For the most part, false and harmful opinions are distributed and supported by influence. We are too likely to accept the views and thoughts of other people without trying to investigate them deeper and further ourselves. Unimportant people are those who accept other people’s thoughts without developing them themselves.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Since retiring as a lion, I have grown to admire and respect the lambs. As it turns out, they are the ones that have not yet been rendered idiots by the ‘health and fitness’ industry. Their meekness comes not from weakness of character, but from highly justified scepticism. Their sideward glances stem not so much from question such as “what am I doing”, but rather “what the hell are you doing..?” And quite rightly so. What the hell are you doing?
~ “MoveMore” from, The Problem with ‘Exercise’ – MoveMore
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A quirky article from some place new (to me). The author (who is completely unidentified across their entire web site as far as I can tell) has a fun way of turning the tables on the standard lambs and lions. They also rail against the mainstream health and fitness representations of, well, “health” and “fitness”.
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To create art we make choices. We do it with intent, seeking to make a change for certain people. When we find that our choices didn’t succeed, vulnerability with lots of personal angst is an available choice. The alternative is to learn from what didn’t resonate. Was it our choices in how we did the work, or did we bring this work to the wrong audience? You are not your work. Your work is a series of choices made with generous intent to cause something to happen. We can always learn to make better choices.
~ Seth Godin
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I get the feeling that a lot of us are afraid of repeating ourselves – as if doing so demonstrates a lack of originality or a “less than” memory.
~ Jon Yuen from, «https://www.yuenjon.com/articles/2020/6/5/reminders»
Clearly (based on all these blog posts) I’m not afraid of repeating myself, and it feels in each moment as if I’m repeating myself. I see the same patterns in what interests me, and I think the same trains of thoughts. When I zoom farther out however, I see long, slow trends. The problem for me with repetition is that I find the salience of things tapers away towards zero. I’m [knowingly] within a few feet of a snake so rarely that my brain effortlessly applies maximum attention; but the number on the scale, not so much. What works for me is when the repetition is uncertain. I know I’ll read one of my quotes tomorrow, but it’ll be a random one—and I’ll remember it instantly as soon as I start reading it. Repetition repetition on to something else then… surprise! …more repetition!
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For the majority of mankind, religion is a habit, or, more precisely, tradition is their religion. Though it seems strange, I think that the first step to moral perfection is your liberation from the religion in which you were raised. Not a single person has come to perfection except by following this way.
~ Henry David Thoreau
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There are mountains of content. None of it is new. How do we decide what to practice or teach? A message can clarify this. There was a time when I did not have a message. I delivered great content, accumulated from various teachers I’d studied from. The participants had fun, but my lack of messaging left me without answers to questions like, “Why does this much strength (or mobility) matter?” or “Why have you chosen these moves and not those moves?”
~ Kyle Fincham from, What’s Your Message?
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It used to be, that when I read things like this article, I would be launched into deep thinking. It’s nice to know what my message is. It’s nice to know why, specifically, each piece of my menagerie is in my care, why I continue feeding it, and what my hopes for it are. It’s nice. I point this out not in some attempt to jump on my soapbox about how everyone should sort their own menagerie out… no. I’m literally just pointing out that my experience of it is nice.
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The more you say, the more likely you are to blow past opportunities, ignore feedback, and cause yourself suffering. The inexperienced and fearful talk to reassure themselves. The ability to listen, to deliberately keep out of a conversation and subsist without its validity is rare. Silence is a way to build strength and self-sufficiency.
~ Ryan Holiday
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A somatic approach to movement can help us get reacquainted with ourselves. This is our home base after all. It’s our guts and tissues, our thoughts and perceptions. It’s our subjective experience of life. […] When we cultivate self-awareness through movement, we come up against the boundary of self and other. We recognize that we don’t live in a vacuum.
~ Chandler Stevens from, «http://chandlerstevens.com/blog/2016/11/9/connection-relation-and-somatic-ecology»
The word “reacquainted” leapt out at me. Every time I truly pause to pay attention, I’m immediately confronted by my physical self. There’s the inevitable settling towards senescence, and frankly that doesn’t bother me. I enjoy looking back at the things I was once capable of and thinking, well, that was nice! No, the confrontation I’m talking about is the stuff that I know is my fault… and I’m not going to list physical metrics. Suffice to say: All I’d have to do it remove the stress and everything else would settle back to a wonderful baseline that I’d love to return to.
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The moral? To recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time and the weather.
~ Alaine De Botton
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Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you’re going to be unhappy. If you’re naturally independent-minded, you’re going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you’re naturally conventional-minded, you’re going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research.
~ Paul Graham from, How to Think for Yourself
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This is a case where I found it difficult to pull-quote. This at least gives you an idea of what the article is about. The challenge for me seems to be not becoming a raving lunatic when I’m off in independent-thinking land. I’ve learned to be able to swim in the conventional–minded, littoral waters, and I’ve been told I can even be helpful there. But my native environment seems to be the deep ocean of solitary thinking. I need to constantly remind myself that coming back to shore is important… as is doffing the raving lunatic appearance before trying to fold myself back into collaborative efforts.
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Not to accept your mistakes is to increase them.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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What does it mean – “having a practice”? It is a very vague definition that can be used in many ways and can mean many things. As well as it can mean nothing at all, just referring to smoke and mirrors. The straightforward notion of “practice” in itself entails being involved in a process, repeatedly engaging in an activity with the end goal of achieving mastery in something. It can be both an empty description of a habit or it can be a phenomenon that fills human life with meaning.
~ Anna Bezuglova from, The Bamboo Body – Blog – Movement Practice Barcelona
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I’ve often mentioned the power of asking movement enthusiasts for, “three words to describe your practice?” The power of my question comes both from the difficulty in summarizing and from the difficulty in describing one’s practice. And yes, I’ve made a note to see if I can get around to talking with Bezuglova on the Movers Mindset podcast.
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Every person has within himself the capability to understand the life of all humanity. This capability is hidden deep in the soul, but it exists, and sooner or later, a person will find it.
~ Edward Carpenter
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However—fourth—over the last century there’s a huge relationship between how rich a country is and the variance in growth. The richest countries have low variance: They all stubbornly keep growing at around the same 1 or 2%. However, middle-income countries vary enormously.
~ “Dynomight” from, Do economies tend to converge or diverge?
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There’s several different interesting threads in this article. But this point about variance leapt out at me. I’m reminded of how just the other day, a piece about statistics that I mentioned was talking about variance (if you clicked through and read the article.) Variance feels like a sort of second-order thinking that I probably should be doing more often.
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What we seek out is someone who sees us and consistently keeps their promises to bring us the magic we were hoping for. Someone who has committed to rhyming with what they did yesterday. When you trust yourself enough to turn pro, You’re entering into a covenant with those you seek to serve. You promise to design with intention, and they agree to engage with the work you promised to bring them.
~ Seth Godin
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Motility, and in particular directed motility, is decisively important for host colonization, as bacteria deliberately seek to colonize an organism and conquer all niches.
~ Ludwig Maximilian from, How stress hormones guide bacteria in their host
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*shudders* The article is about stress hormones in people, and research into how bacteria are (not “may be”) using our hormones to signal when they (the bacteria, *shudder* again) should go on the offensive and move. I don’t have anything to add. This just struck me as creepy.
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When the intellect becomes the slave of vices and passions, the supporter of lies, it becomes not only a perversion, but an illness, and we cannot see the difference between truth and falsehood, good and evil, virtue and vice.
~ William Ellery Channing
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And worse, when something truly significant does happen, it blends in seamlessly with the continuing shitstream that is information in the social media age.
~ Mark Manson from, The Outrage Cycle
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Manson lays it out pretty much as he always does. He’s not swinging a baseball bat; No it’s one of those bats from a zombies movie with nails sticking out of it. But the point is valid none the less.
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The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns us, “when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearances, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasure, torture-chambers or skeletons.”
~ Alain de Botton
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In the past couple weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not to keep my slipbox physical or if I should switch to a digital system. There are specific reasons for having it be physical:
I knew all that when I started. That’s why I created a physical slipbox. But lately, the following things have become a problem, and led me to reconsider going fully digital:
It’s that last item which is really a big deal for me. To solve those three issues I was considering changing the entire slipbox to be digital (and giving up all the other positives of a physical slipbox.)
Fortunately, I kept thinking, reading and experimenting and I figured out I can have both worlds.
I eventually realized that I already have really large “slips” in the slipbox. I already have a collection of digital books, essays, and articles that are in PDF format. For those digital files, their corresponding physical slip has a doodle (it looks like a piece of paper with one corner turned down) that reminds me there’s also a digital file. All of those files are currently “on” slips below the “2” address in the slipbox. (e.g.: The “2tu3” slip has a digital file doodle, and there’s a “2tu3 – Whatever the Title Is.pdf” file.)
For my item 2 above (big digital files of research on people) I just do the same thing for those people. “Jane Doe” would already be on slip “4c1do” (which is a listing of “Doe”, “Donatta”, “Droge”, etc.) I can simply toss in a slip “4c2do1” with a digital-file mark (and name the digital file “4c2do1 – Jane Doe”.) The next person on “4c2do” who needs a digital file gets to be “4c1do2”, and so on.
For item 1 in my list, there’s no reason I can’t have a bunch of files where I keep little “remember this” notes. So I added physical slip “4c3”, and then every slip that might ever go under that address is a digital file. For example, my grammar web site is on “4c3wi1a”. But I never have to know or remember that. I just search for “grammar” and I land on that digital file.
It was item 3 from my list that had me stumped until I remembered Obsidian!
I simply have a folder full of folders and text files in the same organizational structure as my physical slipbox. Where I once had a bunch of digital books, essays, and articles tossed in one folder; those are now all stored under “2”. And there’s a now a “4” folder, with a “4c1” for people’s digital files, and a “4c3” for those “remember this” items. Back over in the physical slipbox, any slip that has a digital-file mark, I’ll find the digital file in the parallel universe of this tree of folders.
Finally, I pointed Obsidian at the outermost folder. Voila! For anything in this tree of folders, in the Obsidian app I can click “copy Obsidian URL…” and I get a URL like this one which I paste anywhere I want:
obsidian://open?vault=Craig's%20Slipbox&file=2%2F2i%2F2io1%20-%20Inconsistent%20yet%20persistentI have the Obsidian app installed on all my devices. Any time I try to navigate to an obsidian:// method URL, it open the app, and Obsidian opens that file.
Physical? Digital? I can’t choose… How about: Mostly physical, but digital when it needs to be? Nice.
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