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The floating feet talisman: presence through the passage from bored tranquility to the uncomfortable exciting
An analysis of Bowie’s metaphor to wade “a little bit further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in” .
- A powerful metaphor for growth: that precise threshold moment when your feet no longer touch the bottom.
- Perfect readiness is an illusion ; we rationalise staying in our comfort zone by believing we need “just a bit more preparation”.
- Being present in these moments, rather than just enduring them, builds confidence for future challenges. It creates rich and accurate memories of past uphill battles instead of catastrophising them.
- Metaphors like these can become a mantra, a “talisman” we can summon when facing new thresholds.
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Musical learning: a mechanism of inescapable feedback
Why does musical practice represent a perfect analogy for learning processes in general?
- Musical practice offers inexorably honest feedback ; mistakes are immediately obvious and cannot be escaped.
- It creates a "self-sufficient reward", as you gain the ability to perform the piece whenever desired.
- In musical practice it is impossible to hide from points of failure and the rewards for overcoming them are immediately tangible. In fact, they are essential, serving as valuable "anchors" for deeper learning.
- The end goal is expressive freedom - the ability to channel complex emotional states through the piece.
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The ontology of ancient gods
How did divinities emerge from prelinguistic societies? What does this suggest about the difference between their experience of the world and ours?
- Early humans likely had limited abstract vocabulary, making it difficult to categorise complex phenomena.
- Ideas of Gods may have emerged as broad notions meant to group related phenomena under recognisable patterns.
- For example, "Zeus" would have united thunder, justice, hospitality, and oaths through a perceived common essence. Zeus created meaningful connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena.
- Modern rational thought has separated nature from humanity, subject from object.
- We've gained scientific precision but lost the dense interlacing of meanings that connected us intimately to the world : an holistic relationship with the cosmos.
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Stories are templates for a more meaningful shared existence
- Good stories require both narrative momentum (beginning, middle, end) and personal accountability.
- Stories represent templates of how deep human relations unfold.
- Rather than being rigid archetypes, these ideals guide us toward more fulfilling relationships.
- Hayao Miyazaki's films exemplify great templates for human relations with their complex antagonists.
- By recognising story patterns in our lives, and steering their building blocks toward these ideals that we acquire through fiction, we can create a more meaningful existence.
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Scavenging the word “bourgeois”
Historically and ideologically charged words like "bourgeois" contain valuable insights. But how can they impede communication despite their conceptual value?
- The word "bourgeois" carries numerous associations beyond its formal definition - from material comfort to intellectual complacency, from Marx to suburban life
- Using such "big fat abstractions" in conversation risks misunderstanding, as different people highlight different aspects of these complex terms.
- We can "scavenge" the husks of such tricky, loaded abstractions to extract useful concepts, cutting them free from historical baggage to make them more accessible in contemporary discourse.
Rather than abandoning valuable observations embedded in controversial terms, we can extract and reformulate these insights using language that won't trigger defensive reactions or ideological associations.