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.”

FLOWERS & FRUIT

December 29th, 2018

Visitors never comment on the seeds in the ground.  A gardener knows what work goes into the flower and the fruit, but the early onlooker judges on appearance, not an understanding of the slow process at work.

Even when something finally pierces the surface, there is still no flower nor fruit.  The well versed gardener takes it as a a good sign, a chance to nurture, a chance to start the real work.

Shipping our project is just the start, like planting a seed.  Think for a moment of how much laborious design went into the instructions curled up in that seed.  Generations of flowers and fruits interacting with the world at larger were slowly edited to give that seed a tweak, a nudge in a direction that might better, more useful, more fruitful. 

Seeds are no flash in the pan, though some weeds may sprout early and fast to take advantage where they find, the oak, though tentative and weak at the start, endures long beyond those petty weeds.

Our projects need not wait for the seasons of the world, but may lie in wait for the season of drive and determination.  Some people go through all of life without a single season of courage, without a single season where their efforts flourish and blossom with flowering fruits of labor long in the making.  Just as the good gardener labors for goods that require patience, any goal or project we undertake must be afforded the generosity of that same patience.   Seeds just planted do not sprout overnight but require time and warmth and water.  So too with our projects for we know not when that first searching limb will take root in the larger imagination of our fellow friend and foe, and produce a chance to change things for the better.

Evolution has done the same to you, and invested millions of years in the design of you.  Just as millions of seasons have shaped the curled instructions of seeds, we too have been honed as best as the past could fashion for an unknown tomorrow.   Are you going to pierce the ground and suck in the sun’s energy?  Whether that be the power wrought from a successful business or a high platform affording you the ears of thousands, maybe millions.  What flower and fruit will you proffer for the world at large to take and find nourishment, in order to move forward into a new and unknown tomorrow?

This episode references Episode 65: The Brain Garden

CHECK YOUR MIRRORS

December 28th, 2018

As the year comes to a close, many eagerly or anxiously await the day when a potentially grueling list of new years resolutions comes into effect and we are obligated by plan to try a whole bunch of novel behaviors.

Perhaps such lists have not yet even been written.  Regardless of where in the perennial process we might find ourselves, and regardless if we even take practice in a ritual that often peters out in silently discarded failure, there’s an important preparatory ritual we can perform that has no risk of failure and can in fact bolster the thoughtfulness of preparing for a new year and the changes we’d like to enact.  We can spend a little time looking back on the year that’s coming to an end.

Just as we are instructed as drivers to check our mirrors before changing lanes, we can take a quick glance at what is behind us before heading in a new direction.

One tint of this metaphorical mirror is to view the year through a list of successes and difficulties.

A refreshing result of this sort of practice may for many be the strange realization that successes outnumber difficulties even though we probably anticipated by raw feeling that the opposite would be true.   For those who find this pattern, we might pause for a moment and ponder that perhaps we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about those difficulties and so they feel bigger and more numerous than they actually are.

Such a rear-view perspective can also help us frame goals for the future: which difficulties are still giving us a hard time and need to be remedied?  Perhaps annoyances that have metastasized need to float higher on the priority list.  And perhaps the successes we’ve accrued imply that we need to aim higher and with more ambition.  Perhaps there is a pattern or trend that links our difficulties or successes, a pattern that can help solve our difficulties or capitalize on our successes.

At the very least, this exercise gives us an awareness, just as checking mirrors while driving gives us an idea of what is behind us, spending time thinking about the year past gives us a better idea of how we behave as a person and ultimately who we are. 

We might realize that some things that we hold as top priorities have not gotten any attention or effort whatsoever.  And this difficult possibility highlights something important: namely, the difference between what we think and say, and what we actually do.  Being honest about what we see looking back might be exactly what we need to look forward once more and change direction so that we live more in accordance with who we thought we were.

This episode references Episode 32: Rear-View.