What comes after this momentary bliss
The Monthly Rabbithole: June/July 2023
The monthly rabbit hole newsletter has gone through a lot of changes because I like to experiment. At first, this newsletter was informative, and then I tried an introspective-type schema, and now I’m trying a combination of both - which is how I really like to write. My style is emergent, sorry to get meta right away, but it is continuously developing. So, here on Nova’s first day of sixth grade, allow me to get a little sentimental as I reflect on the intellectual journey of the summer. For extra sensory context, here’s the playlist I listened to while writing.
Myth, by Beach House, came out in 2012, a month after Novie was born, and its eerie, sweet melody represents that time in my life perfectly. Somehow I’m still in that time. In the final years of my Ph.D I was confused. I didn’t know where I was going next, what I was going to study, or how this tiny bundle of cells I held in my arms was going to change any trajectory I planned. This little darling that I plotted and planned for almost down to the month, turned out to be a surprise in so many ways. I mean look at her: First of all, she’s white.
I tend to think when you see yourself in a child, it’s a lot easier to be for that child whatever it was that you yourself needed at that stage. I’m not sure if it was what she needed or what I needed, but when she was born I decided to take my full 12 weeks, and then for the last month, while we waited to get into Loyola’s adjacent daycare program, I stayed home with her all day and when Ken got home, I went to the lab till about midnight. Things have gotten increasingly complex since then, and seeing her approach adolescence, I’m trying to be the kind of mom I needed.
In fact, I realize I’ll always have to work at being the kind of mom my kid needs. The kind who isn’t completely preoccupied with work (which I could easily be). The kind who doesn’t do everything for her, but does enough so she feels cared for and loved. The kind who reflects on her stage of life and corresponding behaviors. The kind of mom who doesn’t disappear into her child. So, this summer, in between volleyball camps, practices, “girls days”, school shopping, spaghetti dinners, waterpark trips, family activities, trying to revive a start-up, starting a new series for Discourse magazine, and a new podcast season, I did find time to study Complexity, proper. I tried to wait to write this until I had fully digested everything I took in at the Collective Intelligence Symposium in Santa Fe, but now I see: it’s not going to be a discrete phenomenon. Like raising my kid, studying the world is an endless pursuit. Pretty sure that’s the takeaway from what I’ve learned this summer: everything is emergent and continuous.
So, taking time to write this is just giving you a snapshot of
what this pursuit feels like,
what I think I observed, and
what I’m excited to dig deeper into
Here’s how my foray into complexity felt:
Imagine you’re about to start a new term at school. You’ve been out the game a while, and you’re dipping your toe back in, and for some reason (because you’re insane), you’ve enrolled in an advanced course -one that is tangentially relevant to your original degree, but out of your depth. You’ve taken some of the pre-reqs, but you could never take all of them, and that’s why they let you take the course. You read the syllabus, and the intro in the textbook, and maybe even some of the pre-reading before class, and you can understand the text, but there’s some bizarre undercurrent that makes you think you’re missing some key skills or information. Oh, and there are no grades, and the course is mostly self-study after the first few days. Are you wondering why the fuck you did this yet?
The answer is that you’re a sick person but in the best way. You have curiosity sickness, but it’s also a gift.
So, I’d say that’s observation number 1: I have an incurable case of curiosititis. Not that I didn’t know this about myself, but putting yourself in new contexts really shows you who you are.
Some other things I observed:
This symposium was the first of its kind, but it was lovely;
in almost 40 years of the Santa Fe Institute’s existence, they have never put on a conference event, but they sure did it well. It was probably one of my favorite conference - and I’ve been to a lot of different conferences.
The people interested in complexity are incredible.
I bonded with some people who I’m pretty sure will be lasting friends even just after 3 days of studying and exploring together - engineers, consultants, entrepreneurs, psychologists, physicists, computer scientists, evolutionary biologists, educators, artists - it’s wild, how many different types of people I met.
Collective Intelligence has something to do with constraints and limited information.
I’ll have a piece out in Discourse magazine on this topic later, but let me illustrate what I mean with an example: my niece, Pearl, was staying with us while I was in Santa Fe, and on the second day, I got a call from Nova and Pearl. I stepped out of the conference room to answer.
“Hi Babyyyy!” I was so excited to hear from her. She misses me!
“Mom. There’s no food in the house.” She means there are no Takis or Oreos.
“Girl, bye.”
“But MooOOOom, tell dad to take us to the gas sta-”
“Figure it out! You’re smart. Get creative and find yourself some food. Go out to the garden. Pick some cucumbers. Byeee.”
Now, I grew up in an "ingredient household” (video tagged to let you know you’re not the only one) where over the summer while mom was at work, I’d stumble to the fridge and be lucky to find some Kraft singles and a tortilla to throw some shit together for me and my pesky little brother. If there was some Aldi’s semi-sweet chocolate chips - we was ballin’. So, of course, now I am determined to have good snacks in the house (remember: tryna be the mom I “needed”). Before I left I prepped some hummus, boiled eggs, and veggies to last 2 or 3 days, depending on whether Ken ate the snacks, too. So the snacks are gone, and these kids are too lazy to make food or knock on Ken’s office door?! Dang.
I told this story to my conference buddies and all but patted myself on the back for creating constraints where my children (Pearl counts, too) must exercise their intellect and creativity to find solutions.
Those little snitches called my sister, who called my mom, and asked her to order them food! Of course, I got another call where my mom admonished me -psh - as if I didn’t grow up on buttered bread. I told her to leave them be. So when their plan didn’t work they eventually convinced Ken to take them to Publix and pick whatever they wanted. Of course, I came home and the cabinets were more bare than I had left them. But the point is, they figured it out, which brings me to another observation…