On the 8 Spot

read this over at Raganwald’s blog

It was about programming and always talking of a Fictional Third Person.

Although the post was about programming, I feel that it has a larger application for life in general.
Why do we have to make an excuse for how we feel about things. Why do we always have to hide behind another person’s, (even worse a Fictional Third Person.

Let us stop passing the buck in our lives.

We have so much control over what we accept and what we do not accept that it is downright foolish to concede this great responsibility because of useless shame.

More to follow!

A story from Robert M. Pirsig:
He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say.
One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.
When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say.
It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.
He was furious. “You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.
He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide.
She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”
Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing. – Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Often we are fooled by the Illusion that there is an easy path, that we do not have to take control of our lives. Do not give in to this desire. Often people try to not make decisions in general. Notice how when your in a group eating out we often have trouble deciding on where to eat? I continually see the pattern of people not wanting to be blamed with the mistake of choosing the wrong place to eat, but as this writer argues with blame comes hope.

Some friends mistake that I am good at getting places, travelling etc. The fact is I get lost a lot, and I am not generally scared of being lost , because of this I get to go to more places. It’s not being afraid of getting lost, and having this desire to just go places. It’s that fear of the unknown that is the source of too much suffering in this world. And I prescribe my own medicine of immersing yourself with your fears. Try it, get to know the other side, get lost, befriend that cute girl. Just please do something.

A friend recently got the letter that he wrote himself after 6 years.

What hit me is we should be doing things like these more often.

What do I mean things like these?

You know when you are young you have so many wrong ASSumptions that you laugh so much about when you get wiser. The real problem is when the these ASSumptions hurt us and we forget the wrongness of our previous selves and we can’t seem to explain to the NOW YOU why the hell you did somethings you KNOW you won’t be doing if given the chance.

We must learn to accept that change is normal, That we grow wiser through the years, we musn’t forget the OLD YOU because forgetting means being a little condescending with younger people. Forgetting means hating our OLD YOU because you can’t seem to understand some of the things he did. Forgetting means lying awake at night staring at the ceiling and wondering why you were so naive. Life means Growth and we do not live If we stop growing, we are allowed to make mistakes as long as we learn from them, we are allowed , no we continue to make the same mistakes as long as we keep forgetting, I do not want to forget.

Starting now, whenever I am making a semi big decision I am going to write to my future self and explain where I am coming from!

What would I write the future me?

• What is my present situation?
• What am I deciding to do?
• Why am I deciding to do it?
• How am I going to do it?
• Why am I doing it that way?

For me these are the minimum things that my future self would like to know.

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Always wanting to find the 8spot, failing but never a fail!

This is a peek through my journey!