I look inwards much more these days, by the paradoxical consequence of just having more mental bandwidth available – a result itself of doing more stuff from just having the right systems in place, so somehow in this way the things that need to happen happen without my deepest or most conscious effort.
Right now, in reference to the stuff written above, I might go:
What are you doing? That sentence is way too long! Should we use shorter sentences? How about sentences with punch? Ooh, is that the right word?
But I do realize how much of the way I think, see, and articulate the world seems so apparently industrialized; tailored towards efficiency, constructed to facilitate a mimetic carrying-across, the delivery of the correct words in the correct way, that my consciousness in their low resolution dress may eclipse the firmer boundaries of a reader’s consciousness and transport my meaning to whomever should receive it.
Already, I’ve rewritten the paragraph above to challenge that basic paradigm and to overturn it a bit – to let the soul-patterns become that much more varied, no longer homogeneous – for words not necessarily to be “useful” or “not useful”, but somehow retain the quality of being comprehensible in the laboratory that is other people’s minds.
Our industrial language is clear, measured, and specific; it communicates intentions with highest fidelity, increases the probability that the chain of intention will lead to the desired consequences, and thus fulfills a need of capitalism in particular and enterprise at large – it exists for good reason in our age.
But there is a time and a place for it in the bestiary of our personas, both of communication and perception in a world that we could see in ever higher fidelity if only we would challenge ourselves just that bit more.
Returning to that first sentence for a minute…
None of this would have been possible internally for me without the gains of that productivity, that efficiency – the tangible thing that materially shifted things.
Perhaps this is the embodiment of what John Dewey said when he observed that we don’t think our way into a pattern of living – rather, we live our way into a pattern of thinking.
