A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SMALL WINS

April 17th, 2022

Lucilius was tinkering with a giant robotic contraption in his garage. It was a massive complication which - to his perpetual chagrin - wasn’t working. The robot was supposed to become a general laborer to help Lucilius with his other projects but nothing was coming together the way it was supposed to. He was sitting there, trying to run through all the thousands of variables in his mind which a kid walked into the garage and said:

“Hi.”

Lucilius started, startled and turned to see the kid.

“Hello there.”

“Can you teach me to shoot bow and arrow?”

Lucilius raised an eyebrow, now confronted with the refreshing straightforwardness that children can often display.

“Uh, are you from around here?” Lucilius asked, spotting the kid’s bicycle laying on the driveway.

“I live a couple blocks away.”

“And do your parents know where you are?”

“No.”

Lucilius considered the situation for a moment. 

“Do they know you ride your bike around and talk to strangers?”

“Yea.”

“Huh,” Lucilius sounded, “Well, that’s rather … old fashioned of them, I guess. Certainly isn’t progressive,” Lucilius remarked, more for himself.

“So what makes you think I can teach you how to shoot a bow?”

The kid pointed to a corner of the garage, and Lucilius looked, seeing an old compound bow peeking out from a high shelf.

“Well there you go…” Lucilius laughed.

“I saw it while riding by.”

Lucilius looked back at his robotic mess. It would be nice to take a break, he realized. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong anyway.

“Yea sure,” Lucilius said. 

He got down the bow, and a quiver and handed the two to the boy. Then he took some cardboard boxes from the recycling, cut them to create long rectangles, stacked them, and then rolled them all into a tight cylinder which he bound round with duck tape. He grabbed some rope, a fat marker and with the cylinder in hand he motioned for the kid to walk with him. There was a tree on the side of the house that would do nicely, Lucilius figured, thinking about stray arrows flying further into the back yard. He bound the cylinder of cardboard to the tree with rope, parallel to the ground, making one of its ends face the boy. Then he uncapped the marker and scribbled in a bull’s eye.

“How far back should I stand?” The boy asked when all seemed ready.

“That’s a good question,” Lucilius said. “How far back do you think?”

The kid shrugged. “Maybe here?”

“Do you think you can hit the bull’s eye from there?”

“I dunno.”

“Let’s go with a different strategy then. Come over here.”

Lucilius took an arrow from the quiver and helped the boy set it up with the bow directly in front of the target.

“But this is silly.” The boy stated.

Lucilius looked back and forth between the kid and the target right in front of him.

“Why’s it silly?”

“Because the target is right there!”

“But you’ll get a bull’s eye on your first shot, isn’t that cool?”

“Yea but it’s not like a real shot.”

“Well, think of it this way,” Lucilius said. “You could spend all day shooting at this thing from back over there, and eventually at some point, you’ll hit the target. And eventually after that, you’ll probably hit the bull’s eyes. But it’ll take a long time, and it won’t feel good every time you miss. But if we start right here, you’ll have a small win in the bag right at the start.”

“It’s still not a real shot.”

“Ah, but that’s because I’m not thinking about your first shot, I’m think about how to best get you from here, to over there,” Lucilius said, pointing back where the boy had stood previously.

“Go ahead, just for me, take a shot from right here.”

The kid frowned but leveled the bow, concentrated for a moment, and the let the arrow fly, and indeed, it sliced into the wobbly dot Lucilius had scrawled onto the cardboard.

“Nice,” Lucilius said. “Ok, now take a step back.”

The boy did as Lucilius pulled the arrow from the target. “Now try again from there.”

Lucilius repeated this with the boy until he was half a dozen steps away from the target and the arrow’s landing was starting to veer away from the bull’s eye. But with each shot that landed, the boy was getting more and more excited about the process, eager to take the next step back.

On the eighth step back, the arrow hit the edge of the target.

“Ok,” Lucilius said. “Now we have an answer to that question.”

“Which question?” The kid asked.

“How far back should you stand? We found the answer. This is where you should start to practice. When you can hit the bull’s eye from here, you’ll be ready to take another step back.”

The boy pondered the thought, and then he leveled the bow again, concentrated harder and let the arrow fly. This time it landed closer to the center.

“Look at that. Your first nine shots hit the target and a few of them were bull’s eyes. Imagine how you’d be feeling if you missed all of those shots by standing too far away? Do you think you’d be having as much fun as you are now?”

The boy shook his head.

“Small wins, that’s how you start learning anything.”

And as Lucilius watched the boy take his next shot, his own words echoed in his mind. Small wins. He thought back to the monstrosity that was in his garage, and a pained smile grew on his face. He realized that with the entire project, he hadn’t followed his own advice, the simple strategy where success begets more success.

ATTENTIONAL COIN

April 15th, 2022

It’s a casual marvel that we can drive a car and have a conversation simultaneously. No doubt many will remember that this wasn’t always possible. That first time driving was likely high stress, and laser focus. Don’t distract me! But as time goes on and we learn, we learn exactly what needs attention, and what doesn’t. We start off paying attention to everything on the road, and eventually realize that it’s really only necessary to pay attention to potential dangers, freeing up a lot of cognitive energy that we can then put into a conversation with someone in the passenger seat, or on the speaker phone.

It’s fascinating how this split of attention can fluctuate. Hold on a second, while I get through this crazy intersection. 

Now imagine the partner in conversation is a driving instructor, and the task is to talk about your driving as you drive. You need to describe what you are paying attention to, and why. I’m watching the curb because I don’t want to hit it. I’m watching the lights up ahead. I see kids playing close to the street.

Attention is still split, but it’s been folded back on itself, like one side of a coin that can see the other side. This exercise maps on directly to the meditating mind, but instead of driving, it’s your thoughts and the sensations that arrive via your body, be it sound, vision, touch and all the like. 

Can you report on the flux of your thoughts in real time?

It may at first seem like a paradox. Wouldn’t a report on a thought constitute as a thought? Yes, certainly, but there’s a crucial event that takes place. 

Ordinarily we are on a kind of autopilot, as when we effortlessly drive a car. That mental autopilot is dominated by thoughts about the past and the future at the expense of only paying the slightest fraction of attention to the present. When we take a moment to recognize what sort of thought we are currently engaged in, we are switching from the past or future to the present. It’s merely a question about what is happening right now, as opposed to yesterday or tomorrow. This interrupts the train of thought. 

To bring it back to the driving circumstance, it’s possible to get so involved in a conversation with someone on the phone that we lose track of where we are actually trying to go while driving. Where am I going? I missed my turn! This happens all the time, even without a conversation. We can simply be lost in our own thoughts while driving. But imagine this: would it be just as easy to miss your turn if you were constantly talking about your driving experience? No, you’d be doubly focused on what you were doing.

A moment of mindfulness when we realize that we’ve been lost in thought is a lot like realizing you’ve missed your turn. And people who are just beginning to learn how to meditate often see this experience as a failure. Uh! I suck at this! I was having a thought again! But this instance is actually the hallmark of practice. If a person can have enough of these kinds of moments, then they can begin to expand. The time between realizing what thought we were just having and the next stretch of time we are lost in thought grows, and in this space we have the freedom to recognize what’s going on in the moment - how vibrant the visual field is, that tension in the shoulders we’ve been holding and can finally release, the feel and flow of breath.

Strangely, recognizing failure is the first sign of success in meditation. It’s akin to realizing you missed your turn while driving, sooner rather than later. The sooner the mistake is caught, the less distance we need to backtrack, and the more time we save.

For the novice of meditation it’s akin to thinking: wow, imagine if I’d been lost in thought for another decade or two without ever really being present? Could there be any greater success than taking a moment to disconnect from the mind’s incessant jabber to simply be in the present and take some time to appreciate it?

A NEW TYPE OF WATER

April 14th, 2022

It’s not a coincidence that cities pop up near the water, either on the coast or on rivers. Water provided humanity its first truly asymmetric leverage in terms of raw power. We need only consider the task of moving a 1 ton block of stone. Moving it over land is no easy feat, but get it on a boat and suddenly it’s thousands of times easier to move around.

This leverage of movement extends to our own selves. Before the invention of flying, it was often far faster to sail to the other side of a continent than to make the trek on land. And then beyond this leverage of water a la moving things, the movement of water itself can be used to generate enormous power, be it with hydroelectricity or even with a simple water wheel hooked up to a mill or a factory.

Recently, a new type of water has entered the arena of human leverage: it’s the digital realm. And the best way to see the similarity is to think about the visibility of a message. Before we harnessed electricity, messages had to physically move across land by the means of some kind of messenger. Then the telegraph was invented and the age of digital water began to drip into human society. And today we are awash in a flood of this asymmetric realm. Now a single person - with the right knowledge and know how - can build something from scratch this digital ocean, with very few resources, and if conditions are right, the creation can be leveraged to enormous benefit to the creator, and to others.

The modern tech companies are akin to the Dutch East India trading company of several centuries ago. But whereas enormous investment was required to create state-of-the-art sailing ships, that cost of leverage is comparatively minimal.

Framing the comparison yields a particularly delicious metaphor: How do you interact with this new type of water? In the digital age, do you sink? Or can you swim? Or better yet, have you begun building your own ship? Because unlike the watery realm of earth, the new digital water is infinite, and there’s no telling where one might be able to go.

HYPOTHETICAL DESTINATION

April 13th, 2022

Most goals are possible. But whether they are probable or not, is an entirely different question. Probable boils down to a negotiation with reality. Hard work is convincing, but even then probable and possible remain unknown until the imagined happens.

There’s that old eye roll of a koan: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

In this context, it might read this way: If a goal is possible, but no one tries to make it happen, does that mean it’s impossible?

If all is said and done and something that was possible in theory never actually comes to light, does this mean that by the laws of cause and effect in a deterministic universe that such things actually aren’t possible, even if all the ingredients for their being seem quaintly at hand.

The colloquial version of this is reminiscent of something Wayne Gretzky apparently said: you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Is a shot not taken an impossible shot?

Well yes. We have no way of rolling back time to make an attempt. 

Hypothetical destinations, be they goals, aspirations, or even real places never yet visited all remain more in the realm of fantasy and imagination, unless direct and persistent and relentless action is taken towards such things.

FISHERMAN RUNAWAY & IDEOLOGIES

April 12th, 2022

A peacock’s tail can seem very strange and out of place. An astute child can look at the bird and think about the house cat that can catch a much smaller and faster bird and wonder what exactly is going on with this extravagantly vulnerable creature we call a peacock. I remember thinking this as a kid, thinking about how I wouldn’t want to drag that plume behind me wherever I went.

Apparently a peacock’s feather made Darwin sick to his stomach because it seemed at odds with natural selection. That was, of course, before sexual selection was added as a subset of forces in natural selection. The basic premise is that a member of a species can gain a lot of mating status if they can quite elegantly support a whole bunch of meaningless luxury and beauty. In this sense, a peacock’s feather is no different than a Louis Vuitton handbag, or a a Lamborghini. They are all signals used in mating rituals.

There is a downside to this grandiose effort of evolution. The peacock’s tail can simply get too long to the point where it impedes other necessities. There are some extinct species of elk that drove themselves to extinction by selecting for antlers that were so big that the males couldn’t even lift their heads. Suddenly a strategy for mating dominance undermines…actual survival, and this is called Fisherman runaway.

The same concept seems to apply to a lot of ideology. A culture and cult arises around an idea or a set of ideas and the cult and culture supports and propagates these ideas despite their inefficacy. There’s a disturbing amount of present day thinking and debate that can fit -tragically- as an example of Fisherman runaway as applied to ideology.

We become so convinced of the goodness of a particular idea or belief, that it takes little else to bring us to war in the name of the idea. Just think of how many religious wars have been fought, where each side truly believed their particular god was the one true god. Regardless of your religious preference, you can still appreciate that the losing side of such battles may have faired better with a little . . . doubt. It begs one to wonder if a little doubt can go a long way when ideologies and beliefs become one-way trips to the gallows.

This might seem callous and dishonest, but faith might be the ultimate example of Fisherman runaway, because faith isn’t supposed to have a limit, and like a textbook example, it’s clipped quite a few branches of the human family. The question boils down this: is it better to die today for an idea, or live to see another day when a better idea might arise? Death need not even enter the picture, because most arguments and debates devolve into this kind of fatalism anyways.

The use of the Fisherman runaway principle here is to get at a deeper question. Given any particular belief or cherished idea, it’s crucial and perhaps even painful to ask: Why exactly do I hold on to this belief or idea? Is it because it’s actually true? Or are the reasons far more intertwined with my social network than I’m willing to admit?