Being Less Controlling by Softening Attachment

image source

As one of the few economists who is also a life coach, I offer free Positive Intelligence training for economists:

The first step in that training is taking the saboteur assessment. The saboteur assessment is very quick and very revealing. When I took this assessment, the Hyper-Rational, Hyper-Achiever and Victim saboteurs were no surprise to me. But I learned something from my high score for the Controller saboteur. I am working on being less controlling.

To explain what it means to be controlling or not, Shirzad Chamine, the author of the book Positive Intelligence and the originator of the Positive Intelligence curriculum gives the analogy of vainly trying to control the wind and the waves or alternatively, surfing on whatever winds and waves come along.

Another helpful way of thinking about what the alternatives to being controlling are is to think about attachment. Here I use the word in the sense Buddhist’s use it: attachment is not rolling well with the punches that life lands, living in fear of those punches, or acting in fear. A basic principle of Buddhism is that the root of suffering is attachment.

I find the description of different levels of attachment in Don Miguel Ruiz Jr.’s brief book “The Five Levels of Attachment” useful. This book is billed in its subtitle as “Toltec Wisdom for the Modern Age.” To the extent that it actually reflects ancient Toltec wisdom, there is a convergence between Toltec wisdom and Buddhism.

Here are Don Miguel Ruiz Jr.’s 5 levels of attachment, as he describes them using the example of soccer fandom:

Level One: The Authentic Self

Imagine that you like soccer, and you can go to a game at any stadium in the world. It could be a magnificent stadium or a dirt-filled field. The players could be great or mediocre. You are not rooting for or against a side. It doesn't matter who is playing. As soon as you see a game, you sit, watch, and enjoy it for those ninety minutes. You simply enjoy watching the game for what it is. The players could even be kicking around a tin can, and you still enjoy the ups and downs of the sport! The moment the referee blows the whistle that ends the game—win or lose—you leave the game behind. You walk out of the stadium and continue on with your life. …

Level Two: Preference

This time, you attend a game—again, at any stadium in the world, with any teams playing—but now you root for one of the teams. … You created a story of victory or defeat that shaped the experience, but the story had nothing to do with you personally, because the story was about the team. You engaged with the event and the people around you, but at the end of the game, you simply say, “That was fun,” and let go of the attachment. …

Level Three: Identity

This time, you are a committed fan of a particular team. Their colors strike an emotional chord inside of you. When the referee blows the whistle, the result of the game affects you on an emotional level. … You feel elated when your team wins; when your team loses, you feel disappointed. But still, your team's performance is not a condition of your own self-acceptance. And if your team loses, you're able to accept the defeat as you congratulate the other side. … if your team loses, you might have a bad day at work, argue with someone about what or who is responsible for the team losing, or feel sad despite the good things going on around you. No matter what the effect is, you've let an attachment change your persona. Your attachment bleeds into a world that has nothing to do with it.

Level Four: Internalization

… at Level Four your association with your favorite team has now become an intrinsic part of your identity. The story of victory and defeat is now about you. Your team's performance affects your self-worth. When reading the stats, you admonish players for making us look bad. If the opponent team wins, you get angry that they beat you. You feel disconsolate when your team loses, and may even create excuses for the defeat. Of course you would never sit down with one of their fans in a pub for a friendly chat! …

Level Five: Fanaticism

At this level, you worship your team! Your blood bleeds their colors! If you see an opposing team's fan, they are automatically your enemy, because this shield must be defended! This is your land, and others must be subjugated so that they, too, can see that your team is the real team; others are just frauds. What happens on the field says everything about you. Winning championships makes you a better person, and there is always a conspiracy theory that allows you to never accept a loss as legitimate. There is no longer a separation between you and your attachment of any kind. You are a committed to your team through and through, a fan 365 days a year. Your family is going to wear the jersey, and they better be fans of your team. If any of your kids become a fan of an opposing team, you will disinherit them. … at Level Five you don't waste your time with people who don't love the sport.

The real power in this idea of attachment is in applying it to areas of life far beyond sports. Here are some areas in which I notice a lot of attachment by people I know (a set that includes me):

  • political party

  • particular political issues such as climate change or animal rights

  • academic discipline

  • field within economics

  • style of research within a field in economics

  • having particular technical skills

  • having particular social and organizational skills

There is a subtle distinction to be made between devoting oneself to a project or a cause and becoming attached to it. One can devote oneself to a cause and do one’s utmost to advance that cause without your heart being occupied with anger at those who don’t see the importance of that cause or even work against it and without your heart being occupied by the bad things that might happen that are completely beyond your control.

To use a military analogy, Napoleon kept some of his forces in reserve to send into battle at the crucial place a the crucial moment. If all of his forces were in the thick of the fight from the beginning—attached to a particular part of the battle already, with little ability to extricate themselves—he couldn’t have taken advantage of opportunities that arose.

Decision of how long to persist in a particular direction of action and when to do a course correction are crucial in life. Attachment interferes with making those decisions well. You might be too attached to a particular course of action that you persist to long or you might be so attached to winning that you quit too soon when the chance of failure gets to the same order of magnitude as the chance of success.

The more you spy out excesses of attachment and notice the temptations you face to try to control things beyond what is gracefully possible, the more calm and effective you will be. People differ in how big a problem attachment and being controlling is in their lives, but this is an issue at some level for almost everyone.

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass:

On the DSM (Clinical Psychology's 'Diagnostic Statistical Manual')

In the talk shown above about the nature of clinical psychology, Jordan Peterson spends most of his time persuasively making the case that values are an unavoidably central part of clinical psychology. That is very useful.

But I want to focus on the beginning of the talk, about how psychological diagnostic categories are “family resemblance” categories, in Wittgenstein’s terms. Jordan gives the example of a category with a list of 10 symptoms, any 5 of which suffice to declare someone to have that disorder. That means two people could share no symptoms and be diagnosed as having the same disorder.

Let me try top clear up the issues conceptually. What is fundamentally at issue is the efficacy (good effects minus bad side effects) of various types of treatment. Although enough data may not be available to do this for real, conceptually this is a matter of regressing the efficacy of a particular treatment (let’s say by a randomized trial) on a list of symptoms and other indicators. Labeling something as a particular syndrome could mean at least two different things (or could simply be incoherent). It could mean that a set of symptoms strongly co-move so that there seems to be a strong factor in the factor-analytic sense. In that case, taking an average over many symptoms (which amounts to counting if one is only assessing symptoms at the 0 or 1 level of discrimination) makes sense. The other thing labeling something as a syndrome could mean is that there are significant interaction terms in the regression, so that two or more symptoms co-occurring is more predictive than just the sum of the symptoms would predict.

The bottom-line is that if one can specify what they are for (in this case, guiding treatment), family resemblance categories can be thought of in terms of a regression with the individual characteristics as regressors.

In Praise of Buckwheat Pillows

For many years, my wife Gail and I have happily used buckwheat pillows. We had a chiropractor in Ann Arbor who got us into them. The great thing about buckwheat pillows is that you can squish around the buckwheat inside so that they perfectly support your neck will leaving your head in full alignment with your spine.

The buckwheat pillow above is small enough to easily take on trips, while being big enough for comfortable use at home as well. (It comes with a travel case.)

When you first get a buckwheat pillow, it’s a good idea to remove several cups of the buckwheat and put them in ziplock bags. You can always add it back if the pillow feels like it needs it.

What we love about buckwheat pillows is:

  1. Fewer headaches caused by a sore neck!

  2. As mentioned above, you can rearrange the buckwheat to provide support only for your neck. (You can have your head nearly flat on the mattress after you rearrange the buckwheat). You can change the arrangement (don’t worry, you get really fast at this and it comes naturally) when you are ready to roll on your side or onto your back.

  3. Buckwheat pillows stays cooler than regular pillows.

When Gail and I were part of a wildfire evacuation a few months ago (see “New Year's Gratitude on the Occasion of the Marshall Fire”), Gail remembered to bring her buckwheat pillow. I forgot. I regretted that. I could feel the difference in my neck after just a few days without.

Acknowledgement: Gail contributed to this post.

Trends in NBER Working Papers

I received an email from Jim Poterba this morning on the occasion of the 30,000th NBER working paper. Excerpting, it said:

The NBER reached a milestone this morning with the distribution of our 30,000th working paper.  The series was launched in 1973 by labor economist Robert Michael to disseminate research prior to journal publication and to facilitate distribution of data appendices and related supplemental material.  Working paper number 1 was Education, Information, and Efficiency by Finis Welch.

The series began on a modest scale, reflecting the small number of NBER affiliates at the time.  There were 41 working papers in the first year, and it took 12 years to reach the 1000 paper mark.  Originally, working papers were printed and had bright yellow covers. Packets of papers were mailed occasionally to libraries, leading economics departments, and research institutes. As the number of NBER researchers expanded, the volume of working papers rose.  Eventually, a shift to digital distribution became essential for accommodating the expanding number of studies.

In 2020, when many economists ratcheted up their research output to address the many new questions posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a record 1,713 working papers were distributed.  The annual average for the last five years was 1,322. More than 25,000 subscribers receive the “New This Week” email each Monday, and there were more than 2.9 million paper downloads in 2021. Twitter has become an increasingly important channel for calling attention to working paper content. 

The NBER working papers provide some insights on the changing structure of economic research. For example, 60 percent of the papers distributed during the series’ first decade had a single author, while 35 percent were coauthored and 5 percent had more than two authors.  In the last decade, only 11 percent had a single author; 56 percent had three or more.  The number of working papers per NBER affiliate per year, which was more than 1.7 in 1980, has trended down.  It averaged about 0.95 at the turn of the century, and was 0.78 in most recent five years excluding 2020.

In the image at the top of this post, you can see that there exist some older retrospectives on NBER working papers.

The most interesting trend is that people seem to be involved in about as many papers per year as they were before, but with more coauthors, so that papers on CV has not had a big trend, but if only fractional credit were given for papers with coauthors, it would look like productivity had gone down. But I think that papers are more ambitious than they used to be, in rough proportion to the increased number of coauthors. (In the cross-section, I think the number of citations goes up roughly with the square root of the number of coauthors, but the time-series trends would be different from that.)


The Federalist Papers #53: The Wide Knowledge Required for Federal Legislation Makes Biennial Elections to the House of Representatives Better than Annual Elections

The Federalist Papers #53, authored by either Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, continues the argument of #52 that elections to the House of Representatives every two years strikes a reasonable balance.

First, after pointing out that the exact period between elections is somewhat arbitrary—

No man will subject himself to the ridicule of pretending that any natural connection subsists between the sun or the seasons, and the period within which human virtue can bear the temptations of power.

—the author argues that the maxim “where annual elections end, tyranny begins" arose where constitutions were unwritten and more mutable than the difficult-to-amend, written Constitution being proposed for the US. In those contexts, the year as a salient length of time had to make up for lesser tensile strength of the relevant constitutions:

The important distinction so well understood in America, between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed in any other country. … An attention to these dangerous practices has produced a very natural alarm in the votaries of free government, of which frequency of elections is the corner-stone; and has led them to seek for some security to liberty, against the danger to which it is exposed. … Some other security, therefore, was to be sought for; and what better security would the case admit, than that of selecting and appealing to some simple and familiar portion of time, as a standard for measuring the danger of innovations, for fixing the national sentiment, and for uniting the patriotic exertions?

That argument only says that two years between elections to the federal House of Representatives is not a danger to liberty. But why would it be superior to annual elections? Here, the argument is that being a member of the US House of Representatives is more difficult than being in a state legislature (for which annual elections were common), and so benefits more from experience:

No man can be a competent legislator who does not add to an upright intention and a sound judgment a certain degree of knowledge of the subjects on which he is to legislate. … The period of service, ought, therefore, in all such cases, to bear some proportion to the extent of practical knowledge requisite to the due performance of the service. The period of legislative service established in most of the States for the more numerous branch is, as we have seen, one year. The question then may be put into this simple form: does the period of two years bear no greater proportion to the knowledge requisite for federal legislation than one year does to the knowledge requisite for State legislation?

Most of the rest of the Federalist Papers #53 elaborates on these arguments. In addition, there is some consideration of how a high probability of reelection or reappointment can make shorter formal terms of office consistent with having the requisite experience and how on the other hand slow resolution of election disputes makes short terms problematic.

Below is the full text of the Federalist Papers #53.

FEDERALIST NO. 53

The Same Subject Continued: The House of Representatives

From the New York Packet
Tuesday, February 12, 1788.

Author: Alexander Hamilton or James Madison

To the People of the State of New York:

I SHALL here, perhaps, be reminded of a current observation, "that where annual elections end, tyranny begins. " If it be true, as has often been remarked, that sayings which become proverbial are generally founded in reason, it is not less true, that when once established, they are often applied to cases to which the reason of them does not extend. I need not look for a proof beyond the case before us. What is the reason on which this proverbial observation is founded? No man will subject himself to the ridicule of pretending that any natural connection subsists between the sun or the seasons, and the period within which human virtue can bear the temptations of power. Happily for mankind, liberty is not, in this respect, confined to any single point of time; but lies within extremes, which afford sufficient latitude for all the variations which may be required by the various situations and circumstances of civil society. The election of magistrates might be, if it were found expedient, as in some instances it actually has been, daily, weekly, or monthly, as well as annual; and if circumstances may require a deviation from the rule on one side, why not also on the other side? Turning our attention to the periods established among ourselves, for the election of the most numerous branches of the State legislatures, we find them by no means coinciding any more in this instance, than in the elections of other civil magistrates. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, the periods are half-yearly. In the other States, South Carolina excepted, they are annual. In South Carolina they are biennial as is proposed in the federal government. Here is a difference, as four to one, between the longest and shortest periods; and yet it would be not easy to show, that Connecticut or Rhode Island is better governed, or enjoys a greater share of rational liberty, than South Carolina; or that either the one or the other of these States is distinguished in these respects, and by these causes, from the States whose elections are different from both. In searching for the grounds of this doctrine, I can discover but one, and that is wholly inapplicable to our case. The important distinction so well understood in America, between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed in any other country. Wherever the supreme power of legislation has resided, has been supposed to reside also a full power to change the form of the government. Even in Great Britain, where the principles of political and civil liberty have been most discussed, and where we hear most of the rights of the Constitution, it is maintained that the authority of the Parliament is transcendent and uncontrollable, as well with regard to the Constitution, as the ordinary objects of legislative provision. They have accordingly, in several instances, actually changed, by legislative acts, some of the most fundamental articles of the government. They have in particular, on several occasions, changed the period of election; and, on the last occasion, not only introduced septennial in place of triennial elections, but by the same act, continued themselves in place four years beyond the term for which they were elected by the people. An attention to these dangerous practices has produced a very natural alarm in the votaries of free government, of which frequency of elections is the corner-stone; and has led them to seek for some security to liberty, against the danger to which it is exposed. Where no Constitution, paramount to the government, either existed or could be obtained, no constitutional security, similar to that established in the United States, was to be attempted. Some other security, therefore, was to be sought for; and what better security would the case admit, than that of selecting and appealing to some simple and familiar portion of time, as a standard for measuring the danger of innovations, for fixing the national sentiment, and for uniting the patriotic exertions? The most simple and familiar portion of time, applicable to the subject was that of a year; and hence the doctrine has been inculcated by a laudable zeal, to erect some barrier against the gradual innovations of an unlimited government, that the advance towards tyranny was to be calculated by the distance of departure from the fixed point of annual elections. But what necessity can there be of applying this expedient to a government limited, as the federal government will be, by the authority of a paramount Constitution? Or who will pretend that the liberties of the people of America will not be more secure under biennial elections, unalterably fixed by such a Constitution, than those of any other nation would be, where elections were annual, or even more frequent, but subject to alterations by the ordinary power of the government? The second question stated is, whether biennial elections be necessary or useful. The propriety of answering this question in the affirmative will appear from several very obvious considerations. No man can be a competent legislator who does not add to an upright intention and a sound judgment a certain degree of knowledge of the subjects on which he is to legislate. A part of this knowledge may be acquired by means of information which lie within the compass of men in private as well as public stations. Another part can only be attained, or at least thoroughly attained, by actual experience in the station which requires the use of it. The period of service, ought, therefore, in all such cases, to bear some proportion to the extent of practical knowledge requisite to the due performance of the service. The period of legislative service established in most of the States for the more numerous branch is, as we have seen, one year. The question then may be put into this simple form: does the period of two years bear no greater proportion to the knowledge requisite for federal legislation than one year does to the knowledge requisite for State legislation? The very statement of the question, in this form, suggests the answer that ought to be given to it. In a single State, the requisite knowledge relates to the existing laws which are uniform throughout the State, and with which all the citizens are more or less conversant; and to the general affairs of the State, which lie within a small compass, are not very diversified, and occupy much of the attention and conversation of every class of people. The great theatre of the United States presents a very different scene. The laws are so far from being uniform, that they vary in every State; whilst the public affairs of the Union are spread throughout a very extensive region, and are extremely diversified by the local affairs connected with them, and can with difficulty be correctly learnt in any other place than in the central councils to which a knowledge of them will be brought by the representatives of every part of the empire. Yet some knowledge of the affairs, and even of the laws, of all the States, ought to be possessed by the members from each of the States. How can foreign trade be properly regulated by uniform laws, without some acquaintance with the commerce, the ports, the usages, and the regulations of the different States? How can the trade between the different States be duly regulated, without some knowledge of their relative situations in these and other respects? How can taxes be judiciously imposed and effectually collected, if they be not accommodated to the different laws and local circumstances relating to these objects in the different States? How can uniform regulations for the militia be duly provided, without a similar knowledge of many internal circumstances by which the States are distinguished from each other? These are the principal objects of federal legislation, and suggest most forcibly the extensive information which the representatives ought to acquire. The other interior objects will require a proportional degree of information with regard to them. It is true that all these difficulties will, by degrees, be very much diminished. The most laborious task will be the proper inauguration of the government and the primeval formation of a federal code. Improvements on the first draughts will every year become both easier and fewer. Past transactions of the government will be a ready and accurate source of information to new members. The affairs of the Union will become more and more objects of curiosity and conversation among the citizens at large. And the increased intercourse among those of different States will contribute not a little to diffuse a mutual knowledge of their affairs, as this again will contribute to a general assimilation of their manners and laws. But with all these abatements, the business of federal legislation must continue so far to exceed, both in novelty and difficulty, the legislative business of a single State, as to justify the longer period of service assigned to those who are to transact it. A branch of knowledge which belongs to the acquirements of a federal representative, and which has not been mentioned is that of foreign affairs. In regulating our own commerce he ought to be not only acquainted with the treaties between the United States and other nations, but also with the commercial policy and laws of other nations. He ought not to be altogether ignorant of the law of nations; for that, as far as it is a proper object of municipal legislation, is submitted to the federal government.

And although the House of Representatives is not immediately to participate in foreign negotiations and arrangements, yet from the necessary connection between the several branches of public affairs, those particular branches will frequently deserve attention in the ordinary course of legislation, and will sometimes demand particular legislative sanction and co-operation. Some portion of this knowledge may, no doubt, be acquired in a man's closet; but some of it also can only be derived from the public sources of information; and all of it will be acquired to best effect by a practical attention to the subject during the period of actual service in the legislature.

There are other considerations, of less importance, perhaps, but which are not unworthy of notice. The distance which many of the representatives will be obliged to travel, and the arrangements rendered necessary by that circumstance, might be much more serious objections with fit men to this service, if limited to a single year, than if extended to two years. No argument can be drawn on this subject, from the case of the delegates to the existing Congress. They are elected annually, it is true; but their re-election is considered by the legislative assemblies almost as a matter of course. The election of the representatives by the people would not be governed by the same principle. A few of the members, as happens in all such assemblies, will possess superior talents; will, by frequent reelections, become members of long standing; will be thoroughly masters of the public business, and perhaps not unwilling to avail themselves of those advantages. The greater the proportion of new members, and the less the information of the bulk of the members the more apt will they be to fall into the snares that may be laid for them. This remark is no less applicable to the relation which will subsist between the House of Representatives and the Senate. It is an inconvenience mingled with the advantages of our frequent elections even in single States, where they are large, and hold but one legislative session in a year, that spurious elections cannot be investigated and annulled in time for the decision to have its due effect. If a return can be obtained, no matter by what unlawful means, the irregular member, who takes his seat of course, is sure of holding it a sufficient time to answer his purposes. Hence, a very pernicious encouragement is given to the use of unlawful means, for obtaining irregular returns. Were elections for the federal legislature to be annual, this practice might become a very serious abuse, particularly in the more distant States. Each house is, as it necessarily must be, the judge of the elections, qualifications, and returns of its members; and whatever improvements may be suggested by experience, for simplifying and accelerating the process in disputed cases, so great a portion of a year would unavoidably elapse, before an illegitimate member could be dispossessed of his seat, that the prospect of such an event would be little check to unfair and illicit means of obtaining a seat. All these considerations taken together warrant us in affirming, that biennial elections will be as useful to the affairs of the public as we have seen that they will be safe to the liberty of the people.

PUBLIUS.

Links to my other posts on The Federalist Papers so far:

Squatting: A Radical and Effective Calf Stretch

I have been inspired by pictures like the one above to use squatting as a radical and effective calf stretch. When I have time, I take 10 minutes before a walk to use a meditation app (in my case “10% Happier”) or read texts, while squatting with my back to the wall so I don’t fall over. As you can see, unlike the Hadza shown above, my heels don’t touch the ground, making it harder to balance without leaning against something. I hope to someday have my heels touch the ground, but it will probably take me years.

I should be clear that I am relaxing everything while doing this stretch. My heels are off the floor because the relevant calf muscles and tendons are still shorter than they should be, taking the Hadza as an indication of the original human design.

Doing mindfulness meditation goes well with doing this stretch because there is some mild discomfort. One part of mindfulness meditation is accepting mild discomfort; I would rather that the mild discomfort I am learning to accept is something useful like stretching my calves than something not particularly useful, like an itch.

You will want to start with much less than 10 minutes. To begin with, I did only a few minutes. Then I worked up to longer when it seemed a shorter time wasn’t challenging enough and I could go further.

I can really feel the difference after doing this stretch, which is much more conducive to multitasking than alternative, much less effective stretches.

Postscript: You can see that I have a goal of wearing out old clothes by wearing them on days I am not going up to campus :)

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

Analyzing the Great Depression Using Supply and Demand for the Monetary Base

This is a pair of videos I made for my “Intermediate Macro” students in the early days of the pandemic in 2020. They proved to me that teaching the money multiplier is 100% unnecessary. Indeed, on rereading Mankiw’s Macroeconomics Chapter 4 this 2022 Spring Semester, I realized I can cut it from the reading list entirely.

These two videos build on “Supply and Demand for the Monetary Base: How the Fed Currently Determines Interest Rates.” If you find that and these videos interesting, see also “Supply and Demand for the Monetary Base with a Cap on Reserves, a Zero Interest Rate on Reserves and a Negative Reverse Repo Rate.”

Sight: Enjoying Our 7-Dimensional Visual World

This post has many photos. But it is not about photography. It is about encouraging you to delight in all the sights we can see, even in a typical day.

One powerful Zen koan is the question “Who Am I?” In the Zen training I got from my Waking Up app, an answer I really like is “I am everything I see, hear and otherwise experience.” (See “Zen Koan Practice with Miles Kimball: 'I Don't Know What All This Is'.”) This is quite literally true in the sense that everything we experience directly has already been highly processed by the sensory parts of our brain (with inputs from other parts). It is also metaphorically true in the sense that evolution designed us to be connected to the world and to each other. Or as Max Ehrmann’s poem “Desiderata” has it, “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars.” Here is the full poem, which was extremely popular when I was young:

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

How do I get to 7 dimensions? The first is time, represented by the one photo at the top. This is a view out of my bedroom window in the “blue hour” between when it gets light and sunrise. Things look very different at that time of day than when the sun is up. And a whole new set of wonders becomes visible at night.

The next 3 dimensions, to give their local names, are north/south, east/west and high/low. That gives your position—your standpoint. Then there are two dimensions for the spherical angle in which you are looking. Finally narrow/wide focus gives a very different visual experience. That makes 7. And I am not even counting other dimensions such as color, which are less straight forward, but still possible to focus on or not.

The point is that there are riches of visual experience to be had—here the blessing of dimensionality rather than the curse of dimensionality.

In what follows, I’ll dump in the photos I took yesterday on a single walk. At 4 or 5 locations I looked in a set of 4 horizontal directions at 90-degree angles from each other and straight up and straight down at wide focus and at narrow focus. (Straight up was similar enough at the different locations I sometimes skipped that.) I think the high dimensionality of visual potential is clear from these photos. And even though I used an iphone to document these views, seeing them doesn’t require any technology at all.



(Note: This post is still under construction. More photos to come.)