YOU HAVE A POINT

January 3rd, 2019

The word point in this sense of a matter being discussed comes from the late 14^th Century.  As with all words and phrases it’s drifted and morphed into all sorts of expressions:

While you may think you have a point, someone else might say “what’s the point” out of a negative sense of defeat, or they might say “get to the point,” out of frustrated restlessness.  Neither seem to indicate that the distance between our perspective and our companion in dialogue is closing, but quite the opposite.

It’s only when we hear someone say “you have a point,” that we move our discussion in the other direction.  Such a statement is either overly polite and a person wants to indicate a vaguely positive sentiment without conceding the point, or they have been surprised by an unexpected perspective and their own is somewhat unsettled by this. 

It’s only when someone reacts to our ideas by saying they’re ‘on point’, that we know we’re in accord.

Perhaps in this sense it’s more evocative of our common point of view?

Clearly, the number of ways to use this deceptively simple word is large and wide-ranging, making it either very complex, or incredibly simple.

The fractured etymology of this word originally refers to a sharp instrument used to prick a hole in something.  A sharp point if you will.

We can imagine an echo chamber getting a hole pricked in it’s conceptual fabric by a better idea.  Such a hole in the bubble of our own little world might afford us a view of what’s going on outside our own claustrophobic little mindset.  Indeed, it would be a new point of view.

Any new point of view that we seriously entertain is inherently destabilizing.  To lend it credibility is to risk usurping credibility from another part of our worldview.  Such change requires a comfort with uncertainty that seems to be increasingly in short supply the safer our physical lives become.  A risky physical environment makes us attentive because there can be so much more to lose.  Such potential violence might prime the mind to stay receptive to new information in order to survive, whereas a coddled mind, having less and less reason to fear any real repercussions becomes stagnant and stubborn.

In such a circumstance we need to sharpen our own tool and challenge our echo chambers from the inside out.  Nothing is more powerful than a good question to do this. We can sharpen our questions, by rethinking them into new questions, asking them in more specific or counter-intuitive ways, and in so doing fashion a point with which to poke a hole in our own echo-chamber.  A true question is an open-ended concept that creates forward momentum – a forward momentum that takes us out of our comfort zone and challenges us with a new perspective that exists outside our own opinion, seen by means of a new point of view.

This episode references Episode 128: Question, and Episode 30: The Only Tool.

TAKE A HIKE

January 2nd, 2019

Everyone talks about the view from the top, but this is not why we go on hikes.  Certainly the reward of a lovely and interesting view is nice, but few actually spend more than a few minutes looking around, snapping a few photos and trying to orient what they know about geography to what is in front of them.  We go for the actual hiking. 

At it’s most basic, it’s exercise in an interesting natural environment.  But beyond this, you get what you can’t get in a gym: you get a lot of variance in how you have to move your body and where your concentration needs to go as the path winds up.  And at any moment, taking a break is an opportunity to take in the natural world, as opposed to huffing and puffing while looking at a cement wall or at a muted Television.

The hike is a sort of process.  We have to make a decision with every step, being sure to place our foot in a way that is safe and advantageous, all the while having a vague focus on the larger picture of getting to the top. 

Carrying out many ideas that have never been done before require a similar kind of process.  A new business for example, while it might be like many others is inevitably going to involve some kind of novel approach, even if it’s just due to the fact that the person or people have never done it before.  But as with a hike, each and every step is not and will not be perfect.  Our boot slips on wet rock, but this usually does not ruin the hike.  Nor perhaps do we always pick the right spot, and find our boot sinking in mud or punching through soft rotten wood.  As with the process of starting a business or trying to meditate or write a book, almost no single step in the process is perfect, and some might be downright setbacks, but all taken together and we can bask in the glory of a good view from the top of such achievements.

So often we do not start our project, thinking that we must imagine it in our minds so perfectly that each step will be flawless, all obstacles being anticipated and planned for.  But such a perspective is pure fantasy, just as expecting to have an idea of every step of a hike just by looking at the mountain from afar is a ridiculous notion. 

We must toss the idea of the perfect start and just start.  Any success down the line will simply show that a perfect start was not needed, nor was any other perfect step needed, just that steps are taken.

So when we find an interesting but difficult and unlikely idea tumbling out in our language and in response someone sneers and says “go take a hike.”  Perhaps we should take heed and give it a shot.

RE-SOLVE

January 1st, 2019

Today is the entirely overrated first day of the year when we all try to initiate all sorts of new positive behaviors and attempt to beat back the old bad habits that are all too easy to fall back into.

What exactly are these resolutions?

Re-solution.  As in, solve again, or try a new solution. So to resolve to do something, to have a resolution is to attempt to solve a problem.

This is the core of the word but the often missed point.  Each year we start the same good habits with gusto and motivation and naively think that this year the new difficult behavior will stick for sure!  Our sense of drive and determination is all too quiet when our new, fragile behavior has fallen by the wayside.

This boils down to the simple fact that we are not trying a new and different solution to our age-old problems, we are actually just repeating the old solution that we’ve had in our head for a year or two, or perhaps even decades.

Why does it take us so long to clue into the fact that much of our behavior is fruitlessly repeated without change in the result?  We like to cite the ill-conceived idea that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result and yet everyone is guilty of this sort of contradiction.  Especially in the first weeks and months of the year when the excitement of the arbitrary change of year has worn off.

This problem might have to do with the convincing nature of emotions.  We go through the same self-defeating motions because the pattern of emotion that leads us from one action to the next is the same each time.  It’s quite fitting that the two words motion and emotion differ by one letter. 

Because of this behavioral function, New Year’s resolutions are more like New Year’s Repetitions.

We check our mirrors while driving before changing direction, and so too we should look back and honestly think about how any resolutions a year ago failed.  Why did they fail?  And what can be done differently this time to actually solve the problems we resolve to fix?  What about the manner of our thinking can change in order to find this difference in strategy?

When it comes right down to it, the attempt to change one’s self and one’s behavior is a quest and question of emotional manipulation.   We are often chasing goals because of how we imagine we might feel after the goal is achieved, but then we get sidetracked in our progress because the emotions aroused by the progress or lack thereof are not in line with what we expect or what we hoped for.  Focusing on the pattern and flux of different emotions during the process of behavioral change or building to some achievement or goal is probably far more effective than continually trying to remind one’s self of the imagined emotion that waits at the end of the rainbow’s goal.  We must also take into account the very real possibility that we could be wrong about how we’ll feel once we’ve achieved what we’re looking for.  Like an ambitious student who becomes a doctor but forgets to factor in the small problem that they despise being around sick people.  The achievement can be a doorway to misery, even if it comes along with the status and pomp. 

We are best to focus on editing our process.  Finding the Minimum Viable Success here by chipping the goal into small composite pieces is particularly key here.  By biting off small enough chunks of the problem that we can solve and slowly build upon, we can build real achievements.

Knowing how to manipulate one’s own emotional story in this way is key because it is a skill that can then be utilized for any goal or problem that comes up in life. 

The old proverb ‘know thyself’ has a real and practical meaning here.  Being mindful of our emotional state, it’s fluctuations, it’s trips and forks and what cracks exist where we can wiggle in the thin edge of the wedge and hack our way to a new state is the underlying key to changing ourselves, building progress towards achievements and ultimately reordering our operating system to be optimized for a fulfilling process as opposed to chasing some imaginary state.

None of this applies to just one specific day but is relevant during every day we find ourselves still with the gift of being alive.  Each day is not only an opportunity to work towards a goal, but to learn about our own self a little more deeply and perhaps see with a fuller context just how we might steer the ship in a different direction, for even a change of a single degree leads to radically different places.

This episode references Episode 34: Wiggle, Episode 234: Chipping the Composite, Episode 169: Practicing Insanity, Episode 257: Check your Mirrors, and Episode 200: Think Again

DISTANCE FROM NEUTRAL

December 31st, 2018

For anyone who is out of shape and finds it cold in the winter, it’s an interesting discovery to reflect on just how hot it gets when you go for a challenging hike.  Especially for those out of shape, such a trek becomes an ordeal and the problem of temperature flips.  Instead of too cold, now it’s too hot.  The focus is on the discomfort, the emotional distance from neutral that we find ourselves.

Instead of the fact that the body alone is capable of generating a huge amount of heat.  Our emotional state blinds us from this convenient and useful fact.  No fancy gym or equipment is necessary.  If we want to warm up, it’s only a few dozen squats or pushups or jumping jacks away.

Strangely, the more fit a person is, the less emotional distance they travel from neutral.  Certainly their body still warms up, but the situation is not uncomfortable, it’s welcomed.

This distance from neutral is simultaneously something we seek to increase and something we purport not to want.  This quaint little contradiction of human nature is easily elicited by fact that much more free time is squandered on social media getting revved up about this or that issue instead of sitting quietly in order to develop a meditation practice.  How many minutes, hours, days and probably weeks are spent during a given year seeking out this emotional disturbance instead of cultivating a closeness to neutral?  We watch action movies and dramas because they jerk around our emotions.  And all of this movement is away from a sense of neutral.

Our own mind seems geared against us in this way, constantly reminding us of embarrassing or worrisome things that have happened in the past and conjuring up all sorts of terrible forks by which the future might turn.  All of these anxiety-provoking thoughts simply lead us away from the moment, which is often far more neutral.

Whether it be the fitness of the body or mind, it’s a paradox that in order to actually get closer to neutral and remain close to neutral, it requires a constant effort, a constant drama with our own emotions of laziness and lethargy to work out, and a likewise drama with the mind to let go of this thought and stop chasing that one in order to focus on the simple experience of what is happening in the moment.

While at first glance it might seem like a life as far away from neutral would be more exciting – and indeed it probably is when we stop for a moment to ask what exactly is being excited -  the gift that is absent from such excitement and resides in the calmer, more peaceful states of the brain is the ability to make better decisions for ourselves and those around us.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: BETWEEN QUESTIONS

December 30th, 2018

“Do you think animals ask questions?”

Lucilius looked up from his meal and looked at his good friend who had asked the question.

“I don’t know,” Lucilius said, “I’d never really thought about it.”

“I know that you can teach an ape sign language but the ape’ll never use the language to ask a question.”

“Strange,” Lucilius said, “I wonder if trainers have to instruct all the words, or if the ape can even ask how to sign something like a banana?”

“I don’t know,” Lucilius’ friend responded.  “Curious.”

That night Lucilius had a dream where he spent an eternity compiling all of the questions into a single place.  In the dream Lucilius was writing in it right up until the very end of time, streaming every nuanced forking ponderance of advanced AI’s as they cracked open black holes, searching for every last little piece of knowledge about the universe. 

Lucilius woke up and laid in bed a moment pondering this catalogue of questions.  He wondered about all the questions he had asked during his time alive and for the first time wondered about the quality of questions he had been asking.

Certainly there were countless ways to ask the same question and poke at the same unknown sentiment, but were there perhaps better quality questions?

As has always been said, no question is a bad question, but that had never ruled out the fact that some questions are certainly better than others. 

Without getting out of bed Lucilius picked up a small notebook on his bedside table and opened it to the first blank page.  He wrote at the top ‘Catalogue Q’, and resolved to try and live the next year of his life through a search for better questions, by cataloging them, analyzing them, and honing them.

In the beginning Lucilius thought he was making much headway with his life: breaking down problems into finer and finer questions that were answered more easily and for a number of months he saw an immense improvement in his productivity and progress.

But after a while, as he began to curiously look back on his pages of questions through a sense of pride for carrying out the small experiment, he started looking at his answered questions differently.  Time and space from the older questions gave him a new perspective and he started to see the answers he had found to these questions as stale, but also itching in a strange way.  Naturally, a question popped into his mind as a way of testing and ultimately splitting the answers he had found.  He flipped back to a blank page and began to write more questions based on the older ones he thought he had laid to rest.  He wrote feverishly until he had reworded most all the questions he had come up with during the experiment, and then he settled down upon the core problem.  He sat back from his catalogue and mused aloud:

“To wonder is a kind of question.  Or to imagine, or dream.  It’s all a kind of question about reality.  But to take any kind of next step on what we might wonder or imagine or dream requires honing down that vague question into something more specific, something concrete with which we can test reality with.”

He paused, wondering more.

“But any kind of answer we might find to any question we ask really just improves what we know about reality, and so it changes the sort of mental environment in which we can imagine and dream up possibilities.  It goes back and forth.”

Years later when Lucilius’ Godson was an adolescent, he sought advice from his godfather.  He called him up and complained about a lack of motivation, a feeling of aimlessness and purposelessness.

“How,” he asked his godfather, “can I get moving?”

“Answers exist between questions,” Lucilius told the boy.

“That’s your answer to my question?”

“Yes, but what does it tell you is next after this answer?”

“Another question?” the boy queried.

“You got it,” Lucilius said, “time to ask yourself a better question.”