Middle Season #15

 Dianthus (sweet William), salvia, bearded iris (all from the yard) and peonies from neighborhood

Right Speech

 I was stung yesterday after finding out that I was the gossip subject.  It made me remember Joseph Goldstein talking about "Right Speech" in one of his lectures.  Right speech, according to Tricycle magazine

The Buddha was precise in his description of Right Speech. He defined it as “abstinence from false speech, abstinence from malicious speech, abstinence from harsh speech, and abstinence from idle chatter.” In the vernacular this means not lying, not using speech in ways that create discord among people, not using swear words or a cynical, hostile or raised tone of voice, and not engaging in gossip. Re-framed in the positive, these guidelines urge us to say only what is true, to speak in ways that promote harmony among people, to use a tone of voice that is pleasing, kind, and gentle, and to speak mindfully in order that our speech is useful and purposeful

 

Fotoclubismo

 

MOMA has a new exhibition called "Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964." It recounts the story of a group of amateur photographers who spent their weekends taking photos, often together.  From the MOMA website:

Fotoclubismo explores the unforgettable creative achievements of São Paulo’s Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB), a group of amateur photographers whose ambitious and innovative works embodied the abundant originality of postwar Brazilian culture. Although their work was heralded around the world in the 1950s, it subsequently faded from view.

Bandeirante alludes to a colonial-era group of explorers and fortune hunters based in the São Paulo region, whom the FCCB celebrated for their pioneering spirit

Photography was a hobby for most FCCB members: on weekdays, group members—many of whom were women—went to their jobs as businessmen, accountants, journalists, engineers, biologists, and bankers. On weekends, they often traveled to photograph together. They were nonetheless quite serious about their artistic ambition, not unlike millions of people on Instagram today. Their pictures assumed many forms—from inventive experiments to distillations from everyday life—and their attentiveness to abstraction evolved in dialogue with leading critical thinkers and peers in design, painting, and film.

The beautiful image on the cover of the exhibition catalog above is "Filigree" by Gertrudes Altschul, in 1953.

Weekly Meditation Schedule

 Chakra meditation - link

Christiane Wolf's audio meditations - link

John Kabat Zinn - 

Loving kindness  link https://www.mindful.org/this-loving-kindness-meditation-is-a-radical-act-of-love/

Breathscape  https://www.mindful.org/the-breathscape-practice-for-cultivating-mindfulness/

Body Scan meditation - (45 mins) - link

                            How to Embrace Your Own Awareness -   (20 minutes) - (link)

                            Tapping into Wisdom and Beauty (link)

                            All his mitigation retreats (link)

                            Bill Moyers' special on him (mid 1980s) (link)

Alan Watts playlist - link

Your future lurks within you.

There's a new book that publishes for the first time the classic Rainer Maria Rilke "Letters to a Young Poet" along with the actual letters OF the "young poet" Franz Kappus to Rilke.  The New Yorker reviews it here.   

“What we call fate,” Rilke wrote to Kappus, “emerges from out of the person, it doesn’t impinge on the person from without.” This is an extraordinary idea about fate.  It's like what you CAN BE or WILL BE because of your character and choices.  And it carries with it the idea that we will become that thing... but it might take some time.  “The future is stationary,” Rilke wrote. “It is we who are moving in infinite space.” 

New Yorker writer Kamran Javadizadeh reflects, "There’s something frightening about being addressed in this way, about being told that your future lurks within you, but that you will have become a different person once it has emerged. This is a strange way to imagine the flow of time."  And it's a strange way of thinking who we are.  

In the final lines of  the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Rilke writes: “You must change your life.”  But this line comes after a long reflection on a headless statue which is able to communicate through all of the parts of itself... that there is no need for the head to be expressive of what it is.  A better, fuller quotation, then, is "for here there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life."  Your character will emerge.  You must change your life to achieve your fate.

Javadizadeh begins the article with a reflection on letter writing.  I don't know if he means to connect this to Rilke's letters specifically or not, but it seems apt:  "To hold a letter addressed to you and see your own name in another’s hand is to feel an unsettling kind of pleasure. Even before you’ve opened the envelope, your identity has been refracted through someone else’s. The invitation is both estranging and thrilling: Could you become the person whose name you read there?"  Letters, because they contain the image of you from another, often a idealized version of you, call to you like fate.

Eric Carle meets Mr. Rogers

Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Fred Rogers visits Eric Carle (who died this week) to learn how Carle creates his images.

Could you become the person whose name you read there?

 

When my Aunt Judi joined the nunnery, my grandmother kept in touch with her through letters.  Every day, the story is, she would write her daughter a letter.  That story left a deep impression on me. I remember thinking "THAT is an act of love."

One of my favorite takes on letter writing is P.J. Harvey's "The Letter."  

It turns me on
To imagine
Your blue eyes
On my words
Your beautiful pen
Take the cap off
Give me a sign and I'd come running

One of the benefits of traveling is the thinking about it before you actually leave.  One of the benefits of writing letters is the imagining of the other.  In this verse she thinks about the beloved's eyes.  The imagining turns into an invitation.  In the first verse, the invitation turns into longing:

Put the pen
To the paper
Press the envelope
With my scent
Can't you see
In my handwriting
The curve of my g?
The longing

There's a new book that publishes for the first time the classic Rainer Maria Rilke "Letters to a Young Poet" along with the actual letters OF the "young poet" Franz Kappus to Rilke.  The New Yorker reviews it here.   The reviewer writes: "To hold a letter addressed to you and see your own name in another’s hand is to feel an unsettling kind of pleasure. Even before you’ve opened the envelope, your identity has been refracted through someone else’s. The invitation is both estranging and thrilling: Could you become the person whose name you read there?" 

Inviting people to say yes

From Adam Grant on Twitter  

 Pressuring people to say yes today often leaves them more likely to say no tomorrow.

"I need to talk to you" implies an obligation.

"I'd love to talk to you" is an invitation.

"I need your help" imposes a burden.

"I'd value your help" respects freedom and shows  gratitude

Emerson's active seedtime

 Ralph Waldo Emerson's development as a writer and thinker was accompanied (aided?) by enormous amounts of reading and journal keeping.  

One thing he had learned in college was how to keep journals.  Beginning in 1819, when he was a sophomore, Emerson began keeping a college theme notebook as well as a list of books he had read. A third notebook , begun for drafts of his college essays on Socrates, turned into a notebook for poetry. A fourth, begun in 1820 for notes in a lecture course by George Ticknor, grew into a general notebook for drafts of essays and poems, Also, in 1820 he began a series of notebooks, each called "Universe," each with a number, which were commonplace books full of quotations from his reading.  He began yet another series of notebooks in 1920 called "Wide World." He filled two the first year.  After a lapse in 1821 -- graduation year -- he began again earnest in 1822, filling "Wide World" notebooks 3 through 9 with his own thoughts and observations on a wide range of subjects.  He filled three more in 1923.

Emerson's organized, persistent, purposeful journal keeping is one of the most striking aspects of his early intellectual life.  He wrote constantly, he wrote about everything, he covered hundreds of pages. When he had nothing to say, he wrote about having nothing to say.  He read and indexed and reread what he had written.  He copied letters into his journals and prose from his journals into his letters.  He laughed at much of it when he read it over, inserting comments such as "dead before it reached it subject," but he kept at it.  These early journals are mostly dross and largely unoriginal, but they are impressive in their fluent persistency.  They are efforts, essaying at original composition, first reachings for the essay that became his lifelong form.

During this active seedtime, Emerson was also reading in all directions.  He read systematically only for a particular project.  He read current books and old books.  he habitually read the North American Review, the Edinburgh Review, and the Christian Examiner.  And from almost everything he read he culled phrases, details, facts, metaphors, anecdotes, witticisms, aphorisms, and ideas.  He kept this energetic reading and excerpting up for over forty years; the vast system of his personal notebooks and indexes -- including indexes to indexes -- eventually reached over 230 volumes -- filing four shelves of a good-sized bookcase.  The notebooks were in part his storehouse of original writing and in part a filing system, designed to store and give him access to the accumulating fruits of this reading on every topic that ever interested him throughout his life.

Four Kinds of Readers

 

From Robert Richardson's biography of Emerson:

Coleridge notes that there are four kinds of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly bag, and the Golconda. In the first everything that runs in runs right out again.  The sponge gives out all it took in, only a little dirtier.  They jelly bag keeps only the refuse.  The Golconda runs everthing through a sieve and keeps only the diamonds.  

(Emerson, Richardson says, "was not a systematic reader, but he had a genius for skimming and a comprehensive system for taking notes.  Most of the the time he was the pure Golconda, what miners call a high-grader, working his way rapidly through vast mines of material and pocketing the richest bits.  He read rapidly, looking for what he could use.  Certain books, among them Plutarch and Montaigne, were particularly rich for him and could bear endless rereading.

Wondering what a "Golconda" is?  Webster's online is helpful on this:

In the 16th century, Golconda was the capital of the Qutb Shahi kingdom in southern India, near modern Hyderabad. The city was home to one of the most powerful Muslim sultanates in the region and was the center of a flourishing diamond trade. Magnificent diamonds were taken from the mines in the hills surrounding Golconda, including Darya-e Nur (meaning "sea of light"), at 185 carats, the largest and finest diamond of the crown jewels of Iran. By the 1880s, "Golconda" was being used generically by English speakers to refer to any particularly rich mine, and later to any source of great wealth.

Golconda is also the name of a painting by Rene Magritte in 1953.  Renemagritte.org explains the title:

As was often the case with Magritte's works, the title Golconda was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. Golconda is a ruined city in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, near Hyderabad, which from the mid-14th century until the end of the 17th was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region's legendary diamond industry was such that its name remains, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a synonym for 'mine of wealth'."

Middle season #14 trees

 Black locust, pine spreading pollen, hickory flower, horse chestnut 

Middle Season #14

Bluestar, spirea (behind the B&G barn at HC), star-of-Bethlehem, south facing clematis in my yard.

honeysuckle, mom's poppy, phlox, rocketcress in Fullersburg Woods.

another picture of bluestar, before it blooms

 

Tree Alphabet

 

Learned about this "Tree Alphabet" by artist Katie Holton from a tweet from Emergence Magazine.

Holton wrote an article in Irish Times about why she decided to create a new tree alphabet.  She did one for New York City (you can download the actual font here) and one for Ireland.  

I didn't know that there were "old" tree alphabets.  Holton describes how an old Irish language, "Ogham," was her inspiration.

Ireland’s medieval Ogham, sometimes called a “tree alphabet”, used trees for letters. The characters were called feda “trees”, or nin “forking branches” due to their shape. Astonishingly, this ancient alphabet was “written” from the ground up – each character sprouting from a central line, like leaves on a stem or branches on a tree. 

x

Right Listening

One way to have fewer conflicts is to ignore issues.  Sometimes you can turn this ignoring into a "virtue" and say that you're forgiving others' words or deeds.  But this is rarely a solution.  "Listening" and ignoring your own responses to what's being said sets up an expectation that problems will be ignored.  But there's an important balance.  You also can't respond immediately before considering your own "triggers" small or large.

There is a lot of advice about "listening well" -- look at the other person, nod, summarize -- but there's another part that's even more important: realize that the conversation is bringing stuff up in YOU and you should be mindful in how you respond, with thoughts and emotions, especially to things that you don't really want to hear.

Tricycle magazine, in an article about Right Speech, has a story about how the author dealt with "normal" communication problems with her adolescent son.  One of her practices with her son focused on learning the feelings in the body as you hear things:

I attempted to put the communication issues that Emilio and I were experiencing into a larger context. I talked with him about how important and complex listening is, and how the inability to communicate with patience and respect not only damages interpersonal relationships but also contributes to the many problems threatening our world. I told Emilio that if we could continue to improve our communication, it would not only benefit our relationship, but would likely serve each of us in all present and future relationships as well.  I said that in my experience, listening to something I don’t want to hear is completely different from listening to something I find pleasing. Emilio readily agreed that what I call “listening under stress” indeed requires additional skills.

To better illustrate this point, we invented a listening “game.” I gave Emilio four blank index cards, and asked him to write four sentences that he would be happy to hear me say to him. This was easy. He wrote: “Emilio, your teacher says you’re doing an excellent job in school.” “We’re going to pick up our puppy Luna.” “We’re going to Virginia to visit your cousins.” “You’re really doing well in Capoiera!” (Capoiera is an Afro- Brazilian martial art that he was studying at the time). When he finished, I gave him four more index cards, and asked him to write four things he would not want me to say to him.

He seemed a bit puzzled, so we talked about what kinds of things most people do not want to hear.  He said, “criticisms and put-downs.” I added that most people react just as defensively to hearing another person say something they don’t agree with as they do to personal criticism. With this hint, he quickly wrote his next four sentences: “How come your bedroom is so small?” “The middle school you’re going to next year is a horrible school.“ “Border Collies are the worst breed of dogs.” “I heard that your sister was adopted in Bolivia. Why wasn’t she adopted in the United States?” 

Next I asked him to write four neutral sentences. This proved more challenging, and I offered examples of the kinds of things that might be neutral. He then wrote: “I think it’s going to rain.” “Dad’s planting grass in the backyard.” “Claudia is sweeping the kitchen floor.” “Last night’s rain flooded the trail by the river.” 

By this time Emilio was wondering what we were going to do with the index cards. I said I would read them to him one at a time, so that he could feel his reactions to the different kinds of statements. I asked him if I should read the four sentences in each category together, or read all the sentences randomly. He replied, “Random,” so I shuffled the cards before placing them face down on the carpet.  I read them aloud one by one, pausing in between for Emilio to feel his reaction to each sentence.

Not surprisingly, for the different negative statements, Emilio reported, “I’m closed up inside and don’t want to hear it, “ “My muscles are tense,” “My feelings are hurt,” “My chest is tight and rigid,” “I make myself hard inside,” “I want to interrupt and tell you to shut up,” “My reply feels stuck in my throat,” and “My skin feels hot.”

In response to positive statements, Emilio noticed, “Flickers of happiness rise up in my body,” “There’s a lot more life inside,” “I feel space inside, like a big gate swinging open,” “My muscles are soft and relaxed,” “My body feels energetic, like it wants to suddenly move,” and “There’s joy in my mind and heart.”

In response to the neutral statements, Emilio said his body, breath, and heartbeat felt relaxed but not excited, and that he had to try harder to notice these physical sensations. 

Emilio was surprised by how many reactions he had to the sentences, given that he himself had written them a few minutes earlier! His observation highlighted how challenging it is to control our reactions when we don’t know what’s coming. We talked about how reactive thoughts, emotions, and sensations happen to everyone. I said that being more aware of these reactions enables us to know ourselves better, to create a little space in which to decide what we want to do or say, and thus to more consciously choose our behavior.

This reminds me of a short exercise by X where she asks us just to witness how you respond to single words: peace, fear. (???)

More on right listening from the article:

Webster’s dictionary defines ‘listen’ as “to pay attention to sound” and “to hear with thoughtful attention.” Yet effective listening means paying attention to more than just sound, and therefore requires that we use more than just our ears. As we are increasingly able to bring mindfulness to ordinary human interaction, we find that listening means attending to our physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions, as well as to the voice, facial expressions, gestures, pauses, underlying meanings, and rich nuances that accompany the spoken words of others.

This type of listening is what Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh calls “deep listening.” It is what physician Rachel Naomi Remen calls “generous listening,” what Buddhist teacher and Hospice trainer Joan Halifax calls “listening from the heart,” and what the Quakers call “Devout Listening.” Like any other mindfulness practice, Right Listening is both a skill and a way of being. In her book The Zen of Listening, Rebecca Sharif writes, “Listening is one of our greatest personal natural resources, yet it is by far one of our most undeveloped abilities."

Maya Lin's Ghost Forest

Just read a New Yorker article about Maya Lin's Ghost Forest exhibition in Madison Square Park.  A Ghost Forest "is an entire stand of tress that has been killed by climate change."  The project is a "grove" of forty-nine Atlantic white cedars from a ghost forest in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.  The exhibition would also have a soundscape made up of twenty audio recordings from Cornell University of woodland scenes and animals "that used to roam Manhattan."  The audio recording and a documentary are at the exhibition link above.

The exhibition website notes:

In nature, a ghost forest is the evidence of a dead woodland that was once vibrant. Atlantic white cedar populations on the East Coast are endangered by past logging practices and threats from climate change, including extreme weather events that yield salt water intrusion, wind events, and fire.

Interviewed in the New Yorker article, Lin asks, "How can I make you aware of things that are literally disappearing right before our eyes?"

The Ghost Forest work is related to Earthwork artists of the 1970s.  It is part of her ongoing "What is Missing" interactive project which documents ecological loss across the globe.  The web project is one way to make viewers "aware of things that are literally disappearing right before our eyes."  

"With every successive generation, we accept what we know," she says.  "In the eighteen-nineties, a cod was bigger than a man.  And now we now think a cod is this big" holding her hands a foot apart.

The website is a remarkable collection of sounds and images and short articles about species loss, like a world-wide companion piece to Elizabeth Kolbert's Sixth Extinction. 

At home in the world

 1.  Life on the Rocks.  One night Jeff and Ben and I planned a trip and hung out on Wilmette beach.  Gilson park?  I recall sitting on some large rocks and being very comfortable, reclining on some arrangement of rocks that supported me.  It felt like I had "found my place" and could sit there forever.  There was a sense of pleasantness and ease and contentment.  I look back at that feeling as something worthwhile.  I recall, in another occasion, the day after a trip, driving back to Champaign, and feeling the rightness of the late-fall colors.  Lots of different khaki colors in the landscape.  I felt -- deep in my bones -- the rightness of it, the appreciation of it.  There was no typical rush to get done with the car trip, no looking forward to the end of the "commute," just being at home.

2.  Home Places.  Where are the places that you feel at peace? at ease? at home?  

3.  Home Activities.  Where are the activities that help you feel nourished?  healthy, light, vital, alive, nurtured, sustained, aupple, agile, invigorated? recharged? charging?  Where are the settings that you feel creative? 

4.  Relationships. In what relationships do you feel needed, wanted, trusted, liked, appreciated, cherished?  Who do you, yourself, want, trust, like cherish?  How do you show it?  

5.  Claiming things.  Ice Age Trail through hiker "claims" the outdoors for blacks.  Not being afraid, taking up space, stamping them with your presence, usage.  This early blog post talks about "claiming" things.  Wabi Sabi is about claiming used things, often handmade things.  The first half of the suburban adulthood (for dudes) seems to be attempts to lay claim to activities, consumer products to provide a sense of "relaxation" (which might or might not be the same as "being at home"):  TVs, cigars, cocktails, craft beers...  

6.  The hand-chosen life.  The opposite of "claiming" is "renouncing" or "foreswearing."  The hand-chosen life is the result of claiming certain things and renouncing others.  Yes to gardening (and eating things that you helped grow) or baking (eating things that you leavened or fermented).  No to consuming cigars, animals, sitcoms, violent TV, whatever.  Often it means doing these things in opposition to what society seems to be correct for you (like black lesbians through hiking the Ice Age Trail in Wisconsin).  

The End of Poetry by Ada Limon

 The End of Poetry
By Ada Limón

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.

 Published in the April 27, 2020 issue of The New Yorker.  You can hear Limon read the poem there.   

100 5-Page Chapters

Austin Kleon's blog inspired me to head back to the Ralph Waldo Emerson biography by Robert Richardson.   On C-SPAN's booknotes, Richardson is interviewed about why he constructed the biography in the way he did -- 100 5-page chapters.

LAMB: Hundred chapters, five pages each.

RICHARDSON: In the book.

LAMB: When did you decide to do that?

RICHARDSON: Well, I had a wonderful teacher at Harvard, W.J. Bate, who wrote very great biographies of Keats and then of Johnson, and his advice to me when he discovered that I was daring to write a biography was to write in short takes; if at all possible, to write in short pieces so that the reader feels that he or she is getting somewhere. I mean, that's a big, heavy book. And people have busy lives and they have lots else to do, and if you can sit down and read four or five pages and feel like you're getting somewhere instead of these big 30 or 40-page or 50-page chapters, it makes a book readable that might not otherwise seem so.

 Kleon glosses that nicely:

He passed that advice — be kind to your readers and respect their time — on to his students and other biographers: Write 100 pieces of one to two thousand words on the parts of the life you care about the most, and don’t worry about what order they’re in until you have the pieces.

I love the idea of 100 chapters on a subject.  It feels like a series of ten 10x10s.  In fact, that's roughly how he's organized the book: about 10 topics, (the Student, Divinity, The Natural History of the Intellect) each with about 10 chapters.

An LA Review of Books interview contains details on his method and indexing:

AH: A practical question: Emerson’s handwritten journals took up 263 volumes; the index alone ran to more than 400 pages. How in the world do you keep your notes together?

RR: Organization is a big problem. Emerson took me 10 years. I had two three-ring notebooks for the chronology, which is one page for every three months. The left-hand half was for Emerson’s reading and writing. Tons of stuff from the notebooks and from letters went in here; I added fold-out half pages when needed. The right-hand half was for outside events and works. Then I had three notebooks with notes on Emerson’s writings, arranged chronologically. I had a Xerox file, alphabetically arranged, with pages and chapters and articles and whatnot; then a five-by-eight-inch index card file, eventually three of them, arranged by topic, such as “domestic life,” “Henry Thoreau,” “Margaret Fuller,” “religion,” etc.; then four notebooks called topics one, two, three, four, with elaborate notes on, say Swedenborg, Neoplatonism, Plotinus, etc. Then there’s a notebook called “Want to See” which lists everything you think you need to look at. Finally, a notebook called “Bibliographic Control” (this is the key, what makes the whole mess hold up), which has tables-of-contents for all the notebooks, as well as the Xerox file, the index-card files. Xeroxes of indices of manuscripts in libraries, etc., etc. 

And he describes how he turns from researching to writing:

AH: Can you describe what it feels like to move from the research phase to the writing phase? How do you know when you know enough?

RR: When you start running into the same stuff over and over, it is time to think about writing. You need what Emerson calls “the casting moment,” that is the day or two days when you suddenly see it all and can outline it, hurriedly. Then you start writing, with the expectation that you have done about half the research. You’ll do the other half now as you go. Now it is important to write something every day so you don’t dry up or freeze up. When you are stuck, look at the chronology and it will tell you what happens next.

It really helps to have a couple of real people in mind as your readers, it helps with finding the right tone when you know who you mean to address. And in my case, with Emerson especially, I wanted my readers to sympathize and maybe identify with my subject’s struggles when young, and to see that it is possible to make something of life 

Jim Collins 20 Miles March and Day Tracking

Audio Podcast: link

Transcript. https://www.google.com/amp/s/tim.blog/2019/02/20/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-jim-collins-361/amp/

20 mile March

Daily tracking of mood

1000 hours of creative work

And so I went to some faculty members who I greatly respect and I said, “How do the people in the academy that you most respect in yourself spend their time?” And I got a consistent answer: 50, 30, 20. 50 percent of your time in new, intellectual, creative work. 30 percent of your time in teaching. And 20 percent of your time in other stuff that just has to get done — serving on committees, whatever it happens to be that you have to do. And so I thought, “That sounds good. I’m just going to start doing that.” So I started — as I was heading out on the Thelma and Louise leap — counting my hours every day. And I would count how many hours in the day were creative, new, intellectual. And the goal was that had to be above 50 percent.

There’s a concept in Great by Choice called the 20 mile march. And so I kind of had a 20 mile march, I just didn’t know that concept yet. And the idea of it being something that you just do really consistently over time that imposes a very high level of discipline that accumulates to results.

And so I simplified it and I just simply said, “Can I just simply count the number of creative hours I get every day and then hold myself to an account?” So at the end of every single day, I open a spreadsheet and that spreadsheet has three cells on a line; that’s for the day. The first thing is just a simple accounting of what happened that day. Where did my time go? What did I do? etc.

Tim Ferriss: Can you give — sorry to interrupt, but I would love…this is the stuff I love. What might a description for the day look like? Is it three sentences, four sentences, what might it look like?

Jim Collins: It sort of depends on — actually the very best days don’t have much in it at all. They are: “Got up early, two hours of really great creative work, breakfast with Joanne, five hours creative work, work out, nap, three hours of creative work, enjoyed dinner with Joanne, bed.” That’s like a great day. But other days are full of lots of other choppy things. And so what I tend to do is try to capture a bit of what happened this week, what happened with the main tasks of the day. If there were some really interesting conversations that happened or something that hit in those. I’ll notes those. They’re markers so that I can always go back and I’ll just share with you how I use those in a minute because I actually do these correlations with all of that.

And then the second cell is the number of creative hours I got that day. Now there’s no rule about how many you get in a day. Sometimes there’s zero and sometimes they can be nine or 10, which would be a huge number. But then it calculates back over the last 365 days. And the march, which I don’t think I’ve missed for well over 30 years, and I hope to hit for a lot longer now is every single 365 days cycle, every single one, every single day, if you calculate back the last 365 days, the total number of creative hours must exceed 1,000. No matter what.

It doesn’t matter if you’re sick. It doesn’t matter if there’s other stuff you’d like — 1,000 creative hours a year as a minimum baseline. Now you can be above that, that’s fine. But never once, there can’t be a single day in any 365-day cycle, January two to January two, July 22 to July 22, September nine to September nine, it doesn’t matter. Always has to be above 1,000 creative hours. And you watch it — and I put on the whiteboard here at the lab — the three-month pace. So you take the last three months multiply it times four, the six month pace. And then the current 365. And that is a way to kind of monitor. If I start seeing those numbers start to go down, I’ll change my behavior. And sometimes I have a big buffer and sometimes I don’t.

And the idea is, if you stay with that, eventually you’re going to have work. Now there’s a third cell that I put in there that most people don’t know as much about because people know about the hours thing somewhat. But all of us have dark times, difficult times. All of us have good times, right? But here’s an interesting thing I noticed, which is that if you’re kind of going through a funk, it colors your whole life. And you tend to think your whole life is a funk because you’re looking through that lens.

And so I thought, “But actually I feel like my life is really pretty good.” But when you’re in that other place, it doesn’t feel that way, right? And so what I started to do is I started creating a code, which is plus two, plus one, zero minus one, minus two. And the other thing I put in — and the key on all this by the way is you have to do it every day in real time. You can’t five days later look back and say, “How did I feel that day?” And what this is, is a totally subjective “How quality was the day?” A plus two is a super positive day.

Synonym for God

 

John Muir

No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty.

Helmut Jahn

 

https://www.jahn-us.com/work

Brood X is coming

 

Brood X Cicadas are Emerging at Last - Scientific American

Middle Season #13

 Snowdrop anemone (Sylvestri), Honeysuckle full bloom, lilacs, maple helicopters 

Tulips all tired or shot completely.  Leaves popping on oaks.  Leaves on Elms.  In general, crowns of trees are a light green. By end of MS 13, tiny locust tree leaves  

By the end of the season, thousands and thousands of tan maple helicopters falling in the back yard. A glut. 

Redbuds a paler pink each day. 

Cardinals everywhere suddenly  

Lillies of the valley, too.