The third tenet of Distilled Harmony is Distill Complexity. I tend not to write about it as often as Foster Harmony on Enable Beauty, because, well, because it is complicated. Then something happens out there in the “real world” that forces you to consider complexity more closely. This time we get to blame Google - with a little help with their buddies at Harvard - for something other than losing an order. Seems that they have managed to capture the most accurate 3D image of the brain to date. To be specific, according to Singularity Hub.com, they:
“published an intricate map of every cell and connection in a cubic millimeter of the human brain. . . to make the map, the teams sliced donated tissue into 5,300 sections, each 30 nanometers thick, and imaged them with a scanning electron microscope at a resolution of 4 nanometers. The resulting 225 million images were computationally aligned and stitched into a 3D digital representation of the region.”
Wow, that is waaay more pictures than I have on my computer, maybe even more pictures of my grand-daughters that my daughters have posted on Facebook. A simple Google search will take you to all the information about this accomplishment necessary to either warm the cockles of your techie heart, or put you to sleep. I come down somewhere in between: Speechless at the complexity that we carry around between our ears. But while the grace and beauty of the science is truly awesome, for me it pales almost to insignificance in comparison to what those physical structures, revealed by the science, allow us to participate in. Everything we create, experience, believe, feel, realize, everything we are, springs to life only as electrical and chemical impulses flash across those billions and billions of pathways at incompressible speeds. If that isn’t complexity, it will have to do until something better comes along.
So I imagine myself able to sort of amble around in my brain, wandering among those billions and billions of connections (perhaps aka b&bcs? ) of my lives lived, experienced, or perhaps passed by, but still somehow stashed as the “what might have, could have, should have beens up there in the ‘billions and billions of connections’ of brain land.” They stretch out before me, images, poems, writings, people, places waiting for my presence to animate them. Or, if we let the quantum theory notion of "many worlds" sneak in, what happens/happened to those entities/realities I chose not to pursue? Or those for which I have insufficient time?
Whew. I’m not sure when you first begin to question your own immortality. It is an awkward consideration, since, in truth, we have always experienced ourselves as immortal beings. I wake up and there I am. Never been anywhere else - unless you want to count a few confused moments in the 60s. I am fascinated by the literature on near-death experiences, but never having had one - just a couple of minsdiagnosises a couple of decades ago - near death experiences remain just literature to me.
More common and more comfortable, we often tend to create labels for those moments that our lives have in common with those experienced with or by others; angst, love, etc. For example - the notion of a midlife crisis springs to mind. Nice, pat, and probably inaccurate and insufficient. It seems more likely that the time-honored “midlife crisis” occurs when a newly encountered awareness of one’s mortality (something we tend to ignore) intersects with the time necessary to actually consider the slipping of sand through the hour glass. And “so are the Days of Our Lives.” Just kidding, but it is interesting that the time-worn hokey opening of one of television’s longest running daytime soap operas points to a very complex set of issues that most of us will experience, have experienced, or are experiencing.
It is not that we never actually consider the awesome complexity of our lives and the staggering array of possibilities embedded in that complexity. We do. Two iterations come to mind: one time is a fairly accurate “everything is possible” moment, the other is a transient illusion. Strangely we often get them backwards. First the illusion, for which we can usually blame our parents, but unfortunately in doing so, those of us who have children, must usually fess up to handing off the same illusion to our progeny. It’s the old “You can be anything you want to be fallacy!” In pursuit of the Distill Complexity tenet, I’d suggest the acronym YCBAYWTB to sort of simplify.
The problem is this, the YCBAYWTB fallacy neglects the hard reality of prerequisites, something with which my half century in various roles in various classrooms has made me very familiar. So let me use the academic iteration for a quick and dirty example. Say in response to the YCBAYWTB the “7th grade you” decides you want to be the next Elon Musk. OK. If we just want to do the money side the three richest folks in the world are - in a shifting kind of order, Elon Musk (Tesla motors, Space X, PayPal, Solar City, Neuralink, etc.) Jeff Bezos, (who may be slipping given the divorce- Amazon, Blue Origin, Whole Foods, etc. ) and Bernard Arnault (No, I didn’t recognize him either. Google says he is the chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton SE, the world's largest luxury goods company.) They are each worth about 200 billion. OK, none of those guys just started printing money. They had to deal with the prerequisites. They had to somehow get their first job in order to buy their first company to make their first million, or billion or whatever, and in order to do that they probably had to pass algebra, or calculus, or French, or Latin, or etc., etc., etc. Do you see where I am going here? The grand assertion that YCBAYWTB tends to leave out considerations of the prerequisites, all those things you have to do BEFORE YCBAYWTB! So, before we tell our children, or our students YCBAYWTB, in good conscience, we need to tell them about the prerequisites necessary to reach that goal.
And then there is the whole "luck" thing. I used to give a class assignment specifically designed to combat the YCBAYWTB fallacy prevalent among my students, as evidenced by the fact that they had a tendency to change majors every other semester. In the assignment, they had to define exactly what it was that they wanted to be - and then list the prerequisites that they needed to complete to reach that goal. But I specifically forbade "stardom" either in athletics or the arts as their chosen goal. Strange for the guy who seriously considered "God's gift to the musical theater" as a legitimate life goal? Not really. I had come to realize that the pastry of stardom was heavily leavened with the yeast of good fortune. So the next star in any of those performance fields had to use their "fall back option" for this exercise. MVP of the Super Bowl your first choice? Then use a legitimate route to coaching for this exercise. Though, in retrospect, I guess I should have made an exception for Russell Wilson. But how often does that happen? The point is that when advocating for the YCBAYWTB fallacy, it is only fair that one point out the prerequisites that pave the path to that "anything," the hurdles that turn the fallacy into a reality.
So what about the time when YCBAYWTB isn’t an illusion? It is still a bit of an illusion, but at least it is an informed illusion, and it lies at the other end of one’s professional life - retirement. Now let me admit right up front that I know that I have lived, to date anyhow, a pretty charmed life. Born as a white male in a middle class family that believed, and provided for, an education that was not seen as complete until one had a doctorate degree. And also having reached the plateau of 3 score and 12 years with only a few health hiccups, accompanied along the way by folks who cared about me perhaps more than I deserved. Yeah, it has been a pretty nice ride so far, a fortuitous clambering past the prerequisites necessary to reach this iteration of YCBAYWTB.
Don't get me wrong, I realize that there are some things I might want to be that are no longer on the table. Broadway has yet to come calling. But I really don't see that as a bad thing, as that would be a "job." And no "job" really fits in my current YCBAYWTB perspective. As a matter of fact, anything that requires me to march to the beat of someone else's drum is not going to make the cut. Even though the life of a tenured college professor was a pretty "self-controlled" ride, I can't imagine having to be somewhere I didn't want to be - AKA, meetings, classes, etc. Same can be said of playing point guard in the NBA. I never could go to my left, and the highlight reels rarely feature exhausting hours in the weight room, and let’s not even think about the whispered commentary accompanying the gruesome injuries. So what does fit in my personal view of YCBAYWTB as seen from this side of retirement?
Fortunately, the parameters are pretty "me friendly," and not surprisingly, in close step with the tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. And that really is the key to turning this "senior YCBAYWTB" from an illusion into a reality: Determine what you have come to believe and engage in behaviors that manifest those beliefs.
So let’s start with Foster Harmony. Yeah, yeah, it should be pretty simple - just chill, be mellow. However, this one is often a challenge for me and hence I draw a great deal of pleasure and comfort from those times when I actually pull it off. You see the challenge of behaving in a way that Fosters Harmony comes from the fact that in much of the world, and certainly in America, we are taught the oppose. We live in an incredibly competitive world. To quote that famous gentle soul Vince Lombardi - “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!” - a phrase he apparently stole from UCLA football coach Red Sanders.
The point is we are taught that winning is what is important in life - beating the others, being the best, thrusting your fist into the air! Me, me, me! But no, no, no. To truly Foster Harmony you have realize that winning just isn’t that important. Mind you, I am not advocating losing here. Rather you just need to shift the objective. Winning isn’t the goal. Rather, doing whatever you choose to do to the best of your ability - that is the goal. And you reach that goal best by listening, not talking. And when you feel compelled to talk, practice phrases like: “That’s a neat idea!” “What would you like to do?” “I hadn’t thought of that” and "I think you're right!" And even more important, try not to get the last word, even if you are tempted to mutter it as you leave the room. I know - I think of it as "tough harmony."
Sounds kind of wimpish. But one thing I learned in half a century of teaching is that truth and certainty have a way of swiftly changing in the face of more evidence, better research, greater wisdom. So crow, and my own words spoken in haste, are two things I am working on keeping off my dinner plate as I work my way to fostering Harmony.
Enabling Beauty is the tenet that is by far the most fun, because it is the one that implores us to facilitate making the world a more beautiful place. Basically it breaks into two closely related sets of endeavors: doing and supporting. “Doing” is just that. Mess around in any medium, draw, paint, sing, compose, dance, write. But keep two things in mind. First remember that in a Distilled Harmony view of the world, the objective is to create beauty. As I have said and written often before; I don't do horror, I don't do dark. Sorry Guernica, you get no space on my wall. In 1937 maybe it was the primarily role of the artist to draw attention to the horrors of the wars that would soon engulf the world. Today with the mandate of “if it bleeds, it leads,” media. We need merely to glance at the nearest screen, or art exhibit. Ugliness? The advocates of certainty from both left and right seem to have that that covered. Time to take a stand for Beauty.
The supporting part is also great fun. Go to local concerts, community theater. Go to art shows. Buy something, even if your walls are full. Gift it forward.
Also, don’t compare your own work to genius. Just take your best shot at creating Beauty. Lombardi and Sanders were both wrong. The reality is that winning is sometimes a minor by-product of doing your best at what is truly meaningful and important. And while watching sports is enjoyable - guilty here - and incredibly profitable to a small handful of folks, it isn’t really meaningful or important. So perhaps better to increase our focus elsewhere. Maybe by focusing on simply enabling beauty, you may surprised how and when that illusive thing we call genius might emerge.
Perhaps the illusive third tenet - Distill Complexity - may simply be manifested by clarifying your own beliefs and attitudes and then exploring how you can bring those beliefs and attitudes into the more dominant two initial tenets: Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty.
So for my particular senior "YCBAYWTB," I read, draw, write and listen to music - all the time. To be truly content, and, yes, happy, I have to have a Wall post or two, or three, percolating here on my screen, a drawing evolving between my photos, graphics app, and my drawing tablet, and a book - often a mystery - following me on iPad and iPhone, all to the tune of whatever I choose to be listening to a the moment. And, equally important, when any of those three activities seem to generate something worth sharing - I do so. Like now.
Hmm, Maybe not really all that complex after all.
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