Integrate!

If you looked at the title of this entry and assumed that you can only have two of the three characteristics at any one time, it is time to reconsider your beliefs. Clarity and elegance: yes.  These both describe a kind of beauty pared down to its essence, an ascetic aesthetic. Elegance and power: yes.  Like big cats on the prowl or the sportscars modeled on them. Lean, mean, accurate. Clarity and power: yes.  That moment of calm in the storm when you gather strength and get the job done.  We've been there - or admired someone who has. Now, again: Clarity, Elegance, Power.  What does that look like? sound like? feel like?  It is hard to put all three together, hard to believe that the power and clarity can be held together and apart by a concept as lean as elegance. Power and clarity, bound by elegance. Ability and desire, governed by intelligence. The bow, the arrow, and the hand that moves them.

Malcolm Gladwell ( The Tipping Point and blink ) is working on genius.  You can listen to him at www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/gladwell.   He reports on research on mastery that says it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master anything from sports to music to mathematics.  Mastery takes 10,000 hours of paying attention while you practice.  It is not a matter of brilliance or talent or luck.  It is a matter of paying attention to a particular problem or skillset for quite a long time. So why do our universities offer masters degrees that take only one or two years after a bachelor's degree?  On the one hand, the fifth year of study would give one 10,000 hours of university study (mastering the art of being a student!).  On the other hand, that one year of study offers the skills to do the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.  It does not make you a master: it puts you on the path to mastery. I will be offering a master's level course in NLP next mont...

I know a young person who has been stuck for more than a year.  She trained hard for a career, had initial success, and then suffered a physical setback that made it impossible for her to continue in the same path.  That would be hard for anyone. It is especially hard for a much-loved child who had no reason to believe life could change that fast. We say that the young are resilient - and they are. The forms of their resilience are not always what we would choose.  They can stay stuck quite ferociously.  My young friend is stuck.  She does not yet want to be unstuck.  Having flung herself into one brick wall, it is understandable that she does not want to run into the next one.  From the point of view of stuck, any motion is dangerous.  From the point of view of stuck, we do not see that sometimes it is the walls that run at us. I have other friends who are stuck because they are tired. They work hard and long and they make sincere efforts to meet the needs of the people around them.  ...

I just read an article by a journalist, a lamentation really.  The subject was the proliferation of euphemisms which seemed to the journalist to represent a decadent inability to assign responsibility or acknowledge mundane realities.  She felt, as many people seem to feel, that words like "poor" or "crippled" or "junkie" were better descriptions than words like "disadvantaged" or "challenged" or "survivor." Oh. Let's look at "poor" for a minute.  Does it mean that you do not have much money?  Okay.  Does it have a value judgment associated with it?  What if you are doing "poorly" at school or work? What if you are "needy?"  Maybe "poor" is not just the simplest word for the job.  Maybe it is the simplest word for reflecting a reality in which good people have enough and people who do not have enough can be presumed to be not good enough. The poor will be with us always. As will our ...

On my recent trip to Europe, I visited lots of amazing art collections. None made as strong an impression on me as l'Orangerie in Paris.  The link is:  www.musee-orangerie.fr. The first thing I notice as I look at the museum's website is that there were only two rooms filled by Monet's magnificent water lilies.  I remembered three or four.  That is a measure of how deep and wide a conversation I had with these paintings. I stood before each and asked, "teach me to see."  That's what I believe great paintings teach us: they are not about what we see but about how we see it.  Monet's paintings rewarded me with a conversation about what it means to focus so intensely on the surface that the vision comes to include the changes above and below the surface. There are no horizons in these paintings because the artist does not raise his eyes to the place where surface meets sky. Instead, he fixes his image-ination exclusively on the surface that is in front of him...