SLIDING UP

June 21st, 2018

This episode references episode 33 entitled Rose-Colored Cuffs. If you'd like to fully understand the reference, it's suggested that you check out that post first.

We do not install slides where we have staircases for obvious reasons. Slides are fantastic. . .

But only in one direction. 

Every person past playground-age has experienced the difficult results of testing the hypothesis of whether it is possible to go UP a slide. Just like this kid.

Often our success is dependent on a good pair of sneakers and a strong grip. 

Inevitably the stairs prove to be far more convenient.

These structures, and the images evoked by the way we interact with them – or rather the way we try to interact with them can provide some kinder understanding to some of our thoughtfully bad habits:

Our love of conclusions.

Our subsequent tendency to pigeonhole people. . .

Our discomfort with uncertainty.

Our fear of the unknown, the untried & the untested.

On a large enough scale, progress looks much like a staircase. Take this staircase for example.

This staircase, much like the playground staircase, is a ripe analogy.

Each plateau is a rest, a pause between efforts.

And effort here is defined as an interaction with that uncertain space. The space between each stair, between each little plateau. It is the space where failure might creep in. Where we might take a wrong turn. A space that takes energy to interact with in order to make something happen.

Indeed, even when trying to go UP a slide, we invoke the same strategy. With each teetering step, the child tries to grip the slide like a stair. We pause to take a breath, regain balance, and continue.

Each step is like a current conclusion. The last idea we had that panned out. And now we are in a different place, a better place, a higher place with a better perspective, a bigger context. The pattern of the staircase illuminates the solution for getting stuck.

This is often what happens though. We reach a conclusion and we stay there. We get stuck. We get lazy, and we forget what we probably look like from higher up on the staircase.

We form a specific idea about someone, and having reached that conclusion, our ideas about that person stay there, right on that stair and we may be guilty of shackling them with ROSE-COLORED-CUFFS. Totally ignorant of a better perspective, a bigger, more generous context.

Sometimes a person may surprise us. And we are vaulted up a few stairs. 

Somehow, we always seem to forget the surprise and apply it to the future.

We forget that there are more stairs.

In every single aspect of our lives we are climbing a staircase, or usually, just standing in the middle of a staircase, our eyes trained down, locked on the current context. Too lazy to look up and continue the hard work.

Learning something new is climbing a staircase. And each little ‘ah ha!’ moment is the triumph over that uncertain space, when our new footing – a higher footing – is found.

Sometimes the next step is high above, and it’s as if we need to climb a slide to get up there.

Often times this is what we see, looking up at a slide from the bottom. We think, “well that’s not meant to go up.” So we stop. We stay where we are. We climb other stairs. Stairs that still look like stairs. The easy stuff. The low-hanging fruit.

Often times we’d benefit from a little more of that rebellious spirit we all had as kids, when we were willing to entertain ridiculous hypothesizes, testing them, just for the fuck of it, to test our own ability, to test our own ridiculousness.

But then again, if human progress is shaped like that sloping staircase, it shows that walking up the stairs quickly fails as a strategy. The same way low-hanging fruit is easy, but runs out quickly.

To get to the next step, it’s more like climbing a slide.

Enduring the uncertainty for longer.

Entertaining the untried, the untested, and gripping the way up any which way we can, inventing new strategies as we go, and doing our absolute best to do the impossible,

to slide up.

P.S. With practice, with the right idea, the right strategy, or the right technology, getting up that slide can be exhilharating, fast and mindblowing. Like this.

RATE OF CHANGE: NOT IN MY LIFETIME!

June 20th, 2018

It is worth noting that in 1901, Wilbur Wright said to his brother. . .

 

 

 “Man will not fly for 50 years.”

 

 

 

This was not a dejected, negative reaction to one of their failures.  This was an honest prediction.*

 

*I think it’s fair to surmise this because of two auxiliary points:  Once after a failed flight attempt when Wilbur really was feeling down, he said that man won’t fly for a thousand years.  This has the proper hyperbole of a person feeling like a failure.  The other point is that the 50 year prediction is part of a larger quote that assures Wilbur’s attempt to make an accurate prediction. It also encapsulates the main point of this post:

 

“I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years… .  Ever since, I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions” – Wilbur Wright, in a speech to the Aero Club of France, 5 November 1908

 

 

 

Wilbur Wright was one half of the Wright Brothers, who invented the first airplane.  They accomplished this two years after Wilbur made the above prediction.

 

Two years.

 

Here was a man who was about as close to the invention of flying as you could get at the time.  Someone who thought about the subject deeply – who sought to make progress.  We could say that Wilbur, at the time, was one of only two world-class experts in aviation.

 

And yet, his estimation for how long it would take was 25 times more than what actually happened.

 

2 years later they had figured it out. 

 

We expect our experts to be a bit more accurate.

 

 

 

That Wilbur’s dreams were realized in only 2 years is not the most important part of this story.  What happened 67 years later says far more about Wilbur’s poor ability to predict than his dream being realized in 2 years.  What happened 67 years later?

 

 

We put a man on the moon.**

 

 

 

 

From no flight to moon landings.  In a breathtakingly short amount of time. 

 

A little more than a hundred years before Orville and Wilbur cracked the mystery of the bird, the first steam locomotive was invented.    And before that was thousands and thousands of years of walking or trusting an animal to do your walking for you. 

 

Progress follows a very counter-intuitive trend.  While it can crash, stagnate and plateau for long periods of time… when progress is occurring, it does not look like a steady even climb.  It’s more like SLIDING UP by driving a motorcycle at full speed up a slide.

 

 

 

 

Computers used to be giant, slow monsters that cost millions of dollars.  Today they fit in our pockets and not only are they 1,000’s of times cheaper.  They are millions of times more powerful. 

 

When people talk about nanobots, and AI, our default reaction is disbelief fueling doubt.  But if we look on a large enough time line, we can see just how little time is needed for huge changes.

 

It might be worth pausing to think more carefully the next time we hear something and feel the urge to say….

 

 

Not in my lifetime!

 

 

 

 

 

 

**It’s also important to note that Wilbur’s ’50 year’ prediction overshoots the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947.  While the moon landing is more iconic and therefore more useful in this post.  Breaking the sound barrier deserves special merit, simply because it probably wasn’t imaginable.  Going to the moon was imaginable (though not believable) because it was clearly a place, and we are familiar with going from one place to another.  But we were not so familiar with special events that occur at obscure thresholds – like the sound barrier.  Wilbur could have looked at the moon and imagined himself up there looking back.  It’s doubtful that he could have imagined a sonic boom.

 

 

 

 

What unpredictable sonic booms might lie in the future?

THE BRAIN GARDEN

June 19th, 2018

A mature redwood is a huge, robust and magnificent creature to behold.  But if you replanted it in a dessert, it would surely die.  And the seed to create such a gargantuan tree would do no better in the middle of that desert.  Such majestic creatures only appear after the terrain has gone through many different stages of growth.

 

Give a desert a little water, consistently, and grasses will appear.  Flowers.  Some shrubs. 

 

If nurtured further, small trees start to pop up.   Then the fast-growing evergreens.

 

Then finally the slower deciduous trees.

 

But the process takes time.  Growing takes time. 

 

And some things cannot even begin to grow until they have the support of other mature growths. 

 

There is no fast-track to a deep majestic forest.  Those things take time.

 

This blueprint of growth upon growth is a good metaphor for the brain and the way it changes.

 

There is no fast-track to wisdom, health and clear creativity.  These things take time.

 

While ‘drive’ can be a great thing.  It can kill if applied to something that needs to grow a little more to support it.  Like the amount of sun in a desert.  All those forest creatures need the sun.  But too much of just that one thing.  And you get death.  Or water.  Too much and it will drown the young saplings, or wash them away all together.  In the right balance though, something can be nurtured.  Until you get to the point of grand rain forests that create their own weather. 

 

 

 

It can be very exciting to suddenly feel dedicated, motivated and charged up to change yourself and your life for the better.  But such excitement can be like putting up billboards of expectation in your mind. 

 

And expectation is the sole parent of disappointment. 

 

Be kind and careful.  If you feel as though your mind has been like a barren desert that you have slowly been dying in.  Do not expect to turn around and find a forest.  In the heat and torture of such places, we can see mirages of what we want that desert to be.  That excitement can be like a great wash of water over the barren land.  And from it a short superbloom can flower.  And that can be a start, a single-first step on the long road to a deep forest.  Without care though, the fever dream worsens and the mirage is replaced with an even worse nightmare. 

 

Most of all, cultivate patience.  When moments of charge and dedication and motivation visit.  Treat it like you would a gas pedal when you notice your empty fuel-tank light click on.  Savor and make it last, till you get to the next moment – maybe a little accomplishment – that feels like a pit stop, a tiny celebration, even if you’re just recharging the battery a little.  Just enough to get to the next point on your path.

 

These moments add up.  In ways we do not see nor understand.  Like bland grasses, then shrubs.  All the while we are looking up to see trees, but see only sky, unknowing of what grows beneath our view. 

 

In the same way that a meditation practice takes a few months of dedication before you see results. 

 

Or muscles that are growing with a new workout routine, but remain unseen as the pounds surrounding shed so slowly. 

 

But surely.   With a steady practice and patience.

 

The mind is a garden.  Cultivate it.  Particularly that one little tree that will shield the others from too much sun, and hold water in the ground with its roots during dry times – the one that will help all the rest:

 

Patience.

ROOTS OR ANCHORS

June 18th, 2018

To put down roots.  This is a pretty common phrase.  To ‘settle down’, have a home, start a family.  All that.

 

I contest the roots part.  Especially today when nearly everyone can get on a plane or two and hop around.  Just a hundred and some years ago, travel was a big endeavor.  Now it can happen on a whim. 

 

It’s perhaps useful to remember that our ambulating species was a restless, wandering, nomadic migrating people much much longer than we have been sitting wheat-eaters.  The adoption of the word ‘root’ in light of the agricultural revolution is perhaps even more fitting.

 

 

 

Though more has happened since.  And the hunt is clearly still on our minds. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The anchor is a better metaphor.  The quaint idea of growing up and living in the same town for a whole life is quickly becoming a nostalgic ‘once upon a time.’

 

We move.  And while the wanderers might be said to drift, we all have an anchor we can drop.  A movable root.  And isn’t this preferable, if not also more accurate?

 

A storm comes, we can set our anchor against it.  Or.   Slip cables and run the winds, all the while carrying with us the chance, the tool to sit and stick when the place and time are right.  For how long?  It’s pompous to say. 

 

The weatherman is far better at his job than we are at predicting the future.  But that doesn’t mean he’s good at his job.

THE ETYMOLOGY OF FEAR

June 17th, 2018

This episode references episode 57 entitled Compass.  If you’d like to fully understand the reference, please listen to that episode first.

 

 

 

 

Words are like people, in that they have parents and grandparents and great grandparents. . . and so on and so forth.

 

An easy example is ‘blog’.  It originally came from web-log. 

 

Apparently two syllables was too many and we just had to shorten it to the truly unfortunate and sebaceous sounding blog.

 

 

 

The parents of the word fear are predictable: things like ‘taunt’ and ‘danger’, stuff like that.

 

But.

 

If you go far enough back.

 

 

 

All the way back to the Proto-Indo-european root . . . ?

 

The word ‘fear’ is simply a lengthening of the verbal root ‘per-‘ 

 

 

 

What does the proto-indo-european verbal root ‘per’ mean? 

 

‘per-‘ means:

 

to try, to risk.

 

 

 

Fear means try?

 

Risk makes sense.  We fear losing what we risk.

 

When we ‘try’ something, we risk failing.

 

 

 

 

 

One last tangent: what does ‘ex-‘ mean?

 

‘Ex’ means ‘out of’.

 

 

 

Knowing these roots, how can we interpret the word ‘Experiment’ ?

 

Ex – Per – iment.

 

Out of fear.

 

Experience.

 

Out of fear.

 

Or rather:

 

from trying.

 

 

The only way to face fear is to experiment, to face the possibility of trying, and to get something out of trying. 

 

Knowing the meanings of these pieces, we can see an expert might be interpreted as someone who has risked and tried to a huge extent in their field.  They have pulled knowledge from the experience of trying new things.  An expert has literally pulled expertise out of fear.

 

In this way, fear can be a very useful COMPASS.