It is not speaking that breaks our silence, but the anxiety to be heard.
~ Thomas Merton
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On this day
December 22ndThe flywheel mind
It can go well, my sitting and thinking. But only if there’s actually something that requires solving. Far too often I’m just spinning my wheels. Like one of those old-timey air raid sirens that staaaaaaaaaaaaaarts low and slow and builds to a heinous scream. A heinous scream in my head. Fun times.
Focusing on concrete things. For me, I think all of the supposedly therapeutic effect of not thinking comes from having to focus on moving carefully, from being actively distracted from my flywheel mind.
~ Gavin Leech from, Yoga hypothesis dump
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It’s not practical for me to shift by mental effort away from the heinous scream of the flywheel mind. Physical activity works, though. I take my screaming mind and taunt myself thinking, (read this in Condescending Wonka voice) “yes, interesting, oh yes, tell me more about that, yes…”, while moving. Lots of kinds of movement work, like yoga or running. Not light-silly-fun movement, but rather concerted, hard-working movement.
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State violence
State violence cannot be destroyed by decree, only by truth and love. Maybe state violence was necessary for previous generations; Maybe it is even necessary now, but people should conceive of a kind of future government in which violence will not be necessary.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Refuge
Keep this refuge in mind: The back roads of you self. Above all, no strain and no stress. Be straightforward. Look at things like a man, like a human being, like a citizen, like a mortal. And among the things you turn to, these two: Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions. That everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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What to focus upon
The practice is simply this: pause to consider what you’d like to focus on.
~ Leo Babauta from, Becoming Nimble at Dealing with Ever-Changing Plans
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I’m great at focusing, but am weaker at intentionally choosing what I’m focusing on. I’ve no idea when I realized I was weaker at the latter point. While it’s clear I have a lot of habits and behaviors which work well to help me deal with the weakness, I cannot recall if those developed simply by trial and error.
One habit which works well to avoid disaster is dump it out of my brain into an outline. An emergency spillway prevents complete failure of a dam, but if water ever goes over the emergency spillway, something is terribly wrong. That’s me and brain-dump outlining. I flip my 40-minute sand timer and start a fresh outline, saving it to my computer desktop. (Aside: There is never anything on my computer desktop.) As I’m outlining, panic often nips at my heels. Eventually, I get most everything down. I find long strings of knock-down-doable domino tasks. And I usually find at least one Big Question buried in there.
And then I close the document. It’s cathartic. It’s as if, having written it down, it’s in some sense done.
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Your assignment, complete
Consider all that you’ve gone through, all that you’ve survived. And that the story of your life is done, your assignment complete. How many good things have you seen? How much pain and pleasure have you resisted? How many honors have you declined? How many unkind people have you been kind to?
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Reflection
What makes this moment so precarious is that most of us are unconscious, in the event, both of our aspiration and of our Resistance. We’re asleep. We know only that we feel bad. Something’s wrong. We’re restless, we’re bored, we’re angry; we’re seeking something grand but don’t know where to look
~ Steven Pressfield from, Resistance and Addiction
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These days, the skill of reflection is on my mind. I’ve become convinced that discovery, reflection, and efficacy are the three stepping stones to self-actualization. It seems to me that the way out of the Gordian knot presented by Pressfield is via reflection.
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Silent flute
I wish neither to possess,
Nor to be possessed.
I no longer covet paradise,
More important, I no longer fear hell.The medicine for my suffering
I had within me from the very beginning,
But I did not take it.
My ailment came from within myself,
But I did not observe it
Until this moment.Now I see that I will never find the light
~ Bruce Lee from, The Silent Flute
Unless, like the candle, I am my own fuel,
Consuming myself.
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Cord’s closing speech from The Silent Flute.
(hat tip: Martial Artist of Life by J Little.)
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Bertolt
Unlike the other townspeople, who are constantly doing things together, he is content in his own company — a perfect embodiment of the great film director Andrei Tarkovsky’s advice to the young.
Most of all, the boy cherishes his time with Bertolt — the ancient oak he loves to climb.
~ Maria Popova from, Bertolt
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Trees.
More recently I’ve been drawn more strongly to photographing them, standing under them and just generally appreciating them.
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Parkour as a technology of the self
(Part 60 of 72 in series, My Journey)
I’m working on a crazy idea as a side project. Totally unrelated, I’m reading Julie’s CinéParkour. I’m just reading along this evening, and I get to this paragraph. This is so apropos of my train of thought these past few weeks.
Mind.
Blown.
Traceurs are active subjects within dominant power relations who use parkour as a technology of the self; an active transformative tool, to create and understand themselves and move away from fixed notions of identity and behaviour. Through a process of critical thinking and self-awereness traceurs problemitise and set ethics by which they adhere to. Parkour becomes a ‘practice of libery’, where traceurs practice freedom as a lifestyle, based on inventions and styles, that create ethics centered around creative environmental interactions and connections, to reclaim the body as an autonomous vehicle, away from the dominant notion of ‘bio-power’ and other dominant discourses.
~ Julie Angel, from CinéParkour, pg 152
‘technology of the self’
‘freedom as a lifestyle’
‘ethics centered around creative environmental interactions and connections’
‘reclaim the body as an autonomous vehicle’
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Just a selfie
Tracy’s airport-dropoff-goodbye shot from my 2014 trip to Colorado.
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The third wave of IT engineering
Just as human society still envelops everything from pre-agricultural tribes, farming communities, and factory sweat-shops to information-based commerce, in different parts of the globe, so IT today straddles all three `waves’ of development from manual chaos to goal-oriented self-repair in different organizations.
~ Mark Burgess from, CFEngine, SysAdmin 3.0 and the Third Wave of IT Engineering
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A big yes
You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.”
~ Stephen Covey
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