So, I was talking with S earlier today, and she quoted a line from the asdfmovie[1]. It took me a second to understand what she said. It went something like this:

S: [quote]
Me: “What?” “…” “Oh!”

And I suddenly noticed myself going through the process of hearing the words, processing them, then thinking about what to say. I realized how often I actually do the auto-sentence-completion used in predictive punning. The fact that it was so jarring to react to a conversation in order was a clear sign that I had fallen into a pattern.

As Leia said in ‘Heir to the Empire'[2], once you have been in a place for too long, you no longer observe everything that is happening, as your mind only pays attention to larger things and fills in the rest with memories and expectations.

There can be benefits to finishing peoples’ sentences with expectations (more time to think, quicker conversations, less mental energy expended at peak), but there’s a question[3] as to how much you’re actually thinking and listening when you’re filling half of peoples’ sentences from your brain instead of through your ears.

The funny thing is that I really enjoy the feeling of a ‘cache miss‘, which is basically what I described above, where someone says something you didn’t fully anticipate, and you need to go back and re-listen to it. It means that I’m actively learning something, perhaps updating my neural net.

So, how do you balance this tradeoff (between listening and anticipation)? Right now, I tend to lean towards anticipation, but I might start leaning back in the other direction.

[1]The asdfmovie is a work of genius, but not for the easily offended or triggered. NSFW is putting it mildly. It’s violent, and many trigger warnings apply. If you still want to watch it, you can find it (them) here. Also, I’m not sure what the proper plural is here, or if it should even be a plural.

[2]”The Place had become too comfortable, too familiar – her mind no longer really saw everything that went on around her, but merely saw some of it and filled in the rest from memory. It was the kind of psychological weakness that a clever enemy could easily exploit, simply by finding a way to fit himself into her normal routine.” – Heir to the Empire, pp310 Also, even though the ‘Expanded Universe’ is now considered ‘non-canon’, the ‘Thrawn trilogy’ is still by far the best of the Star Wars books (with a close second perhaps the Han Solo trilogy

[3]Also from S, who called it ‘looking for confirmation instead of listening’.

“How do you feel?”

“How do you feel?”

The one question that Spock could not answer after his resurrection at the beginning of ‘The Voyage Home’.

Yesterday, I asked the question ‘how do you feel as you’re just starting to accomplish something?’ I touched on analogies from the ‘Wheel of Time’ series, where characters would use ‘anger’ to break through to, or would ’embrace’ to find the flow.

Early in life, I was taught to suppress emotions, the whole ‘don’t let it affect you’, ‘don’t let the bastards grind you down[1]’, and most importantly, ‘pick your battles[2]’.

Whether it was how I was taught, something from our culture, or raging adolescent hormones, I always saw myself as being in conflict. Writer’s block was something to force myself through, and flow was something I only ever reached when under a deadline or in large unstructured blocks of time.

When you stubbed your toe, the ‘correct’ response was to get angry, focus your anger, and use that to move or put away whatever was in the wrong place.

Only when I was really tired, and my emotional overcontrol lessened would I have I have a cathartic cry, and some of the other things would get expressed.

Music (especially singing with The Northern Lights) helped me a lot with this, teaching me to be much more in touch with many of these things.

To me, there’s a fine (but very important) line between ‘don’t let it affect you’ and ‘be like a cat, feel it completely, then let it wash over you, let it go’. One is much harder and brittle, one is much more flexible. But to an 8 year old who is being mercilessly teased at school, it’s difficult to give advice that advocates one over the other.

I feel like I began to understand this when I was teaching safety to undergrads. I would talk about anger and frustration are often proximate causes of incidents and accidents, and how what I do is to draw the emotion in, experience it fully, then let it go. Like relaxing and breathing into a slightly painful stretch or bodywork.

My current tactic is to laugh at myself, anytime I see myself getting frustrated and pissed at something. I mean, we’re just barely evolved monkeys. We’re allowed to feel all of these things, and all of those feelings are valid. What matters is how we act.

But back to ‘anger vs. flow’. The Wheel of Time describes the process of ‘harnessing Saidar’ as ‘submission’ or ’embracing’. But these terms are still very much bound up in hierarchical and gendered power structures (as is the ‘wrestling’ of harnessing Saidin[3]).

For me, I find the analogy of ‘relaxing into it’ to be more helpful, combined with ‘getting out of your own way[4]’. Of course this is easier said than done. Meditation seems to help some, mindfulness seems to help me with specific things.

Sometimes just thinking about something differently can make all the difference. When I was growing up, we talked about ‘hormones’, as if adolescents were just not in control of themselves, that this was normal, and it would pass.

But what I remember feeling was a lot of *anxiety*, and I feel that if that had been addressed directly, that would have helped a lot.

A simple recasting, a changing of words can make an unsolvable problem seem much more tractable, and maybe help people understand themselves a little better and heal our wounds.

[1]’Illegitimi non carborundum.’ I love Latin ‘translations’.

[2]It’s always ‘battles’. What does it say about our culture and species that one of our most famous coping strategies has violent imagery?

[3]Lan also uses the analogy of ‘the flame and the void’, where you take all of your fears and anxieties and burn them to achieve a Zen-like state. This doesn’t work for me (as an analogy, or as a technique), but I can see how it could be a technique that could work for some people. It still feels like a crutch, though, rather than a fuller possible self-knowledge leading to relaxing and opening up.

[4]I got this from an excellent vocal teacher Peter Barnes, and it feels like it has commonalities with ‘The Inner Game’.

Disclaimer: Years old WoT spoilers below.

How do you feel when you are accomplishing something? More specifically, how do you feel as you’re just starting to accomplish something? People seem to experience this in different ways. Some people call it ‘getting through writer’s block’, some call it ‘breaking through’, some call it ‘relaxing into flow’, for some it can feel like a ‘Zen’ acceptance.

In Robert Jordan’s[1] ‘Wheel of Time’ series, the magic system or ‘channeling’ is ostensibly divided into two halves: ‘Saidar’ and ‘Saidin’. ‘Saidar‘, wielded by women[2] in the books, is described as ‘a river of power which must be surrendered to or embraced in order to be controlled’. ‘Saidin‘, wielded by men, is described as a ‘raging torrent which must be subdued and dominated by a strong-willed channeler in order to be controlled’

Putting aside the obvious connotations, to me this feels like a description of how a writer (or anyone) might experience starting to work on different days. Some days, you ‘surrender’ to the flow of words coming forth from your brain, some days you have to wrestle your brain in order to get anything out, but once you’ve wrestled the flow can feel similar[3].

One of the main characters in the book, Nynaeve, generally considered to be ‘one of the most powerful female channelers alive’, had a block that prevented her from channeling unless she was angry. To me, this feels very similar to how one would channel Saidin, wrestling with one’s self, using strong negative[4] emotions such as anger.

As the women who wrestle with blocks to channel are considered ‘not formally trained’, or ‘wilders’, perhaps this means that all of the male channelers who have to wrestle every time just need a different sort of training, perhaps it’s the patriarchy[5].

Anyways, back to how *you* feel when you’re just starting to accomplish something. Are you fighting with your brain? Are you delicately moving things out of the way, removing distractions, and letting the flow happen?

Title Note: I originally wanted to entitle this ‘Saidin is from Mars, Saidar is from Venus’, but most of my readers don’t know my opinions of the fluidity of ‘Martians’ and ‘Venusians’, and so would react to the sexism inherent in the title.

[1]Including 3 books by Brandon Sanderson!

[2]There are exceptions to this absolute gendering in the novels, but I haven’t read that part, and it’s a little too spoilery for me (and while I always enjoy poking at binaries, it’s a little off-topic right now). As a taste, the two halves can be woven together, and indeed it is a major plot point when they do. (i.e. Linking, the bore, Nynaeve’s ter’angreal, etc…)

[3]I wonder if this is where the idea of the ‘taint’ in Saidin came from. That feeling that when you’re using anger or other types of force on your own brain, that the results are tainted somehow.

[4]Some say that anger is dual-use as an emotion. That is a longer discussion.

[5]It’s always the patriarchy.