Tradition is tending the flame, not worshipping the ashes.
--Composer Gustav Mahler

I'm a 49 year old childless woman. I might have been fertile at one time but I am not anymore. I look at people with children and think they must have a lot of guts, to have babies in a world like ours. And then there's the chaos of childrearing, the diapers left by the side of the road, the screaming brats in the grocery store, the traffic jams taking each child to their designated lessons and teams and events. There haven't been a lot of experiences that have made me regret not having children. A few moments of lingering and merging, but not enough to carry it through.

Even childless I want to give something to new generations, because it seems so sad to send young people out into the world without direction or inspiration. Where parents fail, family or community sometimes steps in. I see the baseball teams training in the park and the kids there are learning something useful. Coordination. Teamwork. I see a strong young woman on the tennis court who is obviously an ace, but who is toying with her two competitors, and idly watching me who is watching her. Will she have children? Perhaps not. Today I heard the daughter of a coworker say that she won't have children. Why not? Will she regret not having children? What will be her creative work in this world, if not baby making?

In many cultures a woman is of little or no use if she does not serve to birth and raise a brood of offspring for a man. Put the food on the table. Clean. What is a woman if she does none of this?

*new tag: legacy

Suspecting
and knowing
are not
the same.


― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

If you limit your actions in life
to things that nobody can possibly find fault with,
you will not do much.
--Lewis Carroll

To practice any art,
no matter how well or badly,
is a way to make your soul grow.
So do it.
--Kurt Vonnegut

Last night while at a Sierra Club meeting involving the effort to hasten decommission of the Columbia Generating Station (nuke at Hanford), I started having all manner of thoughts about my book on homeopathy. I brainstormed my intro and some chapter ideas on the same page where I'd taken a few notes about newly understood seismic activity in the Tri-Cities area, the power needed to make fuel rods, the types of nuclear waste storage currently in use, and such. Part of what brought homeopathy to mind was the groupthink in evidence among the meeting attendees. The anti-nuke information being conveyed was at times not even faintly believable, but the group assumed that all present were on board with the effort to eliminate nuclear power from our bevy of power sources.

This morning in my inbox I find an interesting article by Art Markman on the question of what kind of creativity we display while our conscious minds are occupied with something else. It appears that for simple decisions, it's better to think about consciously it, however for complex issues it may be good to be distracted from the direct question. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren presented Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) in this paper. Another paper by Haiyang Yang et al shows that the duration of unconscious thought has an inverted-U shaped relationship with creativity, suggesting that unconscious thought may outperform conscious for moderate-length deliberations.

So for quick decisions tis best to focus on the matter at hand. For very long and complex deliberations, there might be time for both conscious and unconscious contemplation. And to harness the power of unconscious synthesis thinking, one needs a moderate amount of time in which to do it.

I've heard of UTT before but not by name. I generally have my best ideas while walking, which suggests to me that cross-crawl integration of walking may bring the two brain halves to apply their knowledge to whatever problem is at hand. I've seen the process modeled extensively by television character Dr House. House plays ball, drives bumper cars, or does pranks on his coworkers to distract himself from the burning questions, and allow his unconscious mind to sort out the myriad details of a medical case and arrive at a diagnosis and treatment. People may think that he is goofing off, but in fact it is physical play that brings his most astounding ideas to the fore. He starts with the conscious brainstorming with the help of his team, then goes off to do whatever activity life presents, then returns to the conscious cogitation. The science is beginning to support the use of this technique for creative decisionmaking.

There’s a big difference between riding a coal train through Kansas and Nebraska and trying to write. Writing is a suspension of life. I believe that so-called writer’s block is something that any writer is going to experience every day, but in a minor way. You break through some kind of membrane, and then you go into another world.
--McPhee