OFF BEAT

April 28th, 2021

The days that compose weeks and the weeks that compose months bare a strange similarity to music.  Songs are at once incredibly repetitive and also striving to delight with something new.  This is an odd challenge: how do you present something familiar while making it novel?  This is the task of artists of all kinds, musicians, even companies, programmers, writers and dare we mention politicians.  We are constantly trying to conserve the good of the past while introducing new material that might improve the future.  That’s what we’re constantly trying to do: to get the best of both worlds, those worlds being both the past and the imagined future.

On an individual level, we are living out a song composed by the beat of days.  All sorts of life events come along to disrupt that beat.  A good night of drinking with friends or a tough sleepless night attending to a new born - our beat is constantly experiencing the disruptions of life’s anomalies, and yet, it’s still bound to the rotation of light and dark, or communal sleep and waking, despite how much or little we get to take part in each.

We all go off beat from time to time, whether by design or by force of circumstance.  In a larger sense these departures texture the winding structure of our life, no matter how uncomfortable the experience is.  The departure casts out into a strange direction from which we have to find our way back, like an asymptote, always trying to arrive at the perfect day, that perfect beat.

PERMISSION FORGIVEN

April 27th, 2021

If they don’t say you can’t, you can, and you probably should.  But a little ignorance can be a great benefit in this area.  So many people fail to try new things because of the limiting sense that permission is required.  In nearly all such circumstances, the better strategy is just to ‘go for it’ and ask for forgiveness if things don’t turn out as smooth as hoped.  

The thing is, often times it’s nearly impossible to find the person or entity required to ask for permission.  On the other hand if something truly is against the rules, the one to ask for forgiveness will come find you.  Then again, if something truly is against the rules, it’s likely not something that requires much thinking.  We all have a communal sense for right and wrong.  Just ponder the fact that laws are not taught in schools.  From a logical standpoint this makes no sense whatsoever.  Wouldn’t the education of national laws be a high priority?  And yet it’s not, because culture teaches us these laws by virtue of osmosis.  What comes with this strange transmission is a feeling, a sense for the goodness or wrongness of a given idea or thing.  

If that space feels iffy given a particular idea, then chances are it’s doable, even if asking for forgiveness is something that comes about as a result. 

The lesson is to trust this hazy, ambiguous space, to trust that even if forgiveness is required that it’s worth a shot, because if it’s not obviously bad then there’s something to learn, something to discover.  And while curiosity may have killed the cat, perhaps there’s a reason we ascribe nine lives to the feline.

STABILITY & AGILITY

April 26th, 2021

Stable security is a false goal.  And yet it’s what we goad each other towards: The stable career provides security and there’s a stable traditional path to achieve that career.  But at what cost?

Stability exists as a tradeoff with agility.  The more stable something is, the less agile it is, and vice versa, but the compliment has an ulterior benefit.  The more agility something or someone has, the less stability they have, but also the less stability is needed.

For example, one might say that the Empire State Building is very stable, but if it was actually pushed over, it has no way to recover, whereas a toddler who has just learned to walk might not be very stable, but develops the ability to catch themselves before fully falling.  This is how we all walk.  We push ourselves out of balance and catch ourselves.  But we do this with such automaticity that we don’t even think about it, and falling forward briefly no longer actually feels like falling.  Our agility with regards to walking is so well practiced that we don’t recognize the any difference between walking which is a pattern of instability and something that is stable and inert.  

It’s only when we start navigating an unfamiliar surface that questions of agility and a lack of stability feel pertinent.  For feet well accustomed to the concrete jungles of cities, and the uniform surfaces of modern buildings, the terrain of a rocky hike can suddenly feel like a very unstable experience.   Of course, this is only because our sense of physical agility hasn’t had much practice in that sort of novel environment - we feel a lack of stability when really we experience a lack of agility.

Stability is attractive because once established it requires an absolute minimum of effort.  It’s easy.  Agility on the other hand is a skill that either improves or diminishes based on use.  It’s anything but easy, but it’s far more useful and far more robust than stability.  When circumstances change and the stable job suddenly evaporates, a need for agility to pivot and figure something else is suddenly in high demand, and for someone out of practice, this can be extremely stressful.  But for those who eschew the opportunity for stability, agility becomes a constantly exercised muscle, and nearly all manner of external shifts, large and small feel far more natural to work around or work with.

Stability is, in the short term, far easier, but stability grows more risky with time.  The only true constant is change, and eventually change will come for the conditions that allows for stability.  In the long term, agility is, ironically, the most stable aim to develop.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: END OF A CHAPTER

April 25th, 2021

Lucilius let himself into his apartment, lifted his work bag and placed it on the kitchen island.  The place was quiet and he was tired after a long day.  His work was going well but it had grown exhausted with it.  

He pulled open a fridge door and looked with lacklustre let-down at the collection of condiments, and the snacked left-overs from a few days ago.  He hadn’t been to the grocery store, and he was too tired to go now.  

He ordered more delivery and poured himself a glass of wine and sat quietly while he waited.  He wondered quietly, sensing some lack, some discrepancy that seemed unacknowledged in him.  But as always his thoughts drifted back to his work, as though through a kind of default and habit.  Already he was thinking about what tomorrow would bring, the issues to address and possible solutions that might speed the whole process up.  

The buzzer broke his tired work reverie.  He put down the glass and went to the door.  Dinner too, was quiet, barely enjoyed for thoughts about his work, but he didn’t notice, unaware of how bent his mind had become on the subject.

After packing up the left overs Lucilius followed his well worn, daily path, as though he were running on a track, from the bathroom to bed.  And there he picked up his journal.  He’d kept it for many years, and the volumes were lined up on his bookshelf.  He picked up his pen and flipped through the thick book with a casual thought that he’d very soon be on the next one.  He bought them in bulk a few years ago and numbered them for the future.  As the pages thipped and cascaded from his thumb to rest open, they ran out.  The book was full, and Lucilius turned the last page to find a note scrawled there, one he had written years ago and had completely forgotten about.

It read: Dear Lucilius, no matter the composition of your life right now, pick up only what you need, and leave.  No questions, no plans, just do it.  I promise to you that I will do this.

Lucilius read it several times, blinking and without thinking.  He looked off, trying to remember writing the note.  It was in his hand but he couldn’t for the life of him remember.  He read it a few more times, and slowly a smile began to lift his face.

He threw the covers back and got up.  He opened the closet and pulled out an old hiking backpack and started packing.

LIFE'S GEARS

April 24th, 2021

It feels far more satisfying to knock off a whole bunch of things from the to-do list than just one.  It’s similar to the difference between reading a bunch of short chapters versus one long chapter.  Though the same amount of time may have passed, one instance is more varied in composition and because of this it feels longer, as opposed to doing one thing all day.  Though doing one repetitive thing might drag in the moment, at the end of the day there’s often an eerie wonder about where it all went.

These points about a single day extrapolate to weeks, months, year, and a whole lifetime.  Doing the same thing for a decade makes it feel as though the decade flashed by when it finally is over.  Switch jobs a dozen times, take on different projects, and then it’s as though that decade was packed.  And there’s probably a fairly straight forward explanation for the different experiences of time.

Doing the same thing repeatedly requires less and less mental effort as we get used to the process.  In essence, we don’t have to pay attention to things that are automatic, which is what happens with anything done repeatedly for enough time.  Imagine that, just not paying attention to life as it’s passing you by because you’re so used to what’s going on, and what will happen tomorrow that you don’t really even have to pay attention to it.

The new, the different, the thing we have to figure out, learn and don’t at first understand - these require attention without choice.  Learning something new is one the easiest way to get a visceral sense of the moment, though it’s often not a pleasant one because the default state of learning is confusion - if you aren’t confused and understand it, then you’ve already learned it. Learning on some degree has to happen when we switch things up and work on something new.  Of course this functions on a spectrum.  The more radically different the new work, the more of a dog-ear that will mark in the pages of your life, and in some sense, dog-earring one’s life is the point here because it’ll ensure that life feels full when it’s finally coming to a close.

Perhaps this explains why time feels so long as a child, and seems to speed up as we get older.  As children everything is new.  There’s so much to learn, figure out and explore that a single day can feel like a book of a thousand chapters, and then as we get older the variety of experience radically decreases with jobs that go on repeatedly in much the same way for years and decades with almost no real change.

A fulfilling life is all about switching gears, marking time out episodes in an adventure.  Notice how little repetition exists in all the adventure stories of our heroes.  An adventure story never stays in one gear for the whole time, it’s constantly switching and mixing up. The good news is that as the age of human mechanized labor gets replaced by robots, this will unpleasantly force people into a position that requires being able to switch gears fluidly and more often.  While it sounds less stable, it’s more agile, which is more able in the long run, and more importantly, more memorable.