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I was chatting with a friend the other day about her experience tornado-chasing during a recent summer. She described her awe when she first realized this storm they were watching was in fact rotating, a necessary condition for the beginning of a tornado.

I’m working with some folks to organize a regular student-focused contradance in Amherst, and I was just struck by the aptness of supercells as a metaphor for organizing. There are many efforts to create movements, and many result in mundane rainstorms that dump their inch of organizing energy and dissipate. To really create something with a momentum of its own, however, is less common, because it takes a lot of energy and the right conditions. But it’s so energizing to observe these supercells take off, to start spinning on their own. I love that feeling. It takes a lot of work, but give it a try! Go make something spin!

Today I took an adventure into the city to get panniers for friend’s bike. It took a while to get there, because we weren’t sure exactly where REI was. My friend spent an hour or two choosing, negotiating, and finding the best way to buy the packs. In that time, I

• Sat in the comfy camping chairs
• Smiled at various toddlers
• Stole my friend’s bike and rode around the store for a while
• Sat on a footstool and practiced calling (a contradance)
• Smiled sympathetically at a crying toddler

When we went to leave, we discovered that in fact bikes are not allowed on the Green Line trains, despite the fact that we took it on the Green Line out to REI. But the MBTA guy was nice about it, so we weren’t that pissed. It was an excuse to go for a walk on this lovely day over to the Orange Line!

There are annoying things that children do: crying or whining incessantly, being rebelliously stubborn. But kids also do some really enlightened things that most unfortunately stop doing when they grow up: interacting with strangers, playing in public, sitting down whenever & wherever they feel like it. As adults, we can choose to readopt some of these harmless childlike behaviors. We can also choose to banish from our behavior those traits which we don’t want to have. Too many people uphold the undesirable childlike behaviors and forsake the desirable ones. Let’s do it right! Go, be silly in public!

Last night I went to the first event for my grad school program at Tufts, in the Department of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning. The event last night turned out to be constructed as an extended information session for undecided applicants. Since I have already decided to attend, I felt a lot of the main section was talking past me. The information was interesting and reassuring to me, but it was intended to convince, whereas I needed no convincing.

The best part of the evening for me was talking with faculty, current students, and my fellow accepted applicants afterward. I must have hung around in the room for an hour after the end of the event. I made connections with two faculty members, spoke individually with a couple of current students, and chatted at length with a number of my potential classmates. I had a blast.

Even if a situation doesn’t meet your needs as well as you’d like, it’s usually possible to find your bliss around the edges. Connect with people. It’s what we do best as humans.

There’s an article in Psychology Today from yesterday (Psychology Yesterday?) called “Why Positive Thinking is Bad For You” by Srikumar Rao. His basic point is that trying to “turn lemons into lemonade” is counterproductive, because it requires first thinking of the circumstance as bad. This is straight out of the psychological principle responsible for the trick in the title of George Lakoff’s fantastic book on political framing, “Don’t Think of an Elephant“. It’s impossible to obey that sentence, because by the time your brain has processed the fact that it should steer clear of elephants, it’s already thought of them. It’s similar with reminding yourself to make lemonade out of lemons; thinking that thought by default casts your situation as bad.

Rao advises instead to avoid labels of good and bad, and just treat situations at face value. That’s part of the requisite replacement paradigm, but he misses a couple crucial points important to this philosophy:

Acknowledge emotions

Rao seems to be advocating the denial of our feelings about difficult situations, and that’s a big mistake. Avoiding your emotions can only lead to more stress and pain. So, avoid thinking of things as “bad”, but don’t hide how you’re feeling. Be forthright about it. Your problems aren’t snowballs pelted at you by the fates, they’re just the workings of the world. It’s okay to be sad about the workings of the world.

Moving forward

But how do you avoid letting your emotions kick you down a destructive spiral into depression? If you allow your feelings to run away with you in hard times, you might land back in the boat Rao is trying to help us out of. To avoid thinking about elephants or lemons, you have to be focused on pragmatics. “Okay, what do we do now? How do we get from here to where we want to be?” If you’re centrally focused on that attitude, you won’t stress out when you’re in a bad place. Figure out what the fundamental aspects of your situation are that are making you feel sad or angry or depressed, and change them. Change is usually hard. But this is how you can avoid feeling shat upon by the world. Go for it! What are you going to do when you’re done reading this post?

The lifestyle of making a livable income online has appealed to me for a while, climaxing in my appreciation of The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and sustained by my following of many blogs on the subject. I continue to regularly read good posts about creating income with nothing but hard work and a denial of the ordinary.

But one of the biggest impediments holding me back, and to my happiness in general, is just how hard it is doing new things. Gretchen Rubin has a good post today outlining some solutions to this, and Cath Duncan’s guest post on Zen Habits touches on it as well. The essence of this impediment is fear:

Fear tends to cause us to avoid the thing we’re fearing, which is obviously very useful when the thing you’re fearing is a real threat to your life. But most of the stuff we’re scared about in our daily lives doesn’t pose any threat to our lives, because we’re wired to feel fear whenever we’re dealing with something unfamiliar. This means that, whenever we’re learning and growing and extending our comfort zones, we’ll feel fear. And when you’re growing towards something that’s really important to you, your fear is greatest, because your heart’s in it and you care deeply about the results. So list all the things you’re feeling most afraid about right now. Then ask yourself again, “What does this tell me about what’s important to me?”

The basic solution to this fear of the new is self-discipline, but the slightly more complicated solution is to change the way you react to new situations. As Eddie Izzard says (in regard to coming out), we ought to go toward things that scare us, because frequently, they’re the biggest things holding us back from our dreams. This is the area I need to work on the most, and I hope you will join me! Karol Gajda has a great piece of wisdom on this account, and I will end with a paraphrasing of it: if you’re afraid to do something, it might mean it’s a bad idea. But more often, it means you should do it.

Find something to do for someone else, today! It’s the best sort of addiction. Smiling at strangers counts.

I was blown away last night by an above-average article by my number one favorite blogger, David Roberts. It’s called “Children, the childless, and diverse human ecosystems” and is response to another article on Grist, “Say it loud: I’m childfree and I’m proud” by Lisa Hymas.

Roberts makes the point in his article that choosing to have children and choosing to remain childless are complimentary lifestyles. “Human communities are ecosystems, and in all ecosystems diversity is the key to health and resilience.” The only reason we get defensive about our lifestyle differences is that we’ve been removed from our natural communal living environment. Roberts anticipates the trend of demand for walkable communities will continue and create demand for cohousing arrangements:

If Lisa and I lived in a place with multiple families, some with children and some without, around shared spaces instead of roads and driveways, she would be part of my kids’ life. She’d run into them coming home from school every day or playing on the weekends. She would have the benefits of being involved in their lives and the freedom she enjoys from being childless. With childless folk around to act as babysitters, my wife and I would get the benefits of being able to go out spontaneously, or just get a night off, and the rootedness we enjoy from having children.

Finally, Roberts traces our American isolation back to its source: a built environment tailored disproportionally to cars and consumerism. Current sociological research shows that “the most reliable way to maximize happiness is through social connectedness,” and in America we are exceedingly deficient in that quality.

Our cities, towns, and neighborhoods are designed for cars, and by their very nature, cars limit opportunities for interaction.

That’s why I want to be a planner. I want to change the way our built environment is organized so that we live and work in spaces that encourage social connectedness rather than stifle it. I’ve encountered people who are skeptical that playing with maps can have as great an impact as direct activism in the form of organizing. But social connection is the key to creating collaborative solutions to our society’s problems, and it’s the job of planning to create communities which encourage such connection. I hope you’ll join me in that effort to make more connections with people!

This article by Karol Gajda at Ridiculously Extraordinary hits on something I’ve been experiencing during my current travels. While it’s euphorically liberating having the freedom to travel and visit friends, it’s stressful! This is one of the first things I think of when people express envy at my situation. It takes a lot of work to line up places to stay and transportation. For many bloggers I read with more radically free lifestyles, they make a respectable income through the internet while traveling, and can thus rent apartments and not feel bad about buying expensive bus tickets. I’ve thought about trying to make some sort of living online, but I also like the freedom to not worry about maintaining my income while I’m traveling. My current situation is good for now, and that stress which is brought by constantly traveling is definitely outweighed by the liberation.

I recently discovered Everett Bogue’s blog, The Art of Being Minimalist. It’s a great blog; it reminds me of Karol Grajda’s Ridiculously Extraordinary, except a little more polished. The posts are kinda long, but they’re good. Everett wrote a post today reflecting on his 6-month blogging anniversary. One bullet point that struck me was:

9. Give your best work away for free. You can’t succeed in the digital age if you withhold your best work for paying customers only. Prove that you have the ability to help people by giving them everything for free, and your audience will support you by buying your premium product. People will support the value that they receive. Give your best work away for free and you’ll reach so many more people who can help you make the change that’s necessary.

I’ve thought a lot about the future of news in the age of blogs, and I think this is a crucial insight. It doesn’t completely answer the question of how to fund full news rooms while providing free content and minimal ads, but it’s something I think most traditional news organizations just don’t get.

That bullet, and some of the others more directly, are relevant to this idea in social interaction: do things for other people. There’s the inherent happiness that you get from just being generous, and also your good will frequently creates good will in those around you, and they will do things for you as well. Let me know how it goes.

Zen Habits has a great post today praising solitude. There’s been a lot on what I might refer to as my “mindfulness blogs” about solitude, and while I’ve been in agreement with their sentiments, I’ve also been skeptical because I’m a very social person. However, after experiences the past several days that have required turning the other cheek and learning from past mistakes, these benefit of solitude listed by Leo Babauta in this article particularly resonated with me:

• time for thought
• in being alone, we get to know ourselves
• we face our demons, and deal with them
• space to create
• space to unwind, and find peace
• time to reflect on what we’ve done, and learn from it
• isolation from the influences of other helps us to find our own voice
• quiet helps us to appreciate the smaller things that get lost in the roar

Last night I took an hour-long walk, barefoot, around the moonlit town. It was great. I’m going to try to create more solitude in my life. Join me! It’ll be fun!