Bristling
After an early morning swim, I rode home and noticed everyone looking spritely, fresh, showered, well-heeled. Or still exercising, walking, strolling, hustling. Bustling and bristling. Melbourne achieves this energy in certain parts of town, at certain times. It’s the same vibration of opening up a shop, rushing to an important appointment, but all the time. On every scale. In a waiting room, at a hot dog stand at a baseball game. Some cities are always like this. New York for example.
As a human being, you have a frequency/vibration. When you are in the place that your frequency/vibration matches the frequency/vibration of the place, you feel comfortable. – Jerry Seinfeld
What does $19 dollars actually get you?
A hot coffee, a place to sit, strangers to look at or to meet, a surface to write on, warmth, cover from the elements for a few hours, 500 calories or so.
Quotes
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face. – Jorge Luis Borges
Trust in Allah. Tie up your camel. – Islamic proverb
Existence rests in the fleeting present; it is thus always in motion, resembling “a man running down a mountain who would fall over if he tried to stop and can stay on his feet only by running on… Thus existence is typified by unrest.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
How slipt? What deeds? What duty left undone? – Pythagorus
The whole function of the imagination is to draw up the material from the unconscious, clothe it in images, and transmit it to the conscious mind. – Robert Johnson
Writing
The Talking Cure – Hey! Put down your notepad when I’m talking to you!
Drowning – A review of Manodrome
Honor the Elephant – A review of Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow
The Trolley – A few thoughts on the body we are stuck with
Music
Don’t Stop The Dance – Bryan Ferry
Music and Lights – Imagination
Voyage to Atlantis – The Isley Brothers
Blues at Sunrise – Albert King
Albums
Lambs in the field
We are like lambs in the field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who choose out first one and then another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil Fate may have in store for us—sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or reason. – Schopenhauer
We can admit there will be stuff in the future that we didn’t see coming. What then do we do about that? Forecasting seems to help. If we can forecast then we can potentially avoid some of it (cancel the flight), minimize it (eat something before that meeting), protect yourself (take out insurance), accept it (this is unavoidable) or find meaning in it.
Dreams sometimes indicate upcoming events as we start to mentally prepare for them. We could even think of a dream like a psychological weather forecast: Tomorrow will be partly cloudy. Light winds. High of 19 degrees. Prominent feelings of resentment, judgment, desire and fatigue.
A message from Shakespeare
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Home crowd hostility
An American Beats an Italian In Rome – Seb Korda feeds of the hostile home crowd
Fresh flowers
If we pay attention, our environment teaches us a lot.
For example, I go into a grocery store to buy some flowers. But as soon as I walk in, I’m a bit overwhelmed. Which flowers do I buy? Automatically I start peering very closely to all the varieties and try to think of the ‘best’ one to get. But I can’t make up my mind.
Instead of continuing to slog, I slow down and take a few steps back.
I see some things.
I see that fresh flowers are getting laid out. Someone grabs some while chatting on the phone and says “roses and tulip”. She’s combining flowers. I hear someone else says “get them wrapped”. I see that you can get flowers wrapped for free and they look much nicer.
There’s lots of great information all sitting there. The decision in many ways makes itself.
How to create more time
If you wake up at 5am instead of 7.30am, one would gain about 57 days or nearly 2 months extra per year. If you usually wake up at the luxurious time of 9am, you would gain an additional 7 days per month.
Every thing you need to do in a day, might be able to be combined with another thing you need to do. Don’t go to the grocery store twice.
Is your physical body just like pretty colors on a page?
Donald Hoffman argues that reality is more like a 3D desktop designed to hide the complexity of the real world and guide adapted behavior. Space is the desktop, physical objects are the icons on that desktop. – Do we see reality as it is? – Donald Hoffman
Intellect vs intuition
I can’t think of my bike shed code. I have my phone in hand, where the code is stored in my password manager. But before I check, I let my fingers type in the code without thinking. It feels wrong. I see my fingers type random numbers. Click. Unlocked.
I think our unconscious is quite happy to receive and carry out an order, as long as the conscious doesn’t interfere. For example, I want to fold my hand towel such that the tag is hidden. My intellect wants to figure this out procedurally and say “well if we flip it this way, then this should appear here”. But instead, give yourself the task and let your ‘hands’ figure out the rest.
I wrote more about intuition and the unconscious here.
Fear reduces your options
Only at 3-5, 0-15, do I start to serve with less fear, and worrying less about how ‘good’ it is.
Playing tennis with no fear pulls attention out of your head and soaks it into the other side of the court. Suddenly, I can see where that nasty cross court is coming from. There’s suddenly space to anticipate rather than react.
To riff on Viktor Frankl, I’d say that fear constricts the space between stimulus and response.
A dog with a friendly attitude can make a handful of people in a park very happy in the space of 5 minutes.
Two different ways to look at nature
In Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog and his subject Timothy Treadwell look at nature through very different eyes. They are making up stories about something neutral that is impossible to judge. Timothy sees a dead bumble bee (which was actually sleeping) as “beautiful, sad, tragic”. His heart can’t help but break. Herzog on the other hand, is left cold and haunted by the same environment. “I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy.”
Buddha Bike 