LIVING THE STORY

September 29th, 2020

If you were to sit down and write your autobiography, would it make for good reading?  This requires answering two questions.  The more obvious one is whether you’ve lived an interesting life.  The other refers to how good of a writer you are.  It is imaginable that a boring life can be conveyed in a fascinating way.  But, of course, an interesting life makes for easier writing, and a great story can certainly make it easier to forgive bad writing.  Makes for a valid wonder: what’s easier, to become a great writer or to live an interesting life?

This begs a deeper question regarding what it means to live and ply one’s self to the task of making the most of one’s time.  A great writer need not necessarily live a fascinating life.  That fascinating life can be discovered within the practice and art of honing one’s own craft, and that’s generally a journey that doesn’t exactly translate into an exciting adventure story.  The obstacles and triumphs are of a more cognitive variety - the trial is more with the limits of one’s own self as opposed to the circumstances and vicissitudes of life.

The overwhelming majority of people simply aren’t going to sit down and write an autobiography. Everyone, however, is required to live a life.  That adventure is not up for debate, though the amount of adventure we infuse our life with certainly does receive a wide variable.  Some lead the same blandly content life, day after day and perhaps never notice how much more could be done with it.  While others, in a similar position get to a late point in life and realize how much more could have been done with the time alive.  And of course still others understand the fundamentally fleeting nature of life and seize as much of it as will fit within human grasp and wrench it in all sorts of interesting directions.    Whichever option it be, we are each writing our own story, written or not, but lived all the same.

It bodes well to reflect frequently and ask earnestly: how interesting is your time alive?

PERPETUAL FAILURE

September 28th, 2020

The goal is to fail, and to succeed means to realize you’re failing.  This is at the heart of a mindfulness meditation practice.  To simply notice that you are thinking, to realize that fact, is in some sense to become aware that you are not following the prescription of the practice.  Or rather that you haven’t been following the instructions.  But the very act of realizing that one has been lost in thought is to invoke the aim of the effort.  

The simple fact is that we are nearly always, perpetually lost in a rabbit hole of thinking.  And we are lost in this maze without even realizing it, as though we are drunk on the act.  A mindfulness practice pulls a person out of this narrow point of view, expanding it to include all that is going on.  We’re often lost in our own private rabbit hole of thought at the expense of noticing some fairly mundane things, like the feeling of breath entering and expanding our body, the sense of that body’s weight against the ground, the temperature, the pressure, the light or darkness that engulfs us, among an entire host of other simple aspects of what it’s like to be experiencing life.  

But these simple variables are often overlooked as we are lost.  And yet, the mere noticing of such simple variables can relieve our mind of much un-needed effort.

Strangely, it’s the act of downgrading the importance and prevalence of variables of consciousness that make our experience more aware of the moment.  The more focused we become on any one variable within consciousness, the less connected we are with the moment.  But the instant we downgrade the importance of this variable and become able to incorporate an awareness of a wider variety, the more in touch with the moment we become.

Mindfulness meditation, is in some sense, the practice of continually noticing how unimportant a single thought is in the grand scheme of things, and to realize it’s a failure to concentrate on such at the expense of so much else that is going on.  

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: A LIFE TO LIVE

September 27th, 2020

Lucilius sat down, after a long and tremendously interesting life, to finally, and definitively write his autobiography.  Of course there was the issue of where to start - always problematic, because where does a story start?  Where does a life start?  Is it with birth, or do the seeds of one’s own story go far beyond that, beyond memory and experience.  Lucilius pondered these issues, holding the end of the pen to his lips in consideration, tapping the fingers of his free hand in nervous anticipation of the first words.

As he sat with a rising anxiety, staring at the blank page, a rusty memory brushed itself off and offered itself up.  Lucilius’ eyes grew glassy at the old sight of the unseeable time.  The memory set his mind off on a race, threading through his many unmeasurable adventures - his long life spanning across such a thick measure of time.  Eventually a smile grew on his face and he leaned in over the blank page and pressed the pen to paper.

He wrote: when Lucilius was a very young boy, he sat down to pen his autobiography.  Having a plump and worthy biography seemed like one of the most worthy goals he could think of, and having decided upon it, he figured he might as well do it himself.  But, as the young boy sat with pen poised to record his grand adventures, a problem arose in his mind.  Though he’d lived an excellent boy’s life, weaving himself into all sorts of trouble and fun, he could not find a place to start the grand record of his adventures.  But even more importantly, while reflecting on the little he did have on hand to record, he realized that he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the thoughts and deeds he had to put down.  No, there was far more to be had, to be done.  The marrow of life was far from had, the bones had not even been cracked, indeed, he thought - even as such a youngster - that the hunt had barely begun.  Young Lucilius looked again at the blank page and felt and immense dissatisfaction, but with it, a hope, or more a verve to grab at a goal that would not come with mere hope nor want, but only by dint of long effort and pain, thirst and a desire to hunt.

Young Lucilius stood up and decided to abandon the effort.  There was no need to write down his life when there was so much life to live.

Lucilius stared at the sentence he’d just written.  He read the sentence over and over, and slowly the notion of it’s meaning sunk in.  He leaned back in his seat and stared off in middle distance.  He wasn’t dead yet, he noticed.

Lucilius got up from the barely marked page of paper.  He turned and left.  There was still more life to live.

ATTENTIONAL FLAME

September 26th, 2020

Candlelight is inherently fragile. We protect it with every imaginable design of lantern and for reason that requires no explanation.  It’s so fragile that when asked to picture a candle flame, it’s impossible to keep from seeing that flame snuffed out when someone suggests the idea.  But hold that candle flame to a bone dry forest and it’s hard to imagine a forest fire getting snuffed out.

Attention functions more like that candle flame. Every little distraction risks snuffing out our ability to focus on the task and subject at hand.  And modern culture, supercharged by technologies like social media is a perpetual rain of distractions delivered by machine guns designed specifically for the task of making tatters of our attention and ability to focus.  

We do, though, come across some instances when attention feels somewhat invincible.  This is often referred to as a flow state, and this term has a crisp wholesomeness surrounding it.  Flow state has a reputation of a holy grail in the culture of productivity.  But there are other similar instances that perhaps aren’t so productive.  When immersed in a video game, or even just scrolling.  Who is to say that it’s not a flow state?  While scrolling for an interminable amount of time, we are focused, and undistracted from the task, though the task itself is itself a patchwork of competing distraction.  That of course is the point: much of social media is an ecosystem of competition that evolves more efficient forms of media and content to grab and hold our attention.

Such social media doesn’t so much snuff out our candle flame of attention as it does light the candle with a flamethrower and obliterate the ability to direct focus while consuming all reserves allocated for attention.

Becoming aware of social media’s spell is in fact an ability to get distracted from the act.  While many think that mindfulness and meditation is the ability to focus exclusively on one thing, it’s in fact better described as the ability to mindfully distract yourself from what’s consuming your attention whether it be social media or simply a train of thought and then step back from the situation to take in a wider slice of what consciousness is exposed to.

WORK OF A WORD

September 25th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to John McWhorter who is a linguist, a professor at Columbia University, the host of the Lexicon Valley podcast, and a veritable badass.

As a word is slapped onto a greater variety of things, it loses power.  At first, the relationship between the growth of the word and its power seems to have a linear relationship: as the word grows, so seems its power.  And in the beginning this may be the case, practically speaking.  But if language fails to achieve a balance, the trajectory of growth designs and initiates its own symmetrical decay.

But what does it mean for a word to have power?  Each word here used operates in conjunction with others.  In fact, these words - all words - rely on the networked family in which they exist to have any meaning or power at all.  And that’s exactly what power is for a word, the unit of power is meaning.  Power, here, is an appropriate term and in quite a literal way because the discussion revolves around the work a word can do.  Power is literally defined as the amount of work achieved during a given unit of time.  We might momentarily imagine a sort of linguistic physics where the power of a word is determined by the density of meaning it conveys within a sentence.

To phrase this in a somewhat less technical way: how useful is a vague word?

Let’s zoom out even further: how useful, or rather frustrating is it when someone speaks in vague and hazy language?  Say you are speaking to a friend, or better yet a lover, and neither person can decide what to do that evening, whether to go out for dinner or cook, and if out to dinner, where to go, what cuisine - we’ve all been there.  That hazy cloud of possibilities easily becomes a possible source of infuriation.  

You decide…

No, you decide….

In the context of loved ones the cause is usually altruistic. Each wants the other to be happy, so each is open to anything, and when paired, the good intentions resolve into an unproductive stalemate.  How much easier is it when one party is very motivated to try and make Thai curry?  Everyone is happy, because there’s something specific on the table. 

The example juxtaposes the difference between specificity and vagueness.  There is a trade off between utility and possibility.  The more possibilities at hand, the less utility we get.  The more specific we get, the more utility we have.  

To help illuminate this trade off in terms of language, there is a particularly good example of a metastasizing word that has become crippled by its own growth.

That word is truth.

Truth used to have a definitive meaning.  It was singular in its specificity, and this specificity was  fundamental to its ability to convey honesty.  But now we have your truth, and my truth.

How exactly can two truths exist?  Certainly we’ve never had much of a problem with multiple truths, but this has always been in the sense that there are multiple aphorisms.  It’s akin to saying there are many true statements.  The key is that these each regard different contexts, whereas the recent bastardization of truth into my truth and your truth muddies the water of context.  The silly thing is that people are really talking about perception and opinion.  When people say my truth and your truth, they’re really talking about their opinion.  But as words go, opinion is a lacklustre weakling, and truth carries a splendid and princely quality.

In the absence of a well founded opinion formed through rigorous thinking, the same opinion was simply branded with a better sounding name: truth.

The trade off, of course, is that the word ‘truth’ begins to lose its power as it is applied to more and more opinions, and soon enough it will means as much and as little as the word ‘opinion’.  And in the meantime, we lose out on the utility of an important word, leading to more confusion and misunderstanding.

This has happened many times and it continues to happen.  Another example is the word ‘special’.  Perhaps as a byproduct of the ill-conceived self-esteem movement several decades hence, people began to see the word ‘special’ as differential in an offensive way.  The end result is trophies for participation, and as it’s been aptly summed up many times: if everyone is special then no one is special.

Compare a word like ‘truth’, or ‘special’ to a word like Orca, or better yet, mammal.   Orca is a subset of the word mammal, and mammal defines the broadest ways that a whale is different from a crocodile.  Orca and crocodile might seem more specific than the word mammal because they are subsets of the umbrella terms mammal and reptile, but the word mammal reptile retain their own carefully regulated specificity.  The relationship between all of these words is fairly solid, and that structure allows for meaning to retain its power.  But if, for example, some brilliant new startup out of silicone valley decided to name their latest product Orca, suddenly the word composed of o-r-c and a in that particular order loses just a little bit of it’s power.  And the reason is because there is - imaginably - a sentence where someone uses the word ‘Orca’ and the person listening to this sentence can’t tell if the word refers to the animal or the tech company.  The word has become a bit more vague.  

Returning to the word truth, we need only ask: how useful is truth if there are 8 billion different varieties of it?