Developing Usable Experiences

Monday morning

October 25th, 2010 4:02 am —  14 views

I have about 9 minutes before it’s time to start exercising. W. and I have been working out together in the mornings. We admitted the other day that it is a motivator of sorts. Guilt and disappointment are great motivators.

Now I have 7 minutes.

After doing mad chores and errands on Saturday, like most Saturdays, we spent the early part of Sunday hiking a 2.3 mile path through hilly forests of the Pinckney Recreation Area. You can see the entire album here.

6 minutes…I turn off my little space heater now so I can hear when she gets up.

Soon it will be really cold and then months of snow. Fall is the sweet goodbye kiss of summer.

I hear a toilet flush upstairs. That means I have about 3 minutes. I need to put on my shoes and iPod. And I have new headphones. They have little bubbles of soft rubber with a tiny speaker in the middle and the bubble plugs your ear.

Anyway. Time to go. She’s giving Ozzie some fresh water. I wonder if he went back to bed after I gave him his morning paste.

Image: Taken yesterday on our hike. I was standing on a little wooden walkway over this slow moving creek filled with leaves.

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Working With What You Know

October 5th, 2010 9:11 pm —  10 views

I’m sitting here listening to the Ultimate Nature Sounds Collection. It’s kind of late on a Tuesday night. I used to tell myself that I would call it quits at 11pm but lately it’s easy to be asleep at 9 or 10pm. I wake up a lot in the early morning hours when I do that so I’m reflecting on my life and looking for lessons in what’s going on around me. And I think I see one.

What we think we know about a situation rarely encompasses the truth of that situation. I wanted to write Truth, but I could easily digress into my theory of truth and how truth is a fictitious slice of something that is flowing . But I digress.

I see people around me feeling the pain of not knowing something, not understanding how something has changed, thinking they knew something and that something had changed. I feel this pain daily. The pain of change and having to pursue information so you can act with awareness.

And that’s what I mean by working with what you know. As we go about our days, gathering information via email, phone calls, letters, conversations, meetings, Twitter, Facebook, news, etc., we might think there are things we can say we know. And in a lot of cases we can and we won’t be that wrong. Lots of things can be known pretty easily. Multiple consistent sources and such.

When we think we know something important, we are compelled to share it. Especially if we think it could help prepare a situation for change. But who you share it with matters. Maybe you don’t share it with someone affected by the change and instead share it with someone who doesn’t care. Knowing the difference means knowing more about that situation, those particular circumstances.

It means paying more attention to what you know, what you think you know, and what you think others know. Asking the right questions is the most effective way to learn something. Something you can say you know. Something you can work with.

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