Tinkered Thinking

An agreement between people that seeks to make the future a little more certain. It’s a common idea about how the future is going to look. Or at the very least, it’s a common idea about a future people are going to work to bring about.

Promises are sacred things, they pop up in life in the heart of very important events: marriage, baptisms, court proceedings.

Promises address our deepest concern and our greatest fear, namely chaos. Promises represent a one-way direction away from chaos and towards order.

They can be problematic, in the same way a poor question can lead us in fruitless circles.

An example of such poor questions would be: what’s the meaning of life? This is a terrible question because it’s unanswerable, and at the very least it simply produces anxiety, and at the very most it produces bad philosophy.

Promises that lack a thoughtful and dynamic consideration of the future can be likewise problematic, as so many divorces might attest to.

The problem is that the future is unpredictable, and we often bite off more than we can chew when we make a promise about it. Situations change and people change as a result, and naturally situations change when people do. This is a risky dance, and we often sabotage ourselves by thinking we have more control than we actually do.

This isn’t to say that promises can’t be wonderfully useful, it’s only to say that we need to be careful about the promises we make.

A bad promise kept is worse than a good promise broken.

A bad promise kept perpetuates something rotten through time creating an unwanted future, whereas a good promise broken does not necessarily cancel out the possibility of building that originally envisioned future.

Promises may be more like questions than we might at first realize.

A good question often leads to an even better question.

Does a good promise lead to an even better promise?

Perhaps it helps to remember just what promises are addressing: the future.

Let’s rephrase the question:

Can a good vision for the future lead to an even better vision for the future?

This certainly seems to make sense.

As we move forward productively towards one vision, we inevitably discover things we didn’t expect; this is to be expected considering the unpredictable nature of the future.

Any resourceful person is going to put those unanticipated discoveries to good use, and the leverage of such discoveries can easily make that original idea of the future seem less ambitious as a vision of an even better future emerges.

We might even look at this process as a toggle between promises and questions. As we move forward towards a shared vision, our discoveries might inspire the question: is there something even greater that we can shoot for? Inevitably this spawns more and more questions, and as we slowly answer each one, we update our shared idea of what the future can look like.

The mistake that plagues our promises is that we think of them as static entities. They are solid, which inevitably makes them brittle, and easier to break.

Think about it: what’s easier to break?

A stone,

Or a pool of water.

It’s a trick question of course. How do you break water? We can imagine it frozen, and cracking, just like a rock, but unlike a rock, we can warm those shards, make it all liquid again, put it into the original shape and freeze it. Water is dynamic in a way the stone isn’t.

All this is to say that we make many of our promises as though we are talking about the past. As though we are talking about something that can’t change. But the fact is, when we make a promise we are talking about something that has change at its core.

As we move forward. As we experience more and learn more and understand more. We need to be able to ask: was that the best promise we could make?

Chances are everyone can see something better now.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: LETTERS' END

October 27th, 2019

Lucilius walked into an old used bookstore. Books were stacked from the floor to the ceiling, everywhere, as walls and columns forming a delicate maze. Books made up the bookcases that were mere slats of wood pinned in stacks forming bridges upon which more books were shelved. The smell of the place had a comfort like that of a cool and ancient forest, muffling sound as though everything was resolved into a palpable firmament of thought and dream that floated between towers of words and wood and paper. Lucilius felt himself smile as a calm slowly over took him.

He wandered through the disordered store looking at the spines of color, picking out a title here and there, some upright, some easily read on their side. He’d walked in just out of curiosity and stayed not because he wanted some book to buy and take but merely to appreciate that a place like this existed.

Lucilius was serene, and then a combination of shapes caught his eye. His head slowly turned to a perpendicular and the shapes snapped into recognition as he read the letters of his own name. He stood still, a moment, reading the title of the book over and over:

The Lucilius Parables Vol. II

He so rarely saw his own name that it was a bit of a strange and curious puzzle that he’d never come across this book, and that it was a second volume nonetheless, implying that there was a first made it even stranger. Surely he wasn’t so oblivious that he would have missed two books that happened to have the same name as his own.

He hooked a finger at the top of the spine and unsheathed the small volume from its neighbors. He opened the book to a random page and read:

. . . . Lucilius was serene, and then a combination of shapes caught his eye. His head slowly turned to a perpendicular and the shapes snapped into recognition he read the letters of his own name. He stood still, a moment, reading the title of the book over and over:

The Lucilius Parables Vol. I

He so rarely saw his own name that it was a bit of a strange and curious puzzle that he’d never come across this book, and it was a first volume, implying that there were more volumes either planned or written. Surely he wasn’t so oblivious that he would have missed numerous books that happened to have the same name as his own.

He hooked a finger at the top of the spine and unsheathed the small volume from its neighbors. He opened it at random and read:

Dear Lucilius,

I hope this letter finds you well. Letter of letters - so strange that we refer to a letter of the alphabet and a letter that we mail to someone as the same word. There’s something recursive about it that short-circuits the mind. And to think: it’s mere letters that have granted me the power to pull this notion, this idea from my head and send it through the bizarre distortions of time and reality to you, and then to have that concept bloom again in your mind.

What a strange situation you must find yourself in right now. Reading words you never remember writing. How varied your adventures have been, the loves you have nurtured, the loves you have lost, the triumphs and the crippling realizations, how expansive your adventures will become, and yet, through all of it, what are you looking for other than me?

Well here I am my boy. Not really in the flesh, as one might be poised to say, but more as a recorded ripple, the record itself another ripple, more indelible than the first. Everything I write to you here and now is a mere poor simulation at best. We all know that aching dissatisfaction when we have failed to communicate an idea as we feel it. It’s a strange way of letting yourself down, a form of unintended self-sabotage almost. And yet, any simulation is always a simplification of the thing it seeks to represent. We cut out details that don’t fit in the frame of the simulation, details that don’t seem to have any discernable impact on the way things work at that level of resolution. But you must feel – as I do – that this is a mistake. Every context is self-serving, just as it is limited by it’s own scope. Like your perspective, like all of their perspectives. That’s what I think our mission is Lucilius, to find the loophole – if there is one – that allows these contexts, these perspectives to open a door to one another. I don’t see how it can happen yet, and so I default to the brute force option. Not a brute force upon one another, but upon our only real enemy and treasure: time. I imagine an infinite conversation. Because each word – each letter – expands the context. I am trying to do that right now, here, with you. Perhaps this idea hasn’t occurred to you yet. Perhaps you’ve forgotten, and that possibility pressed me to the page, to write to you, and entrust these letters to ripples of eternity, echoing, like a repeated signal, waiting for the sphere of those pulses to expand out across time and space until they reach you, somehow, somewhere, some time.

It’s all only to say this: don’t let the conversation stop. The moment letters end is the moment when chaos gains the upper hand, when the battle against entropy is surely lost forever, it’s when our chances to unravel the mysteries of this unfathomable riddle blink out of existence forever. Endeavour with me, my friend, in this impossible quest, and I will endeavor with you, for you.

Yours – actually,

and truly,

Lucilius

Lucilius looked up from the book. He flipped back to the cover to look at the title again: Volume One. He opened to the first page, pressing a thumb to the thick edge of pages and curled the pressure until they began to release themselves, flipping out to rest on the other side of the open book. They landed softly on one another as the cache of pages under his thumb dwindled, letters and drawings flicking to life in the light and fading as they were once again pressed between pages. It was as though the past when these pages were written had collapsed into something smaller, something that ran out faster, and just as he neared the end, Lucilius remembered what he’d read and overcome by the strange absurdity of it, he stopped reading.

Lucilius looked up from the book. He flipped back to the cover to look at the title again: Volume Two. He did not need to read any further, having a good notion now of what the book might hold in promise.

He stopped a moment, just holding the book, while standing in the bookshop, thinking about that idea. ‘A promise is something that’s decided, agreed upon beforehand’, he heard his mind say in that silent space of the head. ‘A promise is really a hope to make the future certain in the minds of two different people, is it not?’ The question washed over him, warmly. He looked back down at the book and closed it.

He walked to the front of the bookstore where an old mechanical cash register stood on a cluttered desk full of books. Behind a dingy curtain he heard a woman’s voice, hushed, as though in reverence, as one would have at a library. Lucilius delicately pressed the small metal button of a bell and the tone rolled out through the soft air of the bookshop. There was delight in the woman’s voice, a giggle. An old man emerged from the parting curtains, smiling. He raised his head too high too see Lucilius, looking down at him through low-slung glasses.

“Well hello there,” the old man said.

“Hello to you too,” Lucilius said.

“Feel like reading today?” the old man asked.

“Sure seems like it,” Lucilius said. The old man looked at the book that Lucilius slid forward on the desk. The old man picked it up.

“Oh yea,” the old man said with a wider smile. “this stuff. Not bad.”

Lucilius chuckled to himself.

“Seems promising.”

SETBACK TRAINING

October 26th, 2019

Major setbacks in life are going to show up. More than anything they present the opportunity to be crushed, reduced to an emotional mess and potentially totally incapable of taking the next reasonable step.

So how do you prepare for something like that?

Like anything else, you start small, with micro-setbacks.

Let’s take the smallest, and most literal set-back possible:

Stubbing your toe.

It sucks, it happens frequent enough and until now it might seem like one of the most senseless and unnecessary pains life has to offer on the regular.

It’s the mosquito of moving through physical space.

But unlike the frail, flying vampire, stubbing your toe is an opportunity to prepare for things that are much much worse.

Imagine it for a moment. You are stopped in your tracks. A pain shoots up your leg, and crashes back down into a super-concentrated point. You curse, or yell, and perhaps you have the thought that you now have no choice but to endure this dumb pain for a while. We usually move on from this moment in an attempt to drown the pain by ignoring it and concentrating on other things.

But, you can do something else. Instead of just registering the annoyance of pain, you can look down at your foot and

imagine something worse.

You could say, imagine that your foot is now missing because some powerful piece of machinery hooked you at just the right angle and amputated it. How much worse would that be?

If you are lucky enough to have two working feet, just imagine for a moment going through the rest of your life with just one.

Take it a step further.

. . . . figuratively – of course –

Imagine having no foot and remembering that you used to stub your toe on that missing foot. What would you give to have to put up with the inconvenience of pain when you stub your foot. Would it be worth having the foot. Of course.

This exercise is a mental reframing trick. It’s a way of putting things into perspective by willfully shifting perspectives.

Our imaginations can conjure all sorts of terrible things with which we can torture ourselves, but that same mechanism can paradoxically be used to create a sense of gratitude for what we still actually have.

There are innumerable tiny setbacks like this that punctuate our days and weeks like bullet holes. Each is a pain, an inconvenience, but each is also an opportunity to practice how to deal with setbacks.

This sort of reframing, once well practiced can be used to respond to a setback of any size. When a major setback finally comes along, It can be dealt with as efficiently and effectively as a mere stubbed toe.

This sort of practice offers one other benefit. We aren’t simply equipped for the big stuff.

We’re equipped for everything, and the daily annoyances melt from their prior status.

Our experience of day to day life improves,

and in an age of so much aggravation and frustration. . .

what could be better?

RIVALNYMS: A CASE STUDY

October 25th, 2019

Episode 293 of Tinkered Thinking introduces the concept of Rivalnyms. In short, they are a class of word pairs that have characteristics which locate them in a strange and competitive space between synonyms and antonyms.

One of the most approachable examples is Determined/Stubborn. In the context of Rivalnyms, each word competes for the way we view a person’s efforts. If we approve of their goal, we describe the person as determined in their efforts. If, however, we do not approve of their goal, it’s not a stretch to say that person is stubborn. Each word may encompass a meaning that expands beyond this limited treatment just as the meaning of synonymous words can mean more than they do in the context of being synonymous. As a pair, both stubborn and determined perform well as rivalnyms. In short, both words are rivals for the way we name a situation. The way we settle this rivalry in real-time as we use language ultimately says everything about the speaker.

The concept of rivalnyms gives us a simple framework through which to analyze and ultimately question our own perspective.

This pair of words in particular highlights how the rivalnym concept works.

On the one hand we have

Cooperation,

and on the other hand we have. . .

Conspiracy.

Naturally, the negative and positive tension here is obvious. But on a practical level, these words mean very much the same thing. Both describe the action of a group of people working together to achieve a particular aim. This describes people who are conspiring and this describes people who are cooperating. The difference of course is that people who are conspiring must surely be doing something that is bad, and not in our best interest. Whereas those who cooperate are absolutely doing so for our benefit. Or so we think.

Conspire comes from Latin and means literally ‘breathe together’. Think of the word ‘respiration’. That root ‘spire’ means breath in both instances. The prefix ‘con’ is an assimilated form of ‘com’ which means ‘with’ or ‘together’. Think of the word ‘communal’. In an etymologically literal sense, conspire means ‘communal breathing’. which really takes the sting out of the word. Makes it sound far more…. meditative, passive and contemplative. Of course this carries none of the negativity that the word carries.

Cooperate is even more transparent. It means simply ‘operate together’. And it carries all the positivity that conspire lacks and makes up for in the opposite direction.

The strangeness of this separation between words becomes all the more apparent when we look at usage cases where they are substituted.

Instead of saying: Society is a large instance of cooperation among many individuals,

we could technically say that all of society is a conspiracy. Indeed, it’s true. We’re all conspiring together to create a better life, more or less.

Or we might think of our enemies cooperating behind our back. The positive connotation of the word cooperate puts a similarly strange note in the sentence.

These strange rivalnymic substitutions begin to highlight an important problem with all of language: there is no either/or. The truth of reality always lies somewhere between the two extremes that we often have on hand to express ourselves. Conspiring enemies do exhibit cooperation, and if we turn out to be the true villain in the history books, then those enemies weren’t conspiring at all, they were only cooperating. Think of the sinless ways the founding fathers are described in the United States. In the eyes of England these were conspiring rebels. And in the eyes of the slaves of the time, they were blatant hypocrites. But in the history books they are painted as a brilliant cooperation that triumphed in adverse circumstances.

The words we use have an intrinsic ability to describe not just what we are thinking, but how we are thinking. Rivalnyms are fairly straightforward advertisements for these mechanics.

What’s on offer to learn from rivalnyms is that there’s a space between rivalnyms that we can achieve.

That space is nuance. And it requires the patience and the thoughtfulness to build a larger context, one that fills in the space between cooperation and conspiracy, bridging the two instead of siloing these words in the minds of people who disagree.

THE FLEXIBILITY MACHINE

October 24th, 2019

Ever try to make a point and the response you get is

that’s a bit of a stretch…

No doubt we all have.

The comment simultaneously recognizes that we are trying to connect things that aren’t usually connected and points out that these things also have too much distance between them.

And yet this is exactly the reason for which we praise powerful imaginations. Great ideas often come from connecting things that no one had thought to connect before.

So where lies the difference between the work of a powerful imagination and another instance that’s less convincing, that turns out to be a bit of a stretch?

The value must come from the nature of the connection, and not the things we wish to connect.

It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.

Is a ubiquitous prescription that comes to mind.

Presumably everything in the universe is connected to every other thing in some way. That’s the what, and that notion doesn’t really make much of a spark in the mind. It’s like saying ‘we breathe air.’

Yea, ok. So what?

The truly incredible thing to point out would be to describe how everything is connected to every other thing. This is the perennial goal of physcists. To uncover a T.O.E., or Theory of Everything.

A powerful imagination doesn’t see that two things are connected, it sees how those two things are connected. The manner of connection becomes the substance of persuasion when pointing out the connection to someone else.

When someone reacts by saying that the connection is a bit of a stretch,

it doesn’t mean that connection isn’t there,

what it most likely means is that we have not effectively communicated how these things are connected.

This is somewhat an entirely different problem. This is an issue of human communication.

We can approach the same exact situation from a different angle with a different context.

Ever listen to a teacher or friend give an explanation of something and it just doesn’t make sense? So they pull out a pad of paper, make a quick drawing and make the same explanation while pointing to different parts of the diagram and suddenly it all clicks?

The change in the medium of communication aids the communication. It’s not that the point they were trying to make was somehow flawed, it’s that they couldn’t communicate it very well through just words alone.

When someone reacts to your point by saying it’s a stretch, it may not be that you’re wrong. It may just be that you haven’t yet found the right words.

Again just with the particular connection you see, it’s not what you are trying to tell a person that makes a difference,

it’s how you do it.

In order to find a better way, the same imagination that had the flexibility to see a new connection needs to stretch again to see how our idea connects to the incredulous person before us.

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PROMISE?

October 28th, 2019