Weather of the Mind Remix - Day 14

Retreat is not a luxury. Retreat is something that we need.  We need some quiet time in order to know ourselves, we need some quiet time in order to understand this human life and how we can make the most out of our lives.  

Life is tough.  Life can be viewed as a very challenging sport.  Imagine if a team never had a meeting with the coach where they gathered around and made a plan for that day’s game.  Imagine if a team never had a meeting after that day’s game.  That would not be a very good team. But yet, this is how many of us live our lives, in the middle of the game at all times, without any breaks off to the side to check in and make a new plan. 

Weather of the Mind Remix 2016 - Day 13

Today's commentary is not from the Weather of the Mind text, but it relates.

I would like to start with a little show-and-tell.  I love to track data and crunch data.  As one would expect, I have many fun and exciting excel spreadsheets, but what I love is the craft of working by hand.  Here are two images from this year's NFL against-the-spread studies.  I enjoy this mental challenge because it is quite humbling and it displays week-after-week how unpredictable and chaotic of social systems. 

I love to study sports because they are society fenced in.  Sports are a laboratory for human social systems, boxed in by the dimensions of the field, the relatively clarity of goals, the limits on time or inning.  The NFL is particularly fascinating because there are only 256 games in the regular season, so one can observe and code the results and try to find trends.  

One day I hope to write a small book on how one can study life by picking and observing the results of the NFL season. Spoiler: the main lesson is that life is extremely hard to predict.  I find this notion somewhat humbling, but in that humility, it helps me focus on my small intentions, my small actions, and then I sort of just see them as being dropped into the great chaotic river of life.