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The Advantages Of Speed

I guess you can see that I’ve been having a bit of a blast thinking about how my mind works, how reality works, and so many other things as well – and it is also pretty interesting to reflect how a lot of people who were exposed to it across time became extraordinarily capable people on a level that I could not kid about even if I wanted to – not as a shill of my ability to teach or as some indication of my role of an instructor or friend in some way shape or form – but just an interesting observation.

Well, I have no idea if these blog posts are really influencing anyone – but if they do somehow influence you in some way beyond immediate judgments or thoughts to achieve something a little better than you could before (and I’m primarily talking to myself, as the main consumer and producer of this blog), I would be happy for you.

Anyway, today’s thought:

Speed is king.

That’s one thing that I’ve learned in multiple contexts across time, often in the most unexpected of places.

This is so for many reasons, and I could name a few:

  • In a competitive context, getting stuff done ahead of the other guy means you can submit faster, and thus you win.
  • Getting stuff done ahead of time means you can do it more thoroughly.
  • Practicing stuff faster means you can do more practice (lol) but also that you gain more skill – speed compounds speed!
  • Getting stuff done quickly means that there are fewer impediments that could stop you from doing the thing that you want, increases the probability that you will get things done in one shot (and thus minimizes the probability that intervening circumstances will stop you from doing the thing), and improves the likelihood that you will execute.

I could name a couple more things (and I may later on), but I should say that speed does have its limitations.

For one thing, if you never actually start things, it doesn’t matter how fast you go. Secondly, it is a localized thing – it happens in the instantaneous moment, and it’s unclear that that instantaneous moment is what really shifts outcomes so much that it is definitive; that role probably belongs to the systems that we create to regulate our behavior or to give ourselves the impression that we are regulating our behavior.

It is still meaningful to think about speed though, the preconditions for it (which are many), and how it makes things possible where they were not before – but that extended reflection will have to wait for another day 😀

Process and Reality

…Is the title of a book I have yet to read, but that I’d like to read when I finally get over the monumental beast that is Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, which in turn was a follow-up from Homi K Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, which I decided to read upon being inspired by Shahril Hamdan.

The words ring out to me today though, because they are a nice reminder that reality is a process that unfolds over time – whatever the temporality of that time apart from its objective and lived out experience, it is certainly an unfolding that I experience each minute and second; each of these seconds that I experience are my own, and I cannot experience that of another within the lives of other human beings, whom I can only surmise are as cognitively and texturally rich as my own to the extent that I conclude that others are, in fact, like me.

It is interesting for me to think about this because I am now recalling a conversation with someone who is now a Rhodes Scholar (congratulations! Ok a bit weird to congratulate via blog post sry bro but it just happened that way), who talked to me about solipsism as we ate RM350 hamburgers in a hotel that we had come to only after long walking and near death from starvation – there is a long conversation to be had about that and a story that may well be lost to time except in this brief reflection – but he effectively described to me the common realization we had that in fact, it was not really possible to disconfirm the possibility that everyone outside ourselves were actually just figments of our imagination – even each other.

I suspect he remembers this conversation, but I will do myself and the both of us the needed thing of not sharing names, haha.

Anyway, it is interesting to me to think about people who may abide by solipsistic ideals who may read this post and then think to themselves:”Oh, how interesting! These figments of imagination are so creative nowadays! The universe sure is coming up with some unique theater for me in this weird life game! Haha! Haha! HAHAHAHAHA!”

…Which gives you a small picture of how I think about people who hold this frame of reference.

Anyway, that was a nice little aside that completely sidesteps the reflection I was having earlier, which yields in its completion the following realization:

I (we) experience reality as a process unfolding – directing, being directed, images, reality, predicting, being predicted, with multiple knobs and timelines and impacts of causal shock in a dynamically propagating system whose initial conditions often have very little to do with the final results, but whose possibilities over which determine the entire lodespan of our observable qualia as we progress through time.

It has taken everything I have to resist using the word “diachronic” or to start going into terminologies that are useful only for telling myself I am very bright and I like understanding the deeper things, though, and I observe this to make a simple comment: It is easy to privilege yourself, to treat yourself as unique, special, a fragment of the Imperial cauldron, the Universe consciousness, a snowflake melting in cosmic rays and thus dying by cosmic significance.

Anyway, it is not really the purpose of this blog post to unpack all of reality – whether that is possible I don’t even know, but it will certainly not be done by someone who is here throwing out shower thoughts before going to the gym.

More soon.
Ciao.

My Birthday Gifts To Myself

I’m writing this on the morning of my xth birthday.

Why the x?

Not because I don’t want you to know how old I am (although sure, that’s part of it – guessing is part of the fun, right? 🙂 ) – but because partly, I don’t think it really matters to me anymore how much age is ala age is just a number – or perhaps this is a manifestation of that age dread that comes when a person has reached a certain number?

In any case, because it’s my birthday, I hope you won’t mind if I take part in a little self-indulgence:

It’s a fun thought to realize that life is so different from how I imagined it might be at a later age – I am more secure in many aspects of life that maybe I should have figured out earlier in this process of learning to be human; there are many different things I never thought I would try or that I would ever pursue and get good at, even as time passed and the tradeoff between vitality and its reward began to bloom out.

This year, I am thankful for friendship and nice hikes (see the little hike that I went on this past Merdeka – credits to Joey, the diretor of Her Second Act; thank you for the conversation on the hike!)

Seen: Hiking Kaki membership renewed!

…And I am also thankful for myself for providing the following gifts to myself:

  • The ability to DJ – I played a full set this morning with multiple different transitions that I wasn’t able to do coherently until today, only to realize that somehow this morning, it all flowed.
  • The ability to play the cello and to improvise on music with the piano – Something that I hated with a passion when I was younger, only ever thinking that it was “for losers” and that this skill or talent wouldn’t ever be something I would value or cherish. How wrong I was.
  • Abs and 12% body fat – This is a nice one; can’t really get to this point without effort, planning, and constant learning.
  • The ability to speak and have people pay attention – it’s not a huge number of people, but it does make me pretty happy that people value my insights and thoughts in different ways.

Is there a unifying principle to all these gifts? I suppose there are at least two – the first in that they are related to some kind of way of changing myself into a new person as the old departs – not by external factors, but rather by what I can control; can’t DJ, play the cello, get abs, or speak effectively without practice. These are not material things – they are capacities and states of being. The second? They all require effort and constant practice that miraculously, I’ve been able to balance as part of this game we call life.

It would be nice to say that there is a third unifying principle – that they represent the fruit of my finite time and that alone – but that is untrue. It would be nice to romanticize these gifts and to say that they are all the fruit of effort and that money wasn’t involved – but that would be false; I paid for my DJ classes and for the equipment I practice on, the cello and the cello classes I’ve taken for several years, the gym membership and the classes, and the camera equipment, editing software, and machine that I create and edit videos on – and they are things I would like to integrate into my career as a person, not because I intrinsically think of them as ways of earning money, but rather because they are elements that I consciously chose to integrate into my life and that I think if you consciously choose to integrate anything into your life, it should be in all aspects, work included, as you move towards the highest level.

There are some other things that I could say about this, but I do remember that there is one final gift that I should be thankful for:

My decision to write this post this morning.

Each of these moments of adherence to my chosen identity as a writer is certainly a gift, and one easily forgone.

It was not so today, though – and for that, I am thankful – as I am to you the reader for taking part in my little flight of fancy this morning.

Incidentally, there are many birthday gifts that I cannot give myself, but one of them I will mention is this:

The happiness and health of my friends and loved ones from across the world.

I hope you will be healthy and happy – wise I can’t really say since I’m not really wise myself, but I am glad for your company and your interest in my life and the things that have come with it.

Thank you for reading, and I’ll have more to say in a bit 🙂