Develop a Positive Xenophilia

I've always found it easy to love others. My difficulty has been learning to let others love me. Perhaps because I have trouble loving myself, which makes it hard for me to believe, accept, and trust the authenticity of love from others. I'm only recently figuring out--or maybe remembering after having once again forgotten--that part of taking care of others is letting them take care of me. They won't feel cared for and appreciated unless the vulnerability and care are mutual, unless I can accept their reciprocal love in return. I want to provide them with care and support and help them achieve happiness and yet feel like a burden when they try to do the same for me. I somehow expect to not take anything from them, no matter how gladly given.

I'm a librarian.

There's a stereotype of librarians that, because we are surrounded all day by information and stories, because we immerse ourselves in reading and study, that we are exceptionally knowledgeable. That we know everything.

Every time I encounter that thought, I respond that the key to being a librarian is not knowing things, it's knowing how to find things, the information and stories needed.

Not knowing, but knowing how to find.

That's what I'm good at.

There is a thickheaded form of not knowing, from not having reflected or thought, and an inspired way, being sufficiently educated that we realize how absurdly little we know. The former is plain ignorance, the latter verges on the sacred.

― Thomas Moore, Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality

I'm reminded by what follows next of an article I shared a few years ago in The Beneficial Skill of Complaining.

Say Goodbye to the Information Age: It’s All About Reputation Now

We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others. The way in which the authority of knowledge is now constructed makes us reliant on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom we do not know. . . .

The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from ‘fake news’ and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies. What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.

Whenever we are at the point of accepting or rejecting new information, we should ask ourselves: Where does it come from? Does the source have a good reputation? Who are the authorities who believe it? What are my reasons for deferring to these authorities? Such questions will help us to get a better grip on reality than trying to check directly the reliability of the information at issue.

I'm also reminded by what follows next of the words of quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli in my recent post Reality Is Relational.

The nature of man is not his internal structure but the network of personal, familial, and social interactions within which he exists. It is these that "make" us, these that guard us. As humans, we are that which others know of us, that which we know of ourselves, and that which others know about our knowledge. We are complex nodes in a rich web of reciprocal information.

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Every vision is partial. There is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent on a perspective--no point of view that is absolute and universal.

And yet, points of view communicate. Knowledge is in dialogue with itself and with reality. In the dialogue, those points of view modify, enrich, converge--and our understanding of reality deepens.

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Relations make up our "I," as our society, our cultural, spiritual, and political life.

Knowledge has no meaning until it is applied and put to use. It is trivia until it becomes meaningful through relevance.

I recently read The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, of which I wrote:

This book presents a clear, engaging, and convincing case that human knowledge, for the most part, is a shared enterprise. We know vastly more as a connected community than we do as individuals, and we constantly underestimate how much of what we believe we "know" is actually stored in other people and outside memory devices (like books and computers). We have access to knowledge much more than we have individual, memorized possession of it.

Why should it matter that I personally have information in my head? If you ask me whether I know a phone number, does it matter if I've memorized the number, whether it's on a slip of paper in my pocket, or whether it's in the head of the person next to me? My ability to act doesn't depend on the knowledge that happens to be in my head at a given moment; it depends on what knowledge I can access when I need it.

That's because human brains developed for the purpose of taking action, not storing information, and our thoughts automatically frame information to determine causation, to consider possible outcomes of different actions to determine the best course to take.

This book has three central themes: ignorance, the illusion of understanding, and the community of knowledge, the authors write near the end. We think having access to information means we "know" it, thus creating the illusion that we know much more in isolation than we actually do. In reality, we have shared access to knowledge through interaction with others and access to outside sources. So we need to stop thinking of knowledge and intelligence as individual traits and instead focus on them as shared, group traits.

The authors consider both why this is so and the potential ramifications of conceiving of "thinking" as something we never do alone. Highly recommended.

I took many insights from The Knowledge Illusion:

The human mind is not like a desktop computer, designed to hold reams of information. The mind is a flexible problem solver that evolved to extract only the most useful information to guide decisions in new situations. As a consequence, individuals store very little detailed information about the world in their heads. In that sense, people are like bees and society a beehive: Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind. To function, individuals rely not only on knowledge stored within our skulls but also on knowledge stored elsewhere: in our bodies, in the environment, and especially in other people. When you put it all together, human thought is incredibly impressive. But it is a product of a community, not of any individual alone.

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Thought is for action. Thinking evolved as an extension of the ability to act effectively; it evolved to make us better at doing what's necessary to achieve our goals. Thought allows us to select from among a set of possible actions by predicting the effects of each action and by imagining how the world would be if we had taken different actions in the past.

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The mind stretches beyond the brain to include the body, the environment, and people other than oneself.

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We've seen that people are surprisingly ignorant, more ignorant than they think. We've also seen that the world is complex, even more complex than one might have thought. So why aren't we overwhelmed by this complexity if we're so ignorant? How can we get around, sound knowledgeable, and take ourselves seriously while understanding only a tiny fraction of what there is to know?

The answer is that we do so by living a lie. We ignore complexity by overestimating how much we know about how things work, by living life in the belief that we know how things work even when we don't. We tell ourselves that we understand what's going on, that our opinions are justified by our knowledge, and that our actions are grounded in justified beliefs even though they are not. We tolerate complexity by failing to recognize it. That's the illusion of understanding.

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The reason most of us are not hyperthymesics (able to recall all of our experiences in exact, vivid detail) is because it would make us less successful at what we evolved to do. The mind is busy trying to choose actions by picking out the most useful stuff and leaving the rest behind. Remembering everything gets in the way of focusing on the deeper principles that allow us to recognize how a new situation resembles past situations and what kinds of actions will be effective. . . . 

Storing details is often unnecessary to act effectively; a broad picture is generally all we need. Sometimes storing details is counterproductive.

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Just as people don't think only associatively (as Pavlov thought we do), people do not reason via logical deduction. We reason by causal analysis. People make inferences by reasoning about the way the world works. We think about how causes produce effects, what kinds of things disable or prevent effects, and what factors must be in place for causes to have their influence. Rather than thinking in terms of *propositional* logic, the logic that tells us whether a statement is true or false, people think in terms of *causal* logic, the logic of causation that incorporates knowledge about how events actually come about in order to reach conclusions. . . . 

Causal reasoning is the basis of human cognition; it's in large part what the mind does.

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Storytelling is our natural way of making causal sense of sequences of events. That's why we find stories everywhere. . . . 

A good story goes beyond just describing what actually happened. It tells us about how the world works more broadly, in ways that pertain to things that didn't actually happen or at least haven't happened yet. . . . 

A good story has a moral that applies not just to this world but also to other worlds that we might find ourselves in. . . . 

[Storytelling] requires that we use our understanding of our world's causal mechanisms to build whole alternative worlds to think about. Storytelling helps us to imagine how the world would be if something were different. . . . 

Perhaps the main motivation is that it allows us to consider alternative courses of action.

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Stories are used to transmit causal information and lessons among people, as well as to share experiences, to organize a community's collective memory, and to illustrate and announce an attitude. When a community agrees to buy into a particular story, they are accepting the attitude implied by the story. . . . Stories generally belong to a community, not to an individual, and they are intimately tied to a community's belief system.

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Our beliefs are not isolated pieces of data that we can take and discard at will. Instead, beliefs are deeply intertwined with other beliefs, shared cultural values, and our identities. To discard a belief often means discarding a whole host of other beliefs, forsaking our communities, going against those we trust and love, and in short, challenging our identities.

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Thinking evolved to support complex action. The mind processes information so that individuals can act, so that they can transform the environment to their liking. We have also seen that thought uses the environment to do its processing. The world serves as a memory and is part of the thought process. But a single thinker can do only so much. In nature we often see complex behavior arise through the coordination of multiple individuals. When multiple cognitive systems work together, group intelligence can emerge that goes beyond what each individual is capable of.

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Humans are the most complex and powerful species ever, not just because of what happens in individual brains, but because of how communities of brains work together.

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The ability to share intentionality supports perhaps the most important human capability of all: the ability to store and transmit knowledge from one generation to the next. This leads to what anthropologists call cumulative culture. The transmission of knowledge enabled by our social brains via language, cooperation, and the division of labor accumulates to create a culture. It is one of the most important ingredients in the human success story. Human capabilities are constantly increasing, but not because individuals are getting smarter. Unlike beehives, which have operated pretty much the same way for millions of years, our shared pursuits are always growing more complex and our shared intelligence more powerful.

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Language, memory, attention--indeed, all mental functions--can be thought of as operating in a way that is distributed across a community according to a division of cognitive labor.

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In a community of knowledge, what matters more than having knowledge is having access to knowledge.

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Because we live inside a hive mind, relying heavily on others and the environment to store our knowledge, most of what is in our heads is quite superficial. We can get away with that superficiality most of the time because other people don't expect us to know more; after all, their knowledge is superficial too. We get by because a division of cognitive labor exists that divides responsibility for different aspects of knowledge across a community.

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Most experts love the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, especially when their contribution is acknowledged. Contributing to the community of knowledge is in our collaborative nature.

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The world is infinitely complex and beyond the grasp of any individual. People live in communities of knowledge, and to make the community work, there needs to be a division of cognitive labor. For knowledge to be shared within a community, the role of expert on any given issue must be filled by someone credible and informed. But not everybody needs to know everything. If the community is deciding how to provide health care to its members, then those people who know the most about the most efficient and effective method to distribute health care should be our guides. And if the community is deciding whether to build roads, then engineers are the people to ask, and they need to be trusted. Experts cannot tell communities what they want; that is something that communities have to decide for themselves. But experts can help communities understand what options are available and what the consequences are of taking one or another option.

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He asked people in relationships how long they had been with their partner and how much of the couple's financial decision-making they are responsible for. Next the researchers assessed the couples' financial literacy with a battery of quiz questions about common financial topics. Not surprisingly, people responsible for financial matters got more financially literate as the length of the relationship  increased. People learn, and practice makes perfect. More surprising was that the partner not responsible for financial matters actually got *less* financially literate. Apparently this is a case of "use it or lose it." Ward told us that his biggest takeaway from these studies is how the division of cognitive labor affects what we learn, with the result that we become even more entrenched in our roles.

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Once we start appreciating that knowledge isn't all in the head, that it's shared within a community, our heroes change. Instead of focusing on the individual, we begin to focus on a larger group.

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Awareness that knowledge lives in a community gives us a different way to conceive of intelligence. Instead of regarding intelligence as a personal attribute, it can be understood as how much an individual contributes to the community. If thinking is a social entity that takes place in a group and involves teams, then intelligence resides in the team and not just in individuals. . . . The best way to assess intelligence is by assessing how much an individual contributes to a group's success. An individual contributes to a team, and it is the team that matters, because it is the team that gets things done. An individual's intelligence reflects how critical that individual is to the team.

If we think this way, intelligence is no longer a person's ability to reason and solve problems; it's how much the person contributes to a group's reasoning and problem-solving process. This will involve more than individual information-processing capacities like big memories and fast executive processing units. It will include the ability to understand the perspective of others, to take turns effectively, to understand emotional responses, and to listen. Intelligence becomes a much broader entity when conceived of in terms of the community of knowledge. People can contribute to a community in a variety of different ways: through creative insight but also through willingness to do drudge work for extended periods, by being great orators and by be great navigators.

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One approach is to measure the individual's personal contribution across many groups in the same way ice hockey teams measure the contribution of each player, using a plus-minus score. The idea in hockey is that a team will score more goals when a good player is on the ice and the other team will score fewer. So the quality of a player is indicated by a plus-minus score, the number of goals that the player's team scored while the player was on the ice minus the number of goals that were scored against the player's team. One could measure the contribution of a thinker to a group's problem solving in a similar way. When the person is present, how often does the group succeed and how often does the group fail? A person who reliably contributes to group performance and therefore has a high plus-minus score is "intelligent" in a sense that matters. This is potentially a way to reduce collective intelligence to individual contributions in a way that's consistent with the community of knowledge.

If knowledge and thinking are shared, then intelligence means being good at sharing.

The Knowledge Illusion's argument that human thinking is primarily causal brought to mind an article about AI I shared last month in CAPTCHA:

Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels

Causal reasoning is the neural root of tomorrow-dreaming . . . 

But as natural as causal reasoning feels to us, computers can't do it. . . . 

This inability to perform causal reasoning means that computers cannot do all sorts of stuff that our human brain can. They cannot escape the mathematical present tense of 2 + 2 is 4 to cogitate in was or will be. They cannot think historically or hatch future schemes to do anything, including take over the world.

And they cannot write literature. . . . 

Narrative cranks out chains of this-leads-to-that. . . . 

No matter how nonlogical, irrational, or even madly surreal literature may feel, it hums with narrative logics of cause-and-effect.

You can see more at either link, my previous post or the full article.

The Knowledge Illusion also shows how much of what we call thinking happens automatically by our bodies as they interact with and respond to our environments. Human thinking as we know it requires physical form and sensation.

Memories Without Brains

Certain slime moulds can make decisions, solve mazes and remember things. What can we learn from the blob?

While many people might assume that our memories are primarily stored within our brains, some philosophers like myself argue that – along with some other aspects of cognition – memory can extend beyond the confines of the body to involve coupled interaction with structures in the environment. At least some of our cognitive processes, in short, loop out into our surroundings. Slime mould is an intriguing candidate to explore this idea because it doesn’t have a brain at all, yet in some cases can apparently ‘remember’ things without needing to store those associated memories within itself. In other cases, memories acquired via learning by one individual can even be acquired by a separate individual through physical contact. The behaviour of this strange form of life suggests that some of our ideas about how memories are acquired may need a rethink. . . . 

 . . . focused experiments investigating Physarum’s remarkable ability to make adaptive decisions, solve mazes and even exhibit habituation – a simple form of learning. Once on the verge of being forgotten, P polycephalum is now recognised as a valuable model organism in behavioural biology. Some researchers have even explored it as an unconventional computer, showing how it could perform processing tasks and mimic electronic components. . . . 

The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) states that cognitive processes aren’t always confined to the inner workings of the brain but can sometimes straddle the brain, the body and structures in the environment. Everyday examples include using smartphones to store and recall phone numbers or doing calculations on paper. Cognition, on this view, can span the brain, the body and the world. We were drawn to HEC for several reasons. Beside our shared connection with Clark – who was also my PhD supervisor – I had also become increasingly interested in the evolution of cognition and how non-neuronal organisms might provide clues to understanding how it works in animals. Importantly and to the point, if bacteria, ciliates and protists – organisms entirely lacking neurons – exhibit capacities like learning, memory, and anticipatory behaviour, then HEC’s traditional focus on cognitive spread between brain, body and world seemed too restrictive.

Reid’s study represents a clear example in which a memory trace exists in the environment and is used by the organism to guide future behaviour when encountered. Typically, biological memory is thought to involve an internal, experience-dependent change that can later be recalled and used. But, here, Physarum’s use of its slime to navigate around food-depleted areas demonstrates a form of spatial memory that straddles the body and environment. As far as HEC goes, this is really a ‘no brainer’. . . . 

Just as humans can use mobile phones or notebooks for memory storage and recall, slime moulds can use slime. Granted, numerical memory and navigational memory differ in kind, but the deeper point remains: Physarum evolutionarily stumbled upon an external solution for memory long before humans did.

The fact that extracellular slime can be used as a memory trace by any slime mould that is closely related to the one that left it also raises an important question: whose memory is it? A memory trace is paradigmatically understood to be acquired through experience-dependent learning and possessed by the same individual that acquired it. In the case of Physarum, however, the cell that uses extracellular slime and the cell that deposited it can diverge. . . . 

So, what can slime mould teach us about biological memory? One lesson is that spatial memory needn’t be confined entirely within an organism (á la HEC). Moreover, what becomes memory traces when used (eg, extracellular slime) needn’t be the result of learning by the external trace-producer. Another takeaway is that, in some cases, an individual can acquire such memory without having engaged in learning itself. This raises an intriguing parallel in the human case. We do, after all, routinely read and act upon instructions, maps and manuals written by others, drawing on information acquired through their experiences, not our own. Although such externalised sources of information are typically declarative in structure – designed to represent facts explicitly – we often act upon them automatically, without needing to consciously recall or reflect on the information they convey. In this way, they guide behaviour in ways that functionally resemble non-declarative memory. While the analogy shouldn’t be pushed too far, both the human and slime mould cases illustrate how memory can become decoupled from individual learning, instead becoming accessible to others through environmental structures.

Slime molds, too, never think alone.

We don't think alone; and we don't exist alone. We are never alone.

The Sea Slug Defying Biological Orthodoxy

Symbiosis may be more important to evolution than scientists once thought.

This particular slug starts life a brownish color with a few red dots. Then it begins to eat from the hairlike strands of the green algae Vaucheria litorea: It uses specialized teeth to puncture the alga’s wall, and then it slurps out its cells like one might slurp bubble tea, each bright-green cellular boba moving up the algal straw. The next part remains partially unexplained by science. The slug digests the rest of the cell but keeps the chloroplasts—the plant organelles responsible for photosynthesis—and distributes these green orbs through its branched gut. Somehow, the slug is able to run the chloroplasts itself and, after sucking up enough of them, turns a brilliant green. It appears to get all the food it needs for the rest of its life by way of photosynthesis, transforming light, water, and air into sugar, like a leaf. . . . 

Photosynthesis requires specialized equipment and chemistry, which animals simply do not have—“yet here was an animal that’s figured out how to do it” . . . 

Every cell with a nucleus, meaning all animal and plant cells, has a multigenetic heritage. Mitochondria—the organelles in our cells responsible for generating energy—are likely the product of an ancient symbiosis with a distant ancestor and a microbe, and have their own separate DNA. So we are walking around with the genetic material of some other ancient life form suffused in every cell. And the earliest ancestor of all plants was likely the product of a fusion between a microbe and a cyanobacterium; plants’ photosynthesizing organelles, too, have distinct DNA. Lynn Margulis, the biologist who made the modern case for this idea, was doubted for years until new genetic techniques proved her correct.

Her conviction about the symbiotic origins of mitochondria and chloroplasts was a monumental contribution to cell biology. But Margulis took her theory further; in her view, symbiosis was the driving force of evolution, and many entities were likely composites. Evolution, then, could be traced not only through random mutation, but by combination. “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing one another,” she wrote, with her son, in 1986. This remains pure conjecture, and an exaggeration of the role of symbiosis beyond what mainstream evolutionary theory would support; random mutation is still considered the main driver of speciation.

Yet more scientists now wonder if symbiosis may have played a larger role in the heritage of many species than we presently understand. . . . 

It’s probable that the ancestors of all eukaryotes were more influenced by bacteria in their environments than modern evolutionary theory has accounted for. “All animals and plants likely require interactions with microbes, often in strong, persistent symbiotic associations,” Margaret McFall-Ngai, a leading researcher of the role of microbes in animal development, wrote in 2024. These interactions, she argued, are so fundamental to life that the animal immune system should perhaps be thought of as a sort of management system for our many microbial symbionts. Although biology has been slow to recognize symbiosis’s significance, she thinks this line of research should now take center stage, and could alter how all stripes of biologists think about their work.

Cleves, too, sees himself as working to build a new field of science, by training people on how to ask genetic questions about symbiotic relationships in nature . . . 

Once we start appreciating that knowledge isn't all in the head, that it's shared within a community, our heroes change. Instead of focusing on the individual, we begin to focus on a larger group.

Speaking of slime mold memories and causal, narrative thinking . . . 

The Past Is a Ghost and the Future a Fantasy

We have been taught the past is fixed—a record of what has happened. The future, uncertain and unknown, is the territory of possibility. And yet, what science and philosophy are revealing, with an intimacy and precision our ancestors could only dream of, is that both the past and the future are creations of the mind. Only the present, fleeting and indivisible, is objective. All else is artifice. . . . 

Memory, we now know, is not a storage bin of facts and figures, but the beating, breathing phenomenon of recollection. Each time we remember, we do not pull out a file from the cabinet of the brain. We reconstruct the past. We infer, we embellish, we forget. The act of remembering is not a retrieval but a recreation. The brain opens the memory like a manuscript, edits the text--sometimes subtly, sometimes wildly--and binds it again, unaware that it has revised history.

And why does the brain do this? Because it is not designed for truth--it is designed for survival. To remember is to prepare: to use the past, not to dwell on it, but to anticipate what may come. Memory is not the faculty of historians--it is the engine of prediction.

This is not merely a neurological trick. It is the structure of our lives. We tell stories about ourselves, about where we have been, and these stories, repeated and reshaped, become the tapestry of identity. But that tapestry is stitched not only with threads of what happened--but with what we need to have happened. With what we believe we must have been to justify who we are.

Now look forward. The future, too, is imagined—yet no less vivid. The same architecture of the brain that recalls the past also constructs possible futures. The hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the default mode network—all flicker to life when we anticipate. And what they create is not prophecy. It is simulation. We imagine a dinner party next week or a child we may have one day or the legacy we hope to leave. But these are dreams, no more real than the myths of Homer--crafted from the raw material of memory and desire. . . . 

The self--our sense of self--is itself a construction stretched across time. It is a narrative, told in chapters and revisions, that gives coherence to the moment. But it too is fiction. There is no continuous “I” moving through time, only a series of selves, each suspended in its own present, like beads on a string.

Memory is not a storage bin of facts and figures, but the beating, breathing phenomenon of recollection. . . . it is not designed for truth--it is designed for survival. To remember is to prepare: to use the past, not to dwell on it, but to anticipate what may come. Memory is not the faculty of historians--it is the engine of prediction.

At the top of this post I quoted from Thomas Moore's book Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality. In my last post, Be More Capybara, I shared a few snippets from the introduction and first short essay. I've been trying to find time to read and reflect on one essay (2-3 pages) each day. I'm currently just over 50 (of 150) pages in, and have marked many thoughts to revisit. One of my favorites is from the meditation titled "Welcome the Other into Your Life, both the Stranger and the Strange."

It is not enough to let down our defenses and overcome our xenophobia. An awakened soul requires more of us: not just an end to xenophobia, but the development of a positive xenophilia - love of strangers and the unusual, an appreciation of cultures that are unlike our own and a desire to know groups and individuals that have different ways of understanding and living. All that is not ego is by nature exotic, outside the familiar and usually protected and defended precinct of the self, and so, as we awaken to a life beyond egotistic narcissism, we might feel an attraction to the unfamiliar.

That speaks to me and reflects the way I have tried to live my life. The way I have always tried to approach life. In many ways I feel successful in that approach and happier for it--but, of course, there is always room for improvement.

Two other, shorter quotes from Moore's book to quickly add before moving forward:

One finds meaning in life by living fully and intensely, like the sensitive and self-conscious [Emily Dickinson], within the borders of one's own particular, vernacular, unexceptional existence.

And:

Our emotional symptoms, neurotic habits, and life problems are precious sources of life and individuality.

Octavia Butler's books Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are about a character who starts a new religion based on the idea that God is Change. Change is the one constant. Change is the most powerful force that runs through, impacts, and connects everything.

The older I get, the more I feel this.

All successful life is

Adaptable,

Opportunistic,

Tenacious,

Interconnected, and

Fecund.

Understand this.

Use it.

Shape God.

That's one of Butler's/Lauren's religious verses.

I've always had trouble being adaptable. I value stability. I like to think through every action and decision for a very long time before doing anything. I'm slow. It's not my nature to be spontaneous and flexible--I like to make plans and stick to them. I don't react well to the unexpected. My wife tells me I an our family's "rock." Solid and dependable.

Change is hard.

Change is inevitable.

The world is always changing, and the older I get the more I see that. The more accumulated change I have experienced and observed. Both globally/environmentally and personally.

Two of my main identities, the stories I tell myself about who I am, are work and family. Both arenas are in a time of transition.

Work has changed how the organization is structured and reimagined the titles and duties of many jobs, including mine. My professional identity has changed, my job has changed, the organization has changed, the way I interact with my organization--my role--has changed.

And my spouse is currently processing some changes in herself--nothing that involves unhappiness with me or issues with our relationship, but it still requires me to adapt. I know that people grow and change over time, and that the key to a lasting relationship is being open to the partner's growth and change. It means growing and changing together, and being willing to follow at times instead of lead. Yet . . . 

I'm trying ever so hard to be xenophilic about things, but it has been a lot.

Change is hard.

Change is inevitable.

Change is God?

One of the duties I've undertaken in my new role at work is asking a "weekly question" that everyone on the team can choose to answer--for teambuilding and bonding.

I recently read The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton about a possible near future, the course of a character's life lived in Florida impacted by global warming. Her birth in a hurricane of massive destruction. Growing up with constant storms and flooding while people gradually flee, infrastructure crumbles, and civilization collapses. Surviving on her own as her home is reclaimed by wilderness. And, finally, helping to start a new settlement--perhaps the start of a new civilization--on an island surrounded by water, in a location that used to be solid land.

The Question I asked last week:

Global Warming creates weather extremes. When the warming apocalypse happens, would you rather get stuck in:

• The Frozen Wasteland
• The Scorched Wasteland
• Monster Storm Central
• Floodland (Coastal)

My response:

The middle of the continent is what I've always known and been most comfortable with. The solid, apparent-permanence of vast amounts of earth as far as I can see. There's something about an aquatic life on the border between land and water that appeals to me for being the opposite--nothing solid or permanent, in a constant state of flux, living by completely adapting yourself to the fluid circumstances--but I don't trust I have enough knowledge or skills to pull that off. I enjoy each of the temperature extremes in their own ways and enjoy adventuring through both snow and desert, but I don't think I could handle the monotonous sameness of an unchanging wasteland nor the scarcity of life and resources. I like the variety of weather and extremes we get in the continental heartland. It's a known factor, in my comfort zone. I think I have to go with Monster Storm Central.

I didn't realize at the time I was composing a metaphor for my identity preferences, but in reflection I think there might be something there.

There's something about an aquatic life on the border between land and water that appeals to me for being the opposite--nothing solid or permanent, in a constant state of flux, living by completely adapting yourself to the fluid circumstances.

My xenophobic cravings are to be a rock. Embracing xenophilia means learning to be more fluid.

Adaptable.

A co-worker, only mildly acquainted, with an art background, told me they like the photos I share on Facebook for their liminal quality. I enjoy capturing images that have a feeling of in-betweenness, of intersection between life and decay, old and new, nature and civilization. Of contrast. Of change. Of borderland.

Life exists at the border between stability and fluidity. It requires an ability to change.

All successful life is

Adaptable,

Opportunistic,

Tenacious,

Interconnected, and

Fecund.

Understand this.

Use it,

Shape God.

Welcome the Other into your life,

both the Stranger and the Strange.

One of the things we do at the library is help people figure out how to talk about what they like to read. Our job is to help them find new books they'll like, which means we need them to describe what they like in ways that are useful to us.

Someone at work recently shared the Read Your Color reading preference assessment, and the language it uses for describing the "appeal factors" of different types of books is just brilliant. Here's my result:

You are a Purple Reader - The Unbound Innovator

The Purple Reader is The Unbound Innovator--a bold, unconventional thinker who thrives on experimental storytelling and genre-defying narratives. They read to challenge norms, stretch their imagination, and fuel radical creativity. After finishing a book, they want to feel intellectually awakened and creatively invigorated, as if they've glimpsed a new way of seeing the world.

The kind of books you read are wild, unconventional, and impossible to categorize. You’re drawn to stories that break rules—narratives that twist form, blur genres, or leap through time and space without warning. Traditional plot arcs don’t impress you nearly as much as originality, voice, and sheer creative risk. You love authors who challenge assumptions, upend expectations, and invite you into strange, brilliant new worlds. Whether it’s fiction that feels like a fever dream or nonfiction that dares to imagine entirely new futures, you crave ideas that crack open your thinking. Your bookshelf isn’t safe—it’s a playground for the wildly inventive and the beautifully bizarre.

Your FICTION PREFERENCES:

• Experimental and postmodern novels
• Surreal or dreamlike fables
• Books with nonlinear structures or shifting perspectives
• Genre mashups and speculative fiction with a philosophical edge
• Literary fiction that breaks form or plays with language

Your Non-FICTION PREFERENCES

• Avant-garde essays and unconventional memoirs
• Speculative cultural criticism
• Futurist manifestos and radical theory
• Philosophy or psychology that explores abstract or fringe ideas
• Books on creativity, innovation, and alternative ways of thinking

Every question is crafted to assess:

• The emotional experience you want from reading.
• The pacing and tone that keep you engaged.
• The themes and characters that resonate most deeply with you.
• The kind of payoff (adventure, emotional connection, insight) that makes a book satisfying for you.

You can see from the graphic that "purple" is my favorite type of reading, but I also like blue, orange, and green, and find at least something appealing in everything. Here are brief descriptions for each type, in my order of preference according to the assessment:

Explore the 6 Types

The Purple Reader: The Unbound Innovator (55%)

You read to expand your intellectual horizons and ignite your imagination. After finishing a book, you feel intellectually stimulated, creatively energized, and inspired to rethink possibilities in bold new ways.

The Blue Reader: The Introspective Oracle (40%)

You read to gain clarity, wisdom, and inner peace. Books are your guides on a personal journey, helping you uncover new dimensions within yourself. After finishing a book, you feel serene, enlightened, and deeply connected to the subtle currents of life.

The Orange Reader: The Curious Explorer (35%)

You read to satisfy your curiosity and hunger for adventure. Books make you feel exhilarated, enlightened, and broadened, as though you've returned from an incredible journey, eager to explore even more.

The Green Reader: The Practical Sage (35%)

You read to become smarter, stronger, and better equipped for life's realities. Books are tools for improvement, and when you close a book, you feel empowered, focused, and ready to implement what you’ve learned to achieve your goals.

The Red Reader: The Adrenaline Seeker (20%)

You read to feel your pulse race and your spirit galvanized. Books push you to embrace boldness and excitement, leaving you energized and ready to tackle life’s challenges head-on.

The Yellow Reader: The Emotional Catalyst (15%)

You read to experience life fully through emotion. Books are your path to catharsis, connection, and profound understanding. Finishing a book leaves you feeling deeply moved, emotionally enriched, and intimately connected with the human experience.

The description for the the Purple Reader reminds me of a booklist I created at work last year:

What Did I Just Read?

I seem to enjoy books that fill me with confusion and existential dread - just like life, except the comfort of pretend. Unusual or experimental writing, unreliable narrators or narrators in unreliable situations, strange and off-kilter or simply unique. Often creepy. These are some I have particularly enjoyed.

A bold, unconventional thinker who thrives on experimental storytelling and genre-defying narratives, you love authors who challenge assumptions, upend expectations, and invite you into strange, brilliant new worlds.

Finally, I also recently read Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver.

A passionate and at times captivating small collection of essays on observing nature and Oliver's influences in becoming a writer. In one of the few pieces of literary criticism, of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, she writes, "what Whitman is after is felt experience." So, too is Oliver. Her writing primarily attempts to capture her felt experience of immersing herself in nature.

Unfortunately, I have never loved overly descriptive writing, which is what this is more often than not. Sometimes I can immerse myself into it enough that I get caught up; other times I find I'm tuning out what I'm reading. Her writing is wonderful, just doesn't always connect with me.

The "not," though, in the "more often than not"--sometimes in the midst of describing her nature experiences she includes a thought, feeling, or experience that connects so powerfully and poignantly. Aspects of being human. Consider, for instance, this moment she shares in the middle of "Staying Alive," her essay about how immersing herself in nature and literature saved her as a child:

Once my father took me ice-skating, then forgot me, and went home. He was of course reminded that I had been with him, and sent back, but this was hours later. I had been found wandering over the ice and taken to the home of a kind, young woman, who knew my family slightly; she had phoned them to say where I was.

When my father came through the door, I thought--never had I seen so handsome a man; he talked, he laughed, his movements were smooth and easy, his blue eyes were clear. He had simply, he said, forgotten that I existed. One could see--I can see even now, in memory--what an alleviation, what a lifting from burden he had felt in those few hours. It lay on him, that freedom, like an aura. Then I put on my coat, and we got into the car, and he sat back in the awful prison of himself, the old veils covered his eyes, and he did not say another word.

That stunned me. It's for snippets like that for which I read this book--and they are entirely worth it.

Also:

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

And, from "Staying Alive":

In the first of these--the natural world--I felt at ease; nature was full of beauty and interest and mystery, also good and bad luck, but never misuse. The second world--the world of literature--offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything--other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned: that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness--the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books--can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

Of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," the long first poem of his book Leaves of Grass:

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs

to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease . . . observing a spear

of summer grass.

In these lines the great work is begun, and the secret of success has been given. And what is that great labor? Out-circling interest, sympathy, empathy, transference of focus from the self to all else; the merging of the lonely single self with the wondrous, never-lonely entirety. This is all. The rest is literature: words, words, words; example, metaphor, narrative, lyricism, sweetness, persuasion, the stress of rhetoric, the weight of catalog. The detail, the pace, the elaborations are both necessary and augmentative; this is a long poem and it is not an argument but a thousand examples, a thousand taps and twirls on Whitman's primary statement. Brevity would have made the whole thing ineffectual, for what Whitman is after is felt experience. Experience only, he understand, is the successful persuader.

Logic and sermons never convince,

The damp of the night drives deeper into

my soul

he says, and what would be prolongation or hyperbole in another man's book is part of the earnest and necessary equipage here.

Out-circling interest, sympathy, empathy, transference of focus from the self to all else; the merging of the lonely single self with the wondrous, never-lonely entirety. This is all.

He sat back in the awful prison of himself, the old veils covered his eyes, and he did not say another word.

The world's otherness is antidote to confusion, standing within this otherness--the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books--can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing one another.

It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us, but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable.

Our emotional symptoms, neurotic habits, and life problems are precious sources of life and individuality.

The pervasive fear that I am doing something wrong at all times.

The mind stretches beyond the brain to include the body, the environment, and people other than oneself.

The best way to assess intelligence is by assessing how much an individual contributes to a group's success.

Knowledge is in dialogue with itself and with reality. In the dialogue, those points of view modify, enrich, converge--and our understanding of reality deepens.

If knowledge and thinking are shared, then intelligence means being good at sharing.

Develop a positive xenophilia - love of strangers and the unusual, an appreciation of cultures that are unlike our own and a desire to know groups and individuals that have different ways of understanding and living.

Love those who challenge your assumptions, upend your expectations, and invite you into strange, brilliant new worlds.

Out-circling interest, sympathy, empathy, transference of focus from the self to all else; the merging of the lonely single self with the wondrous, never-lonely entirety. This is all.

Live life in the borderlands--nothing solid or permanent, in a constant state of flux, living by completely adapting yourself to the fluid circumstances.