Aidan’s Infinite Play 8 Liminal Spaces
There are times in life where your view of the world gets fundamentally shifted.
This happened to me this last week. A person I thought was one way turned out to be another.
My view of how relationships work that I had built over my entire 19 years of life was tipped upside down.
It hurt. A lot.
As humans, we are biologically programmed to simplify the world, so it makes more sense in our minds by removing uncertainty. Most of the time, this is a good thing. It keeps us sane.
Otherwise, we would be crippled from the natural chaos of the world.
But it also leads to errors in decision making, heuristics, and cognitive biases. And when our oversimplifications of the world are inevitably proven wrong, we enter a liminal space.
Liminal spaces are the in-between spaces, the border of things. The mixture of chaos and order.
What happens in liminal spaces? Often doubt, discomfort, unfamiliarity, anxiety. But also growth, change, and discovery.
In this way, liminal spaces offer all the ingredients for self-actualization and creativity.
This is why our lowest lows are at the same time often our highest highs. It's why the worst thing that happened to you in a year is often the best thing that happened to you.
It's in the shifting point between different values that I feel most uncertainty. My past ego and values are clashing against the new path I'm trying to follow.
After this last weeks experience, I can give own realizations from journeying through this liminal space.
It's better to deal with our fears and uncertainties before they grow into something worse.
When I was in this space, I didn't reject the thoughts that came up. I let them flow through me.
I was a curious outside observer and I walked around Beebe Lake trying to learn more about what they were telling me. And I came out all the stronger because of it.
Often times, the bad things that happen to us stem from uncertainties and fears we ignored that grew into something greater. This is a conflict that humans have been juggling for thousands of years.
In fact, the dragon myth stems from it. Think about what a dragon is. It's a terrifying creature that hoards a bunch of treasure, often alongside a princess.
In other words, it's an uncertainty or fear that holds what you want until you confront it.
So if you're confronting a fear or uncertainty and in a liminal space, I wish you good luck.
Remember, life is an infinite game.
It may seem like this awful period will last forever. But you will come out stronger on the other side.
Here's what I would like to share this week.
📸News From The Channel!
How I Organize Obsidian with Maps of Content (MOCs): There has long been a battle over how to organize things inside of Obsidian and the PKM community. Folders, Tags, or Links. I attempt to answer this question definitively today through organizing with Maps of Content (MOCs), an idea originally put forward by Nick Milo in the Obsidian community. I take you through my exact process for creating MOCs with my Happiness MOC and discuss the advantages of organizing in this way.
Ian Helfant: Conflict and Insecurities of Notetaking in Academics: We talked about my dad's experience researching for his thesis and books as an undergraduate without modern-day notetaking tools, what makes researchers interested in their research, the conflict with freer form notetaking and publishing, and how to make your notes accessible to the public as an academic.
Flow state MOC: Check out the map of content I made after distilling the insights from the book, Flow The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
💡My Best Insights:
📖Book - Flow The Psychology of Optimal Experience: I recently re-read this book for the second time. It's a book that forms the foundation of my worldview. The people who live the best lives are those who find out how to reliably bring order to consciousness and enter the flow state, a state in which someone becomes completely absorbed in an activity and feels like they are flowing through time. They do this by developing the skill of being able to attend only to information which matters most for a particular activity. By gamifying one's activities, one can enter flow with the body, mind, relationships, and work.
✍️Blog Post - The Objectivity Illusion: George Carlin, once asked his audience: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” This is because of Naive realism, the belief that the way you see the world is the way it is. It comes from the [[Objectivity illusion]] is the illusion that our perception of the world is objective fact.
🎙️Podcast - 144 Gary Klein: Insights for Making Better Decisions: one of my favorite concepts from this episode was a definition of what a mental model is. A mental model describes how something works, what it's limitations are, how to work around them, and how to anticipate confusion. It's not overexaggerating to say that the most effective human beings are those that ingrain the most and best mental models for the goals they are trying to pursue. Listen to this podcast episode to begin your mental model accumulation journey!
📺YouTube Video - How To Get Over a Break Up FAST: You can probably guess why I watched this video after the intro. Trust is by far the most important aspect of a deep, meaningful relationship. This is because trust allows you to simplify the person. They say one thing and because you trust them, you can simplify that to being a part of their character. You trust that how they act is how they are. This is why a breakage of trust is one of the most painful things you can go through. Breakage of trust forces you to question your entire world view.