tinkering, building, and sharing
Fair enough. But maybe I want to hold onto the impracticality of maintaining a personal website.
A little something extra to shake the pattern of “path of least resistance” everything. A place to type words that isn’t fully entrenched within The Algorithm. A place where being authentic is held above being well-liked.
This applies to more than just personal websites. Anything worth doing is probably going to involve inconvenience, so I’ll try to make a habit out of going out of my way.
The 5 Ds of Conversation are as follows (from changingminds.org)
1) Dictating: Telling what to do.
2) Debate: Arguing with zero sum.
3) Discussion: Open conversation.
4) Deliberation: Joint decision-making.
5) Dialog: Exploring one another.
It’s very likely that you’ve had a number of conversations today which resembled and morphed between multiple, if not all of these types of conversation. Kind of how it works. Where that breaks down, however, is when different people are on different settings at the same time in the same conversation.
In other words, if I think we’re having a discussion and you think we’re having a debate, you may take my statement as a rhetorical attack against you rather than its intent, fodder for discussion and further exploration. Likewise, if my boss is dictating something that needs to be done, but I am interpreting the conversation as a dialog about what I want to work on, there will be glaringly unmet expectations and thus, dissatisfied conversation partners. Just some food for thought. Okay, now a sixth D: done.
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When I am caught up in the fear of not being accepted – “is my work good enough”, “is this the right thing to say” – I brace for impact. I clench my body and my mind and actually dream up the negative consequences. If I’m braced for impact, I’m not moving forward. I’m stuck. And the threat is miles off, if it even exists.
Really what I need to do instead of bracing for impact is picking up steam by getting reps in. I don’t expect to get to full speed in one blog post, one coding session, one video pitch to a prospective employer. But the consistent repetition and accumulation of experience and confidence will build momentum. So that when that threat of rejection is actually present, I’ll at least be giving it my best attack, not waiting scared down the road.
Authenticity/brutal honesty. In the “real world”, we have to put on these masks – professionalism, politeness, political correctness. A previous version of me might say “all these masks are phoniness and we. MUST. DESTROY.” Today, I realize we need these masks. You don’t want or need a pilot to be brutally honest with you – you want them to land the plane safely. These social masks, used properly, are healthy and necessary.
They can also get annoying and a major barrier to getting our ~need~ for authenticity met. And it feels amazing to take them off after a long day. Enter friends: those who will accept you as your unfiltered self and you, them. The conversations just flow because all the computing power that goes toward censoring and filtering just gets redirected to pure expression. This opens the door for a deeper connection, one that’s based less on material circumstances and more on love and soulful circumstances.
“Tell me how you really feel” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. I notice that it’s typically used when the masks are still on and people don’t actually want to know how you really feel. What I want and appreciate with friends is when they “tell me how they really feel”. Shoutout to all the homies.
I’ve recently come across this podcast with 5-10 minute episodes of career/life advice called Forward Tilt. I loved this episode because of how actionable the exercise is at the end. It’s all about how when you make an ask (of a prospective donor, an employer, a spouse, whomever) you need to shut up and allow that person to answer before you start adding in all the disclaimers and caveats and comforting walk-backs that you so desperately want to add.
Because if you can avoid that outpouring of walking back, you will increase your chances of getting a clear answer. And you can act on a clear answer. “I can’t give $5,000” or “We don’t have a role available at the moment” or “Yes, let’s set up some time to talk about this”.
The cool thing is you can do this for your own internal dialogue. Make an ask of yourself, “Am I really committed to doing this thing?” and then wait for a clear answer. For me, anything that comes up in the first five seconds is usually complete nonsense or excuses. Just wait, be patient, and see what rises to the surface. Then when that clear answer comes, figure out the way to act accordingly.
I want this to be fun and not time consuming so I will be sticking to an easy to follow format to start: a song lyric and a brief meditation. So here goes:
Lyrical Miracle #1
Trapped in a prism, in a prism of light
Alone in the darkness, darkness of white
We fell in love, alone on a stage
In the reflective age
Arcade Fire – “Reflektor”
I love this song and album but never knew this line exactly: “Alone in the darkness, darkness of white“. Makes me think of this guy -> ☯️. Everything in nature is totally balanced. Whether we are able to grasp that balance is at any time a matter of where our attention is focused. Total darkness and total light are in some silly way one in the very same. So when we’re feeling trapped in the total darkness, we’re really just failing to see some other reflection of light to pierce the veil and open us up to that greater balance.
To me, this is very reassuring given how dark things seem at times. AI doom, financial disasters, political turmoil, epidemics of all sorts – it can be hard to shake ourselves out of a negative perspective (especially if you know where to look). But as someone who can be drawn to this intense darkness at times, it feels healthy to step back and remember that there is light that is just as intense.
To lose all track of the darkness in the world, though, puts you right back in the prism, the darkness of white. I’ve fallen in love with the pursuit of finding balance through reflection.
Murphy's Code 