PRESSURE PLAY

March 12th, 2019

One of the best things to do to make sure something gets done is to set a deadline.  This is hailed as one of the cornerstones, if not the keystone to productivity.  But deadlines cannot and should not be applied to everything we hope to do and get done.  Indeed the useful stress of an impending deadline can be totally destructive to our efforts.

Deadlines can often have that counter effect where we find our self engaging in totally unrelated activities that we rationalize are more pressing because for whatever reason we do not want to do what we know we should be doing.

We might for a humorous moment imagine opening up our computer, clicking on our browser icon and suddenly a message pops up saying “I don’t feel like opening up that app for you right now.”

And yet this is exactly what we do quite often.  Procrastination we might ponder could have two roles:  It may delay action on something so that we actually get it done in the quickest way possible, since work often expands to fill the time allotted for it.  Or it could be evidence that the task is not worth doing.  But both of these undermine a certain aspect of long-term goals that require long-term effort.  If something requires practice on a daily basis, like say, meditation, then procrastination with starting or procrastination to continue immediately starts to undermine the point of the practice.  It’s consistency that is important in such a case.

On the other hand, what of the opposite of this stress caused by deadlines?  What about play?

Play is a seriously underrated and underutilized practice in adult life.  It’s children that play, not adults.  And yet, who learns more efficiently?  But it’s because their minds are young of course – this flexibility and plasticity is what enables them to learn more efficiently.  There is some truth to this sentiment, but it also functions as an excuse to explore no further. 

In the world of productivity, much is written about the flow state.  This is where work is getting done and we are making progress in a seemingly unhindered way.  Distractions do not distract us.  Time seems to fly by.  The work seems to unfold naturally as opposed to being forced into existence, and it’s –dare we say- fun.  We might wonder if play is a kind of catalyst for a flow state.  If there’s a lot you need to learn, best to find the easiest switch to flip in order to turn on that flow state.

But play goes far beyond this mere oiling of our regular work.  Play is an exploratory tool that uncovers new things which prior to such discovery we could not set a deadline on using. 

At base, play is a guilt-free, deadline-free exploration of new aspects of reality where we can discover new patterns which we might be able to manipulate.  These patterns might be the studs on different lego blocks, or it might be query statements for a database language.  This latter example hints at one of the problems we have with the concept of play:  we incorrectly assume play is for meaningless amusement.  But play is not watching a dull sitcom, play is active, exploratory.  With a fuel tank charged with curiosity, play seeks in a nearly destructive manner, taking things apart to see how they work.  This is literally pattern finding.  How something works is really a pattern that we can imagine repeating as something is functioning again.

While play and curiosity deserve far more in depth explorations, the main point here is to highlight their open-ended nature in contrary juxtaposition to the trope of setting deadlines in order to be productive. 

While the business world is marked by this obsession with deadlines, progress ascends when both the pressure of deadlines and the freedom of play are balanced with one another.  The novel patterns discovered through play can then be reimagined in helpful new forms and the work required to manipulate this pieces can than be put into the pressurized environment of the deadline.  This switch from one to the other can become an incredibly powerful recipe for moving forward in an unknown space. 

For example, we might just play with a few colors of paint.  After some time we discover all the other basic colors we can create by applying different mixtures.  Once this is discovered, then we might set a goal of creating a painting with this new understanding.

School seeks to give us these basic parts while stripping the experience of the sense of discovery.  Something handed to you is not discovered.  We might reimagine school as an environment we enter that is primed for students to discover the precepts by simply interacting with that environment – by playing.

Like so many lost gifts of childhood, it can become a superpower in the adult world.

The next time you find yourself stuck, whether on a project, or in life, don’t stress and pressure yourself to work harder.  It might be best to let all that go for a little while, and just play.

TOOTHBRUSH

March 11th, 2019

So often we are simply scared to start.  Self-conscious about one’s ability to write, or dance in public, or whatever it be.  The best antidote is to take heed in the fact that doing it everyday will make this dissolve.  One must simply start and focus more on consistency of effort rather than result and have faith in the idea that results will improve.

A good example of this is brushing teeth.  This habit becomes so engrained that we hardly even think about it.  And beyond that, it seems to happen on it’s own as though it’s automatic and hardcoded into the way we operate.  Surely some people aren’t doing it appropriately or optimally.  Surely some people are brushing too hard, or not brushing long enough, but are these people particularly hung up on the short comings of such a simple ability?  Most likely: absolutely not.

Many impressive abilities fall into the same kind of framework.  Someone who sketches every day for years and years isn’t terribly surprised by their ability at any point in time because their familiarity with their own skill is so pervasive through time.

As is often said: anything worth doing isn’t easy.  But often what this means is figuring out how to make one’s self apply some effort consistently over a long time.  If we are thoughtful in such efforts and don’t simply repeat our effort as we do with brushing teeth, then that concentrated effort compounds.  Small realizations gained through experimenting connect and tie to other realizations to further breed new insight. 

This is the power of thought.  We might take a moment to reflection just how powerful this phenomenon is.  Almost all people, especially those who are listening to this or reading it cannot look around themselves and see something that is not resulting from compounding thoughts of many people over many years.  Just think for a moment about every single little ‘ah ha!’ moment that was required for a smart phone to come into existence.  Such an invention requires so many other supporting inventions, that such ‘ah ha!’ moments extend far into the past.

We can apply this compounding interest of realization to our own life.  This is how we learned to speak as an infant and how to walk.    It’s worthwhile to note that we don’t go to school to learn how to walk or speak.  We figure out these immensely complex tasks on our own, by trying to take part in these activities every day, over and over.

This is the key to many goals we’d like to accomplish.  Steady effort everyday.

One of the greatest attributes of this repetitive effort is that all the self-conscious hang-ups that exists before we even start, slowly but steadily evaporate, until it ceases to exist and we simply do.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: UNUSED LUGGAGE

March 10th, 2019

The dance instructor turned to face the mirror and said “Ok now, everyone, if I can do it, you can do it: follow me!” and began to move through the sequence as everyone else in the room followed along.  Some faltered, but Lucilius did not notice them as he paid close attention to the teacher, moving as well as he could in sync with the movements he saw.

When the class was over, he walked out side into the dreary rain.  The sky was grey and nearing dark.  The wet street bouncing up warped light from the neon signs that lit the drag.  Lucilius turned and walked down the sidewalk, passing storefronts and bars.  A sign stood outside on bar that had chalk scribbled writing.  It said “Heaven is here!” with an arrow pointing into the bar.  Lucilius stopped and looked in.  Music was pumping and the faces of people laughing and smiling filled the joint.  Lucilius smiled weakly and moved on.  He stopped at an intersection and waited for the lights to turn.  Across the street a ragged bearded man stood with a blank expression holding up a cardboard sign that said “Follow Only Him” and below it “John 14:6”

The light seemed to be stuck so Lucilius decided to duck into another bar on the corner for a quick drink.  He ordered brandy and bitters and stood at the bar, thinking back to the dance class, trying to go over the moves in his head.

“You gotta stop being so nervous” Lucilius over heard one guy say to another.  “You gotta be just like me, honestly, forget about you, and maybe just try pretend to be me for a little while.  I mean even if you are nervous.  Hell, we’re all nervous, but I don’t show it cause it’s gonna freak a girl out, make her uncomfortable.  You gotta look confident, you know? Like how you can scare off a bear if you yell at it, but you still wanna be so cool and calm you could walk up to a deer and pet it without scaring if off.”

Lucilius looked at the two young men.  The talker was smiling as he spoke while the other tried to nod encouragingly in response.

“Honestly, you just gotta try, and as you do it, you’ll get the hang of it, and before you know it, you’ll be just like me.  Here, follow me.”

The one followed the other as the leader walked over to a pool table and started chatting with the two girls playing.  Within a few minutes all four of them were playing a game and the girls were laughing.

Lucilius finished his brandy and walked back out into the rain.  The cross walk was lit and the ragged man was still there holding his sign.  He did not look at Lucilius as he passed.

Lucilius ran to catch his buss and as he boarded and paid, the bus driver was pointing at a map and talking to a passenger.

“You’ll have to get off and wait for the next one.  See that green line that cuts through downtown?  You have to follow that all the way to the end. Ok?”

The passenger thanked the driver and got off.  The doors closed and soon enough the bus rumbled on into the night.

When Lucilius got home he put down his bag and flopped down on his bed.  He looked at the biographies on his nightstand, all half read and waiting for more attention.  He clicked on the T.V. and flipped to a movie channel.

“You were looking for a way to change your life.  You could not do this on your own.  All the ways you wish you could be? That’s me…..sometimes you’re still you.  Other times you imagine you’re watching me.  Little by little, you’re just letting yourself become—”  

Lucilius clicked to another channel and found a nature documentary about Tigers.  A raspy British voice narrated about the youngest cat in the litter.  “Soon, she will have to follow in the footsteps of her mother and break off from the family and go on her own way.”

Lucilius clicked off the T.V. and simply laid in bed, staring at the ceiling.  He thought about how the ceiling was just an expanse of light that was hitting his eyes.  How the light was creating tiny reactions in the cells of his retina.  He wondered, was the ceiling really up there, or was it just something occurring in his eye.  He thought about how he could be dreaming, which would mean that none of it was happening with his eye, how it was just all somewhere in the back of his brain, pinging around, mish mashing memories.

He closed his eyes and breathed slowly.  Thoughts bubbled up, but as each did he noticed it, let it do it’s thing and watched it fade.  He felt his chest rise as he breathed in again slowly.  He noticed his attention slowly shift to another thought and he entertained it.

The thought was about happiness and what it was.  Some particular frenzy of neural activity, he figured.  A memory flooded into his consciousness and he smiled at the time.  However it fires up, it’s some sort of structure in this brain that’s thinking this thought.  He refocused on his breathing and felt the air fill his lungs.  I guess that means I carry around that neural structure all the time, he thought.  It has to be the case, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to feel it.  He decided to think about a few things in life that he was grateful for and a smile appeared on his face again.  He wondered if he was consciously poking that neural structure that might involve itself in happiness.  He felt his body exhale and felt himself further relax. 

Then he opened his eyes and rolled over to grab a pencil and a notebook from the nightstand.  He turned to a blank page and wrote:

Happiness is always with you.

DAYDREAMING ABOUT THE PRESENT

March 9th, 2019

It’s unclear what exactly has given us our imaginative abilities, but what is clear is how ruthlessly such abilities dominate our experience.  Often our mental space is inundated with dreams about the future, or nostalgia for the past.  Each tendency has at its core some feeling that we felt or hope to feel again.  We morn the passing of such circumstances that gave us this sense of feeling and we hamster-wheel our way towards future circumstances that we think will bring about this wonderful feeling again.

We can all picture someone sitting on a beach with a wonderful body, in the lap of luxury with a brow furrowed as they angrily tap away at a phone.  Perhaps we have even been fortunate enough to have this unfortunate experience of being miserable while engrossed in a lovely circumstance.

Certainly no one would disagree that this disconnect is rampant in our experience of life.  And yet the follow-up question that should naturally arise from such an observation rarely intercedes on the way we operate in any meaningful or long-lasting way:

Is it not our perspective in the given moment that defines the moment more than the circumstances in which we find ourselves?

Certainly this must be the case.  And yet, do we spend as much time and as many resources developing our perspective as we do on destination vacations?

One of these options certainly sounds way easier.  Pick a place. Spend the money.  Done.

Develop a perspective?  This is far less concrete and certainly not something that is easily or smoothly purchased if such a thing can be purchased at all.  This begins to sound like real work and what could be more antithetical to a destination vacation?  The point is to not work.

The funny allusion here is that something that doesn’t work: is broken, which begs the same question about our perspective.  Do we have broken perspectives?

If our perspective seems hellbent on paying attention to anything other than the present moment, perhaps it is broken.  Such a wayward focus certainly doesn’t help with execution, learning, or the subject at hand: enjoying life as it happens.

The problem here becomes even more twisted if we recognize that the future and the past don’t actually exist.  We cannot go retrieve them in the same way that other existing things can be experienced.  Our experience of the past is really an imperfect memory.  What actually exists is some combination and path of neuronal fire.  The future is exactly the same thing: some novel and changing combination of neuronal fire.  The past only really existed as the present moment, and if the future happens, it will only be experienced as the present moment.  Both the past and the future are really just different ways of thinking about the present.  We are indeed daydreaming about the present moment when we are wrapped up in thoughts about the past or the future, all the while missing the actual present moment.

Of course there is benefit to conceptualizing the future and reflecting on the past: doing so has helped us create the modern world.  But spending too much time exercising this conceptual ability robs us of another ability:  to invoke a sense of calm and equanimity and simply enjoy the present moment, no matter what the circumstance.

Chances are the saving fund for the next vacation should be put aside and the time should be used for a different kind of work, one that begins to answer the question: how do I develop my perspective and my attention so that I can enjoy the gift of being alive in the present moment.

Indeed, the present is the only gift we can really enjoy.

Best to stop daydreaming about it, and figure out how to relax and

let it happen.

ENDURE INURE LIFE

March 8th, 2019

The word inure often has an attributed meaning of jaded and blasé due to being accustomed.  But the word merely means accustomed, or to be in practice and of use.  While not necessarily related in etymology, we can hear the relation of the word inure to other words like durable and and endure.  There is something going on in these related concepts that speaks of a constant practice, one that is often mistaken for a cold and ineffective state.

this is the criticism that has often been levelled at the Stoics, and unfairly so.  Stoicism often evokes the image of a stony and cold man who either has no feelings or snuffs them out with no breathing room.  Nothing about this image sounds healthy, and if anything, any common person or armchair psychologist is going to guess that such a person is a seething pressure cooker just ready to pop.  This is close only insofar as a bullet comes close to it’s target, but misses, and then proceeds to hit something very very far away.

As is often said: a miss is as good as a mile.  Or rather a slight miss is just as meaningful as missing by a huge margin.

Much of stoicism is about exposing one’s self to difficult thoughts, feelings and situations so that over time, such disagreeable items have less effect on one’s being.  Notice the subtle difference of purpose here.  Often people concentrate on their problems in totally counter-productive ways, allowing such problems to chronically stress out their minds and bodies.  The stoic is doing much the same for the exact opposite purpose.

A practical example helps illuminate this:

Someone may eat every chance they get because they are afraid of a time when they might have nothing to eat.

The stoic would simply fast for some period of time in order to have the emotional and physical experience that enables, indeed, entitles such a person to meet that worry square in the face and say “see, we’ll be just fine if we don’t have food, now shut up and leave me alone with your petty and negative fantasies about the future.”

Here the stoic has endured hunger in order to inure one’s self to the experience.  The practice has been put into use and the experience of such creates a cascade of new emotional understanding and a change about what no food actually means.

We can apply this kind of endure to inure practice in many aspects of life.  Whether that be a slight shift to nutrition: picking the healthier option gets far less painful and difficult the more often it is put in practice.

or if we go to the most viscerally unpleasant things, like pain:  lifting weights is painful, in the sense that if someone woke up feeling the sensations that are felt while squatting their own body weight, they’d most likely call an ambulance.  But given enough time engaging and dancing with such pain, it’s sensation decreases, and it can even turn into a kind of pleasure.

This begs a strange question of attention in general.  It seems to be misleading.  In one situation we can focus our attention on the sensations of the body and feel a lot of pain, but if we subjugate our body regularly to such exercises, the focus of our attention garners a much different sensation.

Perhaps the most important arena that this capacity can be applied to is frustration.  Perhaps we are trying to learn something, or deal with an aggravating person.  The frustration that arises in such situations either adds to our overall frustration and brings us closer to the brink of exploding, or with a different perspective, it becomes an instance to exercise our ability to accept and relax.  We can practice this so that we are accustomed with frustration and instead of having losing focus on what we actually need to do, we can smoothly forge ahead.

When it comes to learning something new, this acceptance and accustomed ability to handle frustration can be a superpower that enables one to learn much faster and more efficiently than others.

We can even zoom out to a much grander perspective and wonder if those who are truly at peace with their movement through life, those who seem calm and have achieved a real equanimity: perhaps they are properly inured of life, in the most positive way possible, meaning, none of the meaningless negativity affects them any longer.

How lovely does that sound?