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.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DOUBLE SIP

April 19th, 2020

The spirit was cold from the condenser but it was hot, the hottest there was in the state.  Lucilius brought the metal pannikin to his lips and tasted the sweet fields of corn, the bubbled air of bread and the oatmeal and hazelnut of a mash now simmering in the belly of his still.  Lucilius smiled and handed the tin cup off to his new employer. 

The man in the pinstriped suit swigged the liquid fast, and his eyes went wide having expected a dull whiskied wine.  The man barely managed to swallow.  He pushed his black fedora back on his head, exposing his forehead.  He looked deeply into the little tin cup, glancing quickly at Lucilius with a new found respect.  He tasted the liquid again, this time slower.

“Well damn boy,”  he said, nodding.  The suit turned to his henchmen, “whatever he needs, no matter the cost, get it for him.   Whatever hands he needs.  However he sees this operation fit.  No questions asked, and while I’m not here, which will be all the time, he-” the man said, now pointing at back Lucilius “is boss.”    

A side of Lucilius’ smile curled up.

Within a month he had ten new fractioning columns operating.  They were turning out a gallon of high proof every four minutes, and they had a separate barn for the mashes and a third for the boiling.  Lucilius now had a team of ten men working near round the clock and oh lord how the money flowed in.

Devil drink, as abolitionists had come to call it was prohibited throughout the land.  Lucilius was a bootlegger, and within short time his brew that he’d been spilling out of a shanty up north had brought the attention of his new employer, who had driven clear up the whole country to taste for himself the rumor that had grapevine it’s way down into the south through a lucky channel.

Lucilius had sailed with half the local police when he started and they were quick to keep everything quit in the small town, granted that Lucilius kept their bottles wet.

But the offer up from the south was too good to pass up.  It wasn’t just the money for Lucilius.  On his last run across the Atlantic, he’d decided to stay on the continent a while and rummage around.  It had been a while since he’d puttered about the old states and he found an interesting upstart in Sweden that was pumping out vodkas that burned brighter than any star to steer by.  Lucilius took on a sort of apprenticeship, learning the alchemy of it all.  And now here he was in the south, commanding the biggest operation in the state, drawing in the biggest money, and soon they would be the biggest operation in the country.  But it was for the tinkering it afforded Lucilius.  The design of the still was what he was most interested in.  He’d lured the boss’s men north with a pretty short column, but now with that pinstriped blessing, he had constructed ten different stills of different shapes and sizes and heights.  All to draw his thinking in to the most efficient method of distillation.

He’d be a rich man after all of this, but he didn’t care.  Now he was taking the razor of curiosity to the edge of both taste and yield.  How much, he wondered and wanted, could he increase his yield and keep that sweet taste of southern corn?

There was always the risk of being raided, by the police or the feds, but the locals were in the pocket of course.  Liquored up and padded well with cash to keep quiet and keep the operation safe.  The feds were the largest worry, but Lucilius had a lead on that problem too.

The local agent who was assigned to the uptick in illegal liquor in the state had been a brandy connoisseur before prohibition.  Lucilius had found out by luck more than anything when he’d stuck one of the operation’s men on the job of following the guy.  The guy’s wife was smuggling a little wine home from a friend’s house who was making the stuff in a basement. 

Lucilius whipped up a small barrel of brandy and had it sitting in the man’s living room when he came home one day.  The bribe worked, and soon Lucilius had a sideline of liquor feeding the feds.  Everyone was happy, and Lucilius was the spider at the center of it all.

He’d created an operation that could nearly run itself.  He’d taught his guys to work the whole outfit without him, and he’d marketed himself to the boss as the brains for further innovation to keep himself from being expendable.

On this night though, he needed a bit of a change, and decided to go on one of the late night supply runs to a neighboring county.  Lucilius liked to mingle with the people who enjoyed his product and he’d been cooped up in his barn of operations for a little too long.

They were bumping along in the trucks, the dim headlights barely making out the truck ahead when there was a screeching of brakes.  Lucilius could hear yelling, and click-clack of shotguns.

He scrambled out the side door and ran into the woods without being seen far back in the convoy as he was, and then he tracked up towards the front of the convoy.  There the head truck was surrounded by a semi-circle of feds, all with guns trained on the truck.

Lucilius breathed in deeply and calmed his nerves, and as he did, faces among the feds came into clear view.  He recognized the brandy connoisseur, and several colleagues he’d started supplying.

“Stand down!”  yelled one of the lead feds.

“Half you guys drink this stuff!” Lucilius shouted from the safety of the woods.  A couple guns pointed vaguely in his direction, and he saw some of the men shift uneasily.

“Why threaten the lives of others for something you do yourself?” Lucilius yelled.  But all the guns stayed trained on the first convoy truck.

At the back of the train of trucks, drivers started turning around, and when the feds realized, they opened fire.  Metal rained horizontal as customers of Lucilius and his coworkers were torn down, in the dirt street and in the trucks.  One gas tank exploded and by the end of it, the only sound was that of trickling liquor pouring out into the ground, from whence it came.

AUTHORITY & CURIOSITY

April 18th, 2020

Everyone has at least one area, or an instance when someone else sees them as the authority.  The go-to person, the one who knows how things work, what should be done, how it should go.  It’s the subject that causes us to perk up with delight when someone asks that first question:

Hey, how would you do this ?

The questions that follow reveal everything about the status of our knowledge.  Not just in terms of what we actually know, but also how we handle what we don’t know.

If further questions on the part of a student touch on details that we have no idea about, how do we react?

A default reaction for many is to grow a bit annoyed or frustrated.  The reasoning is, I’ve done this before, stop slowing it down by asking questions and just let me show you.  The brain has a remarkable ability to make up unrelated reasons for the things we do and the things we feel.  There are many lovely experiments regarding split-brain patients that show the truth of this.  We must ask if the annoyance and frustration with a student is really because it’s impeding the learning – which sounds patently ridiculous when phrased that way, or is it due to an insecurity?  Does it highlight the possibility that we may not be as much of an expert as we initially thought?

How best to react to such an idea?

Knowledge is static, but the way we generate or discover knowledge is dynamic.  It is a process, just as the act of teaching someone what we know is not a static exchange but a dynamic interplay. 

Weaknesses in our own domain knowledge is an opportunity, not just to learn more about our own domain, but more importantly to demonstrate the process of how we negotiate unknowns in our domain.  This meta-knowledge is perhaps more important than any fact we might share.  Behind all domain knowledge is a set of heuristics often specific to that domain that enable someone to negotiate unknowns.

For example, coders use debugging tools that are built into browsers in order to negotiate unknowns related to a website they are building.  People who don’t know a lick of code are often oblivious to this fact while using the very same browsers.  These debugging tools come with their own rule sets, and heuristics of use for figuring out an unknown.

An experienced woodworker, likewise, has learned or figured out an entire host of ‘tricks’ for speeding up the work while remaining precise and accurate.

Such heuristics and tools are often the product of curiosity burrowing into a domain.  Curiosity creates its own tools for advancement.

But what happens when we are confronted with the curiosity of someone totally new to the field?  What happens when they quickly ask a question we’ve never considered before?

Do we react with the first emotion that points at our own lack of perfection?

Or do we use the instance as an opportunity to share the true wealth of our authority on the subject? 

Are we willing to share the way we deal with vulnerability?

Do we let someone in on the personal development we’ve been on and reveal the ways we handle adventure into the unknown?