on teaching/learning...

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down. ~Ray Bradbury


I'm not really a fan of uncalculated risks. A calculated risk means analyzing yourself, sizing up your competition, and calculating your odds. If you really want it, you'll get it, and the odds will be in your favor because you've worked hard to get them in your favor. Learning by doing. Having faith. Having the right intention. A willingness to be wrong, so you can get it right. Realizing that the learning never stops. Realizing that there is more than one way to achieve a goal.
It's been a really big challenge being schooled in one way of training gymnastics and, because I was young and naive, commiting to the idea that "this way is the best and only way" only to learn that there are many, many "ways" of doing something. Coaching gymnast is the communist countres where children are basically all brought up the same way and ahve no choice whether or not to be a gymnast presents an entirely new host of challenges. The challenges here in America are that parents have many different methods of disciplining and rewarding their children. This makes some children weak and others strong; mentally physically and spirtually.

And I have to find my own way of being in the midst of all of those different ways of being.

A cast handstand on bars is "finished" when a girl goes from a front support on the bar to a handstand position on the bar. Ideally, she ends up with a completely straight body, completely in control, able to go either forwards or backwards because she is strong/flexible enough to decide, not because she is out of control or relying on sheer momentum to get her up there. She knows exactly where she is at all times during the skill. She is there with it and completely prepared, after hours of mental, physical, and spiritual training, to hit a perfect handstand.

I'm using a cast handstand as an example of a goal, a destination, because in gymnastics, the mentality is "straight line." The mentality of the straight line. It's not only a physical thing. It's a mental and spiritual thing, too. Actually, if you can understand the mental and spiritual side of any movement or movement discipline then the physical part is very easy.

This is what I think about learning....

If you watch how a creature moves, you will gain insight into how it thinks and what it believes.
If you learn how a creature processes information, then you will gain insight into what it believes and how it moves.
If you figure out what a creature believes, then you will gain insight into how it moves and how it thinks.

And the three put together make a person/creature. If you can figure out all three, then you can teach whatever it is you want to teach. This goes for teaching others as well as teaching yourself.  

hunger games

There is a scene at the end of the Hunger Games when the gamemakers dispense a herd of “mutations,” or animal/human hybrids who have been genetically engineered to be horrible, blood-thirsty monsters. As it turns out, these killing-machines have the eyes and features of all of the predeceased children of the Hunger Games. They are essentially the spirits of the dead come back to haunt the living and seek vengeance on the remaining children in the games.

“just my fear of being caught being manifested as a person.” – reddit  

They make me think of all of the things/people that make me happy and why.                  

They make me think of all of the things/people that make me mad and why.

These things are very personal. People say oh an earthquake, a bombing, a war-crime, seeing sad orphans on TV, hearing of horrible crimes, listening to depressing statistics about hunger, famine, and lack….. they say that these things make them sad, mad, or any of the other “dark” emotions. And vice-versa about bright things….. babies crying, birds chirping, etc. etc. But I don’t feel much from things that are so far removed. And I wonder if people really do feel “dark” when they think of, hear, or see such things.

Personally, I like my emotions and feelings to be more personal, more intimate. I think that this gives me depth – makes me more human, more than just a person who laughs at what others laugh at, cry at what others cry at. More than a girl who cries at a funeral and laughs at a Disney movie – not that I don’t. But to me, emotions and feelings should be more personal than that. Otherwise who are we but shells of people who have nothing interesting to say and nothing genuine or authentic about us? 
      I can’t feel anything more than superficial tolerance for them (and by "them" I mean also myself) – I can’t connect with them or share deep things with them. I laugh at their jokes or shake my head at their misfortunes and empathize where I can, but I can’t help feeling a sense of emptiness, shallowness, callousness even. Then there are those special few, and really there are but handfuls, who are truly special. Who I can tell my deepest, darkest secrets with and share my brightest, wildest dreams with (it sounds like a relatively simple thing to be able to share your dreams, but most people will rationalize the shit out of your imagination or whip your dreams into submission).

They more than tolerate me and I more than tolerate them. They more than shake their head or chuckle at me and I more than shake my head or chuckle at them. They more than indulge me and I more than indulge them. They love me and I love them, not because some divine power says “love one another,” but because their has been some real growth-action that has happened between us for whatever reason. you have changed me and i have changed you. you have invited me to see, to appreciate differently. and i, you. 

Important: Lest I should begin to sound all high-and-mighty like I am always in touch with my feelings, my hurts, pains, loves, desires or like I always have something genuine and authentic to say, think my own thoughts, make up my own mind, I should clarify that this is definitely NOT the case.
There are times, frequently, when I forget all of these things. We all do. There are times when I forget who and what I love and why. I guess the trick, then, is to make it a point to somehow, someway remember once you have forgotten.

The Hunger Games movie was difficult to watch for the exact same reason why people (myself included) are often difficult to be around.

Everyone was so flat. I didn't feel connected in any way to any of the characters at all. There was little to no character development or motives behind many of the actions that had the potential of being heart-wrenching (like they were in the book). And they left out what was, in my humble opinion, the best part of the book.... (spoiler alert?); when the human/animal mutations return as "spirits" of the predeceased players to attack the remaining players - this is the part that made me cry in the book and what made the whole story personal - what made it all come full circle; everyone has fears/skeletons in the closet/ghosts of the past that manifest themselves and attack us in many different forms/ways – this part made me think of my own life - what I truly love and why - what I truly despise and why.... but of course if you don't take the time to develop the characters themselves then it doesn't make sense that after they are dead their second coming should mean anything at all. i remember feeling the same way about Harry Potter after having read the books - "where is everything and WHO ARE these people?! Why do they do the things they do and what motivates them to action?" Reading the Hunger Games was so personal and fulfilling; watching it felt like everyone was just going through the motions. I was pretty numb the entire time.

I hate feeling this way around people; why do you do the things you do, love the things you love, hate the things you hate? Have you let yourself be vulnerable enough to experience or feel anything real, anything at all? Or do you do and feel and say and think things because it’s what everyone else is doing and feeling and saying and thinking? Hi self, I'm talking mostly to you.  

PERSPECTIVE

I wonder if the “mutations” in the Hunger Games looked different to the different characters who were left to fend them off? There was Cato, who had been ruthless to almost all of the players. There was Peeta, who had befriended and then stabbed some of them in the back. There was Everdeen, who had done the same, but was an angel to some like Rue. Essentially, human beings are all programmed the same. We all have the capacity for brightness and goodness, but also darkness and evil. Religion teaches us this and also teaches us forgiveness, because we are all God’s children. Etc. etc. blah blah… I used to think “so why not pick just anyone to marry or the first person you date, anyone to befriend, anyone to serve as your confident, to be close with, if we are all just the same?” …….  because we're not.... sure, we are all special, but for whatever reason, we connect with some over others...  

At the end of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the killer says to his latest victim “We have the same urges, you and I, except mine requires more towels.” And tis’ true.  

I guess it’s what we do with these urges, with these emotions, how we empathize, if we forgive, how different people, activities, and experiences bring sadness, happiness, grief, and misery to us in our childhoods that determine our attractions, our aversions, who we end up with, how we connect to people, what we desire….

At the end of the Hunger Games, Everdeen, having professed her “true feelings” to Peeta in what may or may not be an authentic admission of “love,” realizes that she really loves Gale, the boy who she had grown up with. they had been hunters together, growing through and with one another for a greater cause (survival). He was home to her and home feels very different for every which person.

 Home is so personal....… 

emotional party

         There’s an improv game called Emotional Party. It’s played with a bunch of people all in the same room. One person chooses an emotion that they physically display. It could be sadness and I could cry. It could be happiness and I could hug myself, smile, and skip. It could be anger and I could stomp. It could be jealousy and I could go from person to person turning my back. It could be shyness and I could walk around looking down. Whatever the emotion is everyone has to take it on. So if I am sad, then everyone is sad. If I am happy, then everyone is happy. If I am mad then everyone is mad.

Imagine a world in which you can close your eyes and travel to a world where everyone is feeling what you are feeling? A world of anguish, despair, neutrality, ecstatic love, immense fear. Imagine if, just by closing your eyes, everyone that you loved could come with you and be enveloped by whatever emotion you were being consumed by. How would this feel? Comforting? Alienating? Constraining? Self-indulgent?

Based on the idea that a lot of times society expects us and anticipates us feeling a certain way and we generally accept that they are right. We should feel sad at a funeral, happy at the end of a Disney movie. There is a general lack of acceptance of radical emotions or expressions that do not fit this mold. We just label people crazy when their emotions are not predictable or mold-fitting. There is no place for them in society. A society of emotional obedience has led to a numb nation.  

The human survival instinct is often at odds with the pervasive longing for love, camaraderie, community, and affection. We aspire to live and to live well. But we also long to live happily with people who understand us, who elevate our egos, and carve us into something rather than nothing. I am only me because of you. You breath life into me, shape my personality. As it pertains to me, what you laugh at, what you smile at, what you hate, what you love, what annoys you, what pleases you; these all hold baring on how I act, how I think, how I imagine, and what I dream. I am you and you are me and there is a point at which, having spent so much time together, we can say that we are one consciousness. When our survival is at stake, would we risk surviving and living alone, or would we rather die in the company of others? I may be the greatest, strongest, fastest out there, but I am only made known in the presence of others. They make an audience out of millions, they make me out to be the strongest, fastest, smartest, wildest. And if there is someone out there living in obscurity who is stonger, faster, smarter, wilder than I, but who’s presence is not made known, than what is the point? Why strive to be better, stronger, or faster if not in the eye of the public? We wish to survive, and when we know we can, we wish to survive and be happy. When we are happy, we wish to be as happy as the happiest man and then some. In striving to get happier and happier, we become bitter, manipulative, raging in our pursuits of the happiest happiness of all happinesses. And then we become sad and make ourselves sick because some of the hardest, healthiest decisions to make can only be made by someone who is not at odds with themselves and others. And then we wish only to survive, because we feel bad and are sad. And once we get better and realize that we are surviving, we long to be happy; as happy as the happiest man……….  

neutrality

the same thing that makes you successful at one thing makes you successful at many things.


one of the biggest lessons i've learned lately is that "being there" is everything. i noticed this most recently while playing ultimate frisbee, tennis, playing piano, and doing yoga. 


In tennis there is a position called "ready position" which is basically knees bent,  racket held in front of you, relaxed, neutral body. The idea is that from here you can go anywhere depending on where the ball lands. you are at your most adaptable, most flexible, most neutral, most efficient, and most effective. What makes a tennis player good is how quickly (s)he can get into the position that allows him to hit the ball most effectively and efficiently and then how quickly he can return to neutral in order to anticipate the next play. This usually always involves backing up as much as possible. For me, someone who doesn't have a very strong backhand this also involves going to the back left so that the chances of me returning a play with my forehand rather than my backhand are greater.


Basically this is the same position you want to be in when you are playing ultimate frisbee; ready position. Except in frisbee you are moving a lot more. But if you are relaxed and ready to turn at a moments notice then you'll be a lot more successful.


Same thing in Bikram (hot) yoga. You do a pretty intense pose that requires a lot of concentration and heavy breathing (because it's hot), and then after the pose is over you immediately let it go and return back to "neutral" (standing still) in order to prepare yourself for the next pose.


In Wing Chun, which is a Japanese martial art, you are supposed to gaze directly into the "third eye" of your opponent, which is the space right in between your two eyes. This is so that while you are fighting you can "see" what's going on all around you because you aren't focused on any one body part. You are ready to defend an attack with the repertoire of moves that you have learned in the most efficient, effective way because you are in a "neutral" position; just like yoga, just like tennis, just like frisbee.


When you are playing the piano and you want to play a chord progression you can use inversions to make the progression easier to play so that you have to move your fingers as little as possible in order to hit the right notes. This is the same concept as ultimate frisbee as tennis as martial arts as yoga; right place, right time, so you can place whatever it is you are placing (the ball, your body, the frisbee, the notes) wherever you want them to go.


I suppose the questions to ask are: what is the quickest way to get into the most neutral position I can get myself into at any one point in time, what moves (throws, returns, defenses, etc. - sport/discipline specific) do I have in my "bag of tricks" and how do these determine where I should go (ie. limitations, strengths, weaknesses).


What's the point of it all? People always say "happiness." But I don't believe that.  Someone wise once told me that my goal should be "survival." Because if you're constantly happy then you have no depth. It's ok to go off the deep end sometimes, to be incredibly high on life and then incredibly low on life, as long as you understand how to get back to neutral. Life is a series of adventures that require you to constantly assess the situation and ultimately ask yourself what is neutral and how can i get back to it.

the kings-felt year

transulcent meanderings light the fire in a thousand red carriages. Underneath them, pebbles melt into pods of fish and gallop through streams of artificial strands of dreams left untold. Woe-begotten, incensenced, and frail. Incandescent nightmares fill up an already boiling trashcan full of mixed chords and fleeting metaphors. But it's the seventh child that always bites the nail. And it's the steeping honey pan that never gets to pray. One knee folded, one eye closed. One step forward, one glance upward. A thousand strands of DNA couldn't fix this effervescent longing. Knock, knock, twitch, fall. On time and off the wall. Hitting puberty before my mother can make amends with the giant pinecone smell that envelops the sporadic jungle of my sprawled out face. Just play the kings-felt year. And hope for macabre hauntings to melt into spring. It's truly, but not rationally, jinxed, if it were to never be told it weren't unrealized. Tick, tock, mechanical garages toiling with each other in fistfights of retention. "Remember, remember," the free-grazing, but widespread shadows say. It's not the table on which the game is played that determines it's effect; it's whether or not there is any iota of doubt that the effect is determined by the game or table.

good and bad and is

What makes something good or bad? 

Fire in the Hole - Hazel

everything has a context in which it fits just perfectly. 

Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras, dire

 Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras, dire.

The myths that we make...... the heroes, villians, monsters, and Gods that we worship and despise…. the vast unknown 

I remember the sound of dial-up AOL connecting me to the internet. I even remember the picture on the screen; a picture of the world. I remember how BIG it felt to be connected to things outside my living room from within my living room. 

What was life like when we had only nature to reconcile with?

… in the earliest Greek poets a new point of view dawned, never dreamed of in the world before them, but never to leave the world after them. With the coming forward of Greece, mankind became the center of the universe, the most important thing in it. This was a revolution in thought. The Greeks made their Gods in their own image. In Greece, man first realized what mankind was. Until then, Gods had no semblance of reality. 

Before the Greeks, Gods were inhuman. 

Think the Egyptian Sphinx or other ridiculous inhuman manifestations of the divine. 

In ancient Greece, Gods were created according to the needs of society.  Sort of like comic book heros today….

     The many heroes, heroines, Gods, and demons, that have been brought to life in our comic books and our video games are simply reflections of what society needs at any given point in history. In ancient Greece, Zeus was the God of the strong, but the poor needed a God, too, so they created his companion, Justice – protector of the poor.

     Batman didn’t need society; society needed a Batman.

    We’ve been helio-centric and ego-centric. We’ve come up with formulas to describe a reality that the formulas themselves have created. We think that life operates linearly. 

      From cradle to grave; isn’t it long a stay? What is with our fascination with time functioning in an unwavering, linear way; we’re born and need to be coddled  -we’re young and living it up careless and free -we get older, get educated, and get realistic, -we get married, start a family, and breed offspring – we create some good memories and some bad memories, convince ourselves that we’re stressed and come up with different ways to deal with it, have a midlife crisis or two, maybe a second honeymoon or seven -  we get old, we watch as the world turns, we die. Along the way we create memories, try and instill ethics in our offspring and others, find solace in expression and in different people, things, and places that make us feel not insignificant. Really, though, we are very insignificant. Beginning to end. Child’s pose to Savasana. People have developed many allegories that simulate the idea of punctuated time. The reality is that no one knows what happens after we die. Even an Alex Grey painting whose lines suggest abstract things like infinity and interconnectedness, is punctuated by the borders of the canvas on which it rests. 
     Life only progresses accordingly, predictably, conventionally, and inevitably if we think that it does. No one knows what happens after we die and timelessness is both a reality and an illusion depending on the scope of your magnifying glass. The “reality” of time; the illusion that existence is something other than ad infinitum. Ironically, the breaking down of a workday, a workweek, a human life, the history of the world etc. etc. into increments punctuated by the hand of time is both rational and irrational, necessary and completely absurd. 

What must the world be so that man may know it?

Are math formulas descriptive of actual reality or do math formulas create reality?

In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse is the phenomenon in which a wave function appears to reduce to a single state after interaction with an observer. In simplified terms, it is the reduction of the physical possibilities into a single possibility as seen by an observer.

      Upon interaction with an observer, the object is reduced from many possibilities to a single possibility. This is how we process, how we make sense of a world of infinite possibilities. What are the infinite possibilities? What are the opportunity costs? What are the trade offs? There really are an infinite number of possibilities and saying yes to one thing means saying no to many, many others. That's really scary if you're not disciplined. But it can be really blissful if you are. 

I imagine that this is a lot like paradigm shifts in science….

Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believed, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require 'putting on a different kind of thinking-cap', one that renders the anomalous lawlike but that, in the process, also transforms the order exhibited by some other phenomena, previously unproblematic.

We need stability, but we long to be free. We need truth and create Gods and superheroes who epitomize ethics and honesty, but really we have no clue what those things are.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that we’re not the center of the world…

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?:  Plastic…asshole." 
- George Carlin 
      Really, what’s the point of pondering such things? Well, as we get older and as we begin to accept punctuated time within the scope of a reality ad infinitum, we’ll inevitably have to make some big decisions based on the reality that our time is limited..... like whether or not and whom to get married to, whether or not we believe in such things as love, where to live, where to work, whether to explore or settle down, which ethics we believe in, and what we want to teach our children. 
     Much of our happiness appears to be dependent on other people. People say "you have to make yourself happy before you make others happy." Or "no one can make you feel something you don't want to feel." Or "if you can be alone with yourself then you'll never be alone." These things are true, but it is also an act of bravery, a courageous act of love to let yourself be effected by another person. And there's an hourglass sitting on all of our tables. Scarlet O'hara realized she loved Rhett after he had already expended a lifetime loving and waiting for her, but by that time his exasperated response was "Frankly my Dear, I don't give a damn." 


Is it better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all?


      Thinking about science, about mythology, about the Gods, Heroes, and Villians who animate our history as things that we - humans - have created in response to our needs, wants, wishes, and desires, is pretty liberating. What it means is that if society can have such a huge imagination then so can I - I can imagine a way of life that is beautiful and wonderful and not full of "shoulds." If even logical, rational, concrete domains like scientific truth and math formulations are the products of paradigms, then I can create my own way of being.    


       I hope that at the end of the day, I remember that life is not necessarily linear and that just because I’ve become comfortable with a given situation doesn’t mean that it is my only option.  Fear is the opposite of love. I hope that no big decision I make is made out of fear, with eyes and ears closed to the beatings of my own heart.