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30
Jan

Any Sufficiently Advanced (Spiritual) Technology

It’s common, and very wise, to ask God for strength, patience, peace, joy, etc. So how is it, exactly, that God gives these things to us?

Our magnificent church just finished a Daniel fast together. In the final week of it I made a well-meaning but ill-fated attempt to give up most of my usual sources of comfort and rest and entertainment: snacks, fun books, video games, tea, solitary TV-watching, condiments, etc. Everything must go.

The semi-articulated goal behind this experiment was that I wanted to learn to draw strength, comfort, peace and rest from nothing but God. If he didn’t feed me, I would go hungry; not just food hungry, you understand, but all-the-way-down hungry. It was very hard, and I didn’t manage to carry the experiment through the whole week.

Channels of (in this case) hydration -- (c) Tony Hisgett

But what I started realizing more clearly is that in many cases God provides strength, comfort or rest through all sorts of channels, say a hug from my wife Kristen or a nutritious meal. Certainly some of the available channels are not bringing anything from God. I don’t think playing computer games for hours on end is usually a channel of God’s rest (nor, in the end, all that restful). But other things I do, like eating and sleeping and laughing and watching Modern Family with my household, are the actual way God is giving me strength.

Then there are the times God “directly,” seemingly magically, gives me a sudden sense of peace or bravery, usually in response to prayer. But I suspect that that sort of magical infusion is not more holy than gaining confidence and peace through a hug from Kristen and an encouraging e-mail from my dad.

So it becomes a matter of discerning which channels of grace are God-authorized to meet our needs at any given moment. Sometimes a feast with friends is the way God strengthens us, sometimes it is an escapist avoidance of the hard work that would be the real channel of God’s strength.

And there is still the mystery of the magical infusions of one blessing or another. I am inclined to treat these in line with Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Perhaps it’s not that there are “indirect” channels of God’s grace, like hugs from friends, and “direct” channels, where God “just does” something to us or for us. Perhaps it’s simply that we don’t really understand how spirits work yet, and sometimes we are receiving an invisible hug or snack.

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29
Jan

The Plan

I have this problem.


I always forget what I’m obsessed with.

There are all these topics that trigger intense and excited ideas in me. I always recognize them when they come up in conversations, but if you asked me what I’m thinking about these days, I’d never be able to call them to mind.

So I finally did what a rational person would have done eons ago. I started writing them down. Any time one came up, I scribbled it in my name-brand notebook.1 Soon they were tugging each other out of the woodwork and all these crawly little lines appeared and — poof! — a tiny gigantic map of everything I’m obsessed with. Enough to start with, anyway.

“that almost-tangible buzz”

Now I know what it is I’ve been wanting to write about. Posts should begin to slowly creep forward and attempt to tease apart that magnificent tangle of ideas. For now let’s just dip in for a few of the highlights:

Engagement is critical. You know what I’m talking about. It’s that almost-tangible buzz that arises when someone actually pays attention. Kids can’t live without it. Spouses don’t do so well without it either. And engaging with an activity makes a outsized difference in the quality of your results. Engaging with what’s next to you seriously boosts joy. The importance of engagement pops up everywhere once you start looking.

I don’t really understand engagement, but it has something to do with attention. Which gets interesting in its own right, because you can only pay attention to one thing at a time, but of course you’re constantly doing all sorts of things at once. I don’t just mean multitasking in an overt way, like watching a movie while you fold clothes. I mean my fingers are typing and my brain is articulating ideas and my heart is pumping and I’m breathing and shivering and I’ve bitten a couple nails and listened to a song and shifted my position and yet I’m really only paying attention to one of those things per moment.

That’s where we get into habit. Habit is really useful if you need to process common inputs in standard ways without using up your single, precious attention to do so. And attention is perfect for exercising real judgment or solving new problems.

Now, this gives us a stellar grid for understanding bureaucracy, because bureaucratic procedures are to organizations what habits are to people. You have someone, somewhere, who is competent and engaged enough to make decisions about how to deal with new situations. They create the procedures everyone else follows without having to spend attention on defining the process. If you’re willing to trust everyone on the front lines to be that competent and engaged, you can eliminate bureaucracy because your employees will generally make the right decisions.

“bureaucracy…can be just the thing”

But if you have tons of employees and most of them are just there for the paycheck, suddenly you have to define everything in tedious levels of detail and enforce it externally. This also implies that organizational procedures — what I’m calling bureaucracy — can be just the thing when they’re used well, to smooth out common processes and free people to place their attention on the interesting questions and innovations that really require their engagement: the things, we could say, that add value to the world.

Value. What is worth wanting. What there would be more of in a more perfect world. But say you’ve made value, or found value. What do you do with beauty? What is a sufficient response to a solid idea or a really pleasing photograph or a damn fine wine? And how on Earth are you meant to take in the full deep-down gorgeousness of your wife? Appreciation takes practice. Getting better at appreciating value gives you a greater capacity for joy, deeper rest, more delightful work. But I don’t know yet how to get better at appreciating things. I fumble. I stutter. I take sips, not gulps.

So I’m on a pilgrimage, a constant search for value and the secret to taking it into me. I want to be a connoisseur of the world. I want to suck the marrow out of all this blatant glory sizzling in the leaves and books and friends all around me. I have to find and eat the truth. I am ravenous. So hungry, in fact, that if I’m to have any chance at satisfaction, I will need a plan, some tangle of clues that I can begin to tease apart. This is what pens are good for, friends. Keep your fingers moving.

—

1 Fine. Yes. I have a Moleskine. I’ve been carefully cultivating a disdain for them for years, and one day Joe just randomly gives me one and of course it’s perfect at everything all the time. Hmph. The secret is to not respect the notebook. At all. Tear that sucker apart.


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5
Jan

A Method for Typing Very Quick Drafts

When I type a draft of a story or something, or especially when I’m freewriting, I love being able to type incredibly fast without having to stop or think or edit. To that end, I’ve developed a way to type without ever using Backspace that still lets you go back and sew up a pristine draft very easily once you’re done with the initial headlong scramble of typing.

First, never touch Backspace. And never move the cursor back with the mouse or arrow keys.

Second, whenever you make an error, simply press Enter and start again from the most recent correct word (or easily recognizable phrase).

Use double carriage returns when you start a new paragraph. Type Nix when you want to delete to the top of the paragraph and start over, or Nix to Top when you want to delete everything you’ve written so far.

Then type. Really, really fast. Build up momentum and plunge forward. Don’t worry about correcting anything as you go, just start new lines and keep going. You may start the same line twenty times, but don’t even worry about it. You won’t lose any information and you’ll get into this beautiful groove of forward motion. Soon the need to edit as you go will begin to drop away, like those things that drop away from a rocket.

When you’re done with the manic scribbly typing of the first draft, it’s really easy to go back and fix your manuscript up, especially if you use keyboard shortcuts like I do. Start at the bottom. Skip to the top of the last paragraph. Delete backward until the word in front of your cursor replaces a word that looks the same. Skip to the top of the next paragraph. Repeat. If you hit a blank line, press backspace to delete it and you’ll preserve the intended paragraph break.

It makes more sense when you try it. And there’s something magical about watching your weirdo screwy swath of errors mechanically crunch itself down into a clean draft. Give it a try. You’ll see.

I’m still refining it and still forming the habits that will make it fully useful. But it’s nifty, and I thought some of you might enjoy it.

A couple protips for the advanced user:

– If you make a mistake within the first word of a new line, end it with a slash (/). When you’re fixing it afterward, delete the entirety of any line that ends in a slash.

– I’m not sure what the theory should be on exceptions to the no-backspace rule. Sometimes it seems like a quick fix of one or two letters is much more efficient than moving to a new line and retyping a correct word. That may be true, or maybe it varies from user to user. Same with inserting an idea a few sentences back.

– And, of course, there’s the question of whether you’re losing forward momentum by going back to retype your last correct word so frequently. The hypothesis behind this method is that there is enough of a psychological payoff to getting entirely out of edit mode and into a no-holds-barred headlong rush of typing that it will make up for the minor inefficiencies of the system. And the system is also designed to undercut and avoid a lot of the more substantial inefficiencies of editing your work as you go.

So that’s a tool I’m working on. What do you think? Is it useful? Can you think of any improvements?

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5
Jan

The Intriguing Seven

Here’s a doodle from a while ago. It’s sort of my own League of Avengers. Or whatever that thing is. I don’t really read comics. Joe took one look and added Santa. It seems Santa may secretly be the boss or mastermind of the Intriguing Seven, the Charlie to these unpredictable angels.

If anyone’s interested in some sort of Intriguing Seven collaboration — comic, stories, game, freestyle storytelling session — leave a comment or otherwise drop me a line.

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19
Nov

To Do or To Have Done?

There’s an important question when choosing your pursuits: Do you actually enjoy the hard work of doing the thing, or do you like the idea of what you imagine it would be like to have done it?

There are two ways, for example, in which I love being a writer.

I love the idea of being able to spend my days at home, to shape my own schedule — rigorous, yes, but not without grilled cheese sandwiches and walks in the fresh air — to tell people I’m a writer, to collect hefty royalty checks and periodically release good, gripping mystery-fantasy-comedy novels with a touch of philosophy and some life-changing spiritual insights worked in so deeply I wouldn’t be able to sell my books in the Christian section.

That would rock. Sadly, it’s probably not what being a (full-time professional fiction) writer would actually look like at all. More to the point, it’s miles from the life I’m actually living. It’s a pretty picture, but fundamentally irrelevant as long as it’s not turning into steady, systematic execution.

Luckily, the second way I love writing is that I draw massive mind-bending soul electricity from typing lots of words really fast, then erasing most of them and starting over, and repeating that process over and over until the words hum with meaning, ring true to the core, shimmer and dance and set sparks in peoples’ souls. Gah! I can’t stand how much I like filling a blank page with words. I could sit here all day — I do sit here all of some days — punching my brain until sentences come out, then squeezing the sentences until the brilliance positively drips from them.

Point is, pick the thing that you can’t stand not doing, not the thing that will be awesome once you’re so good that you don’t have to do it any more.

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28
Oct

Two Dilemmas

Unemployment is a fascinating situation. So far I’ve discovered two really interesting dilemmas:

1. Progress through useless activity

Any job-search action I take has a very low probability of success and no guarantee of any usefulness, at maximum. Finding a job listing, sending in a resume or making contact with an interesting local resident may be the thing that gets me a job, but 999 times out of 1000, it’s not. Since each individual step seems so unlikely it registers psychologically as useless, there’s little motivation to take the steps. But if I refuse to take the steps because each one provides (nearly) zero results for non-zero effort, I will never find success. So basically the goal here is to keep doing things that feel useless, constantly. Very intriguing.

2. The genuineness dilemma

I think my biggest asset is that I’m naively, almost startlingly non-mercenary. I am quite specifically here to serve the people of Baltimore, just because Jesus loves them and I consider them valuable. It’s what I care about and currently my deepest measure of personal success.

So I’ll go to fairly significant expense and effort just to find ways I can help people, then help them in those ways. I could be a secretary, mop floors as a janitor, head up of a non-profit or stay unemployed and take people out for coffee, and I’ll be largely content and purposeful in any of those cases.

Content minus the fact that I’m not providing for my family, of course, and that’s an important pressure. Because the pressure to provide means that I want to get a job, and wanting to get a job means I’ll start turning whatever assets I have to influence people to want to hire me, which means that I’ll start being genuine and non-mercenary with an ulterior motive, which, we sadly conclude, is no longer non-mercenary, and is therefore no longer an asset.

So essentially my goal is to stay true, stay joyful, keep my value and purpose centered on Jesus, trust him to provide employment and/or money as the (true) need arises, and in the meantime keep doing important, useless things.

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20
Oct

Magnificat

The Song of Mary opened my eyes today. It’s easy in retrospect to see how right her praises are, that she was blessed for all generations and that God had shown powerful mercy to her.

But you have to remember that when she sang that, her life had just fallen apart. She was single, pregnant, probably presumed adulterous, and she’d just walked a mountainous and bandit-ridden road to her relatives’ distant homestead to get some space to think and avoid gossip (or stoning) and figure out what was next. At this stage, as far as we know, Joseph probably either didn’t know she was pregnant or was planning to divorce her. Life as she knew it was over.

Think about the decisions she must have made. She set her focus on God so intentionally that she could see her demolished life as a magnificent blessing, the envy of the generations. In the middle of personal crisis, unexpected pregnancy and hard work,1 what did it take to make the time to let God’s viewpoint infuse her?

See, it’s not about denial, some flaky positive-affirmation self-help that says the pain isn’t real. That’s just stupid. But if God is real and good, and if he made you for a reason, it’s equally stupid to say that the pain is where it ends. God did not create people as containers for problem-cluttered days. He has given each one of us a role in the renovation of the universe. Don’t let the pain blind you to the adventure.

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1 Middle Eastern village ladies don’t get a lot of leisure time. I’ve lived with some.

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18
Oct

Fresh Thinking

It constantly amazes me how easy it is to fall back on old thinking. I’ll plan out a story, say, and then, as soon as it’s on paper, it hardens. Suddenly the paper is a security blanket. Every time I’m trying to figure out or remember what needs to happen in the story, I’m all nervous and I have to find my paper to find the real way the story goes, because it’s no longer an idea, a scribble, a brainstorm. Somehow it’s taken on this severe level of authority, and I feel lowly in its presence. It is the revelation, the work of the master. Any new ideas I develop feel iffy, like I’m trying to remember the real one but not quite getting it.

Which is weird, you know? I wrote it in the first place. It was just an idea. Why does it suddenly hold such sway? I trace it to two things:

1. I’m always — usually — amazed by what comes out when I actually sit down and start producing sentences.

2. It’s hard to sit down and produce sentences.

So reading the old stuff becomes incredibly easy, and the stuff is so good, so good it almost feels like fairies must have written it, so good I can’t imagine where it ever came from, that it reinforces my instinct that this must be the real one, and anything I sit down and laboriously scratch out now will be a pale comparison.

So I have to break that kind of thinking. One, realize that when I work good things happen, and my old ideas do not hold this weird authority over me just because they exist now. If I work more, my new ideas will exist, too, and I’ll be all surprised and delighted all over again. Two, work hard. Write sentences. Suck it frikkin’ up.

After all, this is what I love.

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15
Oct

Number 2

I’m watching a documentary called The Future We Will Create: Inside the world of TED (here). It’s not the first time I’ve watched it. Last time it made me cry. It’s what I think part of life in Heaven will be like.

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15
Oct

Questions

What is love?

What are life and death?

Why do I eat when I’m not hungry?

How can I write better stories?

What is engagement?

How do I keep forgetting how beautiful the world is?

What is value?

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