I'd recommend re-scanning Part 1 before proceeding.
The title is clickbait, just for jollies. This is a more ambitious undertaking: an exploration of how we manage processes, generally. How we keep them running, add new ones, and, sometimes, crash the entire structure. It sheds light on the New Year's Resolution problem, sure, but it’s way more broadly useful.
PressureProcesses, considered individually, can seem hopeful. Some process somewhere in your life is improving! But the aggregate? Oy. The aggregate is an eternal problem. A bane, even.
It must be clear by now that life is a game of whack-a-mole. To mix metaphorical critters, our ducks will not line up, at least not for long. This is not a steady-state world; it's a realm of ceaseless disruption and interruption. And we're NOT OKAY WITH IT. Let's get that straight right now!
If aliens - having observed us via their quantum scopes on Arcturus-5 - were to draw a cartoon panel summing up life on Earth, it would be a harried dude clutching his head between his hands and moaning about
never catching a break ("Mlok, Mlok, Mlok!" chortles Exslx the Younger; "That is SO human!").
Look up from your screen and behold 8 billion humans desperately struggling to tame it all into a composed snapshot for just one goddam moment.
And failing!
We can't be satisfied until we find a status quo where our nice processes run nicely; where we tinker with our fun workshop processes while working briskly down the list of all those totally do-able New Year's resolutions (remember, this is fantasy talking), with no nasty imposed tasks arising to upset the apple cart.
The problem is, the Universe absolutely
hates that scenario. And we, in turn,
hate the Universe for hating it. We're quite literally at war with the Universe over its perennial disruption. And, unsurprisingly, it's winning the war, though we’ll never concede defeat.
A Brief Injection of Broader Perspective
Of course we never stop to think any of this through (
I do - insightfully, too! - but I'm down to about 25 steady readers). Instead, we pump ourselves full of stress and clench tightly in our eternal struggle for a flatly enduring status quo which would absolutely bore our pants off if it ever lasted more than a couple days (remember always that
this maddening world is precisely tailored to our preference).
Nearly all stress stems from the universe's effort to give us what we actually want: lots of rich interruption, disruption, drama, and friction. Plenty of crap to complain about and problems to fall in love with and high-stakes outcomes enticing us to hope and pray and bet and thirst.
In that posting I keep linking to (
"Why God Lets Bad Things Happen") I noted how we build interruption, disruption, drama and friction into every work of fiction and feat of imagination. Conflict is requisite in art, storytelling, and fantasizing. If our lives run smoothly for any length of time, we contrive Rich People Problems or engage in
self-destructive behavior. When happiness arises, we
grasp for painful ballast as countermeasure. A surprisingly large number of us drink to the point of spinning nausea to escape the daily oppression of level, grounded sobriety - exactly the thing we profess to desire.
I started this section saying:
We will never be satisfied until we find a status quo where our nice processes run nicely...
We wouldn't be the least bit satisfied then, either.
But enough broader truth. For the remainder, let's keep pretending we're hapless creatures trying to catch a break in a cruel cold world rife with obstruction and persecution.
The Mechanism of Breakdowns
When the tree falls and blasts a hole in your roof AND your car gets stolen, that's duress. The death of 1000 cuts seems just over the horizon. You'll know you've past a tipping point when you feel no impulse to complain about it. This means you have actual problems (
"How to Tell If You Have an Actual Problem"), and other processes will slow or halt while you work the problem.
It doesn't matter if the aggravating process was added by choice (workshop) or by chance (imposed). Either way, the whole stack slows down and loses efficiency. We begin to "lose it". Keep going (which we often do, because winnowing processes feels like diminishment, and we want to feel like Winners) and you can find yourself in extremis.
Demon processes, meanwhile, keep spinning just fine. Like cockroaches, they'll survive anything. But they begin to grate on us as we become overextended. Camels and straws!
Kids get into trouble by over-packing workshop processes, and by underestimating the time/attention necessary to kindle an engrained process. Adults are normally disrupted by imposed processes.
But, either way, an extra process is an extra process, and headroom is surprisingly limited. Drastic overestimatation of headroom explains the futility of New Year's resolutions, which we foolishly expect to load like cartridges.
The Myth of Multitasking
Psychologists have shown multitasking to be a myth. Duh. Divided attention is
divided attention. Fragmenting attention obviously impacts quality/efficiency/speed. Those who imagine themselves skillful multitaskers are oblivious to their outcomes. Given that few of us are inclined to soberly assess our results, it's hardly surprising that virtually all of us feel like deft multitaskers!
So, without multitasking, how did I ply seven different careers and boatloads of interests, hobbies, and obsessions? First, I didn't do it all simultaneously. It was serial, not parallel. I explained this in
my posting on Procrastination (a must-read follow-up to this series), and also
this, my posting on Promiscuity. Second: loads of passion,
plied playfully/eagerly, not dryly/maturely. Third: I tried (sometimes more successfully than other times) not to waste headroom with processes of self-drama. More on that later.
Paralysis and Shame
You know you've reached really severe disruption/over-extension when engrained processes start to go haywire. Not just center stage workshop processes; but even the slow-simmering engrained stuff gets flakey. We don't eat right, or bathe regularly, and the rhododendron croaks from lack of water as engrained processes fail to fire on schedule.
This conjures up deep shame. I'm lazy! Broken! How hard is it, after all, to water the damned rhododendron?
Wrong question. It's not a lack of will, or a decline of competence. It's a lack of headroom. And headroom is more limited than we realize. Only an old guy sees this properly!
"But wait!" you might argue. "As over-extended as I feel right now, I'm still not working 24/7! I watched a movie last night! What's wrong with me, watching movies when I'm too disrupted to brush my teeth or lock the door? Surely, I'm lazy and/or broken!"
No. Watching movies represents a vital core process: rest. Humans
must rest. We must periodically turn off our brains and immobilize our bodies, and spend time transported into other realities via novels, movies, songs, fantasy, revery, and/or dreams. Our bodies will not let us forego this, just as we can't easily renounce food, shelter, and sleep.
Rest is not avoidance of process. Rest is, itself, a process. A core one! That said, stretching out on a couch for days while your life blows up isn't "rest". Avoidance isn't rest. Beyond a minimal requirement, which you don't need to
think about, because your body will shove you hard into rest mode all on its own,
Rest is Not Real.
Tidy nuggets of rest are obligatory, and feelings of shame (our society retains latent Puritanism) add to the paralysis, shame being yet another process to juggle.
We can certainly hunker down for a few hours, knocking out tasks, but not indefinitely, like a computer blithely working through an infinite queue of tasks. Brunt-force is not a sustainable tactic - which, among other things, explains why we fail to willfully wedge New Year's Resolutions into the fabric of our lives.
"No sweat! Throw a few new processes into the hopper and proceed!" proclaimed an imaginary cartoon version of you. In real life, as we keep relearning, processes don't launch crisply on command, even when we have space in our lives for them. It's fraught and delicate and implausible, like trying to strike a match in a hurricane. Again, it's not about talent, competence, or fortitude. It's all about headroom. We need a sober grasp of our limited process bandwidth, especially since we're taught to imagine ourselves having
unlimited potential.
Getting Past Notions of Indomitability
No! We don't have unlimited potential! C'mon! In fact, don't even use that word! Amid all the plate-spinning
sturm und drang, getting your ego involved - with its dysmorphic illusions of Vast Potential and so forth - is a humungous mistake. It's also yet another process!
Potential fulfills out of process, like water jets from a fountain. The gushing fountains - the outcomes of our labors - are for
others to regard and admire. Rather than muse about this grand trajectory, better to focus attention on those jets. Work the processes single-mindedly and you can avoid the exhausting burden of self-mythologizing - and all the self-deception you'll need to engineer when evidence accumulates that you're really not
all that!
Quick Review
To review: We imagine, cartoonishly, that we can stack more processes willy-nilly. That we're
gnarly that way. In reality, we can maintain our engrained processes, plus a workshopped process - or two or three of them if we playfully leap betwixt - plus the imposed process du jour and the next one inevitably en route. Overdoers make the catastrophic error of heaping on
additional processes of shame and self-mythology, making it impossible to get anything done at all (explaining why
most people do nothing).
As it all starts crumbling, a bath or movie is normal and acceptable. Same for smiling. But while
we're capable of remarkable feats of exertion and endurance, no machine-like version of yourself is poised to swap in and work with cold machine-like efficiency. That's a cartoon - the same one where, on January 2, we leap up from our chairs to go pump iron, clean the basement, and practice cello, while keeping all previous tasks deftly in play.
Happy Frickin' New Year
You will not learn French or karate unless you've been graced with sufficient peace and space to comfortably ply your engrained processes and gently, intentionally, set aside a workshop process or two. If you even use words like "peace" and "space", that shows you're enjoying a respite between imposed processes. Muster some gratitude, and dig in until the septic tank overflows or your kid dislocates his shoulder.
Certain conditions must coincide. It's like needle-threading! Ramping up a new process is not something that can be scheduled, like a dentist visit. That's not how process works. Except, of course, in the cartoon version of you and your life, where adding a process is like popping in a cassette tape.
Space, the Final Frontier
If you're unhappy with the narrow limitations, you have two routes: fit things more cleverly into existing vacant space, or find ways to create more space. Either way, don't ever imagine you can stave off predicaments and persecutions. No human being has ever won an enduring victory against entropy.
The magic trick involves reframing, as usual. I've learned to carve out "peace, space, and comfort", and used the spaciousness to load more workshop processes - while, critically, leaving plenty of room for imposed tasks, which I've come to soberly expect and respect. I do not fight them. I do not resist.
I am an ant.
I handle imposed processes coolly, practically, undramatically, and minimize their disruption by 1. simplifying my life and 2. learning to keep processes running amid tumult, mostly by avoiding self-pity and the shrieking of "No No No No!" I've become cordial with
The Unthinkable. We play cards every Wednesday night. Freaking out is the most taxing and disruptive process of all, and I can't afford it. I've opted out of that indulgence, because it's just too damned expensive.
When you get a respite between imposed challenges, and eagerly take on a new workshop process, do not imagine you've achieved a New Normal. It's an exception, not an entitlement. Most people think of an undisturbed, unmolested, uninterrupted life as their birthright. Interruptions bubble up from some other realm, forcing us to pause Life until we can once again restart the clock and continue living. Opt out of this insane framing to be less pained and stunned (less
interrupted!) when tumult arises, as it certainly will. Reframe the tumult! Deem it not interruption, but
just another process to work!
Ok, now we're into the juicy stuff.
The life clock never stops! Remember the closing line from
last time:
Living never pauses. Process = Life.
Next time: more Juicy Stuff, a Curveball, and advice for building a grand feast one plate at a time.
