FIRST WAVE

October 26th, 2020

Going out with a surfboard for the first time, no one has much in the way of expectations.  It’s something to try out, to see what it’s like.  As a few waves pass and the movements and actions of others are studied, it becomes obvious that there’s an all or nothing moment that requires developing a bit of an intuition in order to catch.

But eventually, with enough trying, that first wave is caught.  Then getting upright on the board and staying up long enough to have the gleeful realization I’m surfing! is often as far as the plan, the hope, and the expectation go - but the wave keeps going, which can be quite a pleasant surprise.

Suddenly necessities like steering left and right to avoid swimmers and other surfers becomes instantly important and is often not something that was thought of in advance.  But with the gleeful first accomplishment of just getting up on the board, the rest is gravy, and so it’s all taken far less seriously.  And sometimes, there are no swimmers or surfers to avoid, and the wave keeps going, lessening, until that first wave has run it’s course.

There’s a certain zen like perspective that many naturally bring to their first attempt with surfing: like a true beginner, like a child, the focus is almost exclusively on that first tiny success: just getting up on the board and get moving with the wave.

However, when it comes to many if not all of our other endeavours, the planing goes haywire and even skips the most important part.  Instead of focusing on just starting, just getting up and getting going, the backflips are planned, the cool shots from inside the curling tunnel of a breaking wave, the competitions are envisioned, the trophies nearly already won, even the dreams scripted for sleep after a long day.  And in all this, the most important step: just getting going, is often overlooked for a much larger, grander vision.  The tradeoff risks the whole endeavour, and because this, it’s best to think of that zen mindset so many have when setting out for that first wave.

Whether it be surfing or starting a company, or writing a novel, or building that killer app, focus on the most important thing:  Just figure out how to get started. 

&

Get going first.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GOLDEN HERRING

October 25th, 2020

This episodes is dedicated to Chris Larsin, whom you can connect with on Twitter with the handle @ChrisLarsin

Lucilius chuckled at the elaborate ploy he’d concocted, and celebrated by taking a sip of rum.  To be sure the ploy hadn’t yet been carried out yet.  But the idea was now completed.  He was delighted as he began to lay down all the pieces, thinking about how nice of a surprise it would be, but noticing the time, he realized he needed to rush.

“Everything ok?”

“Always,” Lucilius said into the phone, realizing he must sound a bit odd, his spirits being so high.

Vacantly, he tried to keep up the conversation but his mind was elsewhere as he organized the clues in an order that seemed best.  He was eager, to get going - to start.

“Every time you get that tone in your voice it means you’ve got something on a roll.”

Lucilius smiled ridiculously, trying not to laugh.

“I guess you could say that,” he admitted, knowing he couldn’t hide the tone of his voice - all aglow.

For a great while Lucilius had been fascinated by the entire notion of a puzzle.  Not just the idea of solving them, but more importantly, crafting them and figuring out where to start.  Lucilius fancied all of life to be a bit of a puzzle, or rather a puzzle made up of puzzles.  And because of this, he relished the opportunity to make up new enigmas, riddles and clues for scavenger hunts that he would then of course give to friends to send them searching.  Needless to say, he’d become a bit infamous.  He loved using anagrams, acrostics, golden shovels, a clever chiasmus, and ever other bit of word play he could find or cook up.

The hanging silence on the phone broke -“..Lu-“

“Sorry! Sorry, just focused on something.”

“If you don’t have time, I can call again later today?”

“No, no, my bad, I’m just excited about something I’ve got on the go.”

“K, well, let’s just chat later then, maybe tonight when you’re done, let’s go out?”

Lucilius smiled to himself, delighted by his own conniving. Even suspicious, how unsuspecting, unknowing it is for such a friend.  It was also important, Lucilius knew, to throw in a little noise into the puzzle, red herrings, as they’re called within the enigmatic idiom.

“About 8 maybe, we could get a drink?”

“Sure, that sounds great, I can always use a bit more hootch.”

“Then I’ll see you later if you show.”

Lucilius laughed.

“Ever been a time when I didn’t?”

The phone filled with a chuckle before the two hung up.

There was still a lot to do.  Lucilius surveyed the clues again, double checking that they all worked together in tandem.  He rearranged them in terms of fastest travel to each location where each clue would be hidden, glancing at the time quickly.  He repeated the order again silently like a sort of mantra.

Each part of the puzzle was like a petal that revealed another part.  Everything had to unravel in the correct order otherwise the whole thing would go askew.  But he’d done this many times before.  Though now, he’d gotten further into the rum.  He stood up, wavering a bit, and surprised he grabbed the bottle and shook what was left of the rum.

Reeling from the tipsy surprise he nearly fell and reached out for something to grab.  He giggled and then flushed with sober panic, he collected all the clues in order to start.

Steadying himself, he got underway, finally.  He grabbed his coat, and patted his pockets for keys and wallet, clues in hand and was just about to leave when he realized he’d forgotten the most important part of the entire plan - the first clue, the one thing he’d yet to think up.  He grabbed a pen and paper and haphazardly wrote down the riddle,  “does meaning lie limp on the story’s surface or across tickled letters, certain words, roused only by a focused moment?

THOUGHTFUL OUROBOROS

October 24th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to the person who operates the Twitter handle @IndigoCorrine, who spurred this line of thinking.

Meditation is often defined popularly and regarded -erroneously- as a practice in the absence of thought.  As with most popular understandings, this is a popular misunderstanding.  Certainly, with a consistent and long practice, moments without thought might arise, but this is not necessarily the ‘goal’, if meditation is to in fact even have a goal.  Instead of goals, it’s perhaps better to think of such things in terms of the effects of meditation.

One effect is most certainly a change in the experience of thought.  For a person with no experience in this area, that might sound like a curious if even paradoxical notion.  Many people, if not most who’ve never spent a good deal of time with formal meditation practice have never even considered the idea that each of us has a relationship with our thoughts.  The very notion offers up some simple questions:

Is it a good relationship?

What does it mean to have a… bad relationship with one’s own thoughts?

From a perspective evolved in conjunction with several years of mindfulness practice, it seems fairly safe and valid to note that a great many people have an awful relationship with their own thoughts and don’t even realize it’s the case or that this relationship can change.

Far from being a total clearance of thought, meditation in the mindfulness tradition often functions as an observation of our relationship with thought.

Contemplate for a moment the odd recursive nature of this situation: can thought observe itself?  If we become aware of the fact that we are having a thought, is that then a thought about a thought? 

This simple recursion, if repeated enough times consciously in formal practice eventually leads to some interesting effects.  The awareness of a thought slows it down, like a sobering moment when the grip of intoxication lessens and a heightened awareness of the situation comes online.  The effect this has on the thought is often one of deflation.  Thoughts we have can often be far from our best interest, and simply noticing that this or that thought is presently occurring can have the effect of de-powering that thought - as though popping it, letting it dissolve in the wide space of the mind.

The nature of this reflective process is a bit like a ouroboros - the depiction of a snake eating it’s own tail.  Mindfulness meditation, in some sense is a practice in the ability to direct focus and awareness in a way that allows thought to eat itself, like a snake swallowing more and more of it’s tail until poof! it simply ceases to exist.

This ability to interrupt, stagnate and then dissolve thought gives the mind a kind of editing function, which - over time - becomes the primary tool to empower a person to change their relationship with their own thoughts.

The composition, cadence and subject matter of the thoughts produced by the mind changes with enough of this simple editing, and with enough time, the mind can become a space of peace filled with a deep sense of what it means to be a living, thinking being in the world.

NOSTALGIA'S EDGE

October 23rd, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Morgan Anastasi who you can connect with on Twitter with the handle @Morgan_Anastasi.

So many yearn for the good old days, and in many cases, those good old days predate the entire life of the nostalgic.  How can this be?  How is it possible for someone to miss, or wish for a time that once existed but which someone has no direct experience of?  There is certainly an impassable gulf between missing something experienced, like a loved one passed, and a time never even glimpsed. In comparison, the people who yearn for some future date are surely far outnumbered by those who yearn for some past time.  The obvious difference that might be ascribed to this rides on the fact that we don’t know what the future holds, whereas, we have some notion of what it was probably like to live back in the 1920’s or even the 1490’s.  But this difference is more subtle than first glance betrays, and the most impactful facets of the past thread silently into our present selves in ways that might even be insidious. 

Culture, as a collection of mindsets, beliefs, ideas, patterns of behaviors and methods of decision making is a constantly evolving, mutating entity.  Each of us located in a unique cross-section of all these intersecting flows of information.  We add to the culture, each contributing an influence on the direction it will take next.  But more important than the way each of us represents an intersection of cultural pieces, is the parts of culture that don’t influence who we are.  

As an example, think about what it means to be on the cutting edge.  Those who make a regular home of this edge are always read up on the newest aspects of some evolving arm of culture.  The cutting edge of technology, for example.

Those who harbour and nourish a palpable nostalgia for some aspect of the past are likely not a part of the cutting edge.  Certainly there may be strange outliers that manage to combine the two in unique ways (Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine, certainly seems to be an example), but for the most part, these two camps have a separation for fundamental reasons.

Nostalgia, if viewed with a pessimistically modern judgement might be described as “backwards looking.”  But this betrays a vital aspect of nostalgia.

Yearning for a past golden time is not so much a realistic desire as it is representative of a way of thinking now misplaced in time.  The “Nostalgiencia” don’t look backward so much as they are looking forward with an old perspective replete with beliefs, ideas, patterns of behaviour and methods of decision making.

The real question pressed by nostalgia isn’t so much whether it’s possible and preferable to “return” to simpler times as it is an implicit challenge to the future to be better.  This comes with certain tradeoffs.  Writing off the potential virtues of nostalgia may write off time tested wisdom.  The industrial-techno evolution of human space, for example, has certainly suffered from a disappointing and willful ignorance of what simple aspects of our surrounding makes for good living.  Obnoxiously simple things, like a little greenery and lighting that is perhaps anything BUT fluorescent white. 

The Nostalgiencia likewise suffer in similar ways.  The arena of coding and programming, for example, is dominated by a variety of person other than the artistic, literary types who are guilty of pursuing something once called “liberal arts”, and yet, an artist who knows how to code becomes a force of culture to be reckoned with.  The limiting factors on artists in previous generations can be lifted with the leverage afforded by a little technological knowledge.  Just imagine for a moment if every artist was suddenly imbued with the ability to code and program?  How many fantastical and fascinating things would begin to pop up on the internet?  One thing that such artistic types fail to realize is that the “look” and “feel” of the internet is dominated by the aesthetic taste or lack thereof of the people who have built the internet, which is primarily people who weren’t interested in the artsy things that lead others to become.. artists.

Artistry and nostalgia have strong ties.  The history of art is an obvious topic for virtually everyone.  Art has been a part of our culture since before we were writing words.  The connection between nostalgia and technology on the other hand is perhaps totally non-existent, and part of this may be that the history that lead to computers is somewhat invisible because it made some monumental jumps that are somewhat counterintuitive.  In many ways, the technological progress that has lead to laptops, super phones and Twitter was invisible because the progress involved something exceedingly tiny and because it evolved with exceptional speed once we learned how to make use of another invisible resource: electricity.

Technology in the modern computing sense is a facet of human exploration that feels as though it has no history, it has no memory, and because of that it looks more to the future, marching like a juggernaut into the unknown.  Being without such roots grants this freedom of perspective or rather, freedom from perspectives that were more relevant in past times.

Both camps are incorrect by lacking the perspective and resources of the other, and those who can comfortably exist in both worlds can operate in each as though with superpowers.  The oil painter who knows how to leverage social media in conjunction with an online store that uses print-on-demand technology to sell hundreds of copies of a painting all with a purely automated system that functions while that artist sleeps and paints is going to do much better than the artist  who doesn’t know how to leverage all those things.  And even more interesting is the fact that an artist with such a commercial system doesn’t even need to know how to code, but simply needs to understand what is technologically possible.  An artist with such a livelihood can spend more of their time actually working on their art.

The inverse is also quite powerful, and not in the straightforward sense that an artist who codes doesn’t need to rely on a graphic designer to do “art work”.  The artist doesn’t just bring skills, but a perspective that is rooted in different fundamentals and directions which then perceives the challenges, obstacles, and most importantly the opportunities inherent in other skills, like coding.

Nostalgia’s Edge is an updated use of older, time-tested methods for approaching the future. While it’s good to let go of old things that hold us back, it’s vital to take stock of the good, because, at the end of the day, the perspectives of the past are what got us to the present opportunity we have today.

INCOMING, OUTGOING

October 22nd, 2020

We operate in conjunction with two vectors: incoming, and outgoing.  Materialism is perhaps the best example of the incoming vector.  We seek to acquire more things, to bring these desirable things closer to us, to possess them.  But of course other things slide along this vector: social media addictions, chemical addictions, and drama of all sorts.

On the other hand the outward vector is the symmetrical version:  We either let go of things, or we create, produce and ship things out into the world. 

One of these vectors is a tool for a far more fulfilling life than the other.  Writing a short story is far more fulfilling than watching the next episode of the show Netflix has queued.  Letting go of possessions is strangely more relaxing than obtaining others.

This simple rubric of direction reveals even more subtlety when we look at some specific language.

Take for example two of the most coveted and desired things in modern society: happiness and passion.  Both of these are concepts that indicate a possession.  You have a passion, and happiness is something we chase.

Compare those to a couple of other terms that seem to be in the same wheelhouse but operate on the other vector: Peace and curiosity.  Both of these are defined by a lack of something.  Peace exists when dread and anxiety of chaos leaves, and curiosity is a thirst for something that is still unknown.  Both are defined more by an outward perspective, whereas happiness and passion are inwardly focused.