves to expect things prepackaged, but nothing emerges fully formed, and what seems to just has the illusion of such.

A butterfly might seem fully formed when it breaks out of its chrysalis, but this is only after a huge transformation, and entire different life as a caterpillar in preparation for the change.  Even more noteworthy is how radically different a butterfly looks when compared to it’s former caterpillar form, the two could not be more different.  One has giant beautiful wings, and the other is fat and furry.

Perhaps, this analogy of the butterfly can inform our question about passion: what if the birth of passion, and it’s early stages look nothing like the final form?

Take for instance something more common, like running, or riding a bike.  Many people find these activities very enjoyable and even rely on such activities for feelings of wellbeing.  Such activities need not be passions, but we can still likewise ask: did such activities start out so enjoyable?

No, definitely not.  We all struggled to stand, and probably every last one of us cried after falling when trying to take our first steps.  Likewise with riding a bike.  Most of us, when the training wheels were taken off, had a spill here and there that left us crying and confused.

All skills and talents we might pursue start like this.  The little kid looking sideways at their own bad drawing is just as easily driven by a sense of frustration that it’s not better as by the enjoyment of actually putting pencil or paintbrush to paper.  Learning, by default, is a confusing and anxious experience that puts us in intimate proximity with our own insecure limits.  Before we’ve gained any competency, we are at the mercy of feeling inadequate.

It’s only long after competency is established does a skill sharpen to a point where other people begin to notice something special, extra-ordinary, and worthy of being referred to as a talent, or a passion.

The embryo of passion is like anything else we’ve learned to do: it’s an experience of difficulty and confusion.  The beginning stages of passion lack all the flare and color that we associate with the accomplishments of people who we deem talented. What we see is only the compounded value of so many hours and days and years of practice and work.

All of us have latent passions: skills and goals, hobbies and  projects that we just don’t work on enough.  Such things only move forward when we actually put our attention to them on a consistent daily basis.  Otherwise, they can remain embryos while life passes us by.

ONE THING

June 10th, 2020

Some days just get written off.  All our plans somehow fall apart, motivation is nowhere to be found, and an entire slew of nothing seems to crop up for us to deal with.  The day passes without much to show for.  Sometimes, this can be nice, enjoyable.  A day off from life. 

But otherwise, the end of the day can arrive with the feeling that it was all a waste, as though the responsibility of actually getting a day to start with has been squandered, and we’ve failed to live up to the chance we’ve been given.

It’s for this reason, for those days, that it’s good to have just one thing that must happen everyday.  Something productive and creative.  Something probably low stakes, something that no one else might ever see, but something that must be done before we close our eyes for that short death between days.

This might be meditating, or a workout, or writing, or coding, or painting, or any number of things.

Imagine the day is like a good friend.  While it’s nice to go all out to show your appreciation for a friend, with the dinner at the fancy restaurant, or the meticulously planned party, we can honor a loved one by the smallest of gestures. 

The day we are granted each time we open our eyes is much the same.  After hours of defeat, the day can still be won by one tiny victory.

EXHAUSTIVE ITERATION

June 9th, 2020

Learning in the absence of fun, passion and proficiency always boils down to an endurance test against frustration and emotional exhaustion.

When we are proficient at a skill, it’s much easier to have fun, and with enough time, the fun of practice turns proficiency into mastery and mastery turns a skill into a passion.

But in the beginning, before proficiency and fun, we are left with a brute force approach.  Trying whatever combinations and iterations we can imagine and plugging those ideas into reality and waiting for something to light up.  As each attempt fails to provoke even the sputter of a spark, the silent feedback from reality grinds on our emotions.  Each impotent attempt adds to a building frustration, and exhaustion.  All the while, we are inching closer to an answer, to a spark when we find a spot where reality is ticklish.

Our success depends on which threshold is breached first. 

Does out exhaustion spill over into a complete abandonment of the task?

Or does the number of iterative attempts needed to find some hint of success run out first?

True failure is determined only by the moment when we stop trying.  It’s a bit like patience in that regard.

Staving off exhaustion and increasing endurance is a skill that can be built.  Similar to exercise.  The first job after years without exercise is going to be painful, but 6 months of daily running is going to make the event far easier to endure – indeed by that point, we’re far beyond frustrationg and exhaustion, proficiency is giving way to enjoyment.  But that first run will most likely leave an individual huffing and puffing with their hands on their knees after just a few minutes.

We hear this all the time: just keep going, you’ll figure it out.  And while it may be good advice, it focuses on the wrong thing: it’s still referencing something imaginary that we haven’t yet encountered, and it says nothing about that which we are dealing with: namely the emotional experience, the frustration, the exhaustion, the hopelessness that fruitless actions imbue us with. 

Perhaps, instead of trying to keep the eye on the prize, that is, an invisible prize, perhaps the experience is an opportunity to renegotiate our own personal response to such situations.  Instead of powering through the exhaustion and frustration and trying to ignore it all the while, perhaps we can examine the exhaustion and frustration itself.  What if we pause and simply recognize: there are emotions here that are ballooning and gaining strength over me.  Merely recognizing an emotion consciously, with thoughtfulness, is often enough to deflate our intoxication with it.

Realize how much more powerful this strategy could be.  It would be like going for that first run and managing lactic acid and shortness of breath with the power of mere thought alone.  If we can regulate the emotions of frustration and exhaustion, then our minds are free to tinker with a topic for as long as we can stay awake.

The solution is always out there, it’s rarely a question smarts or talent, such things are often just excuses people use when really the issue is people’s own emotions, and how these emotions get in their way.  It’s how we get in our own way.  We need not fight ourselves in order to move forward.  Better to let that frustrated, exhausted part have it’s say, with full attention, and then move forward as one.

INDEPENDENCE & HOMOGENEITY

June 8th, 2020

Envision a typical group of friends, the archetypal group of friends.  What are they like?  As individuals, how do they decide if they are going to do something or not? 

Within any group, there is a tendency toward homogeneity.  There is a quality of ‘sameness’ that everyone gravitates towards in order to take part in the experience of belonging to a group.  Much of this is just efficiency.  It’s easier to abide by the methods that a whole bunch of other people have figured out.  If it works for so many others, than surely it must work for me, or so goes the thinking.  Regardless of how well a method or a system adopted by the group works, it’s often easier to just go along with it as opposed to starting with a blank slate and attempting to reinvent a better wheel.

When an individual has an idea about something they’d like to do, the first thing such a person usually does is to bounce the idea off the rest of the group.  Everyone chimes in with their opinion, and all together the effect of this has more to do with how the idea effects the group rather than how it might fare for the individual.  Groups become convinced of their own wisdom by virtue of the fact that there’s agreement or consensus about something.  If everyone thinks it’s a bad idea, than it’s probably a bad idea.  But again, this is a reflection of the group as it’s own unit, and how it might be affected by the idea of the individual.  It’s possible that any idea that is overly beneficial for the individual threatens the cohesiveness of the group.  The group as a unit includes that individual, and if that individual has a good idea that might somehow takes them away from the group, the group can have a negative reaction to that idea, though it is often presented in a different guise, one tailored to convince the individual.

From an individual standpoint, this is where solitude can be used as a powerful tool.  Divorced from the proximity of other perspectives and their opinions, one is forced to consider deeply their own ideas. 

In solitude one has to interrogate their own ideas for value, to interrogate their own self for a desire to pursue that idea, to test how flimsy or strong that desire is, and to match it against values to determine how important the idea is regardless of desire.

The opinion of others can often be a poison and a pollution due to the latent forces that produce it.  Certainly a mindful and compassionate person might be able to give honest and helpful feedback, but your average individual is not so pure of mind and intention. 

Many and most are riddled with faults, weaknesses and insecurities that thwart and warp their genuine intentions to be helpful.  Groups most certainly fall victim to the very same mechanics.

Though this pollution of feedback does not necessarily mean it cannot be useful.  But if we have not properly vetted our ideas in solitude with the range of optics we can bring to it alone, then our own stance on the subject does not have proper footing.  A lack of introspection leaves us vulnerable to be easily influenced by others: our good idea can be dismissed cringingly by someone who reacts quickly, or our bad idea can be superficially propped up by an enthusiastic friend.  In each circumstance, there is no thorough vetting, only a search for someone else to do the thoughtful work.

Independent thought requires first and foremost, independence from others.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: STREAMING

June 7th, 2020

for Sharon, who wanted a story with a stream in it.

Lucilius was sitting on a rock poised in the middle of a stream.  He’d traversed a haphazard path of smaller rocks that jutted out in the water, leading from the short sandy bank, gnarled with curling tree roots.  Lucilius adjusted himself, finding that the rock was most comfortable looking upstream.  He rested, taking in the place.  Threads of water, weaving in living patterns upon the surface gently flowed toward him.  It was as though he were moving forward, propelled through the water, and during moments of delightful illusion, he couldn’t tell if it were the water moving or himself.  It was as good as any place to sit in meditation.  He closed his eyes, and in darkness, the sound of the water dabbling along the land’s ragged edge drifted to him, then the softer splicket of water folding in upon itself, and then finally below it, the low resonance of so much moving across the earth.

Upon that rock, Lucilius spread his mind out against the world to let it dissolve against his experience.  Thoughts materialized in that otherworldly film, as though laid against experience, but he merely watched them without eyes, as though they were sounds drifting up from the water, arriving, and flowing across his mind, and moving on.  One such thought was the realization that all thoughts, sensations, realizations themselves were arriving to push and carve the mind.  Lucilius opened his eyes to look again at the water moving around him.  Everywhere, the water was carving it’s own bed, shaping the way it would carve again in the next moment.  Rocks rounded, and sediment stirred in gentle tumult, moving like thought through a stream of water and time.

Lucilius closed his eyes again, smiling at that perpetual want of the mind, to grasp, to hang on to each and every little thing - that touch of the mind instantly casting pieces of life into things of the past, cast back, looking back, fossilizing the moment in memory, already crumbling.  He breathed deeply and let go of all attempt to grasp at it, and sunk deeply into the present.

Time then smiled upon Lucilius, bowing deeply to the handsome trick, and then it left Lucilius to be in peace.  The water of the small stream continued to make it’s bed, carving and burrowing the shape of it’s movement into the earth, the earth itself just a slower stream of movement.

Days past without touching Lucilius.  Months carved away with their passing until they became years, and the years, gently moving the tumult of days slowly rounded the decades and centuries, until eons were born.

When Lucilius opened his eyes again, he found that the small stream had left for him his island of rock, and had carved deeply and widely around it.  Lucilius now sat upon a stone tower in the middle of a canyon.  He could see far below the stream that had become a river stretch off to the horizon from where it came.

He could no longer hear the movement of the water, now seeing only its grand shape. And it in, he sensed something.  He followed the vision of the dark water, looking down off the edge of the tower, and then slowly he turned to look behind himself. 

He witnessed in a curious and terrible awe as the river extended past, and there behind him it continued to change, lifting, as though separating from the page of reality, the water transforming, snapping to new shapes, like letters or magnets suddenly pulled with immense force into new positions, immortalizing them.  The water, and the stream itself became words and data, bifurcating out of the only existence Lucilius could know.  And from there it continued to stream, forming itself in a perfect memory before moving on to pages and into eyes, and into speakers, and into ears where it then continues to stream in the minds that contemplate these words.