Person to person ...

... ashes to ashes

Earlier this year I lost a contract I’ve had writing a daily news wrap for a particular industry client for more than 25 years. The contract was in fact often non-existent for that period, and when I worked full-time for an employer over those years, I subcontracted the work out to someone else. But at the point they terminated me, we had a contract, and they were 3 months late paying me. When they gave me notice (actually, they tried to end things overnight, so I had to remind them about the contract) I thought perhaps they were in financial difficulties, so I offered to renegotiate my rate. No, they said, they were “moving in a different strategic direction.”

Precisely 30 days after that, the AI version of what I used to write hit my inbox—obviously they didn’t realise I was subscribed myself. Filled with rage at how terrible the AI version was compared to what I usually delivered—it missed key stories of the day and cited third-rate blogs—I emailed them the version of what I would have done for comparison. The AI “would improve,” they insisted, and their decision was final.

***

This isn’t a rant about AI but rather an invitation to consider what it means to be human. What does it mean to live in a body? And to relate to other people, also beings with bodies. It’s this having-a-body, a fallible, mistake-prone, fleshy, emotion-producing, messy, body business that AI can’t replicate (beyond its hallucinations).

Is it a problem that AI doesn’t have a body, or is it a problem that we do?

Some anti-AI arguments seem to be repeats of what happens every time a wave of technology sweeps through society, wiping out some jobs, creating new ones (but still, relentlessly pushing capital up to the fewer and fewer and fewer at the top… so they can spend millions on a wedding, say, in a sinking city, with guests flown in private while we recycle bottles and make sure we take our keep cup to our local cafe).

I agree.

Like most of us, I’ve reskilled multiple times—learning to type on a manual typewriter, upgrading to a word processor, then a little Apple Mac box, then a big desktop Mac, then Windows for work, then back to a laptop Mac etc., etc., with all the iterations of different software that also involved (remember Quark Xpress?)

AI feels different, and particularly frightening, when it comes to creativity. (Though apparently there will be new jobs… like article designers, rather than writers 😳.)

I like this illustrator’s take, who says, “The essence of art… is that there was somebody at the other end with the intent to express something. Communicating emotions from person to person through writing, composing or painting is inefficient and inherently human.” Does it matter if an AI was the creator? For me, as a human, it’s simply not that interesting if a person isn’t trying to communicate with me. The question then though of course, is what if it’s a human using AI in some way to communicate with me? What proportion of person vs AI would be okay for me?

The mother of one of my children’s friends has always sent WA messages, our main way of communicating, in beautifully quirky English—not her first language. She has charming turns of phrases and she’s perfectly easy to understand. Recently, she started to run her messages through AI for editing before sending them to me. She is flattened and homogenised. I hate reading these messages and want the old her back.

It feels like we’re outsourcing our humanity.

No AI used in the creation of this image or these fields. I don’t think?

I feel a surge of rage every time I come across ad copy that begins, “Step into a world of…”, “Elevate your…”, “This is your sign to…”. If I wasn’t interested in your ad to begin with, I’m even less interested in an ad that has been written by AI. I want to deal with a human, much more of a human. (This, before we even consider the environmental costs.)

We have bodies. There is something irrefutable about this. We’re using our brains to communicate, but we’re using so much more than that.

I can imagine a two-tier world. One tier is for people who get to go outside and experience their bodies in the real world. The other is for those who operate exclusively online, able to be anywhere at their whim through an AI-crafted virtual reality, able to have all their needs met by a machine—just so long as we work out how to take care of the now-useless body. The question I suppose I have is: which tier would you rather have access to? The one challenging your body in order to access pleasure, or the one where it’s all easy, it’s all pleasurable?

***

Our neighbours just got a security camera for their front gate. Initially I was enraged (again!) at the violation of our privacy, as they can now see every time we leave or return home, its eyes sticking to my physical body as I move.

Coincidentally, right before they installed it, I had ordered a similar camera for Aldo the dog, who is crated when left alone. When it arrived, I set it up, went out for a late dinner, and was able to see that he was calm and asleep the whole time. Then I realised that I could speak to him through the camera! Then I realised there was a night mode, so I could see him even more clearly than when his black body was asleep on his dark-grey doggie bed! Miraculous!

I couldn’t help thinking of the military technology that likely had to be developed in order for us to get to this point. How the technology of war is improving the lives of those of us not yet being monitored, tracked, surveilled, and followed. If we don’t have a body, we can’t be monitored, tracked, surveilled, and followed. There’s nothing for that movement sensor to detect. But then if we’re exclusively online… every single thing can.

I see you, buddy.

***

And I wonder how yoga ties into this. Whether it’s yoga, or archery, or zorbing, again AI could be involved in the sequencing, in the planning, in the analysis.

But when it comes down to it, the only way to do yoga is to use your body. We might be using our body to ultimately access the power of our mind through meditation, but there’s a sense that we are honouring both sides of the coin, the body and the mind, with a practice that has to be approached with the body.

I take some solace in the idea that maybe yoga, maybe any physical expression and movement, is a form of rebellion against this new order. Celebrating the body, revelling in its heaviness, it’s inflexibility (yes, see me try to touch my toes and not reach!), it’s imperfections, it’s unpredictability. There are no shortcuts.

Tethered to the neighbourhood

... a different kind of grounding

We passed Olga and her dog Noah, a seven-year-old pittie, on a quiet street on one of our smaller walking loops first, where groups of three or four dogs swarm out of gangs (lanes) just as you pass their entrances, then one barks to summon all their mates to rush to the tops of their respective gangs, too. I recommended vinegar spray to her when she told me how bad they could get along this particular stretch.

We passed each other a few more times, and the other day started chatting from opposite sides of the road about where we like to walk. Aldo took a load off, panting after a few kilometres, while Noah edged to the end of his leash, hoping to continue his walk. She told me about a rice paddy walk starting from a gang along our big-loop walk. I checked it out the next day with Skye, and though pretty, passing stubbornly still cows and paddy in various stages of growth—as well as a multitude of construction sites violently carved into the green—it didn’t seem quite long enough. It ended on a little bamboo-shaded island created by two intersecting subak streams, with no way of continuing on. The next day I took Aldo, and realised that I had taken the wrong gang; we cut across paddy to find the right one, and bumped into Zeto, a two-year-old tan Doberman, and his walker Alik (who walks him from 8-12 and 2-4 each day—no wonder we see them everywhere!), whom Olga had mentioned she also passes regularly. The six of us, a little community, tethered to our dogs and the land we crisscross with them again and again, day after day, saying a quick hello and trudging on, dogs on short leashes eyeing each other uneasily. There’s a certain window of the day especially good for walking, when the street dogs have curled up out of view, ready for the worst of the heat or have not yet re-emerged, but the streets are not too hot to walk on bare-pawed. Rain is okay; cloud is better.

***

We have got in the habit of jumping on our motorbike to drive about a kilometre or so from home before we start our various street walks, originally to avoid our next door neighbour’s dog but, now he’s gone, just to avoid the worst of the area’s street dogs. Needing to walk Aldo every day has created a different relationship between the neighbourhood and me. I say hello now to the group of women and single man who sit outside an open-air shopfront, assembling canang, the Balinese decorations laid out around the home and streets every day. The man at the pool pump place, which never seems to close, always nods a greeting if his head isn’t bowed over a mysterious chunk of metal. Aldo ignores the scruffy dog perpetually sleeping outside the supermarket, but likes to bark back at a grumpy beagle who is sometimes behind a fence, sometimes outside with his owner. One day I stopped at one of the two vet clinics we go to, and asked if I could pop Aldo on the scale to be weighed, while no other dogs were around. It had been a while between visits. He clocked in at 39 kilograms. A woman at one of the laundries we seem to pass every 200 metres—their fabric softener perfume mingling with incense, remnants of a morning’s mosquito fogging, and petrol fumes—chatted with me one day when she saw Aldo straining to chase a cat. She told me not to worry; she knows cats and dogs who have become friends. One of the streets we walk along is predominantly Muslim, so there are fewer dogs than usual Balinese neighborhoods, but cats have slunk into the vacuum. They sit atop piles of dirt pooping, sip from water bowls left outside minimarts, sleep next to craftspeople threading bamboo blinds on the floor of their tiled shops, and crouch waiting for Aldo outside nail salons.

The baristas at our favourite coffee shop bring out Aldo’s water before my pineapple blueberry juice. Sometimes I order bacon for Aldo; the staff bring it on a plate plus a takeaway container, like they are rationing it out for him. We say hello to the Qatari man wearing headphones who is here almost every day. He’s just adopted a Chihuaha, but used to have a Rottweiler. A woman who works on a construction site a few blocks down from the cafe and comes here every now and again married her husband with their Dobermans in attendance—they have since passed away. A tattoo artist sitting outside her studio nearby asked for advice on getting her dog to stop leash pulling; a couple eating lunch here told me they wanted to adopt a dog, but were trying for a baby first.

***

We’ve had our moments. The floppy waving balloon man outside our butcher, where we get Aldo’s beef heart and liver, petrified Aldo the first time we passed him. He flinched and tried to lunge away bang onto the busy road, getting nicked by a bike. He was surprised by something outside a wet market, whacking his muscular tank of a torso into my knees, flinging me to the ground. I’ve had leash burns from sudden lunging at dogs that have emerged from nowhere, cats that have fallen from the heavens, and squirrels that have metamorphised in front of our eyes on electricity wires. I’ve had walks where Aldo has refused to go further, collapsing onto the grass and rolling to one side, looking at anything except me to make himself invisible. It was outside the canang-makers shop—they liked that one. We know where all the taps are to stop and get a drink of water. We know the best strips of grass for sniffing and the stretches of semi-broken concrete where I can let the leash out long so he can trot along at his own speed instead of mine.

We reduce grown motorcyling men to five-year-olds who point and shout, “Big dog!” when they speed by, or “Go the Rotties!” even though he’s a Doberman/pitbull. Fair enough; even the vet thought he was one at first. We pass a clothes shop on a street where lunatics like us are the only passing foot traffic, but a woman stands with brochures and asks us to come in to try something on. We’ve seen cafes close and refurbish and reopen, we’ve seen ordinary gang entrances transformed with intricate decorations of white and gold and colourful flowers for weddings, we’ve made use of new footpaths installed on some streets, and stumbled over muddy paths cracked beyond repair on others. You can’t let the world’s headlines get to you when you’re worried about spraining an ankle or being rushed by a pack of snarling teeth-bared dogs.

***

So a new offshoot on a regular loop is a find. An extra kilometre to wander along, unfinished car-free asphalt with only an occasional dog to get by. The green is marred by box-style villas plonked onto the paddy, with alang-alang awnings and gleaming new rubbish bins outside. Most are unfinished, covered with gangs of labourers sweating in the heat, their handwashed laundry hanging in semi-finished rooms. They work barefoot on bamboo scaffolding soaring meters above us, shovel dog-pee stained sand into concrete mixes, and manoeuvre wheelbarrows around muddy tracks. I think we will be able to cut across 50 metres of paddy to join up with one of our other walking streets, adding “falling into mud” to our list of accomplishments, perhaps.

A rebirth...

... of this newsletter

Have you noticed how time flashes by these days? When I was a teenager, spending a night at home alone felt like an eternity. The minutes crawled by. A half-hour TV show felt like a commitment. Writing in my diary took 10 luxurious minutes that I always seemed to have. Doing the washing up? Felt like it took an age. My study plan listed five-minute breaks. I easily had 45 minutes to talk on the phone.

A night at home now goes by in a blink. I spend more time thinking about all the things I will get done tomorrow instead of getting anything done now. If you want to talk on the phone, I probably can’t. Then it’s either a book or a show, I can’t possibly do both. Cooking? Then no book or show, by the time I’m done I’ll be ready for bed.

I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but sometimes I wonder if this speeding up of time is evolution’s way of making it easier to age. When we finally get frail and our health span falls short of our life span, the time will be zipping by so swiftly we won’t really care. Most of us seem to get longsighted, too, just as our wrinkles start to deepen; nature can be kind as well as brutal.

---

I had a minor motorbike accident a couple of weeks ago, dropping the bike and squashing my foot. I went for an x-ray after two days of hobbling around to be sure there was no fracture. There wasn’t. I still can’t put pressure on my big toe, but the dogs must be walked (@couchfish is on his way to the UK by train) so I’ve been hobbling around the block and down to the beach with them. The funny thing is that this foot was already sore; a swollen ankle and inability to point my toes (so an inability to sit on heels) that has gone on for more than a year with no real cause. I think it’s just hormones, as the other foot had the same thing, but got better early last year with a few straight days of 90-minute Bikram classes. I had 14 days of 90s in Portugal this April (I re-did a hot yoga training) and while it got a bit better, it was still bothering me. Then today, approaching a rubbish bin outside Potato Head, my other foot stepped on a wooden pole concealed just underneath sand that has been eroding away thanks to the footpath construction along Batu Belig beach. It broke the skin and I swore, it hurt so much. Is the universe telling me to put my feet up?

---

I lost a corporate contract that I had for 25+ years on the first day of the Portugal training. I’d never communicated with the person who emailed me, who thought I’d started with them during Covid, and didn’t realise we had a contract. I completed the 30 days the contract provided for, and then precisely, oddly, 30 days after that, I received a new version of the email they had said was not being sent anymore. They mustn’t have realised I was subscribed. It was so terrible I was embarassed to have been associated with it. I told them so, and somewhat like a petulant child sent them what I would have done, asking whether they wanted to reconsider. This time (after they promptly unsubscribed me), someone I did know called and said that (i) they had handled things badly and (ii) the new version “will get better over time,” presumably code for “it’s AI-generated.” I think 25+ years is probably 20+ years longer than anyone has a contract these days, so I had a fair innings.

Feet up, then.

---

And though the dogs need walking, Aldo doesn’t need anywhere near as much time aside from that as he has for the past 2 years. Raising a dog like him was 80% of the work of raising a toddler during daylight hours (at least dogs, or at least Aldo, is easier at night with rarely a bark). I would never get another dog aged under two. I happened upon a Thread of a stack of people proudly saying they had got their rescue dogs aged around two or so, after they had been re-homed multiple times, none of them twigging that the reason they were able to handle them was because they had aged into relative calm. A trainer told me that all dogs are assholes aged 10 months to two years and it was the most validating thing I had ever heard. He’s still not there yet, but he’s so much better. The two things that got us here: using a figure 8 lead (perfect for neutralising strong dogs) and vinegar spray (perfect for repelling packs of Bali dogs descending on you unexpectedly on walks).

Raising and training a dog is also set against ideological battlegrounds similar to parenting. Balanced versus force-free. Let them sleep on the bed, don’t let them sleep on the bed! Avoid triggers, approach triggers! Crate train, don’t crate train! Use an e-collar, don’t use an e-collar! Use Bravecto, don’t use Bravecto! Raw versus cooked. Don’t feed chicken! Don’t feed pork! Give organ meat, but not too much! Add oats, don’t add oats! Give ancient grains, don’t give any grains! Give bones, but no, not machine cut bones! I even have Opinions about many of these important issues now.

---

But you’ll have to hear those another time. I’ve put my feet up AND it’s bed-time.

---

If you have read this far—thanks for not getting too bored. That em dash is not an indication of this being AI-written, FYI. Decent writers have always used em dashes. This is a super soft launch-restart of what used to be a regular thing. I didn’t even bother with photos in order to hit send rather than procrastinate for another hour finding them. I hope to experiment a little bit in the weeks ahead. More on yoga? More on dogs? More on my feet? Who knows!

A quick hello ...

... and a cute puppy photo

Several poses in the 26 + 2 series dependably frustrate beginners and sometimes long-time practitioners. One is supta vajrasana, or fixed firm pose, or that one where you sit with your feet apart and place your butt on the floor. I always instruct that if your butt is not on the floor, do not go back. Often, nobody hears. Pretty much everyone tries to hurl their head back even when I say, “If your butt isn’t touching all the way on the floor, please don’t go back. Stay upright.”

The other day I asked someone to sit back up and he said (quietly, frustratedly), “But then I’m not getting the benefits of the full stretch!”

But one point of the practice might be simply to meet that spot where you feel like you want to go further, and you don’t, because your alignment becomes ugly. What happens then? How do you make the next incremental change? Do you push through it, do you breathe through it, do you work harder in the other postures, do you just wait? It doesn’t really matter but the goal is to recognise that you have met this point of resistance, and interrogate it. Do you really need the “benefits of the full stretch”? Maybe you need the benefit of stillness while sitting with the idea that you will, perhaps, never get the benefits of that particular full stretch, simply because of your particular anatomy. Or maybe it’s useful to just sit with the idea that for today, you aren’t going any further.

It’s not a work out, as a teacher of mine mentioned the other day, it’s a work in. What’s happening in that dialogue between your head and your body?

It’s always the same, you’re always different

Another day recently, a relatively new regular seemed to have a very different practice from her previous ones. She just seemed to move more easily in her body.

Afterwards she asked me, somewhat accusingly, “What did you change? You did something different today!”

I had to say no, nothing changed. That’s the beauty of a set sequence like Bikram or Ashtanga.

I said, “What did you change?”

“Oooh, well… I had a great sleep last night!”

We should think more about… 

The body, how it is telling us the truth in differing measures every second of every day. There are millions of truths running up and down the lengths of us. Pay attention to new information. Perhaps it’s time to end an old dynamic or begin something new. Stop suppressing the calls to action; the daily fatigue, the overwhelming boredom, the discomfort — it’s telling you something. There’s a root somewhere.  —Yrsa Daley-Ward via Things Worth Knowing with Farrah Storr

Slashies

I’ve been doing an excellent freelance writing/business course with Lindy Alexander, a freelancer whose work supporting other freelance writers I have followed almost right from when she started, I think. During one of the masterclass sessions she has run, the idea of being a “slashie” popped up. When you’re this, but you’re also that. You’re a plumber say, but you also paint. You’re a dentist, but you’re also a guitarist. I can really only say I know of one person in my professional network who pushes out on LinkedIn that he’s an aviation comms specialist, but also posts clips of himself wearing another hat: country and western singer. So as a yoga teacher/editor/writer (maybe adding counsellor to the list down the track) I enjoyed this Atlantic piece on how hyper-specialisation doesn’t necessarily lead to the best outcomes, including your own happiness. So many quotable snippets, but I did like: “An apparent confusion if lived with long enough may become orderly.” (The similarities in my combination, I’ve come to realise, lie in the story zone. Stories are powerful [writing]; the body tells a story, which you can change by changing your mind/body [yoga]; telling your story helps change your own narrative [counselling].)

Aldo

My daughter has been fostering Aldo, a pitbull/Doberman, for a few weeks. Would you look at those paws? It goes without saying that it’s quite different to fostering a baby, but the process of handing back is reminding me of Sarah Sentilles’ beautiful book Stranger Care.

Chilly air, stunning views

I took a short trip to Batur last week. Would you look at those spring-fed hot tub views? I got up at 5:45am to sit in the tub and watch the sun rise. It was only when I got to the tub I realised they empty it out at night.

A few things I’ve read

Lessons in Chemistry. Joyous, fun, clever.

Candy House. I liked Jennifer Egan’s sort-of follow up to A Visit From the Goon Squad a lot.

Our Missing Hearts. A beautiful, very believable dystopian tale with a focus on race and motherhood.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. George Saunders examines a selection of Russian short stories and explains why they work so well. Generously spirited, funny, and smart.

How to Slow Down Properly. It’s a short list.

It's all the same ...

... and better than you think

I’ve been noticing more what students do in what they think are the gaps between poses. They do a lot! They drink water, they scratch their arms, they wipe sweat away, they have a quiet word to the friend who brought them, they lean over if they feel dizzy (I’m guilty of that one a lot), they adjust their jewellery, they take their own sweet time turning around to get back into savasana once we’re on the floor.

Here’s the thing, though. And it’s something a teacher mentioned to a class I attended years and years ago. It all counts. Every movement, every breath, from the moment you walk in the room—if you want it to. The challenges can be both easier and harder than you think. The challenge is not, say, reaching your hands back to grab your heels in camel. Well, it is, but absolutely no more and no less than not wiping that sweat away in between standing deep breathing and half moon. What do you want to do most at any point in class? Is it having that sip of water? Then don’t take it. That might be your toughest challenge of the entire class. You want to move that hair out of your eyes? Be aware of that desire, but then choose not to move it out of your eyes. Maybe that was harder than holding half moon for sixty seconds—nobody can see it necessarily, but you just did something amazing, my friend.

There are so many opportunities for deep challenges to be met in each class and nobody has any idea when anybody else’s challenge is happening. They are not necessarily the obvious: standing head to knee, full locust, camel held deeply. They are the subtle. They are steady breath. Stillness. Mindfulness. Consistent equanimity. Maybe every moment is an opportunity of challenge. Or is the challenge to turn each moment into a balance of effort and ease no matter what?

Taking it off the mat… What if we are looking for the wrong challenges there, too? We think the challenge is, say, to practice every day. But what if it’s really stopping what doesn’t serve us: the smoking, or the online shopping, or the drinking, or the vaping, or insert X? We are more than the practice and it’s just one part of us.

The challenges are easier to find than we think. You think the challenge is reaching your hands all the way back in camel, or to keep your forehead on your knees in rabbit, but what if the real challenge is only bringing the hands back to your butt when the teacher actually says to do that, or it’s to lift your hips when he says to? It all counts. Either all of it does, or none of it does.

***

I started writing this a while ago—think January 1-ish—and time got away.

You might make more sense of my notes than me:

Irvings black like the black in Fleishman

Nick Cave

Dave Eggers

NYT new drug

***

The beauty is in the cracks.

***

So many beautiful links I can’t share, as they were open over so many weeks and so many Chrome crashes ago, thanks to so many beautiful links being open.

***

Stay challenged. XX