Miasma root gurgling
Encroaching, choking
Not fated, kick the goads.

Suffuse enervation
Heart of lightness
Dew-drizzled dazzler

Glory.
Grace.
Gift.

Wherefore, though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them. For, stirred up with the same movement, mud exhales a horrible stench, and ointment emits a fragrant odor.

But why learn a different keyboard layout? The two main reasons would be reduced risk of RSI and because I enjoy technical challenges. The particular appeal of Colemak is that it changes less keys around than Dvorak, meaning I would hopefully pick it up more quickly. Notably, the z,x, and c keys are identical, keeping cut, copy, and paste keyboard shortcuts in the same place.

I started this past Monday and have been plowing though drills in Master Key 3–4 times per day. I’m quite happy with my progress:

Ian went on to detail his Colemak learning strategy, and I especially liked that he was importing text from a great speech to augment his drills with real text that was simultaneously useful and edifying. Instead of a speech, I decided to go with a classic: St. Augustine’s City of God. This way I can double-down on completely frying my brain.

Some observations:

• Muscle memory fights very hard to not change things. My jaw and shoulders have started to clench up as I’ve moved into higher speed and broader keyboard coverage.
• Somewhere around 25 wpm requires some unconscious typing, triggering the above feelings. I’m trying really hard to stay relaxed while typing.
• It’s much easier to type in the drills because you can focus on the letters, while “real-world” typing operates on more of a words level.
• The City of God starts with Augustine talking smack against the Pagans.
• I wrote this whole post in Colemak. It was slow and I had to use the backspace key a lot.

I haven’t bothered with blacking out my site, but I will urge any USAmerican readers of mine to hassle their representatives. Watch a great summary of the issue below:

And, for a more in-depth explanation, go watch the ever-insightful Clay Shirkey’s talk at TED: Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)

A number of authors … have suggested that the human proclivity for acquiring and transmitting supernatural agent concepts is an incidental byproduct of cognitive mechanisms genetically adapted for other purposes. … have argued that religions are cultural systems that exploit such byproducts to adaptive effect.

In other words, religion is like a leech or a parasite, growing on human capabilities that have evolved to give us advantage in the world. And, scientists would be quick to add, there is no longer any evolutionary advantage for believing such nonsense.

There are a variety of angles from which that idea can be critqued, but Larry Gilman, the author of the aforementioned article, points out naivete about science itself by its practitioners:

But science, too, is “an incidental byproduct of cognitive mechanisms genetically adapted for other purposes,” as well as a “cultural system that exploits such byproducts to adaptive effect.” We didn’t evolve to do calculus, chemistry, and cognitive psychology; our ancestors evolved brains with a huge amount of built-in flexibility, and we have since found some remarkable uses for them. Science is a “cultural system” not in the sense that its narratives are arbitrary, but as a thing that exists only because human beings have figured out together how to do it, and whose standards, terms, and practices we have knocked together in social settings such as laboratories, journals, and universities.

There’s some more good insights in the article, including what this does and doesn’t mean for the truth of both science and religion.

Instead, this year I want to explore the notion of trajectories; of directions I would like to point myself in. I find this more interesting and helpful than resolutions, because I think that resolutions makes far too much of the will. Here’s a not-so-secret secret: willpower is bullshit. Resolutions usually require a set of skills and resources that can only be gained with hard work over time.

Take, for instance, the resolution to lose 20 lbs. While this is at least a specific resolution—much better than “get in better shape”—it fails to take into account the full range of skills and resources it will take to achieve this goal. Is losing weight the goal, or becoming fit? Is fitness a goal in-and-of-itself, or is it merely the means to some other greater end in your life, such as lower stress, a general sense of well-being, or improved body image? Of course, at this point we’re going beyond the typically rote resolution into a more reflective mode.

But a few more points: you have a good reason to get more fit. How are you going to do it? Do you know how to change your diet? What type, quantity, and frequency of physical activity will you do? What type of accountability structures do you have in place to ensure you keep doing these tasks when you run out of willpower? (You will run out of willpower.)

Resolutions are just the tip of the iceberg. Resolutions are fine, but they need to take place within a larger framework of thought and care that is generally ignored.

Enough about resolutions. Here’s my trajectories and things I’d like to explore in the New Year (some of them even sound like resolutions):

1. Mindfulness. My friend Adam started talking a lot about the Buddhist practice of mindfulness a few years back. I didn’t share his enthusiasm at the time, but I’ve been hearing more about it lately and, coupled with my desire to learn more control over my mind and emotions, I’m going to explore it.

2. Be involved in study & discussion. I relentlessly seek new thoughts and subject everything I come across to critical evalution. I’ve had some irons in the fire on this front for some time, but they need to actually happen.

3. Set a blog posting rhythm. It’s the rhythm that’s the key. I’m thinking 3–4 times per week right now.
4. Start polyphasic sleep again. I liked the overall well-being I’d achieved while doing it.
5. Jog twice a week. Three would be better, but two seems to be my sweet spot. Get my rate to 5:30 min/km.
6. Explore writing on more consistent topics. My rough thoughts right now would be to write about justice topics in my local context.
7. Figure out what “success criteria” are in my life at Flatlanders and in my business. When your only evaluation rubric for something is “I should be doing more,” you’re on a surefire path to moodiness, melodramatic teenage angst, and generally unnecessary feelings of failure. While wanting to do more can be healthy and an impetus for growth, not the way I do it.

There are more things on my mind than these, but this is a hefty list. Many of them are specific goals along trajectories I’m already, perhaps makers along the way. There are others which I don’t want to write about publically, and yet more that I would be tempted to include except that an important part of this exercise is to not set myself up for failure.

Here’s to a great New Year for you, too.

But, I like the idea of having practices, rhythms that I simply do because I do them, not because of the capriciousness of how I feel about doing it at the time. The whole point of practices such as reflection is to do something I may not feel like doing at the time because it’s a good thing to do and I said I would do it regularly. Yes, basing a practice on the flipping of a calendar year is arbitrary, but there’s a precedent, and it’s as good a time as any other.

I can hardly remember 2011. It vanished. Work was good, but there was too much of it, and it took over my life at times. I also spent my first full year living at Flatlander’s Inn, an intentional supportive housing community. The entire year felt like a tug-of-war of loyalties between Flatlanders, my business, my wife, and my other relationships in life. I feel like there were only losers in said tug-of-war. Have I mentioned that I get gloomy when I get introspective?

It’s at this point that I begin to rail against the limitations of the two-part retrospective/prospective model. I want to immediately jump ahead and talk about all of the ways that 2012 will be better; will be more balanced, more productive. Fitter, happier, etc. Slow down.

And now I’m at the point where I don’t want to post this on my blog any more, because I was liking my blog moving in more topical and less confessional directions. But again, I’ll abide by the discipline.

And speaking of blogging, my experiment of posting every day to reach 500 posts by year’s end didn’t quite happen, although I did hit a rate of 0.5 posts per day over the duration. This is post no. 467 in just over 6 years of blogging (or 0.21 posts per day), which works out to about 1.5 posts per week or 6.4 posts per month. These long term averages hide the fact that in 2011 had only 53 posts (0.15 posts per day). I’d only posted 21 times in 2011 up and until October 26th, for an average of 0.07 posts per day. But that looks positively stellar compared to 2010, where I posted a mere 7 times. Yes, these numbers should all be in a chart or something. But my writing rates are on the rise, which is a positive part of 2011.

A bit more on blogging: my favourite post I wrote this year was After the God-Shaped Hole, articulating a critical step in my journey as a thinking person of faith in Jesus. But Battlestar Galactica, Rationality & Human Nature was a close second. On Footnotes was the most enjoyable to write, ebooks were much on my mind, and The New mattwie.be and Notebooks and Pocket Computers were tied for most comments in the year. The latter was additionally the most visited post written in 2011, while On Valedictions continues its reign as my most popular post of all time.

I also started an experiment with polyphasic sleep, which I kept a log of for the first few weeks. I slept 4.5 hours per night with two 20 minute naps during the day for about a month, and I liked it quite a bit overall. I stopped due to illness for a time, and found it hard to get back into during the holidays. My writing output was much higher while I was sleeping polyphasically, so I’ll probably try again.

The highlight of the year was undoubtedly the fact that my wife won us a trip to San Francisco via EQ3. For a magical week in mid-October, she and I flaneured through what is now my favourite city in North America. No computers + no work + my wife + San Francisco = amazing, probably the best experience since we visited Europe in 2006.

Here’s a collection of 2011 aphorisms, mostly learned by failing:

• I’m a cynic because I’m a romantic and an idealist.
• There is no magic bullet.
• Life is what happens when you’re making plans to be happy tomorrow, next week, next year. Live now.
• I love the idea of “life’s too short for work you don’t enjoy,” but I’m also painfully aware of how easy that is to say for a young educated white male Canadian.
• I do best when I have practices in my life that I keep doing whether I’m feeling like it at the time or not.
• It’s especially easy to forgo grounding practices when you’re doing well, not realizing that it was your observance of those practices that enabled your well-being.
• When I don’t care about something, it’s usually pardoxically because I care too much. See point about cynicism above.
• You can never do it yourself, but that doesn’t seem to stop me from the foolishness of trying.
• Don’t mistake the aesthetic beauty of a thought for real beauty.
• There is a distinct shortage of people who know how to be alone with their own thoughts and concentrate.

It’s only fitting that, since it’s been four years since my last retrospective, this post has become long enough to compensate for those missing years. Hopefully the upcomging prospective for 2012 will be more merciful on any readers masochistic enough to read this far.

I’d forgotten how much I love despair.com and its demotivational posters like the above.