A LUCILIUS PARABLE: PERFECT PLAN

January 6th, 2019

Once when Lucilius was a young boy, he fell and broke his leg and was confined to his room while the bone healed.  But while lying in bed and remembering the pain when he fell, Lucilius began to fear the future.  The boy’s anxiety rose to such a pitch that even after his body was healed, he remained secluded in his room. 

He became completely obsessed with a future he could not see, and such unknown terrified him.  Days turned into months and the days had become all alike as Lucilius resolved to do absolutely nothing. 

An old man, long revered in the community, was caring for him during this time, kindly bringing him meals at regular times, knowing full well that the regularity only helped to entrench young Lucilius’ thinking about the future.

One day the old man entered Lucilius’ room with lunch a little early, and Lucilius remarked,

“You’re early! You’re not supposed to come in for another 10 minutes.”

The old man smiled and left the room with the food and sat down to wait.  When he came back in to give Lucilius his food, he asked:

“What do you think about all day in bed?”

As Lucilius pulled his bowl of soup close, the boy said, “I’m planning my life.”

“You are?”

“Yes, if I can plan everything, then nothing can happen that I don’t like.”

The old man thought for a few moments.  “And how is your plan coming along?”

“I’m almost done,” he said.

“When does it start?”

“I haven’t planned that yet.”

“Don’t you think that’s a good place to start when planning something so big?”

Lucilius looked at the old man with a suspicious face.  “Yea, maybe, but I have to finish it first before I know when it starts.” he said.

“But doesn’t the plan change depending on where you start?.”

“I’ll start right here when the plan is finished.”

The old man paused for a moment.  “I guess I meant to say ‘when’ the plan starts. Doesn’t the plan change depending on when it starts?”

“I don’t see why.”

“Well let’s say you start your plan in the middle of the night, but in order to do the first thing in your plan, you need to be able to see outside.  You won’t be able to do that at night as well as you can in the middle of the day.”

“I’ll just wait till the next day,” Lucilius said.

The old man thought for another moment.  “Well, that does work for some things that repeat predictably like night and day, but what about things that don’t repeat everyday like sunrise and night time?”

“Like what?” Lucilius asked.

The old man smiled.  “Like your next good idea about what to do.”

“But that’s what I’m doing.”

“Wait,” the old man exclaimed, “You’re telling me you even planned when you would get the good ideas for your plan?”

Lucilius looked down for a moment, puzzled.  “No, I just wait for them.”

“But that means you’ve found something that’s impossible to plan!”

Young Lucilius frowned at the old man, and turned his concentration back to his soup.  The old man smiled and got up, and as he was leaving young Lucilius’ room, he said “You know I’ve found that I have my best ideas while walking through the woods or climbing mountains.  Can’t claim too many good ones while sitting in bed.”  He didn’t need to look, but could feel how young Lucilius’ face crunched in displeased confusion.

The old man closed the door, and turned around to look where he had affixed a booby-trap to the wall above the young boy’s door – a bowl filled to the brim and carefully secured and balanced on a swivel so that it could tip and dump it’s contents.  He double-checked the date, and muttered,

“just about time.” 

He set up the trip wire for the booby-trap and then sat back down near the warm fireplace where he had a good view of the young boy’s bedroom door.   The trap was set, and he smiled thinking back to that time long ago when he had finally been curious enough to leave his room and the surprise and joy he felt when he was showered in candy. 

How he had come to wake up an old man in the town where he had grown up, he had no idea.  

ZEROING IN ON ZENO

January 5th, 2019

I say ‘Marco’, you say ‘Polo’.  And based on what I hear, which direction it sounds like ‘Polo’ comes from and how faint or loud it is, I move in that direction a certain distance.  I repeat it and call out ‘Marco’ again, and hopefully the response sounds a little closer. 

A basic search algorithm for a set of numbers that seeks to find just one number will query the half way point to see if that half way point is smaller or greater than the number it seeks to find.  Having done this, the search algorithm has eliminated half of the dataset from it’s search.  It then performs the same function on just the remaining half, and it repeats this until it finds the number.

Each time it queries whether the halfway point is larger or smaller than the sought after number, it’s somewhat like calling out ‘Marco’ in the game of Marco-Polo.

Then there is Zeno’s Paradox, which states: if you are travelling from point A to point B, then you have to pass the halfway point between A and B, and while traversing the second half, you have to pass the halfway point of this segment, and in order to traverse the second half of this segment, you again have to cross the halfway point.  And since we can always cut something in two in theory, we never arrive at B because we are busy slicing the remaining distance in half.    Zeno’s paradox holds if there isn’t some kind of smallest possible distance that cannot be divided into two, but this is beyond our scope, and question of large debate among physicists.  Clearly we can get from point A to B but this does not some how negate the usefulness of Zeno’s paradox.

Mathematically, Zeno’s paradox is describing an asymptote.  We can picture a curve on a graph that is always getting closer to a particular number, but never actually arriving.  While Zeno’s paradox is always framed as a curious thought experiment about distance and space, it’s more accurately applied to finding, learning and strategizing.

We might think of a given skill that we can learn, like playing pool.  Our first hour playing might be awful, but as we figure things out, our brain is constantly pivoting back and forth in order to find a method of operating that works in closer concert to our goal.  Quickly the accuracy of our shot goes from not even hitting our indented target on the pool table to trying to get it to ricochet at just the right angle.  We are making smaller and smaller adjustments as we move forward.

Or we might think of a sculptor, whether adding clay or removing stone, large amounts of material are being moved to rough out a basic shape, and as the sculptor continues less material is moved with each action until the finishing touches are barely perceptible changes in the form and feature of the sculpture.

Or we might think of switchbacks that lead up a mountain.  At the base each switchback is long, but as we get closer to the top there is literally less room for each switchback so we pivot faster, more often but on a much smaller scale. 

In the case of pool, each shot being taken is slowly zeroing in on a better understanding of the geometry involved.  For the sculpture, the artist slowly zeroes in on just the right size and shape in order to convey the object they portray, and for the hiker, it’s as simple as zeroing in on the top. 

All learning incorporates a kind of search algorithm like this that helps us zero in our skills and fine-tune our efforts.  We start with large leaps, cutting half the dataset out of our perspective, and then slowly work our way towards tiny steps, until we are fine-tuning on such a small scale that there is nearly nothing left to cut in half, or certainly nothing we can easily perceive that can be improved upon. 

This is why, when a friend shows an impressive project, we might be astonished but the creator is likely to disagree somewhat and say that it could be better.  As a mere observer our ability to recognize the interaction of all details pales in comparison to the creator who is zoomed in to the project and sees it with a fine-tooth comb.

It may seem like Zeno made a mistake by applying a principle to the wrong domain, but it’s clear his creative command of concepts zeroed in on just the kind of brain teaser that would last for millennia.

This episode references Episode 8: Tiny Steps and Leaps, and Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom and Episode 72: Perseverance vs. Pivot

IF YOU WILL

January 4th, 2019

This phrase is defined as being used to politely invite a listener or reader to do something or to entertain a fanciful term.

It’s fairly straightforward with regards to asking someone to do something. But why ask with a fanciful term?

Is this just a relic of earlier times when perhaps conventions in language were more formal in the same way that the word ‘please’ comes from the phrase ‘if it pleases you’?

Perhaps, but even so, the lingering linguistic tendency can be usefully interpreted regardless.

So much of the dialogue that goes on is a kind of battle where points are launched in debate against one another.  Arguments abound and a phrase like ‘if you will’ strikes a completely opposite tenor from the tone we often see, most particularly on social media and the news. 

‘If you will’, is an invitation, asked with kindness, to be generous.  Generous with what? we might ask? 

Generous with our perspective, if you will.

Our perspective is a kind of place in the conceptual and linguistic landscape.  If you will is a gentle request that we move – if only for a moment or two – out of our perspective in order to inhabit a different point and place in the conceptual landscape. 

It’s almost as if to say ‘if you will entertain my idea for just a moment, you might be able to see things how I see them, from the place that I stand.’

The suggestion to ‘walk a mile’ in someone else’s shoes seems to be under-used in the atmosphere of today’s divisively inclined world, but it fits in well here.  The phrase in focus asks,

“If you will step into my shoes”

The phrase is almost demure, and perhaps this attitude is more generous than submissive because it can be read to carry an implicit understanding that it’s difficult to abandon one’s own perspective in favor of trying to truly see and understand what someone else is thinking, feeling, experiencing, and ultimately what they are trying to express.  We are all too often trying to achieve this on our own terms, to express what we are thinking and feeling instead of going on the difficult quest of generously entertaining someone else’s point of view. 

Which is, perhaps, the tragedy of the age, if you will.

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.