as I live a few more questions

Going Back In Time: A Tale of Two Ryans

I've had a chance to reread blog entries I'd never thought I'd read again, and contemplate the many changes that have taken place in my life since I first started this blog in September 2003. And the significant impact that this blog, this thing, has had on my life, the amazing assortment of people that I have gotten to know through this medium and how our lives have intersected.

And I realize that there are, in fact, not one but two Ryans: the online Ryan and the offline Ryan. They overlap but are not necesarily the same person.

The online Ryan is both braver and more foolhardy than the offline Ryan, more likely to speak up for a cause or address an injustice.

The online Ryan is is chattier, more likely to interject with a comment or a joke than the offline Ryan. He's both merrier and more despondent, angrier and sorrier, than his offline counterpart.

(Amazingly) The online Ryan is more gregarious than the offline Ryan, effortlessly moving from node to node in myriad social networks, juggling dozens of contacts ranging from nodding acquaintances to bosom buddies and making it look easy.

The offline Ryan—the real Ryan from which the online Ryan springs—is in reality a quieter, soberer, lonelier person. It's almost as if I feel I have to inflate myself into a carnival version of who I am, to make that mark on others. Why? I already know how useless this strategy is in real life; why do I pursue it online?

*sigh* Another question to live, right? It's a perfect example of how you can look at yourself through a blog, and see things that you never realized before.

Maybe I'm bolder online because I'm afraid I'll just wash out in the blare of the blogosphere, my voice drowned out by other, stronger, voices. That no one will hear me. The offline Ryan already knows that it doesn't matter who hears me; what matters is that I hear myself. It's odd that the online Ryan hasn't learned that yet.

Gmail Swap

Gmail Swap. A brilliant idea. Kudos to Sean Michaels at gramophone@gmail.com...

See also: the first two links on Gmail here (one is for pointers to a collection of Gmail-related resources online; the other is how to use a neat utility called GetMail to forward your Hotmail to Gmail).

UPDATE May 20th: Wired New article on Gmail Swap

Eudaemonia: Happiness is Flow; and a Comparison of Virtues

Quote from an interview with Dr. Martin Seligman, President of the American Psychological Association (from The Edge):

The second one is eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi works on, and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music.

The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more—recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life.

Coming out this month as part of the DSM is a classification of strengths and virtues; it's the opposite of the classification of the insanities. When we look we see that there are six virtues, which we find endorsed across cultures, and these break down into 24 strengths. The six virtues that we find are non-arbitrary—first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster; second, a courage cluster; third, virtues like love and humanity; fourth, a justice cluster; fifth a temperance, moderation cluster; and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster. We sent people up to northern Greenland, and down to the Masai, and are involved in a 70-nation study in which we look at the ubiquity of these. Indeed, we're beginning to have the view that those six virtues are just as much a part of human nature as walking on two feet are.

Fascinating reflections. As an exercise, I tried to see if I could create links between the Nine Virtues of the Enneagram, and the six virtues enumerated by Dr. Seligman:

• "first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster": I belive this would correlate to the Enneagram Four (the artist) and the Enneagram Five (the thinker, the investigator, the innovator, the troubleshooter).
  
• "second, a courage cluster": Courage is the virtue of the Enneagram Six. This could also be said to apply to the Enneagram Eight (the challenger, the leader type).
  
• "third, virtues like love and humanity": This is the domain of the Enneagram Two (the lover, the caretaker, the altruist).
  
• "fourth, a justice cluster": This is clearly in the domain of the Enneagram One (the reformer, crusader, activist, and moralist type) and also the Enneagram Three (whose virtue is Veracity or Truth).
  
• "fifth a temperance, moderation cluster": Sobriety is the virtue of the Enneagram Seven.
  
• "and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster": This is the Enneagram Nine (the optimist, the reconciler, the peacemaker and peace-seeker, the utopian), that which encompasses and includes all of the other types.
  

Wow, the two sets of virtues actually correlate well with each other.

Secondhand Suicide

"First and foremost, suicide is stupid. It's a bad idea. I know life sucks. It sucks for everyone, and for some people it sucks a lot worse than it does for you. You may find that hard to believe, but it's true. Trust me on that.

There are also people out there who say, "I just don't understand how anything could be that bad." I'm not one of those people. I understand exactly how things could be that bad, and also how things could be so much worse than that bad that you can't function. I also understand from my own personal experience that if one person commits suicide, it royally, totally and completely fucks up the lives of at least twenty other people. Obliterates them. So don't be an asshole. Good enough? Okay."

Secondhand Suicide, the blog of a woman whose husband shot and killed himself (from metafilter). Staggering, breathtaking, heartbreaking reading.

And, of course, the inevitable metafilter comments/debate... actually, one of the reasons I love metafilter so:

The Nine Passions and Nine Virtues

I have been tinkering around with the Moveable Type (MT) software all week, and I can understand why it has so many fans. It's very configurable and powerful software, and even though it lacks some of the features of other blog software like blogger and LiveJournal, I'm going to stick with it. There is still lots that I haven't investigated yet, notably how to change the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to overhaul the design of the Web site. I had found a Web site caled Moveable Style (I think) that illustrated this feature nicely, but I've lost the URL.

Oh no, wait, I've found it! Check this out: Moveable Style, which brilliantly demonstrates how you can make dramatic changes to the layout of your blog just by adjusting your CSS. Cool.

Anyway, one of the features of MT is the ablity to assign your entries to one or more named categories. It can be an interesting exercise to see how your life divides up into categories; everybody seems to have their own way of splitting life up into little boxes, don't they?

This past summer I attended a particularly funny one-man show as part of the 2003 Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival. The show, Seven Sins, was written and performed by the openly gay American standup comedian James Judd, and featured vignettes from his eclectic and bizarre life and career experiences, demonstrating each of the Seven Deadly Sins in turn, to sell-out crowds at the Festival. And Judd has had a rich life to mine for material: at various times he has been a grape farmer, a criminal defense attorney, and an editor of a technology magazine during the height of the dot.com boom.

This got me to thinking: hey, I could use the same sort of thing to organize quite a few of my posts. But of course, I had to change things a bit, given that I've been studying the Enneagram for a full year now:

The Enneagram (pronounced "ANY-a-gram") is a geometric figure that maps out the nine fundamental personality types of human nature and their complex interrelationships. It is a development of modern psychology that has roots in spiritual wisdom from many different ancient traditions.    (Riso, Don Richard.  The Wisdom of the Enneagram.   Bantam, 1999.  p.10)

The Enneagram, as "an ancient tradition of remembering the nine Divine attributes as they are reflected in human nature" (Riso, p. 22), found their way into the Christian tradition in a flipped way; the opposites of the Divine attributes became the basis for the Seven Deadly Sins, or Capital Sins, or Passions.

So I went and created categories, not for the Seven Deadly Sins, but for the seven sins plus two (fear and deceit) which comprise the Nine Passions of the Enneagram:

1. Anger (Resentment)
2. Pride (Vainglory: pride in one's own virtue), associated with Flattery
3. Deceit (Lying, Arrogance), associated with Vanity and the Ego
4. Envy, associated with Melancholy
5. Avarice (Greed), associated with Stinginess
6. Fear, associated with Cowardice
7. Gluttony (not just for food, but for all positive, stimulating experiences), associated with (Over-)Planning
8. Lust (for intensity, power and control; does not refer only to sexual lust), associated with Vengeance and Revenge
9. Sloth (Indolence, Laziness)

Live the Questions

I love this Live The Questions quote, in fact, I bought a journal that has this quote on the cover. I was even thinking about calling this blog Live the Questions.

But I'm still wondering: Why a blog? Is this meant to replace my paper journal? To supplement it? Do I really want to post things here where anyone with a Web browser can read them?

Maybe these are some of the questions I must live :-)