Leap Day Learning

Every so often my boss does a thing called a “skip level” – he meets with each of our teams without us to take a temperature check and see how they feel about their supervisors.  It’s a good idea. A successful business is more than just the numbers.

The Substance of Memory

I read a very interesting article in this month’s issue of Wired about memories: how they’re formed and changed by the act of recollection, and how it may soon be possible to selectively edit them. Our memories are neither static nor pristine – they’re not perfect recordings of our experiences, but more like movies we edit and re-edit, Lucas-like, based on our current emotions and perceptions.

A part of me finds this disturbing. The past is another country, and apparently less France than Narnia. I’ve always tied a lot of my identity to my past.  Learning that I had large gaps in memories of my twenties was horrifying to me a few years ago.  But it’s not just that my past shapes me, but that I shape my past – it’s a cyclic relationship, a feedback loop. The present rises from the past, speaks back to it, and reshapes it.

So it’s also freeing.

Predictable Chaos

The testing that I do for a living has to be pretty structured. To deliver consistent, repeatable results, we need to have a clear, documented process and follow it as consistently as possible. The further we stray from that process, the less reliable our results are. And since there’s several companies looking to our results to make their business decisions, we need to give reliable results.

My partner has a different take on this. While it’s a given that I can be more rigid and rule-bound than I need to be, and that’s something I’m learning to modify working with him, I still think there’s a lot more room for order in his approach. 

Words I’ve Never Heard

I’m uncommonly lucky. I’m white, male, and of Protestant upbringing. I work in the low-level management of a large, successful, and stable company – a job I got because I know people who like me, trust me, and recognize my potential. I’m not living the life of Riley, but I’m doing a lot better than the vast majority of the world: I don’t have to worry about where my next meal will come from or how many days I’ll have to wait for it. I can afford to keep two cats in my home just for the pleasure of their company. I drive a decent car, I wear decent clothes, and not once in my life have I ever been insulted for the color of my skin.

The Shape of Things

It is easy to imagine the shape of things, to feel their contours in the flex and press of your palm: the curve of a woman’s side, the stiched roundness of a baseball, the ribbed flatness of a guitar’s fingerboard.

But try to imagine them without their familiar shapes. Imagine a woman as a set of overlapping triangles, all sharp corners and straight lines. Or a baseball with a handle like a teacup and a snout like a watering can. Imagine a guitar with a saxophone’s keys – you play it with muffled hammers like the strings of a piano.

Would you love her any less, your spiky angular wife? Would you still smile at the sound of her laugh from the living room, rising over the rattle of popcorn cooking in the microwave? Would you still remember sliding into third behind rented cleats and a cloud of red dust, hoping the baseman’s net wouldn’t hold the ball over you? Would you still hear “Layla” and stop in wonder, even in the middle of a sidewalk rushing like snowmelt down a steep ravine?