Maintaining a status quo

This isn’t about computers, but a computer issue I had today got me thinking. I spent about 6 hours working on a dumb but crippling computer problem; seemed like it should have been minor, but minor or not, it would have stopped me from working come Monday so I needed to fix it. I have a Mac, but I run Windows XP on it, too, using a program called Parallels. It’s pretty cool when it works, and it usually does. But it introduces some new wrinkles, and occasionally I have to work for 6 hours to get things running again. (All things given equal, it’s been easier for me to coax a fussy program like Parallels back to working every once in a while than getting a Windows machine back up once things have gone awry. Virtualization is mostly cool most of the time. Your mileage may vary.) It’s a little sad to spend a Sunday doing stuff like this, but a) I’m kind of sick today, so I was sitting around anyway, b) some of the time I spent was just waiting for the computer, so I played PS2 while I waited, and c) better Sunday than during the week when I have real deadlines.

Anyway, after a bunch of trial and error – mostly error – I found a magic combination of stuff to fix it, and now I’m more or less in the same position I was in at the end of last week. Half of the last day of my tearfully short weekend spent just getting where I used to be.

Once I got that feeling of relief and could move on with my day, it got me thinking; I spent 6 hours just trying to get back to where I used to be, and it never entered my mind to work on making things better than they were before. There are other ways to accomplish what I was working fixing today – other programs that allow Windows to run on a Mac, for example – and I could have taken a chance on one of them and possibly not just fixed my problem but made an improvement in reliability or speed or something. It never occurred to me to try until I was totally done. Once I identified that there was a problem, everything else got blocked out and I developed troubleshooting-tunnelvision where I only considered the narrow range of options that I instinctively come up with for “fixing the problem.” And the way I’ve come to define “fixing the problem” is a pretty common one – I fight to get it back to how it was before. And, when I’m honest about it, I usually settle for “most of the way back,” so things aren’t even as good as before. Necessary or not.

How often do I do that? Pretty often, it seems. I’m sure I occasionally spot opportunities to make things better rather than just get them back to some basic, comfortable level. Actually, I’m sure of it; I do it with my client work all the time. They might ask for one thing, but if I see a way of providing what they’re looking for that might help them more than the specific thing they’ve asked for, I’ll usually suggest it, and sometimes they even take me up on it. But that “working for others” mindset seems to be the main thing that triggers my interest in looking for other answers.

When I’m sick, I just patiently (or not patiently) do whatever it takes to get better. Rest. Have a fever. Drink liquids. Medicate. Herbicate. Whatever. But the goal is always to feel like I felt before, or even close to it.

Same with people; if I argue with my wife or hurt my daughter’s feelings, all I end up doing is working so things were “like they were before.” I never look at it as an opportunity to maybe make things better, I just want to fix them so they’re back how they were.

If I cook something from a recipe that turns out well, I frantically seek out the same recipe when it comes to cooking that same dish again. I mean, I actually do try to improve recipes and things food-related. It’s safe to say that there’s probably a better recipe out there for everything I’ve ever tried to cook, but there are also worse ones, so I tend to stick with a known one rather than take the risks involved with finding a better one. Not exactly life or death stuff, but even with a soup recipe, I find myself clinging to what’s “safe.” I don’t think I’m alone. We form these “safe judgements” about almost everything in our lives. Where we buy gas. Where we casually dine out. The kind of eggs we buy. The kind of movies we watch. Maybe even our political party or religion. It’s not a terrible thing to passively choose what’s safe rather than actively seek what’s good, it’s probably wired into us at some level, but it feels like a slow way to evolve. (Which introduces admittedly knotty questions like, “Just how fast is one supposed to evolve?” or “Is evolving faster better?” or even “Do you really have any say in how fast you evolve, or are you just genetically predisposed to either fight or accept the speed with which things change and the real choices are all illusory?” But I’ll conveniently ignore them.)

It’s not as though every situation must always and absolutely present opportunity to make things better, faster, and stronger. But there’s a way to learn from almost everything that happens. I find that the less I know about something, the bigger chances I take and the bigger leaps I make in the progress, and the more I think I know about something, the more conservative my improvements. I mean, that’s actually how things are supposed to work – there’s a bigger leap from “not playing an instrument / playing an instrument” than “playing in instrument well / playing an instrument more well.” (Isn’t there?) But how much of that is self imposed? We all know that our progress is supposed to slow when we reach a certain point, but how much of our slowing is just living up to our own expectation? (Note to self: Insert rambling about theoretical, unimportant questions here, i.e. “How does one judge just how much progress they’re making at something, and when is it enough?”)

Problem solving is easy, and it feels like the time pressures and multitasking lifestyle a lot of us live forces us to be pretty modal, and when we troubleshoot, we need to kill those problems as quickly as possible so we can pick our kid up from school or get gas or stir the soup or get back to work. Bike has flat tire? Fix flat tire. Battery dead? Change battery. In the interest of “solving the problem,” I find I actually gloss over what caused the problem to begin with most of the time; it’s actually one of the things that helps me fix my own computer – I don’t actually care why something happens, I just want to fix it. I can usually accomplish B without confronting A. Sure, it was just a technical issue with a technical solution I arrived at through trial and error and a determination to repeat the same thing over and over until it worked, which it eventually did. But the real issue deal could also be said to be “how I work.” Might that not be worth really evaluating?

I’m really intrigued by the thought that there are obvious opportunities to learn things and do better around me all the time, and I that just don’t see them. For example, I just said some cross words to my wife about something unimportant. She might not even care, I’m not sure she even noticed, but if she did notice and she does care, my first instinct will definitely be to “fix it,” to do the work that brings things back to where they were. That ignores the obvious question, “Is where we were that great?” Or better, “Is where we were so good that it can’t be improved?” What if I look at what caused my cross words – specifically my own role, not all the other circumstances I can and will use to justify my actions – and try to do more? What if I can spot something that would help me fix some little quirk in myself – take something bad I’ve done and use it to actually do a little better in the future? Seems hard to implement 24/7, but suddenly communication between 2 people who know each other well could actually be communication and not the scripted action/reaction that it’s so easy to fall into.

It probably sounds dumb and lofty and conceptual, but for the moment it seems to me like I’ve understood the relationship between a hammer and a nail for the first time. We’ll see how it works.

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