DESIRABLE FAITH

May 28th, 2019

In a previous episode of Tinkered Thinking, gravity was presented as a good example in order to explore the concept of faith.

Lift an object up and we all have faith that if dropped, the object will hit the floor.  This is an excellent example of faith because it describes our relationship to something that is both: highly reliable and totally unexplainable.

Granted we’ve figured out that there’s a connection between the mass of an object like the earth and the gravitational force that exists around and inside such mass, but we cannot yet explain exactly why and how this actually works. 

This inexplicability of faith is important because it’s often the lingering or missing ingredient when it comes to the goal we might dream of achieving. 

Most often our desires are at total odds with our goals, which, at first seems quite strange.  But we need merely think of the tension we feel between wanting a fit and good looking body and the desire we have to eat a donut that happens to be within arm’s reach.

The goal of getting fit is directly thwarted by the desires that pop up many times during the day.  Regardless of what our fitness has been like in the past, our ability to look forward and forge ahead towards a goal of fitness is dependent on a certain kind of faith in the goal: that it will actually be possible given the right tactics and that we will experience a higher level of satisfaction once that goal is achieved.  That higher level of satisfaction is of course, longer-lasting than the fleeting pleasure of a donut.

This framework applies to many kinds of goals.  Sitting on the couch and vegging out to some dumb show is like that donut when we think about projects that we should be working on instead.  Again, a faith that the project will come to fruition needs to be nurtured, and it’s perhaps this hazy ingredient that we must look for the most in order to defend ourselves from our own desires.

Unlike gravity, however, our notion of reliability is often supplied by an intellectual avenue.  We can look at other people who are fit and simply say that it’s not fair, or we can study their lifestyle, their diet and their exercise in order to come up with a strategy that has the potential to transform our own situation.  That whole process, however, is again an intellectual one, and the notion of reliability is almost completely divorced from the strong emotions that are often responsible for getting us to do things.  It’s intuitive to pick up a donut and eat it because the desire for doing such is a strong emotion.  On the other hand, it’s counter-intuitive to refrain from eating the donut because doing so is literally against our own feelings on the subject.

Upon reflecting, we can realize that having faith that a different life is possible -  a healthier, happier life that is filled with fulfilling accomplishments is a strictly counter-intuitive adventure.

At least in the beginning.  Once we actually get moving in the right direction with the right effort and the right tactics, results –however small- should begin to appear in some way, and it’s these tiny positive outcomes that we should take as signs that our faith in the process has reliability.  We can then slowly build a new intuition that uses these successes as reinforcing guideposts.  In so doing, our desire can slowly morph, and what was once painful becomes pleasurable, and what once held the promise of instant pleasure only reminds us of an old life filled with the perpetual and depressing pall of unrealized goals.

NEW PEOPLE OLD WORK

May 27th, 2019

There’s an important difference to be made between the work we currently do and the people we currently work with. 

If the current work is unsatisfying, one of the important limitations of changing the nature of the work we do is the network we have available.

It may seem that a wholesale change of both is always necessary in order to improve things, making that ‘huge leap’ into a different career path that much more difficult, but the components here can be teased apart in an easier, more virtuous way.

If for example we jump at an easier opportunity, that is doing the same work we’ve been doing, but for different people, we expand our network of people, making it more likely that someone we know has an important connection to a more interesting line of work.

Furthermore the familiar work can be used to demonstrate an ability to deliver.  We are far more likely to give a newbie a chance if they prove reliable in another field.  The things that everyone desires in other people are the same no matter what the work:  being able to deliver quality.  This applies to most all relationships, whether it be a work relationship or family, or even friends: most all our actions boil down to an important and honest judgment of following through on one’s word.  With this quality visibly in place, there’s no piece of paper or resume that will substitute.

And in the quest for more interesting, profitable or fulfilling work, the real task is often finding the people who need such work. 

In short, proving to new people an ability to deliver with old work can potentially lead to new work.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: IMMORTAL COLORS

May 26th, 2019

Lucilius watched as his steps disappeared in the sand of a strange and foreign shore.  Water rushed up the slope of sand in gentle sheets brimming edges of white bubbles.  He walked along, looking out at the copper horizon, a sun of hot iron warping in the low sky.  He pushed his satchel back further behind him as he strode from the water’s reach.  He was an old man now, and as he reflected on the ever-fresh light of a dying sunset, he noticed a girl sitting in the distance, her face in her hands, the bent arc of her back trembling.

Lucilius walked up to the girl and looked the way of the sunset.  “I suppose it must be death, heartbreak, or you’re just a sucker for sunsets.”

The girl looked up at him, confused, her face streaked with tear.  Lucilius’ smile faded looking at the girl.

“heartbreak, isn’t it?”  he said.

The girl nodded, her face further clouded with suspicion and the welcome relief of company.  Lucilius slowly took a knee on his old bones and then sat down.

“fresh?”  Lucilius asked.

“A week ago,” the girl murmured as she sniffed and wiped her face.

“A week?” Lucilius questioned.

The girl’s eyes welled up once more.  “It’s just become so mean.”  She looked away, her face distorting to hold back against the push of feeling.

Lucilius nodded.  “Strange how we become so quick to poison the memory others have of us.”

The thought calmed the girl and she looked at Lucilius.

“Who are you?”

“Oh, just an old man, no one anymore, at least not to anyone I’ve known.”

A corner of the girl’s mouth pulled down at his response.  She sniffled again, watching him look out at the sunset.

“Tell me a story,” she said.

Lucilius glanced at her. 

“Hmm.  A story.”  He looked at her again, judging her face a moment.  “When I was about your age, I found myself in love, but it didn’t work out.  She took to a friend, my very best at the time, and the whole of it left me so bitter, I just took off without knowing any direction, not caring, just going.  I walked out of my home town and into the country, and when night gathered, a storm came with it.  I was soaking wet by the time I came across a big barn, and by that time I was so tired out from my own hurt and bitterness, I broke my way into the barn and fell asleep away from the storm.

The next morning, I woke up with a cup of coffee sitting in front of my face.  I sat up and there was an old woman standing at a table.  The barn had no animals, it was a studio, filled with paintings of flowers and from the ceiling hung thousands of dried flowers.

The old woman noticed me when I woke and called me over.  ‘come here boy,’ she said.  I was somewhat dazed, the memory of how bitter I was still hadn’t hit me and I took my coffee and went to the old woman.

She had more flowers arranged on the table with a big book open.  She handed me two slabs of wood that were bolted at the corners and told me to undo them.  Said she could get them tight, but said it hurt to get them loose herself.

So I loosened the bolts for the old woman and she took the wooden slabs apart and between them a flower had been pressed into paper, it was flat as the paper but as bright as if it had never been picked.  She took it with a smile and fitted it into her book.

I ended up staying with the old woman a month, helping her with her flowers.  She’d had a husband who did the paintings but he was passed by the time I found my way into the barn.  She never asked me any questions, just told me what to do, and each day we sat down and worked together, pressing flowers.  She knew the names of all of them, had a whole library filled with them, and then one day when we’d been working with the flowers for weeks, I asked her why.

‘Out there,’ she said, nodding to the open door of the barn ‘they rot and, turn ugly, make food for other things.’  Then she glanced up at the ceiling of the barn where all the dried flowers hung.  ‘Up there they stay, but they lose all their color.’  Then as she gently pressed a fresh flower with her wooden slabs, she said ‘but in here, they stay bright forever.

It takes work – a little work, but it’s worth it to hold on to the colors a little longer, so they can be appreciated days down the line, as though they’d just opened up.  Flowers are like memories in that way.  They’ll rot if you’re not careful.”

Lucilius pulled his satchel from behind him and unlatched the flap, and took from inside it a small old book.  He handed it to the girl and she took it with curious hands.

Lucilius slowly raised himself to his feet.  He looked down at the girl.  “I think that ought be yours now,” and with that he nodded at the girl and then continued on his way.

The girl opened the book and it was filled with flowers, still vibrant and sharp.  She carefully turned the pages.   And eventually she found, inside the back cover, in the old woman’s fine penmanship:

If I were to be drawn into a battle I lose, by friend or lover or foe; none,

not even my greatest enemy nor greatest love could spoil the memories I have of defeat.

PRESSURE COOKER PATIENCE

May 25th, 2019

Patience should not be keeping it all in.  True patience is simply letting go of steam before it builds up, by removing one’s self from such a tight identification with the emotion.  If we do not identify with it, how can it influence our behavior?  I don’t identify as a four legged animal, so the notion of touching the ground with four limbs as I walk around has no influence on the way I walk around.  This may seem like a far-fetched analogy, but this is intended, if we become far-fetched from our own anger, then it becomes somewhat absurd to act upon it.  This seems to have a contradiction in it: how can we be removed from something that is ‘our own’. 

Possession is a detrimental way to think of this.

Do you own anger?  Or is it merely a common experience that visits you from time to time at intervals and during occasions that are quite similar to most other people?

When you have a cold, is it really.. your cold? 

or

Are you being visited by some biological cocktail that snuck it’s way into your body’s systems?  The constituents of that little bug existed before it came into contact with you, and while your body might kill it off and it may cease to exist after meeting your immune system, it’s at no point entirely sensical to claim it as an identity.  This is somewhat like claiming an identity relative to Lucky Charms while eating the cereal.

And food is another good example which populates the spectrum a little more.

We need only witness one person at the dinner table invading someone else’s plate with a fork and snagging some food.  Many people experiencing such an invasion would not be happy and give the other person a sour look, if not worse.

There’s the sense that food on my plate is my food. 

But again, like the monkey pressing buttons for food in the previous episode, anything we eat is very transitory.  It has a fleeting effect on our body and mind, like ripples when a stone is dropped in water.

Is anger or sickness, not often the exact same thing?

These experiences warp and skew our conscious experience for a time and then slowly the intensity of their influence resigns.

Seeing the similarity between all these ways that reality can poke our conscious experience, can ultimately empower a person to begin toying with the degree and manner in which their consciousness changes as a result of getting poked by these different phenomena.

This is potentially a fair definition of what it means to be mindful, in the meditative sense.

The flip of this would be something like experienceful, where one’s mind is so engrossed and intoxicated with what’s going on that there’s no room left for the actual mind.  A phrase that perhaps captures this sentiment is being lost in the moment.  We do not really think when we are lost in the moment, as often happens during encounters with extreme anger.

Patience, should not be a battle with anger, though this is what is often feels like for many people.  Trying to deal with anger in such a way is like arguing with a fool, which only turns one’s self into a likewise fool.   Engaging in battle with anger is in essence a battle automatically lost.  Doing so is entertaining the experience of anger, welcoming it to leak in and pollute, the mere instance making the mind more and more hospitable to anger.  In essence the emotion feeds off of our willingness to engage with it.  Trying to maintain patience while entertaining anger is akin to turning the heat on a pressure cooking.  No matter how good the construction, all pressure cookers will fail given enough heat.

A mindful approach to anger is to stroll out on to the field where anger hopes to do battle and set down a beach towel to lie upon in order to enjoy the view.  There is no need to fear any display of might and arms that anger might wheel up, all of it is a smokescreen that only becomes real if a person decides to identify as those things.  Such armaments cannot then be used upon the anger which gifted us such weapons.  The gifts of anger can only be used on the people and circumstances of our life, which does about as much good as handing a loved one a pressure-cooker just moments before it explodes.

This episode references Episode 250: Language, Episode 17: The Identity Danger, and Episode 18: Fluid Identity

SUBTLE REWARD

May 24th, 2019

When the monkey presses the right sequence of buttons, the monkey gets a tasty treat.  It would be easy and wrong to label the tasty treat as the reward in this little experiment. 

The tasty treat is an ephemeral aspect of the situation, one that is quickly digested and dissolved by it’s nutritional value.  The tasty treat is gone almost as fast as it arrived, and yet there is a reward that lingers beyond the nutritional flicker of the tasty treat.

The true reward for the monkey is understanding the cause and effect relationship between the buttons available to push and the hunger the monkey feels.  A specific code of behavior stitches them together, allowing a systematic behavior to effectively address the hunger.

The reward is the conceptual theory learned that can be applied again when the issue of hunger arrives.

We can take a different sort of monkey and replace the tasty treat with something a little more subtle:  Let’s say the situation is a grown adult in the middle of a tense and difficult conversation with a loved one.  The tasty treat that is poised to be grasped at the end of this engagement is a calm resolution instead of a worse situation that balloons to take up more time and exhaust more energy and emotion.  The ‘sequence of buttons’ here most likely has something to do with an exercise of patience.  If our adult manages to glide through the interaction without letting anger overwhelm their words and behavior, then the tasty treat is a better outcome, one that does not need to be cleaned up.

The real reward here is discovering a method of behavior that doesn’t make life worse.  Whereas the tasty treat arguably makes life better, the reward here is not dealing with a life that has been made worse.  The reward is not necessarily a net-positive in this case, but one that keeps life a net-even, so to speak. 

Though, beyond this net even, there is still the reward of discovering a method and system of behavior that keeps things from getting worse.  What superficially seems like a situation that results in no positive or negative ultimately has a positive influence on our life because we preserve the resources and time of our current situation, allowing such time and resources to then be devoted to other puzzles that result in overtly positive outcomes as opposed to spending that time and resource cleaning up from unmitigated disasters.

By adding these systems of behavior together that simultaneously preserve the good we have amounted in life, safeguarding that life from devolving and add to the good of our life, we create compounding virtuous cycles that inevitably allow us to Level-Up.

This episode references Episode 42: Level-Up and Episode 386: White Diamond