Doing and Being

life

I remember being young – in my early and mid twenties and working at companies thinking I could do the work of management.

What were they doing anyway.

I was, then, a gifted developer. I still have that gift – although my desire to stay rooted to my computer competes with other desires, like watching Aliens with my family.

I was an excellent doer – in the realm of software development.

What was the management actually doing.

These days I find myself more in management. This is hard for someone who so identified with doing things and also enjoyed doing things. I like the measurement aspect of doing. At the beginning there is nothing and you do something and there is something. In software you do something and it works or it doesn’t work or it works x% of the time and you can increasingly get it to work more of the time.

What do people in management actually do?

Well these days when I am doing my job I am not actually doing anything. I am being.

I am like the stable family that allows the child to go out and explore the world.

I maintain the arena that allows different team members to hash out a battle plan.

When I just be, it is like giving my team a super power. They are no longer held down by gravity… by the laws of physics. They have more freedom.

This hard for me to do. I want to do and I still do. And perhaps my super power is that I can use doing to increase my capacity to be. I do for myself, not for the world, and in building myself I build my ability to be.

This all sounds super nebulous.

I do think there is a relationship between this being state and the notion of weight from family constellations. That some people have more weight than others often associated with their age and then status. So like an 80 year old has more weight than a 20 year old, but the pope has more weight than a VP at a bank. But is it that a pope has more weight because he is the pope, or that he has weight and is then made the pope?

How do we get this weight? I think it is related to our ability to change and integrate those changes – to go through phase transitions in life and be transformed by them, to integrate the light and the shadow.

There is no way to hack your way to being. It is possible that a 30 year old cannot be, that a 20 year old cannot be. It is somewhat sad perhaps that all these tech leaders are doing all their management under the age of say 50. What sort of nourishing ground can exist when you have leadership that is say 80. The elders. This is what we lose in our culture when we silo our elders.

Statement of work: System Poetics

life

I had spent much of 2019 thinking about the intersection of computation and consciousness, something I was calling #consciouscomputation (That hash tag is crucial).

I was starting to collect my thoughts, inspired by a friend of mine who started a small creative community of people who give share and give feedback on work. Then I lost interest.

I was traveling a lot the first two months of the year for my job as a DevOps consultant.  I was in Seattle during the first outbrake of covid19 in the states.  As I traveled I began to feel the environment changing, and this question of computation and consciousness no longer interested me. But my mind was still racing, I was having conversations, collaborations, reading, and writing. 

I started to think on a meta level about what is the constant among all these activities, what could be big enough to contain my interests, but focused enough to be able to communicate clearly.  

Thanks a lot to a creative group I am a part of, and Nitzan who called me a systems poet, I started thinking about what I am calling system poetics. 

What is system poetics? 

A system is a coherent body of thought or methodology.  It can be vedic astrology,  germ theory of disease, transcendental ideology, theory of computation, freudian psychology, sufi mysticism, iconology, the sonnet, and so forth. 

What is not a system? Individual things and individual things grouped together without an organizing principal. 

We can look at different systems in a comparative way to see how concepts and individuals from one system map to one another, or how different systems map to different experiences. And we can also look at systems poetically.

A system poetics looks at spaces between systems and the overlaps that are both ineffable and expressible, and through exploring these spaces open up new avenues of thought and action.  Because. while I am interested in ideas, I am also interested in what how thoughts inform action and experience. 

I am working this through at systempoetics.com. It is a “living document”.  This blog is codified, each post is written once and stamped (and occasionally edited),  system poetics is a running list of what is on the top of my mind, what I want to engage in I am focused on the process of this thinking and the processes of building this out. 

I have some ideas planned, that to be worked out in collaboration with you. Tomorrow, I have my first newsletter going out which will give a taste of what is going to be going on, so please take a look and sign up if you are so interested. 

Coffee Philosopher

life

Today my old friend Paul (Paul P not Paul V) invited me to visit him at a new coffee place – Drip – at 12 Belvidere St, in Bushwick.

The place is perfectly appointed and the pour over coffee is delicious. We discussed coffee tasting with the proprietor. He said that some roasters have the same beans but the coffee tastes different because they way it is roasted. Also he said that drinking coffee should not be like taking a calculus test. If you taste something different, you take your time, taste the nuance, then you are doing it right. That is coffee philosophy. I love social interaction via shop keepers. That no longer really exists.

I am completely exhausted right now. I am doing an amazing 3 day dance workshop that I was going to attend with a friend before she got sick (not corona). It is amazing. I am now feeling my body. I am also feeling exhausted. I wrote 5 lines.

At the beginning of the workshop everyone mentioned things they are thinking of:
I mentioned the unconscious, computation and baths. I do love baths.

Things i like: quesadillas, baths, salt, daisies, cacti, linen, blue enamelled tile.