14 nov 2012

in the same day i --

-- heard this in a radio interview with keith richards on NPR:

RICHARDS: I actually have no doubt. I can play "Street Fighting Man" and "Jumping Jack Flash" on stage and "Brown Sugar" and, you know, those kind of rockers. And they're kind of like Maseratis or Ferraris. You had the chassis. And now, you, like, remodel the body, you know? And they're always interesting to play. You're not playing the same thing ever with the songs like that. There's no, like, de rigueur, you know? Sorry, I've just come back from Paris.

-- heard this in a video interview with kyle merber from a link received in email:

MERBER: Things happen in races and circumstances change and you have to adjust your goals a bit and you have to be ready. When your vision of how a race is going to go changes, you have to change your mindset.

-- read this in a transcript of an interview with richard feyman:

FEYNMAN: I don't know what would have happened if I had thought about it. I may have decided to continue anyway, I don't know. But the point of not thinking about it when the original conditions that made the original decision had changed, that's a mistake.

---

feyman is talking about not rethinking his decision to work on the manhattan project after the original motivation of defeating the nazis was no longer in play. he talks about it quite a bit and says he's not sure he would have changed his mind. he goes on to say he is not sure that - at that time - he would have considered continuing a mistake, and he is not sure - even now - that continuing was in fact a mistake. it's not the continuing per se that he regrets. it was the not stopping to think, to even evaluate new information, that he considers a mistake.

merber is talking about a cross country race. sometimes you'll head out to race, and something will happen that changes everything. he talks about a race he'd just competed in, like the week before, where a runner in front of him tripped and he was among quite a few runners caught in the ensuing pileup. he describes the different ways that he and his teammates got up and brushed themselves off and kept going. he did consider the new information, so he didn't regret not considering it (as feyman did), but from the sound of it, he wasn't particularly happy with his response, seemed to think he could have done better somehow.

richards is talking about playing the same songs night after night for the million years he's been playing those same songs. he doesn't speak about recognising new inputs and weighing them. he doesn't speak about choosing a response based on the available information. he talks about something more instinctive, something simpler, rawer. it's like an osmosis of the inputs and development of a response all in one fell swoop, a synthesis so natural to him that he does it over and over again, night after night, chord after chord, without even thinking about it at all. he's not working, he's playing.

so, there's something here. something about immersion and decision making, about being so attuned to the circumstances that new inputs are merely nuances in the whole cloth. something also about thinking versus doing, about overthinking versus just doing. sure, these are three completely different circumstances, three completely different men. but... still... there's something here.