December Days 2022 #4: Eclectic
Dec. 4th, 2022 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
Both of these definitions apply, usually simultaneously. I aspire to be a professional generalist and an amateur polymath. Stay bits of knowledge gathered through research, browsing posts on all sorts of places, and other inputs lodge in my brain and remain there waiting for a recall trigger. Professionally, I have skill sets that are highly flexible and adaptable to the specific situation in front of me, even as that situation shifts from person to person. When those skill sets are deployed in real time, it can look like magic as questions and inputs produce answers and next steps to follow along with before the previous steps are completely understood. Or the experience is answering questions, some of which may seem very basic, but that somehow produce a resource for the tank at hand without having asked all that many details. Librarians, archivists, and curators can somehow talk to an expert in a field they have little to no expertise in and still manage to find useful resources for that expert, or turn up preprints and other resources. And all of that contact with experts and curious seekers only provides more opportunities for knowledge, trivia, and other things to get in the brain and then come out later on. Often times during contests of trivia, or when another curious seeker comes into the library and that piece of random information learned earlier turns out to be exactly what someone else wants to know. There's a core that gets built over time of things you know will be asked, but around that core orbits some of the most interesting stuff in the world, and no two library people's constellations and planetary systems will look the same. For someone whose brain often craves novelty, all the differences, details, and flourishes around the core of the work experience help keep it from becoming boring or uninteresting. Even if sometimes there has to be effort expended to avoid gliding over the bits that can be boring.
The other definition, the first one, talks about mixing the best elements of doctrines, methods, and styles. It's interesting to see a value judgment applied there, that the eclectic takes what they think is the best of many things and tries to synthesize them. It brings to mind the dynamo of having ideals and trying to be ideal on one pole and being as practical as possible on the other pole, and the energy generated by being in the middle of those usually opposed forces.
The clearest example I have of this is the desire for ritual and the desire for results. As someone who grew up going to the Roman Catholic Mass every week, I saw it much more as a chore than a religious or community experience. Being older, I can see its value as ritual, in participating with others in the community of believers, and in getting prompts for thinking, because the liturgical cycle of Catholicism does being up specific topics over the course of the years. It's not a dialogue, in that the priest is the only one showing while delivering the sermon, but the expectation is that the laity will contemplate the readings and the interpretation provided to them. I suspect that's also the appeal of a Bible study group to those whose denominations encourage believers to read and interpret on their own (although many of them come with the caveat that if your interpretation is too far away from the pastor's, you need to find a church more in line with you.) Doing ritual in a community setting helps people feel not alone, and gives them a form to contemplate the divine and their beliefs. And in many denominations and settings, most of the work of building the rituals, or changing them to suit the current times, that's handled by other people. (And it's not strictly limited to religious domains. Many of the martial arts have ritual as well, and a Way that is about philosophy and the correct exercise of the skills being taught and refined.)
On the other side of all of this, there's the relentlessly practical side, the one encapsulated in a quote attributed to Pat Williams: "Steal what works, fix what's broke, fake the rest." I have seen a similar quote earlier on, which I can't find again, of course. "Do what works, fix what's broke, discard the rest," was the version I was expecting, but both of them represent the idea of the practical. The practical cares less about the ritual and more about the results. If invoking one deity concept is more consistent than others, use that one, even if that's outside your usual pantheon. Or perhaps decide not to have a pantheon at all, but only specific gods for tasks. Or, of you are of the opinion that is all about manipulation of belief and / or mental states, then maybe you don't even go all the way into gods and instead just work with the concepts and their implementations, however you've decided to implement them. With just enough abstraction needed for the human mind interface for it. Which itself takes a certain amount of practice and comfort with your chosen structure.
When encountering "eclectic" in previous readings, it was usually in the context of "an eclectic is a practitioner who doesn't subscribe to a single system," either without a value judgment or with one that suggested the eclectic was much more of a dilettante than a serious student, practitioner, or scholar. Given that was a time when non-Abrahamic religious practice was trendy (or at least getting the attention from reactionary censors, along with gay and lesbian folx,) there was probably some amount of truth to the self-described eclectic wearing their practice as an accessory, rather than as a Way.
I have a Way that I have spent my life building, interrogating, rebuilding, working and reworking. If someone, for whatever reason, wanted to write down the Way of Silver and proclaim it to others as a good and virtuous Way, the writings would probably have to be composed of interviews and analyzing what I've already written down to find the consistent parts of it.
Good luck.
The point is that it is an eclectic, because I am looking for the best things and to avoid the worst. I am looking for the place that doesn't require me to accept the idea that there are the Elect who can do no wrong and the Other who can do no right as a condition of doing ritual together. I am looking for the place where someone understands that I have already had a lifetime of rejection sensitivity and that will mean outsize anxiety and worry about failure or doing something improperly when I don't have expertise and practice. The practice whose practice is that you practice, that failure or difficulty is accepted and unremarkable (or remarked upon specifically for the purpose of avoiding putting people on pedestals,) is a practice that would work better for me. And, of course, a practice that produces results from ritual (and that explicitly says that ritual sometimes means doing things that don't require long preparation, materials, or the presence of others, even if it might be enhanced by all of those,) is also a practice that does well for me. Because I'm generally a private person about my personal beliefs and practices in embodied space (irrational fear of rejection or of being made fun of, even in my own home space) and because my eclectic nature is always open to better, and I can only find it better if I'm willing to listen to what others say and do. (Sometimes they're worse than better, and I learn from that, too.) There won't be an objective best practices, even if that's what my brain and heart truly desire. Getting to being okay with "best for now" or "to the best of my knowledge" is a thing I'm working on for myself, and every time a new connection pathway gets forged, it means there's the possibility that best will change, and a new eclectic will come from the eclectic.
- eclectic (comparative more eclectic, superlative most eclectic)
- Selecting a mixture of what appears to be best of various doctrines, methods or styles.
- Unrelated and unspecialized; heterogeneous.
Both of these definitions apply, usually simultaneously. I aspire to be a professional generalist and an amateur polymath. Stay bits of knowledge gathered through research, browsing posts on all sorts of places, and other inputs lodge in my brain and remain there waiting for a recall trigger. Professionally, I have skill sets that are highly flexible and adaptable to the specific situation in front of me, even as that situation shifts from person to person. When those skill sets are deployed in real time, it can look like magic as questions and inputs produce answers and next steps to follow along with before the previous steps are completely understood. Or the experience is answering questions, some of which may seem very basic, but that somehow produce a resource for the tank at hand without having asked all that many details. Librarians, archivists, and curators can somehow talk to an expert in a field they have little to no expertise in and still manage to find useful resources for that expert, or turn up preprints and other resources. And all of that contact with experts and curious seekers only provides more opportunities for knowledge, trivia, and other things to get in the brain and then come out later on. Often times during contests of trivia, or when another curious seeker comes into the library and that piece of random information learned earlier turns out to be exactly what someone else wants to know. There's a core that gets built over time of things you know will be asked, but around that core orbits some of the most interesting stuff in the world, and no two library people's constellations and planetary systems will look the same. For someone whose brain often craves novelty, all the differences, details, and flourishes around the core of the work experience help keep it from becoming boring or uninteresting. Even if sometimes there has to be effort expended to avoid gliding over the bits that can be boring.
The other definition, the first one, talks about mixing the best elements of doctrines, methods, and styles. It's interesting to see a value judgment applied there, that the eclectic takes what they think is the best of many things and tries to synthesize them. It brings to mind the dynamo of having ideals and trying to be ideal on one pole and being as practical as possible on the other pole, and the energy generated by being in the middle of those usually opposed forces.
The clearest example I have of this is the desire for ritual and the desire for results. As someone who grew up going to the Roman Catholic Mass every week, I saw it much more as a chore than a religious or community experience. Being older, I can see its value as ritual, in participating with others in the community of believers, and in getting prompts for thinking, because the liturgical cycle of Catholicism does being up specific topics over the course of the years. It's not a dialogue, in that the priest is the only one showing while delivering the sermon, but the expectation is that the laity will contemplate the readings and the interpretation provided to them. I suspect that's also the appeal of a Bible study group to those whose denominations encourage believers to read and interpret on their own (although many of them come with the caveat that if your interpretation is too far away from the pastor's, you need to find a church more in line with you.) Doing ritual in a community setting helps people feel not alone, and gives them a form to contemplate the divine and their beliefs. And in many denominations and settings, most of the work of building the rituals, or changing them to suit the current times, that's handled by other people. (And it's not strictly limited to religious domains. Many of the martial arts have ritual as well, and a Way that is about philosophy and the correct exercise of the skills being taught and refined.)
On the other side of all of this, there's the relentlessly practical side, the one encapsulated in a quote attributed to Pat Williams: "Steal what works, fix what's broke, fake the rest." I have seen a similar quote earlier on, which I can't find again, of course. "Do what works, fix what's broke, discard the rest," was the version I was expecting, but both of them represent the idea of the practical. The practical cares less about the ritual and more about the results. If invoking one deity concept is more consistent than others, use that one, even if that's outside your usual pantheon. Or perhaps decide not to have a pantheon at all, but only specific gods for tasks. Or, of you are of the opinion that is all about manipulation of belief and / or mental states, then maybe you don't even go all the way into gods and instead just work with the concepts and their implementations, however you've decided to implement them. With just enough abstraction needed for the human mind interface for it. Which itself takes a certain amount of practice and comfort with your chosen structure.
When encountering "eclectic" in previous readings, it was usually in the context of "an eclectic is a practitioner who doesn't subscribe to a single system," either without a value judgment or with one that suggested the eclectic was much more of a dilettante than a serious student, practitioner, or scholar. Given that was a time when non-Abrahamic religious practice was trendy (or at least getting the attention from reactionary censors, along with gay and lesbian folx,) there was probably some amount of truth to the self-described eclectic wearing their practice as an accessory, rather than as a Way.
I have a Way that I have spent my life building, interrogating, rebuilding, working and reworking. If someone, for whatever reason, wanted to write down the Way of Silver and proclaim it to others as a good and virtuous Way, the writings would probably have to be composed of interviews and analyzing what I've already written down to find the consistent parts of it.
Good luck.
The point is that it is an eclectic, because I am looking for the best things and to avoid the worst. I am looking for the place that doesn't require me to accept the idea that there are the Elect who can do no wrong and the Other who can do no right as a condition of doing ritual together. I am looking for the place where someone understands that I have already had a lifetime of rejection sensitivity and that will mean outsize anxiety and worry about failure or doing something improperly when I don't have expertise and practice. The practice whose practice is that you practice, that failure or difficulty is accepted and unremarkable (or remarked upon specifically for the purpose of avoiding putting people on pedestals,) is a practice that would work better for me. And, of course, a practice that produces results from ritual (and that explicitly says that ritual sometimes means doing things that don't require long preparation, materials, or the presence of others, even if it might be enhanced by all of those,) is also a practice that does well for me. Because I'm generally a private person about my personal beliefs and practices in embodied space (irrational fear of rejection or of being made fun of, even in my own home space) and because my eclectic nature is always open to better, and I can only find it better if I'm willing to listen to what others say and do. (Sometimes they're worse than better, and I learn from that, too.) There won't be an objective best practices, even if that's what my brain and heart truly desire. Getting to being okay with "best for now" or "to the best of my knowledge" is a thing I'm working on for myself, and every time a new connection pathway gets forged, it means there's the possibility that best will change, and a new eclectic will come from the eclectic.
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Date: 2022-12-06 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-06 02:57 am (UTC)