Writing | The Practical Dilettante

Selling Education (Part 1)

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Seonaid

As I may have mentioned, I have spent much of the last 8 months immersed in marketing courses. There’s a knack to marketing, but it’s not rocket science… and I would know.(1) It makes perfect sense. Figure out what you have that’s worth selling, to whom, and how to find and contact those people that will go, “ooh! ooh! That’s exactly what I’m looking for! I’m so glad you found me!” and shower you with money and compliments. (That’s called “social proof”, BTW.)

At any rate, one day I was sitting with my Book of Many Questions spread in front of me, and it said, “Clear benefits that you offer: ” And I froze, like a deer caught in headlights. Benefits. Of education that doesn’t come with a degree that allows you to participate in the ongoing education process… what is the intrinsic benefit of education? What are the instrumental benefits? What is education for, anyway? (1b)

Fortunately (I guess), I have already spent several years considering that set of questions. So I had a starting point, at least. (2)

Let me start at the top of my one-page mindmap that resulted from “Thinking about Education: In which I attempt to answer the question, why should anybody pay me to teach them something in the first place?”, (3) on which is written “Heuristics” and “Hermeneutics”. I invoke the sociological concept of “ideology” as a failure to recognize that a worldview is a temporary model, an interpretation (if you will) of the universe (the text). It includes a portion that compares Fractals, Emergence, and Entropy to the transmission and memory of stories, and George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory. Human needs appear on a spectrum from “staying alive” to “being whole”, there is a comparison of consciousness and reactivity… Myth. Spiritual Materialism. Communities of practice. Problems of translation. “Physicists speak math.” Neil Postman’s point that as teachers we must necessarily sacrifice comprehensiveness for coherence… and it ends with the following statement:

The purpose of education is to communicate (as clearly as we can) the stories and models that (in our experience) provide effective means of predicting and influencing the patterns of the universe (1) of which we are a part, (2) which we can affect, and (3) to which we are subject.

And then I sat back, and thought, “Well, then, what does it mean that we’ve made it a private good?” (4) and then I went to Toronto for a week and wrote poems instead of coming up with an answer.

To be continued…

1. That joke is one of the fringe benefits of a physics education.
1b. I also don’t know who my target market is. Really, what I’ve learned is that I don’t think like a marketer. Or possibly that marketing is harder than rocket science. Or maybe that I’m better at rocket science than I am at marketing.
2. Honestly? This would be easier if I knew less. Then I’d be able to take a side, dig my heels in, and puff smoke at anyone who took a contrary position.
3. You are in no way expected to follow and/or believe the free-association that follows.
4. As you can see, I wandered away from the marketing problem and back to the one that I was writing about five years ago, which falls into the “important, but not urgent” category.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: education, work, Writing | 1 Comment »

On Genius, Enlightenment and The Voices

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Seonaid

There is a Buddhist fable about a traveller who arrives at an enlightened sage. “Please, master,” he says. “Please. I want to know how to become enlightened.”

“Are you sure?” asks the sage.

“Oh, yes. Absolutely.”

“Are you willing to go through whatever it takes?”

“Anything. I’ll do anything.”

The sage looked him in the eye, decided that it was called for, and immediately turned into a demon. For the rest of the man’s days he was pursued by this demon, who hit him incessantly with a stick and screamed, “NOW! NOW! NOW!”

I came across an article this week on Alexandra Franzen’s fabulous blog, Unicorns for Socialism. In this piece, she takes on the idea of genius as something you are, and reframes it (with reference to Malcolm Gladwell) as a state of being passionately in love with something.

This reminded me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk (in which she described the success of Eat, Pray, Love as “freakish”, and admitted that it left her terrified, because, hey, what do you do for an encore???) She suggested that we would be better off thinking of genius as the Romans did, not as something you are, but as something you have. The Genius, The Daemon, The Muse. That thing outside yourself, and also inside, that grabs your consciousness and demands that you write, make art, pursue your question until all hours of the day and night, sometimes at the cost of family, friendships, and your physical needs. Do THIS. it demands, and you do. Maybe kicking and screaming, maybe resentfully, maybe with a loud rational voice questioning the wisdom of quitting your 6-figure job to become an elementary school teacher, but you DO it.

I have one of those.

It feels a lot like that demon in the first story. It is very concerned with ethics, impact, and honesty. It is not forgiving of transgressions. It shakes me awake at 3 in the morning and says, “Get up! Write this down. Now!”

“Oh,” I mumble. “It’s late. I’m tired. I’ll do it in the morning.”

“No, you’ll forget! Get up! Get up! Do it, NOW!”

So I do. Because it has never been wrong. Yes, I will forget by morning. Yes, they are always the thoughts I didn’t know were kicking around in there, like they have gelled in my sleep. (1) And yes, when I get up the next morning, I am always surprised by what I wrote, and glad I did it… although tired. So, so tired. The last month has been like that a lot. Pulling over to the side of the road to scratch things down, calling people to ask them questions when it strikes me so that I don’t forget, and falling into bed at the end of the day, exhausted, at 9 p.m.

There’s another voice, though, and it is sinister. It sounds similar, worries about the same things, concerns itself with my accomplishments, but it does so with a nasty little twist. Whereas the one is merely unconcerned with trivialities like food, water, and sleep, the other has that oily tone to its “encouragement”. “Do this… or you will be a complete and utter failure.” It holds me back (“Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say! Just go get a job like everybody else does. What makes you think you’re so special?”) and then blames me for listening to it (“Oh, you see. You were thinking about that 10 years ago, and now it’s a New York Times bestseller, and what have you done with the last 10 years?!?”) It is absolutely and utterly incoherent, and seems to exist for the sole purpose of destroying me.

Why do we even have that voice?

What could possibly be the evolutionary benefit of a part of consciousness that makes you sick with self-loathing?

Yes, I know the solution: stop listening to that voice/those voices. They don’t even make any sense. But this is so much easier said than done. One teacher taught us to personify them and address them directly, calling them The Inner Critic. (“How,” I ask rhetorically, “did I wind up with an anarcho-capitalist in my suite of inner critics?”) Another calls them The Monsters and suggests that we recognize that they are trying to protect us (from humiliation, from rejection, from making mistakes). I sit in meditation, learning to disidentify. “I am not my thoughts. They do not mean anything. They are not the real world, they are an inaccurate story about the real world. I do not know the future, or what will happen if I take this action.”

The trick, I think, is to learn to tell these two apart. The Genius, although caring little for my creature comforts, personal goals, or professional success, does nothing to undermine me. “She” (because it is always my own voice that I hear, regardless of what it is saying) merely wants me to do it all, do it now, and get it done. The task itself is the driving force. Those other voices want… Well, they don’t really want much of anything. They just want me not to do whatever it is. They are the anti-genius. They are the voices of silence, conformity, placid enoughness, and they want, more than anything, for me to Just Shut Up. Be Invisible. Stay Down Where Nobody Can See You. Draw No Attention. And if they have to resort to reminding me of all the times that I listened to them in the past, and use that as proof that I’m meant to Stay Down and Shut Up, so be it. Coherence is not one of their strong suits.

And what, you may ask, does this have to do with enlightenment?

I’m not sure. But I hear that somewhere along the path, we must learn to stop listening to those voices of the anti-genius.

This is the calling: Keep Showing Up. There are thoughts that need thinking and words that need writing, and paintings that need painting, and songs that need singing.

I know that I am positing a Numinal world here; I know that it is not compatible with my rational scientific training. But it is compatible with my experience. The things I have said and done and written that mattered most, when I opened my mouth and the words poured out, and they were exactly what the person needed to hear at that time, or when I looked at something when I was finished and thought, “Where did that come from?”… those things feel like they came through me, not from me. I cannot make ideas. I can only express them. If they are forming in my mind, unbidden, what part do “I” have in this? Who am I, really? I’m the one with the hands, and the voice, and the body. And there is something in/beside/through me that wants speaking. So I speak it. (2)

Because I could really use a break from this three in the morning stuff.

1. I once learned a difficult quantum mechanics derivation in my sleep. (Time independent perturbation theory. True story.) It is a very strange thing, this brain.
2. And then hit “Publish” even in the agony of self-doubt. And get back to my other job, because dinner ain’t gonna make itself.

Filed under: Essays and Musings, WorldView | Tagged: genius, good-enough, meditation, philosophy, work, Writing | 2 Comments »

Don’t Link to Your Blog. Ever.

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Seonaid

(Anita: Don’t read this. It’ll just piss you off. This warning is only for Anita. And it’s only on account of you don’t want me to worry so much what other people think. I don’t think it is a generally pissing-off kind of post.)

I have recently started hanging out a fair amount on Google+. I like G+ a lot; the structure of the posts with threading, and the ability to make and find public posts makes it a good place to meet new folks, find new readers, and find new conversational partners. It’s great for that. I go there to look for interesting writers and to post my own links. That’s what I’m there for.

So, yesterday, one of the Big Names (that is to say, somebody whose followers run into the thousands who gets referred to a lot by the other Big Names) that I follow told the people that she follows that she didn’t grant them permission to “pitch” her on their social networks, and said that she wanted us not to post links to our blogs, because if she wanted to read them, she’d be reading them already. Note that this was not a request not to send her links directly, but not to even post them to our public streams because that is like standing on a street corner trying to get people to come into our restaurants. If she wanted the food, she’d come in, already. Then she asked, “What does this bring up in you?”

So, before I go on, let me put this in context. This is part of a wider, “Blogging is dead,” zeitgeist that seems to be developing among the well-established:

Blogging lacks intimacy. People’s posts are either generic or stop short of what they could be if only the writers weren’t feeling confined by their social context. Real writers are sending directly to the inbox, only via permission, and all this blogging people are doing (so 2010) is messing up our public spaces.

Oh. And (from another writer) if people aren’t sharing your writing, it’s probably because it sucks, and if you just keep doing it for a few more years so you’ve had enough life experience and you learn to actually write and have some ideas, then maybe it will be interesting enough for me to bother sending a link your way. (This last one was from a twenty-something online-something expert. He’s single. He travels the world solo. He doesn’t blog any more. It doesn’t meet his needs.)

What does this bring up in me??? 275 posts later I’ve got 25 subscribers and now I’m not even supposed to try and find any new readers? What it brings up in me? I suck. Nobody wants to read my writing. If I were any good, I’d be “successful” by now. How dare I continue to pollute the world with my ideas??? I’ve been compared to a huckster flogging bad food that she crosses the street to avoid. I felt sucker punched. I felt like throwing up.

So, yeah. It brought stuff up.

And then (after several minutes of “I suck” angst) I thought, “How dare she tell me that I’m not allowed to offer my ideas to the world in a public forum? One in which she can make me disappear with a single click of the mouse. If she needs quiet that badly, why is she following all of us???”

The thing is, she writes about non-violent communication and boundaries.

Meditate. Breathe deeply. Talk it out for several hours. Non-violent communication and boundaries. She has the right to ask for something to meet a perceived need in herself. I have the right to say, “No.” I don’t even have to justify my, “no,” but in this case, I will. She has it entirely within her control whether she sees my public posts or not. I don’t have to do anything to change that. In my perception, she has made up a rule about public behaviour, and then applied it to the world around her, and then told us that we are rude for breaking it. I think that her asking me (us) to change my (our) (arguably perfectly reasonable, possibly even intended) behaviour for her comfort crosses a boundary into a presumed intimacy. THIS is why I’m so upset. At least, it is my best guess of why I’m so upset. I’m sure that several hours of therapy could add layers upon layers of upsettedness, but I’ve already spent an entire day on this, and I need to move on now. (This has spawned another entire post about whether blogging is, in fact, dead, or whether some of the super-bloggers, having already reaped its rewards, are maybe not in the best position to declare what the rest of us should be doing… but I digress.)

My online writing and social media use meets some of my needs for social and intellectual connection. I want to talk about strange esoteric things and explore challenging intellectual constructs. I don’t have employment in any of the careers I was trained for. I have three kids. I live in a rural community, which means that I have lots of access to personal interactions, that they know me at the post office, and that the new school principal already knew what my son’s extracurricular interests were. I’m pretty happy with my life. But it does somewhat limit my opportunities to stay up drinking beer and talking about… y’know. Grad school pub stuff. I get my grad school pub stuff by meeting strangers on the internet and striking up a conversation… like in grad school, but with less hand waving. And less beer. And less hand-waving-beer-sloshing. If they (the friends I haven’t met yet) aren’t sharing their links, I will never have the chance to meet them. And if I don’t share my links, my poor little baby ideas will sit here languishing, unread and unloved. Poor ideas. This makes me sad.

Fly little ideas. Make friends! Find other ideas! Make new ideas. (I kind of live in a universe where ideas have form, and it is my responsibility to nourish them the same way I do plants and pets.) And if you don’t want to see my ideas, please look somewhere else, rather than asking me to shut up, no matter how politely you do it.

‘K. Thanks. Bye.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: blogging, discipline, ideas, self, work, Writing | 33 Comments »

The Story That Needs Telling

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Seonaid

I signed up for the Trust30 writing prompts for the month of June. The first prompt was this:

“We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

(Author: Gwen Bell)”

And so I wrote this (If it causes you concern for my mental health, please bear in mind that the month of May was probably the most out of balance I’ve been in several years.)

“I never managed to do what I was “supposed” to, but it seems I always managed to do what was needed… eventually. I think my biggest mistake was thinking that it was never enough, impressive enough. I wanted to be Virginia Woolf, or Maude Barlowe, or Vandana Shiva or… somebody. I wanted to feel like it mattered, that somehow I had turned up.

I’m sorry I spent my life trying to be somebody else. Seems that what mattered really were the moments, not the accomplishments. So I never wrote an article that was published in a major magazine, and I never managed to get something on the CBC. I guess my ideas are out there, somewhere, in dribs and drabs. Most people’s are.

I admit I am disappointed, though. I thought it would be different, this life thing. Turns out, maybe, maybe that what I needed was a lot more nothing in my life. Less striving, more sitting. Never got the hang of these schedule things – just another bit to fail at in my opinion. Best not to make plans, that way you won’t be disappointed. Also, in my experience, people always put too much into the schedule, not enough down time, not enough sitting, too much doing. The world needs more yoga, less driving.

Some of my best moments were the nothing ones. Snuggling on the couch, watching the clouds, not even reading a book, not even meditating. Just… nothing. Those were when I felt most truly like I got it. There weren’t enough of those.

Meditation, yoga, snuggling, sitting in the green, creating. All the rest was born of desperation to be seen, Ozymandias-like, I suppose.

Virginia Woolf ended badly, anyway. And I’m going out with a cat on my lap, wind in the trees, and chickens ’round the corner. Far better than a pocket full of rocks.”

And that’s when the timer went. So that is the story I would have left, had it all in fact come to a conclusion while I was sitting in my deck chair this morning.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: good-enough, life, PostADay2011, self, truth, virginia woolf, Writing | 5 Comments »

Poem: Advice from the Inner Critic

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Seonaid

Advice from the Inner Critic

Love?!?

Love’s been done to death.
Nobody’s had anything new to say
In 60 generations.

And how do you plan to avoid
The cheese-traps,
Running mouse-like through
The maze of metaphors?

No. Best to steer clear,
Dance around the edges.

Leave love to the experts.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: love, poem, PostADay2011, self, Writing | 2 Comments »

On Pickles, Particle Physics, and Work-Life Balance

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Seonaid

When I started writing this post, I felt pretty good. I had a great day. I made the pickles that have been sitting in brine for the last 5 days. I wrote about nuclear physics for 2 hours, refreshed my memory on alpha and beta decay, and came up with a good analogy. I had a coffee at an actual coffee shop. I made wine in the morning with my husband, and cookies in the afternoon with my son. I even made it to meditation this evening. It felt spot on.

But when I sat down to write about it, I found myself coming again and again to the same question: if I can do so many things, why can’t I make a decent income? Or, truth be told, any income at all? So I’ve thrown out about 900 words on the topic of work-life balance. Because I don’t know what the answer is. And even though I was willing to call writing my work when I started this post, I can’t write any more this evening, because I’m having a serious case of The Frauds.

Filed under: Day-to-Day | Tagged: discipline, PostADay2011, self, Writing | 4 Comments »

Off My Game

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Seonaid

I keep starting new posts, and they get so big and out of control and problematic, and I’ve written myself into a corner and I can’t find my way back out and, OH!

It is the sheer amount of input. I’m overwhelmed, trying to make sense of natural disasters, a flood of articles sent my way about violence against women and children, and whether I still have the right to worry about the ongoing need to simply maintain my home against the encroachments of wind, water, and time. I note the horrible state of the roads around here, which have been left unrepaired for years, and ponder deferred maintenance in a wealthy state as a symptom of decline, part of our larger deficit to later generations. It also reminds me of my own leaky house, unplanted seeds, and the ubiquitous “check engine” light, which is now on in all three cars temporarily in my care. The disorder in the broader world is mirrored in my home, in my life, in my own experience of entropy, and I don’t know where to start in my defense against it.

Add to that an inability to turn away from the ongoing coverage of the nuclear fires, radiation releases, meltdowns (or not meltdowns – the exact story is still developing). This is not due to a turning away from the human suffering in the existing disaster (as one person suggested on my Twitter feed) but due to a desperate attempt to keep my mind around an ongoing slow-motion potential disaster, which was averted… No! It wasn’t! Yes! Maybe?! Is is a triumph of containment or the second biggest nuclear accident in history (probably both). What does it say that this story is playing out at all? What does it mean?

And thus is writing thwarted. Not writing, as in: the production of words on screen/page. But writing, as in: coherent narrative, finished product, story… meaning. Rage against entropy. 300 words on Despair, Virginia Woolf, and my own battle with depression, 650 on the presence of contaminants in our environment, and how we are made of the very stuff we eat and breathe (thus suggesting, perhaps, we should stop poisoning it). 20 lines on this, a snippet on that, captured, evanescent meaning, the stuff of dreams. Like star stuff. Like life. Slipping through my fingers like so much melted music…

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: blogging, PostADay2011, truth, Writing | Leave a Comment »

Word Wrangling

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Seonaid

I’m having a weird high-tech/low-tech moment. Here I am, curled up in an easy chair in front of a woodstove with a cat in my lap, and writing. But not with a pen and paper; here I am, writing on a laptop that is connected to the rest of the world only through the power of mysterious waves emanating from a device in the office at the other end of the building. And this is the rhythm of my life: chop wood, turn on computer. Cook dinner, order spices through internet. Snuggle child to sleep, check on situation in Egypt, watch Monsanto’s inexorable slide towards controlling the entire food supply.

It has been a week of writer’s block, mainly. It’s not that I have run out of things to say; it is that ideas run over, tumbling against one another, unruly thoughts, each demanding the largest part of my attention… until I sit down to capture them, when they scurry away, pell-mell, to be replaced by whims and the internet. Ever so much easier to read somebody else’s thoughts than to try to pin down these frisky critters flung about all over the tableau of my psyche. Take this post, for example. I was going to write about how my life is so much less automated than it used to be when I realized the absurdity of the situation. Well, yes, we have to cover the windows and bring in firewood. We have to open and close the chicken coop on a daily basis, and clear the solar panels to keep the computer charged (although we have a completely functional electrical grid hooked up to the plug below my desk.) Yet the knowledge of the world is at my fingertips, I can see/hear the music I want, catch snippets of movies, confirm precise quotes, look up whatever book arrived at the edge of my awareness and place an order for it without leaving my desk. This is a strange and ridiculous juxtaposition that lays waste to my original thesis, but illustrates my problem with rampant ideas.

I have over a dozen posts in draft, but I can’t quite make them work for any number of reasons. Most of them are slippery things, playing just around the edge of my abilities and knowledge. Big questions, thorny questions, questions of human motivation, social construction of knowledge, science and religion, race relations in Canada. Arguments and explorations that turn on subtleties of language, precise definitions, and making clear my assumptions… Is that claim too sweeping? Under what circumstances might this be true? How is class/privilege tied up in this issue? Can I call him a prick without being crass?

There is a math joke about two professors. One professor is working on a proof, and he has written it on the board in his office. His colleague comes by, looks at the board, and says, “Oh! It’s obvious.” The first professor sits down at his desk to think about it. Every day for a week, he comes in, sits down and looks at the proof, ponders it, considers, writes down a few lines and goes back home. At the end of the week, he smacks himself on the forehead. “It is obvious!”

I had a similar conversation with an English professor this summer. He said that by the time you’ve worked with ideas long enough to integrate them into your thinking, they become so obvious that they no longer seem worth reporting. Only, he also pointed out, this reasoning is flawed. Clearly they now are “obvious” to you, but the ways in which they fit into your own worldview and the ways in which they are new contributions can get lost in the process of thinking them through. Which is why, right this moment, I’m working on showing up. Writing, whether it works or not. Thinking, whether it is true or not. Struggling with the words, getting them down… having faith that they will eventually hang together. Or the deadline will hit, and they will have to do.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: blogging, PostADay2011, self, Writing | 4 Comments »

Writing as a Gratitude Practice

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Seonaid

I walked into my own “library” last fall, before I started writing in earnest, and standing there, I was overcome with a moment of gratitude for those who have come before, and who have had the kindness to write it all down. I realized that I have before me more of the vastness of human knowledge than could ever be available to one student, no matter how many years they listened to a single master. Burnham’s Celestial Handbook stands here in conversation with Jorge Luis Borges, Douglas Adams, and all of Jane Austen’s novels. Without leaving my house (or turning on the computer) I can read Celtic myths and legends, design a solar house, or learn 51 new games of cards, all because somebody cared enough to compile their knowledge, tell their story, or spend years in dusty libraries and/or dangerous travel and then write it down so the rest of us would have a record of it.

This, to me, was a great moment of revelation. It was the turning point from thinking of my own writing as a pursuit bound by ego, to making of it an offering. I had these experiences. I have had the opportunity to read all these people who came before, and had the chance to spend years of my life in formal education, learning to make some sense of it all. This sense I make, this is the best I can give back to the world. It is my way of saying to my thousands of teachers, “Thank you for writing. Thanks for your books, and your articles, and your blog posts, and your artwork, and your conversations, and for sharing your meaning.”

Since I’m feeling completely overwhelmed with positive feelings right now, I will end with my blessing for a winter evening, that began as a consideration of what I want for my children: May you overcome challenges. May you experience moments of pure joy. And may you come to know that you have done some good in the world.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: gratitude, PostADay2011, Writing | 2 Comments »

What is True?

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Seonaid

Follow your dreams! Do what you love and the money will follow! The universe has a plan.

What makes you so special? Everybody else just sucks it up and goes to work. The universe is meaningless.

There is a God, and we know what He wants. There is no God. There might be a god, but we have no way of knowing what he wants from us. There are many gods, but they are all manifestations of The One.

You are already enlightened, you just haven’t realized it yet. To think that you could become enlightened in this lifetime is the height of ego.

When we live our lives bombarded with contradictory messages, how do we find our path? How do we find a story that is consistent with our experiences, makes internal sense, and provides us with a way to navigate the vagaries of life? How do we decide what is true?

These seem like such abstract and philosophical questions that to spend time with them is a luxury. Aren’t they best left to undergraduates who have time to drink coffee and pontificate, and the small fraction of perpetual students who manage to parlay those skills into a paying job. What is true?!? Who has time to worry about that? We need to pay all these bills, run all these errands, and get the kids over to see the grandparents before we get another scathing phone call about neglect. Maybe when we are older, and the kids leave home, and the mortgage is paid off. Maybe when we get a permanent job. Maybe when we make partner. But surely we don’t have time to think about that right now.

Yet it is ultimately the most practical of questions, because how we deal with our day-to-day tasks depends on how we answer that question. What do we prioritize? What do we spend our money on? Who do we spend time with? Who do we listen to for advice? Did we even have kids? It is, in truth, the most important question.

I don’t know what is true. I have staggered a path through various degrees of certainty, and I have realized that I know less and less. If I keep learning, soon I will know nothing. But in exchange for knowledge, I have gained possibility.

So. Some things that I currently suspect to be true:

Each of us is a meaning-making part of the universe. Each of us has a (profoundly limited) model of the world that we carry around inside our head/minds/mind-body. Every moment we use our models to predict what comes next: How will that person behave? Should I eat that? Will buying this (thing/stock/degree/house/wedding) make me happy? Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe?

The safety ping is on all the time. It’s like echolocation in bats. We navigate the world looking for Safe. We compromise, negotiate, fail, modify our images of ourselves and others, with so much power on the Safety ping. What is true? Whatever will keep us safe. Don’t trust. Don’t risk. Follow these rules, and you will have the life/love/job you have always wanted. Or, risk everything for love! Chuck it all and move to Tahiti!

Well, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you follow all the rules, and everything happens the way it was supposed to, and you get to be a doctor with a nice house, and a perfect partner who cooks dinner, and well dressed children. (That’s the story, isn’t it? Isn’t that what passes for Cinderella these days?) And if it hasn’t worked, you just have to try harder. Or follow the rules better. Or go to church and pray more. Or give up all that praying and become an atheist. Be more sacrificing. Or work more hours. Something.

I know people who have tried all of those things. All of them. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. What is true?

Let me go out on a limb here. I don’t know what is true, but I know what isn’t. The Truth (if there is One) is not any one of those provisional models. The fictional version of your partner that you carry around in your head? Not true. Your explanation of what your boss was thinking at such and such a time? Not true. Yet they have the ring of truth. They are functional. Our greatest mistake is that we mistake our functional models for truth… and then insist that other people adopt the same ones to prove it.

Don’t believe me? Check out the comments section on, oh… everything. Parenting articles on major magazines will do to start. Nasty, cruel, mudslinging, name calling… all in the pursuit of convincing the world of one’s rightness… of the truth. The one who gets to be ‘right’ is the one who spins the most convincing story or is simply the loudest. This is no way of finding truth.

What is true? I don’t know. I have wandered the world in search of truth, and I have come across stories instead. I have heard Richard Dawkins and his ilk dismiss enormous fractions of the human experience as mere delusion. I have have heard true believers wave away the problem of catastrophes with “mysterious ways”, karma, or attraction of negative vibrations. I have heard Thomas King tell me that “the truth about stories is that’s all we are.” I have heard Hamlet tell me that we don’t kill ourselves in the face of it all because we are afraid of the undiscovered country. And I have heard Camus (and Pema Chodron) tell us that we needed to encounter the absurdity of it all and then keep going anyway. The Wisdom of No Escape. Here we are, not quite sure what we’re up to. Trying not to make too much of a mess of it all. Telling a story or two in hopes that they will help somebody else. Spreading the memes that look likely to lead to the type of world we want to inhabit. Hoping they might be… true.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: philosophy, PostADay2011, truth, Writing | 4 Comments »