Decision Brownouts - from the Blogroll

 From Venkatesh Rao's Ribbonfarm blog, May 12, 2024:

Decisiveness is not about making clear choices as much as it’s about unlocking energy. Indecisiveness is enervation.

I think of this state as a decision brownout, as in an electronic device shutting down, getting unreliable, or slipping into a failed reboot loop, due to insufficient or unstable supply voltage. While you’re in a brownout, you procrastinate on all decisions to conserve energy because you have no sense of what’s important.

[...]

 To get out of a brownout you need two things: a new sense of direction, and the energy to pick a path of greater-than-least resistance. Of the two, the energy is the more important thing. A non-default decision option will feel right primarily because it feels energizing enough to make at all, not because of its external effects. And if you make enough non-minimum-energy decisions in a row, the chances of locking on to a new direction increase (but there is no guarantee). The goal is not a particular new vector but a positive-feedback energization spiral. When you want to push-start a car with a dead battery, the correct direction to push is “downhill.” Once the energy is flowing, you can worry about steering.

 

Proverbs for Life

The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.

Those who work their land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies have no sense.

Proverbs 12:10-11

Fall 2023

 

Autumnal Equinox 2023

This small bric-a-brac shelf hangs over the wood stove in the kitchen. My mother would occasionally change the decorative items displayed on it. I have started a tradition of swapping out the pieces at each change of season.

On Knitting Season

It all starts with the weather…. Through the woodsmoke season that opens all hearts’ doors into kitchen industry and soup on the stove, the signs wink at you from everywhere: sticks of kindling, brushstrokes of snow on branches–this is the whole world calling you to take up your paired swords against the coming freeze.

Barbara Kingsolver, “Where It Begins,” in Vogue Knitting, Fall 2022, page 24. 

Editing the Final Details of One's Life

EDITING THE FINAL DETAILS of one's life is like editing a story for the final time. It's the last shot an editor has at making corrections, the last rewrite before the roll of the presses. It's more painful than I anticipated to throw away files and paperwork that seemed critical to my survival just two weeks ago, and today, are all trash. Like the manual for the TV that broke down four years ago, and notebooks for stories that will never be written, and from former girlfriends, letters whose value will plummet the day I die. Filling wastebasket after wastebasket is a regrettable reminder that I have squandered much of my life on trivia.

Jack Thomas (Source) 

Write in the Process of Figuring Things Out

 I’m still sitting on a bunch more material and drafts in that vein [what he used to write about], but the truth is I’m finding it hard to get excited about. It seems like it’s best to write about things while you’re in the process of figuring them out, because they start to feel stale by the time you’re looking back in hindsight.

Richard Meadows 

Snowy Saturday

Barn and Cedar Trees In Snow