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The soft animal loves what he loves

This photo shows what my dog, Bruno, does while I do a workout in the living room (which became a part-time home gym during the COVID times). He never fails to join me for a workout – to offer emotional support, I suppose. But his posture shows such complete relaxation that it makes me chuckle about how much it contrasts with the “no pain, no gain” attitude that is stereotypically associated with physical exercise. It actually reminded me of the first few lines of the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver that I’ve incidentally come across:

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.“

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Practice strategies for adults

One particularly neat thing about being a parent to a nine-year-old is that it gives me an excuse opportunity to try various activities alongside her without an expectation of accomplishment. Theoretically, it’s a license to be a beginner without any pressure to improve performance. Still, having this mindset is easier in theory than in practice. Realistically, one still needs to make some progress to maintain motivation. This raises the question: should adult beginners practice differently from children? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that it is a ‘yes, but only after they’ve acquired the basic skills’.

Take kendo as an example (which my daughter never practiced, by the way, although I had observed other kids’ training). Physical training aimed at improving speed and endurance is a huge aspect of children’s keiko (practice sessions). It is unavoidable for adults  too, but beyond a certain level of  physical ability, the adults are typically directed to shift their focus to other elements of practice, e.g., technique, strategy, psychology, philosophy. It seems that even though there is no hope for an adult beginner to reach a level of mastery that is hypothetically available to children (provided that the kids don’t quit their practice), a better use of an adult’s time would be to concentrate on other, arguably more advance elements of the art, that are beyond pure physical skills.

If we consider violin-playing (which I started studying together with my daughter), an analogue to suburi (empty strike) practice in kendo would be playing scales. The physical skill, i.e. a combination of manual dexterity and sensory perception, which is required for extracting other-than-horrendous sounds from a violin is considerable, and it makes the learning curve very steep. As expected, my daughter leaves me in the dust in terms of the progress. As much as I would like to play the ‘adult beginner’ card and shift my focus to some of the more exciting practice elements, like dynamics of the phrases, etc., the required threshold of the physical skill remains elusive.

Ready for battle. Stll life with chess pieces.

Chess is another example, where adults often strive to improve, but find it difficult. It is a bit different from both kendo and music in that all these activities are difficult to master, but chess is relatively easy to learn. This accessibility is deceptive. It makes people believe that there is no limit to how much they’d be able to improve. While this “everything is possible if you try” attitude is generally admirable, chess is perhaps the most striking example where innate ability (i.e. talent) is dominant over hard work, perseverance and training methodology. Still, there is an analogy to the practice of musical scales and suburi sword swings in chess. The limiting skill there appears to be visualization – the ability to literally see the position of pieces in your mind, without physically setting them up on the board. This ability not only enable the accomplished players do party tricks like playing simultaneous blindfold games, but more fundamentally, to calculate the possible variations several moves ahead.

So it appears that working on the basics, in other words, practicing like a children, is a good strategy for adult beginners too, even if they they are not aiming to achieve great heights in a particular activity. And if they are aiming high, then it is even more critical, because without mastery of the fundamental skills, their progress will always be limited.

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Snow days

It is easy to distort reality with the stories we tell ourselves and the memories we form by doing so. For example, I’ve been living in Victoria sufficiently long to somehow assume that winter almost never comes here. “Six months of spring, six months of autumn,” is how I like to describe local wether to friends who don’t live here. When we went on sabbatical in 2017, we missed a heavy snowfall, and thought that it was our unique chance to see snow around our house in years. But as we were heading out to play in the snow this weekend, my nine-years-old daughter happily remarked that so far it snowed in Victoria every year of her life. That is, actually, a fact, and we even have photos to prove it. I thought that it was good to get calibrated in how I view the place I live at and generally, how we spend our lives. Not that mild winters is something to complain about to begin with, but if we look closely, we don’t even have a reason to fret about being deprived of snow days. Those are short lived, but we made most of them this year – sledding at a local hill, having a snowball fight with Bruno, our dog, and building a fortress in the front yard. Now, it looks like it will all melt away just in time for the start of school tomorrow.

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Bishop’s search for love

Black bishop. Stll life with a chess piece.

I’ve recently discovered for myself a body of writings on chess by a Scottish Grandmaster and philosopher Jonathan Rowson. He is an exceptionally deep thinker, and his books are less about making one a better chess player and more about the metaphors about human life that are contained in the game of chess. I am particularly enjoying the prose he uses and the colourful characteristics that he attributes to various chess pieces, positions and concepts.

Here is an example from “The Seven Deadly Chess Sins” that is so brilliantly funny that I cannot resist capturing it here as a note for myself. The idea is that a bishop pair (the light- and the dark-squared bishops) are more powerful together than their individual point values (~3.5 points per bishop, one point being equal to the material value of one pawn) added together. It is intuitive, of course, because the strength of the piece, and therefore its relative value, changes depending on the position on the board). Still, in the case of the bishop pair in particular, there is an inherent power of the two of them being able to control all the squares, while one of them is capable of only controlling the squares of one colour. To illustrate the point, Rowson evokes Plato’s book Symposium, which describes a banquet attended by Socrates, a philosopher, Alcibiades, the politician, and a comic playwright Aristophanes. In the book these characters give speeches in the praise of Eros, the god of love and desire (strange enough for a chess textbook yet?) I am pretty sure that this classic text would not be able to stand against the modern tides of political correctness and such, but in it Aristophanes argues that men and women were originally not separate beings but hermaphrodites – creatures joined back-to-back and having eight limbs. They perfectly complemented each other and were so powerful, that Zeus feared that they would challenge the gods. So he bisected them and thus created men and women. Since then, they have been searching for each other in order to re-unite, according to the legend. The chess-related metaphor is that the light- and the dark-squared bishops should also be thought of as originally being one exceptionally powerful piece. In this poetic sense, the bishops are in love for each other and need to find a way to be together.

Stll life with chess pieces. Denker vs. Botvinnik. United States vs. Soviet Union, Radio Match, 1945. Move 16.
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Sculpting by numbers

I’ve always enjoyed building scale models, and lately this interest has been rekindled after my daughter and I started working on a Gunpla (Japanese abbreviation for Gundam plastic model). The specific model we chose proved to be too advanced for a nine-year-old, both in terms of her ability to focus on the intricate instructions and the sheer complexity of the construction itself. It’s been just perfect for me, though – challenging enough to be entertaining, and providing an attractive result at each stage of the build, which maintained my daughter’s interest in the project.

As I’ve been building this model, I’ve been thinking why it feels so satisfying to do it. There is no creative aspect in it, at least not until (and if) one decides to paint and customize the model. In that case, there are limitless opportunities for creativity, as evidenced by many YouTube videos that show insane levels of detail and realism that some modellers can achieve. The model can be “weathered”, for example, to simulate realistic wear, tear and battle damage.

Building a Gunpla is similar to painting-by-numbers colouring books that are popular with kids (and some adults, I am sure). Only in the case of plastic models, you are sculpting by numbers. the process goes like this: consult the schematics in the instructional booklet, find the numbered part, cut it from the “sprue tree” (the plastic frame that connects the moulded parts), file away the excess plastic, polish the surface, snap the parts together, et voilà! – a miniature sculpture emerges. You’ve got almost all the benefits of creative surprise without the hard work of problem-solving.

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My 2020 reading list – non-fiction

I picked up most of these books after hearing them mentioned in various podcast interviews that I listened to while walking my dog or working out. The irony is that most of them are aimed at improving personal productivity and reduce time waste, but reading through them appears to be a rather significant time waste in itself (the new and insightful information is few and far between, to be honest). So because I loathe to dedicate time to reading about how to spend less time, I try to get the books of this type in an audio format and listen to them just like I do to podcasts – as a background to some relatively mindless activities. There are some exceptions, though. Certain non-fiction books are really quite excellent and would certainly deserve to be read rather than listened to, like the first one in the list below.

9. “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo. The main concept behind deciding whether to keep an item or to throw it away is asking the question of whether it “sparks joy” for you. My personal main takeaway was that it’s worth physically picking up and paying close attention to each item that you are evaluating as a potential candidate to be discarded. Kondo-san argues that the things that we accumulate take on some features of live beings, because we invest our emotions in them. Even the stuff that was an impulse purchase and has been long forgotten since then had served its purpose of sparking joy in you at some point. Therefore it deserves to be thanked for it by being mentally acknowledged for its service. I find that taking time to go through my old stuff in this mindful, unrushed way  actually saves time in the long run by clarifying the degree of my emotional attachment to various things and making the decisions of whether to keep them or not easier. Oh, and by reading this book I learned the therapeutic value of talking to my socks (and, as my daughter would say, “this is a compliment” for the book) and a practical virtue of not to rolling them up in balls in the drawer.

10. ”Make Time” by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (audiobook). I liked the idea of having one “highlight” activity during each day. It could be anything, from making progress on a work project to eating a delicious meal. The key concept is to plan for it beforehand and to be aware of it when it’s happening. This avoids the feeling that the day has slipped through your fingers without leaving anything to show for it.

11. “Tiny Habits” by B.J. Fogg (audiobook). The title is almost self-explanatory: small changes are easy to make, and they compound into significant results over time. I am a fan of the idea of evolutionary progress, rather than revolutionary one. I don’t recall whom to attribute the quote to, but one of my favourite expressions is that we tend to over-estimate what can be done in a day and under-estimate what can be done in a year.

12. “12 Rules for Life” by Jordan B. Peterson (audiobook). A rather obnoxious title and a controversial text that is just what you’d expect from a controversial author. I think it’s an inevitable pushback on the recent trend of taking political correctness to ridiculous extremes. All this to say that I enjoyed the book. It reminded me of Jocko Willink’s way of giving advice (see his excellent “Extreme Ownership”, for example): “if you want to do more pull-ups – do more pull-ups!” This might not be an exact quote, but the gist of it is hard to miss. Makes matter seem simple, which is quite refreshing.

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My 2020 reading list – fiction

Continuing  the list of books I read last year. The beginning of it, where I list children’s books that we read with my daughter is here. The fiction category is my favourite, but ironically, this is where I actually have to put some effort into making a daily progress. Normally, I read quite a lot of technical literature related to my research, and that takes most of the available reading time. Even the non-fiction books, which I will list later, are somehow easier to read regularly. This is probably because I subconsciously view them as less of a time-waste than fiction. 

6. “A death in the Family” by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I heard about this book in some podcast (probably, the Tim Ferriss Show), and after looking at the reviews it became apparent that it was widely regarded as a masterpiece of modern literature. I must say, it’s not an easy read, and it’s almost unapologetically weird for my tate, but somehow I really liked it. So much, in fact, that I got the second book in the “My struggle” series by Kanusgaard, “A Man in Love”. Here is the conundrum, though – I liked it even better, but haven’t finished reading it, being distracted by faster-paced, more entertaining stories. I left it at 42%, according to my phone. It does give a really curious insight into the (relatively) modern lifestyle of the Scandinavia. Maybe, I’ll pick it up again.

7. “Cockroaches” by Jo Nesbo. Ah, this is what I dropped “A Man in Love” for! It’s a proper page-turner of a detective novel, the second in the series about Harry Hole (the first on is “The Bat”, which is equally good).

8. “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson. That was my favourite book of the year by far – a hard science fiction that is both entertaining and educational. Dynamics of moving chains and whips with applications ranging from launching and retrieving space vehicles to hand-to-hand combat – if that’s not a worthy research topic, I don’t know what is! I also unexpectedly picked up one of my favourite productivity tips from the main character, Dinah MacQuare, who decided to dedicate fifteen minutes a day to her pet robotics project in the face of a global crisis that apparently demanded her entire time and attention. She did it because the alternative would have been to let the project die, and fifteen minutes a day was better than zero. As one would expect, that particular project turned out to be uniquely important, completely validating her decision.

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My 2020 reading list – children’s books

At the beginning of the New Year, I had an idea of looking back at the books I’ve read last year to see if any particularly memorable or useful bits that I learned from them would spring to mind. So here it goes: books I’ve read in 2020, not including various technical books, papers, etc. that I read for work (some of which are actually quite entertaining, but maybe it’s just my nerdy opinion). I am not going to list all of them at once, but rather will try to do it one or two at a time. I think this way I’ll be able to reflect on them a bit deeper.

As a note, most of what I read is e-books, unless otherwise noted. I typically read them in the tiniest chunks of time I have throughout the day while waiting for something or someone. Notable exceptions are the books I read aloud to my daughter. Those are physical paper books, and we read them over longer intervals (15 minutes would be minimum – when we really want to know what happens next in the story, but the bedtime is really close).

1. “Percy Jackson’s Greek Heroes” by Rick Riordan. Just before the COVID lockdown, my daughter participated in a piano festival in Vancouver. After the performance, we stopped by an Indigo bookstore, and this book was recommended to us by a store employee. We got the hardcover version, illustrated by John Rocco. This book has been quite influential for us. It fanned my daughter’s interest in Greek Mythology and prompted us to read more of the Percy Jackson series (Percy is short for Perseus – just to give one spoiler to those who are new to this). I also used this book as a reference in one of the first videos that I made for my Energy Conversion course, when we were abruptly plunged into the online teaching mode in March.

2. “Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods” by Rick Riordan. We simply had to read this book after the “Heroes”, and it did not disappoint.
3. “The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan. As an adult, I personally really enjoyed this book. It has all the components of a good adventure story – fast pace, historical references and just the right amount of humour, which is equally aimed at the millenials (maybe even early generation Z’s), their parents and all the way back to the ancient Greeks themselves.
4. “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” by J.K. Rowling.
5. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” by J.K. Rowling. In parallel with other books, my daughter and I have been slowly making our way through the Harry Potter series. These books need no introductions, and I can just echo what everyone probably already knows – they are practically perfect in every way, to paraphrase Marry Poppins.

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Christmas lights in Victoria

COVID had a huge impact on the Holiday festivities in Victoria. Basically, there were no festivities. Some of our favourite things, like ice-skating and watching the light-up at Butchart Gardens, were not possible this year – everything was cancelled and closed. On the other hand, it seems that individual people had stepped up and decorated their houses beyond what they would typically do in a more normal year. We took advantage of that and drove around the city on Christmas night to see these DIY designs.

We followed a map that someone had created on Google, which showed the most prominent light-up attractions. We spent a couple of hours driving along the route that I made up using a lot of guess work, because the online map didn’t offer any details except a bunch of pins indicating the decorated houses. Upon consideration, I noticed that they were clustered in groups throughout the city, probably because the peer pressure of neighbours putting up the lights pushed the other people in the same neighbourhood to follow suit.

I took my camera, but because it was pouring rain (and because I was lazy), I took most of the pictures without leaving the car. By the time we reached downtown, the rain had stopped, so we parked, walked around shot a few photos of the completely deserted Inner Harbour and the Parliament Building, also illuminated. I also took a picture of the new “Blue bridge” from the Esquimalt side – something that I wanted to do a long time ago, but never found the time.

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Paying attention

I came across the idea that any activity can be made better by paying more attention in the incredibly inspiring book “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The original concept was that achieving the flow state is possible by focussing one’s attention on the activity in question (the process itself, rather than the goal) and consciously increasing the complexity of the activity over time. If you are studying chess, for example, it would be necessary to play higher- and higher-rated opponents and learn more opening theory to avoid stagnation when your level of understanding of the game increases.

More recently, I’ve started thinking that most problems can be solved by concentrating sufficient attention on them. I could use numerous examples from chess, music or martial arts, but the principle holds even in such mundane context as taking my dog for a walk. A dog trainer once told me that, as far as teaching the dog not to pull on the leash, the most important thing is to constantly pay attention to what he is doing and where his focus is. In my experience, as long as I maintain constant contact with voice, treats and changes of speed and direction, Bruno, my Lagotto Romagnolo, is more than happy to follow the lead and keep the leash lose. The problem is that as soon as my attention goes elsewhere (and it’s very easy to zone out during a walk), Bruno finds something else to entertain himself, which immediately leads to his pulling it the direction of his interest. As the dog trainer said, if on a particular day you are not in the mood of giving the puppy your complete attention, it would be better to skip walking on leash altogether to avoid developing bad habits.