What their minds are like. What they work at. What evokes their love and admiration. Imagine their souls stripped bare. And their vanity. To suppose that their disdain could harm anyone—or their praise help them.
~ Marcus Aurelius
slip:4a473.
Imagine →
Peripheral vision →
This last one is my favorite. Start on one leg or tandem stance and begin to look far into the distance about 100 meters. While staring at one spot far in the distance start to take notice of everything in your peripheral vision. Call out what you see, but do not move your gaze.
~ Emily Splichal from, Balance & the Basal Ganglia | The Power of Eye Movement Exercises – Barefoot Strong Blog
slip:4ubaba1.
Frequently, I perambulate through the enormous amounts of information I’ve bookmarked—in every sense of that word. Often I read things which cause me to discover some new thread of thinking. But just as often I find things that simply make me go, “hmm, that’s interesting.” So tomorrow I think I’ll assemble some pipe scaffolding to make something upon which to balance, simply so I can try this exercise.
ɕ
Calm →
Information competes for our conscious attention: the web of thoughts with the greatest activation is usually the one where we direct our attention. The calmer our mind, the fewer thoughts we generate in response to what happens in the world—and the greater the odds that intuition will speak to us.
~ Chris Bailey from, The science of how to get intuition to speak to you – Chris Bailey
slip:4uaite1.
I’m not sure if I truly remember the following story, or if I simply heard it told so many times and subsequently retold it so many times that I believe I saw it first hand, but here it is in first person regardless.
Sitting in an enormous church service early one morning, two parents down front where having increasing difficulty with a precocious young child. With each noise, question, request, and pew kicking, the parents were taking turns playing the, “If you don’t be quiet…” game. The massive church was known by all to have a well-appointed “cry room” at the back complete with a view of the proceedings, amplified reproduction of the goings on, double-pane and mostly scream proof windows, games, rocking chairs and so forth. Meanwhile, in the main hall, everyone could hear the “if you don’t be quiet…” game escalate to defcon 5: “If you don’t be quiet, I’m taking you to the cry room.” The opposing forces countered with a volley of indignation at being forced to… “That’s it!” And the patriarch hoisted the youngster and performed the mandatory “excuse me pardon me excuse me…” incantation across the pew, and started up the aisle with a writhing 3-year-old in Sunday’s best. From the moment of hoisting, the winding-up siren of shock and horror got up to speed until said child was screaming. “I’LL BE QUIET! I’LL BE QUIET!!” The minister had paused, as the father strode briskly for the doors at the back. Hundreds of people sat silently as they passed through rear doors—the child’s screaming dropping instantly in volume as the door swung shut. “I’LL BE QUIET! I’LL BE QUIET! …i’ll be quiet!” At which point, as far as I could tell, everyone collectively giggled at the humor of it all.
While one part of my mind wants to be touring the facility and taking up slack, the petulant child is not to be taken on by main force. When it’s in the mood, the child part can be a source of great power and inspiration. (Apropos, the quote sticking up from the Little Box today reads: “Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge) The inner-child mind has its own agenda and demands its outlets too.
ɕ
Your time is limited →
… death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new … your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
~ Steve Jobs
slip:4a398.
Starting →
The tendency to put off difficult tasks that we don’t want to face is almost universal.
And it turns out, the moment of starting a task is often so much harder than actually doing the task.
~ Leo Babauta from, Getting Good at Just Starting a Difficult Task – Zen Habits Website
slip:4uzesa1.
Tom Petty’s lyrics not withstanding, I agree with Leo. Starting is definitely the hardest part. Unfortunately, I don’t understand why it is so difficult for me.
Take this blog post. It’s 9pm. I go to sleep at 9:30. (Why, is an entirely different story, see, Sleep.) I’ve a long drive tomorrow, and I’ve a few things left to stuff in my overnight bag. I’ve waited all day to do this small task. Writing these blog posts is straightforward; I have a well-oiled process for dropping into the right mindset and dipping into a fertile sea of cached ideas to find one to inspire. Invariably, a few minutes into the process, I’ve found an interesting thread to pull on. This is so much fun, I could—quite literally—do this all day. So why then do I wait until 9pm?
Because you see, it’s not just writing this blog post. I feel all the things on my to-do lists—both literal and in my head—are like writing this blog post: Straightforward, self-chosen, in line with my priorities and goals, inherently interesting, generally worth doing, immediately rewarding in most cases. And yet, the proverbial 9pm rolls around before I feel enough pressure to start.
The only thing I can think of is that some part of my mind just knows that the list will never be done. No matter how many times the “let’s get stuff done” part of my brain were to rise to the occasion, there’s some other part of my brain that will roll Sisyphus’s rock back to the bottom. Maybe this is all there is to it? Is the problem, not the “doer” side, but the “setter upper of things to do” side? Is the problem that I don’t know how to simply be?
Have I, perhaps, only learned instead how to be a human doing?
ɕ
That’s a problem →
How much energy do we need? Just to give everyone in the world the per-capita energy consumption of Europe (which is only half that of the US), we would need to more than triple world energy production
~ Jason Crawford from, Why has nuclear power been a flop?
slip:4urode1.
The nature of the problem: Insufficient total, global energy.
How insufficient? Even if the United States magically cut its energy use in half, and then magically distributed that saved energy to some other countries… the world would still be far short of the energy we need to lift everyone up to even the EU’s per-capita energy level. When you factor in continued population growth, the problem—the amount of new energy we need to find—only gets bigger.
Set aside what you know about how, or where, we might get additional energy. The problem currently faced by the human race is not: How do we reduce our per-capita energy consumption? The problem is not: How do we change equal units of energy from old sources to new, or even renewable, sources.
The problem we face is…
How do we INCREASE the available energy for the entire planet by a factor of 4, or possibly even 5?
ɕ
Willing acceptance →
To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice—it degrades you.
And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.
Objective judgement, now, at this very moment. Unselfish action, now, at this very moment. Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events.
That’s all you need.
~ Marcus Aurelius
slip:4a482.
Destroy later →
I’m a process person. Recently, I was asked if I thought some course-material would be better if it included more process instruction; more step-by-step processes on how to do things. I pointed out that I’ve never been very successful simply handing people a process. I think it’s easier to teach people how to think about processes as a way to solve problems once. When the problem appears again, the earlier thinking—in the form of creating and refining a process—pays off.
Anyway. Today I’m going to do the exact opposite and try to hand you a process. :)
You have “sensitive” papers— things you need to keep around for a while, but probably not, you know, forever.
You have a good shredder— omg if you don’t own a good shredder, stop here and buy a good cross-shredder.
And therefore you have tension between wanting to remember to safely destroy “sensitive” papers— and not wanting to destroy them before you are sure you’re done with them.
- Create a set of “destroy later” file-folders. Find a place to keep them where they won’t be randomly disturbed. (On a shelf out of the way, in your safe, whatever.)
- Grab some file folders. If you want to keep things for 3 months, you need four, file folders. If you want to keep things for 6 months, you need 7 folders.
- Every time you have a “sensitive” paper, place it into the topmost/frontmost folder.
- Each month, take the topmost/frontmost folder full of “sensitive” stuff and move it to the back/bottom.
- Destroy the contents of the folder which is the new topmost/frontmost.
Revel in that tension evaporating, knowing all things will be appropriately destroyed later.
ɕ
Postscript: This is a “tickler file” system. But instead of the usual reminders in a tickler system, we’re reminder ourselves to shred the contents of the tickler system.
Diatoms →
Diatoms are a major group of algae found in the oceans, waterways and soils of the world. Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth’s biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year, […] and constitute nearly half of the organic material found in the oceans. The shells of dead diatoms can reach as much as a half-mile (800 m) deep on the ocean floor, and the entire Amazon basin is fertilized annually by 27 million tons of diatom shell dust transported by transatlantic winds from the African Sahara.
~ From Diatom – Wikipedia
I had grasped long ago that diatoms where single-cellular plants. But somehow I missed the, “with shells,” bit. Diatomaceous earth suddenly makes sense. I had always pictured the microscopic little individual diatoms that I’d seen in books; various shapes and sizes, floating in water. But I hadn’t imagined the shapes, structures and types of shells they’re building out of silicon! Turns out, people interested in nanotechnology are particularly interested in diatoms. Wonders never cease.
ɕ
Final step →
For many, the first step on a spiritual journey is to become lost. The final step is losing one’s self.
~ Wu Hsin
slip:4a327.