How to be not boring

A sure-fire way: engage more in conversations that explore implications.

These are conversations that make explicit the networks of implication that make locales or propositions interesting. Incidents, images, ideas, places, and items redolent of latent implications present themselves or hang in our minds; convex brings these logical associations into the light, spreads them out like an map before us, and invites us to enter. 

Bertrand Russell wrote a mathematical treatise The Theory of Implication in 1906 in which he said early on: ‘The essential property we require of implication is this: what is implied by a true proposition is true’. The word ‘true’ here grounds implication in what is reasonable and meaningful.

The process of drawing implications is not just one of inference toward proof but toward the gradual revelation of worlds: wider: This implies a world-wide conspiracy; denser: More and more people were implicated in the plot; prospective: This implies that we have at most an hour to save the planet; retrospective: His actions implied that his public statements were politically motivated; alternative: If it wasn't you, then by implication, it must have been someone else; speculative: If the earth’s gravity were less than it is, trees could be taller than they are; general: What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA; abstract: What if everyone did it; non-implied: Just because he was found standing over the body with smoking gun in his hand doesn’t prove he committed murder.   

Why do we not more often engage in exploration of implications? First of all, there’s the question of language. Some syntactical forms and intonational patterns such as  ‘let’s say’ speculation, clauses of concession, the perfect tenses, modals generally as well as negative space intonations, can open the door to exploration of implications if the willingness is there to move beyond bare, bland, unsuggestive assertions.

Secondly, not everyone is ready to engage in implication mapping as an exercise since it is a special kind of mental exertion. If recognized and practiced as important, such conversation would become less daunting.

Finally, we’re sometimes reluctant to own the implications we discover through such conversation, not trusting the process of logical exploration. Or we may be disturbed by the uncomfortable nature of the implications we discover. 

But what we lose by not is a level of interestingness that can't be replaced by drama of presentation or profusion of detail or flow of narrative. I mean a sense of ampleness of context, of plenitude of pathways, of kinds of coherence to be discovered. There's a kind of fun to be had in exploration of implications that leaves us with a glow long after the conversation is over. Let's do more of it. 

Watchers

At Downtown Crossing, a middle aged woman in a pant-suit got on the train and sat down a seat away from me. The train was full, no empty seats and tall young men and women standing and looking at their phones--when suddenly the woman broke into a wail of anguish. With her phone pressed to her ear, she held her face and leaned over: My son is dead. My son is dead.

Over the next minutes as she tried to get through to the hospital and get details, we who sat and listened learned there had been a car accident, that the boy was 14, that it was really her child who was gone.

She wept, deep, hawking sobs, her body heaving.  She pled to Jesus for some other fact to be the case. She was in an agony of anguish.

I didn't know what to do, didn't know how to respond, and said as much to the woman on the other side of me who said herself she was at a loss. And the black woman across the way, and the young man with the laptop. As it went on, station after station, the faces took on the shape of sorrow, as I felt mine had, and we wiped our eyes. My son is dead, she cried over and over.

She stood at the door, hanging from a pole. One woman put her arm around her unti the next stop. My neighbor got up and offered tissues from a little packet. Another woman who looked as if she knew something said a few words, but nothing went on except the heart-wrenching wailing  until she got out at Stony Brook.

When we got to Forest Hills, we all left the train without looking at each other, each seared by the terrible emotions, the awful event, we'd just been in the presence of.

My wife had had a hard day, angry at herself for, uncharacteristically, getting taken by a asphalt dumping scam, but she had some ideas of what I coud have done. You could have gone with her to the hospital. Yes, I suppose you're right. I didn't think of it. I had a handkerchief not tissues and an arm around the shoulder: would that be right?

Oh, ma'am, I am so sorry for this nightmare news that tore you to pieces before us. We weren't heartless, just shy in the face of so intense a grief. Still justification doesn't matter; what does is the pain in which you are going to live for the next frightful days, pain which could as well be the lot of any of us who love.

May you soon be in the arms of a comforter, ma'am, and may the presence of God-in-love be with you with more potency than shown by any of us on the train who listened, prayed and wiped our eyes. I'm baffled, somewhat ashamed, and so, so sad.

Thriller

It's like the beginning of a kind of movie we've all seen: a countdown, potential devastation looming, a rallying-around of the team--is it enough? will it be in time?--and then, improbably but through some gutsy, brilliant, on-the-money move, calamity is averted--cue the the brass fanfare--and happy-with-relief faces gaze toward a glowing post-crisis future--except this is not cinema, there are no trick shots, no stuntmen or no sleight-of-hand edits, and the knock-out punch may fall short, get deflected, or arrive with no more punch than a cotton ball.

The scenes of catastrophe that spice our thriller films and titillate us into caring about the drama of final resolution may in fact actually come to pass here, to us, inexorable over the next decade. The smart fixes, the quick decisions, the steady hands that win the day on the screen may not work here. However much we want you 150 heads of state from 195 countries, you 25,000 delegates and 50,000 participants at COP21 to agree on effective steps to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees C, no more than 2 degrees C, you may fail, and we'll bequeath to our progeny a legacy of slo-mo disruption of all that we've thought was normal.

The inertial reluctance to act is so strong, the task so large, the distractions so many, the opponents so tenacious, the time so short, in short, the odds so long...and the clock is ticking.

And yet, whenever have so many representing almost all mankind gathered to seriously address global habitability, the very ability of our planet--the whole planet!--to support our species as it stands.

This feels like a cliff-hanger, a championship final game, a fingers-crossed wait for news from the operating room. I'm in a kind of agony of apprehension. All you there: I hope there are moments when you are in some way more than yourselves, when you live up to and transcend all that mankind has learned over the millenia, and do a work that, like the resonance of certain documents, grows in significance over the generations. Give us, onlookers and well-wishers, something we can be guided by, can live up to.