Dear Reader,
In my regular work life, this past week marked our official return to the office. My workplace is one of those that’s trying out a partial in-office, partial work-from-home model. So I will be going into the office two days a week, and it’s a roll of the dice whether those two days align with the in-office days of any of the coworkers I might happen to wish to bump into.
I took the opportunity on returning to clear out some old papers and whatnot. There’s been a lot of joking around about all the printouts or office tchotchkes or office supplies that we’ve been able to do without perfectly well for the past two years, and lots of full waste bins and recycling bins. But there are a few tattered favorites that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away, which will continue to live on my cube walls:
On the left is a diagram of a plane full of bullet holes, sometimes used to illustrate survivorship bias. If you’re not familiar with the story behind this image: During WWII, the navy was trying to figure out how to optimize armoring its bombers. Armor is protective, obviously, but also heavy, so adding more armor means the plane is less nimble and requires more fuel. So how do you maximize protection of the aircraft without adding unnecessary bulk? Study was undertaken of planes coming back from bombing runs to map out where they were taking hits from enemy fire. It was mathematician Abraham Wald who pointed out that the most important information was actually where they were finding no hits—because planes that were struck in those areas didn’t return.
On the right is a printout of an xkcd comic, Is It Worth the Time? This is a chart that maps out how much time you can spend on making something more efficient, depending on the frequency of the task and how much time you can shave off. It’s tongue in cheek, not exactly a practical reference, and yet it’s a surprisingly useful reality check. For instance, it turns out that it may be well worth spending a significant chunk of time to clean up a bullshit process that you have to do five times a day, even if you only end up shaving five minutes off, if you think you’re going to have to keep doing it over the next five years.
I like both of these examples because they’re pointing out something a little counterintuitive. But also, I like the way they point little bit to the importance of the aggregation of small data or small steps.
All knowledge, all creation, all change is iterative. Sometimes you can make a big leap, or the big leap happens to you whether you like it or not. But day to day, most things don’t progress leap by leap, and mostly that’s not actually a very useful way to try to operate.
Learning a language happens word by phrase. Building a patio happens strata by strata, stone by stone. A 3D printer lays down material layer by layer. Improving aerobic capacity happens through an aggregation of physiological changes starting at the mitochondrial level. Embroidery happens a stitch at a time, and learning to draw goes stroke by stroke.
Above is my first drawing using my fancy pants new drawing tablet. It’s a character from The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting by KJ Charles. And look, on the one hand, it’s not an especially great drawing, but on the other hand, it’s a pretty good effort for someone who doesn’t actually know anything about drawing. I’m very pleased with it and don’t feel a need to pretend false modesty, but I can also see lots of ways it could be better.
Ira Glass talked about the challenge in creative life of the gap between what you know to be good and what you’re capable of producing when you’re starting out. And the way to shrink that gap is to produce a lot of creative output, some of which will inevitably be garbage, and that’s ok. I also remember years ago when I first listened to that original Ira Glass on Storytelling set of recordings, the line that really stood out to me was, “Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap” (at 1:47). Sifting out the garbage is part of the creative process.
I think there’s also another factor to the creative learning curve, which is that in learning and grappling with the sausage-making of art (or of making anything, really), you develop a better feel for the iterative development that everything goes through. That is, the work in progress stops looking so much like garbage and starts to look more like a work in progress. Which ideally carries over into how you start to look at other things, because maybe every hot mess is actually a creative opportunity. And if you chip away at it, tossing out the garbage bits and enhancing and refining the interesting bits, eventually you can end up with something pretty cool.
I guess maybe what I’m really talking about is perseverance.
This is the third inspirational thingie I kept on the wall:
I love the bold sentiment, we shall have to write them ourselves!, then with that acknowledgment, but oof, it is very laborious. It is indeed laborious! But that’s ok, isn’t it? I mean, what else are we here for?
On the book front, I thought I’d make it easy for myself this week and talk about A Room with a View by E.M. Forster. Except it turns out that this book is so much a part of me, and I have so many feelings about it, that I’m not even sure where to start. The story isn’t expressly queer, but Forster was himself gay, and the entire book revolves around the questions of truth and love, the well-intentioned sucking mire of social convention, the elusive eternal why and the answering yes, and what it might look like to find a place you won’t do too much harm and stand in it for all you’re worth, facing the sunshine.
A Room with a View takes place in Italy and England, contrasting the vivid, sensual, slightly chaotic life of the former with the constrained, confining respectability that is the preoccupation of the latter. The English tourist is the subject of some ridicule, but so is the English expat who scorns the English tourist. On her tour of Italy, Lucy Honeychurch brings all her cultural preconceptions, along with her tiresome and tireless cousin as chaperone—and also a longing for adventure, a natural sense of the beating heart of the world around her, and a sense of bafflement, of being teased by something elusive, but quite what the something is, and how to find it out, remains a mystery. Italy throws that all into relief, and I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to read A Room with a View and come away not wanting to visit Florence; yet it’s also really not about Italy, exactly. It’s about how truth and beauty and kindness are real, and important; and also, how we can be such dummies, and we make dumb choices, but there’s nothing for it but to own up to it.
Now it is all dark. Now Beauty and Passion seem never to have existed. I know. But remember the mountains over Florence and the view… You have to go cold into a battle that needs warmth, out into the muddle that you have made yourself… [F]or we fight for more than Love or Pleasure: there is Truth. Truth counts, Truth does count.
This has been a lovely weekend where I am, which is a welcome break from the dreary weather we’d been having. I actually got a bit of a sunburn yesterday. So worth it.
Love,
Beas
