Large Fierce Mammal

Word to the Wise

By LFM

“Beware of the man who shoots only one gun,”
Speaks to marksmanship Able and True.
But as words to the wise,
The same Wisdom applies
To whatever endeavour you do.

For whatever the task, or what Nature would ask,
You will need skill and tools to get through it,
But success that endures
Is what actually cures,
Not just juggles the tools used to do it.

When the problem to beat isn’t beating retreat,
And it’s you, not the foe, on the run,
Are you on the right path,
Or just taking a bath,
From the things you yourself may have done?

Far too often it’s found complications abound
From the side effects dogging our acts,
And we find those travails
Might have stayed on the rails
If we’d only just stuck to the facts.

~ A Long Winter’s Night — 2021 Edition Day 3 ~

Welcome back Goode Reader. As promised when last we spoke, my purpose today is to bring you to Tiers. To begin then, let us review:

Top of Mind Tier:
Tools employed daily in engagement with your world where actions and choices are undertaken to generate the resources needed for daily living.

Bridging Tier:
Wisdom and judgement live here, supporting the Top Tier through roots set firmly in the Foundational Tier below.

Foundational Tier:
The compass. The tiller. The knowledge base and seat of power, though never that of laurels. Inexhaustible in its capacity, the more you pack into it the more you realize needs to be added. Without the top two Tiers it accomplishes nothing. Without it, the others are doomed to failure.

~ Tiers for Fears — Chapter the First ~

In keeping with sound construction practice, we will begin at the ground level with the Foundation Tier because, without a sound foundation you’ll be doomed to the hell of starting vast projects with half-vast ideas.

The Top of Mind Tier may be the place where you spend most of your waking time, but the success of actions and choices you undertake there will be dependent absolutely on the firmness of your fundament. I have oft quoted this from Gregory Bateson‘s Steps to an Ecology of Mind

“No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.”

It should be obvious that the matters best dealt with at unconscious levels by Bateson’s successful organism-about-town will not be adequately addressed by making it all up as you go along, and while I hold to the veracity of Kurt Vonnegut’s advice, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”, I will remind you, Goode reader, “Fake it ’til you make it” as widely practiced was not what he meant.

“Attitude and actions – of the two, which is more important? I would posit that actions, being a physical manifestation of attitude, are what truly matters. If you are smart but pretend to be stupid, then to the rest of humanity, your net effect on the world is that of one who is stupid. Thus, you will be effectively stupid, and treated as such, until you choose not to be. Similarly, if you choose to assemble your reality out of of half understood truths, half truths, and falsehoods you have accepted as truths, your actions will be inappropriate and ineffective when measured against the real state of affairs.” ~ Worldly Wisdom Wednesday – Wise Is as Wise Does

If you have any interest in aviation and most particularly have ever gone through flight training, you will be familiar with the parable of the aspiring pilot who starts out with two buckets — a full one with a small leak in it labelled “LUCK”, and an empty but intact one marked “EXPERIENCE” — with the lesson to be learned that there will come a day when a hand reaching into the LUCK bucket will come up empty, and when that day comes he had better have put the effort in to fill the other one.

All of this serves to highlight that for the Foundational Tier to be of any use at all, it must be built from Facts, not hopes, wishes, and suppositions.

And in addition to that Truth, do not forget: “Without the top two Tiers it accomplishes nothing. Without it, the others are doomed to failure.”

Think on this until next we meet to ascend another rung. Meanwhile, here’s Duke Dumont to sing us out.