Scree

noun : an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff.

What’s actually happening when conversation works? →

Published 28 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 30 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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temenos.place →

Published May 23  ·  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 May 22  ·  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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Where to place the crowbar →

Published May 21  ·  All posts on May 21

Revert to what Epictetus described as our “chief task in life”—getting real clear about what’s up to us and what isn’t. Our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—these are up to us. Other people, the weather, external events, these are not. But here’s the thing: our responses to other people, the weather, external events are in our control. To reset your life, the best place to start is with making this distinction and then choosing to focus on the things that are in your control. If only because it concentrates your resources in the places where they matter.

~ Ryan Holiday, from You Slipped Up […]

Bryan Ward wrote a great article How The Hammer Fails You and reading his metaphor about the hammer versus the crowbar was a pivotal moment for me. Later, I realized that Epictetus’s counsel feels like the seed for Ward’s metaphor.

Am I applying my mental or physical effort in the correct place?

Until my answer was consistently coming up yes, that was the most useful question I kept asking.

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The eudaimonia machine →

Published May 21  ·  All posts on May 21

Perhaps further outside the clear connections, it also reminded me of the Eudaimonia machine, which I’ve previously written about here and here. It’s “a multipart floor plan that effectively funnels employees[, workers, creators, thinkers] through various spaces with the intention of triggering different mental states. The layout consists of an entry gallery, a social salon, a multi-person office, an archival library, and the chamber—a site for deep work.” One can easily think of the cloister as one more space in such a setup.

~ Patrick Tanguay, from The Cloister & The Starship

I’ve long been an admirer of subtly curated spaces. Sentiers itself is one such space. There, I keep staring at the juxtaposition of a starship and a cloister. There’s just something special about a wide range of experiences. For example, listening to meditative music streamed across the Internet—an incredible tech stack just to make some quiet sounds—while sitting in an ancient meditation posture listening to water gurgle in a downspout. We each contain multitudes, as it were.

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Why Scientists Use Lab Notebooks →

Published May 20  ·  All posts on May 20  ·  

You could write in anything. Why do I specifically recommend lab notebooks?

Because they’re designed to solve a specific problem: how do you keep track of what you’re figuring out when you don’t yet know what matters?

Scientists use lab notebooks because experiments don’t always work. Most of the time you’re trying things that might fail. You need a record of what you tried, what happened, and what you thought about it—even the stuff that didn’t work. Especially the stuff that didn’t work, because that’s often where the actual learning is.

Your work is the same way. You’re trying things. Some succeed, some don’t. You’re figuring things out as you go.

Here’s what makes lab notebooks work:

Chronological order. Everything goes in date order. You don’t have to decide where something “belongs.”

Numbered pages. You can reference things later. “See p47” is useful. “That thing I wrote somewhere” is not.

Permanent record. Bound notebooks mean you can’t rip out pages or reorganize. This sounds like a limitation, but it’s a feature. You can write messy thoughts without worrying about making it pretty later.

There is no “later.” There’s just what you wrote and what you write next.

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This is part of a series about Hand-Write. Think Better.—a method for people who feel overwhelmed to start simply writing more on paper. Get the book →

What does practice ask, as the body keeps changing? →

Published May 19  ·  All posts on May 19  ·  

I have a long Aikido background before coming to Art du Déplacement in my forties. I’m in my fifties now. The age of air, this stretch has been caleld — after roots, fire and water. Things that used to take effort don’t. Things that didn’t take effort do. The practice that carried me here doesn’t fit anymore, and I’m still figuring out what I’m going to do about that.

This thread is a path through pieces I’ve written and conversations I’ve had with others, sequenced for someone who’s wondering what their practice is asking of them next. None of it answers the question! But, I’m hoping it makes the question easier for you to explore yourself.

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What does writing actually do to your thinking? →

Published May 12  ·  All posts on May 12  ·  , ,

I’ve written a lot. Often daily on the blog since 2011, years of weekly writing for 7 for Sunday, and a daily journal that’s grown to thousands of pages. Until I started taking writing seriously, I thought writing was for capturing thoughts I already had. It turned out to be the opposite — most of what I think I think only exists once I write it down.

This thread is about what writing actually does to thinking. Not how to write, or what to write, or even why to write. Just about the strange thing that happens when you put words next to each other on a page — the ideas you didn’t know you had until they appeared, the gaps that showed up only because you tried to bridge them, the changes that happen to the mind in the act of clarification and articulation.

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When the Notebook Doesn’t Help →

Published May 6  ·  All posts on May 6  ·  

Let’s be honest: this isn’t a magic solution that fixes everything.

Decisions that are actually emotional, not analytical. If you’re stuck because you’re scared or avoiding something, writing about it might help you realize that—but it won’t make the fear go away. Different problem, different solution.

Things you genuinely don’t care about. If you keep writing “should do X” but never do it, maybe you don’t actually want to do X. The notebook will make this obvious, but it won’t make you care.

Situations where you already know what to do. Sometimes you’re not stuck on figuring it out—you’re stuck on doing it. Writing won’t help there. Just do the thing.

Problems that require other people to change. You can think through how to communicate better or what to do about a situation, but the notebook can’t make other people different.

The notebook helps you think more clearly. It doesn’t make hard things easy—it makes confusing things clearer.

There’s a difference.

Knowing when a tool doesn’t apply is part of using it well.

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This is part of a series about Hand-Write. Think Better.—a method for using paper to think more clearly. Get the book →