How to Tackle Large Problems: Pirsig's "First Brick" Principle

In order to set the scene here, I am going to have to quote a rather long passage from Robert M. Pirsig's amazing novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  It is, in fact, my favorite passage in the book.

He’d been innovating extensively. He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say.

One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.

When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say.

He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they’d confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn’t bluffing him, she really couldn’t think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.

It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: "Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman." It was a stroke of insight.

She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.

He was furious. "You’re not looking!" he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.

He told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick."

Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a fivethousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street," she said, "and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it."

I propose to you that this is the exact strategy that one must follow in attempting to tackle any of the world's ridiculously huge problems.  It works on smaller problems as well.

If you are trying to do something about World Hunger, you have an enormous problem on your hand.  It is large enough to immobilize you.  But you can find the nearest hungry person and give him or her one meal.

If you are trying to end the murderous practice of Abortion, it is going to seem impossibly large.  It stops you in your tracks.  But you can adopt one (supposedly!) unwanted child, and give lie to all the rhetoric of the pro-Abortion camp.

Perhaps you are one-hundred pounds overweight.  It seems a hopelessly difficult problem.  But you can go to the gym and do some modest amount of exercise ... just today ... just that upper left-hand brick.  Just that one brick.

Portrait of Cindy by Rodrigo Aguilera!

For our 30th wedding anniversary, I commissioned an artist to paint a portrait of my wife Cindy.  Earlier in the year, I had become enamored of the work of Houston artist Rodrigo Aguilera.  And circumstances worked out so that I was able to have Rodrigo do a painting of my wife just in time for our 30th Anniversary!

Here is the painting he made:


Up close, it looks Abstract, but viewed from a distance, it presents itself as Realism.  Needless to say, I am thrilled with the painting!

Here is the original reference photo (uncropped) from which Rodrigo made his painting:

The Benedictus: Byrd Short Service - Choir of Mariners' Church, Detroit

My church's choir can beat up your church's choir!   Just saying.

My Ageless Wife

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of photographing my wife Cindy, who is more beautiful than the day nearly 30 years ago when I married her!  The shoot took place only one month short of her 57th birthday.

My point in posting these few photographs from that shoot (in addition to bragging about my wife, of course!) is to point out what is now becoming more and more obvious:  these days, you can in large measure choose how old you want to be.  The decay that has always come along with aging, and to which we have always surrendered, is in some measure being thwarted these days by those willing to eat right, live right, and exercise right.

Cindy is a Personal Trainer by profession, working primarily in Senior Fitness.  If you have (or are yourself) a potential client for her, please contact me and I can put you in touch with her.

Maggie (poem for a friend)

Maggie

“Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.” – C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

No man can tell in what arch-farrier’s fire,

Or in what blessed blacksmith’s forge some morn,

Or how by that great Girlsmith’s good desire,

Those smoldering dark eyes of hers were formed.

With hair like darkest wood she was endowed,

But textured with the grace of flowing silk,
That formed a dark and brooding glory cloud,

To frame a face as smooth and white as milk.

For any man who struggles to be chaste

(And such a man I was and am today),

A danger clear, she was, in form and face;
A most bewitching alloy, I assayed.

But then, as prompted by the Paraclete,

I took a deeper look at her and saw,

The fire of her holiness complete,
And all her beauty, tempered by the law.

So let this lady’s power here be known,
That makes me ever truer to my own.

-- © Paul Erlandson, 2015

Litany for Users of Social Media

Remember not, Lord, our social media offences, neither take thou vengeance of our mis-postings.  Spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, and be not angry with us forever.

Spare us, good Lord.

From propagation of internet hoaxes; from sharing without verifying; and from posting things we simply wish to be true,

Good Lord, deliver us.

From using thy name in vain to guilt-manipulate others into sharing the crap we post,

Good Lord, deliver us.

From paying for our own joy with the tears of our friends,

Good Lord, deliver us.

From the posting of inappropriate images, of the seen which cannot be unseen,

Good Lord, deliver us.
From the mindless amping up of our vapid words by use of the f-bomb,

Good Lord, deliver us.

From cowardly blocking of those who have offended us,

Good Lord, deliver us.

From capricious unfriending of good people,

Good Lord, deliver us.
From sharing of drivel which happens to support our own political views,

Good Lord, deliver us.

In all time of our schadenfreude, in all time of our snarkiness, and in the hour of logging out,
                Good Lord, deliver us.

Stood Up By Tall Girls

I think their names were Pam and Tracy.  The fact that I'd remember that 38 years later says something about the effect these two girls had on my mind.  The two very tall girls I never met.

For the 1976-77 academic year, the powers that be at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) made a very foolish decision.  Their dormitories on West 27th Street were not filled to capacity, so they agreed to let some engineering students from Cooper Union stay in their dorm rooms.  Bob and I were roommates at FIT that year.  It was a great deal for us, if not for the school and its students.  We were on the meal plan, which was an all-you-can-eat affair for both breakfast and dinner, which had to result in an economic loss for FIT in our cases.  And all the more so since we stayed and ate longer than absolutely required by our appetites, simply to watch the splendid walking fashion show put on by the female students of FIT, who were mostly knock-outs, and who never wore the same outfit for both meals.

But, some stuff happened.  I'm not sure about the statute of limitations for some of those things that we allegedly did, but we were not invited back for the Fall of 1977.

Bob and I occupied Room 814 during the 1976-77 school year.  Back then, there weren't cell phones.  There were two pay phones in the hallway of our (co-ed) 8th floor.  If someone (e.g., parents) wanted to get hold of a dorm resident, they called the 8th Floor pay phone and whoever was nearby (or could hear it ring from her/his room) answered it and then fetched the person being called.  So, anyhow, we had this number memorized.

This is how it came to pass that, in September of 1977, Bob and I (being lonely and desiring female companionship) dialed up the 8th Floor pay phone, and asked to speak to either of the girls in Room 814.

"Pam or Tracy?" asked the girl who answered the phone.

"Either," we said.

And so Bob and took turns talking to Pam and Tracy.  Probably they should have hung up on us right away, but were too nice.  We told them that we had lived in their same room (814) the year before.  They asked what we looked like, and we told them.  As far as I can remember, we told the truth.  We asked what they looked like, and they told us:  they were both slender; one of them was 6'0" and the other was 6'1" tall.

Our jaws dropped.  I was 5'9" and Bob was 5'7", so by all societal standards of which guys belong with which girls, it was a mismatch of epic proportions.  Still, they talked to us for more than 30 minutes.  And, even when we called back a different day, they answered and talked to us further.

You have to understand how primitive the dating scene was in those days.  There were no chat rooms, no dating sites, no eHarmony or the like.  But, as relatively unattractive males, we needed a way to interact with girls without them immediately becoming aware of our physical unimpressiveness.  Without knowing it, we were trying to invent the internet.

One day, we asked them to go on a date with us, and they agreed.  It surprised us, honestly.  The date was set for a Saturday around noon, just under two weeks from the time we called to ask.  In the intervening time, we assembled spiffy outfits.  We planned.  We drew pencil marks on the wall to graphically illustrate how tall 6'0" and 6'1" girls would be.  Our two other roommates thought we had gone off our rockers.

Finally the day came.  It was a gorgeous sunny September day in Manhattan, and we were to meet them in Central Park.  I had donned a lavender dress shirt, and we both had corduroy vests which we had purchased at the open air market on Orchard Street the previous weekend.  I think we had each doused ourselves with about half a bottle of Old Spice.  We went to the appointed large rock in Central Park and waited.  Of course, they never showed up.

What to do?  Of course, there were no cell phones, so we couldn't call to see if they'd gotten lost.  In the event, we took the subway down to FIT to see if they were in their room.  Maybe they had forgotten our date?  I don't remember how we got past the guard desk and the entrance to the FIT dorm (perhaps he remembered us from the year before), but we did. We rode the elevator up to the 8th Floor and knocked on the door to Room 814.  For a decently long while.  Of course, they were not there.  Probably, they had agreed to the date knowing that they'd both be out of the city that weekend.  Even then, I hoped that they hadn't had to skip town just to avoid meeting a couple of short guys.

We never bothered them after that. and they didn't call us.  As I began to write this memoir, it occurred to me for the first time that possibly they had lied to us about their heights and appearances.  Perhaps Pam and Tracy had actually been rotund little short girls.  I know we still would like to have met them.

If my memory serves me, we then headed down to McSoreley's Old Ale House.  There are very few wounds or sorrows that cannot be alleviated to some degree by sharing a few dark ales with a good friend.