A LUCILIUS PARABLE: LAME GAME

December 2nd, 2018

Lucilius was in line waiting to get a cup of coffee when he witnessed a truly unfortunate person.  At the front of a line was a beautiful woman, dressed in fine clothes, sporting an impeccable face of paint and cursed for the moment with the most disgusted of facial expressions.

“This is bullshit,” the woman said.  “I come everyday, how do you not keep it in stock? You know I’m going to be here.  Why can’t you think of these things in advance?”

The woman was clearly upset and making the girl behind the cash register very nervous.

In that moment, Lucilius remembered an instance from a time long ago.  Many centuries prior, Lucilius was bending over, water above his ankles, sticking small grassy seedlings of rice down into the water and ground below.  Sweat gathered and soaked where his hat sat on his head and when a moment of tedious exhaustion overcame him, he stood up straight to help his aching back.

As he did he saw a fellow worker, a friend who was not supposed to work that day, trudging towards him, basket in hand. 

Lucilius watched as the friend threw down the basket and clearly disgruntled, began to work, bending over with the seedlings, sticking them down into the paddy. 

Lucilius looked back down to his own spot where the work remained to be continued.  He finally noticed just how sour all his thoughts had gone that day.  Not only was he exhausted by the course of his day but he felt exhausted and wasted at that point in his life.  Aimless and as fruitless as a stone lodged in the branches of a coconut tree.  He looked back at his friend and realized that they were both having a miserable day.

“What,” he wondered, “could he do to lift them both up?”

He thought of another worker who was often with them who was always having a bad day and never ceased to let everyone know.  That worker Annaj, Lucilius knew, was simply always looking for sympathy, feeding on it like some ravenous parasite, always failing to see just how miserable it made everyone else.

“There must be a way,” Lucilius said out loud to himself, “for both of us to feel better.”  And then an idea bounced into his head. 

“Worth a try,” Lucilius said to himself, and then he turned and slogged off towards his friend. 

“Lebca!” he called out when he was close enough.  Lucilius’ friend Lebca looked up momentarily but kept at the work, angrily sticking the rice seedlings into the ground.

“Can see you’re doing about as well as me today.  You ok?”

“I’m not having a good day,” Lebca said, not looking Lucilius in the face.

“Well, we’ve got the whole day to be here and do this work, and we’ve managed to do it while laughing and smiling before, so why not today?” Lucilius asked.

“Not a good day.”

“Ok,” Lucilius said, “Well, I got a game for you.  It’s lame, but I want to see if it’ll work.  You help me out?”

Lebca did not look up, just kept at it.  “Yea, sure whatever you want.”

“Ok, here it is:  I’m going to yell out something that I’m grateful for, and we will take turns, and the first person who can’t think of one loses.”

Lebca huffed a sarcastic breath, “hu, yea… ok.”

Lucilius turned and slogged back to his spot.  Before starting he watched Lebca for another moment.  “Best to let it marinate for a minute or two, I think,” he said to himself and then got back to work, sticking the green seedlings down into the water.  After a few minutes he stood up again and looked over, seeing Lebca’s anger has mellowed with the work, the dreariness of it setting in, turning his movements to a slower, somber rhythm. 

“I’m grateful you had to come to work Lebca.  I was having just a miserable time here, much like you seem to be having a bad day, and when I looked up and saw you, I instantly felt just a little better.  And so, thank you.”

Lebca halted in his work and looked at Lucilius.  Lebca was struggling to maintain some kind of angry confusion, but his brow was softened.  Lucilius went back to work, and waited.  The minutes passed but finally it came.

“Grateful for you too Lucy,” Lebca grudgingly sighed.

Lucilius was not going to let the start, however small, go.

“I’m grateful that it’s not pissing cold rain, like it was last week when we were working.”

He saw the slightest nod of Lebca’s hat as the memory sank into them both.  Lucilius kept at the planting, and waited.

“I’m grateful Annaj isn’t here.”  They both laughed.  It wasn’t the best, Lucilius figured, but it was better than nothing.

“Grateful I’m healthy, not sick and fat like our boss.”  He saw Lebca nod slightly once more, and Lucilius knew then that he had momentum. 

They kept at it, even once they were both feeling quite a bit better.  Throughout the whole day they laughed and chatted, stumbling across new parts of their lives from the stories they told that added to the game.

Lucilius smiled, remembering that day long ago with Lebca.  It was a game that could not sound more lame if you were in the headspace that needed it most.  Lucilius knew this.  But it had worked so smoothly, so effortlessly.  He remembered as they finished the day trying to simply imagine what it had been like to feel so miserable before his friend had come to work.  All of it was so vague and distant.  So strange that it had felt so all encompassing.

The woman in the line for coffee was now waiting for some other beverage at the other end of the small counter.  She was reading something on her phone, paused to look away as she rolled her eyes.

This episode is dedicated to a Monsieur Lopez.  Cheers Brother.

5TH THOUGHT

December 1st, 2018

Do you know what your fifth thought from now is going to be?

Oddly enough, I have a better probability of knowing what your fifth thought is going to be than you do, simply due to the mere fact that you are reading this or listening to me.

You do not know what is next on the plane of reading or sound until you actually encounter it.  Perhaps a quick opinion, thought, or emotional reaction gets squeezed in between sentences, or perhaps you get distracted and veer away from this content.  But if you stick with it, and you have the requisite resources to comprehend what this content intends, then your mind is being appropriated and guided by this content. 

There is an even easier way to highlight this unsettling fact:

If you were to turn away from this content and do absolutely nothing, can you predict what your fifth thought from the moment you start the exercise will be?  No, not at all.  Thoughts simply arise.  Perhaps we’ve had the thought before and it’s simply repeating, but did we plan the repetition?  Not at all.

Delving into this idea by paying attention to the actual moment-to-moment experience of this unpredictable waterfall of thought and sensation can be a little eerie, though exploring such an area can yield equally unexpected treasures.  This idea often arises once a healthy meditation practice is in full swing and exploring it can allay fears.

It can also highlight the potential importance of scheduling.

We often hope that our will power will somehow magically be strong enough to help us dictate our behavior with ironclad success, but this is a relatively useless habit of self-reassurance.  The reassurance has almost no impact on the future actions we hope we will have the will power to undertake.

Those who are simply productive every single day are operating far more from a habit of doing so rather than being some kind of benevolent dictator of themselves.

If we want to become like such productive people, we need to actually schedule that productivity everyday until such behavior becomes a habit.  There are apparently thresholds of habit formation that accord to 3 days, 7 days, 21 days, and so on and so forth.  Regardless of the actual breakdown for a human brain to rewire itself so that a behavior has a high probability of occurring every single day, it is clear that such habit formation exists and a month seems to be a fairly reliable time interval to rely on for this matter.

Forming a habit is akin to creating a structure of thought that repeats on it’s own.  We might not be able to predict our 5^th thought in a random situation, but with behaviors that we schedule and successfully turn into habits, we can begin to predict what we will do in the future.

For example, what is the probability that brushing your teeth will be among the first 10 things you do in the morning?  Probably fairly high, and since it is fair to reason that actions derive from some sort of thought, it’s equally fair to say that brushing one’s teeth will be somewhere nearer to the first thought of the day.  An organization is occurring with this formation of habit, even if the behavior seems so automatic as to require no thought at all.

More importantly might be to schedule free thought about a given problem.  We can become so ritualized that much of life goes on autopilot and by merely going through the motions we are perhaps at risk of letting the most powerful parts of our brain go to rot.

This is the dynamic, curious, searching, problem-solving part of our brain that requires some unknown to chew on.  This is the opposite of the habitual function of the brain.

But can we combine the two?  Productive people who seem to accomplish a lot have done exactly this. 

They have formed a habit of interacting with the unknown.

Such individuals likewise do not know what that 5^th thought is going to be, but with a habit in place, they are fairly sure that it’ll be used to help unlock the next piece of whatever unknown puzzle they have at hand.

This episode references Episode 44: Autopilot and Episode 188: Customizing Autopilot.

WHAT IS A WORD?

November 30th, 2018

No really, what is it?

We use them near incessantly, but the absence of an immediate definition when asked is a bit uncanny.

What exactly is this thing that we use constantly, with others and ourselves?

The dictionary defines a word as “a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing” and the etymology seems to point towards the verbs ‘to speak, or say’.

Clearly its something that we first started doing with our vocal chords to make sound and then we figured out ways to transpile it into other equivalent forms, like writing.  But still, these are circumstantial aspects.  What exactly is a ‘meaningful element’ as pulled from the definition.

Meaning itself is always explained and extrapolated by the use of a whole lot more other words.  The elusive nature of some kind of core of meaning here can be a bit unsettling, like the search for some kind of intrinsic self. In many religions the word ‘soul’ is used, but go looking for one and it’s quite difficult to find, at least compared to say looking for a cloud, or sunshine, or a person, or a Higgs Bosun Particle.  While it’s beyond the current scope to wonder productively about the relationship between soul and a person, it is curious to wonder if the word ‘soul’ is functioning in much the same way that a whole bunch of other words need to be recruited to establish the meaning of any given word, hence definitions.  For a moment, this sounds like some sort of Ponzi scheme.  Perhaps it is.

What a word primarily does is encapsulate a relationship.  That wordy definition that calls upon all sorts of other words in order to define something is in essence extrapolating the relationship that the word symbolizes using a whole bunch of other words in relation to one another.  

A transitive verb is a good place to explore this.  A transitive verb is simply an action from one object to another.  He poured the coffee, for example describes a relationship between a person and the coffee.  That person does something to the coffee.

But what about a word like coffee?  That’s just a thing, so how is it a relationship?

This requires a step back.  The word coffee, whether heard (by my voice) or read on a screen is not the black bitter liquid that many people drink in the morning to try and jumpstart their haggard brain.  It is either a distinct pattern of sound waves or it is a distinct set of shapes pulled from the alphabet and arranged in the correct order.  If that bitter black liquid was somehow actually manifested every time the word coffee were said or written, we’d have a very strange mess on our hands.  What a word like ‘coffee’ actually does is define a common relationship to reality between people who are familiar with the word.  The word coffee has more to do with talking to each other than it has to do with our actual experience of coffee.

Another way of thinking about word as relationship is to think about university studies.  Somehow, words are being added to each discipline.  Why is this?  As we investigate subjects, the relationships between things become more nuanced.  What this means is that we discover a complexity of relationships inside of relationships, and so our need to describe them arises and a word is born.

We might, for example think about the relationships between people for a moment.  We can describe two people as ‘married’, and that is a very easy way of thinking of a word as a relationship.  But if we take those same two people and place them inside a Truman Show like experiment and watch all of their personal interactions, we might walk away from that voyeurism and say that their relationship is more complicated than previously thought.  The word ‘married’ might not be plump enough to fit every way we see them relate and interact with one another.

Research, in some ways is akin to taking a subject and putting it in that Truman Show like experiment and observing it with a greater degree of attention.  We can again look at the institution of university and realize that the whole darn thing is actually a gargantuan vocabulary lesson.

Before departing from this wordy subject, its important to note the movement inherent in nearly every level of this ponderism.  Relationships are perhaps more productively thought of as processes and not necessarily static objects.  Words shift in their meanings as their use is stretched and moved.  We might be tempted to think of language as a kind of rich tapestry of woven concepts, the placement and weave of each strand denoting the relationships words seek to symbolize.  But this is static.  We are better to think of language as thick vines, weaving in and around one another, growing in all directions, attempting to cover the world, lacing into it at every point and spreading to try and encompass everything. 

What is left to wonder is how language changes the things it seeks to describe.  We might even be tempted to view language as a kind of virus that infects our brains and appropriates our bodies in order to change the environment around us and consequently, the world.  Virus is such a negative word though.  We might be tempted to redefine the relationship we have to language.  Perhaps it is a symbiotic relationship.  It is a nearly infinitely malleable tool that can be refashioned. 

Are you getting everything out of your relationship with language that you could?

ENERGY LEVELS

November 29th, 2018

Who are you when you are tired?

Who are you when you are exhausted?

Who are you when you’ve finished hiking for 12 hours?

Who are you after a cup of coffee?

Who are you in the morning after a heavy night of drinking?

Who are you after 5 successive days of abundant sleep, consistent exercise, and healthy food?

All these situations evoke different personalities from us.  Though we seem to be the same person - the same body walking around and being subjected to these things, the state of consciousness and the probability that we will treat others well varies drastically depending on the situation.

That last one sounds great.  5 successive days of abundant sleep, exercise and healthy food.  But what percentage of people that we encounter during the day even come close to this kind of regiment?  It’s quite possible the answer is none.

Most of us have fallen victim to habits formed from trying to patch up these losses in energy.  We drink loads of caffeine in the morning and then throughout the day, being totally oblivious to the fact that caffeine has a 12 hour half life.  Meaning if you have a cup of coffee at 3pm, then half of the caffeine in that cup will still be working it’s magic at 3am.  No wonder sleep wasn’t all that restful and when the next morning comes, more coffee seems to be the answer, when in reality it added to the problem.

These simple mistakes that snowball into habitual behaviors have a strong influence on who we are.  Regardless of the debate surrounding free will, few people would argue that it’s simply easier to be a nicer version of ourselves when we’re well rested, and that the probability of saying something regretful when exhausted is quite a bit higher in comparison.  While it is possible to make a better mindful choice when our past self has conspired to make things difficult for us by being stingy with all the things that give us energy, it’s silly not to try and make the better choice a bit easier.

Strangely, the path to reversing such bad habitual behaviors is not easy.  It’s a paradox that getting to a better energy level where things feel easier begins with decisions and behavior that is so difficult.

But this paradox presents a kind of compass.  Whatever we are afraid to give up, whatever we are too lazy to do, whatever we crave…  All of these things point us in certain directions and the paradox is realizing that we should march in the opposite direction to many of these urges. 

RACING, SCULPTING

November 28th, 2018

The lens through which we view things can drastically impede our abilities.  For example, a project that we might undertake, such as starting a business, can be forever postponed if we look at it as a sort of race that requires a perfect start.  The outcomes of races generally have a high correlation with how they begin, and so we might hesitate forever with our first step regarding a project because we are trying to imagine the perfect step.

Such projects, however, are more like sculptures.  There is no time limit, though limiting time is often very good for progress and productivity.  More importantly, making a sculpture is not a race.  Pieces can be torn off of a sculpture and refashioned in a way that we cannot go back to a certain part of a race and rerace it. 

This second part about doing one part of a race over is innate to the perspective of perceiving a potential project like a race.  The fear of making that mistake before even starting is not properly picked apart.  Whereas, the sculptor looking at a mound of clay naturally has an inverse perspective:  Whatever progress or mistake is made doesn’t matter, it’s all clay anyway and it can be infinitely molded, until it’s just right.

Lack of motivation is almost always the absence of a good question.

Questions are catalysts that can radically alter the lens through which we look at the world.  Something as simple as: am I looking at this potential project like a race or like a sculpture has the potential to instantly ease the mind of fears that stagnate progress or initiation. 

We’re often compelled to collect quotes and jokes, but we may be better served to collect questions and form a kind of filter with that collection so that when we find ourselves stagnating, hesitating or fearful, we can run the situation through this filter of questions to jostle our perspective of the situation and see if something new reveals itself.

We’re best off to simply start:  what questions are you asking yourself these days?