Grokking Cockeyed Perfection
MARK: I wonder how Alison found out about Mimi?
ROGER: Maybe a little bird told her.
COLLINS: Or an angel.
I was on a brief Wikipedia rabbit-hole trip Saturday morning. Goddess only knows what led me to bald eagles, but from there we got to nests, thence to parrots, then to this little fellow, who in one caption told me the meaning of life:
The need for negative capability visits again. I'm as big a believer as ever in the GTD genre of ordering civilized reality in such a way that the tetchy, sketched-out geek brain can deal with it. Of course one has to remember that at the center of the system is this big, hilarious shrug, the panel of the comic that has the caption "then a miracle happens": after you've got your lists and your tags and your projects all ordered and mapped out, you take a deep breath and let it all go and trust your intuition. You're trusting the system, but only secondarily: you're trusting your intuition to use the system the right way. To hear DA talk about it, that's the crux of the whole thing. Rather than try to micromanage everything, you set things up sanely and then trust your intuition to get things right almost all of the time by making use of the system.
And this is kind of all around when you look at it. Nature and civilization both are chock full of exquisitely tuned arrangements that make my rational-universe, authoritarian-geek id twitch awfully. It's spit and bailing wire! Species that don't die because this other species happens to do this thing that's useful to them. Executive secretaries who only know how to get to the Excel sheet holding some vital number without which markets will crash because there's a shortcut to a shortcut on somebody's desktop that some kid making $8 an hour put there five years ago. Huge industrial operations that work out because, generally, Bob, who's worked here since '72, remembers to clean out the transmogrifier a couple of times a year.
It's bad and good and beautiful.
With a little love and luck, you will get by
With a little love and luck, we'll take the sky
In this megalomodern world, you've got to try
ROGER: Maybe a little bird told her.
COLLINS: Or an angel.
I was on a brief Wikipedia rabbit-hole trip Saturday morning. Goddess only knows what led me to bald eagles, but from there we got to nests, thence to parrots, then to this little fellow, who in one caption told me the meaning of life:
The need for negative capability visits again. I'm as big a believer as ever in the GTD genre of ordering civilized reality in such a way that the tetchy, sketched-out geek brain can deal with it. Of course one has to remember that at the center of the system is this big, hilarious shrug, the panel of the comic that has the caption "then a miracle happens": after you've got your lists and your tags and your projects all ordered and mapped out, you take a deep breath and let it all go and trust your intuition. You're trusting the system, but only secondarily: you're trusting your intuition to use the system the right way. To hear DA talk about it, that's the crux of the whole thing. Rather than try to micromanage everything, you set things up sanely and then trust your intuition to get things right almost all of the time by making use of the system.
And this is kind of all around when you look at it. Nature and civilization both are chock full of exquisitely tuned arrangements that make my rational-universe, authoritarian-geek id twitch awfully. It's spit and bailing wire! Species that don't die because this other species happens to do this thing that's useful to them. Executive secretaries who only know how to get to the Excel sheet holding some vital number without which markets will crash because there's a shortcut to a shortcut on somebody's desktop that some kid making $8 an hour put there five years ago. Huge industrial operations that work out because, generally, Bob, who's worked here since '72, remembers to clean out the transmogrifier a couple of times a year.
It's bad and good and beautiful.
With a little love and luck, you will get by
With a little love and luck, we'll take the sky
In this megalomodern world, you've got to try