Turtles all the way down

 Turtles all the way down

Do we deserve the spring?

Rufi Thorpe (The Girls of Corona del Mar) 

The first time I came across the rather amusing phrase ‘turtles all the way down,’ was in a Richard Feynman book. I thought it was really funny, still do and for a number of reasons. It was completely unexpected and random. One of those things that are funny because they are actually an intellectual blindside, but when you sit with it a little bit more then you realize that there is much more to it, layers to it and it is hardly random. Let me explain what I mean by this. I absolutely love turtles. The author of Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta, made me fall in love with them. Besides living for hundreds of years (300 years is the longest record), turtles are everywhere. The only place that you can’t find turtles right now is Antarctica, but they used to be there, there are fossils. 

I don’t know about you, but I think that is pretty impressive. It’s a creature that can be easily taken for granted but it has presence and according to Yunkaporta is a way that we humans can make sense of our world. The native people of Australia used to do this and Yunkaporta explains all of this in Sand Talk. It would therefore be fitting to use turtles in the phrase. They have earned their place in evolutionary time, if Darwin and his Galapagos adventures did not place them there already. Noah Olsen’s (google him) abs look like the carapace of a turtle and if turtles could talk, they would have the temperament of Olsen, through and through. Every time I watch Olsen online, I am reminded of turtles, and it always makes me smile. They may be on the verge of extinction, but metaphysically, they are very much alive in my heart. But I digress.

I recently learnt where the phrase actually comes from. William James was giving a lecture and afterwards an old woman approached James and said something along the lines of “Professor James, you have it wrong. Things aren’t like you said. The world is on the back of a gigantic turtle.” Intrigued, James proceeds to ask the lady what is beneath that gigantic turtle. The lady replies, “Another turtle.” James, “What is under that turtle?” “Another turtle.” To arrest the circular line of questioning, she says, “It’s no use, Professor James. It’s turtles all the way down.” Slam dunk. There is just no winning that kind of argument. 

Free Will

In Determined, Robert Sapolsky uses this line of thinking as a way to show us that free will does not exist. I know. That is not where you thought I was going with all this cute turtle talk, but yes that is indeed where I am going. Interestingly, whenever free will comes to mind, our minds go to dark places. We think of crime, temptations, punishment etc. This may be because, in the Christian sense, exercising free will is linked closely to choosing to do the good thing over the bad, choosing to “not walk in sin.” The operative word when it comes to free will is “choosing.” Sapolsky argues that since everything that came before this present moment affects the decisions we make in this current moment, we cannot have free will. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” Sapolsky explains this best with a scenario involving a man pulling a trigger. 

Suppose that a man pulls the trigger of a gun mechanistically, the muscles in his index finger contracted because they were stimulated by a neuron having an action potential (i.e. being in a particularly excited state.) That neuron in turn had its action potential because it was stimulated by the neuron just upstream which had its own action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before. Then show me that this neuron’s actions were not influenced by whether the man was tired, hungry, stressed, or in pain at the time. That nothing about this neuron’s function was altered by the sights, sounds, and so on, experienced by the man in the previous minutes, nor by the levels of any hormones marinating his brain in the previous hours to days, nor whether he had experienced a life changing event in recent months or years. And show me that this neuron’s supposedly freely willed functioning wasn’t affected by the man’s genes, or by the lifelong changes in regulation of those genes caused by experience during his childhood. Nor by levels he was exposed to as a fetus, when that brain was being constructed. Nor by the centuries of history and ecology that shaped the invention of the culture in which he was raised.   

 

If every decision you ever make is predicated on all these things, including the conditions of your mother’s uterus, how are we then able to say that we freely choose anything? Sapolsky provides concrete examples of how the culture you are born and raised into has a huge effect on the decisions that you make. For example, studies show that people from rice regions accommodate and avoid obstacles. You place two chairs in front of them and they move around the chairs. People from wheat regions, however, remove obstacles. When two chairs are placed in front of them, they move the chairs apart and walk through them. Cultures born in arid, desert-like places are inclined to believe in one God and those born in forests are likely to be polytheists. In Stranger in the Mirror, Robert Levine also goes through a litany of ways that culture informs your decisions. You aren’t who you are because you chose to be, but you are who you because you are who you are. Levine also advises us to hold loosely to the idea that we know who we are. Since there are environmental and biological factors always influencing us, unknowingly most of the time, we cannot be too sure we are who we think we are. 

On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage was leading a work team that was blasting rock to prepare the ground for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad, South of the Vermont settlement of Cavendish. In order to set off a blast, one had to drill a deep hole into a rock outcrop, add blast powder and a fuse, and then pack (or "tamp") sand, clay, or another inert material into the hole above the powder to distribute the blast's energy onto the surrounding rock.

About 4:30 p.m., Gage's attention was drawn to his men who were working behind him. Glancing over his right shoulder, Gage unintentionally aligned his head with the blast hole and tamping iron. As he opened his lips to speak, the tamping iron ignited against the rock, and the powder burst (maybe due to the missing sand). The tamping iron shot out of the hole, measuring 1+1/4 inches (3.2 cm) in diameter, 3 feet 7 inches (1.1 m) in length, and weighing 13+1/4 pounds (6.0 kg). It penetrated Gage's face from the left, angled forward, directly in front of the lower jaw's angle. It went behind the left eye, through the left side of the brain, and out the top of the skull through the frontal bone, continuing upward outside the upper jaw and perhaps breaking the cheekbone. 

If you know anything about Gage’s story, you know that like any good story there was good news and bad news. The good news was that Gage lived. The bad news was that he was not the same Gage that he was before the accident. The part of his brain that we all have, and which inhibits our behaviour was destroyed. Which meant that there was no mechanism in his brain that kept him civil and socially nice. It’s the part in your own brain that stopped you from yelling at the guy who cut you off in traffic or unwisely replying “yes” to your wife’s “do I look fat in these jeans?” question. Our prefrontal cortex helps us to play nice with the people around us. 

All the social norms of Gage’s time flew out the window when that rod went through his head, and he became rude and a difficult person to be around. The inability for his brain to function properly completely altered his personality. Which personality was the real Phineas Gage, (please stand up)? What happens to his personality when something else in his brain stops working the way it should? Identity is but a fragile thing. 

In one of his lectures, Jordan Peterson said that most of us behave the way we do because everything is as it should be. The AC is working, and we have food in our fridge. Let’s say we, I don’t know, find ourselves smack bang in the middle of a pandemic. Would we become selfish and stingy and try to buy all the toilet paper in the store so that no one else could get any? Or we found ourselves in Solzhenitsyn’s gulags? Are we still the same person or do we eat our neighbour? I am not even the same person before my morning Americano and after. I probably go through 5 personality changes before noon every day. There is also the hungry-me which is different from the I-didn’t-sleep-well-last-night me or the Stage 5 (groooooaaaan) load shedding me. These are small changes in my environment, and yet they have an impact on my personality. 

I am a morning person, I relish going to gym at 4:00 in the morning, but I am also an introvert (see above) which means I hate speaking to people first thing in the morning. I am not alone in this. Comedian Ali Siddiq has a bid in his special Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover about how he doesn’t leave his house until 10am because he just cannot deal with the “good morning neighbour” thing that white people do. Can’t do it either. I can’t. After my morning workout and I’ve found my manners at the bottom of a Grande cup of coffee, you may approach. 

Entitlement

If we haven’t chosen who we are, then there are certain conclusions that we have to come to terms with. Most of us think that we deserve the lives we live; the 7 series BMW, the corner office (if you are that type), and a beautiful house in Birnam. We think that it is the culmination of all our hard work, the late nights and early mornings, the sacrifices and copious amounts of caffeine that got us where we are when that is just not the case. I mean, I am sure the coffee helped, a lot, but the thing is luck played such a huge role in that. Like monumental. I don’t need to look too far with this. If I was born to a different mother, then things could have easily turned out differently for me. I wouldn’t be tall (God forbid), or have the IQ I have, be left-handed or be athletic. I would not have gone to the schools I went to and had the peers I had. I wouldn't have been exposed to books and subsequently writing which I am able to make a living from etc… its turtles all the way down. Because of fortune, both ways, I can even say that if I wasn’t born to the mother I had, I would not be an introvert (sixteen years as an only child can do that to a person) or raised without a dad which has a lot of its own implications. Regardless, I am pretty psyched to be where I am, but I am also grateful because I know how much of it was out of my hands. I also know that while I work hard and as Eric Thomas says, “conduct my business,” I am under no illusions of feeling that I deserve my life. I don’t not deserve it either. It just is what it is. 

We don’t deserve the spring, it just arrives. This also means that we don’t deserve the winter. I was watching reruns of Being Mary Jane and in one of the episodes, it's revealed that the eldest brother’s, Patrick Patterson, biological father struggles with substance abuse. Patrick had struggled with a drug problem most of his adult life and the fact that there was a hereditary component to it, made him more compassionate to himself. He understood why it had been so difficult for him to have a healthier relationship with substances.

In Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money, he shares a letter he wrote his son before he was born: 

Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.

I would even say that most poverty is not due to laziness, there are well-designed systemic structures that have ensured that people remain trapped in Sisyphean poverty cycles. Just as Sisyphus could not outwork the curse placed upon his shoulders, there are people, good kind people unlike the tyrannical murderer Sisyphus, who also cannot outwork poverty. 

South Africa was built on the hard work of black people, and it continues to run because this labour is plenty and cheap. This hard work has not gotten most black people anywhere, it has kept them right in place. Therefore, it is clearly not a question of laziness, and most of us know this. It’s just easier to pretend otherwise so that we abdicate ourselves from any culpability and can remain on our soap boxes preaching to poor black people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. 

Punishment

Now things get a little bit interesting. Sapolsky argues that if we are to come to terms with the fact that there is no free will, then we also have to come to terms with the fact that it doesn’t make sense to punish people for their actions. He says that when a car does not work as it should, then it should be removed from the streets, placed in a garage until it is fixed, then put back on the road again. He says that we should take the same approach when it comes to people. If someone is in danger of themselves or other people, then they should be removed from other people and given the help that they need. Once they are ok, they should then be placed back into society. They are not removed from society as a means of punishment, which is what modern-day incarceration is, but they are removed to primarily help them get the help they need so that they are not a danger to themselves and others. 

Earlier this year a boy who was seventeen at the time, Brendan Depa, beat up a teacher’s aid to the point of unconsciousness when she grabbed his Nintendo Switch from his hands. The video was harrowing but the events that followed even more so. In one of his interviews, psychologist Dr. Umar provides a number of compelling reasons why Depa should not have been arrested for his behaviour. In Dr. Umar’s opinion, Depa should not have been in that school to begin with. Depa has mental issues, is taking a bunch of medication, has been through the foster care system and has a lot of developmental problems. His Individualized Education Plan (IEP) explicitly stated that nothing should be grabbed from Depa’s hands because this triggers a fit of rage in him. Yet, the teacher’s assistant disregarded the IEP and was unfortunately almost killed in the process. Depa was tried as an adult, and not as a juvenile, and could have received a jail sentence of up to 30 years. Judge Perkins sentenced him to two years in jail, but Dr. Umar expresses that Depa should not go to jail at all. He should be taken to a school that can cater to his needs. 

It is very human to want to respond to pain with punishment. When your husband cheats on you, you take his children away from him. When women reject you, you trash them online. There are many ways that we punish others in the face of our pain. Hurt people hurt people as the saying goes. The answer to my pain is your pain. We also know that the other person’s pain is only a temporary solution to the new reality. Take the husband who cheats, the new reality is the dissolution of a marriage. Punishing the husband does not change the new reality. It is what it is. I too have struggled hard with this need for “justice.” I’ve also felt the need to make other people pay for the pain they’ve inflicted on me, but I know that won’t erase the new reality. I have to deal with the new reality. 

The Depa video is actually painful to watch, he is 6ft, 270Ibs, and male; this poor woman just did not stand a fighting chance of making it out of the incident without serious damage. Like I wrote, it is painful, but pain does not justify punishment. 

When I was in high school, a buddy of mine and I were just meandering about in the streets of the township, chewing the fat of one thing or another. Out of nowhere, she was slapped hard by a guy whom we all know has mental issues. Like five fingers, ears ringing hard. No one did anything, because it was widely accepted that he was mentally ill. We all understood that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, he did not even know who she was. He just carried on walking as if nothing had happened. We learnt two important lessons that day. When we saw him approaching, we would walk on the other side of the street. The other lesson we learnt was to keep our eyes open so he wouldn’t creep up on us like he had done before. Never again, we vowed, and never again did it happen. We knew that it was not personal though, which is why we kept it moving. It was painful but it would not have made any sense to punish him in any way.

But what if it is personal? What then?

Intention

We ask, “what if the person had bad intentions?” Our bearded and ponytailed neuroendocrinologist would, in true sage fashion, respond to a question with another question. “But where do intentions (bad or otherwise) come from?” You know there is a “turtles all the way down” response to that. Think about it this way. All serial killers had an abusive past. From what can be gleaned from documentaries, it seemed that Ted Bundy came from a loving family. He was a psychopath which has a genetic element to it. 

Even something like infidelity seems to have a hereditary component to it. Reading The State of Affairs by Esther Perel shows that the cultures we are born and raised into have a huge impact on whether we cheat on our spouses or not and what meaning we assign to those infidelities. Proclivities and idiosyncrasies don’t just come from nowhere, they can be traced all the way to the turtle at the very bottom.

By now you should have heard that Judges are likely to grant parole when they’ve eaten and less likely when they are hungry. The intention of the judge is to be fair in these legal proceedings and yet the presence or absence of ghrelin in his stomach is a deciding factor. I bet you that most judges don’t even know what ghrelin is. In a similar vein, attractive people get lighter sentences in general. As Sapolsky puts it, “Thus, all sorts of things often out of your control- stress, pain, hunger, fatigue, whose sweat you are smelling, who's in your peripheral vision- can modulate how effectively your PFC does its job. Usually without you knowing it's happening.”  

So when I wake up in the morning, I set the intention to not eat Maynard Wine Gums.” Everything goes well, until about three in the afternoon. I’ve just spent the morning writing essays that involve a lot of reading and research. When three pm arrives, it finds me compromised. Cognitively, I am spent. Like an automaton, I leave the coffee shop, cross the street and make my way into the local spaza shop where the friendly Malawian who has made sure that the wine gum shelf is stocked, greets me with a smile. Home is where Maynard Wine Gums are. And just like that, my intention has been crushed into a ball and slam dunked into the bin, tongue-out Michael Jordan style. I’ve had to employ psychological and practical tactics to make sure that I keep my intention. I don’t carry money with me and use my Starbucks app instead and I stay away from Clicks, as a general principle, because 3-for-2 is great when I am buying shower gel but not so great when it comes to keeping my intention. When we are tired, we make poor decisions. When we are stressed, we make poor decisions. Hell, when it’s our birthday, we make poor decisions. Emeli Sande has a song called Heaven where she sings about how she wakes up with good intentions, but the day lasts too long. She beseeches heaven to interfere, and I think this makes for a great segue into the next paragraph.

Grace

I’ve always leaned towards the Christian idea of grace more than that of free will. Live long enough and you lean hard on grace. Like Sande, you ask Heaven to intervene because even your best intentions are not enough, you wind up where you don’t want to be. Grace accommodates it all and therefore frees us from the condemnation as we try to do things differently. 

In Chaos Theory, there is a phenomenon called Convergence where two different pathways could each separately determine the progressions to the same outcome. I think Grace and Determinism converge. Determinism says “alas, turtles” and Grace says, “it's all good, you are free from the punishment and condemnation that the behaviour those turtles elicit.” They weren’t studying gene modulation and expression 2000 years ago, but Grace as a practice bridged the ignorance gap. Grace has released many people from the need to punish the behaviour of others or self-flagellate. What if when Jesus was saying “they know not what they do,” he actually meant it. They had an intention to kill him but with these words Jesus was putting this intention into question. Jesus was crucified within a context. Most of those who jeered at and insulted him were products of the culture they lived and were brought up in, of which they did not choose. In Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson writes:

 As parents are to children, cultures are to adults: we do not know how the patterns we act out (or the concepts we utilize) originated, or what precise “purposes” (what long-term “goals”) they currently serve. Such patterns are in fact “emergent properties” of long-term social interactions. Furthermore, we cannot describe such patterns well, abstractly (explicitly, semantically), even though we duplicate them accurately (and unconsciously) in our behaviour (and can represent them, episodically, in our literary endeavours). We do not know why we do what we do, or, to say the same thing, what it is that we are (all ideological theories to the contrary). We watch ourselves, and wonder; our wonder takes the shape of the story or, more fundamentally, the myth. Myths describing the known, explored territory, constitute what we know about our knowing how, before we can state, explicitly, what it is that we know how. Myth is, in part, the image of our adaptive action, as formulated by imagination, before its explicit containment in abstract language; myth is the intermediary between action and abstract linguistic representation of that action. Myth is the distilled essence of the stories we tell ourselves about the patterns of our own behaviour, as they play themselves out in the social and impersonal worlds of experience. We learn the story, which we do not understand (which is to say, cannot make explicit), by watching. We represent the action patterns we encounter in action (that is ritual), image and word: we act, then represent our behaviour, ever more abstractly, ever more explicitly, “consciously.” 

We are hardly aware of the driving forces behind our behaviours which means that our behaviours cannot be of our own choosing. As human beings, with our geocentric view of ourselves, we think that every time we carry out a behaviour, we have chosen it. Rather, the behaviour has chosen us. Heliocentrism sobered us once and we can always count on nature to sober us again. Ants have as much free will as we do, which is to say none. Ants are not automata; they mill about and are driven by their biology and environment as we are. This does not mean that they can’t do incredible complex stuff like build the most jaw-dropping anthills like we have the pyramids. Just because things are deterministic, it does not mean that they are predictable. We humans still get to do great stuff and marvel at the wonder of the works of our hands.  

The sobering part of all of this is that most of us are getting through life the best way we can. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences, good or otherwise, to our behaviours but it does mean that we should seriously reconsider how we react to other people when they behave in ways that we do not approve of. It also does not mean that we can’t take any action because we can, in the way primates with a developed PFC can. 

“I am put into a detached, professorial, egg heady sort of rage by the idea that you can assess someone’s behaviour outside the context of what brought them to that moment of intent, that their history doesn’t matter. Or that even if a behaviour seems determined, free will lurks wherever you’re not looking. And by the conclusion that righteous judgment of others is okay because while life is tough and we’re unfairly gifted or cursed with our attributes, what we freely choose to do with them is the measure of our worth. These instances have fuelled a profound amount of undeserved pain and unearned entitlement.”  Robert Sapolsky   

A Litany for Survival- Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision

crucial and alone

for those of us who cannot indulge

the passing dreams of choice

who love in doorways coming and going

in the hours between dawns 

looking inward and outward

at once before and after

seeking a now that can breed futures

like bread in in our children's mouths so their dreams 

will not reflect the death of ours

For those of us

who were imprinted with fear

like a faint line in the centre of our foreheads

learning to be afraid with our mother's milk

for by this weapon 

this illusion of some safety to be found

the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

for all of us

this instant and this triumph

we were never meant to survive

And when the sun rises 

we are afraid it might not remain

when the sun sets we are afraid 

it might not rise in the morning

when our stomachs are empty we are afraid 

we may never eat again

when we are loved we are afraid

love will vanish

when we are alone we are afraid 

love will never return

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard nor welcomed

but when we are silent 

we are still afraid

so it is better to speak remembering

we were never meant to survive

Joseph and the Robe of Many Colours

‘Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons, because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a robe of many colours’

Genesis 37:3- ESV

 

Jonathan Pageau’s definition of love has stood out the most for me and it makes a great deal of sense in and beyond feelings. ‘Love becomes the manner in which both unity and multiplicity can coexist together. You know, because love does not abolish difference. It celebrates difference, but it also celebrates unity. It celebrates how difference can come together and be really one at the same time.’ Joseph’s robe of many colours was not only an illustration of Jacob’s love for Joseph, but it was also an expression of symbolic love in sartorial form, beyond the personal. The robe is a display of how ‘unity and multiplicity can coexist together’. The multiplicity lies in the many colours and the splendid robe in its entirety is the unity. In Jordan B. Peterson’s Biblical Series, Episode XV: Joseph and the Coat of Many Colours, he limns an insightful picture on what Joseph’s robe means for us today. ‘For something to be many coloured’, says Peterson, ‘it means it spans the entire gamut of possibilities.’ For Peterson, the many colours allude to the variegated skills or qualities Joseph had which we should also have, to be able to deal with the malevolence that is in the world and which we will have to contend with over the course of our lives. Brad Lomenick, in his blog post on the 8 key leadership qualities of Joseph, describes Joseph as principled, humble, disciplined, faithful, graceful, competent, wise, and strategic. These are skills and traits that led him to success despite the malevolence that darkened his path. And there was plenty of malevolence going around: sibling envy, attempted fratricide, domicide, slavery, wrongful imprisonment, perjury, broken promises etc… and yet he was not destroyed. This is what Peterson was pointing to; embodying a ‘differentiated mode of being that enables you to be competent and at home in the widest possible places… you can be put in more places and function properly, which is one of the indications there’s more to you’. Peterson exhorts: ‘Make yourself so damn different and dynamic that you are more than a match [for the malevolence]’.

 

‘People are like houses divided amongst themselves. They are working at cross-paths.’ Peterson here is describing a multiplicity that lacks a unity which is a being that is fractionated and not differentiated. This is a person for which malevolence is not external but an ever present internecine internal force in opposition to the person becoming ‘fully fledged’. Being fractionated limits you while being differentiated expands you in the world. This ties with what Byung-Chul Han writes in his book What is Power? ‘Power allows the ego to be with him- or herself, in the other. It creates a continuity of the self…Power is a phenomenon of continuum. It provides the holder with a vast space of self’. It is the differentiation that realises power in different circumstances and in turn becomes even more powerful… like Joseph. Rollo Tomassi in The Rational Male writes, ‘the definition of power is not financial success, status, or influence over others, but the degree to which we have control over our own lives’. Having control over our lives lies in our ability to deal with chaos and uncertainty and impose our own will on our lives despite the malevolence. It is the ability to move from our own ‘mental point of origin’ to use another Rollo Tomassi phrase. But before we can even sharpen our mental point of origins so that the decisions we make with regards to our lives are the right ones, we must be highly in tune to who we are.

 

A short vignette. About thirteen years ago, a friend of mine lent me his copy of Clem Sunter and Chantell Illbury’s The mind of a fox. It’s still on my bookshelf but he hasn’t returned my 30 Seconds to Mars This is War album, so we are even-steven. The book became my armour against a very judgemental world that insisted on specialization, on deciding your entire future when your brain hadn’t even finished developing yet. I knew as I read the opening quote. ‘The fox knows many things- the hedgehog one big one’ (Archilochus) that I was indubitably a fox and that I was not alone. At the time I was dating a hardcore hedgehog and we had endless yet fun debates on the matter. The book Mastery by Robert Greene was on his bookshelf and that was his weapon of choice which he wielded against my The mind of a fox. I think this played a role in why I had avoided Mastery for the longest time but if you’ve read any of my other blogs; you would know that it has become a firm favourite. Thanks Mr Hedgehog, whichever burrow you are in, for introducing me to Robert Greene. Mr. Hedgehog knew exactly what he wanted to do, sharp clarity, steely determination, laser-like focus and an analytical brain that burrowed down all the way to first principles. Being a fox looked like a snafu in comparison. I was all over the place and I could hear the ‘Get it together Girl!’ reverberating across the expanse. I have long embraced that I have varied interests; unsatiated curiosity; and a general Eckhart Tolle ‘let life unfold’ disposition. I have ‘followed my bliss’ (Joseph Campbell) and have tried to work in alignment to the things I really like doing; naturally inclined to and move in directions to which I was drawn. So here we are. It’s like how Santiago Ramón y Cajal, ‘To him who observes them from afar, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies while in reality they are channelling and strengthening them.’ The reason why I have come to love books like Mastery is because of what Angela Duckworth says we shouldn’t do.  ‘Don’t confuse the healthy development of a work ethic with the premature commitment to a singular passion.’

 

Back to Rollo Tomassi’s mental point of origin. The world is geared towards efficiency, which is why most of the words used to describe the technology or processes we use end in an -er or -st. This efficiency goes hand in hand with early specialization. It starts in the first grade ‘when I grow up, I want to be…’ and then there’s school, university, career, marriage, children then retire. Efficient. It’s not really a system that encourages meanderings. And even if there is a little voice beckoning us elsewhere; we are so encumbered with responsibility that we are absolutely terrified of any uncertainty. Having our own mental point of origin allows us to explore and discover who we are because we will be on the lookout for what David Epstein refers to in Range as ‘match quality’. ‘Match quality is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are- their abilities and proclivities’ and Peter Drucker of Little Bets adds ‘success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves- their strengths, their values, and how they best perform’, but ‘we learn who we are in practice, not in theory’ (Epstein). Maximizing match quality seems to be more efficient in the long run because then people will always have an array of skills to bring to the table like Joseph. Epstein quotes Herminia Ibarra (an organizational behaviour professor) on maximizing match quality. ‘Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat’. And that is now we learn who we are. Epstein touches on the ‘end-of-history illusion’ which is a psychological illusion experienced by individuals of all ages where people believe that they have already experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment but will not substantially grow or mature in the future. So, we mistakenly think that who we are today is who we’ll always be, so we make these huge specialization decisions based on an incorrect assumption. Epstein writes, ‘The precise person you are now is fleeting, just like all the other people you’ve been… that feels like the most unexpected result, but it is also the most well documented… The only certainty is change, both on average as a generation ages, and within each individual’. We rely on this change, though, to become differentiated people. Therein lies the opportunity to tap into parts of us which have been otherwise dormant. Carl Jung calls this movement towards reaching full potential, the ‘circumambulation’. We move around a centre (home in on ourselves in a sense) and this circumambulation manifests itself by making us interested in things. When we follow this interest and tap into it and harness whatever skills or competencies or traits that come about because of that interest, we become differentiated, the centre holds. This centre that holds makes way for expansion which in turn increases our power. This unity can be expressed as a centre with lines homing in from different angles or it can be reconfigured as straight lines coming together to a single point like the tip of a spear. It’s important to bear in mind though; only the presence of a multiplicity produces a unity. Without multiplicity, we cease being spears; we are just sticks.

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In The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene quotes Ian Knight (The Anatomy of the Zulu Army) and it sent chills down my spine: ‘Legend has it that Shaka altered the nature of fighting in the region for ever, by inventing a heavy, broad- bladed spear designed to withstand the stresses of close- quarter combat. Perhaps he did: certainly, both Zulu sources and the accounts of white travellers and officials in the nineteenth century credit him with this achievement… His military innovation s made an impact on Zulu folklore, if nothing else, for Shaka certainly developed fighting techniques to an unprecedented degree, and there is a wealth of stories concerning his prowess as a warrior; he may, indeed, have been one of the great military geniuses of his age’. Shaka’s iklwa is what came to mind when I thought about the tip of the spear. It is the spear itself that increased Shaka’s prowess and the piercing nature of the spear enabled him to defeat his malevolence. Interestingly, Shaka’s warriors used to encircle the enemy and home in on them, circumambulation much? In What is Power?, Han writes that the tip of the spear is centred and gathers everything unto itself. And that is how prowess is culminated; the unity that gathers the multiplicity into itself. Dark Horses is a book by Ogi Ogas and Todd Rose that explores those people who became successful in unconventional ways. They write, ‘people often believe that when it comes to earning a living; you must choose between doing what you like and doing what you must. Dark horses teach us that is a false choice. By harnessing their individuality [who they are and their interests] dark horses attained both prowess and joy. By choosing situations that seemed to offer the best fit for the authentic self, dark horses secured the most effective circumstances for developing excellence at their craft, since engaging in fulfilling work maximises your ability to learn, grow and perform. Thus, dark horses provide a new definition of success suited for the Age of Personalization, one that recognizes that individuality truly matters. Personalized success is living a life of fulfilment and excellence’. The synchronicity of the word ‘prowess’ has not been missed. When we are differentiated then we have prowess and its this prowess that will empower us to contend with the overwhelming computing capacity of AI technology and parry with it.

 

Moravec’s paradox is an occurrence in AI technology where the tasks that are simple for human beings are complex for AI, and the tasks that are complex for human beings are simple for AI. Ogas & Rose ‘describe our epoch as the Age of Standardization as opposed to the industrial age because the age is characterized by the standardization of most fixtures of everyday life, including consumer products, jobs and diplomas’. Premature specialization falls right in line with this group. This standardization that opened the gap for AI; anything that can be turned into an algorithm. But, optimistically; it is this standardization that will inspire human beings to move away from a standardized contribution to a more nuanced, dare I say, differentiated one. Epstein, ‘Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones’. Information is widely available but requires synthesis and the ability to transfer it across disciplines; that is part of the aforementioned prowess. ‘You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning’ (Arturo Casadevall quoted in Range), or as James Flynn puts it, ‘everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines’. It’s this cognitive flexibility that can put human beings in the driving seat of strategists and multi- domain problem solvers and AI in the passenger seat of focusing on tactics. ‘In narrow enough worlds, humans may not have much to contribute much longer, in more open-ended games I think they certainly will. Not just games, in open-ended real-world problems we’re still crushing the machines’ (Gary Marcus). In my line of work, I recently met two amazing girls who are currently in Grade twelve; one goes to St Anne’s Diocesan School for Girls and the other, Roedean School.  They are both remarkable and are involved in a panoply of extra-curricular activities. From drama to hockey to leadership to musical instruments or taking Spanish as an elective and involvement in The President’s Award. Even when interacting with them, one gets the impression that these are pupils who will fare well in life. Both have entrepreneurial parents so there is also exposure on that front. I think their range has long been inspired by how Ivy Leagues wanted learners with range. As I was researching on why that is the case, turns out that it’s no longer the case. In a blogpost titled, ‘How to get into Ivy League Schools: The Definitive Guide’ Shemmassian Academic Consulting writes, ‘In the past, being a ‘well-rounded’college applicant was considered the best admissions strategy. However, in today’s competitive admissions climate, well rounded applicants don’t stand out- there’s nothing about them that’s unique, special or different. The far more effective approach we recommend to our students is to become a specialist in their chosen extracurricular field- to go all in on a specific interest and be extraordinary in that small areas’. These are the reasons listed supporting this strategy:

·         ‘Specialists possess an ‘it factor’ in admissions conversations they get referred to as the ‘tech entrepreneur or the published self-help author’ or the ‘non-profit founder’

·         Specialists elevate their college community through their developed passions, achievements, and unique experiences. A group of students who are each exceptional in different areas make the student body well- rounded as a whole, and to a higher degree than a group of moderately we- rounded students would

·         Specialists have higher levels of self-awareness than students who merely dipped their toes into several different activities. They know who they are, have clear career direction and will take greater advantage of the available Ivy League resources.’

 

Fresh from reading Range and Dark Horse, I, naturally, had questions.

·         Wouldn’t an ‘it-factor’ come from being as differentiated as possible, that your ‘power’ spreads across domains, you are a lateral thinker, you are a better problem-solver overall?

·         Epstein writes, ‘both training and professional incentives are aligning to accelerate specialization, creating intellectual archipelagos’. Are higher education institutions immune from becoming intellectual archipelagos? A group of moderately well-rounded students could better create an actual college community because there would be more potential nodes of creating connections based on similar interests. A group of students who are each exceptional in different areas make the student body look great on paper, like archipelagos on a map but in terms of benefitting the actual student body? Not too sure

·         I made a case earlier in this essay that the people who know who they are, in fact, are the ones who explore and discover who they are. For the majority of people, we had a vague understanding of who we are in high school and so the discovery was still in nascent form. Universities are known to be specialization tanks, and for them to extend their reach of specialization even earlier into the lives of prospective students seems unwise. Epstein writes, ‘Mostly, though, students get what economist Bryan Caplan called narrow vocational training for jobs few of them will ever have. Three-quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major- a trend that includes math and science majors- after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline’. Now even the years prior to university, that could have been used for exploration and ‘sampling’ as Epstein puts it are now dedicated to specialization. Our education systems are designed around specialization, with a few exceptions such as Roedean and St Annes’s whose cultures engender sampling. It sure does come at a steep price. The fee tags attached to those schools are… WOW! What makes it worthwhile is not the fact you’ll achieve A’s at the school (‘Valedictorians or in our context dux scholars don’t become millionaires’- Eric Barker) but the richness of contexts available to learners. What usually happens in standard classrooms is standardization, the truly exciting stuff is happening outside the classrooms. Extra- curricular environments offered by these schools is invaluable. Ultimately, we thrive in environments that are in alignment with who we are. As Eric Barker puts it, ‘Following the rules doesn’t create success, it just eliminates extremes- both good and bad. While this is usually good and all but eliminates downside risk, it also frequently eliminates earth shaking accomplishments. It’s like putting a governor on your engine that stops the car from going over fifty-five; you’re far less likely to get into a lethal crash, but you won’t be setting and land speed records either’. Conventional classrooms are about following rules and conforming; everything outside the classroom is where we get to tap into creativity; to explore; to discover who we are. As Sir Ken Robinson says ‘we are educating people out of their creativity’. 

     I remember how at the end of high school; the big buzz word was ‘innovation’. We were expected to magically start innovating, and my response was a bewildered ‘How sway?’ At which point of my educational journey was innovation cultivated; it felt like a blindside. It was a skill the world was expecting me to have without having taught me methods or approaches that build the innovation muscle. Peter Sims says experimental innovation is the approach that will lead to breakthroughs and success; and where else to experimentally innovate than outside the classroom in those twelve precious years of formal education. ‘For most of us, adopting this experimental approach requires a significant change in mindset. One reason for this is the way most of us have been taught. Great emphasis gets placed in our education system on teaching facts, such as historical information or scientific tables, then testing us in order to measure how much we’ve retained about that body of knowledge. Memorization and learning to follow established procedures are the key methods for success. Even when we are taught problem solving such as solving math problems, the focus is generally either on using established methods or logical inference or deduction, both highly procedural in the way they require us to think. There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own. We are given very little opportunity, for example, to perform our own, original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes. We are graded primarily on getting answers right.’ So, the early specialization required for university admissions, extra-curricular time should not be usurped to serve ‘premature optimization’ as Paul Graham describes it. Range has also inspired me to view educational reform in a very different light. In South Africa, where inequality is rife and rampant, the area code we are born into usually dictates the type of education we get. And I have been myopically focused on reforming, the disadvantaged classroom that learners have a fighting chance in the work market. But that is just ensuring that learners have only one skill (good enough grades to pursue their desired career at the time). As I’ve mentioned earlier in the blog, having one skill makes a person a stick, not a spear. We will not have any prowess. Alternatively, we would have to blow up our perspective and focus on all the time outside the classroom to engross learners in different environments, cultivate skills; and assist learners in discovering who they are or at the very least what they like or are interested in.

 

Some people would describe David ‘stay hard’ Goggins as someone on the extreme side of the continuum of human achievement, and Jessie Itzler lived with him for a month. Respect! If you don’t know who Goggins is, google him and just prepare to be yelled at by a shirtless man for not living out your full potential. Goggins has accused everyone who has called him crazy as lazy and weak because they want to use him as an excuse. According to him, anyone and everyone can do what he does and accomplish what he has accomplished. I’m not as convinced. When Eric Barker introduced the Gautam Mukunda idea of ‘intensifiers’ in his book, Goggins immediately came to mind. Barker, ‘Intensifiers are qualities that on average, are negative but in certain contexts produce sweeping benefits that devastate the competition’. David Goggins is not the ‘sunny disposition’ and ‘rainbows and butterflies’ type. I can imagine him saying, rather yelling, to a five year old on his birthday ‘WHAT YOU EATING CAKE FOR? DID YOU COMPLETE YOUR MORNING RUN?’ Goggins is pretty intense and that is his intensifier. Tapping into that has really differentiated him from the bulk of society, and it has given him power and he is now able to access more people and places(expansion) as a result. I know I said Goggins is shirtless, but he is actually wearing an invisible coat of many colours. Just as how grit is context specific, success is context specific as well, and it is the range of our exposure that increases the likelihood we land up in the right context. Barker writes, ‘[success] is less about being perfect than knowing what you’re best at and being properly aligned with your context… sometimes an ugly duckling can be a swan if it finds the right pond. The thing that sets you apart, the habits you may have tried to banish, the things you were taunted for in school, may ultimately, grant you an unbeatable advantage.’

 Oh, before I forget. Tiger Woods was an early specializer. And I also want to rope in another Tiger into this: Amy Chua, the Tiger Mom. Without getting into too much detail about kind and wicked learning environments; or that the ‘availability heuristic’ regarding Tiger Woods leads us astray; drawing conclusions that do not hold under scrutiny. Its best to use Tiger Woods words to cut straight to the point: ‘To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him.’ Epstein reminds that ‘it’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play.’ This was Amy Chua’s error. One day, after years of being forced to play the violin, Amy’s daughter quit the violin. And that was that. It’s not about imposing yourself on children but rather about creating environments where children are allowed to follow interests, to play, to discover and to develop range

A Digital Footprint is not a History

 

'But what if we are at the crossroads, as the blues singers moan, longing for something else, neither diversion nor distraction, escape nor mere entertainment'

Phil Cousineau

 

‘To people the world over, pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise, an act of devotion to find a source of healing, or even perform a penance. Always, it is a journey of risk and renewal. For a journey without challenge has no meaning; one without purpose has no soul’ (Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage).

This is how I approach my mother’s photo albums. Neatly tucked away at the back of my cupboard, where I have to recruit the assistance of a chair, to be able to reach them. There are two of them, one burgundy and the other mahogany and they are considerably heavy as I move them from the top shelf onto my bed. I am at a crossroad, my soul weary, my bones heavy and I’ve come to these albums for answers, for direction and for healing. To go through my mom’s albums is to go on pilgrimage, is to move from a Here to a There while remaining in the confines of my room. Right before I open the first one I sigh, physiologically, and prepare myself for the challenges that the sojourn always raises within me; the evocation of ‘emotion and commotion‘ as Cousineau puts it.  These albums are sacred to me, and they pull back the curtain slightly on the life the woman who gave birth to me lived. She is beyond the veil now and yet she still speaks to me through her history. She beckons, encourages, clarifies, and guides. ‘The point of a pilgrimage’, writes Cousineau, ‘is to improve yourself by enduring and overcoming difficulties’… and I need improving, in ways only my mother can understand.

As I crack open the first album, its sheaves are stuck together. I separate them and can feel the intensity of the moment build. I’ve visited these albums before, but there is still a hesitation behind my actions, a knowing that whatever is revealed must be obeyed; that is the imperative. This is how it works with arcana; I speak to my mother through photographs, implore and wrestle with her. Carl Sagan, a resounding voice, ‘we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers’. So, I ask courageous questions and I am met with deep answers.  Each photo is a part of a larger narrative, it’s a story unfolding, revealing its essence at the deepest level. People casually and whimsically describe this as walking down memory lane. Although there is nothing whimsy about it, it is a lane that needs to be walked, to be traversed. ’Pilgrimage means following in the footsteps of somebody or something we honour to pay homage. It revitalizes our lives, reinvigorates our very souls’ (Costineau). Following these footsteps and unlocking the clarity of my own path cannot be rushed. These photo albums hold duration within them. Their assembly was a protracted affair, it was undertaken with great care and consideration and that is what each picture, in turn, requires of me. Byung Chul-Han in The Scent of Time writes, ‘The path which separates the place of departure from the place of arrival is also an interval. Like place itself, it is semantically rich. The path of a pilgrimage, for instance, is not an empty space between two places that is to be traversed as quickly as possible. Rather, it constitutes the very goal to be reached. Being- on- one’s way here is altogether meaningful. The walking means doing penance, healing, or gratefulness… it is a prayer. The pilgrim’s path is not merely a thoroughfare, but a transition to a There. In temporal terms, the pilgrim is on the way to the future, which is expected to bring salvation.’

I can’t help but contrast this rich, intense way of keeping record with todays’ electronic albums which are emaciated and weak in comparison. Modern day photos are way too easily retrievable. They can all be accessed at a swipe. There is no preparation needed either to access the pictures and they are always within arm’s reach. The voluminous number of the photos compromise any significance they may possess. The photos comprise mostly of faces without contexts; without a semblance of connection; just sameness with different backgrounds. The photos are merely a matryoshka doll reflecting ourselves back to us at the surface level as the screens through which we view the photos do. Empty and emptying in their proliferation. Han writes, ‘Electronic memories and other technological possibilities for recurrence destroy the temporal interval which is responsible for forgetting. They make what is past instantaneously retrievable and available.’ Part of being human is the ability to forget- that is the healing grace of time. There are things that we are the better for having forgotten. Yet electronic memories do not permit us to forget, and we face death by a thousand cuts constantly reliving painful and unhelpful events. Because of digital media’s ahistoricity, we have no past to speak of, everything can be conjured into the presence as fast as our thumbs allow. This is itself an unkindness. There are no spaces of introspection and growth when everything you’ve ever done is immediate. Society judges you harshly on the things you said or did at 15 and at 50 alike. There is no space for redemption. Redemption is narrative and our digital spaces lump everything together. All specificity is lost, and this is why we age, and we do not grow older. There is no distance between events and the contemplative and introspective aspects of those events. As Han writes, ‘An event is not a theme to which consciousness could relate, but a trauma which cannot be captured by consciousness, which is entirely outside its control or annuls it.’ These events become doubly traumatic because these digital spaces are intolerant of second chances. Therefore, we indiscriminately carry these things with us.

Our brains have evolved in such a way that our memories themselves aren’t concrete; they are porous and continuously reconstruct themselves. I can’t help but think this is for our ultimate good. Our brains are protecting us from things we would otherwise be unable to handle were we required to take them in directly. Our brains allow us to put things in the past; even the sting of difficult things has been devenomized. Our brains filter and dilute events into things we can swallow to ensure we can still carry on living. Our feet are buckling under the weight of our present-past. And because the digital footprint does not discern, neither does it make any concessions; our memories are cold, hard-as-stones facts. The digital space does not hold back any blows, everything is there and anyone with an internet connection can access it and a savvy-coder can hack into our clouds. Forgetting brings a lot of healing and it can also bring freedom and unburdening. The digital space is quite the nuisance at reminding, it picks scabs and it unrelentingly burdens. This process is additive, we are forced to take in and contain more and more memories without the ability of letting anything go. This compulsive remembering flagellates and offers no penance. We are abelian sandpiles and some of us won’t survive the avalanche to re-form again.  

 

My mother’s photo albums are a site, an in-heritage site for her daughters. They are movable locations where pieces of her social, political, cultural, and spiritual history have been preserved. They hold heritage value and lingering power. Electronic memories, however, are sights. ‘Sights are places one passes by. They do not permit any lingering or staying’ (Han).  You see them and move from one photo to the next as though driving fast by them. It’s the feeling evoked when listening to Daniel Caesar sing Streetcar, ‘Seems like streetlights, glowing, happen to be. Just like moments passing in front of me.’ You are persistently swiping or scrolling from one picture to another that it’s a blur. Even though, they themselves are in the photos, they seem to be having an out-of- body experience and are disconnected from the people in the photos because they can’t reconcile the evidence of photos and the lack of experience the photos allude to. The Baudrillard inspired ‘frenetic stillness’ comes to mind: the rush of historical events only provides scant cover for (and ultimately, in effect, produces) a standstill. People are moving rapidly from one event to the next, but it all signifies nothing, existentially they are standing still. People’s ‘histories’ can now be reduced to a single digital footprint. The footprint is quantitatively large but it’s a single lonely footprint unaccompanied by its pair counterpart, with no sense of direction and purpose. Electronic memories don’t take strolls, they don’t take walks, they are simply standing still. ‘Solvitur ambulando’ as the Latin phrase goes, but if we are standing still, it means our lives remain unresolved, and unsaved. Our entire lives a big fat question mark?

Electronic memories do not arrest a gaze because they are mundane; they have no narrative power. Nothing distinguishes them from one another. Electronic memories are ‘atomized time’. ‘Due to the lack of narrative tension, atomized time cannot hold our attention for long. Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety’ (Han).

There is a common saying in our times that ‘if it’s not on the gram, then it didn’t happen’. The irony of that is the fact that if it’s on the gram, that means it was gleaned of life through that process. A chunk of experience was sacrificed at the altar of the Instagram gods. Nowadays, when you have to stop what you are doing to take a picture, then you are not doing what you are meant to be doing anymore. The difference between the photos in my mom’s albums and Instagram is that taking a photo of an event back then was a part of the experience, it added to the experience and the picture was singular. Taking a photo for the gram interrupts the experience and diminishes it and the more this instagramming take place, the more the pictures lose their uniqueness. Kabir, the poet, puts it better when he writes, ‘If you have not experienced something for yourself, then it is not for real.’ And since taking pictures for Instagram robs the moment of its experience, and the posing and curating robs the moment of its realness. It would make more sense to draw the conclusion that if it’s on Instagram then it didn’t actually happen. Han writes, ‘A fulfilled life cannot be explained on a quantitative basis. It does not result from a plenitude of possibilities, just as recounting or listing of events does not necessarily amount to a narration or account. Rather, the latter require a special synthesis to which they owe their meaning.’ Today, we have more photos than we know what do with and because the ‘medium is the message’; following Marshall McLuhan’s thinking, human beings have become servomechanism of phones. The compulsive photo-taking serves the medium although it disguises itself behind serving the people taking the pictures. The proliferation of pictures without any sort of synthesis drains life of its meaning. ‘It is not the total number of events, but experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling. Where one event follows close on the heels of another, nothing enduring comes about. Fulfilment and meaning cannot be explained on quantitative grounds. A life that is lived quickly, without anything lasting long and without anything slow, a life that is characterized by quick, short-term, and short-lived experiences is itself a short life, no matter how high the ‘rate of experience’ may be’ (Han).

‘…he who contemplates does not absorb the object into himself. The long, contemplative gaze trains itself in the preservation of a distance to the things, without, though losing their nearness. Its spatial formula is that of a distanced nearness.’ My mother’s photo albums are a space of contemplation. Each photo absorbs me, pulls me in and there is a losing and subsequent finding of self through the album. I, however, do not absorb the album into myself. Sacred things retain their separateness. Cell phones have become extensions of selves, the contiguity between device and person dissolved. When people cannot spend time away from their devices, it isn’t about missing important communication, its more about the fact that we’ve absorbed the devices into ourselves. The device is a material containment of parts of ourselves like horcruxes and we are as territorial of them as Voldemort was of his horcruxes. We can therefore not truly contemplate them and consequently cannot see the thing properly and since we've  assimilated the device into ourselves, even the way we see ourselves is obscured. To be able to see something, there has to be a distance between us and the object. The galleries on our smartphones, although quantitatively significant, do not offer much of substance to us; if any. And if there was something to be grasped; we would have no way of seeing it. As Cousineau puts it, ‘I don’t believe that the problem is in the sites as it is in the sighting, the way we see… we look more and more but see less and less’.

The photos in my mom’s album went through a selection process. Not the arbitrary selection of the best picture out of 100 to post on social media, but the actual event itself goes through a selection process. The camera only made cameo appearances at events that were deemed important and significant enough and there was also a meaningful order to the events themselves. Nowadays, the camera is whipped up at the least provocation: meals, gym, coffee runs, getting dressed, buying new things, pets being pets, children being children etc... everything has become an event. The wisdom of Patrick Lencioni prevails, ‘If everything is important, then nothing is’ i.e., if everything is an event then nothing is. This is why digital spaces are unable to captivate us. ‘Events are no longer linked up into stories. The narrative chain, which yields a meaning, operates by making a selection. It strictly regulates the sequence of events.’ (Han). Histories bring things together; they are narrative in structure. My mother ‘was able to collect the events around’ her as Han puts it and allowed her history to emerge and we, her descendants, are anchored and can gain purchase into the world because of it. ‘History as directed time protects time against decay, against its dispersion into a pure sequence of point-like presences.’ These ahistorical spaces that we participate daily in, disperse, dissipate and dissolve us and ultimately render us invisible. ‘The decay of the temporal continuum renders existence radically fragile. The soul is permanently exposed to the danger of death and terror of nothingness, because the event which wrests it from death lacks any duration. The intervals between events are death zones. During these eventless in-between times, the soul falls into lethargy. The joy of being mingles with a fear of death. Exaltation is followed by depression, by an ontological depression even.’ (Han). Our digital footprints are indistinct from the general sludge of the internet space which means the way we regard them is the same as the way we regard everything else in the space and since everything on the internet is scattered and pulling in different directions, it confuses us. And since we are unable to stay on things long enough to struggle through to elucidation, our confusion turns into boredom, we give up and move on to the next stimuli. Hurston Smith wrote in the foreword to The Art of Pilgrimage, ‘But by attending to [obstacles] now- openness, attentiveness, and responsiveness are the essence of pilgrimage- you will be able to surmount them by yielding to them in the way that life always requires that we yield to it. And draw the resilience you will need from those who have preceded you, for pilgrims are a hardy breed.’ Which is why histories are so important. When the story unfolds and we see how those who came before us struggled through the obstacles that made them who they eventually became, we are encouraged. The tools for posterity to become ‘a hardy breed’ themselves are laid bare before them.

Pilgrimages are durable and histories are as well. Internet spaces are spaces characterized by instantaneity; they hold no duration which is also a part of the reason they are ahistorical. Han describes electronic mail as follows: ‘Electronic mail produces instantaneity by destroying the paths as spatial intervals in their entirety… Intervals structure not only perception but also life.’ When I behold my mom’s photo albums and think through the chain of mini-events that took place from the point a picture was taken to it making its way to the album, it is just a process brimming with interval spaces. From waiting for the film to be used up, to dark rooms, and archiving, there are spaces of deliberation, selection, waiting and lingering and these structure life. Its even in the descriptive languages of these processes. Traditionally, photos were developed and now they are printed. When something is printed, there are implications of replication and sameness (sludge). When a picture is developed, there is an anticipation to it; we are awaiting a transformation. Transformations are a long time in the making and are not instantaneous. Even dark rooms remind us of a time when everything wasn’t as glaringly ultra- transparent as they are now. Mystery and spaces of becoming have given room to intransmutable digital footprints.

As I return my mom’s photo albums to the place reserved for them, I feel like I have been a witness to the life of a great crocodile. I am now at a new Here equipped to return to life and live as fiercely as my mother did.

 

‘Traveler, there is no path

Paths are made by [putting our smartphones down and] walking’

 Antonio Machado with annotation

Robala ka kgotso, Kwena ya metsi