Dismantling our creative potential →

Published 12 Hours Ago  ·  All posts on May 28

And then the newest erosion – the AI rabbit hole. Everyone deep in their own individual loop. Getting more productive. Getting more fluent. And getting, incrementally, more disconnected from the people around them. The half-formed question that used to get asked out loud – I’m stuck on this, has anyone dealt with something like this? – now goes to a chatbot. The same technology that was supposed to unlock creative potential is, in its default form, dismantling the sidewalk ballet entirely.

~ Zoe Scaman, from Creative Mycelium

Yes. But, see also Schizoid Kairos for a view of the situations where it’s also a novel new paradigm.

As with every technology—every tool—humankind has ever picked up, it matters what you do with it. Sure, I want to live in that “sidewalk city” where my ideas mix with others’. If only those scenes still existed.

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Perseverance is something larger →

Published 1 Day Ago  ·  All posts on May 28  ·  

If persistence is attempting to solve some difficult problem with dogged determination and hammering until the break occurs, then plenty of people can be said to be persistent. But perseverance is something larger. It’s the long game. It’s about what happens not just in round one but in round two and every round after—and then the fight after that and the fight after that, until the end.

~ Ryan Holiday

slip:4a1573.

This we built with our hands

This we built with our hands →

Published 1 Day Ago  ·  All posts on May 27

This is a massive wood crib for stacking and drying firewood.

I have two smaller versions of this at my house where I stack up green, split firewood. A friend of mine wanted one as well. This was such a fun project. I started with a pen and paper sketching what I’d built nearly 20 years ago. Then discussions about the size he wanted. I came up with the buy-list and break-down list, and took all my notes on a long car ride. The next day we headed into town and loaded up on lumber. We carried the materials to the spot, and as we considered the exact layout, he asked, “What if we just made one big crib?” Well, I agreed that was an even better idea.

The best part: Midway I said, “I love this project! I’m not doing anything except helping.”

“That’s funny,” he replied, “all I’m doing is helping you!”

Much later it struck me: That might just be the best definition of a good day’s honest labor.

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Incomplete. Forever. →

Published 2 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 26  ·  

For most of human history, you bought a thing, and it was yours, and it was finished.

That word is nearly extinct.

Nothing you own is finished. Everything exists in a state of permanent incompletion, permanently needing. Your phone needs updates, needs charging, needs storage cleared, needs passwords rotated.

~ Terry Godier, from The Last Quiet Thing

That’s exactly it. I’m often talking about calm technology and that’s one key issue with stuff these days. But this point about finished makes my heart sink.

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What’s actually happening when conversation works? →

Published 3 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 26  ·  ,

I’ve recorded a lot of conversations over the past decade — and started my Open + Curious project to explicitly write down what I think I’ve learned. The advice everyone gets about conversation — be warm, follow up, build rapport — doesn’t fully describe what I’ve actually seen happen in the conversations that worked.

This thread is a path through pieces I’ve written and conversations I’ve distilled, sequenced for someone who’s wondering why so many attempts at meaningful conversation fall flat. As usual for my writing, none of them answer the question. Instead, they name some of the gaps between what we usually mean by good conversation and what’s happening when a conversation is actually good.

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Who controls the terms →

Published 5 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 24

But the real Luddites weren’t afraid of machines; they were afraid of the social and economic impacts of the new technology on people—and of who controlled the terms of technological change.

~ Courtney C. Radsch, from We should all be Luddites

I don’t see what else I can really add to this…

The more things change, the more they stay the same? History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes? Do you think your individual choices about current technology trends are going to be enough? At why point do you feel coordinated effort is going to be necessary? Luddites.

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Who belongs to what? →

Published 5 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 23  ·  ,

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.

~ Novalis

slip:4a1572.

temenos.place →

Published 6 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 23  ·  ,

A small marked enclosure where a different kind of attention is kept.

A temenos, in ancient Greek, was a piece of ground set apart from ordinary use — bounded, dedicated to something larger than daily life, and respected as such. Not a temple, necessarily; just a marked enclosure where a different kind of attention was kept. People went there to do something they couldn’t quite do anywhere else — pay attention to what was hard to see in the noise of regular life. The marker around the place mattered as much as anything that happened inside it.

Temenos.place is an instance of one. A small daily instance. Each day, one thing appears on a page behind this one — a sentence, a question, a quote. Anyone who’s joined can sit with it. They can leave a short reply, where the others can see it but no one responds to it. Tomorrow the post is gone, the replies are gone, a new one is there. Nothing accumulates; there’s no archive, no body of work being built, no count of anything. People can show up today, or not, and either is fine. There is nothing to fall behind on.

The thing worth taking from this page is the temenos itself, which is yours to mark out wherever you are. A notebook, a chair, a corner of a morning, a daily walk — anywhere you decide that a particular kind of attention will be kept. If reading this gives you the word for something you’ve been doing already, or the permission to start, that’s enough.

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Access to a temenos →

Published 6 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 22  ·  ,

It’s important for us to remember in our own journey to self-improvement: one never arrives. The sage—the perfect Stoic who behaves perfectly in every situation—is an ideal, not an end.

~ Ryan Holiday

For me, the first glimmer of my own access to a temenos (the ancient name and clarity of the place’s meaning and utility came much later) was when I took up a daily reading practice. At first, I selected a physical book designed to be a daily devotional, and later I’ve bent all my daily reading into digital formats. The key point being: I needed to anchor my daily habit in an analog context, away from all the digital addictions I had developed. Later, once the habit was the thing I enjoyed more than the digital distraction, I was able to bend digital tools to my use.

As opposed to how digital tools normally (by their creators’ designs) bend you to their use.

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Spectacular Peony blooms

Spectacular Peony blooms →

Published 7 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 22

These blooms (and the greenery) were snipped by Tracy to create an entry for the American Peony Society’s annual convention. It’s WAY more complicated than I made it sound. Her hobby is hybridizing Peonies, and that means there are more than 100 tree- and herbaceous Peonies around our house. o_O

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