Does New Information Slow Down Your Life?

I was perusing Irish Times early this morning and I ran across an astounding article by William Reville on how time is measured by memory. I concur with the premise experientially and almost entirely cognitively. Reville makes his point rather convincingly.

In the end he concludes:

"Finally, here is a “guaranteed” way to lengthen your life. Childhood holidays seem to last forever, but as you grow older time seems to accelerate. “Time” is related to how much information you are taking in – information stretches time. A child’s day from 9am to 3.30pm is like a 20-hour day for an adult. Children experience many new things every day and time passes slowly, but as people get older they have fewer new experiences and time is less stretched by information. So, you can “lengthen” your life by minimising routine and making sure your life is full of new active experiences – travel to new places, take on new interests, and spend more time living in the preset."

Definitely give this piece a read. You can find it here.

Best Paragraph of the Day: The Benefits of a Second Language

This is the best bit I read today. Tip of the hat to T.C. for the pointer:

"...good fluency in a second or third language significantly expands one’s ability to see and understand and also articulate other points of view.  And most of the very great thinkers of the past were fluent or semi-fluent in multiple languages.  By teaching other languages at an early age, we can make our most productive thinkers deeper and more productive.

In the Moment

Living in the moment is something that comes with difficulty to many of us. What I did today, however, was to fully unplug. Yes, no Blackberry. No iPhone. No iPad.
I'm not just enumerating the list of gadgets I own here. I'm simply making the point that unplugging once in a while when the weather is stupendous and you simply want to reconnect with yourself and your loved ones, do it.
Unplug, go for a run, get a coffee, and just be.

What Is Trust?

I've thought a lot about trust recently. Not just the noun form but the verb form especially.

My attraction to the word has perhaps as much to do with semantics as it does with etymology. It's from the time frame in which I was formally trained, i.e., the Middle Ages, more specifically: 1175–1225. The time frame makes me salivate. I know, it's as nerdy as one can get. And it's one thing that's not directly impacted by change. Not yet, at least. Back to trust. The lexeme derives from the following:

(Noun) Middle English  & Old Norse: traust  trust(cognate with German Trost  comfort); (verb) Middle English trusten; Old Norse: treysta,  derivative of traust

The German noun, Trost, is what truly brings the semantic nature of this word home for me. Trost means comfort. There is comfort in knowing that one can rely on someone and something else. There is comfort in a plurality of sources of support. That is what trust is. Trust, however, doesn't happen sans interest. As a matter of fact, it's solely predicated on interest.

Someone told me two days ago that trust is not something that actually exists. They are wrong. Trust exists. Trust, however, like all else in life is of a nature that constantly undergoes metamorphoses in relation to personal interest.

It is, for lack of a better expression, a reified commodity. You can trust with more ease if all participating interests are made clear to one. Trust is easier to give and take when informed by personal interest. Without the latter it cannot be.

I'd venture to say that the most ubiquitous currency of trust is interest. Personal interest.

I can't help being a 'word' person. Just like others can't help being 'visual' people. Or 'aural' people. We tend to be one thing more than the other. Our fundamental natures are what dictate how we take in information and experience, how we go about processing it, and taking it all in. In the end, what truly governs how we react to all information is what out self-interest is bound to gain/lose as a result.

I have had reason recently to wonder why I have such an easy time processing certain things and why such ease doesn't translate to others.

However, what I do know about my nature is that once I complete a chapter, I'm done with it. The thrill of the chase calls me again and I'm off reading a new chapter. It's the ping-pong phase all over again. One year I'm on a team, going on tournaments, winning mostly, and the next I'm off reading and memorizing Dante in a place far away from where I grew up.

The thing is, we are all, to some extent, led by this desire to move to the next thing. Human nature needs novelty, edification even, for without it it's simply too vacuous to inspire anything. Life, the force of life, cannot be without the fresh blood of new pursuits.

I illustrate, a couple of nights ago I spent some time with a local friend of mine. We went to this place that was playing the sort of music I'd consider not très cool to listen to. I somehow found myself attracted to it. I got on my iPhone, hit Shazam which then told me what the song was. I then went to iTunes, purchased it right while we were finishing our appetizers and on the drive home we had the track on repeat. A couple of times of hearing it, I had the 'hook' down.

"Dude, this is nothing like you," says the other party. "I know. I kinda dig it." I retort quickly. And then I let some fresh air into the car, stick my left arm out, start nodding to the rhythm of the song, and sing along to the predictably simple lyrics,

"It’s time, time to let the predator out

Cause it’s watch your back

You’re a killer beast, you’re an animal

And it’s easy to see, you’re an animal."

What can you trust, really? What one can trust is one's relationship to what's around one. Few things remain static. Everything and everyone around one changes. If one doesn't become accustomed to the ever-evolving nature of change, one will wither. I've always been copacetic with change. The only time when I somehow got to hoping that things would not change was very recently. While I had some sort of idea as to what inspires such a desire for a lack of change, I seemed to have lost track of the notion that I've always known: that all changes: things and people alike. And that trust in said things needs to be modified and altered accordingly.

Clip du jour

Whenever I see this clip from Frasier, I am bound to laugh, and laugh, and laugh. Till my sides hurt. The last 4 minutes are everything.

Photograph of the Day

Brilliant photograph. Minus the cigarette, of course. 

Angus and Julia Stone

They make good music, these two. I'll post two tracks here. The critics like them and I was never one to not mind the critics. They know, more often than the masses, what has substance and what doesn't. They read and sample stuff. They know. And, they're definitely right about these two. If you've been experiencing a bit of a music drought recently, as have I, check them out.

Incidentally, I was asked by a number of people if I had any new music to recommend this past week so this comes at a good time.

The sound is generally existential and conducive to introspection. It's also as sexy as it could be. Man, do they know how to arrange!

Julia's solo project is equally intriguing. A small taste here:

"Huge Vocabulary"

I've thought quite a bit about the impact that specialized education has on daily life. A cluster of days ago, I had a pretty big meeting with some people in the technology business. I had the floor for about two hours during which time everything was covered from the battle of operating systems: do you iOS5 or Androyd?, to market expansion in new technology, to bench development, to market shares and, yes, promotions, promotions.

There were some laughters interspersed and having spent a good deal of my already much lived life in public speaking, I always think that a few chuckles are better and more inviting than the heaviness of seriousness.

So, there I was. Talking shop about this and that, marrying words like 'dude' and 'awesome' to 'amelioration' and 'anthropomorphizing of devices.' I believe that jargons have to be mixed up. Just like it does one good to mix company, a peasant socializing with a peregrinating writer, an athlete playing chess with a 'nerd,' words have to co-exist. By socializing high with low, one gleans much about communication for, understanding, after all, is multi-faceted and it only comes to life when seen through the prism of varied experience and company.

Perhaps this is why I'm so attracted to colloquialism and diversity. To bring up Dante again because, of course, it's been a while, as he points out in his De Vulgari Eloquentiae i.e., On Eloquence in the Vernacular, which incidentally he had to write in Latin, the vernacular deserves the same dignity as Latin or elevated speech. Language, after all, is an ever-evolving organism. But, once reaching the second book, Dante got bored with the essay and dumped the project altogether. It must have happened around the time when things with the wife weren't all that great and Beatrice got married to someone else. Same human experience keeps recycling itself century in, century out. But I digress. I was talking about mixing highs and lows in language.

He says, "so-and-so is 'intimidated' because you have such a huge vocabulary." To which I say, "well, that vocabulary cost me a pretty penny, so, yeah." The only way to react to that statement was to be, meaning appear, nonchalant and easy-breezy. Deep down, however, I could feel my ears getting red out of frustration. I then added, "it's just words, in the end, who cares if it takes one of us longer to say the same thing?"

And then I drive back and I think of other contexts in which I felt like the company in which I found myself needed more mixing up, you know the onset of boredom, you know what it feels like. Like, the time when a pack of academics would get together and talk Dante or Goethe or ________, and all I was craving was some good ol' rock 'n roll or a quick chat with someone containing phrases like, 'WTF, dude, and I'm picking up what you're putting down, and it's just how I roll, and blah, blah, blah." Or the time when at a rock concert venue, my friends would insert a certain word after every other word and all I wanted to do was sit in my favorite chair and read a sonnet or a stanza from Dante. Bottom line, diversity is sexy and when it's lacking, it leaves a trace of something you know you're missing but can't quite define.

A Day of Birth

It's my birthday. I just woke up to a 'it's your birthday.' I felt funny hearing it. I go to the living room, turn the TV on, pick the new episode of Mad Men I PVR-ed from the night before, and get my laptop out. I've not done a whole lot of writing recently due to my infatuation with the tablet I recently purchased.

Tablets are great for seeing things but not so great for contributing things. Last night I said I'd give it to someone. Someone who was always better as seeing than doing. I never was good at it. I was only good at doing. I got this truth about my nature early on in life. And I've owned it since. I was always good at detaching. My folks could never understand how I'd get so easily bored with things I always seemed to want so much. My answer was always the same. The reason was simply because I got to get them. I meant, I understood what their function was, made use of them, and then recycled them with the same ease one recycles bottles. This is why I always had a hard time relating to those who were into the collecting of things.

So, this morning, before I head to work I think I'll mail the tablet to someone who's a better fit to own it. So, on my birthday I'll give something of mine away. Feels about right. This is what I love about technology. It seems to have something for every personality type. But back to the topic sentence.

I usually am more aware of my day of birth because I get asked ad nauseam what I want for it. The same thing happened this year as it happens every year but, this time around, for some odd reason I paid no attention to the birthday-related chatter.

First, it was the 3-day visit from one of the most important people in my life. It was a good three days. We did things that made me remember what it is that I usually need to do and be in order to be content. It's rather amazing how easy it is to forget that which is fundamentally true about one's self. And then the visit was over and it was time to face the music of quotidianity, and I was fine with it. I was bought flowers which I promised I'd continue to water. But then my nature kicked in. I got distracted. I forgot to water them as I had promised and today I'll have to throw them out. But I'm ok with it. I am true to my nature. I took pleasure out of viewing them for a few days and now I can let them go.

Two times during the year I do one specific thing and it's the same every year. I take stock of life, usually while sipping some caramel macchiato, and then I always move on to something new, usually a new album I want to listen to. You see, what's great about a May birth is that there's always new music to check out. I take time to take stock of life twice a year. I do so on New Year's Eve and on May 28-th. I think of where the year has taken me, what decisions I have made that have led me to the results of the day, how things would be if I'd taken other routes, and more importantly, what routes I feel I should take the next year. And usually there is detachment. Not this time around, however. There is attachment this time around which is why I react to the day differently than in years past.

This year went by faster than I'm accustomed to. And I and it always go fast. This year, however, I learned things about myself I never learned before. I am a fan of cyclical learning. I am a fan of it because it cements fundamental truths about life and existence that we need in order to be fine. We cannot learn life lessons by only being exposed to them once. We need repetition. Because we are, at the core, nothing more than children. What's made this year unique in my own existence, however, is that I experienced things I have never experienced before. And, as much as I'm drawn to novelty, I've been missing that which, by nature, I'm inclined to: history.

So, how can one process experience if it happens outside of a cycle of regularity? One can only do so one way: one has to face it, really get to know it, and then decide if one wants to keep it in the bank of experience or withdraw it quickly and forget it the way you forget an insignificant purchase that puts an initial dent in your account but then for some reason becomes forgettable and you can give it away with ease. Like my tablet.

One of the leaders of the company I work for asked me why I specialized in what I did in academia. I said I was drawn to it and, as a result, I let myself be taken there. I said, "I'm into history. And it turned out I was good at writing about it. And talking about it. And then I became a doctor of said things." I was happy with the explanation. I felt it made more sense than reciting some multisyllabic words than really say little of consequence.

The Sounds of Aronofsky

Tip of the hat to Aronofsky for never having a film that didn't stimulate my mind. And eyes.