Make buildings which are poems.
A bit about beauty, poetry, and factorization
Hello and welcome to the first edition of Subject to Change!
The newsletter is launching right off the heels of a writing course I took called Write of Passage. The pun is no joke, it really feels like I've gone through a transformative experience of sorts. Hallmark features include overcoming a series of challenges within a tight, nearly unrealistic duration of time, together with a dedicated group of people who all bond over the intense experience. The dangers of operating at such a high capacity for five weeks is that it will come to an end. And when it does, there'll be a big crash waiting for you.
How will I cope? Will the good writing habits endure? What will a new normal look like after this? Will I fall into a pit of despair without the support system of the writing community? The pain and the discomfort in the beginning is real, but like any habit, the true benefits of a habit don't show up until much later.
That said, I'm very grateful that you've chosen to be here, right from the awkward start 😅 my intention with the newsletter is to share ideas I’ve been thinking about, along with cool stuff I’ve encountered during the week.
So without further ado, let’s get this letter started!
🐦 Tweet: Values that distort cities
We all want to build good cities, but none of us can agree on what unanimously is good for a city and its people. On the other hand, I do think it's easier to agree on what's bad for cities. I tweeted this thread on values that distort cities:
✍️ Essay: Beauty is Life
One of the essays I wrote for Write of Passage was on beauty. I describe childhood memories that instilled in me three types of lived beauty: The beauty in noticing, the beauty in expressing, and the beauty in stewardship. It also includes a quote from the late Irish poet John O'Donohue, who I've recently become a huge fan of.
📖 Word of the week: Factorization
Originally a math term, it is to find the basic parts that make up a complex sum. I like the implications of factorizing in other domains, such as the challenge of reverse-engineering a cake you bought in a shop. Can you extract the precise ingredients, the amounts, and the transformational process they went through?
In note-taking, the term factorization is used when you're breaking down a complex idea into smaller, reusable parts. These are sometimes called Atomic Ideas. An idea can be used in many different contexts, in the same way that flour can be used in cakes, breads, and pies.
Finally, factorization is an essential part of systems thinking; a disciplined approach to examining cause and effect in the world such as how a weakening Gulf Stream will affect the climate, or how road design influences driving speed.
💡 From elsewhere: “The Letdown Lean In"
This piece was written by another Write of Passage student, Lyssa Menard, who coined this term after observing what happens to people once they go through a high-pressure event like an Olympic Games or the presentation of a doctoral dissertation. Here's Lyssa:
"...most people experience a letdown following an important event, especially one that requires considerable dedication and preparation. ...when years worth of effort culminates with a brief presentation and a pat on the back, it feels anticlimactic at best."
She walks us through how it happens, and the term "Letdown Lean In" is what we can do to mitigate some of the psychological effects of this phenomenon. Read her piece here, plus a follow-up piece she wrote at the very end of our course here. Both have been salves for me as I too deal with the after effects of this high-intensity course.
⚓️ Quote from book I'm reading
I'm currently reading A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Its physical book attributes are akin to a religious tome: 1171 thin pages with tightly-set text, bound in a hardback cover. The book, first published in 1977, is about the patterns that make comfortable cities and places for humans to live. It lists no less than 253 such patterns that one can follow. The book presents a complex theory, so this week's quote is a meaty introduction to his thinking, describing the use of language as a metaphor for building cities:
... English can be a medium for prose, or a medium for poetry. The difference between prose and poetry is not that different languages are used, but that the same language is used, differently. In an ordinary English sentence, each word has one meaning, and the sentence too, has one meaning. In a poem, the meaning is far more dense. Each word carries several meanings; and the sentence as a whole carries an enormous density of interlocking meanings, which together illuminate the whole.
The same is true for pattern languages. It is possible to make buildings by stringing together patterns, in a rather loose way. A building made like this, is an assembly of patterns. It is not dense. It is not profound. But it is also possible to put patterns together in such a way that many many patterns overlap in the same physical space: the building is very dense; it has many meanings captured in a small space; and through this density, it becomes profound.
[...] It is essential then, once you have learned to use the language, that you pay attention to the possibility of compressing the many patterns which you put together, in the smallest possible space. You may think of this process of compressing patterns as a way to make the cheapest possible building which has the necessary patterns in it. It is, also, the only way of using a pattern language to make buildings which are poems.
That’s it! Thanks for reading and until next week,
Stay safe and stay curious 🍂
Great issue, thanks for sharing!
Excellent, insightful read!