ITERATE

August 14th, 2018

Groundhog day is a movie where the main character experiences the same day over and over. It’s the exact same day, Groundhog day, and he has to endure the same celebration in a small town over and over and over.

The main character, played by Bill Murray hates the beginning of the process and tries in vain to get away from it all.  He even resorts to suicide.  But alas, he is given the same day once again.

He finally comes to a sort of peace with the situation and begins to embody a frame of mind that is less based on being imposed upon by external circumstances, to a perspective that is more akin to “What the hell, might as well do something with the time.”

This is where the character begins to change and blossom.

He begins to explore and more importantly he begins to ITERATE.

With piano lessons, with ice sculpture, with all sorts of things.

He devotes a little of each day to iterating on this or that project.

And in each areas, things begin to COMPOUND.

The most brilliant part about the movie is not that the character gets the gift of a seemingly infinite repeating day.

The brilliant part of the movie is that it’s really not any much different from normal life.

Yes, different things happen from day to day.  But with routine, structure and schedule, we can make our own Groundhog day, and in so doing create repeating spaces were we can make progress on all sorts of fronts.

One good one is waking up.

For a lot of people, waking up is a painful, difficult, miserable process.  The reason why it’s often difficult is because our focus is backward.  We are thinking about how comfortable and restful it was to be asleep. 

But what happens if similar good feelings apply to the things we are about to do?  Like waking up early to open gifts on a holiday, or get going for a vacation that has been in the works for a while.

Or how about a project that we’ve been making progress on.

What is the project is an insanely simple one.

What if the project is just to wake up with more drive and motivation?

How might we accomplish this repeating feat?

No formula will work for everyone and this is why it’s so important to ITERATE  the process and try to find what works.

It might help to replace the alarm clock with a coffee maker that brews on a timer.  It might be helpful to adopt a cold shower routine first thing in the morning.  Or doing pushups or stretches or meditation or figuring out what the best food to give the body first thing might be.

Regardless of what the final formula for the best possible morning wake – up routine might be, the most important thing to undertake is the process of Iterating.

We may find that we can always make it a little better.

And in so doing we never hit a plateau. 

We are living a trend. 

The truly strange thing about embodying a living trend with any sort of iterating project that we attempt to improve ourselves through is that with any kind of consistency and perseverance, we can perpetually experience a better version of ourselves.  This would mean that every moment is a time when we are better, which effectively means we are perpetually experiencing the best existence we’ve experienced because our ability to engage with reality supersedes all prior moments.

Of course no one functions on this kind of upward trend.  We all fall a few paces behind in this or that respect or with this project or that hope.  But the prospect is still one to shoot for, because it is a perspective that offers a high probability for improving. 

This episode references Episode 80: Compound. If you’d like to fully explore the reference, please check out that episode next.

NEXT LEVEL

August 13th, 2018

How many levels are there?  This is a fairly straight-forward question when it comes to a video game.  It’s like a book.  There’s a first page.  A beginning, a middle and eventually that last page comes around and hopefully, if the writing is good enough and the imagination of the game developers is creative enough, that last little bit of the book or the game is as satisfying as possible.   A paragraph, or level, or boss character to defeat that requires the context and skills of the entire game or book in order to succeed or truly appreciate. 

What about life?

Often we here people say colloquially  “That’s some next level stuff”.

But what does this mean?

How many levels are there?

Is there a glass ceiling of growth that we cannot go beyond as individuals?  A final plateau that we are forever stuck on, running flat toward an infinite horizon, forever unable to attain anything higher, more expansive in context?

No.

As humans, we can always keep growing.  The problem is that the process either gets cut short, or we start to go in the other direction: we start to decay.

Remember, it’s best not to rest on one’s own laurels.  Our minds are sharks and if they are not moving forward, they are dying.

If our brains are not challenged with learning and new knowledge, then our brains are decaying.

It seems that the shifting nature of the present does not allow for much stability.  As much as we like to fool ourselves otherwise.

Each moment is either a moment of growth and learning

or

it is a moment of decay and oblivion.

For the depressed mind, staring at the past and seeing a lack of accomplishments might be akin to chewing on some kind of masochistic gristle, and in turn hinder or downright prevent any change for the better as the focus on the past determines the future by perpetuating the past.

We must remember that the present moment is a TIGHTROPE, where neither the past nor the future actually exist.

Our next action is constantly a blank slate, no matter the past, no matter our accomplishments or lack thereof. 

Focusing on the past too much results in decay and oblivion.  Fearing the future or fantasizing about it too much likewise is a recipe for the decay and oblivion of the moment.

Each moment is a choice between decay or growth. 

We can sink back down a level and let more time pass us by.

Or we can LEVEL-UP and grow. 

The truly incredible piece about being alive is that while we know where the bottom level is, whether it be beginning with birth or decaying into death, we do not know where the top is. 

As far as we know, there are infinite levels above us through which we might ITERATE. 

All of us can, within a minute or two, think of areas in our life that we’d like to be better.  Areas where we’d like to LEVEL-UP.

Often the steps to gain that next level are fairly simple, straight-forward and even blatantly obvious.

Figuring out the steps to the next level is not the hard part.

The part we seem to have so much difficulty with is choosing in the moment to take those steps, one after another, consistently, by paying mindful attention to what we are doing during that moment.

This episode references Episode 42: Level-Up and Episode 88 Tightrope.  If you’d like to fully explore these episodes, please check them out next.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: NORMAL IS THE NEW CRAZY

August 12th, 2018

Early in the Twenty-First century, Lucilius found himself on a bus, tired and staring at a woman who was clearly homeless and lacking in the sort of mental stability that was considered normal at the time.  Lucilius was very tired and did not realize how off-putting his staring might be.  He was looking at the details of this woman’s poverty.  The cheap stretch pants that teenage girls had worn a decade prior, a jean jacket that had the wrist cuffs chewed off, and a faux Louis Vuitton suitcase that was mended with duct tape along one side.  The front of the suitcase was bedazzled with small, fake, plastic jewels to make a unicorn head.

Lucilius, being so tired, dazed off into a blurry middle space, and did not realize he was still looking directly at the woman.

On the quiet bus, she noticed and yelled.

“What the fuck do you think YOU’RE looking at?”

Abruptly, Lucilius snapped back to attention, realizing the woman was speaking to him, realizing his casual mistake of staring haphazardly, but rudely in her direction.

Lucilius quickly wondered what response he might say.  He could ignore this woman.  It was common practice to just ignore the loudly less fortunate.  He could spit words back at her in the manner she had.

But this is a person, Lucilius thought.  And he had been looking in her direction, not out of some perverse sense of anthropological disgust, but with genuine interest.

“I was looking at your bag,”  Lucilius said.  “I really like the unicorn head.”

The enraged woman’s face softened.

“Oh,” she said.  “Why thank you.  I did it myself.”

“How long did it take?”

“This?  Oh just a day or two. Had to do it twice cause I didn’t have enough sparkly bits and didn’t realize, so I had to make it smaller.”

The bus lurched to a stop and the woman realized in a fluster that she had to get going.  She propped herself up and gathered her belongings and started shuffling toward the door. 

She stopped where Lucilius stood and smiled quickly at him.

“Nice talking to you.”

“You too,” Lucilius said.

The woman shuffled off the bus humming and walked into the night.

Interesting, Lucilius thought.  Lucilius looked around the bus at all the other people.  None of them seemed phased by the interaction in any way.  Normal, Lucilius wondered.  This is what normal is supposed to be.  There was something uniform about all the people left on the bus.  Something subdued.  Something sadly insane. 

Normal is crazy, Lucilius thought.  Because it’s safe and nothing is more dangerous than playing it safe.

GROW GILLS

August 11th, 2018

The brain might not be able to shape-shift as fast as a chameleon changes colors, but it certainly has the ability to change itself drastically over time, if there is enough pressure or curiosity. 

One way to think about our shifts of perspectives is to think of our personality like an evolving organism.    It can be inspiring just to think about how many changes some organisms have gone through to reach their current form. 

Take whales for example.  They started off as a sea-creature, evolved into a land creature, and then returned to the ocean to become the biggest animal on the planet today.  These sorts of iterations take much time because the lifetimes of such creatures are so long.

Fruit flies on the other hand are used in experiments because they iterate so fast.  They are lucky to live for a month and a half.  Such a short lifespan is a boon to researchers who wish to observe changes between generations.

But what about the evolution of the mind?

Surely none of us can claim to be the same sort of person that we were when we were 5 years old.  And only a sadly short-sighted 80 year-old is going to claim they are the exact same person they were when 18 years old. 

It’s clear we change over time, and naturally this must be a result of changes in our brain. 

As with exercising the body, it’s equally clear that mental hardship only does the brain good: solving a problem is far healthier for the brain then endless hours in front of a languid sitcom.

Often we are hurried along to perform the same task day-in and day-out at a job or due to the obligations of family.  A lack of variety is akin to a languid sitcom in this case.

But we do not PAUSE to consider the ramifications.

Indeed it’s often painful to PAUSE because to do so involves facing some hard truths about the way we spend out time and it can be sad, disheartening experience to realize that our life does not match our PRIORITIES.  And we humans have a fantastically detrimental ability to avoid such experiences. 

But if we can endure that uncomfortable space.

Like a creature diving farther down into the water for sustenance.

We might evolve super-efficient lungs.

Or… if we hold our breath long enough, we might just grow gills.

Just imagine this super-power:  The ability to do with ease anything that is uncomfortable, taxing, difficult or scary. 

This is like a person who takes cold showers merely on the principle that it’s an exercise of will.

If this kind of vigilance over one’s self could be extended to all areas of life, what might we be capable of?

What might we achieve?

How much more of that unknown depth might we explore if we could grow gills?

This episode references Episode 23: PAUSE and Episode 10: PRIORITIES, if you’d like to explore these references further, please check out those episodes next.

THE CLEAVER

August 10th, 2018

The WELL OILED ZOOM is the ability to zoom in and out on subjects.  It’s akin to seeing the forest and then taking a look at a single leaf or vice versa.  It’s an incredibly important skill to have because otherwise it can be like walking around looking at the world through a TUBE.   Just try to imagine driving a car looking through a pair of binoculars. 

Sometimes, however, things can get to the point where our ZOOM is effectively stuck, and life is constantly focused on one thing.  Those who experience depression or anxiety might feel as though their zoom is stuck in this way in the sense that repetitive and negative thoughts are often a hallmark of these experiences.

If such a sort of condition were literalized as  a tube someone felt forced to perpetually view the world through, how eager would a person crave a way to chop down that TUBE, to get that zoom working again and see the world in a different, larger, more generous way?

One important avenue is is to use THE ONLY TOOL, which is a method of designing a series of questions that create better questions.   Asking the right question can be like taking a CLEAVER to the tube stuck to our own narrowly focused view. 

THE ONLY TOOL is merely the act of finding a better question.

Perhaps we feel as though we have asked all the questions we can, but this is a hall mark of a ZOOM that is stuck.

The key to building a CLEAVER is remembering that there is always a better question we can ask.  A better question we can ask of ourselves.  A better question we can ask about our situation.  A better question we can ask about the questions we’ve thought of so far.  A question that can sharpen a question, and in so doing cut through whatever fog keeps us from seeing a more generous, wondrous life that we can explore creatively and curiously.

This episode references Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom, Episode 30: The Only Tool, and Episode 113: The Tube.  If you’d like to fully understand those references, please check out those episodes next.