Love. Life. Practice.

Personal Development with Gray Miller

22 May 2013

you are strong enough

When Less is Annoying

Recently a dear friend sent me a Lifehack 30-Second Tip image. I’m a big fan of the site, and I’ve enjoyed several of their similar images, but this one…this one I had some problems with. Can you guess why?

You are strong enough.

 

The Zen Grammarian

Obviously the first problem is with the grammar: as any reliable source will tell you, when talking about anything you can count the correct word is “fewer”, not “less.” Even more than that, though, something about the ideas in this rubbed me the wrong way.

After some thought, I realized the way I would have rewritten it:

don’t wish it was easier, realize you’re strong enough to handle it
don’t wish for fewer problems, remember that you will outlast them
don’t wish for fewer challenges, relish the lessons they teach you

That’s my version, minus a picture of rocks. What’s yours?

 

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20 May 2013
1 Comment

focus your power

When Good Advice is Hard to Take

Like most of us, I struggle to balance between my intake of media and the quality thereof. The Gravy Hose is a constant distraction, and it’s gotten to where it’s a triumph when I can make it through a movie or an episode without checking email or some RSS feed. Part of this is because there is always that one nugget of gold amongst the dross, that one thing that makes you go “Oh! That’s good to know!” and somehow justifies the distraction or the multitasking. Somehow you ignore just how much effort and time it took to get to that nugget, and how much more effective you can be if you focus your power.

A Good Problem is Still a Problem

This was driven home to me pretty thoroughly recently on the Art of Nonconformity Blog. I subscribe to Chris’s email updates, and when I got the one about “Revisions” it piqued my interest. Editing is very difficult for me – most of these blog entries are simply written and posted (please, do me a favor and pretend you’re surprised). I’ve actually managed to cultivate a practice that would be the envy of many bloggers – about 3000 words a week, for over a year. I’ve got at least three books worth, more if you count e-books! And I’ve always had the intention of working these entries into a book – I even expressed that intention to my blogger’s support group here in Madison.

In reading the comments for the post on AONC Blog, it appeared that I was pretty exceptional in this trait. Writer after writer talked about how hard the first draft is, how much easier it is to go back and do the second, third (huh?) or fourth revision (you gotta be kidding me!). 

I’m exactly the opposite. The words flow, no problem – in fact, sometimes with fiction I can just get lost in the story and have no idea how much time I’ve been writing – but thousands of words are there on the screen. But going back? Changing them? Making them express the ideas better, getting rid of redundantly repetitive phrases written over and over (see what I did there?), even at times just throwing it out and starting over…this is hard for me.

This is my area of procrastination. I know this. Which is why I added this comment to Chris’ blog:

I hate editing. I’ve been writing an average of 3000 words a week on my blog for over a year – so I’ve got at least a couple of books worth, right? Yet the process of going in and actually pulling out the info, and actually editing it into coherent form…it’s the biggest procrastinative lure I have.

And that’s not even mentioning the novel I’m trying to edit, and the outline for my nonfiction book based on a workshop I teach…oh, and a handbook for conference presenters in my field.

Too much content. Too many projects. Editing is my nemesis.

Any ideas?

Of course, I forgot: Chris has a habit of reading and replying to all the comments.

A Matter of Scale

So yep, right there was an answer to my question. Chris said:

Screen Shot 2013-05-20 at 11.05.13 AMMy first comment is that 3,000 words on a blog per week is great, but blog posts don’t usually combine very well into books. My second comment is that with the blog stuff, the novel, the non-fiction book, and the conference handbook … maybe you should pick one of these to start with. :)

It doesn’t mean you can’t do the others later, of course. That’s my $0.02!

And just like that, my head went ping. Sure, I talk a lot about multitasking on a small scale – chatting while working, texting while driving (don’t!), skimming a newsfeed while watching TV. All the proof is out there: multitasking is less efficient, and bad for you besides.

But what about on a larger scale? We already know you’re only supposed to change one habit at a time…but maybe that applies to the bigger goals as well? Of course it does! Chris was absolutely on the money: multitasking is a problem on both sides of the scale.

The Hard Choice to Focus Your Power

Trying to be a great blogger, a great fiction writer, author a personal development book and a book on Open Space facilitation? Might be over-reaching. Perhaps, Gray, I hear you saying, you could focus your power and skill on one of these projects, and do it really, really well.

It’s a nice idea, this focusing practice. It doesn’t mean I have anything less to do – it just means that the things I’m doing have a single goal, rather than having the effort flying off in multiple directions. It is hard to say it’s ok to let that project go…but with practice, it gets easier.

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17 May 2013
3 Comments

love should be witnessed

Real Friends Watch Calphalon

Last night I served a very odd function: I was asked to be a “neutral observer” as two friends who are going through a divorce divided some of their property. The request was simple: watch them go through a list of items, mainly cookware, determining who would take what. If either of them wandered off topic or started to argue, I was to simply remind them to get back to the list. I didn’t actually have to say anything, but standing there I had a lot of time to think about how the end of love should be witnessed. They were meticulous and focused as they discussed knives and Calphalon pans with the occasional fond reminiscence about their cats.

Speaker for the Hearts

There’s a blockbuster movie coming out soon, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. The sequel to that book will be a bit more difficult to make into a movie. It’s called Speaker for the Dead, and among other things it posits the existence of a new kind of officiant at funerals:

Speakers are treated with the respect afforded to a priest or cleric. Any citizen has the legal right to summon a Speaker (or a priest of any faith, which Speakers are legally considered) to mark the death of a family member. Speakers research the dead person’s life and give a speech that attempts to speak for them, describing the person’s life as he or she tried to live it. This speech is not given in order to persuade the audience to condemn or forgive the deceased, but rather a way to understand the person as a whole, including any flaws or misdeeds. – from Wikipedia (warning: Spoilers!)

I’ve known these two friends for a couple of decades now. It is sad to see their union end, but at the same time I can see the factors that contributed to it, as well as why they found it necessary to end their marriage and continue their life journeys apart. My own perspective, without the hormonal swings of anger and love attached, simply is filled with the fond memories of the times I’ve shared with them and other friends, together and individually. I realized, standing there, that even though their relationship had passed on it could still find a voice in the way it had touched my life and others.

It seemed strange to me, standing there, that we don’t have eulogies for our relationships. That we don’t have ceremonies that celebrate the existence of love, even when it has passed on or changed into a form that we don’t recognize. Instead we seem to have the opposite, focusing on the fact of it ending as being proof that somehow it never really existed at all.

What would a Speaker for the Heart look like? How would they go about speaking for the love after it’s gone? I don’t know, but it makes me thoughtful…

courtesy Dark4 via Flickr CC

Is this how the end of love should be witnessed? Maybe so…

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15 May 2013

life isn’t out to get you

Life Doesn’t Care – Why Should You?

I’m kind of concerned that this is going to come across as a nihilistic post, when it’s certainly not intended as such.  It was inspired by a recent article about motivation with the basic idea that “sometimes the best way to get things done is to give up.” The idea is that often too much time is spent trying to get us “motivated” – in other words, trying to feel like doing something. The argument is that no, trying to convince yourself that you do feel like doing something – or worse, that you should feel like doing something – is counter-productive. It’s ok if you don’t want to do something. Accept that. Indulge in it, even.

And then do it anyway. I’ve written about it before, and even decided there should be a whole category called “Didn’t Wanna. Did It Anyway” on my “Have Done” list.

That, by the way, is the list you ought to have at the end of a day of working through To-Do’s. For some reason, we never focus on that…

“God Does Not Play Dice With the Universe”

I don’t know that Einstein ever really said that, but it occurs to me that there are two ways to take it – either with the emphasis on the dice, or with the emphasis on “God.” Many theists use it to back up intelligent design theories, and that’s all well and good – I would never try and argue someone’s faith. But either way you take it – whether as an argument that there is a definite plan to the universe, or that it’s all happenstance and the dice are rolling themselves, it comes down to the same thing: the universe was not created for YOUR convenience.

It’s a convenience that we share. And thank God (sic) for that! Can you imagine the pressure you’d be under if the entire world was centered around you? That would mean that every tragedy that happened was directly traceable to YOUR needs. All of that beauty around you, and you’re spending the afternoon watching re-runs of The Shield? How could you waste such richness? With an entire universe shaped for your benefit, you had better amount to something or else you are wasting the biggest gift anyone could ever give you!

That’s a lot of pressure. No thanks, I say. I am much happier living in a universe that exists for all of us, equally, with laws that have exceptions that we don’t understand and exceptions to laws that we haven’t even imagined yet. I don’t have to worry about the world in Australia right now, no matter what my newsfeed tells me – rather, I get to enjoy the small wonders, like the fact that my grandson Victor, after a rough night of crying, blew me a kiss when I dropped him off at daycare.

It’s Not Personal. It’s Galactic.

Yet even when we accept that we only have a very small part of the larger world to perceive and interact with, we still tend to treat life as though it was a Grand Opponent. “Why is the world out to get me?” “Sorry I’m so mixed up, Mercury is in retrograde” or even the classic “I just can’t win!”

Here’s a secret: much like in yoga, you can’t win because nobody is competing against you. Life is simply happening, just the way it’s supposed to. The measure of your suffering, as the wise Zen masters say, is simply the difference between the way you think life ought to be and the way life is.

The challenges of life get much easier to deal with when you realize that they’re not part of some grand conspiracy or even some trend of the odds. Sure, you certainly contribute to the odds of things happening to you through your own action, whether that’s a tummy-ache after a carton of ice cream or your house being swept away because you chose to live in a certain geographic location.

But you can only predict your failures or your successes to a certain degree, and a large part is the way you choose to define “failure” or “success”.

For starters, if you want to win: stop inventing imaginary invincible opponents

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10 May 2013

real love

An AHA Screwdriver For Your Heart

Real Love is a good counter to Real HateIn Monday’s post about developing the AHA Screwdriver – that is, the Affective Hedonic Adjustment tool that would help you synthesize a happier life – I mentioned that one of the biggest paradoxes of our lives can be the way that real love will turn our expectations on their head. We make lists and plans and work really hard to both find and be the perfect person to love…and then it all gets “gang aft agley“, as the poet would put it.

Why is that? There’s a lot of scientific reasons for it, involving the limbic system, (“Suddenly across the room their eyes met,“) epinephrine and dopamine released into the bloodstream (“He makes me feel like no one else ever has!“), the release of prolactin and oxytocin (“I could just lie here in your arms forever“) and the very real addiction that can come from repeating the process (“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone…“). Some would feel that there’s something lost by putting such a “magical” event into such Newtonian terms, but real love, whether a mystical force or chemical reaction, is pretty amazing regardless.

It could even be argued that having a more thorough understanding of these chemical processes, along with the psychological phenomena like confirmation bias (“We were destined to be together!“) could be a useful way to develop your AHA screwdriver. After all, if you can identify Ah, she’s holding my hand, here comes the dopamine! Wheeeee!! then that should make the let down when she’s not holding your hand more rational, right? Ah, I’m having a surge of prolactin, the depressant hormone, so that my body will stop the dopamine is better than Why did she stop holding my hand? She must not want to be with me! I’m disgusting! Why did I ever think she would like me in the first place?

Sad to say, it ain’t so.

Real Love is Real, Regardless

As was brilliantly written about in the most recent Hyperbole and a Half, emotions like love and depression, even when you understand them, still affect you. You can know that you are just suffering (or enjoying) a chemical imbalance, but that doesn’t necessarily change the effects of that imbalance. Let’s use a metaphor: if you’re sitting in the middle of the desert, having a map or even a GPS doesn’t give you any more water.

I suppose it could be argued that the map could help show you the direction of the water…but again, there are other factors. I used the analogy recently that it’s not so great having a map to your destination if your car doesn’t even have wheels. What it comes down to is: having read many books, scientific articles, consulted with and attended lectures by some of the finest minds in the field, I am fairly confident in saying: I know a lot about love, but I don’t know much of anything about dealing with it.

Theory is fine, but it’s the practice that gives you the real tools you need. So rather than list books on love that I’ve enjoyed (which is almost what this post was), I’ll just say: sit with the love you have, in whatever form, right now. Self love. Filial love. Romantic love. Long-lost love. “Loving mens, loving womens, loving ALL God’s children!” to quote the band A3.

And when I say sit, I don’t mean revel. I don’t mean enjoy it, or miss it, or long for it. You’ll do all those things anyway. Instead, sit and watch yourself do it. See how the love actually makes you feel, or rather, see how you choose to feel about love. It’s a strange little meta-practice, but I’m convinced it’s the only place we’ll really figure out how to handle this crazy little thing called…well, you know what I mean.

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08 May 2013

living the life you wish

Freelancer’s Fantasy

Paging through Fast Company Magazine, years ago, trying to answer the gnawing question: “Gray, why aren’t your living the life you wish?” There is an ad for a resort in Northern England. Not the tropical kind of getaway, obviously, but playing on the beautiful scenery of the region. It shows a man in a white shirt and dark slacks sitting at a small table in the middle of a pastoral green field. His cordless laptop is open in front of him, along with the incredible vista of sunny fields and mountains. The ad copy reads something like “What if this was your office?” and I find myself asking “Yes…what if?”

•   •   •

An idle fantasy comes to mind one afternoon as I’m contemplating my “ideal house.” What I come up with is a Roman-style villa, with four buildings surrounding an open-air courtyard, perhaps with a nice fountain in it. I can picture my grandkids playing there, and I indulge in the fantasy of being able to provide a comfortable home for my children and their families as they grow. It’s all balderdash, of course – we don’t live in that kind of culture – but it’s funny how my Fierce Warrior fantasies have been replaced by the Pater Familias.

Plus, It’s Good Ground for the Zombie Apocalypse

I am writing this in the middle of the courtyard of the apartment complex where I live. There is green grass and the whistling of birds mingling with the whistling of groundskeepers. The buildings are laid out in a rectangle surrounding the courtyard, with a pool, business center (free wifi) and well-equipped gym within easy walking distance. While my partner and I were walking to workout the other day I commented that it was an easily defensible compound, especially if you felled the trees between the buildings to hold back the ravenous zombies.

She commented that my brain is kind of strange.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to getting Harvey and Victor our on this field for some touch football, or to ride their bikes around the walkway that rings the courtyard. It’s conveniently on the way to my daughter’s work, so she can drop him off occasionally on her way to work. There are other kids his age in the complex, and it’s shaping up to be a nice sociable summer.

In other words, while it’s not precisely what I fantasized about – either in pastoral setting or family compound – it’s remarkably close, especially considering that I wasn’t actually trying for either one.

Freelancing is often the path to living the life you wished for

Click to Enlarge. Some stats may surprise you.

Living the Life You Wish with Bonus Features

The interesting thing to me is not that my life resembles these fantasies I’ve had. It’s not even that I seem to have gotten here more unconsciously than through any planned event. No, what I find fascinating is the “undocumented features” and “unintended consequences” that come about when we stumble into what we thought we wanted all along.

An easy example relates to the “What if this was your office?” idea. I am fully aware of the luxury of having a flexible schedule, of being almost entirely location-independent in my work. My friends in cubicles read about me working out in the sunlight and practically glow green with envy.

What you don’t hear about is what happened after I wrote that last heading: my iPad screen suddenly blanked and a “Temperature Too Hot” alert came on the screen. Apparently the sun that I’d been enjoying on my back had been too much for the machine. Moving to the shade fixed the problem after a few minutes, but they didn’t mention that in the “What if this was your office?” ad. If my iPad breaks down, I don’t get to just requisition a new one; likewise, there’s no IT department for me to call if I have problems with my computer.

There is a bit of a Marxist revenge here. Workers now own their own means of production.
- Daniel Pink, Author, Free Agent Nation

I’m not complaining; truth is, Google and the wisdom of crowds is a far better tech support team than any in-house team or consultant I’ve ever worked with. But there are other costs to this kind of work and life that are rarely considered. For example, “Free Agent Nation“, a manifesto published in  blithely talks about “alternative healthcare plans for individuals” without admitting that these are usually far more expensive and far less comprehensive than employer-subsidized insurance. As a result, I live under the Great American “Don’t Get Sick & If You Do, Die Quickly” health care system, and take care of my body as best I can.

In general, most of the “knowledge worker” success stories seem to run along the lines of “If you want to be a successful independent knowledge worker, write a book about how to be a successful independent knowledge worker.” That kind of Ouroborousian system doesn’t appeal to me, and so you get posts like this rather than “Five Steps to Financial Bliss.”

Instead, the best I can do is say “Yes, wish for what you want! It will probably end up in your lap.”  But it might be worthwhile to also follow Jay Easton’s example from his comment on my last post:

Love what is. Find where and how I am profoundly grateful for whatever is arising in my life – now, and now, and now, and now. Become obsessive in my love affair with truth and reality. And when I can’t manage that in the moment, then I diligently look for how I can at least accept and live in harmony and integration with reality-as-it-is-right-now until I find the clarity to be loving it again.

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06 May 2013
2 Comments

cultivate synthetic happiness

The Wrong Toolbox

Fair warning: this is going to be one of those posts where I bring up a need, something that’s missing from the  bulk of personal development blogs. In a nutshell, it’s our inability to cultivate synthetic happiness. I’ll go into what that is, but I feel the need to explain in advance that I don’t have a solution for the problem. But maybe, just maybe, if I lay out what I’m seeing, you’ll have a better grasp than me for what needs to be done.

The realization came as I was watching a colleague who specializes in relationship counseling for alternative relationships. She was outlining her suggestions to help people find the right partner, and I found myself nodding along with her as she talked. She said very important things that we all-to-often forget, such as maintaining our own identities and knowing our own boundaries and insisting on a partner who respects them. All very important, very good stuff.

Then she went on to suggest that you have a list of the things that you need in a relationship, the things that make you happy. If you are looking for a traditional domestic bliss type living situation, for example, you shouldn’t hook up with the person who is traveling the world from rave to rave. If your idea of a lovely day is hiking through the mountains, then the woman who spends the majority of her recreational time playing Skyrim is probably not the right person for you. Those are the gross exaggerations, of course, but you can get much more personal. What are your views on sexuality? Jealousy? Politics? History? All of these things can make or break relationships, and my colleague insisted that you should know what you need to be happy in a relationship before you start screening potential partners.

And that’s where my brain did a scooby-doo Ruh-Roh!

Find Natural Happiness or Cultivate Synthetic Happiness?

Happiness is like a box of chocolates. That is, you can try and go with the guide that’s written on the top of the box, but the odds are that somebody’s been there before and rearranged the pieces. Or that the description of the Toffee-Butterscotch-Wasabi-Pimento-Nougat won’t taste quite the way you expect.

The thing that’s strange, though, is that if I tell you that you only get one piece of chocolate, the odds are that even if you make a funny face at the first bite you will eventually tell somebody else “Oh, you should try that TBWPN chocolate – you’ll be surprised!” Dan Gilbert defines this as the difference between “natural” and “synthetic” happiness – that is, the difference between being happy because you stumbled on exactly what you wanted vs. the happiness you create when you don’t get what you want.

He explains it in detail, with bar graphs, in his TED talk. Part of Dr. Gilbert’s premise is that synthetic happiness is just as valuable and enduring as natural happiness, which is counter-intuitive to a lot of “authentic self” theories. He also points out briefly (and more extensively in his excellent book) that we are notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy, and even worse at predicting how happy we’ll be whether we get what we want or not. This isn’t a hypothetical model; study after study has shown that our prefrontal cortex (i.e., imagination) is as wildly inaccurate as it is wonderfully entertaining.

And that’s where I suddenly had a problem with my colleague’s suggestion. If you make a list of the things you want, then the odds are that list is not going to actually be accurate. It’s going to be filled with the things you think you want, or the things you’re told you should want, or the things you wish you wanted (for example, I want to like doing yoga, but the best I can do is like having done yoga). Worse, if you take that list and apply it to a series of “candidates”, you are faced with choices. “Freedom is the enemy of synthetic happiness,” Dr. Gilbert says, and I’m afraid he has the bar-graphs to back it up.

The Affective Hedonic Aesthetic Screwdriver

What I’m suggesting is that lists and speculation are not what we need to increase the odds of being happy. The last thing we need is another version of the Meyers-Briggs personality test. If you’re a fan, then I apologize, and if you’re unfamiliar with it, let me explain:

The idea behind the test is that people can measure various aspects of their character by answering questions about their attitude, perception, adjustment, and lifestyle. This gives you a four-letter category (“I’m INTJ!“) which you can then match up to jobs, social events, and even other people to figure out how compatible you are.

There are several problems with this, rather eloquently laid out by The Skeptoid. In particular, there is this: “ It’s been found that 50% of test takers who retake it score differently the second time…depending on their mood that day or other factors, may answer enough questions differently to push them over… This makes it possible for two people who are very similar to actually end up with completely opposite scores.”

Lying to yourself is probably not the way to cultivate synthetic happiness.

Lying to yourself is probably not the way to cultivate synthetic happiness.

So not only are we bad at predicting what will make us happy: so is everybody else. There’s the problem: we concentrate so much on figuring out how to get what we want, when what we really need is a way to adjust to the things that we have – an “Affective Hedonic Aesthetic Screwdriver”, to steal a beat from Dr. Who. It should be noted, it’s not about rationalizing things: we do that already. It’s as ancient as Aesop and the tale of the “Sour Grapes.” I don’t know about you, but I never thought the Fox actually believed that he didn’t want the grapes. Rationalizing “I didn’t really want that anyway“, like affirmations, doesn’t seem to work terribly well, at least on their own.

Rather, we should be developing strategies for irrational situations like being happy with the things we didn’t expect. For example: the sudden gut-wrenching attraction to the person who doesn’t match our list.

Sounds like a good topic for Friday, yes? Any other ideas for the creation of your own personal “AHA Screwdriver”?

 

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03 May 2013

love makes you happier

SitRep: Project Friends & Family

It was about six months ago that I made the decision to stop focusing on my career and my romantic pursuits. I was in a place where I’d followed a lot of the wisest advice I could find in both categories, and nothing seemed to be giving me much joy. I was struggling with where I was living, I was no closer to a stable relationship than I’d ever been, despite a lot of effort. I was getting disillusioned with the idea that love makes you happier, at least the kind of love I was experiencing. It seemed to be that I was stressing myself working really hard on things that didn’t make me happy at all.

About that time I was also exploring some of Dan Gilbert’s research on what makes people happy, and one particular aspect came to light:

We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends. - Stumbling on Happiness

At the time I had some great friends. I still miss them, every day, and the conversations we have had. But I was also quite aware of how fast my grandsons were growing up, and that they didn’t know their grandpa. I knew that my daughters were facing challenges in their lives, and while they have all grown into strong and capable young women, it seemed possible that having Dad around occasionally could help.

So I packed everything – well, as much as I could – into my Saturn and drove through the early winter storms back to Madison, WI, in time to enjoy Thanksgiving with a large part of my extended family.

Dan’s Right: Love Makes You Happier

Remember, Boys: Love Makes You Happier

Remember, Boys: Love Makes You Happier

The motto of this blog is “Practical tips to make hard times happier.” If you’ve been reading it for any length of time, you know that I shy away from absolute declarations: If you do X, then Y is the result! I’m a firm believer in the Gray area, that there are many dimensions to any problem and that solutions are packed with unintended consequences.

So when I tell you that I am completely positive that focusing on my friends and family makes my life better, happier, and has no unfortunate side effects, you should be surprised.

Or not; some people may be sitting here going Duh! We knew that! That’s fine, though I suspect it’s not nearly so obvious. There’s a lot of focus on careers, on family, on recreational activities. And there’s nothing wrong with that – we need our alone time. We need to have the time to focus on ourselves. I simply think that perhaps the focus is too much on the glamorous roller-coaster of romantic love, rather than the more subtle love of family and friends.

It’s been astonishingly simple to improve the quality of my life: just prioritize, family first, then friends, then everything else. For example, I’m writing this post a few hours earlier than intended because my daughter called and asked if I could watch Harvey for a few hours today. The other night we canceled dinner plans to give my nephew a ride to school. Rather than go to a geeky Meetup yesterday, I went to have margaritas with a personal friend who will not be in the area for long.

What surprises me about this is that it’s not hard. It’s simply saying “yes” whenever someone who falls in the circle of family or friends asks me to do something with them. And the rewards are enormous – I can’t think of any decision I’ve made in the last forty-odd years that has been so unequivocally positive in result. I’ve been able to help just a little here and there in the lives of my friends and family, and that tiny bit has made the general happiness of my life higher than just about any time.

Tempus Fugit

I’m well aware that it may not last – Harvey’s out of diapers already, and little Victor isn’t even drinking his bottle! In five years, my niece will be out of high school! The time seems to just fly by. And it’s not like life is one long blissful experience.

Love doesn’t make you happy. It’s not supposed to; you’re not supposed to be happy all the time. But love makes you happier, that’s for sure. Can you really ask for anything more?

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01 May 2013

Let Life Organize Itself

Fighting the Waves

Wu-Wei: Letting Life Organize Itself

Wu-Wei: Letting Life Organize Itself

As a follow-up to my previous post, which dealt with evaluating your habits before you decide to change them, I’d like to talk about self-organizing processes. Specifically, let’s take the same principle from the level of individual habits and up to the big picture. Your environment is the result of innumerable factors that combined to put you where you are, and those factors are all changing, disappearing and appearing every moment. Might it be smarter to sit back and let life organize itself into the way things should be?

In Taoism (and the pedant in me begs you to pronounce that “T” like a “D”) there is a concept called wu-wei, which is variously translated as “non-dual action” or “non-action.” Some writers call it the second most important principle in all Taoism, second only to the Tao itself; others see it as an excuse for laziness. It’s a hard one for someone raised on the idea of “…taking arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them!“ 

However, a practicing Taoist might reflect that seas have both storms and calm, and that if you simply are a clever sailor and ride out the waves they will actually end themselves. Rather than fight the waves, the smart sailor cultivates the skill of navigating them, because she recognizes that every calm is the prelude to another storm.

The Strange Process of Open Space

One of the neat parts of any Open Space conference is the creation of the agenda. The facilitator leads people through a fairly simple exercise that takes a blank wall (affectionately known as the “What the heck are we gonna do?” space) and turns it into a grid full of class sessions that people are passionate about (also affectionately known as the “How the heck are we gonna do all that?” space). The process is remarkable to see – at one of the first ones I facilitated, a “regular” conference organizer watched with a slightly resentful look on his face. “It took me six weeks to come up with the agenda for our last conference,” he murmured to me. “You just did it in fifteen minutes.”

It’s not magic. It’s setting up a system that has the essential elements of time, space, and passionate people, and then just stepping back and letting it work. For beginning facilitators, that “stepping back” is the hardest part. In fact, in the guidebook Harrison Owen recommends you deliberately stick your hands in your pockets or go for a coffee, because if people are hesitant to put something on the wall the natural urge is to encourage them, or set an example, or call on someone.

It is absolutely essential that the facilitator do nothing. My mentor, Lisa Heft, told me once of a long three-minute silence that seemed to drag on forever. Eventually, though, people realized that nothing was going to happen unless they moved…and gradually the wall filled with sessions. That is always what happens, if the facilitator has enough patience to let it. And the process of letting people create the day through their agenda rather than the agenda creating the day for the people – that makes incredibly magical events.

The funny part for facilitators, that we talk about with each other in puzzled tones, is the clients who come to us either before or after and say “But…how can a bunch of people just organize themselves?” The answer, of course, is simply this: how could they do anything else? At any “regular” conference the agenda is not an inevitable force moving people; they have to decide to attend classes, speeches, etc. Usually they do, through the clever process of not making anything else readily available. But most people who regularly attend conferences have at least one example of a side conversation, a coffee break, a chance meeting in the hall that turned into an immensely productive and beneficial learning experience. That’s self-initiated, coming out of the confluence of time, space, and opportunity.

The entire world of humankind is self-organizing, Harrison would say, whether it knows it or not.

Does Life Organize Itself?

The idea of wu-wei is not one of laziness or procrastination. It’s more like a libertarian view of personal development: just as much work as necessary, and no more. Rather than learning what to do next, you learn when to stop doing. You learn how to create the time and space in your life for the opportunities to present themselves.

This is anathema to most productivity methods. There is an entire school of thought which says you must constantly be doing, hustling, that nothing will be given to you unless you go out and take it. It’s an interesting philosophy, and entirely at odds with reality. By their very existence, everyone alive has had something given to them – whether that’s nourishment and shelter as an infant or a scholarship to a college or the chance to excel past their disadvantages. If you can accept the reality that life is far more complicated than it’s possible to comprehend, it follows that any system that claims to “organize” or “make sense of” life can only do so by ignoring vast quantities of facts and processes.

That’s fine; it is, in fact, part of the process of your life organizing itself into the life you want. But it’s possible that you’re making that process more difficult than it needs to be, through trying too hard. You may not notice the things that make you happy because you’re too busy thinking about the things that don’t, or the things you don’t have that should.

Time. Space. Opportunity knocks, but you have to be able to hear what’s at the door to be able to open it.

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29 Apr 2013
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evaluate before you practice

Time Tips from XKCD:

a comic graph from XKCD asking:

from XKCD: Why It’s Important to Reflect & Evaluate Before You Practice Change

 

I’ve gotta be honest: I don’t know enough math to really understand this comic ( though I appreciate hearing about it from Karl). I believe the point, though, is that the first step in productivity is to make sure that whatever process you’re putting into place is really necessary. The lifehack threads are full of promises: Lose weight! Save money! Save time! Learn how to relax twice as much in half the time in order to be three times more productive! But rarely do they include the first step: evaluate before you practice.

The problem is that the changes themselves come at a cost. I’m experiencing that right now with my attempts to be more mindful of spending. I have a tiny app that is simply a budgeting record. It records every transaction along with simple categories which theoretically would give me a better idea of where my money is going.

The problem is that those few seconds after each transaction have an awkwardness around them that makes it inconvenient to record the purchase. In addition, being a freelance type with multiple income streams means that my influx of money is not terribly predictable, neither does it always fit into neat categories. Wrap all that into a big “try to be more mindful of your surroundings and spend less time on your phone” general life goal and you have a big problem with establishing a habit.

So I continue to try different methods to set up an environment – a portable environment, since it has to come with me – for keeping track of my money. And it’s going to take time, both in small increments and in the larger scheme of things, trying to understand the ways that my spending habits are currently functioning and how I can improve them.

Take the Time to Evaluate Before You Practice or Change Habits

I’m pretty sure I need to improve my money skills. Trust me on that. But what if I decided to add in time tracking? There are apps that help you log every minute of your day, and many productivity gurus will tell you to do just that. Should that be my next step?

I don’t think so, for one very big reason: time is not an issue with me. I recently spent fifteen minutes writing a short piece, off the cuff, and it turned into one of the most popular pieces I’ve ever written for the specialized audience it was intended for. At the same time, there were articles I’ve struggled for hours over that have barely made a ripple.

Lesson learned: time is not the factor in terms of my writing. If I took the time to track every minute of my day, and then optimized it so that somehow I was dedicating more time to writing…there is no guarantee that my writing would improve.

On the other hand, maybe putting myself in high-pressure fifteen minute production environments would be worth it…

The moral of the story is this: systems tend to self-organize into optimum modes. So before you go changing the habits of a lifetime, check and make sure they need to be changed. It’s possible you’ve set your life up the way it is for a reason.

Put another way: if it works, don’t break it.

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