In the Sci-Fi comedy The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a wife argues with her husband and tells him to get a sense of perspective. Just to spite her, the husband goes ahead and creates the Total Perspective Vortex—an unbearable room that shows visitors their incredible smallness in relation to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe—to prove that the one thing we simply cannot live with is a sense of perspective. The room ends up frying his wife’s mind, which saddens the husband, but also satisfies him that he’s at least proven his point.
In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. I was reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—and had just gotten to the part about the Total Perspective Vortex—when I started Flow, so I laughed when I saw how Csikszentmihalyi kicked off his book by framing human dissatisfaction from a universal perspective. In a section called “The Roots of Discontent,” he writes:
The motions of stars, the transformations of energy that occur in it might be predicted and explained well enough. But natural processes do not take human desires into account. They are deaf and blind to our needs, and thus they are random in contrast with the order we attempt to establish through our goals. A meteorite on a collision course with New York City might be obeying all the laws of the universe, but it would still be a damn nuisance. The virus that attacks the cells of a Mozart is only doing what comes naturally, even though it inflicts a grave loss on humankind. ‘The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly,’ in the words of J.H. Holmes. ‘It is simply indifferent.’
The universe is big, chaotic, and for all practical purposes, does not care about our happiness. In fact, much of the enjoyment we experience in life, is the result of our ability to create order in the midst of the chaos. Csikszentmihalyi argues that culture, religion, work, and any personal goals we might have for how we use our time on this earth are all attempts to bring psychological order to our sense of self and prevent chaos from unraveling it—what he calls “psychic entropy.” He goes on to write:
How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.
And that’s just it—it comes down to what we have the ability to control. Csikszentmihalyi concludes the section by describing the kinds of people who are able to improve their quality of life through the flow experiences that result from an appropriate focus on what they can control:
Such individuals lead vigorous lives, are open to a variety of experiences, keep on learning until the day they die, and have strong ties and commitments to other people and to the environment in which they live. They enjoy whatever they do, even if tedious or difficult; they are hardly ever bored, and they can take in stride anything that comes their way. Perhaps their greatest strength is that they are in control of their lives.
The one thing we can truly control is ourselves. That’s a perspective we can maybe all agree on, both husband and wife.
Then again, when it comes to having a universal perspective, recent research suggests that maybe the husband was wrong after all. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Acceptance frees us to fly – I made this animation from a paper bag I got at the
Jade Rivera gallery
in Lima
In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about finishing Oliver Burkeman’s book 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I loved its central message of accepting our limitations—not the least of which is the limited time we all have in this place—as a way of living more freely and more meaningfully. In particular, I loved the sentiment with which Burkeman ended his book:
And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.
It has me reflecting on what “magnificent task or weird little thing” I came here for and goes well with Austin Kleon’s “Be the weird you wish to see.”
It also has me wondering about how limitations can counterintuitively liberate us in other areas of life. On this topic, Kleon too, has something to say. In the final chapter of his book Steal Like an Artist—titled “Creativity Is Subtraction”—he writes:
Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of unlimited possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying.
The way to get over creative blocks is to simply put some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom.
I’ve recently started following Erik Winkowski’s newsletter Paper Films, which I find to be wildly creative. When I think about using constraints as a way of unleashing creativity in your work, Winkowski’s short films immediately come to mind. For example, a few weeks ago he posted a video showing how he uses a typewriter to draw.
It’s hard to imagine a more constrained way of drawing than doing so on a typewriter.
Kleon also employs the humble typewriter as a limiting tool for his own creative work. He conducts his excellent typewriter interviews via the U.S. Postal Service, a constraint in its own right. In today’s hyperconnected world, the time it takes to type up interview questions, mail them out, wait for a response, and post the results serves as a limiter that brings Kleon’s creative work and collaborations into focus. It’s the good friction.
He also popularized blackout poetry—a form of found poetry in which you remove, or “black out,” words of a newspaper or other text to create your own unique composition.
One of Kleon’s predecessors in this type of work was the visual artist Tom Phillips. In 1966, Phillips decided to take W.H. Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document and modify every page through his beautiful paintings and collages with the goal of creating an entirely new work of art—blackout poetry taken to the extreme. Phillips’s commitment to the project would produce his magnum opus: A Humument. Over the course of 50 years, A Humument saw various publications and modifications, the latest version coming out in 2016, just six years before Phillips passed away. Every page of this beautifully unique and impressive book is graciously available for viewing on Thomas Phillips’s website.
Page 93 of Tom Phillips’s A Humument (2nd version 1986)
In the end, Winkowski, Kleon, and Phillips have all used limitations as a way of freeing themselves to pursue and define their life’s work. In doing so, they’ve carved out their own creative niche—their own unique voice, their own version of weird.
I think we need limitations in life. There’s definitely a time for pushing yourself beyond your limits, but when life seems complicated, I always find it helpful to simplify. If I ever feel stressed out, this mantra always helps to ground me: “Keep it simple.” This could just as well be, “Find a limitation.” It’s a way of focusing yourself in on what you can actually do now with the tools you currently have.
Setting such limitations ends up teaching you something important—it might even reveal the wings of your real self opening, or the weird little thing you came here for.
Joy Division’s album artwork for Unknown Pleasures – Image viaThe Current
Earlier this year, Bad Bunny released a short film a few days ahead of his sixth studio album—both titled DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (I Should’ve Taken More Photos). The short film features Puerto Rican director and poet Jacobo Morales who laments over not having taken more photos throughout his life. In doing so, he contemplates Puerto Rican identity over the course of a complex colonial history. Morales expresses the belief that taking more photos might have improved his memory of Puerto Rico’s past and the cultural identity he longs to preserve. The video leaves an impression, and I wrote about it in a post called “Photos and Memory.”
It’s a complicated task to consider the cultural identity of a whole nation. It’s complicated enough to consider the identity of a single individual. In our current cultural landscape, I hear a lot about searching for your authentic self—as if my current self is not my authentic one. It often leaves me wondering what we mean by “authentic self.” Is your authentic self something you can uncover by peeling back the layers that hide it? Or, is your authentic self something you actively create by simply living out your life and carving your own path?
Both photos and memory are attempts to preserve time—to record its passing. But time is a hard concept for humans to grasp. Historian of science James Gleick refers to it as the “the fast-expanding tapestry of interwoven ideas and facts that we call our culture.” Stitched within the fabric of time is memory, and Gleick also points out how problematic memory can be. Referencing both Woolf and Carroll, he writes:
We say that memory ‘takes us back.’ Virginia Woolf called memory a seamstress ‘and a capricious one at that.’ … ‘I can’t remember things before they happen,’ says Alice, and the Queen retorts, ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.’ Memory both is and is not our past. It is not recorded, as we sometimes imagine; it is made, and continually remade.
Memory is not as reliable as it appears to be, and neither is a photo. A photo represents a moment frozen in time. A photo of yourself, then, represents yourself frozen in time. If you string a bunch of those photos together, you can create a continuum, of sorts, leading from your past all the way into your present. This string of photos would compose your personal identity, or at least part of it. While considering personal identity, philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein asks:
What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be…?
She goes on to compare her current identity with a childhood picture of herself:
I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth.
A photographer named Noah Kalina took such a comparison a lot further. In January of 2000, Kalina started the Everyday project, and began taking a picture of himself every day. He was 19 years old at the time, and after 25 years, he’s still taking them.
Sequence of self-portraits from Noah Kalina’s Everyday project
At a few different points over the years, Noah has released a video that dramatically documents his journey, the most recent coming out in 2020. It takes the viewer through 7,263 photos of Noah, captured from ages 19 to 39, in just over eight minutes—his calm face gazing unsmiling into the camera.
Watching the video, it’s fascinating to see Noah age through the thousands of photos rapidly flashing across the screen. Even more compelling is the realization that behind each mundane snapshot is a life being lived—with all its joys and triumphs, all its hardships and tribulations. The simplistic and quick linear movement of the pictures from past to present obscures the nonlinear life that Noah has lived—a life we all live.
The British anthropologist Tim Ingold knows a lot about lines and writes about them as beautifully and eloquently as I imagine anyone can. In a 2020 article titled “Lines, Threads & Traces,” he quotes artist Paul Klee who once said, “Drawing is like taking a line for a walk.” Ingold continues by describing the curving path that’s created when many feet walk upon that same line over time:
But the path, like the line made by drawing, twists and turns. So, too, does life itself. Life goes on, precisely because it is not lived at this point or that, but is rather on the way from someplace to someplace else. It is in the detours that everything happens. That’s why the stories we tell, of our own and others’ lives, also circle around. We have to circle too, to follow them.
We know that life doesn’t make haste to simply move in a straight line from point A to point B. Rather, it curves and twists, sometimes reversing back or changing course altogether. Life moves along lines more like those created by the Biro life forms pictured in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
As with life, these lines are all over the place. An individual line moves in its own unique, nonlinear fashion, while intersecting with the lines of others. It’s at the moment of intersection that our life’s path has the opportunity to impact—or be impacted by—someone else’s. Ingold concludes that each single line ends up connecting to the lines of others and eventually forms the web of lines that make up a community. After describing the isolated clicks of a keyboard, he rejects the notion that we should consider these lines as nonlinear, and advocates for the connectedness and vitality that’s achieved through the curvatures of handwriting:
Linear thinking, we say, goes from point to point; linear transport from location to location; linear time from moment to moment. Of thinking, travel or time that wanders off course, or loops around, we are inclined to say that it is non-linear. Yet did you not just draw a line with your pencil? Does the winding path not follow a line, as does the story with its twists and turns? Indeed, what we witness today is not the birth but the death of the line. To reduce a linear movement to a rigid sequence of fixed points is to drain it of vitality, of everything that gives it life and growth. For the living world, in truth, is not connected like a net, but a writing mesh of lines. Knotted in the midst, their loose ends never cease to root for other lines to tangle with.
What is our community but a mesh of individual lines—sometimes knotted with others or with themselves, sometimes floating loosely—always seeking to lay down roots or longing to intertwine with others. Even for the most introverted among us, our life story is meant to be joined with those of others in community. Something about our authentic self, I believe, comes from who we are when we’re with other people. Our lines not only progress forward as we live out life, but they also circle around and outward, impacting others along the way. Their lines do the same for us.
Translation: I don’t know where I’m going but I’m going (via 72kilos)
Joy Division (New Order) is one of the bands that was nominated to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year. The cover art of their 1979 album Unknown Pleasures is both iconic and enigmatic. It’s no stranger to a T-shirt and it’s instantly recognizable when you see it. Unlike its appearance on clothing, the album’s front cover doesn’t include its title or the name of the band. It’s all black with 80 straight-ish, white horizontal lines that form a small square in the center. The individual lines peak unevenly and irregularly in the middle, giving the impression of a mountain range that runs vertically through them.
The image is the result of a star, or rather an exploded one—a supernova explosion. This Far Out article provides more details:
Simply put, the image is a “stacked plot” of the radio emissions given out by a pulsar, a ‘rotating neutron star.’ This sudden overload of astronomical terms might be a little overwhelming, but the concept though ‘unknown’, gives one immense ‘pleasure’.
To trace the pulsar’s origin, we need to rewind a little. The pulsar named CP 1919 was discovered in 1967 by two Cambridge academicians–a student named Jocelyn Bell Burnell and her supervisor Antony Hewish. As per their observation, when the star turns, it emits electromagnetic radiation in a beam, much like a lighthouse overlooking a vast stretch of a dark ocean. Radio telescopes can pick up these radiations; hence, each line on the image is an individual pulse, varying in length as waves travel a long distance confronting various obstacles on the way.
Back in 2019, to celebrate the album’s 40th anniversary, scientists made a new recording of the same pulsar and posted it here. Each “peak” of the 80 lines featured on the album’s cover was a recording of one of 80 radio emissions that came from the neutron star as it made 80 turns in 107 seconds. In essence, the lines on the album cover represent radio waves caused by lightning in outer space, observed from many light-years away. Although separate, the lines appear to be connected—each peak was the result of energy received from the rotating neutron star. It’s the same with us: our life’s path, or line, is impacted by the energy of others.
Looking down on the magnetic pole of pulsar CP 1919, which is encircled by lightning (via The Conversation)
The vast lightning systems of CP 1919, as pictured above, continue to circle around the magnetic poles of the pulsar, and while they initially appeared to be chaotic, over time they have revealed a more uniform pattern. The same can be said for how our line in life eventually reveals patterns—our authentic self, perhaps—over time. In a post called “The Continuous Thread of Revelation,” Maria Popova references author Eudora Welty’s thoughts on “writing, time, and embracing the nonlinearity of how we become who we are.” I love Welty’s perspective on writing—and on life:
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life. This has been the case with me. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you’ve come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect.
As humans, we long to find the meaning in belonging to something bigger than ourselves. In its absence, we’ll go so far as to create it. We want to find the stories and the patterns that help us understand ourselves and one another better.
Translation: Everything that seemed disconnected soon will make sense (via 72kilos)
We start with a single line. Our line sometimes goes straight, but then it begins to curve around, perhaps to avoid an obstacle. It continues on, moving forward and outward. It intersects and interacts with the lines of others, bending and peaking as it receives energy from both obvious and surprising sources. It gives off its own energy as well. It mixes and mingles and forms connections with other lines, eventually forming webs. Over time, it reveals the larger patterns of an identity—the culmination a life lived, with all its joys, hardships, and mundanities.
This is the authentic self—a narrative that we paradoxically create, even as it creates us. We are shaped by our life experiences, both good and bad, many of which are beyond our control. However, the story we tell ourselves about our life is within our control. And it’s this story that determines how those experiences will shape our identity from this moment onward. If both memory and photos are unreliable or unhelpful references for us, we have a degree of flexibility that works in our favor. We can hold onto narratives that empower us and release those that hold us back. The beautiful thing about controlling our own story is that we can change it at any point. Our identity is active and we continue to create it each day—its threads and through lines weaving together the fabric of our authentic self.
Pine trees in our Wisconsin backyard under the Northern Lights (May, 2024)
Right after the presidential election last November, I wrote about having more empathy for one another. In the post, I suggested “suspending judgement” when it comes to interacting with someone who believes differently than you.
I don’t know about you, but I’m finding a lot of people who think differently than me. I see them online, in my local community, and in different parts of the world—each with their unique experience and perspective. More often than not, the interactions I observe in these spaces are pretty negative and nonconstructive.
This past week, I was thinking about how to navigate different perspectives while also keeping my sanity. For sure, there’s a time when it’s better to disengage from it all—or, as Austin Kleon would describe it, to plant your garden. But then there’s a time to engage with it and to listen. Rick Rubin writes about this in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being:
We often take shortcuts without knowing it. When listening, we tend to skip forward and generalize the speaker’s overall message. We miss the subtleties of the point, if not the entire premise. In addition to the assumption that we are saving time, this shortcut also avoids the discomfort of challenging our prevailing stories. And our worldview continues to shrink.
So many of today’s problems are the result of people avoiding the good friction that is produced from engaging in discussions that expand our worldview. Rubin’s comments reminded me of an old friend I had in grad school. Whenever I talked with Peter, I could tell that he was listening to me so authentically hard—not in the “active listening” sense, but more of a completely-and-silently-focused sense—that I always felt challenged to really pay attention to what I was saying, in a good way, to make sure it all added up. I had to clearly express myself and I knew if I didn’t, I’d be met with a thoughtful follow-up question because Peter truly wanted to understand my perspective.
Like many, I loved Ted Lasso. One of my favorite scenes from the series is when Ted takes on Rupert in a game of darts to prevent him from tormenting Rebecca in the owner’s box. Before sealing his victory with three extremely difficult shots, Ted calls out Rupert’s air of superiority and invites him to be more curious.
In the clip, Ted quotes Walt Whitman: “Be curious, not judgmental.” While it turns out Whitman didn’t actually say this, the message rings true. Curiosity is valuable. It’s a perspective and orientation toward life that grows your worldview.
In his book Show Your Work, Austin Kleon quotes some thoughts that C.S. Lewis penned for his introduction to Reflections on the Psalms (1958). Here’s Lewis:
I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself. It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. When you took the problem to the master, either he was so fluent in the whole subject that he could not understand the difficulty, or he had forgotten what it was like to be puzzled by it. The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago that he has forgotten.
As a teacher, I love this quote. I love that teaching is a reflective practice. You’re always a student of the profession, even as you become a seasoned professional. It’s a dynamic job that you can always build upon. You never arrive, which can be frustrating at times, but in the end I think is what makes it such a worthwhile pursuit. Teachers inspire curiosity and the good ones continue to be curious themselves.
Our experience is valuable but how does it compare to a beginner’s mindset? What limiting beliefs have emerged as a result of our self-confidence in our abilities and our experiences?
As it were, the very next chapter I read in Rubin’s book was entitled “Beginner’s Mindset.” In the chapter, he tells a story about the board game Go, which is said to be around 4,000 year old.
Go is one of the most complex games ever created by humans. There are more possible board configurations in Go than there are atoms in the universe. Back in 2014, the artificial intelligence research company DeepMind started development on an AI system that would be capable of solving complex problems. They called it AlphaGo and intended it to take on the best Go players in the world. But the way they designed AlphaGo to learn the game was unique. DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis described it like this:
Traditional games engines comprise thousands of rules handcrafted by strong human players that try to account for every eventuality in a game. The final version of AlphaGo does not use any rules. Instead it learns the game from scratch by playing against different versions of itself thousands of times, incrementally learning through a process of trial and error, known as reinforcement learning. This means it is free to learn the game for itself, unconstrained by orthodox thinking.
Two years later, AlphaGo had taught itself enough to take on legendary Go player Lee Sedol. More than 200 million people from around the world tuned in for the televised event. During the game, AlphaGo made a series of unconventional moves, which culminated in move 37, a completely unique and creative move that no human professional would ever have made. Professional Go player Fan Hui said the follow of move 37:
Move 37 goes against all conventional teaching and no experienced human player would ever have played it. In fact, we know from AlphaGo’s calculations there was just a one in ten thousand chance of a player selecting that move. It was a moment of inspiration that came from its unique approach to the game. Unlike the way I — and all other human players — approach Go, its decisions are unencumbered by the tradition, theory, and teaching of human play. Instead, it learns the game for itself, giving it the opportunity for fresh thinking and leading to a unique ‘free spirited’ style which in turn has unshackled human players from tradition and allowed us to also think differently about the game.
AlphaGo’s success speaks to the power of a beginner’s mindset that isn’t limited by culture, tradition, or experience. It’s a fascinating story, which you can read more about on this Google Arts & Culture page. There’s also a documentary about it that’s available for free streaming here.
Rubin concludes with this about the AlphaGo story:
There’s a great power in not knowing. When faced with a challenging task, we may tell ourselves it’s too difficult, it’s not worth the effort, it’s not the way things are done, it’s not likely to work, or it’s not likely to work for us. If we approach a task with ignorance, it can remove the barricade of knowledge blocking progress. Curiously, not being aware of a challenge may be just what we need to rise to it.
Jason Kottke references this too, in a post called “Ignorance and the curious idiot.” Bringing it back to Ted Lasso, Kottke writes about how the creative team initially came up with the idea for the show—they wondered, “What if we did a show where the main character was an ignorant guy who was actually curious?” Kottke goes on to link curiosity with paying attention, and paying attention with love.
I like the idea of emptying ourselves so we can learn, of seeking simplicity in the midst of life’s complexities, and of paying attention as a form of love. I like remaining curious, suspending judgment, and having a beginner’s mindset.
In the end, there’s so much we don’t know and that’s okay. Maybe it’s enough not to know. And maybe it’s better to know that much than to think we know more than we actually do. One of my favorite songs from the Canadian band The Sadies is “Why Be So Curious?” I think it’s a good and peaceful place to wrap this up. The lyrics go like this:
Feelin’ me the sun, glow so big and warm upon everyone Be the tallest tree, grow as rain falls down upon everyone Look at the clouds and the stars as they glow Why be so curious when nobody knows… The truth
Hear the birds all sing, the most beautiful things hear what they sing Feel the love you feel, don’t poison the well with worry and fear Look to the simple and be like the snow Why be so curious when nobody knows… The truth
Watch the river flow, as you get right in and feel the love flow Move along the way, float with care and ease off to the seas
Look at your fingers and look at your toes Why be so curious when nobody knows? Nobody knows… The truth
These are some of the things that made 2024 special:
Cal getting his wisdom teeth out and calling me at work to say in Spanglish, “Estoy triste porque el dentista took mis dientes and won’t give them back.”
Celebrating 16 years with Angie a là saunas and cold baths.
Annual adoption day breakfast with Cal at the delicious Breakfast Bear.
Swanson and Rislove kazoo chorus at Kin & Kind‘s live music night with Jason and Ryan.
My buddy Boyd spinning vinyl at Whitewater Music Hall. Also, wearing baby blue to support him and his Lions while serving ourselves at Sconni’s. My buddy Ben closing ‘er down to host us.
Receiving a lucky bamboo from a student with the message, “The bamboo plant is said to bring good luck and positive energy to the place where it is grown. This bamboo has been selected to express my gratitude and appreciation for everything you do. I hope that this bamboo plant will bring you and your family good luck, health, and happiness.“
Sunday walks listening to Mountain Stage. Realizing that this is the music I’d choose to listen to on my deathbed.
Finishing my fourth year of teaching Spanish at D.C. Everest Senior High. Watching students I mentored complete the Global Scholars Program.
June recognizance mission to Grenada with Angie as part of See SGU. Live music at 61 West and hearing “This one goes out to all the lovebirds out there” before every single song.
Camping with my family in Brule, WI. Ordering the 1, 1, and 1 at the Twin Gables Cafe, having the waitress and my family doubt my choice because of how small it was, and immediately needing to eat something else upon returning to camp because I felt faint.
Food and beers at the Fish Shed in Cornucopia, WI and visiting with our friend Joe (but missing our friend Jody).
Blending in kitchen cabinets to accommodate a bigger refrigerator.
Attending the Blue Ox Music Festival with “festival Angie.” Listening to great music and spending wonderful time with friends.
Hosting Cal’s Madison friends for a weekend. Hoops and pool time at grandma and grandpa’s.
Deciding to quit my teaching job to support Angie as she attends medical school in Grenada. Cleaning out my Spanish classroom at D.C. Everest and remembering all the memories.
Buckley and Moco’s tolerance of one another (and maybe even affection for one another).
Brad’s bachelor party in Milwaukee, WI—playing Spikeball, throwing axes, and general shenanigans.
Brad and Deborah’s wedding—hotel room dance parties, celebratory dinners, testing out my Portuguese skills, general merrymaking with family and friends, and celebrating an amazing couple. Post-wedding beach visit with Angie and Brad.
Successfully changing a flat tire while on a bike ride with my bro.
Teaching my niece and nephews tennis at my dad’s summer camp.
Spending time with the Caseys at their cabin.
Finding childhood Michael Jordan posters in my parent’s basement and passing them onto Cal.
Cleaning and organizing our house to prepare for our move. Taking breaks to watch the Olympics when feeling unmotivated and somehow finding the inspiration to carry on cleaning and organizing.
Having high school friends over for a campfire and having two of them show up in full-on track suits.
First full-on Barn Dance since before Covid. Witnessing the next generation sit down and sing “Stand By Me” in unison.
Giving Cal one of my flannels for the Barn Dance because he couldn’t find any and having him cut off the sleeves of said flannel before immediately finding one of his own and saying, “Oh, here’s one of mine.”
Full moons.
Former Mankato neighbors adopting sweet Moco while we are away. Dan taking care of Buckley, along with the occasional help of several other good friends.
Watching Cal play on a local summer soccer league.
The support of all our friends and loved ones at our going away party, hosted by our lovely neighborhood craft beer bar Kin & Kind.
Finding rainbows.
Fluffy bunnies and the Alto Fair.
Baby Etta.
Eating sushi in Wauwatosa before taking Angie to O’Hare Airport.
Packing our remaining possessions into our upstairs bedroom.
Anticipating that I’d have a lot of time to read in Grenada and buying a Kindle Paperwhite, along with a sweet cork cover for it that reminded me of a surfboard (because in my mind, Caribbean = surfing, apparently).
Spending time with Cal and moving him to Madison before the pair of us traveled to Grenada. Packing up his stuff and moving him into his first apartment. Self pickup of the apartment keys from The Hub Realty. Finding the perfect-sized bed frame and building him a bedroom shelf. Shopping at the tiny Ace Hardware store on Willy Street.
Loosing my year+ Duolingo streak during a chaotic August and not caring. Feeling empowered to control my own language-learning journey and not let an owl dictate how I feel about it. Take that Duo!
Angie persevering (once again!) through a lost luggage situation and Cal incredibly finding said lost luggage (aided by the fact that Angie’s suitcase is bright florescent green) in a sea of gray and black suitcases at the Miami Airport while on a 6+ hour delay.
Cooking red snapper whole. Cooking much more to support Angie’s intensive study schedule.
Holding my own playing ultimate frisbee with a bunch of SGU youngsters.
Taking a random walk through my neighborhood and starting a conversation with this guy I met along the way, the first of what would become many with my newfound friend Matt.
My buddy Matt teaching me how to sail a Hobie Cat.
Walking on the beach with a rum punch, or two (but absolutely no more or else you’re flirting with danger).
A Caribbean Christmas with visits from my parents and Cal. Driving them around, visiting sweet beaches and a waterfall, and eating good food.
Listening to my dad sing some 70s classics at an open mic night at Nimrod’s. Surprising musician Paul by joining him to sing the Buena Vista Social Club song “Dos Gardenias.”
Lynda Barry is a cartoonist and professor at UW-Madison who teaches a class called The Unthinkable Mind. In the class, Barry combines neuroscience, psychology, and drawing to help students build the skill of creativity and apply it to their life’s work. Last week I saw this Instagram post by Barry and it reminded me of the incredible link between art and science. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, widely considered to be the father of neuroscience, also understood this connection. Cajal’s work drew inspiration from both the sciences and the arts, and his drawings of the brain beautifully communicate its complexities.
I like how this work is both artistic and scientific. Referencing visuals and producing them ourselves has always helped us understand the world better. Branching in particular is helpful, I think in part, because it’s all around us. Its reproductions and reflections are seemingly endless, as Barry’s lesson plan highlights.
I’ve enjoyed watching Angie study medicine these past few months. To me, her notes look like works of art to and I’ll often ask her to send me pictures of them, like this one, which of course reveals some branching:
Angie’s notes
As we wrap up 2024, thinking about branching has me thinking a lot about the big decisions we make in life. Looking into our past, we might envision a fork in the road that was created in the moment of deciding—one path branching off to the left and another off to the right, each leading to a separate reality that was created by our choice.
Or maybe we can envision a separate reality that was created simply by circumstance, as is the case in the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, where Gwyneth Paltrow’s character experiences two alternate realities based on whether or not she successfully catches a subway train. Throughout the rest of the movie we see her life play out along these two separate paths.
The idea of alternate realities has always fascinated me. Even more fascinating is the theory suggesting they may actually be real. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that every possible outcome of every event creates a new universe or world that runs parallel to our own. Physicist Aaron O’Connell talks about the feasibility of this idea in his 2011 TED Talk.
Alternate realities have long been the subject of some of the best science fiction. If you love speculating about these branching realities as much as I do, here are some great stories to check out:
Ted Chiang has a short story entitled “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” from his book Exhalation, that looks at this idea. It’s somewhat of a redemption story in which characters use a device called a prism that allows them to communicate with versions of themselves from alternate realities—realities that stem from divergent past decisions the characters have made. You may already be familiar with Chiang’s work from the movie Arrival, which was based on his short story “Story of Your Life,” from Stories of Your Life and Others. It dawned on me that one of my family’s favorite holiday movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, also deals with alternate realities. Blake Crouch’s book Dark Matter (recently made into an Apple+ series) was first described to me as an “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the 21st century. And then, of course, there’s a wealth of amazing works by the Spanish-speaking world that dive into choice and the alternate realities it produces. Check out Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (also see this TED Ed video on his mind-bending work) and the Spotify podcast Case 63 (based on the Chilean Caso 63).
Choice is powerful. One of my favorite quotes about choice comes from the Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
The realization that we always have a choice as to how we will respond to those things going on around us, even if we can’t control them, is an empowering one. Frankl should know. As a Holocaust survivor, he faced unimaginable horrors, yet never forgot his power to choose. When everything was stripped away from him, he held to that power closely.
Frankl addresses choice in terms of how we respond to circumstances beyond our control, when our freedom has been reduced to a minimum. But what about choice in terms of the many circumstances within our power to control, when freedom abounds? I think we tend to view a choice like this:
As in the old Robert Frost poem, we consider the two roads diverging before us in the woods, and try our best to choose which one we’ll travel upon. In her book Transformative Experiences, philosopher LA Paul suggests a different way of looking at choice. She asks us to imagine having to choose whether or not we’d like to become a vampire, gaining immortality with the caveat of not having to hurt anyone. It’s a thought experiment that gets to the heart of Plato’s question, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” She writes:
When you find yourself facing a decision involving a new experience that is unlike any other experience you’ve had before, you can find yourself in a special sort of epistemic situation. In this sort of situation, you know very little about your possible future, in the same way that you are limited when you face a possible future as a vampire. And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem… You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it—by assessing what the different possibilities would be like and choosing between them. The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.
So our choice might be better viewed in the following way:
“A” represents the space that is completely familiar to us, while “B” represents the space that is completely foreign to us. It’s the known versus the unknown. We only know ourselves on the “A” side of a decision. There’s no real way of knowing who we’d become if we made the choice to leave “A” behind, cross through the doorway, and enter into “B.”
This is the problem we face when making big decisions. We are biased toward our current experience in life. Going through that door and entering the unknown is often very scary, because both our experiences and who we will become are unknown. In her contemplation of the vampire problem, Maria Popova writes:
We are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.
When we choose to enter these unknown spaces, in a way, we choose to let our former self die in order for a transformed self to emerge. In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit describes the value of such transformation and the process by which we can obtain it:
The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration—how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
Extending the boundaries of self and becoming someone else is a difficult process. It’s far easier to stay within our comfort zone. Stepping into the great unknown is exhilarating, but it has its costs. Viktor Frankl looked at the problem of restricted freedom—when the door to possibility is closed. Unlimited freedom to open whichever door one chooses can also be problematic. There’s a reason Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom.” Looking through that open door into the abyss of the unknown can be destabilizing.
But in life, moving into the unknown is often what’s required of us, and it’s often where we should go. In The Meaning of Anxiety, psychologist Rollo May expands on Kierkegaard’s thoughts about anxiety:
Because it is possible to create—creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process)—one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself.
In any big decision, the choice we make leads us toward gaining something and losing something else. I think that much is a given. And it’s something I can accept. For me, the important thing is to keep choosing to grow. Growing is how I can create hope in a world that often seems at the brink of losing itself. It’s like what Emerson once wrote: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” I think it’s also important to remember that making small choices can also be unsettling, and if made consistently over time, can lead to big changes in a person’s character and experience of the world. Ted Chiang’s short story “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” from his book Exhalation, dives into this idea beautifully.
But even though we can’t know what’s on the other side of a big decision, I like Walt Whitman’s take in “Song of Myself” (43), on how we can enter those unknown spaces with confidence:
I do not know what is untried and afterward, But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.
It helps to look back into your past as you enter those untried future spaces. The past can provide some finite concreteness that stabilizes you from the infinite possibilities of the future. You’ve faced trials before and prevailed. You will prevail again.
They’ve been on my mind as of late. Maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to Mac Miller’s album Circles, or because I just read an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson called Circles. Maybe it’s because there was just an election and it seems as though there are some people within my circle and some outside of it. Then again, maybe it’s the circular movements around me—the changing of the seasons or the cycling of the moon. Whatever the reason, I hope you read on and find something you’d like to circle and add to your list of things to check out.
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. (…) Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning
It made me think about circle stories I’ve read or seen, where the ending circles back around to the beginning, like in the movie 12 Monkeys. I recently learned that 12 Monkeys was based on the 1962 French film La Jetée, a minimalist 28-minute movie consisting of nothing more than 422 photos, a voiceover, and a score. This video provides a beautiful analysis of the film that doesn’t move (yet still moves in a circle):
You can also draw circles around circles, and zoom in and out on them. I thought about how Prezi allows you to do this and it led me to compare Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now” with something Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Mitchell zooms out to find differing perspectives while Whitman zooms in to also find differing perspectives. Whether you zoom in or out, life is still complex.
