Moments of Joy

Last week I found myself in a dangerous situation not unlike many I had experienced before. A recent storm had dropped several inches of snow in the middle of a deep freeze that left a glaze of ice on what little road was exposed. The responsible thing to do was to work at home, eliminating the chance of committing an act of evil: that which, by intention, increases the risk of death or pain for other people without their consent and their ability to share in any gains. There was a chance, but it was arguably small, since everyone on the roads had implicitly decided to take the same risk. After a brief call to my boss, who subtly reminded me that work at the office was expected except under extreme circumstances, I decided to attempt the drive.

My first fourteen years of driving were in the Boston area, in cars that were far less reliable than the one I now drive, and under conditions much worse than any I've encountered in the Denver area since I moved here. I remembered that as I watched cars randomly cross lanes of the highway that were hidden by the snow. A reassuring thought stream from my subconscious reminded me that I was spoiled but not unprepared, and fed me directions derived from those early years and basic knowledge that was now part of my neuron memory.

As conditions rapidly deteriorated in one part of the trip, I experienced a burst of euphoria brought about by one stark, illuminating thought: if I die soon, I'll make sure that I die happy. Every experience any of us has ever had is already locked into the Universe, which no one and nothing can destroy; the next few minutes can be good or bad, in large part based on our own actions, and they too will be locked into the fabric of spacetime. We may as well make them good.

Coincidentally, my iPod started playing the theme to the TV show "Spenser for Hire," which had been a popular addition to Boston culture when I was driving there. The euphoria was joined by nostalgia, in part for the decade-long creative binge I enjoyed while working with my father in an attempt to develop and teach self-reliance through joyful derivation and use of understanding in any situation. My memories have long cast that time in terms of building a better future, but I now grasped that they depended on experiencing a better present. My father thrived in new situations, sometimes created by making what others would consider a mistake, and learning things from them that could alter his understanding of everything else so that life was more interesting. It was easy for me to focus on those larger insights, but I had lost sight of their source in the minute-by-minute experiences that are constantly embedded in the reality of the past and should be savored as much – or more.

As the world becomes a more dangerous place in the weeks and months ahead, I'm taking that recent experience and its insights to heart, folding them into a vision of how I want to spend the rest of my life, however long or short, and holding onto the goal of embedding as much joy as possible into the Universe – moment by moment.

Self Calibration

When you're trying to contribute to a land of conscience, it's important to listen to your own conscience more frequently. Several hours after writing my last post (“Working Stiff”) it's clear that I was really full of myself, virtually gloating that I have a new job (if that's what you can call a contract gig these days) and bragging that I'm giving away my research so those “greedy bastards” can't profit from it. While everything I said was true, my conscience is more awake now, and I'm not so proud of where it was coming from, especially when I review the backstory of how I reacted when I got the news about the job.

The first thing I did was celebrate, which is one of my few traditions, by taking my wife out to dinner. Since being out of work, we've cut back on a lot relative to how we lived when we were both working full time jobs; we “walked the walk” of limiting consumption out of necessity, like too many other members of the vanishing middle class in the U.S. Knowing you have more money – or at least the promise of it – is like a drug, and I'm no less an addict than anyone else, binging on junk food, entertainment, and “replacement” equipment when it became possible again. While I was castigating politicians and business leaders for leading us all toward a cliff, in my own way and at a much smaller scale I was shuffling along in the same direction with rationalizations not dissimilar to theirs.

I've been thinking a lot about streamlines lately. The graphs I created on my Web site depicting the happiness and perceived environments of different people in the world's population bear a remarkable resemblance to those mathematical representations of the movement of water and air molecules that I studied as a physics student. It's not too far a stretch to expect that such an analysis might ultimately yield a similar field theory for the behavior of humans, which could have huge applications in strategic decision-making across all scales of life. Considering that prospect, I felt a burst of optimism that I haven't experienced in a long time. The “holy grail” of my research – a simple set of tools for anticipating the effects of everyday decisions on humanity's long-term future, the basis of my value system – appeared to be in reach, and it might be usable in time to avoid the global disaster that the use of our current set of tools is propelling us toward.

Not too surprisingly in retrospect, my head got bigger. On top of that, the career profile I completed at the local workforce center confirmed that I was more intellectual than practical, so I must be doing the right thing. I just needed to figure out how to get paid for it. That's where I was coming from last night.

The reader needs to keep in mind, as I reminded myself today, that I could be totally full of crap. As elaborate as my abstractions and musings have become, they are, at best, hypotheses based on an admittedly limited understanding of the world. I put them out to the world with the hope that others will test them and perhaps find them useful in some way I can't even imagine. I'm simply contributing to a conversation, doing my part to fill in the universal jigsaw puzzle that is human understanding of ourselves and where we live, so we can improve the chances of all living better and longer lives.

Sharing my personal experience is the newest part of that contribution. As a test engineer, one of my first steps in verifying the results of a measurement was to check the calibration of the equipment and procedures used to generate it. These reflections are, in large part, an effort to provide readers with information about my personal biases, so they can check my “calibration” and use it to filter the “raw data” I'm generating. Using that analogy, the review of the past using one's conscience is a form of “self-calibration,” which may be one of its most critical roles as the mind's way of viewing itself with something approaching objectivity.

Reconnecting With Reality

Last weekend I attended a conference held by Transition Colorado to explore what would be involved in meeting food demand from local resources, and, by extension, how to create a resilient community that can survive the physical and psychological shocks sure to accompany the end of cheap energy and the advancing of global climate change. I came to the conference with several objectives: (1) to perform research for my writing; (2) to contribute to the discussion about options; (3) to develop relationships with people who have common interests and goals; and (4) to gain some insight into what my next career should be.

What I ultimately ended up doing was reconnecting with reality, which I didn't fully appreciate until I got home and was strongly, viscerally repulsed by the Oscar awards that were just starting. Only a short time earlier, I had been in an earnest discussion with a group of people about building community through spending time with people and Nature without the intrusion of an artificial, impersonal, intellectually and emotionally shallow barrage of images and sounds designed to promote behavior that is killing our planet and ourselves. As television and radio often do to me, it shut out my sense of self and connection with everything but them, the everything else that, I was reminded, really matters.

After dinner, I spent some time in my office, which in my months of unemployment (or “self-employment,” if you count my prolific writing over that period) have been a big part of my reality, and – uncharacteristically – my mind went blank. The books, the furniture, the Web sites such as Facebook where I was used to catching up on the activities and interests of family and friends, all the trappings of my so-called existence, were all a hazy, meaningless blur that held no interest. Of course, I'm there now, and a good night's sleep has added some much-needed perspective. It's all a bunch of tools, and tools only have value when you use them to do something meaningful (excuse me... that just became one of my “pithy comments”). If you have a tool between you and other people, (or you and – fill in the blank:______) your experience of them is warped such that they assume some part of the character of the tool itself. A part of your mind is engaged that considers them something to be manipulated, because, after all, you're experiencing the tool manipulating them.

This is something I've been grappling with for a long time, which has resulted in an elaborate theoretical, intellectual understanding of the world and its current predicament, including the “perils of abstraction” themselves. The conference certainly added to that understanding, and suggested some amendments to consider for the structure of ideas I've constructed. While most of the new information and insights aren't personal, they do reflect a larger reality I know must somehow be reflected in our collective consciousness, the story we tell ourselves and others about the world that helps us make responsible, informed decisions in the here-and-now. Our tools of abstraction, such as TV and computers, still have the power to help with this, despite the fact that they have been largely co-opted to enhance the competition that is killing us.

In my search for a new career, I have considered my natural tendency to explore, develop, test, and improve conceptual representations of experience. Essentially, I'm a scientist, but one that prefers to figure things out on his own, even at the most basic level, and gets a thrill from seeing things that should be obvious but no one else has noticed. In that last discussion at the conference, I shared that approach with the group in the context of using play to learn and prepare for new experiences, which I think would be extremely helpful if practiced on all levels, from the personal to the global. I would love to help encourage this while meeting my personal financial obligations and being an active part of a community of people who know and support each other directly and personally.