Why I'm Happy Problem Solving

Just about every piece of technology I usually rely on for my work has had some significant glitch in the last two or three days. It's probably because I'm actually doing the work at a decent pace now instead of planning for it, putting the pieces in order, then moving them around and trying something else.

When I recorded the video which formed the first draft of today's essay, I was having trouble with my wireless mic. I'm also having trouble with transferring data back from my gaming console to my laptop, sorting out some old automatic power backups, and just... solving problem after problem as they arise.

One of my favorite things to do is problem solve, so none of this has me upset, except for the standard exasperation of having to spend thirty minutes troubleshooting login issues across three devices.

When I worked at Scout Camp back in around 2006, my two favorite positions were running the handicraft department and being Commissioner. With the area director job, it was because it was such a lovely combination of hands-on and braining. Also because I had a little apartment on the side of the handicraft building where I could hide for hours watching Andromeda on my laptop. The definition of Commissioner varies from camp to camp. It's basically the official public relations / fixer. Go around and make sure there's no problems. Fix problems when they're occurring. Keep everyone happy. Some camps you bring the newspapers to the Scout Masters every morning. It's a flexible role, very self-defined, and I don't know that I did a great job at it when I was 21. But how many of us do a great job when we're 21? And they kept hiring me back, so I suppose that counts for something.

Troubleshooting things, solving problems along the way, that's a delight. As long as it doesn't become part of that whole process of working around an issue instead of ever spiraling into the exact thing that you need to fix.

The funny thing about this weekend is that so much is going right.

We've had multiple deaths in the family in the last couple of months and that's led to me... carefully putting the pieces of my day back together. See, when you wake up to a particular routine of elder care, or child care or personal care, and then that routine has to change, whether because your kids grow up, the elders you're caring for pass on or have to go into more advanced care, or just because your life circumstances don't allow you to devote 20 minutes a morning to yoga and meditation... you get into a routine of being continually busy and on alert. Having that flexibility has been so essential in my life as we've dealt with thing after thing.

Being flexible means taking that time I intended to be recording footage for Narrative Eversion and accepting that multiple hours of recording got corrupted by a single power outage when I thought my device was on a battery backup.

There's so many positives and negatives hitting simultaneously that it does cause a little bit of that cognitive dissonance.

Why am I so happy when I am taking care of people who are dying?

Why am I so happy when I'm fixing a problem here at the farm?

And then why do I get so anxious when there's a moment of peace... of inaction?

Amid all of the technology problems and processing of grief and intentionally leaving space empty, all of that... things are going well.

I think I've got the flavor of Narrative Eversion almost down. It's not supposed to be perfect. It's not supposed to be a lecture. It's a podcast that I've been working on in one form or another for four years, and I'm finally just releasing the episodes and accepting that sometimes they are going to be awkward. Episode three and four feel a little bloated to me, but they also have a lot of ideas in them. I've got everything set up now to record episodes five through seven, and I've got six through probably thirteen almost ready.

It's a good feeling knowing that all I actually have to do in order to make something I've been dreaming of doing for a long time happen is actually sit down and do it. It's also important for me to know that I don't need to overdo it. I don't need to hammer on it every single day, because then I'll be so focused on just how to pick apart that story that I won't be thinking outside of stories. On one hand that's lovely, because I love disappearing into stories, however it's challenging to disappear into stories when you've got real life that you need to keep up with.

The other challenge of diving deep into stories is acknowledging that my own brain goes into overdrive if I don't give it breaks. I love binging a series, but I also like having little mental breaks about every twenty minutes of watching an older show that has the rhythm of "fade-to-commercial" built in. I like binging a series and then talking about it a lot while either rewatching it with somebody who has a totally different perspective, or while watching something totally different. That's a lot of why, as I've mentioned in a few of my videos, I choose to live out in the country even though the work I'm trying so much to do could very much be done in the city.

This weekend I also recorded the start of a new thing called Commonplace Observation. Seeing that typed, I must confess that my titles always feel overwrought, even pretentious. On the other hand, they say exactly what I'm trying to do. Commonplace Observation is basically a workshop where I'm sharing my process of juxtaposing concepts, studying them, focusing on them, and doing it all in a more tangible manner. I get kind of rambly in these vlogs, and with Commonplace Observation I'm really trying to model the process of focusing in on a small task or a small project or a small object in almost a meditative way. The overarching goal is to explore and share how we can slow our minds down so that when we ramp them up again we know the difference between our baseline and our AI-accelerated state.

That's something that's going to be incredibly important for people going forward. It's a lot of what I try to teach in my chess classes and my photography classes and my D&D groups. I try to encourage interaction with an environment, be it a chessboard, a D&D puzzle, or examining one's photographs.

The core of all of my work, what I'm trying to get to almost every day is modeling thought processes, or perhaps what some people call "body doubling." That process of being there with you or with my students as you are doing the thing. It's often a thing that I'm not an expert at, because none of us can be perfect experts in everything.

Take chess, for example. People who are so high-level at chess that they are winning tournaments on the regular often struggle with teaching chess. Whereas I think I'm pretty spectacular at teaching chess, and yet I struggle with memorizing board notation. It's that cross-disciplinary challenge: Can you hyper-focus on something while also maintaining enough breadth of knowledge to communicate about it?

There's a real beauty to taking that time and doing that work and seeing what you've noticed, and then reflecting on it and letting it influence the rest of your life.

There's some work to be done here before the storms come, so that does it for today, folks. I'm really excited, and I hope that you like what I have to share in the coming weeks.