Middle Season 12

 

The season of crab apples and the slowly developing lilacs.  Of Virginia bluebells and great stands of tulips.  Profusion of color.  

Kevin Kelly on Optimism

 

Koitsu Tsuchiya

Kevin Kelly on Tim Ferriss podcast:

On Optimism:

what is the argument for why we should be optimistic?

Kevin Kelly: Generally, people see optimism as kind of a temperament, it’s a sunny view, and I think there is some of that, and I have a natural amount of it, but over time, I’ve actually become even more optimistic than my general tendency, deliberately. It’s kind of like a learned optimism, and I think the reason we should be as optimistic as we can is because it is how we make really good things, good, complicated things.

It’s hard enough. Well, I mean, it’s very hard to make good complicated things work because generally there’s more way things can fail than they can succeed, and it’s very unlikely that we’re going to make something really good that’s complicated, inadvertently. They’re hard to do. So we have to see it and believe that it can be done, and that is where the optimism comes in, is envisioning something and then believing that you could make it real. Because, when we look back on history, and that’s where a lot of my optimism comes, we realize that most of the things that we have now have been made by people who are optimistic. Reviewing that it was possible to make them, and believe that they were going to make them, and could imagine them.

So, I think of it as a work of imagination where you kind of imagine a good scenario, which is harder to do than imagining a scenario where it fails or collapses. It is much easier to imagine how things break than it is to see how they work, and that’s why entrepreneurs and all the others are rightly lauded because they’re going against that grain. It is hard to imagine how we could have this thing that seems like it is improbable, and most things that work are improbable. That’s the definition from the Santa Fe complexity theory, is that things breaking down is the probable. Complicated things working are improbable by definition.

And, so you’re against the improbable. And that work of imagining the improbable and having the improbable succeed, and believing it can, is optimism, which means that the optimists are the ones who shape our future. So I’d like to give a little story of a car, and you need to have brakes on the car to steer the car but the engine is actually the more important element, and so there are people and there are organizations, and there are methods that are going to be doing the braking, and I think they’re essential. I want brakes in the car, but I just feel that the brake can overwhelm and cause stagnation, and that we also wanted to remember to focus on making the engine even stronger, and so I emphasized the engine.

(I love your distinction between passive optimism and active.)

what's "progress"? 

It means that, overall, on average, this is a better place to live than at any time in the past, and this is the kind of Obama test. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that, but it’s like if you were to be born randomly in any time period, it could be male, female, poor, rich, you’re totally at random, on some average thing. What time do you want to live in? What time period? And there’s no way you want to be anything before, at least, 50 years ago, and maybe not even within 50 years.

I think there’s a movement called Degrowth, the degrowth movement.

Tim Ferriss: I’m not familiar.

Kevin Kelly: So these are people who basically see the troubles of the world, in particular the climate one, coming from our addiction to growth. That growth, this is kind of the consumer, capitalistic kind of idea that grow, grow, grow, grow, and they’re saying, it’s finite. We can’t continue to grow, and we have to degrowth, stop growing, and there’s a little bit of a confusion in English because there’s two meanings of the word growth. There’s growth to add more pounds, to add more and more stuff, to get bigger, wider, heavier, to have more things, to sell more refrigerators, to sell more bottles of wine, but there’s another meaning of the word growth, which is probably closer to what you’re interested in. Personal growth, developing, maturing — 

Tim Ferriss: Or knowledge growth.

Kevin Kelly: Knowledge growth.

Tim Ferriss: I guess, in a sense, it’s the same as the first, but it’s — 

Kevin Kelly: No, it’s increasing its complexity. It’s taking the same number of atoms and having a more complex arrangement. It’s going from a jellyfish to a chimpanzee or something, and so that complex, adaptive system, where you have increasing levels of complexity and more exotropy in it, that is a different kind of growth.

...So what type of growth is an increase in complexity? So you have an economy where instead of trying to sell more bottles of wine, you try to sell the same number of wines, but better wine.

Kevin Kelly ChatGPT for first drafts

 On First Drafts

Kevin Kelly: Yes, ChatGPT, Bing, and stuff, and Google. For me, I’ve always had problems making that first draft. It’s just a killer.

Tim Ferriss: Yes. And I know the feeling.

Kevin Kelly: You know the feeling. I find it helpful in making the first draft.

Tim Ferriss: How do you prompt it? What would be an example approach?

Kevin Kelly: All different ways. And I’ve been collecting this. And here’s the thing about — 

Tim Ferriss: Your book of spells.

Kevin Kelly: Yes. Here’s the thing about it, is that this is an important lesson about technology, is that we have to use it to figure it out. There’s something I call thinkism, which is this reliance on trying to solve problems by thinking about them, which is very appealing to people who like to think. And you can only go so far with thinkism because all the things we’re discovering about this, none of the inventors of this had any idea that they could be used this way.

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.

Kevin Kelly: Right? And so we’re discovering, we collectively, by using it are discovering its capabilities and eventually its harms. But that’s important because this is how we steer the things. And so the problem with trying to prohibit or turn it off or ban it, is that you don’t get to steer anything. Going back to that metaphor.

So right now through use we’re uncovering all these things. And I’ve been trying to track how people are actually using them. For instance, chats. There’s a couple prompts. So here’s the thing, these chat models, basically what they generate are wisdom of the crowd kind of knowledge. The wisdom of the crowd is very famous, counting the jelly beans. If you average all the attempts by humans to count the number of the jelly beans in a bottle, the best guess, the most accurate, was the average of it. And that’s what we’re getting with the chat. It’s taking everything as written, the plus and the minuses, the geniuses and the jerks, and it’s averaging out. And that’s what it’s giving you is an average.

So most of the content generated by the chats is broadly correct, very average, very bland. And a lot of what you’re doing with the intern is pressing them. So one of the tricks is that you can ask for it to be a little bit snarkier or more professional.

Tim Ferriss: So let’s say you’re starting tabula rasa. Idea popped into your head in the shower. Okay, I want to give a rough draft a shot. What is the step number one, step number two?

Kevin Kelly: So it depends, but I might ask it to do a summary of what’s known about this. Tell me everything that it knows about it. And then maybe write a first draft with bullets, five bullet points. And then I might — 

Tim Ferriss: Could you give a real example or a example you might use?

Kevin Kelly: I’m trying to think of the last one I did.

Tim Ferriss: How the Egyptians influenced Roman architecture. I don’t know, making that up.

Kevin Kelly: Exactly right. You could do that. Give me the five bullet points and stuff. And then you could have questions about some parts you didn’t understand or expand bullet one citing more sources or give me an example of a day in the life of this or 10 more examples of how this might play out. You could expand it that way. You could also shrink it in terms of summarizing, making bullet points or what’s the key takeaway or how about if I wanted to have a teachable moment out of this. And so you would have all these kinds of things flowing around. And then, again, it’s the intern at work. It’s good but you’re not going to use it. You’re probably rewriting it. It maybe gives me some ideas I didn’t have or maybe the structure of how it organized it, that’s pretty good for four of them. And so it’s a start. 

Setting Boundaries with Family

 From NYT article "How to Set Boundaries with a Difficult Family Member"

Nedra Glover Tawwab knows deep in her bones that you cannot choose the family you are raised in.

Ms. Tawwab, 39, grew up in a bustling home in Detroit where she “experienced it all,” she said, “from substance abuse to neglect in family relationships.” She scores a seven out of 10 on the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey, a tool commonly used by health care providers to measure the severity of trauma that a child has faced.

That background led to her career as a licensed clinical social worker focusing on relationships. She is also a best-selling author of the book “Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself” and a popular Instagram therapist whose 1.7 million followers devour her pithy nuggets. (A recent example: “The silent treatment isn’t teaching them a lesson; it’s showing you can’t handle conflict.”)

In Ms. Tawwab’s newest book, “Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships,” she offers practical strategies for dealing with toxic family dynamics — and ways to successfully disconnect from a person when you decide to do so.

“As a child, relationships are put on you, but as an adult you get to choose who you want to be in relationships with and how,” Ms. Tawwab said. “Even with family.”

Decide what a “successful” relationship would look like to you. To begin, identify the issues that are affecting your dynamic with this family member, she said. Then decide what type of relationship you can realistically have, and want to have, with that person, taking those dynamics into account.

Ask yourself: What can I control?  “When the solution to the problem is ‘they need to change,’ the problem will never go away,” she writes. “You can only control your side of the street.”

Increase your tolerance for difficult conversations.  

Then, when it’s time to address your family member, keep your script simple, Ms. Tawwab said. People often put off difficult conversations because they are searching for the “right” words. It’s OK to say something like “I don’t want you yelling at me anymore,” she offered as an example, adding, “There’s not a more ‘beautiful’ or perfect way to say that.” (Therapy can also help you identify and connect to your needs and learn to express them, she said.)  “We have tricked ourselves into thinking that we’re supposed to always feel comfortable, so even as we’re saying hard things our goal is to say it without the other person feeling upset or mad or wanting a further explanation,” she said. “And that’s not realistic.”

Know that the family member will likely take it personally.

In dysfunctional families, change is almost always seen as a rejection, Ms. Tawwab said. She writes in her book that “boundaries in unhealthy families are a threat to the system of dysfunction.”Your call for change might be met with disapproval (“You’re wrong for changing; everything was going well until you intervened”), shame (“You’re a terrible person”), or resentment (“I’m upset because you want something different”), she writes. You could also encounter general pushback, which might involve your family member continuing to behave as though you said nothing or pressuring you to change your mind. Anticipating those responses can help you steel yourself so you are not hurt by your family member’s reaction.

 

Made a little book

 Kevin Kelly on making Excellent Advice for Living from Tim Ferriss podcast

But let’s zoom out. So I’m holding two copies of the book. One is very, very tiny. This is a prized possession, now. I’ve read it probably 12 times. I have many, many notes and there are all sorts of notes in here. Excellent Advice for Living. Now the tiny version I have says, “Seeds for contemplation,” which I also like. And then there’s the very beautiful cover of this galley that you handed to me just before we started recording. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. How did this come to be? What is the genesis story?

Kevin Kelly: So I would write down bits of advice to help me change my own behavior. I like to reduce something that I could say to myself, to repeat to myself, to remember something as a way of changing my behavior. And that kind of encapsulation and reduction to a little tiny sentence, for me, it was a handle to grab hold of it and bring it forth when I needed it. And an example would be if I know I have something in my household and I can’t find it, then when I finally do find it, I’d say to myself, when I’m getting ready to put it back, “Don’t put it back where I found it, put it back where I first looked for it.” So I had my flashlight, “Put it back where you first looked for it.” So I’m reminding myself that. And so I would start to write things down.

Another one would be if I’m invited to do a talk or go meet somebody or have coffee, whatever it is, I would say to myself, “Would I do this if it was tomorrow morning?” As kind of a filter to really make sure it passed that hurdle, because eventually it will be tomorrow morning and I have to think about it. And so I would say, “I got this invite. Well that’s kind of interesting, good. But would I do this tomorrow morning?” So making it into some portable way that I could remind myself very easily. And I start to get in the habit of writing these down and I realized a lot of it was advice that I wish I had known earlier.

...

— for 70 years. I was giving it out. But it’s scattered around the internet. And I thought it would be really handy to have it in a book. So I made a prototype myself, just made a little book. I made five copies and I sent it around to see if it worked as a book. And this book also has my little doodles in it. And it worked. And so I sent it to a publisher, they loved it. They said they didn’t like the doodles, and so they said, “No art by you.” So it’s in a portable form. And actually I realized afterwards, although it was not in my head at the time, but it’s very tweetable.

These are tweets. And so they work at the attention span of a young person these days and they transmit well. 

I tried to make them as practical as possible, actionable, not conventional, positive, if at all possible, and short. “You can find no better medicine for your family than regular meals together without screens.”

It's my job to find out

 

Koitsu Tsuchiya

Kevin Kelly on Tim Ferriss podcase

I actually use that, in a similar form of the question, at dinner parties when I’m sitting next to a buddy. So one of my bits of advice is that almost everybody knows a lot more about something than anybody else around them. And so I’ll sit down, it’s like, “What do you know more about than most people?” And I feel it’s my job to find out what that is. And it’s not obvious, it’s not always obvious, you have to work at it, but it’s always amazing.

Questions from a 42 year old me

From my journal on April 24, 2013 (journal was a black Moleskin/Evernote... elephants on front embossed in the leather) I was 42 at the time.

(also on this day: Ran 4.5 miles at 6:54 pace -- that didn't feel particualrly fast.  Good song comes in at end to fuel me.)  

Questions: 

• what are you preparing for? 
• What will make you satisfied/stop charging hard? 
• What does life demand from you? 
• How can you put your talent to work? And enjoy yourself? 
• How can you be most useful? 
• What would cause max satisfaction? 
• What project have you started? 
• What are your next projects? A project is output not input. 
• What service are you providing? 
• Are you adding beauty, truth to the world, not just to your family? 
• Are you making life better for others? 
• What are your strengths? What are you good at? 
• What are you actively engaged in getting better at? 
• What are you practicing so you can be better? 
• What will this chapter end and the next begin? are you taking notes for that? 
• Is your writing getting any better? how do you know? 
• Is your guitar getting better? how do you know? 
• Is your health improving? how do you know? 
• What's something you're consulted about? 
• What would you like to be consulted about? 
• What little experiments are you running in your life? how will you evaluate them? 
• What good things did you do today? for whom? 
• Who do you emulate? 
• What is "truly living"? 
• What are you dreaming towards/about?

Shagbark hickory

 https://www.uwgb.edu/biodiversity-old/herbarium/trees/carova_bud_opening01_400gf.jpg

At North Farm by John Ashbury

 

At North Farm

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, 
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

John Ashbery

Middle Season #11

 

Suburbia of the Mind

 From McKIbben's Long Distance:

Growing Older, it seemed to me, usually involved figuring out how not to risk your ego, how not to put yourself on the line. You found that comfort zone, that suburbia of the mind, and heart, and you stayed safely inside it.

This is true freedom

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

A walk in the woods: a walk in the neighborhood

 

Favorite Things Lists

 From my diary on April 20, 2013

I'm drawn to the idea of "favorite things" -- a Friday list, but also a daily list... things that happened today - these are little memorials of the them. For instance today: 1. mom's homemade granola from Cook's Illustrated, 2. mom's apricot dessert bars with lots of oatmeal with real apricots, 3. pagoda dogwood named for its branching structure, like a pagoda, 4, quote from Carl Sandburg in 1955: we live in an age of endless consumption; 5. the sky a bit of the blue blue towards the west even at 8:30 when parents leave.

Dreaming is raw state of perception

 Kevin Kelly blog post about the similarities between dreaming and NN AI (like ChatGPT)

I have a proto-theory: That our brains tend to produce dreams at all times, and that during waking hours, our brains tame the dream machine into perception and truthiness. At night, we let it run free to keep the brain areas occupied. The foundational mode of the intelligence is therefore dreaming.

A corollary of this theory —that dreaming is the raw state of perception — is that all animals with eyeballs will dream. Without language they will not have access to their dreams the same way, but dream they would.  

He also references this researcher who talks about the biological function of dreaming that I've come across before:

Neurobiologist David Eagleman has a theory that the evolutionary purpose of dreaming is to protect our visual apparatus. Our brains are so plastic and malleable, that their processing power can be quickly taken over by different brain functions. So if the huge visual/auditory department closes down at night, or 1/3 of the day, other brain functions would begin to colonize this resource that was not being used. To prevent that hijacking, the brain keeps its sensory department busy 24/7 by running dreams. That keeps it occupied and fully staffed for daytime.

Full Benefit

From Action for Happiness

(From Twitter @TMitrosilis)

Navy SEALs have a saying.You may find it helpful. When something sucks, they look at each other and say:

"FULL BENEFIT"

It’s an instant mindset shift.

• Hiking and it starts pouring rain?

• Driving and your car breaks down?

• Working on a project and lost a draft?

FULL BENEFIT.

LESSON: Adversity is an opportunity

The message is simple. Every adversity is an opportunity.

• To grow

• To learn

• To evolve

• To get stronger

• To become better

These moments forge us if we let them.  The next time you're facing something hard, welcome it.

Work through the process. Learn the lessons. Reap the full benefit.

The exquisite wonder and beauty of everything

My photo, showing the magnolia petals fallings already

This NYT article is about Dr. Roland Griffiths whose cancer diagnosis has allowed (caused?) him to savor life more.  The "gift" of enhanced appreciation/conciousness perhaps was aided by his own past or current psychedlic experiences.

As the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, Dr. Roland Griffiths has been a pioneer in investigating the ways in which psychedelics can help treat depression, addiction and, in patients with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis, psychological distress. He has also looked at how the use of psychedelics can produce transformative and long-lasting feelings of human interconnectedness and unity. One could surely classify his achievements using various medical and scientific terms, but I’ll just put it like this: Griffiths has expanded the knowledge of how we might better learn to live.

Now he is learning to die. Griffiths, who is 76, has been diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic colon cancer. It’s a diagnosis, in all likelihood terminal, that for him has brought forth transcendently positive feelings about existence and what he calls the great mystery of consciousness. “We all know that we’re terminal,” says Griffiths, who since being diagnosed has established an endowment at Johns Hopkins to study psychedelics and their potential for increasing human flourishing. “So I believe that in principle we shouldn’t need this Stage 4 cancer diagnosis to awaken. I’m excited to communicate, to shake the bars and tell people, ‘Come on, let’s wake up!’ ”

...

In spite of that, life has been more beautiful, more wonderful than ever. When I first got that diagnosis, because I work out regularly, I watch my diet, I sleep well, this came out of left field. There was this period in which it felt like I was going to wake up and say, “Boy, that was” — to put it in psychedelic language — “a bummer, a bad dream.” But soon after that I started to contemplate the different psychological states that would be naturally forthcoming with a diagnosis like mine: depression, anxiety, denial, anger, or adopting some belief system of religious outcomes, which as a scientist I was not cut out to do. I went through those, exploring what life would be like if I inhabited those reactions, and I quickly concluded that that was not a wise way to live. I have a long-term meditation practice (Griffiths practices Vipassana meditation) and the focus there is on the nature of mind, of consciousness, and one comes to see that thoughts, emotions, are transient. They’re appearances of mind that you needn’t identify with. That practice — and some experience with psychedelics — was incredibly useful because what I recognized is that the best way to be with this diagnosis was to practice gratitude for the preciousness of our lives. Grasping for the cure wasn’t useful.  

You talk about your cancer almost as if it’s a gift. Does that mean you don’t have regrets about what’s happening? My life has never been better! If I had a regret, it’s that I didn’t wake up as much as I have without a cancer diagnosis. It’s been incredible. There have been so many positive things: my relationship with my children, my grandchildren, my siblings, my wife. 

...

So I did a session with a psychedelic4(He used LSD) and went into that explicitly asking a couple of questions. First, asking myself, “Is there something I am not dealing with?” The answer came back: “No, the joy you’re experiencing is great. This is how it should be.” Then I asked a question directly of the cancer. I’m hesitant to talk about it because it’s reifying the cancer as “other,” and I don’t hold that the cancer is some “other” with which I can have a dialogue. But as a metaphor, it’s an interesting way to probe that question. So I asked the cancer: “What are you doing here? What can you tell me about what’s going on?” I got nothing back. Then I wanted to humanize it, and I said: “I really respect you. I talk about you as a blessing. I have had this astonishing sense of well-being and gratitude, despite everything that’s happening, and so I want to thank you. This process, is it going to kill me?” The answer was, “Yes, you will die, but everything is absolutely perfect; there’s meaning and purpose to this that goes beyond your understanding, but how you’re managing that is exactly how you should manage it.” So then I said: “OK, there’s purpose and meaning. I’m not ungrateful for the opportunity, but how about giving me more time?” [Laughs.] I got no response to that. But that’s OK.

How else have psychedelics, both studying them and using them, helped prepare you for death? Our first therapeutic study was in cancer patients. Ironically enough, these were cancer patients who were depressed and anxious because of a life-threatening diagnosis. The findings of that study were profound: A single treatment of psilocybin (Psilocybin is the psychoactive compound found in some mushrooms. After we spoke, Griffiths mailed me a medallion embossed with an image of mushrooms and inscribed with the phrase “May you remain aware of awareness.”)produced large and enduring decreases in depression and anxiety. I’ve had some limited experience with psychedelics since then. But what did that teach me about my diagnosis? We’ve now treated hundreds of participants with psychedelics and before sessions, one of the key things that we teach them is that upon taking a psychedelic, there’s going to be an explosion of interior experiences. What we ask them to do is be with those experiences — be interested and curious. You don’t have to figure anything out. You’re going to have guides, and we’re going to create this safety container around you. But here’s the trick: These are not necessarily feel-good experiences. People can have experiences in which they feel like they come to this beautiful understanding of who they are and what the world is, but people can also have frightening experiences. 

The preparation we give for these experiences is to stay with them, be curious and recognize the ephemeral nature of them. If you do that, you’re going to find that they change. The metaphor we use is, imagine that you’re confronted with the most frightening demon you can imagine. It’s made by you, for you, to scare you. I’ll say: “There’s nothing in consciousness that can hurt you. So what you want to do is be deeply curious and, if anything, approach it.” If your natural tendency is to run, it can chase you for the entire session. But if you can see it as an appearance of mind, then you go, “Oh, that’s scary, but yeah, I’m going to investigate that.”

...

So you have this sense, near the end of your life, of waking up to life’s real meaning. What’s the most important thing for everyone else who’s still asleep to know? I want everyone to appreciate the joy and wonder of every single moment of their lives. We should be astonished that we are here when we look around at the exquisite wonder and beauty of everything. I think everyone has a sense of that already. It’s leaning into that more fully. There is a reason every day to celebrate that we’re alive, that we have another day to explore whatever this gift is of being conscious, of being aware, of being aware that we are aware. That’s the deep mystery that I keep talking about. That’s to be celebrated!

 

Love is a normal experience

 @BashoSociety tweeted this recently:

Love is

a normal

experience

I'm captivated by the tweet... it's not, like is their style, a haiku.  Yet, it's written in haiku style.  It does similar things in my brain as a haiku.  

It also makes me think of "the speaker" of the words.  What would cause someone to write this?  What is the ACTUAL norm that would make someone want/need to express this?

How can we make love a more normal experience?

(why would some people think that it's good that love is NOT a normal experience?)

What else can we try to make a normal experience? 

Beauty 

Making music

Trying something new

Being at ease

Meditating

Lifting weights 

(for school: writing about poems, liking poems, writing poems, writing creatively, reading for fun, speaking in public, having conversations)

So, this phrase is also interesting:   ____________ is a normal experience

More recent Haiku

Hasui Kawase

 

Here are a few haiku from Twitter:

when there are mountains, I look at mountains 

when there is a rainy day, I listen to the rain              

    ― Santoka (tr. Gabi Greve)

an afternoon nap 

first spring rainbow 

best of days  

Issa

open the door 

let the moonlight  

enter your temple   

Basho

with a whisper  

a flock of birds 

bursting into flight   

Issa

nothing but  

a calm heart 

and cool air  

Issa

even the 

thorn brush

is blooming! 

Issa

morning rain

the birds celebrating

their successful return 

Issa

sunshine 

passing through 

a sleeping butterfly  

Ranko 

being alive 

in the shadow 

of cherry blossoms  

Issa

Middle Season 10

 

What’s your favorite detail?

From Twitter: What's your favorite detail of any work of art?  I think the right hand of Michelangelo's David is one of the greatest things ever made.

Diversify your self

 

Hasui Kawase

The key to a strong identity is to diversify your sense of self. 

Called "self-complexity," it makes you less scared to fail and more enduring, robust, and resilient to change:  

The more you define yourself by any one activity the more fragile you become. 

If that activity doesn't go well or changes, you lose a sense of who you are. 

The opposite is "self-complexity," a term researchers use for having multiple solid components to your identity.

We all wear many hats.

Examples include:

• Writer

• Spouse 

• Athlete 

• Parent

• Employee

• Artist

• Neighbor

• Entrepreneur

• Baker

Take an inventory of your own identities. Are there any upon which you are over-reliant for meaning and self-worth?

What would it look like to diversify your sense of self?

Even if you desire to go “all in” on a certain endeavor, you've got to ensure that you don’t leave others completely behind.

It's okay to put all your eggs in one basket—so long as you have other baskets available when the one you are currently pouring yourself into changes.

Challenge yourself to integrate the various elements of your identity into a cohesive whole. 

This allows you to emphasize and de-emphasize certain parts of your identity at different periods of time.

If you want to be really good at something you have to be willing to fail.  Being will to fail is easier when you have a strong sense of self. 

Having a strong sense of self requires not identifying too closely with any single activity, dimension, or pursuit.

It's OK to take your time

 

Action for Happiness

Be the biggest fan of the people you care about

 

From Farnum Street

Be the biggest fan of the people you care about...  

• Show them you care.
• Make them look good.
• Unconditionally support them.
• Catch them when they stumble.
• Remind them of what they do well.
• Help them accomplish their dreams.

How much nature do you need?

my photo of star magnolia

How much nature do you need? 

What is the dosage that you need: Do you need a spoonful a day a big bowl of it? Five minutes? 

 What is enough to sustain? What is enough to maintain balance?  

Does a big dose of it impact us like testosterone? like protein? or like a water soluble vitamin?

And what counts as "nature" -- will houseplants do?  The sight of something wild from inside the house down the street?  

Maybe a walk in the park is a 25mg capsule while a 3-day hike in the forest is a 1000-mg horse pill.

And after nature, what else should we talk about in terms of minimum daily doses? talking to friends, quiet, sunlight, connecting to family, making art making some thing music.

Our brains probably crave different amounts of it... so, through homeostatis we edge towards things that we need.  But maybe also we're in a constant state of craving... a constant state of depletion.

Three Alarms & Identity Image

 

The Three Alarms (from Erik Partker)

The Three Alarms is a practical method for closing the gap between who you are and who you’re capable of being on the work, health, and home fronts.

I set three daily alarms that assign a “best self” identity to each segment of my day.

6:30 am: a World Fitness Champion alarm reminds me to show up at the gym as that version of myself.

9:00 am: the World’s Best CEO alert prompts me to bring my highest leadership skills to the office.

6:30 pm: my World’s Best Husband and Father alarm inspires me to give my most loving self to my family.

These three alarms keep me focused on bringing the champion version of myself to the three areas that matter most in my life: health, wealth, and relationships.

He provides an example: 

Health

Patrick thought, “If I were to start every day being greeted by the 70-year old version of me — to show me the effect of all my poor health decisions on my body — I wouldn’t make those decisions.” 

So he set a 6:30 am wake-up alarm and named it “70-Year Old Me.” Every morning, he woke up to that imaginary greeting from his future self.

Within days, Patrick’s health behaviors changed dramatically.  He hadn’t been in the gym for two years, but suddenly he was there four times a week. His morning muffin-and-coffee routine vanished, and he cut bread and processed foods out of his meals. 

Within three months, he lost 12 kilos (over 25 pounds).  

All it took was naming his alarm after his future self to fuel his best health behavior. 

For Patrick, setting those alarms was like changing into a Superman costume for each of his daily roles. 

When each alert went off, he was prompted to choose the actions a champion would take.

That’s your champion proof — the one action you can take today that will align you with your most heroic self. 

For instance, proof of my fitness champion might be hitting 700 burned calories on the bike.

Let me give you an example from work. I recently had to give a 30-minute talk at an event. I knew that if I rehearsed that speech three times in a row, I’d nail it the next day on stage. 

A 90-minute rehearsal is exhausting, but that’s what the champion version of myself would do. So I did it — and it worked. 

Harnessing the Power of Identity-Based Change

The key to getting results like Patrick’s is to focus on those three areas: health, wealth, and relationships. 

 Choose an identity you want to emulate in each area, and an alarm to remind you of that goal. Select alarm names that trigger an identity image that causes you to show up as your best self. 

 When each alarm goes off, challenge yourself to determine your champion proof — the one move that will define you as a champion in that area. 

Then take action, and watch your life improve.

Now we must earnestly search out the road

From Alan Jacob's micro blog, a link to a Palm Sunday sermon from Bernard of Clairvaux from Plough magazine.

It is not necessary for you to cross the seas, nor to pierce the clouds, nor to climb mountains to meet your God. It is not a lengthy road that is set before you; you have only to enter into yourself to find him.

This line reminds me of Buddhism/ mediation.  And, "you have enough" in general.

Before this in the sermon, though, there's this other line that interests me:

Now we must earnestly search out the road by which he comes, so that we may be able to go out to meet him as is fitting.

 The idea that we should be actively (and earnestly!) searching the road "by which he comes" reminds me the time I was driving to Countryside and everything that happened felt "divinely created"... as if it was there for a reason (and in my memory the events were things like geese crossing the road and getting stopped by a funeral procession).

Books are musical scores

Dall-E

From Austin Kleon:

This is also what Margaret Atwood says about writing books:

"Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different."

The corollary is that any writing is also writing music:

In this great interview with James Hannaham, he talks about how his musical background influences his writing:

"When you write pretty much anything, you’re essentially asking someone to read a musical score—to hear it in their head. So an attentiveness to sound and rhythm and meter is really useful to your aesthetic as somebody who’s putting words on a page. It’s pretty similar to putting notes on a staff, in its way."

 

 

Fading with time

 fragrant 

cherry blossoms 

fading with time

Buson