Knowing Not

I have a goal to lose 10 pounds by the end of the year. I’m considering a lot of different techniques. Weight lifting to increase my metabolism, cutting out carbs, drinking water instead of beer in the evening, adding another session of cardio to my weak, eating a hundred pancakes a day, having a day of the week that I will fast. 

One of those things is not like the other and you absolutely can tell. I know you can. Read the list again in case you missed it, but you and I both know that one of those is not going to work for losing weight. 

As much as my heart desires maple syrup, butter, and flour, we both know that one hundred pancakes a day is the exact opposite of what I need if I want to lose weight. 

For all the other weight loss strategies above, we all know someone who has tried one of those tactics with mixed results. For every person who swears by weekly fasts, there someone else who can’t seem to make it work. Even when a strategy successful, we don’t know if it will work to hit the target. Would fasting one day a week make me lose 10 pounds? Maybe, but also maybe not. But scarfing pancakes just won’t work. 

And you are like me, you are certain of that. 

Can you take a moment and notice that feeling of certainty? Why was it so obvious and certain to you that pancakes were a bad move? You didn’t have to even think about it. You didn’t have to compare it to your knowledge of Calories In / Calories Out, or argue about ketosis, or anything like that. You just knew. There wasn’t any reasoning involved, though we can do some post hoc work to show why our instinct was right. 

Isn’t that weird? What in the world is going on there?

Let’s do it again. 

I set an annual goal of sailing one day a month on average this year. I haven’t sailed much this year, so I’ll need to sail a fair bit this fall to hit my goal. I’m thinking about selling my boat. I’m going to sign up for grad school. I’m starting a home renovation. I’m taking on an intense job assignment. 

Did you just “pancake” again? Did you just know that all those other things, the grad school, the renovation, the job assignment, the boat sale, were terrible choices if I wanted to sail? 

You didn’t even have to reason about it, did you? You weren’t calling up some line of argument, “Well, if you do grad school, will you have time on the weekends to sail?” You just sort of instinctually knew that. How strange!

Try it out yourself. Think of something you want to do and brain storm about things that would prevent you from doing that. If you’d like a harder challenge, think of something you care about, like justice, or telling the truth, and everything that might bring harm or prevent that. The well is deep, isn’t it? The problems, risks, and dangers spill out readily. 

One more little experiment. Notice what happens when you try to do the opposite. Think of a goal that you’d like to complete, and think of the ways you could make that happen. Try to think of the details and tactics. Is that harder for you? Is the well a bit (or a lot) drier? 

I don’t know if this is universal for everyone, but most folks I’ve talked to about this seem to agree that the negative and the critical is easier to do than ideating on successful strategies. Maybe it’s a feature of how we’ve been educated. Maybe those years of compare and contrast essays made us this way. It could be that successful strategies are more rare than unsuccessful strategies, but that wouldn’t explain why it’s so obvious to us when something is flawed. 

Regardless of the reasons, we are better at noticing errors than recommending good options. We are better at demolition than construction.

I’d like to put this feature of our minds to work. It’s a powerful little engine and it runs much easier and produces much more energy than our strategizing. With it, we don’t need to know what something is, don’t need to rigorously define a thing, but can instead say what it is not, what it is different than. I’m hoping that this feature of our minds may be exactly the edge I need in order to pry up the hood of “meaning” and see how it works. We might be able to use our destructive powers to see how meaning breaks and infer how meaning operates from the pieces. We may be able to turn this negative skill into an apophatic method of meaning, a way to see the night hawk despite the evening dark.