A LUCILIUS PARABLE: LOST IN TRANSLATION

August 11th, 2019

The kiss and lick of water echoed up through the wood of the old ferry as it moved across the ancient river.  Lucilius grimaced at the metallic taste in his mouth, and looked back at the old and quiet ferryman.

“Do you ever get tired of your job?”  Lucilius asked, his voice a bit garbled.

The ferryman stared at him for a moment and then looked back out over the bow of the ferry as he lifted the long pole and pushed the ferry closer to the far side of the river.

“You ever take a break and enjoy all that money you’ve got?”  Lucilius prodded again.

The ferryman didn’t even look at him.  But merely plodded his ferry onward through the murky waters.

“Yea, ok.  Tough crowd.” Lucilius mumbled to himself.

The distance ahead thinned and the bow thudded lightly and rose on the muddy bank.  Lucilius jumped up to get out, but the ferryman extended his hand.

“Oh yea,” Lucilius said.  He reached into his mouth and retrieved a silver dollar from under his tongue.  He flicked it in a high arc and the ferryman snatched it from the air, staring at Lucilius the whole time. 

“Well, thanks I guess.  See you later.”  Lucilius said.

The ferryman raised an eyebrow.  “Doubtful,” he said. 

“Oh, don’t you worry,” Lucilius said.  “I have friends in creative places.”

An insidious smile carved up the ferryman’s face and he abruptly stabbed the pole into the sloped bank, pushing the ferry back and making Lucilius stumble onto the land.

Lucilius sighed watching the ferryman drift back into a mist. 

“People can get so grumpy doing the same thing day in and day out, year after year.”

He got up, dusted himself off and turned towards the grey landscape. 

“Well,” he spoke out loud to himself. “They said it would be dreary.”

He tramped up the embankment and looked out over a field filled with people like zombies, mindless ghosts of themselves, milling about. 

“As above, same as below… pretty much.” Lucilius said to himself as he walked towards the crowd to explore.

Lucilius wandered for quite a long time, longer than he could tell or keep track of.  Something about the place felt a bit like being drunk .  Time seemed to slow and pass by faster than he could catch.  Travelling to a place he could see somehow seemed to take forever, as though he were wading through a dream.  And other times, merely thinking about being there seemed to teleport him to the place.

Eventually the sweet smell of cedar and pine came to him and he followed the scent.  Out of the dingy mist, away from the milling crowd, Lucilius came across grass growing in the mud, short shrubs, and before long he found himself surrounded by huge trees.  A distant zing barely rang out through the woods, and Lucilius walked towards the sound.  He came upon a house, half-built and walked through the arched entrance.

Inside was a woodshop, full of tools, saws, drills and the like and a man in a white robe was bent over a piece of wood, checking the angle of a saw before clicking it into loud life and slicing the wood.  Lucilius looked closer without moving.

“No shit,” he said.  “You’re here?”

The man practically jumped, startled as he was, looking around.  When he saw Lucilius his blank face stuttered in comprehension before it widened with a gentler surprise.

“Lucilius?”

“Yea,” Lucilius said, overjoyed to see his old childhood friend.  “Holy shit.  Like literally.”

The two went to one another and took each other into a long embrace.

“So what are you doing here?” Lucilius asked, looking around.  “Building.. a house, I guess?”

“Sort of,” the man said.  “Every time I nail a couple pieces of wood together, a few nails somewhere else disappear, and something falls apart.”  The man paused looking around, and as he did, a few planks of wood making up part of a wall gently eased away from the others and fell to the floor. 

“I haven’t exactly figured out the trick to making it all come together…”

The two laughed.  “Ah, it’s good to see you Lucilius.  Been a while since I’ve seen a kind face.”

“I can imagine,” Lucilius said.  His face brightened.  “So I heard you once walked on water, that true?”

“Nah, I’m just a really good swimmer.  You know how people exaggerate, especially when you can do something they can’t.  They think you’re bloody magical.”

“And that coming back from the dead thing?”

“Aw, hell, I was just tired.  People have come back from worse.”  He looked around.  “Though, I am hoping to figure that one out.”

“And the wine?”

“Well, when you’ve got a group of people that dehydrated, everyone gets delirious over a sip of water.”

The man sighed in frustration, stumbling over unsaid words.

“Look at it this way, everyone is eager to misinterpret things in ways that entitle them to be lazier.  If it takes divine and transcendental power to be a good person, then no one feels all that obligated to be a good person.  All that’s required is a little misinterpretation.  A little bend and warp of a word or two here, a totally misremembered sentence there.  Even if everything I’ve said and done was somehow perfectly recorded, there would still be ways to misinterpret what’s happened, and what was meant.  You can not help someone who is unwilling to help themselves.  You can only offer your help, your thoughts, and your example and pray that one day they will grow enough to make sense of it all in the way it was intended.”

Lucilius nodded.  “Yea, I’ve found much the same really.  But, like come on, even I was pretty pumped to believe all that stuff.  Just sounded so cool.”

The man rolled his eyes.  And Lucilius feared annoying his old friend, and thought of switching the subject.

“So, how exactly did you get here again?”  Lucilius asked.

“Oh, my father sent me here.  Said I could maybe try to clean up the place,”  The man paused.  “Then again, he said that about the last place he sent me to.”  A troubled look came across his face as he realized the implications of this realization.

Lucilius shrugged, “maybe the cause is lost if it’s not your own.  Isn’t that what you were just saying?” 

The man looked at Lucilius and after a long moment. He smiled, and he laughed.  Lucilius joined in as they both basked in the absurdity of their situation.

Lucilius’ old friend looked around after their joy settled.

“Well, I guess I’m done trying to build this house.  I suppose now it’s time to figure out how get out here.”

“I got you covered,” Lucilius said.

“You know how to get out of this hell hole?”

“Let’s just I’ve got a resourceful friend in a creative place.”

With all the jeering awkwardness that comes with an abrupt narrative shift, Lucilius and his old friend suddenly found themselves on a beach in Mexico.  The two were laid out on towels, in bathing suits, sweating comfortably under tall sun and blue sky.

Lucilius’ friend looked around.  “Wow.  How’d you do that?”

Lucilius smiled.  “I have no idea.”

COGNITIVE FABRIC

August 10th, 2019

To be lost in thought is to miss the moment.

This echoes what Allen Saunders said and what John Lennon popularized: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

The moment is inherently neutral.  It’s our reaction to it post-moment that colors it with judgment, offense, joy and all that makes life good or bad.  The same applies to our thoughts about future moments.  We fear bad things happening, we hope for good things.  It’s this imaginative and reactive space where most of us live most of our lives.

Meditative practices, specifically those practices that orbit the idea of mindfulness are ultimately techniques for shedding the habit of living in the imagination and being more present with the moment.

During meditation, there inevitably comes a moment when a person realizes they’ve been lost in thought.  For the beginner this can birth a feeling of failure, and the next thought is concerned with beating up one’s self for not doing the correct thing.  This is, of course, getting lost in a new thought, which can again evoke a feeling of failure.  But this is an ability of mindfulness beginning to come to life and poke holes in the cognitive fabric of the mind.

This ‘feeling of failure’ is paradoxically a signal of success.

It’s the opposite of patience in terms of structure.

Patience is a success only as long at it lasts.

Whereas in this context of meditation, success occurs as soon as failure is recognized.

In meditation, an individual is constantly beginning again, as thoughts are recognized from a mindful position and released. Patience is the name of the game: over the course of days, months and years, we seek to make these mindful moments more numerous and therefore more probable in the future.  In some sense we are simply reminding ourselves that this neutral remove and reflection upon the intoxication of a thought is possible, and the moment we remember this possibility, it happens.

The concepts of success and failure here eventually blur and ameliorate one another.

To recognize a thought and label it a failure is simply a new thought, although it is a reflection of that prior thought with a negative tint.

Likewise if we label that ‘failure’ as a success.  Noticing that we’ve been lost in thought can eventually feel like a success, but to think of it as such is to do the same thing: it’s a reflection of that prior thought with a positive tint.

These reflective thoughts of judgment can also be noticed, and ultimately we can release them.  What falls into place is whatever is happening: the sensations of breathing, of the heartbeat and body.

It’s almost as though our cognitive fabric begins like a thick blanket that we start to poke holes in as it slides by.

Eventually it might look like disorganized tatter, and the goal might be to achieve some sort of beautiful macramé. 

The truth may be closer to a kind of woven dance that attention plays between external reality as it occurs and what our internal processes can contribute by way of interpretation, thought, and action.

But this is just a thought, which has used your mind as a host in the moment and in so doing become a thread in your cognitive fabric.

CAN OF WORMS

August 9th, 2019

The phrase is fairly ubiquitous.  Opening a can of worms is synonymous with a decision or action that results in subsequent problems that are numerous and complex.

It’s a cute phrase even if it doesn’t make too much intuitive sense in a time when we don’t run across too many canned worms.

Kettle of Fish

and

Pandora’s Box

are similar concepts that we like to use.

But there’s something particularly modern about a can of worms.  Namely, the can.

Some one invented the can.  And then cans were manufactured.  Then we had to decide what to put in the can.  Then it was packaged, and finally people are in possession of cans that can be opened.

If we think about the idiom literally, it becomes even more poignant:

Someone had to invent the problem. . .

Pandora’s box is a mythical item, and a kettle can presumably be used for other things.

But a can of worms represents a problem that we as a species specifically sought to invent.

It begs to make us wonder recursively:  what problems are we busy creating right now?

All sorts of things fall into this category.  To take a literal and physical example: Lead paint and Asbestos.  At the time lead was added to paint, or vehicle fuel, it seemed like a great idea.  Likewise with Asbestos in all its numerous applications.  But these ‘inventions’ only succeeded in creating microscopic problems that have been replicated trillions of times in terms of the molecules that surround us.

Lead in gasoline is another great example of something terrible, in this respect.  Gasoline engines used to ‘knock’, and it was discovered that this ‘knocking’ would totally disappear with the addition of lead.  Of course, this addition adds a substantial amount of lead to the air that we breath and it turns out there is a troubling correlation between rates of violence and the years when lead was being pumped into our breathing air via ICE’s.

Thinking ahead and trying to figure out just how our actions will effect future events is maybe the most difficult and coveted skill imaginable.  This skill does not simply predict the future, it creates the future.

However, in most cases our notion of the ‘future’ is too short:

If I add lead to this fuel, cars will function better!

If I add Asbestos and Lead to this paint, the company will save money and we’ll have a better product!

Both of these aims are concerned with a short-term look at the future.  But they fail to concern the ‘whole’ future.

Our success often depends on just how far into the future we are willing to imagine as we craft our next action.

What sort of can are you busy building right now?

CAUTION

August 8th, 2019

For the most part, it seems that we fear the wrong things in the modern world. 

We fear taking a chance with a business idea for risk of feeling like a failure.  But the total predicted fallout of climate change is a met with a shrug of shoulders and a couple of words about the size of problems a person can tackle.

Fear most certainly was one of evolutions most brilliant inventions.  In many situations, it has kept us safe.  But fear is a bit of a water hose on full blast with no one holding it: all sorts of unnecessary things get drenched in fear, and many things that we should have fear don’t get touched at all.  At least, this is the case in the modern era where the dangers of life are far less obvious.

Modern life has arisen in large part because of the development of the neocortex, and the abilities it has bestowed upon us to radically change our environment.  This change in environment has likewise shifted the dangers.  An obvious, but difficult to manage one is obesity.  While being obese today presents great danger to a person’s health, ten thousand years ago this was not an issue what-so-ever, and going down the rabbit-hole of avoiding hunger feels very natural.

The neocortex, which is largely responsible for civilization, is also the only practical tool we now have to identify real dangers.  Since we’ve created an environment that is no longer in sync with our intuitions, the identification of real danger requires the counter-intuitive process of carefully thinking through situations. 

This is not easy. 

But given the situation we’ve created for ourselves, it’s our only choice.  And those who don’t put in this difficult, thoughtful work are bound to pay the price when real dangers manifest.

OPEN DOOR POLICY

August 7th, 2019

Being a critical thinker is all about putting your beliefs at risk.

Think of it this way: Mother nature is a pretty ruthless mother, in the sense that she leaves the front door wide open for any thing to waltz in and try to gobble up her children.  If those children make it through the battle, then they get to stay.   Clearly she’s a parent who is all about independence for her children.  Most parents are a bit more protective of their children, locking the front door, and the backdoor to make sure nothing can get in.

We have the same tendency with our thoughts and beliefs.  We protect them.  We lock the door to keep them safe from risk, same from anything that might waltz in through the door and potentially destroy those beliefs. 

In some sense this is a hold-over from blasphemy laws, which governed against the ability to speak offensively towards things held as sacrilegious.  This is an attempt to protect an idea from another idea that turns out to be better, stronger, fitter.

At the end of the day, it’s a tendency that’s fueled by fear and laziness. 

Fitness, literally and figuratively is something that requires constant testing and exercise in order to be maintained.  Just as our bodies do best when constantly tested, so too, our ideas evolve into more robust forms as they are challenged by new ones.  And this requires a genuine open-door policy.

It requires Mother Nature’s courage: the sort of courage that tosses up every beloved conceptual child for potential risk to the unknown. 

The difference of course is that there’s no pain and no reason to mourn when an idea fails to endure and falls prey to something better.

The real tragedy is when actual people fall victim and suffer due to an idea that someone isn’t willing to put at risk for fear of a better idea that might crush it.