As we get older and gain more experience, the one thing we get better at, I think, is learning not to react to the world around us as readily. Recently, I was reminded of the idea that this is a mindset that we choose to adopt — we are either responsive or reactive to situations. Responsive is good; reactive is bad. Responsive means that we’ve taken a moment to digest external input and formulate a line of action. Reactive, on the other hand, implies a lack of intentionality on our part.

But I like to think of it thus:

To think before you (re)act is wisdom; to refrain from action altogether is Zen.

The root of the idea is this: nothing is ever as bad as it seems, and nothing is ever as good as it seems. In fact, facets of the same situation may simultaneously be better and worse than expected. Not only is the future unpredictable, it is also a continuous flow of moments, not a discrete set of milestones that we win or lose. All of this is summarized pithily in the Persian adage, “…and this, too, shall pass”.

But I’m not suggesting that we give up on our wants. Rather, I have found it to be true (more often than not) that taking no action is the quickest and most effective path to getting what you want, and all your actions or reactions, though well-intentioned, only tend to get in the way. Have you ever had the experience of working hard every single day, never taking a break because you’re worried that everything will fall apart if you do, and then one day you finally take a vacation for three weeks, and disconcertingly what happens is…nothing at all — everyone carries on just fine? In a similar vein, things that seem like huge problems often melt away; the real problems are the ones that come out of left field.

To avoid taking action requires a great deal of patience, and to be patient, one needs boundless optimism that all the right things will magically happen, that the universe will conspire to help you, and that everything will fall into place.

Be unreasonably optimistic.

It’s as simple as it sounds: we have sunflower plants by our window. I hope that in time each one of them grows up to yield a sunflower. And of course, giving us many more seeds for many more plants.

The vast majority of work product is mediocre at best. It takes an incredible amount of time and effort to raise its quality to a point where one might consider it to be ‘reasonably good’. But sometimes, you run into output that is simply superlative in its quality. A cultural factor may be at play here, for certain niches of society seem more inclined to produce such output if at all.

Consider, for example, the “Basic User Manual” of the memoir package for LaTeX typesetting, available in PDF form and linked from the package page. This supposedly “basic” manual is a whopping 625 pages long, with roughly 10 editions of the material since June 3^rd, 2001. But it isn’t the length of the manual alone that is impressive, what stands out is the degree of care that’s clearly been applied to creating the manual. At the outset, it slyly misquotes Ambrose Bierce — the definition seems fitting, but doesn’t actually exist in Bierce’s satirical work, The Devil’s Dictionary.

memoir, n. a fiction designed to flatter the subject and to impress the reader.
With apologies to Ambrose Bierce

From then on, it proceeds to explain useful terminology, but always with a sense of mirth hidden behind the curtain that’s waiting to pounce.

The point system was invented by Pierre Fournier le jeune in 1737 with a length of 0.349mm. Later in the same century François-Ambroise Didot introduced his point system with a length of 0.3759mm. This is the value still used in Europe. Much later, in 1886, the American Type Founders Association settled on 0.013837in as the standard size for the point, and the British followed in 1898. Conveniently for those who are not entirely metric in their thinking this means that six picas are approximately equal to one inch.

And here’s a brief explanation of the ms printing option, where the author clearly means business:

this tries to make the document look as though it was prepared on a typewriter. Some publishers prefer to receive poor looking submissions.

Every detail is attended to with care, and subtly reveals the richness of thought that went into it.

Another excellent specimen within this rarified space of high quality work is the manual for TikZ and PGF, a graphics typesetting system. Once again, the manual oozes quality, as it walks the reader through numerous examples of everyday usage.

One wonders why, then, is it so difficult to encounter — or create — high quality work in our day-to-day lives? Is it like the lottery — you hear about the winners all the time, despite the 1 in 292,201,338 chance that they’ve had to beat?

Today, we drove a little further out, to Longmire near Mount Rainier, to hike the Rampart Ridge Loop trail. This is another easy trail with a total length of 5.28 miles and elevation gain of 1,456 feet (if you return via the Wonderland trail as we did, instead of doubling back). The peace and quiet during the hike was absolutely worth the 2-hour drive it took us to get there. In fact, we encountered no one else during this hike except for a couple of people at the very end. I rather enjoyed this communion with nature, punctuated with conversations on random topics like speculative science.

Although, we were promised excellent views of Mount Rainier, we came across none, or perhaps we missed it behind the clouds. It’s ironic that Mount Rainier is ever present and easy to spot from Seattle and Bellevue, but much harder to find when we’re right at its foot.

The trail had a number of quaint little bridges over small streams, one of which seemed extremely rickety. The national park has some spectacular trees, and this trail is no exception.

I found some specimens of ‘Common Beargrass’ (xerophyllum tenax), ‘Devil’s Club’ (oplopanax horridus), and ‘Cascade Oregon-grape’ (berberis nervosa) along the way.

On the way back, we stopped at Narada Falls. This waterfall flows into the Paradise river, which runs parallel to the Nisqually river and eventually joins it.

The glorious Narada Falls, on the way to Paradise.

We got some coffee and soda at the Elbe Market Country Store. There are several statues of Bigfoot in front of and around the store. The light blue waters of Alder Lake by the road here was quite a sight to behold.

I’d mentioned earlier that I had abandoned (rather, left frozen) my WordPress website optimix and moved over to writing here instead. Today, I wandered back to see how things looked (much like one visits an old town that they had lived in previously). I realized that something was wrong, equations that I had typeset in LaTeX using the KaTeX plugin weren’t rendering; in fact, they were throwing an ugly error. I looked further into my WordPress admin page to discover that auto-updates were unavailable for the plugin. Then I headed over to the plugin page on the WordPress website, to learn that the plugin had been “closed” (whatever that meant) as of July 9^th, 2024, because of some “Guideline Violation”. What the heck!?

Fortunately, it turned that the already-installed plugin was actually working just fine, all I had to do was unblock JavaScript in my browser (which I’d turned off by default via NoScript and forgotten about). For now, though I don’t get further updates for the plugin, it continues to function correctly.

I am still curious to know what that supposed “Guideline Violation” is.