Internal quietude and a cup of coffee

I need to find the quiet inside of me. I lost it. Slowly, at first, I didn’t even notice it slip away… and now I live in fear of the quiet.

It started when I was a teenager. I spent time on airplanes and buses, shuttling between boarding school and wherever I was going to meet my parents. I needed books to read, tapes for my Walkman, and music magazines. The idea of having nothing in front of my eyes petrified me. It provided me with a depth of knowledge, but it also became a refuge from my thoughts, and my feelings. I needed constant external stimulation.

Over time it became the computer, and then the smart phone, and my tablet. I had one of the first BlackBerries, and I would check it constantly. Now it is my iPhone, and social media, that has me enthralled. It is shocking how estranged I have become from my own thoughts, and how divorced from my feelings. I will check the device habitually… while waiting for an elevator, in the driver’s seat enduring a red light, while supervising the children… At first I was able to justify it. “Business! If you eat lunch, you are lunch!” and all of those late-90s platitudes. Now it’s about the business of art. But honestly, a lot of it is based on the feedback loop of social media, responding to a new Like or reading a comment left on a post.

It is in some ways an addiction, certainly a behavioral disorder. The question of whether my actions hurt myself or the ones I love must be answered affirmatively… mainly myself in this case. It provides refuge from feelings, and it stops me from engaging in thoughts that might fuel additional creativity. But unlike a Heroin addiction which can be stopped cold turkey, this technological abuse is more like an eating disorder. A bulimic can’t just quit food… so new behavior patterns must be formed. Because the truth is that social media and the gadgets that enable this consumption are also a great source of creative inspiration, a wonderful way of staying in touch with friends, family, and fans, while also providing a platform for showing one’s work.

So why do I want my free brain cycles back? Because that is where my creativity happens… I have ideas. Every once in a while I have big ideas. But most of the time, I am in a project, and I rethink and question and skewer some smaller aspect of what I’m working on. It’s this creative mastication that I seem to have forfeited. I need those cycles. And it’s not always about creative output, often it is the ancillary ideas that fall by the wayside. Yes, the clearest moments are those trance-induced endorphin periods when I get into a good cardio-groove while swimming, biking or running on the treadmill. I do cardio mainly to think.

But I need those little moments back. They’re mine.

So I am reclaiming them. And small steps are needed.

I found a post today by a blogger called David Cain and his site raptitude. He’s been anointed by some of his readers as a sort of self-help guru, but he is the most down-to-earth guy I have seen in this field. Cain recommends clarity of mind, and although he insists there is nothing meditative about his process, it actually gets close to that… and that’s a good thing. I will paraphrase a post of his, because he is a tea drinker… and although I enjoy tea, my life revolves around coffee. I need a quick cup in the morning, but my favorite coffee moments are in the studio mid-day, or in the afternoon right after a cat-nap and before my second wave of creative effort. Cain ultimately posted it as advice… So I will share his knowledge, but my readers expect it in my voice.

How to make a cup of coffee:

First, slow down… like you’ve just turned off the highway into a quiet neighborhood. Normal rat-race speed is unsuitable for what is about to happen. Hurrying through the process of relaxing defeats its purpose.

This experience is all about decelerating. Take an extra breath, it will focus you.

Take out your tools. The kettle. Your favorite cup. The clean French Press from the drip rack.

Your supplies — the consumables — will be some of nature’s simplest creations: water, coffee beans, and milk.

Choose your coffee. A good Viennese roast is my favorite, but there’s Blue Hawaiian that I’ve loved, good Columbian, or a great Espresso. I keep different kinds in the fridge at home. One of the most important parts of this ritual for me is grinding the beans, but your coffee may already be ground.

Run water into the kettle, feeling its growing weight, and take a moment to smile at your fortune if you did not have to leave the house to do so.

Turn on the heat. Put your ground coffee beans into the French Press.

… and here comes the hard part! You will now confront one of modern society’s ever-present dangers, which is the risk of distraction we face whenever nothing interesting happens for a few minutes. Your long-formed habits will suggest something, maybe slipping your smartphone out, maybe leaning over the computer chair to surf Facebook, maybe straightening something on the counter. Worst of all, you may start talking to yourself in your head.

Stay where you are. You’re making coffee. It’s tempting to think of the next two minutes of kettle-heating time as something in the way, something you want to get to the end of, like an unmemorable stretch of parking lot you have to cross to get from your car to your destination.

Your impulse might be to fill the empty time. Opt instead to do something simple and self-contained, looking out the window, or studying the light around the kitchen. If you’re game, just stand beside the stove. Let time just hang there, without making you feel like you should be somewhere else.

Clear your mind.

Whatever you end up doing for that two minutes, if you stay with it, your simple experience of standing or looking will seem to grow in intensity, until your whole world begins whistling and rattling.

Don’t rush here. A boiling kettle is not a crisis. To make sure you’re not reacting, watch it exhale steam for a few seconds. Observe how the world stays together. Let your pulse return to normal, then take it off.

Pour your water into the French Press. Set the kettle aside. Heat off.

Place the plunger top over the French Press, and allow yourself to look forward to pushing that plunger down. Take your cup, and some milk, and the Press over to your favorite seat. NOT the one at your desk. You’ll need a surface to set your coffee down on, within arm’s reach of your chair. Put the cup down before you even think about sitting down.

Then sit, and rest your bones. Take a big, unpretentious breath, and as you let it go watch the remaining tension go with it. You are looking for the feeling of sitting at the center of the universe. You might as well be.

Eventually you’ll notice a curl of steam or a whiff of coffee and discover that your press is ready. When you are also ready, push the plunger down, and watch the darkness swirl. Pour yourself some coffee, inhale the aroma, add some milk, pick up your cup… and drink some.

Give yourself as much time as you need. Really, give the time to yourself, as a present. The most important part is to agree that everything in your world, except for sitting with your drink, will be dealt with later. Your gift is a complete — though short — subjugation of the rest of your life. For fifteen minutes, make the rest of your world subordinate to this experience.

And if you’re lucky, your mind will open.

Think about the image you want to create… or the story you’re writing, the characters, the setting, the world you’re creating.

The thought may make a part of you nervous at first, deferring the remainder of whole universe, everything dear to you, until you finish your coffee. Whatever normally fetters your psyche during the day — career plans, family issues, budget constraints, website updates, ambitions for revolutionary art or a spotless house — all of it can be picked up again and fretted about once your coffee is finished, if you still think it’s worthwhile.

Obviously, leave your phone where it is — even if it chimes or quivers while you sit. Ignore it. It’s just a sound, it doesn’t mean anything else right now. If your friend “Likes” your Thoreau quote, or somebody comments on your link, you will learn this later, in a different moment. If the mind wanders, bring it back to your bones.

It’s important to note that this is not an uptight meditation ritual. You don’t need to concentrate, just put your attention on what you’re doing. If it wanders, bring it back. This is all physical, and there are no spiritual pretentions, no ancient wisdom, no asceticism or self-mortification. Nothing here is hard. You don’t have to keep your spine upright like a stack of coins. You don’t have to keep your shoulders back. You shouldn’t look constipated to an outside observer. The thoughts will come, or you will simply have given some time to yourself.

So… small steps. Remove social media apps from smart phone. Log off every time you leave such a site, just to add a re-entry hurdle. Drive with the radio off. Clear the mind. Do cardio. And allow your mind to chat with you…

That’s why people are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, it’s because they don’t want to be alone with their thoughts.

  – Martin Amis

Facebook

I don’t know what posessed me, but I decided to join Facebook last week.

…as though my prior forays into Social Networking were so successful…

The first few days are overwhelming. I am suddenly in touch with hundreds of people, many of whom I haven’t seen in thirty years. I attended a number of schools, which means I have a much larger circle of people to reconnect with than most others I know. Add in the various online communities I participate in, and it becomes a wide circle of people.

It’s great fun to surf through the players of your own personal history, and see what everyone else has been up to. Most won’t admit it, but the first thing people do when they join Facebook is to see what various ex-crushes and high-school sweethearts look like. The next thing is seeing whom they still might be friends with from the old days. It’s one of the great guilty pleasures of the internet. It’s even more fun if you’ve managed to keep your looks, and can show off a good-looking family and a successful career.

Some of the people are difficult to recognize… I think Facebook ought to develop some kind of forensic app, an age regression software that will show the middle-aged men staring out from their poorly-shot profile picture as the young teenagers in uniforms they once were. Even worse are the members who are unwilling to show themselves at all, and instead post pictures of their toddler, or a favorite cat.

I have to admit it’s a joy to reconnect with some old friends. I find that my instincts were right. Some are living interesting, engaged, and involved lives, whereas others… are posting pictures of their favorite cats. There are some I always thought were a little “thick”, and lo and behold, their hobbies and affiliations bear out what I had already suspected. But in most cases the common ground that made someone my friend has remained in place, and we have moved along the same trajectory over time.

Much more difficult is the Friends of Friends phenomenon. Every time you reconnect with someone, their friends see the connection. Well, many of them will then send you a Friend Request as well… At first I accepted all of the requests, and my network grew exponentially. Size may matter to a teenager, but it has become quickly apparent that I value quality over quantity. I am now “Friends” with people I barely know. It’s these people that are often the most active… they enjoy their network action, and will comment on everything incessantly. Some of it is funny, occasionally it’s stupid, most of it is irrelevant, and all of it is a huge distraction.

I’m not above this kind of behavior, by the way. You can only see someone’s profile if you’re Friends with them… well, I’ll send a Friend Request to people I didn’t know that well back then, but I want to see what their lives are like these days. I figure I can “cancel” the Friendship later (Facebook won’t tell ’em) but in the mean time I get to see if they’re still as cool (or artsey, or sporty, or intimidating) as they were back then.

But I am ruthless. I will begin “unfriending” people by next week. I’ve already started turning down various invites, especially those of teenage kids. Some of my friends have offspring with their own internet accounts, but I have no interest in filtering what I say… and I am even less interested in what they did last weekend. I have now moved my Facebook link to Internet Explorer. I use Firefox for serious work, whereas the other browser is reserved for spare time activity and frivolous surfing.

Nonetheless, the final verdict is positive. It is proving to be a fun way of staying in touch, and Facebook is well-written… the granular privacy settings that allow you to grant different types of access to virtually every member you’re Friends with ensures that you can have some fun, and still look like a serious business person at the water-cooler on Monday morning.

Poke!

Electric Kool-Aid?

I am an absolute hobbyist when it comes to energy policy. I know even less about energy generation and distribution. But being in the US during this election year is interesting, because energy is one of the big topics. Germany has the same problem of course, but it seems more acute here in the US.

One of the biggest problems (beside how to power all the air conditioners) is the vast distances, and the fact that 70% of all Americans now live in a suburban environment. That means that every American family member over the age of 16 expects to have access to a car. It’s all about private transportation, and putting a couple of buses out on the street is not going to fix the problem.

T. Boone Pickens, former oil man, take-over investor, and current hedge fund manager is aggressively pitching The Pickens Plan. He proposes building wind farms to create energy that would be used to generate power for homes and businesses. This would free up the natural gas that is currently being used at powerplants, and use it for consumption in cars. All this would give the United States a period in which to develop alternative energy sources. Of course, natural gas is not a renewable resource, but Pickens argues that it is cheaper and local, and subsequently a viable alternative to oil for the US. His website site does a pretty voter-friendly job of describing it. It’s a little unclear at times whether he’s identifying a solution to a national problem, or a business opportuntity, but I imagine to a man like T. Boone Pickens the perfect solution is both.

Andy Grove, the man who built Intel, has also put his hat in the ring. In a conversation with Bloomberg yesterday, he summarized his commitment toward electric cars. Note the rather urgent tone he’s adopting – he believes that the battle for resources might drive us to war or cause us to starve, and that we need to act now. I’m surprised he failed to mention Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place, but it seems Grove is supporting teams from Silicon Valley.

Interestingly, both Pickens and Grove consider the reduction of green house gases and the inherent climate change a secondary mission. Their primary concern is keeping the economy from collapsing.

I think the electric car has a big chance in the US. Americans like cars, and they like technology. It just needs to be reliable. More importantly, they need to agree quickly on standards. If every car/company/distributor is going to have a different kind of battery/charger/voltage then electric transportation will wither on the vine.

But when I think about Germany, one thing is obvious when comparing it to the United States: Only in America could private men like T. Boone Pickens or Andy Grove pick up the slack and drive the national agenda. In Germany everyone expects everything to come down from the government, and people fundamentally mistrust anything else. It is clear that Amercan dependancy on foreign oil, and the lack of an alternative strategy for power and transportation, is due to weak leadership. Well, if the government won’t do it, people will. I don’t believe Pickens and Grove came up with these ideas out of the blue. I’m sure scientists and activists laid a lot of the groundwork for them, but they have the civic pride and courage to stand up and do something about the problem they see. I wish we had these kinds of people in Germany.

The Hum on the Street

I walked along my street here in Manhattan after a quick bite and a long browse at Barnes & Noble, but more about that in my next post.

It’s hot – very hot. It’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 30 Celsius, whatever sounds hotter, although admittedly it is cooling off a little now that it’s nighttime. That also means there’s less cars, and occasionally there are no cars. But it’s not silent, not in the way it is on a spring night.

Because at that carless moment I realize I’m surrounded by hundreds of window-unit air conditioners roaring away at full speed. They are blasting their owners’ apartments with full gusto and rage, and the street becomes a canyon filled with angry little machines churning away in the crevices above me.

It boggles my mind just how much power is being consumed at that moment. I have to wonder how many people these days are foregoing air conditioning in the face of rising energy costs.  It also makes me wonder how we’re seriously going to address the power crisis. I don’t think all the windfarms and solar collection sites can feed the need of a large city like New York, and the prognosis is continued growth in power demand by larger populations, living in mega-cities. And if Africa and other developing areas finally get it together, there will be a lot of power that’s needed.

To me, the obvious answer is nuclear power. If the airline industry can figure out how transport millions of people safely each year, certainly the smartest minds in the world can figure out how to safely generate energy by splitting atoms. The one stand-out argument against nuclear power has always been the risk to human lives. Something could go horribly wrong. But so what? How is that still a viable argument? If you look at the millions of lives lost due to carbon polution, the economies and environments affected climate change, and the lives lost or altered in wars to protect resources and “our way of life”, I can’t help but think we need to begin building reactors.

I guess we can just wait for the Chinese to do it – they have a somewhat more casual relationship to the health and physical welfare of their citizens – there’s a LOT of them, and none of them vote. They’ll probably steal the French technology, perfect it themselves, and then license it to the rest of us.

It’s still better than more oil money going to the Arabs (*ahem*, I meant “Oil Producing Nations”). Come to think of it, they should be funding the research – and no, that doesn’t give Iran a pass to continue with their program.

Oh, and should anyone think I’m flippant about the nuclear mishap thing, please believe me – I’m not. If you’re strong – really strong – then click on this link and watch Paul Fusco’s report about the Children of Chernobyl.

Linkedin and red wine…

Oh man.

I’ve decided to set up a Linkedin profile. At first I was extremely wary of it, but after closer inspection I realize Linkedin offers all the controls I would like. The site gives me the chance to show or hide as much info as I want to, including my Connections.

So I go ahead and invite people that I think would enjoy participating in this kind of social networking madness. Fair enough, I import my primary Contacts from Outlook (about 200 entries that I use on a daily basis), and then invite selected people – with a sensible custom message in the text.

Then I go out to dinner with some friends, and we fall deep into several bottles of Brunello. I get home, and decide I’m going to finish up my Linkedin profile. I import all my Contacts from what I call the Master Contact List (about 750 entries), thinking I’m going to invite a few select people I haven’t heard from in a while, or just to see if they’re already on Linkedin. By default, all the Contacts are check-marked, but I only wanted to invite a few. So I click INVERT ALL to undo the check-marks.

No I didn’t. I actually hit INVITE ALL.

Oh great.

Good thing I didn’t use the Old Contacts. I’m a digital pack-rat, and have every old Contact stashed away in a folder (about 3,000 entries) – which would have included every ex-girlfriend, former business associate, or electrician I ever added to my Outlook.

So the point is: social networking and wine are not good travel companions.

House of Cards

I found this interesting video by Radiohead today. It was shot without cameras or lights, and simply uses a new technology based on a high-end scanner rotating on an axis. It captures data, and then uses computers to recreate the scene by placing pixels in a 3D space, and attributing a basic amount of color and light information to each pixel.

The result is actually highly fragmented, and looks like what it is: grainy data. But I can see that once the digital horsepower is available – data capture, data transfer, and finally, the ability to render the data on the user end – this could be a very interesting technology. This is only a few thousand pixels with a few colors, but imagine millions of pixels at full 16-bit color depth. It could conceivably enable real-time map displays, or allow video games to be played within real environments… virtual golf-cart race through the Vatican, anyone?

Anyway, the song of the video is gently reflective and a little sad, which I must admit appeals to the emo kid in me.

Check it out.

Oh, and you can actually play with the data at Google’s Data site.