🚲Throwing Away Our Training Wheels and Just Ripping It🚲
🔥Welcome to volume 000020!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
Hope everyone is staying safe in this crazy time.
🚲Throwing Away Our Training Wheels and Just Ripping It🚲
I picked up a BMX bike for the 4 year old the day my office shut down due to Corona. It felt good to have something to look forward to given the questions that hung in the air. It gave us something to celebrate as the fog rolled in.
On the way home, Alex rode the bike for a mile and a half, letting the training wheels keep him up. It was great to see him go after it. It was even better to not have to carry him and the bike home.
He kicked around on the training wheels for a month. Even though he leveled up his strider bike last summer at the skate parks and Big Marsh Park, he felt uncomfortable with the pedals.
Then on last Sunday we decided to take off the training wheels. We needed an Easter celebration. Alex wanted to stick the landing or crash and burn. His first attempt was closer to the later outcome. Visions of broken arms danced in my head. The third attempt, after needing a little push (ramps, mountains and pushes always make things easier), he was off to the races. It wasn’t poetry in motion, but he got the job done.
This got me wondering how many times we stop ourselves or hide behind our training wheels. How often we hold ourselves back by not believing in ourselves, telling ourselves a story that doesn’t serve us, or being comfortable with an unnecessary assist.
After Alex got done with his first day of riding, he wanted me to throw away the training wheels. I loved the fact that he was burning the boats and there was no going back. When I said we were keeping them for his brother, he let me know that he would teach Isaac to ride without them.
Then he said “I was ripping it”.
What training wheels do you need to throw away? What do you need to start ripping it on?
📓Articles to Read📓
Dan Wang on Life in Beijing Right Now
Corona Virus is a living breathing version of the William Gibson quote “the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed”. Beijing gives a peak into one of the potential futures as things unfold and the “new normal” takes hold.
Restrictions of this type on daily life have been in place in Beijing for the past two months. Someone now takes my temperature not only when I enter my own apartment building but also when I enter every shop and restaurant, my office, and on certain commercial roads. Security guards check entry cards at every apartment building and hutong (narrow lane) entrance, making it difficult to invite in friends or guests. At first, people could congregate in bars and restaurants. Recent regulations made that more difficult, limiting the number of people allowed at a table and barring them from sitting face-to-face.
Mask wearing quickly became universal. In a public park, I furtively took off my mask when I saw no staff around. Speakers on a ranger’s car then came to life, blaring at me to put it back on. Today, most retail stores have a sign declaring that entry requires wearing a mask. Friends have told me that they now feel almost naked if they’re walking barefaced in public. It’s not an uncommon sight to see people wearing not just masks and gloves but also goggles.
Beijing has so far lifted few of the restrictions on daily life. In fact, it has tightened them. As the imperial center of the entire Chinese civilization, an outbreak in Beijing is politically intolerable. Other cities, I hear, have been more active in relaxing controls, but the central authorities are still not letting up. Starting in mid-March, everyone flying into Beijing from abroad has had to quarantine in designated hotels at their own expense. Subsequently, the country suspended entry of nearly all foreigners.
Robert Schank on Teachers Not Destroying Online Learning Because They Can’t Do It Well.
Online learning isn’t easy. Just like working, parenting and teaching isn’t easy. But one thing we can do with the kids is Projects! Projects! Projects!
Real learning (the kind we do everyday) occurs in the context of truly held goals and the attempt to achieve them. Kids learn that way in school in the context of everyday life not studying in academic subjects.
When we go back to thinking about online education, please don’t try to replicate the classroom. Try to replicate real life.
Some programs we built in those days which would entertain and educate kids today if they were available to them.
Road trip: travel around the country to see stuff that interests you
Creanimate: design you own animal
Sickle Cell Counselor: advise couples about whether they should get married by doing genetic tests
Broadcast News: review the days event and put together tonight’s evening news.
Dustin: enter a foreign country and try to learn the language by interacting with the people you find there
Advise the president: war has broken out in Eastern Europe. You need to advise the president about what we should do
Is it a Rembrandt: a museum has a painting that they think is a Rembrandt. Help them figure out if it is a forgery
Outbreak: A pandemic has broken out; fix it
We build many more. They were all meant to entertain and to allow kids to learn by doing. They weren’t “taught.”
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Weird Stories Podcast on Marshall McLuahn (spotify)
The Medium is the Message as a Zen Koan —> not nonsense but its meaning can’t be understood from the front. It takes reflection to understand that quote and the idea
It’s not the advertising its the form of the advertising. It is not the thing but the form of the thing. Artists realize this but other people don’t
Life isn’t linear and reversals happen all the time. The future
Four Laws of Media that are testable and falsifiable Media can do four things —> 1. Obsolescence, 2. Retrieve, 3. Enhance and 4. Reverse into
Printing needs mass literacy which rewires everyone's brains. We switch to the eye from the ear (which was the prior world). Modern industrial society was from the eye and technology adjusts this all into an auditory world quickly.
We see the world from the eye and then the medium changes. The challenge is we get stuck in the medium. We need to see beyond the medium. That is why “The Medium is the Message” is a zen koan. We need to see beyond it
The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists.
Ken Burns PBS Series on The Gene
Quest Love DJing every night during the shelter in place (see below for some notes on his latest book)
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland (goodreads)
Douglas writes a biography on Marshall and his amazing life
The power of randomness… Marshall moved to a university with a Professor Innis whose sole focus was on the media. He wrote a book called Bias in Communication. His view was the bias is the medium which helped spurn the idea of the Medium is the Message. This helped shine the light on many of the ideas that McLuhan made popular
McLuhan loved to improv it and just throw out ideas. He needed an audience as sparing partners to help ignite his ideas
He called conversation sparing with students in a class room setting spit balling ideas. Thinking in real time with an audience was conversation for Marshall. I’d call that doing improv
Marshall need a team to collaborate and create. Without a team later in life he was unable to create
Form > content … All medium is some extension of human faculty (clothes, wheels, paper, TV, radio, internet etc). Displacing any one sense with another sense changes how we see the world and how we see ourselves (visual vs. acoustic is a big change that took place from books to tv/radio)
After suffering a stroke late in life, he lost the ability to read and talk. At that point his creative genius ended as he could no longer create
Marshal was the patron saint to Wired magazine and the Whole Earth Catalog. Two of my important mentors, who I’ve never met, Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand cut brought us Wired and the Whole Earth Catalog. They then created the Long Now Foundation, whose message and mission is even more important in a time like now
Link to chapter 1 of Understanding Media
Creative Quest by Questlove (Goodreads)
Find your habits and beliefs that both allow you to be creative and stop you from being creative. Use this knowledge to your advantage
Pay attention (and pay attention to what you pay attention to). Patterns and links are everywhere, let your brain notice them.
David Byrne “Don’t imagine what you will become, but what you won’t become”. Helps create discernment so you know what to pay attention to
Be in the moment and a million miles away! Present and absent like a Zen. I call this the observer and over looker (at the same time)
Use Mentors, Ladders and Swings… Pay attention to people who you don’t know exactly why they are doing things and see if you can recreate the why (like J Dilla reversing the circuit)
Do some oblique moves — wake up believing the opposite, remember you are the audience of your creations, garden, play things backwards, say Yes and (like Marshall in the piece above)
If stuck copy something,
Go to edges, go to adjacencies, push yourself, challenge yourself, and curate
Manage the yin and the yang, the chaos and order that goes into creating
Push things past beta
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Mr Rogers:
“You know, I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex. In the end, life isn’t about material things. It’s about the relationships you have with one another and yourself.”
Finite and Infinite Games - James Carse
Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of play, but in the course of play. The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play
The Philosophical Baby - Alison Gopnik
If our nature is determined by our genes, you would think that we would be the same now as we were in the Pleistocene. The puzzling fact about human beings is that our capacity for change, both in our own lives and through history, is the most distinctive and unchanging thing about us. Is there a way of explaining this flexibility and creativity, this ability to alter our individual and collective fate, without resorting to mysticism?
Religion feels incompatible with modern life because it seems to involve delusional beliefs, but if the above results came from a trial of a new drug, we would want to add it to tap water. Just because we don’t know why it works, we should not be blind to the fact that it does....
William Gibson Talks About 'The Peripheral,' the Power of Twitter, and His Next Book Set in Today's Silicon Valley by Matt Rosoff
My catch phrase for that over the years has been "the street finds its own uses for things." You invent the telephone pager never knowing that you're altering forever the geography of urban drug dealing and causing pay phones to be removed from entire neighborhoods. And it all works like that in some organic sense.
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
What training wheels do you need to take off? What do you need to just start ripping?
The current environment provides us plenty of opportunities to practice things and rip it!
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Namaste,
Christian
