Author: T

Common knowledge vs personal practice

It happens sometimes, that in our practice, we arrive at ‘a-ha’ moments. Such moments, upon our initial fascination, and upon closer inspection, turn out to be particularly resembling common wisdom. They often belong to the realm of general knowledge.

I have an example in my recent experience, while learning a useless trick of spinning a pen around my thumb. I started by trying a couple of times and failing. Watched gifs and videos and read tutorials. Next time, about ten minutes into practice, failure after failure — I still didn’t learn the trick. But something happened. I had my first aha moment: I realized that I was sending the pen on a wrong trajectory. It was far from the first signs of success. But that was a step ahead. That revelation would not have been possible without the initial practice. Multiple repetitions, without putting any thought into what I was doing, without losing the motivation — that was what got me to that first step on a learning ladder. I wasn’t succeeding, but I was learning something. That’s what kids are good at. And that’s, probably, something that we call “an inner child”, that center of curiosity and readiness to fail, without turning away from the task.

This particular “insight” that I had can be translated into a common-knowledge phrase “practice makes perfect.” So simple, so familiar. But it feels completely different when you arrive at this from your own experience, as something you felt rather than something you overheard. Something that you thought rather than something that you agreed with. And this is what helps us grow. Even if in a questionably useful task of pen spinning.

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Approaches to writing

Have been reading a few things that seemingly have to promote my writing (or any project work, for that matter). Paul Graham writes specifically about writing usefully.

To write like he does means to follow the path of a very good essay writing. It is very demanding. Which is a worthy mindset. Holding yourself to very high standards, and only put something out there in the world that has been deemed useful, and of the best quality one is capable of. But to write well, one needs practice. To get practice, one needs to write a lot. While Graham’s view is that one only must write something that is useful, strong, and truthful. This is my constant struggle: writing something that is just “meh”, whatever comes, getting the words and the sentences and the paragraphs out, strength in numbers. Or writing scarcely and powerfully. As with everything, there needs to be a delicate balance. (Here, for example, this text is a perfect example of meh writing, something very vague.)

Getting the numbers out on the page or the screen is very meditative, and is more a practice with a focus on itself rather than the result. Essay writing is different, it’s purposeful. I write without focus, without purpose, for what it’s worth. If I want to do it differently, I need to find a theme, and pursue it strongly. However, my interest (at this moment) is all the curiosities of life, and my own observations.

I don’t know whether there can be a balance of scarce/strong and abundant. All I know is that to write better, it is necessary to write. At the level of greatness, of true writing mastery, there’s a marriage of strength and abundance. But first, one just needs to write.

The latest Seth Godin’s book (Is it his latest? It’s hard to tell, the guy writes a lot) is called “Practice”. It is, like all his books, a big and lengthy pat on the back. Whatever you set your mind on, do it. There will be, and is, an audience. There is the need for art, there is everything — just transform your motivation into practice of doing art and building your skill one step at a time, day by day.

On the inside, the ideas of Paul Graham and Seth Godin don’t contradict each other. They both talk about practice, and while one can doubt whether or not practice makes perfect, there’s certainty around practice building skills. And practice is what I’ll do.

I’d like to close this off with one of my favorite quotes, from J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey”:

“Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might.”

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Personal workplaces; writers, too

I’ve been thinking about the notion of personal space, one’s own place. Not everyone has the same environment, not everyone follows the same path. But the need for a space of one’s own is quite common, as well as how we have own spaces during our lives.

It’s funny how this topic is going to be about the title of this blog, “before… and then…”

Before, as a child, you have a room of your own. As a teenager, however your day went, however things are are, when you feel like the whole world betrayed you, you can and go and lock yourself in your room. It can be a prison if you’re grounded, it can be a castle if you just want to be left alone.

Then, you grow up, move out, maybe live in a dorm and share a room, or you live in a shared apartment and have roommates. You can have a room of your own (hopefully). Then you mature as much as to afford yourself an apartment of your own. This is your space, more than a room, hopefully, you very own space where you can fully enjoy your privacy.

And then, you meet someone you are ready to share your space with, you move in together. (Surely, just one scenario, but common, and mine.) As a couple, and later, maybe, as parents, you have a shared place, a house or an apartment, and most likely, you don’t have such a thing as “your room” anymore. The entire place is yours, but only your kids — again, if your living arrangements allow — get to have something to call “my room”. You have a bedroom, that you share with your partner, hopefully. Unless you can afford a big house that includes separate rooms for various needs, to accomodate the habits and wishes of each family member, their own sacred spaces, and common areas, you probably don’t have a room of your own anymore.

To carve out a private space, most people have to work it out somehow — a cupboard-sized office is one example. Or claiming the kitchen as your working area — both if you’re cooking and working on something “yours” using the kitchen counter or a dining table as a desk. I like to work from my dining table, actually, in part because it offers easy access to tea, my preferred writing and thinking fuel.

I like looking at how different authors write, and how people work in general, those of us who use desks or something like a desk.

Douglas Coupland prefers to write on a plane, Neil Gaiman has a gazebo for writing, and other people who write have or had so many different setups.

The working setup, of course, is not limited to writing. This is work, in general, than many people do from their computers, or notebooks. Some need more privacy than others, and a specifically setup place for the proper state of mind.

Since I was a kid, I paid the most attention to rearranging my desk. More than the rest of the room. Moving things around, placing different books, or decorations, or notebooks, trying various containers for pens and pencils. Then all sorts of gadgets came, and my working space contracted to the confinements of a laptop screen, placed either on my lap, or on a desk. So the importance of having a chair and a desk counted, and little else. Having something to drink, too, like water or tea. Having a place to put my notebook to take any handwritten notes. Working from a cafe started to become a thing for me. The sense of this weird mix of private and public. A coffee shop itself being the public aspect, and whatever I had open on my computer, the private. Felt good to be around people, and at the same time disconnected. But still, I needed my private space to do work.

I’ve been talking here about personal space. But there’s also another aspect of it — personal time. The idea of having a room, or any kind of space to focus on the work, is not enough. Or, rather, having this kind of space also means that it accommodates you and gives you uninterrupted spread of time to do what you came here to do. It’s harder with kids, harder with the pace of life of someone with many commitments. It’s a choice, again, divided by the circumstances. I tend to enjoy a much smaller number of commitments now, one of them simply sleeping well. And so many desirable activities clash with the time devoted to sleep! Yet again, time is an important part of the equation: the luxury and the comfort and the pure need of one’s personal time and personal space.

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Paul Celan

Today is the birthday of Paul Celan, a Ukrainian-born German poet.

To Stand in the Shadow

To stand in the Shadow
of the Wound’s-Mark in the Air.

For no-one and nothing to Stand.
Unknown,
for you,
alone.

With all, that within finds Room,
even without
Speech.

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Tea: Biluochun (Green Snail Spring)

My go-to tea is Japanese sencha, but I can’t deny the pull of Chinese greens.

This morning, I had biluochun (or pi lo chun), “green snail spring”, one of the well-known Chinese green teas. While enjoying the tea, I read about it, and here, I found a legend about the tea:

Pi Lo Chun originates in the Dongting Mountain region on Jiangsu province. These days, it is also grown in other parts of China, most notably Zhejiang and Sichuan provinces, but the ones from the Dongting area are by far the best. Biluochun from other regions has larger and less uniform leaves and a nuttier and fruitier flavor.

As mentioned, the name translates as Green Snail Spring, which refers to the shape and the early harvest time. But that wasn’t the original name. This tea was first called “scary fragrance”.

Legend has it that a tea picker carried some of the tea leaves between her breasts when she ran out of space in her basket and after a while, her body heat warmed the leaves and they began to emit a strong smell.

It was renamed to the much more pleasant current name during the Qing Dynasty. An emperor visited the area and loved the tea, but did not think the name was appropriate. He renamed it to the current “Green Snail Spring.”

Drinking tea is pleasure enough. But sipping from a cup, thinking of a story, something that might have happened or not, a long long time ago, even if the story contains tea carried around between the breasts, mixing with the heat and, I’m guessing, the sweat — I don’t really know if that’s supposed to be attractive or a tiny bit disgusting… Anyway, with a myth of its own attached to it, you drink age, you drink centuries, you drink tradition. A sudden awareness of where the tea was grown, the generations of cultivation it went through, transforms tea drinking into a cultural experience, giving you a sense of tradition and of the realm of the simple things that remain unchanged, and can be relied on as often as you need them.

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Being But Men

On this day, November 9, 1953, died Dylan Thomas. This morning, half-accidentally, I picked up play, Under Milk Wood, aiming to spend part of the day reading it.

Here, I want to share one of the poet’s works, Being But Men.

Being But Men

Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.

Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.

That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.

Being but men, we walked into the trees.

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Who the fun is for, and how to do it well

Seth Godin wrote on his blog, making a comparison between birthday parties thrown for very young kids (who don’t yet care about parties) and many of our interactions in adult life:

It’s pretty clear that it wasn’t for you. It was for your parents and their circle of supporters and friends. A rite of passage and thanks and relief, all in one.

Many of the interactions we have that are ostensibly for us are actually for other people. Once we can see who it’s for, it’s a lot easier to do it well.

With my kid’s birthday last week, I’m taking it very literally, of course. She turned four, the first time birthday meant something, really.

With COVID taking out the fun of social interaction, I have to ask myself, what are the elements of birthday fun that really matter, in the time when you can’t have all the normal that you otherwise would.

Rethinking and reformatting holidays and vacations is a big agenda while the pandemic imposes its limitations. Are vacations still vacations without travel?

Disco for three, with DJ and glow sticks. Trick or treating within your own home (treasure hunt now)… Just remember who you are doing it for, and do it well.

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Shed the skin of those days

“It seemed as if I had already shed the skin of those days.”

I was reading Patti Smith’s “Year of the Monkey”, and I stopped and reread and then repeated this sentence to myself. I find the phrase comforting, this idea of shedding skin of the days past. All of a sudden, it makes sense. That’s how the world works. That’s how I work.

I had already shed the skin of those days. It’s that easy. Or not easy, but it happens. You don’t stay in that same skin that you were wearing ten years ago. Things get lost, people can, too — this is also part of the old skin of you that has to go. You shed that skin and grow a new one. You change, things change. No need to carry your old self, your old habits just because they were there at some point. You don’t even owe anything to the person you once were. You don’t need to carry the old skin around with you.

This is a very casual and at the same time celebratory sentence. With a hint of nostalgia, but without bitterness. It is just so. As I read it, I looked outside the window of S-Bahn, at the autumn trees changing color, and shedding their leaves. Symmetrical to the thought.

***

One more thought as I read the book.

When people read and highlight things on Kindle, it shows most popular highlights. All of them are the things that are “universal”. Things that go beyond the story, beyond the book. Things that can be taken and transported to some kind of “universal truth”, an interesting observation of its own.

What goes unnoticed most of the time are the things that are specific to the book, things beyond generalizations and pretense of a broader truth.

Commonly highlighted in “Year of the Monkey”:

The trouble with dreaming, I was thinking, is that one can be drawn into a mystery that is no mystery at all, occasioning absurd observations and discourse leading to not a single reality-based conclusion.

Not commonly highlighted:

I thought him arrogant, though in an appealing way, but his suggestion that I should front a rock band, though improbable, was also intriguing. At the time, I was seeing Sam Shepard and I told him what Sandy had said. Sam just looked at me intently and told me I could do anything. We were all young then, and that was the general idea. That we could do anything.

This latter quote provides, I think, a better insight into Patti Smith’s writing. It is the book’s better representation. Even though it actually has the words “the general idea”, it is more people-and-situation-specific. Very characteristic of Smith and Shepard and their “zeitgeist”.

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Just a pair of jeans, and a lot of history

My history with jeans in general, and Levi’s in particular, is a winding road.

In the Soviet childhood, you don’t just own a pair of Levi’s — or any jeans, for that matter. There was a black market for jeans. In the late 80s–early 90s, my family was lucky, as we had distant relatives in the U.S., and we sometimes got parcels with food and some clothes from them. Then my family traveled too, before and after the USSR collapse, and I vividly remember at least two pairs of Levi’s that I had: straight/slim corduroy reds and pinks. Fancy, right?

In the immediate post-Soviet times, good jeans were hard to fine and extremely expensive (well, under the circumstances of poverty, that 90% of population was living with, everything was expensive and out of reach). The markets were where a lot of people bought clothes, and they were overflowing with fake Diesel, and Mustang, and what have you. I almost never had to go through the ordeal of looking for something there, in muddy rows of these clothing and shoes, and the “fitting rooms” behind the self-assembled curtains with dirty mirrors. Thanks to my mom who, during out time living abroad, was wise to (a) choose quality items even for a kid, and (b) buy things for me to wear as I grow. I’m still immensely thankful to her for this. I wasn’t dressed in the latest fashion of the town. But I had my Levi’s pants and jackets.

From one of my first jobs, I saved up (yes, saved up) to buy my “first” pair of Levi’s. I remember they were black, skinny, in the 900 series (I’m thinking 911s, but now I’m not completely sure). This might not be the smartest move — after all, remember this was still the time when the “real thing” was crazy expensive, but I wore them with joy and pride, and a lot of brand awareness.

When the “dark times” passed, as I had more freedom with my money (and more of “my own money”, making a living), and as the consumer market exploded, there were all sorts of other jeans. Levi’s stopped being the most-wished-for unicorn. There were Calvin Kleins, and Diesels, and then jeans were just… jeans. Just casual pants that you buy without even much thinking.

A couple of years ago, I went without jeans at all, for a year. Well, I had one pair of white jeans, and wore it only occasionally (in my view, it doesn’t count). It went easier than I imagined, after all, I wasn’t as hooked up on jeans as before, there were plenty other options, and my style has changed significantly, too. Today, as I have recovered from the half-life on predominantly wearing only jeans, I know I can survive on dresses if I want to. And that’s when I go back to the Levi’s store, without the reverence I’d have as a teenager. But that’s a prerogative of a lot of things during the teenage years, so I guess it’s long lost anyway. Without the reverence, but still, with joy of getting me something affordable and desired.

“Affordable and desired” is the happiness formula — something that you can have, and that you can afford. Something that won’t clutter your life, but will become a good possession, helping, nice, not treasured as much as not to use, but used with care.

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Being a parent

I spent time with her today. Not a lot as I was diving in meetings the moment we came home. But then we played with a balloon, and we both were so happy. And we made some postcards.

This is what works. Having time to spend with her. Really pay attention and enjoy. It’s not always enjoyable. But it is when I forget about all the other things I could have been doing instead of playing with my kid.

Seriously, one thing that works for me is having fewer obligations and things that I need to do in a day. Having enough time for her without depriving myself of the time for me. And I need both. When I have alone time, i am a better parent.

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