jducoeur

Here's a bit of exploration I've been doing in my own head, which I'll toss out as an exercise for those who want to play.

What are your key principles of life? We live in a giant web of memes -- lots of Big Ideas that influence us in many ways. I could probably come up with dozens that matter to my life and those around me, ranging from Joy to Law to Life to Spontaneity. But as an exercise, I decided to think about which ones are *most* important to me: the ones that seem to drive my life and decisions more than any others. (For this exercise, I suspect that the target number is 1-3.)

For me, I settled on three: Honesty, Caring and Balance. Each of those is pretty subtle, so let's unpack.


I started out with the first one as "Truth", but quickly decided that the connotations are wrong. For many people, Truth is a quest, and particularly a quest for an absolute. Truth is a pillar that often purports to be complete and irrefutable, and it defines some peoples' lives. But the simple fact is, I don't personally believe in that. The world is a messy place, and I find that the questions you choose to ask often define the Truth you wind up with.

Honesty has a different set of connotations. It's not about an external and absolute Truth -- it's about an internal one. It's about being honest with those around you, but even more it's about not kidding yourself. The mindset of Honesty is all about embracing the world as you find it, not chasing the world you wish for. It's absolutely at the heart of the Synchronicity Train, and has become central to my worldview. Wishing the world was something other than what it is tends to lead to misery (one of the basic principles of Buddhism). Taking it as it is and loving it for that, OTOH, seems to work astonishingly well, at least for me.


Similarly, the second started out as "Love", but that's too narrow and not quite right. I don't mean either romantic or sexual love here -- both are very important to me, but not quite central to who I am. I thought about the common Masonic tweak of "Charity", but that's not right either, at least as commonly used.

So it really comes out as Caring -- quite literally, giving a damn about the people around me. This is important as a conscious choice: not merely the instinctive hindbrain likes and dislikes, but trying to pay attention to them and *think* about them. And it partly means accepting that nobody, including those I love most deeply, is perfect -- that everyone is flawed in their own ways, and everyone deserves caring anyway.


And then there is Balance. This has always been my touchstone, since freshman year of college when someone (Janis?) assigned me the two of pentacles in a tarot reading and I took it in that somewhat idiosyncratic way. My central motto is, "Balance in all things, including Balance" -- that is, there are times when you have to take an off-balance stand, but choose those moments carefully. In general, I am always suspicious of extremes: anyone who wants me to accept a view of the world that is without nuance is someone who I am likely to distrust.

And it stands between the other two, since Honesty and Caring are always slightly in tension: it is altogether too easy to hurt those I care about with ill-chosen honesty. That doesn't mean that the honesty loses, though: rather, it means that the caring needs to nuance the honesty, remembering them and their feelings in how I present it.


How about you? What are your central principles? My suspicion is that most people, looking at themselves honestly, will come up with their own distinctive set...

Pardon a moment of introspection, which may be helpful to folks trying to figure out where my head's at. This one's been teasing around at the edge of my consciousness for a few weeks, but I finally figured it out during a conversation this morning.

The first thing you have to keep in mind is that I'm a fair bit more broken right now than I probably look. I'm putting on a good front, and truth to tell I'm okay most of the time. Knock on wood, I seem to be largely avoiding depression, and life is toddling along. But there's a lot of broken glass in my head, and I'm still figuring out where the sharp edges are.

The one I finally puzzled out this morning is that I've gotten *enormously* commitment-phobic. I'm having fun socializing with folks (very heavily), but it's almost entirely spontaneous -- even a hint of having to commit to something sends me skittering away. (Probably closely related is that I've gotten almost entirely *reactive* in my social life: I'm accepting lots of invitations, but extending very few.) My reaction to commitments on a timescale longer than a few days is surprisingly visceral, almost fight-or-flight: just an incredibly strong "don't wanna".

It's not entirely clear where this is coming from. Some of it may be that real commitments come from the grown-up part of my brain, and that part is still quite deeply in shock. Maybe even more strongly, I'm simply out of the habit: after much of a year of living almost entirely reactively, juggling crisis after crisis of ever-growing proportions, I'm just out of practice in stepping back and making plans. And some is likely just plain emotional trauma -- a few too many instances in recent years of my plans and expectations ending in ash, making me just plain gun-shy about expecting *anything*.

(Side-note: curiously, this doesn't seem to be affecting work at all -- it's just in my personal life. Far as I can tell, the mental disciplines I've spent years building up at work are standing me in good stead. The difference seems to be that my ego is largely decoupled from work, quite intentionally: I've concluded over the years that part of being a truly *great* engineer is getting your ego the hell out of your code. As a result, work seems to occupy the same mental space as a game for me: a big, important, high-stakes game that I want to win, but a game nonetheless. And the result is that all the planning comes from the engineering side of my brain, not the personal side. I hadn't actually realized that I'd compartmentalized quite that effectively.)

Anyway, this shouldn't be over-interpreted, and I believe I'll eventually get over it: that's part of the deliberate project of rebuilding my head over the next 4-6 months. Indeed, the Movie Night concept is semi-intentional mental judo on myself: trying to assemble a very *small*, limited project that is likely to work and be fun, which makes a good stepping-stone towards learning how to plan my life again. But for now, please don't be surprised if I appear strangely reticent about planning: I'm continually having to force myself over mental hurdles in order to do so...

[Happy birthday to shava23!]

I'm beginning to suspect that I'm rather weird. That's not going to surprise folks, but I'd like to take a quick survey. Note that the following questions are entirely about intuition -- not what you intellectually think, but what, at a *gut* level, seems correct to you, so don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. Yes, I'm being intentionally simplistic in the replies: I'm curious whether, when pushed into a black and white answer about their gut reaction, folks find these ideas sensible.

[Poll #1029830]

Interesting. I've noticed for a while that I've been doing rather badly at many things -- in particular, I'm procrastinating a lot. That's showing up in a lot of venues: SCA stuff, but also my LARP writing, and even somewhat at work.

And it occurs to me: somewhere along the line, I've developed an odd phobia to my own nature, and particularly one of the INTJish aspects. That is, it's a natural tendency of mine to get deeply sucked into projects -- perhaps not quite obsessive, but certainly quite deeply focused. That focus is precisely what I've been lacking lately, and it's not just a matter of accident: if I look inside, there's a strange aversion to it. Which makes little sense, because it is, frankly, generally pretty fun when I do let myself get sucked in -- like I said, it's a natural tendency.

Where did this come from? I need to dig into that a bit. Best initial guess is that it's a side-effect of my attempts to make myself better at multi-tasking. In a number of respects (not least work) I've needed to learn how to keep a lot more balls in the air at once. Getting "focused" often intereferes with that, since I will often neglect other projects while I'm involved in one. (Indeed, "focus" can be used as a procrastination technique itself.) Also possibly related: I've been teaching myself to skim things, as a partial solution to my media addiction and my *ludicrous* backlog of various media. That skimming is, again, rather opposed to "focus".

Either or both of these might be driving the effect. Regardless, though, I think I need to bring myself back around to focusing again, and get past the fear of it -- for better or worse, it's how I actually get things done...