Not my problem... yet.

Taido/Blog has been fixed, but not neutered.

A few months after I launched Taido/Blog, I had some major prob­lems with the soft­ware back­end, and it prompted me to con­front a per­sonal weak­ness. In par­tic­u­lar, I wrote about the men­tal “will­ful igno­rance” cat­e­gory of thought of which we all seem to make lib­eral, if uncon­scious, use. This is a giant brain data­base of things we have con­sciously or uncon­sciously decided not to bother with learn­ing to understand.

I believe that this is a per­va­sive habit among humans; it’s preva­lent in every cul­ture with which I have any expe­ri­ence. Sometimes, we just decide that things are going to be impos­si­ble for us, and then we prove that assump­tion to our­selves. Here in Japan, it’s espe­cially com­mon; I can’t count the num­ber of times I’ve made a per­fectly lucid com­ment in Japanese, only to be met with the response “eigo wakari­masen (I don’t under­stand English)”. Apparently any utter­ance issued by white peo­ple is English…

Westerners are not immune to this kind of think­ing. Somebody makes a com­ment we don’t like, and we decide that this per­son is an ass­hole with­out even tak­ing the time to con­sider why he or she may have made such a state­ment. It’s quite pos­si­ble that there was a good rea­son — after all, most non-psychotic peo­ple believe them­selves to have ratio­nal pur­poses for most of what they say.

In Life, the Universe, and Everything (I think it was that one), Douglas Adams gives us a won­der­ful exam­ple of a prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion for this phe­nom­e­non in the not-my-problem field that Slartibartfast uses to hide the Starship Bistromath. What kinds of not-my-problem fields are there in Taido? What aspects of our prac­tice do we just take at face value with­out both­er­ing to look at the pos­si­bil­ity of find­ing bet­ter meth­ods? What have we cho­sen (con­sciously or uncon­sciously) not to bother learn­ing to under­stand? I’ve been try­ing to answer these ques­tions for myself in my writ­ing on Taido/Blog.

I think we rel­e­gate things to our men­tal willful-ignorance files for three major rea­sons. Sometimes, we just don’t feel some­thing is impor­tant enough. Other times, we may be trust­ing some­body else to take care of it for us. Most often, I think it’s because we don’t feel we are capa­ble of under­stand­ing the issue well enough to con­tribute sig­nif­i­cantly to man­ag­ing it. In any of these three cases, there is a very good chance that what­ever issue we store away like this will come back to bite us at a later date.

And this brings us up to date with Taido/Blog. At one point, I had been hav­ing issues with my data­base soft­ware, and I arranged what seemed like a viable patch. I fig­ured that I had solved the prob­lem and that no more cod­ing or file man­age­ment prob­lems would arise until I made my next major over­haul. Was I ever wrong.

Everything looked fine for a cou­ple of days — until I tried to post a com­ment clar­i­fy­ing a point in my Less Talk, More Rock arti­cle, and found that (as some read­ers had no doubt pre­vi­ously dis­cov­ered) the com­ment would not post, and I was rewarded for a few min­utes of thought­ful writ­ing with a blank screen. In try­ing to dis­cover the source of the prob­lem and cor­rect it, I ended break­ing my admin inter­face and ren­der­ing the entire site uned­itable in the usual manner.

The upshot of this is that I gave myself no choice but to learn a lot more about the code archi­tec­ture that makes up the WordPress blog­ging plat­form. This may pro­vide some cool ben­e­fits in the future as it will allow me to tweak things more accu­rately and avoid giant screw-ups like what hap­pened last week (which I now believe I under­stand well enough to pre­vent from hap­pen­ing again — maybe).

Anyway, let’s remem­ber that our will­ful igno­rance, our not-my-problem fields, and our attempts at avoid­ing sticky issues will even­tu­ally bite our asses. Someday, some­place, some­how — “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.” I believe that this is true in every cor­ner of our lives — of course, includ­ing Taido.

I’ve addressed some not-my-problem prob­lems with Taido in past arti­cles and plan to get around to writ­ing more in the future. Most impor­tantly though is that we all decide to begin think­ing about these issues and how we can address them in ways that are healthy and sat­is­fy­ing to all of us. Instead of look­ing at Taido in terms of “if it ain’t broke…,” let’s get down into the pro­gram­ming, into the machin­ery, and have a look at what we can do to make Taido the super-badass mar­tial art of the future is was orig­i­nally con­ceived to be.

I’m sure there are plenty of aspects of Taido that I too have at some point cho­sen to ignore. If you think of some­thing I’ve missed, please let me know.