LETTING (YOURSELF) GO

August 21st, 2019

The real drive of any action is often the relief or satisfaction that comes at the end of such an activity.  Whether this be the satisfaction of a goal, or the rest after a workout, we are often pushing ourselves towards or luring ourselves forward in some way.

Even this constant organized business of doing all sorts of things can itself call for it’s own relief.  A vacation of sorts.  A time when we can really let go.

Perhaps the most visceral example of this is just before falling asleep after a horrendously active day, when sleep feels as though it’s clawing at the mind.  In that moment, letting go becomes a sort of default state.  We fall into it without effort or thought.  It really is a loss of the prior condition. 

Without such an active day, we tend to approach sleep as another activity to initiate, and a restless mind can make it seem as though we masochistically procrastinate, when really we have simply failed to let go of the day’s thoughts.

This sort of phrasing pops up in another sense, as in: letting yourself go.

Here we let baser instincts run the show: see donut, eat donut?  Watch T.V. instead of going for a run.  Snap at a loved on instead of pausing to think the situation through.

Nearly all the things that make us human in the way we seek to be more humane have some easier, baser counterpart of action.  The automatic reflex that often fails to be in our best interest.

With this in mind, what does the opposite mean?

What does it mean to get a grip?

PAUSE OF THE PAINTER

August 20th, 2019

If a game of charades instantly materialized, and you had to silently represent a painter, what would be more iconic than gesturing a few feathery strokes with a grasping hand and then taking a step back to pause and ponder the current state of your imaginary painting.

That pause is perhaps the most iconic act of such an artist.

The underlying questions of such a pause?

How is it going?

What is the current state of the work?

Where should it go now?

Every pause is a crossroads, an opportunity to pivot in a better direction.

This is another iconic image.  That crossroads in the middle of nowhere.  Four paths adjoined with stop signs. 

The decision is clear: continue on the current path, or take a left or a right.

The artist pausing to contemplate the state of work is doing the exact same thing. 

Shall I continue with the current method and line of thought?

Or should another train of thought and feeling be followed off in another direction?

The artist, unlike the career-track individual is merely an individual who is more practiced with the variety and depth of questions they are capable of asking themselves.

Notice that subtle difference in image also.  The ‘career track’ vs. the Artist who contemplates the possibilities provided by a crossroads.

The distinction lie in how a crossroads emerges.

Every street is essentially a track until it hits a crossroads.

Most people are simply waiting to arrive at a crossroads where upon a decision about a new direction can be entertained.

And here in lies the crucial distinction:

Artists create crossroads by asking themselves questions.

If you are stuck in a rut, or on a bad track, the right question cleaves the path with other avenues of possibility. 

This episode references Episode 117: The Cleaver, Episode 72: Perseverance Vs. Pivot, and Episode 390: Question about the Question

PASS THE TIME

August 19th, 2019

Something to pass the time is a very strange concept.

Time is the most precious opportunity we have.  No matter what we do, it’s going to pass.

Money makes a bit more sense in this context.  It’s always possible to make more, but time?  That’s gone the moment it’s used.

It stands to reason that the person who is just trying to pass the time, until the next pressing matter is at hand, has not thought deeply about what it means to have only some unknown finite amount of time left.

Contemplating this regularly exercises an important discretion about the tasks and activities that we choose to do.

For example, if each of us could have a total for all the time we’ve spent watching T.V. or scrolling through social media, and then instantly be able to convert that into time spent doing one difficult thing, like learning the piano, or a language, or some new skill, or building out a business idea, it’s likely to be staggering just how much time seems like it was wasted. 

We have lulled ourselves into a state of complacency about how fast death hurtles towards us from the future.

When unplanned intervals of time open up in front of us, the best way to pass that time is perhaps to review how we’ve been spending our time, and whether or not we need to make a change.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: FULL STOP

August 18th, 2019

Lucilius was contemplating a detail of a recent project when he realized he’d forgotten to message a friend about an upcoming dinner he wouldn’t be able to make.  It reminded him of the last time they’d gotten together.  The food had been spectacular, particularly a dish of sunchokes.  He could probably recreate the dish himself he realized.  And how much better would it all taste if he grew everything himself.  Something to keep in mind for the future.  He’d always wanted to build a cabin up in the north, and of course it would have a huge garden where he could plant everything to his heart’s content.  He’d tried to do his best with an urban plot once but his work had kept him away from the untended ground.  Some things he’d planted had popped up, and along with them so many other things.  Weeds and what not.  Things always popping up, he thought, and felt himself sigh at the tiring thought.  But it was this sense of his body in space, his chest falling that allowed his mind to stumble off the train of thought.  Lucilius realized, remembered really, that he was sitting on a cushion, and had been for several hours.  He was on a silent retreat, and it was the third day, and he smiled, amused, as his practice kicked him back into the present.

PEAK EDUCATION

August 17th, 2019

This episode is dedicated to London, who claims to have reached ‘peak education’.

There are a few general areas in which we can strive to be better.  We can seek to be in better physical condition through exercise and nutrition.  We can seek to be wealthier by making more money.  And then we can also – presumably – learn, acquire knowledge and understand.

The first, physical fitness, has a limit to it.  We are constrained by the physical body that we have.  Different genetic make ups accord to the sort of physique a person can acquire.  Someone who is 5 foot 2 inches can’t reach 6 feet through any kind of exercise.

In this respect, money and education are more alike.  We can always make more money.  There is no limit on this, as evidenced by the fact that the richest person to exist isn’t in the past, but in the present, and these people, along with many others grow richer every day.  The success of the lottery is a great example of this belief.  Imagine for a moment someone who says they’ve reached ‘peak money’ with the aim of meaning that it’s impossible for them to have more money than they have.  This is simply ridiculous.  Anyone could disprove this person by handing them a penny.

Education falls into a similar suit.  A fifteen year old, equipped with even the most lackluster education would be like a god if he were suddenly transported to the twelfth century, or even imagine a time before Aristotle and the pre-Socratics, when this fifteen year old - with the ease only afforded by being jaded - could describe the movement and number of the planets, their general composition, the fact that on a microscopic level all things are made of atoms that vaguely resemble the structure of solar systems with negatively charged electrons zipping around a nucleus made of protons and neutrons.  Imagine still further, this jaded fifteen year old before a crowd of befuddled elders listening, noticing someone in the back coughing from sickness, and then describing the nature of germs and how microbes move through air and by touch and enter the body and wreak havoc, and how our immune system which is composed of similar elements formats itself to combat the virus or bacteria.  Not only this, but a fifteen year old would be able to describe what soap is, and even though your average 15 year old doesn’t know how to make soap, chances are good that this fifteen year old could probably figure it out through some experimentation.

It took the human species thousands of years to figure these things out.  And if we go beyond the human race, we can say that brains that can presumably think and figure things out the way a crow can use meta-tools to solve a puzzle that contains food, have been around for far longer.  As a bubbling entity itself, it took the planet billions of years to become aware of these concepts.

Imagine what kind of status would be bestowed upon this fifteen year old thrown back in time.

It’s been theorized that proto-religious leaders who were able to understand and calculate the appearance of rare events like solar and lunar eclipses gained power through this knowledge.  Simply because it was impressive.

Everything looks like magic until the underlying mechanics are understood.

If you are the only person who understands something, then you look like a magician. 

Now if we return to this idea of ‘peak education’.  We can wonder: if a fifteen year old from the year 9,000 were suddenly transported to us today, what kind of divine magician would he appear to be?

There is only one avenue through which this can occur.  Physical exercise peaks, and money, while it can yield influence and create mobility, cannot actually make you smarter, even if you try to pay people to make you smarter.  It is only education that accomplishes this.  But a still subtler distinction must be made here.

Aside from some research initiatives, everything that one might learn in an educational institution falls into the category of what we already know.

Attending a university is – for the most part – a giant request for information we’ve already gathered and integrated.  Most educational programs are at base simply an elaborate vocabulary test, whether that means defining Godel’s Theorem or describing the function and position of the Substantia Nigra within the brain.

The cutting edge of education is ultimately self-education.

It’s a process of forming novel questions and seeking the answers by manipulating reality until reality shows you how it works in a way that no one has ever seen before.

And if you can ask a good question that nobody has ever asked before.  Bonus points.

If you can answer it, then fame and fortune may await, for we will all be amazed by something that seems like magic.

To you, of course, it’ll seem like an obvious no brainer

since,

you understand.

This episode relies heavily on ideas explored in Episode 390: Question about the Question.