Essential Parts: Systems Thinking

Blog post in the early hours of the morning today. This is not my habit. My habit is to write in a journal and think onto the page with a pen in my hand at this hour. Sort my thoughts. Question myself. Call myself to task and ask myself the harder questions. But I cannot do this today because I left my journal - together with a pair of reading glasses and a pen - at the library last night, after teaching a Teens Write Here class. (Only those classes aren't so much "teaching" as experiments in pyromania. More on that in a moment.) First thought: maybe a blog post should be a morning habit, even if it comes after all the pen-to-paper work.

Second thought: what needs to come out of my head on this morning is Systems Thinking. Every one of my current systems is arranged in my brain this morning. They look like the various choirs from the olden days of "Musicale," when all the area's little Christian high schools would gather near one of them each year, and the adjudicators would come, and we'd take our turns impressing them, and then there'd be the night of the big performance, when all the choirs would sing a few pieces together. We'd have each been practicing them back at home for the whole school year. At Musicale, we'd sing them together. Hundreds of teenagers, each concentrating on their individual participation in the art. One year we'd learned a piece that had eight parts - two bass lines, two tenor lines, two alto lines, and two soprano lines. The choirs were split for the performance, so that four parts were one one side of that gymnasium and four on the other side, and we sang that piece back and forth across the space. It was incredible. Glorious. It was, perhaps, the most unified compound complex systems I've ever participated in, and almost forty years later I do not remember the title of the piece, but I remember that moment of glory.

This morning, I wonder if I remember it not only for its glorious art, or its focusing of all of that young energy into one laser sharp edge (was it that sharp? would a recording back up my memory of that?) ... not only for the choir-ness of it, but also for the system of it. This morning I realize how much the system matters to me. The systems. Plural. Lots of them.

There's the generally useful CAPER system I've been experimenting with.

• Collect everything you need for the coming task
• Arrange it in a useful, logical, and/or experimental way
• Perform the task
• Evaluate what happened
• Rest

This is the system for shelving books at the library, cooking dinner in the kitchen, studying for a class, or going for a walk. Mostly, people tend to blitz through the C and the A, and revisit those steps in the midst of P, and never do the E or the R in any kind of conscious way. Mostly, in our era at least, people spell their days C A P A C A P A PPPPPP (now P is for Panic) C P - and life sounds like a sputter. I got tired of the sputter and started watching people who have articulated what they're doing or who are very good at what they're doing, and I saw that they CAPER. (And I do like a word that can be a food or a story.)

Then there's the Health and Well-being system. I'm working on that one right now. Trying to locate the pieces for the C part of it, and to Arrange what I do have and experiment with it to see if it hangs together in a sustainable way. For this system, so far, I've got:

• Foundation Training to underlie a bit of Pilates and a lot of walking (which I don't Perform nearly as often or as consistently as I need to be). Foundation Training unifies what I've learned about "core" and aging and physicality and embodiment. 
• Real Food Fermentation, and The Art of Fermentation - the beginnings of a library of reference material about getting the right systems of interactions restored in the gut. Plus, fermented foods taste good and if I can figure this out, I think I'll be able to get a healthful and delicious genuine honest to goodness local to my very house and home sourdough starter going and make some bread.
• Practical Paleo, Mark Sisson's work and books, and the other "paleo," "primal," and whole foods resources which minimize carbs in the diet. This is not because the current craze is a bandwagon and I just loooooove me a bandwagon ride (she said sarcastically, being a habitual bandwagon avoider), but because ever since I first got solid health help, back when I saw my first natural medicine sort of doctor in the seventh grade (I was in the seventh grade - the doctor was a grown up), I've been told and I've known from experience that too many carbs cause illness for me. And too little protein is always my first preference and major obstacle. Pregnancies, arthritis style illnesses, mono, stress . . . all of the health problems or challenges I've ever had say the same thing to me: fewer carbs, more whole foods, more protein. This is the way I need to eat, and these recent comers to the party are being very helpful at the moment. 
• And the newest addition to this choir, Michael Mosley and company. Fasting (restricting calories to 500 in women and 600 in men) two days a week (we're only doing one here so far) has a lot of current scientific backing, and it also has my favorite systems analysis already done on it. There have been millennia of people who fast, for a variety of reasons. The data's in. Longevity and health are enhanced by a body's not being too heavy and overloaded, and fasting is a way to give the body a break and a change to repair, and it's also good for the soul.

My whole life is made of systems like the Health and Well-being System. I try to remember to put all of the letters into my CAPER in the practice of any of my systems, and writing in the morning is one way to do the Evaluation for all the systems. Figure out which parts were only thought to be essential. Ask myself about my habits of thought, of words, of deeds. First thing in the morning, when it's still dark outside and my unconscious, dreaming brain is ready to synthesize its work of the night season, I get up and write. (Sun's up! Husband's up! Gotta go now.)

This bit of writing brought to you by Jazzed by the Kids: the state of mind that follows a good fire. Last night's Teens Write Here session for the Imagined Ink contest at the library was ... WOW. If there's one thing I love, it's a good blaze that fills the fireplace, and last night, on the second session of TWH, there were four girls, aged 12-14. Three had been at the first session, one was new to the group. We've got a poet, a sci-fi writer, a creative nonfiction writer, and a graphic novelist! By the end of our 90 minutes, all four of those kids were completely wrapped up in enthusiasm for each other's projects, and I was barely able to keep from doing a happy dance all over the library. That's why I forgot to bring home my notebook. It took about a session and a half for the thing to catch, but when it did ... what a blaze! Go, teen writers, go!

A Less Dim Bulb

Hurrah!! One constant and nagging problem, solved!

For as long as I can remember, I have needed and wanted and thought about and tried to design some system - some product - some technique - anything to keep my ideas where I can find them when I want them. Since I began a few weeks ago to wake up very early in the morning to write, more ideas than ever have been flooding into my brain, and a couple of days ago I realized what almost all of these ideas are. They're titles. These are things I want to write about, that's what they are.

Now, what to do ... what to do ... file cards? Some people live and die by their file cards. (I fondly remember the file card box I handed in to my Marriage and Family instructor, back in the day. I was the only one in the class that had decorated my box and cards, and the only one who had used an elaborate filing system so that my box of 3x5 cards was much more Byzantine meets Rococo in a Rose Garden than office product.) No. Not file cards. After I design my perfect system for filing, I'll never keep up with it. Too fussybusyfloweryfoofoo.

A white board? A chalk board? A bulletin board? The thousand and one sticky notes my boss uses at the library? Huh-uh. Same problem, less foo foo. I'd never keep up that system. The problem really is that my system already exists. It exists in my head. And all I need is a navigation technique for what's in there (and there's a lot of stuff in there!)

Well, one morning it hit me! So I've been trying it. And it works!

I use an ordinary (sewn spine - no staples - they rust) composition notebook of lined paper (because the lack of lines makes them less easily perused in after years -- thread over staples, and lines over blanks, courtesy of Mario Milosevic's writerly experience -- thanks, Mario!) I use a blue or black ink pen. I follow, as any chronic student type would, the faint red margin line on the outside edges, and this leaves me with a border. And so, every time I have an idea for a piece, I put ... no, I draw a little light bulb.

And now, when I am casting about for ideas, all I will have to do is leaf through a journal, looking for little light bulbs, and there, on the page, will be the stream of consciousness as context, the date on that entry, and a sweet little title, just waiting to be plucked and chewed on. It might not seem like an enormously important thing to many people, but for me, this light going on has extinguished a few decades of frustration. Hurrah!