QUESTING STATEMENTS

January 23rd, 2020

At the heart of a question is a push to go discover something.  It’s even in the word.  Lop off the last three letters of the word question and what do you get?  A quest. 

It’s no accident.

What exactly is at the end of that quest we are pushed on to go discover?

The answer, ironically, isn’t really an answer.

What we hunt for at the behest of a good question is a new perspective, one that reveals the world in a different way, in the context of the original question now well explored.

For a moment, think of it like a movie you are about to see that you’ve heard excellent things about. 

What’s it about?

You’re in for a treat. I don’t want to tell you any more, just watch it.

There’s a kind of joyful buzz in the imagination in those moments before we actually begin to watch.  And then when the film is over, our question: what’s it about?  . . . has certainly been answered, but it’s more than an answer at that point.  It’s an experience that has unfolded in a continual change of perspective. 

Good questions aren’t meant to simply ponder, they push us into a dialogue of building with reality, rearranging parts of reality so that it shows us a new perspective.

Another way to think about this is to realize that questions in this manner can also be rephrased as statements.

Take this question for example:  Is there a better way to word this?

versus..

I know there is a better way to word this.

Both the question and the statement are indicating something about the future where some imagined version of reality may or may not exist.  However, the statement carries a bit more psychological horsepower than the tentative sounding question, which might defeatedly be answered with a no.

We might look at our project and ask:  can I make this work?

The question holds almost as much impending failure as the limp statement I’ll try.

But rephrase the question as I know I can make this work.  And suddenly there’s a bit more motivation to go on the journey to actually find out.

While this connection between questions and this particular variety of statements might seem to undermine their respective definitions a little, we have to step back and take in a larger context regarding language, namely, what’s the point if not to use it to better effect?  Language is, after all, a tool, and regardless of how it’s seems to have been built and how it seems it should be used, the more important consideration is what can we actually do with it?

TIME WELL SPENT

January 22nd, 2020

We’re always afraid to lose tangible things.  The money in the safe, a sentimental trinket, our phone.  But these things pale in comparison to the value of time.

Time is potentially infinitely more valuable than anything we might own.  And yet we are ironically quick to let it slip by.  Or sell it to the owner of the company we work for.

It’s perhaps a little quaint, not to mention ironic, that we are so careless with the one thing that is most valuable in life.

Luxury, when we commonly think of it, calls to mind images of private jets, glasses of cold champagne, nice watches, and effortless destinations.  But this is not the true definition of what luxury means to those who can “afford” it.

The most luxurious gift you can give someone is to grant them more time – to somehow save them time that they’d otherwise have to spend on something extraneous.  The top tier of luxury has more to do with convenience than it has to do with fancy things to own.

This pairs the ultra wealthy with an unlikely subset of society: the homeless.  Though, it goes without saying that the life of almost all homeless is an extremely tough one, and the time they do have on their hands is most likely not enjoyable.  The likeness to the ultra wealthy is more akin with those who have willingly separated themselves from possession and the usual obligations of society.  A figure like the Buddha comes to mind. 

Both the ultra wealthy and the ascetic have this one central issue with time in common; both are going to extremes in order to hang on to as much time as possible.

This begs the question:  what is time well spent?

This may in fact be the most important, and of course, the most difficult question that we can  confront ourselves with.

Is time well spent if you are using it to maximize future time?

Or it time better spent without bothering with such things and simply investigating how to simply be present inside the enigmatic moment?

There’s something paradoxically inscrutable about this question.  It’s almost as infuriating as what’s the meaning of life?

But fortunately it can prove to be more useful.  And we can achieve this by changing the context.  By zooming in.  Instead of asking how ALL time can be well spent, which is a bit of a non sequitur since we cannot spend all time in one single way, we can ask: 

How would today be well spent?

or

How would the next hour be well spent?

How would the next five minutes be well spent?

All of these questions invariably have different answers because they are addressing different levels of context, and each question increases in specificity because the resolution of time is higher.  These questions, though share something crucial in common.  They all require a thoughtful pause.

One thing we can be fairly sure about when it comes to this question of time well spent is that time spent contemplating the value of our moments alive is never wasted.  This small action, this event, this question that we are always free to pose ourselves, is at core, an act of gratitude.

No matter how difficult life is, even the worst of our lot is lucky to glimpse this strange universe.  To wonder how to spend our time during this glimpse is to honor it.

METATTENTION

January 21st, 2020

One aspect of mindfulness meditation, or Vipassanā, as it’s referred to in the original Pali, is developing the ability to notice what your attention is focused on and realize when this focus changes.

This might at first sound a little odd.  Doesn’t this require two sources of attention?  First there’s the attention that’s focused on say, our breathing, but does it not require another perspective to notice when that focus has wandered off to thoughts about lunch?

Or are we simply ricocheting very quickly between breath, lunch and the realization that thoughts of lunch interrupted focus on the breath . . .

. . . which was in turn interrupted by the realization that thoughts of lunch were interrupted by the realization that a switch had taken place.

It’s bizarrely recursive, just to try and describe it. 

But two examples come to mind in order to dig into this conundrum.  First there’s watching a movie.  Often times we can get so engrossed in the movie that we totally forget where are, and we can even forget the fact that we’re watching a movie.  And yet, with other movies, perhaps less compelling movies, we can pay attention to what’s going on in the story while still being very aware of what’s going on around us.  Perhaps this is a single attention bouncing between the movie and the larger situation quickly enough so that both threads of attention appear seamless.

Another example involves young kids, or even animals.  As we watch them, perhaps to make sure they don’t hurt themselves, we have the ability to realize what the child or the animal is focusing on. Perhaps a toy a few feet away that the child is crawling towards.  It’s this ability to imagine the child’s source of attention that allows us to look ahead, see that a potentially hazardous paperclip is near the toy and that we should remove it.  We might call this awareness of the situation.  Again, perhaps it’s a single attention of ours that has the ability to quickly bounce between different things, zooming the context in and out, but it can happen so quickly that it’s easy to suspect or wonder if there’s not two cameras of attention keeping an eye on things, like two eyes that can look in different directions. 

With the practice of mindfulness, our seemingly second attention, our meta-attention, can begin to take on the role of a movie goer.  After enough time it’s as though our better self is always present, and most of the time, this better, more thoughtful self, just watches the movie of our life as it happens. 

But unlike the movie goer who is bound to the whims and turns of a predetermined script up on the silver screen, this metattention that we develop in mindfulness creates the constant opportunity for our better self to step in and change our default behavior. 

For example, those who have anger problems can seem practically drunk on the emotion.  Some people even experience memory problems regarding their spells of anger.  With enough practice of meditation, a metattention of the situation allows for a more thoughtful version of this angry person to eventually have the ability to step in and decide that the default actions that are usually taken in anger, won’t be this time.

This is one of the true benefits of meditation.  So many of us are simply on autopilot, doing the same thing day in and day out, unable to break the pattern, even if we want to, because the moments when we truly and thoughtfully pause are few and far between.  Meditation not only gives a person the ability to see themselves more clearly, but eventually it provides the avenue to step in and make changes in the moments when it is most needed.

RIVALNYM CASE STUDY: ALONE

January 20th, 2020

If you are unfamiliar with rivalnyms, they are a particularly juicy class of words that exist between synonyms and antonyms. They often define the exact same thing but with completely opposite emotional valences. 

Here’s an example from episode 558: Conspire & Cooperate

Both words describe people who are working together to bring about a commonly desired goal.

But cooperation is generally positive and conspiracy is generally negative.  As is often noted, history is always written by the winners and those winners then, in hindsight identify the losers as conspirators, whereas the winners who have the final say in the matter, that is, they get to write the history books, these winners define their past actions as cooperation.

The importance of rivalnyms derive from their ability to be a mirror for our own thinking.  If we are aware of rivalnym pairs, then we begin to notice them in our own speech, and the particular word in a rivalnym pair that we use reveals fundamental aspects of how we are thinking and feeling.

There is, for example, a rivalnym pair that surrounds the phenomenon of being alone.  As with all rivalnyms one word in this pair describes the experience of being alone in positive terms and the other describes it in negative terms.  Or in this case, we might rephrase positive and negative as desirable and undesirable. 

These words are:

Solitude & Loneliness

No one wants to be lonely, but at the same time it’s not unusual to crave solitude.  Is this not somewhat of a contradiction?  If no one wants to be lonely, then why on earth would we ever seek to be alone?

This is too simplistic of course, and it’s only to further highlight the question: what exactly is the difference between solitude and loneliness?

While alone, the perspective of loneliness is focused on an absence – on the fact that someone could be with us.  This is not something that we have immediate control over.  Without changing our perspective from which loneliness arises, we cannot necessarily snap our fingers and poof someone appears.  We can of course go find someone to alleviate this loneliness, but the condition and the solution here generally demonstrate far less agency for the person experiencing these things.

Solitude, on the other hand, is more purposeful.  A person seeks solitude or enjoys solitude with more of a mission.  Even if that mission is to practice meditation in order to relax the notion of having a mission in the first place.  Solitude provides an undistracted space to work, contemplate, and to feel.  In contrast, loneliness consists of a completely distracted space that impedes work, derails any meaningful contemplation and absorbs our feelings in what could be.

Notice it only impedes work though.  We can crack the spell of loneliness by diving into some work more fully, and by doing so flip the coin of being alone so that we see it as solitude instead of loneliness.  We might further delve into the idea of purpose and solitude.  Mere busy work is less likely to transform our loneliness into a gratifying experience of solitude.  But if our work is meaningful and sufficiently difficult, then any progress in that work is going to provide a sense of achievement, which in turn is likely to make our experience of being alone more satisfying, and hence, we might be more likely to think of it as solitude as opposed to loneliness.

The difference between solitude and loneliness is the gift of perspective that we bring to the experience of being alone.

This point about perspective and our opportunity to analyze our own perspective is what can make rivalnyms so useful.  If we can catch ourselves feeling lonely and identify it as loneliness, we can ask: how might I transform this experience of being alone into a gratifying instance of solitude?

Often the feeling associated with any experience is simply a hint about what we should do next.  How we react to that feeling is everything.  And sometimes, a feeling pops up as a useful counterpoint, one which we would to best to rebel against, or see as a danger sign, one that tells us to turn around or explore a new direction.  Unfortunately, we’re often likely to entertain that feeling and proceed down a path of which that feeling is meant to stand as a warning.  The study of rivalnyms, however, as mere a concept we can keep in the back of our mind can serve to remind us that there might be an equally valid and diametrically positive way of interpreting or navigating the exact same experience.

For more on Rivalnyms, check out Episode 293: Rivalnym.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: WELL USED

January 19th, 2020

The old wooden table was packed. Cured meats, sliced, imported cheeses, pickled vegetables and olives, patés and biscuits, and a tall beaker glowing red with Negroni in the afternoon light, all cluttered the view of fine inlayed patterns of wood.  Lucilius and a friend chatted, nursing the time with the taste of enough food fit for many meals, sipping the sweet bitter from beaded glasses.  It was an eternal afternoon with no plan and no aim to end, where time seemed to leave people alone for once.

Lucilius leaned back, the gorging of food beginning to beg him to stretch out.  He carefully nudged a little space into the clutter of the table with his heels, crossing them and relaxed.

It was the first time he took notice of the table, having had a hand to woodworking before, he was impressed with the designs.  The interlocking surface of different woods, once seamless and smooth had grown blocky with gaps as the different woods had swelled and shriveled at different rates through the years.

“Beautiful table,” Lucilius remarked.

“Antique,” his friendly host remarked.

“Really?  The woodwork is amazing.”

“15^th century, England.”

Lucilius jolted upright pulling his feet from the table’s edge.

“What? Are you kidding?”

Lucilius was greeted with a slightly amused look.  “No, not at all.”

Lucilius, flustered, stumbled over his own words.  “I’m sorry I had my feet up on it, that wasn’t very thoughtful of me.”

“What are you talking about?  Put your feet back up, relax, that’s the point.”

“But 15^th century?  This thing must be worth a fortune, it could be in a museum.”

His argument landed and bounced back a short laugh.

“And what good would it do in a museum?  I bought it because I think it’s beautiful and leaving something untouched in a corner or behind some glass is no way to appreciate something beautiful.  Just look at this lovely afternoon we’ve been having?  All of this delicious food, our conversation.  It wouldn’t necessarily be any less enjoyable if perhaps this were a table I’d picked up for ten bucks at a yard sale, but if you have something beautiful like this, why not honor it by using it?”

Lucilius liked the logic but he still didn’t feel at ease.

“I mean it, put your feet back on it.  Relax, enjoy.  That’s the point.”