🐲 Rickshaw / Buster / Live Like a Chimera

¡ pattern-language

Live Like a Chimera (rambling notes)

These are notes-to-myself about an eventual update to my Live Like a Hydra post from 2013, new and improved after 7 years of intermittent play-testing and working through similar frameworks others have developed.

Unresolved questions:

  • @delightfuljon: What is the 150 word version?
  • @miri: I wonder where chaos plays into this.
  • Does it pass its own test of being important, real, and useful?
  • What form should it take in terms of expression?
  • I haven’t explained the Chimera part of the title yet at all.
  • Is this a pattern language?

What it is not?

Unlike other mythologies that first draw the ground and place us delicately on top of it, this is an attempt to draw us first, and to articulate how we can then draw the ground under us. Historically we’ve been attracted to creation myths that explain where we came from, but that was backwards – this is an “us” myth that helps explain why we often crave creation myths.

What is it in 150 words?

When the Chaos Monkey inevitably gets into your bananas again, what do you do?

  • A) Lean on an ideology (or a patchwork of ideologies) that help you figure out how to recover those bananas.
  • B) Convince yourself that the bananas were sour and meaningless anyway.
  • C) Something else / who knows.

Over 50% of people will choose A. Another 40% will choose B. So if you’re 10% people who think C is clearly the best answer, come with me, this post is for you.

I have a weird game to share that will generate increasingly better answers to fill C’s empty vessel of possibility. They have one thing in common: they use the Chaos Monkey’s element of irreducible rascality as fuel to feed productive conversations with yourself, others, and the material world.

What is it in 500 words?

This is an experiment / game for using the endless supply of chaotic energy emanating from our daily lives and the world around us to build your own self-correcting internal narrative (I sometimes call it a personal mythology) out of 3 foundational conversations we have with ourselves, others, and the world.

The 1st conversation is between our narrating mind and our less-accessible intuitive minds, when we ask “What is important?” When the conversation is going well we feel self-acceptance, we can uphold our integrity, and we aren’t afraid or dismissive of our own dark sides. When it’s going poorly we feel anxiety, numb to everything, anxious, and cynical.

The 2nd conversation is between our narrating mind and the knowable universe, when we ask “What is real?” When the conversation is going well we feel curious, intellectually honest, and generous in our observations and listening. When it’s going poorly we feel like everything is absurd, nonsensical, bullshit, and fake.

The 3rd conversation is between our narrating mind and other people, communities, and complex systems that have agency of their own, when we ask, “What is useful?” When the conversation is going well we feel courageous, playful, and able to willfully participate in something larger than us. When it’s not going well we feel alientated, invisible, and empty.

Each of these 3 conversations generate or drain energy from us. For shorthand reasons, I refer to the first conversation as generating/draining red energy, the second as generating/draining blue energy, and the third as generating/draining green energy.

The game is broken up into 3 phases.

The first phase, or observation phase, or red phase, is about identifying conversational contexts in your own life (places around your house and broader world, windows of time, influencial people and communities, pockets of energy, attention, and ability, and more that we’ll get into) that increase and/or decrease the quality of these conversations you’re already having. Figuring out which conversations are going well, and which aren’t.

The second phase, or low-hanging fruit phase, or blue phase, of the game is about identifying where there is wiggle room for conversational contexts to be course-corrected towards “going well”. This phase is all about building confidence that these conversational contexts A) can be influenced and B) that influencing them has a noticable impact on your quality of life.

The third phase, or normalizing phase, or green phase, of the game is about weaving the game into each of your conversational contexts so that the moves can be easily accessed in the moment as conversations open up windows of wiggle room to shift up or down in quality. The goal here is to collapse the three phases of the game into a single always-running phaseless non-game. It becomes just normal and part of you.

It’s called Live Like a Chimera, because a chimera is a Greek mythological creature that was a hybrid of a lion, goat, and snake. In this game, a chimera is a symbol of who we can become if we’re able to keep the three conversations actively eating up chaotic energy bananas and turning them into red, blue, and green energy. We can then re-invest that energy to deepen the dialogues we have with our intuitions, the world, and community.

You win when you are living like a chaos-eating Chimera, skipping through the Dark Forest of Meaninglessness, playfully indulging the Chaos Monkey’s endless attempts to trip you up.

Another X words

TBD

Another Y words

TBD


Raw notes

Theory-heavy kitchen sink

I’m testing out (via daily writing, and occasional conversations) a “mythic pattern language” that has these 3 foundational categories of practice:

  1. ❤️🦞🏡 RED: Deepening dialogues with our Intuitions. Seeking the center of our own internal world via the experience of sensing and being.
    • Core question: What is important?
    • Wicked problem: There’s no essential meaning to give things importance.
    • Connected mode: self-acceptance, integrity, authenticity, integration of shadow
    • Disconnected mode: anxiety, lost soul, numb to everything, cynical
    • Synonyms for Intuition: the subconscious, our identities, value systems, belief systems, preferences, story-telling, being mode.
    • Symbols: Red, Cat, Heart, Self, Home, Paper
  2. 🧠🦋🌎 BLUE: Deepening dialogues with the Universe. Extending our map of the known universe and making more of it feel relevant to us.
    • Core question: What is real?
    • Wicked problem: There’s too much information.
    • Connected mode: curiosity, intellectual honesty, wondering, generous observation and listening
    • Disconnected mode: absurdity, all is nonsense / bullshit / fake
    • Synonyms for Universe: reality, truth, material evidence, verifiable information, science, having mode.
    • Symbols: Blu, Raven, Head, World, Public, Scissors
  3. ✋🐉🌳 GREEN: Deepening dialogues with Community. Noticing the interdependent dynamics playing between everything, working within the messiness of communication, feedback loops, and the multiple-order effects. It’s about doing things and then seeing what happens.
    • Core question: What is useful?
    • Wicked problem: Time and resources are always constrained.
    • Connected mode: playfulness, humor, courage, participating in something bigger than self
    • Disconnected mode: feeling alienated, not belonging, being invisible, avoiding, denial, lashing out
    • Synonyms for Community: systems, social contracts, cultural norms, interdependence, strategy, doing mode.
    • Symbols: Green, Turtle, Hands, Community, Frontier, Rock

What is a foundational category?

Each of the 3 categories is a fuzzy, nebulous, building block that can help us realize what is relevant to us (important, real, and useful).

A metaphor will help here I think, maybe. Let’s try some color and light theory. As you know, there is a very wide spectrum of electromagetic waves, and we’re able to perceive a certain subset of the spectrum with 3 cones in our eyes (okay, sometimes 4, though we’ll discard that for the purposes of this metaphor). The 3 cones are sensitive to different wavelengths of light that correspond roughly to red, green, and blue (again, not perfectly, I know) and with these 3 cones we perceive millions of different colors that make up our visible spectrum of light. This interplay between electromagnetic waves and our eyeball cones allow our brains to see things in the world and make sense of them.

There’s nothing intrinsic to the universe that gives the specific wavelengths of color we see meaning, and yet we still find the act of vision meaningful.

I’m proposing here that we have developed 3 fundamental ways for constructing an infinite variety of personal, purposeful, meaning, and action in our lives from a tiny subset of the full spectrum of possible experience. There is no intrinsic meaning built in to our experiences that we mine, but rather we’ve developed ways to realize/generate/evolve connection and purpose within it.

We do this by having conversations that take us deeper into the bi-directional dialogue with of our intuitions (RED), the bi-directional dialogue with external reality however you think of that (BLUE), and the bi-directional dialogue with community and systems (GREEN). These dialogues allow us to create meaning from our experiences, but it’s important to remember that they aren’t discovering something that exists separately from our experience of it, like a divine truth, for example. It’s closer to the kind of meaning we derive from growing up developmentally. The act of growing, physically and mentally, is a process that transforms us as we go through it, both integrating new experiences into our narrative self and shedding old stories and memories that no longer serve us. This process, when going well, feeds us at our deepest levels of existence.

What is a Conversational Context?

If you are familiar with Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” a conversational context is a repeating conversational pattern that is happening in your life.

Small list of examples from my life:

  • Alternating early morning parent-on-duty to allow the other a chance to sleep in a tiny bit (red)
  • Family breakfast (green)
  • Tracking lunar cycles and checking the moon out when it swings by (blue)
  • Date night (green)
  • Hiding in the bathroom for some emergency alone time (an introvert pro-tip) (red)
  • Peloton-time (red + green)
  • Coding (red + blue + green)
  • Cooking dinner and listening to podcasts with a glass of wine (red + blue + green)

The color coding is not always accurate, but meant to illustrate how these conversation contexts generate and/or drain different kinds of energy.

What is a Core Question?

It’s a question we can’t help but ask that pulls us towards the foundational category (intuition, the world, community), and into wicked problems at their center, thus sparking a heated dialogue.

What are Wicked Problems?

They are the reasons the core questions and resulting dialogues are neither answerable nor dismissable. A wicked problem is a problem that has the following qualities:

  • It’s personal: We can’t avoid the problem
  • It’s difficult: The solutions require incredible investment up front
  • It’s complex: The problem is hard to pin down
  • It’s solutions are conflicted: There’s vast disagreement about viable solutions

The Dark Forest is sometimes used interchangeably with Wicked Problems. The Chaos Monkey is that irreducible element of rascality and futility at the heart of the Dark Forest and our Wicked Problems.

What do the Connected and Disconnected modes refer to?

They are two ends of a black-and-white spectrum that represent our own subjective experience (aka the narrating mind) of how well the dialogues are doing. When they’re going poorly, we disconnect from their energy, but then suffer as a result. When they’re going well, we integrate their energy and shed the dead parts of ourselves than are holding us back from growth.

What are the Synonyms and Symbols about?

This is basically a grab bag of other frameworks, some familiar and others personal to my own mental models, that map to these same three foundational categories. Because there is nothing “essential” holding these categories in place, no synonym or symbol will perfectly point to the category for everyone, especially since the categories, synonyms, and symbols are all also drifting over time. If the ones here don’t quite work for you, try to use them to triangulate synonyms and symbols that resonate more with you. This requires a good dose of RED energy, which will make it hard to do if that conversation isn’t going well. In that case, forget about labels and just focus on finding a conversational context that might generate RED energy first.

Potential risks and blind spots of this framework

I don’t want to make everything fit into these categories in a forced way, nor enforce things to only be in one category. That’s part of why I like the color system’s ability to blend in an intuitive way.

For example, if a personal interest like cooking feels like it has elements of all three (pure enjoyment of food = red, understanding the chemistry of cooking = blue, breaking bread with others = green) then the act of cooking in this instance is iridescent / white. Private journaling is mostly in the red category, unless we participate in a private journaling community (green)… so that one is red+green=yellow (using the light/additive color model). Of course, cooking and journaling can both also be unenjoyable, dismissive of chemistry, and disconnected from community… the acts themselves don’t have color intrinsically, but they gain color through the interplay of self, the world, and community.

My biggest question right now is whether these three categories are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive enough to not introduce blind spots (aka infrared and ultraviolent light, as well as color-blindness). Of course, that question is a non-terminating one so I haven’t been able to know when I’ve tested enough possibilities to move on.

Assuming I can do that, the next biggest question is whether the system can make these categories more valuable, evidence-based, and socially valuable in the language that it is. Is the framework itself important, true, and useful – aka iridescent?

And THEN the question is… what form should it take in terms of expression? (HINT: these notes are not it.)

An unspoken assumption I have for myself is that this needs to be de-nerdified quite a bit. I want to have done all of this work and thought and then package it like a Snickers bar that anyone can enjoy.

And this is what I think @kev_mcg and @splangster and others talking about pattern languages and homes and spaces excels. Ultimately this is enjoyable if I can use it to better relate to my bedside table, the side porch, my kitchen, my desk, my bathroom, my workplace, my relationships, my internal monologue, and my calendar.

Where do I go to dialogue with myself, and what do I do there? I have a growing list of notes about this. My basement. My morning shower. My headphones with music on a walk. If I look at these places and times and contexts, could this pattern language give me tools to make these accidental rituals more effective?

Where do I go to dialogue with the world? I realized I often look out the window near my kitchen to the sky and to squirrels walking on power lines when I need more connection to objective reality. This is a neglected area for me, though… and I have recently started studying moon phases and solstices and equinoxes to have better hand holds in terms of dialoguing with the universe.

Where do I go to dialogue with community and systems? Here, for one. Also, the table in my kitchen, and the living room, and the sitting area in my backyard. Being a guest on podcasts also qualifies. Work in the past has qualified. I have a default preference for very small groups over large, but am beginning to wonder if those defaults have room to grow and expand.

The opportunity: In all three cases I see very low hanging fruit to change the spaces, the times, the beliefs, and the expectations about these accidental rituals. It’s easy for me to see how they could be improved, given more vibrant life, and turned into quiet, but powerful, mini rituals and celebrations of the sacred within the mundane.

High level outline

There are 8 modes that capture all possible relationships between the self and the subconscious, the world, and the community:

  1. Opaque / Black: no dialogue with all three
  2. Red: dialogue with our intuitions but not the other two
  3. Blue: dialogue with the world but not the other two
  4. Green: dialogue with community but not the other two
  5. Magenta: dialogue with our intuitions and the world but not community
  6. Cyan: dialogue with the world and community but not our intuitions
  7. Yellow: dialogue with our intuitions and commuity but not the world
  8. Iridescent / White: dialogue open with all three

My old Live Like a Hydra post maps pretty well to this, with only a couple gaps:

  1. Recovery mode = opaque / black
  2. Novelty mode = blue
  3. Word mode = green
  4. Self mode = red
  5. Flow mode = cyan and magenta combined
  6. People mode = yellow and some cyan
  7. Gold mode = iridescent / white

I see this color / chimera system as being a bit more precise and useful specifically when talking about the Flow and People modes of the Hydra framework. Or rather it’s a bit more “mutually exclusive” even though they are both equally exhaustive.

Quick test. Which mode are you in right now?

You can quickly figure out which mode you’re in right now by asking yourself these three Y/N questions.

3 questions: In this moment, does A or B feel more true:

  1. I am A) in touch with my intuitions and authentic self B) out-of-touch and uncentered with my intuitions and authentic self
  2. I feel A) useful and appreciated by my community B) alienated and invisible to my community.
  3. The world outside my community feels: A) grounded and reliable B) disorganized and absurd

Answer key: A and B represent answers to the 3 questions above.

BBB = Gray. AAA = Clear. ABB = Red. BAB = Green. BBA = Blue. AAB = Yellow. BAA = Cyan. ABA = Magenta.

What is the Chimera reference to?

TBD

The test: Is it important? Is it true? Is it useful?

TBD

Is this too orderly? What about the chaos monkey?

I currently don’t think of chaos as having a voice. It is a hidden part of the subconscious, the world, and the community that represents miscommunication or lack of communication. It’s just the shadow of those things that we don’t have any dialogue with. But, we should at the very least have a way of talking about the chaos monkey and the dark forest (and the ouroboros and the bewilderbeasts and the chimera).

Past writing that explored this from various angles