The baseball legend Yogi Berra was once bringing a group of people home and on the way called with the report: We’re lost, but we’re making good time.

Virginia Postrel in the NY Times this week reports on the dynamics of personal resolutions by this year’s economic science Nobel prize co-winner, Thomas Schelling.

Aside from the algorithmic models of personal decision sciences, he raises the question about the relationship between the “self” who makes a resolution and the “self” who is supposed to deliver faithful compliance to the first self’s mandate.

Whether we’re talking about resolutions of initiating new behaviors like working out or extinguishing old behaviors like food indulgences, there is a curious “third self” whose job is to think of clever ways to resolve conflicts between the first and second selves.

The third self employs all kinds of logic, rewards, and punishments to get compliance of the second self to the first self’s supposed “good” intentions.

I would think that the whole matter requires a fourth (higher) self who looks at the whole drama and says, my only intention is to be unapologetically who I am. It is the resolution to favor authenticity over manipulation.

One of my favorite visual arts genres features imaginative pieces and installations built on “found objects.” They can be natural, household, land waste, or industrial discards and fragments that can go against any other media for flexibility and integrity in the creative process.

In conversational spaces, found objects are stories and snippets, factoids, observations, edgy ideas, new questions and distinctions. And the best conversations find ways to incorporate these objects into an interesting pattern of meaning and delight.

Light the candle, illuminate your heart
don’t be afraid of the dark
Along with the winter comes the sound of snowfall
resting heavy upon our soul.

Ring out the old,
bring in the new,
bless and release what you have to,
with love, with all the love …

Illuminate, from the album “Cool Morning”/ Sloan Wainwright

Reading Christopher Alexander’s masterpiece treatise on design, The Timeless Way of Building. He amply makes the case that all good design represents unique expressions. No big boxes, no tributes to mass anything. His aesthetic is pattern language that never repeats the same way twice.

In his world, bad design suceeds in compliance and fails to surprise. Good design delights our yearning and courage to feel alive.

This, the first day after the holidays must be a well-deserved relief for people who ply their craft as personal shoppers to the rich and busy. A good break from the harrowing demands of people too busy to squander precious time in the pedestrian world of retail shopping.

So in their honor, and in the pre-New Year ruminations about new entrepreneurial ventures, I’m thinking of a new service for the wealthy and wise: personal meditators.

For a modest fee, hourly or package rates depending on how stressed your life is, I will spend time on the zafu meditating for you. While you bustle along in your hectic affairs, you enjoy the peace of mind knowing someone is meditating for you, sending you and yours blissful energy.

Please direct all inquiries to Jack/Zen. Gassho ; )

… a good day for visualizing peace

We were talking yesterday about politically correct holiday greetings in a pluralitsic culture. Someone raised the question on the correct wish to Buddhists. My buddy Valdis’ suggestion: Happy Now!

The American culture is in some ways more of a utilitarian than sensuous culture. We tend to demand functionality while settling for little sensuality. We think there is a kind of truth possible without beauty.

In a sensuous culture, eating is accompanied by talk about food, not our to-do lists and other distractions from the joy of eating and cooking. We nibble and share from each other’s plates and sip from each other’s glasses. We wear clothes people can’t resist touching. We use technology that pleases the eye as much as the hand.

We greet and part with touching, if not hugs, kisses, whatever our gender or generation or cultural differences or commonalities. We savor moments of shared silence without rushing to prevent their delicious possibilities into something new. We live and work in spaces that makes us feel cared for and alive. We speak in words, tones, cadences, and phrases that produce as much music as meaning. We take care of our skin and are known to stretch or sing in public spaces.

We care how our ambient air smells, often adorning it with flowers or incense. We use color that invites emotion. We let music breathe life into the spaces between. We speak in stories.

The NY Times reports this week that the Indianapolis FBI has targeted a Vegan Community Project in its anti-terrorism surveillance on targets they refer to as “disruptive organizations” and “networks, which have no declared leaders and are only loosely organized.”

It’s what I’ve been saying for a long time: these social networks of vegans are itchin’ to be watched.