Daily pages - September 15, 2021

This week, the theme has been the need to move beyond the daily pages, because I’m gaining insights by doing this writing, but they’re not necessarily making it into patterns and helping me complete patterns. The recent plan has been to move the text from these into the digital garden, then copy parts either into notes where I can expand on them or directly into patterns. Lately, the notes I’ve been writing most have been outlines of the patterns, trying to get a straight-forward argument outlines before I spend time writing everything out in detail.

Everything seem so much in flux; I keep hoping I’m going to find my footing where arguments are relevant to the pattern and I’m not trying to explain my whole world view in every pattern. I was encouraged by a Tik Tok I saw yesterday that asked “how long should your creative project take?” and answered with “it should take as long as you need to do it well.” In my earlier desire to match Seth Godin’s prolific daily blogging, I was focusing on quantity. The Tik Tok speaker made the point that we are all busy and inundated by information, so no one is going to notice if you miss a day posting your creative work. When you do post it, if it’s of high quality, they will notice and appreciate it. Quality over quantity.

I do feel like if I keep hacking away, I’m going to get it all worked out. There is a coherent set of patterns, based on coherent arguments, that I can put together. It may be that this first set of patterns need to develop together so I can see more clearly how patterns interact and support one another. Perhaps once I get that it will be easier to see the core ideas in a pattern and express them effectively.

For example, I keep running into this argument that government and business are not the solution, yet I think they could be part of the solution, and some government and some businesses are already part of the solution. And where does that argument live? Right now, I think it goes with Global Civilization, but I was using some of the same ideas in Infinite Path. So, I need to kind see the meta-arguments that I’m making in these early patterns so they all work together as a coherent whole.

One questions that I’m thinking about is how change vectors fit into the greater livingness pattern. They seem to be an important thing to explain, yet I have a whole pattern for them in the design section of the book. The Change Vectors pattern explains that in the process of figuring out what change you want to create, you should look at the change vectors and make sure each one is likely to change in the direction you want it to. In the original Pattern Language by Alexander, he doesn’t really include the process of using the patterns in the pattern language. He doesn’t talk about the design process except in the introductory text. Yet, I think that the process is really important in my book. That makes it kind of self-referencing, but I don’t know if that’s a problem.

In the case of change vectors, they reflect the fact that in life and living systems, qualities are rarely either all or nothing. A judicial system is not 100% fair, nor is it devoid of fairness. It attempts to maximize fairness, but it’s always along a gradient. And where it falls on that gradient can be different for different kinds of cases, involving different kinds of people. It’s clear to many that the US judicial system is less fair to black and brown citizens than it is to white citizens. The assumption is that being aware of these kinds of gradients and trying to push them in certain directions is going to be more effective than just decrying that they’re not 100% and dismissing the system completely.

Livingness is like the master volume slider on an audio equalizer. Once we tweak the various frequencies, the sound is more balanced, and we can turn it up.

I’m not sure that’s a valid metaphor. It’s more like Livingness is the overall sound, and we can improve that sound by tweaking individual frequencies, like fairness, access, accuracy, truth, power, diversity, influence and so on to produce a greater livingness.

Or here’s another view: Livingness is the overall sound, and we are the equalizer, trying to tamp down some voices that have too much influence or power while raising some voices that are not always heard. The goal is not to simply amplify the voices of the unheard but the create a better balance between all of them.

Another topic on my mind is the structure of the context statements. I worry that my context statements aren’t doing the work they need to do, which is to tie various patterns together in a coherent process-oriented narrative. In a lot of what I’ve written, I feel like I’m saying “in order to accomplish X pattern, we need to consider Y.” which in my mind is equivalent to saying Y pattern helps complete X pattern without explaining how it does it or why it’s needed. Something I’m exploring.