7 for Sunday

7 for Sunday is a weekly serving of 7 things for you to savor. — It’s an email containing my reflections on interesting things I find laying about, seasoned with some quotes from my collection. See https://7forsunday.com/.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

November 20

I’m deep into NO!vember and of course the biggest reduction in overload is the practice of not adding more things. But I’m finding some snowball effect too: As I see the pile evaporating… as I’m not adding more things… I’m feeling more inspired and motivated to pick off one or two problem things.

One thing I will say about these lists: they are written as a way of fortune and future-telling and anticipating what a technology might do. But you often don’t know the answers to a lot of the questions until you adopt the technology.

~ Austin Kleon from, https://austinkleon.com/2021/08/16/questions-for-technology/

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Kleon’s post is a significant collection of things (people who’ve dug into technology, lists of questions as way to evaluate technology, and more) for evaluating technology. But this point he makes at the very end is critical: Sometimes, you just can’t tell until you try it.

I hate that about technology. In fact, I use it as a key test of my own. If I cant’ tell without trying it, then it’s not worth my time trying.

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Happy. Generous. Contributing.

November 19

For years now I’ve been fascinated by groups of three.

These perspectives are not just useful literary devices. They are core practical perspectives that we adopt toward the world and our place in it. As we pursue our projects and pleasures, interact with others, and share public institutions and meanings, we are constantly shifting back and forth among these three practical perspectives, each bringing different elements of a situation to salience and highlighting different features of the world and our place in it as good or bad.

[…]

Am I happy? Am I generous? Am I contributing to the world? The moral struggle we face is finding a way to honestly and accurately answer ‘Yes’ to all three of these questions at once, over the course of a life that presents us with many obstacles to doing so.

~ Irene McMullin from, https://aeon.co/essays/how-should-you-choose-the-right-right-thing-to-do

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Just yesterday, in a conversation for a podcast, I was responding to a guest who asked my opinion… I don’t think I’ve ever expressed what I said so clearly, when I suggested balancing the first-person and second-person points of view. And here I am one day later staring at something I originally read months ago, crafting a blog post… and *POW* this quite philosophical essay is talking about balancing the three perspectives of the first-, second-, and third-person. But, sorry, now I’ve buried the lead.

Am I happy? Am I generous? Am I contributing to the world? This group of 3 questions is clearly yet another guiding principle straight from the How to Be a Human manual. (Which I feel compelled to point out I’m certain exists despite my never having received a copy upon arrival in this human form.)

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It matters that you start

November 17

It matters that I start something. I don’t have to start everything; That’d be tragic. I don’t have to start many things, nor even more than one thing. But it matters that I start something. The knowledge is in the doing of that something. It matters that I go through contemplation (choosing just the right something), then into commitment, and then… that’s where I often struggle.

I’d like to propose a different view: that struggle is the place of growth, learning, curiosity, love, creativity. Struggle is an incredible opportunity for being creative.

~ Leo Babauta from, https://zenhabits.net/struggle-to-creativity/

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I struggle when there’s a huge gap between the know-naught starting point, and my being one of those effortless creatives who get stuff done. Those who get stuff done well and demonstrate craftsmanship and care and pride and joy! (Gazing at the horizon,) there’s the thing. I know what it can be. I see how to begin, but I see hills and I know there will be challenges. Don’t turn away. (Gazing at the horizon,) if there’s somewhere I want to be, I need to start walking.

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It matters that you stop

November 15, 2023

“I wonder what would happen if I created a daily podcast, and did nothing else— if I didn’t tell anyone, didn’t share on social media, nothing. Just publish the thing every day.” So I went and made it happen, over 1,300 times. The answer to “what if?” is: I would receive a cornucopia of benefits simply from doing the work, even if no one heard a single one of them. I received: practice speaking extemporaneously, lessons in dramatic reading, countless tiny lessons of microphone technique, countless nuanced insights of physiology, and much much more.

Unfortunately, over the years, I became fixated on the least-important part of my original question: Daily.

I think this dynamic, to one degree or another, impacts anyone who has been fortunate enough to experience some success in their field. Doing important work matters and sometimes this requires sacrifices. But there’s also a deep part of our humanity that responds to these successes — and the positive feedback they generate — by pushing us to seek this high at ever-increasing frequencies.

~ Cal Newport from, https://calnewport.com/danielle-steel-and-the-tragic-appeal-of-overwork/

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It’s become clear that maintaining the pace is a problem, and so I’ve changed the pace. And in a blink, I feel I’m again focused on that still-overflowing cornucopia of benefits.

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I arrange my thoughts

November 14, 2023

[A]s I write I think about all sorts of things. I don’t necessarily write down what I’m thinking; It’s just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths. No matter how much I write, though, I never reach a conclusion. And no matter how much I rewrite, I never reach the destination. Even after decades of writing, the same still holds true.

~ Haruki Murakami

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This right here is just fine

November 13, 2023

There are only two things which seem to work for me: Plain old discipline, and regular, high-intensity exercise. Make a plan. Work the plan. Follow through. I don’t have to finish it all. (That used to be a huge problem too.) Each day, make a plan. And yes, some days the plan is, “today there’s no plan just follow your nose.” Where the mental freedom to believe that’s a good plan is banked during the days with a more plan-looking plan. The exercise acts as a baseline reset.

The result? An inevitable sense of disappointment. A sense that other people are doing better than us. We feel guilt. We feel pressure. We think “Oh, if only I had more money, or a better job, or lived in France where the child care benefits were different, if I had more custody, then things would be good…”

~ Ryan Holiday from, https://ryanholiday.net/all-time-is-quality-time/

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Slowly, daily, my false sense of urgency ratchets up. It’s not healthy, but going out and doing something high intensity resets my personal brand of insanity. Every time I’m in the worst of moods, all I have to do is head out and just start running like I hate myself. (This is rare, but frequent enough that it’s useful to have a strategy ready.) I can go just a couple minutes running like I stole something, and then my crazy-brain starts bargaining… okay, uh, if we can just slow down a bit, I promise to stop acting crazy. I’m pretty sure that’s not the best way to deal with things, but it’s definitely a coping strategy that works well. And the side effects are awesome.

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Our experience of time

November 12, 2023

Sometimes I sit in a chair on the patio in the afternoon sun. If I’m just the right combination of tired, relaxed, and comfortable, and if the wind, sun, temperature, and soundscape are just so, I can drift into a trance. Time passes. After which, I have no clear sense of whether it was a moment, or ten minutes. It doesn’t seem that time had stopped, rather it feels like time had ceased to affect me. Did I breath? Did I move? Did I even think in that time?

It’s not only that our experiences of space are different. Our experiences of time are likely different, too. We think about the passage of time through our terrestrial experience of unidirectional motion through space – our metaphors of time are almost all grounded in the way our bodies move forward through the environment. Given this fact, how would an octopus, who can easily see and move in all directions, conceptualise time?

~ David Borkenhagen from, https://aeon.co/essays/can-the-liquid-motion-of-the-octopus-radicalise-our-ideas-about-time

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Sometimes I find things on the Internet and there’s a clear takeaway for me, or a clear new-to-me idea or connection. This isn’t one of those times. Instead, I dipped into this article one day, came out the other end aware that it had to be included in a post.

And, perhaps I just fell asleep?

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The illusion of control

November 10, 2023

What is the opposite of play? …the opposite of playing an infinite game? I can’t think of a better candidate than the desire for control. My desire for control—when it rears its ugly head—stems from insecurity. (But let’s leave my insecurity for another day.) When I grasp for control I start trying to prepare for every contingency. When I grasp for control I start trying to control the contexts around everything I’m doing, everything I’m experiencing, and how others see me. And when I don’t grasp for control, I’m able to play.

The site you’re reading, Raptitude, is essentially an attempt to convey certain kinds of embodied knowing, having to do with the subtleties of being human, rather than driving a car or doing long division. I’m trying to get people to have some of the same perspective shifts I’ve had.

~ David Cain from, https://www.raptitude.com/2023/04/knowing-is-doing-not-remembering/

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Experiencing that embodied knowing is what I enjoy about conversation. It’s not vacuous, and it’s not an attempt by me to control. It’s play, and it’s learning.

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We close our eyes

November 8, 2023

My journey of growth has been ascending levels of perspective shifts. Some of us don’t get to go on that journey because of external and evil forces or because of the random, initial conditions they drew at the beginning of their lives. While I don’t understand what my self even is, I do understand that hiding—ignoring reality—is not going to move me further along on my journey of self-discovery.

“Daytime” is us closing our eyes and pretending it makes infinity go away.

~ Randall Munroe from, https://xkcd.com/2849/

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Munroe has gone on quite a journey. I think everyone far enough along on their needs-satisfaction curve (anyone who’s ever watched entertainment or played a video game is far enough along) would be moved, inspired, made to laugh and cry, by reading all of Munroe’s cartoons.

This cartoon is number 2,849. He publishes a cartoon Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So, he’s published cartoons for about 950 weeks. About 18 years.

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There’s no “Fin!”

November 6, 2023

In the last 20 years I’ve made three false–starts at sketching. They parallel my personal growth. The first false–start involved me buying books and materials, and spending a lot of time setting things up to create what I thought was the perfect environment. No sketching happened. The second false–start involved my removing what I thought was a barrier; I switched to journaling in pencil (a multi-year side quest I eventually returned from loving ink more deeply) because I thought having the sketching tools before me more often would lead to sketching. The third false-start now happens once every few weeks: I find myself paused, looking at something, really seeing, and I notice an urge to sketch.

I came late to his work: I remember seeing him on TV when I was a kid, but I only really started reading him post-cancer, around 2010 or so, when he was in the middle of his great blogging explosion caused by losing his voice due to his health complications.

~ Austin Kleon from, https://austinkleon.com/2023/04/04/10-years-without-roger-ebert/

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The connection is that Roger Ebert did a lot of sketching in addition to a lot of writing.

This time of year, every year, I’m thinking about seasons of life at large, and cycles in our work. I find that it’s fulfilling when I finish some large thing— when the last piece of a large project clicks into place like the final jigsaw piece. What doesn’t work is when I imagine that feeling of fulfillment too soon. I do try to imagine what done looks like before I begin small things—few-hours sized things, days sized things. But for large things, it’s often better if I think of a few possible ways it could eventually be “done” and then simply get to work. It’s best if I remember there’s no tidy “Fin!” like at the end of a movie; There’s only the doing.

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