Dig

There is "dig where you stand" and there is "say Yes more often," and the reflective "que sera, sera," but these idioms all refer to what must be some fundamental principle of all systems theory: that in order to get anything, you have to start with something.

This sounds so banal that, if I wasn't in a hurry to explain it, I would not write it down.  Starting with something is actually a condition that many people eschew with.  We often think that, while we are wearing a red dress and eating a muffin, the thing we should really be doing is riding a train in a linen suit. Without any linen or a suit pattern or a train, we are to suddenly shed the somethings we have and acquire new somethings out of the blue.  The problem people then percieve seems to them to be a tactical one: how to get from here to there. 

I think that, in physics, if you were asking a particle how it might want to manifest itself as a collapsed piece of matter on a wall from its present state of being expressed as a wave function, it would just shrug.  It would not know.  The gap would be too big and the circumstances by which such a thing too numerous to even begin to build a plan.  The circumstances for the ways in which this may not happen would be even more numerous still.  So much so, in fact, that they would dominate statistically and would cause the current state of the particle's mind which would be that the plan for collapsing is not to be entertained at all.

The wisdom philosophers, writers and comedians throughout the ages and in our modern times echo this incredulity.  Stop trying to shape a future that is as far removed from you as a the opposite side of the canyon you're standing on.  In order to get to the other side - or to some other place - you need to just start walking.  No promises about the other side.  Only promises that, along the way, you will build a path that, in retrospect, will most likely seem inevitable, because, after all, it was built from every step that came before the previous one, a pattern that is not easily replicable and impossible to foreshadow at the start.

It's really like the simple principle of building:  one brick at a time, one cell at a time.  Nobody does it in any other way.  Nature does not begin with a cell and say, I want this to turn into a pumpkin and, somehow, through sheer will and ambition, make it so.  Or, even less so, by taking an alternate path from the one it had the germ of.  It doesn't throw away the seed because the seed is a daisy and it wants a pumpkin.  It doesn't know what it wants - a good lesson for people to internalize - so it just starts building on the seed. And sooner or later, it will get whatever was meant to happen from it.  Daisy or pumpkin.  Grass blade or dud whose rotting energy fuels the nearby blade. 

Nature does not have a plan.  It has a code and it has a history.  That is true and that is very important, for, without the past, the future extinguishes instantly, like the receding line of electrons from the center of an old-fashioned TV.  But a blueprint doesn't mean a path.  It only means a contour on top of which, that which is place will balance or fall off according to the shapes of the land.  This is the way in which biology appears to have directive and leads so many people to consider the need for a willful being as conductor.  Because of what happened before, what happens next has a certain natural trajectory.  It isn't perfectly defined and no one planned it any more than an unraveling weave plans the final snap of the straightening yarn, but because there is a chain link in human and physical events, at any point in the chain, looking back, one sees a straight and perfect path leading exactly to the point where he stands:  inevitable, meant to be, planned from the start.   Most of us forget what nature never even dwells upon:  that this view would be true under any and every circumstance in which time as we know it is the guiding measure of change in the world.

This is all to say that "dig where you stand," is not only good advice but is actually inescapable. You cannot not dig where you stand.  And all people who attempt to jump the cite where they are and leap over to a different position either never make it off the ground and use up all their energy just huffing up in an attempt at liftoff or, instead of digging, rent a backhoe, with the help of their ambitious parents, and bulldoze through everything the should have carefully dug around in their slow journey forward, reaching the point they had their sites set to, yes, but looking back and seeing a big mess, without a trace of the bridge that should exist between their position and where they came from.

These latter people often suffer from identity problems, because, again, they cannot see the path of their journey.  And we all want to see a path. We want to know that what we have done has a history and a purpose, perhaps because, if we were a photon, we could not avoid this fate.  It would be in the equations.  As people, in whom the photon's tiny error margin is collected one quadrillion times, the ability to err becomes visible and, through the bio-neurological mechanism of behavior, we exercise our right to control our environment incorrectly. 

But as behavioral economist Dan Arieli will tell you, in fact, people seem to want to want to see a lasting pattern their work. Something meaningful and logical. Something that came from somewhere and will go elsewhere.  And this always requires a scaffolding.  It is impossible to see a pattern in work if you drop the shovel you were holding and rent a backhoe much too large for you.  In essence, you have to start with what you've got and build on.  And there are no shortcuts.  This is what starting with something in order to get another something means.  I know the words do not suggest it, but the somethings are not random.  They are related, connected.  Inextricable. You must hold on to your shovel.  And only your shovel.  And you cannot exchange it, sell it or even buff it.  You must just grip it and dig.  The rocks and dirt in your way will tell you what next, and, it is only through this blind pursuit that you will get the pleasure of looking back at an orderly path.

That's why the wisdoms advocate the Yes and "que sera" and why the millions who try to soar over their yards end up building such elaborate psychological defenses around them that we begin to bump into their giant round dome-bot bodies everywhere and it is uncomfortable.

Closer

Long ago, in some missive whose origin I've forgotten, someone said that a passionate kiss can feel as if you completely climbed inside another person's face. The writer was making the point that this only happens in youth, but forgetting the particularities of the comparison, it seems rather that adults of all ages spend many years trying to climb inside a chose area of interest. All the way inside, to embody it.

First, usually, is the study of said area. Books are opened. Possibly, degrees conferred. Then a professional effort is launched to approach more and more closely the core of whatever it was that interested you. If it was architecture, for example, you begin to practice it and you hope that, through this proximity, you will gain entrance into the muddled core love you felt when all things technical, structural and upright merged with all things human, emotional and spacial in the world, like the feeling you may have gotten when the sun peaked around a structure while you were on an escapade with your best friend on a lazy Saturday afternoon in high school. But, as you work, though other pleasures are no doubt born and buried daily in the rise to adulthood, that particular pleasure of bottling up your favorite thing in a can and cloistering it tightly throughout your career has yet evaded you. You have studied and now you have practiced and still there is no can. There is only tasks and moments and you know you are in the vicinity but the elusive concentrate still seems to graze by you and lightly mock as it zooms past, unable to offer you a staircase for a complete climb inside.

At this point, young adults usually attempt to alleviate the vacancy by coming together with friends and discussing. Nowadays, much of this can be done online through digital social media but back just a few years ago, people still preferred to get together in bars and talk over the whole thing. Work, colleagues and ambitions.

Talking does work. Either through books or through friends in conversation, poignant explanations of the nature of life and of what we are pursuing come to the surface. Most of us have had many
Eureka moments, when either we or someone we know or have been reading seems to solve a problem we've had a question we've been harboring. It doesn't have to be a personal question. Often, it is not. It is bigger, broader and more satisfying: so that's why architecture works this way. Or doesn't. That's why I like to wake up at six rather than at 8. Oh, that's how behavioral economics controls small market. Aha moments are everywhere and they feel so satisfying that, for a brief moment, we feel as if we have arrived: we have achieved the closest proximity we have to the subject we were interested in. We have asked THE question and a satisfying answer has rung back.
But almost as soon as the words have been spoken or read, the void of distance returns. As if we were on the latter to the inside of the cave and just as we saw inside and would enter, the entire thing vanished like a mirage. So, while we still have its vision in our minds, some of us turn to writing about it. If studying a thing and practicing a thing and hashing a thing out with our friends doesn't get us completely inside it then perhaps putting what we know down on paper would.

That's solid: a piece of thinking we can at least always refer back to if we ever forget what it feels like to have put our finger on the main gist of the matter. This is sometimes called journal writing. Sometimes it is reports or emails or personal manifestos. In extreme cases, this kind of attempt turns into a book of personal philosophy or of a memoir: What I learned from my time on Wall Street. All manner of attempts are both put down on paper and consumed off the paper by readers and writers in an attempt at proximity to the situations we are curious about, knowledgeable about or longing for.
Writing works for a bit longer than talking, because, at the very least, it takes longer to produce and is, after all, physically permanent. Or can be.

But just as when you were sitting at your drawing board, enjoying moments of professional serenity, sketching beauty on paper and, the moment that you were done, your proximity to your profession vanished, just so, in the writing about it, for those who chose to do so, the moment you are finished with the effort, you are alone again. Not really an architect. Not carrying the insights you brought forth with you on your back. You are free from all the load that you have just produced, what you did not want to be free from. What, indeed, you thought that, in the exposition of, you would have more permanently weaved into the texture of your personality, a permanence that had been the object of the exercise. And, despite the very deep dive you may have taken within the study, practice, writing, reading and talking about said subject - or moment or question - at the time that you cease talking, musing, writing or practicing it, its presence disappears. At least it disappears from being attached to the surface of your skin. It becomes a subject again, to be broached at a distance, to be drawn ever closer, once again and all over, through effort and erudition.

It's as if proximity to fields of study or to the poignant moments that make professions appealing to us is tethered to a rubber band. You can pull on the rubber band and you will bring the fullness of it closer to you but as soon as you let go which you inevitably must, either to take a breath or stir the chicken or get back to work, it snaps into that distant spot that it seems to occupy, taunting you again with its remove and asking for yet another get together in which wine, conversation and maybe some napkin notes bring the satisfaction of proximity more nearby.

Possibly, fields of research have a different relationship than this to their areas of interest. If the main job, every day, is to design experiments that, through slow, measured tenure ask the questions that hold the promise of unveiling some fundamental truth about life and planet, then maybe, since the question-asking is so spread out over time, the gratification is never-ending as well. The rubber band is never snapped back because it has not yet been pulled out all the way. Yet, as pleasant as it would be not to have rebound, it must also be unsatisfying to a move at a speed that is beneficial to the collection of knowledge but not very beneficial to radical conjectures and quick answers, which our interest in climbing whole-bodied into the areas of our interest requires.
For most of the rest of us, the recourse is simply to do it again. Get together again. Go over the main points again. Was Goethe right ore was Nietzsche right. Is architecture really an art and what is the final nature of design, once and for all. Once and for all but not for all, because as soon as the party is over, so is the sense that we have solved any mysteries. As soon as we are done reading the essay and go put on our slippers for bed, we feel that, if we want to figure out that thing that the writer talked about, we must read the essay again. As if only in the act of reading, only in the act of talking, of writing of kissing do we experience the thing we are interested in and there is no sticking power to its surface. We can never walk inside it and have it stick around our body like a bag that we, from thereon out carry forth and feel permanently.

There is certainly a neuroscientific explanation for this. Some circuit is released from duty the moment you cease to engage it, being necessary for some other critical function, like keeping your balance or seeing depth. Bartenders must know all about this as patrons repeat the same stories and fixating philosophies week after week. Bartenders and wives and husbands. Friends and colleagues and children. We all know it and we still somehow think that the next time we have a chance to, we will settle the question once and for all since last time didn't seem to stick. No doubt engaging a brain circuit that, in the next moment, will be cleared for use in our swallowing of our hot wing and soda.