AFTER DOES NOT EXIST

July 12th, 2019

Particularly in the world of exercise and physique, the practice of comparing ‘before’ and ‘after’ is widespread.

Exactly what is the subject here when we refer to a situation before it and after it?

Some sort of change, naturally.  However, this is a cognitive misnomer.  The concept of ‘before’ whether it refer to physique or something else is representative of an old status quo.  The real problem is with the term ‘after’.  It telegraphs the sense of what movies do with montages. That there is some sort of concentrated event and voila, there’s a new easy status quo that is remarkably better.

What fails to come across with the use of ‘after’ is that a process of change is often still in motion.

It would be more appropriate to say ‘before’ and ‘during’, since the results that we are reporting are the result of a process in progress.

The real difference between before and during is not some isolated incident like popping a pill.

The difference is merely starting.

DOORS

July 11th, 2019

In movies, doors seem frivolous, mere commas in the action of the story that characters pass through, unless of course a door has a particularly guarded significance, like the door to a bank vault. These special doors aside, characters in movies appear to have far more relaxed rules of personal space regarding doors.  Opening an unlocked door and casually venturing forth is far less common in real life than it is in movies.  It’s useful to ask, why?

The narratives that we create and tell each other are ultimately imbued with far more courage and risk taking than we ourselves are comfortable taking in real life.  With such stories, we are not just seeking to explain parts of our own existence, we are trying to influence the way we exist, and the way we behave.

Throwing out a counter-productive personal narrative that has had us spinning wheels for years is a fast way to touch ground with those tires and gain traction.  Often the story we tell ourselves has us distracted from other, better stories that are either available or waiting to be invented.

The story we tell ourselves is most likely filled with doors that we never dare to open, just like real life.  Everyday we walk past hundreds if not thousands of doors and we only ever try to open doors that we know we are meant to open. Granted, those of us who are not thieves respect what we imagine these doors to mean in real life.  Concepts of privacy and personal property dominate our milquetoast daring, and mostly for good reason.  The highlight here is how casually these concepts are violated in fiction, and often for a greater and justifiable purpose.

We might challenge ourselves with a thought experiment entailing all the doors in the real world: how many physical doors exist that we can walk through without any negative consequence.  We might think of the front doors of the headquarters for a company we admire and perhaps dream of working at.  This number alone can be in the hundreds if not thousands. Phone calls and emails and even tweeting at someone all constitute walking through a kind of doorway.  And all of these things are free, and yet, in spite of being free we often find them far more difficult than spending large amounts of money for some thing or endeavor or vacation, even though these free chances could lead to far better lives.

Unlike a wall, a door is fundamentally meant to be used to go through.  The catch is who is allowed to go through that door.  Often we have automatically decided against our own selves, when really the doors we seek might be unlocked.

CRAFTING RIDDLES

July 10th, 2019

Einstein once said “we cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.”

The cognitive move that he’s suggesting is termed lateral thinking.

If rational thinking is often visualized as a step by step process, each step giving rise to the next, in a sequential order like stepping stones, then lateral thinking would be the equivalent of taking a right turn and swimming off into unknown territory.  To echo Einstein, it is the ability to abandon the train of thought in which a problem is created in order to approach the matter from a radically different angle.

The word problem is appropriately a bit… problematic in this sense.  Problems can perpetuate, like a sort of static quo.  We think of problems like stubborn, hard-to-move realities, which do not lend well to the discovery of their solution.

We can ask: what is the first step in order to solve a problem?

This question actually represents – recursively – the first step to solving any given problem.

It is a micro problem, and what it reveals is the connection between problems and questions.

Problems can be reworded as questions, and often the solution to a problem is dependent on rephrasing the problem into the appropriate question.  We generally don’t give much thought to the art and practice of forming questions, but this is the underlying practice that creates a foundation of creativity in nearly all fields.

We are always only a single question away from thinking in a much better direction.

Riddles, present one of the juiciest examples of question forming.  The solution to many riddles often depends on some alternate lateral interpretation of some key piece of information.

Take for example this short riddle:

Say my name and I disappear.  Who am I?

Finding the answer depends on reinterpreting the subject of the riddle and realizing that the ‘name’ is not a person at all, but a thing.  We can reword the riddle and see that it’s perhaps easier to solve.

What ceases to exist while we are speaking?

The questions have the same answer, but they reframe the problem differently.  We can rephrase the question again and see if the solution becomes even more obvious:

What is present while we are not talking but suddenly doesn’t exist once we start talking and is therefore probably like the opposite of talking?

In this way, rephrasing problems as questions and then rephrasing those question can actually allow us to close in on an answer, so much so that the rephrased questions begin to describe the solution.

Solving problems, is in many ways dependent on the art of crafting riddles, or simply put, asking better questions.

A FRIEND FOREVER

July 9th, 2019

Loneliness can seem somewhat paradoxical when considered in one’s own company.  The sentiment seems to call into mind an idea of there always being two people in a person. Our simple ability to reflect on our own thoughts and emotions in real time generates enough of a remove to at least create a helpful illusion.

In the meditation practice of Metta, one is directed to think of another person with loving-kindness and wish them free of suffering and hope that they experience fulfillment and joy.  This practice is often then redirected to take one’s own self as the object of Metta.  To wish one’s self well as we might wish a good friend well.

For those who are often very hard on themselves, this can be a difficult task that can easily produce remorse.  This common tendency begs a larger question: why do we not seek to build a friendship with ourselves?

It’s not uncommon for a person to be self-sacrificing to a fault, giving to a point where they are incurring detriment.  One way to think about this a little more clearly is to imagine a person giving to a friend at the expense of another friend who is loved and cherished equally.  The situation makes no sense.  What we are best off to seek is the win-winwhere we can give at no detriment, because the person who is self-sacrificing to a fault ultimately harms those relationships in the long-term when the cost is more apparent.

More importantly, if we investigate the mind closely enough, it’s quite difficult to find the person we think we are.  If this seems confusing, we can contemplate this question:

Can you locate the source of your attention that allows you to read and understand this sentence?

Or rather,

can your attention pay attention to itself?

. . . not really. 

It’s a bit like trying to use a camera to take a picture of the very same camera without the use of a mirror.  It’s simply impossible to point the camera at itself.

We are, in a sense, constantly witnessing who we’ve turned out to be.  We witness thoughts arise, we do not predict them, for to try and predict a thought is to actually have it.

Reflecting on one’s own self in this way, the little separation can help foster a sense of good will, in the same way it’s easy to foster good will towards others.

At the very least, at the end of the day, you’re stuck with yourself.

or, we can look at it differently:

You will always have your own company.  In light of that, it’s probably best to make a good friend.

MONEY MOUTH

July 8th, 2019

Opinions, we dispense with freely.  We do so as though we are handing out good deeds, advice to be heeded, benefited from.  We often phrase these opinions in the manner of directives.  This is how people shouldlook at things, understand things, do things.

But like Priorities, what we say is often not in accord with what we do.

The verbal smorgasbord that we constantly issue is in many ways its own animal, and an emotional one at that, one not totally in step with the actions we take.

The old aphorism “actions speak louder than words”

is only true because words so often cease to say anything that amounts to substance.  Action, as a comparison, only seems more truthful or powerful because action is itself the manifestation of it’s own substance.

That being said, words can be just as substantial as actions.  It’s a rare and worthy person whose words have as much substance as their actions.  This has far more to do with a careful curation of one’s words than it has to do with being a person of tremendous and varied action.

There exists another aphorism that echoes the previous one about actions and words, but it hits at the heart of one’s ability or inability to be more careful with our words so that they might meet our actions more truly.

Put your money where your mouth is.

This is most often used when a person sings the praises of something they might buy or support financially.  It’s a directive that says don’t allow your actions, or lack of actions speak louder than your words. 

Or to phrase it another way:

Don’t let your actions betray the meaning or your words.  Live up to your language.

This is an incredibly difficult symmetry to create in one’s own person.

One way to think about it a little differently is to price it out with a thought experiment.

Imagine if every sentence spoken had a price tag associated with it.

Let’s say $10 per sentence for starters.

Anything uttered that we do take action on, we get our money back, no matter the outcome of our efforts.  Total failure is fine.

No effort whatsoever to live up to our word results in a total loss of money.

And conscious lies double the charge and the money is totally lost.

This sounds pretty ruthless, but just for a moment, imagine what the world would look like.

The first thought is that the world would turn into a quiet, near silent place overnight.

But how realistic is that?  The urge for self-expression far outweighs something as ridiculous as sentences that have a cost.

If anything, it’s easier to imagine a world that is suddenly far more thoughtful about what is said.

There is one macro-example that applies here that might at first seem an odd match to this discussion:

Nuclear Weapons.

Incredibly, These apocalyptic weapons have not been aggressively used since the conclusion of WWII.  While many like to concentrate on how close we perpetually are to some catastrophic event involving these weapons, the nearly 80 years that we’ve stacked up without using them is possibly a tribute to a rarely witnessed aspect of human nature, simply put:

when the cost is high enough, we behave. 

To invoke the example on a more individual level, we can imagine some horror movie villain attaching some sort of fatal shock collar to a person, the catch being it activates if they raise their voice to a loved one. 

If our lives depended on the equanimity and civility of our conversation, would we be so quick to anger and frustration? Faced with such high costs, chances are we’d change quick.  Just as the world has continually de-escalated the size and magnitude of violent wars since WWII.  This isn’t to say that wars have totally vanished, no, not at all.  But nothing even near the scale of a World War has existed.

Thing is, we already pay a higher price than any cash that might leak from our pockets when our words fail to match what we do.  It’s not as obvious, in-your-face, but subtler, steeper.  The cost is our very own self.  That sense of a self that we all carry through the world: it’s impossible to find behind our very own eyes, and yet we can see it exist through our actions, by the authenticity through which we endeavor to match the machinations of a mouth to the attempts of our ability.  The lazier and more careless we are with that endeavor, the more we cease to be a real part of the world.

To grasp a place in this world, we need only try to improve.  We need only be a little more thoughtful about our words each time, and we need only be a little more effortful with our actions in compliance with what we’ve heard ourselves say. 

Just a little more each time allows a trend to form and compound.  And slowly, we improve.

This episode references Episode 10: Priorities