Procrastination Post

It occurs to me that people are wrong when they scoff at our fear of failing and recommend we "just" stop caring what others think. They are wrong because what others think is not why we fear failing: solely or even mainly. Not every emotion is a social emotion. I for one fear failing because failing makes me feel powerless and vulnerable. Which feels awful. Which I don't like. Saying I fear failing is like saying I fear tooth extractions without an anaesthetic. Yes. I do.

What's more, sitting quietly with powerlessness and vulnerability, I realise it's the same pain in many places: when I sit down to write this policy and procedure for supervision, which needs to happen today, when I think about writing this blog post, when I miss people. It's the same everywhere: the pain of powerlessness and vulnerability. I hurt because where do I even begin to write this policy; hurt because hearing where this sentence screeches out of satisfying tune with superfluity and slop is not enough to know how to make it better; and hurt because I can't control people and have to be vulnerable to the ones I like. Truly, who cares what people think? There's plenty to hurt about regardless.

Diagnoses matter because each suggests a different medicine. The diagnosis that fear of failing is caused by your need of approval implies the solution is to suppress that need. (Or whatever it is that people mean by "caring less about what people think".) But in so far as the fear of failing is not caused by needing approval, needing it less won't help.

So here are my solutions.

One is mindfulness. We're all migrants through time, says Mohsin Hamid, and so we are. You move towards the future like the pilgrim through a black forest. It helps to keep your eyes open. Call it something like this: sincere self-awareness. Know, be honest with yourself about, your limitations, be aware of what hurts when and how much, remember what feels OK and what doesn't, and then choose.. intelligently. Intelligence means this: new moment, new decision. Compute afresh. By all means, draw on experience, but remember also that right now is like nothing you've experienced already. Don't suffer sufferings that belong to the past. Don't confuse fear with anger. Don't try to still time. It's OK to have no idea how to write a policy and procedure for supervision, especially when that's a key part of your business strategy. What small person wouldn't procrastinate entering the arena with a dragon? It's OK, stop, breathe. And then enter the arena anyway.

Two is curiosity. You're useless, but you're not entirely useless. And sometimes a little bit of usefulness can go a long way. Look a bit closer, is what I mean. Aesthetics terrifies me far more than judgement does, because while it's hard to face being wrong, it's much harder to face being ugly. The wrong have their tribes, at least; there's few if any tribes for the ugly. Physical ugliness, spiritual ugliness, ugliness of style. They are deadly. When I like someone's style, I can put up with their wrongness (is how I kept all my Brexit-voting friends); but when their style makes me shudder, reason alone bounds my cruelty. Hence this unique horror that I feel when I fail to transcend ugly writing. Hence why caring less about the thoughts of others is useless here: it's my own shuddering, before my own ugliness, that makes me want to crawl out of my skin and incinerate the leftovers to limit infection. "Self-hatred" as a concept kind of misses the point, I reckon: it's self-disgust that's the real killer, that movement in which the mind puts itself in the same category as a rotting rodent. Self-disgust is the auto-immune disease of the soul. But there is a way to stop it, or at least make it more discernible: be curious. Isn't there a baby in this bathwater? Can't we find something to keep. Collect the bits that are worth keeping, even a little, and pin them to a wall. You only need to be a little bit beautiful.

Third is, sadness. Some things you really can't help. The world contains love and pain both and doors will let both in with equal efficiency. Still, you need doors. Doorless dwellings are tombs and useless. I really, really hate feeling vulnerable. But as luck will have it, the opposite of vulnerability is not safety. It's loneliness. So you're still looking at the lesser of two evils.

Of course, some days I feel like doing none of the above and just kick and drink. That works too.

But then I come back, because there's water all the way up, and what else is there but to do what the Romans do, divide and conquer. I opened the policy document and wrote "X must supervise Y". Already, the next step is a little clearer.

(Close cat video.)

Water All The Way Up

Here's how I reason about pain in moments of disappointment.

I was meant to go to Australia. I'd been looking forward to this trip for months. But now it looks like I won't get to go there after all. Due to a combination of personal incompetence, bad luck, and the Australian government's blatant operation of a visa system, in spite of their claims to the contrary. (The Romanian Government complained to the EU about this but no cigar.)

It was bad. Is bad. I woke up, saw their email, sent the documents, called my friend, and as soon as the administrative distraction was no longer present, I sat there, as the saying goes. thunderstruck. I sat there, feeling like a heavy rusty work wrench had just been casually pushed through my forehead and wedged inside my chest like a tombstone. I sat there, at the end of a week in which the visa thing had been the least of my troubles, feeling like I'd just received a cancer diagnosis. Disoriented, angry, vexed, and sad beyond comprehension. A huddle of negative emotion, as if my brain couldn't quite decide which pain receptors to reach out to first.

I got up, took a few steps around my room and sat back down. Got up, sat down. Got up, sat down. Then lay down, wrapping myself in my duvet, waiting for some sort of letup I suppose. Then got up again. Confusion. I took another few steps and my eyes rested on my shower towel. Still, no coherent thought agreed to present itself to me. So I walked to the hallway. And then stopped again. Walked to the shower, stopped. Opened the door to the shower cabin and stood starring. Pain in varied forms was the only discernible emotion. I felt ill. Get in the shower, said a voice, you're cold. My own rational thinking, coming to me as if from above. Pain pain pain, I thought vaguely, pain pain pain. I turned the water on. Pain pain intolerable pain pain. Pain pain pain. Pain like a kick in a slowly healing gunshot wound. Pain like a bad movie. Pain recalling every hardship, every disappointment, every fear and moment of horror, every sadness and vexation, every ego damage I'd ever experienced and could still recall.

Then, out of habit, I thought this: mustn't narrow frame. That's my preferred method for handling seriously bad news. Don't narrow frame. Not everything outside this context is damaged. There's stuff outside this one trip to Australia. Things are bad here, but they are not bad everywhere. A neat mental habit, if you can teach yourself it. Perspective. A drab cliche if you cannot conjure the associated emotion, or a life-affirming soul gift from the fucking gods.

Don't narrow frame. I thought of Time longitudinally. One of the small benefits of age is that you can imagine Time in long- as well as cross- section. I thought of elsewhere and elsewhen. Will this matter in 6 months? a year? 5 years?

But then something happened. Pain.

The pain was physically in my body, here and now. The pain was permeating and very real. And none of my elsewhere/elsewhen thoughts were helping very much. The body independent from the mind. I felt the disconnection distinctly: like trying to push a balloon upwards by a long limp ineffective thread. My wide framing wasn't working.

And that's when the penny rolled of the margin. Something I knew, of course, but never knew feelingly. It's stupid but kind of important to get this. You can't leave your body. You can't crawl outside your skin, is the real prick of the problem. No matter how bad the game is going, you can't just switch it off and go have tea. Any which way I moved, I continued to be inside Living. No out. That was it. No out. I could walk from one room to another, from one country to another, from one job to another, from one aspiration to the next. But no matter how far, how different, I'd always be inside. Living. Nowhere to come up for air, you see. Because there's no above water. It's water all the way up.

Really. Water all the way up.

I see.

So that was it, all those years. That sadness. That forever sadness. That sadness I was heaving around with me like a heavy suitcase wherever I went. That rootless, disembodied sadness, sadness eating, sadness speaking, sadness lodged behind my sternum like a knot. That sadness. That's what that was all about. It wasn't about whatever happened. Failed attempts, disappointments, heartaches, no no. I was narrow framing all along. That sadness was really about this. Water all the way up.

Water all the way up. The supreme mother of all problems.

The thought rather cheered me up. Blessed intellectualization. I'd pulled it off after all, the perspective trick. Big Problem had put Little Problem in its proper place.

I came out of the shower, got dressed, and walked to a coffee shop.

The pain was still kicking, but now I had a better avenue for thought. Without being too reductive, making your body stop hurting is not that different from fixing a motorcycle. Or indeed a bug in a computer app. The thing that gets you stuck is always not enough information. The thing that gets you unstuck is thinking things through. And coffee. And food.

Clue One. This thought made me feel better: Oh well, I thought. Such is life. I'll go to Singapore. Or Mexico. Or even the US. There's other places with desert. I'll go to Flagstaff. I'll buy a bike.

Clue Two. This thought made me feel worse: But I won't see Alex. I won't see Darwin. I won't drive to Uluru for days and days through the baking desert and I won't meet Pat.

Oh I know what this is.

One: disappointment. Well OK, disappointment hurts. But it also comes and goes.

Two: this interim and unmitigated horror of water all the way up. This desert between two pursuits of desire, when you have nothing to chase and therefore no chase to distract you from the thought of your unpausable existence. This waterless desert between losing one chase and starting another; between failing to secure one wish and that moment of hope when your imagination conjures for you a new desire. In this desert, you think: I don't want another cookie, I wanted that cookie; I'll never want another cookie again. It's this that makes the body hurting unbearable. Q.v. DFW: "No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering". I'll never want another cookie again. No distant goal will ever again distract me from It. And, horror of all horrors, there's water all the way up.

Well well.

How long now? Another 60 years?

I suddenly imagined waiting for a train in a rural train station in Siberia. Waiting for weeks on end. In the intolerable cold. No one else there. And no books.

This you see is the very heart of the problem. 60 years and water all the way up. You know those days when you feel lousy for no particular reason no matter what you do? Well, this is the reason. Call it the Tragedy of Existence.

I finished my second cup of coffee and thought about my day. An errand or two. Friends, alcohol. Books. Waiting to be told I can't fly to Sydney. The heartlessness of bureaucracies. The heartlessness of bad luck. Was I missing anything?

Well, you know, yes. Freedom, friendship, and thought.

The day is overcast but clear. No rain. I can walk. Happy thought from Clue One kicking around somewhere. Plenty of other places. Longitudinal Time. And a new desire with the associated plan and hope will eventually occur to me. There's no out, sure, but inside of here there's any number of ways of being. And I'll imagine one, eventually, I'm sure. Once I've been bored enough.

It's just the way of empty train stations underwater.

Quo Vadis

In Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), Isaiah Berlin makes a helpful distinction between technical and political matters. "Where ends are agreed", he says, "the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors". Technical problems, he appears to be saying, are to be settled through objectivity and rational debate. Political problems, however, are creatures of the far murkier land of Value, Ethics, Aesthetics and Subjectivity.

This I thought about while reading Radical Focus, a 2016 book by Christina Wodtke, in which she advertises the many benefits of running your business by using Objectives and Key Results. Give your team inspiring Objectives, say the proponents of OKRs, and quantify progress using meaningful metrics and that will put you on the clear blue flightpath to entrepreneurial success.

"Inspiring" is about the only insight given here into exactly what makes something a good Objective. "Qualitative". Something that will "make people excited about getting out of bed", she further adds, just in case by this point you had any lingering uncertainty. And achievable in 3 to 6 months.

Some further clues emerge when she mentions that Objectives should align with your overall Mission, where Mission is a sort of philosophical lattice for your more pedestrian Objectives to hang off of. She recommends the formula: "We [reduce pain] in [market] by [value proposition]". Now this seemed a bit more promising. Reduced pain does sound, if not exactly inspiring, at least marginally preferable, most of the time.

And finally we get some hints as to what makes Objectives bad. Unexciting. Uninspiring. Drab. "Hit revenue target of $10m", to approximate one of her examples. Who cares? Normal people don't get excited about making (usually someone else) big piles of cash.

At this point, Ms Wodtke posits that this is a bad Objective because it fails to be an Objective at all, being instead just a lowly metric with zero to none inspirational umph. But I think there is a deeper reason why a revenue target doesn't quite work. Making money is a boring goal not just because it's quantitative, but also because it's selfish. It's all about you. "Be a writer". Same problem. Being a writer is an exciting vision for the starry-eyed aspiring writer and literally nobody else.

Think of it this way. Reality is a multiverse. You and I are here, in boring Universe A, and over there is better and much more exciting glorious Universe B: all we need to do is put the effort in to travel over. Our objective is a feature of the Target Universe, a sort of North Pole to help orient our journey. But there's a catch: we can't go there alone. A Target Universe doesn't become a Real Universe until we manage to convince enough people to travel there with us. Like Moses. So now you can see why "hit revenue target of £10m" or "be a writer" are bad objectives. Nobody wants to go there other than ourselves, who covet something in that universe. And why would they?

This is where the Promised Land idea comes in. A good objective is transcendental. Unselfish. Grand. It belongs to a Target Universe in which everyone's life is better. That's what it means to be inspiring. "Solve problem X" rather than "hit target revenue of £10m". People will travel to a world in which problem X is no longer a problem. The money will follow. Don't just be a writer, be someone who can analyse a phenomenon, articulate a vision, entertain, explain, reassure. Make the Target Universe better in some way and people will follow. Is the theory.

But it's hard gig being Moses. The distance between Universes A and B is a wide and perilous desert. The empty space of mutinies, nostalgia, confusion. People lose faith in this desert. They riot and jump ship.

Besides which, who knows what constitutes a Promised Land, exactly? What do people want. Besides bread and circus, that is, and triumphs and romance; and handy tech for continually proving to themselves their own lack of significance and personal glamour. Hard to tell. More money, less hassle, dignity, respect. Most of the stuff in the lower half of Maslow's pyramid and one or two things from the summit.

And in the light of this it doesn't surprise me at all that the tech world has a hard time telling you exactly what makes a good Objective. That is, beyond the hand-wavy notions that they should be "qualitative", "inspiring" and able to wake people out of their AM slumber like a large dose of pharma-grade class A amphetamines. The tech world is exactly that: technical. And I'd posit a little more philosophy amid its people wouldn't entirely go amiss.

The Culture of You

A few months ago a friend was breaking up with his girlfriend. The saddest thing about breaking up, he said, is having to take apart this world that you've built together. The private language you've invented based on shared experiences. She's gone and you're now the sole witness that this thing ever even existed. It's like being the last surviving native of some dying culture.

This came to mind yesterday. These private languages.

I was cycling into the city centre after the rain had stopped, cycling westbound, towards and into the afternoon sun. On the glittering tarmac. They've laid down this tarmac on Leadenhall Street, between the junctions with Fenchurch Street at one end and Bishopsgate, that glitters after a rain like water. It was like gliding into the death scene from a movie, when the screen goes all bright and the hero wakes up in heaven. It reminded me of a frame from The Story of Film by Mark Cousins, when he talks about innovative use of light in the Scandinavian cinema of 1910. Benjamin Christensen and Victor Sjöström. The frame looked like this:

I really enjoyed the connection. I'd misremembered that the frame had come from a film by Benjamin Christensen and further confabulated that it was a recurring motif throughout film history. (It isn't.) I thought it would be cool to recreate that image, but using instead the glittering tarmac and the canyon of buildings as stand-ins for trees. I rather liked that idea and dwelt on it. It would go into my Love of London exhibition: the artist's comment on natural beauty in the man-made world. Tarmac for lake, the canyon of buildings for forest. I was pleased too with the philosophy of it, I saw it as a visual expression of the ideas of Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I was reading. The Buddha is everywhere etc.

So my pleasure was manyfold. It was the physical pleasure of cycling into the afternoon light, the memory of that documentary, the idea of Buddha is everywhere and so on. Which further reminded me of Howard Woodhouse and his introduction to Bertrand Russell's collection of essays In Praise of Idleness. Woodhouse comments on the essay called Useless Knowledge (1935) in which Bertrand Russell enthuses on how knowledge of the etymology of the word 'apricot' made eating the fruit more enjoyable:

Curious learning, says Russell, not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kanisha introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word 'apricot' is derived from the same Latin source as the word 'precocious', because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.

This further amused me, because it's at once pretentious and unavoidably funny. And I do enjoy apricots more since knowing that. The way I also enjoy more the word "enthusiasm", since I learned, from Pirsig, that it literally means ‘possessed by a god, inspired’ (from theos - ‘god’), from the Greek enthousiasmos. Which enjoyment is further increased because Pirsig's idea that when you feel enthusiasm for your work you are experiencing something close to a religious experience, is the same as what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow". Two independent minds reaching the same conclusion. A nice idea made more real by its being accounted for by two uncorrelated sources. This makes me happy. And from there I remembered, from Daniel Kahneman, that Csikszentmihalyi used to explain that his name was pronounced Chicks-sent-me-high. Which is funnier still, you see?

The point being that these private languages don't just develop between lovers. They develop also in your own head. The little private jokes you have with yourself that make you smile but you'd be at a loss to explain to anyone Other. That is, you are the last surviving native of a dying culture. The culture of You.

Ego Goals

Having the right sort of motivation is like the feather that broke the camel's back: the weightless difference between two very different outcomes, between broke and unbroke, between achieving your goal and not achieving it.

So here is an observation. It's from Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Narrator and ten year old son are hiking up a mountain.

Up ahead all of Chris's movements seem tired and angry. He stumbles on things, lets branches tear at him, instead of pulling them to one side.

I'm sorry to see this. Some blame can be put on the YMCA camp he attended for two weeks just before we started. From what he's told me, they made a big ego thing out of the whole outdoor experience. A proof-of-manhood thing. He began in a lowly class they were careful to point out was rather disgraceful to be in...original sin. Then he was allowed to prove himself with a long series of accomplishments - swimming, rope tying... he mentioned a dozen of them, but I've forgotten them.

It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.

At this point you might imagine this all sounds moralistic. Preachy. A sermon about good and bad behaviour. But I must ask you to put aside that mode of looking at things for just a moment, because this isn't about what is Good and what is Bad. It's about what Works. Think of it as a technical problem. When your mentor says that being systematic is going to make you a more effective debugger, she isn't preaching a Moral Dogma. She's merely pointing out a fact borne out by experience.

And the fact here is that ego goals are hard to attain. I'll let Pirsig explain:

Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents.

He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage when on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn't enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn't enough either. He didn't think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn't ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.

To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk if forever about somewhere else, something else. He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be further up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here".... Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

This seems to be Chris's problem now.

For an atheist who spent over two decades convinced that religious feeling was just self-satisfying delusion by another name, this is a troubling passage. But then being who I am today, I am willing to read it. Because these days I am open to the possibility that religious feeling may in fact have actual scientific, as well as subjective, reality. I know that academic research into how this feeling can be reliably induced using psychedelics is restarting, after half a century of censorship. I know that bans on research with drugs such as LSD are being lifted, that we may be only a few short decades away from serious breakthroughs into our understanding of consciousness. I have The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test sitting up on my shelf. So I am open to the possibility that rational materialism might not be the sole and whole explanation of reality.

I became open to this possibility out of simple necessity. I needed more drive. I felt I wasn't living and working and pursuing my goals with enough gusto. Something lacked. I did not experience every waking minute of existence as being aflame with the same fire that lit the sacred stars. My work didn't feel meaningful.

So now is the point where I have to confess to a long running habit of setting ego-goals. My goals have far too much been about me, my success, my self-improvement. Me me me me. I was so tired of me. Then one day I discovered, almost by accident, how it felt to serve a higher purpose.

It happened like this.

I had spent years struggling with let's for lack of a better word call it depression. Existential melancholia. Low mood. Lack of vitality. Anger, frustration, resentment, hopelessness, the whole 12 course with 6 types of wines and interim palate-cleansing pickled ginger Michelin-star feast. Not fun stuff. And I wanted to "feel better". And you'd think that "feeling better" would be a self-evidently worthwhile goal to pursue. I mean, what's more autotelic that "feeling better", surely? Or so my consciousness thought. But my unconscious adamantly refused to pursue this agenda and remained as stubbornly miserable as before.

Until, that is, on day in June. I've tried to write about this before, badly, as I'm sure I'll continue to try. It was an odd enough gestalt.

Best I can describe it is that during one moment of particularly low mood and morbid existential despair, all that I'd spent the previous 9 months studying suddenly came together in a splendid, clear, unavoidable, transcendental, revelatory realisation. The Project of Being. It was something like this. Human beings are a social species. As such, we are a node in a Network. We are connected to other living humans whether we like and approve of it or not. We are by necessity someone's child, sibling, lover, friend, employee, tenant, audience. It's inevitable. OK, so now something bad happens. Maybe to us, maybe near us. It doesn't matter. We suffer. And when we suffer, two knee-jerk reactions appear possible: anger and depression: the world is awful or we are awful: hatred or self-loathing. OK, now here's the problem: both reactions damage the Network. If we hate, all we do is take the pain we experience and push it back out into the Network, usually many times multiplied. If we self-hate, we damage ourselves and by unavoidable extension the nodes in the Network we are immediately connected to. In both scenarios the Network suffers. The Project of Being suffers. And in my 9 months study I'd come to rather like the Project of Being, in complex and awe-inspiring totto. Because, let's face it, the Project of Being is kind of cool. Whatever this thing called Being is (from inorganic molecules to your very own Homo Sometimes if Proded by Necessity Sapiens), it's a whole lot more interesting than Not Being. Or so I decided to feel. And here is the gestalt. The minute I decided I loved The Project of Being, feeling better stopped being an Ego Goal. It was no longer something I needed to do for myself. It wasn't For My Own Pleasure. It was for a greater good and a good that I felt was worth it. You must keep the love of living alive, in spite of the Tragedy of Existence, because the alternative is damaging the Network and thereby the Project of Being. Well yes. This is the point at which many religious people would go: d'uh.

But the point is that all of a sudden, what felt impossible before, felt now not only possible, but easy. I became a pilgrim. "We must imagine Sisyphus to be happy", said Nietzsche. Of course!

So at some very high abstract level, I'd solved it. But the trouble with something as immense and undefined as The Project of Being is that it doesn't tell you very much about what exactly to pursue in your far more pedestrian daily existence. The quest is by no means over.

But that's not the point. The point is that now I know to stay away from Ego Goals. I know that whatever I'm searching for is something transcendental. Value. Quality, to use Pirsig's term. The Buddha. Whatever. But the knowledge I'm after is no long likely to lie in the epistemology section. What comes next is about Aesthetics. What is Valuable? What is worth giving my time to, worth loving? Worth climbing a Mountain for?

Thoughts of Departure

Senility must feel like a pretty bad trip. I sometimes wonder what it might be like. A complete lack of coherence in the Story that you inhabit.

Even now, thoughts come and go and their coming and going stresses me out. The fear of forgetting my own thoughts stresses me out. Not that they're such valuable insights, these thoughts, but their unruly coming and going stresses me out. Is why talking and writing are such boons. You can relax, because there is something or someone to collect, into half-coherent piles, the fluttering scraps of thinking which the minutes blow continually off the desktop of your conscious attention.

What was I thinking just now? It felt valuable. Valuable to me, at least. What was it that I was trying to remember?

Blank.

I think I was quite old when it first dawned on me that what I'd come to call my memory was evermorphing. I know that sounds stupid, but I really did think of myself as a static entity. An ego swimming in the same loch of thoughts, year in after year out. I guess I started reading more and reading was the sputtering stream of fresh imaginings.

But what is memory?

My flashbacks are like the remembrall in Harry Potter - cartoonish clips of myself telling myself to not forget something I've now clearly forgotten.

I think: memory is two things - the facts I observe and the story I tell about those facts.

So then past and future both are these strange fact-based stories, complex artifacts of the mind. Part reality, part invention. The facts remain fast, but the story is ever changing. The story has to change, because every new fact changes the meaning of the facts that you know already. Like the twist at the end of Usual Suspects. Of The Sixth Sense. I think: the facts - mercifully - remain fast. But walk down the multi-tunneled catacomb of memory and on every navigation you take a slightly different path: return with a slightly different story. Sometimes a different story from the very same set of facts. Facts like stars - steady and still. Stories like constellations - drawing facts together in orderly, coherent patterns.

The stories make all the difference.

I think: stories only exist because Time exists. I think: only conscious creatures are aware of Time. I think: stories are coherence unfolding over Time.

Frame after frame, the immersive illusion of consciousness. OK.

Q.v. Alain de Botton: "Happiness is the telling of a better story from the same set of facts".

Q.v. David Foster Wallace, when the story becomes unendurable, taking it one frame at a time:

Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Malden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem.....Cold Turkey.....Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling like this second for 60 more of these seconds - he couldn't deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second - less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses.....:living completely In The Moment.....

He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of....of a lifetime on the edge of this bunk....., remembering. It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. What's real is the tube and the Noxzema and the pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over.....

What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

But though it's easy to forget everything else, one thing is ironically impossible to forget: Time. Awareness of it pulls you out of the present and out of the meditation. And again you start telling tales about the past, about the future. There's no getting away from it, if you want to be living. The only Life we know is this one, which exists inside Time.

I'm really not sure what is the meaning of Time independent of consciousness.

Age 3, a year of Time feels like eternity. Age 30, and you're in perpetual confusion at your own shifting perception of it. Q.v. special relativity. Time gets funnier and funnier and my head hurts more and more.

But the point of all of this is that these days I can't get away from this feeling: that I inhabit the story I'm in the process of creating. Every waking minute. And I can make the story go any which way I want. All I need to do is imagine.

Except, of course, imagining new things is very hard. Is something hardly any of us ever do.

And maybe story is the wrong metaphor. Maybe life is more like a house, because this story (of past and future, of who we are and who we might be) is one we actively inhabit. Like a house.

And if I look around it, I haven't been that original with it. I've cobble together a pastiche from whatever models of living were available. I cobble together still. I look around, see people in relationships, and fancy maybe getting into one myself. I see people in successful careers and try to emulate them. I get my likes and dislikes from the paper, my taste for food from restaurants I happen to visit, my interests from friends and role models and the books I happen to know about. I look around all the time, like a shopper in a furniture store, trying on in my imagination how these models of living might play out in my own house. I furnish my existence from what's available. It's never seriously occurred to me to question the fundamentals of experience and create my own life. Make my own clothes, build my own furniture. Because what do I know about furniture?

But then I see that you can connect these dots any which way and I feel this strange urge: I wonder what would happen if I did something different. Maybe bad things would happen, the story would go all haywire and all chaos would break loose. Then again, maybe trying it on now will make senility more endurable.

,

The Mater of Mater

I've been living near Victoria Park for close to two years. That's enough time to notice a change in yourself. But the question is - would I have noticed that change as much as had I moved elsewhere?

This park is teeming with flashbacks. Along my running route lie piles and piles of my past me's, discarded versions of potential selves like spare parts in a ghostly puppet-making workshop. Or a painter's studio. Everything that didn't work, that didn't make the cut, is scattered here.

But it's the park itself that holds the memories, like an external storage device. I never think about these things unless I'm here. And then I remember them the way that Robert M. Pirsig's schizophrenic character in Zen or the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance remembers the life of his alter ego: they are sudden, fragmentary flashbacks of how I used to feel.

I used to feel very very afraid. I felt weak, unsure that I'd manage to handle the overwhelming challenge of a full scale adult existence. Anxious to achieve some form of success and fearful that I would fail to achieve it. But I don't feel like that anymore. And it's not as simple as saying that I no longer feel anxious about achieving success.  It's more like that my categories of thought have shifted so much, mutated so that the old notion of "achieving success" simply no longer exists in the same format, the way an egg no longer exists in the same form, once you add it to the dough, knead and bake it in the oven.

Trying to empathise with your past self if an eerie exercise. It's sometimes as hard as trying to empathise with another person ("what was I thinking?!"), except that glimpses of what you were thinking will now and again flash through your mind. And they are alien-familiar. What mind reading would feel like, if it existed. Say, what it felt like to be in love with someone, or not to be in love with them. Alas, you can't unknow things.

So then space is important. Objects. People. Those elements outside of ourselves that store our thoughts, our memories, our sense of passing time, of who we are, of change. Is why I missed London during my long exile. Is why, in London, I miss travelling and the places in which I used to live. We're weird creatures, with weird selves that span spacetime in weird unexpected ways, like forests, like bacteria.

Duality

"According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small and incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual - but its object is always exterior to the man. The man suggests that he is capable of doing to you or for you. (...)

By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defined what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste - indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. (...) To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. (...) From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. 

And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman."

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

In writing to a man, for instance, you notice this distinction with unmistakable clarity.

The surveyed: buoyant, filled to the brim with living emotion, alive, absurd, intense, short-sighted, impulsive, unpredictable, sensual, demanding, loving and in love, confused, afraid, enraged, enthralled, ecstatic, thrilled, intemperate, playful, silly and fun, despairing, sincerely attached, suffused with the awe of being and of the other, attentive, curious, engaged, capable of infinite healing and unpredictable growth, but fragile, but funny, but silly, and sad.

The surveyor: sometimes embarrassed on behalf of the surveyed, sometimes tyrannical, sometimes begrudging. Maybe the sort of attitude inherited from one's parents, who themselves were embarrassed by their own humanity, tyrannical dictators of it, frustrated managers. Maybe dictated by the community, which needs you to be predictable and well-behaved.

But what does the surveyor convey for others to understand? There is a midpoint between the two endpoints, between sincerity and politeness, between being fully yourself and being something that fits within the bigger picture. And the midpoint varies from situation to situation. And I don't know what forces pull in each direction.

In the personal, we champion the surveyed. Who today won't tell you to show yourself, to do you, to be honest, and bold?

In the professional, it's the surveyor that often or usually gets the praise. The very word "professional" suggest a person who has mastered herself and can mould herself to the required interface. In work, the community must win over the individual, because that's how anything gets done. We put aside our whimsical multicoloured selves for a while in order to build the city. It's the sacrifice we make in order to have cities. And everything else that membership of the human community affords us.

And sometimes when you work all the time, the surveyed grows riotous from suppression. Can you be yourself and still do good work? Can you even do better work by being yourself?

The answer, as ever, is balance. Bowing yourself to the greater cause of Building is not a problem to be done away with. The sacrifice can be awe-inspiring, grand. There is a Building instinct within us. Such as there is a Social instinct within us, for which being polite at the cost of sincerity is a joyous sacrifice.

Falling in Love

Some time ago I fell in love with Being. And this is a thing I've been failing to communicate to people ever since. This falling in love thing. With capital B Being. This how I went from thinking that the being alive was maybe a bit of a not even an especially funny joke to perceiving long stretches of moments of breath and consciousness and thought as staggeringly, transcendentally beautiful, maybe not continuously perceiving this but reliably, that moments of being are self-evidently filled with awe and laden with meaning, grounded, large, rooted in time, rooted in space, connected, rich, and good, exactly. It came down mostly to eyebrows lifted at angles and cocked heads and wry smiles to signify a thinking person's sophisticated scepticism. And that maybe can they have some of whatever I was on, please. 

But then they always say this of people in love.

But so I take my validation and approval from books, however. And this life affirming love of living is something many millions of people have arrived at over the years, independently. Here's, for instance, Virginia Woolf:

Or here's David Foster Wallace in this is water, the spirit of whom I'm currently being inhabited by, in case you couldn't tell.

Or indeed here's Leo Tolstoy, whom if you find yourself judging and deriding and dismissing because of the God references in the paragraph below, then maybe perhaps best to stop reading this right now, because this whole philosophical essay is maybe just about beyond you at this point in your character-building journey. I'd venture to tender.

Because the language of mysticism sort of works here and maybe is needed here, to hint appropriately at these mysterious facts of being. The language of music, the language of the visual arts. The language of the beyond-articulated-meaning and so on.

Because this life-affirming love of Being is an in-place gestalt in perception rather than a journey to some elsewhere [q.v. M. Proust "The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another" etc]. It's a telling of a better story from the same set of facts, as it were, to paraphrase another of my heroes. But not in the self-delusional sense of believing a lie rather than having the steel cohones to face the meaninglessness of existence, like a real man, I should like to make clear.

Because the fact of the matter is that the meaning of existence is not an illusion. It's always there, if you know how to look at things. Through this seeing with the new eyes.

Because meaning then reveals itself to you like the 3D object in a magic eye picture. Can you see it?

Deviant Art

Stereograms are the perfect visual metaphor for this, I think.

Some people seem to simply get it.

And just for the record I should say that I consider myself an atheist and not intently given to any lust for magical thinking, I don't think; but I have sympathy with the religions on this. Because I suspect the Christian tradition was right, allegorically, that this way of looking at the world is not beyond anyone who genuinely wants it. But rather is democratic. Every religious tradition that I know of seems to have a version of this idea. Mindfulness and meditation, say. Apparently Carl Jung said that people do not see God because they don't look low enough.

Every moment is inexhaustible.

And I should also like to stress that this is not to be confused with hedonism. It's not meant to be hedonism, anyway. Because the hedonistic view of living is only half the story. The other half is our duty to protect Being. And a sacred duty at that, for lack of a better adjective. We are, more than just metaphorically, mere stewards of existence, really: we carry the torch of Life from one moment in time to another. We live just long enough to carry this torch for a while. And so may as well try our best not to become hell-bent on putting it out, the torch, if we can manage it. Try our best not to be resentful of what a stupid mission this is and painful and pointless, this carrying of the torch. Because while it might be, at times, (stupid and painful and pointless), but beside that it's also sacred: because Being must continue Being, you see. Because Being is good. Whatever Being is, i.e. whatever it means for something to be living and un-rock-like: it's worth having. On balance.

This is an axiom, by the way: that Being is good and worth having.

Accepting this axiom is what the religious mind means by the expression `leap of faith`, is what I gather from Mr J. B. Peterson. Live your life as if Being were good and worth having, says he, and every moment of being (an expression of Being) will reveal itself to you as meaningful and joyful and worth every bit of the very real and unpleasant hassle of living it. As overflowing with meaning, these moments, as ripe fruit overflow with juices. Something like that. Or maybe better that you listen to JBP preach about it, in much more articulated form, in this lecture series.

But so anyway, accepting this axiom is a choice, though.

The interesting thing is, being inclined to dismiss these non-hard-numbers-and-science-y ways of looking at things myself, I didn't actually arrive at this conclusion via the religious route, exactly. Though what the difference is between the religious experience and the aesthetic experience is not precisely clear to me yet. But let's anyway say I arrived at it via psychology. Via philosophy. And via the I thought secular wisdom of literature, I guess.

You could say it started with Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which as far as I'm concerned is all about epistemology and a lot more fun to read than the corresponding entry on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which I never had the dedication to finish). How do we know what we know, and cetera. Though in higher probably it actually kicked off with the untold numbers of hours I spent listening to Alain de Botton's butter-rich voice telling me how I was in fact OK and everything was OK and always had been OK and feeling finally unconditionally loved and regarded and accepted. Or likelier still with the unconditional love and acceptance lavished upon me by my existential phenomenological therapist in the US of A.

But so anyway it's still probably fair to say that epistemology consumed me somewhat at this time in my life. And fancying myself, as I said, weary of mysticism, I turned to philosophy. Well, popular philosophy (I'm not that either smart or patient). Q.v. Truth, by Simon Blackburn, and Think, and Ethics, which I returned to. And David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, which I've written about before. Et cetera. But it was Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow, I think, which made me a bit more willing to consider that perhaps maybe this psychotherapeutic view of the human psyche wasn't entirely unscientifically deluded. Because here was psychology and cognitive science and neuroscience as I gathered it from Mr. Steven Pinker's several books corroborating the psychotherapeutic claims, or so it seemed like. And anyway reading Carl Rogers, and Brene Brown, and Leo Tolstoy made me feel so beloved and OK and accepted and so on.

Though it was probably War and Peace that finally sealed the deal, for me, I think. Something in that book managed to help me see Being in a whole new lighting. Or not new light exactly, as just a new framing. A wide framing. An all-encompassing framing.

Because, that's the nub and essence of it, I think, of this loving of being. It's that before I loved being consciously, I was narrow framing. I thought that Life was about my life. And it isn't.

I'll pause for a moment to let you take that in.

Being is not about my being. And the good of Being is not about the extent to which my own being is not (let's be honest about how we consider things) not even good, but pleasant. Something like that. Life, in its entirety, is miraculous beyond expression, is the right way of looking at it, I think. And so no sooner I'd thought this than I began to see evidence of this everywhere. In watching London go about its life, in city lights glittering on the river, in the staggering strangeness of people going about doing their people things, in standing besides and marvelling at the ethereal beauty of Ttéia 1C and so on. I mean, it's everywhere, once the scales fall from your eyes, this truth and beauty and meaning.

And it occurs to me that I may have hated Being because I used to think this: that if my life sucks therefore Being sucks also. But in fact this is invalid. Just because you are suffering doesn't mean that everything and everyone suffers everywhere. No, indeed, there are at any given moment, scores of people in the world, non-trivial numbers of people, who are truly and actually happy. And I don't mean deluded-happy. I don't mean distracted or drugged up or horse-like beheld by the carrot of future felicity. I mean happy. And there are places on this planet of breathtaking, transcendental beauty and people beholding these places right now, and feeling nothing but hug-from-God-like bliss and joy and pure unadulterated happiness. Really. 

They say it's only at around age 2 that children begin to realise how their own emotions do in fact end at the boundary at their own bodies and how other people around them can, and in fact are, feeling differently from themselves in all sorts of ways, most of the time. But I, for one, didn't quite internalise that lesson.

But of course the thing about appreciating the marvel of Being is that you have to give up your resentment. With all the associated feelings of anger and self-righteousness and occasional malefic glee, which feel nice, to be fair. And just enjoy the possibility of happiness vicariously, if so it happens to elude you, personally. Maybe.

Though just to be clear, this celebration of Being does not in fact entail, for me at least, entering some permanent state of bliss a la Eckhart Tolle. I'm not saying life isn't suffering, because it is. And I'm not saying you should resign yourself to the suffering and injustice of the human universe, because you shouldn't. This is not about turning the cheek and accepting everything unconditionally and going into denials that there's any such thing as evil or tragedy.

(Though it's probably worth noticing that suffering is a lot oftener due to the axiomatic tragedy of being, rooted in the inherent vulnerability of all things living, than it is due to deliberate malevolence and evil. Since this helps with the giving up of the resentment project.)

But anyway back to the clarification, loving Being isn't to deny that evil and tragedy are real. The whole thing comes down to avoiding narrow framing: just because evil and tragedy are real, doesn't mean that bliss and awe-inspiring splendour of existence aren't real also. They're both real. Concomitantly.

Q.v. the concept of ambivalence.

Which is interesting because not so unlike what is required for the falling of actually in love, in the more parochial sense of with another human person. Realising how to embrace this ambivalence towards your own self as well as another's. That is to say, realising & accepting that you are both flawed creatures by necessity, mere intermittently-rational primates with a long and comprehensive list of unseemly inadequacies.

But that maybe if you really tried, you could just about make it. If you really put your mind to it and tried, putting aside your self-pity and resentment and fear for a moment, and fear of responsibility and fear of inadequacy to the side for just one minute, and actually tried sincerely to do the loving for once, active tense loving, without waiting around to be loved, and if you decided to love and participate in The Project of Being, and if you did this, at least some of the time, then maybe just maybe, you could just about make it, and manage to carry the torch of life from one end of your lifespan to the other, successfully.

Resolutions

I said to the man: I want to read more, in 2018.
And the man said: Why?
And I said: Good question.

Why's are important. When I don't feel like doing something - say the washing up, to exercise, or return a phone call - it's either because I want something else more (sleep, usually) or because I forgot why I wanted to do the thing in the first place. Chores are chores not only because they are tedious - what isn't! - but because they are imposed. By necessity, by nagging spouses, by the law. Quite often, by your own incomprehensible past self. You either never knew or forgot the why. But if you take a moment to recover the reasons, almost by magic, motivation returns.

This occurred to me one day when I was doing the washing up. I hate doing the washing up. It's so boring. I'd put it off and off all morning and now I had a legitimate reason to put it off further still: I was running late already. But then I remembered my why: I didn't want to be a crappy housemate. I was living with my sister at the time and I didn't want her coming home after a long workday to cook dinner in a dirty kitchen. In addition to which, I have this pact with Future Me: I do my best not to make its life too difficult and in return it doesn't judge me too harshly with the benefit of hindsight. It's a good deal. So here were two very good motives. Suddenly, I wanted to do the washing up. I was, in fact, quite glad to do it.

Why do a good thing for the wrong reason if you could do it for the right ones? When I first started to run, I did it because I wanted to be more like the foreign kids I met at university. Apparently exercising was cool in this part of the world. All the well-dressed people did it. So I started running. Then I fancied that it would make more attractive to the men. I became wedded to an image of myself that looked suspiciously a lot like what I'd seen in Nike adverts. And so I kept pushing myself to exercise, getting by turns angry and depressed whenever I didn't. But here's the problem with that logic: running makes you neither desirable by men nor trendy. Really, the relation between those two things and running is correlational at best. So then if those are your motives, no wonder you don't want to do it. Your inner sloth might be a sloth, but it isn't stupid: it knows when it's being lied to! Here's when I stopped having trouble motivating myself to exercise. When I learned that past age 30 your IQ begins slowly to drop - unless you exercise regularly. I looked it up and there is solid science behind this claim. These days, that fact has sunk in so thoroughly, that when several days have gone by without a good workout, I literally feel stupider. (It helps that I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, but still.) The point is - good reasons are good motivators.

Nowadays, if I don't return a call, attend a party, or run a chose, I always ask myself why. I assume it's for a good reason. Being tired is a good reason. Pushing yourself beyond the threshold of sustainability is like living off your credit card. It's either desperate or stupid. And eventually you'll pay for it way more than it's worth.

So when the man asked me why I wanted to read more, I was stunned. I couldn't think of an answer. Why wouldn't I, I attempted feebly. No wonder I had failed my 2017 Goodreads challenge. I'd forgotten my motives.

So why do I read? This is a good question, because reading is really quite expensive. It takes hours and hours and hours and if you take notes and write about and reflect upon your reading, it takes hours and hours still more. As we speak, it's Saturday night in London and I chose to stay in so I could finish reading my book. This is not self-evidently the smart choice for a 30 year-old single female. And plenty of people don't read. Smart, educated people, people whose brains are worth many tens of thousands of units of legal tender - do not read. Not regularly, anyway, not books. Most humans have no more than about six thinking hours in a day and most of us pledge that to some legal entity in return for money. Or invest it in relationships. Or in a million other ways to spend free time. So whatever my reason, it had better be good.

And it is good. I think. The reason is this. I read because reading, I find, is the best way, sometimes the only way, a way certainly well-trodden, whereby I change my mind. And changing my mind, no hyperbole, is the only thing that keeps me living.

I know when I haven't been reading for some time, because I feel utterly depressed, quite painfully. It's like being trapped in a room wherein the stultifying air's gone stale. It's agonising, like boredom, but it's worse than boredom, because it stretches infinitely in every direction. Everything I do feels tedious and uninspiring. There's no mystery of existence to be experienced, no magic. It's like walking on a bruise. Like watching daytime reruns. My mind is stuck on looping over the same old ways of looking at the world, my curiosity wanes and wilts and slowly gives way to cynicism and then I start to feel like death and then like dying. It's excruciating. The same old thoughts swirling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, in endlessly recurring patterns, never jolting, nothing new, never any new conclusions. It's downright claustrophobic. And it can make for a pretty miserable existence. I know more than one person about whom I quite regularly think: if only you could move in thought-space just a little and change the way you interpret the world - just a little - how much wiser you would be and how much lighter-hearted!

Reading keeps me sane the way exercise keeps me sane. And staying sane is autotelic.