Wow. Was that 4 years? Mind numbing.
In the last 2 years we've often mused about how some things feel long and some short. In short, good things feel shorter than expected, and bad things feel long. That's how things can feel both long and short at the same time - and by asking yourself which feels short, you get to know yourself and you can remind yourself what you like - and probably need more of. But sometimes bad is good and good is bad, and if you mix it up just right you get the real good you want - which is good enough, and always striving toward better, but knowing you can never achieve it because you already have it, but if you stop striving you will lose it.
So where do good and bad mix up? I think its when you confuse lots with long.... they're easy to confuse. For example, if you spend the holiday doing the same thing every day, it feels short... and if you do something different every day, it feels long. But a long work day is seldom great, and neither is a short holiday.... a long holiday feels good, while a short work day feels good....
So how did the clothes horse last so long after the previous fixes? I can't even remember, but I don't recall going all out in fixing it... and neither did I now. I just completely removed some lattices, and replaced them, properly... the broken lattices I replaced with brand new ones, with pilot holes drilled to the exact right width and depth... and some of the worn pine ones I put in longer screws. It's markedly less crooked... so what did I learn?
I love metaphors, so lets see what we can compare this to...
The clothes horse is to dry clothes... so it needs to take the weight, when the clothes are wet. Perhaps more weight for longer, in winter... the weight puts force on each lattice. If they're all equally strong, they all carry equal weight... but as the weight shifts around, some take more weight than others, and those taking more weight will get weaker, and the balance will shift so that yet others take more weight... until at some point a weaker lattice will crack and a screw gets loose... and a lattice gets loose, and the whole thing collapses.
If we made an analogy to an economy, what would the best analogy for the clothes be?
Cycles of clean and dirty... dirt can be our unfulfilled needs, or selfish urges. Or less biased... market demand. The clothes horse can be the structures of society... market demand puts pressures on those... as the weaker ones fail the stronger ones get more pressure? If we can make small tweaks, we can contain the damage? It's better to fix certain things at certain times in the cycle? Quick- or bad fixes don't last long... and some fixes are better than others. A clothes horse is pretty egalitarian... every joint and lattice carries similar weight... Okay, this analogy is getting old already.
Four years?! I would've guessed 2 years... isn't it great that we have language and writing to supplement our memories? In the olden days, we used to have vibrant oral storytelling, and community, too. Well, one thing I learned in the last 4 years, or re-learned, was that roughly 1/3 of the world is still living like that... so by olden days, I would suppose that we mean "like our great-great-grandparents...." who still lived like that, like many still do today... they remember things we don't and see things we've become blind to. They are connecting to the internet... and I think that is how we will learn more and more about this... finally, again...
I've been helping some such communities... and it's been a healing process. Not because "I've been doing something good", or because I might have been doing it in a good, super consultative way... unlike most, but because the people I've been working with are so much more humane... they understand people and social things so much better, and they've helped me to understand myself better, as well as my past, and what was wrong with my thinking... and what is still wrong with most of the "first world" thinking...
Monday, 18 November 2019
Monday, 3 August 2015
Beacons of light...
On figuring out how to piece things together... in a concise, intelligible, intruiging way...
Perhaps that's what this Clothes Horse is, collapsed on the ground. Too intriguing to fix. Or perhaps when I do, I'd have figured out how to piece my life together in a way that will allow me to piece more together than just an intriguing clothes-horse.
But what is it about intrigue...
intrigue
Perhaps that's what this Clothes Horse is, collapsed on the ground. Too intriguing to fix. Or perhaps when I do, I'd have figured out how to piece my life together in a way that will allow me to piece more together than just an intriguing clothes-horse.
But what is it about intrigue...
intrigue
See definition in
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
Definition of intrigue in English:
verb
Pronunciation: /ɪnˈtriːɡ/
(intrigues, intriguing, intrigued)
2 [no object] Make secret plans to do something illicit or detrimental to someone: Henry and Louis intrigued with the local nobles
...A definition only a bureaucracy-wary Oxford academic would come up with...
Wikitionary has a different take:
Etymology:
Borrowing from French intrigue, from Italian intricare, from Latin intrīcō (“I entangle, perplex, embarrass”).
...And I guess the French are much more familiar with the art of being embarrassed...
But let's for a moment assume that not everything leads back to procreation and authority...
Every day, on the bus, I'm surrounded by the so many so very intriguing people. My thoughts are in a constant state of overflow with ideas and things I've seen and felt I'd like to share... mistakes I've overcome... solutions to everyday problems, staring me in the face, all day long...
...And yet, I can't get myself to utter a word. I sit, and stare... like everyone else. I'll share, perhaps, a polite look, or gesture... unless someone else stumbles to a first move, voluntarily or not.
So, I'll live, do stuff, meet people, feel things... work, work work, and perhaps if I'm lucky at some point settle into some zone of moderate comfort... If I'm lucky I'll do something of intrigue or meaning to some people in this life... If I'm less lucky, only some poor future souls will feel like they've been understood, should they happen upon what few of my thoughts I by chance noted down on some nook for them to stumble upon.
My life and mutterings (not these! Please, no!) will only be of intrigue to a community of soul-mates I may never meet... Hell, no, why even bother writing anything down, then? Why do them the disservice of making them feel.... well... that's the thing, isn't it? "Like they're not the first."
What's this splinter in our collective minds? The ego's yearning for validation by being at the front? By being the first? By leading? The splinter being, that, for some to lead, some must follow... and that there's a hierarchy with the leaders on top. Leaders are made by followers.
A leader can't stand up and lead a people who are not ready to follow. The people must first be ready, before the leader can lead.
There are no "self-made" men. Yes, there's a great many ants stuck in the molasses of the comfort they have found... whom each, in some small part, crave excitement, and drama, and a way to escape the everything-in-their-lives that has become mundane...
And there are those who are so enraged by the lack of intrigue and meaning in their lives... (could it be caused by an abundance of meaning? Too much choice? ... too much noise?) ...that they can no longer stand idly by, that their egos drive them to act on their instincts and override the woolly cotton numbness of understanding, and just do the things that everyone else wish they had the guts too, but are all to glad they don't... because deep down they know it's not an easy life, even though it may look it on the surface...
...And how deeply hidden is this "driver" sitting in the ego-seat... and why is "He" playing coy with me, so many places he thinks he can hide... so deep, so far, jou bliksem, jou splinter! Ek het jou uitgehaal en nou's ek weer in beheer.
Is the ego the archetype of the devil, and the superego our goggles through which we see- and yearn for God?
Is entropy the "cloud of unknowing"? Does "free will" travel towards or away from it? Or does it forever tread the boundaries...? Does it like wet toes... and is it only so it can remember where it came from? Does it regret what it can not remember? How can you regret what you can not remember...? Unless it's the fact that you can not remember which is why you want to do it again, and again, and again and again... but that's what the ego does, and the world it lives in, because it doesn't have memory, like the superego.... When I refer to the ego, I of course mean, the ego driven by the id.
... and what a detour... that in my mind took seconds, but sharing added another few detours of its own... what I would normally now do, is to delete all of this, and replace it by just a sentence or two.
And that even, I still have to build up to: if knowledge is all we're out to find here, and our greatest satisfaction is in sharing that sense of understanding something about the nature of the world we find ourselves in- and part of... whether this sharing is with those closest to us, academic peers, or people and civilizations that we can yet only dream about...
Aren't we all just beacons of light that we navigate by?
...Keeping each other in check, like the poles of my wooden clothes horse, against gravity. Gravity the entropy, the sink, that pulls us toward the future... the greedy monster of unlimited possibility; our knowledge about it, our way to fly... as far away from it as we can get. To push it back for as long as possible... to resist time collapsing around us. To resist everything from happening all at once... to find the serenity of nothing. Because in the end the only thing that is new, is nothing... and closest we can get to it, is here...
(You see what I did there?!) ...But who's fooling who?
...Possibility intrigues us. Knowledge, the cornerstone of which seems to be that we'll only ever see the tip of the iceberg, the more we see, the bigger the iceberg... like a mirage... now if that does not sound like a lie... well, it is. My brain is my jail... my brain IS the iceberg... and I've figured out how to grow it... but how big can it get, and will it be the same?
I can augment my senses, and my mind... I can fill the solar system with my mind, and use all the power from the sun... I can grow my mind unimaginably intricate, from the smallest bits, to fill the largest space... perhaps even figure out how to create space... and now space becomes the iceberg...
And even so... what will I gain, that is not within my reach, already... right now? Is the common sense I think I have, not perhaps pushing me away from the common sense I had... and you still have?
Is understanding all this anything but a theme park I've built for you to explore? A castle to run through, while you exclaim "I finally know all the rooms... and it's all mine... all mine..." I can go anywhere I like, be and do everything.... until I get bored and start melting away the iceberg of space, the iceberg of my mind... the iceberg of the mind in which my life is a living figment of the imagination of a mind I set on fire when I got too close to the beacon of someone else's sun...
Wikitionary has a different take:
Etymology:
Borrowing from French intrigue, from Italian intricare, from Latin intrīcō (“I entangle, perplex, embarrass”).
...And I guess the French are much more familiar with the art of being embarrassed...
But let's for a moment assume that not everything leads back to procreation and authority...
Every day, on the bus, I'm surrounded by the so many so very intriguing people. My thoughts are in a constant state of overflow with ideas and things I've seen and felt I'd like to share... mistakes I've overcome... solutions to everyday problems, staring me in the face, all day long...
...And yet, I can't get myself to utter a word. I sit, and stare... like everyone else. I'll share, perhaps, a polite look, or gesture... unless someone else stumbles to a first move, voluntarily or not.
So, I'll live, do stuff, meet people, feel things... work, work work, and perhaps if I'm lucky at some point settle into some zone of moderate comfort... If I'm lucky I'll do something of intrigue or meaning to some people in this life... If I'm less lucky, only some poor future souls will feel like they've been understood, should they happen upon what few of my thoughts I by chance noted down on some nook for them to stumble upon.
My life and mutterings (not these! Please, no!) will only be of intrigue to a community of soul-mates I may never meet... Hell, no, why even bother writing anything down, then? Why do them the disservice of making them feel.... well... that's the thing, isn't it? "Like they're not the first."
What's this splinter in our collective minds? The ego's yearning for validation by being at the front? By being the first? By leading? The splinter being, that, for some to lead, some must follow... and that there's a hierarchy with the leaders on top. Leaders are made by followers.
A leader can't stand up and lead a people who are not ready to follow. The people must first be ready, before the leader can lead.
There are no "self-made" men. Yes, there's a great many ants stuck in the molasses of the comfort they have found... whom each, in some small part, crave excitement, and drama, and a way to escape the everything-in-their-lives that has become mundane...
And there are those who are so enraged by the lack of intrigue and meaning in their lives... (could it be caused by an abundance of meaning? Too much choice? ... too much noise?) ...that they can no longer stand idly by, that their egos drive them to act on their instincts and override the woolly cotton numbness of understanding, and just do the things that everyone else wish they had the guts too, but are all to glad they don't... because deep down they know it's not an easy life, even though it may look it on the surface...
...And how deeply hidden is this "driver" sitting in the ego-seat... and why is "He" playing coy with me, so many places he thinks he can hide... so deep, so far, jou bliksem, jou splinter! Ek het jou uitgehaal en nou's ek weer in beheer.
Is the ego the archetype of the devil, and the superego our goggles through which we see- and yearn for God?
Is entropy the "cloud of unknowing"? Does "free will" travel towards or away from it? Or does it forever tread the boundaries...? Does it like wet toes... and is it only so it can remember where it came from? Does it regret what it can not remember? How can you regret what you can not remember...? Unless it's the fact that you can not remember which is why you want to do it again, and again, and again and again... but that's what the ego does, and the world it lives in, because it doesn't have memory, like the superego.... When I refer to the ego, I of course mean, the ego driven by the id.
... and what a detour... that in my mind took seconds, but sharing added another few detours of its own... what I would normally now do, is to delete all of this, and replace it by just a sentence or two.
And that even, I still have to build up to: if knowledge is all we're out to find here, and our greatest satisfaction is in sharing that sense of understanding something about the nature of the world we find ourselves in- and part of... whether this sharing is with those closest to us, academic peers, or people and civilizations that we can yet only dream about...
Aren't we all just beacons of light that we navigate by?
...Keeping each other in check, like the poles of my wooden clothes horse, against gravity. Gravity the entropy, the sink, that pulls us toward the future... the greedy monster of unlimited possibility; our knowledge about it, our way to fly... as far away from it as we can get. To push it back for as long as possible... to resist time collapsing around us. To resist everything from happening all at once... to find the serenity of nothing. Because in the end the only thing that is new, is nothing... and closest we can get to it, is here...
(You see what I did there?!) ...But who's fooling who?
...Possibility intrigues us. Knowledge, the cornerstone of which seems to be that we'll only ever see the tip of the iceberg, the more we see, the bigger the iceberg... like a mirage... now if that does not sound like a lie... well, it is. My brain is my jail... my brain IS the iceberg... and I've figured out how to grow it... but how big can it get, and will it be the same?
I can augment my senses, and my mind... I can fill the solar system with my mind, and use all the power from the sun... I can grow my mind unimaginably intricate, from the smallest bits, to fill the largest space... perhaps even figure out how to create space... and now space becomes the iceberg...
And even so... what will I gain, that is not within my reach, already... right now? Is the common sense I think I have, not perhaps pushing me away from the common sense I had... and you still have?
Is understanding all this anything but a theme park I've built for you to explore? A castle to run through, while you exclaim "I finally know all the rooms... and it's all mine... all mine..." I can go anywhere I like, be and do everything.... until I get bored and start melting away the iceberg of space, the iceberg of my mind... the iceberg of the mind in which my life is a living figment of the imagination of a mind I set on fire when I got too close to the beacon of someone else's sun...
Thursday, 16 July 2015
...and the world is still turning.
So about a week ago, right before I left home, the third full week in a row out of town for work, I had to reassemble the constellation of planks responsible for getting our clothes dry in time...
...If I keep this up, and I don't count the time spent sleeping, for the rest of my entire life, I will only have around 7 years to spend with the person I really want to spend the next 60, or hopefully more, with.
But that's not the strangest thing about this universe where we grind up and roast all kinds of beans and seeds just so the resultant deconstructed wireframes of molecules will tickle different parts of our tongues, on this bubble of air and earth in a seemingly infinite nothingness...
What really is the strangest, is the fact we seem to be constructed in a way that makes us perceive time to be flowing in one direction. As if we were flowing down a tube, through a one-way valve.
What if time really was going in the other direction, and we were doing everything in reverse? Would we even know?
What if the ultimate fate of the universe, is to be compressed into a little dot of light and we have been busy constructing as much as possible to fit into the tiniest space? What if the universe we think we know, is just a zip file being decompressed, and the last thing we can remember is what we are currently experiencing, and that is of the zip file being compressed.
But even stranger, what if you could escape this dream... snap out of it completely, and not in a ashes-to-ashes-bones-to-dust-sort-of-fashion, because that's happening anyways, err.. where you came from (albeit through a very elaborate labyrinth of molecule-reverse-waterfall-roller-coasters) but what if while all of this was happening, a little vapor of your self-aware-essence could condensate in some sort of parallel place, induced by a magic combination of thoughts... Another universe, separate, decoupled, completely isolated from everything that could exist here... save for in the induced vibration, the escape of some magic combination of thoughts...?
A new place, where there are no wooden clothes horses and no washing... where things never have to go bad so you can appreciate the good times, but where you can still appreciate everything you're not missing...
...If I keep this up, and I don't count the time spent sleeping, for the rest of my entire life, I will only have around 7 years to spend with the person I really want to spend the next 60, or hopefully more, with.
But that's not the strangest thing about this universe where we grind up and roast all kinds of beans and seeds just so the resultant deconstructed wireframes of molecules will tickle different parts of our tongues, on this bubble of air and earth in a seemingly infinite nothingness...
What really is the strangest, is the fact we seem to be constructed in a way that makes us perceive time to be flowing in one direction. As if we were flowing down a tube, through a one-way valve.
What if time really was going in the other direction, and we were doing everything in reverse? Would we even know?
What if the ultimate fate of the universe, is to be compressed into a little dot of light and we have been busy constructing as much as possible to fit into the tiniest space? What if the universe we think we know, is just a zip file being decompressed, and the last thing we can remember is what we are currently experiencing, and that is of the zip file being compressed.
But even stranger, what if you could escape this dream... snap out of it completely, and not in a ashes-to-ashes-bones-to-dust-sort-of-fashion, because that's happening anyways, err.. where you came from (albeit through a very elaborate labyrinth of molecule-reverse-waterfall-roller-coasters) but what if while all of this was happening, a little vapor of your self-aware-essence could condensate in some sort of parallel place, induced by a magic combination of thoughts... Another universe, separate, decoupled, completely isolated from everything that could exist here... save for in the induced vibration, the escape of some magic combination of thoughts...?
A new place, where there are no wooden clothes horses and no washing... where things never have to go bad so you can appreciate the good times, but where you can still appreciate everything you're not missing...
Monday, 22 June 2015
So much to share...
...And so much time. If you can find a way to glue it all together.
For the so-many-eth time, our wooden clothes horse made of wooden dowels and planks, one of a model readily available in local shops, collapsed. I'm not entirely sure why or how it came to be in its current state, with some of the lattices that have seemingly shrunk, and some too long (you better believe it!) and perhaps a screw or two missing and the ends of one or two of the dowels completely worn out from gettings screwed too much... perhaps it's not in such a bad state considering 7 years of service.
But by now it's standing quite crooked, like an old, tired clothes horse.
Much like many ideas in my head. (And perhaps almost certainly in the heads of those who know me, when they think about the way I tackle my problems, and the problems I choose to tackle... hence this blog. To explain it to you Daleks!)
The most notable of which: Why do I put up with this broken clothes horse. Even after having bought replacement dowels and screws, some months ago already.
Well, it's simple really. I don't have a saw. Actually, I do have. I have 3, maybe 4, no actually I have 5. But none of them are at hand right about the time that I think of fixing the clothes horse and of the saws I have, only two are really meant to cut wood. Add to that the fact that the clothes horse is sufficiently low on my list of priorities, so as to never make it into any to-do list or calendar entry.
Which leads us to this blog, where I will make a post every time that the clothes horse collapses and I have to re-adjust it to stand tall until it inevitably collapses again. Once I get around to fixing it, I'll devise another trigger for these blog posts.
So, until rather soon, depending on how often we do the washing, and how often my beautiful and wonderful wife, Adri, takes it upon herself to relocate or fix the clothes horse, so long and farewell.
For the so-many-eth time, our wooden clothes horse made of wooden dowels and planks, one of a model readily available in local shops, collapsed. I'm not entirely sure why or how it came to be in its current state, with some of the lattices that have seemingly shrunk, and some too long (you better believe it!) and perhaps a screw or two missing and the ends of one or two of the dowels completely worn out from gettings screwed too much... perhaps it's not in such a bad state considering 7 years of service.
But by now it's standing quite crooked, like an old, tired clothes horse.
Much like many ideas in my head. (And perhaps almost certainly in the heads of those who know me, when they think about the way I tackle my problems, and the problems I choose to tackle... hence this blog. To explain it to you Daleks!)
The most notable of which: Why do I put up with this broken clothes horse. Even after having bought replacement dowels and screws, some months ago already.
Well, it's simple really. I don't have a saw. Actually, I do have. I have 3, maybe 4, no actually I have 5. But none of them are at hand right about the time that I think of fixing the clothes horse and of the saws I have, only two are really meant to cut wood. Add to that the fact that the clothes horse is sufficiently low on my list of priorities, so as to never make it into any to-do list or calendar entry.
Which leads us to this blog, where I will make a post every time that the clothes horse collapses and I have to re-adjust it to stand tall until it inevitably collapses again. Once I get around to fixing it, I'll devise another trigger for these blog posts.
So, until rather soon, depending on how often we do the washing, and how often my beautiful and wonderful wife, Adri, takes it upon herself to relocate or fix the clothes horse, so long and farewell.
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