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.

IMAGINATIVE MAINTENANCE

May 5th, 2020

Boredom is the imagination’s punishment for being ignored.  Of course, this humanizes the imagination, anthropomorphizes it, making it out to be like another person, one that has feelings and opinions about what we’ve done, or haven’t done.  And for the most part, this is a mistake.  As powerfully diverse and creative as the imagination is, it should be regarded less like some sort of entity or muse and more like a muscle.

A muscle has no opinion on what workouts you have or haven’t done.  It simply exists and responds according to what has happened previously and what is currently happening.  Just as boredom is the imagination’s punishment for being ignored, physical pain is the muscle’s response for being unused for so long.

Everything dies off if it is not fed in some way.  Muscles atrophy when not used, the imagination goes blank, hunger fades after enough fasting, good relationships crumble if not nurtured, fire snuffs out if given no fuel.

It’s a universal principle: Use it or lose it.

But perhaps even more important is the inverse implication of this principle:

Use it to boost it.

There is no middle ground where we assume things stay at rest.  Things either decay or improve.  Rocks slowly chip and weather.  Even the glass in windows slowly slumps downward over decades.  Change is the only constant.  And nothing highlights the state of an individual’s imagination more than a fat dollop of free time. 

With this quarantine, for example, many people are having such a hard time with all this free time because life has normally been packed with the busyness of a bullshit job that only ever requires a sliver of creativity and imagination.  And now, with the feeble constraints of a busy job gone, the true weakness of people’s imaginations becomes obvious, like an astronaut who cannot stand against the force of gravity after a long enough time in space.

On the other hand, for those who have by fortune or habit maintained a healthy exercise of their own imagination – these people are feasting on this opportunity of free time like never before.

Reminders that great things have been achieved during times of quarantine have circulated social media in recent months.   Newton created Calculus during the plague.  John Milton finished writing Paradise Lost during quarantine.  Shakespeare’s most productive years were likewise during an epidemic.  But the missing key for all of these anecdotes is the fact that these people were exercising their imaginations rather obsessively before the opportunity of such free time became available during times of the plague.  It’s easy to imagine the mental health of your run-of-the-mill laborer during such times declining while these people created some humanity’s greatest works.  In short, these creative people were prepared when the opportunity came along.

What harms one person is an opportunity to another.  But where is the real difference if it’s the same event that both people are experiencing?

The good thing is that we can only stand so much pain before we get fed up and do something about it.  What we do, of course, determines everything.  If we don’t placate boredom with mindless entertainment – if we sit with that boredom, it burns itself out.  The rusted gears of the imagination grow warm, and crackle back to life.  The mind, if left to it’s own devices for long enough begins to create.  Even those who have been mentally blindsided by this event have an opportunity, to once again, get their most powerful asset rolling again.