Through the Prism: The Way That a Glacier Is Placid

Wow, I see it's been a month since my last post. Not that I really keep track, I just generally fill up with enough thoughts and ideas and new things consumed that they spill over into some kind of post every couple of weeks. But I took a couple of weeks vacation from work for a family trip, caught up for almost a week, then was bedridden for another week with my second round of covid--so I've been out of my normal routines and habits for most of the month. Not as much has compiled as usual, though I've had more actual life experiences instead. :-) And I took many photos, so this post will include more pictures and fewer words than my typical.

A little something I composed on Facebook in the middle of the night:

I do not like it, Sam-I-Am,

I do not like Covid again.

I do not like it in my bed,

I do not like it hurts my head.

Shivers, fever,

Chills retriever

From the dark;

All through the night,

Awake instead.

I do not like this sleeplessness,

I do not like this feebleness.

I do not like Covid again,

I do not like it, Sam-I-Am.

I will share a couple of quick anecdotes from our family trip. I snapped this at a Legoland area called "Rebuild the World." I thought it might be fun for a quick icebreaker or teambuilding in group settings. More than the flow chart itself, though, I like the five types. I like the idea that these are the types needed to build a good world.

Are you a Storyteller, Designer, Maker, Dreamer, or Explorer?

And I had a really cool encounter with a tiger while taking photos of our two boys at the zoo.

Out of a packed crowd of people who had gathered to watch the tiger roar and be active at the end of the day, it picked me to make eye contact with each time it paced by, until, finally, it stopped to stare into my eyes long enough to fog the glass between us with its breath. It turned to walk away when I said I wasn't going to give it any scratches.

The boys don't believe us that the tiger saw them as tasty morsels, but here it's licking its lips as it eyes them.

A thought I shared on Facebook:

Am I the only one who sometimes wonders how a book narrator, seeing me appear out of a crowd in an airport or observing me in a restaurant or noticing me interacting with my family at the park, would describe me as a character in their book; not just my physical appearance, but my bearing and demeanor and manner, the impressions I make and the ways I interact with others and the world?

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Catoptric Tristesse

n. the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad, or if at all—that although you can gather a few hints here and there, and even ask around for honest feedback, you’ll always have to wonder which opinions are being softened out of flattery, sharpened out of malice, or held back because it’s simply not their place.

In Ancient Rome, the catoptric cistula was a kind of mirror-lined box whose interior appeared to expand into an infinite forest, library, or treasure room. Pronounced “kuh-top-trik tris-tes.”

I wasn't fishing for responses of this sort, but one friend (coworker) did offer this description:

There was an air about him of a person who drank the same tea but read a different book every day. He was placid in the way that a glacier is placid, but with the suggestion that if he ever had occasion to raise his voice in anger, it would sound like that same glacier calving. His eyes roved back and forth across the computer screen, bringing to mind the words "constant" and "inevitable"; he was a man who had always been in this chair, reading this screen, and would always be in this chair, reading this screen, and perhaps this chair and this screen had been placed in this room specifically so that someday he would come here and allow them to realize their purpose.

I think it's awesome.

Here's an essay that I recently enjoyed.

Three Ways to Get in Touch with Your Shadow Self

It is often easy to point fingers at those who repel us and to think how awful they are. But sometimes you might find that they are acting as a kind of mirror, reflecting back qualities you find abhorrent, but that you actually possess yourself, as uncomfortable and unwelcome as that idea might be.

Coming to terms with these unwanted aspects of ourselves is arguably a necessary struggle in life. It enables us to take responsibility for our faults, our failings or shortcomings, and to blame others less. This can create deeper and more meaningful relationships. . . .

Many of us do this work and derive great benefit from it. There are aspects of ourselves buried in the Shadows that need to be discovered, uncovered and incorporated in order for us to become more whole human beings. To live only in the lighter, more socially valued and acceptable aspects of life can make for a shallow existence. That can leave us less able to create deep and fulfilling relationships in life and instead leave us feeling empty or hollow.

I probably have as much trouble getting into touch with my shadows as anyone, though I do prefer my stories and art to have some darkness.

It's Amy's favorite. (She seems so sweet on the surface, no?) Amy and I do not always have the exact same taste in things, but this I like.

When she told me it was her favorite, it suggested to me strange and wonderful things about her character that I had not guessed, dark places that I might like to visit.

People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

I don't want a shallow existence.

I'm currently part of a team at my work tasked with looking at how we meet and communicate in our organization. Some of the members started pulling articles from business journals about how to have better meetings, and I felt the need to advocate for adding a different dimension to the discussion than I was seeing. Here's what I wrote:

I would like to offer an alternative view. (Surprise!) I too have many critiques of the way we meet in this organization, yet am also not a fan of the basic orientation in the articles you've provided, that meetings should be all about efficiency, time management, decisions, and getting things done. If those are your goals, eliminate meetings; individuals are almost always more nimble and efficient than groups.

I see the benefit of meetings being the opportunity to create a greater whole than the sum of the individuals. Becoming a greater whole means deeply dwelling with each other, listening, participating, airing dissent and difference, and taking time to make slow decisions. The value in meetings is the ability to interact with each other, face-to-face. When I organize meetings, I rarely present and I don't think of myself as leading an agenda but facilitating a conversation. I de-center myself as much as possible to create a forum where everyone else can be seen and heard. And participants regularly tell me that my meetings are the best ones they attend. Maybe we don't always "get shit done," but we bond and grow and empower each other, and come out more capable of tackling work on the other side.

That is the type of culture I would advocate us working to create.

Soon after contributing those thoughts, this showed up on my feed. It says what I wanted to, but better.

What the Ju/'hoansi Can Tell Us about Group Decision Making

The Ju/’hoansi are careful not to entrust key decisions to single individuals or small sub-groups. Leadership is temporary and knowledge-based, shifting even within a single conversation. Leaders refrain from stating their opinions early in the conversation, which could bias the opinions of others who have yet to speak. The role of a leader in group decisions is to guide deliberation, state the group’s mood, and help finalise a decision. Leaders are respected, but they cannot coerce others. Biesele refers to this as ‘sapiential authority’.

With the goal of consensus, the group itself is the decision-maker. Decisions typically start as grassroots affairs between neighbours and friends. Only later does the community gather together for a formal meeting. During deliberation, everyone – man or woman, old or young – is encouraged to state their opinion about important matters. In the egalitarian culture of the Ju/’hoansi, people do their own thing and therefore have their own unique experiences and ways of representing problems that may be relevant to a group decision.

The Ju/’hoansi are not culturally diverse, but their permissiveness of individual differences means their groups are functionally diverse. The social norm of widespread participation ensures the free and open exchange of information, reducing the likelihood of an information cascade. Biesele documented a principle that, if each person’s opinion was not heard, trouble would follow. Repressed opinions, it was said, could cause sickness. . . .

Discussion continues until a consensus is reached. Everyone has to agree on the course of action because it legitimates the decision as belonging to the group. It is not merely the actual result of the decision that counts, but the process itself. Everyone must attend to what Silberbauer calls the social balance-sheet. The social balance-sheet is no less than the promise of future cooperation, perhaps the most important thing in the life of a hunter-gatherer.

Consensus is also about the creation of shared meaning. The Ju/’hoansi, according to Silberbauer, are not only exchanging facts about reality but also values, objectives and ‘logical and causal relationships between items of information’. To decide well, the band must think together. . . .

According to William Isaacs, who teaches workshops on dialogue-based approaches to communication, dialogue is ‘a shared inquiry, a way of thinking and reflecting together. It is not something you do to another person. It is something you do with people … Dialogue is a living experience of inquiry within and between people.’ Contrast this with debate, the root of which comes from the Old French word debatre – ‘to fight’. . . .

Just because hunter-gatherers do something does not make it necessarily good. But according to social psychologists, the features of Ju/’hoansi decision-making are the very ones that make for high collective intelligence. Consider a 2020 article from the Harvard Business Review outlining the best practices that optimise good decision-making in small groups: heterogeneous groups are better than homogeneous ones; dissent is crucial; people should arrive at their opinions independently; people should feel free to speak their minds; individuals should share collective responsibility.

Taken together, there is robust evidence that the Ju/’hoansi are able to avoid levels of polarisation like we see in our current political moment. This is achieved not necessarily through individual virtue but rather with cultural guardrails and prolonged deliberation. The Ju/’hoansi are well aware that their social norms around deliberation improve the quality of their decisions. As Biesele told me, Ju/’hoansi informants would say things like: ‘It’s necessary to draw on the strengths of each person, to minimise the chances that decisions will be made on the basis of the weakness of one or a few persons.’ In contrast, even though discussion generally improves group reasoning performance, people in Western society are poor at recognising this fact. . . .

Some of our most important decisions still occur in small face-to-face groups, whether it’s in the Oval Office, the corporate boardroom, or the family dinner table. The Ju/’hoansi show us how the best outcomes can be achieved in these groups. Success comes from material interdependence, common purpose and shared meaning. Also critical are the conversational guardrails that enable us to truly think in, and as, groups. This is ancient knowledge that any of us can put into action now: don’t get heated, detach ideas from ego, put yourself in others’ shoes, listen. And always speak your mind.

I really love this orientation to being together. Success comes from material interdependence, common purpose and shared meaning.

I believe this is the Harvard Business Review article referenced:

7 Strategies for Better Group Decision-Making

Keep the group small when you need to make an important decision.
Choose a heterogenous group over a homogenous one (most of the time).
Appoint a strategic dissenter (or even two).
Collect opinions independently.
Provide a safe space to speak up.
Don’t over-rely on experts.
Share collective responsibility.

And the group did manage to find a few really good articles to create some "meeting best practices" from. This is the best of the lot:

Why Your Meetings Stink—and What to Do About It

Meetings can efficiently bring together ideas and opinions and allow people to do their jobs in a more coordinated and cooperative manner. They help individuals form a coherent whole that is more adaptive, resilient, and self-directing, especially in times of crisis. Perhaps most important, meetings help establish and promote consensus, thus serving as a focal point for collective drive and energy.

Success comes from material interdependence, common purpose and shared meaning.

A poem.

Dick Westheimer

WHERE DOES A PERSON WITH APHANTASIA DREAM OF GOING?

My son asks me how can I run the same
mile-long loops through the woods every day
and not be bored and I tell him it’s different—
every time. The sun angles through the trees
in changing ways. The undersides of the leaves

shudder to the breeze much as a lover’s kiss
differs from the next and the next. Shadows dapple
the path in new ways with each step and I know
the route but not the way until I walk it. Sometimes
the creek wafts the gaseous smell of heron dung, sometimes

it’s the reek of rotting scum, sometimes it’s the faint taste
of the sea. Often I hear the water wash over the rocks
like little bells, other times it sluices like a million million mothers
whispering shush. There are portals in the heat of summer
when a pocket of cool air comes up from the bottoms

like a great refrigerator door that I stand before.
How could anyone dream this—this moment on this path
with my foot suspended right before it falls, this definitive minute
closer to my death? And who wouldn’t want to visit this
very point in time, this infinitesimal instant when

there is no pain, this instant between two others I know
I share with you dear reader. Maybe you too saw that single
dewdrop cling to the tip of the blade of grass, the lone bee
foraging the one white clover that did not succumb
to weed killer? I don’t recall your name or face

but I know this about you: If you are reading this,
you will hear this click. And I will take this one more
breath. Then this. Then …
And you will hear the word “this.”

—from Prompt Poem of the Month
June 2024

Maybe you too saw that single dewdrop cling to the tip of the blade of grass, the lone bee foraging the one white clover that did not succumb to weed killer?

I managed to read a few things while traveling and ill. Here are two that stand out.

The Collectors, ed. by A.S. King:

"I liked some more than others; a few I really loved; a few were just okay." I seem to write some version of that sentiment about every collection of short stories that I review. Only, this time, I can't. Because I loved--or at least really liked--almost everything on offer. This is a uniformly strong collection.

Though not uniform. King writes in her introduction that she started with the goal of creating a "weird short story collection." I'm not sure if she intended that to mean a weird collection of stories or a collection of weird stories, but she accomplished both. Some of the stories are quirky and strange and disquieting. Some are authentic and moving and poignant. Each takes a unique approach to the idea of a character with a "collection." Each is wonderful in its own way.

I really enjoyed this odd collection about odd collectors.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

An enthralling, fascinating, and intense book. Each story is based on actual scientific and mathematical achievements of the twentieth century and the unusual personalities of the people who made them.

For all of them, Labatut uses a skeleton of facts then builds onto them seemingly true details of the intimate and extreme lives involved in the developments. The first story is almost entirely factual, then each that follows is increasingly fabricated through to the final story that has only a hint of truth--though I only know that because of a brief author's note at the end and other reviews; they read as real and it would take a good bit of research, I imagine, to unwind the fiction from the nonfiction.

Regardless, they are stellar stories, both intellectually engaging and superbly entertaining. I'm glad I stumbled onto this little collection.

I'm only just now noticing that both are story collections instead of novels.

A poem that I particularly love.

Jen DeGregorio

AN ARGUMENT AGAINST CYNICISM

What surprises me more than a new
millipede species was discovered this week
in Los Angeles County is that anyone cares
enough about millipedes to look for them. Entomologists
may be the last true heroes. They may be
a species unto themselves, one they have overlooked
in their zeal to turn from the mirror
toward the dirt. The Illacme socal
has four hundred eighty-six legs, a toothy head,
the L.A. Times says, and the greenish translucence
of a glow-in-the-dark toy. It weaves through the soil
as elegantly as an embroiderer’s needle. The reporter
must have labored over these phrases, felt enough
joy in prose to fuel her a few more days
in her reviled profession. A survey this year said half
of Americans think all journalists are liars. To them I offer
Corinne Purtill, who surely spent hours listening
to entomologists so she could tell us something approaching
the true nature of millipedes—not insects
but arthropods, more like lobsters than beetles,
vile-tasting to birds, garbagemen
of the forest, eaters of dead leaves they transform
into food for what grows—and of entomologists
themselves. How one named Paul Marek drove
on Christmas to Whiting Ranch to find specimens
which he gently scooped into plastic vials
with a bit of soil, then tucked into his carry-on
for the trip back to his lab. Attention
is the highest form of love. And I love entomologists
for the attention they pay to the smallest among us, and journalists
for the attention they pay to the ones who pay attention
to the spectrum of beauty and terror, our discoveries
and petty political battles and vicious crimes and acts
of unearned mercy and weddings and burials
in the somehow still teeming earth.

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024