THE ART OF ATTENTION

April 20th, 2021

Imagine for a moment someone looking through your eyes.  Now, putting aside the aspects that could make this an absolute disaster of anxiety production, imagine further that you had a bit of privacy control over this borrowed experience so that the experiment could actually function.  Say for instance it’s turned on only while you are going for a walk.  But in addition to being privy to what you see, the other person hooked into your experience also experiences your attention, your thoughts, and your mood.

Again, putting aside the anxiety that this might cause in a lot of people, let’s just imagine for a moment what it would be like to Shepard the experience of someone else via our own.  Would someone else have a pleasant time being you?

Would they marvel with you at the color and shimmer of cherry blossoms on the trees that line the street, or would they be bound by your bickering mind, hellbent on obsessing over some extraneous detail of life that has nothing to do with this street and the walk you are currently on?

We can imagine - God forbid - getting rated on the quality of attention we have after someone has come along for the ride.  Now before thoughts about being harshly judged come to mind, just imagine what it would be like to score exceptionally.  Imagine someone taking a step into your mind for a few minutes while walking down a street lined with cherry blossoms, and the reaction afterwards is full of compliments, admiration and awe.  

This is how you experience life?

 Can you teach me?

Attention is a bit of an art, and this art is only really addressed in meditation practices, but it’s worth it to wonder if this sort of art might have a wider spectrum of influence than what meditation provides.  

Sports, for example are a form of attentional ability that we judge and score.  We are usually more concerned about someone’s physique, how that gives them an advantage, but when people are evenly matched in terms of strength, speed and general ability, it’s not a matter of what’s possible physically, but what’s possible mentally, and specifically that’s in terms of the quality of attention an athlete brings to the table.  

We might say the same thing about anything competitive, whether it be video games, or chess.  Pending external physical factors, it’s a competition in the quality of one’s attention.  And even better is when someone triumphs despite some kind of external handicap - that’s the real gold we love to hone into because it harks of something uniquely human that allows an underdog to rise above a circumstance.  The underdog rises because of an art in accordance to attention.

Now, realize that at each moment of your life, you are engaged in this art of attention.  You might not be putting any conscious effort into it, but your performance in this realm of art determines everything about your life.  A rich person can be miserable concentrating on the wrong things, and a homeless and impoverished person can experience complete contentment by focusing on the right things.  These things aren’t just possible, they are fairly regular - it’s the ability to craft and mold, nurture and respect one’s attention that creates the separation between the two.  So the question arises: how practiced you in the art of attention?

THE FUTURE OF LANGUAGE

April 19th, 2021

Imagine for a moment what it would be like if everyone knew every single word, and everyone was comfortable using the vast array of vocabulary and jargon that is technically available to us.  Would our ability to communicate improve?  The obvious answer seems as though it would be yes, but would the improvement be totally comprehensive?  Would we suddenly be able to communicate absolutely every conceivable and possible aspect of human experience?  No, of course not.

Language falls disastrously short of the project to capture and transmit human experience.  And yet it’s all we really have.  It’s fun to imagine if future brain machine interface technologies might enable us to achieve a kind of conceptual and emotional telepathy.  It even stands to reason that language might fall out of use, like the typewriter did to the computer.  If the fidelity of communication is much higher when you can have an identical experience to someone else transmitted to you, would this not be a huge leap beyond language?  When someone tries to describe an experience that felt magical or powerful, what if instead of using those rather loose and worn out words someone could simply give you a taste of that experience, why would we ever use language again.

It’s fun to explore some of the further applications, like therapy.  How much good might accrue if we could give each other a sense of different flavors of well being.  Would we simply grow jealous and wish for more like it’s some kind of drug?  Or would the experience itself be transformative?

Future possibilities aside, it’s fantastic to behold all that we’ve accomplished with language despite it’s enormous shortcomings and trappings.  While it often functions like an engine of discord in our enormous family, it has also been the glue of our cooperative powers.  The future of language may might turn the writers and poets into a new kind of luddite, but the implications for a new form of communication may have for our cooperative powers is simply endless: there’s just no telling what miracles we might make real if our ability to understand one another makes a quantum leap.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: NO HOPE

April 18th, 2021

Lucilius could almost reach it, his fingers just barely grazing, but it was too far.  He pulled back, wincing at the pain of his pinches shoulder released from the narrow space.  He gazed again down into the abyss where his old ring had rolled off into, and grimaced.

Then there was a knock at the door.  Lucilius answered it and found the little boy from next door.

“Mom working a double again?”

“Yea, you mind if I hand out over here?”

“Always a treat,” Lucilius said, he pushed the door wider so the kid could enter, and after he closed the door he rolled his shoulder back a few times to try and ease off the pain.

“You ok?” The boy asked.  

“Yea, I just pinched my shoulder trying to get something that fell behind a counter in the kitchen. There’s this weird spot where they skimped on the splashboard…”. He trailed off, and shook his head so to make it seem as though it was nothing.

“What did you lose?”

“A ring.”

“Did you get it back.”

Lucilius shook his head.

“Show me where it fell,” the boy said with a certain confident authority that came with the young pride of someone who had something figured out.  Lucilius showed the boy and he inspected the opening and looked down into the crevice with a quiet, analyzing gaze.  Then the boy seemed to come to a conclusion.  He edged to the lip of the counter and then hopped down.  Briskly he walked out of the kitchen and Lucilius heard his front door open and close.  Lucilius looked down behind the counter again, wondering if maybe he could somehow hook it, but his front door opened again, and this time it clanked oddly several times.  The boy came back into the kitchen wheeling a vacuum along with him.

Lucilius chuckled.  “Smart idea, but then we’re going to have to dig through the vacuums to find it.”

The boy smiled deviously.  He lifted a foot and pulled his shoe off.  Then with a bit more difficultly he pulled his sock off and put it over the the long attachment of the vacuum so it made like a screen.  Then the boy plugged in the vacuum, jumped up on the counter, stuck the noise frustrated attachment down behind the counter and pulled it back up and pointed it at Lucilius, and there, stuck to the sock screen along with a dime and a few pieces of detritus was his ring.  

Lucilius pulled it off and smiled.

The boy killed the vacuum and looked up at Lucilius.

“I bet you could just almost reach it, right?”

“Uh huh…could just about touch it.”

“Yea,” the boy said. “I had the same problem the other day, but my arms are a lot shorter.  Not even a hope.  But..” The boy said, growing contemplative,“…not having hope can be a good thing I guess.” He looked at Lucilius again,  “stops you from trying to make something work that just won’t work.  Makes it a lot easier to give up and figure something else out.”

THE HUMBLE & THE ARROGANT

April 17th, 2021

Arrogant people take pride in themselves. Humble people take pride in other things, like family, friends.

The vectors of attention for each are in opposite directions.  The narcissist is focused inwardly, the humble outwardly.  We think of these two categories as definitive and mutually exclusive, but they represent two parts of a single process.

Fact is, we all start out quite arrogant and narcissistic, frankly because we are helpless.  No one in their right might would bother a friend or loved one in the tremendous and destabilizing way that an infant does.  That wouldn’t just be rude, that would very quickly be the end of a a relationship.  Just imagine, waking a friend up at odd hours of the night, multiple times a night, by screaming and crying in a particularly irritating way.  Not to mention all the other inconveniences that infants inflict upon parents.  This sort of behavior in an adult would be the absolute pinnacle of arrogance and narcism.  There simply is no such thing as a humble infant.

Humility comes later, if someone is lucky and open to the slings and arrows of life.  It’s no surprise that a sheltered life that requires no effort often stokes arrogance and narcism.  Is that because such people genuinely think they are better than others?  Or is it simply due to the fact that no other perspective has been learned to replace it?

Certainly there are some psychopaths who are incapable of the sort of humility that we tend to value in people, but a lot of arrogance may simply be a lack of development in the manner that we hope people would make.

There is of course some worrisome traps along the way.  The hard lessons of reality can lead to a defeated and jaded perspective on life, as though a person has one foot still stuck in the self-obsessed narcissism of infancy, bummed about their own ineffectiveness as a result of having a taste of the notion that there’s more to life than their own idea of it and the role they thought they had as the only protagonist.  

A healthy sense of humility comes when a person realizes that they aren’t alone in this wide dynamic game of life.  This is an insult to the narcism of course, but it also turns out to be a comfort: you aren’t alone, and the loved ones who populate our life become a source of joy and fulfillment that self-importance can never grant.

OLD LOGIC, NEW BEHAVIOR

April 16th, 2021

Society adheres to habits in much the same way that individuals do.  Once in place, they persist, despite new circumstances that call for new behavior.  The logic of the initial behavior or system often becomes outdated with new circumstance.  What created a precedent back then does not account for what is happening now. 

Acting anew is often greeted with skepticism, especially if on the surface it seems hypocritical when compared to the older logic which gave to the behavior being replaced.  But that’s the thing, a new situation calls for a new logic derived from a fresh perspective fit with new variables.  We compare today with yesterday without admitting the radical differences that may now be in place.  On an individual level this sort of thing makes sense.  People don’t change too much and they seem to change less and less as they get older.  And people extrapolate their personal logic to the larger topic of society.  (Hence the fact that people tend to grow a bit more conservative as they get older.). These personal trends, regardless of the reason they exist grow in a way that increasingly ignores the present in favor of an idea that mimics the past.  Somehow we seem to think that the good old days can only be recreated literally and not anew in spirit.

What’s odd about that sort of nostalgic logic is that on average, everyone’s personal past was equipped with far more flexibility and change.  The good old days are marked by the very thing that people become more resistant to as they age.  

This sort of tendency is reflected in bureaucratic settings. Institutions will often hit long periods of stagnancy that have little to no growth because the people in charge of that setting have aged to the point of merely maintaining the status quo.  In many organizations it quite literally requires the retirement of one generation and the promotion of the next in order for some innovative breathing room to inject some life into the institution.  That is until the newly promoted leaders themselves age into complacency.  

The mistake lies primarily in the idea that ‘we’ve seen this before.’  There is much about the present that will just about always look like the past and we can lull ourselves into a false sense of familiarity, having faith that old solutions will work just fine for a situation that looks pretty much like the old one.  But even the slightest nuance can radically shift the reality of circumstance.  Entire frameworks of logic can suddenly be as irrelevant as a house of cards in a gale, yet we’re less likely to think so because behaviour, habit and thought have melded into a heuristic reaction.  We act as though on autopilot, on the feeble hope that old programming will work in totally novel terrain.