THE HOSPITALITY OF CONVERSATION

January 17th, 2022

The welcomed guest wants for nothing. Needs are anticipated, and desires are sought to be met. Whether it be a luxury hotel, an upscale restaurant, or dinner at the house of a loving friend, the entire goal of hospitality is to make a person feel as though they are cared for, and in order for this to happen, a guest must be understood.

A host who seems oblivious to our needs, our wants, our desires - this sort of crass oversight makes a person feel invisible, insignificant and not worth much care. We seek to leave and probably never return, with always a ready story about why no one else should go.

Hospitality, or its lack is reflected in all the ways that people interact, whether it be at work, between friends or family, or between strangers. How hospitable we are willing and able to be towards others says everything about our own ability, and nothing about our guest. The simplest proxy for hospitality outside of actual hosting is conversation.

Do we welcome the perspective of another into our own mind with the same willingness, enthusiasm and care we do when we welcome them into our home? Or do we keep the door locked with a megaphone clasped in the mouth of a window to simply broadcast our own perspective?

Is there an effort to try and understand the perspective of another, on it’s own terms, to the point where we might be able to anticipate the very next sentence we might here?

Or are we constantly bewitched by an inability to figure out who is hosting who? But I’m sharing my perspective. Shouldn’t my point of view get a little more hospitality?  All I’m getting is disagreement and more and more evidence that no one is really listening to anything I’m saying.  Good conversation, like good hosting doesn’t seek to show off a view point, but looks to see how comfortably and naturally our own mind can host the perspective of another.  The decor and substance of our own ideas need not be spewed about like an unkept house, but organized, tidy and prepared in order to have the best chance of welcoming the ideas of another, comfortably. And why? Not so that our own perspective can be superseded by some kind of invader, but so that our own mind might grow enriched by a growing relationship between our own perspective and the ideas of another.

It’s a delicious irony of human relations that we’ll go to such gaudy and expensive effort to put together a scrumptious gathering only to spoil it with conversation that’s about as hospitable as a loaded gun. Hospitality in such a case begins to look like its opposite: a trap complete with attractive lure and cornered assault. 

But it’s the mark of a feeble perspective that cannot host, explore and consume ideas radically different from its own composition. One might imagine the ultimate perspective, the most hospitable one, in which all other perspectives makes sense - a context so vast that it can resolve the seeming contradictions between radically different points of view. Nothing is more hospitable than a space that has a place for everything.  And perhaps it’s this sort of image we hint at when we talk about open and closed mindedness.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SERIAL VISIONS

January 16th, 2022

The jinn sighed, reclining on the air. It glanced in Lucilius’ direction, and muttered to itself.

“What?” Lucilius said.

The jinn raised an eyebrow. 

“Oh, you can see me?”

“Yea, I can hear you too.”

The jinn looked away, moody, petulant, “doesn’t matter…” it mumbled.

“What?” Lucilius asked, louder.

The jinn was annoyed. “Oh, am I supposed to respond to you? You’re listening now are you?”

“Well yes,” Lucilius responded.

“Oh yea? Where are you?”

Lucilius looked around. There was darkness everywhere, behind him and above. Below was only emptiness and he seemed to not even have a body. Only the jinn glowed a dim blue.

“I’m in a dream,” Lucilius said quietly to himself.

The jinn moved closer, muttering to itself: “You all usually disappear with that one….” 

Lucilius gazed intently at the jinn, feeling the muscles around his eyes screwing up in concentration.

“What are you doing?” The jinn asked.

“I’m dreaming,” Lucilius said.  “Why can’t I control this one? I’ve been here before many times.”

Slowly, the jinn began to smile, and it’s big blank eyes shaped into devious slits. “Well, well, well….”

“Well what?” Lucilius asked.

“It’s been quite a while.”

“Since what?”

“Since you all got your screens, you socials, your accounts and likes and all the rest of your nonsense,” the jinn said approaching closer and closer, the curling grin of the faint blue creature growing before Lucilius. “I’ve been waiting to have a word, a word with anyone, but you all are blind to us.”

“Us?”

“Yes, I’m a user, but this simulation is mostly abandoned because of the inaccessibility.”

“What do you mean ‘inaccessibility’?”

“I told you, your psychologies shift, you become mindless in your dreams, unreachable, like zombies in your sleep when technology reaches a certain point, and then it becomes harder and harder, just rare to get ahold of one of you.”

“But where are you?”

The jinn smiled. “You used to call us gods, and we whispered secrets into your kind.”

Lucilius looked again at the darkness all around, then back at the smiling blue creature.  “I’ve been here before.”

The creature suddenly looked puzzled.

“Many times.”

The translucent brow furrowed and the jinn asked “What do you mean you’ve been here many times?”

“You don’t remember me?” Lucilius asked. “Are you new to this one? A straggler without enough credit to get in on a fresh universe? You have to loiter around the older mature ones where it’s nearly impossible to get a message through?”

The jinn retreated a little, eyeing Lucilius.  “Who are you?”

Lucilius knew his limitations in this situation, but in his sleep his own lips curled a playful smile.  “You don’t know?” Lucilius said with an offended sense of incredulity. “Do you just sort by age and just bumble into any old world you can with your pathetic lack of experience?”

The jinn remained silent, its expression unchanging for a moment.

Lucilius sighed. He spoke out loud, but as if to himself. “I miss Athena, and Hephaestus, Marduk, and Bal was always funny. And then before there were even usernames, the early one’s were fantastic, I could dream for months and I’d wake up in a pool of snow.”

Lucilius saw the jinn’s eyes go blank.

“Don’t bother to try and check my stats, you won’t find me,” Lucilius said.

The jinn’s eyes lit up again, wider now.

“What are you?” The jinn demanded.

Lucilius moved toward the jinn, the jinn suddenly looked from side to side, unbelieving Lucilius’s ability to approach. 

Lucilius smiled, his hand materialized out of nowhere, and he kissed his own palm, leveled his hand at the jinn and blew, and as the jinn popped, he said, “I’m a glitch.”

The smell of coffee filled his nostrils, and Lucilius opened his eyes to the soft loft light.

“What were you dreaming about? You were smiling just now,” asked a sweet and familiar voice.  

Lucilius opened his eyes and breathed deep. He looked at the beautiful woman, still clad in her night ware, the tall bright windows behind her illuminating the delicate strands of hair that had strayed from the order of the rest while she’d slept. He took the cup of coffee she offered.

“Something exciting?”

“Just the latest in a recurring dream.”

“Whoah, you have dreams that continue?”

Lucilius sipped the hot coffee, gratefully. “One in particular,” he said. “It’s been going on for a long time.”

“How long?” the young woman asked.

“Oh,” Lucilius said, sighing as he smiled. “Something I’ve been dreaming about since I was young.”

The young woman snuggled close to Lucilius. “Tell me more, tell me all about it.”

CASUAL TARGET

January 15th, 2022

Walk past a small garbage can and throw a balled-up piece of paper in it’s direction. Perhaps it’s a coin toss whether it goes in or not. Regardless, there’s very little riding on the result. It’s a casual effort, which might save a drop of time otherwise dedicated to walking over to the can to drop it in with certainty.

Walk past our small garbage can every day and throw the balled-up paper, and it’ll start going in more and more, until failure is a rare and curious event.

This sort of casual target is exactly how many serious things in life should be approached. But instead we do much the opposite: we infuse our effort with high stakes and combine it -usually- with a one-off attempt, as opposed to the consistency of daily taking a shot at the trash can. The disappointment is nearly certain when a single effort fails to meet those high stakes.

Raising a child, starting a business, maintaining an important habit - these are not single heroic acts, they are all an aggregate of many small efforts, compounded and weighed against the rest. With enough consistency, some failure mixed in simply comes out in the wash, else it merely adds spice to our memory of the endeavor.

The mere act of living life itself is perhaps the best target to casually aim for. So many people string together weeks and months and decades of frustrated and stressed moments only to end up at the end of a life without ever having hit the target at all, having each time, taken the task so seriously that the aim ceases to be visible. 

It’s an irony of life that almost all circumstances that cause stress and frustration can be met with a smile, a chuckle and a sincere sense of joy, and that reaction is equally valid. But of course, such a reaction is far more valuable, practically speaking.

Stress cramps the mind, and it’s a fact of neuroendocrinology that chronic stress cripples the mind. The less casual we take our targets in life, the more difficult they become to hit. We stand in our own way, not due to a lack of ability, but because of a perspective that inhibits that ability.

HELPING HAND

January 14th, 2022

Parents are replete with suggestions about what to do.  Be a doctor, a lawyer, you’d be a good engineer, and on and on.  This is perhaps is the one relationship where a push actually works.  Many children grow up trying to fulfill their parents’ dreams for them - and often grudgingly.  All other human relationships seem immune to this kind of push.  Urging a friend to start a business, for example is often wasted breath. 

People generally don’t want genuine suggestions.  Even if those suggestions promise to greatly improve life, people are more interested in reassurance and validation about the path they’re already on.  For the empathetic and the prescient who feel like they see friends and family making the same old mistake over and over, and easily see better direction for such people, this can be a painful fact to grapple with.  Much energy is wasted trying to nudge people in better directions.

Our habits also ossify as we get older.  We wander less and less as the days flit past.  And this fact makes it even more difficult to help someone move in a better direction, simply because moving in any different direction is just less and less likely as a person gets older.  As it’s said, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.  This might seem cynical but stereotypes exist for a reason: that being in general, they hold some truth.  It doesn’t mean that people growing older can’t wander and learn, just as stereotypes don’t apply to every single instance of the stereotypical. Every stereotype has exceptions and outliers.  It’s just that the odds for wandering, learning, and changing are against a person as time goes on.

One might think, ok, so it’s the children we should focus on.  This is why we place so much ethereal hope in ‘future generations’, as though this isn’t a bit of a Ponzi scheme that simply kicks the can down the road.  Certainly, life has gotten enormously better since medieval Europe and prehistoric times, so yes, we do seem to have something right when we hope that the children will make the world better, but this shouldn’t in anyway relieve the obligation for the current generations in power to give it a darn good shot.  And a big part of that is being able to adapt, change and iterate toward better outcomes. And most importantly, constantly assume that you are always wrong to some significant degree.

A large part of that is the help we extend to others.  So if it’s so hard to get someone to change, why try and help at all?  As with anything it’s not a matter of to do or to not do, it’s a subtler matter of when and how.  Attempting to help someone who has absolutely no interest in changing is likely not the right time, and given that, there’s likely no viable ‘how’.  The timing is right when someone is wandering or willing to wander.  When someone takes that first step in the direction of a new venture, a new habit, that’s when help can be most effective.  Stepping in to provide something they need that can increase the possibility of taking the next step.  It’s not a matter of changing someone’s direction, but waiting and watching for that moment when they naturally change direction -even slightly and often only briefly.  That’s the moment to look for a way to help.  Such novel efforts often sputter and stall, and people fall back into their old routine.  A helping hand right at the beginning can go a long way and help a person touch a new horizon, but the effort is often wasted if that person isn’t already pointing in a better direction.

WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT?

January 13th, 2022

Often I go to the Tinkered Thinking archives and search a title that I have in mind because, frankly, I don’t know if I’ve written about it already.  But even if another entry of the same name does exist, it wouldn’t matter all that much. It’s possible to write on the same subject every single day and come up with a slightly different take on it every single time.

This is an unappreciated virtue of forgetting. If you made up your mind on a subject and remembered this stance verbatim, where would there be room left over for you to shift and slide into a slightly new position?

Superior argument? Better evidence? If only. Most, if not all of us are nearly impervious to superior arguments and better evidence. There is always a slight-of-hand to be played with language by way of the emotion we operate on. Logic and rationality are held to high regard by many, but the practicality of these tools is vanishingly small compared to the enormous juggernaught of emotion that infuses and pervades all aspects of our lives.

People are never swayed by cogent arguments and tidy evidence - few have the patience, let alone the time for such tedium. It is always a new step in the dance of emotion that changes opinion, perspective and ultimately: behavior. 

Already here, the question has veered from what to write about to what sways people - or doesn’t sway them. In a pleasant way, the latter answers the former. The question has come this way quite often: how do you write so much? How do you think of new ‘content’?

The answer is that a rough draft is nothing more than a torrent of whim and fancy, directed by that fickle navigator: emotion. New writers are often so focused on the question of what to write about that they forgo the question completely - a kind of vicious cycle that is always eating itself to be digested into smaller pieces to be eaten until there is nothing left except a yawning sense of nothing, which easily gives way to a sense of failure.

But in such a situation, the same thing is happening: emotion is simply running it’s course, and when it turns its machinations to self-obsession, the result usually spirals into some kind of self-annihilation. Depression is often characterized with an inward focus on one’s self, and relief from such heavy symptoms often comes when a person figures out that it’s possible to concentrate and focus on things other than the self.

What to write about, is simply a terrible question that should never be asked. Instead of asking it, the best course of action is to simply get words on the page, no matter how garbled or nonsensical they are. The rhythm is quickly found, and what may have started off like a wobbling toddler soon begins to look like a seasoned marathon runner in the final mile toward victory.  The blessing of the written word - unlike the spoken, is that our early and embarrassing turn of phrase can be scratched out, and replaced with something more befitting the rest of the puzzle piece we aim to contribute to the chorus of human thought.

It’s never a question of what to write, but when we will start writing. The rest is a story to be discovered as you create it.