An Exercise In Data Collection

The last couple of weeks have been, for almost everyone I’ve asked, long. Not good, not bad, just long. It is difficult to describe how the return to the cycle of lectures and rehearsals after the long stretch of summer is disconcerting and difficult. It is not aided by the university’s systems never quite meshing; the administrators never quite communicate properly with the academics, the timetable is the looming spectre which is to control our lives for another nine months.

I’m not going to insult you by saying anything unnecessary. I’ve simply come to tell you about a poisonous thing in the hope that you’ll provide an antidote.

Upstairs, Downstairs (2010) --- “The Love That Pays The Price”

For me, it feels like full seasons have happened since I wrote my last post, but it has been less than a fortnight. Having even more rehearsals than usual at the moment is exacerbating the feeling of time passing at an uncomfortably fast rate, but is not the leading cause.

Identifying the crux of a problem facilitates finding a solution; the issue lies when the problem is unclear or the solution is just to wait and see. Waiting can feel like an eternity when the onwards march of the surrounding world is so relentless. There is a word for the fear of time passing and leaving you behind: temporaphobia. Is this not just a universal fact of life, the sense that life is both not enough to get everything done and also too much to bear? I’m currently in the process of an emotional reset, and it’s astonishing how unusual it is for me to feel normal.

On multiple occasions in the last week, often against my better judgement, I have found myself talking about problems that I have, or more to the point, one specific problem. This could be the climax of that, in fact, albeit in very roundabout terms. In talking to others when my guards are dropped, the hope is always that the data which I seek is going to present itself. It rarely, if ever, does. We cannot act in good faith to others if we act without collecting the necessary and sufficient information to validate our actions. Where do we draw the line of sufficiency? To this, I have no answer.

The best way to make a change is to act as if the change has already happened.

Hank Green (on ‘Dear Hank and John’)

I have given bad advice frequently on the subject of when to act. The problem is that I’ve never got it right myself, and it is such an instinctual thing that most cannot even explain how to tell, or how they knew. I am inclined to say that I should act soon, as once sufficient data has been gathered, it may be too late. Time is not something I have in bounteous quantities at present, nor is patience. In my particular situation, there is a disjunct between the necessary and the sufficient. How to cope if the initial necessary condition for resolution is fulfilled but is proven to have been insufficient is a hurdle which is going to have to be vaulted, preferably without too much disaster.

Playing the game theory is hard when it comes to real human problems.
I am suffering with analysis paralysis about the most basic of human emotional states.
The more data gathering which happens, the worse it will become.
It would be a bad idea, or selfish, or an uncomfortable power dynamic, or just too soon, to tackle the problem head on, without having to collect data first.
Or would it be?
Really?