Response #

Remember: we’re still in snap #

Response happens when we take a more considered approach. Our goal is in mind, and we’re working towards it.

It doesn’t include any kind of reevaluation. There’s no time (or, in longer timescales, no allotted bandwidth) to think about ethics, morals, how the process and outcomes might affect an ouruborus of perception, let alone how it might bubble up into group dynamics or culture. 

We see what we want. We aim. We go, and (more or less) nimbly manage hiccups and speedbumps, and capture opportunity.

This is business in a nutshell. Productivity. We do. We achieve.

It’s also how many of us get through most days. Our days are so tight with all our to-do’s, marketing-stolen cognitive load, and maintaining our digital social ties. It’s what we have: getting through as best we can with what we know.

It’s also entirely based on what we know. When we know what we know, we can’t change our minds and grow. We stay the same, running the same patterns that get mostly emphasized. A great portion of us lean into confirmation bias. 

When you know, it’s easy to move with confidence, to see the opportunities and what could derail you. If you don’t take time to question what you know, it speeds up the process. 

It’s also easier to talk you out of any residual ethics. When the goal is the only consideration, it’s easy to talk you into doing what doesn’t quite sit well with ethics. If it’s goes on long enough, you won’t even question why, you’ll just worry about adding this new nugget to the process. It expedites, it gets it done. You can deal with the blowback later, when the goal is achieved.

It is only good business sense to layer the goals — start up the next as this one is winding down. And since this one is winding down and seems to have achieved its desired outcome, doesn’t it make sense to just build on what you know?

Business, run in the type of competitive environment in which we live today, isn’t built to consider. It isn’t built to think. It’s built to run, to achieve its goals as succinctly as possible, and keep moving forward based on the assumption that what worked before will work again. Or that’s the narrative and in-the-trenches expectation, anyway.

When we live our days in response-mind, we are reliable. We meet expectations because the decisions made then are still reflected now. The people around us, affected by us, can tell themselves that they know you, you are a stable point in their own flow, and depend on that going forward. They even know your foibles, and consider them in their plans as they aim at their own goals.

Which is a good thing for survivability, or when life is lived in tight tolerance. Working in concert with others is a really effective way to survive longer. Having tried and tested it is a great way manage that survivability with confidence when circumstances turn harsh.

It’s not so good for understanding. 

It creates expectations, looking out and looking in. You look at the world and believe that what you see is everything it holds — forgetting that you are constrained by your viewpoint and through cognitive biases. 

So when we live in response state — as a person, as a group, as a culture, even as a society — we’re pretty much locked in, and keep each other locked in to what’s already figured out. 

Some of us can grow to fear relearning anything. That fear will show up at any given stability point — whether a new process or folding in a new person in the workflow. 

We have aspects of our lives that won’t see us change. Certain people will take history and their particular view of it and believe that’s all reality can be.  They’ll even course-correct others back to the accepted place in their world, acting with more aggression as the hint isn’t taken. 

This is our forward motion through space and time. But in response-mind, we’re starting to get some layers involved. This is how our mind is reflected out into the world.

What goes on in our minds is complicated, and while I’ve pulled this together from knowns and understoods, and it’s shown itself to be close enough to leverage, I don’t think it’s everything yet.

We live in three dimensional space, but I think our thinking happens in a far more complicated space.

When I meditate (I do it a lot, across the span of decades, initially as a way to manage migraines and eventually because I delighted in the aspect and my ability to switch viewpoints), I can ‘see’ the natterings of my mind.

There is no one single right and wrong way to meditate, and my meditation changes over time and sometimes in outlier spots. Its dependent on my current environment: physical, biological, social, mental, etc.

Some of my meditation sessions makes me think that our minds live in more dimensions than we currently accept as part of physical space. Actually, these are the sessions I set aside with a greater sense of peace and joy. 

In this meditation state, I can let my snap-mind continue nattering along, but my presence is focused on my calm. It becomes an envelope.  During it, I can see where my mind is spinning and around what gravity points: anger, confusion, joy, hope, a situation, some specific happening that my mind got focused on. I mark it, and I let it flow, and I look at more eddies and try to see the whole movement and note the ones that have more influence. 

All while my ego, and the signals picked up by Muse (a device created to monitor meditation calm states), register me as calm. 

When I stop and reintegrate the entire stream, my overall state is more calm than what it was before I meditated. More importantly, though, I have clarity on what’s pushing and pulling my mind. I can work to manage the eddies, realign where the eddies are simply reactive states based on things outside my scope of control and rethink what is in my control and where a balance can be figured out.

I work to understand what are tigers, what are kittens, and what are something else entirely.

This is why I think our minds are more than three dimensional space. This process of meditation is not the only one available, just the one that I’ve been able to explore and develop as the most intuitive for me.

It’s also not people in a snap. It’s a taste of potential movements after the snap.