The last few months have been strangely hectic. I got vaccinated in late April/early May, moved in early June, and spent most of the month settling into life in my new apartment, living on my own for the first time in a couple of years. Things in my corner of the world mostly went back to normal for a while, though with the delta variant causing local COVID cases to be on the upswing, those days may be numbered. Thankfully, the vaccines seem to be working. But still, the weather is (sometimes) nice and I would like to enjoy that while I can.

Just like everywhere else in the world, climate change has come to New England. We had a week of very hot weather, then a couple weeks of continuously cloudy skies and lots of rain, and then as things were starting to improve, we got a few days of haze, I suspect from the fires on the west coast. All that being said, we’re doing much better than some parts of the world, and there have been a number of really nice days: warm, but not hot, bright blue skies with generous helpings of mostly white clouds.

This reminds me that it really is the small things in life that matter most, like a good tuna sandwich, or earbuds that pause whatever is playing when you take one of them out of your ear. I suspect this will be especially true as the world continues in a state of political, socio-economic, and environmental upheaval.

I’ve been noticing that whenever I feel down, blocked, uncertain, or confused, I come back to the same things to help me feel grounded and stable: a morning routine, a solid gym workout, a day’s work in a beautiful environment (like the Boston Athenaeum), a couple pieces from my favorite authors where I notice something new every time I read them. Maybe I’m just getting old, and ossifying around the same things, or maybe these things resonate with core parts of my psyche. In any case, I regularly come back to Craig Mod’s interview in Offscreen Magazine. All of it is worth reading, especially the part about respect for life itself:

So I ask myself regularly: Am I maximizing this so-called respect for my being alive or not? Does my work pay dividends in making me more empathetic, more curious, kinder, smarter? And the best way I’ve found to say ‘yes’ to this somewhat ridiculous question is to ask if the work, my day to day, moves my heart.

In the end I’ve found that understanding how you define respect for life itself is a really good organizing function for thinking about how to live, how to spend your days.

Also like Mr. Mod, getting thoughts out of my head and into words is an important way in which I process my experience of the world. In particular, it is very easy for me to get stuck in my own head for an extended period of time, which is no good for me, or the people around me. Unfortunately, I’ve been doing far too little of this for the last few years, and I fear my life has been dimmed as a consequence. So I’m trying again to make this a regular practice. I will probably fail at this (again), but as my meditation practice has taught me, much of life is simply getting up and trying again.

Part of my growing reluctance to write online is that WordPress, that powers this blog, is becoming increasingly unsuitable. It’s become more focused on being a content management platform rather than a writing tool, evidenced by the “write” button being shoved up into the right hand corner. I have mixed feelings about the block editor. While my own writing tool is far from ready for production, I’ve been looking into Write.as as an alternative, any may start at least mirroring some posts there. There’s a 14-day trial of the Pro version which seems suitable for my needs.

That’s all folks! This month has honestly been mostly devoted to resting, settling into a new environment, and enjoying the weather when possible. Next month should be a more typically productive month.

However, The Unfettered Mind is not the only such work in this vein. Yagyū Munenori himself wrote a book called The Life-Giving Sword, possibly inspired by this work. His contemporary and rival, the legendary Miyamoto Musashi, also wrote a book fusing the art of swordsmanship and the discipline of the mind: The Book of Five Rings.

Together these three books make for a sort of trilogy, combining martial arts and Zen practice. I worked my way through The Unfettered Mind over the last week and have The Book of Five Rings waiting on my bookshelf. And yes, I did find The Unfettered Mind quite enlightening, though I suspect it will take me a few more readings to really grasp the various nuances.

Blog About What You Struggled With

While we’re on the topic of writing more, Julia Evans makes an interesting point: write about the things you’ve struggled with. It’s a good way to both cement your knowledge and maintain a record for the future, not to mention, create something that will be useful to others.

How to Become a Better Writer by Becoming a Better Noticer

Talking about blogging, getting better at writing is something I’ve been interested in for a long time. I took a number of creative writing classes in college, and I remember a number of assignments that focused on observing the world, rather than directly writing about it. So here’s an article about getting better at writing by getting better at noticer. It’s full of both examples and exercises, and will definitely go into my writing toolbox.

Kumail Nanjiani Can Be Your Hero, Baby

The first teaser trailer for the upcoming Eternals movie from Marvel dropped a couple of days, which reminded me of this article that I saved a couple of months ago and never got around to reading. So I remedied it, got a peek into Nanjiani’s life, and the kind of mental and physical training that it takes to have the body of a superhero. As someone who’s put on a rather embarrassing amount of weight over the last year, I’ll put this in the “inspiration” category.

And on the topic of the Eternals trailer, here it is:

And finally an actual book:

Philosopher of the Heart by Claire Carlisle

For the first time in a while, I’m reading a number of different books at once. Of those, this one strikes a good balance of being entertaining, informative, and easy to digest. The author takes us on a (non-chronological!) tour of Kierkegaard’s life, and in the process gives us a thorough understanding of his philosophy and the cultural context in which his ideas came about. It’s also a surprisingly quick read, and I’m going through almost a chapter day. Highly recommend if you have an interest in European philosophy.

Thanks to Andre Garzia I came across The StoryGraph. It lets you track books that you’ve read and recommends new books based on them and your supplied interests. Yes, it’s similar to GoodReads, but cleaner and more community-oriented, and without the ties to Amazon (all of which I consider a good thing). There are some things I don’t like about it: it’s more focused on recommendations than tracking, the process for adding things I’m currently reading is clunky, and there are no native mobile apps, so I can’t just point my camera at a book’s barcode and have it added to my profile. I also don’t seem to have a public profile page, so I can’t share what I’m reading with someone who isn’t on the site. All that being said, the service looks like it’s in active development, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

I came across Oxide Computer’s new website which also describes their in-development product in some detail. It tickles the part of my brain that loves to tinker with hardware and bare metal computing. In an alternate life, where I didn’t decide to move up the abstraction layers to programming languages and tools, I would definitely be interested in working at a place like Oxide, and more generally doing the kind of co-design that they are.

That in turn led me to Bryan Cantrill’s talk about the coming golden age of hardware/software co-design. Lots of interesting things seem to be coming in the near future, I just hope we put it to use running something other than invasive machine learning algorithms on biased datasets. Time will tell I suppose.

I learned about the author and professor, Robert D. Richardson (via Austin Kleon) who not only wrote biographies of Thoreau, Emerson, and William James, but also impressed Annie Dillard enough to marry her after “two lunches and three handshakes”. That makes for a whole new set of #relationshipgoals, as the kids say these days. I let myself fall into a bit of an Annie Dillard rabbit hole, following the links from Kleon’s post. I read this very interesting New York Times interview done shortly after her book A Pilgrim’s Progress was published, as well as this interview of Richardson, where he talks (among other things) about the effect she has had on his writing.

Now that I’m fully vaccinated, I’ve been using the Boston Athenaeum as a workspace a couple of times a week. As Cal Newport says in his latest essay in the New Yorker, remote work doesn’t necessarily mean working from home, maybe just close to home. A welcome side effect of that is a little more in-person human interaction, including random conversations with strangers in the elevator. It is still a little bit strange with masks on, but hopefully that will only be a part of our shared reality for a short while longer (at least here in Massachusetts).

Talia Ringer tweeted about how she feels more conscious each year, feeling more present and more aware of her thoughts and surroundings. I’ve been having a similar experience, especially in the last couple of years as I invest more time and energy into meditation and therapy. Part of this is due to a deeper feeling of agency over things that I thought were out of my control, like my emotions, motivations and priorities. Some of it is also due to realizing that there’s more to life than following a pre-determined plan. At the same time, it’s unfortunately very easy for me to not be present, to exist with my brain wrapped in a sort of distracted fog, with my mind lost in the past or present or fictional, fantastic worlds.

Talking of fantastic worlds, I realized that binge watching random TV shows as a way to relieve stress was not doing me any favors. It was starting to feel like an addiction, and made being present even more difficult. But I still enjoy movies and television and don’t want to cut them out of my life entirely. Instead, I want to watch higher quality productions, starting with Season 4 of The Expanse. It’s definitely one of the better science fiction shows of the last few years, filled with interesting concepts and plotlines, good actors, lots of careful worldbuilding and high production quality. I watched the first episode, which was very entertaining, and did a whole lot of setup for the rest of the season. I’m hoping to gradually work my way through it, one episode a day, over the next few weeks.

As an aside, as much as I like how much high quality television there is these days, I am not thrilled at how seasons seem to have very few episodes these days (sometimes in the single digits).

I’ve been going to the Boston Athenaeum for a few days each week. It’s a beautiful workspace and it’s a good way to get out of the house. They also have a couple of open balconies which offer great views of downtown Boston. And the iPhone 12’s ultrawide lens comes in handy for taking these sorts of shots. Being able to go out to libraries and cafes, is a big perk of things starting to go back to normal. A welcome side effect of things starting to go back to normal, and being in a place like the Athenaeum, is feeling like I have headspace again and re-realizing how much I love deep intellectual work.

I’ve started using Apple Notes to take short, mostly temporary notes and it seems to be work well for that. Thanks to iCloud, Nto I do have a number of gripes though. Apples Notes uses a yellow-ish accent color for the sidebar, which isn’t my favorite. The only way to change it on macOS is to change the system-wide accent color, which in turn makes other apps look less than ideal. The UI for writing notes is quite good, there’s support for basic text formatting, tables and lists with checkboxes. There’s also support for inline links, making it good for collecting notes from websites without having raw URIs sticking out. However, there’s no editor button for adding a hyperlink and the macOS keyboard convention for the keyboard shortcut is ⌘K rather than ⌘L (for link) or ⌘H (for hyperlink). Finally, it would be great if there was a way to archive notes, instead of deleting them. None of these are dealbreakers, but hopefully some of them get updated in future versions.

Like many transitions, this one has gotten me thinking about life again, something I last did at the start of the year. In particular, I have been thinking about practice as a way of life. As someone whose life has often been about chasing goals, or reaching certain milestones as quickly as possible, the forced slowdown of the last year was a shock to the system. As doing things becomes possible again, I am trying to cultivate a life that is about more than moving from one thing to the next as quickly as possible.

How to Practice

Here’s a realization I didn’t have until after I turned 30: that life (for most of us) is actually quite long. And that, somewhat paradoxically, making the most of that life requires a certain amount of slowing down. It’s not going slow for its own sake, but rather, slowing down is a prerequisite for the intentionality required for a good life. As Ann Patchett tells us in this narrative, that intentionality is improved by practice and imagination.

Private Practice: Toward a Philosophy of Just Sitting

On the other hand, often the point of practice is just that: to practice. This again, is somewhat paradoxical, and I began to appreciate it only after a couple years of a regular meditation practice. It was also something that completely eluded me in the several years that I spent playing the violin as a teenager. I suppose practice is requirement of that elusive state: mindfulness, the feeling that you’re actually here, living your life and not just passing through it. And learning to just sit, for maybe 10-15 minutes a day, is a good way to get started.

What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?

Closely related to practice, I think, is play. In fact, as this article suggests, play or fun might just be one of the foundational organizing principles of the universe. Given how much our brains seem to require meaningful work and play in balanced proportions, this idea strikes me as a having a certain amount of credibility. Besides, living with cats for two years has firmly convinced me that the importance of play reaches deep into the animal kingdom.

The Man Who Found the Flow

Finally, it seems likely that practice and play (and meaningful deep work) both help us tap into the psychological state of flow. I first encountered Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas in college, I have been thinking more about them recently, especially in context of a year when doomscrolling become a de facto part of our daily routines. It’s perhaps unsurprising that later in life I become interested in meditation, which I think helps bring about a similar state of mind.

Free Software: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed

If you’re anywhere around the software or information technology, you’ve probably heard that Richard Stallman was recently reinstated to the board of the Free Software Foundation. This has been widely regarded as a bad move, and has caused a number of board members to resign. This article argues that maybe it’s time not to praise free software, but to bury it, an opinion I find myself agreeing with.

The Long Term iPhone 12 Camera Review

With the weather starting to improve, and more people getting vaccinated, I am looking forward to being out and about more often, which means more opportunities to take pictures. Though I’ve always been interesting in photography, I’ve never managed to justify the cost of a good camera, and even when I’ve bought standalone cameras, I’ve not inclined to carry them on a regular basis. So having a very good camera on a device I already have on me has been just right for me.

The Point of Doing Pointless Things

I don’t know if this my type-A personality or something else, but it’s often hard for me to relax. Part of that difficulty is feeling the need to always do the best thing, even if it’s relaxing. For a long time, I would feel bad if even my “time off” activities didn’t produce something, or lead to personal improvement in some way. For better of worse, the last year of sitting at home has changed that. I couldn’t do a lot of my go-to activities like going to museums, concerts, or various talks and lectures. Doing the digital version of those things just felt like spending even more time sitting in the same place. Instead I’ve had to get used to doing things just because I liked them (like reading comic books) or sometimes just doing nothing at all.

What the Buddha Taught

But of course, I can’t escape my type-A-ness all together, so a lot of my non-fiction reading has been about Buddhist philosophy recently. It’s something I’ve encountered in bits and pieces over the last few years, but it’s nice to have a well-written book that clearly explains the key concepts in an orderly fashion (I’m one of those people who prefer learning things from a textbook). While the writing style is a little dated, and does flow awkwardly at times, it does a good job at both explaining key concepts and answering some more technical questions (like what does it mean for free will if there is no self). If you’re interested in Buddhism at all, this is a good place to start.

Ursula K LeGuin is probably one of the foremost intellects of the 20th century (which makes me more than a little ashamed that I haven’t read much of her work). I’ve been reading more about Zen Buddhism, and it’s close cousin Taoism over the last few years, so I’m looking forward to reading this in the near future. This is really more of an interpretation than a translation, but as the excerpts show, it seems to capture the spirit of the original (along with some choice commentary for the modern age).

David Lynch’s Industrious Pandemic

Talking of cultural icons, I did not know much about David Lynch until this piece. I think the only work of his I’ve seen is the 1984 Dune, which this piece calls “pretty unwatchable”. I was drawn to this piece because of the subtitle which talks about Lynch “living a farmer’s life during the pandemic” by keeping himself “engaged with self-prescribed daily routines”. That’s certainly been a luxury that’s out of reach of most of us, but as I noted in my reflections on 2020, it’s not enough to simply exist. We have to live as well, even in tough times, and we must make use of our privileges and luxuries where we have them.

Love Sick: It’s time to Uncouple Care Work from Romantic Love

Talking of pandemics, the past year has certainly shaped a lot of conversations and thoughts about family, community and caring. As someone who’s often depended on friends and acquaintances for help in ways both big and small, this year has made me even more aware of the value of self-sufficiency. At the same time, I do believe that humans aren’t meant to be alone, and we should all work harder to develop bonds of family and community, but it’s much easier said than done, and no, I haven’t figure out how to do it for myself yet.

Henry Rollins on Defining Success

Even though I’m not very familiar with Rollins’ artistic work, his writing always seem to strike a chord with me. Some years ago, his article on Iron and the Soul encouraged me to make regular exercise, especially weightlifting, a serious part of my life. It was something that I managed to more or less keep up over the years and my life was better for it (until COVID-19 made gyms a bad idea). Similarly, the advice and ideas he presents in this piece are not exactly new, but he phrases them in a way that makes them seem like a breath of fresh air in a world that lately seems rather stale.

And now for something completely different:

Formalizing mathematics: an introduction

This is probably not going to be of much interest if you’re not a mathematician or theoretical computer scientist, but it’s something that’s been bouncing around my head. I’ve been looking into the Lean Theorem Prover, where one can write mathematical proofs in a programming language, so that the computer can check them. Theorem provers are being increasingly used to verify properties of software, but it seems like the pure mathematics is just getting on board with how useful they can be. This article tells us why these theorem provers might be crucial for advancing the state of pure mathematics, in more ways than one.

Brad Wright’s rules for Stargates, Star Wars and Superheroes

If there’s anything I like more than computers and software, it’s science fiction (ok, and food and drink and friends and family, but that’s a matter for another blog post). Brad Wright is a writer and showrunner responsible for the Stargate TV shows and for Travellers, which I think is one of the best high-concept, low-flash science fiction shows of the last decade. In this article, he talks about some of his rules of thumbs for not just good science fiction, but good storytelling, and I think many of my readers will find themselves nodding along.

The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe by Stephen Hawking

I decided to start my book reading this year with one of the slimmest ones on my bookshelf. This is a series of lectures given by Stephen Hawking on how the universe began, how it’s continuing and how it might end. But what’s perhaps more interesting, Hawking goes into depth about how we came to know about all of it through centuries of discovery (and a number of wrong turns on the way). Reading this book reminded me of how much I enjoyed pop science as a teenager. I might have to pick up Hawking’s Brief History of Time after I’m done with this one.

Stacey Abrams on 3 questions to ask yourself about everything you do

If you haven’t been living under a rock you’re probably aware of the Democrats’ win in Georgia, thanks in large part due to the organizing activities of Stacey Abrams. I didn’t know much about her until the elections, besides that she ran for Georgia governor in 2018. In this TED talk from shortly after that election, she talks about events from her life that shaped, and as the title says, 3 questions to ask about everything you do.