To adapt to the new or stick to the old

In his blog article defending change (or the status quo) Seth Godin argues that its easy to take the stance of either sticking vehemently with the old and not giving the new a chance or entirely getting sucked up into the new (like technophiles) and denigrating the old. He says

What’s truly difficult is being a fair arbiter. I fall into this trap all the time. We begin to develop a point of view, usually around defending the status quo, but sometimes around overturning it, and then the arguments become more and more concrete. While we might pretend to be evenhanded, it’s very hard to do. Sometimes, we end up simply arguing for or against a given status quo, instead of the issue that’s actually at hand. And the danger is pretending you’re being fair, when you’re not. - Seth Godin

its necessary to take the good parts of both arguments and align them and see more holistically and objectively to the new options in life be it opportunities or technologies. To add to what Seth says, I feel we don’t think very clearly at times because of our conditioning and our passions. Our conditioning exaggerates the benefits of the old and our passions exaggerate the benefits of the new. Somewhere we need to step away from both of these and focus on the change in question more clearly. It helps to question where are beliefs about the advantages / disadvantages of a change are rooted, in conditioning, in our passions or in logic.

Be Useless

While writing my morning pages this morning came up this line.

Come up with something useful everyday.

Every day, no matter what, I make a poem and post it online. Most days they’re mediocre, some days they’re great, and some days they’re awful. (Jerry Garcia: “You go diving for pearls every night but sometimes you end up with clams.”) But it doesn’t matter to me whether the day’s poem was good or not, what matters is that it got done. I did the work. I didn’t break the chain. If I have a shitty day, I go to sleep and know that tomorrow I get to take another whack at it. - Austin Kleon

Changing Roots

A conversation over coffee led us to the topic of childhood. Somewhere down the line we spoke about how we are all like trees, our roots being our past and our trunk and branches growing from our past into the now. And we thought how difficult it is for a tree to grow to its full potential if its roots have an atrophied growth due to negligence or active harm done to them in their formation. One can easily get rid of unwanted growth in the trunks and the branches of life, yet to get rid of one’s own roots is a really tricky task, if not done carefully the tree succumbs.

In many ways many of us are tending to our roots knowing the problem lies within and on the surface we just see little growth, but once the difficult task of addressing the roots is done, detangling them, relying less on certain directions, containing rapid unwanted growth in others, the tree has more of a chance to renew itself. One grows newer roots and relies more on them and can enjoy the sun much more profoundly and blossom.