Daily pages - July 30, 2021

I had a nice dream this morning. I was in a creative space (literally a studio or some place) that was messy and interesting and I was working with my wife to put together a presentation for clients. There may have even been clients there, but I feel like it was more of a brainstorm session. Sonya was presenting, and I was helping draw a diagram/mind map that would walk her and the client through our process (I think). I woke up with the word chronograph in my mind. In this world, that is a highly accurate watch, but in my dream, it represented something else. Unfortunately, I don’t remember it well.

It could have just been a was of displaying information in chronological order, but layered with other data that made it more useful. After I woke up, the idea of a change vector came to mind, and I realized that a change vector always points forward in time. Kind of obvious, but it was something I’d never made explicit in my writing. So a change vector moves you toward a particular quality over time. Maybe the whole point was that change takes time, but that during that time, every stage can still improve things. In a sense, that is what the continuous growth model is: a cyclical cycle that should produce advantage at every cycle.

That brings to mind a proto-pattern that came from something in Helmut’s book about how each transformation should bring immediate advantage. I’ve never quite understood the relevance of that, but rather than being a description of a natural transformation, it could be a design goal.

So the graph that I was seeing in my dream might have been something that showed a design for a series of transformations, and we could have been brainstorming what the advantage would be at each transformation and how to accomplish it.

It felt both fun and important in that we were using a new approach to problem-solving that was compatible with my current book, but more evolved, where I felt my book had opened up an opportunity to be actively in the process of making a better world.

For me, that seems like how I’m trying to think of the book. I don’t think it’s an end so much as it’s a means to further means. It’s a step in a larger process that could take me in directions I haven’t yet imagined. That is both a relief and a concern in that I don’t want to spend forever on it like it’s my only life’s work, but I also want to make it really good and representative of what I’m thinking about. It may be that the book is just one form, and I’m trying to make it so it can evolve with the rest of the thinking, so by making it an open artifacts project, I will make it stronger than I can even imagine at this point.

I think today I’d like to focus on trying to put a clear outline together for the Personal Universe pattern. It’s one of the two patterns that I’ve really had trouble distilling into a simple concept, yet I think the concept is simple, so I’m just overcomplicating it. I’ve written about it in other daily pages, so I think I can pull some stuff from there and probably have a working outline by the end of the day. In some ways, I’m hoping to get more material into the digital garden, but that’s mostly so I can edit it more easily on the iPad, and honestly, I think that’s a red herring. I’m not likely to be able to do any real work on my book after Sunday this week. I suppose maybe Monday while traveling, but that’s a pretty distracted space to be trying to work like that.