Psych-Out

“More humans have run away from their enemies than have fought them.”
Theodore Zeldon, An Intimate History of Humanity

We are escape artists.  We are a species more prone to flight, than facing our battles with our backs up, teeth bared and claws ready to dig in.  (Our teeth and claws are pretty useless in a fight, anyway, except against each other.)  For most of us, to stand in there and fight means over-riding a highly evolved impulse that commands our bodies, “Run!  Get out of there!”

Escape brings us to safety.  Escape brings us respite.  If successful, we come to a place of real or imagined sanctuary, whether physical or emotional.  Escape allows us safe haven where we can gather our wits, our strength, and our allies.  And if we need, it allows us to lick our wounds.   Emily Dickinson wrote, “Escape – it is the Basket/In which the heart is caught.”

The notion of escape gets a bum wrap in cool-headed times.  Only cowards fail to turn and face the test, we’re often told.   But, how much we enjoy those Hollywood chase scenes (nearly all movies have one), and how many times do we whisper to the hero or heroine when the villain is nearby and has the upper hand, “Get out of there – please.”

Matrix Bike Chase

In the Alain Resnais film Mon Oncle d’Amerique, the real-to-life neurosurgeon, philosopher, and behavioral researcher Henri Laborit proclaimed that science confirms the opinion of the ancient sages – to run away is the truest wisdom.  Fighting, if successful, becomes addictive and draws us into the stress of a competitive life.  And the chronic stress of a competitive, combative life will eat at us from the inside out.

You see, it’s not escape that’s the problem, but an inhibited fight-or-flight response.   Inhibition can affect health and our immune systems.  Once we start a cycle of inhibited action that habit engraves itself into our body-memory.  Instead of fighting or fleeing, we will habitually freeze in face of those pesky modern day threats, and thus render ourselves helpless.

Cat and mouse between blind Audrey Hepburn and Alain Arkin, Wait Until Dark

As Laborit urges, escape first and foremost from your inhibitions.  We need to fight;  or,  we need to flee.  If neither is possible, then find some other way of turning the unbearable situation into meaningful action. Talk.  Write.  Get angry.  Laugh it off.  Insult the person who’s annoying you.  Whatever it is, do it with a sense of purpose.

Watch an animal escape from a trap.  He’ll escape with power, assuredness, and intent.  How far will he run, once free?  Until he’s out of harm’s way — no more, no less — then, back to business.

Our escapes are many.  We escape into alcohol, religion, art, sports, vacations, movies, drugs, sex and rock-n-roll.  We no longer escape boars, bulls, and saber tooth tigers, but bosses, spouses, bill-collectors, kids, and head-concocted threats that live in either our memory or our imaginations.  When we meet the enemy now, often he is us, and as often there’s no place to run but to select corners of our own thoughts.

Remember, however, escape, too, can be habit forming.  When we run often we forget to stop, or run too far, or run to the wrong corner, or don’t look back so we know when we’re out of harm’s way, thus over-stressing our resources. Sometimes we overstate the danger before us and run when there’s nothing to run from.  And other times, we mistake a healthy dose of flight with avoidance, choosing to hide out indefinitely in our trees, caves, or burrows instead of stepping back out into the bump-and-grind of everyday life.

Escape from swift Cheetah!

“A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring… It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home.  It does not show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on.” Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway

We all have a beast within, a bull to kill…whether it be a habit, a troublesome attachment, a pattern of thought, a sorrow, an addiction, a mood, a fixation, a fear, or something that brings us to rage.

Know that bull.  Study where it’s taken its place of refuge.  That place in your life where it burrows in.  It could be in a bottle of scotch.  It could be a room in the house, a chair, your garage, or even in front of your TV or computer screen.

“…in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.“

It could be a state of mind, or that way in which you address your lover, kids, husband, or wife.  It could be a place in your imagination where you return again and again to relive a conversation, an encounter, or a past or future dread.  It could be a thought, or a cherished belief.

“The bull may take up his querencia in a place where a horse has been killed in a previous fight, where he smells the blood;  a place where he has tossed a bullfighter, or any part of the ring for no apparent reason at all;  simply because he feels at home there.”

In that place, your bull will be confident, brave, and secure.  When you, or anyone else, attempts to challenge it there, you may feel its stubborn refusal in your brooding, or snapping, or numbing, or anger, depression, anxiety, or irritation.  The bull has lifted its horns for the goring.  Pity the poor loved one who tries to step toward it there.

Like a great matador, we need bring the beast out from it’s place of safety.  After a long day’s work, refuse to let it establish its place in your ring.  Risk making it uncomfortable.

“The bull must be brought out;  but he is gone completely on the defensive and will not respond to the cape and will cut at them with his horns, refusing altogether to charge.”

Step away from that computer.  Change your tone of voice.  Refuse to spend the night brooding in that chair.  Reach for that novel you’ve wanted to read, instead of the TV remote.  Pull out that bike, camera or drawing pad, instead of cracking open that beer, marijuana, or bottle of Xanax.  Kiss your partner, instead of barking out that complaint.  (Or stamp your feet and yell, instead of that half-hearted kiss, if that’s where the bull chooses to live.)  Go to that movie by yourself, instead of waiting by the phone.  Cook that delicious meal, instead of another night of pizza or take-out chinese.

That pint of ice cream you seem ever destined to eat?  Look it square in the eyes, then show it your cape.  Weekends get you down?  Drink too much?  Take a canoe trip, instead of burrowing in and letting that bull raise its surly horns through your boredom, or list of domestic chores.

“…a bull who knows how to use his horns and who cannot be made to leave his querencia is as dangerous for the man to come within range of as a rattlesnake….”

Be brave.  Be clever.  Change it up.  Break routine.  Coax it out.  If just for an afternoon, flash your cape, and by surprise, slay the fear that owns you.   Olé!

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Death In Afternoon, Ernest Hermingway.  p150-151

’“An olive won’t ripen any quicker, however much you mess with it.” (Tuscan Proverb)

Olive grove

We are time–addicts. Time-sick. We’ve come to feel our lives as tiredly, time-deprived. Time is our heroin. We mojo our lives trying to find ways to score more and more. Let’s add time for me. Time for you. There’s work, there’s exercise. There’s family time. Special time for e-mail. Oh, and then there’s organizing those seven hundred thirty-six digital photographs. I’ll save that for next month. That novel I’ve always wanted to read? I’ll make time next year.

We gorge ourselves, yet never end up satisfied. Our solution? More activity at even a faster pace. Speed reading, speed meditating, speed yoga.  Let’s keep that rat-wheel turning. Speed up. Keep moving. That fix is coming. “I’ll move faster. Schedule my time better. I’ll find that plan so I can finally squeeze in every want, desire and need.”

We hire personal coaches, buy the latest scheduling technologies, we read dozens of books by time gurus. But, like a drug deal gone bad, the best laid plans go astray. We can’t open that vein to slip that last half-dozen activities in. Depression and anxiety ensues.

Queen, Under Pressure

In his book Slowness, Carl Honoré writes, “In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.”

We get a kick from going fast. Literally. Think roller coasters, and downhill skiing, and snowmobiles. Even rushing to and from work, or the yoga center, will give us that kick. There’s a heady surge of sensory input when we go fast. Adrenaline and noradrenaline shoot into our blood stream. Two chemicals released during sex; two chemicals tied to our most basic stress response. Fight or run.

When we start off our mornings in a mad-dash rush, we signal to our bodies DANGER DANGER. Even if we’re just driving to the library. We trigger our sympathetic nervous system into high gear. Then, it stays there for the rest of the day. Fight-or-flight with nothing really to fight, and nowhere to flee. Day in, day out. More hours in the day than not. It’s not the place in our bodies where we’re meant to make our home.

Our sympathetic nervous system is meant for special occasions, or periodic spurts during the course of the day. Say, when that lion is chasing us, or we haven’t eaten in days and we need that kill. Or, when times are good and we’re up for mating. Little surges of challenge here and there during our days are okay. Some stress is good for us. It invigorates our spirit, makes us more resilient. Like that sports car that occasionally you need to take onto the highway and rip open full-throttle.

Still, it’s the opposing parasympathetic nervous system where we find our true home. Eating figs by the watering hole, with nothing much to do but rest and digest, whether it’s food, or the day’s experiences.

It’s here in our parasympathetic nervous system where we consolidate memories, heal our bodies, digest our food, organize our thoughts, solve our problems, restore our sanity. We’re most creative when we slow down. Have a problem you’re trying to work through? You’re more likely to find that creative solution taking a bath, or brushing your teeth, or taking a stroll, or lollygagging in the back yard, than when racing into and through that next activity fix. Albert Einstein would sit in his Princeton University office for hours staring into space. He changed the world.

Our time addiction can be slowed. Take a day a week, or even just an evening or two, and ignore those Time tyrants. Forget those plans. Bring a spontaneous revolt to your soul. Throw off the self-help books, blackberries, e-mail, to-do lists, or that novel you were intending to read. To hell with yoga, meditation, the kid’s soccer game, the book club, and weeknight hockey. Tell your gurus and those pushers of personal growth to go jump in the lake.

Go outside and stare into the sky. Take off all your clothes. Or, turn off all the lights, build a fire, and watch the flames flicker and dance. Dare yourself for a day, a night, or even just an hour to live in the glow of knowing that time is forever and always at hand.

Simon and Garfunkel, Sound of Silence

Imagine. You are running. The sun warms your skin. You feel the drumming of the pavement against the bottoms of your feet. Your arms move in rhythm to your steps. Beads of sweat trickle down your forehead. Smell the freshly mowed grass. Birds flutter and chirp along the tree lined street. An occasional car passes. You hit stride. You are running with more energy than you’ve ever run before. A feeling of health and animal pleasure glow inside your body.

If you stayed with the above fantasy, the same regions of your visual, olfactory, and kinesthetic brain circuits lit up as would have if you really were taking that run. It’s the same if you imagined tapping out a pattern with your fingers, hitting a tennis ball, or imagining your cat hop onto your lap.

We’ve known for some time that experience changes the function and structure of our neural wiring. We call this learning. But what has become increasingly evident is that thinking alone, with no input from the outside world, can also change the physical structure of our brain.

Researchers asked one group of subjects to visualize practicing a 5-finger right-handed piano exercise over and over again for several hours. They were not to touch the keys, but only imagine themselves doing so. The same regions of the brain that controlled the right fingers expanded in the same way as those subjects who were instructed to actually practice the piece touching the piano.

The mere thought of doing something has the capacity to change your brain structure, and thus your performance. It’s something that sports psychologists have know for a long time. If you can see it, you’re training your brain and your body to make it happen.

Researcher Gary Klein found that imagination, or mental simulation, is one of the most important decision making tools for combat commanders, fireman, chess masters, ER doctors, ICU nurses. In the heat of the moment, experts don’t follow rules and procedures. Nor do they use formal logic. Instead, they create mental images based on their experiences. As one fire commander confided, “To be a good fire ground commander, you need to have a rich fantasy life.”

Klein writes, “he was referring to the ability to use the imagination, to imagine how the fire got started, how it was going to continue spreading, or what would happen using a new procedure. A commander who cannot imagine these things is in trouble.” (1)

Visualization is not just for athletes or experts under fire. It can be a crucial tool for navigating your day to day, especially if depressed, anxious, or finding yourself facing some uphill battle. If we practice the scene in our imagination and build into the fantasy as much positive emotion as we can muster, then we have brought ourselves several steps closer to accomplishing whatever challenge is before us. If you can see it, you are crucial step closer to making it happen.

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(1) Klein, Gary. Sources of Power. US: MIT Press, 1999. (p. 45.)

Bathsheba with King David’s Letter, Rembrandt

A letter makes it personal.  It reaches us like a whisper.  We may steal off to some private corner to unseal the envelope, if only to better reflect on the words without distraction.  We go off to that corner because we can.  A letter can be carried anywhere.  We can secret it between the pages of a book, or in a pocket, or in your bosom beneath your blouse.

To sit down and compose a letter means taking your time, distilling your intent.  There’s paper to choose.  The right pen.  The envelope.  The stamp.  In days of old we’d seal our letters closed with wax.

La Lecture de la Lettre, Picasso

When writing the letter, the words must fall carefully to avoid starting over again.  Of course, we can leave in the scratch-out, the fingerprint, the smudge, the spill of coffee.  To the spouse, lover, or dear friend the misfortune is not a stain, but your actual presence on the page.  Leave it, you create a deeper intimacy.

Letters can be heart-filled, or poisoned.   A letter can be sensual, tearful, raging, philosophical, mundane.  A letter has a weight and texture that we can know through our hands.  It can carry a lock of hair, or the trace of perfume.

Napolean scolded his Josephene, “You never write to me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters give him yet you cannot even manage to write him half a dozen lines, dashed off in a moment! What then do you do all day, Madame? What business is so vital that it robs you of the time to write to your faithful lover?”

One way or another, a letter begs the writer’s attention and time.

A letter is handled.  Held.  Touched.  Read.  Reread.  Folded.  The envelope is licked and addressed.  The stamp is carefully, or carelessly, secured in its corner.  One way or another, you are worth the time and the 42 or some odd cents.

Ask the soldier on the front what it is to receive a letter.  If it’s from a wife or lover, he might hold it to his nose hoping to catch her scent.  He might kiss it.  Lick the envelope’s glue as if seizing the taste of her lips from afar.

Captain Joseph Bush wrote to his wife from Vietnam, “If my mail means as much to you as yours does to me then I know how you feel when the mailbox is empty.  Whether or not I get a letter determines if it’s a good day or not.” (1)

A letter holds the other’s presence.  It demands thought.  Reflection.  A sense that the distance between us matters.

“ooooh, my baby she wrote me a letter…”, that soulful Joe Cocker

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from Dear America:  Letters Home from Vietnam, edited by Bernard Edelman.

Samual Awaking Eli,  George de la Tour

2:48 am.  For no apparent reason, we’ve awakened.  “Four more hours,” we think, then toss to our other side.  If lucky, sleep overtakes us for the rest of the night.  If not, we lay there fretting about the loss of sleep, thus cheating ourselves – not of sleep, but of the wee hours.

Segmented sleep may be more natural to us than a continuous eight hours. In his book At Day’s Close, historian A. Roger Ekirch writes, “Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.”

Anthropologist Carol Worthman studied the sleep patterns of non-Western populations where artificial light is minimal, if not absent all together.  From the !Kung hunter-gatherers in Africa to the Swat Pathan herders in Pakistan, Dr. Worthman documented a pattern of communal sleep in which individuals drifted in and out of sleep throughout the night.  Other anthropologists have found that in some African villages, Tiv, Chagga, and G/wi, for example, life after midnight is surprisingly lively with newly roused adults and children.

Could it be that there was an evolutionary advantage to segmented sleep?  Life in the open savannas was brimming with nocturnal predators.  Periods of nightly awakening may have been crucial to our survival.

The Sleeping Gypsy, Henri Rousseau

Dr. Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health conducted a landmark experiment in which he placed a group of normal volunteers in 14-hour dark periods each day for a month. As part of the experiment, he let the subjects sleep as much and as long as they wanted.

By the fourth week, subjects averaged 3-5 hours of solid sleep, followed by an hour or two of peaceful wakefulness.  Then, they returned to sleep for another 3-5 hour sleep period.  Such a pattern of interrupted sleep has been observed in other wild animals.

What did our pre-modern european relatives do during that time of our first awakening, or as some would call it, the watch?  First of all, few of us fretted.  We viewed that time as natural to our nocturnal stirrings.  We’d smoke tobacco.  Tend a fire.  Pray.  Study.   Talk with our bedmate.  Copulate.  Some of us would leave our beds;  some would not.  Benjamin Franklin would take “cold air baths” or sit naked in his chamber and read, or write.

Godfried Schlalcken (1643-1706)

It was a time for magic, for mischief, for light domestic work, or for reflection. This time “twixt sleepe and wake” is semi-conscious.  As Nathaniel Hawthorn insisted in The Haunted Mind, it was a time “where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly present.”  In 1692, the Hammersmith minister John Wade complained it was a time of “unsettled independent thoughts,”  “vain unprofitable musing,”  and “devising mischief.”

Dr. Wehr likens this intermittent period of wakefulness to something approaching an altered state of consciousness with a physiology all its own.  In the wee hours, silence is magnified, our thoughts concoct schemes and plans, we pull together far reaching connections, and our minds seem as if primed for self- reflection.

Maria Magdalena, George de la Tour

Next time you awaken in those wee hours – slip out of bed, wander the darkness of your house, sit in your favorite chair, perhaps light a candle, or brew a cup of tea.  Take out that notebook and draw, or write in your journal.  Soak in the sensibility of that forgotten segment of time lost to our age of time schedules, computer screens, i-phones, 24-hour cable news, and artificial light.  Tell yourself that it’s not a time of lost sleep, but merely the night’s first awakening.

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Read: Ekirch, A. Roger, At Day’s Close.  W.W. Norton & Co.  2005.

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out. This slogan was uttered by Timothy Leary to 30,000 hippies in Golden State Park. It was 1967 — prelude to the Summer of Love. Hippie culture and the language of psychedelia broke from our television sets right into our suburban living rooms.

The Age of Aquarius has given way to the Age of Silicon. Where once LSD and psilocybin churned the neural circuitry of a few hippie brains, now my entire species is being doused by the continuous humming, buzzing and bleeping of pockets, purses, and hip-holsters alive with electronic gadgetry. Cellphone? Check. Blackberry? Check. I-pod? You betcha!

Plug in, turn up, and tune out suburbia. And suburbia is everywhere.

Now, I’m not a Luddite grinding my axe in anticipation of some anti-technology uprising. But something is unsettling about all this bleeping. As a psychotherapist, I’ve noticed a drastic rise in psychological troubles tied directly to the hows, whens, and whys of technology usage. Whether it be cyber-gaming, cyber-love, endless interruptions of one’s personal life by e-mail, cellphones and text messages, people feel their flesh-and-blood lives have indeed been broken into. One personal friend of mine counted with horror that he’d spent the equivalent of a full seven months out of his year locked inside that 3 by 4 foot space around his computer screen. (And that didn’t include work hours!)

Who needs LSD? We have Youtube.

Age of Aquarius, from electronica

It was Marshall McLuhan who taught us how the form of a medium, more than its content, alters our senses. All of this electric circuitry plugged into our ears and before our eyes has morphed into an extension of our central nervous systems - a kind of technological skin we can now wear to restaurants. We even live our lives and conduct our relationships inside of these gadgets.

How many times have I tried to leave my cell phone at home, or not check my e-mail for the umpteenth time, or avoid plugging into one of the many technological contraptions that I keep around for my comfort and entertainment, only to find myself feeling as if tweaked by a phantom limb. Try it. Notice how long before the panic sets in.

I braced myself. I committed. My cellphone would remain on SILENT. No walking, nor driving when using it - and away from public. I’d portion my e-mail to twice a day. And watch that internet surfing! For the first 36 hours I went through something I can only characterize as withdrawal - anxiety, restlessness, emotional hand-wringing. But once I slipped free from the urgings of my technological skin to graft itself back in, low and behold, it’s as if I’d awakened to my real skin. I came to an eerie sensation that I’d come back into my body.

Beam me back down, Scottie.

Timothy Leary’s slogan didn’t really mean that we should drop out of the world and do a lot of drugs. His urging was that we do what it takes to open our minds to everything in and around us.

Tune in — interact with the world. Externalize, look around.

Turn on — activate your neural and genetic equipment. Access the layers of consciousness that are available by virtue of your human wiring.

Drop out — free yourself from all those unconscious and involuntary commitments not of your choosing. Amen!

We humans evolved over a span of a few million years hunting and gathering within wide-opened African savannas. Our senses evolved to respond to a simpler, yet more physically demanding pleistocene world. We’ve plugged ourselves into all of these comfort-gadgets for only a microsecond in relative time. Our genetic wiring has not adjusted. It’s making us all a little crazy.

Still, technology is not a devil I’ll ever want to exorcise completely, even if I could. These layers of technological devices are woven intricately into my day to day, and I must admit their benefits. No, this is a devil with whom I’ll have to dance. I’ve grown too accustomed to writing on a computer to ever go back.

Besides, where would I stop if gripped by some whack-brained effort to extricate myself completely? The manual typewriter? The quill? Chisel and stone? And how I still love surfing YouTube, and the intimacy of my I-pod where I can saunter down the street shuffling from Sinatra, to Talib Kwali, to Zepplin and Incubus. As for the cell-phone, nothing frees me up more when I need to touch base with my kids or confirm whether it’s chicken breast “with or without the bone.” It’s time for a strategy — for hard fought middle ground.

Marshall McLuhan reminded, “there is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” For me I need stop and think at every point when I have that urge to plug in. It’s to be my new norm, not an exception — to live more hours unplugged than plugged so I not forget the play of the flesh and blood world upon my senses.

What’s that? It’s a real voice. A real set of eyes. A real person un-mediated by some byte of technological wizardry. Everyday I remind myself with this reworked mantra from the Summer of Love, “tune in, turn on, and drop out.”

Face-to-face eye-gazing.  Remember that?

So when that cell phone rings or that e-mail flags demanding some immediate response? “Sorry, man - you’ll have to improvise. I’m unplugged, right now.”

“Conversation has to explore new territory to become an adventure.”
Theodore Zeldin, Conversation

A great conversation casts a spell.  You know the kind of conversation.  Where time disappears.  There’s no place else you’d rather be.  Like a great meal, it fills us.  Like an aphrodisiac, it excites us. Through the interweaving of words, thoughts, and ideas, something within us changes.

The Bean Feast, Jan Steen

A great conversation is improvisational.  It strikes as if out of nowhere:  often late at night; or, within the soft flickering glow of candlelight; or, woven within the tastes, textures, and scents of that great meal.

I found myself in one of those conversations, in a dining car on a train from Ann Arbor to Albuquerque.  We were an unlikely quartet of strangers tossed together by the train’s 7:30 dinner seating schedule –  an elderly couple from Oregon who’d never before left their state; a tattooed, face-pierced death metal avenger with a Morbid Angel t-shirt; and, me.

Our table talk twisted and turned across the dusky cornfields of Iowa over two bottles of wine.  No expectations of a future, and no shared baggage from  the past, the four of us laughed heartily at life, at ourselves, while wondering aloud about each other.  There was an ever present curiosity about our divergent philosophies and life experiences peppered with musings about the likes of Ozzie Osborne, Sinatra, Led Zepplin, and Elvis.

Opening scene:  Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train

Great conversations are filled with the unexpected.

Theodore Zeldon in his book Conversation writes, “conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts:  they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought.  Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards; it creates new cards.”

There are plenty of books that teach the how-to’s of conversation.  Like trying to follow a manual on how to make love, however, you’ll fail without the right spirit and mood.   You can’t coax that great conversation without a sense of safety, mutual respect, acceptance, and curiosity.  And, according to Zeldon, what matters most is courage.  Courage to speak one’s mind.  Courage to be open to new ideas, and new ways of thinking.   Courage to acknowledge differences.  Courage to listen.

My Dinner with Andre, by Louis Malle

These truths hold for friends, co-workers, spouses, lovers, parents and their children. How many dinner times turn miserable because of iron-fisted commands about what is and isn’t acceptable to say, think, and feel?  How many relationships start to falter for fear of letting slip, or just hearing, those private, yet exciting little thoughts that slide against the grain of convention?

Conversation flourishes when the table is set as a safe place to make discoveries about the world, to discuss them, and digest them.  And, when there’s no cause for fear.

You want to open the possibility for more talk in your life? Loosen the reigns.  Keep at bay your fears of what you might say, or what you might hear.  Nurture the qualities of spirit and mind that make for great conversation –

well-informed, sympathetic, interested in life, moderate in response, curious about differences in life experiences;  be attentive, good humored, have a sense of proportion, don’t preach, don’t take yourself too seriously, don’t be argumentative; be original, broad-minded, charitable, unselfish, considerate, flexible, poised, enthusiastic, and, don’t forget, always a trifle whimsical.

Dangling Conversation, Simon and Garfunkel (Youtube by Starlightmoonflower)

Col.  John Boyd knew a thing or two about life and death decisions under conditions of rapid change, uncertainty, and ambiguity.  As a fighter pilot he bet any taker that he could maneuver onto his tail position and shoot him down within 40 seconds.  Most of the time it took less than 20.  He never lost the bet.  Boyd was arrogant, brash, cocky, and always testing limits – whether airplanes, people, ideas, or the military bureaucracy, itself.  To some he was a crackpot.  To others he was one of the greatest military and strategic thinkers of the 20th century.

Boyd read extensively.  Mathematics.  Physics.  Genetics.  Biology.  Anthropology.  Sociology.  Political and military history.  His intellectual grasp of scientific and philosophical ideas was expert.  He found connections everywhere.  In a conversational flourish, he might weave together Marx’s theory of alienation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Mendel’s genetics, and throw in Sun Tzu, quantum physics and Michael Jordan’s slam dunk for emphasis. Boyd believed that learning how to think sharply, deeply, and quickly was a prerequisite to our ability to adapt to complex, uncertain, and ever changing circumstances.  His motto may well have been, “Think sharply and innovate, or die.”

The basis of Boyd’s philosophy of adaptability is that we must stay open to survive.   Living systems are open systems, communicating continuously with the outside world.  We communicate to gather information, knowledge and understanding, as well as replenish our life energy.  If we close ourselves in and the wider world out, we cripple our capacity to adapt, and eventually die out as a non-discerning and uninteresting part of that world.

When under fire – whether it be through misunderstandings, failings, bad breaks, setbacks, disappointments – our tendency may be to isolate ourselves to the security of a more certain physical, emotional, or intellectual space.

We hide out in our living rooms, we close ourselves off from other people, we fix ourselves to our secure biases about other people and the world, failing to let ourselves be challenged by new information.  What we gain in temporary sense of safety and security, we lose in the potential of stretching our capacity to not only adapt, but even thrive in face of uncertainty, ambiguity and change.

Boyd’s key concept was the OODA loop.  It was a strategy of staying engaged both physically and mentally during times of uncertainty.

Observation: gather information from the world by means of experience and your senses.  Pay special attention to information that runs counter to your experience or expectations.

Orientation: Analyze and synthesize the information to form  a perspective from which to guide a strategy of action.

Decision: Determine a course of action based on how you’ve chosen to orient yourself to the situation.

Action: Play out the decision, while continuously adjusting according to how the world responds.

For Boyd, a life that always works out, a life without loose ends, or failings, or humiliating defeats, or blown fuses would not be a life worth living.  We need challenges.  We need to be pushed.  Without problems to solve, and setbacks to overcome, we would become automatons — life’s furniture rather than creative, thinking agents of change.

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To read more about this amazing personality see:

Coram, R. (New York). Boyd: The Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War. 2002: Little, Brown, and Company.

Hammond, G. T. (2001). The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

rock climber

“Improvisation is based on building from what is already given, accepting it, and taking it one step further,” writes comedian Andy Goldberg. One of the first rules of improvisation, any improvisation, DON’T DENY. Accept what’s been established. In improvisational comedy, denial is “refusing to give up a preconceived notion of what is going to happen next in a scene.”(1)

Denial stops action. Denial is our refusal to accept the unfolding moment.

Saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker never stopped mid-riff if he didn’t take to a particular chord. His saxophone flourishes wove themselves throughout whatever augmented 7th or diminished 9th flashed his way. Another bird, basketball legend Larry Bird, never stopped action mid-game to complain, “I don’t like the way you’re defending me!” Whatever the defenses threw against him, he found a way.

Both birds were great improvisers. They excelled at playing the moment. Playing the moment is the second golden rule of good improvising. Every action builds from the previous one. Each response leads to the next. Goldberg writes, “You can’t be so busy thinking about what you are going to say or do next that you miss what is going on.”

Keith Johnstone, another master of comedic improvisation writes, “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged.” Why? Because good improvisers accept all offers. (2)

Great improvisers are great listeners. Their senses are ever alert to what’s in front of them. A basketball player scans, a chef smells and tastes, a musician hears. Great improvisers don’t deny what’s in front of them. They don’t resist it. They don’t sit back brooding and wishing things were different. “Bring it on!” is their mantra.

Rock climbing pioneer Arno Ilgner talks about “hoping” and “wishing” as passive mental states that bleed off our capacity to respond in the immediate. (3) When on a difficult part of a climb it’s useless to escape into wishing that a particular hand or foot hold be different. You still have to push past. (See Lynn Hill climbing video below.) Yet, it’s a trap into which we all can fall. How often do we sit fixated on a past conversation, or replaying a long gone moment, or wishing that we weren’t in the spot we were in and that things will somehow magically turn out differently?

Rock Climber, Lynn Hill

Survival expert and trainer John Wiseman knows a thing or two about improvising. “When facing a disaster it is easy to let yourself go, to collapse and be consumed in self-pity,” he writes. “But it is no use giving up or burying your head in the sand and hoping that this is a bad dream that will soon pass.”  (See PsychOut post entitled Shame.) Stay confident. Accept your circumstance. Use everything in front of you to the fullest. (4)

In life, we all find ourselves in tough spots or in new and unfamiliar circumstances. When there, don’t deny. Accept the moment. Keep your senses engaged. Take what’s given. Think of the two Birds. Improvise!

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1) Goldberg, Andy. Improv Comedy. Hollywood: Samuel French Trade, 1991.
2) Johnstone, Keith. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979.
3) Ilgner, Arno. The Rock Warrior’s Way. La Vergne, TN: Desiderata Institute, 2003.
4) Wiseman, John “Lofty. SAS Survival Handbook. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.