Three Meditations on Rhythm & Flow

November 29, 2015

Three Meditations on Rhythm & Flow

An excerpt from my work-in-progress The Integrated Writer

(and you can read it too, even if you aren't a writer!)

Timing is everything. But what is timing? It's a sort of synching of body, mind, space, and time. Find your rhythm, and things will flow. Here are some ways for you to practice the art of synching . . . and feeling good in your life and in your work.

First Meditation: You’re the Task

Choose a time-consuming and attention-demanding household task: cleaning the living room and kitchen after a big party; washing, drying, ironing, and folding several laundry loads; sorting through a year’s worth of tax receipts; writing letters, postcards, and e-mails to two dozen correspondents. The aim of the game is for you to undertake the task in an even mood, clear-headed and constructive, taking as much time as you need to accomplish the whole task without doing dumb things—breaking a glass, putting a new red skirt with a load of whites, mistakenly throwing away an important bank statement, stuffing the wrong letter inside an addressed envelope.

If you rush, you make mistakes. If you drag, you lose interest. How to avoid both?

Spread your attention so that you keep many things in mind at the same time: the task itself, with its many requirements; the environment of time and space, be it kitchen, basement laundry room, or office desktop; and, most important of all, your own self, your physicality in back, legs, and arms, breath, sight, hearing, touch.

Let’s say you’re hand-washing two dozen crystal glasses which you really, really don’t want to break. Normally you take a glass, dump its contents down the drain, soap it, rinse it, put it on the rack, then dry it and put it away. In this meditation you take a glass in your hands and immediately notice the feeling of the stem against your fingers, and also the feeling of your fingers as they wrap the stem. Beyond your fingers you feel your whole hand, your wrist, your arm; you turn the glass to empty it into the sink, and you marvel at the mobility of your arm, how its parts are at the same time independent yet connected. You sense how the arm belongs together with the shoulder, the shoulder with the back, the back with the pelvis and legs; holding a glass, turning it, emptying it are all gestures of your whole body. Every little motion of your hand is a pleasure, an adventure, a discovery. Every glass you wash is a celebration of your whole self. The task becomes amazingly agreeable; you feel as if you could wash glasses for the rest of your life. And you end up accomplishing the task perfectly.

The more experienced you become in being attentive to yourself as you perform a task, the less time you’ll need to perform the task. But to get there you’ll need trust, faith and perseverance. It’s not easy to believe that taking time to be centered is the most time-saving device there is.

Second Meditation: More Reception, Less Acquisition

Choose a museum or art gallery to visit. Ideally you’d go to a fine museum showing a first-rate, must-see temporary exhibit: a Cézanne retrospective, a big Brancusi display, something bold and ambitious and exciting, spread over a large surface encompassing several rooms, perhaps two floors or more.

Enter the exhibit and walk through it at a steady pace, unhurried but also unhesitant. Do several rounds of the whole show, and visit an individual room again and again if you wish. But you must never stop walking, never plant yourself in front of a painting or sculpture, never study something up close or in detail. Take in the whole environment, the gallery’s architecture, the way natural and artificial light intermingle to illuminate the artworks, the smell of floor wax and turpentine. Watch the museumgoers, the couples, the bored children, the horny man stalking a young woman who obviously attends art school, the guards sitting at their stools with walkie-talkies hanging from their belts. See the paintings as well, note their shapes and colors, the way they occupy the walls. And don’t stop walking, ever. Stay a good hour inside the galleries, walking, watching, perceiving.

The object of the game is flow plus observation: taking in everything without letting yourself being drawn in by anything; developing an open mind, observant, attentive, mildly discerning but not acquisitive, dispassionate and disinterested—and therefore tremendously astute. In this game, the flow of locomotion and observation becomes more important than attachment, analysis, detail, all those traits of an acquisitive mind that wants to own something for itself by discerning and judging. Let it all be, let it all go; not through indifference, but through detachment.

Needless to say, the writer in you can then approach every writing task with the same mind. The flow of stimulation is permanent; the desire to acquire, to judge, to control is permanent; the duty to keep the mind open is permanent. But instead of acquiring, judging, and controlling, your observant and equitable mind lets everything go by.

After you finish the meditation at the museum, take a break, visit the museum’s coffee shop, have a little caffeine and sugar; then return to the exhibit and look closely at a few of the artworks. Love some, hate others, imagine what it’d be like to live in a big downtown loft full of exquisite Brancusis. Then go home and write.

Third Meditation: Organize Slowly, Execute Quickly

Make a sizable shopping list, including a variety of items such as fresh and canned foods, paper goods, toiletries, and so on—let’s say your family’s need for a whole week. Go to a supermarket you’ve never been to, even if you have to drive out of your way. With your shopping list in hand, walk through the supermarket without a cart, not taking anything in your hands, but just finding out where everything is and making choices of brand, flavor, and quantities for every item on your list. In other words, stake out the new supermarket and get to know it, taking as much time as you need to locate and ponder every item you need. After you’ve made every single one of your shopping decisions, envision a one-way route thought the isles, without ever backtracking. Now take a shopping cart and execute every decision without hesitation, without changing your mind, without adding new items or leaving any behind: bam-bam-bam-bam-BOOM. The purpose of the exercise is to become able to make a comprehensive plan—however long it takes to make it—and to execute it unflinchingly, and as fast as you can,

There will be plenty of times in your life, both as a writer and otherwise, when the planning/executing skill will come in handy. For instance, you’re researching a big project and you need to look at some materials at a library out of town. You can only spare two hours there, on your way to your in-laws’ for Thanksgiving dinner. If you know how to plan (which may take a long time) and how to execute (which may take no time at all) then you can make the best use of a difficult situation and optimize the resources at your disposal.

The meditation covers both strategy and tactics. (Strategy comes from the Greek strategia, meaning “generalship.” Tactics comes from the Greek taktikos, meaning “ordered, arranged.”) Strategy is all about establishing priorities and long-term goals. Tactics are the best moves to achieve your strategy. Although time is flexible and can be made to appear lengthy, in the end we all have a limited amount of time on this earth. Strategic and tactical skills create extra time to live, to work, and to enjoy your earthly existence.

Once you get good at planning and implementing a plan, you don’t have to be rigid about it. In the meditation I propose that you execute your shopping plan unflinchingly, without backtracking, without revising your decisions. It’s a good skill to develop. But in most tasks of daily life, to revise decisions is both needed and healthy. In other words, become good at being firm, become good at being flexible.

The Spinning Stool

October 28, 2015

On a recent trip to New York City, I visited the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Museum Design, up on Fifth Avenue along Central Park. The museum is a compact place featuring many delights for anyone interested in design, engineering, architecture, visual arts, communication, and information.

I started on the third (and top) floor, where I saw a temporary exhibition celebrating the creative accomplishments of Heatherwick Studio, a London-based design and architecture firm. Then I went to the second floor, the highlight of which was the Immersion Room, a sort of wraparound, room-size toolbox in which you can design and digitally display your own wallpaper. Then I descended to the first floor, where another temporary exhibition led you through a series of brilliant posters from decades past, showing you how poster artists use “principles of composition, perception and storytelling to convey ideas and construct experiences” (in the museum’s words).

By then I had already had any number of uplifting and enlightening experiences, but the basement remained to be explored. There I found a strange object, a cross between a stool and a spinning top made of hard plastic (or, to get technical, “rotationally molded polyethylene”). Created by those accomplished fellows from the Heatherwick Studio, this “spinning stool,” so to speak, is wobbly by design. You sit on it quite low, with your butt and most of your back cocooned against the stool’s inner curves. Then you lift your feet off the floor and . . . and the thing starts wobbling, with you in it. Meaning, YOU start wobbling in space, seemingly out of control, seemingly in danger of falling off and breaking your neck.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the famous five stages of loss and grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What’s interesting about these stages is how dynamic they are; they imply change, movement, and finally growth.

Riding the wobbly spinning stool, I felt myself passing through four stages. They weren’t similar to the actual stages of loss and grieving, but they were certainly dynamic—and, like the stages of loss and grieving, they involved strong emotions.

First stage: “I don’t wanna do this. It looks unsafe. I was never any good at sports. I’ll fall, people will laugh, everyone will know I’m a pathetic old fool.”

Second stage: “Okay, I’m doing it. How does it work? Wow, it’s so low. And if I take my feet off the floor . . .? Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod! Someone, stop this! Pleeease, let me out!”

Third stage: “Hey, it’s kinda nifty. It kinda feels nice. You can kinda control it with just a little sway of the hips. Hmmm . . . groovy . . . hmmm . . . it reminds me of Woody Allen having sex with the Orb in ‘Sleeper’ . . . hmmm . . ."

“Hmmm . . . was it the Orb or the Orgasmatron? Hmmm . . .”

When I stood up from the Orgasmatron—I mean, the wobbly spinning stool—I noticed that my whole body felt loose and energized, as if I had just had a session with a skilful sacrocranial osteopath. In fact, the spinning stool had healed me from the feelings I had before I sat on it—my feelings of fear and inadequacy.

Fourth stage: “I love the spinning stool. Let me wobble again. I could wobble all day. I’m good at it, and it’s good to me! I’m so full of love I could kiss that guard standing by the door over there!”

Two Japanese women entered the room while I was enjoying my spin. One of them sat cautiously on another stool. It wobbled a little bit, and she panicked big time. She let out a heartbreaking yelp, and her friend helped her get off the stool. That was it for the two of them. Let’s get the heck out of this spinning room! Sayonara, Cooper-Hewitt!

I felt for them.

We all have our blocks, our fears, our habits and compensations, our pains, our preconceived ideas . . . our hatreds. A new tool (or a person or an idea) enters our lives. Our first perception of the tool is that it’s a threat, a danger, a horror. Then we employ the tool with our habitual fears, we respond awkwardly to the situation, and the tool seemingly confirms our perception of its dangers: it hurts us, it humiliates us, it . . . it makes us wobble uncontrollably.

When handling the tool (or person or idea) that carries potential solutions to our problems, we tend to get stuck in the first stage, where we’re so deeply triggered by our habits that we don’t even see the tool. Instead, we see in it a projection of our fears.

And yet, this tool (or person or idea) happens to be the solution to our problems; it heals our fears and dissipates our hurts, and it makes us feel really, really good.

Let’s call the four stages fear, exploration, practice, and love. The passage from one to the other requires courage and determination. Along the way, there are many possibilities for things to go not to your liking—that is, for things to go wrong according to your subjective assessment, perhaps so wrong that you’ll feel justified in quitting. But if you stick it out . . . you’ll want to kiss the guard.

Symbolically speaking, of course.

Or literally speaking. It’s your call!

[And if you’re curious about the five stages of grief and loss, here’s an infographic.]

The Game

October 23, 2015

The Game

An excerpt from my work-in-progress The Integrated Writer

I grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, one of the biggest and busiest cities in the world. It’s so big it makes New York seem like a miniature diorama of a proper city. Add the population of Los Angeles and New York together, and São Paulo is bigger still.

And badder.

When we were in our mid-teens, my older brother Luís Eduardo and I would sometimes visit the historic downtown district and run a race along a particular obstacle course. Rua Direita, which links the cathedral to the opera house, is a pedestrian street teeming with the life of an anthill in battle. The crowd there includes shoppers, office boys in a hurry, throngs of beggars, bank cashiers running errands for the keepers of illegal games, fat women carrying enormous loads balanced on their heads, toothless and drunk black men the grandchildren of slaves, con artists, pickpockets, cardsharps, prostitutes, transvestites, and thousands upon thousands of other men and women and children and animals of dubious genetic make-up, all squeezed into a narrow street and jostling for space using as weapons everything hard and pointy: their briefcases, umbrellas, canes, shopping bags, elbows, knees, and falsies.

The game that Luís and I played consisted in racing from one end of the street to the other, as quickly as possible but without letting both feet leave the ground at the same time, and without touching anyone else in our path.

It was a riveting game. Adrenaline and testosterone made us feel like toreros in a mythical arena, both seeking danger and running away from it. Luís was bigger and stronger than I, built like a fridge with legs. He played dirty without knowing that he did; it was just his natural way of being. I was all rubbery and elastic, prone to falling down and scraping my knees or twisting an ankle or three. I played ugly, not dirty; but, unlike the warm-hearted brute that was my brother, I knew I played ugly. I did it on purpose, to spite the competition, to sully the world in revenge for being unfair to me.

The game was a great life lesson: The individual against the crowd, brother against brother, legs against brains. To play the game you absolutely had to interact with several thousand people, in varying degrees of intimacy. You could do your very best and not get anywhere; the obstacles were unyielding, uncooperative, too many, too big, too slow. You could play fair or dirty, pretty or ugly; but you could never, ever be sure of winning, regardless of how you played.

Timing, however, improved your chances. Knowing when to stop, when to speed up, when to slow down, when to skirt a group of office boys who stood motionless right on your path, when to jump, when to skip, when to walk, when to run, when to take a longer route that might be faster—if you knew the “when” of everything, you might possibly beat the competition.

In fact, timing is everything, regardless of what game you play.

Golf? It’s all in the rhythm of your swing, the timing of your decisions to do or not to do, to lead or to follow. Tiger Wood may have amazing physical capabilities, but it’s his rhythm that got him places.

Hockey? The greatest players aren’t the strongest ones, but the ones with the best sense of timing. Wayne Gretzky was a skinny little guy who looked like a speck of humanity next to his teammates and opponents. But he took his father’s advice when he was young: “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been.” And he became skillful than anyone else, superior in mind and body, more imaginative, more creative—thanks in good part to his uncanny sense of rhythm.

Neurosurgery? Here’s Malcolm Gladwell profiling the great surgeon Charlie Wilson in The New Yorker:

Once, when a new head of nursing at U.C.S.F. wanted to start rotating nursing teams in neurosurgery, instead of letting Wilson work with the same team every day, [Wilson] stopped operating for a week in protest. New nurses, he explained, would mean more mistakes—not fatal mistakes but irregularities in the flow of his operating room, such as someone's handing him the wrong instrument, or handing him an instrument with the blade up instead of down, or even just a certain hesitation, because to Wilson the perfect operation requires a particular grace and rhythm.

Writing? It’s all about Rhythm & Flow. The timing of your every decision will determine whether or not you write that book, or finish it, or get it published. Writing is a game of creativity—a game with complex rules, in which winning means transforming a dream into a reality, an idea into a book, a personal insight into a public work of art. The integrated writer is a good player who enjoys the game and who plays it with skill and joy.

Imagine we’re back in São Paulo playing the game. Let me tell you how timing affects it.

If I wait a second too long, or if I take off a second too soon, I may find my path blocked by a busload of shoppers who suddenly stop dead on their tracks to look at a window. A second, perhaps a fraction of a second, and I’m blocked. Part of the game, then, is determined by timing: when to do something, when not to do it. This is true for everything in a writer’s life. The integrated writer knows when to write, when to write by hand or at the computer, when to write by hand with a pencil or with a pen, when to edit, when to delete, when to submit, when to do anything whatsoever—and, most importantly, when not to do anything at all.

To play the game, it’s simply not possible to keep to a single speed throughout the entire race. There are too many factors involved, too many obstacles, too many other agents and witnesses and receptors to deal with. The least event affects my rhythms of thought and movement, making them faster or slower. A drunken beggar reaches out, trying to touch my arm, and I speed up away from him. A gaggle of deliverymen spills out from nowhere, and I bring myself to a sudden stop. I never know when I’ll have to change my speed or for how long. Habit, routine, safety and predictability are all delusory. The integrated writer is alert and adaptable. You must not only have many speeds at your disposal, but you must also know how to change speeds quickly and smoothly.

Throughout the game, I play three rhythmic roles. I’m an actor, making active decisions to do something or to refrain from doing it: I decide to run, to wait, to turn to the left all of a sudden, or to sit in the middle of the road and cry. I’m a receptor: I see, hear, smell, and sense everything around me, watching dozens of people at a time, listening to a cacophony of voices and barking dogs and music blaring from inside shops. And I’m a witness: I observe, analyze, and synthesize information as if I were "someone else" at a remove from the game. Needless to say, the witness inside an adolescent in a fight with his brother tends to be perfectly pathetic!

You can’t escape your triple role, not even if you go live alone in a hut in the Outer Hebrides. There too you’ll act, receive, and witness; there too you’ll be subject to the laws of Rhythm & Flow, one of which says your rhythm depends on the rhythms of other people, animals, and forces of nature. On Rua Direita, if someone behind me makes a decision of his own and speeds up, I suffer the consequences and get booted in the ankle; if someone decides to pickpocket an old lady a yard away from me, my game is changed in some way big or small. The same rule applies to every writer who’s ever lived: poets, novelists, screenwriters, journalists, stenographers, fortune-cookie scribes. We all must constantly deal with collaborators, editors, designers, marketers, and booksellers. The integrated writer is an individual who can do team work, and a team player full of individuality. The integrated writer yields to other players some of the time, but imposes his or her will the rest of the time. The integrated writer knows when to delegate, when to take over; when to share, when to keep things from other people’s eyes; when to engage with another player, when to disengage from another player.

St. Augustine once asked, “What is time? If you don’t ask me, I know. If you ask me, I don’t know.” Time is too difficult to define, but for our purposes we’ll say it’s a continuum of past, present, and future, every microsecond of your immediate future always becoming immediately your present, and every microsecond of your present always becoming immediately and forever your past. You can’t play the game well if you live in the past or in the future; you can only play it in the present. To do so, however, you must be permanently attuned to your past and to your future. Look back, look ahead, and look all around you—here, now!

©Pedro de Alcantara, 2015

The Void

October 5, 2015

The Void

An excerpt from my work-in-progress The Integrated Writer

Your little child is running outside. She trips, falls, hits her face against a stone step, hurts herself badly. After a few seconds of suffocated silence, she starts screaming. She may have broken her jaw.

What do you do?

Some years ago I witnessed this very scenario. I was at Les Halles, a busy shopping mall in the heart of Paris. Inside the complex there’s a small courtyard, with stone steps leading to a terrace. The girl was about two years old. She was running at full tilt with unbound excitement, and when she rushed onto the steps she fell face down, hitting her jaw on the stone. The sound her jaw made against the stone was horrifying and indescribable.

Her father was standing right next to her. Immediately after she fell, he exclaimed, loudly enough for all to hear: “I told you not to run like that!”

We can’t know for sure what was going on through his mind. Is he that much of an insensitive father, a control freak, a monstrous disciplinarian? Perhaps; there certainly exist guys like that. Was he concerned with other people’s assessment of his ability to “educate” his child? It’s possible, but we can’t know for sure. Was he just freaking out, and voicing the dread that his beloved daughter was badly hurt? That’s possible, too.

We can’t know any of that. But we can be almost sure that his reaction did nothing to solve the problem at hand, and most likely aggravated it.

Before we deal too harshly with this hapless parent, let’s accept that when faced with many of life’s problems, big and small, we all have the potential to act pretty much the way he did. We want the problem to disappear. We want the problem never to have existed. We want to blame other people for the problem. Or we find fault with ourselves, even when we are blameless. We feel angry, frustrated, and afraid. And we don’t want those emotions to stay inside us. We vent. We rant and rave. Or we act and do something.

More often than not, this makes the problem worse. Conflicts escalate. Our ability to think through the problem and its possible solutions gets clouded. The problem itself escapes us; we lose sight of what the problem actually is.

And that becomes the problem.

The father of my example put himself in a state. As long as he stayed there, he’d be unable to do anything constructive to solve that other, more pressing, problem: his endangered child, overwhelmed and helpless.

The father’s first duty toward her daughter (and in truth also toward himself) is to do nothing that aggravates the problem. And to make sure he doesn’t aggravate the problem, he must do nothing, period—perhaps for a microsecond, perhaps longer. The void (that is, doing nothing) provides room for all good things in the world to come in; but once the void is filled with something, all other possibilities are excluded, at least until room is made for them by the creation of another void. And the void is preferable to anything negative or destructive that occupies it.

The father does absolutely nothing for a moment that may be extremely short. During the moment of doing nothing, he gets a grip on himself; check his fear, his desire to act out on the fear, his impulse to have his child be the recipient of his fear. And then he picks up his child and calls for the ambulance.

Let’s open a parenthesis and look at a less urgent situation.

We take roller coaster riders and watch horror movies and smoke dope just so we can lose our balance, our sense of habitual safety. We like it, as long as we know our balance will be restored. Children do the same thing: they turn and turn and turn until they’re so dizzy they fall on the ground, laughing all the while. A child might trip and fall accidentally, in the playground or at the beach. She might decide the fall is no big deal. She’ll get up and resume her running, as happy as only a child knows how to be. Or she might ponder the situation for a brief moment. While pondering it, she hears her mother’s voice: “Ohmigod! Are you okay? Are you okay?” The mother certainly behaves as if she herself thinks the child is in danger. The child hears it, loud and clear: “Mommy is upset. That can only mean one thing: a bad thing has just happened. I . . . I did a bad thing. I’m hurt. I’ll be punished. Bwaaaah!”

Your fear? Yes, your child reacts to it.

Anger? You bet.

Scorn and mockery? Yep.

Well-meaning concern? Of course. The child reacts to every emotion. And a parent’s well-meaning concern is a potential burden for the child to carry. I think the parent serves the child best by a tender attitude that says, “I’ll help you if you want my help. I’ll leave you alone if you want to be left alone. Cry if you want to, suppress your crying if you want to. I’ll wait for you until you’re ready.” This is different from saying, “Cry, baby, cry.” Or “Don’t cry, baby, you’re all right.”

Now we go back to our example of a child badly hurt.

Who is the ideal ambulance driver? Someone cool and collected, in full possession of his driving skills, his sense of direction, his capacity to ask for a police escort or warn an ER of his impending arrival. The ambulance driver is neutral, alert, and intelligent.

Let’s say you get your daughter to the hospital. Let’s say she has fractured her jaw and needs facial surgery. Throughout the entire ordeal—accident, ER, surgery, intensive care, recovery at home—the child reacts to your thoughts and emotions. Your duty, then, is to put yourself in the ambulance-driver state: neutral, alert, and intelligent. Your child hurts? You’re neutral, alert, and intelligent. Your child is in intensive care? You’re neutral, alert, and intelligent. Your child arrives home with her mouth wired shut? You’re neutral, alert, and intelligent, at her service in whatever capacity she requires you to be.

The human potential for self-regeneration is remarkable. I used to see a doctor who would hear my complaints, then say, “Call me again in three months if it persists.” Often the complaints dissipated, and I wouldn’t need to call the doctor back. Time helps; attitudes and their energies help, too. If you keep focusing on the problem, you’ll think “accident, pain, fear, danger, hurt, frustration, anger, guilt.” This very thought spins negative and unhealthy energies. To solve the problem, then, you have to stop thinking of it, and turn your attention instead to the solution: the intermediate steps, the indirect procedures, the side trips and tangents that eventually lead to the problem’s dissolution.

You’re going to entertain the child, keep her company, give her small gifts. But if she wants to be left alone, you’ll do that, too. She has her own powers of self-regeneration, and by doing too much for her you may be sabotaging her recovery. It’s no good to keep telling her, “You’re strong, you’ll recover; you’re strong, you’ll recover.” If she’s strong, she doesn’t need to be told it; if she needs to be told it, she isn’t strong; if you keep telling her she’s strong, she’ll suss out that you’re saying, “You’re not strong enough to recover without my telling you again and again that you’re strong.” And she’ll behave accordingly.

Give her time, space, the possibility of her taking initiatives even if some of her initiatives carry risks and dangers—as do all initiatives, without exception. Haven’t you been telling the child how she strong she is? Let her be.

The solution for every problem in your life starts with your doing nothing—every last problem, including stage fright, writer’s block, a twisted ankle, a troubled sibling, an exam, a lawsuit, anything. Within yourself, create a void: a neutral, alert, and intelligent state in which you’ll be able to stop focusing on the problem and start focusing on the solution. And don’t wait until you have a problem. Embody the void, now and always. Thanks to you, many potential problems will be preventively “voided.”