Stuck Between Gears

A few months ago Gregory Rader of On The Spiral wrote a post about the challenges he observed regarding his experiences with Crossfit. In Structural Change, Learning Curves and The Dual-Mind Limitation, Rader poses the idea that:

We are only capable of maintaining two levels of awareness in mind at a given time. You can perform and learn at the same time. You can focus on learning and meta-learning at the same time. But you can’t do all three.

That idea sat and percolated for a few months, and only came back to mind this week as I sought closure for February-March and began preparing for April and May.

February and March were stressful and chaotic, and while there were some external circumstances, for the most part it simply felt like I was continuously mishandling life. Projects at work felt opaque and full of dead ends and rabbit trails, habits at home went neglected and resolutions were undermined.

I suspect some of the reasons for the difficulties relate to Rader’s insight. For example, one project involved learning functional programming (Javascript, the meta-learning), a library (jQuery, the learning) and use them along with HTML and CSS to create a new form of interactive documentation (practice) and rough out its content (also practice). The entire process felt like running on uneven stilts, and although I’m pleased with the end results, the process left something to be desired.

It’s also come up a bit on this blog. The earlier post Atheisms: Personal, Political, Social & Structural failed, I believe, because it attempted to span the entire spectrum simultaneously, but most people only engaged with it on a single level.

I’m not sure what a good solution is, yet. I’m in a position where I feel the most energy needs to go towards practice and meta-learning (or, what I’ll call theory), but practice assumes a theory, and practice gets disrupted easily, and its benefits lost, when the underlying assumptions change. It’s the intellectual equivalent of attempting to learn martial arts, but changing classes from judo to tae kwon do to jiujitsu.

Perhaps this is also why there is traditionally a gap (in religions, business, politics, etc) in which the most theoretically capable are also the least practically-minded, and vice versa. It requires a careful mind, an initial scaffold, and the ability to construct and deconstruct up and down the grade to get beyond that impasse.