Getting Hairy

All through college, and when I first moved to NYC, I kept clean-shaven.  But when I was 22 or 23, initially for the convenience during a period of frequent travel, I decided to try growing a beard.  Quickly, I realized that anything over two or three weeks of growth looked pretty terrible—overly patchy, like a mangy dog.  But with a trimmer, I could hold at one or two weeks of scruff, which I liked.  Every month or two, I’d shave it off completely.  And once or twice a year, I’d do a few weeks of 70’s porn ‘stache, until mounting protest would get me to shave that, too.  But otherwise, for the last decade and a half, short beard has been pretty much my default setting.

Over the years, as I’ve gotten older, my facial hair has also gotten thicker and heavier.  I first noticed the increase of heft during those mustached stretches, as in recent years I could get a surprisingly Tom Selleck/Sam Elliott thing going if I gave it time.  Which made me think: if I had vetoed the grown-out full beard on account of thinness, perhaps that would no longer be an issue.  So I resolved I’d let my beard grow for at least a month or two past my normal 3-week cap, and see what happened.

And, indeed, it did grow in, quickly and remarkably thickly, auburn red (the color of my mother’s hair, and, according to 23&me, the remnant of a Scandinavian streak in my otherwise solely Ashkenazi Jewish Eastern European Mutt ethnicity) with the occasional speckle of gray for a touch of gravitas.  But, as it grew for month after month, I also began to realize it wasn’t really veering towards mountain man/special forces/polar explorer in the way I had hoped.  Instead, I looked, in a word, rabbinical.  All I was missing was payis (the sideburn curls), a long black coat, and a black felt hat.

So, after four solid months, I eventually shaved back to ground zero.  And, based on the immediate feedback, I dropped about a decade of perceived age in the process.  Thus, it appears the answer remains: a week or two of scruff or less.  Any more and it’s oy gevalt indeed.

June 9, 2018

Hit the Road Jack

A couple of months ago, I started having pain in my right hip and far-right lower back when I would do heavy back squats.  Then, a few weeks later, it started to happen during deadlifts, too.  Soon, even running was causing hip pain, light cleans or box jumps would send stabs of pain through my back.

I tried stretches, foam rolling, dynamic mobility warm-ups.  I did pre-hab and re-hab progressions.  I focused even harder on my exercise form.  All of which helped a bit.  But not much, and not in a lasting way.

Throughout, I was mystified.  I couldn’t find anything that had changed in my workout, couldn’t point to a traumatic injury, couldn’t spot a movement dysfunction that could have chipped away at me over time.  I started to think perhaps I’d just never figure it out.

But, after another month of puzzling, I realized something had changed.  Due to a shift in schedule, I was suddenly walking much, much less than I had been before.  And I was wearing shoes – less flexible, heeled, toe-smushing work shoes – vastly more often.

So, with nothing else to lose, I started increasing my steps.  Thanks to my schedule, they were almost all indoor steps, often multi-tasking while walking a figure-eight around a room.  (Lesson learned the hard way: if I just walk around a room in a circle, I end up dizzy and nauseous enough after ten or twenty loops that I need to sit down; a figure-eight turns in opposite directions at either end, so I can loop indefinitely without falling over / throwing up.)  But indoor stepping did allow me to take off my shoes, so I walked the majority of those steps barefoot (or, rather, in sock feet).

I determined that I’d fallen to only walking 3,000-4,000 daily steps, so I inched that up by 500 a day, first to 10,000, then (as I was enjoying it) all the way to a daily 15,000.  And, lo and behold, even before I hit that 15k step count, my back and hip pain had completely and permanently disappeared.

Previously, I could have told you about the importance of daily movement, and of walking in particular.  Looking at our ancestors and current hunter-gatherer tribes, I would have said, it’s pretty clear that we evolved to walk 3-5 miles (or, funny enough, 10-15k steps) every single day.  And I would have theorized that not getting that amount of daily walking was one of the underlying drivers of pain and dysfunction in modern life.

But this was the first time in my adult life that I’d fallen to such a low level of daily movement myself, and had directly paid the price.  Which highlighted the big difference between knowing something intellectually, and really understanding it at a visceral level.  I now know, first-hand, what happens if you don’t stay active.  And I can definitively say: the truth hurts.

June 4, 2018

Break it Down

When I was a kid, my parents splurged, and bought the (at the time, rather expensive) Encyclopedia Britannica.  My father had wanted to own it himself as a child, though the purchase was clearly mostly for my benefit, as the heavy volumes lived in my room, taking up the entire bottom rows of my three bookshelves.  And, frankly, I loved it.  As anyone who, in the years since, has fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole can attest, it’s remarkably easy to get engrossed in random encyclopedia entries, whether on how the Tower of Pisa got its famous lean, or on the mechanics required for a snake to swallow and digest animals (including whole people) wildly larger than itself.

The Britannica was divided into three parts: the Macropaedia, which had long-form articles on major subjects; the Micropaedia, which had shorter entries on a far wider array of topics; and, my favorite, the Propaedia, a single, relatively slim volume.

Let’s say you wanted to construct an encyclopedia.  Where would you start?  How would you decide which topics to include?  Britannica’s answer was the Propaedia, a taxonomy of all the world’s knowledge.  Like the phylogenic tree of life, it started from a single root, and sub-divided endlessly: ‘Matter & Energy’ split to ‘The Universe’ then to ‘Galaxies & Stars’ to ‘Extragalactic Radio Sources’ to ‘Quasars.’  ‘History of Mankind’ broke into ‘The Modern World’ then to ‘Western Europe 1500-1789′ to “The European States’ to ‘France’ to ‘The Age of Louis XIV.’  I spent almost as much time poring over that single volume as all the others combined. I loved the structure, the organization.  I loved the way it linked across seemingly disparate fields and bodies of knowledge. I intuited, even at a young age, that the better my framework for the big picture, the more easily I would be able to understand, retain, and connect all the details.

These days, I’ve been thinking about the Propaedia a lot, as I’ve been spending much of my time working on the algorithm for Composite.  The idea is simple: if you’re a professional athlete, or a movie star prepping for a role, you have an excellent, experienced, and educated coach who designs a workout plan, a nutrition plan, a set of lifestyle changes, etc., all tailored specifically to you and your goals.  And those plans, plus accountability to the coach to help you actually stick to them, tend to yield extremely impressive results, as a trip to the ballpark or cinema illustrates.

The rest of us, however, just go for a run, copy workouts from fitness magazines, or hire trainers at local gyms whose primary credentials usually include having played D3 football and being great at yelling “it’s all you, bro, it’s all you!”  None of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, work quite as well.  So, fundamentally, Composite is about leveraging the power of AI (as well as technology in general, plus recent research in sport science and behavioral medicine) to let everyone get the pro athlete/movie star custom treatment—and results.

Composite’s algorithm is a neural network, so it will evolve over time, continuously improving its prescriptions as it learns from members’ results (as measured on things like blood panels, body composition, and benchmark workout times).  But, to set the algorithm up, we had a sort of Catch-22: you can’t train a neural net without a ton of data, but because there’s never previously been a use for that kind of data in the fitness world, it doesn’t really exist (at least not in a central, digital way).

To get around the chicken and egg problem, we’ve had to do some heavy lifting, initially building the algorithm using GOFAI (“good ol’ fashioned AI”), setting the symbol weights entirely by hand.  Doing that, in turn, has meant coming up with taxonomy after taxonomy after taxonomy.  We’ve had to reduce all possible, beneficial exercises, all possible nutritional approaches, all training periodization structures, all healthful lifestyle changes, all stretches and mobilizations and pre-hab movements, etc., into meaningfully structured trees.

Which, on the one hand, is kind of bananas.  But, on the other, has been absolutely the best part of the job.  All of those taxonomies have gone through a crazy number of iterations already, and I still regularly jump out of bed at 3 AM to scribble down an epiphany that sends at least one of them straight back to the drawing board.

Each time I work on those taxonomies, I think back to the Propaedia.  And I’m still not sure: did all that time perusing it change my brain and how I look at the world?  Or did it just so perfectly fit the way I already saw things, and gave me a master class in structured thinking, done rigorously and at scale?

Either way, that book was the best thing I could have had sitting on my bedroom shelf.  And I wonder if my own future kids, skipping around Wikipedia, but unable to hold in their own hands a single, unifying big picture, won’t be missing something beautiful and important as a result.

May 21, 2018

One is Silver

Early last year, I read that Kushner’s Angels in America would be coming back to Broadway, and realized I’d never actually seen either half of the play (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, staged separately but part of a single whole), on stage or even on TV (via Mike Nichol’s famed HBO adaptation).  Nor had I even read the play.  So, I got a copy, and banged through it in a single evening.  And while, in some ways, it felt totally dated—an artifact of an earlier NYC where AIDS was a new and ascendant threat and being gay and out meant something very different than it does today; in others, it was totally prescient—in its choice of villain, for example: the closeted yet AIDS-stricken New York attorney Roy Cohen, who famously mentored the (rather constitutionally similar) Donald Trump.

But, in short, Angels blew my mind. And it led me to search out and try to fill other lacunae in my cultural literacy—first more plays (like the Shakespeare and Chekhov I’d missed; so many Richards, so many melancholy Russians shooting themselves), then onto novels (ones I truly loved, like Ishiguro’s perfect Remains of the Day and Proulx’s sly The Shipping News, as well as others, like Updike’s Rabbit Run, that I found easier to admire than enjoy).

In the process, I also stumbled across an original copy of Sartre’s What is Literature, a book both off-putting and deeply fascinating, which gave me a lot of food for thought in my fill-in-the-blanks reading quest.  Though it’s a meandering polemic, one of the points on which Sartre seems particularly insistent is that books are written from a cultural context to an audience that shares that same context.  And, therefore, that when we read things years down the line, from our new context, we invariably have a different, much paler experience than the author intended.  Or, in other words, that my catch-up reading is a waste of time.  Because, as Sartre at one point puts it, “bananas have a better taste when they have just been picked.  Works of the mind should likewise be eaten on the spot.”

On the one hand, I take Sartre’s point.  As I noted, my experience of reading Angels would have been quite different were I a young gay man in NYC in 1992.  And I’m sure, generally, that there’s something far more visceral, far more alive, about engaging with art that, in turn, engages the very world you inhabit.  Yet, on the other hand, I also suspect Sturgeon’s Law—”90% of everything is crap”—is optimistic.  And since, over time, a sort of Darwinian winnowing occurs, while what people still read from 5 or 50 (much less 500) years ago may indeed be dated, it’s also likely to be better than most of what you can pull off the ‘new and noteworthy’ table today.

So, for the time being, I’m trying to hoe a middle road: I’m still working through the endless list of all the great works I’ve somehow missed, but alternating them with the most promising of current releases.  Because, with apologies to Sartre, it seems to me that it’s choosing solely one or the other that would be bananas.

May 17, 2018

Plucked Chicken

When it comes to getting haircuts, I have a few simple rules: I look for barber shops, not salons. I don’t pay more than $20. And ideally, I choose places that have a revolving pole out front, straight razors on the wall, a pile of old Playboys in the corner, and a cadre of regulars who sit around for hours discussing the best boxing fight they ever saw.  (Cf., Coming to America.)  Ridiculously enough, I’ve discovered this almost always yields a better haircut than what I’ve received in fancy spots for literally ten times the price.

On the other hand, when things go wrong with this approach, they can go quite wrong indeed.  Like this past week, when I made an emergency stop at a new barber.  I had gone literally months since my last trim, and when the urge to have it sheared suddenly hit me, I couldn’t wait.

I sat down in the chair, and the barber asked me how long I wanted the sides.  Or, at least, that was my understanding.  But, as is often the case with my rules, there was a bit of a language barrier.  In fact, he was actually asking me how long I wanted the top.  I realized as much from his first trimmer swipe, which went not above my ear, but rather straight down the center of my head, leaving me with an inverted Mohawk.

Perhaps from my shocked expression, the barber appeared to suddenly realize the miscommunication, too.  “Oh,” he said somberly, “this isn’t what you wanted at all.”  Still, what was done was done, and there’s no use crying over spilled clippings. I laughed and told him, no, it wasn’t, but that he should nonetheless just buzz away.  It’s only hair, I told him.  It grows back.

So, now, my hair is very, very short.  Military short.  Went out yesterday and bought a lightweight baseball cap to run in because you can see my scalp and it’s definitely going to burn otherwise short.  And, more positively, so short that my already brief ‘styling routine’ – combing my hair after I shower – has now further reduced to doing absolutely nothing, because at this length even combing doesn’t matter.

I don’t suspect I’ll be going this short again any time soon.  Instead, I’m planning to wait a couple of months (until it reaches a point I’d previously have considered my “I just got a pretty short haircut” length), to get it shaped up a bit, and to roll forward per usual from there.

But I’m also kind of glad this happened.  Because, for years, I’d wondered what I would look like with a buzz, but had always been too much of a wuss to actually find out.  Now, I know.  And while, to be honest, it’s not what I’d call my best look, I can also say, modesty aside, that I still look pretty damn cute.

May 10, 2018

How to Make Lemonade

Over the past couple of years, I’ve faced a handful of major personal disasters.  And, in response, I’ve floundered through a wide array of coping mechanisms.  Some worked well; others, not so much.  In the hope that I can save you some pain, here’s what I learned through that experience, the things that were actually helpful in carrying me through difficult (and sometimes exceedingly difficult) stretches of life.

But, first, let me start with what doesn’t work: numbness, rage, and despair.  That said, at least in my own case, when shit hits the fan, they’re my inevitable first response.  For some initial period of time – hours or even days – I’m completely numb. Then I alternate like clockwork between feeling wildly angry and wallowing in misery.  Neuroscience research suggest it takes at least an hour for your brain to recover from even minor slights and setbacks.  And, at the other end of the spectrum, Judaism  “shiva” – the period of intense mourning after the death of an immediate family member – at seven days.  So, based on the severity of your disaster, find somewhere in that range: no less than an hour, no more than a week.  During that time, cycle through raging / despairing / feeling numb (or whatever else you personally default to) without chastising yourself.  Just let it rip.  Then stop, because it isn’t actually helping, and do this instead:

  1. Envision the Future.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust as a prisoner in several concentration camps, losing his entire family along the way (so, in short, he had it worse than whatever you’re dealing with) said, “with the right why, a man can survive any how.”  In his case, the ‘why’ was the drive to write a book about his experience, to share the psychological insights he’d gained with world.  (And if you haven’t read the resultant Man’s Search for Meaning, go do that now.)  But the specific why doesn’t matter, so long as it’s extremely compelling to you, and at least a year or two (and possibly ten or twenty) in the future.  I recommend strongly that you commit your why to paper, whether it’s a (to use Jim Collins’ famous phrase) Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal that you’re excited to pursue, or just a detailed description of a better future – where you’ll be, with whom, what you’ll be doing, what you’ll have done.  Whatever it is, write it down, and then re-read it frequently.  At least daily at first, if not more.  Tell yourself that’s what you’re gunning for, that’s what on the far side of this current, seemingly unsurvivable mess.  Use that ‘why’ as your north star, and let it carry you through.

  1. Then Focus on Today

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “there’s no burden so heavy it can’t be carried until nightfall.”  So, as Sir William Osler advised, “live your life in day-tight compartments.”  Thinking about that distant-future ‘why’ will buoy you up.  But thinking about any future short of that – how you’re going to make it through tomorrow, or the next two weeks, or the next year and a half – will drive you into the ground. You project your current misery forward, multiply its weight by all those future days, and are sure there’s no way that you can possibly deal with all the unhappiness you see stretched out ahead.  But as the Zen Buddhists say, thinking you can’t survive another second of a pain you’re feeling is a lie; you survived this second, so you can survive the next, too.  So make that your focus: surviving one more day.  Make it into bed, this evening, in one piece, and call that victory. Worry about today today, and deal with tomorrow once it arrives.

  1. Get Moving

First, literally.  Especially right after something terrible happens, I’ve found that walking is the very best thing I can do.  My mind may be reeling, but just taking step after step after step seems to slowly dissipate some of the overwhelm.  Similarly, going to the gym, and working out hard does more for my mood than almost anything else.  But after that, get your brain moving.  When things go wrong, I usually feel like I’m facing an endless number of problems, all piled up on top of one another.  But, in fact, while your problems may be terrible, they’re also finite.  So when everything is crap, I start by making a ‘cloud list’ – an inventory of everything that’s a problem in my life at that moment.  In my own experience, and for the people who I’ve helped do this during their own crises, just making a concrete list, seeing it down on paper, helps a surprising amount by itself.  Then, for each problem, figure out a first thing or two that you can do in response.  Some problems can’t be ‘fixed,’ but for all of them there’s still some concrete, positive action you can take.  You have terminal cancer with three months to live?  Fine; draft a plan for how you’re going to make the most of those three months.  Similarly, for some problems, the action might be a long-shot Hail Mary, unlikely to even work.  Which is also fine.  You’ll still feel hugely better knowing you’re at least going down swinging.  But, in short, find something you can do, and start doing it.  In my experience, forward motion helps more than anything else.

  1. See the Moon

One of my favorite poems is a Haiku by Basho:

Barn’s burned down.
Now,
I can see the moon.

Or as an old cowboy couplet has it

Two men looked out from prison bars;
one saw the mud, the other saw stars.

Sometimes, life sucks.  And I wouldn’t suggest pretending otherwise, becoming a mindless Polyanna.  But eventually, after you let yourself rage and despair, after you find your future ‘why,’ focus on today, and get moving, the only other thing you can do is to start looking for what good there still is in the world.  Sitting surrounded by the ashes and embers of your burned-down barn of a life, at some point, you have to look for the moon.  To be honest, I’m still puzzling out the best way to do that, the best way to snap myself back to seeing the glass as half-full.  Often, just reading that Basho haiku does it for me.  And when that doesn’t work, I’ve also had success with giving myself a daily journaling assignment: for a week (or even a month), starting with the prompt, “[Disaster x] is the best thing that ever happened to me, because…” and forcing myself to complete the page.  But, at the end of the day, it comes down to making a choice: deciding that you’d rather focus on whatever is positive in your life, rather than the negative that’s been weighing you down.

That’s the four-step plan that works for me.  So now, when things go wrong, I may still be launched into a first stretch of numbness and rage and despair.  But even then, I know there’s a reliable path out the other side.

May 3, 2018

Communication Breakdown

Twenty years back, I read Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand in a gender linguistics class at Yale.  A few weeks ago, I stumbled across the book again.  Paging through the introduction, I decided it might be worth a second read.  After two intervening decades, full of a lot of dates, a failed marriage, and a truly wonderful current long-term relationship, I thought I might get something different out of the book with older, wiser eyes.

Indeed, it turned out to be great, and more than worth the repeat time.  Previously, I remembered it mainly as the origin of the ‘men don’t ask for directions’ trope that has since pervaded cultural common sense.  After this second pass, while I still don’t agree with everything Tannen concludes, and am sometimes not a fan of her methods (she bounces back and forth between citing research-based conclusions, and then riffing broad theories based on anecdotal excerpts from random short stories and plays), I found nearly every page a source of insight or food for thought.

Fundamentally, the book starts from the proposition that men and women have different conversational aims: women are primarily concerned with intimacy and use communication to establish connection; men are primarily concerned with independence and use communication to establish hierarchy.  While generations of subsequent self-help books (like the seemingly endless Men are From Mars series) have been penned using a dumbed-down version of the same argument, they pale painfully in comparison to Tannen’s original.

But the book goes well beyond that simple start, illustrating the myriad other ways that things can get lost in translation between men and women, and between any number of other divergent groups, too.  For example, in a chapter about interruptions, Tannen makes clear that ‘interrupting’ is much more complicated than just the mechanical question of whether two people’s words overlap.  In certain cultures (what she calls “high involvement”) people over-talk as a way to egg each other on with questions, agreement, support, etc.  Whereas in others (“high consideration”) the exact same over-talk might be seen as dismissive and rude.  She analyzes a transcribed conversation between six friends at a dinner party, and concludes:

In my study of dinner table conversation, the three high-involvement speakers were New York City natives of Jewish background.  Of the three high-considerateness speakers, two were Catholics from California and one was from London, England.  Although a sample of three does not prove anything, nearly everyone agrees that many (obviously not all) Jewish New Yorkers, many New Yorkers who are not Jewish, and many Jews who are not from New York have high-involvement styles and are often perceived as interrupting in conversations with speakers from different backgrounds, such as the Californians in my study.  But many Californians expect shorter pauses than many Midwesterners or New Englanders, so in conversations between them, Californians end up interrupting.  Just as I was considered extremely polite when I lived in New York but was sometimes perceived as rude in California, a polite Californian I know was shocked and hurt to find herself accused of rudeness when she moved to Vermont.

The cycle is endless.  Linguists Ron and Suzanne Scollon show that midwestern Americans, who may find themselves interrupted in conversations with Easterners, become aggressive interrupters when they talk to Athabaskan Indians, who expect much longer pauses.  Many Americans find themselves interrupting when they talk to Scandinavians, but Swedes and Norwegians are perceived as interrupting by the longer-pausing Finns, who are themselves divided by regional differences with regard to length of pauses and rate of speaking.  As a result, Finns from certain parts of the country are stereotyped as fast talking and pushy, and those from other parts of the country are stereotyped as slow talking and stupid, according to Finnish linguists Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara.

The whole book is chock full of this kind of stuff, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  Indeed, if you’re a man or a woman, and you regularly talk to men or women (and, especially, if you’re in or would like to be in a heterosexual relationship), I’d say it’s an essential read.

February 12, 2018

Back to Uni

About 15 years ago, ‘functional fitness’ became a hot trend in the fitness industry.  Suddenly, people everywhere were doing squats on top of BOSUs, bench pressing on stability balls, and doing crazy one-arm, one-leg movements using cable pulley machines.  At the time, I dismissed the trend as garbage.  And, in the years that followed, studies backed that opinion: EMG muscle readings showed that people simply used their muscles less intensely when they used them in weird, unstable, cockamamie ways.

But as fitness expert Alwyn Cosgrove has observed, we tend to overreact to new ideas in the short term, and under-react to them in the long term.  So while the functional fitness trend has largely now passed, I recently read Mike Boyle’s newly updated *New Functional Training for Sports, 2nd Edition*, and I think Cosgrove may be right.  While there was certainly much to disdain about the functional fitness trend, I’m also pretty sure I threw out a valuable baby with that bathwater.

For example, as we’re working with a bunch of Baby Boomers and older adults through Composite, training to prevent falls is an increasing element of our programming.  Previously, I had always thought of that as a ‘software’ question – improving the proprioception needed for balance.  However, it’s increasingly clear to me in practice that the functional guys had it right: it’s not that your brain doesn’t know when your shin isn’t vertical, or when your hips aren’t parallel to the ground; it’s that you don’t have the strength to stabilize them correctly while you’re moving and on one leg.  And, similarly, it’s not that your brain doesn’t try to move a foot to catch yourself if you start to fall; it’s that you don’t have the speed to move that foot fast enough.  While strength falls off at 1% a year as we age, power, the fitness attribute that underlies foot speed, declines twice as quickly.  So making sure we strengthen on one leg – and build unilateral power in particular – seems like a wise training priority.

Or consider “core work,” which often focuses on lumbar flexion (sit-ups) or lumbar rotation (Russian twists). However, as the functional training crowd points out, that’s not really how the body moves in sport or real-world pursuits.  Instead, if you watch carefully, you’ll notice that almost all athletic movement comes from flexion, extension, and rotation at the hips and thoracic (upper) spine.  The lumbar (lower) spine mostly just braces in place, to transmit power.  Therefore, exercises focused on anti-flexion (like roll-outs) and anti-rotation (like Paloff presses and plank reaches) probably better translate out of the gym.

Even the stability ball – a device I’ve long derided – might be worth its salt.  For the past few weeks, I and handful of our athletes have been using them for hamstring curls (back on the floor, feet on the ball, rolling it in and out), and we’ve found they activate the hamstrings in a remarkably intense way (especially for anyone not yet ready to graduate to a full glute-ham developer raise).  Which is to say, I’ll definitely be including the movement in programs going forward.

So, in summary, when it comes to functional training, I now stand corrected.  Possibly even on one foot.

January 22, 2018

Freedom

“There is a famous allegory in the writings of Rabbenu Yona:

‘Prisoners in a jail effect an escape – they dig a tunnel under the wall of their cell and squeeze through.  All except one: one prisoner remains, ignoring the avenue of escape.  The jailer enters to discover that his prisoners have flown, and begins beating the one who remains.’

This is a difficult allegory to understand.  Why is the one who remains being beaten?  He appears to be the one who is acting properly; after all, he is the only one obeying the law. What has he done?

The meaning is this: in remaining, he has escaped more profoundly than those who have fled. The escapees have broken jail; it no longer contains them, that is true. But the one who remains has redefined the jail: when he shows that he is there voluntarily, he shows that this is no jail at all. While the cell was intact, he appeared to be imprisoned; but now that it is clear that he has no desire to leave, he reveals the jail never held him. A jail is a place that holds those who wish to be free; those who wish to be there are not held by it. The jailer is angry not because this inmate has done something as simple as escaping, but because he has declared the jailer and his jail to be entirely irrelevant. The others have left the jail; he has utterly destroyed it.”

– Rabbit Akiva Tatz, Letters to a Buddhist Jew

January 12, 2018

Shoot ‘Em

Per my last post, I have a pretty anal-retentive approach to goals, habits, and projects, which has helped me to push forward on a wide array of big pursuits that I care about.  But, over the years, I’ve also slowly accumulated a list of small, random skills I’d also like to improve or acquire.  And, precisely because I don’t care that much about them, I never really get around to doing anything about them; they seem to perpetually live on my back burner.

This fall, however, I came up with a new idea: each quarter, I’d choose one of those random back-burner pursuits, and commit to spending 5-10 minutes on it daily for three months.  At the end of the quarter, I could make a more permanent, ongoing habit of anything I discovered I really cared about; for everything else, a quarter’s worth of daily progress would be enough to check the box, and to make me feel like I had put in the effort.

So, in September, I started off with chess.  Prior to that, I had played perhaps five games of chess in my life.  I knew how the pieces moved, but that was about it.  So I read a handful of chess books (in case you’re on a similar quest, I highly recommend Bobby Fischer Teachers Chess), and then started playing games. Three months later, I’m still a bit short of grandmaster.  But I can, at least, hold my own in a casual game – well enough to play with a friend, or against a simulator on the iPhone to kill time on a plane or train ride.  Which, really, was all I wanted.

This week, with a new quarter, I moved on to a new skill: playing pool.  Fortuitously, there’s a pool table in my building lobby, which is almost always abandoned in the mornings.  So, for five or ten minutes on the way to work, I stop in and practice some pool drills.

Much like with chess, I think I’ve played maybe two dozen pool games in my life – usually while in a bar, fairly drunk. It’s a frustrating game for me, as, in my mind, I’m excellent.  The geometry and strategy make perfect sense.  But somehow, when the stick hits the cue ball, things never unfold quite like I envisioned them.

We’ll see how much that changes over a quarter of practice.  But if I’m diligent, I think I should be able to make it from horrific to just moderately terrible.  And, for me, that should be good enough. I can move on next quarter to massacring drawing instead, and can keep crossing those little things, one by one, off my back-burner bucket list.

January 6, 2018