Experience is weaving in novel patterns, and I was waiting for some consolidation before writing about it, but no consolidation has come. So I will write about the bits and pieces that have formed here and there:
I’ve been experimenting with a pressure cooker. I had never used one before, and it brings novel possibilities to cooking. I’ve been learning by trial and error, and one mistake I made was thinking I did not have to release all of the pressure in order to open the lid. I knew it was standard procedure, yet I thought: what is the worst that could happen if there’s still some pressure inside? The lid would just pop. The lid popping was accurate, but I didn’t foresee a small explosion that splattered the kitchen with tomato sauce and scalded my hands. I reacted with surprising indifference to the event: ahhh, a lesson well learned I thought. Today I have blisters from the burn. Strangely, I don’t regret the experience.
I met with Javier for lunch, and among other things he spoke about the function of pleasure in design. We are both reformed Ulm zealots, and the zealousness was transcended in different ways. Javier’s link of reasoning was well developed, coming through the German protestant reformation and its relationship to the Catholic church, and a whole constellation of different ideas related to the shift in consciousness happening at the time.
It’s as if someone pointed at the night sky and said “Polaris is not the true North Star” and I replied “I’ve noticed that too, but I can’t explain it”, and then some hints are given about how the stars are moving, but in order to verify it one must sit down and observe the sky carefully for a couple of nights. These are navigational references not only for professional but inner work and it’s crucial to understand from within.
I had been struggling with the most simple of tasks: add The Boolean Game to Method of Action’s homepage. How this improvised homepage came to be: long after Method of Action as-an-online course fell apart, it was posted to Hacker News, and people were getting exciting over a dead project. In the space of one hour I came up with what’s up now to replace the homepage as to not disappoint anybody.
Now that it’s revived the current homepage is inadequate, but I know this to be a larger project than what I would like to tackle at this time. Still, I just could help take a couple of stabs at the direction I wanted to take it and then hold myself because this is not what is important at this time. Finally, I set myself an artificial constraint: I was sitting at the gym and I had a spare hour until yoga class started, and I thought this is perfect, I have one hour for this task and whatever comes out will be an improvement. And this is finally how I worked through the impossibility of a redesign at this time.
When I got sick I stopped lifting weights and begun going to yoga every day, as my body would protest vehemently against any other kind of physical activity. I used to go only once per week, because the teacher I like only gives classes once per week. However, I’ve come to appreciate the different approaches each teacher has.
My favorite teacher has this natural disposition towards yoga, she is calm yet energetic and has a permanent uplifted mood. She doesn’t need to teach yoga, she can simply embody it and it rubs off on you. Other teachers evidently didn’t arrive to yoga through a natural disposition, they evidently needed it in their personal lives and by practice they came to be able to teach it.
The difference between a natural yogi and a trained one is that the trained one knows the path from neuroticism to calmness, whereas the natural one has never traversed this path. And so trained teachers will often prompt with little pointers about how to come into states of deeper relaxation which the natural one doesn’t.