Dawn of April 23, 2009

April 23 dawns cool and gray and mizzly, but turns sunny this time. I could wonder at how there should be echoes in a cirque, but I am busy moving out from under.

Get Busy Moving

I count myself lucky to have once shared with Lara a three hour, donut-and-coffee fueled dash from Tacoma to a class field trip site southeast of Mount Saint Helens. Neither of us wanted to go down the night before with the rest of the class, and we were new graduate students in the same UW lab, so we shot down the freeway the next morning, late. And somewhere around the Nisqually bridge, it became evident that Lara had an answer to the single biggest ogre I was wrestling at the time, which was an answer to the question, “How does someone who thrives on approval function in the absence of clear expectation?” The answer, in a nutshell: Don’t bother with expectation and approval. Get busy moving out from under that kind of limitation.

I am not particularly a climber of ice and rock. Instead, I walk lots of miles in search of wild places that, through accidents of biogeography and geomorphology, clearly see climate. It is our strange profession to turn elegant, complete processes found in nature into estimates and their surrounding uncertainty. Lara knew that this is all too often how science works. She also knew that the true purpose is to go the other way: to go beyond our hair-raisingly clunky numbers and uncertainties and get at those elegant processes that underlie what we observe and so ineffectively measure. A power law is a mathematical version of the same idea, and it is beautiful. At that point, we were reinforcing each other’s perspectives: grappling with trying to write better and embracing the search for elegance in a field that is prone to studying noisiness – and too often, giving up. Get busy moving out from under that kind of limitation.

And then there was Lara with advice on adolescent cattledogs. We adopted a 6 month old cattledog / German shepherd cross (big ears, big curiosity, big endurance, big voice, profound need to herd, in 55 lbs of spotted and crafty soul) and within weeks I was at wits end, with a list a yard long of “What Would Jasper Chew.” Lara told me about “Greedy-proofing” during the kitchen remodel, and I learned another lesson, this one in a nearly meditative patience that she seemed so good at. What did it matter if my dog ate everything in sight? He’s a dog. Jasper-proof what little matters, and get busy moving out from under that kind of limitation.

So, now the cheerful, patient teacher who showed me how to unclip from my imagined obligations, who was my power law compadre, and who rescued me from my rescue dog, cannot offer advice and consolation when I run aground, and like so many others, I am bereft. But chances are, I should get busy moving out from under that kind of limitation. The iterations of this are as obvious as they are endless: Find another line, find another tool, sharpen the focus. If it doesn’t exist, invent it. If it’s in your way, go over, around, or through it.

Lacking the ability to describe the unlimited and infinite ideal, I looked around for the truest characterization of it I could find (apologies to those with two X chromosomes; we all know it’s universal):

“The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.”
-Don Juan Matus, Tales of Power, Castaneda

Lara, you will be missed. I thank you for your generous friendship, your example, and your kind and patient insistence that I get busy moving…..

Jeremy Littell, Seattle, WA