Solving a problem in one day

You can solve a problem in one day. I wouldn't recommend doing this every day. Change can be difficult, and you don't want to overwhelm yourself. But during the first month of the year when you are still thinking in terms of making changes, it is good to instantiate several changes, as I've done this year.  I'm not listing everything I've done, because there are some that are too personal to discuss here.

What you do is identify a problem that has a single solution, involving stopping or starting a habit. On a single day, you either begin or end a habit, by which action you solve a problem.

For example, I have decided not to have my email on in the background on my computer.  Now I will not read every email as it comes in.  I have solved that problem, of being distracted by email.

Other things you can do:

delete your facebook profile or your twitter account (I did this with twitter and haven't looked back)

deleting an app from your phone which is a waster of time (I've done that with some stupid games)

begin meditating (I've done this one, beginning in 2019)

quit smoking

join an organization (I've done this; joining the choir; not singing with them now, but I put in a few years with good results)

sign up for a class

cutting off a toxic friendship

Now you want to make sure they are things you can really do, that you won't backslide on.  Things like quitting smoking can be hard, because it may be you really like to smoke. Maybe binging on Netflix is a good release for you, and you don't really want to quit it.  That's fine too.  I thought about giving up my crossword puzzles, but I don't think they are a bad addiction to have, as addictions go.

What Can You Do in 2 Hours?

I could learn most of a page of not too difficult piano music.

Referee an article or two.

Read 120 pages of a novel.

Produce a not too bad drawing of something.

Watch a movie.

Walk six miles.

Shop for, cook and eat a meal.

Memorize two short poems.

Write 8 blog posts.

Write an outline of an article I want to write.

Write an abstract for a conference.

Prepare for and teach an 1:15 minute class.

Listen to music for two hours.

There are many things you can do in two hours. We have 8 hours to sleep, so that leaves 8 blocks of two hours. If you work just four hours a day during the summer, you can do two significant work-related things.

Post Title Would Go Here If I had a Good Title for This Post

Here's an idea I want to try: figure out everything I have control over. Everything for which I am the "decision maker." For an adult, this means discretionary spending, what color socks to wear, what to eat, how to spend free time. For a full professor, it also means allocation of effort on different projects, where I want to focus my attention.

This is what we might call the sphere of personal control or autonomy.  The first revelation I am having is that freedom means that I am the decision maker, not someone else, so freedom and control are the same thing in this sphere.

Having a lot of it is good, but then again it is also more difficult because everything must be decided. The next step would be to exercise optimal choices within this sphere.

You might find that there are constraints that operate within what should be the sphere of personal autonomy.  Suppose you fear wearing colorful socks because people will ridicule you. Also, you would prefer to wear $2,000 suits but there are economic constraints. Autonomy is never absolute.

Then there are cases where you can't really control what you eat, though that should be within that sphere. Or you are addicted to opioids. Then that indicates a problem. Any discrepancy in what is ideally autonomous indicates a level of dysfunction. I can choose to skip a crossword puzzle, or decide that I want to never skip one. If I skip one and feel huge anxiety, then I am addicted.

[This exercise leaves out the things that are not under your sphere of autonomy, ever.  For example, other people's private sphere of autonomy.  We're just not worrying about that right now.  

It also leaves out things from a relationship that impinge on autonomy.  In a healthy relationship, you should still have hobbies that the other person has no say about, things you can go off and do alone without worrying about it.]

What I have discovered, then, is that I do have great personal autonomy, but I haven't quite learned to use it optimally. A lot of the anxiety I have is about how to use time, energy, and money.

The first exercise might be to choose something over which to exercise control over in a week. Start with something easy (for you).  See how difficult or easy it actually turns out to be.  Look for the points of tension.

Real Estate

By real estate I mean the amount of available attention. It could be conceived of as time, space, or energy, too, but for now let's use the idea of attention, what the mind can attend to at any given time, or on any given day.  

A big project you are working on occupies a lot of it, and it does so even if you are not working on it very much. A course you are teaching occupies a certain amount of real estate, even during the hours one is not teaching it or preparing it. We talk about a teaching "load" as though we are trucks and have a burden to carry on our backs.

Other parts of life occupy real estate as well, relationships, hobbies...  If you imagine a 13-year old boy and 80% of the real estate is give over to sexual desire. A seriously ill person will have most of their real estate occupied by their illness.

With meditation, which I am getting more serious about, you realize you have more real estate than you thought: the mind frees up space by sorting out things that aren't quite as significant and assigning them their proper amount of weight and attention. It doesn't resolve problems, in itself, but shrinks them to their proper size. It is wonderfully freeing.  

We don't want to have a lot of extra real estate unassigned to things. It might make us feel lazy or uncommitted. That is why we might want to take extra things on, even when we don't need to. It is fine to have the attention occupied by something meaningful, and freeing the mind from unnecessary shit helps us to refocus on things we actually might care about.

Sand Bags

Although don't meditate enough, I keep trying. Yesterday I got an insight: that ruminative non-productive thought is both effortful and, well, non-productive.

The image that popped into mind as I was meditating was of the task of moving heavy bags full of sand from one room to another in a house. So say the kitchen needed a bag, and you had to move it from the bedroom, and then another two bags from the living room to the bathroom, and so forth throughout the day, without much purpose.

So many of my thoughts seem to be of that nature. You can work hard at thinking about your life but if it is just moving sandbags around, it is rather pointless, but also very tiring. Productive thought is simpler, without as much wasted effort, and also more productive in that it simplifies problems rather than complicating them.

The war on clutter

One of the ways I artificially limit myself is by leaving behind a trail of clutter.  Some of this is creative clutter, like piles of books I am reading for a project, but some is damaging clutter. What needs to happen is to first reduce the piles of clutter, but then, more significantly, change the habits so that the same thing doesn't happen again. This means spending a little time everyday decluttering, so that the clutter will decrease over time rather than accumulating.

I started with my car.  I tend to put books in there to have something to read, but then the book stay then and I have library in my car. Untrashing my car was a first step, then my mailbox on campus, and, today, my office. Then I will work on home office, the most crowded and cluttered area of my dwelling place. After that, clothes in the closet and the kitchen.

The clutter itself is not important, except that is takes on a symbolic importance as my deliberate sabotage of myself, and freeing myself of it is tremendously... freeing I guess.  If I can eliminate it, it means that it is not necessary, that I don't need it to protect myself and that it is actually a negative adaptation.

"Negative narratives do not define me"

That's what I wrote today in my journal of positives. A negative narrative can define someone by seeming to identify all the features of an individual with a single trait. (Saying someone is a criminal or an addict, for example.)

I guess that's why I also don't like the tropes about Sylvia Plath or other suffering artists. It is very easy: all you need is one identifying idea and then you understand the artist.  Kahlo's suffering body, Plath's depression, Monk's eccentricity, Bird's heroin, Lorca's sexuality.

Even when the narrative is not negative, it is still a mistake. Don't let yourself be defined by one positive narrative either.  We are multi-faceted individuals. That's what gives us the capacity for growth.

***

Growth, by the way, is a more useful category than change. Things change all the time, whether we like it or not, and change in itself is neither negative or positive. I don't know whether people can change, but they can grow. At one point I felt myself becoming, always, more like my own core self, hardening in all my preferences. That occurs too as one gets older, but growth is better.  

Discounting

You don't have to discount good things about yourself. In fact, there are few habits that are as harmful. By discounting I mean reframing a positive attribute as a negative, or explaining it away in a fashion that makes it less salient.

I got almost a 4.0 average, getting only one B in my college career? Not that impressive, since it was a state school and a humanities major. I wrote some books that had a positive response from others in my field? "All you know how to do is write your books." I published in a major journal? Oh, some idiots have published there too. Know a lot about Lorca? No, Christopher Maurer knows far more than I do. I know several languages, have extensive knowledge of music history? That's just a mark of "privilege." And other people know more languages. I can do the Saturday New York Times crossword in under half an hour? A useless skill. A good father? Well everyone love their own children. If you are smart, and know it, then of course you are arrogant or full of yourself.

Discounting is easy to do. There isn't a positive thing that can't be turned around against you with almost no effort.  It's far worse, even, than the negative self-talk, because it doesn't allow you any answer to the negative radio. If you've been psychologically abused, then you will do it to yourself if you don't take active steps to stop.

"I am committed to personal growth"

It sounds a bit corny, but an idea to turn off the radio voice is to write down a list of things you like about yourself. The first thing I wrote down was

"I am committed to personal growth."

Once I had written that down, I knew I was on to something. If you look at it, that statement is perfect. It is confident and optimistic, but it is not like saying "I am smart and good-looking." It acknowledges any weaknesses that might be there, implicitly.

Then I wrote:

", and I have already made progress; I have shown that this growth is possible, and I am not done yet."

Then I wrote some more things. Some more specific and others equally general. I tended not to write things like "I am a good writer." I think I am comfortable with listing things I am good at, but those things don't tend to dig as deep. I could easily discount a thing like "I can make a good omelet," because it doesn't seem as powerful a statement as "I am committed to personal growth." Lots of folks can fry an egg, after all, but how many are as truly committed to personal, intellectual, and musical growth as I am?

***

But if you want to start off with just things you are good at, that's fine too.

***

I have a friend, not a close friend yet but a relatively new acquaintance and part of my larger circle of friends. He is relatively young, tall, good-looking, and personable; he's read a lot of poetry and is very bright. He is smart and easy to talk with, etc... I was thinking, yeah, he's a great guy, it would seem, involved with his children's activities and someone most people would like.

Then the next thought was that I am all these things too (aside from tall and young!). So I sometimes use that as a device to ease up the pressure on myself. Why should I be harder on myself than I would be on my acquaintance?    

Turning off the radio

Imagine if you had a radio commentator analyzing every move you made, everything you did or didn't do, in critical terms. "Jonathan is not having a very good day, no.  Look, he's procrastinating again. Why can't he do better, I just don't understand it...." When you went out of the house, you would get more criticism from this radio narrator about yourself, your inadequacies and failings of various kinds, and it wouldn't stop all day long. You would probably want to turn the radio off, right?

A lot of people have that, though, in their own heads, and don't know how to turn it off.  I, for one.  Where is the switch?

Here are some ideas.

*Try to find that other narrative, the one that tells you you great.  It sounds a bit corny and embarrassing.

*Avoid negative people.

*Figure out where that voice comes from.  Parents? Ex-spouses? That voice is not really your "self" talking to you but an interiorization of other voices.

*Get into groove-like activities in which that voice isn't there. For example, when I am explaining my project to my friends, I just feel empowered, and the voice isn't there. Keep as busy as possible, but in good, supportive activities.  

*Meditation is great, but it also gives space for that negative voice to be heard. If you aren't great at meditating (as I'm not) it might be because the idea of sitting there thinking about nothing allows for the worst thing in the world, which is called rumination. You still have to try it, but just be warned that that will happen at times. You can't be afraid of the voice, you just have to gently put it aside every time.    

Brilliant

My daughter is in a trumpet class and they have to criticize one another. She's the grad student and thus senior student in the group. When one kid didn't play well, at all (almost everything wrong in multiple ways), she told me that she said this:  "I think you should play with more confidence. That will help you to play much better and address some of the other issues you are having." This seemed brilliant to me. If she had just listed all the problems with this kid's playing, it would have not been constructive in the least. She said she always says, "what I'd like to hear is..."

Self Improvement

The point of self-improvement is not to reach some ideal self, but not to stay in the same place or get worse. So suppose I hadn't started to write music, hadn't taken piano lessons or sung in the choir.  I would be the same person, but without whatever growth I achieved from going into music more seriously.  I didn't need to learn to read Italian: I would have been fine without doing so. I could give up crossword puzzles and still have a satisfying life, without trying to do them faster and faster every day.

The idea that I need to find new research projects.  I could easily just coast the rest of my career, and teach things I have already learned rather than come into the classroom with things I have learned in the past few years, as I like to do.

Without self-improvement, though, the world narrows rather than expanding. I would find it difficult to imagine being in a teaching situation in which I couldn't be a learner myself. It would go stale pretty quickly, and I think the students would notice too.

Some Ideas about rejection

Rejection leaves things as they were. Suppose you ask for something and the answer is no. Then you have exactly what you had before you asked.

The fear of rejection is much worse than rejection itself. Someone who hasn't been rejected a lot hasn't tried very much, has played it safe most of the time.  

Rejection is not a stain on you. If you read poems in a literary journal you will read what is there, not what isn't, so nobody is thinking about your rejected poems.

You can think of rejection as a percentage. If you had to sell 10 tickets to an event you might have to ask 500 people. Then you've met your goal.  I'm going to submit poems every day of the year that I can.   I just have to have a few acceptances out of all of those. If I want 10 poems in print I might have to send out 500.  

Rejection isn't personal (except when it is!). There is such a thing as personal rejection: someone is rejecting you, as a person, does not want to be your friend or romantic partner, or even to do something with you. That is a topic for another post. But a lot of rejection has nothing to do with one's self.  Say you send in an article and it is read as a blind submission. Even when there is some personal element, it is helpful to realize that it might be less of a factor than you assume.

There are people who have been rejected in traumatic ways, or for whom rejection is the dominant experience in their life. Those people won't be able to view rejection in the way that I am recommending.  

Copyediting / horseback riding

When I realize what one of my main fears is it sounds ridiculous:  copyediting. I am in fear that the book will have things I have to fix on the technical level of citations, etc... and that I will be bored and hence careless in doing this work.

From this I derive a new insight. If we can relabel fears with ridiculous labels, they will not be as frightening. You are afraid of copyediting?

***

In a dream last night I dreamt that someone was criticizing me for various things. One of them was my lack of skill at riding a horse. Apparently she had seen me try and noticed I was a bit awkward on the horse. I responded very logically: I rarely need to ride a horse, hence this lack of ability is largely beside the point. Moreover, because of this irrelevance, the only reason to bring up my clumsiness has to be deliberate cruelty on your part. I am perfectly aware that I am not an expert or experienced rider, and do not care. (In fact, I have only been on horse once as an adult.)  

***

Apart from the merit or lack of merit in my musical compositions, what amazes me is that I can do it at all. Just to be able to say: I wrote that.  At one point I wanted to take lessons in song-writing, but I have just realized that what I wanted was reassurance, someone saying: yes, that is indeed a song. This, too, is ridiculous, since I know that it is so already.

Razor's Edge

 As part of my project "razor's edge" I outlined my goals as related to music. As you can see, it is not just "get to be a better piano player," but a good deal more than that. I basically want to retire to being a songwriter, as my full time hobbyjob, in 10 years time. I started this project in Sept. 2015, without knowing that it was the start of something. I figure need to be about 80% of where a truly good pianist is, though that is a nebulous concept because 80% of what, exactly?  For me it might mean playing tastefully and tastily within my particular technical limits. I'm about 30% now, realistically. Writing out these goals makes me realize that I need to focus on one thing, like mastering Sibelius, that is holding me back from other things.   

Overall goal:

Be a songwriter able to play and sing my own songs in public and to record own cds. 

Specific Goals

Play piano and sing at 80% level

Compose at 90% level

Record cds of my music

Steps already taken

Write songs  

Take voice lessons

Take piano lessons

Establish piano practice routine

Learn to read lead sheets / basic jazz triadic voicings

Acquire keyboard

Join choir and participate in performances

Experiment with recording self in library

Perform in talent show

Begin to improvise walking bass lines and “rhythm changes”

Use phone app to notate leads sheets of own songs

Next steps

Master Sibelius software

Go to open mics

Improve reading / sight-reading

Work on lyric writing / have lyrics for at least 5 songs

Further Steps

Learn quartal voicings / jazz comping at a fluid level

Improve ear and listening ability

Improvise at high level

Play more with other musicians 

Learn arranging / more sophisticated compositional techniques

More advanced and detailed knowledge of harmony

Write for SATB or other formats 
Lose fear of other recording technologies

Frameworks: late night thoughts

There are several models we might consider.

*Your main problem is your enemies.
*Your source of obstacles is your rivals.
*Your problem is a system or set of circumstances that is rigged against you.
*Your problem is your own self or behavior.
*It is something else? Random events? Sheer luck or the lack of it?

Any of these frameworks might be correct for a given problem. I don't think I have enemies to speak of, and if I do I don't think they are doing much harm to me. My rivals aren't hurting me. I might envy Christopher Maurer and Andrew Anderson their superior knowledge of Lorca, but nothing they do holds me back in any way, and in fact it furthers my own ends.

The system is rigged in my favor so it's not that.

So in my case the majority of barriers to productivity are self-generated. And, frankly, I am productive so even here these barriers cannot be all that frightening.  Yet I find that they are... I'm publishing my book later than I thought it would come out, for example.

Financial tip

Don't go to the ATT site to pay your ATT bill, your apartment complex site to pay your rent, your auto loan company to pay your auto loan, etc... Instead, pay everything through your own on-line banking.  Then you can cancel, resume, accelerate, a payment without having to go through a special process at five different sites.

Routine

Routine is good and change is also good, and even the temporary breaking of routine can be good.

Routine is good because it is comforting, and can also be efficient if it is a good routine. But stagnation is bad, so the routine should be changed or temporarily altered in ways that do not disturb the comfort level or efficiency. Even a bad routine can have a certain comfortableness to it.

You might want to change your routine every month or so, just because. Not entirely, just mix it up a bit.

Here are some changes you can make

Here are some changes you can make:

dietary: become a vegetarian or vegan; give up gluten

you can decide to give up a relationship or even a casual acquaintanceship that isn't helping you

you can begin a practice of something and do it every day for a month, like playing an instrument or drawing

you can stop doing something you feel you need to do, but that you don't really need to do (if you go to 4 conferences a year because you feel that need, but maybe 2 is enough?).

you can retire or quit or decide to look for other job

***

I don't recommend giving up things that you really love as a faux-askesis. It is better to bring more rather than less pleasure into life. The breakfast salad movement is all about aesthetic pleasure, not giving up on pleasures. The breakfast salad can have potatoes or bacon, or anything else you want. It should be attractive and offer a wealth of contrasting and complementary flavors: acid, sweetness, the fattiness of an avocado. Want you want to avoid is "pleasure" that really actually dulls the senses rather than heightening them.  

Instantly

I was looking at Operation Razor's Edge and I saw a goal I could achieve instantly, which is to buy a piano. (What I had is broken.) I just bought a keyboard off the internet and it will arrive tomorrow.  This conflicts with another goal, which is to pay off credit card completely, setting me back a few months from that.

But with this piano, a Yamaha electric keyboard of about $400, I can go to an open mic and play, which will achieve a second goal. I also had to buy a stand for it which wasn't expensive. I can also play at night when I am lazy to go to Murphy hall and find a room. I could have waited until I had money to buy a $1,500 instrument with cash and not credit, but I felt a strong impulse of something I could do right now.  

***

We think of habits as things hard to change, lose, or acquire.  Yes, this is true. But you can also make a change instantly.  Look at your own equivalent of ORE and find something you can do today.  Many things have happened to me like this. Incremental change is fine, but you also need to do things that will fundamentally re-orient yourself (assuming that you are not well oriented!). You cannot make fundamental changes every day, because there are only so many changes you need to make, and you cannot rush certain things either. I am not recommending impulsiveness as a general rule, but sometimes an impulse must be followed. End a toxic relationship?

***

How do you know if you are oriented? First, does what you do every day line up with your core values and identity? So if you want to be a professional musician but you are not practicing and playing, then there is a mismatch. If you are doing things to sabotage yourself, prevent yourself from doing what you really want to do.

Secondly, do you feel at ease with yourself, comfortable in your own skin? I have rarely if ever felt this in my entire life, but I feel it when composing music and bad poems, sometimes when lecturing my friends on poststructuralism. I begin to feel it when I feel completely accepted by someone I love, and get some inkling of what self-acceptance would feel like.

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