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Slow Movement

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Jacobs argues that engaging meaningfully with the writings of the past – the strange, the uncomfortable, the profound – can help ease the anxieties of modern life.

🖼️ Contexts

I picked this up on an Barnes and Noble summer run a couple years ago, looking for books to freshen up some lectures on introducing literary analysis. I ended up sitting in the aisle, reading the first 20 pages of this book, and knew I should probably buy it (even though it wasn’t particularly suited for the task at hand). It’s a good read, and a solid argument, for reading widely in the face of uncertain times. There are also an inordinate amount of research-breadcrumbs and intriguing anecdotes that are woven into the crisp, engaging prose (see “Brain Tickles” below for a selection).

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • It is important to see the past for its “treasures more than its threats” – and that these “treasures” can guide us in an age of information overload, social acceleration, and algorithmic marketing.
  • “Informational triage” is a modern necessity – the ability to quickly filter through massive amounts of information so we can be “ruthless” in how we “deploy our attention.” And part of our strategy should be to read the “classics.”
  • The key to a tranquil mind is increasing “personal density” – a term coined by Thomas Pynchon – that is “directly proportional to temporal bandwidth”. Our connectedness to the ancient, and the perspective in lends, are vital to increasing density so we can transcend the moments of our newsfeeds to ground ourselves in a “bigger time.”
  • Young people and children should be exposed to older art and that for which they are not the intended audience so that they can “find value and pleasure in something that wasn’t necessarily made for them.”
  • Encountering texts from the past is a relatively non-threatening way to engage with difference, especially that which runs counter to our current sensibilities.
  • The great figures of the past provide models for both those who want an active life and a contemplative one.

💯 Strong Lines

  • On using the classics to future-cast: “To read old books is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing.”
  • John Dewey (in Democracy and Education, 1916), on navigating information overload: “A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive. The result will be a confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of the blind and externally directed activities of others.”
  • On the past: “The past the ties us to people in ways that hurt also ties us to people in ways that make healing possible. Sometimes we wish that the past could be over; sometimes we are grateful that it is not.”
  • On judging historic figures with modern understandings: “…We are all inconstant and changeable, we all shy away from the full implications of our best and strongest ideas. Why should Washington and Jefferson and Milton have been any different? We should not be surprised that they failed to live up their ideals; we should, I think, be surprised that in their time and place they upheld such ideals at all.”
  • On religious texts and their presumed timelessness: “…the ability to transcend temporal and cultural distance is one of the primary traits that makes a sacred text sacred.”
  • On reading and identification: “…power arises in some cases from likeness—from the sense that that could be me speaking—and from difference—that is someone very different from me speaking. For mental and moral health we need both.”
  • On the relative comprehension of old texts and their authors: “These complications of perception are essential to the value of reading the past – they are the chief means, I think, by which, increasing or temporal bandwidth, increases our personal density. Yes, there is a cost of this, and we have to fight or triage instincts to get to the point of experiencing, along with the people of the past, the choices that shaped their lives. We see their moral frames, continually coming in and out of focus: at one moment, we feel that we know them intimately, and at the next, scarcely at all.”
  • On our instinctive responses to what we read: “This testing of our responses against those of our ancestors is an exciting endeavor – a potentially endless table conversation, though, again, one we can suspend at any time….As Leslie Jamison says, that tension crackles and sparks. And the sparks produce both light and warmth.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • Climate change, as a theme, is relatively rare in contemporary fiction (Amitav Ghosh’s observation from The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable); while “cli-fi” does exist, it usually looks dystopically to the future rather than dealing with the here and now.
  • German Sociologist Gerd-Günter Voss’s three ways to “conduct life”: 1) traditional – your life takes the form of the lives of those who came before, in alignment with your culture, class and context 2) strategic – your life is based on goals and strategic plans to get them 3) situational – less likely to “plan out” anything (a particular career, having children, settling in one place) as there is accelerated change and this is one way of coping with that reality. From Rosa’s Social Acceleration, pp. 236-237.
  • Alyssa Vance’s distinction between “positive” and “negative” selection – when you’re in the selection business, you can focus on what candidates are able to do or unable to do—and, academia in particular is built upon “negative” selection (in admissions, tenure, promotion).
  • Julian Baggini’s argument to read the past – and controversial thinkers such as Kant and Hume – with an understanding that “none of these figures had the good fortune to be confronted with eloquent proponents of opposing views.” And, this in turn, should make us all the more admiring of other thinkers – Wollstonecraft and Douglass, for example – who were able to cut their way through thickets of convention that “so reliably trap ordinary folks—and sometimes even great geniuses.”
  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking, a book that argues for “generosity as an enduring habit of mind, a conversational practice.” I think it might connect nicely to Kline’s Time to Think.
  • Brian Eno’s “Big Here and Long Now” thinking – “big here” is spatial bandwidth (learning languages, reading books in translation, seeking to understand other cultures), and “here now” is in recognition that every moment is grown from the past and a seed for the future.
  • Donna Zuckerberg’s journal Eidolon, and her research into the resurgence of Stoic philosophy in the manosphere.
  • Loving the aside on futurists (pg. 144) in the discussion of Wendell Barry’s “Standing by Words” (1980) where he compares them to the “projectors” of Gulliver’s Travels: “… men who appear to be meaningfully related to the future, but are in fact wholly self-absorbed….Their imagined world is devoid of actual persons and much of the rest of creation as well.” The key distinction is between projecting and promising: “The ‘projecting’ of ‘futurologists’ uses the future as the safest possible context for whatever is desired; it binds one to selfish interest. But making a promise binds one to someone else’s future.”
  • Paul Connerton’s How Modernity Forgets.

🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

There are a lot of anecdotes and excerpts that feel relevant to teaching; here are a sampling:

  • Italo Calvino’s concept of “your classics” – books that take on a particular status for a particular reader…Jacobs defines it further, “…a book becomes a classic for you in part because of its power to compel you to hear something that you not only hadn’t thought but might not believe, or might not want to belief. In this sense a book can become very much like a friend.”
  • The discussion of Plutarch’s comparative studies model (in his case, of Roman and Greek military figures) that provided an educational framework for the whole of Western Europe for centuries.
  • Niccolò Machiavelli on the solace of ancient texts: “When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and, decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.”
  • Patrocinio Schweickart’s “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading” and the recommendation of looking for a “utopian moment” or “authentic kernel” where something deeply beautiful and human emerges even in the midst of patriarchal muck.
  • A resurfacing of Kipling’s famous poem, “The Gods of Copybook Headings,” and in particular, this stanza: With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch / They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch, / They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings, / So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
  • The extended discussion of Seamus Heaney’s “Sandstone Keepsake” at the beginning of chapter 9. would make a lovely mini-lesson on poetic allusions.
  • The discussion (pp. 154-155) of Paul Kingsnorth’s describing his visit to the Salon Noir, and asking questions that might be asked of any text, artifact or work of art: Why did these people, some fifteen thousand years ago, paint animals, and paint them with such (apparently) loving attention? What was the world, to them, and what spirits haunted it? What stories did they tell about their place here, about the past and the present? Who, what, did they think they were?

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by

1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Cal Newport discusses the importance of regular sessions of “deep work” (distraction-free concentration), arguing that this way of working produces neurological, psychological and philosophical benefits and is needed for the jobs of the future.

🖼️ Contexts

This book is consistently recommended in productivity circles but I wasn’t compelled to read it until I heard Newport discuss his career in an interview last year. I found his style of writing—combining dense research and storytelling—compelling and breezy. One of the aspects I like most about this book are the many “breadcrumbs” of interesting research and literature he cites throughout that are a joy to follow up on (see “brain tickles” below).

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • “Deep work” is defined as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive abilities to their limit” producing value and skill acquisition that is hard to replicate in other ways. “Shallow work” is non-cognitively demanding in nature, consisting of tasks that can be done while distracted (emails, etc.)
  • Uninterrupted, carefully curated distraction-free “deep work” can be done up to four hours per day (but rarely more). While learning or applying new skills, only 1-2 hours of “deep work” can usually be accomplished per day.
  • Routines, ritual and location play a big role in enacting “deep work.” Banning internet use during sessions, or instituting a metric (like words per day), or even changing locations—having a special place where deep work is done—can provide useful constraints. “Start up” and “wind down” rituals (like, a cup of coffee and a walk) are also beneficial for signaling the shift for your mind and body.
  • It is important to aim for a small number of “wildly important goals.”

💯 Strong Lines

  • Why deep work matters: “The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
  • On the challenge of deep work in our tech-driven society: “Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological.”
  • On the pitfalls of modern work culture**:** “On our worst days, it can seem that all knowledge work boils down to the same exhausting roil of e-mails and PowerPoint, with only the charts used in the slides differentiating one career from another.
  • On the importance of ending a workday: “At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • The Intellectual Life by Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, who wrote “Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”
  • “Attention residue” as defined by Sophie Leroy in “Why is it so hard to do my work?”
  • Dreyfus and Kelly’s All Things Shining which cites the Enlightenment as a turning point in how we see ourselves in relation to work and the world: “The Enlightenment’s metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life…it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.”
  • The practice of giving of your time and attention, without expectation of reward or anything in return, as explored in Adam Grant’s Give and Take.
  • Kaplan’s Attention restoration theory (ART) —the importance of being in nature as a natural remedy for chronic concentration loss.

🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

There are no explicit sections for teaching and learning (though Newport himself is a professor and has authored another book aimed directly at a student audience), but a lot of the cited studies have implications for how we teach:

  • For example, we should think about just how much students can learn of an unfamiliar concept or discipline: “…for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit.”
  • On the importance of building “boredom stamina”: “Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction…it’s hard to shake the addition even when you want to concentrate.”
  • Incorporation of “productive meditation” into learning—spaces where students are occupied physically but not mentally (walking, jogging, building, etc.) so that periods of focused concentration are more productive.
  • Not from the book but from his blog: “The Advice I gave my Students” (a low-key approach to digital minimalism during exams).

The Grind Culture Detox

by

1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Archer connects “grind culture”—a values system wherein an individual’s worth is determined by what they produce economically—to the legacies of racial slavery and hyper-capitalism in the United States; she argues for a rejection of this pervasive paradigm and provides a guide to intentional practices of self-care, affirmation, and healing.

🖼️ Contexts

I picked this one up on a visit to BookWoman here in Austin. I had originally gone in to pick up Maria Tatar’s new book The Heroine with 1,001 Faces but this one caught my eye, too. It relates to themes in Wintering but draws a direct throughline from our society’s rejection of rest to slavery—an institution that spurred exponential economic growth by leveraging free labor without regard to its brutal and unimaginable human costs: “The foundations of American capitalism was built on a viciously high-stakes environment of productivity or death.” She goes on to connect this as well to our current anti-labor practices and the anti-social welfare rhetoric that precludes progress toward paid maternity care, universal healthcare, and living wages. I was also drawn to her personal story as it mirrored my own in several key ways. Though I’ve managed to take back a measure of my time from the 9-5 grind, I still find myself signing onto projects, filling my days back up with work, and often as mentally and physically depleted as I was before. I suppose this one called out to me so I could read this phrase, toward the book’s end, “…falling back into our old patterns can often provide a beautiful learning opportunity.” As I head into 2023, I found this to be a gentle nudge toward re-centering and listening to mind, body, and spirit.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • If you have experienced any of the following, you’re experiencing the effects of grind culture: a fear of stillness, feeling guilty about resting, viewing exhaustion as productive, sacrificing the needs of your body to produce, overpacking your calendar, never feeling satisfied with what you have, competing with others over who grinds hardest, treating some people as though they are “more important” than others based on their profession.
  • Detoxing from grind culture is not a one-and-done process; the framework of “harm reduction” can be helpful in making steps toward incremental transformation when abstinence is not possible (after all, most of us will continue to need to work).
  • Healthy boundaries are essential to preserving mental, physical, emotional energy and are a key to self-sovereignty and work-life liberation.
  • “Thriving activities” should be customized — there is no one-size-fits all in terms of tending to one’s own well-being. While it is important to engage in movement, nutrition, creativity, mindfulness, learning, rest, and social connection—the methods are entirely up to what brings personal joy.

💯 Strong Lines

  • On grind culture and oppression: “…most of the sacred beings on this beautifully abundant planet are under the spell of materialism, manipulation, control, and coercion. This unfortunate dynamic helps construct things such as racism, gender-based oppression, and ableism. Grind culture provides the fuel to keep these toxic systems running.” (pg. 5)
  • On perfectionism: “Perfectionism is a form of self-harm rooted in the need to appear perfect or attain perfection as a threshold for self-worth in society….[it] dims our resilience, eats up time and energy, blocks our courage, and thwarts the mistakes we have to be able to make in order to learn and grow.” (pg. 10)
  • On motherhood: “Mothers are presented with a painful dichotomy. On the one hand, we’re expected to nurture our newborn from an endless well of attention, care and presence, and on the other, grind culture wants us to prove that our caretaking won’t be a liability.” (pg. 30)
  • On “self-care” (quoting Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha): “It’s not about self-care—it’s about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for. It is the way we do the work, which centers disabled-femme-of-color ways of being in the world, where many of us have often worked form our sickbeds, our kid beds, or our too-crazy-to-go-out-today beds. Where we actually care for each other and don’t leave each other behind. Which is what we started with, right?” (pg. 46)
  • On resting as defiance: “It disrupts grind culture’s spinning wheels. There is power in the slowdown. When you slow down, you rest; when you rest, you self-reflect; when you self-reflect, you begin to question, which in turn disrupts the culture of grinding.” (pg. 80)
  • On quiet-as-resistance (quoting Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet, with reference to Black social justice movements): “Quiet is often used interchangeably with silence or stillness…Quiet instead is a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life, wants, desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears, the inner life is not apolitical or without social value….It has its own sovereignty, it is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent and inevitable.” (pg. 81)

🧠 Brain Tickles

🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

There are so many activities that relate to social-emotional learning and holistic education. The term “self-care” is well-worn and I have seen the same strategies recommended in many corners—deep breathing, a nature walk, drinking enough water, etc (all good, by the way!) But Archer provides a wealth of other strategies in this book, encouraging readers to create their own “toolkits”. Some highlights that would be easy to incorporate/recommend for students:

  • Archer cites the work of Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, who outlines a framework for the “rest revolution”—highlighting seven forms of rest: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, sensory, creative. She offers a free “rest quiz” to locate the types of rest you most need to attend to.
  • I think there is a beautiful opportunity to connect some of the activities around “core values” to this book. Archer has a journal reflection that prompts people to think of their core values and then what the “highest expression of honoring these values” would look like in daily life. Then, to outline what one prefers to do to honor it (activities that bring joy connected to the value), what one is willing to allow but does not prefer (norms and tasks that are necessary but not enjoyable), and what one will not allow (i.e. activities, norms and environments that would negate the value entirely). An example of response to this prompt can be found on page 126.
  • The templates for ancestor acknowledgment and land acknowledgment (pp. 34-40) would be powerful connectors for communities of students to better appreciate each others’ experiences and perspectives, and the land they share in common.

Clutter: An Untidy History by Jennifer Howard

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

This book examines the history and significance of our individual and collective relationship to things—what fuels the desire, purchasing, and accumulation cycles in a country where both minimalism and Amazon Prime are cultural obsessions.

🖼️ Contexts

I went in search of Wintering, and found this book on a shelf nearby. As someone who has struggled to tame the accumulation of clutter around me (both my own and the sentimental detritus of others), I was intrigued to explore the causes of this phenomenon. This slim volume presents a personal and researched account of materialism and its underlying causes.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • One way of looking at clutter: “delayed decisions”.
  • Historical examples of conspicuous consumption can be found throughout the world (for example, in late Ming China and at the height of the Italian Renaissance).
  • Reviving the concept of street-sellers and street-finders (occupations that existed during Victorian times) might help alleviate the buy, organize, overwhelm, dump and landfill cycles of modern consumer life.
  • Digital hoarding is a growing problem; a 2018 study found that digital hoarding behaviors are similar to physical hoarding in that those surveyed found it difficult to delete digital objects (pictures, music, video) and felt anxiety related to their accumulation.
  • Be mindful of what you leave behind; the author details, throughout her book, the struggle to clear out her deceased mother’s house, and ends with the idea that we must be thoughtful in the things we choose to live with for it is ultimately future generations that will face the consequences of maximalist consumption.

💯 Strong Lines

  • Lucy Worsley on middle-class anxiety in 17th century Britain: “What might be termed the ‘middle-class living room was full of superfluous objects, chosen for ornament rather than use yet cheap and not truly beautiful: a barricade of possessions intended to stabilize a precarious position in the world.”
  • On post-WWII consumer patriotism: “Americans trained to scrimp and save and buy war bonds had to be coaxed back into consumerism. The trick was to appeal to their sense of greater welfare.”
  • Children are trained to become “commodity fetishists”: “Beginning with the first lovey they receive as babies, children are taught to look at objects as sources of emotional stability.”
  • Minimalism as spirituality: “the hunger for spiritual cleansing…has gone hand in hand with the latest minimalist outbreak in the United States and beyond. Today’s minimalist gurus turn the quest for fewer things into something close to religion. Live simply so that others may simply live. The ghosts of thrift and order, of right living, persist in such sayings, handed down in my family and many others.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • From Victor Lebow’s article in the Journal of Retailing (an oft-quoted and succinct explanation of the connection between what we buy and who we imagine ourselves to be): Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns.

🍎 Ideas & Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

There were many additional resources cited here that could make for an interesting thematic arc or course of their own, especially those that connect clutter to environmental degradation, values systems, mental health, and materialism:

  • Matt Haig’s Notes on a Nervous Planet about the connection of anxiety to clutter in a world where there is “an excess of everything.”
  • William Morris’ “The Beauty of Life” speech (1880) connects the creation of art to clutter-free spaces: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Morris had profound influence on the Arts and Crafts movement (Mission Style) and drew on the tradition of medieval architecture that inspired him to reject Victorian manufacturing in favor of craftsmanship and quality materials.
  • Lucy Worsley’s entertaining and informative documentary series If These Walls Could Talk: A History of the Home (I watched this a few years ago and highly recommend it; here is Episode 1).
  • Stephen Smith’s “The American Dream and Consumer Credit” – a brief and fascinating history of the connection between the American Dream and installment-based credit plans from the Civil War to the present day.

4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

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1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

This stoic’s approach to time management argues that the ways we’ve been conditioned to “use” our time ultimately leave us exhausted and overwhelmed because there is an “unbridgeable gap” between what we’d ideally like to do with our lives and the realities of our finite existence on earth.

🖼️ Contexts

I was listening to an interview with Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work (among many other books), and he recommended this as a thought-provoking take on the productivity-industrial complex. I found it helpful to reframe some of my own life goals and get closer to the heart of what I truly would like to experience with whatever time I’m gifted.

🔑 Key Takeaways

  • Time shouldn’t be viewed as a resource. Once we commodify it, it can be exploited, wasted, bought, or sold. This connects with the “attention economy” but more deeply to our individual feelings and the self-loathing when feel when we don’t use it as “productively” as we should. Max Weber names this “idleness aversion” as one of the key components of the modern soul (in earlier times, our yearnings for productivity would have been yearnings for eternal life).
  • Existential overwhelm is the epidemic of our age. We have a greater sense today, as a result of the internet, of the variety of worthwhile experiences a human being can have. This “inexhaustible supply” of potentiality can lead to feelings of regret, overwhelm and decision paralysis.
  • Embrace being-towards-death. This idea, developed by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, requires that we fully acknowledge our limitations and come to embrace the idea that we cannot depend on a single moment in the future (because none of us know if we shall indeed live to experience it).
  • Procrastinators and productivists are two sides of the same coin. The former believe they have all the time in the world to do a task, while the latter believe they can cram all the tasks in the world into a finite period of time. Each is in denial of mortality.
  • All “distractions” relieve us of the discomfort of confronting our own limited control. Zen Buddhists say all human suffering is connected to our efforts to resist paying full attention to life as it is (wanting circumstance to be different from what it is) or wishing we had more control in the process.
  • Plans are just thoughts. We need plans as tools to construct meaningful lives – but take them to be frameworks for exerting control over the future when all they really can be is “a present-moment statement of intent.”
  • Hobbies are subversive. In a world where every activity is a means to an end, hobbies are a refreshing antidote (he also says they should be a “little embarassaing” in order to qualify as real hobbies).

💯 Strong Lines

  • On secular modernity: “When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life.”
  • On time management systems: “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”
  • On saying no to the things you love: “You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”
  • On the illusion of creating a perfect anything: “Something—our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events, and over the actions of other people—will always render our creation less than perfect.
  • On worry loops and anxiety spirals: “Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again.”
  • On capitalism: “One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit.”
  • On digital nomadism: “…every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s. The digital nomad’s lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

  • On Settling, Robert Goodin’s treatise on the connection between settling and striving (you cannot become successful at anything without first settling on that thing)
  • I loved this quote by Simone de Beauvoir that was shared about how chance and choice converge in life:

I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement—why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?… The penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the birth of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about. And it is chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.

  • Most parenting advice focuses on the future adult the child will become (either the most happy, most successful, most economically productive) and our assumption is that a child’s purpose is to grow up rather than to be a child.
  • If you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself (this applies almost everywhere—creative work, relationship troubles, politics, parenting).
  • Cosmic insignificance therapy. In the grand scheme of things, all we can hope for is a modestly meaningful life given the minute significance we actually have.

🍎 Ideas & Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

  • Loved the critique of the “big rocks” metaphor (which is often used in the classroom and elsewhere for goal-setting activities) on page 73: “The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks. It’s that there are too many rocks—and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar.”
  • “Attention is the beginning of devotion” – a whole different way to think about the attention economy starting with this line from Mary Oliver’s Upstream (excerpt here) and with the author’s recollection of a moment on a wind-swept Scottish beach, pg. 97.
  • Jennifer Roberts’ assignment on patience (as described on page 174)
  • This description of the writing process (from Robert Boice): “It was precisely the students’ impatient desire to hasten their work beyond its appropriate pace, to race on to the point of completion, that was impeding their progress. They couldn’t stand the discomfort that arose from being forced to acknowledge their limited control over the speed of the creative process—and so they sought to escape it, either by not getting down to work at all, or by rushing headlong into stressful all-day writing binges, which led to procrastination later on, because it made them learn to hate the whole endeavor.”

Five Questions (starting on pg. 220:

  1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
    • James Hollis recommends this version at key decisions in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?”
  2. What would you do differently with your time, today, if you knew in your bones that salvation was never coming—that your standards had been unreachable all along, and that you’ll therefore never manage to make time for all you hoped you might?
  3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
  4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
  5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

Life Advice (starting on pg. 235)

  1. Adopt a fixed-volume approach to productivity. Keep two lists – one “open” (with all the tasks you could ever want or hope to do) and one “closed” that can only have 4, or 6 or 10 entries at a time. Or, set boundaries for work times. Only work as much as you can within those constraints.
  2. Serialize, serialize, serialize. Focus on one project at a time.
  3. Decide, in advance, what to fail at.
  4. Focus on what you’ve already completed.
  5. Consolidate your caring.
  6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology.
  7. Seek out novelty in the mundane.
  8. Be a “researcher” in relationships.
  9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity.
  10. Practice doing nothing.