Month: December 2023

2023: Personal Things Learned.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

My normal perspective on the ‘New Year’ is that it’s just another day, and in that regard tomorrow will be the same. Yet there is plenty that I learned this year that is noteworthy, and today is as good a day as any to be thoughtful about it.

Friendships.

I’ve seen friends come and go, and old friends rise from the ashes of time to return. Good friends, you see, do not disappear – they simply go on their own paths a while, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll eventually meet them again and it will be as if you had only seen them yesterday.

I lost friends this year to death, to their own character, and to different paths. The ones I lost to death I am fortunate with because they left behind people in their wake that are of worth, and who bear the mark of their own friendships. That’s the way of things, and there is no better or worse about it.

When it comes to those lost to their own character, there is little to be said about it. Perhaps I am too set in my own ways, but when people show me who they are with their actions, I do not ignore it. I generally ask a few questions or observe a bit longer, but some people aren’t friends anymore, and sometimes they never were. Those are the ones I celebrate leaving because they free me to meet new and interesting people.

The different paths aspect is a constant in my life. In some respects, I am a traveler and the people I have met over the years are generally also travelers; I have more in common with those that explore ideas and thoughts than those that stay in one place, comfortable in accepting what is around them.

One thing I have taken to saying this year is that while people may be traveling in the same direction, their destinations may be different. They must chart their own courses, and while you have them learn what you can from them.

Imagination

My imagination and I have reconnected, though this world conspires against it. Part of it was related to sleep. Part of it was related to mindset, part of it was related to some of the wrong people being around me and filling my head with their static drudgery.

You know the sort of people. The ones who age even though stuck in time, not having grown and depending on the growth of others to pull them along.

This has opened up worlds of possibility in my mind which I have been researching and writing about using some groovy new software. The act of buying software itself was a leap, it was actually more feeling than rationality. I dreamed of what I needed, I took a leap, and I got lucky and I must say that the words are flowing much better than they once were.

A lot of this has to do with the present state of artificial intelligence, too. While it’s all mainly statistical models and probability that gives us what we want, what is being marketed as artificial intelligence is allowing me to connect things in new and interesting ways, which I hope to publish more of either on my websites or in books.

Personal Growth.

Any actual adult that has been adulting for some time will tell you that being an adult is not very fun. It isn’t. Because of the way I grew up, I only maybe had about 10 years of childhood before I was working and dealing with things that are commonly problems of adulting.

In that, I picked up some scar tissue along the way, as we all do, but this year my former psychologist told me I wasn’t insane. Granted, that’s not quite the same as being sane, but I’m of the firm opinion that no one is actually sane. Questions I had about myself that I couldn’t really fathom I did get some help with, and I was fortunate to have found a great psychologist who was good at gently nudging me along my introspection and empowered me on some things by allowing me to say things out loud that I never knew I needed to say out loud.

Oddly enough, bonsai was a large part of my personal growth as well. There are a lot of metaphors in bonsai that apply to life, and you don’t learn it in a class. Some things need to sit in a clay pot to get back to them, some things need more trimming and attention than others, all need different things to grow and, most importantly, you cannot make something do what it cannot do.

My first Barbados Cherry bonsai.

You can, however, do amazing things by letting things tell you what they want to do, and what is possible.

And so, from the regular readers and subscribers to this blog, I would like to thank you for showing up and reading. For those that just stop in, I hope you found what you were looking for or even better, found things you didn’t know that you were looking for.

2024 will not be better or worse, really. We can make ourselves better, and I’d encourage you all lean toward becoming better versions of yourself, as we all should aspire to.

Life Advice.

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I was visiting a friend yesterday, a recent widow, and her grandson asked me a question out of the blue – what sort of advice would I give him. He mentioned things like, “study hard” and all the other cliche advice that we give to younger people. It’s not bad advice, it’s just nebulous when received. You have to be ready for the right advice.

We’re strange creatures, we humans.

I’d just seen him do something that I would have done at his age – keep playing after getting hurt, and then getting hurt again. His mother and grandmother fussed and admonished him at the same time, but he wanted to keep going so he did and when he did hurt himself again, it of course happened again.

Thus, my advice yesterday was to take care of his body better because he only gets one in his lifetime.

It got me thinking along two different lines.

Playing Hurt.

The first line is wondering why we do that, why we keep going when hurt, and the answer to that is pretty obvious. In life, we end up ‘playing hurt’ a lot, not because we want to but because we have to. His mother survived cancer not long ago, and she’s not taking it any easier. He lost his grandfather recently, a good friend of mine, and he’s still pushing himself and his grandmother is figuring things out. We’re all hurt humans in some way or the other, and if we’re not something strange is going on.

It’s an evolutionary trait, I think. The people who can’t play hurt don’t survive, and it’s more important when we’re younger so we spread our genes all over the planet. The trouble is when we get hurt too badly to press on, and that’s where the social connections kick in to get us to a place where we can keep ‘fighting the good fight’ once again. ‘Support systems’. We press on, we stay the course, and sometimes even use our heads as battering rams.

That seems a good enough answer. So why do we do it when we’re young and have no need to? Maybe it’s because we do need to so that we can push past pain in the future. I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but I’ve pushed past plenty of pain not out of masochism but necessity.

I also know I didn’t take a lot of advice or even ask for any when I was younger.

Why Ask Me?

The other thing I wondered about is being asked for advice. I fumbled with that for a while, because I know I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my life and I had even mentioned that to the young man when I said I had no regrets. Every mistake taught me something. Every mistake gave me experience, and without those mistakes I could never be who I am today.1

When my former psychologist – the one who fired me for being sane – asked me how I made choices in difficult situations, I told her that I simply picked the path where I believed I would have the least regrets. I did my best to get as much information as I could before any choice like that. Despite that, I managed to somehow get through this much of life without too much trouble, and while I know I could have made better choices, I am confident that I made the best choices I could with the information I had and the experience I had.

Here we are headed into 2024, our time traveling continuing at one second per second. People act like it’s some magical day, that things are going to change when a ball drops in New York City. Real change, I have found, happens slow. It happens with adapting habits and being an example of what you want the world to be like. It doesn’t happen on a certain day, it happens every day.

Advice to the young is generally wasted on them because they get it when they aren’t ready to understand it yet. I even told him that, that he likely wouldn’t listen and when he could tell when it rained by bones in his body, when he started making strange sounds when he got up from sitting or laying down, he’d likely remember.

Maybe I should have told him to turn off the stove when he’s done with it. Maybe I should have told him to study hard, or to not let his education interfere with his learning. I don’t know.

I’m just a human who has lived a while and has a while more to live.

  1. Oddly enough, that’s the mantra of Silicon Valley, for better or worse. ↩︎

The Defense.

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This is a part of a larger story I wrote some time ago that didn’t get published. Edited for brevity.

In a kingdom there lived a young woman named Eleanor. She was the youngest of three children in a noble family, but as a female she only was permitted to hunt while her two brothers were taught swordsmanship and battle tactics. As the lone girl, she was tasked with learning to run the castle and to understand it’s day to day operation.

She was bored most of the time, though she excelled at understanding how the castle ran. She watched as lovers snuck out to the surrounding forest, she watched how the smugglers brought in their wares. Any absences were easily explained to her widowed father about some female issue or the other, which of course he didn’t want to hear about.

When news of an impending war reached their lands, Eleanor’s family prepared to leave. Her father and two brothers donned their armor, ready to defend their kingdom. Eleanor pleaded with her father to go with them, but her father insisted that someone needed to stay behind to manage the castle. The war would be far away, he said, and the castle had practical things to deal with. Reluctantly, she agreed, feeling a mix of frustration and disappointment.

Days turned into weeks, and Eleanor ran the castle with efficiency. The ravens were silent and brought no word, so she only found things out from traders. Without her father and brothers around, she spent her evenings practicing with a sword in secret, driven by the feel of her body as it danced. She wasn’t very good since she had no one to train with, but it helped her focus and gave her some breaks from boredom. She was very talented with the bow, and often found spots where she could hunt for the kitchen. Every time she dropped meat off at the kitchen, she quietly held a finger to her lips, and the cooks nodded and quietly smiled.

Things were running smoothly at the castle with her father and brothers gone, with their odd demands no longer pressing on the men and women of the castle. People were becoming used to the way things were, and since things were running so smoothly she was able to practice more, to observe more, and to quietly adjust things as needed without causing too much of an issue with anyone.

Months passed, and there was no word on the war. A lookout spotted an enemy army advancing towards the castle. The kingdom’s main forces were away, engaged in a distant battle, leaving the castle vulnerable. There was some panic, but Eleanor remained calm and confidently pulled in hunters to man the walls. She called in the smugglers one by one, making them aware she knew what they had been doing and enlisting them in the effort. A few were more difficult than others, but the fact that she had let them do their trade without interfering swayed them.

The smugglers had stockpiles of oil and weapons. As a child she had observed a barrel of oil explode and recalled her father telling her brothers that in war those barrels could be set with bits of metal around them so that when they exploded, shrapnel would not just hurt the enemy, but could also destroy their morale.

They would be planning a siege, she knew, so she sent barrels of oil dipped in wax, with nails embedded in the wax, in a clearing where the soldiers would likely camp. It was convenient. Her father had maintained it as a place to hold tournaments and festivals, but he had also heard him say that it was a good spot for an enemy to camp because of it. He’d made sure there was chopped wood nearby to encourage that because if you have an enemy camped outside your castle, as he told his sons, it’s best to have them where you want them.

And so she had barrels strategically hidden up in the trees. She had spare hooded candles near the fuses, and when they were just close enough, she had the candles lit. It would be about 3 hours before they went off, and she made a big show of running around on the parapets looking frantic. She wore no armor, carried no sword, but her bow was never far away.

The enemy showed up, flying their banners, and seeing the castle doors closed, they settled in for the night, exactly where her father had kept clear. A few hours later, there were explosions and screams of wounded men. Upset horses could be heard galloping off into the night.

As dawn broke, the remains of the enemy stood just out of bow shot along the walls. They looked tired, some were bandaged, and by the initial tally they were missing one third of their original numbers. It had not been enough to stop them, but it had been enough to thin their numbers. They only outnumbered those in the castle that could hold bows by two to one. They didn’t stand much of a chance if they attacked, but they could maintain a siege by cutting off supplies.

The smugglers, though, had been convinced with the smile of a princess and a bit of coin to open their stores to the castle. Winter was here, spring months away. They could hold out longer than the enemy thought. They were trained for war, not running a castle. That was the job of the female nobility and they didn’t think to bring any women with them.

Eleanor would outlast them, harrying them at night when they got comfortable by raining arrows on their tents and destroying their food stores. Every day, she smiled from the parapet, waving at the enemy.

They left eventually, with no supplies. They would tell exaggerated stories of the nights her people harried them, because what army would want to be bested by a princess? She was clearly a witch, her father and brothers long gone in a war that no one remembers.

Stories of her spread, the Smiling Witch-Queen Eleanor, and no one bothered her castle in her lifetime.

The Spores.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

The ancient world’s biosphere was creating it’s own way to populate other worlds, as life does, and it began creating spores of itself and in doing so created something new.

Something unexpected.

Something that had so much potential for carrying itself to new places, new planets, new…

But we get ahead of ourselves, as we usually do.

What history will they create? What change will they cause?

A Gifted Journey.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

I suppose we all like to think we’re special even while we’re trying to fade into the collective. It’s a strange thing I gave up on long ago.

Through Facebook, I somehow ended up reading a bad article on gifted people that resonated, and mentioned the name Francis Heylighen. I’d never been to this site before – Tango something – so I took a look at the main page and it had horoscope information articles on it.

That’s not a good sign for worthwhile information. I realize that there are people that believe in that stuff, but really, one’s accidental geography of birth says more about your life than a vague fortune cookie description of what will happen to you today.

I dug in, though, because the confirmation bias was strong. I found Heylighen’s “Gifted People And Their Problems” and sure enough, I felt a little like I was under a magnifying glass so I continued staring back. After all, just about everyone I know could feel some sort of confirmation bias with the article. Then I dug in further and dug into the citations and found…

I found out that this may be true of me. It’s a bit late to be finding out in my life, but it does explain a lot of things. It’s also a bit uncomfortable because it’s also a bit convenient to have things set out almost as if they had psychoanalyzed me. Yet there it was. It wasn’t really based on IQ either, which is one of the things that has always annoyed me with labels.

I’ve always been motivated by curiosity, not money or kudos, and I don’t know many others like that. The rest fits better than I was comfortable with.

Of course, it doesn’t really mention what to do about it – but what interested me most was the bit about was digging through the citations and finding this:

…Most people don’t know that what is considered normal for the gifted is most often labeled as neurosis in the general population and as a result, the gifted are personally and emotionally vulnerable to a variety of unique relationship difficulties at home, work, school and in the community. 

Since the gifted function with relatively high levels of intensity and sensitivity, when they seek therapy they are frequently misdiagnosed because therapists receive no specialized training in the identification and treatment of persons who have advanced and complex patterns of development. 

Therapeutic assessment of gifted persons with asynchronous development, heightened levels of awareness, energy and emotional response, and an intense level of inner turmoil often results in their developmental transition being mislabeled as a personality or attentional disorder… 

Misdiagnosis of the Gifted by Lynne Azpeitia, M.A. and Mary Rocamora, M.A. (original date of publication and actual publication not found at the time of this writing).

This article has been cited and republished everywhere, yet I’d never seen it before and I’m a skeptic who needed to assure himself about confirmation bias, so I tracked down Lynne Azpeitia and Mary Rocamora. Legitimate.

And yet, there were no answers for me, really. There’s no clear path, there is just an identification of ‘gifted’ which is mildly annoying because so many times I was told something along these lines but it generally was said so that I would solve something for someone. Compliments meant living up to expectations, expectations were not my own, and it was a problem throughout life. Maybe because of the way I grew up I am more comfortable with constructive criticism than compliments.

This all, too, is a great shroud to hide in to make excuses for things, and I wonder how many people hide in it and excuse all sorts of things on it. The quotation above has also been ‘chicken or egged’ as well, and I’m uncertain whether people (as an example) with ADHD or ADD might actually be gifted or not. It’s confusing to consider.

So I don’t know. It seems to me that if you feel gifted and you have more future ahead of you than someone who has seen half a century, it might be worth looking into. For me, it looks more like a terminal diagnosis, attempting to fit into a world that doesn’t quite fit.

Interesting journey, though. Bonus: Francis Heylighen sparked some curiosity, so I’ll be reading more of what he has been writing. It looks interesting, but it will take some time to work through the Principia Cybernetica.

Meander.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

Sometimes, I just sit and stare at the screen expectantly, waiting for words to flow out onto it and see what they do. It isn’t writer’s block. It’s that there’s so much going on in the world that it can be debilitating.

And a lot of it is bullshit.

The trouble is sifting through all of it to find the little truths that keep the world going. In childhood, the news was something that was deemed trustworthy though maybe it wasn’t as much as it was thought of. There’s so much misinformation out there these days, and it doesn’t look like it will stop anytime soon.

That’s why I stick to science, I suppose, and a lot has been happening in science, but even who funds the studies that give us the science is called into question at times.

I’ve had a feeling that we humans are on the brink of something for the last year or so, and everything feels a bit… unsettled. It’s as if one day the world society as we know it will break. We have the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is pretty simple and straightforward – sovereignty. Hamas and Israel are at it again, but this time the civilians on both sides are getting killed much more frequently. Around here, the Israel/Hamas conflict is polarizing, as I imagine it is elsewhere.

To me, I just look at what is going on. Russia’s trying to claim more territory and using force to do it, we say it’s bad so the Russians are naughty. Israel has been claiming more Palestinian land, but they’re not naughty because Hamas is naughty because Hamas… well, I don’t even know what Hamas is trying to do but it’s pretty clear that they’re not doing it for land. So I don’t know. Israel has been settling more and more land while the remaining Palestinians are fish in a barrel for automatic weapons. I’m not siding with Hamas or Israel. I’m just saying what I see.

While all of that is going on, Venezuela and Guyana are talking about their borders with the overture of war which, this past week, Maduro said was going to stay peaceful. Oil is involved, Guyana got a crappy deal with Exxon but it’s better than what they had while Venezuela remains under sanctions and… well, the Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister is wandering around and hoping for a windfall out of it all, since he’s been promising the citizenry something for about 8 years.

China and Taiwan, and so on.

It’s all messy, and a lot of what we see about all these things is someone’s narrative.

I’m just waiting for Daenerys Targaryen to show up and start burning cities down somewhere.

Wit and Wisdom.

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There are many ways to say things, and over time I learned that poking at the stupidity of an idea instead of a person was more productive. People like Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver make their points with humor, as did George Carlin and others. Douglas Adams. Mark Twain. Every single member of Monty Python.

If I missed someone, feel free to add them in the comments.

All of them flipped the world around, some still do, and showed us the world in a different way – a way that begged for some sort of change. Some people resist this, not acknowledging how silly the world is, this house of cards built by people doing what they think is best from moment to moment. The larger the systems, the more they are prone to silliness which can be terrible for some people and because others are immune, they don’t pay attention.

It takes wit and wisdom to point out those things, and I think it’s something we should all aspire to.

It’s when the silly things we do become cumulative in systems that we either let it pass or mock the silly things.

Fractal Behaviors.

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Reflecting on a friend who recently passed away, I can say that he lead a great life and that to the very end. He was held in high regard by so many.

The secret to this, from my observations, is that he was always willing to help. This created relationships, and those relationships connected people in much the same way. The more you helped, the stronger the relationships were, the more weight they could sustain – like tree branches.

Religions and philosophies and all they overlap all are based on much the same thing, on creating patterns within society. Don’t go around killing people is probably the most common and popular one, which has gotten us to a pretty large population on an increasingly small world. Some might call it morals or ethics, integrity or character, but in a world where everyone seems to want to be more moral, ethical, integrous… it becomes a mockery of itself at times because people pretend rather than be.

It’s rare to find authentic people who follow these patterns without pretending. Politicians pretend all time, so much so that we expect politicians to be liars and it does not seem to be something that disappoints us too much because we keep doing it.

Our friends, though, our true friends, show a higher standard or should.

These habits, these simple things, allow us to be predictable, to allow us to fit into a world in such a way that even in our absence we are not lost because those patterns have been woven into the very fabric of the little worlds we create.

Pressing Forward.

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Sometimes it all hits at once, large waves crashing upon the bow of your ship as you begin plowing through the water again. The storms are wonderful things, but they are filled with minutiae that can be troublesome.

Over the weekend, I attended an Annual General Meeting of the residential community and after I had told the directors a few times that they weren’t giving time to assess some changes they wanted to make 3 times, they still tried to do it even when I pointed out in the bylaws that it wasn’t enough notice. My conscience clear, I let them have it. It felt good in the disturbing way that anger feels good, so I retired to my own thoughts.

On Sunday I encountered a German who I drank some beers with for a while. We talked about the world and how Germans see it, and how Americans see it, and how Trinis see it, and all the other places where we had both been. Between both of us, we had close to 60% of the world covered, and it was a fun and challenging conversation about the state of the world.

Monday came around, and I lost a friend who was a bit older than me. It shocked me; I didn’t expect him to go so quickly with so much going on. I’d just updated to Windows 11 on my writing machine, I was playing with the new writing software, and suddenly I’m trying to find out what hospital my friend had gone to. Before I found out, I found out he passed away and… well.

So I spent a little time with his family, and since they have such a great support system in that family, I felt sort of useless and left. They know I’m around if they need anything, but otherwise I felt a bit out of place and didn’t want people to feel awkward either.

He lived a great life, and it was a very interesting one. He had a quick smile, a fun laugh, and was as authentic as they came. I treasured him. He was always busy seeing about something or the other, and I wish we had spent more time together.

So it’s been a busy weekend, and while I haven’t been writing I most certainly have been living, and being. These experiences round us off a little, make us see things differently, and are of very great value. They come with pain sometimes, as some growth does, but what is life without growth?

We do the best we can and we move on, looking back now and then to see what we might have done better.

A Good Result

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Back in the early 1980s, my father had one of his rare talks with me where I understood him. I wasn’t doing well in school, he didn’t understand why and I wasn’t certain why I should care other than my father being angry with me. He was always angry with me, so it wasn’t something I felt I could change anyway.

What he said was, “A good student and a good teacher will give you a good result. A bad student and a bad teacher will give you a bad result. A bad student and a good teacher gives you a bad result. A good student and a bad teacher gives you a good result.”

There’s plenty of potential for each one of those sentences to be wrong, but what he was communicating was the responsibility. He was trying to explain to me that I was responsible for my own education. The grades were my fault, but I never had to work in school before then, and I’d fallen behind by a few years.

When people talk about teachers and students, I find myself hearing about poor parenting or bad teachers. Strangely, they never say both are the problem and that could actually be a part of the problem, but I digress.

All of that robs young students – children to teenagers. It robs them of the responsibility that they can take for what they learn, as well as the rewards that come with it beyond silly grades to pass silly tests to impress silly people.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where we have to impress silly people to get silly jobs which, in turn, allow us to earn income so that we might pay for our place on the planet.

We quite literally charge rent for a planet that doesn’t really belong to us, which we’re collectively only now beginning to consider that we might have to manage a bit better. To that end, people with pieces of paper roll out the alphabet behind their names.

If only that alphabet worked in our collective interests. In the name of paying our rent on a planet we don’t really own, we do a lot of strange things. We sell people stuff that they don’t need, things that generally are supposed to elevate the experience of being on the planet from trinkets to games.

We spend a lot of time teaching ways to earn a living to pay that rent. We don’t spend a lot of time teaching about how to learn, about how to progress as a species because we’re so caught up in our own worlds that we don’t really see the world around us.

The education system could help with that, but… if we want a good result and we consider the education system our teacher, maybe we need to consider that individually we are students.

A good student and a good teacher will give you a good result. A bad student and a bad teacher will give you a bad result. A bad student and a good teacher gives you a bad result. A good student and a bad teacher gives you a good result.