debate
From the Water
I think about water. A lot. I think about water because it has this exquisite power: water can change dramatically while retaining its original properties. It morphs into unrecognizably different states of matter while continuing to be itself, unaltered.
It is easy to resist change. We are conditioned against it in most of our cultures, generally speaking. Is it a natural reflex to resist it? Many of us make great sacrifice to avoid it. Laws are written and put into place to stymy it. Large, expensive buildings are built to protect against it. Minds are made up against it and reject ideas that even hint at it. Blockades of all sorts are built against experience that may lead to it. The fights against it use energy we don’t even have to spare. In some cases, some put themselves at risk in the process physically, emotionally. Heavy stuff.
Steeped in a culture of change, I anticipate it, ride it, enjoy and thrive in it. They say change is the only thing that stays the same so, even as a child, it was clear: why not make friends with it and welcome such opportunities for growth and learning? I owe my resiliency to having a family that faced many changes and stayed together through each and every one, relying on change, even as it was difficult. We collectively and individually learned to make the most of each one and find lessons in change that could not have been learned from any school. We taught ourselves to live better through it and within it. I owe the quality of my life and my capacity for experience to these lessons and to my family for providing access to them.
Wherever I go I meet people who spend a lot of time, energy, and resources fighting change. Inevitably change wins out and I am forced then to watch them tire and cave into it reluctantly, sometimes painfully. I try and not speak during such situations. I have only the choice to let others make their own mistakes in whatever way they choose. There is no other way to learn. We can try to tell them to just let change take them on the ride and enjoy it, but that doesn’t work. It only inspires them to resist more zealously.
I think about water. While I’m watching those I barely know or those I love with all my heart as they adapt to change, I think about water. I think about how long water has been doing it, changing, adapting, enduring, and yet it does not really change. Water does not waste time or energy in the face of the inevitable. It literally just rolls with it. It finds a way around obstacles. Every time.
I think about children, too. In children lies this spirit, willing to explore change, even revel in it. Somewhere along the line most of us seem to lose touch with a kind of innocent tenacity, the way a child solves a problem in play. The effort to change is transparent in children, like water. They have the ability to exhaustively problem-solve using none of the biased doubt (I call it ‘obstructionism’) often found in grown-ups. We make excuses and use our amazing brain-machines to come up with answers for everything, or create atmospheres of resistance, even subconsciously trying to derail change, arrogantly, ignorantly, trying everything except friendly solutions to accepting it and making it work for us.
Being afraid is no fun. It causes stress. It is no good. It affects everyone around us while we give into it. My strategies for dealing with it is this: I think about water. I think about children. Mostly water. I come from the water.
The trade-offs of trading up
This past week alone, two pals of mine, who have historically resisted change, have traded their old-school cell phones (of the Symbian variety) for next-gen SmartPhones. One, an Android, the other, an iPhone. Upon getting home and beginning to introduce themselves to a new paradigm in communication technologies, each contacted me separately to ask what they need to know to get each to work the way they want, having discovered things about each that come up short.
Technology, by the way, is always a trade-off. For each convenience offered, there are always new obstacles to overcome.
As far as operating systems go, this is a seemingly timeless (and predictably endless), Coke vs. Pepsi debate. The two leading mobile/tablet platforms, Android and iOS are both far from perfect on their own. While they do have much in common, such as superb haptic interfaces and decent battery life, this is true especially when it comes to making each work the way we want, out-of-the-box. There is a tradeoff involved in each of them. This overhead includes installing and configuring them to work just the way we like.
iOS, for example, while far more mature, stable, and predictable in performance, is missing a great deal of core functionality, requiring that each be jailbreak it in order to fully realize the device’s potential as a tool, both for work and play.
Android, on the other hand, is friendlier in this regard, however, lacks much of the stability and ease-of-use, requiring third party ROMs installed for seemingly every other app. This is reminiscent of Windows’ driver requirements, each of which further contributes to a system’s unpredictable performance.
Much of this is due to the Android Market being less discerning in terms of the quality of apps it allows into the wild. We do complain about Apple’s App Store for not being as utilitarian as we’d like, however, it is far more discriminating about the quality of apps offered. This, in addition to superior hardware design, contribute to making iOS the more stable and predictable platform.
The best of breed, IMHO, is jailbroken iOS. The addition of tools, such as coreutils, Terminal, OpenSSH, and SBSSettings, adds the invaluable functionality of Debian to the stability of the existing platform atop the elegant design and usability of the hardware.
As stated earlier, though, not without a little time and effort ; )
As an example, one of the additional steps required on iOS (post-jailbreak) occurs after installing and configuring OpenSSH. Upon connecting to devices, we see the following error once we are logged into a shell and perform the ls command to view contents of the current directory:
>ls
>ls: unrecognized prefix: hl
>ls: unparsable value for LS_COLORS environment variable
This issue is well known and documented in a Debian Bug report log:
#544871 – coreutils: ls complains about LS_COLORS: unrecognized prefix: hl, color define has been changed from hl to mh, which produced the error.
There is a simple solution to this. Do:
vi /etc/profile.d/coreutils.sh
modify the dircolors value thus: eval “$(dircolors -b | sed s/hl/mh/)”
then do: source /etc/profile.d/coreutils.sh
Well-known is documented is great, however, it is preferable to not have to modify anything at all and without requiring additional time researching and/or sleuthing. Things are indeed getting better, though, and as each evolves, we will continue to see improvement in the way each is used and developed, requiring less and less overhead at the outset in order to have access to the modern Swiss Army Knife that each can and will eventually be – out-of-the-box : )
Is Better the enemy of Good?
To some, the answer to this question is “no”. The same ones who believe better is always the goal, always, at all costs. There is a time and place for that, surely. Nonetheless, good has been under attack for far too long by the ones who perhaps misinterpreted the message. The same ones who are always scanning the room for someone more interesting, more attractive, more wealthy, more – whatever. “Better”. The same ones who sacrifice personal relationships for sales, spending time at the office when they aren’t obligated instead of with their families and friends. The ones who create unsustainable work cultures for themselves and then blame the job. The ones who don’t set boundaries for themselves. The ones who boast of their strengths but deceive themselves about their weaknesses. The ones who prefer to push feelings down deep and then later become angry about their cowardice, taking it out unfairly on others. The same ones who talk it but don’t walk it. The same ones who are always quick with snarky retorts about feelings, who pride themselves on their sarcastic bag of tricks, walking around with their bully suits on. The same ones who walk through life at an arm’s length away from true feeling, wondering why they can’t connect with others. The same ones who would risk nothing for beauty. The same ones who make decisions for a living and don’t consider the people whose lives those decisions affect. The same ones who think it cool to buy instead of make. The same ones who don’t think it important to nurture and build their own culture but adopt someone else’s culture as their own. TV. The same ones who take big things for granted and are completely oblivious to the small things. The same ones who have next to zero powers of observation. The ones who say “no” by default instead of “yes”. The ones who are sure they know that already and say “I know” a lot. The same ones who are absolutely, positively sure they are sane. The same ones who don’t spend time or earnest effort on anything that doesn’t make obvious contributions to the bottom lines that power any dreams they might have left. Dreams about stuff, things, empty, unfeeling ways of thinking about the world and ways to live in it. Empty. Unsustainable.
This can be any or all of us at any time. We are ALL guilty of waging war against good.
I’m writing my thoughts and feelings here today in defense of the idea of good.
The reason for the recent turn in the economy is clear: we simply haven’t been building a sustainable culture, not in work, not inside of ourselves, not outside, not anywhere. We have been neglecting good, collectively. A strong majority of us continue to forget the lessons illuminated for us in films, literature, et al, yet we still continue to seek out the insatiable paths to ruin. Double-glazing this-and-that isn’t going to change the nature of us. We leave those tough decisions to the characters in our movies and novels.
At some point we all will die. In the moments leading up to thee moment we pass on to whatever that means, is all of this clear, or is even that moment obscured by the impulse to sacrifice good for the sake of better?
I think of that moment more often than I should have to but it keeps me grounded, tied to what good means. I’m not afflicted with the disease of chronic dissatisfaction with my life, my friends, my car, etc. To some that may sound morbid, or even arrogant, but it gives me access to moments of sheer awe, real connectedness to people, and tear-soaked moments of absolute, all-encompassing thankfulness for each and every moment of it.
In the coming year, it is my wish for all of the people everywhere to let go of this anger, stop buying it and buying into it online, on TV, on the radio, in person. Wherever the voice of what makes us unsatisfied lives, turn it off, turn on something that BUILDS, that uplifts, that reminds us of the wondrous things we are capable of, of what’s GOOD.
good
–adjective
of high quality; excellent.
right; proper; fit.
honorable or worthy.
educated and refined.
financially sound or safe.
genuine; not counterfeit.
sound or valid.
reliable; dependable.
healthful; beneficial.
in excellent condition.
not spoiled or tainted; edible; palatable.
favorable; propitious.
cheerful; optimistic; amiable.
Whether we like it or not, good is good and it’s entirely up to each of us to nurture it in our own time in this world, whatever it is.
Cheers to all of the good in our lives now and in the years to come.
Herskovits and the Heart of Blackness
A compelling examination of the career and controversy surrounding Melville J. Herskovits, the pioneering American anthropologist of African Studies and controversial intellectual who established the first African Studies Center at an American university and authored, “The Myth of the Negro Past.”:
