How to Pause
January 30, 2021Microcosmographia lxiii: How to Pause
Microcosmographia is a newsletter thing about honestly trying to understand design and humanity.
Hallon, I’m apparently joining a couple of friends like Sarah and Ash by, while not having intentionally and officially stopped sending letters, starting to send them again.
I tend to believe that for maintaining resilience, your inherent character is less important than the systems you’ve put in place as a vehicle to weather the bizarre world we’ve grown around us. When challenges come, I hope to have some system for handling them, or to develop one anew. And, well, the past year has put all of my systems to the test. The vehicle is windswept and battered; the passenger is shaken but intact. The theme that seemed to emerge for me was “expending a lot of effort in order to feel mostly okay”. Without the systems in place, it would likely have been “despite expending a lot of effort, still not feeling okay at all”.
The past six weeks in particular have been the real trial. I’m on leave from work, running the household of three by myself. Survival has been my only aim, and I’m pretty proud that my systems have allowed me to achieve it. (I think loneliness has been the worst of it. Do say hello!)
One of the most important additions to my all-encompassing meta-system is a new understanding of what to do when life, or the entire world, or both, get too absurdly askew to carry on as normal. My automatic response was to pause all systems and focus entirely on the sudden exec-level design dash at work, the household distress, or the current event of historic gravity. Surely I can’t be expected to run my systems and keep up with all that.
As it turns out, though, there is a sort of hierarchy to the systems that determines which ones are all right to switch off, and when.
- Cadence is an overarching meta-system based on reviews for making sure you’re working toward longer-term meaning. Dropping down to survival mode for a week or a couple of months means pretty much ignoring all of this structure but maintaining the mindset that following it has generated, and looking forward to returning to questions of meaning and self once things are stable again. Pause.
- (One exception to the above is that I’ve found a number of opportunities for microcadences, small but deeply meaningful and affirming experiences, especially during the pandemic when a lot of such stuff has moved online. A virtual concert by a band that means the world to me, two personal screenprinting sessions with my favorite visual artist, et cetera. It feels like a true blessing to be able to continue to pursue such moments among such difficulty. Microcadences are yet another system concept I hope to document soon!)
- Durable Notes is a system for accumulating a library of intertwined knowledge over time, rather than letting it wash past. But when I’m not deeply reading or studying, there’s nothing to accumulate anyway. Pause.
- Commonplace is a system for journaling and generally thinking things out in text. In survival mode its main function is therapeutic, for venting and sorting out thoughts. Inspirational and documentary functions are paused.
- Texture is a system for nurturing loose emotions and reinforcing the sort of person you want to be in the present. Wow, that sounds ridiculous when summarized and I hope to write it up for you soon — but for me it basically ends up involving lots of calm reading, video, and music from subcultures I feel affinity to. (Usually in Japanese, because I’m coping by pretending I’m in Japan whenever possible.) This turns out to be even more important while in survival mode, so I have replaced much of the Discipline with Texture instead.
- The Discipline is a system for deciding how to fruitfully spend available time. But when deep in survival mode, with (at most) zero psychic resources left at the end of the day, I’ve found that I can’t do anything beyond picking one or two default Texturey activities that are at least not bad for me and using those to psychically recharge; the more mentally expensive focuses like Create and Study, and even Play, are set aside.
- Be Well v2 is a system of “wellness for the reluctantly corporeal”. It’s less about ambition to get healthier or more fit, and more about recognizing that if I don’t maintain a baseline level of health, I’m certain to be useless and miserable. I must never pause this system. Even in survival mode, there’s a floor on the amount of sleep, activity, and meditation I need, and falling beneath it will interfere with the aim to survive.
The lesson here was, apparently, that it’s okay to pause your cerebral, ambitious systems for success when things get dire. But it’s not okay to pause your systems of nurturance and well-being. You’ll need those more than ever.