Alongside the gray road, you will encounter people who speak of work-life balance. You have a hard time taking that topic seriously.
The idea of work-life balance reminds you of people who put milk in their coffee. If the coffee isn’t good, just drink better coffee.
After a few years on the gray road, you’ve learned a few things. Not because you’re so smart, but through blistering repetition.
You’ve learned that most people haven’t had good coffee. They think that’s what coffee is. (You used to think that yourself.) That kind of coffee, of course, you balance out with milk, soy milk, almond milk, rice milk, hemp milk, cream, and sugar.
And work like that, work so bad that people start talking about work-life balance and with standing meetings where everybody sits for half an hour and organizational culture and institutional values and birthday parties?
Sit down. Pull up a chair. Sun’s setting on the last day of the year. It’s not so much a redness as a distant and early haze. Let’s get to it.
This year you moved into a little house on a little street, with a little lawn you don’t mow quite often enough. You moped and flailed and tried to be helpful during a harrowing. Two people entered, and three people left. That’s really all that happened this year, isn’t it? Took all your time and treasure and then some. You looked into your boy’s beautiful tiny eyes and knew it was time to move on from things that’d become ineffective. He gave you courage. You took a breath, and went back to work. When he was two weeks old, you wrote some notes called “Walking with Milo”. Joke is: he’s gonna be actually, literally walking super imminently. You tried to do good work for good people in effective organizations. To use software to help solve problems, as indulgent and arcanely (second-millenium-style) optimistic as that sounds. You tried to be kind to your family, and to not forget your friends. You did alright. There’s room for improvement, so improve.
But first: sun’s almost gone. Go hold your sweet heart and your sweet light and welcome the new year, in darkness but in warmth.
The service was like a public restroom. It was a venue for scrawled graffiti, and scribbles scribbled while doing something else. The service accidentally fostered real communication amidst sloganeering (frodo lives and imagine whirled peas and #yolo) and longing and horrorshows. It was like a public restroom, with one basic innovation: in this room, time and distance have been erased. Why ascribe value to this space? Who looks at those embattled, toxic stalls and sees unsold ad inventory? The service makes a deal. We’ll keep it clean and tidy and safe. Polished tile and scent in the air.
Here is a free magazine about your favorite celebrities.
A reading from The Voice of the Machines, Gerald Stanley Lee’s “Introduction to the Twentieth Century”:
All language is irrelevant, feeble, and absurd. We live in an organically inexpressible world. The language of everything in it is absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the universe over our heads — with its cunning little stars in it — is the height of absurdity, as a self-expression. The sky laughs at us. We know it when we look in a telescope. Time and space are God’s jokes. Looked at strictly in its outer language, the whole visible world is a joke. To suppose that God has ever expressed Himself to us in it, or to suppose that He could express Himself in it, or that any one can express anything in it, is not to see the point of the joke.
We cannot even express ourselves to one another. The language of everything we use or touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we do our living with — even the things that human beings amuse themselves with — are inexpressive and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis and football have all been accused in turn, by people who do not know them from the inside, of being meaningless. A golf-stick does not convey anything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight of a golf-stick lying on a seat is a feeling to the one to whom it belongs, a play of sense and spirit to him, a subtle thrill in his arms. The same is true of a new fiery-red baby, which, considering the fuss that is made about it, to a comparative outsider like a small boy, has always been from the beginning of the world a ridiculous and inadequate object. A man could not possibly conceive, even if he gave all his time to it, of a more futile, reckless, hapless expression of or pointer to an immortal soul than a week-old baby wailing at time and space. The idea of a baby may be all right, but in its outer form, at first, at least, a baby is a failure, and always has been.
The Voice of the Machines is a small and deeply weird book, one of those that are worth revisiting from time to time. The book doesn’t change (anymore), but maybe you do.
They call it the law of personal mobility, or the law of two feet: that you are responsible for your own learning and engagement. This law, stated in various ways (another example: “when your mind wanders, let your body follow”), is the cornerstone of a participant’s experience during an open space technology meeting. Everyone’s job is to act according to this law, and the facilitator’s job is to create a venue (or to open a space) where it’s effortless to do so.
The Thelemites’d say: howdy & welcome to the Æeon of Horus, where do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. (And these guys were cribbing Augustine’s love, and do what you will.)
I’d like you to meet Bruce, my father-in-law:
Now, he’s been known to say that whatever you do is right, and what he says is true. Once he figures out what you’re going to do, he makes it alright. Even as Bruce leads by action (in a more relaxed style than the phrase suggests), sometimes he has to say something, so that’s what he says.
The point
You aren’t what you say, but what you do. Still, you have to say something. That’s our curse. These aphorisms pile up like logs in tide and time, and bang their big ideas against the bulkhead at night:
Nobody but you can take responsibility for your engagement with your environment. Authorities and charlatans such as employers, politicians, or religious figures will attempt to collect rent — financial or otherwise — by claiming this duty, but their claim isn’t a responsibility.
Nobody else can tell if you are learning anything today. People only learn when they are ready to learn. People only do anything when they are ready, except die. If you aren’t learning today, you should be. Fix this problem. Turns out it’s pretty easy for people to tell if you learned anything yesterday.
If you aren’t engaged in what you’re doing, everybody can tell (but they probably don’t care). Recall the last time you waited out a meeting you were invited to, but didn’t have any purpose at or contribution to. You were wasting your time, and you knew it. From the organization’s perspective it might have been waste, or slack, or just the way we do it here. Great, but remember whose candle is being burned.
Living in open space
During an open space meeting, you discover an environment where it’s easy and delightful to make effective use of your time. You’ll do what’s necessary to do in order to learn, and to teach, and to find and solve the problems that have brought everybody together.
Maybe you need to start a conversation, or introduce two people who aren’t friends yet. Maybe you need to leave early. The space has been carefully laid out and opened up to make these actions easier than the alternatives. If you’re bored, it’s OK to walk away. If you’re hungry, it’s OK to eat. If there’s a break in the rain, nobody’ll mind if you go outside. The organizers work to make the meeting effective by making the participants effective. By making you effective.
The next day or so, the meeting is over, and you’re back into your life and all of the things from it. However, that fruit cannot be uneaten. The next time your mind wanders, you’ll want to get up and follow. When you’re not learning, you’ll notice. If you’re not engaged, you’ll want to actually disengage rather than sit there and look good. This is probably when you’ll realize that, inside an open space, the law of personal mobility can be followed without any real consequences. And you’re way outside the open space, in the cold dark wolf-ridden world, where actions do have consequences.
This is honestly really tough. Because you are still responsible for your own learning and engagement, in a way that is completely evident and easy to understand — but now every weird action you take has its cost. You are, to put it gently, ruined for life. For example: if you have a job, you can use this law to improve your performance. It’s likely that you’ll do so by leaving that job. You’ll understand that the only person who might possibly assume this huge responsibility — for your own learning and engagement — is you. Therefore, when you’re getting bored or feeling somebody else’s slack or pressure, you’ll ask:
is this what I really need to be doing with my hour/day/life?
how bad would it be to walk away (versus the cost of staying here, and wasting my hour/day/life)?
and much of the time, you’ll decide to stay put, because you just can’t or just won’t accept the alternative and its risk, cost, or damage.
But it’ll be your decision, not inertia or fate. The ongoing cadence of asking these questions (and, maybe, the content of any answers you come up with) will convene an open space for you to live in. A world where whatever you do is right.
Onwards, upwards, & older
Worthy items are marked with a delicious cup of coffee: ♨.
02012/06/19 ⋯ The jar It’s called a myth because it’s true.
