# Clarity
**Hi, I'm Tech Capo and this is the third post on my Blog Chain**
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In my twenties I used to skydive. I took an accelerated free fall course: they
take you up 4000m high and you jump on your own but with two instructors on
each side to keep you safe. On my first jump, while I was already in free-fall
I had this flash of panic "oh no I'm gonna fall down!" but then I realised I
was already falling down, everything's fine, this was the plan all along. It
was soothing, a scary thing is happening but you are there precisly to do the scary thing.
(Recently I had this same experience watching Eliezer Yudkowsky talk about AI
doom. Yes, we are all going to die, but this was the plan all along. Might as
well enjoy watching my children laugh while I can.)
Skydiving puts you in an alien environment. The drag is coming up at you at 180
km/h and you are sort of swimming in there. It's loud. Your body is flailing
around. You have a hard time orienting yourself, all your senses are in
disarray. It's a blur. It took around ten jumps until I first noticed another
skydiver falling below me, up until then my brain lacked the proper
signal-processing patterns to do that. Or maybe it was too busy with everything
going on. Too many signals. Paying attention takes practice.
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One thing I noticed while walking around town with my kids is that they have no
idea what to look for when we're crossing the street. I'm teaching them the
concept of looking around, and they're doing the motions but they aren't really
looking. Too many signals, everything's a blur. They don't have the proper
pattern-matching circuits trained yet, or maybe they're too busy with
everything going on. Always hold their hands at crossings.
I recall that when I was learning to drive, it was very difficult to pay
attention to everything. Operating the vehicle saturated my compute so I
could hardly focus on street signs and other cars. A blur. Once I committed the
motions into muscle memory, I could observe my surroundings with more clarity.
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I've been using the BrightMind meditation app every day for the last two
months. It develops three mental muscles: concentration, balance and clarity.
Concentration is paying attention to paying attention. Balance is about doing
it without push or pull: without clinging to good sensations or flinching away
from bad ones. Clarity is about observing details about whatever you are
observing.
This practice resulted in a quantum leap in my awereness. I can pay attention
to the intricate fabric of reality, or at least my experience thereof. Life is
becoming less of a blur.
Previously I thought you can either see skydivers/traffic or you don't, it's a
binary ability. What if this is a spectrum, though? You start out from complete
blur and as you gain awarness you advance towards complete clarity, whatever
that might look like. I'm going to find out.
---
*This is a blog chain. I'm linking the previous blog post at the end of each
blog post. Here's the story of how I gotten into Bitcoin, a story of greed and
FOMO:*
[prev blog - Greed]
(ord://fccfbc0aa579655c3dd834d7f0ebf8de07f41e3cee8c5a56cbaa0e104248d7cai0)