Fernando Gros's Blog, page 16

How To Use Seasonal Themes

‘Japan has four seasons.’ You hear it all the time, as if Japan were the only country to experience seasons. Foreigners living in Japan often mock the cliché because Japan isn’t the only country with distinct seasons. Rather, life in Japan feels different because seasons are so deeply enmeshed in the art, holidays, poetry, and life of the country.

It starts with a procession of colour that marks spring, from cherry and plum blossoms, through the vibrancy of azaleas and hydrangeas, to the calm of dogwoods and peonies. Then summer changes the air, filling it with heat, humidity, storms, and relentless rain. Autumn sees the days calm down and colour explode again as the leaves turn before the solemnity of the cold, icy winds of winter bring the year to an end.

We assume the four seasons are universal. But that pattern reflects life only in temperate climates. It spread around the world thanks to colonialism, even to places where the seasons don’t divide into four.

The Indigenous people of Australia acknowledged five or six seasons, and the timing of those seasons, together with their length, varied depending on where they lived. Having observed these in Sydney and Adelaide, to me they make a lot more sense as a description of local weather patterns than the imposed European calendar. Six seasons are also common in the south and parts of the east of India. The Cree calendar in North America also has six seasons, but in Thailand and other parts of South East Asia there are three.

These divisions of the year – into three, four, five or six seasons – come from observing nature and then considering how we should organise our lives in response.

Maybe it’s time to bring our thinking about how to live well and our observations of the seasons of life closer together?

Seasonal Themes

For a while now, I’ve suggested choosing a theme for your year, one word that sets the tone for what you hope to achieve and how you hope to achieve it. My theme for 2020 is Momentum, and my previous themes were Conviction, and Simple.

Alongside a yearly theme, a seasonal theme can be helpful. Three-month blocks (13 weeks, or 91 days, if you prefer) map out well onto a lot of different kinds of projects.

Having a seasonal theme gives you a chance to put four different perspectives on your yearly theme. For the first months of 2020, my seasonal theme was ‘move well’, because I had a lot of travel. Then it was ‘move the ideas’, because I was reorganising my plans in light of the pandemic. Now it’s ‘frictionless’, because I’m trying to change the small points of friction in every day that make things less efficient and pleasant.

Seasonal themes help you reflect the pattern of your life. Maybe there’s a time of year when you travel a lot or when you face a repeated commitment like the start of the school year.

Seasonal themes can also help you deal with big life transitions. When I was leaving Japan, the theme for my last three months was ‘finish without regret’. This came from a little prayer I said a lot in my last months in Japan IL2 and also a conviction to make the most of my last days in a place I’d loved so much.

‘To be interested in the changing seasons is… a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.’

― George Santayana

Micro-Seasons

In Japan, each of the four seasons is sometimes divided into three subsystems. These can be subdivided to create a schema of 72 micro-seasons. Some of them are only a few days long. These are often reflected in local festivals and in poetry. My favourite is the season when fish start to break the ice on frozen lakes and rivers.

That time of year when it’s still winter, but you can sense the slightest hint that spring might be arriving soon, is a micro-season.

As much as I love the reflective and philosophical nature of yearly themes, it’s the seasonal themes that drive a lot of work and personal growth.

Seasons Add Meaning And Focus

Bigger than days, weeks, or months, but much smaller than years, seasons give structure to the year. They also connect us to the world around us. The whole logic of seasons flows from observing our ecological environment.

During 2020, when our sense of time and its passing feels so messed up, maybe we need something to hold onto that gives us more meaning and greater focus. Noticing the passing of seasons slows us down, forces us to take stock, and encourages us to pay attention to the changes in the world around us. It stops the passing of time from feeling like a blur.

So name the season and ask it to give you one small, but meaningful, gift.

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This Season

The table always catches people’s attention. Visitors comment on it, often while running an open hand over the smooth, satin surface.

“Where’s it from?” they ask, or “What’s it made of?”

“American walnut,” I say, “designed in Singapore, modelled after a mid-century Danish style, with a smooth satin finish.”

It’s been our dining table in Singapore and Tokyo, and now in London. Through the bad times and the good.

I usually like each item of stuff to have a few uses. A dining table is for eating. OK, maybe for homework, sometimes. But I’d been happy for the table to sit unused most of the day, only coming to life at mealtimes.

This pandemic season forced me to let go of that cherished ideal. Living with isolation and quarantine, with the many fractures in our connection to the outside world, has changed the table’s role.

This is the 21st blogpost I’ve written since going into isolation back on March 9. For every one of them I’ve put my iPad on a little stand, fired up the wireless keyboard, taken a sip of water, run my hands over the tabletop, and then started writing.

I sit only a few metres from the front door. This is kind of convenient, since having everything delivered to our home means the doorbell rings at least three or four times a day, and sometimes more than that just during the morning writing session. Each time I must stop writing, walk to the entranceway, take off my indoor slippers and put on the outdoor ones that live on the mat, don a face mask and open the door. Then I repeat the process in reverse, wash my hands thoroughly, and return to the table.

The writing position is also a few metres from the kitchen, where I spend the largest slice of each week, cooking meals, baking bread, and preparing our home-made bacon and smoked salmon.

This isn’t the kind of writing environment I suggest people create, whenever people ask me what kind of writing environment they should create. No matter how good each writing session is, or how many notes I have around me as I write, I have to pack it all up to make room for lunch. And the feeling of being trapped between the ever-ringing doorbell and the perpetually demanding kitchen is too much sometimes.

Even on the good days.

On the mornings where it seems pointless to resist the impending doom, fuelled as it seems to be by so many collective failures of imagination and intelligence, the beloved table feels like a trap.

But still I return every morning, wearing cotton jinbei, a sort of Japanese pyjama, with drawstring shorts, and a top that ties at the waist. I fight the urge to doomscroll through the news, or surf music videos on YouTube, and I try to write.

My rule is I can take any day off writing, but it can’t be today, and it can’t be two days in a row. Mostly, I’ve been able to obey this rule.

Looking back over my writing this season reveals some repeating motifs. There’s been a lot of self-reflection, a lot of concern about having a good frame of mind, and a lot about how to make the most of this time.

My theme for 2020 has been momentum. At the start of the year I was thinking about it in terms of a big project, writing my next book. I didn’t want to get bogged down. But now momentum means something much smaller. Just going on, day to day, and not losing hope.

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Have Fewer Beliefs

I love Marie Kondo. Sure, she has her critics. But after reading each of her books, I feel better. My stuff looks tidier. More importantly, life makes more sense.

Kondo’s approach to tidying starts with a simple idea. Put everything in one place. Rather than tidying up room by room, you gather together everything from one category. Consider books. You might have some in your lounge room, or in the kitchen, maybe a few next to your bed. Doesn’t matter. Bring them all together, and sort through them all at once.

A dramatic example of this is sorting through clothes. Empty all your hangers, shelves, and drawers. Make one huge pile. Then sort, deciding what to keep based on whether it ‘sparks joy’.

This simple idea cuts through a lot of our justifications for keeping stuff we no longer need, no longer like, or no longer use. It encourages us to shape our environment. It leads us towards designing a more joyous life.

Have Fewer Beliefs

This got me wondering: what if we applied this same idea, which works so well for the stuff around us, to the stuff inside us. What if we audited the things we believe – about ourselves, about the world – with the same mantra?

What if we kept only the beliefs that spark joy?

Throughout life, we acquire a lot of beliefs. They are our explanations for how the world works, the reasons we give for why we are the way we are.

We don’t question them often. Sometimes we ask if they are true or not. But what if we tidied up our beliefs more openly? Much like Kondo’s approach to tidying our homes?

What if we asked whether out beliefs help us live fulfilled lives?

Or whether they spark joy?

Learning To Choose Our Beliefs

Carole Dweck, in her book Mindset, introduces the idea of self-limiting beliefs – beliefs that limit our potential, hold us back, stop us from having what she calls a ‘growth mindset’.

For Dweck, a growth mindset includes the belief that your abilities can grow. Someone with a growth mindset believes they can become better, smarter and more skilful. Dweck shows plenty of evidence that people with growth mindsets respond more positively to setbacks, treat failures as opportunities to develop, and perform better over time.

Dweck says people with ‘fixed mindsets’ see their attributes as unchanging. They are more likely to consider failure a sign they should try something else, are less able to learn from setbacks, and are more likely to feel stuck in their life and career.

While the two mindsets can lead otherwise imitar people to very different life outcomes, they have only one real difference: a different set of beliefs about ourselves. People can be equally capable, but the ones with a growth mindset will, over time, learn more, adapt better, and thrive more often.

If we are interested in nurturing our creativity, our ability to innovate, our potential to create art, our potential to bounce back from adversity, and our skill at navigating uncertainty, then we should embrace a growth mindset.

The Beliefs We Should Hold Onto

Dweck has some suggestions for the kinds of beliefs that develop and support a growth mindset. We can accept the science around our brain’s ability to change and develop based on what we do (neuroplasticity). We can focus more on our effort than on our attributes. We can reflect on our actions and improve our strategies in the situations we face. We can track our progress and improvement and look for ways to develop further. And we can take more time to celebrate our perseverance and effort, not just our successes.

The lesson is our beliefs shape who we become, how we live, and what we achieve.

Going Further With Epistemic Minimalism

To get there, we’ll have to clean out our beliefs, just like cleaning out a cluttered cupboard. We’ll hold onto only the best beliefs. And, of course, we’ll end up with fewer beliefs as well.

To develop a growth mindset, we could consider the concept of epistemic minimalism. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with how we think and how we develop beliefs. Epistemic minimalism is one way to approach beliefs – it suggests we try to have as few as possible.

It’s tempting to think you have to have beliefs about everything you do. The internet encourages this trend. To some extent, so does modern education.

But consider walking for a moment. What are you beliefs about walking? What is your opinion on the right way to walk? If pressed for an answer, you can probably think of things, but most of the time we just walk. We don’t need a belief system for it or for many of the things we do in life. And where do have beliefs, things like ‘walking is a good form of exercise’, those beliefs are simple.

And sometimes the best answer is simply ‘I don’t know.’

The hidden secret is that we don’t really need beliefs or opinions about every single thing. More importantly, we could gain a lot by ditching many of the beliefs we hold about ourselves.

Beliefs And Conviction

My personal theme for 2019 year was conviction. A younger version of me would’ve taken this as a test: How many beliefs can you come up with, and how diligently can you defend them? I used to think having an intricate belief system was a marker of intelligence.

Now I feel like it’s a cage that just holds the believer back from experiencing the world deeply.

Having fewer beliefs is a radically countercultural move. You’ll need to embrace your inner rebel just to try. But if you do, your soul might find itself in a wild and peaceful place, untamed by the fear and rigidity that drags down so many conversations today.

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You Might Be Better Than You Think

There were things I’d clipped from magazines. Online pages printed out for reference. Reams of sheet music. Notes from all sorts of projects. Receipts and invoices. Documents and statements from companies I’d started. And certificates from courses I’d completed. All of it neatly organised into topics and categories.

Some of it was in old paper folders. Faded pastel colours. Made by Leitz in Germany. Others were in bright plastic ring binders, with clear inserts, from King Jim or Kokuyo in Japan.

Lifting each paper, clipping or printout from a folder and reading it was like travelling in a faulty time machine, bouncing from glorious success to tragic failure, with all sorts of mundane everyday moments in between.

The experience wasn’t sad. Or nostalgic. Maybe it’s because we’re in the midst of a pandemic. Holding onto what is good in life. Because the whole thing felt glorious.

I tend not to want to look back. I fear that I’ll obsess over the things that went wrong. The projects I didn’t finish. The stuff that didn’t work out. But, it seems like I’m better, and far more productive, than I ever gave myself credit for.

It’s a cliché to say we are too hard on ourselves. But, it’s also true.

We internalise so many negative images of ourselves. And we accept the toxicity of the modern culture of work. Which asks us to focus on our weaknesses. We obsess about the reasons our bosses and clients give for not paying us what we believe we’re worth. Then there’s the hustle culture. The idea that we have to punish ourselves with sleepless nights followed by draining coffee-enabled days before we deserve success.

Or the way all the talk of productivity lures us into thinking that what matters is how many things we can tick off the endless to-do lists rather than how well we can focus our energy on the relatively few things that really matter.

This time, however, all that stuff just faded away.

What I learnt over the weekend, what I’d like to say to you, is this.

So much of what you are currently doing is better than you think it is. Many of your ideas are more interesting than your family, friends and work colleagues give you credit for. One day, you’ll look back on the previous year or so of your life and realise it created some your most precious memories.

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Either/Or Thinking

It’s been a very long time since I graded academic assignments. It must be different now. I remember the piles of paper. Staples in every top left corner. Footnotes at the bottom of each page. A red pen in hand as I scanned the double-spaced text, looking for the strengths and weaknesses in each student’s ideas.

One sure way to lose marks back then was to display any sign of what we called either/or thinking.

Either/or thinking, or binary opposition, was considered to be a sign of weak research at best and deceptive argument-making at worst. Because most things in the world are not simply a choice between two, and only two, possibilities.

Pepsi or Coke feels like the classic example of this. Of course, there were always more flavours of cola on offer, if you were curious enough to look.

In philosophy this is called a false dilemma or false dichotomy. It’s also called binary thinking: presenting a choice between two ideas, A or B, when there’s another choice, C, and maybe D and E as well.

In order to arrive at either/or you must bring into play some logical sleight of hand. You leave out alternatives. You eliminate subtle differences. You reduce or hide complexity. And you present some reason why it need not all be included, usually by reference to an abstraction that is hard to refute, such as the alternatives being complicated or impractical.

In a similar way, either/or thinking can be used to avoid thinking deeply about complex problems. When there are only two choices, you can go with your gut instinct, picking the one that feels right to you. But as soon as other possibilities are considered, deeper thought is required.

Ultimately, either/or thinking lets you divide the world into simple categories. Like good or bad.

Or divide people.

The Alternative

The obvious alternative is to resist the temptation to present only two choices when there are more. Stop suggesting there are two sides, two ideas, two choices, or two competing ideologies when there are many.

The more radical alternative, especially in our moment in history, is to embrace the many.

Both/and thinking tries to do this. It’s a different approach to truth. Because the answers we need might not even exist yet. The seeds of the future could be contained within competing ideas.

The conversational reflex of both/and is to begin with a yes.

Yes, and…

To be inclusive, generative, open-ended, and hospitable in dialogue. Because if our truths are to reflect reality, then they must reflect something that is intricately complex and beautifully interconnected.

We Need Hope

Our world is troubled at the moment. There are signs of hope amidst the chaos. But it feels like we need to reset the way we talk to other. To change our preferences. To reconsider how our language shapes our ability to find sustainable solutions to the problems we share.

It’s time to drop the either/or and bring back the both/and.

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The Science Of Well-Being

Get up, throw together some breakfast (muesli and berries in a bowl with yogurt and some home-smoked bacon on yesterday’s sourdough bread), struggle to write some words, sip the coffee that has gone cold while staring out the window wondering when then next ambulance would pass, force myself to make and eat lunch, and then wash up before finally collapsing in a supine heap on the sofa while trying to talk myself into going for a walk and resisting the urge to start thinking about what to cook for dinner, or worse, because there are so many bad things to think about.

During the height of the lockdown and quarantine, my days settled into a predictable pattern. It wasn’t awful. Life can get a lot worse. But, it was most definitely a grind. Things that used to be fun, like writing, cooking, walking and even spending time with my family, felt like a burden. Even reading, watching films or playing guitar didn’t bring me any joy.

Well-Being In A Time Of Pandemic

I don’t even remember when the digital gods offered me the Science of Well-Being course. However, a few weeks of learning what recent research has to say about happiness and having a good mindset felt like the perfect reprieve from the pandemic blues.

Coursera is a kind of Netflix for university courses. Signing up is pretty easy. It’s free to join and there are monthly plans if you want a certificate for your studies or if you would like to sign up to longer programmes. After a few clicks, I was in.

How The Course Is Delivered

The first six weeks of the course involved watching video lectures and doing some reading. There’s a generous number of links to academic papers, if you want to read more deeply about the research mentioned in the lectures, and there’s a short test at the end of each week.

The videos are mostly recorded in a campus seminar setting. Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology at Yale and a specialist in cognitive science, is an engaging speaker. The material is fascinating. The pace of delivery and the amount of work are just right to keep you engaged but not overwhelmed.

But, you do have to wade through a lot, as this course was designed originally for undergraduate students and many of the examples are relevant to their stage of life (getting good grades, etc).

The course ends with a four-week personal assignment (more details below) and then a reflection exercise where you look back over the course and what you’ve learnt.

The Power Of Rewirement

Neuroplasticity is the term for our brain’s ability to rewire itself. Older models of the brain assumed that there was a fixed structure, so things like personality, intelligence and memory were sort of set, and then just decayed as you got older.

However, it turns out this isn’t true.

Our brains can be reshaped. Habits and practice change the physical structure of the brain. That’s why a piano player’s brain looks different on a scan to a trumpet player’s.

Recent research into positive emotions suggests that we can make ourselves feel better by changing our behaviour. We can almost hack our way to happiness (I explored some of this in my series on creativity and mental health).

The Science of Well-Being explores how habits can help you to rewire your brain. Such good habits can be physical activities, like sleep or exercise, choices, like opting for spending your money on experiences rather than things, mindsets, like gratitude or not comparing yourself to others, and social practices, like kindness and being socially connected.

It also gives you plenty of strategies for making these kinds of habits stick, like developing goals, identifying and working around obstacles, and even designing the environment around you so that it supports you and the changes you want to make.

The Great Rewirement Experiment

The final four weeks of the course involve a personal experiment. You choose one of the insights from the course and apply it daily, trying to build a new well-being habit.

I opted for applying character strengths based on the VIA Institute survey (here’s something about this from a few weeks ago). This meant trying to utilise as many of the top character strengths from that test in my daily life.

I managed to do this for 23 out of the 28 days and didn’t miss two days in a row. The most fascinating aspect was going through all my projects and recurring commitments and thinking about how my character strengths fit into them. For a few projects, and things I’d like to do in the future, I even changed the parameters of the project to include the strengths in more ways.

However, the feeling that this induced wasn’t something I’d describe as happiness.

Did It Make Me Happier?

At the start of the course, you’re asked to take two tests that measure your happiness. On the PERMA survey, I got 6.69 out of a possible 10, and my Authentic Happiness Score was 2.58 out of 5. By the end of the course I’d scored 8.4 and 4.29, respectively.

So, according to the academically validated tests, I’m happier.

But, do I feel happier? Well, yes, sort of. What happiness looks like in our pared-down pandemic lives is difficult to judge. I’m certainly dancing and laughing more often, and enjoying long spells of reading and playing the guitar.

Perhaps more than happiness, I feel a greater sense of agency and power. I already owned everything I had to do, but doing the course, and especially the four-week assignment, drove home the feeling that the things I was doing, and the life choices I’d made to get here, authentically belonged to me.

A Few Realisations

Before doing this course, I tended to track mainly physical habits. Tracking them was largely a quantitative game. Walk 10,000 steps, get 8 hours sleep, or read for an hour, yes or no, every day.

The course made me look harder at how I tracked my mental habits and I realised I had to do more than just keep a numerical tally. I was already doing a daily gratitude habit, for example, but that was just listing three things every day.

Mindset maintenance requires more than just ticking things off a list.

Perhaps my biggest realisation was that many of my habits were a form of preparation for well-being. They create the conditions necessary for happiness. But habits like applying my character strengths actually bring the science of well-being inside the daily work itself.

So, I find myself starting my daily routines by asking new questions. How can I make cooking an act of learning? How can I bring an appreciation of beauty and excellence to how I set up my writing station and create work like this? How do I keep feeding my sense of curiosity when my daily environment doesn’t change much?

Once you accept that your mind can be reshaped and that your choices can play a role in that reshaping, then it’s fascinating to explore the ways you can use habits to alter your mindset and your mood.

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