#2: And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave

Hello.

I'm bringing you today notes from my first week of classes here at Purdue, which ran from January 9th - January 13th, however for those of you seeking more recent updates, let it be known that I am very much thriving over here in this new environment, and having the most special of times.

Obviously the biggest adjustment of moving to a new place like this is going to be the educational system, but as you'll read I've been pleasantly surprised in many regards with my classes so far, and there has been so much other stuff outside of studies to occupy my time and energy with that there is still very much this bottom note of playful joy underpinning all that is going on around me. As we proceed into the coming weeks, as the winter draws out and routine mundanity comes beckoning, it will be interesting to see whether this spark remains kindled, whether I can actively sustain it throughout each week right through until that final exam. I very much hope so.

Aside from the classes, the theme of this first week was really about discovery of various kinds - of people, of places, of sights and of memories, and all in the most beautiful of ways even if perhaps the not most pleasant at the time. See the learnings below for further comment on this. I went to my first basketball game here, something I shall endeavour to do every week until the season ends. And most importantly, I met some truly wonderful, intelligent and kind people from all around the world, not least of which were from the state of Indiana themselves.

One final comment: many months ago I set up some basic analytics tracking on my website to monitor the number of daily page visits I was getting (don't worry, that is the extent of the information I receive). From the time of setting up until last week, this dashboard never registered more than about 5 visits, and they were all from my computer working on aspects of the website. To check in throughout the week and see about 80 user visits or so was so very exciting, even if only a small number. Thank you for taking the time to read what I am writing!

P.S. Keep scrolling down to Releases. for the notes on our weekend trip to Chicago!

Photos.

Releases.

My Kind of Town

Bullet digest.

• Something I'm watching... Wild Wild Country on Netflix. A name that came up with frequency amongst those who I completed a 10-day retreat with in December was Osho, a claimed enlightened guru. This 6-episode miniseries tells his story, and how he brought his followers to a small town in Oregon and created their own utopia...before it very quickly became a dystopia. There is much to be said about Osho and the many actors of this story, but without spoiling anything the FBI get involved and this man becomes to be considered an immense national security threat.

• Something I'm listening to... I have met a lot of people here at Purdue from Central and South America, and have correspondingly been exposed to a fair amount of Latin music; in particular, as per a suggestion from an El Salvadorean friend of mine, Reggaeton. Despite just being the generic Spotify one, this playlist has been a relatively enjoyable introduction to the genre.

• Something I've been experimenting with... My sleep is something that I am fairly precious about, mostly because it has to be the first or second most important thing I do each day that determines the quality of the next. Though I am known to wake up reasonably early, I still use an alarm to ensure it is the same time everyday, however I've found that the jarring sound of the alarm can cause an unpleasant first few waking minutes and a quick search indicates potential health downsides for this. The apartment here has smart lights, which means I can programmatically have them dim down in incremental fashion as evening turns, thereby encouraging the onsetting sleep, and turn them on in place of my alarm to wake myself in a more "natural", less jarring (and certainly in a way less disruptive to fellow roommates) way. Results from a few days are positive but hard to track beyond subjective feel the effects to this point.

Learnings.

• On a similar topic from last week, thoughts I have been considering relate to the matter of how positively we reflect on given experiences. Let's start with an analogy.

• At a basic level, the human brain is made up of neurons and synapses, the latter of which allows adjacent copies of the former to communicate between one another. Oversimplifying details that I don't understand, the synapse acts as a chemical switch that fires when a certain threshold level is met. Like one of those drinking ducks that fills up with water before it finally falls forward to "drink" the water.

  • In many ways, I think of how we derive enjoyment to be modelled in a similar fashion, with the existence of some threshold level of positive experience that needs to become saturated before we are ever, consciously or otherwise, to reflect in good terms on the event.

    • And bad sensations that appear empty this bucket, too. So there is some sort of calculus going on where the ratio between good and bad, as well as their relative intensities, arbitrates our sentiment.

  • For most of us, it might require a ratio such as 10 good moments for every bad moment before we are comfortable in passing positive reflections.

    • The number of times where, for instance, I have felt negatively about a semester because of a singular bad exam, test or conversation with a colleague or friend, despite all of the wonderfully cherished times, is quite a bit more frequent than I would have hoped

• So what raises this threshold? Where does it get set? One variable we need to consider is expectation. Expectation, both of past experiences in our own lives and the feedback or sentiment from others with respect to the particular experience we are about to have. Too much anticipation skews the ratio in a bad direction.

  • On the former type of expectation, living highly comfortable lives for the most part preconditions us to a priori expect a certain latent signal of nice sensations to be met in any given moment. We are all aware of when we fall below this level; it is the region of experience most commonly associated with fear and discomfort in my books.

• Something I am considering in all of this then is whether, with strong intention, this threshold (activation energy perhaps to borrow from the chemistry) can be lowered so as to cast even the most gloomy of experiences in a positive glow when called into hindsight.

  • Can I find a place where even one good moment in 1000 bad ones is sufficient enough inertia to puncture through my melancholy?

  • Though difficult to do so, imagine a world in which something as thoroughly unpleasant as studying for an exam, or a long car drive, or something genuinely painful like sickness and death, may be converted out of the pits of sorrow and despair and into something entirely more constructive and uplifting.