A.R. Williams's Blog, page 26

Truly, the Outer Limits of Philosophy

Verizon.

Verizon, which calls me up to remind me that I haven’t returned the equipment for which they promised to send a UPS box for.

Verizon, which has an unfindable address on their website, just in case you want to drive to BFE Virginia to drop off your equipment to get them to stop calling you.

Verizon, which has a phone number alongside that unfindable address, which goes to their wireless store, a location which does not accept equipment.

Verizon, where the employees at their wireless stores are cheerful and offer to connect you to their customer service line.

Verizon, where the customer service line will randomly hang up on you after you wait an eon to speak to someone.

Verizon, where the customer service line will lose you on hold indefinitely.

Verizon, which will never ever ever again enjoy my business.

I generally avoid anger.  I don’t like being angry.  I have conversations with myself about everyone doing the best they can with what they’ve got.  It didn’t work today.

So I’m going to sit down and breathe into my stomach and hope that the bile eases up.

There is no Trying in Baseball

You will never get where you want to be by trying harder.

Try to float and you sink.

Trying to forgive isn’t forgiveness.

Trying to show up isn’t showing up.

Trying to eat healthy just means that you’re eating crap and feeling bad about it.

Trying to be patient isn’t patience.

And you certainly cannot try your way into Om.

Trying is a word that sits between the poles of success and failure, and assumes that one can, through sheer effort of will, walk closer to success and put a greater distance between yourself and failure.  There is no trying, there is only doing or not doing.  Allowing or refusing.

 ω

One of the hallmarks of depression is a heightened awareness of how little control you have over your life. It is also a gift. As you crawl out from underneath the black cloud, in theory you regain a sense of control over your world and your experience of it.

Alternately, you come to the conclusion that control is an illusion, and things like sunshine and thunderstorms and creme brulee are comprised of grace. You can’t earn your way to them, you can’t want it bad enough. My wanting can’t extend backwards to make the genius that invented creme brulee work harder at perfecting custard. Someone did. That’s it. And that I can experience it is nothing short of evidence that the Universe is benevolent. Certainly there is no requirement of physics that there should be raspberries. Or poetry. Or good dreams. Or even love. Love is not required for the furthering of the species.

I don’t know why there’s grace. It certainly isn’t promised or required and it isn’t the kind of thing that you can try your way into. It just is. You can either accept and be grateful or refuse and carry on with trying.

To question whether or not you’ve earned grace is just silly. Of course you didn’t earn it.

You are loved. It is impossible to earn love. If you could, don’t you think we’d all choose to be good enough to avoid heartbreak? You can’t make someone love you, no matter how hard you try. You can’t make someone stop loving you either. You can work real hard at breaking their trust or hurting them so badly that they have no choice but to walk away, but love is love. It either is or it isn’t. Like the way a tornado can be there one second and evaporate the next with no explanation or apology.

It’s better this way. Capricious, but better.

If you have to be good enough for love, then any slip means that your status can be taken away.

And maybe whoever loves you won’t love you forever. It happens. But what a gift for as long as it is given. Your job is not to hold on, or to try to hold on; your job is to accept and wonder and be grateful.

 ω

There is no trying in Om.

I know. I tried to try my way into it for a long time. I tried to try my way into the Four Agreements. It didn’t work. Try implies a gap between yourself and the thing. and then, if you’re lucky, you slip from a state of not understanding into understanding and you realize that you never had to try, you just had to allow.

Trust

Reblogged from The Daily Headache:

"You have a hard time trusting."

Heard that before? It's kind of a dumb thing to say. Sort of like, "The sky is blue," or "Things fall if you drop them."

Duh.

It's just a statement. Is there anything in particular I was ever supposed to do about it? Was there anything you were expected to do?

Trust through an effort of will?

Read more… 174 more words

A Name for Everything

There are many ways in which I’m just super dense.  For example, on some level, I just don’t get why there has to be a name for everything before it’s a thing.  A name, a process, and an SOP and suddenly something is legit whereas if you just called it common sense and moved on, you could save a lot of paper.

Yes, I know.  Common sense isn’t so common.

Project Management and the PMBOK.

How on earth did anyone get anything done before there was the PMP certification and the PMBOK to remind you that teams need to talk to each other and deadlines are important?  Someone somewhere is making a boatload of money off of having given some pretty basic principles a name and matching them up with a certification.

Lean Six Sigma

I hate to be the first to say this out loud, but people don’t conform to the level of predictability and perfection as a robot on the floor of a Toyota plant.  I’ve seen a black-belt Lean Six Sigma pro look at a process that was all about the people and find herself unable to help.  Perfection is a reasonable goal when you’re talking about a robot screwing a bolt into a sheet of metal.  People, however, refuse to present the same set of circumstances every day and require flexibility, a nuanced understanding, and multiple avenues to achieving the same end.

Agile

Now this is one management thing that I can get behind.  Even if I am saddened that a group of smart people had to sit down in a room and come up with a manifesto in order for these values to be recognized as a legitimate approach.

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Seriously?  We now need an ether-sanctioned “thing” to tell us that plans rarely survive first contact with reality and that accomplishing something means reacting constructively to change?  No one knew that before?  Oh, right.  Because they were so wedded to the PMBOK and the way things are “supposed” to be that they hadn’t noticed how infrequently reality corresponds to what we think it is “supposed” to be.

Somehow it seems like the working world is so wrapped up in its SOPs and Manuals and Processes and Guidelines and Handbooks that it doesn’t even matter what’s produced anymore.  And we kind of like it that way.  Everyone can walk around the office bumping into walls justifying their daily bread with sub-paragraph 3.8.18 of this regulation or that manual and the fact that nothing ever gets done is nobody’s damn fault because for all that the PMBOK made sure that the deadlines were met, the thing that we most needed done still isn’t up and running.

But hey, we all get to take home a paycheck, right?

And most of us live in terror that we’ll get found out for making money for doing nothing tangible.

Sometimes I wonder how long this particular expression of capitalism is going to hold up.  It seems like a glass house just waiting for a good stoning.

Can I be allowed some translations?  Please feel free to add your own…

Business Process Improvement – we’re doing the right thing in the wrong way, so let’s get it un-f*cked so we can go home feeling like we accomplished something.
Reorganization – we’re alphabetizing the spices while the roof is on fire.  Hey, it needed to be done.
Culture – the behaviors and values the boss wishes everyone else was but doesn’t demonstrate him/herself.
Survey – let’s spend money asking questions we don’t want the answer to in such a way as we don’t get to the truth so we can measure it again next year and hope that the results are slightly different because we talked about the data in a couple of meetings.
Big Data – the world is complicated – too complicated for us to figure out in the limited time that we’ve got.  Let’s mush up all the information we can possibly get our hands on and see if anything interesting comes out of the aggregation.  With this much computing power, we might as well use it for something.
Outside the Box – make us feel brave by suggesting something that is just a little bit new.  By outside the box, we really mean like the label stuck on the outside of the box.
We need Smart people – we need people who are smart enough.  Smart enough to do what we say with out asking too many questions, not smart enough to see through our BS.
Exit Strategy – when this goes arse over teakettle, how are we going to keep from going down with the project.
Risk Mitigation – we’re going to move so slowly in the right direction that there’s no chance in hell that anything is ever going to happen.
Risk tolerance – None.  Don’t eff up the bottom line.
Proactive – Don’t make me tell you what to do, but God help you if you do the wrong thing.  And by wrong thing I mean something I hadn’t already thought of doing myself.
Paradigm Shift – Apparently there was a metaphorical earthquake with a tornado thrown in for good measure all on the same day.  It happened a good six months ago, but we’re just now figuring out that the roof is gone and the walls are cracked.
Synergy – Talk to people outside your department.  But not too much.  Or too often.  Maybe at the company picnic.  Assuming we have one this year.
Efficiencies – Maybe it is time to stop having six different people do the same thing when two people working together might be able to get it done once and then move on.
Bandwidth – My head is full, damn it, and I simply cannot absorb another crisis today.  Come back when I’m dead.
Best Practices – Someone gave this process a name, so we’re going to appropriate it, make it official, and skip the part where we think an approach through ourselves.
Adding Value – This effort was worth the money you put into it.  Well, it really wasn’t.  If you’d cleared up the persistent question of who’s in charge and what approval you needed to fix the issue, then you could have done it yourself.  But you didn’t and now you need to feel good about spending the money and we need to feel good about taking it.

Loyalty Is Hard

Reblogged from Scott Williams:

Most of us can count on one hand the number of authentic, lifelong friendships we have. We would like to believe our friends at work and play are deep and meaningful but we know, because it has happened before, that after we leave we will gradually lose contact with people we have cared about. This is a natural, even healthy part of life.

Read more… 721 more words

Somehow, this guy always shows up with exactly the reminder I need.

Enough, Again

The thing is, even if you reject the idea that women need to be skinny to be attractive and worthy of love, there are still so many ways we are told we are less than. You’re not strong enough, you care too much about your looks, you care too little, you need a makeover, you have a lame job, your house isn’t pretty, your kids aren’t achieving enough… First they sell us on all our defects and then they sell us all the “fixes.” (Including, you know, Dove.) But you’ll never be able to buy “enough.” The great irony is that probably the best way to fix yourself is to stop fixing things. You’re not broken. I’m not broken. Sure, I can improve. Of course I can. I hope I can. But seeking to refine yourself is different than seeing yourself as inherently flawed.

I found this over at The Great Fitness Experiment, the bolding is mine.  This funny lady is writing for a female audience, but I’m going to get bold and talk to a unisex audience…  It isn’t just the women who have trouble with arbitrary and shifting standards.

You are not broken.

Do you hear me?  Enough doesn’t exist.  You can either spend your whole life trying to meet a measure that is always going to be out of reach because you’re ALWAYS going to move it before you get there; or you can stop asking the stupid effing question.  We’re asking whether or not we’re strong enough, brave enough, good enough, fit enough, attractive enough, driven enough, successful enough, rich enough and they are all the wrong question.

Change the question and everything changes with it.

Here are the only questions that matter:

1) What is the most important thing I can do today to move myself in the direction of where I want to be?

2) What next?

3) Where do I need to show up in order to try?

I don’t give a rat’s diseased ass where you’ve been, what you’ve done, how you think you failed.  What is behind you doesn’t matter (excepting my standard caveat: if it involves willfully hurting the defenseless because you think you are entitled to enjoying someone else’s pain, then I care.)  How you’ve failed is irrelevant.  You’re here now.  Can you let go of your BS, ephemeral measures; the self-criticism that keeps you swaddled up in reasons why you’re this, that, or the other thing?  Can you let yourself be wrong about your opinion of yourself and see where asking a different question will take you?

There is someone out there who loves you, exactly as you are.  Someone who isn’t measuring you and deciding what you’re worth or what you deserve or if you are good enough.  Someone operating in a binary system, where your name is enough to light up the 1 and your absence is enough to darken the 0.  Do you really want to waste time thinking about whether you deserve that kind of acceptance, when you could be finding some respite in it instead?  Room to breathe, permission to give up in order to be able to keep going?

For the love of Elvis, if the question you are asking isn’t getting you any further, ask a new bloody effing question.

 

Tips for Talking To Men And Attracting Them Like Crazy

Reblogged from Scott Williams:

from here: "Most women dream of the day they will attract the man of their dreams. Many describe a man who is “tall, dark, handsome, (preferably) rich, sensitive, loves kids, has an advanced degree and loves his mom.” I've described this same man, listened to my friends describe men of similar ilk and pondered, plotted and schemed about how to meet this mystery man.

Read more… 868 more words

This:

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

Of Marx, Mice, and Men

I wish we could revisit the issues Marx identified and talk about the need to address them without getting into an argument about whether or not Communism, Socialism, or Capitalism is the right answer to structuring society. The alienation Marx talks about – a human cog in an industrial machine struggling with the loss of autonomy or ownership that is part and parcel of being a cog, wither sentient or not – is both profoundly pervasive and represents a massive waste of human potential.

It isn’t just factory workers that experience this break between their sense of self-determination and the reality of their working life. As the factory model of production has been applied to office work, your “knowledge” workers are dealing with the same sense of alienation and isolation that Marx identified in the proletariat.

How many of the people in your little world love their jobs? I bet not many. Personally, I know one – an ESL teacher for adults. Everyone else I know who is working for someone else is pretty much miserable.

One of my favorite tidbits about antidepressants (and one I’ve probably mentioned here before) is how mice are used in the first trials to see if an antidepressant has a chance of being effective. Mice hate water. Researchers give the compound and a placebo to the mice. Placebo mice give up quickly. The mice given an effective compound swim for longer. Gives the term “dead in the water” a whole new meaning.

Basically, antidepressants are there to help us do stuff we hate to do for longer – to keep swimming when we most want to give up.

As long as there is money to be made by molding human beings into cogs, I suppose it is going to go on much as before. I mean really, it’s good money for the entities that already have it. We willingly get addicted to credit cards and rewards before payment, then feel like we’re trapped by our burden of debt. Add the anti-depressants in to the mix and you have generation after generation of self-lobotomized people moving piles of paper from one side of their desk to the other. People who would rather consume than create because they don’t know how to create anymore.

I really wish I could believe in a grand puppet master cracking his knuckles, swimming in his gold, and orchestrating it all. Unfortunately, I think we’ve all been very busy with our evolutionary programming for conformity, our hunter-gatherer hunger for more stuff, and our desire for immediate gratification. No one had to herd us into the slaughterhouse: we went willingly. And this time there isn’t much popular support for a revolution for we did it to ourselves. As much as we hate what we’ve become and what we have to do to get by, we envy those who are reaping the benefits of this massive societal agreement.

The trouble is that no one knows what else to do. We don’t want to go back to the ways we kept busy when we were unaffiliated tribes, scraping hides for clothing, grinding our own corn, and riding out every day to hunt for dinner.

Um. Wait. Riding out every day sounds like it would be pretty okay.

Never mind. The point stands. Where we’ve been doesn’t sound like a good plan. Since there is very little that is brand new, what does that leave us with? I don’t think the cottage industries represented on etsy are 100% viable for all the people that want to be the next wedding dress designer/swanky panty maker/etc. The real cost of producing those goods make them out of reach to the numbers of people that would be required to sustain the volume of wold-be creators.

Clearly, I’m not the leading expert on what next. I’m just not sure how much longer we’re going to pretend that what we’ve got is the right answer.

The Philosopher’s Toothache

It is said that there was never a philosopher yet that could bear a toothache gracefully.  I’m going to add moving to that list.  My bookshelf has been abandoned.  All the books that make up an identity, both from what I’ve ingested and what I aspire to read but haven’t gotten around to, are in boxes.

I’m moving in with a friend and I suspect it is going to be chaotic for a good long while.  I also suspect that my philosophy is going to abandon me (or I abandon it) until my bed is made up in the new place, I know where my camera and my computer are, and I have a place for my odd collection of talismans that make a place mine.  The dog looks at me like Really Lady?  Again?

Yes.  Again.

The things I say to myself aren’t working.

Look, there is only so much you can control here.  Do what you can and let go of the rest.

Surrender.

There will be a time after this.  All you have to do is breathe until you get there.

You can’t fight this.  Let yourself go under it instead of trying to keep your head above the water.

Aye right.  The problem is rarely that we don’t know what to do, it’s our expectation of there being a how involved.   There’s no how in surrender.  Either you do or you don’t.

I haven’t surrendered yet, but I’d better get around to it quickly.

Signs

I was driving yesterday and wondering how I was going to hold it all together for long enough to get to pay day.  There’s a move happening, uncertainty with the job, some brand new things happening between my ears… and I was thinking I just don’t know how I’m going to pull this week off.

Then I got home to a letter from my best friend.  I don’t know how she managed to pull it off, but there in the mail was everything I needed to make it through until Friday.  Both in the support and in what felt like a sign.

It’s going to be okay.

I don’t know much about angels, at least not in the traditional winged sort of way.  This is what I do think: obey every generous impulse you get.  You never know what is going on with other people, and what might seem like a little thing to you becomes a nudge from the Divine/Universe/Source/God(ess)/Whatever you want to call It, a sign to the recipient that it’s safe to take a deep breath and keep on.

Nothing turns out perfectly, not for anyone.  There are varying and assorted degrees of imperfect, but no one gets there.  Our humanity is not defined by achievement, but by that stupid will to life that survives on the thinnest of diets.  Achievement is nice, but the beauty is in the trying.  Don’t be afraid to give someone else a nudge in the direction of keeping calm and carrying on.  You don’t know how much it means.