a virtual space of one's own

half-written riffs on visualizing 'all my stuff'

I won’t explain this one

This post started out as a braindump note-to-self, so it might make less sense than my other posts, but I haven’t published anything in a while so I figure I might as well post it here.

When i search my heart I find that there’s a rather strange complex of anger and frustration… at the world… for its dogged insistence on changing everything so damn much, so damn always. I feel some grief, some despair at all the time and energy I spent trying to make sense of things that have since un-thinged themselves. what was all that FOR? Sure, I can put on this little act that goes, “ah well, no work is ever wasted, it was still good practice for the next thing,” and while that’s true in a sense, and I can mean it somewhat earnestly, it’s also fundamentally Cope – reassuring patter meant to diminish the sting of mistakes. which isn’t intrisically ‘bad’, but I want to be clear with myself that it IS Cope. and there’s a lot to explore in the landscape of mistakes, and possible attitudes towards those mistakes. It took me years to see that even self-flagellation is a kind of Cope, because beating yourself up about a mistake can so easily become a distraction from correcting the mistake, or addressing the consequences of the mistake, or making amends.¹

When i sit a little longer with the original frustration (“how dare the world change on me like this!”), the frustration starts to change, too. after all, the world is what it is. it always has been. the targeting laser of my frustration begins to shifts towards myself, at my foolishness in attempting the absurd. and then for a moment it veers sharply towards the world again– but a smaller world, this time– the world that made me. My local world, that raised me to think how I think, to assume what I assume, to believe what I believe. The world of my intellectual and cultural and emotional inheritance, which in this context seems like it has served me so poorly, miseducated me so badly, misprepared me for the wider World.

But can anybody prepare anyone for the World as it is? it seems like it would take someone truly magnificent. Real World-Teachers are surely in exceedingly short supply, and even if you were so blessed as to encounter one, they cannot possibly teach you much in the limited confines of a classroom. It seems that it would take someone truly in tune with themselves and beyond to perform this most profound task of education, and their students would have to share a rich context with them where they can truly work and play and explore and fuckup, and learn via osmosis.

So, okay. There’s no sense being frustrated with The World for being what it is, and there’s no sense being frustrated with my local world either, for it too did the best it could. And there’s not much sense in being frustrated with myself, because the same things apply all the way down. Our stories begin wherever they begin, and we can’t possibly know everything, and what we DO know is invariably contaminated with misunderstandings and confusions. All of this takes years and years to even begin to understand, and this understanding too will likely be confused, for misunderstanding is the default state. So, alright. Breathe in, breathe out. Everything is still as it is. I am still who I am. What I’ve done is still what I’ve done. The question, as always, is what will I do now?

the virtual space

I haven’t moved from my bed (where I’m writing this), but in my mind’s eye I feel myself stepping out of a small room– like a bathroom or a closet, or maybe from a vague ‘outside’, like a nondescript smoke break, and stepping into my personal, local ‘psychic environment’. My thoughts, my feelings, my writings, my relationships, my decisions, my fears and anxieties, all lay strewn about haphazardly in a mental space. This space feels moderately undefined, so maybe I should describe it, to give it life. It’s basically or ‘spiritually’ similar to my living room. The ceiling is quite low, which is odd considering that I have the freedom to design this space however I like. The two books that I’ve written each stand out amidst the mess, like monuments in a city, and they hum with exuberant pride. (I’m getting the image of the Empire State and the Chrysler buildings in NYC.) My wife is sitting in a corner, happily playing with our toddler, neither of them really noticing that they’re in a virtual reality of my imagining. There’s a window- it hasn’t been cleaned in a while, and when I look through it I can see friends from all over the world in what looks like a lively coffeehouse. I can correspond with them via texts, but I can’t physically climb through the window to meet them. Nevertheless, I’m deeply grateful that they’re there. I look back into the main room. There’s a foreboding pile of papers, books, notes and cards in a large disorganized heap, and I find myself flinching when I look at it. I know that I’ve made attempts in the past to organize it, and that the heap in its current state must have a certain orderliness to it that I laboriously brought about in the not-too-distant past, but when I currently glance at it I just see an incomprehensible, indecipherable mess and I feel tired. On one of the walls is an incredibly vast tapestry of all of my tweets.

I take another deep breath— — — — and I ask myself, alright, what’s all this then? What am I doing here? What do I want? And the first answer that arises is, I want to be comfortable. This mess isn’t hospitable, but I know in my heart that it could be. I’m like a guy who decided to build a canoe in his living room, and there’s wood and sawdust and paint and epoxy everywhere. The canoe is far from finished, and the living room is far from livable. It’s the worst of both worlds.

/u/According_Effort_433’s shop space

So what do I do? Well. The striking thing that came up here for me is that my mental model of my personal virtual space seems to be modelled on my own home², which is in a general state of disarray for a multitude of reasons I’m not going to get into here– and the good news there is that I’m going to be finally moving out of my current home in about 2 months. So I have an opportunity to do a great mental remodelling of my personal virtual space.

One thing I’m really looking forward to in my new home will be setting aside a designated room entirely for my work, as an office space. My current setup at home has evolved through a bunch of trial-and-error, and it’s always been less-than-ideal. I used to share an office space with my wife– it was our original bedroom, and our clothes are still there. And then when we had our kid, we ended up turning it into the kid’s playroom, and I moved my computer and monitors out into the living room. It’s just been weird all around. The hope is that when I get to have a dedicated office space, I’ll be able to have my own undisturbed whiteboard where I can think out loud with index cards– I tried this in my current living room for a little while, and it was great while it lasted, but unfeasible once we had the kid. I expect I’ll also make videos much more regularly once I can have a semi-permanent camera setup.

I realize I didn’t directly answer the question. What do I do, about the mess of the canoe? Well, ideally I’d move it into a proper workshop, and have a clearer demarcation between workspace and living space. What if that’s just not feasible? Well… could you ‘live elsewhere’, in a sense? Actually, this is a class of solution that I haven’t properly considered. I mentioned that I have a playroom for the kid– but it’s haphazardly put together. Even with 60 or so days left in my current house, it would probably be worthwhile if I spent 1-3 days reorganizing the playroom in a way that makes it more habitable. The current arrangement of bookshelf space is thoughtlessly put together. There’s almost always opportunity for a more thoughtful arrangement of elements, in a way that serves one’s intended purposes. But you’d have to have an open and honest conversation with yourself about what your purposes are, and how you might better approximate serving them.

closing

I realize I just sprung the idea of a virtual mental space without particularly contextualizing it, and it’s a little late in the post to do it but maybe it’ll be worth talking about it a little. I’ve long been familiar with the idea of a ‘memory palace’, where you remember things by visualizing them in an imaginary physical space, typically one that has emotional resonance for you– so you might imagine a bunch of things laid out in your childhood home, for instance. I was never particularly good at that. But I found myself doing some approximate form of it over the years when thinking about my tweets, which is how I remember them. It’s hard to explain, because it’s a little bit abstract, but basically I tend to think in terms of phrases. Some phrases are much more resonant and memorable than others, and I try to ‘tie’ the things I want to remember, with the things that I already do remember.

Anyway, I’m getting tired and this post will be published as-is, for better or worse. The question I have for you is, do you use any kind of visualization technique or system in your own life or work? I’d love to hear about it.

1. Mistakes: I wrote a whole book (Introspect) to explore and rehabilitate my feelings around making mistakes– to appreciate the utility of embracing one’s mistakes, to really learn from them. It’s deceptively simple in theory, but in practice it can get very murky. That said, I feel like I’ve learned a lot from musicians here, such as Victor Wooten, who talks about “erasing mistakes by making music”.

2. An interesting question here is, could it be possible to simply envision an entirely different virtual space, and get benefits from that? What if I imagined that my virtual space has a high ceiling, and lots of natural light, and so on? Surely it can’t be that easy. But barely costs anything to try, so I think I’ll do that as I drift off to sleep after publishing this.