Tag: being

Time, Being & Identity

~ cafebedouin

Suppose you wanted to claim that you are someone who does some activity, such as a writer, a programmer, a teacher, a runner, an artist, a boxer, or whatever. How much time is required and on what time scale?

Let’s assume weekly blocks of time. A week has a 168 hours. Suppose we sleep for 50 of those hours. So, we have a total of 118 hours to do some activity. Let’s assume another 18 hours are consumed by doing things like eating, personal hygiene, etc. So, let’s say there are a 100 hours available to do something. Now, let’s try a few examples:

  • If you are a writer, how much of your time would been to be spent writing?
  • If you are a runner, how much of your time is spent running?
  • If you are an artist, how much of your time is making art?

It occurs to me that it is possible to be something without practicing it. It is possible to both be a father and spend no time doing any activity with a child. So, there is an ontological argument. It is possible to be artistic without making art. But, this does not apply in other ways. Hard to imagine being a programmer than does not write programs. Writing programs is not an intrinsic activity that people can do “naturally”.

People do “naturally” run. But, it seems strange to claim to be a runner, without spending some significant percentage of your time block on the activity. What should that percentage be? Perhaps 5%?

For running, we can compute the mileage. If we run at a 10 minute pace, which is relatively slow, 5 hours is 30 miles. This is probably more than most self-described “runners” run in a week. It’s probably safe to say it is more than 2 hours, which would be 12 miles. So, maybe >2% is the right amount to claim some activity as intrinsic to your identity.

But, if you aren’t reading a book for two hours a week, are you a reader? I think you have to include Twitter, Facebook and other social media with a reading component. If that’s the metric, more people might be readers than ever before.

What are you spending >2% of your time on? Is that who you want to be?

Theater, Circus & Being

~ cafebedouin

“In Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self, Tzachi Zamir proposes a theory of persons that allows participants in the theater to amplify and improve their own sense of self. According to Zamir, “a person is a cluster of possibilities, and actualizes a small portion of these.” The personal benefit of acting is that it broadens the scope of a person’s usual set of possibilities, potentially leading to a wider range of opportunities or ‘live options’ in real life for the person acting. Zamir calls this “existential amplification.” Acting (not merely observing acting) can help someone better understand themselves as they actually are, against a broadened backdrop of what’s possible for them…

…In Duncan Wall’s The Ordinary Acrobat, Jonathan Conant, one of the founders of Trapeze School New York describes the flying trapeze as “a machine for helping people re-evaluate what they are capable of.” He continues: “Before a flight, people are invariably uncomfortable. They’re pissed off, they’re scared, they’re sad. There’s a real fear of getting hurt.” They think that the trapeze is “…magical. It’s unattainable. It’s hugely difficult. It’s completely out of the realm of possibility for most people’s minds.” Yet after flying, “[t]here’s an evolution, an acceptance of what’s possible. The trapeze is so built up in people’s heads. And then someone says, ‘You can actually do this, too.’ That totally shifts the realm of what’s possible.” Conant continues, “People like to say that the trapeze is a metaphor for overcoming your fears. But this is wrong. A metaphor is just a symbol. The trapeze actually works.” Circus literature is rich with such accounts, especially in connection to the flying trapeze. Very often, there is talk of a great shift in perspective, of seeing the world differently, experiencing life anew, and even: becoming a whole new being.”

-Meg Wallace, “Circus and Philosophy: Teaching Aristotle Through Juggling.” aesthticsforbirds.com. December 2, 2021

Interesting throughout. I like the idea that trying new things, whether they be new ideas or ways of being in the world, can help us reconstruct ourselves into “a whole new being.”