Walden . . . Underground

I know that my most loyal reader has dreamed before about a cabin in the woods, a place to draw nourishment off nature and solitude.

In that spirit, I did a post on my blog about sustainability about underground houses.

Get the Dao Where I Can

It is very safe to say that over the last 12 months I have been immensly influenced by Daoism.  It has been my way of dealing with the loss of my grandfather, and it will probably be how I deal with the loss of my dad.  It also made me want to take up Tai Chi and play Go.

Both are lovely activities, but neither are at this point my true path (pun intended).  I order my time with Daoism by the following hierarchy:

1) Time in nature, with the right silence, openness, and stillness of mind.  This is where perfect days should be spent.

2) Time with the Daodejing.  Last year I copied passages by hand.  This year I will memorize my favorite passages.  In the future, I might take up calligraphy and really make some beautiful copies.  Also, there is the possibility of copying it in Spanish, French, or other languages.

3) Tai Chi.  I plan to pick it up in the winters, when the land has lost most of its scents and bird song.  True story: I was doing quite a bit of Tai Chi in the winter and then one day I went out in February and I could just smell the spring.  After that, I have not learned any new moves.  I mostly just used it for stretches when we got out of the car during our vacation.  I think when nature speaks to me less, I will take up Tai Chi again.  It's a seasonal thing.

4) The game of Go.  So in the end, I am not going with Go.  A dozen games or so of Go forms the basis of some images that serve as metaphors for the Dao, but after that it just a game.  Granted, an absorbing game full of tactics.  Oh my, just in writing, I am getting an itch to play.  But that is nothing that losing a few games to a computer wont fix.

Go as a metaphor can help in my spiritual enlightenment, but the actual practice of Go does not get past being a game.  And as I get older, I find more satisfaction from getting things done in real life and progressing in useful skills.

I also find more purpose in spirituality.  And I want the time I spend in my life to reflect that.

Dao Yourself a Favor

Read this translation of the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) of Laozi.

There are certain passages, including my core 5 favorite, that I like rendered better in other translations, but the scholarship of the one above is just fantastic.  Some of the passage that make no sense to me finally do through this translation.

Slow Carb is Dead, Long Live the Diet

180.6

I'm off the slow carb diet.  At least the way I was doing it, it made me too spacey and cranky (bad combination).  I suppose I should have ate a lot more beans, and probably should have tried to re-experiment with fasting until 3:30.  Life and learn.

Two other factors: 1.) slow carb caused some friction with my wife about the places we could eat and what I could make for dinner and 2.) I have grown to hate most meats at most restaurants, so there was a gross out factor that kept plaguing me these last two weeks.  Trying to figure out what and where to eat with a brain not working right and getting increasingly frustrated with

I have in the past lost a lot of weight under the slow-carb rules, and so that was why I wanted to to do it again, but I have also lost weight simply going 6 days a week on 1,300 calories, and then a free day.  My numbers show the slow-carb diet was faster at getting weight loss, but quality of life has to play into this decision as well.

I really want to crack 177.  This is the weight at which I would usually start diets in college.  Several times that weight became my "wake up call."  When I weighed 200 pounds, I thought with sadness how long it would take to even get back to that number.  I think it would be great -- very motivating -- to be below that number again.   That's why I was willing to slow carb again, and even deal with a little pain.  But it was getting ridiculous, and I can't afford to be mean as a teacher or husband.

Go into Nature

Last week I wrote about going into the silence.  It truly is the best place to invest your time, whether in quiet thought, meditation, or writing.  Today I want to write about my favorite kind of silence: going into nature.

This doesn't have to be elaborate, like going to some nature preserve.  Instead, you can go to a park, or even slowly walk through your neighborhood, stopping ever so often to just focus on some detail of landscaping and to just  . . . listen.  Or, you can do my favorite method, garden in a way that lets nature in.

The benefits of going into nature as your means of going into the silence have been demonstrated by research.  (As a side note, this leads to one of the great paradoxes our age has not yet grappled with entirely: what to do when science and data vindicate a practice that doesn't seem to follow the rigid or analytic patterns of science.  But that's the thing: analysis the is the tool the human uses to improve life.  When there is a conflict between the system and the human, just go ahead and value the human).

Check out the webMD article on Eco-therapy or this website that clearly enthusiastic on the subject.  If you share my intuition that a connection to nature is the right thing for humans, you might skip the articles.

The real trick, however, is spending the time in nature.  To do that you have to giving yourself permission to spend the time in this way.  To give yourself that permission, in the short run, you might need to get more done in less time.  If you're in that situation, look into my time management tricks.

You Become Your Own Machine

It has been said that "you must not lie to yourself . . . and you are the easier person to lie to".

Likewise, it is very easy to take a project and push yourself too far in its pursuit.  And this becomes especially dangerous when the project is self-selected.

I am taking a day off from physical work today because I felt I had to pull up all the perennial grass in a vegetable bed.  Secondly, I have been working toward my million word challenge in Spanish.  I wrote yesterday about finding an addictive way to go by reading lots of bits and pieces from Spanish wikipedia.  And that is how I became my own machine, spending a large chunk of my break serving my own made-up goal.

My biggest problem with me becoming my own machine isn't really the risk of pain or injury, however.  It is the way I become locked in and unsatisfied.  Let's look at both in turn.

Locked in.

I narrow in what I am doing in such a way that I am not receptive to the world.  A person can come in and try to talk to me, and I am not present for them.  Even my wife.  And while I see everyone around me prone to this same problem, that doesn't make it right, especially if I have the means to do better.  If instead of working on something "addictive," I spend that time on a pleasant stroll about the garden or gently reading a book, then I am not locked in, but instead open to others.  I am a better person in those moments I am not locked in.

Unsatisfied.

Having over 50,000 words toward a million word challenge doesn't make me feel more satisfied -- at least not until I consciously reflect on that.  Instead, it leads to head games where I somehow try to figure out how to do get the rest now.  And of course that is impossible, so my addict brain tries to make myself believe 100,000 will be fine, just get that. . .

Making the content super-interesting only increases the sense of feeling incomplete.  All the sudden, I have 20 tabs open.  When I was not reading, I feel like I should be.  Being a machine makes you feel jittery.

The Dao to the Rescue.

Instead of getting back on the treadmill today, I drank a cup of coffee and started walking through my garden.  It felt some pleasant, so aimless, so complete, that I came inside and felt cured of all my longings.  So instead I reread a bit of the Tao Te Ching I had hand copied.

I followed my own advise about going into the silence, and as usual, I did not regret it.

Go into the Silence

To manage time well, you have to move to quality, instead of a myopic focus on efficiency.   If you're efficient at doing the wrong things at least two problems can crop up: first, you can create more work for yourself (ie you did it wrong the first time), and secondly, if you work within an organization, you can typecast yourself as a workhorse or "savior", and then get more work assigned to you.  Thus, in a dynamic sense, it is very inefficient to be efficient.  Efficiency alone is static thinking that tries to make human beings fit a system.  It's not good for the human being. (It's actually not good for the system either, but systems are too driven by static calculations to see that).

The only ways I know of to get out of this trap are 1) frugality and 2) high-quality work.  First, frugality gives you the leverage to carve out freedom, and especially time wealth.  And the other great path is to do quality work.  Cal Newport has a book entitled So Good They Can't Ignore You, which is a title based on Steve Martin's advice to young comedians -- be so good they can't ignore you.

How do you become so good that they can't ignore you?  It's not really through hard work alone, as I have shown that efficiency alone is a trap.  To have the greatest breakthroughs in you life, whether in career, creative pursuit, or relationship, you need to go into the silence.

I first saw the phrase expressed this way in the book Energizing the 12 Powers of Your Mind by Howard E. Hill.  I mention this to give credit where it is due, rather than make a recommendation of the book.  It gets a little too new-agey, rah-rah, and self confident for my tastes.  But hey, if you ever find a copy, it make be worth a read for you.  It actually was for me.  I'm just also a skeptical jerk and an intellectual snob.

You can look through the biography of almost any great innovator, or even great leader (ie positively transformative -- not necessarily "popular") and there is almost always a strong streak of finding quiet time away from others, and this time is often consciously protected and seen as a key to creativity. Heck, even I had that with my "Walden Years."

Susan Cain in her powerful TED talk states, ". . . no wilderness, no revelations."  Herman Melville is even more direct, saying "God's one and only voice is silence."  Cal Newport, the author of the aforementioned book, has a blog that has shifted away from efficiency to a focus on deep thinking and deep work habits. Here is a representative post along that theme.

To think deeply, you have to remove distractions.  You have to cut yourself off, at least temporarily, from the day-to-day.  This is not an optional feature, based on preference.  This is a best practice, and probably the only way to get to quality work.

Another way to look at it: your subconscious is demonstrably better at epiphanies than your weak, headache prone, hold 7 items -- plus or minus 2-- consciousness.  When you go into the silence, your mind works things over at its true rhythm, and not doused in stress hormones.  The breakthroughs just bubble up to the surface when they are ready.  Trying to get the same result by consciously straining is the using the wrong tool for the job.

So I here is my updated plan for improving someone's time management:

1. Use efficiency tricks to get more done in the same time, so you can have time to invest.  Once you have finished your normal amount of work, stop, and DO NOT use that time to do more of the same crap (how will you even know if the additional work is crap? Well, go to step #2)
2. Go into the silence.  Only then can you reorient your thinking enough to know what the next, best moves are.  Even more importantly, you can stop being reactive and instead start figuring out what the next worst moves are, and avoiding those. Then . . .
3. Invest in other types of personal development, such as  exercise, reading, journaling, work skills, etc.

How to Have a Perfect Day (For Me)

Breaks, like the current Spring Break, allow me to see what a perfect day would be like. 

First, go outside when it is nice, stay outside as long as it is nice, with brief breaks going inside.

Once it stops feeling nice, finally go inside.  When inside, don't allow myself to sit so long that my body goes into a lethargic zombie mode.  I used to solve this with the pomodoro method, but my problem now with the pomodoro is that it relies on focused work during that 25 minute block.  Forcing yourself to do focused work on something that you aren't interested in enough to do anyway is really lame.  Sure, the pomodoro method, with its frequent breaks, is a more humane method of personal slave-driving, but that just makes me wonder why you can't work on what you want to when you want to and make sure you take breaks for health, mental sharpness, and to prevent your body from stiffening?  So that's now what I want to do with my indoor time.  (With outdoor time I find am so inclined to move and rest in the right balance, that I don't need to give myself any external help).

So, after I am pushed indoors, it is all about doing whatever I want in a natural blob of work-as-play and play-as-work.  I do this in 25 minute bits, and in that way basically organize my day by hours.  This isn't really the pomodoro method because I am not making myself focus on one thing; I allow my attention to drift as much or as little as I want during those 25 minutes.  On the first break of an hour, I make sure to get up and walk around the house at least a few steps.  If I have something physical to do -- such as soak dishes, or do the litter box -- then I'll do it on the first break.  Then I do 25 minutes more of worky-play.  After that, an hour has passed, so I work on whatever physical challenge I am on.  Right now, I am training to do a set of 100 push-ups using grease the groove.  During the summer I think I might go for 25 pull ups.

I keep this cycle going day and day and then year and after year, enjoying the process all along, and then every now and then I get to look back and seeing I have achieved cool things.

My Walden Years

Somewhere between the ages of 10 and 13, I remember imaging myself living in the house I grew up in (my parents rented it out for a year or two and it reasonable to talk of one day me owning it).  In that vision of a life I would inherit my father's landscaping business and own almost nothing.  I didn't picture owning furniture, just a rug where I would meditate.  I would work, come home and meditate.  I would not own a t.v.

This is my earliest memory of thinking I would not own a television, though I am sure reading Fahrenheit 451 and the profound impact it had on me played a big part.  Nonetheless, after years of telling them what I would do, my parents were shocked when I moved out of their house and I didn't take a television with me.  They hadn't listened to me, so my actions got to speak more loudly than my words.  I had begun my Walden years.

The first 6 months I didn't even have the internet.  I don't remember that as particularly productive time, but it was worth noting how peaceful it was.  I'm a fairly private person, so I didn't have as many "are you crazy" conversations as you might have thought, but I do remember one time explaining to a particularly dubious person that  I would listen to the radio to "create enough noise," but really never happened. I learned to work in silence.  I caught up on my sleep, and I listened myself think.

I also took up wine tasting to see if there was anything to all the fuss, and found that really wasn't.  But I still have a lovely memory of a beautiful spring day, laying on my couch, listening to the breeze, sipping a Merlot, and reading Nietzsche.  I read incredibly slowly, stopping to think often, and the birds sand their lovely songs.  It's hard to improve on a moment like that, even with a meditation mat (something which I didn't and do not own).

Though being unplugged from the world of instant information was an interesting and worthwhile experience, I got the internet and while I spent the last four and a half years which I lived on my own without a television, I had to find other ways to be unconventional. For example, I started watching a bunch of videos on YouTube, but they happened to mostly fall into three categories: 1)  gardening (useful and good idea)  2) YouTube polyglots (much more of an addiction -- one I find myself pulled into far too often). 3)  Videos on computer programming.  I learned how to program again (or really learn how to program the right way for the first time).

Thoreau's own time at Walden Pond ended after 2 years, and my time had to end as well.  Now that I am married, we have a television, but I'd like to believe that the gravitational pull of my unconventional ways is responsible for the fact that my wife and I only watch it around 2 hours a week, though my wife does watch movies on it in addition to that.

From Walden and some of Thoreau's other writings, I have completely lost my earlier notion, more of a prejudice, that Thoreau was a "phony."  Instead, I see his time at Walden as a stand he had to take, one that put him on a firm footing for the rest of his life.

I see my time when I lived alone the same way.

Easiest Software to Write

One of my most difficult goals on the bucket list to achieve, at least as I first conceived it, is to have 10,000 people use software I have written.  It's not that I doubt I can learn the skills, but rather I don't have the motivation to work in any programming language.  It drives me nuts that programming is an endless treadmill of the-next-best-thing-to-make-work-so-much-easier(!!!).  You keep pursuing enough things to make your work easier, and your work ends up a lot more difficult.  And no one seems to get this.  It is very un-dao.  

Here's my planned hack: I will write the software for a new home page, which will also be a collection of 1.) my longer works and 2.) my aphorisms.  Then, I just need to get 10,000 to go there in my separate quest to go viral so I can help others with time management and environmental issues.   

A blog is something easy to write, and by coding it myself, I can avoid all the add ons, privacy violations, and general b.s. (like facebook) that make the internet an ever-worsening experience.  

I will write it myself to start it simple, keep it simple, and avoid it ever getting complicated.

Time for more philosophy: for a while, my thoughts have had a central theme of decluttering.  This blog really started going into high gear last summer when I had decluttered so much that the void was too big.  So it is possible to be too declutered.  But society is far, far too unbalanced in the other direction.

My software, even though it is just a humble webpage, will thus have a purpose: to combine the fact that we are interconnected, so that the ideas I want to share can reach as large of an audience possible, but to do so in a way that is only an improvement in their life, and not an extension of dominate force of our time: consumerism.

Tai Chi Videos

First, a link with some super simple moves explained.

A much bigger video, with first philosophy and then good technical instruction:

The Right Balance

I don't believe work/life balance is the key balance to look track.  I think work should be minimized as much as possible and then after that is accomplished, a focus should be given to living the best life possible.

And to live that best possible life you have to balance action and rest (either actual sleep, or even slow, unstrained meditative thinking).  Now, that action can be what we call productive work, and actually so can that kind of thinking.  But it really doesn't have to be.

Also, balancing works in rhythms and cycles, so that certain times of day are better than others. And really, again, this is about enjoyment.  This is a completely side conversation as to whether someone wants their entire life co-opted by their employer (which just seems bad to me).


Physical
Action -- chores, strength training
Rest --  qigong/tai chi, napping

Gardening
Action -- digging, pruning, moving heavy debris, mowing
Rest --  planting seeds, gentle weeding in a loose bed, strolling about on a nice day, snacking by whim

Mental
Action -- e-mails, lesson planing, writing a quick blog post, working on a skill for a goal nerd goal
Rest -- thinking in silence, writing in cursive in a notebook, reading a good book slowly and pausing to think

Games to Play with Others
Action -- Backgammon, Yahtzee, Poker
Rest -- Go with the right handicap

Solitare games
Action --, Russian Backgammon Solitaire,  Open Face Chinese Poker Solitare (though I often play it when I can't sleep, so maybe it is in between "action" and "rest").
Rest -- Working through Go Joseki

Sage Quote on Teaching Sagely

From chapter two of Tao Te Ching, translated Priya Hemenway:

The Sage is occupied with the unspoken, and acts without effort. Teaching without verbosity.  Producing without possessing,  Creating without regard to result.  Claiming nothing.  The Sage has nothing to lose

I would change "without effort" to without straining effort -- with a vision from martial arts of the master just standing there while a student attacks until in one lightening quick instant, there is one move and the student is flipped . . . the master still standing there, unaffected.  

Also, the "claiming nothing," and "without possessing," in this passage, also through the lens of another translation I saw emphasizes a non-material strain to being a true sage. 

That combination of voluntary simplicity and teaching without ego has been a powerful one for thousands of years.  

I only wish to live up to the tradition.

The Daoist Elephant in the Room

For several months, a good deal of my freely chosen reading keeps back to the concept of the Dao.

If my goal was to achieve all of my goals as quickly as possible, through a series of super-amazing anyone-can-do-but-I'm-so-special-so-you-should-give-me-money-life-hacks, then Daoism would be a huge distraction.  But I call this blog "the good life: becoming a goal nerd."  Not only would I emphasize that I am seeking the good the life, but I would also point out that is says becoming a goal nerd, not that I am, and not certainly not "hear the proclamations of the the one, the only goal nerd."

I kept seeing the Dao come up in everything I was reading, from Daniel Suelo and talk of spirituality and moneylessness, the book Trying not to Try, which I  borrowed from the library because it was on display, and most recently, a remarkable book I have recently read called the Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin.

Daoism ties together several threads that have been going on in my mind since before my students were born, a phrase I have taken to use with my students -- when try -- both for the dramatic effect it causes for them, but also to remind myself of the chasm between myself and them.  I plan on doing much reflective writing on all of these threads, but they include gardening and my love for uncontrolled "margins" of a garden, the need for alone time to clear my head, breathing and meditation, the balancing of goals that seem to have contradictory aspects, a calm state of mind and peak human performance.

If you want a basic primer of Daoist thought, sure Wikipedia works, but I found a decent page dedicated to Lao Tzu's original.  And there is Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon, which is written in terse writing by a Brit who went by the pen name Wei Wu Wei (which translates to action through non-action, and is the central paradox addressed in the book Trying not to Try, and a paradox worth spending much time reflecting upon.)

As I was trying to clarify my terms, and see how much my understanding of daoism is an idiosyncratic reading, I came by this quote from from Encyclopedia Britannica online about the Dao:

Human beings, whose society and culture are marked by artifice and constraint, can hope only to attune themselves to its mysterious transformations but receive no special favour. 

A good life, including the pursuit of goals, needs to take into account this fact.

Go as Meditation in Action

I have been saved the trouble of needing to write further pieces on the philosophical implications of Go by one I have read today.  (This is not to say I wont use Go to express insights into other areas; I have already begun one such piece in my notebook.  Also, if I will write about my Go studies, if nothing else so I can have them scrap-booked for me somewhere.)

Though the piece tries to make the most important implication of Go is an answer to nihilism,  But I don't see that argument as unique to Go.  It is basically that rules make parameters on the chaos of reality, giving us a framework for interaction.  Without that framework we are left in a nihilistic situation:

 When two people confront each other across a Go board, they could do virtually anything—throw the stones at each other, carve their initials in the board, etc. Why play Go? The broader question is, why do anything at all?

To answer that we need to know what kind of beings we are: impermanent and interconnected.  And the stones in Go serve the purpose of showing representing this truth:

 A stone’s real significance lies in its potentiality for interaction with other stones. It can surround territory or disrupt the ability of stones of the other color to do so, and even capture those stones . . .  the significance of any stone or group of stones is subject to the possibility of radical change. A stone or group of stones that is important at one point can become dispensable as a result of later developments . . .  The significance of the vulnerability of the stones accustoms the players to the reality of impermanence, and again this is found to be not a dreadful situation, but one that greatly enriches the experience of playing.

 We are impermanent beings who can only cobble together temporary, contextual truths (much harder to have Truths).  So why not play a game that mirrors that reality?  Throw in some aspects of harmony and interconnections, and adjust the handicaps of the game so that you are only winning 50-60% of the time, and you have an enjoyable game that becomes more of an enjoyable art.

The article is worth the read (and reread).

If Left Red-in-the-Face-Embarrassed

. . . it is probably time to take a break.

It's amazing how naturally I go from playing a game, thinking a lot about it, taking those images in my mind's eye and projecting it into my future, imagining playing it having as a significant meaning to my life, learning about the social scene (and social status) of the game, thinking of how I will one day be great, thinking how that means I must be making rapid progress, and being deeply embarrassed  when I suffer the kind of set-back a newbie must come to accept.

I wrote that this all happened naturally, and I love nature, so I love this too . . . right?  No, this pattern may be natural, but it in unbalanced.  This is not the a path that a well-adjusted or centered person will follow for long.

It is natural for any individual, or even a group, to get unbalanced.  But the whole will push back to that part. And when the whole gently pushes back, we can tense up, and redouble our efforts . . . or we can breath, get some perspective, and (re)locate a balance.

All of this came from playing Go.  I thought I was ready to move down another handicap against Fuego.  I thought I understood the concepts to win at the next level down.  I did not.

And that should be okay.  And it is if you play the game for its own merits, instead of following the path outlined above.  I want Go to a game in which I cultivate a different growth than ego-measuring (never will your ego be less than when you are constantly seeking to validate it).  To do that, I should only play it when I am in a mood to do that kind of cultivation.

There is the advice to "lose 50 games as quickly as you can."  And I like that advice.  But, for it to be a real vehicle for harmony in my life -- a stop-gap when I can not get it from natural surroundings bursting with life -- then I need to balance the seeking of 50 games with other values.  To be balanced, I must balance the game-of-balance with clearing my head enough to have an attitude open to balance.

Game, Meta-Game, Harmonies

When I decided to make the game Diplomacy a key part of my speech/communications class it occurred to me that I am completely fascinated by games.  Perhaps easily obsessed is more true.  Or, perhaps I can be generous and say that games give a home.

The rules of a game create limit on the chaos of reality.  I know this leads us right to what Taleb calls the ludic fallacy, but I don't see the path of games leading directly to such mistaken reasoning.  Or maybe it is a trade-off: a game creates an environment that can be rich enough to occupy the human mind for a lifetime in a situation safety, fun, and perhaps friendship.   The price for this the conditioning that makes it seem that all of life can also be a game.

 I have also pointed out that games are can be free: you are producing your own amusement for free (or cheap) rather than consuming entertainment (for maximum price).  Even this has a trade-off, however.  Games are so addictive that becomes hard to do other important things.

For these reasons you must move beyond the level of the game to the meta-game.  That most people do not make this step is not he fault of the game.  A game is as good of a path as any.

The write up about Diplomacy in the classroom shows an example of a game going to the next level:

In this game, Italy, France, Turkey, and Russia had a four-way unbreakable alliance. Their ultimate goal was share supply centers in a game-end tie, refusing to backstab each other for a victory and thus force me to award the piddling of extra-credit I was offering to the winner to all four of them. Essentially, they were using Diplomacy to metagame their class grades, and good for them! THIS was the kind of thing I was hoping would click for some of these kids -- and all of them said as much in their essays.

And though these moments are rare, if there is no game, then there is no meta-game.

One thing I like about turning my speech class into a game is it means, in conjunction with my debate classes, I am now playing games for the majority of the day.   And debate at Norman North is the ultimate quite the meta-game.  We are created an environment where students count on each other and invest in training the next wave of North debaters.  Having the meta-game of nurturing more and more talent then makes us better at the games, but does not eliminate the games, nor the need for them.

The next level up (and even rarer than the meta-game) is an understanding of the essential harmonies. the real pace and rhythms of life,  You see through the illusions of the day to day.  It is the dao, the spirit.  It is right effort without striving.  But even then, when you are well-adjusted and content, games are still fun.  They become as worthy of a use of your time as any.

I love to the give the gift of gifts (the meta-gift for the meta-game of debate), but I also love to give the gift of games.

And I love to play games.

But only as part of a well-balanced life.