If new information compels me to change behaviour, I am comfortable to make the change and then forget the information. Ask me why I mix apple cider vinegar and mānuka honey into my green tea, and I don’t have an answer, but I know that there is a good one for those who go looking. I don’t have the bandwidth to be prepared for every justification.
I started ruminating on this idea in the context of conversation, storytelling and genuine connection. I've long been a conversation partner weighted towards listening and encouraging, steering and injecting energy but not taking up much breath. People like me do a lot of noticing: patterns of speech, nuances of body language, inconsistencies, and cultural references. There is a gravitation towards original thoughts and new connections between ideas, and this is often private at the expense of lively and engaging contribution.
How then to find repose and self-confidence as a quiet, thoughtful contributor? Compared to charismatic or encyclopaedic speakers, it is easy to feel uninteresting. The person recounting adventures or reciting factoids commands and holds attention like a flame. In their light, one wonders if they should strive to be more rhetorical. Sometimes, a pressure builds to say something just for the sake of making noise, daring you to saying something sycophantic, redundant or stupid.
Conversations often feel frenetic. They're often not conversations at all, but overlapping monologues driven by word association and automaticity. The sentences people construct are often formations of words they've used many times before, or the unwittingly precise regurgitations of someone not present.
If new information compels me to change behaviour, I am comfortable to make the change and then forget the information. Ask me why I mix apple cider vinegar and mānuka honey into my green tea, and I don’t have an answer, but I know that there is a good one for those who go looking. I don’t have the bandwidth to be prepared for every justification.
I started ruminating on this idea in the context of conversation, storytelling and genuine connection. I've long been a conversation partner weighted towards listening and encouraging, steering and injecting energy but not taking up much breath. People like me do a lot of noticing: patterns of speech, nuances of body language, inconsistencies, and cultural references. There is a gravitation towards original thoughts and new connections between ideas, and this is often private at the expense of lively and engaging contribution.
How then to find repose and self-confidence as a quiet, thoughtful contributor? Compared to charismatic or encyclopaedic speakers, it is easy to feel uninteresting. The person recounting adventures or reciting factoids commands and holds attention like a flame. In their light, one wonders if they should strive to be more rhetorical. Sometimes, a pressure builds to say something just for the sake of making noise, daring you to saying something sycophantic, redundant or stupid.
Conversations often feel frenetic. They're often not conversations at all, but overlapping monologues driven by word association and automaticity. The sentences people construct are often formations of words they've used many times before, or the unwittingly precise regurgitations of someone not present.
That’s the solipsistic social context for this essay, but its exposition goes beyond confidence in conversation. There is a way to trust in the power of your accumulated experiences and let go of the fixated self-flagellation of reputation maintenance.
Knowledge of and participation in the world are not sought so they can be recited. The moments of our lives are subsumed into a diffuse, mercurial operational framework. Many experiences and revelations will be impossible to forget, but the rest is worth dwelling on only until it can be integrated. For whom are your mnemonics and memory palaces, your anecdotes and book notes? Why not live with an invitation to jettison the cognitive and emotional detritus of your emergent path?
Randomness does not require scrutiny. Even luminous experiences don't need to be repeated or even recalled. Everything that happens to you is assimilated into your Being so that you might return focus inwards, local, present, lost neither in the irretrievable past nor the unknowable future. This is iterative integration.
Once I started rolling this idea around, I noticed that it was analogous to the omnipotent evolutionary force of life itself. Moment-to-moment inputs wash over us, our brains collect and consolidate them into a formation of character that we act out in the world, and our acting out shapes future experiences.
Think about the numberless, individuated experiences of any organism across time, and the adaptations made mandatory by its environmental circumstances. An evolutionary trajectory may appear in hindsight perfectly intentional, creative, and considered. But a population does not dwell on what shaped it, cannot retain experiences other than what lingers in unknown ways to beat a path to an unknowable future. From coalescing nebulae to ancient ocean life, momentary inputs are folded into Being itself and simultaneously lost forever and exalted in molecular poetry. So it is with our eternal now.
Iterative integration operates beyond the realm of conscious intent, in the subtle, the effortless, and the barely perceptible. It does not ask anything of you, but apprehending it can dispel some of the illusions of our pathology.
This thought experiment that I've masturbatorily called a theory has helped me with shame, guilt, loss, memory, forgiveness and expectation. I hope it might serve you in some way, too.
That’s the solipsistic social context for this essay, but its exposition goes beyond confidence in conversation. There is a way to trust in the power of your accumulated experiences and let go of the fixated self-flagellation of reputation maintenance.
Knowledge of and participation in the world are not sought so they can be recited. The moments of our lives are subsumed into a diffuse, mercurial operational framework. Many experiences and revelations will be impossible to forget, but the rest is worth dwelling on only until it can be integrated. For whom are your mnemonics and memory palaces, your anecdotes and book notes? Why not live with an invitation to jettison the cognitive and emotional detritus of your emergent path?
Randomness does not require scrutiny. Even luminous experiences don't need to be repeated or even recalled. Everything that happens to you is assimilated into your Being so that you might return focus inwards, local, present, lost neither in the irretrievable past nor the unknowable future. This is iterative integration.
Once I started rolling this idea around, I noticed that it was analogous to the omnipotent evolutionary force of life itself. Moment-to-moment inputs wash over us, our brains collect and consolidate them into a formation of character that we act out in the world, and our acting out shapes future experiences.
Think about the numberless, individuated experiences of any organism across time, and the adaptations made mandatory by its environmental circumstances. An evolutionary trajectory may appear in hindsight perfectly intentional, creative, and considered. But a population does not dwell on what shaped it, cannot retain experiences other than what lingers in unknown ways to beat a path to an unknowable future. From coalescing nebulae to ancient ocean life, momentary inputs are folded into Being itself and simultaneously lost forever and exalted in molecular poetry. So it is with our eternal now.
Iterative integration operates beyond the realm of conscious intent, in the subtle, the effortless, and the barely perceptible. It does not ask anything of you, but apprehending it can dispel some of the illusions of our pathology.
This thought experiment that I've masturbatorily called a theory has helped me with shame, guilt, loss, memory, forgiveness and expectation. I hope it might serve you in some way, too.
