Category: Philosophy

Why Do Cars Have Brakes?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

“The more sure we are, the more likely we are to suffer an illusion.” – Jerry Weinberg

Why do automobiles have brakes?

To stop, right?

To stop. That’s one answer.

Is there another answer? I heard this on the radio recently, and I jotted it down in my mental notebook.

Cars have brakes so they can go fast.

It’s the ability to stop quickly that allows us to travel at speeds much faster than if we didn’t have brakes.

Without brakes, we’d all drive very, very slowly. Brakes give us flexibility in stopping when you want, where you want, and how you want.

Analogously, in your life it’s the very presence of boundaries that create new freedoms. Freedom isn’t free. (Similarly paradoxical, having choice isn’t what helps us in decision-making.) Having a gas pedal isn’t what enables you to go fast. It’s having a gas pedal AND a brake pedal.

Sometimes the short-term sacrifices in our lives are actually enabling us to achieve long-term goals. Your brakes are helping you go faster, even if it’s frustrating to stop at the stop sign.

Also to note: how you answered this question clues you into how your brain operates when thinking about actions, functions, and relationships among systems. Thinking that brakes brake; and that’s all, is a limited view on the capability of a function in a system. Often, each action or movement has multiple effects in the system.

How can you train your brain to look again and see if you can find other answers? It’s very Jerry Weinberg (author of An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.)

The next time you do something, ask yourself how it works. And ask yourself, is that the only thing happening here?

Probably not.

So, why do cars have brakes?

“The boundary of one thing is often the beginning of another” – Leonardo

I is for Integrity.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I was asked to write about Integrity as part of Molly Mahar’s “Blog Crawl” on self-love this February. Today’s post is part of Stratejoy’s The ABC’s of Self Love Blog Crawl + Treasure Hunt. Molly’s series is part of her bigger program called The Fierce Love Course. I had a chance to meet with Molly in San Diego last fall and see her amazing work first-hand, and I was delighted to be picked to post as part of this series.

I is for Integrity.

“Integrity is not achieved, attained, or accomplished. Integrity, like character, is built through quiet persistence, a structural consistency in all that you say, do, and believe.” 

“To have integrity is to believe fully in your soul, and your being. It is to act in accordance with yourself, and accept nothing less.”

Continual Motion.

I’m sweating. Breathing hard. I’ve got my leg over my shoulder, and my knee is creaking. My hand is slipping, slowly, against the rubbery mat surface and I can hear seventeen other students also breathing hard. I’m trying to get into a new space, move towards a new pose in my yoga class, and I can’t figure out if I’m going to be able to get there today. Leftover alcohol and chlorine equally permeate my sweat, and I curse having spent a week and a half doing nothing – why didn’t I say in shape? – I mutter. I forget it, letting the thought slide out of my brain easily. I’m here now. This is good. This feels good. But bad. Good lord, does this feel bad. Awful in a stretching, pulling kind of way. Unglamorous.

I drop my head, lifting my left hand quickly off the mat to wipe sweat from my face. Drops fall from my face to the mat, making it more slippery, less sticky. Damn.

And my leg slides, centimeters, stretching again, and all of a sudden I can point my toes. I feel it, a balanced, taught centeredness, muscles working together. My hands are aligned below me, my chest is centered squarely above me, my bones stacking neatly, my legs pointing towards opposite walls.

It’s graceful, but exertion doesn’t stop. Sweat keeps dripping. I’m still moving. I’m either working towards the pose or relaxing, dropping from it.

Movement, the teacher intones. It’s all about movement. You’re constantly moving, constantly shifting, always realigning and re-centering.

Yes.

“Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.”

Commitment.

We made a commitment at the beginning of class, a small devotion to ourselves and our practice, and we chose a phrase or a word to stick to for the night. A set of words to recall when our brains freeze in mindless chatter, when our thoughts dart outside of the room and into the future or past, worrying needlessly about all things could-have and should-have and might-have and would-have. The words bring our loose cannons back to alignment, briefly, like five-year-olds in a small class, restlessly bopping about while waiting for lunchtime.

My commitment, my word, my phrase – how do I pick a word? I mused over independence, over writing, over being, over gratitude. My frazzled brain did it again, tumbling through a thousand thoughts, looking for a life-line and a mantra to relax into. Words float in: blessings, health, kindness, of being kind and grateful for everything, of releasing the relentless pressure I build up in myself to achieve and to do and to be. And then I my mind, like my body, stumbles onto a phrase that settles nicely in my mind, a gentle kindness that pulls towards a longer form of being, an integrity. “Move towards,” the voice told me: “Move towards your goals. Move towards integrity.”

Movement, this idea, resonates: there’s no need for a valiant, chest-puffing stake in the ground, a moment in time that says, I WILL DO THIS! As though now that I have shouted it, it is and it will be! (Insert multiple exclamation points). It is quieter, more peaceful, more consistent. It’s a set of actions, a layered being, a nuanced commitment to yourself over time.

Moving towards integrity.

“Character is not what you say, it is not what you boast. It is what you do when no one is watching.”

What is integrity? 

Integrity is knowing what you stand for. It is showing consistency in your actions and having a soundness of moral character. Integrity is doing what you say you’re going to do, even when no one is watching.

Integrity is being accountable to yourself.

In buildings, structural integrity means that the building will stand up – that the components, the joints, the system at play is sound and built well; that it won’t deteriorate or break down over time. It is a consistency and standard of excellence in engineering.

Some definitions include “the state of being unimpaired; soundness,” or another: “the quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness.”

 “ You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do” – Henry Ford

For me, integrity is living up to my expectations of myself. It’s upholding both my thoughts and actions; it’s  behaving my best, even during the worst situations. It’s going to the gym, even if I don’t want to, because I made a commitment to myself. It’s planning ahead, giving someone grace when it’s due, it’s standing up for myself, it’s for chasing after your dreams even if no one else knows what you are up to. It’s believing in yourself and your dreams, and holding yourself accountable for acting in accordance with the best that you can be.

The opposite is also true.

We’ve all screwed up. Royally, beautifully, messily, fantastically. If we were perfect already, I suppose that would be boring. We mess up. We’re human. The difference is in how you decide to behave. What you choose to do before, during, afterwards. Whether or not you are capable of repairing a situation.

Integrity is not a stake in the ground. It’s not a goal that’s achieved. It’s a consistency of action, over time, that builds in what you say, believe, and do.

You’ve probably encountered situations where someone or something lacked integrity.

Perhaps it was you.

I’ve been there.

Last year, in Paris, traveling with my sister, I found one (of many) weaknesses in my character through exploring new settings, circumstances, and places. In particular, I found I had to question my ability to make decisions and what I thought was true about myself. I got beautifully, horribly conned in Monte Martre, duped into doing something, and I was rattled by the change in my behavior in the given context. More alarming than losing dozens of Euros was the red glaring flag hitting itself loudly against my conscience:

Do I really make good decisions? Am I what I think I am? Or am I actually just all talk? I babbled as such to my sister as we walked up to the top of the Sacre Coure, wondering how I could have wandered down a spiral of decision points that led to very silly—and alarming—behaviors.

Yet all was not lost: dissonance is good. Dissonance reminds us when our behaviors and actions aren’t in line with what we believe to be true about ourselves. Moments of discomfort tell us when we’re not behaving in accordance with who we truly are. The act of testing, of being, of doing–these are the moments that matter.

You’re not perfect. You’ll mess up. I’ve found that time and again, I test my integrity and sometimes fall short. Each time, I have to stop and analyze, wondering: what am I? Is this what I want to be? Do I like this?

Why does it matter?

Does it matter? You can brush it under the rug, sweep it away, think, “Oh Sarah, who cares!” – but it matters. It’s not about what other people think, say or believe about you.

At the end of the day, you’re the one that has to live with you. You’re there when you wake up, when you breathe, when you think, when you act.

I’m the one who has to sleep with myself at night; I’m the one who wakes up when I can’t stand how I’ve behaved; I’m the one who runs away from my emotions at times. It’s all just me.

And at the end of the day, if you don’t stand up for yourself, who will?

If you don’t do what you say you will—not for anyone else, but for yourself—then you lose trust in yourself. If you can’t keep your own word to yourself, and do what it is that you say you’re going to do, then what good is your word?

“Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.” –David Star Jordan

What does integrity look like? What does it feel like?

“I never had a policy. I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.” – Abraham Lincoln 

The things I’m proudest of aren’t the big goals, the declarations, the accomplishments. They are perpetual works of art, things I’m continuing to move towards. A quiet integrity, the knowledge that each action is cumulative, and that with each effort, exertion, breathe and stance, I’m working towards becoming what I say I want to become.

And from yoga, standing next, upright with my leg straight out, foot held in my hand, my upper thigh quivering with tension, my hamstrings stretched to their maximum, my opposite leg shaking silently in exertion. This is the act of standing, of balancing, an act of perpetual motion. Of persistent strain. Of forces, acting in opposition, continual moving back and forth against each other.

Tracy Chapman plays in the background: “… All you have is your soul,” she sings, deep and rich. She’s right. You’re all you’ve got. You know what you are capable of. And you know when you don’t live up to what you could be.

The most beautiful poses in yoga, in life, in being–are actually those of endless motion, of shifting and moving and realigning. Even in the long stretches, the folds and the bends, the fibers in our muscular systems shift and lengthen, releasing millimeters, day by day, until one day we wake up with our face against our knees and wonder,

Well, shit.

How did I get here?  

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This post is part of Molly Mahar of Stratejoy’s “Blog Crawl” for self-love this February. Find out more about The ABC’s of Self Love Blog Crawl + Treasure Hunt here. Check out the previous authors and their thoughts on self-love, here:  

The ABC’s of Self-Love:

A is for Acceptance by Molly Mahar: “Luckily, accepting who I am is more than embracing my (gorgeous, quirky, messy) imperfections. It’s also about celebrating my strengths, admiring my awesome, appreciating my honor.”

B is for Beauty by Rebecca Bass-Ching: “I now revel in the awe-inspiring beauty of courage, generosity, gentleness, kindness, sacrificial love, compassion, vulnerability, motherhood and respect.”

C is for Celebration by Dani: “Stand in front of the mirror and point out all the things you love about yourself. Instant self-love!”

D is for Determination by Ash Ambirge: “Want success? Make more decisions, choose more often, gain more control, and then take responsibility over your success. Period.” 

E is for Enough by Amy Kessel:“The resistance to loving ourselves disappears when we know, really know, that we are enough.”

F is for Freedom by Jenny Blake: “A fallacy of freedom is that we must not allow ourselves to be tied-down, lest we lock the cage on our ability to fly.”

G is for Growth by Justine Musk:  “It’s how you grow through and out of it – the meaning you make of it – that can not only shape yourself and your creative work (and your life) — but inspire others.”

H is for Honoring by Randi Buckley: “The deepest honor in the name of self-love shines light onto the whispers in the heart.”

Swimming Taught Me This: Early Morning Reflections

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I’ve taken a four-month break from swimming; launching a project, traveling, and other interests have put my swimming adventures on the back burner recently. For several reasons: A) I’m not super-human, and therefore, B) I can’t do everything at once. Yet I’m getting the itch, again, and feeling the need to be swimming. The glorious (albeit strange) sunny mornings in the Bay have me standing at the waters’ edge, wishing I were back in the ocean, navigating the waves. And it’s apparent in my writings: I’m writing, dreaming, imagining, planning about swimming. Here’s a story I wrote about a race last summer, and what I was thinking about before driving to the start line. 

Also, if you’re in San Francisco next week, I’ll be giving a talk about endurance swimming and telling the story of the 9 mile prison-to-prison swim on Thursday, February 16th, 7 PM along with five other endurance athletes. Come join! 

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The morning of the race, I drive slowly through the foggy air on the 101 highway, meandering my small hatchback Toyota Matrix along the winding highways and through the tunnel. The golden gate bridge arches gracefully, simply, silently across the mountainous opening to the vast terrain of the flat Bay waters. To the east, the sun still hides beyond the tangent of the earth’s curved surface, darkness enveloping the city. The black water sprawls out eastward, north, and south, tendrils circling around bay towns, creating a flat plane of water connecting and separating each of the communities in the area.

The drive across the bridge in my car is same rhythm; a sweep under the poised arches, the swoop from the long linear cables supporting the vast planes of concrete. Despite crossing the bridge back and forth most every day of my San Francisco life, I still marvel at the towers with each crossing. Like a patron at a church, I bow gracefully in my mind to the relics of humanity; to the strength and impressiveness of architecture and engineering. Together, we built this. We created this. Somewhere in our collective history, we did something together to build, piece by piece, the metal structures and spans that stand, today, as the icon of the city and gateway to the bay area.

My car, my mechanical lump of plastic and steel, zooms quickly across the bridge, hugging tightly against the center lane. The bridge is divided split down the middle, barely a drop of traffic this early in the morning. At certain times of the day, the bridge lanes change direction in response to the disproportionate volumes of traffic headed in and out of the city. Small round holes with 2’ high yellow pegs indicate the lane change, a single white line separating the two lanes of high speed traffic. Why there are not more head-on collisions is beyond me.

The beauty of the bridge, in my mind, is tempered by the sadness of the deaths associated with it. Each year, 40-odd individuals stand at the height of the towers, looking out from the rust red metal railings, and stare into the open air. At over 300 feet high, in the center of the small opening to the bay, wind whips around the bridges’ struts, a sense of extreme brevity and tenuousness alighting any lone soul on the bridge. Loneliness, emptiness, and fatigue with life are exacerbated by the conditions at hand: extreme distance, crisp air quality, a stunning visual 360-degree view of the entire Bay’s waters and the history embedded in the waterfront shorelines. San Francisco, home to the gold rush, to the container ships from China, to a massive amount of trade; the heart of the northern California area. In the center of the Bay, Angel Island; south of that, Alcatraz. Below and above the bridge, fog runs in and out, slowly engulfing the bridge and releasing it in a temperamental dance.

But my mind flickers to the dark side of the bridge; the stories untold and unreported by the media. Despite the beauty, despite its grace, the bridge offers a sinister promise to humanity. The ideal of death, the promise of ending, the temptation of suicide flashes into the minds of those haunted by their own psychology, plagued by the torturous thoughts that inhabit their psyche.

And, slowly, people step up the rails, arch their arms, lean forward, and drop with the heavy weight of gravity to the watery world below, ending their brief and seemingly inconsequential reign on this planet. That people can get to this place, the darkness of isolation, the sadness of mental confusion – this flashes through my head as I drive. Every day, I pay homage both to the brilliant architects and engineers, and to the lost people who didn’t make it to their next day, for reasons unknown fully beyond even their own mental capacity. And yet, I understand them both. I am them both. We are all here, together, and sadness – it is not a unique condition. I feel it when I swim, I escape from it when I run, I hear it when I play, I taste it when I breathe. I know. Deeply, intuitively, living it – I know the depth of darkness and sadness, and I feel the lone harmonicas and haunting harps play when the mind starts to bend in maladaptive ways to become our own worst enemy, to work against ourselves by worrying, by thinking, by being.

And swimming, swimming, swimming – the beautiful sport of being by yourself, the act of understanding how your mind plays with your body, and how your body can overcome your mind, and how you can move beyond something by steadily practicing it each day, bending your physical and mental capabilities into new territories – it is a marvel to me. My mind is a joy, my being an art, my ability to negotiate the two terrains a brilliance I try to dumbfoundedly enjoy. Swimming taught me this, I know it. I feel it. I reach my arms out and pull invisibly, feeling the weight of the air and the lightness of the world, knowing that this practice has somehow made me able to see this. The good side. The beauty in it all.

I love swimming. 

Make time and space for what matters.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Make time and space for the things that are the most important to you.

If you don’t know what those are, make time and space for the finding out what things are most important to you.

Making time and space for what matters means you need to know what matters to you.

So: what matters to you?

What are the 10 most important things in your life?

A harder question: what’s the one most important thing to you in your life?

We all have long life lists and goals and aspirations. Change that around a bit. If you could only do ONE thing in your life, what would it be? Why?

And, if you could only achieve one thing today, what would it be?

Are you working on it?
Why not?

You are / whatever you say / you are.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Perhaps Eminen had it right when he said, “I am / whatever you say / I am.” We are what we say we are. YOU are what you say you are. (Or maybe he’s completely wrong, because he’s suggesting that his identity is whatever other people say he is – so why argue with others, and just accept your identity as defined by others?) For the purposes of this post, I can’t get this idea out of my head: that I am whatever I say I am. And what we say about ourselves matters.

Sometimes our cognitive frameworks (put simply: our minds), get in the way of who we really are.

I’ll use running as a short example. For a long time, I said to myself “I want to be a runner” — I jogged and I huffed and I puffed, and I iced my knees and went back to swimming and looked longingly at the smooth runners pounding the pavement throughout San Francisco and gliding easily up and down the hills through the Presidio.  I dabbled in running, I took long breaks, and I never got past the “jogging” phase. For a while.

Then, somehow, I started running more and I would find myself making time for 6 and 8 mile runs and actually liking them. By all standards, I was a “runner.”  And yet when people would ask me if I was a runner, I would brush the thought aside, quickly dismissing it by saying:  “I’m not a runner … I’m training to be, but I’m not a runner.” In some regards, adopting new personal identities takes as much effort and training in the mind as it does physical training.

It takes a lot of time before we acknowledge within ourselves that we are what we do.

How long do we have to train before we become ourselves?

In July, I finished my first half marathon, and yet for some reason I still I didn’t picture myself as a runner.  Despite having run 13.1 miles through the hills of San Francisco, I still declined to acknowledge my status as a “runner.” Somehow in my brain, I couldn’t put “me” and “”runner” together in the same schema.

My Dad, once a great runner, finally had to correct me:

He said, “you know Sarah, you ran a half marathon.”

“I think you can call yourself a runner now.”

Our minds can be slow to accept the changes that happen so readily at our fingertips. Sometimes I still feel like the nervous, awkward girl from my teens and I wonder if I’m really capable of the vast amounts of responsibility and increasing autonomy in front of me. I won’t lie: sometimes I’m scared shitless by what there is ahead of me. I feel like my dreams are still “out there,” — and it takes time to switch my brain over to the idea that somehow already I’ve attained some of my dreams, and that life — and my goals — are expanding out in front of me. And that, through careful, repeated, steady progress, I can, and will, become better than I am today.

To what extent do we limit what we’re capable of simply by not believing in our own abilities? On several occasions, I’ve surprised myself in doing better than I thought I was capable of. I didn’t believe I could finish six miles at the end of a triathlon – and then I did it. I didn’t think I could run 13 miles — and then I did it.

The question, then, is: what are we capable of? More importantly, what are we capable of beyond what we imagine we can do? What sorts of things can we do, if we actually allow ourselves the possibilities to dream? It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it — it was that I thought I couldn’t do it. There’s a distinct difference – and to sell yourself short of your abilities by not believing in yourself is a terrible waste.

What are you not doing simply because you think you can’t do it?

Excellence rarely exceeds expectations, my coach always taught me. By the time you’ve attained a goal, your mind will be seeking new ventures and tasks to tackle. You won’t realize how quickly you’re growing until you’ve already surpassed some of your earlier expectations. Despite proving to myself that I was now capable of running further and further distances, I kept pushing the boundaries of a “runner identity” further from my reach, not reconciling this state of being with who I was becoming. I was limiting myself by dreaming too small.

Three months later, I have another confession to make: Much like I never considered myself a runner, I’ve also never considered myself a writer. I didn’t realize that I wanted to be a writer even after I left school and (somewhat sheepishly, I must admit) — I found that I missed writing papers. I wrote ridiculously long emails to friends and drafted papers about topics that had no audiences. I wrote aimlessly in notebooks and spiral bounds and in the margins of books. Post-it note littered the pages of my magazines with ideas about how I would respond to the authors. I had anonymous conversations with myself, in my head, and imagined ideas for possible stories and fiction books. On long drives, runs, swims, and bus rides, I found myself crafting stories and books in my head.

I dreamed about writing books and short stories, but was too busy with my “work” and “career” to actually focus on writing. Somehow, I started a blog (it starts with) in order to let myself keep writing. My friends in the design world (and I love design, by the way) think I’m crazy for wanting to write so much. It was a bit aimless, I’ll admit, but the pull and tug to keep writing was there. Somehow, I was marching along a path that I knew I had to do. A year or two after graduate school, I found myself in a long conversation with a good friend and mentor, and I said: you know, I think I finally know what I want to be when I grow up:

I want to be a writer.

She looked at me with a funny look on her face:

You ARE a writer, she said. And again, I found myself subject to the same “closed-mind” problem as before.

How much of who we are is limited by the way we think about ourselves? Are we much more capable that we admit, or even dare to dream? How long does it take – and how many examples does it take – to become convinced that we are, in fact, what we do?

Who are you? Who do you want to be? And who is it that you say you are? This is important. Are you what others say you are? Or are you what you say you are?  More importantly — do you dream big and admit your capabilities to yourself?

Today, it is with pride that I stand up and admit – to me (and to you): I don’t want to be a writer someday.  I AM a writer. And I freaking love it.

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What’s your biggest, scariest dream? How would you describe yourself , if no one were really paying attention? Leave your answer in the comments below.