A LUCILIUS PARABLE: STEP ONE

April 7th, 2019

Lucilius sat staring at a blank screen, watching the cursor blink on and off, taunting him with a reminder of time passing.  Time unused, wasted and flitted away, as though with a pernicious cackle, escaping his ability to grasp quick that single resource and produce something for the assignment he had at hand.  He shut the computer and stood up just as his phone lit up with a message: did he have time to watch his godson for a while?

He wrote back and then readied to go out. He grabbed his keys and caught a glimpse of his computer.  He paused, hesitated, then grabbed the computer, placing it in a bag as he left.

He arrived as his young godson was waking from a nap and slowly comprehending that Lucilius was here and that his mother had to run some errands.  The boy perked up at the sound of Lucilius’ name and he ran to the godfather.  Lucilius picked up the delighted boy as the boy’s mother kissed her quick goodbyes and left. 

“What shall we do?” Lucilius asked.

“Legos!” the boy exclaimed.

“Alright, then let’s get to it.”

Lucilius let the boy down and followed him as he ran into a play room with scattered toys, toy-boxes and drawings affixed at funny angles low on the wall.  The boy dragged a duffle bag out from a corner and dumped a pile of Legos onto the floor.

“What shall we build?” Lucilius asked.

“I dunno.” the boy said as he picked up pieces and started clicking them together.

Lucilius watched for a few moments as the boy picked up random pieces and added them.  The boy tilted his head, looking at the creation and then exclaimed: Spaceship! He moved it through the air as though through deep space, and then stopped.

“It needs boosters.”

The two scoured the pile for matching pieces that could work as engines and together attached them to the growing starship.  They added a cockpit, and eventually a cargo hold and in no time the spaceship had doubled in size.  Lucilius fiddled with a detail, searching for a tiny matching piece as his godson zoomed the ship through the air.  Then the boy put the legoship down.

“I’m gonna draw now,” the boy decided.

“Ok,” Lucilius said, brushing pieces around, searching for a pair.  He looked up after moment once the boy had his giant pad of paper ready.  The boy went at the page with a colored pencil and Lucilius asked,

“Whatchya drawing?”

“I dunno, just drawing.”

Lucilius watched the boy’s drawing develop, forgetting his search for the small lego.  His godson hunted for a black colored pencil and then started scribbling between the orbs he’d drawn.

“What is it?”  Lucilius asked.

“It’s the planets where the spaceship is headed to explore.”

The two kept on long after the boy’s mother had returned and after dinner Lucilius finally went home.  There he sat on the couch, smiling at the day’s fun and then fished out his computer and flipped it open.  He didn’t notice the blank screen that met him, already he was too focused on the keys he was pressing.

PERSONAL PROTOCOL

April 6th, 2019

Think different, be the black sheep, venture into the unknown, take a chance, just do it – these commonplace aphorisms, among countless others are each a call to go against the grain of society at large.

In the case of Apple and Nike, the implementation of such declarations against the grain embodies a marketing that is at once a clever hijacking of our lure to the exotic and new and a mass movement to create a new grain for the masses, one in line with the business models of such companies. 

Just about everything we do is a reflection of different parts of the society in which we find ourselves.  Even the riskiest moonshots are, in many ways modelled on the success or ideas of others.  We are inevitably tied to this relationship matrix because it is the opinions others have of our work and our creations that ultimately dictate how valuable our contributions are, and in turn grant a person the social resources of reputation and financial capital. 

Many of the ways in which we reflect our society at large, however, do not necessarily benefit us.  We can take something as simple as the mattress.  Normally, this is a giant cushion full of springs that requires a second giant box that further has springs.  These things are large, incredibly cumbersome units that are apparently necessary for our rest while sleeping.  They are expensive, and difficult to move and dispose of.  The mattress/boxspring combo might be described as an integral part of the protocol for sleeping in a country like the United States, or Canada.  It’s easy to imagine that an overwhelming percentage of the people who abide by this protocol have never thought much about it.  All the while, we are tempted by more expensive versions that employ innovations like memory foam and that are advocated and owned by people like Oprah.

Not sleeping well?  It’s probably your mattress, goes the obvious colloquial logic.  The answer?  Spend more money on a better mattress.

We are convinced to need things that once acquired birth the actual need.  Much like an addictive substance, however, much of this phenomenon is simply habit and routine.  The brain is somewhat stubborn and rigid in many ways, and real change often requires a rather forceful and prolonged yank out of the normal avenues of behavior.  As the saying goes “You get used to things”.  We can use this fact of human psychology to our benefit by forcibly exposing ourselves to less luxury, less comfort and eventually getting used to it in order to gestate a greater long term benefit. 

The back-pain that we believe is caused by the old mattress is more likely due to a lack of working out the back muscles effectively.  Anyone who has gone for a long and challenging hike followed by a night in a tent knows just how well one can sleep on a thin foam sheet when exhausted.

Our efforts as a species can be generally described as an effort to make ourselves safe and comfortable.  We have risen to the top of the food chain, and in so doing starvation is no longer an issue for most people and predators are no longer a concern.  Our efforts, however, go too far.  Instead of eating an optimal diet, we now battle obesity, and being free from the physical efforts of actually procuring our food in the natural world, our muscles atrophy and our system struggles with a weight it has no strength for, and then of course, we try to throw more money at the problem and buy a new mattress.

It’s important to realize that the conglomerated protocols created by the laws of government and the influence of corporations are not optimized to create the healthiest society possible by creating the healthiest individuals possible.  This likely goes without saying, though the optimist, looking at human history on a large time scale might suspect that we are trending towards this sort of utopia.  In the meantime, however, we each of us are left to our own devices – and in such circumstance, we have the opportunity to create a life that is closer to a personal utopia than what the protocols of society dictate.

Creating a better life invariably boils down to the personal protocols that we set for ourselves, and with many things, such protocols are likely to honor our cultural aphorisms that urge us to be different, while rejecting many of the actual protocols that culture dictates for modern living.

 Sleeping on the floor is quite counter to the cultural protocol and for those who live by the book of cultural protocols, this would sound like a move in a very uncomfortable direction, perhaps even a dangerous direction, like poverty.

And yet, the person whose personal protocols are purposefully designed with less comfort ultimately adapts far more efficiently when less fortunate circumstances arise.  Familiarity breeds comfort, and a familiarity with discomfort paradoxically enables a person to be comfortable where others will suffer. 

The same is true for physical exercise and again the same is true for the diets that we design and implement for nutrition and pleasure. 

One of the easiest examples in this realm is fasting.  The person who has researched and found interest in the effects of fasting finds an additional one when actually experimenting with the practice: successfully fasting for even a day or two equips a person with the knowledge that it’s possible, and then later when a circumstance arises where such a person would normally declare “I’m starving!”, the memory of fasting eases this desperation with a new thought, that of: been here, done it before.  Not really an issue.

This simple example can replicate in many ways in the different arenas that make up our daily experience.  The person who meditates daily has little issue waiting in a long line or enduring a delayed flight, or any unplanned space of time.

These personal protocols, whether it be a practice of meditation, exercise, reading, writing, diet or fasting – they shape our moment to moment experience of reality.  With each protocol, reality converts into a slightly different version, and if we tinker with these protocols, fine-tuning them, adding new ones and doing away with others, we can mold our experience and our response to reality in order to create something that leans towards a utopia of the mind.

This episode references Episode 299: The Obvious Choice, Episode 311: Fake Fortune, and Episode 325: Failures of Cooperation.

NOTHING IS FUNNY

April 5th, 2019

Young children will often laugh for no obvious reason.  Parents of children or teachers, siblings, and relatives will notice this if given enough time together.

The so called ‘adult’ will usually raise a jaded eyebrow with a bemused smile and detach with a conclusive ohhhh-kay.

The children are growing.  They haven’t developed their sense of humor.  Or something like that is proposed as the explanation.  We might wonder if such an explanation is actually true, or is it a kind of reasoned excuse to circumvent our embarrassed inability to jump in and take part in the fun?

Comedy can be a wonderful therapy.  Someone who has had no good reason to laugh in a long time can easily feel renewed when a friend drags them out to a good comedy show.  The jokes inevitably have little relation to one’s personal life and yet one can easily achieve a totally new perspective on life by benefit of a few punch lines.

Perhaps some people consciously or unconsciously withhold their willingness to laugh in an effort to seem more completely jaded or to display an intellect that is only broken by the smartest and wittiest of novel ideas.

One might wonder if such people are doing themselves a disservice by withholding their minds from the beneficial salve of laughter. 

We might wonder further about a connection between health and a willingness to laugh:  who is more likely to be healthier?  The person with a high threshold of humor, or the individual who will laugh at almost anything?

Regardless of the propensities that genetics and circumstance have handed us, we can always consciously invoke a smile.  The simple act, if sustained can change one’s mood, and often our mood, our current emotion is the biggest factor holding us back from what we’d be better off doing.

Just as kids can exercise the capacity to laugh even though nothing present is particularly funny, we too can hack our own head and smile for the mere sake of smiling, or rather for the contribution such an action makes to our overall brain chemistry, and any subsequent change in our perspective. 

Consciously failing to take things too seriously can free up our perspective in order to see that key missing detail that allows everything to suddenly come together.

PLANS & ROADMAPS

April 4th, 2019

Plans are not roadmaps.  Like instructions, roadmaps are representations of actual phenomena. 

Instructions dictate a series of actions that produce a certain result.

Roadmaps do much the same thing.  Roadmaps dictate a series of directions that produce a certain destination.

Take a left, go 4 blocks, turn right, first place on your left.

Boil water, add pasta, wait 10 minutes, strain and eat.

Too often we fail to remember the distinction between these concrete frameworks about reality and the imaginings we have for the future, i.e. Plans

A plan is a temporary manifestation of a strategy.  Both plans and strategies are dynamic entities.  This means that they change.  A strategy changes based on new incoming information that changes our model of the world or situation. 

A change in strategy must reflexively produce a change in plans.

If our plans fail to change due to new information, than there is either something wrong with our awareness, our understanding of what we observe, or the nature of our strategy.

However, if we have the capacity to notice new information, then it goes to follow that our awareness might not be too bad.  This leaves understanding and strategy as the culprits for producing rigid and brittle plans that fail to succeed due to a lack of flexibility.

If we fail to understand something, than there is likely a detail, or a perspective that is eluding our attention.  If we have recognized some potentially important information, but it is confusing or for whatever reason our strategy does not properly react to such information, we may need to consciously go back upstream and investigate more fully what phenomena our awareness has gifted us.  Discovering the right detail can make all the difference and click off a cascading set of understandings and ideas, and eventually, a new plan about what we can do.

Note however that plans are specific designs about what reality could be.  Roadmaps and instructions are concrete frameworks about what reality actually is.

The nuance concept of specificity here is the subversive bridge in language that fools much of our thinking about reality and plans.  Specificity is easily coupled with the concept of concreteness with regards to roadmaps and instructions.

The specificity of a plan is a feature of a tightly iterating strategy, not a definitive statement about reality.   

To illustrate this, we might think of a road trip.  Looking at a map, we trace along a highway and any twists and turns it might take to get to our destination.   We form a plan based on the frameworks we have at hand that we have good reason to believe accurately reflect reality.  We can note how specific the plan is based on this roadmap, but we can also envision other routes that lead to the same destination if we pretend that our preferred route does not exist.  Then we go on our trip based on our plan which is based on a strategic consideration of the map we have at hand.  Halfway through a mountainous portion of the drive however, we discover that a large portion of the road has been swept away in a landslide creating a drop off where on the map there illustrates a continuous road.  The new information we experience on the fly in real time instantly updates what we know about our map of reality: it was inaccurate.  The solution in such a physical case is obvious, turn around and find another way.  But in less obvious circumstances, much of our action is characterized by driving straight off the cliff.  We stick to our plan even though we’ve encountered information that dictates our plan is no longer wise to follow.

Plans are imaginative reconfigurations of possibilities that we form based on the concrete maps we have available. 

The specificity of both is crucial because one depends on the accuracy of the other, but staying tied to the specificity of a plan when we find the map is inaccurate can be catastrophic. 

It’s for this reason our plans must embody a somewhat paradoxical contradiction:

Plans must both be highly changeable and highly specific.

This is a grey space, a liminal or in-between space that people are generally uncomfortable with.

But if we can relinquish our obsession with security and embrace the unknown, we can inhabit this paradoxical space.

When we do, our strategy grows stronger through agility.  Our strategy gains the ability to redesign new plans as fast as we gather information, allowing our path to pivot more efficiently towards our goals.

This episode references Episode 285: Plan on no Plans, Episode 340: Discovering Details,, Episode 37: The Instructions Are Always Written Afterwards, and Episode 72: Persevere vs. Pivot

VIRTUOUS MISTAKE

April 3rd, 2019

The right mistake can produce a wonderful pressure to do the right thing.

Say for example we have a need to renew a passport or some form of identification.  Booking tickets for a trip suddenly becomes a huge motivation to go to the right offices to sort out the new identification.  This is not the intuitive or ideal order of operations, but the mistake of switching the steps makes the whole process move along much faster.

Saying the wrong thing at a business meeting might be a mistake that gets a person fired, but being freshly unemployed is a fantastic pressure to push someone towards a better circumstance.

Often such an occurrence is referred to as a ‘silver lining’, which is an effort to optimistically see the positive in a situation that is more easily categorized as negative.

But this simplifies the world far too much.  We can consciously initiate actions that may seem like mistakes in order to further benefit ourselves.

In fact, it might be better to blow past the ‘silver-lining’ idea and assume that all mistakes produce good results.  At the very least this will make a person far more likely to take action as opposed to perseverating over some static idea of what should be done or can’t be done.

It’s long been said that there are lessons in failure.  If this is the case than nearly all action outside the realms of violence is progress as long as we have the awareness to capture the fruit of a success and see the lesson in a mistake.

This episode references Episode 352: Order of Operations