“We sometimes think of creativity as coming from brilliant loners. In fact, it more often happens when bright people pair up and complement each other.”
— Walter Isaacson1
Do we need someone to give up their career so the family can function well? At some point, many of us consider what this involves and what it looks like. When practicing Homeostatic Design, we give a lot of consideration to what it feels like. We assess the typical ways of doing things and decide whether we want to interact like that. We combine science and art like we use our thumb and forefinger—to grasp things.2
Model Of the World. According to Jeff Hawkins in A Thousand Brains, scientists say our brain learns a model of the world.3 Learning a model involves careful observation and feeling our way through situations.4 Achieving goals requires learning how things in the model typically behave when we interact with them.5 Hawkins:6
To learn a new tool, we must hold it in our hand, turning it this way and that, looking and attending to different parts with our fingers and eyes. At a basic level, to learn a model of the world requires moving one or more sensors relative to the things in the world. […] This is referred to as embodiment. […] Without embodiment, what can be learned is limited.
Scientists warn against getting too comfy with our model (believing it).7 They stress the importance of updating our beliefs and routinely confirming whether they are compatible with observation.8 Accurate perception can change our minds and, ultimately, our models.9 Conversely, action can change the world to make it more compatible with our beliefs and goals.10
Artists are not like connoisseurs who walk through the world’s art galleries and perceive the best pictures; they are the ones who involve themselves in the stuff of the world and make the best pictures.11 Said another way, artists actively engage with the world to create it. Perception and action are complementary ways to minimize discrepancies between our generative model and the world.12
When we prioritize family over career, our model significantly impacts our self-image. Our beliefs determine whether we flourish or languish.13 Hawkins says our brain’s model of the world includes a model of our self.14 This leads to the strange truth that what you and I perceive, moment to moment, is a simulation of the world, not the real world, and false beliefs can be difficult to eliminate.15
Self-Expansion. Psychologist Arthur Aron argues that people are inherently driven to expand their potential efficacy through opportunity, self-improvement, competence, and broadening of perspective.16 In marriage, we can expand our sense of self because, in a close relationship, we experience the other person’s resources, perspectives, and identities as our own to some extent. In other words, our spouse is included in our sense of self.
The image above is the Inclusion of Others in Self (IOS) Scale, widely used to assess closeness in a relationship. It features seven pairs of overlapping circles. Respondents circle the picture that best describes their relationship with their partner. This simple pictorial assessment captures emotional and behavioral closeness and has been found to outperform more complex measures in predicting the longevity of relationships.17
When shown the circles above, Robbi Behr and her husband, Matthew Swanson, circled the last choice; they are as close as you get. More than that, Matthew said, “I’d probably choose one where the two circles were even more on top of one another if there was one, with just the faintest sliver of independent self visible outside the middle ground.”18 Robbi said she felt the same.
The last set of circles is what we all aspire to, correct? Especially in the context of partnering together. It’s what teamwork looks like. Closeness. Expansion. What’s the problem?
Here’s the thing: with an artist’s insight, Robbi objected to the graphic’s visual language. She observed that although the circles on the second row are larger than the first, it still implies that the closer you get to someone, the less total territory you have. I think she hit on something.
Self-LESS-ness. If it doesn’t appear as though the middle ground is growth, a problem can develop. If, instead of expansion, sacrificing a career looks like relegation to the faintest sliver of self; a contraction on the outskirts of middle ground. Rather than an image of purpose, meaning, and fulfillment, the last choice can represent the fear and anxiety of resentment.
We have been taught to believe that work enhances our psychological well-being. We understand that mental health issues are linked to idleness and that work gives us a sense of purpose and vitality.19 Without work, do we have value? Stepping back from our careers and choosing to spend more time with our children can lead to feelings and perceptions of inadequacy, personally, professionally, and culturally. “Work and the existential anxiety that is associated with it are replaced by no work and its different anxieties.”20
The problem can just as easily stem from this: Aron argues that we are motivated to our core by a drive to become more.21 Does sacrifice vibe with our ambition and opportunity to do just that? Not working goes against human nature; it involves waste.22 Our discipline, productivity, energy, and resources are at risk.
Paradigm Shift. A paradigm serves as a model for understanding and interpreting reality. Reality will only be understood if the paradigm is accurate.23 The shift from Ptolemy to Copernicus was a basic paradigm shift; thanks to Copernicus, our model reveals the earth revolving around the sun. It was a complete reversal, and with the shift, everything changed. Navigators and astronauts wouldn’t have embarked on what they did without it. But also—nothing changed. The sun and earth didn’t swap places. What changed was something in our minds: our way of looking at things.24 Eugene Peterson:25
Before genuine creative work takes place there must be a withdrawal from what other people demand, from routines and habits, from what voices, within and without, tell us to do.
The account about Robbi Behr is found in Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Powers of Two. The subtitle: Finding the essence of innovation in creative pairs, motivates us to make a paradigm shift. If a sliver is what we see, and we agree that sacrifice is the way, we have to revise our imaginations radically.26 The thing is this: Robbi Behr objected to the graphic’s visual language—not marriage. She said the scale implied that the closer you get to someone, the less total territory you have. Shenk:27
Even though the circles on the second row are larger than the first, she told me, “It still suggests on the whole that the closer you get to someone, the less total territory you have. But it’s actually the opposite. When we go back and forth, our ideas, our ambitions, our efficiency, our ability—everything gets bigger. The more we overlap, the larger we become, much larger than we were as two individuals.
Make Your World. According to the Chinese sage Wang Yangming, ‘The heart-mind [xin] is nothing without the body, and the body is nothing without the heart-mind.’ Tiren is a word (with no English equivalent) some philosophers use to describe knowing something intellectually and throughout the entire body and mind.28 I grew up in South Florida. As a little kid, I knew what snow was, but I didn’t know what snow was. My body never moved through time and space—with snow. Then, one Christmas, we traveled, and I made my first snow angel. That’s when (through perception and action) I minimized discrepancies between my generative model of snow (hanging cutouts on Dunkin’ Donuts windows) and the world.29 My knowledge became tiren, or fully embodied.30
Let me pause to say the obvious. Exploring your options (should you work from home, step back from your career, or consider childcare?) means you haven’t done the whole embodiment thing yet.31 All you have to go by is what you’ve seen and heard.32 Make sure not to let anyone’s story of “less than” perceptions influence what you do.33 Make your world. You are the chooser when it comes down to how it feels.34
We Make Ours. I have been married to Scott for twenty-eight years. We met in college and quickly became best friends. We were often confronted by tales of failed marriages in life or through media, which put us off. It wasn’t just the divorce rate or adultery. It was witnessing marriages with no passion, fire, or spunk. People seemed restless, inattentive to one another, and—bored. We agreed that marriage looked like no fun and that we would have none of it.
Then, one day, talking as usual on the breezeway that connected our dorms, we were struck by a bolt of pure genius. We said hey, if we marry each other, we can get out of having to do that crappy married thing. I was twenty-one, and Scott was twenty. We said our vows and began to make our world.
Questions have emerged while raising a family: Who am I?35 What’s my purpose?36 Most of my life, my answer has been that I am a hard worker. I had absorbed a strong, clear message that work gives me value. I’ve been driven by a deep need to be useful and a belief that consistent effort over time gets you where you wanna be. Recently, however, I’ve had to update my beliefs because dreams based on these beliefs have died. It’s been a hard lesson, but I’ve learned that it’s not a failure when something dies or ends.37 Our world happens because we live in cycles, not perpetuity.38 Adrienne Maree Brown:39
This could be nourishment. And when something breaks down in our communities, it’s actually a moment, usually, when something needs nourishing or when something is dead, when something is done, it’s complete, and it needs to be processed back into the whole.
Since 2019, I’ve processed what has happened back into the whole, and the identity nourished from this time period has stripped me down to an original identity, one that marked our marriage from the start: friend. Now I’m about relationship, not function.40 Friendship is cozy—even when it isn’t.41 It involves struggle and loss, respect and honor, but mostly, it has an everyday, ordinary quality that suits us.42
About seven years into marriage, we started thinking about family. I was a graphic designer, and Scott was an accountant. We both had office jobs. A problem emerged: where do the kids go? To solve for that, I started my own business (with a built-in accountant!) while continuing to work full-time. For three years, I grew my clientele until I reached a point where I could leave the office behind. I was six months pregnant. “Keeping my career” was no more a thought than “sacrificing it.” If there were other options, no one told us.
Times were different then. Most seemed insensitive to what working from home with babies feels like. Comments like, “Oh, that’s so nice. You work from home,” felt cruel. But now? The whole planet pretty much has an appreciation for how hard it is. Thank you, COVID.
More To Come. A lifestyle created from perceptions of less-than would not have been enough. Our life has been set upon the firm foundation of friendship, and it has been a strong position to meet what life has thrown our way.43 In posts two and three, we’ll discuss friendship in marriage, how to deepen a shallow friendship, and why friendship leads to longevity and peace.
“Strange. We come to ourselves by giving up the self.”
— Joshua Wolf Shenk
Shenk, J. W. (2014). Powers of two: finding the essence of innovation in creative pairs. Boston, Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt., hereafter cited as POT | (praise for Powers of Two), jacket cover
Eugene H. Peterson. (2018). As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A conversation on the ways of God formed by the words of God. WaterBrook., hereafter cited as KCF | p 11, “I remember one friend telling me several months ago that science and religion are opposites, the way your thumb and forefinger are opposites: if you are going to get a grip on things, you need them both.”
Hawkins, J. (2021). A thousand brains: A new theory of intelligence. Basic Books., hereafter cited as TB | p 4, “Scientists say that the brain learns a model of the world.”
Solms, M. (2021). The hidden spring: A journey to the source of consciousness. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., hereafter cited as HS | p 143, “We know by now that the fundamental form of consciousness is affect, which enables us to ‘feel’ our way through unpredicted situations.”
TB | p 4, “To recognize something, we need to first learn what it looks and feels like, and to achieve goals we need to learn how things in the world typically behave when we interact with them.”
Ibid., p 148
TB | pp 173 & 175, “The world we think we live in is not the real world; it is a simulation of the real world. This leads to a problem. What we believe is often not true. […] Importantly, these thoughts and perceptions are relative to the brain’s model of the world, not the physical world outside the skull. Therefore, the world we perceive is a simulation of the real world. […] The truth is we perceive our model of the world, not the world itself or the rapidly changing spikes entering the skull. As we go about our day, the sensory inputs to the brain invoke the appropriate parts of our world model, but what we perceive and what we believe is happening in the model. […] The model can be wrong.”
Parr, T., Pezzulo, G., & Friston, K. J. (2022). Active inference: the free energy principle in mind, brain, and behavior. MIT Press., hereafter cited as AI | p 161, “… learning is the process of optimizing beliefs about the parameters of a generative model. In the continuous-time domain, this means accumulating evidence over time.” | p 247, “To enable learning, we need to incorporate prior beliefs about the parameters of the probability distribution that comprise the generative model.” || HS || p 141, “Voluntary action then entails a process of testing our expectations against the actual consequences of our actions.”
AI | p 9, “Perception minimizes free energy (and surprise) by (Bayesian) belief updating or changing your mind, thus making your beliefs compatible with sensory observations.”
Ibid., “Instead, action minimizes free energy (and surprise) by changing the world to make it more compatible with your beliefs and goals.”
Eugene H. Peterson (1988), Traveling Light: Galatians and the Free Life in Christ, Helmers & Howard., hereafter cited as TL | p 170, “Creative people are not connoisseurs who walk through the art galleries of the world and collect the best pictures; they are the ones who involve themselves in the stuff of the world and make the best pictures.”
AI | p 9, “Under Active Inference, perception and action are two complementary ways to fulfill the same imperative: minimization of free energy. […] This unification of cognitive functions marks a fundamental difference between Active Inference and other approaches that treat action and perception in isolation from one another. Learning is yet another way to minimize free energy. However, it is not fundamentally different from perception; it simply operates on a slower timescale.”
Aron, A., Lewandowski Jr, G. W., Mashek, D., & Aron, E. N. (2013). The self-expansion model of motivation and cognition in close relationships. The Oxford handbook of close relationships, 12(1), 90-115., hereafter cited as SEM | “When the dyad is in sync, infants are observed to have relational affects of well-being, pleasure, and joy; when the dyad is not in sync, they tend to be anxious and unhappy as their sense of coherence dissipates. The authors state, ‘Thus infants will seek feelings of expansion and connection and avoid anxious, fearful feelings associated with dissipation’. That is, during human development, expansion and connection with others are almost synonymous.”
TB | p 5, “The brain’s model of the world includes a model of our self.”
Ibid., p 6, “This leads to the strange truth that what you and I perceive, moment to moment, is a simulation of the world, not the real world. One consequence of the Thousand Brains Theory is that our beliefs about the world can be false. I explain how this can occur, why false beliefs can be difficult to eliminate, […]”
SEM | “1. Motivational principle: Again, people seek to expand their potential efficacy—that is, the model posits that one of the most basic human motives is what has previously been described by other scholars as exploration, opportunity, effectance, self-improvement, curiosity, competence, or a broadening of one’s perspective. 2. Inclusion-of-other-in-the-self principle: One way in which people seek to expand the self is through close relationships because, in a close relationship, the other’s resources, perspectives, and identities are experienced, to some extent, as one’s own. That is, the other is to some extent ‘included in the self.’”
Ibid., “The metaphor of overlapping selves led to the creation of what has become a very widely used instrument for assessing interpersonal closeness, the Inclusion of Others in Self (IOS) Scale. […] The IOS Scale consists of seven pairs of overlapping circles; each pair overlaps slightly more than the preceding pair. Respondents select the pair of circles that best portrays their relationship with another (e.g., romantic partner, friend, parent, community, the environment). […] The original validation of the IOS Scale also found that this simple pictorial assessment of closeness captured aspects of both feeling close and behaving close, and correlated strongly with more complex, multi-item measures of closeness and intimacy. Further, this single-item pictorial measure outperformed more complex measures of closeness in predicting prospectively whether relationships would remain intact over the subsequent 3 months.”
POT | p 51
Zornberg, A. G. (2022). The hidden order of intimacy: reflections on the Book of Leviticus (First edition.). Schocken Books., hereafter cited as HOI | p 232, “Psychologically, too, work enhances vital energy. Keeping busy has a survival value in itself. […] Mental health concerns are associated with idleness: the court may intervene to divorce a couple if the husband will not let his wife work! Batalah, the boredom of not working, can be fatal. Work, or trade, makes one feel purposeful, alive;”
Ibid., p 234
POT, p 50, “Aron argues that people are motivated, down to their core, by a wish to become more.”
HOI | pp 232 & 233, “On the other hand, there is not working, which is also learned from God. It is associated with holiness. But it goes against the grain of human nature, it involves waste and even destruction of resources; […] It exposes one to the dread of emptiness.”
Eugene Peterson (1992). Under the Unpredictable Plant: an Exploration in Vocational Holiness. Alive Communications., hereafter cited as UUP | p 174, “A paradigm is a model or pattern for grasping and interpreting reality. If the paradigm is wrong or deficient in some way, reality is understood wrongly or deficiently. It makes no difference that the pieces of reality that are fed into the paradigm are true and understood accurately; if the paradigm arranges them wrongly they come out wrong. Some paradigms work adequately for a while but then, as conditions change or new knowledge is acquired, they have to be set aside for another. This is known as a basic paradigm shift.”
Ibid., 174 & 175, “The shift from Ptolemy to Copernicus was a basic paradigm shift. […] It was a complete reversal of the way we imagine the earth and the universe. With the paradigm shift everything changed. Neither the navigators who set sail and verified that the flat earth was, in fact, a globe nor the space explorers who walked on the moon could have embarked on their ventures without this paradigm shift. […] But at the same time that a paradigm shift changes everything, it also changes nothing. Everything goes on the same as before. […] So if everything looks the same, smells the same, and behaves the same, what has changed? Only something in our minds. Only our way of looking at things.”
TL | p 168
UUP | p 175, “Only? But that interior shift of the imagination, that radical reconceptualizing of reality immediately expands our sense of reality past understanding, sets us down in a world far, far larger than anything we could have dreamed of, and makes it possbile to travel, build, heal, learn, and experience in ways impossible previous to the pardigm shift. The paradigm shift didn’t create more reality; it made it possible for us to be adequate to far more of the reality there.”
POT | p 51
Lent, J. (2021). The web of meaning: Integrating science and traditional wisdom to find our place in the universe. New Society Publishers., hereafter cited as WOM | p 76, “In contrast to the European tradition, the Chinese saw no essential distinction between reason and emotion. Some philosophers used a particular word, tiren, to refer to knowing something, not just intellectually but throughout the entire body and mind – for which no English word exists.” || TB, p 147, “As I described earlier, we learn by moving. In order to learn a model of a building, we must walk through it, going from room to room. || p 149, “The important point is that for an intelligent machine to learn a model of the world, it needs sensory inputs that can be moved.”
HS | p 141, “The motor tendencies that are activated through midbrain-affect selection release simple reflexes and instincts […] But, as you now know, such automatic behaviours are brought under individualized control during development, through learning from experience. […] The behavioral sequence arising with each new action cycle unfolds upwards over these progressively expanding levels of forebrain control, from procedural ‘responses’ to representational ‘memory images’. This generates what Merker calls a ‘fully articulated, panoramic, three-dimensional world composed of shaped solid objects: the world of our familiar phenomenal experience’.”
WOM | p 76, “Imagine living in a hot climate and learning about snow as a concept. Then, one day, you visit the mountains and actually experience the snow falling on you and making snowballs. That’s the moment when your knowledge of snow becomes tiren, or fully embodied.”
POT | Jacket: “Shenk draws on academic research, original reportage, and historical evidence to show that creativity is not the work of an individual mind. In fact, it is a social activity, and the pair is its primary embodiment.”
HS | p 142, “Most people don’t realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions generated mainly from long-term memory, But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round.”
HOI | p 91, “Sacrifice, then, ‘restores a lost value through the relinquishment of that value. But death is not necessarily linked to it, and the most solemn sacrifice may not be bloody. To sacrifice is not to kill but to relinquish and give.’ Sacrifice focuses attention on the moment. What it consumes is the thing-ness, the usefulness, of the object. Sacrifice is, in this sense, ‘gift and relinquishment.’ This is the meaning of ‘sacrificing to the deity,’ whose sacred essence is comparable to a fire. To sacrifice is to give as one gives coal to the furnace.” || Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast Transcript, Episode 9 || “Our Hair Is a Portal Into Our Souls” with Tracee Ellis Ross., hereafter cited as LP || July 25, 2023 || audible.com/tlp/episode9 | Michelle Obama: “Or maybe it’s not there for you. I mean, love. That’s not always in your control. If you don’t wanna just marry anybody, if you don't wanna fall in love with anybody, you know, finding that person and then making it work. What if it doesn’t happen? What, what, what if it doesn't happen? I do not want my kids to say, my daughters to think, well, I, I can’t be happy because I didn’t find that person. That’s when people just start picking somebody. They just pick a thing.”
LP | Tracee Ellis Ross: “That’s right. And I have spent 10, the last 10 years of my life publicly talking about the fact that I’m the chooser. That’s right. I get to choose my own life. And we get very confused around this narrative, and then we wrap it up in all these other different little bows and make people think – But the bottom line is: who do you want to be? What do you want for your, from your life? What do you wanna give? What do you wanna share? What do you wanna get? What do you want it to feel like? And then that person might or might not enter. Whether it’s a man or a woman or whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. That person might– it might be a dog for God’s sakes.”
Merker, B. (2007). Consciousness without a cerebral cortex: A challenge for neuroscience and medicine. Behavioral and brain sciences, 30(1), 63-81. | “The range of possibilities in this regard is felicitously captured by the ‘scale of sentience’ of Indian tradition (Bagchi 1975), as follows:
“This.”
“This is so.”
“I am affected by this which is so.”
“So this is I who am affected by this which is so.”
Each ‘stage’ in this scale, from mere experienced sensation to self-consciousness, falls within the compass of consciousness as here defined, and presupposes it. Accordingly, to see, to hear, to feel, or otherwise to experience something is to be conscious, irrespective of whether in addition one is aware that one is seeing, hearing, and so forth, as cogently argued by Dretske.”
On Being with Krista Tippett| adrienne maree brown | On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life, hereafter cited as OB | Tippett: — it’s a cultural kind of bias and sensibility that we have, that if something dies or ends… brown: Yes, that that’s bad. Tippett: …that it’s failure. brown: Exactly. Tippett: And it’s an ending and it’s a beginning — it’s vitality.
OB | brown: It’s vitality. And what you’re speaking to is the life force, right? Like mushrooms, to me, mushrooms are like, everything dies, but that’s kind of good. [laughs] It makes for a very rich world. All the richness, all that fecundity, all that beautiful miracle of life; it happens because we live in cycles, not perpetuity.
OB | Tippett: And as you say, composts something else, right — other seeds. Other seeds are then — have their moment, have their time. brown: Exactly. Exactly. And it’s trying to hold onto stuff and not let it die that actually puts us in precarious positions, even for our species. This is actually one of our biggest issues right now, is we’re so scared of death. And so we think about, how do we make people live forever, and how do we look young forever, and do all this stuff, instead of being like, oh, no — how do I get good at dying? How do I get to where I’ll be at peace when my time comes because there’s other generations that need to survive off of the resources of this place? [laughs] It’s in the design.
KCF | p 19, “Friend is totally about relationship, not a function. There is an everyday, ordinary quality to it. We find ourselves friends with people not for what they can do for us but simply for who they are.”
KCF | p 17, “To be a friend of God does not mean everything is cozy between you and the Almighty.”
Ibid., “Friendship also involves struggle and loss, tension and turbulence. One of my favorite proverbs is ‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend’ (Proverbs 27:6). A friend, if honest and true, will tell you things you don’t want to hear. A friend, if deeply serious about you, will do things that feel painful. Friends do that because they respect our dignity and honor our uniqueness.”
“What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does.” —Rubeus Hagrid, Harry Potter