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/.

Wagashi

April 17, 2024

It’s nice to find little oases of respite. It doesn’t have to be a Japanese garden, of course. You can find respite nearly anywhere.

In the 1960s, the city of Portland converted an old zoo into a 12-acre garden as part of an effort to promote peace and cultural exchange between the U.S. and Japan. The grounds have been called the most beautiful and authentic Japanese gardens outside of Japan by luminaries like Nobuo Matsunaga, the former Japanese ambassador to the United States. The teahouse, the Umami Café, strives to bring the same authentic flair to their fare. While their grassy matcha and roasted-rice teas are always on the menu, their wagashi changes with the turning of the seasons.

~ Roxanne Hoorn from, The Woman Putting a West-Coast Spin on Japan’s Traditional Tea Sweets

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Even better, you can create little spaces of your own.

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Good advice

April 15, 2024

There are two really important parts to good advice: The advice, and the taking of it.

Head high and […]

~ Nick Cave‘s mother, from The Red Hand Files – Issue #14

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As Cave briefly explains, his mother had previously been a font of advice, but he’d not listened. Or perhaps he wasn’t ready to listen? Either way, I’ve totally nope never nuh-uh not me ever failed to heed words of wisdom from my mother.

What’s that? What advice has she given? I think the best would be her diet book: If it tastes good, spit it out. (That’s the whole book, not the title.) And her mother’s best advice was: Let the young ones do it.

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Hidden gems

April 14, 2024

Suppose you wanted to be surprised and delighted (and possibly intrigued and befuddled) in some field. You could start with the Top 10. Today, I’m talking about movies, so find some list of the 10 Greatest Films. This sort of listing is ubiquitous: 10 Greatest Dramas, 100 Films preserved by the U.S. Library of Congress, The British Film Institute’s (BFI) 100 Greatest Films, and on and on.

The following list from BFI is not that sort of list. Not at all.

Each of these films is one of the greatest according to just one voter in our recent Greatest Films of All Time poll; they are some of the hidden gems among the more than 4,300 films voted for by more than 2,000 participants. (For the pedantic reader, the films that got one vote each – more than we can fit in here – are all technically joint 1,956th greatest film of all time, combining the tallies of our critics’ and directors’ polls.)

~ from 101 hidden gems: the greatest films you’ve never seen

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Effectively, that’s a list of 101 movies which all tied for last place, in list of the top 2,000-or-so movies. Above, the BFI is showing an entirely different way to be surprised and delighted (and possibly intrigued and befuddled): Find one person who is into the thing way more than you, and ask them for a list of the greatest. On their list, it is likely there will be one which they recommend, that no one else would recommend. What is up with that one recommendation?

Any big list is created by many people collaborating and, in the end, averaging out their individual tastes. But if you ask that one really-into-it person, you’ll get a very surprising and delightful (and probably intriguing and befuddling) opinion.

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Where’s… everything?

April 12, 2024

It doesn’t matter how you store things, only that you do. If I know that, somewhere, I know something… and I can find it… that’s success. There are two parts to remembering (aka storing in such a way that it can be later found and used) everything: First, capture it in some form and put it somewhere intentional. Second, when you go for something and it’s not in the first place you looked (it’s instead in the 3rd place you looked), move it to the first place you looked.

These books helped educated people cope with the “information explosion” unleashed by the printing press and industrialization. They were highly idiosyncratic, personalized texts used to make sense of a new world of intercontinental trade, long distance communication, and mass media. Commonplace books could contain recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas, notes from sermons, and remedies for common maladies, among many other things.

~ Tiago Forte from, Commonplace Books: Creative Note-Taking Through History

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Of course, the hard part is getting in the habit of capturing things. Our minds are terrible at holding ideas. Our minds are for having ideas (and composition and creation and more.) The best day to begin capturing your knowledge was yesterday. If you missed that opportunity, today is also good.

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The cake is a lie

April 10, 2024

I’ve tried everything. Lists, timers, project management systems, Pomodoro, time blocking, dashes, scheduling, time tracking… everything. It turns out: There are things I enjoy doing; they get done. There are things I don’t enjoy doing; they are a struggle. This is the way.

This lie is often called “work/life balance.” And it’s a deviously demotivating false dichotomy. A narrative designed to stigmatize work and trivialize what work is really all about. It reduces transformation to a mere transaction.

~ Cierra Martin from, «https://www.gapingvoid.com/must-we-hate-our-jobs/»

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There’s no need to struggle against my nature. It’s futile and that way lies madness. What remains is to reign in my Idea Monster. I also do not need to attempt everything I can possibly imagine that might be fun or productive. Essentialism is the middle road I steer towards more and more. This is the way.

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Open + Curious

April 8, 2024

I’m excited to share that Jesse Danger and I have begun a new podcast show, Open + Curious. I’ve been writing up my thoughts around conversation, and this podcast is a new part of the Open + Curious project. Please consider subscribing to support our efforts.

Are you looking for ways to bring conversation alive? Then you are in the right place.

In each 15-minute episode we begin with a question, and work our way to a challenge. Some questions we explore have clear answers, and some lead to more questions and further unknowns. The challenge we seek to find, at the end of each episode, is meant to help you explore each question on your own.

https://openandcurious.org/bringing-conversation-alive/

I accept

April 7, 2024

I have had the privilege of standing—not in the exact cedars and mountains you’ll discover below—but nonetheless in cedars, in mountains, in northern Japan. It wasn’t a pilgrimage. But it sort of was. It was a long train ride. A very long walk. A very nearly exhausting long ascent. No guide. Just a curiosity. Just two of us. At the top… I realized that the journey—if we had wanted to continue—had only just begun. Choices about time and commitments to others were made.

As a faint mist settles in among the towering cedar trees (some more than 1,000 years old), our funeral procession slowly ascends Mt Haguro’s stone stairway. It’s summer, but the air here is still cool. When the poet Matsuo Bashō made a similar journey through these holy mountains in 1689, he wrote a haiku describing the summer wind being ‘scented’ with the clearly visible snow of Mt Gassan in the distance. Today, it smells of pine needles and earth.

~ Tim Bunting from, More radical and practical than Stoicism – discover Shugendō

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Is mine a story I’ve shared, or a suggestion?

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Not me, I’m certain

April 5, 2024

Three words matter much: Not me, I’m certain I am uncertain. I’m not simply uncertain. Not simply indecisive, beset by unknowns, nor stymied by possibilities.

The virtue of intellectual humility is getting a lot of attention. It’s heralded as a part of wisdom, an aid to self-improvement and a catalyst for more productive political dialogue. While researchers define intellectual humility in various ways, the core of the idea is “recognizing that one’s beliefs and opinions might be incorrect.”

But achieving intellectual humility is hard. Overconfidence is a persistent problem, faced by many, and does not appear to be improved by education or expertise. Even scientific pioneers can sometimes lack this valuable trait.

~ Michael Dickson from, Intellectual humility is a key ingredient for scientific progress

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The compass for me is, “so what?” When I’m certain of something, I ask myself: So, what? Connecting that which I’m certain of, out into the world via, “so, what?” challenges me to look at the underpinnings of my beliefs, and the integration with my knowledge in total.

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Always be starting

April 3, 2024

Am I too often seeking the sense of safety or control? (And it is indeed only a sense-of. It is only an illusion.) What happened to the simple feeling of joy in being?

What this means, as I understand it, is that when we let go of all attachment to the outcome of our novel publication/album release/opening of our Thai Fusion restaurant … we shift the locus of our enterprise from the ego to the Self (or the soul if you prefer.)

The Muse likes this. Heaven likes this.

We are now operating on the plane of the soul, not the plane of the ego.

~ Steven Pressfield from, “Start the next one today”

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Sometimes an outcome is important; the measurements, the color, the specific dimensions. When the idea began with the intention of trading the outcome with another. But not every waking moment. Too much of that is obviously an imbalance.

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Path

April 2, 2024

I always tell young people to find a path in life that you can embrace and enjoy rather than something that you’re expected to do. That’s what makes life interesting. And once you achieve a certain level of success, no matter where you are, what you’re doing, don’t be content with that level. Push yourself to another level. People that are successful are always pushing.

~ Ed Viesturs

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Knowledge management

April 1, 2024

I’ve spent decades wrestling with knowledge management. In the realm of systems administration, capturing obscure incantations, and the why’s and hazards that go with it are critical. I have a digital collection of notes going back more than 20 years. Yes, of course it’s named Grimoire. More recently, I started creating my own person knowledge system and ended up with my own variation of a slipbox.

For most of human history, knowledge was something completely inseparable from a particular person. It didn’t mean anything to point to a piece of knowledge without reference to the person from whose life experience it emerged. The idea of a “piece” of knowledge didn’t even make sense, as knowledge couldn’t be broken down into discrete units as long as it remained in someone’s head.

~ Tiago Forte from, Inventing the Digital Filing Cabinet

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My first learning around knowledge systems was that the very act of building them is incredibly helpful at learning. The effort of composing the notes (or whatever) requires careful thinking, rethinking, adding context, imagining the future where the knowledge will be used, etc. All of which is repetition and integration—key components of learning.

My second learning has just clicked into place as I read Forte’s article: Knowledge systems are tools for later use. I used to think that by building the system up, I was somehow creating something (something as yet unknown and unexpected.) Which was silly of me, because Grimoire has taught me, over decades, that any given incantation found therein can never simply be incanted. The knowledge within is only part of the magic. Only if the knowledge within can be combined with experience and expertise will it be useful in some current endeavor. The knowledge system is working and complete as it is, if when I’m doing something, I can find the knowledge I need to continue.

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