When you look at an object, you see one side of it at a time; the nature of vision. When you think about something, you think about it in one context at a time; the nature of thought.
Context determines what your mind thinks just as viewing-angle determines what your eye sees.
I choose to juggle this year and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
That goal will serve to organize and measure the best of my energies & skills. That challenge is one that I am willing to accept, one I am unwilling to postpone, one which I intend to win. -thank you John F. Kennedy
Mental activity in the pink matter (wet) comes up with an idea that drives the hand that picks up the pencil & paper (dry) and writes the idea down. From there it gets uploaded across the firewall into (air) cyberspace.
Daniel Kahneman refers to Fast and Slow thinking as System One and System Two, respectively. System One defines the effortless, intuitive part of our thinking while System Two explains the kind of concentration that involves effort.
The time & energy required to train your mind to STOP thinking is even greater. That higher level of control over your thoughts is achieved through the practice of meditation.
Last night G stepped into a conversation between R and M. The problem R was expressing to M was exactly the same problem G was experiencing.
It seemed R and G might commiserate to find the one right solution for both because, although M and R were on the same team and G was leading a distinctly different team, any answers found would be to their mutual benefit.
But, G was outside R & M’s coupling and so easy to dismiss.
Focus on situations with change potential:
This approach requires serious commitment. Development requires time. The secret is to invest a few moments every day to maximize learning.”
Development First by David Peterson & Mary Dee Hicks
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
-Leo Tolstoy
Here they sat at a social breakfast table–all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes–looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains.
Chapter 5: Breakfast – Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Coffee drinking in the morning is what makes getting up in the morning such a pleasure, makes life worth living. And coffee gets one moving, and you know: moving is good for you.
Hunger is the first element of self-discipline.
If you can control what you eat & drink, you can control everything else.