you should quit

“I should know. I’m a medical doctor. I own a mansion and a yacht.”

-the Yacht Lady in  Richard Linklater’s Slacker, 1991.

 

From this year’s National Novel Writing Month novel  in progress.

Chapter Seventeen

I should quit.

Or maybe, I think instead I should run away.

But that’s too much trouble.  I’d have to figure out where I want to go first.

And besides, didn’t I already do that at least once?

Maybe I should just stay here and make things better, instead.

I should run for office.

Or better yet, maybe I should just run around the block, I could use the exercise,

But I’m running out of time.

So I should do something important with my life, something with purpose like Oprah says in her magazine.

At least I could throw away some of these old magazines that keep getting in the way of the refrigerator door.

It would be nice to see the floor again, but there’s way too much dirt.

Hey, I should do some gardening in this floor dirt. Grow potatoes.

I might as well plant weeds in this dirt.

I might as well stop worrying too, then maybe I could stop talking to myself.

Maybe I should listen to somebody else for a change.

I should change. No, I mean, I should really transform myself.

And I should start by counting up all these things I should change.

And I should start by changing my mind.

And if I changed my mind, I might start making some kind of sense at least when I write so that I don’t embarrass myself so much when I finally get around to reading it.

And don’t ever, ever, ever let me allow you to read any of this mess.

What a waste of time.

Besides, it’s time to start cleaning the mess that I left in the kitchen.

I should have put away that poor, cold chicken who never saw the light of day.

I should have washed my hands before I started messing with this borrowed computer.

I should buy my own computer.

At least if I’m going to write on the computer with chicken grease all over fingers, I should have bought organic.

I should have bought free range.

I should have bought fair trade.

I should have bought wheat grass.

I should become vegan.

I should have grown my own.

I should quit eating.

I should quit eating and become food for somebody else to eat.

I should become raw, candida, and gluten free so somebody can come along and eat me up without feeling guilty and they wouldn’t even have to cook me.

I should invent a food source that doesn’t kill anything ever and just keeps us thin no matter how much of it we eat and that meets all our nutritional requirements and that tastes like chicken and that never runs out.

I should become an activist who cares about larger causes and complex situations and world issues.

I should get a nose job.

I should quit my job, but then I’d have to get one first and then I’d have to tell my boss.

Maybe I should just send an email.

I should have gotten out of bed earlier and stopped dreaming so much about zombies who scratch their way out of graves in the middle of the night and then come running after me and grab hold of me and shake me and wake me up and then it’s noon.

I should have dreamed of a good future, a hopeful time, a life of destiny, a life with purpose.

I should have given up all the bad things when there was still time, coffee,  cigarettes, double butter burgers, whippets, the water, the moonlight, the cheap music, the Bingo parlors, the pimento spread, the Little Debbie snack cakes, the roller rinks, the Tetris, crossword puzzles, the Benny Hill.

I should have quit a long, long time ago and I should have listened to the inner voice chit chatting away, telling me not to do this that I wasn’t good enough to do that.  I should have listened so that I could remember what it was I wasn’t good enough to do, because now I can’t even remember what it was and now look at the mess I’m in.

I should have dumped all the dumpable people who stayed  undumped in my not-quite-ready-to-be-dumped pile.

I should have quit listening to you and I should have kicked that guy off my couch and out of my apartment before it was too late.

I should feel guilty.

I should learn how to do more than one thing at a time.

That way I should be able to cut my should list in half.

I should be doing what I am here doing and I should be doing something else too.

I should work faster and make more money and be more beautiful and lose more weight and reverse the clock so I can look more beautiful and I can have more opportunities and do more things.

I should do whatever it is I do very well and then I can learn how to be fast at several things simultaneously so that I can get much more than ever done.

I should be more mindful.

I should be present.

I should slow down.

I should slow down.

I shouldn’t even think.

I should just become mindful of my breath so later I worry about more important things.

I should earn credit for doing the laundry.

I should learn from my brother who found that if he turns the vacuum cleaner on and hides behind a bookshelf he can get away with making his wife think that he is doing chores for a little while, when all the while all he is doing is goofing off reading from some old book.  Too bad she caught him.  I should invent a contraption that would push the vacuum cleaner back and forth a little so that the drone isn’t so constant and so it sounds more like my brother’s really cleaning when he’s not.

I should do just one of the things I keep threatening to do.

All right then,

I quit.



A slow learner by any other name may be an expert novice

Today I complained to my highly opinionated son that I’ve been  suffering from a severe case of distractability. I had been reading Jerzy Grotowski’s  Towards a Poor Theatre when I was supposed to be doing a million other things I’d started and hadn’t finished.  I’ve been thinking about how cool it would be to set up a lab where a group of friends would do theatre games and mind experiments. Sounds like a great idea, I know, but I have no expertise in theatre. This is totally out of my field (whatever that is).  How am I ever supposed to get anything done when there is so much to do, so much to try,  so much to learn?

I’ve come to trust John to comfort me in times like these by offering me yet further distractions, suggestions for even more reading and movies and cool stuff to look at online. True to my expectations, John emailed me this reply.

“On being distractable, I just ran across this in a footnote, quoted by Katie Salen (the slow games lady):

Situated learning is …constituted by immersion in meaningful practices within a community of learners who are capable of playing multiple and different roles based on their backgrounds and experiences. The community must include experts, that is people who have mastered certain practices. Minimally, it must include expert novices, that is people who are experts at learning new domains in some depth.

Such experts can guide learners, serving as mentors and designers of their learning processes. (New London Group, 2000, p. 33)

‘Expert Novice’ –  That’s what I am.  Constantly excited (distracted) by the allure of learning a new skill, or entering a new domain.  Not so great at actually doing anything with those skills, but great at learning them.  The term ‘dilettante’ is far too negative, and ‘renaissance man’ is far to arrogant. Until now I haven’t had a good way to express the learning and living style that I enjoy so much. I’m an expert at being a novice, and learning communities need me. So there.  Last night I spent 4 hours learning about VJing.  I have no plans to be a VJ.”

I find it kind of funny that John would say this since I had just told a friend that what I really wanted to do with my life was to be a VJ for wild and crazy dance events. Of course, as with many of my impulses, that too passed.

I know I will forever and will always be an expert novice.  And now, thanks to John and Katie Salen, I can be a little less shy about being one.

Postscript: When John and his sister Liz were little I used to tell them that the Ice Cream Truck was really a Music Truck.  I said that the van that would ride around with kids running after it was just for entertaining us with music. Turns out Katie Salen had a similar idea.  Check out Karaoke Ice. You, too,  can be a novice expert on her site for hours. That is until something else distracts you.

Alan Watts, Trey Parker, and Slowlearning

Arianna Chooses Slow

Arianna Huffington announces her first pick for her book club: In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honore. Perfect.

In his blog post, Honore responds to her selection:

“Around the world, 120 official Slow Cities are now putting quality of life ahead of sprawl. Slow Food is a household name and the Slow Sex movement could be next. Slow Travel is booming as people look for ways to savor the journey. A Harvard dean has written an open letter extolling the virtues of doing less and relaxing more. Its title: “Slow Down.”

And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are now movements for Slow Medicine, Exercise, Parenting, Retail, Design, Education, Blogging, Production, Fashion, Art and Reading.”

What’s next?  Slow learning?  Of course, we’ve been celebrating slow learners for quite some time now. It’s good to see the idea catching on.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-honore/the-slow-revolution-is-gr_b_310712.html

continuum

A graphic reflection on my first experience with Continuum.  On Monday morning, we yawned and undulated and voiced and writhed.  Then  I went to the lake and sat with the water, came home,  and painted this.

we’re evolving

new self portrait

“We’re all busy learning on a learning curve.”

Slow Learning Hall of Fame: Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore with nothing but time on his hands
Slow Learner, Philosopher, Artist, Musician, Composer, Poet, Novelist, Playwright, Nonauthoritarian Learning Leader, Nobel Laureate, School fund-raiser, Doodler, Underneath-the-tree-sitter/thinker

Born May 7, 1861
Died August 7, 1941

“Hunger for the Epic”

Highlights of Slow Learning Super Powers:

• Wrote  first poem at the age of eight.
• Started painting and drawing at the age of sixty.
• Wrote songs, including two national anthems
  
• Founded schools (an outdoor children’s school, university, and rural school)
• Proclaimed that learning might be natural, sympathetic, and pleasurable
• Extreme multidisciplinarian
  
• possibly gifted with Attention Surplus Syndrome (aka ADD)
  

Tagore on feeding hungry children:

We have come to this world to accept it, not merely to know it.  We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy.  The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.  But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed.  From our very childhood habits are formed and knowledge is imparted in such a manner that our life is weaned away from nature and our mind and the world are set in opposition from the beginning of our days. Thus the greatest of educations for which we came prepared is neglected, and we are made to lose our world to find a bagful of information instead.  We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to teach him grammar.  His hunger is for the Epic, but he is supplied with chronicles of facts and dates…Child-nature protests against such calamity with all its power of suffering, subdued at last into silence by punishment. (Rabindranath Tagore, Personality,1917: 116-17)

Tagore on the pleasures of slow:

A Moment’s Indulgence

I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side. The works
that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite,
and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and
the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.

Now it is time to sit quite, face to face with thee, and to sing
dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure

For more on Tagore as Slow Learner and Slow Learning activist: Check out Kathleen O’Connell’s post on Infed.

a cure for outrage overload: the slow long now

Whenever I get too upset with current events, I find it comforting to step back, to change perspective, and to take a good, long, slow view of things.

My favorite Slovenian industrial metal band’s song, Kingdom of God, reminds me we won’t be here forever.

The John Cage As Slow As Possible Project involves a performance lasting over  639 years. Don’t laugh. They’re already almost nine years in.

And, now, at long last, I’ve found this:  The Long Now Foundation.

Talk about a gifted group of slow learners! The Long Now board includes Stewart Brand (remember Whole Earth Catalog?), Chris Anderson  of Wired Magazine, Brian Eno (yes, the composer, producer, superstar) and a whole gaggle of other legendary hot geeks.

The Long Now Foundation boasts the world’s slowest computer,  uses five digit dates (02009), supports a 10,000 year clock, hosts seminars in long-term thinking, offers some geeky thing called a long server, and supports the Rosetta Project, the “largest collection of linguistic data on the Net.

on re-learning language

Amanda Baggs‘ video challenges all notions of language, communication, and learning.  Be patient and watch through to her explanation about halfway through.

Does verbal  language prevent us from communicating? Is it possible to tell a story without language? What happens when we fully communciate with others? Is verbal language always necessary? Can we even think without words? Does all our talk keep us from connecting with each other? What is there to learn from people who speak in another radically different language? Baggs  learned to speak in our language.  What might be possible when we learn to speak in hers? Is nonverbal dialogue even possible?

to do list

Mindmap for possibility