Secondhand Bag of Holding @secondhandbagofholding - Tumblr Blog

Tending Your Garden

Again I sit awake at 3 a.m. watching the evidence roll in that, not all but, a significant number of people in my country have chosen fear, lies, anger, hatred, and bigotry as their call to action. Again I sit here unsure how that could possibly be, as if this perpetual game of ethical tennis hasn't been going on since long before I was born. People are imperfect, and they make imperfect decisions based on imperfect information, often to the detriment of other people, as well as themselves. So every four years, at least in the USA, I sit at the computer at 3 a.m. watching and fearing.

Fear is a powerful motivator, but it's also often a lie. It drives us to make decisions and form ideas and values based on shades and phantoms of reality, rather than the actual solid facts of our existence. I think evil exists in how people act in response to that fear. I think evil is a thing you do, not a thing you can be, and I think you do the most evil when you let fear, and fear alone, drive you to action. Perhaps worse though, is when you use fear to motivate others; when you use fear to get others to forget their communities and their humanity.

But not all fear is evil. It's in the doing, not the being or the feeling, that evil lives. Fearing for your safety, or your rights, or your security, or the safety, rights, and security of your community is something you should listen to. But it's in learning truth, and acting to cultivate and protect that you turn your fear from evil into good. It's in the cultivation and truth that you can find right action.

In a garden there are many jobs to be done. Seeds must be planted. Weeds must be managed. Fertilizer and nutrients must be added. Water has to be given. Only then will your harvest be fruitful, and you'll be able to relax and enjoy the literal fruits of your labor. If you forget a piece of the whole, if your tending of your garden lacks balance, the garden will suffer. It still may bear fruit, but it won't be as bountiful as it could have been. The more off balance your tending becomes, the worse off your garden will become.

Cultivating your community is like gardening. It requires balance. If fear is the only thing you focus on, then you will only ever fight at the weeds that will never stop growing. If you spend all your time fighting, for fear of losing your garden to the weeds, you will never grow vegetables. All you will be left with is barren earth, devoid of anything but weeds. Fear must be tempered by truth, and then it must be used only so far as it is useful. There are other things that need tending.

I intend to try to be better at cultivating community. My life has been lived mostly in fear, and the past 12 years have been lived trying to avoid the worst. I have no community here, where I live. I see only people who would potentially harm myself or those I love, and I only take actions to avoid that outcome. That is evil. I have let fear drive my actions, and without truth, seen only the fight and nothing else. I have been so focused on the enemy, I have lost sight of the people around me. All have become enemies. My garden has only weeds.

There is a chance nothing will change. But I will, or at least I will try. And I have to believe that we can change, that we can be better. That everyone can be a little bit more kind and community minded. But I think it will take moving our eyes from the enemy, and focusing on the people around us. It will take reaching our hands out and helping those closest to us where it is needed. Cultivating community can't make things worse, and if there's a chance it will make things better, maybe it's worth a try.

Don't lose hope. It's bad right now. And it may be bad for some time yet. But if you reach out, others will reach back. There is good out there, even in people you don't expect it from.

#us elections #election 2024 #musings #silly goofy mood #writing

fforsythiaaa

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

fairycosmos

your problem is you think if you communicate with clarity and earnestness that people will actually understand you

boyslovevisualnovel

Tenma Burger Tuesday

louisegluckpdf

i think every publisher should have to institute a ban on books that fail what i’m calling the “little life” and “what else?” tests

louisegluckpdf

for reference.

twiststreet

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

scorchroots

I've never loved anyone as much as I love Ursula Le Guin

tahthetrickster

me: i have a very specific tumblr accent meme im thinking of that surely i should be able to pull up by searching the text in the meme

the most dogshit useless decimated search engine in the entire world:

tahthetrickster

i did find it btw but having a COMPUTER address me like it’s a person sent me into such an incandescent rage i nearly pitched my phone clear across the room

thewrithingsouth

i can tell when the edible starts to work when i start z-targeting shit irl

thewrithingsouth

iu'm doing this shit when i run into my cat in the hallway

d-meanor

puniper

imagine fucking up this bad

ilovecoelacanths

went to a new optometrist today wearing my squid facts ‘save our freaks dont mine the deep’ shirt from @sarahmackattack that has a strawberry squid on it. and i wasn’t even thinking about it but the optometrist walked in and he was like ‘oh what does your shirt say’ so i showed him and he was like ‘oh that’s neat!’ and then i thought he might like to know about strawberry squid eyes since they have weird eyes and he is an optometrist and all. so i was like ‘yeah it’s actually a real kind of squid called a strawberry squid, their eyes are really cool because they have one big yellow-green one and one small blue one’ and he kind of gasped and went ‘oh my god that’s so interesting i wonder why they have that. do you know what their retina composition is like?’ and i watched as he minimized my chart on the computer and started looking up images of strawberry squid and then he googled ‘strawberry squid retina composition’ and he was like ‘sorry we’ll get to your eye exam in a moment i just really want to find out’ LMAO 10/10 optometrist experience will be returning