A LUCILIUS PARABLE: STAY THE COURSE

March 21st, 2021

Lucilius glanced at the big brass compass in the binnacle and then looked back at his hands on the ships wheel.  They felt frozen shut, wrapped around the wooden handles.  He tilted the wheel to keep the ship on it’s dark course and the port and starboard tiller ropes pulled and gave through their deck holes before his boots.  They were running dark on a moonless night, the exhausted crew commanded to be vigilant for an enemy they knew coursed through the same waters.  

Lucilius looked back at the officer on watch.  The boy, Lucilius’ junior by many years was passed out against brace lines held fast.  Lucilius looked forward, wondering about his bow watch.  He couldn’t see the other officer and wondered if that boy too was fast asleep. 

Lucilius preferred the naval outfits.  The merchant bloodboats were always more work, and you never knew what sort of conditions you were walking into.  At least with the navy, he knew what he was signing up for.  But of course it came with that ever present threat of battle.  Friends were easily lost in business and service, but the loss was always harder when the battle was with blood instead of money.  He was growing tired of the death, the mourning, of friends gone in certain and undecided ways.

He looked ahead again for his bow watch but still couldn’t see the officer.  He knew he should wake up his watch officer and get eyes ahead, but something in him restrained, to let them just sleep a little more, Lucilius figured.  

Then his body jolted with an electric heat that was freezing.  Out ahead he could see it, the enemy ship, and the two were headed nearly straight for one another.  Lucilius’ mouth hung open, slowing on an impulse to yell.  Something held him back again.  He could hear nothing, no commotion in the silent waters, both ships in the lightest of winds.

Silently, Lucilius just held the ship’s course, aghast at his inaction.  He would be reprimanded, perhaps hanged for such gross incompetence, perhaps accused as a traitor.  At any moment if anyone woke up and saw the ship so close they would know Lucilius’ silence had been deliberate.  And yet still, he did nothing aside from watch the enemy ship grow larger ahead.  It would pass just to starboard with both headings.  The enemy ship was also running dark, ghostly squares hanging nearly limp as his own ships’ as they moved slowly toward one another.

The clear and curled sense of a feeling - just a hunch held Lucilius rapt in a dangerous curiosity.  But the enemy ship was now close enough.  They could have started firing to land clear shots by now.  But perhaps they suspected the blindness of a tired crew and held back on a hair trigger impulse in order to get just a little closer, perhaps even to broadside Lucilius’ ship.  

The fatal certainty of the situation grew with Lucilius’ horror.  But in spite of it, he simply kept quiet and held the ship to its course.  All was silent and stayed silent as Lucilius watched in awe as the enemy ship, looming large a few points from the bow came close.  The ship was so close that Lucilius could see the gunport were closed, and as his heart raced, he suddenly picked out the sight of an officer on the enemy ship, slumped against a forestay, asleep.

The two massive ships silently glided past one another, and Lucilius watched the tall masts, their vast sails, mirroring one another, trading places like shifting forests. Lucilius’ eyes scanned the enemy deck, barely a stone’s toss from where he stood, and he picked out the watch officers passed out as it went, until finally his gaze met that of the helmsman.  

The two locked one another’s stare as they grew closer, and as they finally came abreast, the ships now having all but passed each other, the helmsman aboard that enemy ship gently nodded at Lucilius, and Lucilius in kind nodded back.  Then both turned back to their task and held their course.

TAP THE GAUGE

March 20th, 2021

How sensitive are you?  Not in the sense of being offended - that topic is tremendously uninteresting.  But how sensitive are you to changes in your situation, your environment, and your body?

While there’s many aspects of life that turn out just fine with a ballpark guess, some things benefit enormously from even a slight improvement in precision.  Nutrition, for example, is a good one.  People generally eat such a wide variety of things, even in a single setting, that a person can go years without realizing the bad effects of a single staple food.  The signal is lost in the noise created by the consumption of so many different foods at once.  The cause, in such a case is impossible to pin down because there are so many variables or candidates in the mix.

The process of figuring out that one bad food is best found by simplifying the diet to absolute bare essentials.  This sort of experiment is highly disagreeable to many people who are so accustomed to satisfying every little craving.  But, when the situation is simplest, it’s easiest to see what the impact of any one given added ingredient creates.  

Complexity creates obfuscation.  Simplicity allows for clarity because it becomes possible to measure effects and establish causes effectively.

Scraping life and situations of unnecessary complexity is like tapping the gauge, making the needle and the reading sensitive once again to what’s going on.

We would imaginably all benefit tremendously from looking at the different areas of our life where we aren’t currently getting a good reading and give that gauge a good tap, to simplify what’s going on, if only for a short time in order to figure out what’s really going on.  Otherwise, any change we seek to make is a bit of a shot in the dark.  Eliminating one food at a time would take far longer than eliminating everything and slowly adding back.  While it seems as though it would take the same amount of time, the simpler version also eliminates any cumulative effects that are created by a cocktail of variables.  

The paradox of sensitivity is that you don’t realize how insensitive you are to certain variables, like someone who is surprised at how good they feel after a first month of clean eating after decades of lethargic living - it’s simply not possible to see what you’re missing out on until it’s experienced.  It is, however, possible to imagine that we are missing out on something, and it’s curiosity that can fill in the real lived sense.  Curiosity fills in for sensitivity because it can help us imagine the unexperienced.

COWBOY DIRECTIONS

March 19th, 2021

It’s so fun to push the instructions off to the side and just go for it.  Certainly, not everyone enjoys this frivolous approach.  Some people are utterly paralyzed without step-by-step instructions.  

The cowboy, as he is popularly held in imagination is a frontier’s character.  One that pushes into the unknown without a plan, but solidly equipped with creative methods for dealing with everything and anything the unknown might hold.

Are these methods ideal, or the most efficient?  Certainly not, though perhaps.  Blazing a trail is a laborious and inefficient process.  The trail, once established, represents the efficient set of instructions about how to proceed forward.  

So, when does the cowboy follow the instructions?  The kitchen is a good place to zero in on for this discussion.  Cooking can be a very fun, creative, and forgiving avenue for creativity.  Baking, on the other hand isn’t as forgiving.  Baking requires a good set of instructions because deviations often result in disaster.  Stir fries, on the other hand are a kind melange, a mess that can work in a near infinite number of combinations.  The stir fry, with it’s forgiving flexibility is like the realm of the frontier: it’s easier to try something new and get away with it.  

Both the way of the cowboy and that of step by step instructions embody two different perspectives.  Because any thoughtful consideration realizes that even the instructions for a cake had to be discovered.  Such a thing could not be deduced.  There was certainly many inglorious attempts to produce cake similar to any desserts attempted today by those who only give the instructions a cursory glance.  This is at the heart of why and how the ability to ‘cowboy’  is essential: it’s the way we discover instructions.  The ability to simply follow instructions - to invoke the recipe perfectly can only get us as far as we’ve already gone.  But the ability to cowboy allows us to move further - it allows us to discover the new, even if what is discovered is a new way about how NOT to do something.

The instructions of the cowboy are more like guidelines.  Like a compass that points vaguely north, all that’s often needed is a bird’s eye view of what’s going on.  Details can get ironed out later.  What matter’s most is that we’re headed in the right direction, and that’s only possible with a temporary disregard of specifics in favor of larger perspective the includes both the current situation and the ideal destination in the distance.

LATERAL MEDITATIVE HYPOTHESIS

March 18th, 2021

What impact does meditation have on the way the two halves of the brain function relative to one another?

Iain McGilchrist’s book “The Master and his Emissary” explores the radical differences between the brain’s two hemispheres.  To paraphrase in a way that disservices a book with 600 pages, the left hemisphere is detail and desire oriented, while the right hemisphere is focused on the big picture.  In order to have an idea of what’s going on in any dynamic situation, we need the right hemisphere to make sense of all that’s happening, but often we are focused in a cramped way, obsessing about details that don’t necessarily have a lasting impact - this is the left hemisphere having a bit more of an influence than we are best off with.  

Much of the long term benefit of meditation has to do with a conscious abandonment of overly focused thought in favor of a more expansive acceptance of the contents of consciousness.  One modern characteristic of thought is obsessiveness and repetitiveness, and for many this is a tragic instance of self-torture.  While it has yet to be studied clinically, it’s easily imaginable that a mindfulness practice strengthens the right hemisphere’s ability to impact our experience of the moment.  Mindfulness practice trains a mind in the ability to release focus on any single thought.  The release of such a thought opens up the field of awareness, and naturally this ushers in a larger perspective.  We don’t just simply switch out one thought for another when engaged in a mindfulness practice, we switch out one perspective for another, and this is exactly how the two hemispheres can be best characterized.

“The Master and his Emissary” goes on to form a thesis which holds that the left hemisphere regularly becomes universally dominates; as a civilization we become too focused without seeing the larger picture and this is why civilizations in the past have undergone a tragic cycle of boom and bust.

It may turn out that the proselytizing proponents of meditation who claim that it will solve all the world’s ills might actually be on to something.  If Hemisphere dominance turns out to be a legitimate piece of our collapsing puzzle, and if meditation does in fact have lateral effects that combat asymmetrical dominance, than is possible that mental training similar to mindfulness may in fact be an option for raising the probability of long term civilizational stability.

WHILE AWAY

March 17th, 2021

It’s an interesting discrepancy that we generally adhere to eight hour work days and yet it’s widely acclaimed that we only really get four hours of quality work done.  What exactly is happening during those other four hours, or the other twelve for that matter?

The obvious and widely denied truth is that we aren’t actually as productive as we think.  We don’t actually take breaks from our strenuous and continuous work, it’s more the other way around:  we take breaks from our laziness in order to get something done.

Perhaps such a statement comes across as cynical and judgemental, but on the contrary, it’s in line with our evolution. (Another grand statement…). But in terms of energy and efficiency it makes sense:  an animal that can make more use of less energy is exactly the name of the game when it comes to evolutionary and environmental pressure.

Now when it comes to intelligence, a new definition is applicable:  intelligence is efficient laziness.  Or rather, intelligence can allow you to get the same thing done in less time by finding a better way - that’s efficiency.  Work smarter, not harder.

And yet we are beset with the guilt of not getting more done, of being lazy, procrastinating, and wasting that precious time.  Perhaps the only real problem isn’t actually wasting time, but feeling bad about it.  What if the guilt we feel about procrastination actually perpetuates the procrastination?  Is there any possibility that we’d get started sooner and be more productive if we held no ill will about doing nothing and wasting time when in fact that’s the default?

All progress is just a short break from the holy task of wasting time.  Our real problem isn’t a  of productivity, but an ability to enjoy those moments as they while away.