Mind like water

As I go through life I find strange parallels. I am not in anyway a mystic and view such things with a healthy (in my view) scepticism. It was thus with a little surprise that I found myself using a metaphor I recognised, from old oriental teachings, when I was trying to define how to get things done. I had in my mind a colleague who had a negative outlook and who could find the objections to anything. I was trying to classify the differences between this attitude and my own as I thrive on problems people claim are impossible.

I started by thinking about the fact that I am happy to throw out ideas even if they are a shade ridiculous. Occasionally one of these ideas, when examined closely, will be practical despite being ridiculous. It will approach things from a different angle. Once you have seen how it might work you explore all around it and you either end up with a new approach, or more likely a set of objections. You then look for ways of getting around all of the objections. Sometimes this will kill the idea off and you go back to throwing out ideas, but sometimes you will manage all of the objections, and in the process develop a new view and a new approach that makes the whole thing look obvious.

The analogy I saw was of a vessel to contain water. Let's imagine one of those stone ponds the Japanese supposedly have in their gardens. The pond has great workmanship to make it water tight. The water does not think "this is a watertight pond, let's give up" it just seeps into anywhere it can. Most of the cracks and crevices will not go anywhere, but it fills them anyway. If there is a route through it will try to fill that too, and end up leaking very slowly out through it. The leaking will slowly wear away at the sides and, ever so slowly, widen the path. In the end you will have a hole so large you cannot see how it could ever have been thought of as water tight. This is the process for doing the seemingly impossible.

I thought about this for a while and was struck by the tie up with many philosophies. Then today I was looking at an article about getting things done and noticed it had the phrase "mind like water". On first glance it seemed to be using it quite differently, but looking closer I am not sure that it really is.

He is talking about 'the ready state of the martial artist, poised and stress-free" and goes on to suggest that “Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax,”. If you think about it the water simply relaxes into the shape available and everything else follows. A less relaxed substance like earth would never make it out.

This could all be just coincidence, but I like to think that I am just seeing the same things as others because I am looking at the same sorts of people doing the same things. Human nature is probably much the same regardless of geography and chronology.

Rufus Evison

Children: a corollary on automation

First time you do something for your child you just do it.
Second time you show them how to do it for themselves.
third time you ask them to do it for you.

When to automate...

The first time you have to do something just do it.
The second time you have to do something think about how to do it with less effort or automatically.
The third time don't do it, automate it and get it done for you.

RufusM Evison