Unpredictablity

One of my favorite books is 'The Black Swan-The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Taleb, for two particular points he raises. One is if you can't imagine what you don't know, you will be shocked and unsettled when the unthinkably improbable event happens. And that past events are not very good indicators of future ones. The turkey story illustrates both these ideas.
Imagine a turkey. Farmer Jones feeds said turkey every day. Turkey comes to believe Farmer Jones is a great guy. Very reliable. Until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Farmer Jones comes not with feed but an axe. Thwack!
Unpredictable? Well, not in retrospect. Of if viewed from Farmer Jones' perspective and not the turkey's.
But we tend to view events, our lives, the world (being Westerners) are linear. Progress is linear, moving in one direction, towards some goal. And therefore we are terribly unsettled when an event happens that is not on this linear path but is a 180 degree reversal. But life is made up of reversals, and hairpin turns, backtracks and sometimes spectacular leaps ahead.
We can make mistakes and become frustrated when we expect a simple linear pattern when the actual one is circular and complex. We may not even recognize a reversal if we're so set on a progression forward, and wonder why we bang our heads against the same wall over and over.
Sometimes seeing is believing, but more likely, it's our beliefs that color how we see.

Ok Evan, we will write in our blogs

I don't write much here, at this blog that I created just to see what it would look like. My sister uses her blog very constructively--as a daily column to muse and work out academic thoughts or personal quandries that may be universal. I forget to write on mine.
I went over to Laura and Chris' house yesterday, as it was their youngest daughter's birthday (re: some kids with a bunch of adults drinking copious amounts of bubbly), and some how conversation turned to blogging.... ah, I remember how--Laura said she could do a better job writing a particular column than the particular writer of said column could, and Evan told her, well, then just write one! Easy enough to write and put whatever out there now--no excuses for what one 'could do if only (fill in the blank). I said I had a blog, but never write on it, as I wasn't sure I really wanted anyone to read it. And he said, "That's not the point. The point is put it out there, even, or especially if, no one reads it". Just chronicle what's happening. Maybe we'll want to remember what happened some day.
Or maybe it's an exercise in just a thought process, a processing of thoughts.

I'm in a holding pattern right now. A limbo between finishing a yoga teacher training course (now picking up various classes), and starting shooting again on FNL. Three weeks of time to fill, hopefully fruitfully. Reading my favorite types of books-just finished Dianne Dumanoski's "The End of the Long Summer" which for a little book packs a lot of information on the complexity of the global ecosystem and humankind's role in influencing it and surviving our own philosophical errors.

And the title of that book seems otherwise fitting. This has been a long, incredibly hot and dry summer. Too full of heat and death, nothing is surviving summer 2009. Relationships have died (a whole other post, maybe I can write about someday maybe), Teddy the big paint draft was put down, Simon and Justin era in Austin is over, so much change, so many endings.

Fall is typically a time for me of beginnings. August is the longest cruelest month, not April.

Three more weeks. Let's see what happens.