THE DOOR AND THE DARK STAIRCASE

October 30th, 2018

Imagine for a moment an old two story house, like one you might find in a quaint town in the Midwest of the United States, or perhaps New England.

Often in such houses, on the second floor, often in the guest bedroom or the second bedroom there will be a door that seems at first glance to be a second closet.  But open it and directly behind it is a dark staircase.  A staircase that leads up to a dark attic.

If this sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel, then perhaps that is appropriate.  Ascending to a dark and unknown place is bound to be fraught with a sense of fear.

Picture something else for a moment: a long corridor of doors.  Open a door and perhaps it leads to another room or corridor filled with doors, but every once in a while, we open a door and there is a dark staircase.

This is a simple architectural analogy for opportunities in life.  Opportunities are often spoken of with the allusion of doors.  We’re all familiar with the adage: “one door closes, another door opens” but our image of the eerie staircase right behind the door perhaps paints a more accurate picture of the experience of an opportunity.  Real opportunity in life comes with a signal of fear>.  Often it is couched in the possibility of our failure, or the idea that everyone will think our idea is stupid or silly.  The whole gambit of human dread is available and almost always frames the doorway of real opportunity.  And so the menacing Stephen king-esque stairway to some unknown height is perfectly placed.  A staircase as an analogy is a literal levelling-up.   By climbing a staircase we literally level up from our current level to the next one.  So why shouldn’t the doorways of opportunity be coupled with the looming staircase behind?

Could such foreboding darkness that we look up into be more appropriate for the fear that comes along with trying something new?  I think not.

Such darkness may simply symbolize our inability to see the future.  Relative to bright daylight, we are virtually blind in the dark. 

But if we can gather courage and take the first step.  Perhaps our eyes will adjust ever so slightly. 

We might not be able to see the future, but the next step we can take might become a little more clear.  Like a stepping stone emerging in the fog, even if we cannot see it, we can reach out with our foot and feel around for a secure place to step, and perhaps with luck, it’ll be a step up.

The fascinating thing about courage is that it functions like a muscle.  The more we exercise it, the better it performs, and with enough training the whole concept of ‘having courage’ can feel like a habit, like a routine – we can grow so comfortable with tempting fate with our resolve and hard work that when scary staircases or monstrous obstacles present themselves, we don’t simply get to work, we can smile, and laughingly lean into such situations, to feel out this dark and unknown path or hurdle this monstrous obstacle. 

As with anything, the first time is always the scariest and most difficult.   Not because of the actual task at hand, but because of how it exists within our mind.

Fear, as we’ve explored before here on Tinkered Thinking is simply the price of entry for engaging with the unknown.  But as with anything that we might engage in, whether it be buying in bulk or being a loyal customer, the price of entry gets less and less the more we engage.  Simply put,  the more fear you face, the less fear you feel.

The reason why we are stimulated by horror movies along side dramas and comedies is that some parts of life can be as scary as a horror movie, like when we wake up, go about our day and some opportunity comes up, and for a moment we freeze, like opening a door and finding behind it some dark staircase.

With doorknob in hand, we would be best to thoughtfully pause, and look up into the darkness.  We might want to remember the heroes from our favorite stories and movies.  We might even be bold enough to grow curious about such darkness and think..

“I wonder what’s up there.”

Perhaps we might even respond to our own question.  We might think….

“There’s only one way to find out.”

This episode references two foundational episodes of Tinkered Thinking: Episode 63: The Etymology of Fear and Episode 42: Level-Up.

THAT'S STRANGE

October 29th, 2018

It’s often reiterated that most scientific breakthroughs arise from a moment when a scientist or researcher get’s an unexpected result, and pauses, thinking to themselves “Huh, that’s strange.”

Such is the reaction when something counter-intuitive happens, and here we would do well to note exactly what counter-intuitive means.

Intuition in this case really just refers to our feelings.  How we feel about a given choice, what we feel a given outcome will be, or which set of outcomes are most likely.   Without much of a second thought, we rely on a feeling to divine an answer.  Such divination is, of course based on our whole life’s experience, but then it’s exactly this sort of reason that makes our intuition systemically blind to unexpected results.  Unless, of course, we have given substantial thought and practice to the difficult art of tempering our intuition with a knowledge that unexpected and even unimagined things can happen.  Even with such tempering, our intuition is still largely responsible for most of our decisions, which is unfortunate: because it leaves us far less likely to entertain possible solutions that might actually solve some of our problems.

Take the common difficulty of being tired.  The solution might seem like drinking coffee, or some other caffeinated drink.  We might do so without realizing that the half-life of caffeine is 12 hours, meaning that 12 hours after drinking a cup of coffee, half of that caffeine is still floating around in our system having an effect.  This is bound to have an ill effect on how we sleep, and inevitably lead to feeling tired the next day.  In the same way that alcohol is joked as being both a problem and it’s cure, a cup of coffee slides into the same position as yesterday’s coffee keeps our sleep from properly rejuvenating our body and mind.

It seems counter-intuitive to get rid of the intuitive solution.  I.E. get rid of the coffee altogether.  If someone were somehow able to convince us of entertaining a strategy that just doesn’t feel right, but ends up working better than our previous solutions, we might reflect on the situation and thinking “huh, that’s strange.”

If we experience this enough times, or even hear about such things happening enough times, we might be able to foster a very healthy doubt to combat our all-too-flawed intuition when it comes to certain decisions.  Whenever there is an opportunity to systematically and safely try different strategies, we would do well to scrap any input from our intuition altogether.  It is our feelings and intuition that can keep us stubbornly tethered to a bad line of thinking and behaving for years and years, and without the useful tool of skepticism applied to our own intuition, we can remain slaves to our past, which is, at the end of the day, a fairly limited data set about what is possible and what works.

Like the scientist who does not even realize the impending breakthrough when she says “huh, that’s strange,” we should eagerly seek such situations and revelations about our own life.  Each time we try something counter-intuitive that produces a result that we never anticipated, we are indeed growing the data set we carry around about what’s possible, and the more things we are aware of that are possible, the more agency we can evoke as people in the world. 

It’s counter-intuitive, but fostering a determination to hunt down the areas were you are wrong actually makes you more accurate and precise in the long term.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: PEEK-A-BOO MAGIC

October 28th, 2018

Lucilius found himself honored with the opportunity to be a Godfather.  He sat before the smiling infant and wondered what thoughts were running through the child’s mind.  Such thoughts could scarcely be anything couched in words, but more like a kaleidoscope of concept, Lucilius concluded. 

He decided to play the age-old game with the child.  He covered his face with his hands, and then after a few moments, he smiled, opened his hands and said:

Peek-a-Boo!

The young child squealed in delight and surprise at the sight of Lucilius’ face.  Lucilius covered his face once more and the child’s delight simmered down to the usual quiet babble.  He smiled, opened his hands once more and repeated:

Peek-a-Boo!

The child squealed again with delight, and what seemed to Lucilius an equal amount of surprise.

He sat for a moment, smiling at his Godson.  Thinking.

The godson’s mother watched Lucilius’ curious face from across the room, and her new-mother-nerves made her cautiously curious.

“What’s up over there?”

Lucilius looked over at his godson’s mother.  “Oh nothing, I was just thinking about this peek-a-boo thing that we do with kids.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Well,” Lucilius said, looking at his godson, “ he probably doesn’t yet have a full grasp as to what constitutes a hand, let alone be able to recognize my hands.  It’s faces that we probably learn first.  Yours is most definitely the very first, and that makes fairly intuitive sense… you are his sole source of nourishment and where he’s spent most time.”

“Yea, ok.  What’s that got to do with peek-a-boo?”

“Well, peek-a-boo doesn’t work with anyone older.  We all know wha t’s going on, and when a person covers their face, there’s no surprise when they take their hands away.”

“Yea, ok, so?” 

“I was just thinking about what must be going on in his head when we play peek-a-boo.”

“Well he can’t see you anymore so he thinks you’re gone and he’s happy when you show up again, whereas I know you haven’t actually left.”

“Yea, I think you’re spot on,” Lucilius said.  “But what occurred to me is what it would take for someone older, like us, to have the same level of surprise.”

“What do you mean?”

“I guess like a magic trick.  A magician will count on the thing that we take for granted, which is that when we cover our hand with something, it’s still there behind our hand, like my face here when I play peek-a-boo.  The magician does some sort of switch so that when the result is uncovered there’s been some kind of unanticipated change and that’s how we get that little thrill of excitement like this little guy gets when I play peek-a-boo.”

“I’d never thought of that, but I guess that makes sense.”

“Yea, but I think the cool part is, that this guy wouldn’t get a thrill from the magic trick.”  Lucilius looked to the mother to see if she was following his thinking.

“No… I guess he wouldn’t.”

“Yea… he doesn’t expect anything because he hasn’t learned that my face is still behind my hands when I hold them in place.”

The mother thought for a moment.  And Lucilius continued.

“In some sense, he’s having a more authentic version of reality than we are.  For him, things are simply arising in consciousness, and he’s taking them as they come, whereas we create a story that we go along with, and – for the most part- reality seems to go along with our story because what we’ve figured out is generally accurate, but then there are those simple and easy magic tricks turn us into infants again for a moment.”

The mother looked at her son with a strange look of appreciation.  “yea, you know, it’s been interesting to watch him slowly learn little things.”

Lucilius laughed.  “Perhaps it’s a mistake to learn some of the things we think we know.”

The mother laughed in turn.  “Tell that to my husband.”

Lucilius smiled and turned back to his godson.  He covered his face for a moment and then, smiling, took them away again.

Peek-a-boo

PEBBLE OR SEED?

October 27th, 2018

Anyone new to gardening might pick up a seed and even after close inspection have no idea whether they hold a seed or a pebble.

Imagine such a novice gardener planting a small pebble and nurturing the soil tenderly with hopes that it will sprout and bloom.

Because of that initial mistake, there’s simply no amount of TLC that is going to get a pebble to sprout.  Much energy might be wasted, doubts may rise, motivation may resurge, and all manner of strategy may be employed, but in the end, a pebble is no seed.

The generation of ideas does well to take into account this mistake of seed and pebbles.  Often the generation of a new idea is more important than dwelling on the development of a prior idea.  This becomes a hazy and vague line.   It’s good to persevere and push through adversity, but doing so could just be adding to a sunk-cost that never yields any of the success we might look or hope for.  When is perseverance and pushing through adversity a good idea and when does it become clear that it’s time to stop and pivot? 

For example, it’s generally established within the scientific community that meditation does not yield noticeable brain changes for at least three months.  The subjective experience of such results might be difficult to pin down, but if it were fair to say that a person also does not experience much change in the way of subjective experience until this three month period is accrued, it would be a shame for anyone who stops after two and a half months.  Such a person might give up the practice, thinking that what they’d been nurturing was just a pebble when in reality they were feeding an Infernal Parking Meter  (See episode 78 for what constitutes an Infernal Parking Meter).

The problem of pebble or seed may be more a question of scope.  Plants and trees generally produce lots of seeds for the same exact reason that a  gardener should not fuss over any given seed that may be a pebble in disguise: even some of the seeds don’t sprout.  In this respect we have zoomed out to a larger picture.  We see gardening on a larger scale and realize that in order to grow a whole garden, we cannot obsess over the possibility of one small flower. 

We can take such an image and apply it to our individual financial strategy.  Wealthy people rarely only have one source of income, they have many.  While many of us devote the majority of our time and effort to one job, like a gardener who cares for only one plant, a wealthy individual is generally stimulated by the process of nurturing many incomes.   In this respect, it suddenly makes sense that losing one’s job is one of the most stressful things that can happen in a person’s life.  Losing just one source of income out of many is never mentioned in the same company.  For equally obvious reason: all is not lost if there are auxiliary sources of income in place.

The productive writer also benefits from such a practice.  Following the first idea just about never pans out.  One writer once referred to the practice as akin to sifting for gold: going through a lot of material and only occasionally finding small useful nuggets.    But tiny shiny pieces stand out from pebbles far better than seeds and the whole difficulty of whether to try and develop an idea or move on is lost. 

We might want to ask ourselves at this point:  how do I know if I have a pebble or a seed?  Should I just move on?

We can spend years gazing at the darn little thing, and we might make the mistake of thinking all those wasted years are proof that what we have is indeed no seed because it’s never sprouted.

The mistake here is of a different order.

If we never ship a project, we’ll never even have the chance to nurture it.

If we don’t write down the idea, we won’t see if it leads to a bigger idea.

If we don’t open up our business concept to the market, we’ll never know if it’ll yield another income.

Simply,

If we don’t plant what we have in our hand, we won’t know if it’ll sprout.

This episode references Episode 78: Infernal Parking Meter and Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom.

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

October 26th, 2018

Such a phrase is pinned to the passive dreamers.  Those who seem to do a lot of thinking, or day dreaming and not much action.

They might have a look as though they are far away, as though they imagine themselves in a different place from where their body is, often thinking of some kind of idyllic future, or nostalgic past.

The problem is quite the opposite from being far removed from one’s self.  Someone with their head in the clouds would be hard pressed to be more isolated from those clouds, the sky, and anything around them.  They are in fact buried within themselves, lost in a made-up story of their own making.  A narrative that can be increasingly fraught with inaccuracy when cut off from reality.  This is a kind of blindness, one that can be worse than the loss of eyesight, for it robs a person of the greatest gift we have: the present.

Being lost in thought isn’t much different from having one’s head in the clouds.  Such prolonged ‘thinking’ has almost no lasting effect unless we act on such thoughts or translate them in some way, through writing or some other medium.  Chances are high that all that thinking is just a waste of the present.

We’d do well to ask: how often do I have my head in the clouds?  How often am I lost in thought?

Nothing is more powerful than being present in the here and now.  The present is our only tool for shaping the future, but if we have our head in the clouds we relinquish that tool and we will fail to see that particular opportunity passing by that could make tomorrow look more like that vision we see in the clouds.