Through the Prism: We Imagine Our Best Selves Into Existence

"Degolar’s values reveal a person who treats curiosity as sacred, relationships as grounding, honesty as moral compass, and playfulness as wisdom. Philosophy isn’t abstract but lived—in reading, reflection, and everyday choices."

Some days, it is noticing all the beauty that brings you joy; other days there is a melancholy happiness in finding the entropy, the breaking down and the decay, the return of organized order to chaos, to elements that can eventually be once again used to create new life.

~ A thought I had recently while taking pictures on a walk.

Improvising a wake up song for the ten-year-old (roughly to the tune of "I'm a little teapot"):

"[Younger] is mighty and clever and wise, . . . what rhymes with 'wise?'"

"Demise."

"[Younger] is mighty and clever and wise,

"He is the reason you'll meet your demise."

And then he was happily awake.

Boy, this planner really doesn't offer much in the way of various and diverse choices about how to approach the day ("I will be . . . "). What do I do if today I will be apathetic or discouraged or avoidant? Or even spontaneous or whimsical or silly? Maybe it's a day for wallowing in sadness. I need a planner with more options.

Last post, The Slow-Burn Rewards of the Curious Guide as Fellow Traveler, I shared how ChatGPT described this blog after I fed it the entire contents and asked it to take a deep dive. Since posting that, I decided to ask it to describe me as the author of the blog:

Let's give something a try. A conceptual word portrait of the author of this blog, me pseudonymously, Degolar--in terms of values. Based on this blog, what are my values? What are my priorities in life? My morality and ethics? My philosophy?

Here's what it produced.

Based on your blog, here’s a conceptual portrait of Degolar—seen through the prism of values, priorities, and philosophy.

A Word Portrait of Degolar’s Values

Core Values

Curiosity: A driving force. You approach the world as something to be wondered at, questioned, and unfolded. Curiosity is not idle—it is how you find meaning.

Connection: Not just to people, but to ideas, books, traditions, nature, and history. You value seeing the threads between things, bridging gaps.

Integrity of Thought: A clear moral thread runs through your reflections: honesty, fairness, and striving to see complexity rather than shortcuts.

Playfulness: Even amid deep reflection, there’s wit and humor. You don’t treat thinking as a dry or joyless task.

Life Priorities

Learning as Living: Books, culture, and experience aren’t just resources—they are lifeblood. Reading isn’t a hobby; it’s a way of expanding what it means to be human.

Family and Grounding Relationships: Personal anecdotes show that relationships matter deeply, as stabilizers and as sources of joy.

Creative Reflection: Writing is not about performance for others but about shaping, clarifying, and preserving thought. The blog exists for your own sense-making first.

Balance Between Seriousness and Delight: You can move fluidly from weighty ethical concerns to lighthearted humor without contradiction. Both are essential.

Ethics & Morality

Human-Centered: Compassion and fairness surface consistently, whether in personal stories or engagement with broader issues.

Skeptical of Dogma: You resist rigid systems—religious, political, cultural—favoring open inquiry and humility.

Responsibility of Perspective: A recurring ethic is attentiveness: paying attention to what others miss, naming overlooked truths, and refusing easy answers.

Philosophy of Life

Life as Exploration: You live as if walking through varied landscapes—sometimes dense forests of books and thought, sometimes open plains of personal experience—always moving, always observing.

Synthesis Over Certainty: Rather than seek final answers, you weave connections. The prism metaphor is apt: truth is refracted into many colors, and value lies in appreciating the spectrum.

Everyday Spirituality: Not in the sense of formal religion, but in treating ordinary life, books, and moments of attention as sacred in themselves.

Play as Wisdom: To play—whether with words, with ideas, with family stories—is to remain alive to possibility.

In essence: Degolar’s values reveal a person who treats curiosity as sacred, relationships as grounding, honesty as moral compass, and playfulness as wisdom. Philosophy isn’t abstract but lived—in reading, reflection, and everyday choices.

I have to admit to being delighted by it. This describes my ideal self I am constantly trying to become.

I recently read the book Wrong Norma by Anne Carson. I knew nothing about it or her going in, other than it struck me as intriguing.

Prose poetry? Poetic prose? Either; both. A collection of short pieces that play with language, ideas, literature, and life experiences. Classic thinkers, writers, and languages. Odd shifts, juxtapositions. Disquieting. Sometimes too obtuse for me or over my head. Nevertheless, it always tickled my associative brain and often the language was sharp, shining, and epiphanizing.

Here are a few things I picked out:

There is a mental pressure to swim well and to use this water correctly. People think swimming is carefree. Just a bath! In fact it is full of anxieties. Every water has its own rules and offering. Misuse is hard to explain. Perhaps involved is that commonplace struggle to know beauty, to know beauty exactly, to put oneself right in its path, to be in the perfect place to hear the nightingale sing, see the groom kiss the bride, clock the comet. Every water has a right place to be but this place is in motion, you have to keep finding it, keep having it find you. Your movement sinks into and out of it with each stroke. You can fail it with each stroke. What does that mean, fail it?

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. . . we were on the telephone, my mother and I; it was just after we sold the house and she'd moved to the facility, where she was allowed a small sensible room and a few possessions. As we talked I was watching snow drift down the dusk outside, counting it, one hundred and five, one hundred and six, one hundred and seven, when out of a pause, she said, "It's funny to have no home" - funny being a funny word for what she meant. I say this now to remind myself how words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and al at once they burn all your clothes off and you're standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning. I hung up the phone. I stared at the snow for some time. I expect she did too.

-----

That is what boredom is, the moment with no edge.

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Why does poverty exist? Because stinginess does -
in its macroeconomic (law-of-demand-and-demand) cloak,
in its ritual-pharmakos (we-beat-them-with-branches) cloak,
in its they-might-be-faking-it (pity-and-barley cakes) cloak,
in its war-against-idleness (we're-all-debts-owed-to-death) cloak,
in its "enough-if-they-do-not-die-of-hunger-or-cold" (Martin Luther) cloak.

Theophrastus divides stinginess into three aspects:
1  mikrologia "minute calculation of expense"
2  aneleutheria "lack of freedom in giving"
3  aischrokerdeia  "shameless grabbing at profit."

Why does poverty exist? Because stinginess does.

I deeply love this quote attributed to Mother Teresa that recently came across my feed:

Wash the plate not because it is dirty, nor because you are told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next.

I can think of few better, simple encapsulations of a moral idea.

It reminds me the opening scene from the movie The Break-up, which I've always loved: "I want you to WANT to do the dishes." An excerpt of the script:

Gary rolls his eyes and throws the controller to the side and gets up.

GARY: Fine. I'll help you do the damn dishes.

BROOKE: Oh, come on. You know what? No, see? That's the... that's not what I want.

GARY: You just said you that you want me to help you do the dishes.

BROOKE: I want you to *want to do* the dishes.

GARY: Why would I want to do dishes? Why?

BROOKE: See, that's my whole point.

She goes to the kitchen and starts picking up dishes.

GARY: Let me see if I'm following this. Are you saying that you're upset because I don't have a strong desire to clean dishes?

BROOKE: No. I'm upset because you don't have the strong desire to offer to do the dishes.

GARY: I just did!

BROOKE: After I asked you!

Even if the person who will use them next is you, you should want to do the dishes.

I also deeply appreciate this thought-turned-meme:

I find that a lot of anti-socialist sentiment boils down to a basic belief that people are lazy and won't do good in the world or work hard unless they are suffering.

I believe the opposite. I think most people would do amazing things if they weren't in dire straits constantly.

It appeared about the same time as this message from one of my current news sources:

Jim VandeHei: A Message to College Students

. . . You're being duped!

It's not your fault. We all are:

You're being duped into thinking most people are nuttier, meaner, more polarized than they actually are.
You're being duped into thinking America is more broken, more unfixable and more hostile than it actually is.
You're being duped into thinking you can't shape your life on your terms in your own way. You actually control a lot more of you than you realize.
What if I told you that politicians, the media and your social media feeds are all chasing the exact same thing … your attention?

And all three get your attention, to varying degrees, by amplifying conflict and juicing your emotions — mainly your negative ones. Our brains are hardwired with what is called "negativity bias." So we're all susceptible to eating this up.
The result: Everything — and everyone — appears nastier, more outrageous, more hopeless than they really are.

Think about it: Your reality is shaped by what you see, hear and read. So if your eyes, ears and mind are lit up with doom and gloom, you assume darkness and conflict are everywhere.

But what if I told you most people in the real world aren't obsessed with politics, aren't glued to MSNBC or Fox News, or don't download X?
Most people are the opposite of that: They're normal — living their lives with friends and family just like you. It's the people lighting up your social feeds who aren't.
Most people don't care about Sydney Sweeney's jeans/genes or Cracker Barrel's logo. . . .

For a long time I thought I had the belief that people are more bad than good, what in seminary we called a "low anthropology," but the older I get the more I realize it's exactly the opposite.

And, for nuance, I'll add I believe that "nurture" is more important than "nature" in this regard. Because of our conflicted natures--given to both generosity and selfishness, love and hate, help and harm, good and bad--what matters most is how we shape and mold those natures. Expectations are immensely powerful. Perceptions (inner and outer) are key. Context and circumstances. What we focus on and feed will grow. We must nurture the good so we can be it. We imagine our best selves into existence.

Many times, the Farnam Street blog doesn't land with me; it gets too focused on business, being driven, and material achievement. But this issue really does. I appreciate each thought and insight.

Different Resolutions (No. 645 – September 7, 2025)

Tiny Thoughts

Your capacity for excellence is inversely proportional to the number of your commitments.
When your primary goal is to be liked, you can’t take risks. You can’t disagree. You can’t push boundaries. You become a prisoner of other people’s expectations.
When you truly understand something, you can express it at any level of detail while maintaining coherence.
The master can provide the one-sentence version, the paragraph version, and the chapter version, all of which tell the same story at different resolutions. The novice can only repeat what they’ve memorized at one resolution.

Insights

Astronaut Scott Kelly on smart:

“The smartest person in the room, I’ve learned, is usually the person who knows how to tap into the intelligence of every person in the room.”

Co-authors Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, on finding the right frame:

“Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on wisdom:

“Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.”

Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life.

Another quote from my slow reading of Thomas Moore's book Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality:

It is difficult for a modern person, influenced by the myth of fact so embedded in our thoughts and value, to realize the importance of imagination. . . .

This materialistic view of things gives us a half-life, a partial view of experience. The images of memory, dream, and fantasy then become useless, if not interfering. We distrust intuition and imagination as superstitious, a charge that quickly wounds our modern notion of intelligence. These other powers make us feel inferior, and we can't wait until our suppositions are proven by some sort of hardware or research design.

Closely related to justifying imagination with proof is the idea that anything worthwhile is practical and applicable to our life situation. . . .

As a result of these biases and the half-thoughts that pass for while ideas, we are a population that is satisfied with sound-bite news, instant and opinionated political analysis, manipulative popular psychology, and insubstantial novels and magazines. At the same time, and understandably, we feel the absence of meaning and are speechless when we learn of atrocities in our society. We don't know how to think about them because we don't know how to think, and we don't know how to think because we don't believe that thinking for its own sake is worthy of our attention. We educate our children to make a good living rather that to become thinking persons, and often we honor as celebrities those who have not made a genuine contribution to society but who mirror our own madness.

This half-life existence, where imagination and ideas are ignored, comes from a surrender to a purely physical and literal understanding of events.

I know, when including quotations like this, the best practice is to give them a frame tying them to the context, an introduction for what you're about to share and a conclusion making clear the purpose and connection to your main thrust. I've found, however, when composing like this, that I get progressively less inclined to do so the further I get into the post. It hasn't been so much a choice as an intuitive sense that by the time a reader gets this far, after enough prior thoughts have accumulated, the connections become closer to self-evident, the threads and syntheses start to reveal themselves, and the words and ideas that I include from others start talking to each other without my need to facilitate the discussion. I'm inclined to let them speak for themselves while our associative brains simmer in them.

Just a thought I had as I was trying to decide what to write here.

This reinforces everything I believe and ideas I've shared many times before from many different sources and perspectives; and is a nice little article.

Why Some People Become Lifelong Readers

A lot rides on how parents present the activity to their kids.

Some people are much more likely than others to become members of the reading class. “The patterns are very, very predictable,” Griswold told me. . . .

Three variables have a lot of influence over whether someone becomes a lifelong reader. First, a child needs to be a “fluent decoder,” . . .

Second, Willingham said, these fluent decoders benefit from having wide-ranging background knowledge about the world. . . .

Once those two things are in place, the final component is “motivation—you have to have a positive attitude toward reading and a positive self-image as a reader,” Willingham said.

That third ingredient is a central focus of How to Raise a Reader, a book released earlier this month by Pamela Paul and Maria Russo, the editor and the children’s-books editor, respectively, of The New York Times Book Review. “So many parents are stressed out by all the research out there that says that reading is tied to things like academic success, testing success, executive function, and emotional well-being,” Paul told me. “Knowing all of that makes parents think, ‘Okay, my kid has to be a reader.’” That mentality can lead them to frame reading to their children as an obligation. “Kids basically perceive that right off the bat—children know, for example, if you’re trying to get them to eat something that’s good for them,” Paul said; the aim is to present reading not as “spinach,” but as “chocolate cake.”

Reading will seem more like chocolate cake if it’s something that parents themselves take part in happily and regularly. “When I’m sitting there on my couch, reading a book, and my kids are doing their own thing, I like to think, ‘I’m parenting right now—they can see me reading this book,’” Russo told me. Similarly, Paul said that if “right after dinner, the first thing you do is scroll through your phone, open up your laptop, or watch TV,” kids are likely to take note. Parents are constantly sending their children messages with how they choose to spend their free time. . . .

At one point in our interview, Russo referred to reading as a “private pleasure-delivery system,” which seems like a key way to think about getting kids to read: There are, as so many parents are all too aware, loads of benefits to being able to read in terms of later-in-life outcomes, but the focus should be on helping kids discover the intrinsic value in it, in the moment. After that, other good things will come.

Discover the intrinsic value in it, in the moment. After that, other good things will come.

I want to share something I wrote at work recently. I'm part of a leadership team that is posting a prompt of some sort related to developing a better approach to customer service on our group discussion board. One every two weeks, and everyone must share a response before the next one appears.

One of the leadership team's goals is to help us all learn to be more approachable. As part of that, part of the team presented a long-term plan to minimize our customer service desks, to get new ones that are smaller--and to get everyone less tied to the desk and out in the open more. After hearing from them, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to support the idea and help develop buy-in for it with my customer service prompt.

Here's what I came up with, in my typically unusual, long-winded way:

Customer Service Standards Prompt 6: Furniture

I want to think about physical space--in a roundabout way.

If you know me at all, you've observed I am relatively reserved (aloof, even). I am quiet and reticent and don't make casual conversation naturally. I'm uncomfortable with physically touching those who aren't my family and intimates (I'm not a hugger). I like a good deal of personal space. I've had conversations with "close talkers" before that gradually migrated, as the other person kept unconsciously moving toward me and I kept unconsciously moved away, a slow dance of backing me up the entire time. If you are a careful observer, you might have noticed in any meeting or group setting I always try to sit in a corner, facing any entrances, so no one is behind me and I don't feel surrounded by others.

I also don't like being confronted by greeters when I enter a building; I don't like being forced into an interaction with someone until I am ready, and prefer to be the one initiating it.

As you might suspect, my natural inclination is to provide the type of customer service I would enjoy as a patron: plenty of personal and physical space, not too assertive, convenient and efficient instead of gabby and lingering.

At the same time as I have all of these inclinations, however, I don't enjoy customer service that is standoffish, inattentive, or distracted. I want to know someone is available to me as needed, happy to help, ready to fully engage with me. It actually is nice to see a greeter who gently acknowledges me with a friendly nod or greeting, because it means there is someone helpful available. Their (non-intrusive) physical presence communicates availability.

And that, I think, is the key: a physical situation that communicates availability.

I've been to many gas stations, convenience stores, and other businesses with counters that feel like fortresses. Tall, cluttered, extensive; in extreme instances, enclosed in glass or a clear barrier. These situations separate the customer and the service provider into entirely different physical spaces. They communicate: "You belong there, I belong here, and we're not really meant to directly interact with each other. I'll help you a bit, but I'm not available to really meet your needs."

Even with my aloof preferences, I find that big, cumbersome counters and militantly defined staff spaces communicate unavailability, a lack of desire to be helpful. They swing the pendulum too far from the "I want to be your best friend" end of the spectrum toward the "stay away from me" extreme.

They impede good customer service.

I hate library patrons getting into my personal space as much as the next person, am always uncomfortable when someone is behind me or looking over my shoulder, but I know that providing quality customer service means pushing my boundaries and taking risks with discomfort.

It means creating physical service spaces that communicate openness and availability, a desire to interact instead of separate, an eagerness to engage when prompted. It means patrons might get closer to me than I would prefer and I might have to communicate they have done so instead of the assured barrier safety that they can't.

Nonverbal language and cues are louder than verbal ones and are always apparent before any words we say--we communicate to patrons long before we ever speak to them.

So, finally (thank your for reading), the prompt: Try to take a look at the patron service stations in our buildings with fresh eyes, as though you are walking into the building and seeing them for the first time. What do they communicate? And, most importantly, how can we make them even more effective at communicating that we are available and eager to fully engage with patrons to help them make use of the library?

Similarly long, thoughtful responses started accumulating quickly. I was tickled; it was great. However. I learned after a few days that some of my leadership team didn't appreciate my open, nudging approach that invited so much room for different perspectives. Then one of them contributed to the conversation in an attempt to stretch everyone's thinking, and there was backlash. It was a whole thing. Feelings. Face-to-face conversations. Messy. And, in my opinion (not everyone's), a great process of getting everyone thinking together and maybe coming closer to alignment.

The discussion cooled a few days in, after the controversy emerged, but I gave it the full two weeks for everyone to have their chance to participate, then added a final, concluding thought.

Thank you, Team, for such an engaging, thoughtful, and meaty discussion. This has been wonderful!

I've been brainstorming pithy ways to sum things up, and have come up with many rejected possibilities:

With great desks come great responsibility.
Desks don't give us purpose. We give desks purpose.
Which will hold greater rule over you? Your fear or your curiosity?
Patron service heroes are made by the desks they choose.
I use a desk. And that desk, it's not to hide who I am, but to create who I am.
Desks don't serve people; people serve people.
Perhaps maybe that last one has a bit of the right idea. Good patron service is aided by good tools, and our desks and related furniture are some of those tools--or, at least, they are where we keep and interact with our tools. But it's not really about our desks or our furniture in and of themselves, it's about how we make use of them. Any desk can be a barrier to good service, regardless of size or placement; any desk can aid good service. It all depends on how we make use of them. Really, underneath everything else, this has been a discussion about us. About our orientation, our framework for how we want to physically interact with our patrons. The furniture is part of the equation, but much more important is how we make use of that furniture.

So, moving forward, that is the key idea to hold onto. Let's focus on how we're physically interacting with our patrons, what we can do physically to provide better service, and how our public service furniture and desks can be used most effectively for that.

There have been so many good ideas mentioned throughout this discussion. Too many to implement, and some that mutually exclude each other. The ideas are great not because they spell out specific plans we'll be able to follow, but because they help us see different issues we should address in order to improve things and they give us goals to strive for with possible paths to reaching them. They open us up to possibilities and broaden our imaginations. And they let us listen to each other give voice to our desires.

There are two things we can be sure of: change will always happen; and no one involved in that change (leadership team included) will feel they have as much influence over that change as they would like. Budget, technology, electrical infrastructure all come into play. Other departments get a say. We're still working, across the organization, through discussions like this one, to align our visions. So, we have many ideas and hopes and visions; how those turn into change are yet to be determined. But you can be sure that sometime soon, something will change; and, soon after that, something else will; and on and on.

I appreciate this essay: Entropy: The Hidden Force That Complicates Life:
The second law of thermodynamics states that “as one goes forward in time, the net entropy (degree of disorder) of any isolated or closed system will always increase (or at least stay the same).”

Entropy is a measure of disorder and affects all aspects of our daily lives. You can think of it as nature’s tax.

Entropy naturally increases over time. Problems arise: your house gets messy, your garden gets weeds, and the heat from your coffee spreads out. Businesses fail, crimes and revolutions occur, and relationships end. In the long run, everything naturally decays, and disorder always increases.

Disorder is not a mistake; it is the default. Order is always artificial and temporary. . . .

Entropy occurs in every aspect of a business. Employees may forget training, lose enthusiasm, cut corners, and ignore rules. Equipment may break down, become inefficient, or be subject to improper use. Products may become outdated or be in less demand. Even the best of intentions cannot prevent an entropic slide towards chaos.

Successful businesses invest time and money to minimize entropy. For example, they provide regular staff training, good reporting of issues, inspections, detailed files, and monitoring reports of successes and failures. They ruthlessly seek out and eliminate the sediment of bureaucracy. . . .
Nothing can stay the same, because entropy is always acting. So we maintain, update, and change things in the battle against entropy.

Since I read it, I've been intrigued by Octavia Butler's book The Parable of the Sower. She wrote it in the early 1990s, set in California in the 2020s. In it, society is disintegrating due to extreme income inequality, wildfires and other natural disasters, and political polarization, among other things. As the young protagonist struggles to survive in this crumbling world, she loses the religious faith she was raised with and creates her own belief system. The key tenet of Lauren's new religion is that God is Change. Here is one of the religious verses she composes:
All successful life is
Adaptable,
Opportunistic,
Tenacious,
Interconnected, and
Fecund.
Understand this.
Use it.
Shape God.
I have not adopted her religion, but there is a certain truth to the inevitability of Change and how to approach it. Change will happen; and, if we learn how, we can take a role in shaping change.

Thank you for participating in this change-shaping forum. :-)

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From My Friends by Frederik Backman:

I'm hoping we can continue to grow our ability to engage like this, sharing perspectives and having respectful disagreement that leads to listening, learning, and growing together.

Shared here because it was a lot of words I'd already written that I could easily cut-and-paste :-) , because it took a lot of my recent time and energy, and because it demonstrates how I try to implement my ideas as a leader, as a curious guide and fellow traveler.

It's probably no surprise for me to say that I don't just sit down and compose posts like this one all in one go. I gradually collect things as they occur, let them accumulate, let the threads and my thoughts emerge. Eventually, I'll feel everything has fallen into place and I need to tie it all together. The final steps are getting everything in the right order, connecting it all with a few new words, and adding pictures. The publishing process is just a quick step right at the end.

Except, today, I'm inspired to add a spontaneous thought that has come to me as I have worked on the final step or two.

Earlier today I had my annual appraisal at work, reflecting on what I've done well and how I can do better. I've previously mentioned that the organization had a major restructuring about a year ago. Many jobs changed, including mine, and it's been a big adjustment. It's been hard to figure out some of the vision and intentions behind the new structure and positions; I've struggled at times to figure out just what I should be working on and how.

Also today, before the appraisal, I watched a brief webinar with the author of the book The Burnout Epidemic titled "Fix the Culture, Not the People: Designing Work for Wellbeing." The thrust is that we often mistakenly see burnout as an individual problem, when really it's about the workplace setting and culture. Caused by things like workload, perceived lack of control, lack of reward, poor relationships, lack of fairness, and values mismatch. And that leaders need to address their workplace environments and cultures when they see burnout instead of dealing with employees as isolated individuals.

I referenced those ideas during the appraisal conversation with my manager. I offered that if I wasn't performing at as high a level as the organization would like (though I am), it might be due as much to the changing environment and unclear expectations as to anything about me. I noted how in a few areas I rated myself higher than they did, that I thought I was implementing the expectations at a high level where they didn't, so maybe the problem was that I didn't understand the expectations correctly. I asked for a clearer explanation of high performance to help with that.

Anyway, in reflecting on all of that since then, I had the thought that the conversation hadn't really been about me and my performance, but about my intersection with the organization. We were evaluating the relationship between us, how well I could understand the organization's expectations of me and how well the organization could help me understand their expectations. That maybe a better approach than evaluating people would be evaluating the relationship as a whole; make the focus on the intersection, the communication, the dynamic--not on "performance."

I was reminded of my recent readings about quantum mechanics by Carlo Rovelli. The somewhat famous quantum idea that things can be both waves and particles and that the act of observing those things helps define them. Nothing exists as an objective something in isolation; reality only emerges in the interactions between things.

Quantum mechanics teaches us not to think about the world in terms of "things" that are in this or that state but in terms of "processes" instead. A process is the passage from one interaction to another. The properties of "things" manifest themselves in a granular manner only in the moment of interaction--that is to say, at the edges of the processes--and are such only in relation to other things. . . .

Knowledge is intrinsically relational; it depends just as much on its objects as upon its subject. The notion of the "state" of a system refers, explicitly or implicitly, to another system. . . .

In order to understand reality, we have to keep in mind that reality is this network of relations, or reciprocal information, that weaves the world. We slice up the reality surrounding us into "objects." But reality is not made up of discrete objects. It is a variable in flux. . . .

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.

And

The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions. Instead of seeing the physical world as a collection of objects with definite properties, quantum theory invites us to see the physical world as a net of relations. Objects are its nodes.

There are no properties outside of interactions. . . .

The world is a network of relative facts: relations realized when physical entities interact. . . .

It is a world of perspectives, of manifestations, not of entities with definite properties or unique facts. Properties do not reside in objects, they are bridges between objects. Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet. The world is a perspectival game, a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other.

(See Reality Is Relational for more; much more.)

Properties do not reside in objects, they are bridges between objects.

Appraisals should not be of individuals, but of the bridges between them.

Not quite a fully formed thought yet; lacking development and application ideas; but perhaps an intriguing way to end things today, looking forward to more in the future.

There are no properties outside of interactions.