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diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index 4e637eb..37bbeb7 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -2,6 +2,66 @@ The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order. # Scratch +Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. + +The primary tools that one needs in modern day culture are to know how to make things up, and how to figure things out. This is creativity in two of its forms. These are called imagination and problem-solving. —STEVEN SNYDER + +--- + +In his 1870 essay What is Authority?, Bakunin wrote: + +Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. + +--- + +As Matthew Crawford observes in Shop Class as Soulcraft, “shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives, and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future.” + + +## Collapse notes +--- +Other Owen, and for good reason! But that’s an important part of what I was talking about. A market economy depends on the fundamental agreement that the seller will provide the buyer with a product worth buying. Now that corporations by and large no longer do this, the market is collapsing, and they have no idea what to do about it — since listening to consumers and providing them with what they need and want is nowhere in the modern corporate vocabulary. +-JMG + + +Making sense of the ideas of one great culture from within another great culture is notoriously hard. (It’s an interesting detail of history, for example, that the first two European scholars to study the I Ching both went incurably insane.) Thus I don’t claim to be able to sound the depths of either of the two future cultures I’ve sketched out here; I was raised in a culture weighed down by the Faustian veneer, and I live in a region that mediates between western Europe and the North American heartland. (The ground under my feet is part of the same long-vanished continent as the western half of Britain.) Being who, when, and where I am, I’m poised unsteadily between two great cultures, the fading Faustian culture and the future American culture. That’s part of the hand I was dealt when I was born. + +That awkward position, between the dissolving forms of the Faustian vision and the first stirrings of tamanous culture, seems to be becoming common among my American and Canadian readers, for what it’s worth. (I haven’t yet seen it among my European readers, which comes as no surprise—again, each great culture is rooted in its own land.) Here in North America, the Faustian veneer seems to be cracking very rapidly just now, outside those classes that have adopted Faustian thoughtways as the basis for their identity and their power. The widening gap between the Faustian managerial caste and the post-Faustian masses is among the major facts in American public life today, and it accounts for a great deal of the total incomprehension with which each side regards the other. + +One of the chief questions in my mind right now is how that gap will evolve in the years ahead. Most great cultures, once they leave their ages of reason, wind up their creative eras, and settle into stasis, can expect a long slow decline—in cases such as ancient Egypt and traditional China, this lasted for many centuries. The surge toward infinity is so central to the Faustian ethos, however, that the total failure of the will to power that drives it may send the nations of the West down another, harsher route. We’ll talk about that in two weeks. +-JMG + +--- + + + +# Stories to Tell + +## On the Economy of Walden + +Walden is a curious book. Curious because what the world has chosen to remember about Thoreau is that he opted to go live in the woods for a time, renounce in some way the modern world and get fback to nature. But this isn't at all what Thoreau did. Forget the historical context (which is that Thoreau went into the woods to write another book, A week and concord and merrimack river, while at the same time processing his bother's death. Forget that because if you just come to book without any of that there is still no reason to walk away thinking you've read a book about a man who renounced the modern world. He does nothing of the sort, and most of the book isn't nature writing. The first and longest chapter is called Economy. + +Thoreau's writing on nature and his own inner expereinces is just something you should read. Me telling you about it won't mean anything. It is experiential writing. + +This is what struck me about Walden when I recently reread it: that it starts with something very practical, very bound up in 19th century Concord, very grounded you might say in the world of its day, and yet ends up in place that is very spiritual. It struck me because I have had exactly the same experience. + +In getting in the bus I did not set out to step away from society. I have not stepped away from it at all. I am typing this using grid powered electricity, listen to the cacophony of helicopter rides while staring at the dense Florida branbles around our campsite, which, were I to bushwack through them, would lead me to the Walmart parking lot where I stocked up on steak, eggs and veggies not four hours ago. I am in Concord. And yet I am not. I understand now HD. + +And I also see both your flaws and mine. 20th-century French anthropologist René Girard's mimetic theory takes this idea of Thoreau's -- that we do not want things a vacuum, we want them because other people want them -- and reminds us that when you leave behind one certain mimetic process, you always enter into another one. You might not want a big fancy house, but you might want a really cool vintage RV, or a particular sailboat. Something will always fill that vacuum on desire and unless you're really on your toes -- and I certainly am not -- chances are that thing that fills it will again be something you don't actually a) need b) want, save because someone else has it. + + +What one needs to do is question the forces which are pulling them. Mimetic desire runs deep, so deep that most of it is simply accepted as opposed to worked with. What I mean by this is that the majority of items we have and actions we undertake are not acquired or undertaken out of conscious wanting, but out of the general acceptance that they and that is what you do/get. People have 3-piece sofas, fridges, tons of cutlery and plates, nic-nacs, new cars, new phones etc. People go to school, have kids, get mortgages, take out loans, perform Christmas day etc. And all of this falls under the idea of 'It's just want you do.' In fact, perhaps that's a good place to finish up, as I've just found my new favorite slogan... + +is in many ways a restating of the standard arguments agains + + + + + +--- + +"The best you can do in this moment, with whatever awareness and resources you can muster right now. Make the best spaghetti sauce you can with what you have and who you are, right now. Make this the best staff meeting you could possibly have, given the circumstances at the moment. While talking with your friend, your spouse, your mom, or your son, make it the very best conversation that you could be having. The best proposal, the best drive with my family, the best performance review, and the best nap." + +--- The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien @@ -107,36 +167,93 @@ We can have much to do, deadlines and meals and kiddos and never ending tasks, b Gurdjieff notion that you should do a task by hand. if you have to dig a ditch you should do it and dig it by hand because there's an opportunity there for spiritual growth. if you're offloading it to a machine you're losing that opportunity for spiritual growth. if we offload tasks to machines we lose the opportunities that they have for spiritual growth and we may not fully understand the consequences of offloading things to technology because we'll never go through it to see what Spiritual Development we might have had if we had done it ourselves -## Collapse notes ---- -Other Owen, and for good reason! But that’s an important part of what I was talking about. A market economy depends on the fundamental agreement that the seller will provide the buyer with a product worth buying. Now that corporations by and large no longer do this, the market is collapsing, and they have no idea what to do about it — since listening to consumers and providing them with what they need and want is nowhere in the modern corporate vocabulary. --JMG +## Have your own code +Not a contractors code. Not any organizations code. Your own code that means something to you, that makes you take pride in your work. -Making sense of the ideas of one great culture from within another great culture is notoriously hard. (It’s an interesting detail of history, for example, that the first two European scholars to study the I Ching both went incurably insane.) Thus I don’t claim to be able to sound the depths of either of the two future cultures I’ve sketched out here; I was raised in a culture weighed down by the Faustian veneer, and I live in a region that mediates between western Europe and the North American heartland. (The ground under my feet is part of the same long-vanished continent as the western half of Britain.) Being who, when, and where I am, I’m poised unsteadily between two great cultures, the fading Faustian culture and the future American culture. That’s part of the hand I was dealt when I was born. +When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a place. Even if that place is to just shove it in a messy cabinet and close the door quickly. Otherwise you space will be unbearable. -That awkward position, between the dissolving forms of the Faustian vision and the first stirrings of tamanous culture, seems to be becoming common among my American and Canadian readers, for what it’s worth. (I haven’t yet seen it among my European readers, which comes as no surprise—again, each great culture is rooted in its own land.) Here in North America, the Faustian veneer seems to be cracking very rapidly just now, outside those classes that have adopted Faustian thoughtways as the basis for their identity and their power. The widening gap between the Faustian managerial caste and the post-Faustian masses is among the major facts in American public life today, and it accounts for a great deal of the total incomprehension with which each side regards the other. -One of the chief questions in my mind right now is how that gap will evolve in the years ahead. Most great cultures, once they leave their ages of reason, wind up their creative eras, and settle into stasis, can expect a long slow decline—in cases such as ancient Egypt and traditional China, this lasted for many centuries. The surge toward infinity is so central to the Faustian ethos, however, that the total failure of the will to power that drives it may send the nations of the West down another, harsher route. We’ll talk about that in two weeks. --JMG +## Fire Notes: Seeking the Sun + +People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun. + +## New Orleans + +After Galveston we headed north, bound for New Orleans. We broke up the drive with a stop at one of the gates of hell, located in Sea Rim, Texas. Sea Grim as we call it. Do not go there. Ever. For any reason. We had to abandon the bus there that night and retreat to a hotel. The next morning we went back, fired up the bus, and did not stop driving until we were safely over the state line in Louisiana -- successfully [escaping Texas](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/06/escaping-texas) again, but this was definitely our closest call yet. + +We regrouped for a day at a little state park on a small bayou outside Lake Charles, Louisiana. It was good to be back in the bayous, swamp cypress, and most of all, warm humid air. Never thought I'd miss it, but I did. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-06_132438_bayou.jpg" id="image-3243" class="picwide" /> + +We met an Australian couple there who have been coming to the US nearly every year since the early 2000s, traveling around in an older RV. It's always humbling to meet someone from somewhere else who knows your country better than you do. We were headed in opposite directions unfortunately, but we were able to save them from Sea Rim at least. I look forward to our paths crossing again one day. --- +The next day we continue on, taking the beat-up, pothole-strewn back roads through the sugar cane fields and flooded rice paddies, past where we once spent Mardi Gras, on down into New Orleans. We arrived a little too late to head into the city that day. We had to stave off our New Orleans cravings with a few crayfish sausages grilled over the fire that night. +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-07_132438_driving-new-orleans.jpg" id="image-3242" class="picwide" /> -# Stories to Tell +The next morning we headed over the river and into the city. +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-13_130726_new-orleans.jpg" id="image-3240" class="picwide" /> -## Have your own code +There is something truly remarkable about New Orleans. Long time readers may have noticed that New Orleans is essentially the only city we visit. Chicago? Drove right by as fast as we could. Atlanta? We've been known to detour hundreds of miles to avoid it. We did stop in Columbia, SC, and regretted it. We have been to Milwaukee, but that's to visit friends, not because we love the city. -Not a contractors code. Not any organizations code. Your own code that means something to you, that makes you take pride in your work. +No, if we're going into a city it has to be a city that's alive the way a forest is alive, the way a seashore is alive: organically, miraculously, beautifully. Why waste your time on anything else? A good city should evoke the three transcendentals in you when you're in it: goodness, truth, and beauty. The only U.S. city where I have experienced those things every time I go is New Orleans. -When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a place. Even if that place is to just shove it in a messy cabinet and close the door quickly. Otherwise you space will be unbearable. +If you were just looking at it on paper, New Orleans probably wouldn't jump out at you. It's insanely touristy. It's rough around the edges. It has a reputation for violence. And yet none of those things seem to affect the city or the people. It's a mystery, but it's not hard to see how living here you might come to think like Ignatius J Reilly when he rather famously says, "Leaving New Orleans frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins." +Picking apart what makes New Orleans great is likely as fruitless as trying to figure out how it got that way. Something about the collision of Afro-Caribbean culture, Acadian culture, French culture -- among others -- created something unlike anywhere else on earth. New Orleans is louder, more vibrant, and more alive than any other city in America and that, I think, is what keeps us coming back. -## Fire Notes: Seeking the Sun +Just as we took the girls out for a [birthday around Milwaukee](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/hello-milwaukee), we had promised Elliott a day out in New Orleans. It started with an early lunch at a Thai restaurant. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_121233_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3223" class="picwide" /> + +Then we went to the thing the kids have been talking about ever since we where here in 2018: the New Orleans Children's Museum. Alas, a lot can change in four years. It turned out the Children's museum had moved locations and been "modernized". The kids still had fun, though they all agreed the old one was better. The new one offered a few of the same things, but everything was new and clean and looked like it had just come off the Ikea shelf. The old museum had a rather more homemade charm about it. + +This is what passes for progress in modern America though -- taking good things, throwing them away, and replacing them with things that don't work as well and generally suck. In that sense I'm glad the kids are getting a gentle introduction to the future now. + +And maybe I am reading to much into it, but I found it interesting that much of what was missing were what you might call blue collar stuff: the exhibit showcasing what an electrician does, the sample bayou farm, the signage about lap boarding, and the example working fishing boat. Among the new exhibits were a fake laboratory where the kids could pretend to be scientists and a purely mechanical farming setup that moved crops from harvest to ship without the presence of a single human. Again, maybe I'm overthinking it, but I felt the distinct presence of a specific agenda at work when I compared the old museum with the new. + +All that said, at least the kids had fun. And the legendary (in our family) giant bubble maker was still there. + +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_140728_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3231" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_131634_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3225" class="picwide" /> +<div class="cluster"> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_133650_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3227" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_133242_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3228" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> + <span class="row-2"> +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_134027_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3229" class="cluster pic66" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_134134_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3230" class="cluster pic66" /> + </span> +</div> + +After a few hours playing with all the stuff, we decamped for the French Quarter to get crepes at our favorite stand in the French Market. This first pic is 2018, the next 2022: + +<img src="images/2018/2018-02-18_145959_new-orleans.jpg" id="image-1178" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_164526_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3235" class="picwide" /> + +Aside from the jarring sight of my children getting older, I can't help but notice that we've shed even more vestiges of civilization... forks? Who needs forks? + +<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_154738_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3232" class="picwide" /> + +That was supposed to be the end of our day. We planned to wander over to Jackson Square, maybe listen to some music and then head back to the bus. In Jackson Square though we came across some street performers doing some amazing athletic stuff -- standing flips, gymnastic-style flips without the padding, you have to stop and respect that. So we did. And that's when they said "we need a few volunteers from the audience". As soon as someone says that, I am volunteered. Not because I want to mind you, but because in any situation that requires a volunteer or random person to be selected, it's not random, it's me. Always. I think it's a kind of penance I have to pay for being very lucky in games of chance. Whatever the case, yes, I was selected. And I had fun dancing for a crowd with a bunch of other people who couldn't dance either. + +That's not the surprising part though. The surprising part is that Lilah volunteered -- legitimately volunteered. She and another girl got up and did a similarly impromptu choreographed dance. More surprising is that the street performers gave her and the other girl $20 to keep. Naturally, since this is the most money she has ever earned in about 30 minutes, Lilah is convinced street performers are the greatest thing ever and she is going to be one. And who knows, maybe they are. Their job is certainly a lot more fun than mine. + +By the time that was all over with though we were famished again. We headed over to the warehouse district to an Argentinean restaurant Corrinne had been wanting to try. A few arepas later we all felt much better. It was a long day in the city, but a good one. I still judge the success of our days by how quickly the kids fall asleep and I don't think anyone was up past 9 that night. + +We spent a full week in New Orleans, mostly exploring the city, though we did have one day of running errands. I even found a reputable Volvo mechanic and took the Volvo in to see about replacing the hose I fixed with some fuel line and other scraps back in Devil's Tower. He looked at what I'd done, leak tested it with some brake fluid, and told me he wouldn't touch it unless he had to. Good enough for me. It's held up well. I did pay to have him clear out all the sensor codes and warnings though so we'll know if something is going amiss from here on out. + +So often what we do in New Orleans is just wander around. It's a city that lends itself to wandering. We've got our favorite little spots in the French Quarter, some in the Garden District, some in the Marigny, some in the Treme. This time around though we decided to visit some of the museums we've never bothered with before. + +The notable one was the Jazz museum. I mention is chiefly because I don't think I have ever been somewhere quite so disappointing. Now granted, Jazz is a big topic, spanning almost 100 years now, and even if you narrow it down to New Orleans... it's a lot for any museum to cover. That said, the Jazz museum was a massive letdown. I don't think the kids came out understanding any more about the history of Jazz than when they went in. They were more impressed with the tiny exhibit about the old Mint in the basement than they were with Jazz museum. + +Oh well, we'll stick to just wandering around, listen to the jazz you hear all over the city. Maybe that's the thing, maybe you can't stick Jazz or any other part of New Orleans in a building and try to explain it. It is what it is. Maybe you have to come out here and wander around, discover your own version of the city, to really understand. -People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun. ## Galveston Sings @@ -1504,6 +1621,11 @@ were the best of all my days # Essays +## Do It Yourself + +It’s probably cheaper and easier to buy most things, but when I can I’d rather make things myself. What else are you going to do with your life if you aren’t making stuff? Watch TV? Stop buying stuff and hiring people for everything. Give yourself a chance to solve the problem first. Contrary to what it says on the label, professionals and experts aren’t necessary. They’ll do it faster and better than you will, but you’ll learn and improve every time you do it yourself. + + ## Safety Third If you land on luxagraf.net on an odd day of the month, you might notice the little tag line under the site title is "safety third". This comes from a sticker we saw on a pole outside the [Henry Miller Library](https://henrymiller.org) in [Big Sur California](). Whoever put it there had read their Miller because he would have agreed. Actually he would have probably ranked safety much lower. I often do. @@ -1573,80 +1695,84 @@ There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing. **Everything is a Practice.** -A practice is the disciplined repetition of what you know in an effort to unlock those things you don't yet know. It is ever-accumulating, and never-ending. +A practice is the disciplined repetition of what you know with enough experimentation in that repetition to unlock those things you don't yet know. It is ever-accumulating, and never-ending. It is sometimes painful, but that is the way. -Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. You may finishing writing a book, or reach the end of a run, or understand how to fix an engine, but there is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough, you've learned enough. The practices never end, which means you get to keep improving. +Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. You may finish writing a book, or reach the end of a run, or understand how to fix an engine, but there is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough, you've learned enough. The practices never end, which means you get to keep improving. The practice leaves a path behind you to show you how far you have come and carves out a path ahead of you to show you where you can go. -The practices of your life *are* your life. They form the path you follow, they are how you become what you want to become, they make you who you are and who the world wants you to be. You are not solely in charge of your practices or the path they form. The world[^1] gets a vote too. In the end that's part of the practice too -- adjusting to feedback from the world, your body, your life, your family, your friends. All of these things are part of the practice, all of them inform it. +The practices of your life *are* your life. They form the path you follow, they are how you become what you want to become, they make you who you are and who the world wants you to be. You are not solely in charge of your practices or the path they form. The world gets a vote too. In the end that's part of the practice too -- adjusting to feedback from the world, your body, your life, your family, your friends. All of these things are part of the practice, all of them inform it. -So how do you find *your* practice? I don't know what you need to do or where you ought to go, but I can offer some places to start, some questions to think about. +The practice also informs the experimentation that expands it. -The Webster's 1913 dictionary definition of practice includes as examples "the practice of rising early; the practice of making regular entries of accounts; the practice of daily exercise." That's not a bad place to start: get up, get moving, and keep track of where your money is going. That can take you far. None of that is revolutionary, Ben Franklin is famous for saying roughly the same thing, and you can find similar quotes going back to the very edges of written history, but it's still a solid place to start. Get up and get going. +The trick is to follow your curiosity. That often forgotten part of you that society tries to get you to repress. That voice that says, what would happen if... This is the way. Follow it. Follow it knowing you will likely fail, knowing that you're probably doing it the wrong way, but you're going to try it anyway... you'd be surprised what works. I've fixed loose battery wires with a bit of nail, held hoses on with zip ties, and countless other things that should not have worked, but did, at least for a little while. There's plenty of failures along the way of course. Those people always telling you it can't be done -- whatever it might be -- are sometimes right, but wouldn't it be better to find out for yourself? -What I think gets lost in our time -- [the time of The Experts](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) -- is that there's not a single path, not a set of practices that work for everyone. We've been conditioned to look for prescriptions that fit everyone and that's just not how life works. You and I are different. You have to experiment and find what works for you. It might be nearly the same as what works for me, but it also might be totally different. I know people who are very much on their path who work late at night and eat totally differently than me. You have to find your own way. +Now there are reasonable limits to this... I wouldn't go trying to repair a $4,000 lens on your first attempt at lens repair. I wouldn't pick a rare, difficult to replace engine for your first rebuild. Learn to manage risk. When you know you're headed off the map to experiment, pick things to experiment on and situations to experiment in where you can keep the risk level low. Whether that means using something cheap, or doing it at low speed, or making sure the water is deep enough before you jump. Whatever the case, learn to manage risk so that your lessons learned aren't so painful -- financially, emotionally, physically --- that you forget what you learned and remember only the trauma of the learning. -That said, I do have suggestion on where to start: start with touching your nose. +In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother. You are building real world skills that you can use over and over. Every skill that you pick up transfers to other things too. Your practice will expand and keep growing. -I know, that sounds stupid. If you're into making some kind of huge change in your life the last thing you want to hear is that you should start by touching your nose. What the hell is that going to do? The answer is: it's going to train your will. +The experience you gain using a multimeter to untangle the rats nest of wires under the dash will come in handy when you need to figure out why the fridge suddenly stopped. That method of troubleshooting, following wires, testing voltages, making sure resisters are working, and so on, that method of inquiry you learned working under that dash transfers to other things. It's the same method of inquiry needed to figure out what's happening with anything electrical. There will be some differences between the fridge and the dash and the dishwasher and the vacuum, but the basic method is the same. From one small repair you gain an insight that makes countless future repairs that much easier. But only if you do it yourself. -If you were out of shape, unable to do a single push up, but desiring to be able to knock out 100 push ups you wouldn't start with 50, you'd start with one. But even then, there is a high risk of failure because the effort it takes to get from zero push ups to ten is more than it takes to get from ten to 100. There's a very good chance that you're going to give up before you get to ten -- not because it's too hard, but because you aren't accustomed to forcing yourself to do things. You are not in control of your will. +In this way everything you do is always building your skill set. You're always expanding your practice. This makes the path that much easier. You are that much more proficient at being human. The journey become easier, you are less reliant on others and you free up resources to focus on life's more interesting things. That way when the fridge dies at anchor in the San Blas, two days sail from the nearest repair shop, you don't worry. You fix the issues and get on with the dive you were planning to do that day. -It's not your fault. Unless you happen to have enlisted in the armed forces, practice a martial art, or have monastic religious training, you have very likely never even been taught that you can train your will, let alone how to do it. That's okay. - -The good news is that, unlike the hypothetical arms in the push up example, the will is not weak. Your will is as strong as it was when you were a baby starting to crawl and you willed your entire body to do something it had never done before. If your will feels week it is because it's divided against itself. The power of the will comes from disciplined focus. When you can focus your will on a single thing, and only that thing, you can do remarkable things. - -Getting to that point is the hard part. That is the practice of the will. This is where all practices start. This is the metapractice that enables all the other practices to come into being. The will, directed, is the thing that enable you to turn words into ideas, ideas into action, action into skills. The will is what opens up the path in front of you and enables you to move forward. - -When you say "will" though most people think of some miserable thing where you grit your teeth and bear some suffering. That's not the will, that's you fighting your will. When your will is focused following it is effortless, in fact you can't not follow it, you are directing it after all. - -The problem is that most of your life you've been told to do things you didn't want to do. School is the primary culprit here for most of us, though there maybe other things in your life. Schooling in the United States is almost universally designed to damage the will and leave you unable to do much of anything save serve the will of others. This is why most of us leave school and get a job. We literally go out to serve another's will. Our will has been so damaged we think that the thing we fight against when we "grit our teeth" or "just do it" is our will. +Skills transfer in unexpected ways too. It isn't all just troubleshooting methods that transfer. The experience you gain struggling at terrible sketches of birds will come in handy when you start staring at the engine, trying to make sense of what's gone wrong -- you've trained your mind to pay attention to the little details of feathers, which is not so different than paying attention to the little details of how a machine is running or how the wind and weather are changing. It is all connected. -That's not your will, that's your will divided. Our wills know a shit deal when they see one, even we don't. And they fight it. And we fight them. And we become convinced we're weak. +I should probably stop here and point out that I am a miserable hack with very few skills. I am not a repair expert or wunderkind of any sort. I can barely fix my way out of a paper bag. I am writing this not because I have mastered it on some long journey of experience, but because I have lived a couple of these examples and when thinking about it later, realized, oh, I made that connection because of this other things that I didn't see as related at the time, but then it turned out it was. -That makes for a ton of emotional baggage wrapped up in our divided will. That why every New Year's when we vow to hit the gym and do those push ups, we fail. Your will is the source of your emotions -- when your will succeeds in the world, you are happy, when it fails you are miserable. If you have a lot of miserably emotions locked up in your will and you try to focus it... it doesn't work. By the end of February it's been two months since you went to the gym. +I am writing this because I have seen other people who can do this at a level I know I'll never get close to. I am writing this because you may be younger than me, you may have more time to learn. By the time you get to my age, you might be where I wish I was. Where I would be if I'd been paying more attention earlier on in life. -That's why you start with touching your nose. This is a variation on what every religious training manual (and some of the better secular ones) I've read advices doing. Something silly. Something that doesn't matter. Something that you have no emotional attachment to. Something you will not fail to do because of years of damage to your will. Touching your nose is easy and has not emotional connotations. +I write not as an expert, but as a cautionary tale. Learn more than I did. Experiment more than I did. Expose yourself to more adversity than I did so that you learn to overcome it, not in theory, not by reading on the comfort of your couch, but in practice, at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, when it really counts. -So do it. Right now. Wherever you are sitting, reading this. Use your left hand and touch your nose ten times, returning your hand to your side or lap each time. Do it now before you read any further. +And now a little practice I wish I'd run across when I was much younger. -Congratulations, you unified your will and succeeded. This is the beginning. This is how you train yourself to use your will deliberately. +--- -Now you need to do that every day. Write "touch your nose!" on a piece of note paper and put it somewhere you will see it every day, ideally multiple times a day, ideally somewhere other people won't bother you about it. Then every time you see it, touch your nose ten times with your left hand. +How do you find *your* practice? I don't know what you need to do or where you ought to go, but I can offer some places to start, some questions to think about. -Congratulations. You have a new practice in your life. No, not touching your hose. The habit of doing something because you chose to do it. Not because some authority told you to or some unnoticed compulsion drove you to -- you chose to do this. You do it. You direct your will. +The Webster's 1913 dictionary definition of practice includes as examples, "the practice of rising early; the practice of making regular entries of accounts; the practice of daily exercise." That's not a bad place to start: get up, get moving, and keep track of where your money is going. That can take you far. None of that is revolutionary. Ben Franklin is famous for saying roughly the same thing. You can find similar quotes going back to the very edges of written history, but it's still a solid place to start. Get up and get going. -*Note: Some might object that I have told you to do this and therefore it is yet another example of you yielding your will to another. This isn't true. It doesn't have to be your idea to do something, you just have to choose to do it. That's your will, you are choosing what to do.* +What I think gets lost in our time -- [the time of The Experts](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) -- is that there's not a single path, not a set of practices that work for everyone. We've been conditioned to look for prescriptions that fit everyone and that's just not how life works. You and I are different. You have to experiment and find what works for you. It might be nearly the same as what works for me, but it also might be totally different. I know people who are very much on their path who are vegans and do their best work late at night. You have to find your own way. +That said, I do have a suggestion on where to start: start with touching your nose. +I know, that sounds stupid. If you're into making some kind of huge change in your life the last thing you want to hear is that you should start by touching your nose. What the hell is that going to do? The answer is: it's going to train your will. +If you were out of shape, unable to do a single push up, but desiring to be able to knock out 100 push ups in two minutes you wouldn't start with 50, you'd start with one. But even then, there is a high risk of failure because the effort it takes to get from zero push ups to ten is more than it takes to get from ten to 100. There's a very good chance that you're going to give up before you get to ten -- not because it's too hard, but because you aren't accustomed to forcing yourself to do things. You are not in control of your will. +It's not your fault. Unless you happen to have enlisted in the armed forces, practice a martial art, or have monastic religious training, you have very likely never even been taught that you can train your will, let alone how to do it. That's okay. -Some teeth-gritting must happen from time to time in all our lives, but once you develop your will sufficiently and begin to progress, most people find that there is little effort needed. +The good news is that, unlike the hypothetical arms in the push up example, the will is not weak. Your will is as strong as it was when you were a baby starting to crawl and you willed your entire body to do something it had never done before. If your will feels weak it is because it's divided against itself. The power of the will comes from disciplined focus. When you can focus your will on a single thing, and only that thing, you can do remarkable things. +Getting to that point is the hard part. That is the practice of the will. This is where all practices start. This is the metapractice that enables all the other practices to come into being. The will, directed, is the thing that enable you to turn words into ideas, ideas into action, action into skills. The will is what opens up the path in front of you and enables you to move forward. +When you say "will" though most people think of some miserable thing where you grit your teeth and bear some suffering. That's not the will, that's you fighting your will. When your will is focused following it is effortless, in fact you can't not follow it, you are directing it after all. +The problem is that most of your life you've been told to do things you didn't want to do. School is the primary culprit here for most of us, though there maybe other things in your life. Schooling in the United States is almost universally designed to damage the will and leave you unable to do much of anything save serve the will of others. This is why most of us leave school and get a job. We literally go out to serve another's will. Our will has been so damaged we think that the thing we fight against when we "grit our teeth" or "just do it" is our will. +That's not your will, that's your will divided. Our wills know a bad deal when they see one, even if we don't. And so they fight it -- they fight school, they fight our pointless jobs, they fight our uninspired cities and all the rest. And we fight our will. And we become convinced that this struggle against ourselves is what it means to direct our will. We become convinced that we're weak. +That makes for a ton of emotional baggage wrapped up in our divided will. That why every New Year's when we vow to hit the gym and do those push ups, we fail. We spiral downward, further convinced we are weak. -The problem isn't that your will is weak. +This is compounded by the fact that your will is the source of most of your emotions -- when your will succeeds in the world, you are happy, when it fails you are miserable. If you have a lot of miserably emotions locked up in your will and you try to focus it... it doesn't work. By the end of February it's been two months since you went to the gym. +That's why you start with touching your nose. This is a variation on what every religious training manual (and some of the better secular ones) I've read advices doing. Something silly. Something that doesn't matter. Something that you have no emotional attachment to. Something you will not fail to do because of years of damage to your will. Touching your nose is easy and has no emotional baggage for most people. -Just do it -- don't think about it, don't decide for yourself whether it's a good idea, and above all else don't wonder about what motives are behind what's being pushed at you. Unthinking, reflexive reactions to collective stimuli are exactly what every ruling elite wants to inculcate in its serfs. +So do it. Right now. Wherever you are sitting, reading this. Use your left hand and touch your nose ten times, returning your hand to your side or lap each time. Do it now before you read any further. +Congratulations, you unified your will and succeeded. This is the beginning. This is how you train yourself to use your will deliberately. +Now you need to do that every day. Write "touch your nose!" on a piece of note paper and put it somewhere you will see it every day, ideally multiple times a day, ideally somewhere other people won't bother you about it. Then every time you see it, touch your nose ten times with your left hand. +Congratulations. You have a new practice in your life. No, not touching your hose. The habit of doing something because you chose to do it. Not because some authority told you to or some unnoticed compulsion drove you to -- you chose to do this. You do it. You direct your will. -Even when you find some things that do, keep experimenting, you never know when you'll find some new practice you love that opens up new paths. +That is the beginning of the practice. -I don’t know exactly where this path leads (and I have no idea where yours might lead you), but I do know that there is a path out there for each of us. And I don’t think the path that’s being offered up by our society these days is very appealing. I think that’s part of the reason people read this site. Because you also probably don’t think we were put here on earth, as part of this grand dance of existence, to maximize our safety and security, to build wealth or amass petty power. -I believe that we are here to give the gifts that we have built up inside us over millennia of our soul’s existence, that we are here to shepherd each other toward our gifts and give to the world those things that we have inside us. +*Note: Some might object that I have told you to do this and therefore it is yet another example of you yielding your will to another. This isn't true. It doesn't have to be your idea to do something, you just have to choose to do it. That's your will, you are choosing what to do.* We are all in the process of maturation. Both as individuals and as a species. None of knows where this all goes, but I think we all know that the current stories don’t wash and it’s time for something new. I don’t know what that looks like for you, but for myself, for us out here, it looks like this. It looks like walks through primordial forests, long afternoons on windswept beaches, evenings around the fire. I believe that you’ll know when you are on the right path. You’ll feel it. Life will begin to feel like what it is, a gift, an adventure, a joy. You’ll feel connection, fulfillment, that deep sense of satisfaction at the end of the day that comes from knowing there is nothing else you would rather have done that day. That is the path. And if you manage to find it, don’t stray. Do the work. It isn’t always easy. It isn’t always beaches and campfires. Sometimes it’s engine repair and frustration and despair. But these moments are fleeting, they are the necessary growth, the twists and turns that reveal. Stay disciplined, stay focused, stay on the path. Let go of control and just walk the path. It will reveal itself slowly, only as much as you need to see, just keep on it, and see where it leads you. That’s adventure. That’s living. @@ -1703,7 +1829,7 @@ Not in human terms anyway. Individual projects may come to an end, but the pract [^1]: This would be a good example of -## tk +## No Cavalry -- what to do? @@ -2422,3 +2548,20 @@ Interestingly though, what's true of a screen is also true of a book. After all A book's distraction from life is much less consuming than a computer screen. It is a single story. Its depth is limited. A book ends on the final page. The boundary of its world is well-defined. We known our way in, we find our way out just as easily. +## Back to X11 + +Earlier this year I upgraded my Lenovo laptop with a new, larger SSD. Video takes a staggering amount of disk space. In the process I decided to completely re-install everything. It had probably been at least five years since I've done that. + +Normally I would never say anything about this because really, the software you run is just a tool. If it works for you then that's all that matters. However, since I once disregarded this otherwise excellent advice and wrote about how [I use Arch Linux](https://luxagraf.net/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux) and [Sway](https://luxagraf.net/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway), I feel somewhat obligated to follow up and report that I still love Arch, but I no longer run Sway or Wayland. + +I went back to X.org. Sorry Wayland, but much as I love Sway, I did not love wrestling with MIDI controller drivers, JACK, video codecs and hardware acceleration and all the other elements of an audio/video workflow in Wayland. It can be done, but it's more work. I don't want to work at getting software to work. I'm too old for that shit. + +I want to open a video and edit. I want to plug in a microphone and record. If it's any more complicated than that -- and it was for me in Wayland with the mics I own -- I will find something else. Again, I really don't care what my software stack is, so long as I can create what I want to create with it. + +So I went back to running Openbox with a Tint2 status bar. And you know what... I really like it. + +Wayland was smoother, less graphically glitchy, but meh, whatever. Ninety-five percent of the time I'm writing in Vim in a Urxvt window. I even started [browsing the web in the terminal](https://luxagraf.net/src/console-based-web-browsing-w3m) half the time. I need smooth scrolling and transitions like I need a hole in my head. + +That said, I did take all of Sway's good ideas and try as best I could to replicate them in Openbox. So I still have the same keyboard shortcuts and honestly, aside from the fact that Tint2 has more icons than Waybar, and creating "desktops" isn't dynamic, I can't tell much difference. Even my battery life seems to have improved in X11, and that's why I switched to Wayland in the first place, was the better battery life I was getting. Apparently that's not true with this laptop (a Lenovo Flex 5, as opposed to the X270, which does get better battery life under Wayland). + +Anyway, there you have it. X11 for the win. At least for me. For now. |