Tag: Moblog

Posted from the phone

Letting go..

There’s no trying new things without letting some things go.

There’s no new life, if there’s no death.

There’s no bandwidth to explore new books, genres, TV shows, people, if we’re not ready to abandon the ones that turn stale, or we grow out of, or finished.

Bandwidth is finite. Cognitivo capacity is finite. Time is finite.

A core constraint on growing, changing, exploring, is our reluctance to let go of some of what we have and are.

Create space by letting some mediocre stuff go. Then fill it with something new, untested, unusual. If it fits, great. If it doesn’t, chuck it and try again. Something new, untested, unusual.

Why did the sulking end?

Little S was sulking yesterday afternoon.

I saw him standing outside his house, doing nothing, looking morose. I know that look. That’s almost exactly how I used to sulk.

Later in the evening, he came over for a bit of play and chat, sans parents.

I asked him how/why did the sulking session end?

“My legs started hurting”

I love the honesty in kids 🙂

Ankle pain..

.. is a sign of weekend spent well.

Started yesterday with the year’s best time at the parkrun. Only by 2 secs, but on a very windy day.

Then walked the boys, fixed the bathroom door, almost fixed the shower holder, did a bit of weeding, and played with the boy in the backyard.

Ended the day totally knackered, with almost 18000 steps, and an aching ankle. Happy but hurt.

Continue reading Ankle pain..

Is Ctrl+Z handicapping us in the real world?

Has an easy undo feature trained us to work at high-speed but low focus?

When it’s always easy to undo and correct, there’s no reason to focus on getting things right, or even thinking things through before doing them.

Handwriting (or typing on a typewriter) a document meant being focused on the task because any mistakes meant ugly cross marks or rewriting the page.

Similarly, working with physical objects – in a carpentry class in college, or cooking a simple dish – required strong focus. A wrong cut in a wood slab meant a wasted slab or a hacked joint. A dish could end up overcooked or unsalted.

But when working on a computer, any errors due to a lack of attention can easily be rectified with a simple undo, removing the need for full focus in the moment.

As we (I) spend more of our time—work and leisure—on computers, we may have trained ourselves to expect the undo feature everywhere.

This mental training (‘all errors are undoable’) creeps into our non-computer activities and interactions. We may be forgetting to stay fully focused in the moment, to think ahead (before we speak/do), and thus may be becoming more inefficient/incapable than before.

Continue reading Is Ctrl+Z handicapping us in the real world?