A LUCILIUS PARABLE: IT HAPPENS

January 13th, 2019

Lucilius was looking out at a cascade of stars fading in a thin dark blue over the horizon as he stood at the helm of a fishing trawler.  They had been steaming northeast for a day and would go another day before arriving at the fishing grounds where they would drop nets.  The sea was calm and Lucilius coveted the cool quiet time.

The captain of the ship climbed up into the wheelhouse from below and handed Lucilius a fresh cup of coffee.

“Thanks,” Lucilius said.

“How goes?” the captain asked. 

“Steady as,” Lucilius replied.  “Beauty of a night.”

They stood in silence, watching the horizon warm, the faint light slowly spreading out across the water, stretching towards the ship.

The captain started up.  “So yesterday, when we were pullin’ out I realized I left all the booze for this trip on the dock.  Just totally forgot.”  The captain laughed some, checking Lucilius’ reaction.  He smiled but with a curious look.

“Oh, I always keep extra in my cabin, as a sort of back up.  But shit, good thing none of the boys saw, cause that was a few hundred bucks, might as well just been poured down the drain.”   He laughed, somewhat absurdly at his own mistake and Lucilius humored him by laughing along.  “Eh, whaddya do?  A little nick to the bottom line, it happens.”

Ernie, another fisherman came up and took over the helm from Lucilius and Lucilius stayed just long enough to see the sun split water and sky before going down below to get some sleep.

Several days later they were in the thick of routine, hauling nets, gutting and icing fish and working round the clock.  Most all the crew was nursing a short reprieve in the galley, smoking cigarettes while huddled round mugs of coffee when the intercom blared into high volume.

The captain yelled through the intercom, making the speaker nearly short, twisting his curses as the crew went wide eyed at the captain’s anger. 

Some gear had been left out of place on deck, one of the nets not completely rolled, some bycatch left in a trough. 

All the crew looked around at each other, quickly realizing that the only one still asleep, Ernie, was the one who’d been on deck last with the job of cleaning up.

The captain kept going on, cursing them all out, and Lucilius could see his shipmates growing nervous and angry.  Surely Ernie was awake by now, listening to the tirade of passive aggression the captain was shouting throughout the ship.

“Amazing,” the captain shouted.  “I’m so proud of all of you.”  Then the intercom clicked and it was silent save for the low drone of the huge caterpillar engine.  A minute later  Ernie came into the Galley and Lucilius watched as none of the shipmates even looked at the man, let alone acknowledge his presence.  Lucilius watched Ernie fumble with a pack of cigarettes, give up and then head up a ladder to the wheelhouse to confront the captain.  They could all dimly hear Ernie apologizing, trying to explain, but it seemed to land on deaf ears.  During the next shift, the men left Ernie out of their talk, and Lucilius alone took up position next to Ernie, separating catch.

“Must of gotten a shit call from his old lady,” Lucilius said.  Ernie smiled weakly.

“I was exhausted,” Ernie said.  “Couldn’t sleep through those rollers the other night, and by the end of that shift, I could barely keep my eyes open.”

“It happens,” Lucilius said.  Ernie smirked and through the shift Lucilius kept up the conversation, giving his friend some little comfort.  And when their shift came to an end Ernie went down to the Galley and Lucilius decided to take his cigarette up in the wheelhouse with the captain.  The two stood quietly as Lucilius clicked a lighter to life and made the cigarette end glow with a quick toke.  The ship rocked and Lucilius glanced at the captain.  The man’s face was set and unamused.

“Unbelievable,” the captain said slowly.

Lucilius raised an eyebrow.  “What, Ernie’s messup?”

“Yea, just unbelievable.  Just sloppy, so sloppy.”

“He was tired,” Lucilius defended.

“I don’t care. He left the deck a mess.  It’s unacceptable.”

The two stood in silence for a moment.  Lucilius dragged the cigarette, looked off at the southern horizon.

“How is it that you can make the honest mistake of leaving all the booze for the trip back at port, dock the pay for the catch to cover it, and you and I just laugh about it, but when it comes to Ernie being tired and leaving a few things out of place, you ream the whole crew out and make Ernie feel like some kind of leper when all he did was forget a few minor things, none of which lost us any money.”  Lucilius glanced at the captain’s face.  The man had a harder expression set now.

“Yea ok,”  the captain said.  And after a moment he asked.  “Mind taking the helm, I’m gonna go apologize to Ernie.”

Lucilius took a long drag, looking at the captain, leaving him to hold the helm.

“You called out the guy in public, in front of his shipmates, but you’re gonna apologize in private?”

The captain stared a moment.  Then left the helm, leaving Lucilius to take the wheel.

A week later when they were back in port Lucilius and Ernie left the ship for good.

SHUCKING EMOTIONS

January 12th, 2019

How useful are emotions?

Certainly they have incredible utility because they form the fuel and engine for everything we do. 

The question is too vague however.  We might for example ask how useful a tree is?  In this case it’s perhaps more intuitive to follow up with a second question: useful for what?  If we seek to build a table then certainly the tree is potentially very useful, but not in it’s current form.  If however we see the tree’s utility as an entity that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere, then it is useful as is.  What’s important to note here is that while the tree can be useful for many things, for some we need to convert that tree and put it through a process.

Likewise with emotions.  All emotions provide us with the energy and impetus to actually do things.

Positive feelings of kinship and compassion perhaps need no conversion or processing, much like a tree  seen as useful just being a tree.

But, we can think of far more difficult emotions like anger and frustration which rarely do us any good if we act upon these emotions in the form that we experience them.  We generally lash out and create similar negative emotions in other people.  We break things, undermine a project, damage relationships… all variety of things occur that we can very quickly come to regret.

This does not mean that the negative emotion cannot be useful.  Like cutting a tree into slabs to make it more conducive to building a table, or shucking and roasting an ear of corn in order to eat, we can put our negative emotions through a process to convert them into more useful sources of energy and better reasons to take action.

This can be a mental energy to focus on a problem and think about it effectively in order to institute a solution.

This requires converting the stressful, negative emotion present into something that achieves a focused contemplation.  Akin to peeling an orange, we get rid of what we don’t need, and what is left over is a sort of raw energy that we can use. 

If we strip away the identity of an emotion, it’s negativeness –if you will, then what’s left over is simply a healthy amount of energy and a problem that needs solving.  It becomes, in essence, two problems which can solve each other.  The large amount of energy we need to expend can be spent actually solving the problem.

The problem is the reason we experience the hot emotion in the first place.  But by shucking the emotion, removing the unuseful husk, we use that emotion like a fungible battery to power a calm laser-like focus to understand the constituent parts of the problem and enable us to see a real solution, as opposed to acting out on the negative emotion as fast as possible.

DROPPING THE BALL

January 11th, 2019

We all drop the ball.  No one is immune from making a mistake, whether they affect ourselves solely or those around us in a team or family.  And often, emotions are quick to rise on any and all sides that might suffer as a result of such mistakes.

As a quick aside we might ask what function do emotions serve?  While our lives, decisions and identity to a large degree seem to be woven of emotions, this question does not seem to be a particularly common ponderance, perhaps because they seem to make up everything about our experience.  It’s akin to a fish wondering about water. 

Whether positive or negative, whether effective or counter-productive, at their base, emotions simply impel us to do things, to take action and attempt to make things different.  This is particularly salient after someone has made a mistake we find frustrating.  Hot-tempered aggravation ignites and we immediately have the cause, direction and immense energy required to do something.

At this point, our wisest decision is to pause and simply regain calm.  Anger is often referred to as a knife held by the blade.  The tighter we hold on the more it simply injures us.  Perhaps not as immediately as a knife, perhaps the wound is a long term circumstance, but it’s clear that anger rarely hands us the most effective option for solving problems. 

If we merely pause before acting on such an emotion we can then convert the emotion to something more useful and turn this built-in adversary into a powerful asset.  But this may not even be necessary.

When someone drops the ball, we need only ask one question that can potentially nullify the whole situation:  Is this a one-off occurrence, or is this part of a pattern?

Even when we are the one who has dropped the ball, this question can perform a lot of good.  If the mistake and occasion is a one-off occurrence, then there’s likely little to worry about.  Most likely there was some extenuating circumstance that has had an influence or perhaps we’ve suffered a bout of mindlessness.  All our vulnerable to such things.  So when someone else drops the ball and it’s unusual, it’s not simply the benefit of the doubt to assume that something rare and unintended caused the mishap, it’s a matter of historical precedent and probability that this is the case.  We can ask further questions to find out exactly what, but even that is not necessary because a single occurrence does not imply a problem – all it does it reaffirm the large complexity and noise of the world we live in.

If on the other hand the dropped ball is not an isolated instance, then there is perhaps a problem.  If it is part of a pattern, then there is good cause to assume a problem actually exists.  But the good thing about a pattern is that we can manipulate them.  Since they are predictable, we can plan against them.   And in so doing, solve the problem.  We cannot however plan specifically for one-off events.  Measures might be taken to lessen their effect, but every once in a while someone is going to have a sleepless night causing an exhaustion they cannot leave at the door, or all manner of problems that can perhaps not even be mitigated by some sort of super-human fortitude.    In which case we should look at it as a minor blip in the wide scheme of things.

Everyone drops the ball, but to see it as larger than a blip is to lose focus and misapply a solution.

This is called iatrogenic.  When the diagnosis or treatment actually causes the problem that was assumed to be present when in fact everything was fine.

The most important thing to wait for and notice when the ball is dropped is whether or not it rolls off afterwards, or if it’s caught after the bounce and the game can go on.

FOCUSING THE SPIN

January 10th, 2019

For a moment picture a figure skater spinning.  At first the posture of the figure skater is large and open as in a Biellmann spin or the Camel Spin which has as much weight distributed outwards from the center of the spin.

But we all know what the figure skater does next.  With a stable rotation established, the skater begins to bring their weight towards the center.  This concentrates the spin and speeds it up.  Eventually the skater will compress into a near fetal position with all of their body weight compressed into as small a space as possible centered on the axis of their spin.  This creates an impressive display of rotational speed.

This process of going from a large slow posture down into a small tight spin is a demonstration of a whirlpool, an image often mentioned on Tinkered Thinking to help represent positive and negative compounding cycles, often good habits and bad habits. 

What we can learn from the image of the skater is how important the slower start of the spin is for the rest of the process.  This slower spin with a larger posture is used to stabilize the spin, to ensure that as it’s concentrated, the refocused power won’t work against the skater and abruptly throw them off balance and fall.

This slower larger spin can work as an analogy for the amount of concentration we need to devote when establishing a new good habit.  In the beginning it’s very useful to gamify the process by using a counter to keep track of days and to put much conscious effort into the necessary steps and actions to make sure our target behavior occurs.  But over time, as this behavior reshapes some of the structure and firing pattern of our brain, the daily initiation of this behavior becomes automatic.  In this case the stability of the spin has been well established, and at this point the accrued benefits of the daily habit begin to compound to a noticeable degree.  This is a good habit - like our spinning skater brining in their weight – well focused.

These good habits are like spinning drill bits that allow us to drill into the future with purpose.  Though bad habits function just the same.  More than anything aside from unpredictably impactful events, our future is largely the result of our most concentrated habits, whether they be good or bad.  This should give us reason to pause.  And think about what things in our life are already spinning, and what behaviors we’d wish to have as the shapers of our future.

BLAZING TRACKS

January 9th, 2019

Somehow ‘being on the right track’ and ‘blazing trails’ have come to mean much the same thing in the cultural parlance of moving forward and making progress.  And yet these images could not be more incompatibly paired as synonyms.

They’ve perhaps been lumped together because any kind of forward progress is now coveted in a culture of productivity, leveling-up and the perennial task of eschewing the atrophy of being mediocre. 

We can see this innate desire for novelty in the way social media platforms are built.  Each social feed is designed with a primary concentration on tempting us with scrolling more, discovering the new.  Novelty in this case appears to be a stickier factor than quality.  But any kind of thoughtful pause will allow anyone to generally come to the conclusion that quality before novelty is probably a better order of priorities. 

This obsession with the new perhaps undermines our ability to properly filter for quality.  Instead of spending time with something to properly analyze it, we simply move forward.  Each social media feed is like a track, which someone else has built, and in doing so, that person has much more control about where we go and what we see.  This is where the two phrases ‘being on the right track’ and ‘blazing trails’ immediately diverge.  While both are indicative of forward motion, suddenly the concepts of direction and agency emerge as attributes that make these phrases far from similar. 

Being on the right track inherently carries with it an implication that we are using someone else’s structure to get somewhere, and since someone has already built this structure, anywhere we might go is a predetermined place, somewhere someone has already been because the person who built such a track had to get there first to actually lay the track.  We might look at secondary education and much of the traditional career model as a system that conforms to this image of the track.  In such a paradigm, it’s only a matter of picking the right track.  The universities have already been built, the curriculum and diplomas already designed, the bureaucratic ladders of promotion already established.  It’s just a matter of picking the right track and jumping through all the necessary hoops.  Doing so might feel like blazing a trail personally in an emotional sense because each experience in this process is new to the individual, but this has an uncanny similarity to the social feeds we look.  Every social feed is showing you something new.  The important caveat is that while it appears new to the individual, it is not new to the larger system nor the population that takes part in such a system.  We are seeing and experiencing what others have.  Everyone who rides the same train is going to have a different experience that feels new to each person, but they are still experiencing much the same environment which can be predicted and anticipated or even designed by someone who is familiar with the overall structure of the track.

Blazing a trail on the other hand involves interacting with something that is truly new.  Such an image might evoke a rugged character making a way through dense jungle, hacking at the foliage in order to get through.  Here there is no set path, no track to zip us forward on our way.  This is where no one has ever gone before.  Blazing a trail is an image that is reserved exclusively for a frontier.  It is where we come face to face with the unknown and the experience of uncertainty.  And in this eerie pair of synonyms lie potential treasures that cannot be found on any track; for a very simple and straightforward reason.  Anyone who has laid a track had to blaze a trail and clear the path in order to lay the track so any treasures that were found on the way into such unmapped territory were picked up by that explorer who had the luck to come across those treasures first.  We might think of the creators of social media platforms, whether it be facebook, Instagram, twitter or even myspace.  All of the creators of these systems and structures have become very wealthy as a result of their efforts.  Not necessarily because they blazed the trail, but because they also laid tracks for others to easily follow in their wake and effortlessly see the new landscape that they traversed first.  In the case of social media platforms, that track is a digital one and the landscape is other people and their thoughts, pictures, writings, songs, drawings and all other current manner of expression that can be hosted on this digital track.

One way to blaze a trail with these structures is to try and find a kind of human expression that has no representation on these large platforms.  Finding a way to digitally integrate a form of human expression that currently has no representation is a way of blazing a trail away from these platforms, while simultaneously laying a branching track that people can follow.

But blazing a trail need not even be connected to any current popular system.  While blazing a trail emotionally might be fulfilled by current systems, in order to truly blaze a trail where no one has ever ventured before, the two great navigational tools are curiosity and fear.  Most of us battle a fairly ambient level of fear that coaxes us into more traditional forms of behavior and down more traditional tracks.  Often we fear taking a chance and this is the emotional bottle neck that keeps the superpower of curiosity out of reach for use.  For those who find their directions and even identity dominated by the status quo, their curiosity is tiled over with fear.  Facing fear, if closely examined is really a matter of facing the unknown.  Curiosity is the most efficient tool for navigating the unknown.  It is the compliment to the cultural prescription to face one’s fear.  While facing one’s fears is akin to progressing forward while leaning back and bracing for some kind of negativity, curiosity is progressing forward and leaning into the process with eagerness and a kind of hunger that can become unstoppable.

While it may seem like a wholly bad idea to follow someone else’s track based on this analysis, there is one singular benefit that should not be ignored.  Tracks laid by another person can quite literally fast track you to a place where you can then curiously embark off into the unknown on your own.  A place that would be impossible to get to on your own.  This is the great gift of culture.  And the simplest example is the language through which you understand these words.  They were not created by you nor I, but we use them to fast track our ability to communicate and share ideas.  In so doing we can compound the achievements of our forebears and build upon their tracks in order to use our limited time to explore the current frontiers and figure out a place where we can strike out on our own and find something new, some gift that we can turn around and show our fellow people, some unknown that might benefit our grand family.

This episode references Episode 63: The Etymology of Fear.