Once we feel like weāre a little good at something, we cling to that. We cling to wanting others to think we know things and are good at things. We cling to the feeling of knowing what weāre doing.
Balancing continuing to work on what I know, and single mindedly focusing on something new, is the challenge I can never seem to resolve. Destroy all the things I know? ā¦that doesn’t end well. Destroy some of the things I know? ā¦sure, but which ones.
The more man is alienated from his work, the more he must look elsewhere for sources of growth, mastery, and fulfillment; the more he is alienated from his work, the more critical it becomes for him to cultivate his life outside of it ā his leisure.
This is both a brilliant survey of leisure over recent centuries and an insightful suggestion for how anyone might improve their life. Not everyone has time for leisure, but those who do are wise to be intentional about what they do with what time they have. Like many of McKay’s articles, this one goes into the evergreen bookshelves fill by centuries of authors and finds some old gems worth noting.
Nine years ago I wrote a journal entry containing this quote:
At the end, when your legs are tired and your arms are giving out, GET ANGRY. Get angry that you are tired. THEN HIT IT HARDER.
~ unknown
slip:4a109.
Although I still like that quote, I no longer find it inspiring. For me, the time and place for that mindset are behind me. I’m not quitting. Rather, when I get tired and my arms and legs give out, I now think: I misjudged the goal. I can access that other mindset if I choose to go on, but I’m also serenely happy to rest.
Many statements which are accepted as truth because they have been passed down to us by tradition look like truth only because we have never tested them, never thought about them in a more precise way.
I read that short article and now I think I have insomnia. Sometimes, anyway. Clearly I’m a hypochondriac though. But in all seriousness, the author suggests something thatādare I say it?āI almost hope I have trouble getting to sleep tonight so I can try it.
Every time I left the house, my dad would always say, “Remember who you are.” Now that I am a father, this is a very profound thing to me. At the time I was like, “Dad, what the hell? You’re so weird. Like Im gonna forget who I am? What are you saying?” Now, I’m like, “Gosh, that guy was kind of smart.”
āCharles blew a little smoke and said, āBuild a thousand and if we canāt sell them, we will use them in the store for something,āā Mr. Roach recalled in remarks to the Fort Worth Executive Round Table last month. āWe were finally able to ship some machines in September and shipped 5,000 that year, all we could assemble,ā Mr. Roach said. āOur competitors shipped none.ā
I had no idea who this person was until I saw this. A TRS-80 (the portable model, called a “4P”, so my computer’s name became “Forpy”) was literally the first in our home. We unpacked it Christmas morning and my father had declined to buy any games (which cost extra) for it. I didn’t even noticeāI programmed the crap out of that thing. First in ASCII graphics, then added a graphics card so it couldāgaspādraw progressively changing, black-and-white ellipses that looked like othello pieces flipping. I even manually coded the optimal tic-tac-toe algorithm so it could actually play. So, just knowing that one of the people who made that possible, is now goneā¦ well, that’s a little sad.
You should go find the TV series Halt and Catch Fire.
While others may find beauty in endless dreams, warriors find it in reality, in awareness of limits, in making the most of what they have. [ā¦] Their awareness that their days are numberedāthat they could die at any timeāgrounds them in reality. There are things they can never do, talents they will never have, lofty goals they will never reach; that hardly bothers them. Warriors focus on what they do have, the strengths that they do possess and that they must use creatively. Knowing when to slow down, to renew, to retrench, they outlast their opponents. They play for the long term.
People who came here from my old blog, http://www.popehat.com, will remember my long-time co-blogger and friend Patrick. Patrick, another irascible trial lawyer, wrote at Popehat for more than a decade. He shared our Twitter account for years, and went on to co-author the wickedly satirical @dprknews account and his own Twitter account @PresidentDawg. He died yesterday.
Dang! That’s a eulogy. You should read the whole thing. And you should follow all of White’s links from therein. I’ve been following White and Patrick and “Popehat” from the beginning and it’s every bit as awesome as White suggests in retrospect.
I distinctly remember [my dad] saying not to worry about what I was going to do because the job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet. [ā¦] The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up. That’s something I certainly hope to instill in my son: Don’t worry about what your job is going to be. [ā¦] Do things that you’re interested in, and if you do them really well, you’re going to find a way to temper them with some good business opportunity.
This is not a passive-aggressive maneuver to get you to scroll to the bottom, read the footer and consider supporting my work. (It would mean a lot though if you did.)
This is a serious question which I ask myself at a frequency approaching every minute. All the benefits are not directly measurable.
Exposure ā In order to ensure I have material to write posts, I have various processes and systems that force me to skim an insane amount of stuff pretty much every day. If you imagine skimming my weekly email in a second or two, that’s 7 items. I skim about 300 to 500 items every day. A small number each day catch my attention enough that I toss them on my read-later queue. There are 764 things on that queue at this instant. It takes me significant time to read them, but often just a few seconds to realize, “yeah this is going to be a blog post” (and then I go on reading to the end and then I write the post.) If I stopped blogging, would I still do all that work to be exposed to ideas?
Learning ā Writing blog posts creates a third “imprint” in my mind. First a glance, then a read, and then thinking about it. Even if I sometimes abort the blog post mid-writing, it’s still three different repetitions. And I have software that feeds me my own blog posts (“what did I post 10 years ago, today?” etc.) so I am constantly re-reading everything on this site; that’s more repetitions as things drift into history.
Integration ā If I write a blog post about it, I generally try to figure out its relationship to everything else. Adding blog tags is the most obvious bit of integration. But figuring out what to pull quote involves deciding what is salient to me. And deciding which part(s) I want to focus on, magnify, or disagree with requires further integration.
Writing ā Thoughts swirl in my mind. Characters appear on my screen. There are several skills one can work on between those two sentences.
All of that goes into feeding my personal growth and priming my curiosity. Since good conversation is powered by genuine curiosity, all that stuff also enables my person mission.
Should I keep blogging? It doesn’t feel like stopping is realistically an option.
If you spend your time focusing on the things that are wrong, and that’s what you express and project to people you know, you don’t become a source of growth for people, you become a source of destruction for people. That draws more destructiveness.
In its original Latin use, the word genius was more readily applied to places ā genius loci: āthe spirit of a placeā ā than to persons, encoded with the reminder that we are profoundly shaped by the patch of spacetime into which the chance-accident of our birth has deposited us, our minds porous to the ideological atmosphere of our epoch. It is a humbling notion ā an antidote to the vanity of seeing our ideas as the autonomous and unalloyed products of our own minds.
This is sheer nonsense from the jump. Americans donāt have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech. The very notion is completely incoherent. Someone else shaming me is their free speech, and someone else shunning me is their free association, both protected by the First Amendment.
This is long (by Internet standards, so maybe 5 minutes?) but borders on a being a ribald savaging of a New York Times editorial. Bully for Ken White. He had me at the byline. If you’re not a fan of White, it’s still worth reading until the part I’ve quoted. If you read that far, you may just become a fan of White’s writing. (And of course there’s more of him quoted here too.)
What are the goals, challenges, and experiences shaping the Women’s Parkour Movement (WPKM) and its annual gatherings?
Volunteer organizers reflect on the balance between leadership, inclusion, and community building in parkour.
For me, the women’s parkour movement space is much, much more about the feeling of being accepted and valued for what it is and who it is that you are and whatever you’re bringing to the table.
~ Alice Popejoy (26:45)
Whether parkour companies are sharing more female movement because of guilt or social pressure, the fact that itās happening and weāre seeing more of it is a good thing.
~ Gabby St. Martin (43:08)
The conversation focuses on the Women’s Parkour Movement (WPKM) organization, emphasizing the need for safe, empowering spaces for women and non-binary individuals in parkour. Gabby, Adrienne and Alice discuss the origins, leadership transitions, and ethos of the annual gatherings, highlighting the importance of fostering inclusivity, play, and body positivity. They share personal stories of discovering parkour and finding strength and community within women-centered spaces.
Challenges like representation, leadership diversity, and societal biases are explored, alongside positive trends in visibility and inclusion. The discussion touches on the broader implications of creating platforms that amplify underrepresented voices, with reflections on the impact of movements like “#MeToo” and strategies to build empathetic, inclusive communities.
Takeaways
Creating women-focused parkour spaces ā fosters empowerment and community building.
Importance of inclusivity ā ensuring spaces welcome women, non-binary individuals, and other underrepresented groups.
Volunteer leadership ā highlights the dedication and personal sacrifices of organizers.
Play and creativity ā emphasized as key elements of parkour practice in these spaces.
Challenges of representation ā ongoing efforts are needed to improve visibility and leadership diversity.
Cultural shifts in parkour ā moving toward valuing diverse styles beyond power and strength.
Addressing gender-based issues ā from biases in coaching to ethical challenges in leadership.
The role of social media ā visibility for women in parkour is increasing but requires further equity.
Most people to this day think of [the sciences and the arts] as so radically different from each other. But I want to posit a different way to look at it. It comes from what I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of art on the part of most people. Because they think of art as learning to draw or learning a certain kind of self-expression. But in fact, what artists do is they learn to see.
That’s a perfect turn of phrase from McKay. I love to find myself exposed to new people; those moments where I think, “that’s interesting!” are like single-serving sized friends (with hat tip to Chuck Palahniuk).
Most of us in life are tacticians, not strategists. We become so enmeshed in the conflicts we face that we can think only of how to get what we want in the battle we are currently facing. To think strategically is difficult and unnatural. You may imagine you are being strategic, but in all likelihood you are merely being tactical. To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into.
It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those werenāt very helpful to him, because of course he couldnāt read cursive.
People of a certain age know that cursive is no longer taught and that of course there must be people who can’t read or write cursive. But I certainly wasn’t clear on when the sun actually set. (Hint: Teaching of cursive ended in 2010.)
What struck me in this article was how Faust’s not knowing about the sunset of cursive knowledge sparked an interesting discussion among himself and the students in his class. Rather than rail against the cessation of cursive education, I’m left with interesting questions: I was taught a specific, superāsimplified form of cursive. I know there are other styles, even hardcore calligraphy, which I can barely read. While there are lots of reasons trotted out for why cursive should be taught, maybe I should go through the effort of learning another form of cursive to put my efforts where my mouth has always been? If my cursive knowledgeāfor exampleāopens up my ability to access certain documents, wouldn’t it be better (my own argument goes) to learn another form, or to practice even more, to access even more?