UGLY OPPORTUNITY

August 7th, 2020

Nothing goes perfectly, and things are always going wrong.  An obvious platitude to be sure, but the next step in the story is the crucial one, often so poorly addressed: how do we respond to a continual onslaught of disappointment and attempts by fate to shove us off balance.  Do we fall down? Tempted by stagnant comfort, or do we go through the extra effort of standing back up again?

Beyond any skill, whether it be writing, or coding, painting, people management, finance management, or picking the right stock out of the sky, the ability to navigate the disappointment is the primary skill that reins above and rules them all.  Because no matter how skilled you are in all that you do, the universe is constantly tapping its fingers together around the next corner, giggling quietly and waiting for that perfect moment to stick a foot out and trip you up.  It’s going to happen, and it’s best to expect it optimistically.

How on earth does a person expect disappointment optimistically?

Is this not a concept of pure nonsense?  No.  Because disappointment is an opportunity.  Opportunity for what?  To navigate that disappointment - to get better at the one skill that improves all the others: to pivot and dance with the fickle will and whim of the universe.

We can dive in a little deeper and examine disappointment in relation to the nature of our plans.  Why do we plan anything?  Why do we do anything really?

Each and every action can be described as an attempted solution to some sort of problem.  You scratch your forearm to solve the problem of an itch, you start a business to solve the problem of wanting a better life, or even better, you start a business to solve the issue of living in a world without the solution your business offers.  You eat to solve the problem of hunger, you socialize to solve loneliness, among other things.  You learned to code to solve the problem of your inability to build what you want to see in the world.

The point here isn’t to merely define life in terms of problems and solutions, but to merely point out that it can be done.  And the purpose is to highlight that our skills all boil down to this one higher level skill: problem solving.  Every large endeavour, wish or problem resolves into a net of tiny easy problems.

But we can get hung up on these easy problems, due to the emotional resonance of disappointment.  We can stew for hours and days, cursing our luck and wondering how we are going to move forward.  How strange is it that when we finally do figure out to move forward, we rarely reflect on that troublesome time of cursing our luck?  Is it not possible to analyze the uselessness of that period and project it forward and think: well the next time some sort of disappointment comes along, perhaps I should remember that it’s probably not as bad as I think?

Follow this line of questioning far enough, and one starts to wonder if this refractory period initiated by disappointment is itself a kink in the process to be solved.  Spoiler alert: of course it is.  The more effortlessly we can glide through the emotions that pop up as a response to disappointment, the faster we can honour our original vision and our ongoing intention to make something happen.  Once this issue has been identified as a solvable problem, we start looking out for it, and that ugly experience suddenly starts looking like..

…an opportunity.

TIME & ATTENTION

August 6th, 2020

Attention is time.

Not all time is attention.

You only have one chance in each moment to pay attention.

The obvious truism is to try and not miss that moment.  But this presents a further paradox about the present:  can you actually get anything done if you are focusing on the moment in a sense that you want to be present?

These flashes of time that remain shining in memory as moments when we were truly present are often passive, meaning we appreciate and experience the present best from an observatory role.  This is much of what the practice of meditation involves: just observe the moment.  That’s it.

But is it possible to observe the moment and do something at the same time?  Does action require a narrowing of focus that drops our experience out of the observatory role?  At first pass the answer seems to be yes.  But it should be noted that there exists the possibility with a great deal of meditative practice to bridge the two sides of this paradox and become present in an appreciatively observatory role while quite active.

This bears a remarkable similarity to what’s commonly referred to as flow.  The athlete who falls into a virtuous synchronicity with the game feels as though they have taken a step back from their own experience, observing all at once and fitting in their movements with ease, as though those movements were mere obvious choices provoked by the details blooming from the situation rather than some complicated calculation of free will.

Flow can also seem like quite the opposite, where gobs of time fly by while we are buried within a vault of concentration.  The task finds its completion and we finally breathe deep, lean back and notice with astonishment the first rays of sunrise.

Strangely, this second description bears more similarity to our experience of the exact opposite: think of half a dozen hours wasted in front of Netflix autoplaying show after show.  A season finishes and finally we wake up from the wasteful daze and realize that another day is now gone.  While oddly similar in subjective experience, the difference here is enormous: one experience is active, the other is passive.

What exactly is happening with our attention in each of these circumstances?  We might be tempted to ascribe a direction to flow in each of these.  With the passive day wasted in front of Netflix, the flow is from the external to the internal, we just receive sound and light and whatever other accoutrement might accompany entertainment.  And then with the productive flow state, the direction is reversed: we are generating something, putting out into the world and changing the state of the universe in some tiny way.

With this rubric of direction it can seem like the act of being mindfully present as practiced in meditation is of the wasteful, passive variety.  It’s not at all unfair to say that this is true: you could be getting something else done.  But this is an example of short-term logic, and it misses the larger point which only emerges after months or years, and perhaps even decades of practice:  the point of meditation isn’t to passively witness your life during a couple dozen minutes a day, but to gain the ability to incorporate the skill into life at large and ultimately, to have your cake and eat it too.

Your life, as witnessed from your eyes and through your ears, by the sensation of your skin, the weight of your bones and the movement or your whole self through space and time is like the quintessential movie.  It’s not just during the quiet moments, nor the practiced moments or the special moments that we can observe this vast spectacle.  With practice, we can observe with joy and gratitude that single protagonist during their most strenuous or concentrated moments.

Meditation practice, defined as that group of wasted minutes when we sit and try to do nothing is very much like backing up from the edge of the precipice in order to get a running start.  The daily practice of meditation adds just a little momentum to a growing way of thought and experience that can, with time & attention, bridge the paradox of focus and presence, ensuring that you don’t miss out on life while you’re busy getting it done.

THE FIRST METAQUESTION

August 5th, 2020

It’s possible and all too common to waste an enormous amount of time trying to answer a bad question.  What’s the meaning of life?  Who am I?  What’s my passion? These are all bad questions.  Why exactly are they bad questions?  Very simple: none of them fit the definition of a good question:

A question is an open ended concept that creates forward momentum.

While the above questions are open-ended concepts, they don’t create momentum in any particular direction.  They are questions ripe for round-about wondering - rumination that goes nowhere.  Such questions can be tempting because they seem to offer such an expanse of possibility.  But without constraint, we get lost in such nebulous spaces, and questions - good questions - are the only tool we have to navigate that nebulous space of the unknown.

The first metaquestion - that is, the first question we must ask about our current question is:

Is this a good question or bad question?

This question itself requires a small family of subquestions in order to find its answer.  One subquestion that enables a judgement of goodness or badness has to do with action:  

Does the question describe an actionable next step that can provoke feedback that can help answer the question?

If the answer is ‘no’, then the question is either a bad one, or simply to large, too vague, and in need of focus. We can also ask:

Does this question circumscribe a single answer or many possible answers?

If a question clearly has a single answer that we can find, then it’s likely a better one.  For example: will this business experiment work?  That question has a definitive answer, and it’s a decent starting question because it provokes the path for its own answer.  Compare that question to What’s the meaning of life?  This question might have one answer, but there’s no way to know before hand when equipped just with the question.  The business experiment, on the other hand, is either going to work, or not.

We can examine a sort of in-between amalgam of these two questions to get a cleaner sense of good and bad questions relative to the number of possible answers they hint at.  We can ask: 

What business should I start?

This is a debilitatingly open-ended question.  And while it is more specific than what’s the meaning of life?, it circumscribes an area that is simply too large.  We have to ask: what would be a better form of this question?  Or how can the cloud of possible answers be narrowed in some way?  From those subquestions we can wonder:

How many different types of businesses are there, and which might create a lifestyle that seems attractive to me?

This is a far better question because it immediately points to a path of action.  We can do something as simple as google that question and see what sort of types have been identified.  Furthermore, it has a much smaller number of answers.  There are effectively infinite businesses that could be started, but all of them fall into a far smaller number of possible categories.

Notice how this chain of questions has grown more specific with each jump.  First we went from something totally open-ended and stagnant, like What’s the meaning of life? To a binary situation: is that question good or bad?  From there we can narrow in on better questions merely by assessing the quantity of possible answers.

But this whole process begins with the first metaquestion where we can turn the tool of the question onto itself and bootstrap our mind out of the circular morass caused by a bad question by asking: is this question helping me move in a productive direction?

STACK THE DECK

August 4th, 2020

There’s nothing quite like no choice to make the next step searingly obvious.  This odd constraint is perhaps why the entire phenomenon of ‘jobs’ work.  As many have discovered this year, it can be quite difficult to create your own schedule in the absence of one given to you by work.  But with a job, the constraints of what needs to get done fall into place like marbles circling the funnel.  Sometimes the order doesn’t matter and it’s just a matter of getting things done and the pressure of everything that needs to get done makes choosing a quick, nearly whimsical event.

But remove all the constraints, give a person days and days off, and the decision to get up off the couch to get a jar of Nutella, or continue with the bag of chips can incur great deliberation.  Salty or sweet?  Is it time to switch?  … hard to say.

The remedy to such an unfulfilling existence of limp leisure is to invent constraints similar to those at work.  To stack the deck of tasks.  As is often said: if you want something done, give it to a busy person.  Such an individual has the pressure to keep in motion - the motivation is perpetual motion machine of emotion.  

It’s a paradox of productivity that the best way to exercise your choice about how to spend your time, is to give yourself no other choice.  This ensures that what you want to do, actually gets done, rather than let that idea, dream or goal remain in the hazy bucket of ‘someday’.

SIGN ON THE DOOR

August 3rd, 2020

We all know looks can be deceiving, but we still fail to realize the deception.  How many things do we engage with because they look good or seem good but which will inevitably turn out to backfire?  Probably all of us have something we do habitually that falls into this pit of facepalm.  Despite having experienced the lack of pay off and injury to resolve, we’re still fooled from the outset.

The opposite is also true and we are just as fooled:  we fail to realize just how much pay off there will be and we fail to follow through because that payoff isn’t immediately evident.  Like going to the gym, or meditating.  These things have virtually no payoff in the first days, weeks, even months.  Like many good things, the results take a long time to emerge.  

Real value is rarely readily apparent.

But it’s almost always apparent in what we know.  We know what’s good for us, but we don’t intuit this knowledge in a way that changes our behaviour in a fundamental or even reliable way.  Normal curiosity doesn’t have anything tangible to grab hold of in order to move forward.  There’s no real feedback to spice our natural interest.  

What it requires is a curiosity that’s hooked into a purely conceptual game.  A curiosity that is divorced from if not purposely exiled from our sensory experience.  In that intellectual realm, curiosity has no choice but to wait to see the results of experiments carried out over a long period of time, be it months for meditation and exercise or years for investing, or decades for other skills and abilities to fully mature..

But where do we plug the incentive to get the body to carry out these actions: to go to the gym, to sit on the cushion, to ignore the moment-to-moment stock price, to endure the drudgery of confusion before a detail of a skill we are yet to possess?

If this had a straightforward answer, we’d all be billionaires with six-packs, and perhaps that’s the most important part of the mistake.  Each failure to realize or follow through requires its own strategy, each is its own puzzle to solve.  We begin to make faster progress when we find ways for different strategies to interlock, overlap and become additive in combinatorial ways. 

One example is to realize that invisible payoffs return at different time scales.  A real example is meditation combined with exercise.  Meditation, despite some studies that a selection of people do experience a reduction in stress quite quickly, doesn’t really start having substantial impacts on the brain that can be seen via changes in brain structure until about 3-4 months into the process.  That’s a long time to wait in order to start feeling better, hence the ubiquity of anti-depressives.  Exercise seems similar, unless you’re already in fairly good shape, an individual isn’t going to actually see results for quite a while.  Both of these are bummers, however, exercise has the short term pay off of altering brain chemistry in mood elevating ways - but these don’t last.

If both exercise and meditation are combined and the practices initiated at once, the invisible short term pay off of exercise can fill in the role that meditation will play in the long term.  Of course, this is just one way that strategies across practices can interlock in virtuous ways.  Ultimately, it’s an exercise in creative problem solving, and who knows what sort of web can be stitched between our efforts, not just for pay off, but to help us stick to each.