PANDORA'S SATELLITE

July 30th, 2018

In the public arena, switching one’s stance on a subject is often an act akin to shooting one’s own foot.  Which is strange considering a moving target is harder to hit.

It probably has to do with our fear of uncertainty and randomness.  If someone shifts their opinion, we worry what else about them might shift.   Unfortunately we love certain definitiveness.  We like to categorize things and have them stay put.  Just imagine if while cleaning your room, objects meandered about at random.  Establishing a sense of order would be an infuriating endeavor to say the least.  (Perhaps this is why the parents of toddlers can get so stressed.)

As a population of people we expect individuals, especially those in the media spotlight to be like lighthouses that never shift.  Indeed a moving lighthouse would be the worst nightmare for someone trying to navigate and many sailors have been deceived and killed by bandits who lead them onto rocks by impersonating a lighthouse’s flame in the wrong place.

The expectation is an unfair one.  No one fully figures out everything, and because of that we must understand that people will and should shift in their views and their understanding of things as they live and learn.

As individuals, how shall we best think about the possible perspectives that can be taken of any given subject?

Any given subject should not be treated like a painting for which we stand in front of and look at from pretty much one angle. 

We need to be agile and on the move and treat any given subject like a sculpture.  Something you walk around and look at from many angles.    We might trace a circle around a sculpture, and in doing so it’s important to remember that any given circle has an infinite number of points on it. 

But even a circle is limited in the way that you can view a sculpture or a picture.

Think for a moment of the artist who made the sculpture.  While sculpting, how many perspectives did they take while working?  Such an artist likely had a ladder on hand to look at it from all sorts of angles above the sculpture.  Such an artist also probably had the sculpture elevated so that the artist could crouch down and look at it from many lower angles.  In all, the artist is trying to consider the work from a sphere of perspectives.  This is probably not done in some orderly fashion either, like tracing an equator around the piece and then moving up a few degrees of latitude and looking at it from a higher tighter circle around the sculpture.

We are all fairly familiar with the story of Pandora’s Box.  It was opened and out spilled a chaotic mix of evils.

Pandora has an interesting name though.  Pan means ‘all’ and ‘dora’ means gift.  Perhaps her box contained the wrong sort of gift, but imagine if she had a satellite.  What kind of a gift would that be?

Pandora’s Satellite would move around the earth in any and all directions, looking at the earth from every possible point of view.  Like the artist looking at their own sculpture, we would benefit from thinking about Pandora’s Satellite, and ask: “How else can I look at this subject?”  Remember, just like points on a circle or a sphere, there’s an infinite number of ways to look at anything.  Should we be so trusting and certain of our own opinion on any given topic?  Or would it be more beneficial to entertain a few other ways of walking around a subject.

It would even do some good to entertain that original fear of uncertainty and randomness and even embody it.  Taking a view of a subject from a random set of points is going to make much quicker work of figuring out what you’re looking at then starting at one point and making an ant’s crawl around the subject.

And also remember when someone switches their opinion on a subject.  Perhaps they’ve got a better understanding of the subject by entertaining other points of view and a new one just proves to be more useful.

This episode references Episode 103: Opinion or POV, Episode 69: Two Eyes, Episode 81: Walk and Talking, Episode 8: Tiny Steps & Leaps  If you haven’t checked out those episodes yet, they would definitely be great starting points for this episode.

OCCASION

July 29th, 2018

Present someone with the occasion, and what happens? 

Throwing out an interesting and contentious topic into just about any group of people will GENERATE the occasion for just about any and all to jostle and joust against one another in order to gain the floor to share their wisdom, their logic, their common sense, their infallible feeling . . . and perhaps first and foremost their ability to out-argue and grasp at some elusive sense of ‘winning’.

What do these people do without the occasion to jury and joust?

Most often, we remain passive.  The most active thing we do is to look for passive activities. 

(Thank you Facebook Feed, Reddit, and Instagram)

Only with the right occasion do we seem naturally impelled to become active.  Forced by work, goaded by a social group, instructed by school.

Indeed, we may have years of poorly structured, instructive schooling to thank for this built-in passivity. 

Once school has ended, how many of us simply wait?  Wait for the next occasion.  When something is asked of us.

Some go back to school.  Is it in part so that we can again have the assignment?  So we can be handed the occasion to actually do something.    The backbone of this decision is about the ‘credential’ that lies at the end of additional schooling.  The legitimacy that enables us to get an interview and say,

“I’m legit, I did this stuff, when certified people asked me to.”

Is it more impressive or less impressive to go through the schooling on one’s own, say via online courses and independent study?

I went to school.  I have this piece of paper.

Or.

I taught myself.  I figured it out.

Indeed the first is supposed to give us the later.  But school misses the most important step.  It fails to teach the near infinite malleability of the moment.  That during any given moment while watching the fourth season of a show, we can turn the T.V. off, put away the tub of ice cream, and go find something interesting and difficult to delve into.

The years of occasions that school offers us... so that we may rise up to the occasion… always fails to imbue us with a more important lesson:

We must craft our own occasion. 

And then rise to it.

This episode referenced Episode 93: The Generator, if you’d like to fully understand the reference, please check out that episode next.

PULL-STRING

July 28th, 2018

This episode references Episode 101 entitled RESPONSIBILITY and Episode 23: PAUSE  If you haven’t read that episode it’s highly recommended you do so before listening to this episode.

If RESPONSIBILITY is the ability to respond to things that happen in our lives, we must also think about the manner in which we respond.

Ability to respond should not be mistaken for merely responding in any capacity whatsoever.  Being able means being effective, which means selecting the appropriate response and executing it diligently.

Just because we can muster some kind of action in response to a life circumstance, does not mean we are necessarily picking the correct response.

This call-and-response dance that we must engage in with our life can breed a bad habit of responding in a canned number of ways, like a pull-string toy.

If we experience anxiety about our station in life, do we respond the same way by buckling down and working harder longer hours at the same dead-end job?  Doing this repeatedly does not simply perpetuate the problem.  It’s recreating the problem anew. 

Think about this for a moment. 

The response to anxiety becomes the thing that creates the conditions for anxiety to arise.  How backward is this?  We like to regard ourselves as smart thinking human beings that would not fall for this kind of silly trap, but this iatrogenic habit is everywhere keeping us imprisoned in the lives and personalities that we wish to grow beyond.

Another example that really makes this sort of bad cycle obvious is the experience of looking in the mirror and not liking what we find.  How do we respond?  Well if the response is to quell feelings of depression and little self-worth instead of the underlying problem, then we are more likely to make ourselves feel better with short-term solutions, like a bowl of ice-cream.    The dopamine fix will make us feel better  faster than anything.  But as we all know, it doesn’t last.  More importantly though, the response to the problem helps perpetuate the problem, indeed, once again, it creates the problem.  This is like the pull-string on a toy.  Repeating one of a few rotating responses to things that happen in life. 

How do we begin to unravel this ever-tightening knot?  How do we rip the pull-string out, root and stem and become smarter and more agile with our responses to circumstance?

The first piece of this puzzle is to recognize what exactly the response is addressing.  The answer is more obvious in the second example.  The response of eating ice-cream is addressing the depressed feelings, not the cause of the depressive problems.   Addressing the actual cause would require the opposite of what we feel like doing in the moment.

The analysis is the same for the first situation.  The response is geared towards the feeling of anxiety and not the cause of that anxiety.    Recognizing the difference between an unpleasant emotion and it’s cause is the first step to loosening this vicious cycle knot.

The second is to think carefully about a better response to the initial circumstance, the real problem at hand.

Both of these require only one thing: a thoughtful PAUSE.  Before reacting, we must regain a sense of calm.  Only then are we most likely to think clearly about what would actually make our life better.

OPINION OR POV

July 27th, 2018

What is the difference between an Opinion and a Point of View?

We might jump to the quick thought that they are the same thing.  But then why two?  Why not just one word?

Words shift in their meanings.  They shift by subtle changes in connotations that then begin to have a long-term effect on changes in definitions. 

A connotation is an additional idea or feeling that a word invokes aside from it’s primary definition. 

So what might we say is the connotative difference between Opinion and Point of View?

Sometimes, this sort of comparative juxtaposition can benefit from throwing in a third word and seeing which word gravitates closer.  Let’s take this word:

Belief.

Which one is closer?  Most people would probably say that Opinion is closer to a belief than Point of View.

Both are considered nouns, but Point of View implies more than just a static entity.

Why?  Perhaps it’s because the word View is also a noun and a verb.  The word ‘Point’ also has the implication of being located in a larger space. 

There is something about this phrase ‘Point of View’ that is simply a little more active than the standalone word Opinion. Point of View has the connotation that it can change at any moment.  The view can change by merely changing the location of the point.  Take a tiny step in any direction and suddenly the view changes.  It also evokes a sense of it’s own limitation: the larger space implied naturally includes other points from which we might view the subject.  And perhaps most importantly, Point of View has an outward focus – literally.  There is a clear separation between the actual thing that is being viewed, and the observer who can see it from one specific side or another specific side if only the point of viewing is changed.

The word opinion does not do this nearly as effectively.  Opinion is more inwardly focused.  A declaration of someone’s belief more than it is an observation of something going on in reality.  It’s a static noun that does not even imply the possibility of change. 

So often, when asked a question, we are expected to have some kind of fully thought out response ready on hand, as though speaking were merely a matter of looking up an entry already written and logged somewhere in our brain. 

How often do our responses in these circumstances trap us into commitments of belief and expectations of action and behavior that we quickly find ourselves disagreeing with?

How can we take a can-opener to the whole concept of opinion and give our minds a little more breathing room to consider subjects with more thoughtfulness?  Can we design our language to make room for changes in our own point of view? 

How about this:  the next time someone asks you about something, even if you’ve thought deeply about it, try this:

“I’m not sure what I think about this, but the way I see it right now….”

Sometimes we forget how much we have changed over the years.  We need to remember that this also applies to the future:  we are going to change, for better or worse, but luckily we can choose.  One step in doing so is to make a habit of designing our language to anticipate, and facilitate how we might change in the future.  Only if we are thoughtful, can we change for the better.  Setting ourselves up for a smoother, easier transition will simply let a better perspective and a better life arrive a little sooner.

This episode references Episode 69: Two Eyes.  If you’d like to fully understand the reference, please check out that episode next.

FROM ZEUS' HEAD

July 26th, 2018

In Greek Mythology, Athena is born one day when Zeus has a headache. Someone cleaves his head with an ax and his daughter Athena pops out, fully grown in full battle armor.

If only our hopes and dreams could materialize in the real world in such a spectacular and wishfully quick fashion. 

Alas, while some people’s migraines might feel like headaches fit only for Olympians, our projects and endeavors almost never occur in the same divine fashion.

But this is how we often think of other people’s accomplishments.  When someone has a book published, how many of us are quick to think that we could never accomplish such a feat?

Or someone who cycles across North America.  How many are quick to box themselves into the category of people who could never do such a thing?

Why do we look at the book or the cross-country trip and fail to think of all the little bits of time it took to accomplish?  Perhaps because we only ever see the fully formed Athena in full battle armor. 

It’s effectively a magic trick.  Of course we’re smart enough to know that writing a book must have taken loads of time that was not necessarily filled with the sort of creative spectacle that Athena’s birth entails, but somehow we seem to forget it.  Perhaps it has to do with that old adage: out of sight, out of mind.

A cross-country cycling trip is just a matter of going for a bike ride in one direction every day for a couple months.

Writing a book is just a matter of sitting down everyday and throwing words at a screen for a little while.

Have an Athena-sized idea?

Best not to hope for a headache.  Best not even to think of it as a fully formed idea.  Maybe just take a first casual step.  And repeat that casual effort everyday, and see what happens, who knows what new coast you might find.