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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.

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Patience

Violin-maker in Sforza Castle. Milan. Italy.
Violin-maker in Sforza Castle. Milan. Italy.

Last week, I was given similar advice by teachers in two seemingly unrelated disciplines: kendo and music.

In kendo, during keiko (free practice) with a fifth-dan sensei, I tried hard to take initiative and ended up attacking non-stop, without really controlling the pace of the match. Rather, the match went on neither my nor on my opponent’s terms – kind of like the match in my recent grading examination. It felt rushed and hectic, certainly not projecting the yondan-level of pace and control that I was aiming at. The advice I was given after the practice was that I should have slowed down and observed the opponent: this is practice; you should make an opening and let the opponent hit you. Even if you receive a strike, you should learn from it: “Oh, this is his speed. This is his distance.” Then, you can use this knowledge in your own oji-waza (counter-attacks).

During a violin lesson on the same day, I was learning to play with an accompaniment. My problem was that I was not holding the long notes sufficiently long and as was “running away” from the accompanist.

Basically, both in music and in kendo, I lacked patience. I anticipated what was coming up next and didn’t let the current event unfold to completion. I think this is a general problem, and I am not unique in making this mistake. My daily life is over-scheduled with activities, both work- and family-related, especially during the pre-holiday season, which for me also coincides with the end-of-the-academic-term rush to complete various teaching obligations. As I go through the day, my focus shifts from the task at hand to the next item on my calendar, and as a result, I shortchange the present moment awareness. I cut short the long note I am supposed to hold.

As usual, there are positive lessons to learn from any consistent mistake, including this one. First, the very fact that I can identify and analyze the issue means that I am already on the way to correcting it. The real problem is when I am not even aware of something being out of place. As Morpheus said to Neo in “The Matrix”, which is my all-time favourite movie:
— …It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
–What truth?
–That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

Second, the good news is that even in the midst of a hectic, over-scheduled life there are moments when I not only can, but indeed, am expected to, to pause and enjoy the long notes.

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Being non-reactive

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The keiko portion of my yondan (4th dan) kendo exam didn’t feel right as soon I finished it. This is the “match” portion of the test, were the judges observe your sparring with an opponent, who is attempting the same-level grading. No score is kept, and you have 1 minute and 20 seconds to demonstrate your “best kendo”. Because of being nervous, I went into a shiai (competition) mode too much, and exchanged way too many strikes with my opponent, mostly rather sloppily executed. I ended up failing the exam, so my intuition was correct.

While the exam is still fresh in my memory, I thought I would try to analyze the possible ways of dealing with the urge to attack. I do realize, that thinking about kendo is not a substitute for practice, but some analysis in addition to keiko must be better than mindlessly going through the motions.

Here is a piece of advice I received from a 5th dan sensei. At the yondan level, it is important to show the judges that you are in control of the match. On one hand, this means demonstrating ‘sen’ attitude – being in the attacking mode, exerting pressure on the opponent. On the other hand, your attacks should not be forced, to borrow the term from chess. For example, if your opponent faints an attack and moves the tip of his/her (I actually had a female opponent during my previous grading, so it definitely can be ‘her’) shinai upward, and you react by flinching and immediately jerking your shinai in the same direction, the judges will mark their report cards with an “X” against your name, and you will fail the exam. Your purely instinctive reaction shows that you are easily swayed by the opponent and are not in control of the match. It’s a tricky balance: to show attacking spirit, but attack only on your own terms.

So, what to do if the opponent attacks too often, and you want to impose a more deliberate pace to the match? The way I see it, there are basically two options: ignore the attack or counter-attack.

Ignoring doesn’t mean doing nothing. There are several ways of deflating the opponent’s attack without counter-attacking. One way is to hold a firm kamae and let the opponent impale himself on your shinai (assuming he doesn’t use uchi-zeme to knock your shinai out of the way before going for men). I have seen this done by senior sensei many times during keiko with junior kendoka. It seems a bit arrogant to me to do so, as if the opponent is offering something (a chance to exchange hits in this case), but I am refusing to accept it. Perhaps, this is a manifestation of the evolutionary-developed sense of obligation to accept gifts from strangers and to reciprocate with gifts of our own. Robert Chialdini describes this effect in detail in his book “Influence”. This instinctive reaction to accept favours and to pay back is what makes tourists vulnerable to scams (say, being offered colourful threads as “souvenirs from Africa”) on central streets of major European cities.

Perhaps, this is the way to act at the exam, though – confidently on the verge of arrogance in order to show that you are capable of sticking to your way of fighting regardless of the opponent is throwing at you.

Another course of action in the face of opponent’s attack is, of course, a defence immediately followed by a counter-attack. An important point her is that defence by itself won’t do. There is a saying in kendo: “bogyo no tame no bogyo nashi” – no defence for the sake of defence. The key is, however, not to fall into simply reacting to the opponent’s motions, but to lead him – to actually cause him to attack you (by applying seme) at the moment chosen by you.

So the balance between controlling the match and not reacting to a barrage of attacks is a tricky one. In NAVY SEAL terminology, you need to be both aggressive and situationally aware. Easier said than done.

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The underlying concept applies in all aspects of life, of course, beyond martial arts. As a professional photographer, for example, there is a difference between not missing creative opportunities and compulsively reacting to every request or job offer that comes your way. It is important to always be working on your craft, but sometimes detecting pitches and proposals. Chasing gigs that do not help develop your own style shows your immaturity as an artist – that you are not yet a ‘yondan’. And this is fine, by the way, because there are plenty of opportunities for practice at your current level. And, except for rare occasions, nobody is judging anyway.

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Micro-progress

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Before starting the treadmill for my lunch-break run, I put on my stylish black-and-red wireless headphones. If I forget to to charge them the day before or put them in the wrong bag it throws a major wrench into my workout. I listen to podcasts during my runs. This means that I am not completely focused on improving my running performance. If I were to follow the deliberate practice concepts, I would not want to be distracted by the soundtrack, but concentrate on my technique all the time – being aware of my stride length, pace and ground contact point relative to my center of gravity. Instead, I am half-way there – I follow a training program generated by the Runkeeper app, which keeps challenging me in terms of the distance and pace, but I do listen to non-running related stuff to distract me from the pain of the workout.

On my last run, I listened to an interview with Frank Shamrock, who made some insightful comments about warrior mindset. Although he talked in the context from which the term actually evolved – martial arts, many of the associated tactics became well-known in other fields, like business, sports and healthcare. A significant part of the warrior mindset is striving for self-improvement on a daily basis.

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The ubiquitous concept of kaizen is usually taken to mean “continuous improvement”. Also, in business context it is often understood to involve all aspects of a company’s operation and all of its personnel. Although the Japanese word “kaizen” itself does not include any notions of continuity or all-inclusiveness (it literally means “improvement”), the continuity of practice and improvement is key in martial arts. This is at least part of the reason why there is a default disdain towards “hobbyist kendo” and the view of many high-level Japanese sensei that foreign kendoka have no appreciation for daily practice.

The improvements don’t have to be large. In fact they can be microscopic in the grand scheme of things, and they don’t have to happen in all areas of performance at once, but there needs to be some improvement every day.

Personally, I distinguish between progress in quantity and quality of work. This applies to any field, not just kendo in my case. For example, when I work on post-processing images from a large photoshoot, simply reducing the number of photos in the pipeline is not sufficiently satisfactory for me as a measure of progress. I try to develop new processing techniques and make mental notes about composition and camera settings for future shoots. This way, working on the particular shoot has the benefit of leaving me with improved skills, even in the worst case scenario, say, if the images themselves would never be looked at by the clients ever again.

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Favourite failure

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Failure is an important measure of progress. My violin teacher says I need to throw caution to the wind every so often and play as fluid and as fast as I can, ramping up the speed until something fails, either intonation or bow pressure or one of the other thousand or so technical elements that apparently can mess up the final result. When something does fail, it is important to notice what it is and then start practicing that specific element at a slow and deliberate speed.

There is another type of failure, one that you are not looking for intentionally as part of deliberate practice. It’s the failure that you are trying to avoid, but that happens despite your intentions. There is an argument that even this kind of failure is often good for you in retrospect.

Tim Ferriss has a question that he asks all his podcast guests and that is prominently featured in his new book “Tribe of Mentors”: “What is your favourite failure and what did you learn from it?” I find it insightful to see how the interviewees process what appears to be a failure into something they view as a valuable lesson. More than the specific examples, what fascinates me is how resilient these people are. And, of course, the lessons learned from failures are illustrations of what Steve Jobs famously said: you can connect the dots only looking back.

Extracting useful lessons from failures is hard in general. I can say, though, that the main thing I learned from failing yondan kendo grading this past Saturday was realizing that life goes on after that almost completely unchanged. I can still talk about kendo with friends on the ferry on our way back from Vancouver to Victoria, I can go to see the Nutcracker ballet with my family the following day, I can have a cup of coffee and hot chocolate with my daughter after school at our favourite cafe,.. And, even more significantly, I can do all these things regardless of whether or not I go to grading next year or ever again. So next time, if there is a next time, there is no need to worry… as I keep saying to myself every time.

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Frozen splashes

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I am waiting in the school yard at pick-up time. My daughter runs out with her class. Her face is splattered with mud. “I’ve been playing with mud!” – she states the obvious. Her teacher praises her adventurous spirit, and I nod my approval too – the only correct reaction at that point.

Then, the teacher says to me: “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.” Nothing makes you feel on the spot like a teacher calling you out, even though there is no homework question to answer (I am pretty sure), and she is not even your teacher.

It turns out, I am being invited to give a guest presentation to the first-graders about something based on my work/expertise and at the same time related to their science lessons. My research area is fluid mechanics, and they have been learning about craters on the Moon… I look at my daughter’s mud-splattered face and decide that I will show the kids how the craters are formed. They are like frozen splashes.

Looking at splashes caused by droplets falling into liquid pools has been a pet project in our lab over the past couple of years. It is a bit unusual (perhaps unfortunately so) for my research to be motivated by shear curiosity. As many colleagues in engineering, I suppose, I am generally more opportunistic when choosing the topics – chasing grant funding or cool industrial applications. In this case though, we initially simply wanted to take cool photos of splashes, but in the process an artistic objective got replaced by a scientific one.

Still, this request to make a presentation for the kids is the most valuable outcome of the “droplets” project to date, at least for me personally. Paraphrasing Bart Simpson, finally there is a practical application of fluid mechanics!

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Meta-creativity

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We stop by a local cafe t have a cup of hot chocolate after school and before my daughter’s art lesson. It’s a boost of sugar-induced energy after an already long day and an un-rushed comfort of a warm drink on a cold (by Victoria’s standard anyway) night.

It turns out that her creativity is well primed for the upcoming lesson. The foam on the hot chocolate comes expertly decorated by the barista with a doodle of a bear. That’s what I call applied art! My daughter sees the bear and raises the stakes by sipping the milk carefully, so the bear turns into a bunny…

I simply cannot complain about running of subjects for photos when surrounded by creative people everywhere I go.

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Chasing novelty

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My daughter wakes up and goes straight for her new toys, which we bought the day before. It’s set of figurines of babies in cute costumes and their pet animals. She is eager to involve me into the game, while I am making her breakfast, so she lines up the animals at the edge of the table and makes a math problem for me: how many of them have tails? I am a little surprised at this initiative. Normally, it is my wife and I, who try to work little math questions into our games with our daughter.

I think what sparked her creativity is the fact these toys are new to her. She absolutely craves new things. Of course, this is not surprising, simply because she is human. I’ve read somewhere that the humans are programmed by evolution to favour new over old. A new object that enters the scope of our attention is getting more processing power of the brain dedicated to it, because there is potential danger and opportunity in the novelty.

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I think it was Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, who said recently that if you have a choice between being the best at doing something and being the first to have done something, choose being the first if you want to make a mark in history (or generally make a impact). Actually, I think it is a false dichotomy. You don’t have to choose, because in many situations you can be both first and, eventually, the best (or one of the best). But the point is generally correct – it is a powerful statement and an advantageous position to be the first, whether it is scoring the first point in a kendo match, publishing the first paper in a particular research area or being the first to apply a certain technique (either in science or in art).

Of course, being the first at something genuinely novel is difficult. One technique is to broaden the scope to include not only whatever you are doing, but also yourself. For example, Amilia Earhart is not known because she was the ninetieth (or so, depending on how you count the early flights) person to fly over the Atlantic, but because she was the first female to do it. We all have a combination of certain skills, and while we might not be the best in the world in any one of them, the intersection of these skills makes us quite unique.

So with the new toys for children, it is probably wise to maintain some balance. On the one hand, excessive dependance on external rewards or praise is not healthy. On the other hand, new toys, puzzles and books are clearly effective for stimulating thinking, because novelty sides with evolution.

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