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“To learn the path it is important to be sharp yet inconspicuous. When you are sharp, you are not confused by people; when you are inconspicuous, you don’t contend with people. Not being confused by people, you are empty and spiritual; not contending with people, you are serene and subtle.”

-Liao-an

Boy this slideshow feature at Slate takes me back. back to being a kid.

When I was a kid, at a point before I can very clearly remember, I loved painting and making art in a kid-like fashion. But I was a mess. I got paint everywhere. I missed spots. I strayed from the lines. I’m not talking at an excuseable three-year old age. I’m talking age eight, when my contemporaries had art hanging in the school halls, winning child art contests. I was a klutz – my attempts at crafts always had a little glue showing, a step missed, a visible “mistake.”

I just didn’t know they were mistakes until people pointed them out.

“That’s ugly.” “You missed a spot.” “Stay in the lines.” I came to know my artist self by others’ assessments of me. And early on I put my artist self in a drawer and strived to be a scholar, since that was something I could easily fulfill to everyone’s expectations of me.

Thirty years later, I am making art. And you know, it is what it is. The mistakes and all – all part of the creation. It all says, “Take my offering, mistakes and all. Or not. I enjoyed making this, for what it’s worth.”

That is also why I find such a kindred spirit in the art of Cy Twombly. His retrospective is on exhibit at the Whitney right now. He captures a spirit of pre-art, childlike, that defies any interpretation and criticism. His paintings are often unmistakeably purposefully huge, containing doodles and scribbles that stand, to me, as a monumental “Fuck You” to the critics and the assessors who instist that all art must meet standards, must “mean something,” to be considered art. Cy Twombly’s art is what it is and that’s all.

There are lots of artists whose work I like to go and see, but no one’s art makes me want to go right out and paint like Cy Twombly’s does. Luckily we have a shrine to his art right here in Houston. I can visit my muse at will. I stand before one of his wall-sized scribbles and he speaks to me. It’s like he’s saying, “Sure kid, go paint. Offer it up for what it is and nothing more. Defy criticism. It is what it is, mistakes and all.”

“Let go, and respond to the immediate needs around you. Don’t get caught in some false perception of yourself. There will always be another person more gifted than you. And don’t perceive your position as important, but be ready to serve at any moment. If you can let go of who you think you are, you will become free - ready to love others. If you learn to see your impermanence, you will be able to live for the moment and not miss opportunities to love by pushing things into the future.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

I just got done with one of those intensive team building workshops where they put a bunch of strangers together and mold them into a team. In such situations, I am usually the “idea guy”. It just works out that way. My particular type of team role is a relatively small percentage of the population, so on most teams I end up on, I am the creative one, the “out-of-the-box” thinker, the visionary. I “pitch” ideas and have to rely on others to “catch” them and decide what to do with them and how to implement them. In a world of pitchers and catchers, I’m usually a pitcher. That’s rather simplistic, but you get the idea, right? (Catch!)

But on this team, as luck would have it, there were four of my type out of seven. And one was easily much better than me at my own game. At first I was all, “Hey. I’m the idea guy!” to myself. But I am also flexible, so I put on a catcher’s mitt for a few days and mostly played catch.

I could have spent three days in competition with this guy, trying to preserve my ego. But as Grace would have it, for these three days at least, my ability to let go of my own self-perception left me free to serve and love where I was needed.

That said, it’s also nice to come back to my home field and take the mound once more.

What good does it do to recognize that you’re in an Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma if no one else on your team or any of the other teams has ever heard of it? Whither Superrationality?

For a while now I’ve wanted to hack my Limbic system and switch some stuff around, like making veggies and the stuff that’s good for me taste good and attenuating the pleasureability of stuff that’s not as good for me. I’ve always thought that our physical brains have not kept up with social evolution – we don’t need brains that cause us to seek out calorie dense foods anymore.

So I am encouraged that, apparently, researchers at least know what area to hack when the time comes. Apparently this area called the NAc in the brain’s limbic system encodes learning and judgements about taste-related stimuli.

Just in time. I was considering resorting to cruder programming, like feeding myself raw vegetables while thinking pleasant thoughts.

The story of my life, in a humorous poem.

“The Distracted Centipede”

– Anonymous

I start a new job today. Sort of. For the past four months I’ve been the Manager of my work group. Sort of. Make that Acting Manager. So now today a real manager comes to take my place and, instead of going back to being who I was before I became manager, I’m going back to school. Sort of.

Six months of training, seven weeks in the classroom, to become a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. (Hiiii Yaaa!) I have a lot to learn, not the least of which is a repertoire of retorts to those oh-so-witty-(and-original) karate jokes.