“Do we see the stories that we’re telling ourselves and question their validity?”
— Pema Chodron
|
Toothpaste
Toothpaste provides an example of viscosity: the harder you squeeze the more resistance you feel. That’s because faster movement generates more resistance in a substance that has many interconnections.
Insight always involves the coming together of many things without a loss of complexity. Insight is not simply the ingestion of data, it requires the digestion of it. Insight unfolds slowly because it adds connections between things rather than just increasing their numbers.
It takes little time to remove things, but our brains take time to put things together. Some things can be put together more quickly than others. It depends on your skill and experience. Complicated combinations take more time.
An explosion is a rapid chemical rearrangement. You might think of an epiphany as a conceptual explosion as it has some similarities. It liberates energy, it leaves certain residues, and it involves rearrangement. We think of explosions as destructive because of how they appear, but the result can be more valuable than what we start with.
Persistence, Pressure, and Change
We can train awareness, starting with obvious things and becoming more sensitive. Becoming more aware requires focus, attention, and sensitivity but those are not enough. You also need insight.
A cat has focus, attention, and sensitivity. It is more situationally aware than we are, but it lacks what we call insight. A cat reacts quickly but thinks slowly.
Perform this test of your sensitivity. On a dry day go into your kitchen, close the doors and windows, and put a quart of water on a high boil for 10 minutes. You can make a hard boiled egg while you’re waiting. Water expands 1,500 times its liquid volume when it turns into steam, so boiling 500 ml of water will put about a cubic meter of steam in the air.
If your kitchen has the volume of a 10-foot cube, 30 cubic meters, then adding this steam will increase the air’s humidity by 3% which is less than the smell of rain. Can you perceive this change?
You may think this is beside the point, but perception is trainable. It improves with focus and attention. Because it requires quieting our minds, perception training will quiet your mind.
We can train ourselves to perceive more quickly, think more deeply, and react more effectively. Moving all of these things forward requires a combination of skills. Some pressure is necessary to fuel persistence.
Continuity Leads to Awareness
Continuity forms a baseline for any process. On this are built strategies and decisions. Lacking continuity follows from indecision, weak commitment, and misunderstood circumstances. It’s difficult to move forward when there is a lack of continuity, but this is normal for creativity and exploration. Progress rarely moves in a straight line, but one hopes the digressions are useful.
Greater awareness results from a continued, broader focus. Progress often requires stitching together different and unexpected things. From discarded objects we might create art or science. From perplexing events we might see new patterns. A narrow focus leads to shallow thinking, limited use strategies, and habit. It can be addicting.
It’s not enough to broaden at the expense of losing focus. This is often how things start as we caste about for new ideas, but it easily leads to distraction. Childhood is all about breadth of focus but it comes with a curiosity to understand. Awareness is a subtle skill.
What is awareness for you? Consider whether it’s something you apply—as in becoming aware of—versus something you become—as in becoming more meaningfully engaged. If you refine either of these, then that aspect of awareness will grow.
This is the importance of continuity. To develop something new requires continuous pressure, like getting toothpaste out of the tube. The pressure can’t be irritating or annoying, although there are some situations where we endure suffering.
If we’re not getting an immediate reward then we’re expecting one. This requires we have some awareness of progress. Not the dramatic and spectacular kind, but the kind that’s incremental, definitive, and enduring. You’ll only perceive this kind of progress if you’re able to quiet the noise and take note of all your thoughts and feelings.
Having a full experience, one that includes both thoughts and feelings, is what we often feel is missing. It’s one of the reasons people take things to extremes: if nature doesn’t reward us, maybe shock will. This leads into my study of dangerous sports, a project I’m now working on.
Most people block aspects of their feelings. Like an occluded artery, blocked feelings lead to attacks of emotion and emotional collapse. We’d like to avoid these situations but, it seems, we often create them. Emotional outbursts are the typical method by which we blow through our occlusions in our search for emotional continuity.
My ex-wife once said, “It’s okay for couples to fight.” This is not correct, fighting does not result in peace, and that’s why she is my ex. It’s normal for couples to find conflict and failing relationships often resort to fighting.
Progress comes from insight and constructive understanding which does not come from fighting. Fighting is retrenchment, freezing is denial, and running away is just avoidance. Successful couples disagree but they don’t fight.
Awareness Leads To Curiosity and Confusion
Confusion lies on the other side of our blocked emotions. When the dam breaks, we have feelings we don’t know what to do with.
Repression is typical and socially endorsed. In society, order is preferred to insight. Humans are not as bad as ants, who will kill any individual who breaks the pattern. Nevertheless, we do resist growth and change.
You’re told not to feel, don’t get angry, don’t grieve, and don’t be depressed. Take a pill, get back to work, and be productive. This plugs the hole and repairs the dam. Confusion is avoided, awareness removed, and change is pushed into the future. Progress is deferred until everyone has a reason to get onboard.
Panic is a reaction to confusion. Fight, flight, faint, or freeze are all ways to dampen awareness. The alternative is to be both aware and engaged. Insight combines an awareness of disorder with engagement and curiosity.
Try this when you’re next on a roller coaster. Instead of becoming anxious and frightened, become open and elated. The result will be that you become activated and energized instead of exhausted and depleted. If roller coasters are not your thing, then try getting lost somewhere, maybe in a city, a park, or in the woods.
Novelty Is Confusing
Embracing new information presses you to consider new ideas. This is why we’re attracted to novelty and the news: we’re looking for ideas, fascinated by spectacle, and easily lured by elusive rewards.
If new information is not rich enough the tendency is to collect more of it. But drama is generally mistaken for value when it caters to our need for security and opportunity. Pitching more drama—especially meaningless drama—plays to our fascination but overloads us. The solution to data overload is to embrace the information, navigate the confusion, and become discerning.
We want to be given opportunities rather than having to create them ourselves, but that is cowardly and exploitative. Just because you can take something doesn’t mean you deserve it. You are still responsible even when you feel powerless. Measure all your actions. Be critical of what you do and suspicious of what’s given to you.
In our information age we mistake information for insight. It is true that understanding makes sense of data, but more data does not lead to greater understanding. A bigger haystack does not make the needle easier to find. And the needle you’re looking for does not look like a needle, it looks like a contradiction.
Particle or wave, fear or excitement, criticism or support, challenge or reward, sensitivity or indulgence, these are some of our pregnant contradictions. Is their resolution one or the other, both, or neither? The best answer is neither in every case. This sounds like no answer at all, but it is actually the suggestion to look beyond the dichotomy.
Duality is fine but it can lead to a deception of alternatives. Duality arises from contrast while dichotomy is born from a conflict in understanding. A compromise is the last thing you want. A compromise leaves you stuck in the middle, unsatisfied.
The key to your lack of understanding is something you’ve seen a thousand times. It’s staring you in the face every time you’re upset. The solution is not obvious but the steps to it are: become more aware and accepting of what you feel. Find what’s good in what threatens you and let go of the rest. Reorient yourself, act, reconsider, and repeat.
Skill and Discernment
Skill is the ability to assemble into order what’s different and conflicting. This applies both to building relationships and bird houses. You must tolerate the confusion because it contains the potential for change. You don’t want less confusion, you want more information, more ideas, and the ability to move with them.
Greater structures make the world richer. New structures embrace diversity by making greater use of resources. Opportunities come from the interaction of many elements, and appreciating this takes skill.
Politics and society continually confront problems of growth. When they work, they build larger, more complex structures. As with all new projects, success is a process of exploring failure. Wise managers fail fast, learn quickly, and improve.
We see the opposite of this in Donald Trump’s rejection of diversity. As has been suggested (IEA 2025, Cave 2025), Trump sees success as a zero-sum game. His history and attitudes reflect a population that’s been gifted power without learning how to use it.
Skill requires discernment. You can’t do better if you can’t tell what is better. Here you’ll find the trap of delusion in which contrivance rewards ignorance. This is the dark side of religion and patriotism which, when stripped of dogmas and substituted for thinking, are the same.
Consider this in your own life. Are you under the misimpression that gaining more control will lead to better outcomes? Most experts are spectacularly wrong (Ritholtz 2025) and it is only through repetition and the passage of time that progress is woven into history.
If this essay seems confusing it’s because it strings a thin web across a broad topic. The topic is how things are put together and the web is made of attitudes and perceptions. The essay could be amplified one hundred fold but would only be twice as memorable.
Shorter is better. Remember these steps: for greater continuity in your life, embrace diversity and confusion while cultivating persistence, awareness, skill, and discernment.
References
Cave, Damien (2025, Mar 1). “Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out? Zero-sum thinking has spread like a mind virus, from geopolitics to pop culture.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/world/asia/trump-zero-sum-world.html
IEA (2025 Apr 4). “Zero Sum Delusions: Trump’s Tariffs: You’re going to get tired of losing.” Institute of Economic Affairs. https://insider.iea.org.uk/p/zero-sum-delusions-trumps-tariffs
Ritholtz, Barry (2015). How Not to Invest: Avoid the Mistakes That Destroy Wealth. Harriman House. https://dokumen.pub/qdownload/how-not-to-invest-9781804091203-9781804091197-9781804091340.html
If you’d like help making things better, call me.
Enter your email for a FREE 1x/month or a paid 4x/month subscription.
Click the Stream of the Subconscious button.