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Habits are synthetic

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I have started reading “Better Than Before” by Gretchen Rubin, and in the introduction, she writes that habits are powerful because they eliminate the necessity of decision-making, which, she also argues, is a finite resource. Basically, you make decision once and then follow a habitual sequence of steps to the desired result without thinking about the individual steps.

This reminded me of the “Creation and Destruction” essay by John Boyd, which I came across a month ago. Boyd was a military strategist and an instructor of fighter pilots. His theory of making creative decisions is based on a continuous loop of analysis (destruction) of the current reality (and one’s mental model of it) and synthesis (creation) of a new and improved mental model. In this context, a habit, as Rubin describes it, is a synthetic process – you don’t analyze the components of a habit, but instead string them together into one complex action.

Acting without thinking, but in a way appropriate to the situation is, of course, a central concept in martial arts. In kendo, it is called mushin. And just as an everyday habit, the instinctive reaction in a fight is developed through repeated practice.

Being a fairly universal principle, habit-forming can be applied practically to everything. For example, in photography, say, I decide that I want to freeze action of dancers during a performance. I select a ‘fast’ lens, open the aperture wide, set the shutter speed high, autofocus – to continuous tracking mode, framing rate – to ‘high’ and from that point on worry only about composition and catching the dynamic moments. Actually, even this preliminary setup becomes habitual with practice. I only need to think ‘freeze action’, and the rest happens more or less on autopilot.

Of course, as Gretchen Rubin also mentions, habits are great servants, but terrible masters. They makes us more efficient, but in doing so rob us of the actual experience of the action. When you hit a pause on Boyds Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop and delegate part of the sequence to a habit, you sacrifice present-moment awareness. Autopilots, after all, are not famous for their creativity.

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Getting sick abroad

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Falling ill or getting injured abroad is certainly not fun. We have had several brushes with foreign medical services during our travels. The first time, it was in Czech Republic, when my wife got bitten in a leg by an insect while taking a long-exposure night photo on Charles Bridge in Prague. The bite got infected, and, following doctor’s orders, my wife had to spend the next few days in our hotel room with her leg elevated. “But we have vacation plans. How would I get around?” my wife asked the doctor (they were communicating using equal parts of English, Czech and Russian). “You’ve got a strong-looking husband,” she replied, “he should be carrying you in his arms.” I took it as a compliment. This happened on the second day of our trip, so fortunately, she had time to recover while I was attending a conference, and our subsequent vacation travels were not interrupted.

The other couple of incidents happened when our daughter became sick abroad, most recently a year ago in Milan. Just a few days ago, it was my father’s turn to get injured, while visiting us here in Victoria.

Dealing with all the stress and logistics, I thought that it was amazing how time heals the wounds, metaphorically speaking. The worry, the pain, the frustration eventually became blurred in our memories. My wife and I mostly remember the funny details of dealing with the language barrier, the universal kindness of doctors and nurses, the interactions among ourselves during the difficult times.

To be philosophical about it, health issues are a part of life, and they are bound to happen on the road as much as they will occur at home. And a far as travelling with family is concerned, I think that such trips are not so much about the destination itself or sightseeing, but more about spending time with family while travelling. Being on the road only adds a common element of novelty and excitement (and a bit of stress) to experience together. And the sickness or injury, as the time passes and the wounds heal (in the literal sense), eventually becomes just another experience – something that adds to the overall impression of the trip. Just buy insurance before leaving home.

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West Coast

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French Beach is a special place for me. When we first moved to Vancouver Island, we drove there to explore our new surroundings, and this is where I was really struck by the beauty of the local nature. It is very much tamed by the park setting, but it doesn’t detract much from the impression. To me, French Beach has all the essential West Coast elements – waves, tall trees, large pebbles and driftwood on the beach.

It all typically comes with West Coast weather too – rain, fog, wind. Last year, just after Christmas, we decided to go for a drive along the coast of the island despite the gloomy weather forecast.

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We thought that we would explore the Sheringham Point Lighthouse, which we have never seen before. It is hidden among the private lands, and the access point from the main road is not obvious. The lighthouse was a bit underwhelming, but still a nice find, considering how long we have lived here without being aware of it’s existence.

The weather that day, was a real gift, though. An almost clear sky without any wind. I was just a single fine day in a row of cold and gloomy ones – perfect for getting out to the coast. Being able to look out of the window, grab a camera bag and some sandwiches and be out by the ocean at one of the most beautiful spots I know – this is what I like about living here.

I am also conscious that I cannot take for granted how easygoing our six-year-old daughter is. The fact that she can cheerfully switch from her Playmobil figurines to the idea of going to a picnic is impressive to me. Flexibility. It is yet another thing I am learning from her.

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Honey cake

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My mom baked a honey cake for the New Year. It is my childhood favourite. She wanted to write “2018” on it, and I suggested making a paper stencil and shaving chocolate over it. When I was a child, she would decorate the cake with chocolate shavings all over the top. Now, my mom thought that stencil was a great idea, but she understood it so that the chocolate would be inside the digits. Instead, I thought that the image should be inverted – everything but the digits would be chocolate-covered. She went with my design, naturally – the more chocolate the better!

A note for the next time: the dough crumbs on the top are not necessary at all. Having a white cream background would make the writing more contrasty and would make the chocolate shavings stick better. As Winnie the Pooh told Piglet in the Russian version of the cartoon, “Both jam and honey, please, and you can skip the bread!”

My mom’s honey cakes are very close to the top of my sweetest childhood memories, but more recently, my notion what a fantastic honey cake looks and tastes like was re-calibrated when my wife and I travelled in Czech Republic in 2008. I had a conference in Prague, and after that, we travelled around most of the Southern part of the country by car over a two-week period. Two things impressed me in terms of cuisine: beer was cheaper than (bottled) water and honey cakes (called medovik) were served nearly in every cafe. The recipes were slightly different, but they were were all very-very good. Maybe, this is why that trip is one of my all-time favourites? After all, we all have incredibly strong emotional relationships with food one way or another.

Portrait of a young woman on a Charles Bridge in Pargue. Czech Republic
Portrait of a young woman on a Charles Bridge in Pargue. Czech Republic

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Sketching at the museum

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We discovered that our daughter loved drawing in museums when we are on sabbatical in Milan last year. We would bling her sketchbook and pencils wherever we’d go, and she would stop in front of every sculpture to draw it.

Today, we went to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria to see the wildlife photography exhibit, and there were some interactive setups aimed, I suppose, to teach kids the “rule of thirds” of composition. One could look at an animal figure through a frame with some wire grid and sketch it on a piece of paper.

Our daughter was happy to draw the animals, and she thought that the frame was cool, but as far as I could tell, she did not use any composition rules. I am glad that she she feels in her element drawing in public. And I miss our Italian museum trips, where my daughter and I sat side by side, sketching something. We should start drawing together again, while she still wants to do it.

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Career plans

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I am sitting on a couch next to my six-year-old daughter, watching “Whisper Of The Heart” for the n-th time. She asks:
– Do you know what I want to be?
– What?
I half-expect the answer to be “A Pokemon Master” (it’s this kind of period for her).
– I want to make books.
– To be a writer?
– Yes.
The context of the movie we are watching is obvious – Shizuku Fukushima, the main character wants to be a writer. Then, my daughter asks if I want to be a writer. I don’t want to dismiss it, so I really think about it.
– Yes.
Then, I think some more.
– Actually, I am already a writer. You see, I write all the time.
After all, my work requires me to write. But if I think more, this is not what she is asking. Would I like to tell stories? I think the answer would still be yes. Or maybe, because a picture is worth a thousand words, I would rather be a photographer? Oh, wait, actually, I am already one. You see, I take pictures all the time…

Not to take anything away from the “Pokemons” (lots of exiting career choices there), but “Whisper of the Heart” is a truly special film. It doesn’t stop surprising me. I might be biased, because this is one of the few movies that I pay close attention to as I watch it. I know that it is my daughter’s favourite, and I want to know what she see in it. There are so many fascinating details that I notice one-by-one each time I am watching the movie. For example, I am wondering, what is the significance of airships to Hayao Miyazaki? There is a blimp flying past Shizuku’s apartment at the beginning of “Whisper of the Heart”, and an airship plays a major role in “Kiki’s Delivery Service” – another favourite of ours.

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Cookies for Santa

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I am quite positively pretty much almost completely certain that my six-year-old daughter doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. But she is willing to play the game with full commitment, without skipping the beat. So today we were doing the Christmasy things all day – hanging lights outside our house, hanging stalkings on the mantle, putting out milk and cookies for Santa… Our daughter even pulled up a rocking chair for him “because he’s old”. So I even starting to think that she might be believing in Santa, at least a little bit.

I think, once again, that she is teaching me something here. That this is the way to do go about things: not to deny some magic in our lives, but not to lose the sight of reality either – simply enjoy the process as much as possible. As Yoda said, “truly wonderful, the mind of a child is”.

And then it started snowing – for the first time this year, in our neck of the woods anyway. Isn’t it magical? Probably not, but we’ll take it.

After our daughter went to bed, my wife and I were wrapping the gifts and stuffing the stalkings. I think I kind of believe in Santa too – specifically, that it’s my turn to be It.

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Running with my daughter

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Today, my daughter and I went for a bike ride/run to a nearby ocean-side park. I ran and she biked. I remember that the first time we did this was last Spring in Milan, where we were on a six-months sabbatical. We would run/bike along Naviglio Martesana. She could handle about 15 minutes of non-stop pedalling on her bike, which we borrowed from my colleague. In that time, we could get to a playground, where she would play for about half-an-hour, spending most of that time hanging on monkey bars. We would eat an apple and some pretzels, which was her go-to snack over there, much like “fishy crackers” are consistent favourites here in Canada, and head back home. It was hot. We strategically chose the path to stay in the shade, as we ran/biked along the canal.

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Today, it was cold (by Victoria standard anyway – about 0 degrees C) and windy. My daughter is stronger now and she has a bigger bike, so she can ride 30 minutes non-stop. Still, I ran at a pace, where we could talk without breathing hard. It was fun to run with her, but it was no question about playing when we got to a playground at the local park. It was so cold, that even stopping was uncomfortable. This is the thing about Victoria: the running trails around our home are some of the best I’ve tried anywhere in the world. The air is unbelievably fresh – I was really missing it in Milan. The nature is spectacular. The people are friendly and polite. Yet, it is just not quite warm enough to be truly enjoyable.

To be fair, though, I would need to compare apples to apples, or rather, winter to winter. The very first time I ran in Milan was in the winter, in the cold, in the dark, along a busy Via Melchiorre Gioia to Piazza Game Aulenti, which was the closest place to our apartment (that I knew of), where some stores were open late at night. I wanted to buy a thermos for my daughter to bring hot chocolate in to her ice-skating lesson the next morning (the irony of the fact that she came to Italy from Canada to learn skating is not lost on me, by the way), so I decided to make a running workout of the shopping trip. It was slippery with ice, windy, dark, noisy and generally quite unpleasant to run that night. But at that time, when we were without a car for the first time in many years, simply bing able to cove some distance on foot and explore the new city was liberating.

Today also, the simple fact that my daughter and I could on the whim put on the runners, jump on a bike and be in a forest, by the ocean in less than 15 minutes, chatting all the way there, was definitely a gift, cold weather or not.

Night view of the Unicredit tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
Night view of the Unicredit tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.

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Music and air combat

Air show. Milan. Italy.
Air show. Milan. Italy.

My violin-playing assignment for the Christmas break is practicing the D major and the A major scales. Finally. When I started the lessons with my daughter four months ago, I expected that I would be doing only “scales and arpeggios” , like Berlioz from “The Aristocats” – the movie that at the time shaped my view of music education.

I can see that breaking up the established muscle memory and coordination between my right and left hands is not going to be easy. That is why kids have an advantage in learning music – they don’t have years of muscle memory to unlearn.

For myself, as a late-starter in music, I see it as a good opportunity to practice John Boyd’s “Destruction and Creation” principle. I recently came across his essay of the same title, and it is a fascinating read. Boyd himself was an amazing character. He developed a highly-influential Energy-Maneuverabilty theory of air-to-air combat. His writing is to-the-point practical and concise but also surprisingly deep in the underlying philosophy.

One of the main ideas is that creative process (he used the process of decision-making as an example) is really a combination of analysis (“destruction”) of the existing mental models in view of the current observations of reality, followed by synthesis (“creation”) of new and improved models from the individual components (concepts, ideas, etc.) that are the result of breaking apart the old models. In other words, breaking-down and building-up go hand-in-hand in a continuously repeating loop. In fact, one of the best-known results of Boyd’s work is the Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop, which has been the foundation for training of fighter pilots and design of fighter aircraft. There, “Orientation” is the part that contains the analysis and the synthesis of the observed data to form a current mental perspective.

With music, five-year-olds have an advantage over adults in that they have less breaking-down (of existing habits) to do before they can get to the creative part. On the other hand, I’d like to believe that as an adult, if I do the analysis part of my existing habits well, I would have more material to play with when I am eventually in a position to do some synthesis.

Orchestra pit at Teatro alla Scala. Milan. Italy.
Orchestra pit at Teatro alla Scala. Milan. Italy.
Air show. Milan. Italy.
Air show. Milan. Italy.
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Bathtub experiments

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When our daughter was born, a colleague said that she was going to teach us a lot about fluid mechanics. It certainly has been true on many occasions. Nowadays, I find entertainment in finding funny analogies between her bathtub games and my research projects.

Yesterday, my daughter took her camera to the bathtub to document her newest toy – a robotic swimming turtle. The turtle has a rotating propeller (an intelligent design, I suppose). We noticed that it was noisier, when filmed from underwater. I could not help but chuckle, because our research group’s current project is related to propeller noise of ships. Who said the bathtub experiments are useless?!

Seriously, though, there is something to be said about learning by playing and experimentation. For example, if I had to explain to a six-year-old why a propeller is noisier in the water than in the air, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Somehow, the fact that the speed of sound is 4.3 times larger, doesn’t strike a six-year-old as a good conversation starter. But a pink swimming turtle does.