Tiled With Pentagons

(With thanks for foundational conceptual engineering to ZM.) Your day seems to be going fine. So does your week. But you find yourself constantly feeling behind, constantly putting out a fire right before having to dash off to the next fire to put out; in a fragile state, like if anything at all goes wrong, you'll break. You've got too many plates spinning. You're smart, you're competent, you're skilled, and you're motivated. So what's going wrong? What are you missing? There's something specific but elusive that you need, and the word for it is "Slack". No, not the overgrown Discord-like that's metastasized into the way all communications in your company get run, the abstract resource, the rationalist term of art. Put succinctly, it's uncommitted capacity. It's the breathing room, the bit of extra reserves that let you keep slightly clearer of the edge of your safety envelope. It's the margin that lets you absorb a shock withou...

There is a place in Brooklyn, in New York State just outside Manhattan; a little plot of land deep in a Jewish neighborhood.  I know it, because a piece of me is buried there; a piece that existed long before I was born. There is a bit of mythology in my family, you see: I share most of my name with my great-grandfather - the one in my direct paternal line, the Jewish side of my family. Because I resemble him so closely in temperament - an aesthete, an epicure, an ideologue, a traveller, a polyglot - the story goes that I am his reincarnation, giving this whole "living" thing a second crack. I've traded an MD in internal medicine for a PhD in math, and I can't enjoy pistachio ice cream anymore, but I'm in better health and don't have to contend with a world war. So once a decade, I join my father in a visit to the buried part of me whose nameplate I share and thus inherited, right down to the "Dr.".   I visited it on a fine Saturday much like this on...

(Epistemic status: Painfully well-tested. For anyone who's ever had to navigate a reality they wished were different.)  "What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived." Eugene Gendlin said that, and I find myself turning it over and over in my head, especially lately. It's not because I like it - though I do - but because it's one of those chewy crystallized chunks of insight you can gnaw on forever and keep getting nourishing juice out, like some kind of  everlasting candied ginger of rationality. It cuts straight to the heart of how to stay oriented when something important about the world is so much worse than you wished it were. The operant phrase there is "interacted with". Not "observed", not "waited out", not "endured", and certa...

(This one's just plain weird; a stream-of-consciousness meditation in deep time. Written while riding back from a long and interesting day spent with SP full of sunshowers. Thanks, SP.)     ...And I found myself staring out at the skyline as the sun set, feeling a wistful sort of emotion I had and have no name for, wondering whether it really might be beautiful on fire - "all twisted metal stretching upwards, everything washed in a thin orange haze" - and thinking about how permanent concrete was; how solid the pourable stone was once set, how it was so durable and so literally castable stone that cement mixers must hurry along on their way, lest their cargo sit still for too long and cure solid, becoming a total loss, unless you felt like going in for days with a jackhammer. So concrete can't burn, actually, any more than the stone of the hill beneath me could burn. But hillsides aren't permanent, nor even mountains, it occurred to me - "until Mount Baektu w...

(With apologies to the Seattle Garages.) Much has been made of two major ways of relating to personal identity, neither one better than the other, and both of them seemingly innate. There's episodic identity, where you consider yourself a different person altogether from who you were in past years, and diachronic identity, where you consider yourself to be the very same person in all respects to who you were long ago. Naturally, there are in-between ways to see yourself: the timescale of episodes can vary widely, trending towards diachronicity at the long end; alternately, the starkness of the episodic cuts can be softened, with each new self being a new version rather than a complete renewal. For myself, I tend towards the diachronic side, but not completely. When I think about the course of my life to date, I tend to divide it into rough eras or arcs; I've been the same person throughout, with mostly the same core drives and motivations and capacities and interests, but have ...

(Epistemic status: Yet another post that I hope dearly that you only dimly comprehend, but if you understand it all to well, this is for you. In particular, for LW.) There is a place beyond sadness, beyond grief, beyond despair. In the lightless depths of that place, there is no meaning, no joy, and precious little sensation. Food turns to ash in the mouth, and the body feels wooden and alien, and living each day feels like an unbearable burden. If you find yourself there, know that I sometimes find myself there, too. One thing to internalize: you must lose hope, and endure all the same. To those who come again and again to that abyss, to hope is to stare into the sun and be blinded by it; to desire is to hold fast to thorns and bleed. So don't do that, not for now, not until you drift back up or claw your way out. Just be stable and keep space for that day on which you can live again. Gather your energy; scrape it together and stopper it tightly inside yourself against the corrosi...

(Epistemic status: I hope for your sake that this whole post is near-incomprehensible to you. Nonetheless it'll make more sense if you've read "33. Your Heart Will Go On" and "37. Seven-ish Emotions From My Culture".) (With thanks to Mutemath.) There's a very specific emotion that you personally may not be able to feel. If you can, you'll know it after I've described it, and I feel for you. It's one of those things where (e.g.) you ask if anyone's ever been so hungry they were nauseous, and you get answers of either "yeah, I hate it when that happens" else "no, what the heck?!"s and horrified stares. It goes like this, that nameless feeling: you think about something you love, or something you want very badly. Your mind's eye can't stop staring at it, unblinkingly. It's so beautiful, so real, so alive to you, but so far away. You're tearing up? Oh, no, you're tearing up, and something hurts deep in ...

(Epistemic status: There sure do seem to be a lot of folks from other Everett branches who washed up in this one, aren't there?) It's not just words and sayings I bring from the culture and the [counterhistory] I surely wasn't actually drawn from, it's emotions as well. In particular, they're emotions which we would consider every bit as fundamental as irritation or delight or disdain are to American culture. Unfortunately, I don't have good terms for any of them, so I'll just have to describe them carefully. 1.  You know the thing about "do it scared, do it messy, but do it"? An emotion that corresponds passably well to that. Or for another much closer point of reference, the sort of thing Luigi Mario seems to be experiencing constantly in the Luigi's Mansion series - sobbing and terrified and still sucking up one ghost to wail on another one with. Driving forward progress driven by a terror of stopping, with a side of near-total [emotional-co...

Other people have written about the necessity of grieving losses - everything from dead relatives to missed opportunities, from ruined years to sharply ended relationships. Here's a mental motion I have found to help keep the process moving when the grief might otherwise uselessly paralyze you. First, notice the feeling of grief as it arises, likely by chance - this is a technique best suited to those times when grief for the loss arises spontaneously, as it often does. (There is a model of grieving where there is a ball bouncing inside a box, and a button within it of shrinking size, and when the ball hits the button, you feel grief. This is a false but useful model: this technique is for when the ball hits the button.)  Locate where in your body you feel the grief. Maybe it's in your chest, or your heart - it sure is for me. Maybe it's in your neck, or your guts. Wherever it lives in you, feel the pain and loss sharply; concentrate on it. This will likely bring you to t...

When I talk about metaphorical hearts - or, if you like, in My Culture's Language and Idiom - what that means is not something necessarily about love, but something about desire or longing. (Love - affection and things akin to romantic love and limerence - lives in the liver, along with care and worry; sometimes also in the lungs, with action and expression and centeredness.) It's about what feels alive to you, what feels innately appealing, what strikes directly at your core, your sense of self, your motivation and drive. Crucially, the broader context of that idiom is visibility; think "wearing your heart on your sleeve", or prying your chest open. With that in mind, I'll define four attitudes or actions that extend that sense of "heart": showing your heart, hiding your heart, denying your heart, and trampling on your heart. To "show your heart" means to pursue your desires freely and openly, and to be frank about the things that you want - a...