Little Luxuries

This Spring my wife and I went for a chilly, drizzly, windy walk one morning to work up an appetite for breakfast. (Completely unnecessary: breakfast always sounds good to me.) Between the weather and the then-new stay at home order, we pretty much had the bike path to ourselves.

The birds seemed to be enjoying Spring. We saw a ton of robins, two bluejays, a Mallard duck couple, 2-3 cardinals: all out, singing their songs and doing their thing. Curiously, there was also a crawfish in the middle of the bike path about 40 feet from a footbridge that crosses a stream.

Ordinarily, I trust that animals know better than I do where they should be and what they should be doing, but in this case my wife and I decided to repatriate it to a more suitable habitat. I set him (He’s a guy, right? Should have asked directions, right?) down on the bank of the creek, where there were raccoon tracks in the mud from the night before. From the bridge, we could watch Bartholomew Crawfish (wife’s choice of name) slowly make his way down toward the water, accidentally rolling onto his back a couple of times, then righting himself. He was moving quite slowly, but deliberately. It could be my imagination, but he seemed relieved to stick his head back in the water.

Back home, we warmed up over hot oatmeal and coffee. Those comforts always seem to possess a depth beyond the ordinary when you’re cold and damp. A dinner companion of Ruth Reichl says it well in her book Save Me the Plums, “When you attain my age you will understand one of life’s great secrets: Luxury is best appreciated in small portions. When it becomes routine it loses its allure.”

A Push and a Pull

My jujutsu instructors would remind us frequently that every effective technique has a push and a pull. Only pushing against a joint for a lock or a throw can get you most of the way there, but it’s clumsy and requires too much force. Only pulling on your opponent’s body, whether his limb or his uniform is simply futile most of the time. Ideally, both forces need to be applied with the correct timing to produce the desired effect.

I think the same concept is useful to help solve the problem of how we might re-embody our lives: technology is the push, design is the pull.

Technology has been used to make things nearly effortless. Driving my Honda CRV is nothing like driving the '65 Ford pickup my grandpa had. (And I don’t want to give up the improvements in safety...) Driving the '65 Ford required engagement and effort due to the manual steering and manual transmission. I think we’re at a point now where we could allow the user to select a little more resistance in the steering and I know that some cars allow you to enter a mode where you “shift manually”. We have riding lawnmowers, of course, and almost all of the walk-behind models are self-propelled. But what if those devices were re-engineered so that a moderate amount of effort was required to use them?

The second example doesn’t sound very appealing, does it? I think that’s where design comes in: inviting the user to play. Take, for example the Qwerkywriter USB keyboard:

It’s retro, yes, but it has 2 knobs! And a carriage return lever! The knobs and carriage return lever can be programmed to do different useful things—they’re not just quaint decorations.

These are just a couple of quick examples to illustrate the larger principles: we can change the way that work shapes us by re-engineering our tools to require a little more physical work and making the design attractive enough to outweigh the perceived inconvenience.

Redesign the effort and invite people to play: a push and a pull.

Body of Knowledge

Our brains are physical things and the place where most of us locate our minds and certainly our thoughts. There’s growing evidence and a lot of work around the idea that thinking is “embodied”, which is to say that our physical body—our whole body, not just our brainparts—influences and takes part in our thoughts.

Activities like walking and working with your hands can help you to think. “Taking a break” by doing some “mindless” task, like washing the dishes for the 4th time today, because somehow being at home all the time creates dirty dishes beyond all proportion, can sometimes lead to breakthroughs in problem solving. Some might say that the mind is working in the background while you wash dishes; proponents of embodied cognition (fancy nerd-speak) might say that you’re simply bringing your body to bear on the problem as well as your brain.

I’m not really sure how it all works, but consider this: if thinking is helped or changed by our body then perhaps our knowledge is, too. When we know things “in our bones” or we have a “gut feeling” about something, it might not be just in our head. Maybe our bodies know something we don’t.

I Wish More of Our Tools Looked Like Hammers

I grilled out tonight. I spatchcocked a chicken and it turned out pretty nice: juicy meat and crispy skin. It’s hard to beat the flavors you get from a charcoal grill. All the tools I used for preparation had handles. You know, for your hands: a shears for cutting out the backbone, a spatula, a tongs, a knife.

A handle is necessary for doing physical work, for manipulating objects and exerting force. Information and digital representations don’t really respond to force, so I guess that’s why phones and tablets and laptops are designed for our pockets and desks and backpacks.

I miss hammers sometimes. What would it take to make more of our problems look like nails, so we could use hammers more often?

Look Around

Squirrels, birds, chipmunks: they all look around a lot. They move—quickly—then stop and look around. For many animals, this is life and death stuff because the cat, coyote and hawk are also looking around. They do it a little differently because they’re predators. They look differently in both senses of the word. Their movements are more fluid, and steady and they are, let’s say, carefully shopping instead of trying to get through a haunted house.

When we look around these days it’s often on-line or maybe in the fridge. We don’t examine our surroundings like either a chipmunk or a bear. We behave as if we literally inhabit a separate world.

This is OK until it isn’t. I was preoccupied with a thought one day as I stepped out from between two cars into the street. Another car was coming down my side of the street, but I didn’t realize it until I felt the turbulent air on my left arm as it passed by.

There are other reasons to be observant and watchful these days, unfortunately, but it’s a habit that can be developed without too much fuss. I would make an analogy with driving: you simply glance up from your phone every so often and… NO!!! Please put your phone down while you’re driving! As I was saying, just like when you’re driving, you cultivate a relaxed awareness of all the traffic around you: just noticing the cars, the people, the bicycles and how they’re moving. Just looking around like you have a casual interest in everything that’s going on.

One more example: if you’ve ever seen two farmers talking you may have noticed that they stand facing roughly 90 degrees to each other. There are a couple of reasons for this. They can keep an eye on the fields, the weather and the roads. A tremendous amount of Midwestern conversation is driven solely by the current and forecasted weather conditions, and it’s considered polite to wave when you see a neighbor on their way into town. (The continuous examination of the landscape during conversation might also be to avoid making prolonged eye contact and the subsequent awkwardness.) But the farmers might also be displaying a behavior from our heritage: scanning the savannah for weather, neighbors and danger.

Yoga is Wasted on the Young

Well, not wasted, exactly. It’s certainly an enjoyable and beneficial activity in more than one way at any age.

But you really need to be in your 40’s to fully appreciate being given permission (and instruction) to indulge in the luxurious act of moving your body and assuming postures with such care.

Granularity and Scale

When we think about nutrition, it’s common to bring up different vitamins and minerals and macronutrients. When we think about food, we think about special dishes and restaurant menus or cooking with and for loved ones.

When we think about language, it’s common to bring up vocabulary and grammar, perhaps some idioms or intricate rules. When we think about conversation or literature, we think about jokes, heartfelt exchanges, difficult times and amazing tales.

When we think about exercise, it’s common to bring up set/rep schemes and programming, anatomy and physiology. When we think about play or adventure, we think about effort and weather and the stories that follow from accidents—both happy and unhappy.

When does nutrition become food? When does language become conversation? When does exercise become adventure?

And how would we quantify the elements of talking about the Sandhill Cranes we unexpectedly happened upon during a long walk through the Arboretum this morning over a cup of coffee?

Everyday Leverage

Written language helps to make the size of our brains appear larger than they are: it increases our memory in size and duration, and it helps us think more complicated thoughts because we can visualize more information at once in the short term, too.

Cooking helps our digestive system extract more nutrition from food: all kinds of cooking could be considered external pre-digestion. Fermentation, roasting, steaming, boiling – all of these techniques break down some of the more complicated, difficult to digest molecules and make them smaller. (And tastier, too! Tiny, tasty molecules. Mmmm...)

Sports (or Sport, apparently, if you’re British...) and play help our brains as well as our bodies develop and grow to be highly adaptable, responsive and attentive to the environment.

It’s weird to think of these things as technologies, but for the amount of leverage that can be gained from applying them they must be, right?

Trying to Find the Words

I like cilantro a little too much. I like it on my tacos, which is to say I don’t really care if there’s anything else besides some tasty meat and an obscene amount of cilantro. I am not one of those unlucky people who think cilantro tastes like soap or metal or swamp water.

But the names of foods—especially plants—are tricky. Cilantro is the Spanish name for coriander, which is Latin. Most of the time here in the US, the stems and leaves are sold in a bundle as “cilantro” and “coriander” is reserved as the name of the spice that is made from the seeds of the coriander plant. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone, but I do find it a little weird when it’s referred to as “Mexican parsley” because we’ve already got two pretty good words for the plant that are highly accurate and from Romance languages. Why bring parsley into it?

Way back when, I went shopping at the grocery store for a fennel bulb, along with some staples. I casually surveyed the produce section at first, then did a more methodical search and finally started moving through the vegetables one by one like some kind of very discerning, foraging animal.

This was before I knew what fennel was and before I had a smartphone. This was before smartphones, in fact. This was long, long ago, in a time when information was locked away on supercomputers that did not fit in pants pockets.

Anyway, there were these weird things that the grocery store labeled “Anise” that had big white bulbs and green stalks and frilly leaves that reminded me of dill weed. I kinda thought they might be fennel, but obviously the grocery store knew better than me so it couldn’t be what I was looking for. Clearly. Besides, it sorta smelled like licorice. I was not told to buy a licorice plant—that would be silly. I mean, I knew that anise was used to flavor black licorice. I was looking for fennel. But I was becoming a little annoyed. And frustrated. And panicky. Where, in this monstrosity of a grocery store with everything, is the goddamn fennel?

I did have a cell phone and I did eventually work out with my wife that the bizarre object I was looking at was, in fact, probably a fennel bulb but when I got to the checkout line, there was no little sticker on the side of it.

The Latino cashier puzzled over it ever so briefly before looking at me and said, “Anís?”

Moving Prose

When I tell you about how I used a French press to make coffee this morning, I move a lot. My lungs expand and contract as my diaphragm pulls itself taut and then relaxes. My mouth and tongue make funny shapes as the air passes by, and my larynx bounces up and down. Depending on how excited I am by the coffee this morning (or how much sleep I had last night), I may gesture. I may even pump my fist with enthusiasm if I have truly nailed it.

Likewise, as you listen to my raving, the sound waves reaching your ears induce a subtle but important dance inside your head—tiny bones sympathetically vibrate as part of a Rube Goldberg machine that brings the fact that I let the coffee bloom for about 20 seconds to your brain. You might also roll your eyes.

The eye-rolling is important, because it’s an example of what we call body language. (We will all be paying particularly close attention to this phenomena over the next few weeks as politicians attempt to persuade us of a number of things.) And while body language is more ambiguous and less intentional than spoken language, many important things can be perceived or inferred. Pay particular attention if there’s a large number of people running in the same direction: there’s probably a reason.

Sign language is, of course, almost completely reliant on the movement of the hands and arms. It’s not “body language” in the same sense as eye-rolling or panic-running—it’s fully-developed human language performed with different parts of our body.

Even just reading (certainly typing) is dependent on movement. Our eyes move about in their sockets to absorb the details of text encoded in light: funny little sudden movements called saccades, from the French, “violent pull”.

Language is movement.

(And making a second pot of coffee says a lot.)

What’d you say?

Talking to yourself is the verbal equivalent of scratch paper. It’s sketching in the air, especially if you gesture. It’s thumbing through your mental dictionary (or thesaurus). It’s a way to feel your way through your thoughts and think through your feelings a little more deliberately. It is at once a telescope and a microscope trained on your inner landscape.

Talking to yourself out loud is also a check on the voice you use to talk to yourself silently.

Tension vs. Control

I’m reading a paper about motor learning. (“Motor” here refers to how we move our limbs and things about, not an engine in a car or a bus.) Anyway, there are people who study the damndest things about how we learn to tie our shoes or brush our teeth or learn to play the bassoon. This particular paper deals with how people who are learning something new tend to tense all the muscles involved—not just the ones you need to, say, swing a tennis racket for a backhand stroke, but all the damn muscles in your arm, even the ones that slow down your backhand.

As it turns out, people do this instinctively because the additional tension from the other muscles helps to keep the racket “on target”. The additional tension actually leads to better control and it even helps you learn the correct movements faster. But, as the person learns and practices and becomes more skillful, that tension gradually decreases. They no longer need the extra muscles to keep things aligned properly and to diminish the errors in movement. Efficiency becomes more important over time.

So the tension is something we need in the short term. And now it doesn’t really make a lot of sense when I think back to the experiences where people have told me, “OK, good, now just relax” after the first 2 minutes because doing that would actually slow down my progress. (And I, of course, have given the same unhelpful advice to others. Dammit...)

Maybe we can let the tension be for a while—just a little while as we get used to the new movements. It doesn’t have to feel relaxing or easy at first.

Building Blocks

Food:

• Water

• Protein

• Fat

• Carbohydrates

• Vitamins & Minerals

• Fiber

Exercise:

• Pushing

• Pulling

• Squeezing Squatting

• Hinging (at the hips)

Language:

• Nouns

• Verbs

• Adjectives

• Adverbs

Building blocks are important. They give us a way to enter into an understanding of the subject. They suggest useful, first-order approaches for their application to real- world scenarios. But...

A list of nutrients will never be a substitute for wholesome nutrition.

A list of single-joint movements will never be a substitute for engaged activity.

A list of language constructs will never be a substitute for compelling speech or poetry.

Building blocks are important and can be terribly interesting all by themselves, but they’re not the building.

Mise en place

It’s French for “putting in place” or “everything in its place”, and the most popular context for the phrase is in the kitchen. It’s a form of preparation that involves getting all your ingredients and tools (and maybe a glass of wine, if it’s been that kind of day) together before you begin setting things on fi... er, cooking.

It takes some of the excitement out of cooking, because there’s a lot less running back and forth to the pantry, looking for spices or realizing that you’re out of clean ramekins. (Ramekin is a weird word, so I had to look it up: we use it to refer to a little circular dish-thingy. The French, from whence the word comes, use ramequin to refer to a small amount of cheese toasted or baked with breadcrumbs, eggs and seasoning in the little dish we call a ramekin. I have yet to discover what the French call the little dish that they bake ramequin in. With nonsense like this, it’s amazing that we can actually translate anything from any language. Seriously...)

Anyway, pros take this pretty seriously because pros don’t mess around. With proper mise en place there’s less of a chance of being unprepared or surprised and things seem to go a lot smoother and faster. Which probably explains why I’ve been so resistant to using it until the last few years. I didn’t grow up in the French culinary tradition. I grew up in a tradition of Minnesotan Norwegian Lutheran casseroles—or “hot dish”—on my mom’s side and German farmers who could weld tractor parts together with swear words on my dad’s side. Stoicism, yes. Elegance and refinement... less so.

My excuse for not gathering together the necessary items beforehand has perennially been that I’m in a hurry, I have to start right now. Never mind that I do NOT write code this way. I don’t even pack for a trip that way. I wouldn’t paint a room that way if I only had an hour. I guess some things do need to be taught in context, or perhaps I’m just a little slow.

I remember watching the Food Network what feels like a loooong time ago. A couple things stand out about those episodes: the chef putting a dish in one of the ovens and then taking the finished dish out of a different oven after the commercial break is one example. “Ah, yes, the magic of television!”, I laughed to myself.

But the other was this: all of the beautiful ingredients magically waiting for the chef in neatly arranged glass bowls and ramekins, waiting for their expert hands to deftly make an omelette or a croque en bouche or a grilled cheese sandwich with pickles. And I sat there, watching, thinking “Well, yeah, it would be nice if someone got all the stuff together for me ahead of time!”

Yeah, dumbass, it would, wouldn’t it?

Breakfast by the Water

We ran errands the other morning, grabbing some breakfast to go at a cafe. We sat on the banks of a lake and ate. We sat in the shade, idly looking out at the lily pads when a crane flew in and stood among them in the water. There are stories about martial arts styles inspired by the movement of cranes, so I was curious to watch it for a while.

We watched it watch the water for a while. It stood still, then took a careful step forward and stood still some more. Its head seems to be a separate thing from the rest of its body: it extends horizontally out in front, like a probe, and then it takes a step so that its body can be close again, like an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner being pulled along behind the hose and nozzle.

Eventually, I noticed it noticing something, and again its head seemed to take the lead, ahead of its body. It turned its head smoothly to the right without moving the rest of its body and took a step in that new direction just before plunging its head down into the water. It came back up with a prize I couldn’t quite see (fish? frog?), but it was breakfast, in any case.

We used to have to work for food a lot more directly. We would need to cultivate patience, awareness, stillness and quick, decisive movements to be able to do that again. Breakfasts would be more… focused and engaging.

Efficient Exercises

The deadlift is a powerful activity because nearly every muscle in your body is exercised in order to move the weight off of the floor until you’re standing straight up—especially when the weight gets heavy.

Making soup (most cooking, really) is a powerful activity because all 5 of your senses are exercised: touch as you chop vegetables and stir the pot, taste (obviously), smell (also, duh...), sight (does it look like there are enough carrots? Have they turned that really bright orange yet?) and sound (how hot is the pan?).

Writing is a powerful activity because it exercises your creativity, judgement, style, vocabulary, sense of structure and it encourages clarity.

I think part of what makes these activities interesting is how much of us is engaged in them simultaneously.

From Zero to Several!?

Humans are unique in their development of language. This is not to say that animals don’t communicate—they absolutely do. (My cats tell me all sorts of things like, “Food. Now!” Or, “Hey, pay attention to me. Hey! Hey!”) And we still have everything to learn about the complex and subtle communication used by whales, elephants and trees. However, the signaling and communication used by animals doesn’t come anywhere near the level of sophistication that humans have achieved. It is generally accepted that animals don’t, for instance, say to each other, “Hey, did you see that thing that washed up on the beach the other day?” (HT: John McWhorter)

There has been a lot of work to try to figure out how language first emerged among humans and what might have caused it. We had already learned how to make fire and probably we were already cooking food over it. Our brains certainly got bigger over time, which helped to enable it, but probably didn’t cause language development. And, by the way, our big brains consume a lot of calories, so the cooking thing is a very big deal: it enabled us to get more calories out of food and not have to spend literally hours every day chewing on stuff that didn’t taste all that good. Some researchers link the origins of language development to the need to teach tool making and tool use to others.

And babies seem to pick it up spoken language pretty reliably even when we don’t try to deliberately teach it to them. Their little spongy brains are, no doubt, evolved to learn such things in that nearly-magical way that helps ensure their survival in the community, along with looking adorable. In any event, it’s a complicated endeavor and it’s a miracle that we can even talk the way we do, much less type words like this.

Consider these things one more time, carefully:

1. No other animal possesses language anywhere near us in terms of complexity.
2. Big brains seem to be a requirement for this, and high caloric intake must support it.

3. Children acquire language without needing explicit instruction.

A question struck me the other day: how on Earth—why on Earth—are we able to learn multiple languages?

It seems highly improbable—almost like discovering that because we evolved to walk upright, we also evolved to walk forward and backward in time. Nature is pretty stingy with innovation: you have to be able to make the payments on anything new you add to the evolutionary mortgage. Our abilities with tools and fire and cooking and walking or running long distances pay off big: we can hunt and gather and power our big brains. Cooperation and coordination are needed in communities to help support all of those activities, and language facilitates that.

But we didn’t have international travel back then. We grew up and lived in groups that stayed together for long periods of time. And we spoke the same language, because that’s what makes language useful.

Why would we have ever needed to learn more than one language? I’m nonplussed.

What is Technology?

Whether a branch or a rock, a hammer or a tennis racket, technology is the thing that fits our hands and gives us more of what we want. It’s an expression of our desires and an extension of our capabilities, whether we’re talking about carpet, a lightbulb or a garbage truck. (Yes, technically carpet fits our feet, not our hands: I meant it metaphorically. Let’s agree not to discuss toilets, OK?)

Perhaps, then, technology is a continuation of labor by another means.

The things we create are the stories we tell ourselves made manifest; both good and bad. Archaeology is a thing because it takes the idea seriously that our stuff says something about what we think, what we need and how we behave. Technology isn’t a perfect or complete expression of who we are, any more than our languages are. There are limitations to our skill and our patience. But we are there; in it somehow. We are the foot, the shoe we make and wear, and the footprint we leave behind.

Technology isn’t separate from us, it is us.

If you have to break some eggs…

What’s the difference between an omelette and scrambled eggs? Order. Tidyness. Clear boundaries.

If you try to make an omelette and you screw it up, you can quickly pivot to scrambled eggs: throw in the filling and mash the whole mess around in the pan. Voila! Scrambled eggs. Have you already put the filling on, tried the folding maneuver and it didn’t work? Same thing: apply violence to the omelette and you’ll get scrambled eggs. Nice recovery: treat yourself to a 5th cup of coffee.

Going the other direction is not so easy—impossible, I’d say.

Having a fallback plan that works with an increase in chaos is helpful. If the original plan doesn’t work, there might be something almost as good you can make from the mistake. But it’s important to figure that out ahead of time, because not everything is so easily rescued. (This idea works waaaay better with cooking than with baking, by the way. Baking requires a ridiculous amount of order and structure and should be considered a delicate activity.)

P.S. Some technologies are like this: out of order escalators become stairs (RIP, Mitch Hedberg), dead electric toothbrushes become toothbrushes with giant-assed handles and a broken scissors becomes a matching set of letter openers.

Too Late to Stop Moving

A friend of mine that I used to work with was telling me about her grandfather one day. He still lives back in the Old Country. He was in his late 80’s or early 90’s when she told me this, and still lived by himself. Impressive!

She said he still chopped wood to heat his home. Not: he has a subscription to a wood chopping service to heat his home. She meant he still chops his own wood with his own personal axe and then carries it into his house so that he can make fires in the wood-burning stove during the winter months.

My first reaction was, “Wow, that’s amazing! I hope when I’m that old I can still get around by myself and do stuff.” But the more I thought about it and heard about other people in their golden years who were still active, I had a different thought:

They can still do things like chop and carry wood in their 80’s and 90’s because they never stopped doing it. It’s way easier to maintain a !tness or activity level than to try to increase it as we get older. Another friend of mine who’s a ski bum said he was on a mountain and shared a lift with “an old guy” who looked like he was in his 70’s. My friend, recognizing a sage when he saw one, asked him if he had any advice and the gentleman replied, “Never miss a season.”

It might be a good idea to pick a few things you’d like to be able to do in your old age and make a habit of doing them. Hint: walking had better be one of them.