QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

April 24th, 2020

Our most difficult task at all times is to look at reality and determine what is possible, and what is not.  As powerful and essential as our imagination is, it leads us astray much of the time.  Imagination often fails to pay heed to some true laws of nature and pays too much heed to imaginary customs, invented by people, fake laws, if you will.

It’s well known that you can teach a gorilla sign language.  But strangely enough, even though you can ask a gorilla a question and it will answer, such animals don’t ask questions.

This might give a clue as to why our species has been able to accomplish so many outrageous things.  There aren’t any fish or caterpillars, whales or giraffes that have been able to send any of their kind to the moon.

Clearly our imagination plays a huge role in our success, and at the core of our imagination may be the ability to form and ask a question.

Questions are the product of imagination.  Answers are a product of observation.

A question reorients your perspective on the world.  The question makes you curious, and somewhat suspicious of reality, as though it’s hiding something that you can discover. 

The process is fairly straight forward, and it’s a lot like the scientific method: you ask a question, and you poke reality in a way that hopefully answers your question.  Sometimes you get the sort of response you’re looking for, sometimes you get something totally surprising, and often you get no answer at all.  This process repeats.  Based on the feedback, we ask another question that’s been informed by our first experiment.  Eventually, we end up rephrasing our initial question until the framing of the question creates a perspective on reality where the answer emerges.

The art of the question is the art of rephrasing, and doing so until the question phrases the parameters of that unknown answer so well that the question actually begins to describe the answer.

It’s never just one question and one answer.  It’s a game that volleys between reality and our imagination. 

This whole space is indeterminate.  It’s uncertain, and while it can feel as though it lacks the order that accompanies certainty, it’s a fluid process that has a method and a logic of it’s own, the way two people dancing together don’t know what the next few moves are going to be, but they operate on heuristics that allow them to move gracefully through that improvisation.

The analogy of volley goes even further.  Just as it only takes one ball to play a game of tennis with two people, the volley of questions and answers has one thing at its core: our perspective.  It’s the way we view things and understand the situation that is getting volleyed between reality and our imagination.  It’s important to realize the difference between our perspective and our imagination.  Our perspective is an understanding, whereas imagination is this chaos machine that we have somewhat separately from our perspective.  We understand the world to be a certain way, but still have some confusion, and our imagination supplies us with these odd ways of looking at the world, seeing connections that aren’t explicit when we just look at the parts, and from that warp of imagination we then question reality.  The answer we get isn’t somehow a raw piece of reality, it’s just another influence that shapes our perception.  We then go back to the imagination with this new understanding, and with luck, we get another question.

The true power of the imagination is that it allows us to wonder if reality isn’t as it seems.  It allows us to wonder if there is a secret mechanism that is making things work and behave the way they are.  Essentially, the imagination allows us to see a different reality.  It’s messy, and clearly the imagination can be disorienting, but this is why it’s so important to try and pin down reality with the points of those questions.    The way to stay grounded is to actually try and find the ground, the bedrock of reality, that waits for us to see it as it really is.

This episode references 739: Fake Laws

FAKE LAWS

April 23rd, 2020

What guidelines does imagination follow?  It certainly breaks some laws, the big obvious ones, like gravity, and a variety of other chemical laws and those of physics as we imagine castles in the sky and things appearing out of thin air and then transform into something else.  Meanwhile, imagination pays heed to other guidelines that aren’t actually real.  We imagine within the confines of our culture.

How is it that our one superpower is so irreverent of the laws of nature, but behaves in the light of other people’s opinions?

We are limited not by what is actually physically possible, but by what we believe is acceptable in the eyes of other people.

This isn’t too hard to realize, and it’s encapsulated by such platitudes as the perennial “don’t care what other people think.”

But here’s the thing about caring about what other people think.  If you don’t explicitly question why people behave the way they do and why you operate within the customs of normal society, then your default will be to operate within those constraints, regardless of whether you have a suspicion that they might be bullshit or not.

An explicit question cleaves a subject, deconstructs it, reveals it’s gut, or lack of substance, and this process of questioning is an emotional realization more than it is a logical understanding. 

Dietary suggestions prove to be a good example of this if you dig into the history of it a little.  We would benefit from asking why we eat certain things.  Did hunter gatherers have a bowl of cereal before they went out to do their hunting and gathering?  It’s a banal example, but considering how tremendous the shift in health and weight has been over the last century, it goes to show just how susceptible we are to following the herd.  Few buffalo ask why they shouldn’t turn off from the herd. There seems to be good reason for this, but being unable to do this means you’ll have no other option when the herd is going over a cliff.

The only laws that really need to be studies are the natural laws of physics.  Is it at all surprising that we don’t learn the laws of our country in school despite their being thousands of laws?  Somehow they all fall within the realm of ‘common sense’, or rather, we’re so good at picking up on these laws from what others do that we abide due to an osmosis.   Not to mention the fact that few people care about breaking a law if it’s clear that it won’t hurt anyone. 

But we might do well to take this further:  what frivolous laws are we unconsciously following that would be a great benefit for us to question?

THE REINS

April 22nd, 2020

Our imagination is our one true superpower.  But the benefit of this superpower also creates the biggest bottleneck between what we imagine and the reality we live in.  Our imagination manifests superpowers that only exist in the imaginary world.

Each of us can close our eyes and picture castles assembling themselves in the sky, spaceships cracking the fabric of space, or perhaps things far more quaint, like that cabin in the woods we’d like to build, or that family we’d like to be surrounded by.  The ease with which these things can be imagined is somewhat deceptive.  Converting products of the imagination into works of reality is to negotiate an immense gulf.  This void, bottlenecking dreams from entering the world we know, is the true realm of the exceptional imagination – one that can imagine in terms of the real.

Things is, it’s all fine and good to imagine a castle in the sky.  It’s a delightful image, but it does little more than encourage someone to disassociate from the real world.

There is nothing special about imagining the impossible.  What’s truly impressive is achieving what has never been done but what is entirely within the realm of possibility. 

With our entertainment, perhaps our religions, and even with our personal dreams we allows our imaginations to venture ridiculously.  It is like the friend we go for a hike with who is simply too fast and is out of sight in no time, leaving us to feel lost and lonely where we are. 

Some people go on and on about IQ tests, others point at their social skills, others flex muscles, but at the end of the day, is not the greatest and most basic display of being alive the ability to imagine something and then do it?  To make that imaginary thing exist in the real world?

The problem isn’t that we lack imagination, it’s that we let our imagination run wild without us.  The subtlety lies in keeping tight reins on that imagination, not in the sense of keeping it reined in, but making sure it takes you along for the ride, weighed down as you are with all the laws and possibilities of the real world.

ACCURACY & KINDNESS

April 21st, 2020

Is it accurate to be kind?  Or is it kind to be accurate?  These questions evoke the difficult issue of tough love.  Is tough love kind by virtue of its accuracy?  Or is it kind to forego tough love and cater to how you know someone wants to feel?

The answer to these questions all depends on your scope of time.  Are you acting with short term motives in mind, or are you thinking long term?  Each scope of thinking gives you different answers to questions of kindness, accuracy and tough love.

To be kind with short term results in mind, it doesn’t make sense to give someone some tough love honesty.  Tough love invariably includes being painfully accurate about something in a way that is likely to hurt a person.  But if we think long term, then we understand that short term pain can lead to long term gain.  To be kind in the long term means to be accurate in short term.

Accuracy in human relationships just boils down to honesty.  We can take a mechanical perspective of human relationships and ask whether the connection between two people is accurate?  Accuracy means ‘correct in details’.  Clearly, for a relationship to be ‘correct in details’ means that details are being shared correctly between both parties.

Etymology sends us an interesting, perhaps convoluting swing here.  Accuracy comes from the Latin accuratus, meaning ‘done with care’.  Embedded in the history of this word is a conflation with kindness.  Is it not accurate to say that healthy relationships are approached with care?  The connections here are either tortured or all too appropriate.  To approach a relationship with care means to be accurate.  In a roundabout and incidental way, the roots of the word accuracy imply  kindness.

The message that arises from the dance of these different words, is that kindness doesn’t just extend to the people we care about, but also to the accuracy of details we share with these people.

LOSING LUSTER

April 20th, 2020

There’s a curious phenomenon when a projects starts to lose steam in the final mile.  It’s as though the novelty of the whole endeavor is long over by that point.  The interesting part of the work, as work, is pretty much over, and those last few percent to completion feel a bit more like going through the motions.

The whole thing strangely loses luster.  With the whole thing so close to being a reality, there seems like little surprise between what we think is possible and what actually is possible.  With all the pieces pulled from a dream now in the real world, that final assembly holds less intrigue.

We can have a tendency to undermine ourselves right when the effect presents it’s greatest danger.

The trick here is to see this part of the process as a different kind of work.  It’s no longer about intrigue, surprise and molding reality in the shape of dreams.  The work of that final mile is a psychological one, a stretch that has more to do with pushing one’s self than any sense of dream or possibility.  Those finishing touches before pressing print, require a different muscle.  One that is of huge importance.  It’s that mechanism that is at the heart of self-motivation.  It’s the ability to do a thing solely for the sake of doing.  This muscle, this ability, that we constantly forgo opportunities to exercise, doesn’t just come up at the tail end of projects, but everywhere.  At the beginning before we’ve even started, during gaps in process when we feel stuck or blocked.  In the beginning we have things like curiosity and interest to help fuel this psychological engine, and again during the process when we get stuck, the instance itself can feel like a frustrating puzzle that generates its own energy for a solution.

At the tail end when the project is losing luster in the final mile, we need to see our own self as the puzzle, the factor to be solved for, the lock to be cracked.  It’s this predicament more than anything where we risk to lose the most by holding ourselves back, for the simple reason that we don’t risk losing what might be possible so much as losing what we’ve already proved actually is possible.