Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’
~ Helen Exley
slip:4a1423.
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/.
Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’
~ Helen Exley
slip:4a1423.
Perspective is endlessly fascinating to me. What is it like to look back on decades of one’s own efforts? What’s it like to look back on one’s efforts if they’ve shifted the world?
Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web […]
~ Tim Berners-Lee from, Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter – World Wide Web Foundation
slip:4uwema1.
Well, that’s an ‘I’ statement with a little punch.
ɕ
Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words.
Get 7 for Sunday in your inbox. → Subscribe here.
This issue is https://7forsunday.com/88
Calm technology. Slow thought. Peace.
We need a philosophy of Slow Thought to ease thinking into a more playful and porous dialogue about what it means to live.
~ Vincenzo Di Nicola from, Take your time: the seven pillars of a Slow Thought manifesto | Aeon Essays
slip:4uaeea7.
We can each do some things, and not everything. Choose wisely.
ɕ
I find that whatever hindrances occur I write just about the same amount of truth in my journal; For the record is more concentrated, and usually it is so very real and earnest life, after all, that interrupts. All flourishes are omitted.
~ H. D. Thoreau
slip:4a1422.
I’m frequently, acutely aware of the ephemeral nature of everything I create. As I’m writing—right this moment—I’m sitting outside. The notebook computer I’m typing upon has a display—the “lid”—which is maybe one quarter inch thick. It even feels thin when I reach out and grasp it on both sides between my thumbs and forefingers; Thin, like grabbing a pinch of salt feels thin. Visually, around the display I see the table, the lawn, a tree, a garden, a shed, then other trees, houses… an entire, real world that I could, in but a moment, stand up and move into. Then I grasp this little display… everything I create is “within” the pinch of my fingers… then I tip the display towards me, and glance behind the display… nothing I create is behind the display either… from the other side—say, a passer-by’s perspective—I’m just a person, hyper-fixedly staring into the other side of the small, opaque, grey rectangle they see.
We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.
~ Edward Zitron from, Are We Watching The Internet Die?
slip:4uweae1.
But, boy howdy! what a universe is pinched into that thin, living, little square that I see, from my point of view.
ɕ
I have rarely sat down at my desk with something to say, other than I am ready. The sitting comes first, turning up with a certain alertness to possibility. Only then does the idea feel free to settle. It settles small and very tentatively, then, through your active attention, it can grow into something much bigger. Sitting in a readied state can sometimes last a long and anxious time. But you must not despair! I have never found a situation where the idea refuses to come to the prepared mind.
~ Nick Cave
slip:4a1421.
It’s blinding when I see something put clearly and realize just how stuck I’ve been on my own imperfect understanding. Here, have 6 what-ifs.
What if, to the contrary, positive thinking represents a biased grasp of reality? What if, when I was depressed, I learned something valuable, that I wouldn’t be able to learn at a lower cost? What if it was a collapse of illusions – the collapse of unrealistic thinking – and the glimpse of a reality that actually caused my anxiety? What if, when depressed, we actually perceive reality more accurately? What if both my need to be happy and the demand of psychotherapy to heal depression are based on the same illusion? What if the so-called gold standard of therapy is just a comforting pseudoscience itself?
~ Julie Reshe from, Depressive realism
slip:4uaeea8.
All of those sentences are just couched as what-ifs to entice people to read them and consider. My opinion? Just delete all the “What if” parts and capitalize the new first letter of each of those statements. Go ahead, reread them as statements instead of questions. What if, indeed.
ɕ
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
~ Anne Lamott
slip:4a1420.
I picked up this book off someone’s bookshelf, thumbed through it, gave it the page 88 test, and decided it was interesting enough… and borrowed it. (It is vanishingly rare that I borrow books. I normally just buy my own and hand the potentially borrowed book back to its owner.) Over a year passed with the book untouched.
I picked it up again and spent an hour with it hopping around and again decided I did want to read it. So I bought my own copy and returned the loaner. Then one day I was preparing for some podcast conversation and (as I often do) I thought about what books I might have which are related… and, for the third time I landed in this book. I dove into the index, found something interesting related to the podcast conversation I was preparing for and got lost reading for an hour.
Okay, fine. Apparently, it’s important that I read this book. So the other day, I cracked it open at the very beginning. I find that while I often skip chapters in a book, it’s always useful to read the introduction, preface, foreword, etc. Below is the literal first paragraph in this book, which I’d not seen in my first three visits.
During rare, spontaneous moments, experiences of very special quality and great import emerge from the depths of the human brain. To each person, these awakenings seem awesomely new. What they convey is not. It is the simplest, oldest wisdom in the world. The message is that ultimate meaning is to be found in this present moment, infusing our everyday lives, here and now. But one can’t predict such major peaks of enlightenment. Their insight-wisdom is next to impossible to describe. Even so, these fragile events inspired our major religions in ways that still shape our cultural development.
~ James Austin from, Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness
If you see the book, you’ll think it’s going to be some left-brain, hyper-analytical, what forest? …it’s just trees, sort of thing. At least, that’s what I thought, each of those first three times I visited. Turns out, it’s actually 850 pages of, “Woa! That’s interesting…”
ɕ
Reading time: About 4 minutes, 800 words.
Get 7 for Sunday in your inbox. → Subscribe here.
This issue is https://7forsunday.com/87
I’ve recently started reading a book about the importance of having exactly one thing upon which to focus. As with priority, becoming priorities, focusing on exactly one thing soon becomes two, and then three. Suddenly, it’s 23 things. And since the first 90% of any thing is vastly easier than the second 90%, in short order I’m busy, overwhelmed, sprinting in multiple directions. As the Russians say: Chase two rabbits and you’ll catch neither.
Do you want to be the artist who loses their joy for the process, who has strip-mined their soul in such a way that there is nothing left to draw upon? Burn out or fade away—that was the question in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note. How is that even a dilemma?
~ Ryan Holiday from, The Indiscipline Of Overwork
slip:4uryte2.
To answer Holiday’s first question I say emphatically, no! Thus I’m currently well into clearing the decks of multiple focuses. I’m imagining endings for things, major pivots and minor adjustments. There’s a great quote from Epictetus about how any idiot can steer the ship when the wind, sea and weather are good, but in challenging times all it takes is but an instant of distraction to lose the whole ship.
ɕ
I ain’t going to give up. Every time you think I’m one place, I’m going to show up someplace else. I come pre-hated. Take your best shot.
~ Cyndi Lauper
slip:4a1419.
In college (which was before the Internet was readily accessible; before the Web was invented) was when I first encountered true information and opportunity overload. In hindsight, there really should have been a class about how that’s a real thing, and ways that one should embrace it. Not fight it. Not try to control it… but ways to embrace it.
The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association. The historian Robert Darnton describes this tangled mix of writing and reading […]
~ Steven Johnson from, The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book
slip:4usete4.
The point that it’s the tension that feels uncomfortable is the key that unlocked for me. Yes, there’s tension from all the complexity and voluminous information. That’s a feature to be used and leveraged, not a problem to be resolved.
ɕ
A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour.
~ Bulwer-Lyton
slip:4a1418.
I truly don’t mind the cold; I enjoy snow and blustery winds and cozy fires and hot cocoa. Arguably, I suffer much more in unusually hot weather than I do in unusually cold weather. But even I have a limit.
The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness. Every direction he turned, he could see ice stretching to the edge of the Earth: white ice and blue ice, glacial-ice tongues and ice wedges. There were no living creatures in sight. Not a bear or even a bird. Nothing but him.
~ David Grann from, The White Darkness
slip:4unema3.
That is far, far beyond my limit.
ɕ
What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.
~ Ram Dass
slip:4a1417.
I often remind myself that there’s nothing new under the sun. Of course, that’s not actually true, but it reminds me to temper my insanity. Enthusiasm is wonderful fuel for getting things done, but I’m too often sprinting up in the insanity range, rather than gleefully skipping along in the enthusiastic range. I digress.
Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson’s quest for personal liberation. The inventor’s hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.
~ Gary Wolf from, The Curse of Xanadu
slip:4uwixa1.
I’ve spent a lot of time learning about, and tinkering with, personal knowledge systems. To my embarrassment, I don’t actually recall ever learning about Xanadu. I vaguely knew that the “hypertext” of the HyperText Transfer Protocol—the HT in the HTTP and HTTPS—wasn’t a fresh invention; The Web as we saw it invented did not also invent hyptertext. But I’d never seen this Wired article by Wolf.
ɕ
Reading time: About 4 minutes, 900 words.
Get 7 for Sunday in your inbox. → Subscribe here.
This issue is https://7forsunday.com/86
Without over-explaining how the soup gets made, I’ll just mention that this, and the third, things for you to savor this week are exceptionally nerdy this week. I’m not sure whether I’m more excited by the contents of this essay (which to be fair, I only skimmed) or the fact that it’s from like 1992.
[I]n having a body, we are spatially located creatures: we must always be facing some direction, have only certain objects in view, be within reach of certain others. How we manage the spatial arrangement of items around us is not an afterthought: it is an integral part of the way we think, plan, and behave.
~ David Kirsh from, The Intelligent Use of Space
slip:4uueki1.
Those four sentences are a good start at explaining what it means to be human. I heard Ido Portal (on a podcast) say something like that… about our legs for moving, arms for manipulating, and our spine for orienting ourselves. Just some random thoughts today around space (not “outer”) and ourselves.
ɕ