The Least Confessed - Most Often Pursued - Resolution

“The purpose of life is to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

-          Kurt Vonnegut

I like the idea of new year's resolutions. I love the idea of using any excuse for a fresh start, for renewing or creating a new goal or way of being. I'm not a cynic about goals or resolutions, but I do find it curious that what appears to be most valued is least mentioned.

Left to our own devices, we will play. We will stare at monitors, out windows, and at wallpaper. We will engage ourselves in such meaningless tasks that should someone ask us, "What'd you do?" the only honest response would be, "Haven't a clue."

And yet no one says, "This year, I resolve to give myself, guilt free, hours each week to dabble, putz, and fool around," in spite of the fact that our actions would seem to suggest that this is something we value.

If it is guilt that keeps you from admitting to your love for idle time, it seems to me that there are at least a couple of socially redeeming justifications for such behavior - justifications beyond the simple enough justification of "it makes me happy."

Idling gives you more energy to sprint when you need to. I find that the more time I spend trying to be productive, the less productive I can be. If you are trying to be productive 26.2 miles a day, you'll go at a much slower pace than if you are trying to be productive for 100 yards. Some tasks are more performance than productive; you have to be "on" for 15 minutes or an hour. If idling into that surge of adrenalin and engagement makes you more powerful in that moment, idling might be the smartest thing you can do.

Plus, this is a complicated and confusing world which requires us to learn and change, something that play makes easier. Covey used to make the distinction between efficient ("he was fast up that ladder") and effective ("oops - his ladder was leaning against the wrong wall!"). The person who has his head down the whole time, working to be productive, has less opportunity to explore other possibilities, to contemplate other ways to be. Children play all the time and no adult learns as much or changes as much as a child. Play - or fiddling about - gives a child a safe space to experiment with other personalities, goals, and roles. Play is personal experimentation and facilitates development.

Perhaps this is the year to stop pretending that you don't like to pretend, to play, to daydream, and to fart around. Perhaps this year it is worth leaving your self some elbow room to develop, muse, and unfold in unexpected directions.

Work or Play - Musings, Part 2 in a series

She wanted to work on her relationship with him, which was a pity, really, because it kind of missed the point. She was playful and if she wanted the relationship to thrive she wouldn’t work on it – she’d engage him in play. He had enough work during the week and didn’t need to couple that with working on his relationship. If she hadn’t tried so hard to work on her relationship, she might have seen this.

My Play: the Audience (John Cage Composition Accompanies)

Friday night, while waiting for the play Oscar and the Pink Lady to begin, I wrote my first play. In its entirety.

The Pink Lady was performed at the Old Globe's Cassius Carter Centre Stage - a theater in the round, the stage completely surrounded by seats. As you look past the stage, you see other theater goers looking at the stage. The play started a little late and I found myself quite enjoying the notion that the play would not be performed and the audience would simply have to watch one another watching one another, never particularly sure whether we were performers or in the audience, a role similar to what we all have in life. The brain is able to contemplate itself contemplating itself - a particular trick of recursion that makes us self aware and thus more advanced. Watching the audience begin to watch the audience, I got the idea for my play. Why not, then, have an audience watching itself watch itself - a particular trick of contemplation and entertainment that could, indeed, mean something different for each member of the audience?

And this is my entire play. 45 minutes of the audience in the round watching other members of the audience in the round, the stage becoming secondary to the drama of fidgeting, stolen glances, and muted emotion.

Thinking about it later, I realized that this isn't really a completely new idea. It is, in fact, just a dramatic variation of John Cage's 4 minutes 33 seconds, a musical composition in which no music in played and the audience is free to project onto the pianist (or full orchestra) what they like. Cage's composition is provided here, for your (listening? viewing? contemplating?) pleasure. If my play had musical accompaniment, I suppose I would need to use Cage's composition. I thoroughly enjoyed this BBC broadcast of Cage's composition. I hope you do too.

The End of Education as We Know it

I once did a calculation, projecting that we'd increase the level of education as much in this century as we did in the last. In the last century, only a small percentage of 13 year-olds were in school and even a smaller percentage of the twenty-something population was. By 2000, about 97% of the 13-17 year-old population was engaged in formal education and about 20-some percentage of adult population had a college degree. This has helped to fuel a huge increase in productivity and economic growth and the importance of education is widely accepted. The problem is, we can't continue with the same model of more formal education for more people as a means for continued economic growth.

If we continued to increase education as much in this century as we did in the last, we'd have a generation of 50 year-old graduates in 2100. Barring some wild innovation in student loan programs, this is probably not feasible.

So given that education is so vital, how do we improve it as much in this century as the last? The answer will probably take a century to articulate, but I suspect that it will start with an observation made by one of our great thinkers.

Russell Ackoff points out that we've taken a classically analytic view of work, play, and learning - approaching them each as separate. We build schools where people are expected to learn but not play or work. We build stadiums and playgrounds for play. Factories where people are not expected to play or learn. Although the human experience defies such neat boundaries - play, work, and productivity are not so neatly contained within proscribed environments - we nonetheless pretend that it is.

Perhaps the answer to learning is to break down the walls between work and learning and play, changing our expectations of all institutions. Montessori's high schools are much rarer than Montessori preschools. Why? Perhaps part of the reason is that she felt that teens were ready to run businesses as a means to both feel productive and to learn. Imagine how much that could benefit communities? And what of requiring any MBA grad actually manage a community improvement project - some activity directed at addressing a problem of road salt dumped into creeks reducing the number of trout spawned? or homeless populations that lower property values? or intersections with accidents? or creating a voice for residents trying to influence local government? Imagine a work place that actually awarded a group of employees a degree for deciphering the code of their culture and how to change it for the better - a task that may involve a blend of formal education, assessment and practical changes to policy?