The process...............

 Why is improvement hard?

Part of the issue is everyone wants to improve, but nobody wants to destroy. Change often requires destruction. Or, at least, unlearning.

Let's call it gentle elimination. You may have to leave little habits, update current beliefs, eliminate comfortable patterns. When you want better outcomes, your daily norms may need to change. The process of improvement is not just about adding things you like.
Sometimes habits and patterns belong to who you were, not who you are trying to be. If you'd like something better, then a routine you are comfortable with may have to die.

-James Clear, from today's effort

It's simple........................

 

It's simple, you just take something, and then you do something to it, and then you do something else to it.  Keep doing this and pretty soon you've got something.

-attributed to Jasper Johns

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

-attributed to Tom Peters

We will be testing his theory......

 

    We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes.  Put more simply, future shock is the human response to overstimulation.

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Change is not merely necessary to life; it is life. By the same token, life is adaptation.

     There are, however, limits on adaptability. When we alter our life style, when we make and break relationships with things, places or people, when we move restlessly through the organizational geography of society, when we learn new information and ideas, we adapt; we live. Yet there are finite boundaries; we are not infinitely resilient. Each orientation response, each adaptive reaction exacts a price, wearing down the body's machinery bit by minute bit, until perceptible tissue damage results.

     Thus man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)

the illusion of certainty...................

 

Diving in headfirst to explore the unknown is something humans were created to do and cannot resist.  The unknown is where we feel the most alive.  Although our minds crave certainty, our hearts desire freedom.  We live in an illusion of certainty.  Most of what we have can be lost or taken away at a moment's notice.  We all know the only constant is change, yet we spend most of our energy trying to fight what is natural and inevitable and wonder why we are suffering so much.  It is not change that we should fear but staying the same.

-Joseph Nguyen,  Don't Believe Everything You Think

writing a different story.................

 

Not everyone who supported the Revolution would necessarily see it as an opportunity to make wide-ranging changes in society.  Dissolving the connections to Great Britain would be enough.  People go go about their business in pretty much the same way as they had before.  Of course, some changes would necessarily have to take place because the basic structure of a republic differs from that of a monarchy.  Subjects become citizens with new responsibilities that would alter the contours of society.  Men, though certainly not all of them, would have to get used to voting. . . .

If the Americans were not really operating with a tabula rasa after breaking from the British Empire, there was substantial opportunity to write a different story for the newly created United States, one that would help transform the world.  Jefferson sounded this theme throughout his political career and until his death.

-Annette Gordon-Reed from her essay "Thomas Jefferson, Optimistic Visionary", as found in The American Revolution at 250:  Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding

In all my years of schooling....................

 

...............I had maybe four teachers on par with Rob Firchau - but they made all the difference, 

open.......................

 

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.  You're able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open.  And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression.  You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die.  And you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.

-Pema Chödrön

a young Spinoza.....................

 

Like many thinkers before him, the young Spinoza came to realize that the alleged benefits of material and social success tend to be short-lived and unpredictable.  Moreover, they are invariably accompanied by a variety of evils, including anxiety, envy, and unfulfilled desire.  Seeking a more enduring source of satisfaction, he concluded that it was time "to embark on a new way of life."

Steven Nadler, Think Least Of Death: Spinoza On How To Live And How To Die

Viewed from the proper timeline...........

 

.....................................our planet is not only alive but it is doing what it has always done.

   via

Wondering about Francis Bacon...........

 

The contention that knowledge is power, as advanced by Bacon, secularized the previously occult dictum to great effect. Disinterested curiosity was not Bacon’s only goal; he also envisioned the command of nature, its subjugation and bondage, in the advancement of human comfort, wealth, control, and power. And his vision would shape the dominant ideology of the next half-millennium. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one,” claimed Bacon in Novum Organum, charting the passage of that supposedly unsinkable ship of civilization toward the brighter and more prosperous future that enlightened men had long dreamed of. All that was required was a ritual sacrifice of the mystery that had suffused the world in the millennia the scientific revolution. 

-as culled from this Hedgehog Review essay

Staying awake at night..........................

 

............................with Jared Dillion:

There is a chart that gets passed around from time to time which is a chart of the S&P 500 going up annotated with all the reasons why it might go down over the last 40 years or whatever, the most recent example being the Iran War. The price of oil goes up 50%? Fuck you, stocks are going up anyway. That has been our experience, pretty much, for most of the last 20 years. Every worry, every pullback has been a buying opportunity.

Now, it doesn’t take a galaxy brain to figure out that this dynamic might not continue indefinitely. 

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We just elected large-C Communist mayors in Seattle and New York. The Democrats are moving to the far left faster than you can say Hegelian dialectic. It seems as though the stakes are higher for each successive election, and it says something when Gavin Newsom is probably your most centrist candidate. Newsom would have been far to the left of Carter in the 1970s. But here we are, and the polarization is a freight train coming through your living room. 

a merger of stability..................

 

     As early as 1826, there were proposals to amend the Constitution by members who saw the legislative elections as fraught with corruption and delay.  At the start of the twentieth century, William Jennings Bryan and others pushed for direct elections, and many argued that the Senate was " a sort of aristocratic body too far removed from the people, beyond their reach, and with no special interest in their welfare."  It was an interesting argument, since that was precisely what it was designed to do.  The framers wanted to merge the stability of oligarchic and democratic systems.  This marriage was perfectly captured in a House with short terms of popular-election members and a Senate with longe terms of legislatively selected members.  That changed in 1913 with the Seventeenth Amendment specifying that senators would be chosen, like House members, in direct elections.  While there were clearly good arguments for direct elections to make senators more accountable to the voters, the change removed arguably the most important control of states in Congress.  With the expansive interpretation given interstate commerce, states would face increasing federal authority and decreasing political control.

-Jonathan Turley, Rage and the Republic:  The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution

Tiny Thoughts....................

 

We spend time chasing money, then spend money chasing time.

-Shane Parrish, from this edition

We've evolved a bit...........................

 

     The State Governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal Government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organisation of the former.  Without the intervention of the State Legislatures, the President of the United States cannot be elected at all.*  They must in all cases have a great share in his appointment, and will perhaps in most cases of themselves determine it.  The Senate will be elected absolutely and exclusively by the State Legislatures.**  Even the House of Representatives, though drawn immediately from the people, will be chose very much under the influence of that class of men, whose influence over the people obtains for themselves an election into the State Legislatures.  Thus each of the principal branches of the federal Government will owe its existence more or less to the favor of the State Governments, and must consequently feel a dependence, which is much more likely to beget a disposition too obsequious, than too overbearing towards them.  On the other side, the component parts of the State Governments will in no instance be indebted for their appointment to the direct agency of the federal government, and very little if at all, to the local influence of its members.

-The Federalist #45, James Madison, January 26, 1788

*in 1800, the President was elected by the Electoral College.  In ten states, at that time, the Electors representing that state, were appointed by the State Legislatures.

**the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1913, established the direct election of U. S. senators in each state.

reforming.....................

 

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves.  Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us.  Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.  The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on.  "If anything ail a man," says Thoreau, "so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even . . . he forthwith sets about reforming—the world."

-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

The alchemy of............................

 

......................................listening:

To listen is to place oneself in relation with uncertainty, with not-knowing, with the unknowable. Alchemists knew this well: the process could not be rushed, outcomes could not be guaranteed. Listening likewise resists certainty. It asks for a suspension of control, a willingness to not know in advance what will emerge. This is why listening feels risky. It exposes the listener to alteration. One cannot listen deeply and remain untouched.

In contemporary life, we are trained otherwise. We are trained to capture, to categorize, to respond efficiently. Sound becomes data. Speech becomes content. The world becomes something to be processed rather than encountered, engaged only within fixed norms. Listening, in this climate, is easily reduced to a technique; active listening, strategic listening, optimized listening. But alchemy does not function this way. It does not optimize; it transforms. It changes the conditions under which something can appear.

Listening as alchemy suggests that attention itself is a material force. Where attention goes, matter behaves differently. 

via swissmiss

It's the little things..................

 

From ancient times until now, wise men and women who wanted to make the world a better place didn’t start with some grandiose plan for others. Instead, they practiced the “make your bed” philosophy, where real change most often starts with self-improvement.

-Jeff Minick, with his list of seven ways

adjustments..................

 

Technology paces industry, but there's a long lag in the process. Industry paces economics. It changes the tools, a great ecological change. And in that manner we come finally to everyday life.

The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment. To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.

-Buckminster Fuller

Daring.....................

 

via

Questions not asked..............

 

An interesting study on the Labor Force in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was published last month.   It was noted that, in the past five years, there was an out-migration, with 182,000 "net domestic residents" leaving the Commonwealth.  Judging from the study, this is a problem.

As far as I can tell, they never asked the question: why did they leave?  It's a puzzle.

via