Categories
Vertical Development

Growing by Exploring & Reflectively Mapping Beyond Our Present Selves

How our future growth requires reflecting back upon our past experiences of trying to step beyond our present self.

A month ago, in a conversation with my sister, she indicated the following.

I have a thing for history and preserving the past šŸ˜‰ The record keeper in me. 

She said these words because she is our family archivist. She enjoys maintaining photos of our past but also discovering things in our past that some of us might not be aware of. Some examples of this might be discovering our family lineage or discovering something that our dad worked on (i.e. the Red River Floodway in Manitoba) when he was younger.

For some reason though, her words kept tugging on me, almost as though my intuition was telling me there was something important about them.

At the same time though, Iā€™ve been redesigning my website, importing old posts back onto it, and going back to try to fix any importing errors in them (which Iā€™m still in the process of doing).

What Iā€™ve already noted as being revealing in this process is how much I became aware of how much I was radically changing over time. In effect, I often beat myself up that I wasnā€™t reaching the goal or destination of fully expressing myself in the way I wanted to do so, yet I was still expressing myself in ways that showed how much I was changing.

To put this another way, I was courageously trying to express myself in ways that I often couldnā€™t logically articulate because I still didnā€™t fully understand who I was becoming. Yet I still stepped beyond and off the edge of my existing worldview to try to intuitively express myself in an emotional way, expressing what I was feeling at the time.

What this made me realize this morning is that growth and development require reflecting upon the past to see how we were previously looking to the future. In doing so, it collectively helps us to understand who we are fully becoming in the present.

In effect, reflecting upon the past is not enough. Nor is just looking to the future. They both have to be done in combination. This relates to something Steve Jobs said.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Steve Jobs

To emphasize this even more so, let me explain it in a different way.

To grow and develop, one needs to step beyond who they think and believe they are. This is a daily practice of trying to articulate who you feel you are wanting to become without fully knowing who you are becoming as of yet.

Often this entails articulating what you feel you need in your life that relates to values you want to embody.

Yet in that present moment of articulation, one will often feel like they are off the edge of the known world, exploring a newer, unknown one that they can barely comprehend. Actually so much so, that they may feel lost within it.

They are lost because this newer unknown world is a larger worldview they are exploring. So they actually have to lose themselves to find themselves.

Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau

But to be able to map it and understand it, you have to actually step into the unknown of it and explore it, experiencing it like a traveller exploring a new world.

But you canā€™t just experience it. You actually have to try to articulate the experience, almost like youā€™re a storyteller describing your journey into this new world, even though it may be feel impossible to do so.

Yet in doing so, in repeatedly trying to express the experience of stepping into this unknown, you are mapping it out and make it known.

Letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience.

Carl Rogers

So again, to fully map out a newer worldview and a newer state of being for yourself, which represents your growth and development, you continually have to step beyond who you think and believe you are to discover who you truly are.

But the discovery of oneā€™s larger sense of Self only comes from reflecting upon your exploration, not from the exploration itself, even though the exploration is an essential part of the overall process itself.

Thatā€™s because your reflection is an act of navigation, both in terms of navigating between the newer places youā€™ve explored, thus understanding how they relate to one another, but also in terms of navigating between your old world(view) and newer, emerging one as a whole.

All said and done, this has been a very enlightening experience of reflection for myself, especially for someone who is usually just future-focused on creatively releasing potentials and possibilities. Itā€™s taught me that getting to that future and releasing oneā€™s potential requires continually reflecting upon your past actions of exploring your future self.

At the same time though, this also makes it evident why most people donā€™t continue to grow and develop much once they become an ā€œadult.ā€ Itā€™s because they often reach a point in their lives where they stop looking forward to exploring newer experiences, because they may feel that they are too uncertain and risky now, and instead just focus on nostalgically protecting and defending their past which defines their present belief of who they are.

Yet in doing so, their old beliefs of themselves are actually standing in the way of newer experiences and of who they can still potentially become. In effect, itā€™s almost as though these old beliefs act like a chasm or moat at the edge of their worldview. It both protects them from having to deal with the unknown (ie ā€œHere be dragonsā€) but also prevents them from expanding their worldview at the same time.

To navigate well through midlife and beyond is not to build stronger armor but to learn when to lower our heartā€™s drawbridge, allowing ourselves to be truly seen and to behold the world in all its stunning mystery and wonder.

Steven Morris

This is another paradox of growth and development. It is not about pushing ourselves forward into the unknown which feels like someone pushing you off a cliff or into a chasm. It is more about recognizing and becoming aware of how we are often already being pulled into playfully and curiously exploring the unknown without fully realizing it yet.

This again embodies what creativity means to me when applied to oneā€™s self. It is about discovering something that has already been there all along but you just werenā€™t aware of it.

Categories
Links

Reawakening Childlike Curiosity and the Joy of Wonder

Categories
General

How the Transdisciplinary Nature of My Work Makes Categorizing It Difficult

Back in October 2005, I wrote the following post entitled What’s Next 2.0?

It looks like Everybody 2.0 and their Dog 2.0 is coming up with another 2.0 buzzword similar to Web 2.0. I guess Iā€™ll add to the party and talk about the cultural paradigm shift that is occurring right now and call that Culture 2.0. Hopefully when this is completed we will have Society 2.0, not to mention Business 2.0 (for real this time!), where people will actually have Compassion 2.0 for one another and works towards a better World 2.0. Did I miss anythingā€¦2.0?

Why I want to highlight this is because it emphasizes a frustration I’ve always had with trying to categorize information on my website.

Like seriously, I could easily categorize this post with the following categories: culture, community, identity, and web. But what I just realized was that these categories as a collective whole emphasized my overall frustration that work wasn’t working anymore (i.e. the conventional concept of it) and it needed a reboot along with a new paradigm.

In fact, my more current categories like the future of work, creativity, vertical development, and even life as a role-playing game, really all just reiterate this same narrative. And that narrative is working isn’t working anymore and we need a new paradigm or more appropriately a new worldview for it.

But if I was going to expand up this, I’d say that the core of this new worldview is one in which it requires us to not just go beyond the conventional concept of work but also beyond the conventional concept of learning and playing as well.

Or if I was going to put it a different way, I’d say it was about reinventing learning and working using and embodying the very principles of playing.

All said and done though, this just emphasizes something in terms of my categorization. That it seems pointless to do so.

Don’t get me wrong. I want to provide an overarching view of my lifelong growth and development, highlighting these different domains of knowledge that I’ve leaped between over the years. But the key thing to realize here is that I’m not leaving behind a knowledge domain when I jump to a new one. Rather I’m collectively trying to synthesize them all into this larger narrative, with each new domain helping to clarify it overall.

This is why categorizing my posts seems pointless to me because my most current ones would effectively be utilizing all the categories I’ve created to date. That’s because creating a new paradigm for living effectively embodies all of the knowledge I’ve explored to date.

For example, computers as a knowledge domain isn’t left behind because this new paradigm utilizes computers (such as note-taking and AI) to help us understand ourselves better. And the web as a knowledge domain isn’t left behind because it’s about sharing our growth and development online, so that others can see which direction you’re adventuring in within life and decide if they want to go in the same direction, thus potentially creating a collaboration and cooperation between you and others.

Again all of these domains of knowledge I’ve explored over the years aren’t separate disciplinary silos of thought. These domains of knowledge are instead used in a transdisciplinary way, as they are all interconnected and essentially interdependent upon each other to help create this new paradigm and new worldview.

Categories
Links

Seeing Is More Than Believing

Categories
Music

Save It for Later

Eddie Vedder

Sooner or later,
your legs give way, you hit the ground
Save it for later,
don’t run away, don’t let me down

Categories
Web

Notes, Journal, & Articles

In writing my last post about redesigning my website, something dawned on me. I’m noticing a pattern emerging from posts, both in the present and in the past.

Basically I have three types of posts.

Note posts are short form content, usually emphasizing a single block of content (i.e. video, music, quote).

Journal posts are intermediate in size (i.e. a handful of paragraphs) and don’t have a featured image or intro text excerpt. This post itself would be considered as such. It’s basically jotting down a thought or idea as it occurs to you.

Article posts are long form, usually including a featured image and an intro text excerpt describing it. This is a thought or idea explored in detail.

All that said, if I following this pattern that is already emerging, I really don’t need to stylize or structure my content any more than it needs to be. If anything, it’s more about pacing the rhythm of the different post types so they accent one another.

Categories
Web

Stylizing vs Structuring My Website

I’m still playing around with my website and I’m making headway but I’m also still hitting roadblocks.

What I’m noticing is that I like the single post view on my website, like when you click on an article to view it by itself.

However I’m still not liking my blog list view, as it feels very busy and overwhelming to read and follow.

I think this is because I’m still trying to determine how to best include short form content vs long form content.

In effect, should short form content be completely separated on its own page? Or should it be integrated alongside the long form content?

Previously I integrated it within my blog list view, such as displaying movies and music posts, because I found that the short form content provided a nice break from the long form content.

However, I think the primary issue I’m experiencing right now is that some of my posts are extremely long, such as my conversations with ChatGPT. Even more so, these chats are technically considered short form content (i.e. sharing a chat similar to sharing an article link).

What’s weird though is that if I go back and look at the blog list view of older posts, like when I first started my website, it looks fine. I think this is because most of my content was shorter posts of just a few paragraphs of text with the occasional long form post.

And finally, I’m still not really sure about using categories. In effect, even though my progression over the years has progressed from one domain of knowledge to another (i.e. games, computers, web, community, culture, etc), I often have a hard time trying to categorize a post and stick it within a set silo, when it feels like it could apply to many different things at once.

Yet at the same time, categorizing a post as a “movie” or “music” seems completely normal and fine.

All said and done, while I enjoy design and styling my website, I think my greatest difficulty is organizing and structuring content.

Categories
Quotes

Itā€™s Not What You Know But What You Synthesize

The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you know. Itā€™s how well you synthesize.

Adam Grant
Categories
Television

Impossible Peace

Iā€™ve been watching this series on Amazon Prime Video recently and I highly recommend it, as it definitely relates to the times we are living in with history almost repeating itself.

One such example is the Tariff Act of 1930, signed by President Herbert Hoover which ā€œprompted retaliatory tariffs by many other countriesā€ (mirroring President Donald Trumpā€™s tariffs on Canada and Mexico which spurred retaliatory tariffs in return).

Categories
Quotes

Looking Back Everything’s Different

Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different.

C.S. Lewis