To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
~ Bette Davis
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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/.
Enhancing relationships
HomeNet could be (and has been) interpreted as an indictment of the internet, or screens, or modern communications technology in general. In truth, it illustrates a much simpler truth about love and happiness: Technology that crowds out our real-life interaction with others will lower our well-being and thus must be managed with great care in our lives. In order to reap their full benefits, we should use digital tools in ways that enhance our relationships.
~ Arthur C. Brooks from, Technology Can Make Your Relationships Shallower
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I’m reminded of some comments by Rafe Kelley.
If junk food is flavor divorced from nutrition, then pornography is sexuality divorced from the context of relationships. Video games are thrill divorced from physicality. And so you take these boys who have this inherent aggression and you let them play Fortnite, and they can play all day without any self-regulation from having the physical demands of actual rough and tumble play. The problem is that it so easily out-competes the actual thing that we need, which is the real physical play.
~ Rafe Kelley from a video short from an Instagram post, so I’ll just link you to his Evolve. Move. Play. project.
Brooks and Kelley are talking about different technologies, but I think they’re both pointing toward the “divorce” being the actual issue. The arrival in the living room (mentioned by Brooks) divorced [I’ll say] the mental stimulation from the other people in the house.
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Love
You want my opinion? We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.
~ Robert Fulghum
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What scales
efficiency scales but isn’t memorable
inefficiency is memorable but doesn’t scale
~ “Gaping Void” from, «https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2022/09/20/core-human-motivations-thoughts-inspired-by-kunal-shah/»
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This post over on Gaping Void is a great tour of their illustration style. There are several fun and interesting take-aways from a podcast episode from a different favorite site of mine, Farnam Street.
The point (from Shah, in the podcast) about what scales and what doesn’t has always fascinated me. If I try to imagine how to build something (whatever it is) in a way that it will scale up to “huge” it never works out well. Planning for scale up front, involves huge amounts of time, and then huge amounts of building. Instead, I like to think of technology (or any system) as a force multiplier; can I, by my own linear work, do something whose affect can be multiplied through technology?
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Simplicity
Simplicity is the consequence of refined emotions.
~ Jean D’Alembert
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Not forever
At some point in our lives we realize that we aren’t spring chickens anymore and we become a bit less interested in looking good naked and more interested in feeling better and making the most of the rest of our lives. It’s a hard thing to slowly realize you aren’t going to live forever.
But once you accept it, you can start to address it.
~ Jarlo Ilano from, How to Live Forever (or at least stay healthy for a really long time)
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I talk a lot about movement, and the people over at GMB are top-notch. If you’re looking for something (to inspire you, get you moving, solve a specific issue, etc.) then go there.
I also talk a lot about sleep. In recent months I’ve decided my mattress is done. I’ve been refusing to spend the insane amount to replace it (and yes, I’ve heard of that brand you’re considering telling me about.) Instead I chose to lean into sleeping on really hard surfaces.
I’ve been sleeping on a 2-inch-thick air mattress, on the floor, for a week. Thoracic extension— delightful. Hip extension as an antidote to desk-sitting— delightful. Even lying on my side requires new adaptations— delightful. As it happens, I already have a platform bed with Tatami mats. Based on my week’s experiment (and countless nights sleeping on my air mattress on host’s floors) I’ve shoved the western-style mattress off the platform and ordered a traditional “floor mattress” which goes atop tatami mats. We shall see.
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May 07, 2023 — #31
Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/31
Organic
The project started with the intent to regenerate a forgotten piece of land in a dense Coburg pocket. Felicity and her husband, architect Marc Bernstein, purchased the awkwardly shaped 250 square metre block to make it happen, but council deemed the land ‘undevelopable’, and banks were unwilling to approve finances.
~ Amelia Barnes from, An Ultra-Sustainable Home On An ‘Undevelopable’ Melbourne Site
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To be clear: The property is 250 square-meters, or ~1,700 square-feet. Get to a large computer screen. Get your beverage of choice. Then, click through and get lost on that site.
Meanwhile, the thing that struck me was the undulating ground cover outside the master bedroom. It’s good (but not particularly original) to use something that doesn’t require a lot of water (as opposed to turf grasses)—but to shape the ground into something interesting struck me as whimsical. If I don’t have to mow it, then it doesn’t need to be flat. I wonder where else, in the design of my own environment, am I stuck in my thinking.
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Age-old struggle
The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle—the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.
~ Douglas MacArthur
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Extraneous as passing fiction
After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone — each nudged aside by the march of inventive genius, by steel cogs and copper discs and hair-thin wires on white faces that are dumb, but speak — it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it. One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds the knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction.
~ Beryl Markham from, A Different Solitude: Pioneering Aviator Beryl Markham on What She Learned About Life in the Bottomless Night
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As if there’s anything I could write which would add to that.
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Listening
When you don’t know what to say, that’s okay. That shows you’re listening.
~ Anna Sale
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Do you get me meaning?
And one of my goals as the communicator is to make it as easy as possible for you to get the meaning I’m intending to convey.
~ Shane Parrish from, Language: Why We Hear More Than Words
The article also has a tidy explanation of irony. Irony (humor, sarcasm and many other linguistic forms) work so well because they are very powerful. A few words said and heard in person can transfer large ideas. The article goes all the way to mentioning our “power to attribute mental states to others.” A subtle and, frankly, amazing power of projection. My mental state, plus your mental state, plus my saying some words, should have gotten you to this other mental state. Heady stuff.
If I wrote, “That was fun.” you’re pretty sure those three words were only part of what the speaker was trying to convey. By default, we have to go with the literal interpretation, but feel we’ve been gypped. We feel the urge to skip back a few lines looking for hints to reveal the rest of the meaning meant to be conveyed. We are accustomed to having to write much more to get the same job done. I have to write: Then, with a wry smile, “That was fun.”
Which is all very interesting. But today, the question I have is: Wait. How did I ever get good at this insanely complex process without ever having anyone explicitly tell me anything about it?
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Real change
Change—real change—comes from the inside out. It doesn’t come from hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior with quickfix personality ethic techniques. It comes from striking at the root—the fabric of our thought, the fundamental, essential paradigms, which give definition to our character and create the lens through which we see the world.
~ Stephen Covey
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Who we are
The Stoics believed that, in the end, it’s not about what we do, it’s about who we are when we do it. They believed that anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble or impressive, as long as it’s the right thing. That greatness is up to you—it’s what you bring to everything you do.
~ Ryan Holiday from, Discipline is Destiny: 25 Habits That Will Guarantee You Success
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Depending on where you are on your own journey, this could be the greatest 25-item list you’ve ever seen, or it could be 24 items of hogwash. How great is that? For me, it’s the one about being kind to oneself which I need most to let sink in farther. Every absolute rule, every simple guideline, and every pithy virtue becomes problematic when taken to the extreme. It’s almost as if *gasp* life is complicated, and I’m a complex person.
I feel like I’m living in the negative. My life isn’t a passing timeline of “this is nice” punctuated with some stuff that qualifies as work, chores, and maintency-things. Instead, I feel like any time I’m in a span of “this is nice”, I’m on borrowed time. It’s is always “this is nice, but…” followed by something I feel I should be doing just as soon as I’m done loafing. It’s as if my personal demon is relaxing, just out of sight at the bar as I loaf here on the veranda, but still dutifully keeping track of exactly how long I’ve been loafing. I continuously feel like things will go better for me (in the way mobsters would say that) if I choose to stop loafing rather than waiting to see how long I can get away with it. That’s not healthy and thus my awareness of the need for self-kindness.
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April 30, 2023 — #30
Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1100 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/30
What does done look like?
And then they got home, and there were piles of tasks, emails and messages waiting for them. The urgency of those piles threw them off their best intentions.
The urgency of piles throws off all of our best laid plans.
~ Leo Babauta from, The Urgency of Piles
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If I could have one wish this holiday season (maybe I should start marking silly pop-culture references in a different typeface) it would be that you’d just go read everything he’s written. If I could have two wishes, it’d be for you to click on his name which takes you to a listing of all of my posts related to him, and then for you to continue onward to read each of his things I’ve linked. But, to dig specifically into his topic of piles, I’ll try to make a point about working all the way to done.
Some things are never going to be done in the sense of disappearing from your life; our household will always have a gentle snow of tax-related paperwork accumulating through the year. That’s technically a pile. But that pile has a home (out of sight) and related things always, immediately go on that pile, where they sit until tax season. That pile has no tension associated with it. Laundry is the same way; of course there’s always some dirty laundry in a “pile” (both a physical pile and in baskets which have homes.) But again, no tension. That’s where dirty laundry belongs.
What causes tension is when your expectations (I want things a certain way—like a tidy, uncluttered home) conflict with reality (the mail, taxes and laundry are strewn about.) The key is to realize that the second 90% of anything is the unglamorous part we’d prefer to skip. We want to jump ahead to the first 90% of the next thing.
What do I mean by the second 90%? Filling up the gas tank as you approach your destinationis part of the journey. What does done look like driving somewhere? The car’s normal state is to have some reasonable amount of gas in it. Drive it (the first 90%… the fun part involving getting somewhere) and get gas (the second 90%… the un-fun part including leaving early enough to have time to stop for gas.) What does done look like mowing the lawn? I need the time and energy to clean the mower at the end. What does done look like doing laundry? I have time and energy to do the ironing, folding and putting-away parts. And yes, big project that involve multiple sessions of working? Each session has it’s own done to reach.
Do this for everything. Every. Thing. Ask: What does done look like? Do I have enough time and energy to actually get to done? …or am I just excited by that first 90% and I’m going to quit there?
You’ll quickly realize you cannot get everything (literally everything) to a “done” that corresponds to your expectations. The hardest part starts once you realize that you’ve over-stuffed your life. The real problem is that you really don’t have the time and energy to do the second 90% of every thing. The real solution then is to make the hard choices to undo the mistakes that un-simplified one’s life.
And by “you” I mean “me.”
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Dreams
It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.
~ Don DeLillo
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Should have read the label
There is a part of you that will *become* your job/profession.
~ Toby Nagle from, 20 years in
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That’s number 7 from his 10-point listicle.
Also: I’ve taken to using the word “listicle” only when I mean it as a compliment. Versus, my perception that everyone else means it as derogatory. I think that being able to organize one’s writing into a coherent, ordered list of things all of which are on roughly equal footing, shows a significant level of comprehension and integration. Most short writings which have a numbered list of points are crappy click-bait, and people rightly derogate them. This is not that, so there. (English is a mess, but ain’t finger-painting fun?i)
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Mistakes
Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.
~ Thomas Carlyle
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Antifragile
The aims of safety-ism were noble. They saw that young people were experiencing greater amounts of anxiety, stress, and depression than previous generations and sought to remedy their angst by protecting them from anything that could potentially harm or upset them.
~ Mark Manson from, Trigger Warning: Reality Hurts
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It always seemed obvious to me that wasn’t going to work. When I find something which triggers me, that’s a problem with me; That points me towards something I can improve upon. The problem is not the problem. The problem is my attitude towards the problem.
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