What I've Learned So Far

I’ve written before about the great new Worldchanging book that I hope is already populating your coffee table and your imagination even now. (If not, there’s a perfect chance to buy it tonight — the 29th — so read on!) Last night I got to meet the bulk of the Worldchanging staff (i.e., the book’s editors) at a salon-style party here in Austin. These folks — Alex Steffen, Sarah Rich, and Tessa Levine-Sauerhoff — are on the road for a month’s worth of events supporting the launch of Worldchanging the book and to get the word out about the whole concept of Worldchanging the organization. great people, great book, great cause — and a great time was had by all. I predict the same for tonight’s book signing, slated for 7 p.m. at Bookpeople. Y’all really need to get down there and check it out.

Meantime, go read some bloggy goodness, at both the Austin Worldchanging site and the Worldchanging mothership.

Last night’s event, I should mention, was put on by Solar Austin, and their hospitality could not have been nicer; the connection between Solar Austin and Worldchanging comes in the person of Jon Lebkowsky, whom I also got to meet last night. It’s always pleasant to shake hands and talk with someone whose blog you’ve been reading for ages.

More about Worldchanging anon . . .

A friend put me onto Russell’s a few months ago, and since then I’ve been back periodically, often to ply my kids with the bakery’s waaaaaaaay-above-average cinnamon rolls. They also have good coffee, and I can verify that their fruit-flavored birthday cakes are creamy and fluffy and altogether outstanding. This is the type of bakery you would go to for a wedding cake.

I’m thinking of this afresh because I stopped by Russell’s last week to pick up some pies for Thanksgiving. I mean, when you have family coming into town for Thanksgiving, the last thing you want to do is run out of pie. The apple pie was good enough that I didn’t even wait for Thanksgiving itself to roll around before I dived right in. (I did this while fending off the dagger-stares of my lovely wife, who has a greater sense of propriety in these things.) As I write this, I’ve just had a largish dinner and a couple of gooey, hot chocolate cookies. If you put another Russell’s apple pie in front of me, I might yet try to eat a quarter of it.

And then there was . . . the pumpkin bourbon pecan pie. “Pie” isn’t quite right — it was a little more like a custard tart — but wow was it something. Rich? Like Croesus, if you’re into that sort of thing. Bourbon-y? Oh sweet yes. Delicious? Mmm-hmmm.

If you’re in Austin and you like you some good baked goods, check out Russell’s. Oh, and they also apparently serve sandwiches and whatnot for lunch, not that I would notice in my obsessive quest for the fruits of the baker’s art. Anyway, here’s their menu.

Came across this story last week and meant to post about it then . . . but I got distracted:

Driven to distraction by technology
by Ina Fried, CNET News.com

The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state. [...]

Once I did sit down to read it straight through, it led me to this even more interesting interview with Dr. Edward Hallowell, who specializes in human cognitive disorders:

Why can’t you pay attention anymore?
By Alorie Gilbert

The interview focuses on what Hallowell calls Attention Deficit Trait (ADT) which is the acquired cousin of the pathological Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

Q: What is ADT?
Hallowell: It’s sort of like the normal version of attention deficit disorder. But it’s a condition induced by modern life, in which you’ve become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving.

Now, I have no idea whether ADD applies to me as a clinical condition, but I do know that my attention span is ridiculously short, and that I’m highly susceptible to the sin of distraction. I like using that term — sin — because to me it implies “wrong relation”. It’s the opposite of righteousness, which means “right relation”. The kind of underachievement that Hallowell talks about — and that certainly applies to me — is a symptom of living in a state of wrong relation with yourself. You could be doing so much more, but for a variety of reasons, the distractions of the world crowd out your best impulses and the best uses of your best faculties. Instead of achieving something meaningful for yourself and the world, you fritter your days away in a frenzy of busy-ness.

(For “you” and “your” read “I” and “my”.)

The real challenge in using modern technology is to take advantage of the richness that it brings us. You can start right here and go straight to one of Samuel Johnson’s great essays, or Charlie Stross’s head-trip of a novel, Accelerando, or — well, you don’t need me to tell you about the neatest things on the Internet. We all take advantage of e-mail and news updates and everything else, grand or petty, that online access offers. The problem is that we often take advantage of it too much, too often, and too much to the exclusion of real, deep work.

One item of special importance from Hallowell’s interview is his comment on fear:

Q: You say fear can really rev up ADT? How so?
Hallowell: When you’re in a state of high-level fear, your brain devotes much of its resources to surviving. You go into survival mode. The lower centers of the brain recruit the higher centers of the brain to make sure you’re not going to get killed. And you get a big volt of adrenaline and cortisol, and you go into very much black-and-white thinking, on or off, up or down.

You lose the functions I was talking about earlier: flexibility; ability to see shades of gray, deal with uncertainty, have a sense of humor, entertain new ideas. All of that goes out the window, and you’re just wanting to fix it, lest you be annihilated. That’s good if you’re being chased by a sabertooth tiger. It’s not good if you’re in your average daily work environment at IBM.

In my over-committed life, I face this all the time. Instead of immersing myself in some grand project — and I’m spoiled to say that I have several to chose from — I ruin my time, my ease, and my sense of humor by worrying about the next pressing deadline.

Hallowell’s closing comment could also be read as an indictment aimed at me:

If you’re just paying attention to trivial e-mails for the majority of your time, you’re wasting time and mental energy. It’s the great seduction of the information age. You can create the illusion of doing work and of being productive and creative when you’re not. You’re just treading water.

My own problems with this sent me to Hallowell’s site and the list of his recent books. Two of them, Delivered from Distraction and CrazyBusy, appealed to me, and there were enough thoughtful, highly positive reviews of them on Amazon that I just bought them both. I’ll let you know what I think of them once I’ve read them.

How is it for you these days — distracted, focused, or what?

Tom Burke of E3G offers this at openDemocracy:

Climate change: time to get real

My take is that Burke addresses the major problem — lack of political will — accurately. His prescription to fix it is a bit under-detailed, but all in all he has the right idea. Worth reading.

Learn this like a mantra: Climate change is real, it’s happening now and can only get worse without serious intervention right away, and governments have to be part of the solution. The good news is that it will be cheaper to mitigate climate change than it will be to experience the full brunt of its ill effects.

At times I have remarked on my liking — unusual for a native-born American — for the sport of cricket. Well, the biggest rivalry in the sport, Australia versus England, is being played out right now in Brisbane. The short version: Australia is giving England a merciless hiding.

England won this hallowed series/grudge match, which is called The Ashes, in the English summer of 2005. I listened to the whole thing via Internet radio, and England’s unexpected win was gripping. I don’t think they’ll be repeating that sports miracle this time.

Match scorecard, Test No. 1817, Australia v England.

Briefly, the new James Bond film = excellent. My wife and I both liked it, and it confirms the high opinion we formed of Daniel Craig from watching Layer Cake. Well worth your while.

How much junk do you have in your garage? Your attic? Your basement? Your hall closet? Your desk? Your inbox? Your head? My own answer for myself: still too much, but it’s getting better.

Down the street from a house we used to rent is a carport filled with junk. The carport is attached to a little green house, but you don’t notice the house so much as the boxes, cartons, and other jumbled stuff stacked up in the carport. When I want it to, my morning commute takes me that way, and I like to pass down that street for old times’ sake. The carport pile was already there when we lived in the house four years ago, and since then it has only grown. Among everthing else, there are more plastic buckets and an old piece of exercise equipment — enough extra junk that it has all spilled onto the front porch and an uncovered area beside the carport. But it hasn’t exactly spilled, since the configuration is obviously precise. Only waterproof buckets sit exposed to the weather, and there are walkways through the pile to the doorways. This is tended junk.

To know all is to forgive all, and no doubt if I knew the situation of the people inside, the mess outside would make more sense. Maybe Papa is a packrat but an invalid, and he’s made Mama promise that she won’t throw out any of his “things”. She humors him. But short of knowing the facts behind this speculation, it’s clear that the people in the house should not do this — should not live like this. Every day that junk sits in plain view brings down their own property values and others’, which can’t make them too popular with the neighbors. The pile is an eyesore, and it must attract rodents and other vermin. It is all kept out of any rain that falls straight down, but otherwise it is hardly protected from the elements. What’s more, if those householders’ experience is like mine, this pile of junk surely damages their psyches. When you weed the physical junk out of your life, you help to weed the mental junk out of your mind. In fact, physical junk is usually, in my experience, merely the outward manifestation of an inward flaw.

But let’s turn the lens around and point it at ourselves. These folks’ flaws are out there for all to see. I have faced some of these same demons, but mostly out of the public view. My junk is hidden from the world, both because I have an enclosed garage and because my greatest accumulations of junk are in my own papers, which are neatly tucked into a groaning file cabinet, and my own mind, which is not-so-neatly stuffed with the mental scree I’ve been carrying around for years.

Last week I went through the stacks in my garage and disposed of two boxes’ worth of material from my high school days. It’s amazing how a skeptical eye and a ready trash can will help you turn two or three boxes of mementos or papers or unsorted crap into half a box of things you actually do want to keep. I’ve been at this project for many months, dribbling through my boxes one by one, turning up fresh garbage to throw away, fresh paper to recycle, fresh donations for Goodwill, even “new” toys for my kids. Just today my children played a game of “Battleship” with their cousin — on the same game set that my sister and I used when we were young. Things like this bring me pleasant memories; other items bring me unpleasant reminders of my foibles or my past failures. Some of the instructive reminders I save, but most I throw away. I had to live through the humiliations of junior high and high school once, so why would I want to do it again? I save the trophies and love letters, but discard the rest.

Somewhere I came across a good idea to help you go through a large assortment of things, whether a desk’s worth or a warehouse’s worth, by a very simple system of binary sorting. First you divide everything into two piles: “trash” and “not trash”. That’s pretty straightforward, and it saves you from having to decide the final destination of each non-trash item you encounter. You bin the rubbish and leave the rest in neatish stacks. Then you go back through from the beginning and divide everything into two new piles: “donate” and “don’t donate”. You can repeat the process for “delegate” and “don’t delegate”, “file” and “don’t file”, “put to use” and “store for later”. Finally you are left with a small stack of things that require real action to solve. Follow this process out to its conclusion et voila — a clean desk, warehouse, garage, . . . or carport.

My short-term goal is to clear one side of my garage so that my wife can park her new car out of the weather. She takes the kids to school in the morning, and it will be more comfortable for them to pile in a car that has been in out of the cold all night. Beyond that, I want the satisfaction of handling every single thing I own and putting it into some sort of filing or storage system, even if that system is imperfect. As it stands, there are still a few areas of the garage that would be labeled “He Be Dragons” on the old maps. I won’t uncover all of them tomorrow (no, not even on the long Thanksgiving weekend), but little by little fills the pot — or, in this case, empties the garage.

I wonder how often the folks who have packed that carport think about all that junk sitting out there. Maybe they are to the point of the morbidly obese person or the problem drinker who is simply beyond caring, ready to die in a condition far from ideal. But I need not wonder about the benefits of my own efforts to clean my garage. It’s such a small thing, you know, to dispose of a box; yet if it be truly a small thing, why do I feel so much relief every time another box is gone? Why does it give me a mild thrill each time I fill the garbage bin yet again with detritus from my bygone days? I think it’s because getting rid of this stuff, and viewing the foibles from my past along the way, helps me to be honest with myself. It reminds me of the dreams I used to have, whether worthy or unworthy. For as long as the boxes sit there unexamined, they fester; as soon as I open them up and clean them out, my mind gets a little freer. So far, this routine has never gotten old: the more I do it, the freer I feel. My wish for the folks with the junky carport is that they, too, will someday feel the same freedom.

What’s the junk in your garage?

I’ve been meaning to write about the improved solar rebate program from Austin Energy, but my pal Redneck Mother — owner of a photovoltaically equipped house, she is — beat me to it.

The sun: not just for warming the globe

A British government minister said that British grocery shoppers should remove excess packaging from their groceries and leave it at the till. Grocers . . . aren’t so happy with this ploy. But who knows? — maybe this government-suggested bit of civic action will lead to less wasteful packaging, which can only benefit the environment.

‘The government told us to do it’ from the Guardian.

“The most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do.”

–Friedrich Nietzsche

(Confession: I do this. You?)