Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings (from the tundra)…

1) Climate. Why is it no longer called “Global Warming”?

2) Stroll. I could walk to Toronto in a straight line. 57 miles, direct. Except for the fact that it’s presently -3 degrees.

See #2.

3) Godwink. Someone who comes into a place or a life at exactly the time their arrival was needed and makes everything better. First encountered in reference to Joe Madden, new manager of the Cubs.

I like that. Gonna ponder it a bit while I stay on the lookout for Godwinks in the wild.

4) Paleo. “I’m on a low duck-fat diet.” –Kim Gordon

Now that’s just funny. It reminds me of a line in “The House of God” when the street savvy intern who saved the life of a chocking patient by removing the foodstuff obstructing the airway. When asked by his supervisor how he would treat the patient going forward:

“Well darling, that’s easy. I’m putting her on a low broccoli diet.”

Sonic Youth in the gym for me today.

5) Culture. “When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you’re responsible for what spawns in the vacuum.” –Leigh Alexander

Nature abhors a vacuum. In all ways and in all places. While I have never seen this immutable law applied to group culture that only speaks to my own lack of imagination and insight, and by extension Alexander’s surfeit of both. I use “spaces” a bit differently, preferring the term as a reference to internal or personal geography (timespace, brainspace, emotionalspace). Alexander’s choice of “space” rather than “place” adds to the brilliance, the “aha”-ness of the insight in that it specifically includes the virtual as well as the physical.

Some people exert, or could exert, enormous influence over very large spaces by either actively tending to the culture or by standing aside and simply observing what fills the vacuum. The CEO of our local medical behemoth has imposed his will at a very granular level on an organization that employs 10’s of thousands. Rules and regulations abound there. Here, chez CrossFit, the culture arose primarily from the founder’s philosophy and worldview. Pretty freewheeling, rough and tumble, then and now.

Think for a moment about your own spaces, maybe looking initially at the ones over which you might have a bit of control or influence. Work. Home. Box, whether owner or member. What has your role been in the creation and ongoing curation of the culture of those spaces? It’s a rather Taoist proposition, I think: to act is precisely equal to not acting, because one or the other course must be chosen. At my day job we actually did go about the task of creating a culture (A Tribe of Adults), and we knowingly curate that space by culling the tribe of those who don’t, won’t, or can’t acculturate.

In the end this is probably just another entreaty to consciously examine your own spaces, your world, and seek to exert whatever control you can wherever you can in order to live well. Whatever “well” means to you. Again, the Tao te Ching gives us some useful vocabulary, imagery we might reference. In the end we are all more like the pebble in the stream than the reed in the field. We may aspire to live as the reed, flexible and ever able to flow with whatever breeze may blow through. The reality is that an untended culture surrounding us flows so powerfully that it, like the water in a stream, eventually reshapes us as it inevitably sculpts the stone in the stream.

The difference, as both Lao-tse and Leigh Alexander teach us, is that you have the ability to control the flow.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at February 15, 2015 6:50 AM

The view where I write is of an inland sea. Today the sea before me melts, unleashing the power of water untethered as fully as it curbs the equally awe inspiring power of ice on the march. Indeed, the power of water is inexorable and undeniable in any form. After all, it was the glaciers of an epoch long gone that carved the great crevasses of the earth that we call canyons. Anyone with a flat roof can attest to the stealth of water as liquid, endlessly, tirelessly seeking the smallest weakness and pouring through once it does.

Water is the most valuable and least appreciated resource on our planet. Least appreciated, that is, until you are denied access to it. The water intakes of Lake Erie were frozen solid for some 24 hours this week, in some cases rendering indoor plumbing a concept of the mind only. In West Virginia all uses of all tap water are forbidden, a tasteless and odorless poison carried like a parasite on the back of the whale. Indeed, water lubricates the politics of states and nations, literally, as they fight in ways large and small over who controls the water.

In the end we will discover, to our inevitable surprise, that it is the water that controls us.