miso

It's not quite october yet but it's already getting cold in there. Summer went by so fast. It's fine though, I like cold. And what's better than reading what other people have been up to when it's cold outside and you are comfortably seated inside?

In RE: Letter 001, CJ wrote:

I slow down, trying to be more thoughtful in how I respond to your ideas.

That's it. Slowing down. I think this is what makes engaging a great experience. Taking the time. Doesn't mean we need to engage with a lot of people if we can take time to engage in a meaningful way once. Slowing down brings quiet, we're not racing for endless notifications. It's slow but it isn't shallow. It also allows us to focus and not be reactionary.

In general I should slow down in lots of things I'm doing. It just feels better that way. Why rush all the time? Are we going faster if we don't slow down? Or do we need to slow down if we want to accelerate? So many questions.

It makes me think of notifications and whether they are needed all of the time.

They aren't. That's what I realize. If I want to check if a message has been answered, I know where to look. You've made a great analogy to the physical world:

Read.write.as, then, acts as a little town square of sorts where, as you said, you go about “looking to see what other writer are talking about, seeing if you have been mentioned, seeing if a conversation is progressing.” That to me is a place on the web worth dwelling in.

Yes! I love the town square analogy. Thanks for replying to my letter.

It's coincidentally interesting that miso should be Acknowledging feelings in a similar time frame that I've been mulling over an article on Gurdjieffian self-observation.

That's comforting to see some of us are intrigued by similar thoughts. I've never taken so much time to observe myself as I had in the past week. I knew emotions were important, but I now realize that they drive us.

Gurdjieff makes clear that our feelings and emotions are the horses that drive the carriage of our body.

Scary, isn't it? I never thought emotions could control us so much. Yet it makes sense. It also means that if someone can cater to some emotional input they could manipulate your logical mind in a non-logical way. Yes, definitely scary.

Here, I can get things as close to how I want them as I like in an editor, and then after posting keep telling myself that the two people that might skim it will somehow magically understand it exactly how I did while staring at it in the editor buffer, and so there's this sense that communication is working as it ought.

Which reminds me a little of a computer program. It's a series of statement/expression that get executed, or interpreted. The interpreter reads the program and do stuff. It's unambiguous so two different interpreters will produce the same output. It's also very deterministic. But take writing now. We write, but we can only hope it will be interpreted the way we intend to by our reader. Maybe if I say “table” you will think of a brown round table although the one in my head is gray and rectangle.