FRUSTRATION & PATIENCE

June 1st, 2020

Learning is often a difficult process.  Before we have understood what we are trying to wrap our mind around, the experience is confusing and uncomfortable.  Often, learning is just pure frustration.

I don’t understand.

How does this make sense?

This must be wrong.

It’s debilitating to experience something that has a hidden logic, a framework that deceives your ability to grasp it.  Emotionally, it is an assault to our sense of agency.  It functions like an impassable wall of reality that withholds our ability to move forward.  It seems pretty natural to grow frustrated, even angry that such a thing should happen.  It can even seem like it’s unfair.

Why is this happening to me?

Notice the focus of attention in this description. The whole point is the person with the experience.  The focus is inward, but that’s not where the problem lies.  The problem is out there, with the framework that is still invisible, the rules and principles we have yet to figure out.  But meanwhile our focus is elsewhere, turned inward. 

How can we figure something out without focusing on it?

The question frames the issue well enough to highlight the mistake in a painfully obvious way.  The more we focus on our inability to figure something out, and the emotional experience of that inability, the more distracted and detached our focus becomes from the actual problem: that thing in the real world that we are supposed to be figuring out.

It is possible to focus on a problem with such a balance of concentration and intensity that you forget yourself.  Like watching an engrossing movie, or playing a sport, our experience of what it is to be alive in those moments is entirely externalized.  We fail to notice how hungry we are, or that pain in the back, or anything.  It’s as though the mind transports itself on rays of attention to immerse itself in what is happening.  Many people refer to this as a flow state, when concentration and learning, and problem solving all seem to be in harmony, composing an engine running at full tilt in its highest gear.  It’s a fantastic experience, nearly otherworldly.  In fact it is otherworldly.  It’s the difference between the cramped internal world, and the expansive external world of our experience.

The juxtaposition leaves a tremendous and difficult gulf: how can the two be bridged?

How do we transform the frustration, exasperation and powerless feeling of inability and a lack of understanding – how does all that get transformed into a flow state?

The answer is best encapsulated by a simple formula:

Frustration combined with infinite patience turns into curiosity.

Patience is key.  A willingness to endure feelings of inadequacy, and the further ability to understand them, recognize them, note them and move on in faith that you can figure it out – this faith and memory of the fact that you’ve figured out things before, it allows these feelings to settle.  Accepting the reality of our inability and the perfectly natural feelings that arise allows us to let go of such feelings.  Only then do we gain the ability to focus on the task at hand, externally instead of internally.

With a bit more clarity, the mind can reroute the buzz of that anxiety into one of it’s most powerful tools.  Questions begin to form about the problem at hand.  Ideas about the underlying nature of situation arise, guesses to be tested.  We turn from the inner realm and let loose our most valuable asset to it’s natural habitat, the playground of external reality, where curiosity weaves out to explore and bring back the treasure of new understanding.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: WORK SPACE

May 31st, 2020

A wisp of blue emerged and danced out upon the canvas, trailing Lucilius’ paintbrush.  He took a step back from the painting and looked at it sideways.  The piece seemed to be coming together, and he wondered how much left he had to do.  Could it be done?  He wondered.  He stepped in close to the painting, and seemed to see it anew.  He nicked a bit of color and mixed it into the blue that he was working with and brought the shade up to the canvas.  He leaned in closer and touched the paintbrush to the canvas.  Then he leaned back again and tried to take in the whole context of the change.  The tiny addition seemed to leave the whole piece lacking, and Lucilius suddenly felt that he had a lot further to go before he was done.  The tiny addition revealed an entire range of details across the painting that now seemed to be missing.  So he went to work.

The next day, Lucilius bought an entire set of smaller brushes.  It was clear the painting needed a new level of detail, and he needed a precision that he couldn’t achieve with his current set.  He got to work with the small brushes, leaning in closely to the canvas.  Before long he found he was constantly rubbing his eyes, as the fineness of the detail was making him go a little cross-eyed.

The next day, Lucilius bought a pair of glasses used by jewelers, and with them, he could see the details of paint and color on an entirely new level.

Soon he was painting with brushes that had scarcely more than a couple bristles, carrying the tiniest amount of paint between the pallet and the canvas.  Each tiny portion of the painting was now it’s own story, an epic construction that Lucilius labored upon as he worked slower and slower in order to hunt down the level of detail that seemed to be eluding him.

He was at this work for weeks, when one day he walked into his studio and finally for the first time in a long while, he saw the painting from a distance.  During his long and laborious foray into the minutia he’d been exploring he’d forgotten to take a step back and look at the whole thing. 

The painting seemed strange and foreign to him.  It wasn’t at all the painting he felt he’d been working on for so long, and now, realizing that this is how everyone else would see it, he was confused and disappointed with the effort.  His gaze drifted off to the jeweler’s glasses and the tiny brushes.  He struck the setup with back of his hand and sent brushes and mineral oil scattering in a mess across the studio floor. 

He got out his larger brushes, and reluctantly, picked up the small set that littered the floor.  He added them together, and sighed before the work of the painting.  It seemed as though the more progress he made, the further he had to go.  The painting would have to be completely reworked.

He set about it, taking larger strokes, plastering over levels of detail in a way that filled him with doubt and disappointment.  But when he leaned back far from the surface of the canvas, the bold stroke seemed to work.  Slowly, he worked, trying to find a balance between the exquisite detail he’d carved with the tiny brushes and the dangerous structure of a larger way of painting.

After a few weeks Lucilius leaned in close and found that the painting no longer seemed to work so close up.  When he stood up and backed away, the painting failed again to spark in him the right response.  Now it seemed as though the work left ahead was infinite, as though he would have to chase the image for all eternity.  He rubbed his face, sighing at the prospect, when there was a knock on his studio door.

“Come in,” he miserably proclaimed.

A young woman entered, carrying a pizza and a bottle of wine.  She emerged into the main room of the studio, and saw the painting.

“Oh, you finished!” she exclaimed.

“What?” Lucilius said, confused.  “Not at all.”

“Sure you have,” the young woman said.  “It’s just missing one thing.”

“What?” Lucilius asked.

She set the pizza down and handed the bottle to Lucilius.  “Here, open this, we’re gonna celebrate your new painting.”

She approached the easel, slowly, smiling at the painting, and then she quickly looked around at his materials and tools until she spotted what she wanted.  She picked up a block stamp that Lucilius had carved a design of fractal triangles into.  The image it printed stood as his signature.  The young woman dipped it in ink and crouched down to then gently press the stamp into the lower corner of the painting. 

Suddenly, with that simple touch, the whole painting seemed riddled with a life that he couldn’t see before.  The woman backed away until she was standing next to him.  She looked at it sideways.

“Perfect,” she said.

Surprised, Lucilius found he could hardly disagree.  He walked over to the small kitchen to get a corkscrew, smiling, and as he wove the tool into the bottle, he found himself looking at a collection of blank canvases that were leaned against the wall. 

All of them were waiting for paint.

Years later the two were having another pizza, catching up on lost time, reminiscing over times long ago, when Lucilius brought up the painting he’d spent so long.

“Oh gosh,” the woman said, “the never-ending painting.”

Lucilius reflected.  “I definitely put a lot of work into that one.”

“And you wouldn’t stop!” the woman said, her eyes wide with the ridiculousness of the memory.  “That’s why I stamped it with your sign.”

“What?” Lucilius asked.  “You said it was finished.  That it was perfect.”

The woman took a sip of wine, looking at Lucilius over the rim of the glass.  She rolled her eyes at his confusion.

“That painting looked wonderful during the last three months that you were working on it.  It was clear you were caught in some strange loop.  And if you’ll recall, I had a gallery to fill at the time.”

MAIN CHARACTER

May 30th, 2020

What’s the difference between your life and a hyper-realistic movie where you can feel the aches and pains of the main character, the hunger, the annoyance, the joy and happiness and the strain of their endeavors?

We don’t ever really know what’s going to happen in the movie of our life tomorrow, nor even in the next moments.  We can’t even predict our next thought.  They just happen to us.  Much the same way we see the adventure unfold on the silver screen.

The difference of course is that it seems as though we have a bit of influence about what happens in our movie, and what the main character does.  We certainly don’t have total control.  We all procrastinate more than we’d like to, and often we look back on immediate moments wondering why we did this instead of that other thing we know we should have done.  But on the whole, we do seem to have the gift of some sort of choice and decision.  Even if it is an illusion, that smokescreen is enough of a good story to point us in better directions.

The illusion of free will influences the process regardless of whether free will exists or not.  It’s the original kernel of imposter syndrome.  To fake it till you make it is to instantly begin the process of becoming.

The question remains; given that you’re stuck for the time being watching the movie through the eyes of this main character, what kind of movie do you want to watch, and what sort of adventure do you want to see this main character endeavor through?

MENTAL SPACE

May 29th, 2020

Despite the tantalizing inequality of space presented by the night sky and all that exists beyond the thin blue border of our atmosphere, space as we experience it is finite and limited.  For anyone who has crammed the mechanics of their life into a tiny studio apartment in an urban filing cabinet, the fact can resonate so deeply that claustrophobia takes on new dimensions.

A room can be completely filled with stuff until there is literally no space left.  Imagine a room filled to the ceiling with junk.  How do you make space?

The answer is obvious: take some of the stuff out.  Making space is a subtractive process because space is finite.  In order to make space, we have to address each and every thing in the room.  Picking it up, and hauling it out.

The mind has a fairly similar requirement.  To make some mental space, we need to take out the things that are buzzing in the heart of our attention and clouding our ability to see.  Sometimes this is as easy as writing down a list of things to do.

But most of the time, it is even easier, though few people are practiced in the process.  Often times, a thought, or the shadow of a thought just needs some acknowledgement.  It’s as though we have two minds.  One vast mind that encompasses all that we might do and all that we dream ourselves to be.  And a second mind that clutters our view of that vastness with a cloud of annoying, unhelpful thoughts.

We need only note them, consciously, and often such extraneous mental paraphernalia pops and vanishes into nothing.  Like the junk in the room, we remove thoughts from our mind.

This is an essential skill for any person to develop.  It is a path to peace.  It may in fact be the only path the peace.  Or, at the very least, the only reliable path to peace that anyone can walk at any time.

To have clarity, to have mental space, to be at peace.  These things are not achieved by the addition of things that we believe will spark joy somewhere in the fussy workings of our mind.

We must take the opposite approach.

Only then do we get a clear view of what we really are: something far more vast and capable than we’re lead to believe as we swat at the normal cloud of pesky thoughts.

Clarity requires removing things from our sphere of consciousness.

Peace is a subtractive process. 

CONTEXT & DEFINITION

May 28th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Anne-Laure, creator of Nesslabs which is an online community that focuses on mindful productivity.

Even within a native tongue, there are words that we continually forget or mix up; words that sound similar and perhaps mean similar things.  For example, effect and affect don’t just share most of their letters, the meanings are so close that the definition of one includes the other.  Perhaps even more problematic is the fact that these two words are hard to distinguish in speech, and without written language it’s possible that many people would never realize that two words exist.

Strive and thrive might pose a similar problem.  Is someone who is striving not also thriving?  Or rather, if someone is thriving is it not also because they strive for accomplishment?  The words are quite similar, though one can have an object.  You can strive to accomplish a goal.  You can’t thrive for something in particular.  Thriving is a quality of state, an indication of general fitness.  As a writer I am striving to get a certain point across.

When students learn vocabulary in school, they are usually asked to do two things: memorize the definition, and use the word in a sentence.

But why?

One is the theory, the other is the practice.

It seems that in most all areas of life, there exists a gulf between theory and practice that we continually need to bridge.  It’s one thing to be shown how to do something.  It’s quite another to do it yourself. The definition of a word is just common theory regarding how most people use the word and why.  Putting that word into an original sentence creates a context for the word, and constitutes, of course, the practice of language.

Context seems to have a far more powerful affect on our memory.  We are a species operates based on a story.  We think in stories, we remember using stories.  This is why the definition of a word can be so frail for our memory.  It might be why we can end up checking the definition many times without ever really learning it.

Our memory of a particular word thrives and our ability to use it flourishes when it exists in a strong context, when we can remember a story that wraps around it.  Without this context, we can struggle and strive endlessly, and to no good end by simply looking up the word over and over.  Our memory of a word thrives when we strive to use it in a strong context.