During a short camping stay, I had the delightful chance to sit between paddling around.
Words don’t really do the feeling justice. I spent decades sailing (beginning in the womb). For many years we went every weekend to the nearest lakes. Lakes, rivers, the Caribbean even. My dad was really into it. Once, my father excitedly got us to the lake for the first, Spring-sailing outing of a season (think: fr-fr-fr-frigid water, rubber wetsuits, die-hard sailors) only to discover the entire lake was STILL FROZEN. Too soon, dad. Too soon. Much fun. Endless stories.
As the edges of human knowledge are advanced, the total amount one must learn to be able to then contribute to further advancement grows. If there’s a proverbial mountain of knowledge, it grows taller as each contributor adds. If you start from the beach (at birth), wander inland in your early years of not-guided-by-you learning, and eventually decide to scale the mountain… well, it really matters in what epoch you happened to be born. Or maybe it doesn’t?
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers-conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
Bush played a complex role in the history of the United States. (It’s better if you form your own opinion about him and his work.) His short essay from about 80 years ago is these days seen by technophiles as heralding our own, current Internet and information age. In particular, a lot is read into Bush’s description of a desk which behaves like our modern Internet, information systems, and data processing. That’s fine. It’s like reading 80-year-old science fiction that became science fact.
Much more interesting to me is the point that with just a bit of squinting, it looks like nothing has changed in 80 years. Everything about this—the mountain of information, the tools [eg, Bush’s imagined desk, our internet], the people feeling overloaded, the specialization—feels fractal.
Students today should begrudge every moment of time. This dewlike life fades away; Time speeds swiftly. In this short life of ours, avoid involvement in superfluous things and just study the Way.
No one is crushed by adverse Fortune who has not first been beguiled by her smile. Only those who become enamored of her gifts as if they were their own forever, and expect deference because of them are prostrated by grief when the deceitful and ephemeral baubles abandon empty and childish minds ignorant of every abiding satisfaction.
I’ve been on a road trip this week recording podcasts for Movers Mindset. One thing I wanted to experiment with was trying to record “short” form podcasts for Movers Mindset while on the road. Adrienne Toumayan joined me for a recording titled, Balance.
I’m process oriented. I want to figure something out once, and then move on to having other interesting thoughts or experiences. That leads me to a sort of, “do one, cross off two,” mentality; I try to do more work up front—do the more complicated things first—in an attempt to reap a larger gain in the long run. I’m a tool builder you could say.
But my power of process, can also be a problem. There is, of course, an XKCD for this lesson: https://xkcd.com/974/. I digress.
Today, I wanted to share a bit of the process that I use to distill the things I find, and to focus my thinking. (I’m not going to go into how I find things, nor how I ensure a fresh “stream” of those things is brought to my attention.)
I have a WordPress-based blog using my own domain name. I also have a separate email account with a non-obvious address. It’s in my address book at “blog – Postie to Blog” [as you can see in the screenshot].
Whenever I see, read, or find something that inspires an interesting train of thought, I fire off an email to this special address. I simply brain dump my thinking. I insert bare URLs into the email. I put a “>” in front of blobs of text I want to show quoted. But I don’t bother with any formatting; it’s all just basic text.
I use the Postie plugin for my WordPress site. It’s an email client which periodically looks in my special mailbox and creates draft posts on my site. It deletes the emails as it creates the drafts.
When I want to work on blog posts, I go into my WordPress site and look at my drafts. I clean up the draft—fixing anything that I couldn’t stand having out on the internet. I dress up the links, organize the quoted parts, season it with my personal style, etc.. Very rarely, I’ll simply delete a draft. This has the advantage of giving me a chance to review my ideas for posts at some distance from when I initially captured it. Most of the time, I can see ways to drastically improve the post, but I don’t bother preferring instead to post the snapshot I had originally captured. I schedule the post for whatever day I want it to go out on. I’m writing this blog for my own benefit—it’s part of my process of reflection. So it’s not usually important when any particular post goes public.
Finally, I have a Mail Chimp account that has a recurring Campaign. It follows the RSS feed from my site, and emails whatever it finds to be new at 11am every day.
Why? Well, that’s probably best left for another day.
EIGHT. DOLLARS. I found a place which sells these online for 8 (eight, EIGHT?!) dollars each. Sure, it took forever to get here, their box exploded and FedEx apparently had to re-box and re-label it. But EIGHT dollars? So, uh, bribe me if you want to buy clamps from this site before they figure out they have these priced wrong… *scurries off to play with clamps* (This is probably like that time when that well known Scotch-selling web site based in England finally figured out that it’s illegal to ship alcohol to Pennsylvania… after I ordered from them a bunch of times :P
Growth hormone stays flat for about 40 minutes, after which it goes up steeply. At around the 90-minute mark, it reaches a level that is quite high; 300 percent higher than it was prior to the exercise session. Natural elevation of circulating growth hormone through intense exercise, intermittent fasting, and restful sleep, leads to a number of health benefits. It helps burn abdominal fat, often hours after the exercise session, and helps builds muscle (in conjunction with other hormones, such as testosterone). It appears to increase insulin sensitivity in the long run.
