Birds. They seems to be everywhere. Looking up I can’t see any of them. They’re singing, trilling, shouting, talking. Even if they were in eyeshot, the sun is preventing me from seeing very much.
It’s morning in April. Not quite as poetic as morning in America, but I guess it’s that too. Sometimes one feels a little Reaganish while one is drinking their coffee, but one has no idea why or what that means. One, meaning this coffee drinker writing this thing about an actor-president. There are now ducks that I can see that are wandering around in eyeshot. These ducks (actually I think they are geese) were acquired by the neighbors to keep the foxes and hawks from eating the chickens, but they instead serve to keep neighbors from getting close to their people. That’s what you get for bonding too closely to waterfowl, they refuse to do the jobs they were acquired to do. I think this might be the core of the issue with the modern corporation as well. Have you felt close to the people that you work with before? Have you felt like the things those people really want to do are the things they should be doing, rather than the things the hierarchically defined people or role descriptions say they should do? My sense is that for the most part, if people were able to do what they wanted to do, organizations would not exist but the world still would. But the expectations associated with the relatively hardcore accountability structures that investors create to make sure they get their returns would not be met sometimes. There’s something to learn there about expectations and maybe not having them quite so much.
What is the deal with expectations? When I’m typing in this window, when the text does not appear immediately (sometimes I get a full sentence ahead of its appearance because I use a crappier browser than Google’s often, for the privacy (pronounced with a British soft “i”, please)) my expectations spasms start: I want to see what my fingers have done right away, because I don’t trust that it will appear and I don’t want to have to try to think of what I had done with my fingers and re-do it if the words didn’t appear. If this is confusing and silly sounding to you, either you live in a time where typing is no longer a thing or I’m being super unclear. Either way, expectations are probably still a thing.
For example, I would love it if these geese came over and said hello to me and maybe sat next to me on this bench. But I don’t expect it. Is my “would love it” a fervent hope that is essentially a low-probability expectation? I think it is. But I’m putting my feet flat on the ground and not worrying too much about it.
On the worrying about it line, I’ve been thinking a bit about the window of stress tolerance. Sometimes, I find myself in situations that are overwhelming for various reasons. It’s not usually that I feel as though I’m going to jump out of my own skin in a single moment of awful discomfort. It’s more often that an unresolved thing gathers compound interest and mass and poignance, and eventually I’m sleeping poorly, filled with anxiety, and crying in front of anyone who listens to me for more than five minutes. This happens seemingly quite fast sometimes. It’s the main reason I left my last job. I haven’t yet resolved what was helping to pile up the compound interest in that daily (and sometimes meetingly) accelerating, exponential, rice pieces on a chessboard to infinity way, but I have some hypotheses. Something about laziness, power, banality, and low-level, societally acceptable pseudo-cruelty. I hedge on the cruelty, because I think most malice is not intended by most of the brain regions of the malicious – there’s just an under-active amygdala giving way to the finance, economics, and MBA parts of the brain (which are very small and underdeveloped). And I’m willing to believe that the structures and educational systems that refine the fineconoMBA brain areas are more responsible for the malice than any notion of “free will” (scare quotes deliberate and hopefully extra scary).
But here I am, a product of the fineconoMBA ecosystems by choice and deliberation. My amygdala has taken a back seat so many times to conceptual rigor and optimization. Even the optimization of compassionate concepts (didn’t use scare quotes there, but probably should have) has the effect of de-contextualizing and de-personalizing. Kindness delivered to the wrong door in the wrong way is cruelty. Compassion offered without paying attention to the recipient and being aware of one’s delivery is malice. And too much awareness is apparently narcissism. So the bramble bind tightens as it is observed more closely.
And yet a lack of observation does not feel like an option. Perhaps that’s the primary failure of the industrial-scientific education system; hypotheses, observations, and actions are the units of analysis and so the units of learning (students or humans or children or whatever you want to call them) become standard units that are meant to pay more attention to unit-hood than to that which is more difficult to observe (and in particular, to quantify).
I had a rough go of it in school. I am glad I didn’t keep a journal so I couldn’t go back and figure out how many days I pretended to be sick in middle school and elementary school. I had mostly overcome this avoidance of projects I was worried I couldn’t do by high school, but not completely. In school, I learned tools for helplessness because nobody seemed particularly helpful and I wasn’t exactly ready to help myself (self-help books were among the stacks of fantasy novels I would take home from the library).
It seems like the plot points and histories end up scattered among the commentaries. That was my favorite thing about Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Grossman told a beautiful, horrible, tragic, funny story in great detail and didn’t hesitate to spend a long, front of the feet paragraph on pure commentary that seemed to be coming from a narrator (or maybe it was coming from the most recent character). Talking about life is much easier when you’re describing life. Each feels out of place without the other, life flowering trees without birds singing.
So here I am, in chapter four, the middle of the beginning of the middle. Depending on how many chapters end up being here. To put the last few chapters in plot-time-context for those of you who prefer (need?) that, I’ve written a chapter a day since starting. That doesn’t give you the date (that would be far too intimate) but it’s year two of this pandemic decade and we’re up into the twenties of the April month. To help put it into context.
How many chapters will there be? Will I tell enough stories from enough time brackets in my life for this to become an autobiography? No one currently knows, though I will by the time you’re reading this. Unless you’re reading this just after I publish it on the Internet instead of when it’s in a book and the publisher is taking a cut (but I’m also getting paid). Raise the cup of coffee you’re drinking to the hopes that that never happens. And find as many sentences as you can to right “that” next to the word “that”. And if you think too hard about the word “that”, please let me know what you figure out. Zhuangzi’s translators talking about this and that and the transformation of things is something I’m still very much interested in figuring out.
I just remembered a Marxist person in my life. A writer. She wrote a night. I learned a lot. I have the urge to go to New Orleans and do very little while doing very much activism.
I’m not sure what activism is yet. I think about air quality because I’m under the impression that breathing is necessary for thinking and that the thinking is improved when the air is of higher quality (and that this would be desirable to optimize). Perhaps activism is the way to make this happen. But is it having an opinion and doing activities to make that opinion the guide for reality? Is it about “organizing” (those are meant to be “I don’t know what this is either” quotes, not scare quotes)? I still have a lot of questions. I’ll keep writing until I run out of questions. Though maybe I’ll stop writing this book before I run out of questions. That would make it easier for an audio book reader to sit down (or preferably walk around) and record. And maybe I’ll stop writing this chapter now. I’ve always wondered if it’s better to stop reading in the middle of a chapter, at the end of a chapter, or even in the middle of a sentence. Which leads to a higher likelihood of coming back? I have always found that stopping only at the end of the book is the fastest way to finish.
Roman Ryan 