Ice age, dirty rooms and compounding

If something compounds—if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth—a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic. It can be so logic-defying that you underestimate what’s possible, where growth comes from, and what it can lead to. - Morgan Housel

It was surprising to me when I read the cause of Ice ages in Morgan Housel’s amazing book The Psychology of Money. After decades of assumptions scientists basically came down to this conclusion:

“It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.”

As year after year the sun became moderately cooler, summers became slightly less warmer, the ice sheets persisted and compounded every winter year after year after year until they became so strong that the strongest of summers took thousands of years to melt it down.

Morgan uses this as a brilliant analogy to understand compounding in money. James Clear in his book Atomic Habits (which is a must read for every soul IMO) talks at length about how small habits can compound into life-defining changes that might seem unheard of at the start. And of course bad habits compound too.

The room I didn’t clean gathered some dust over the last three days and the very nature of dust is such that it attracts more dust quicker compared to that of a clean tile surface. The next three days it will exponentially cause more dust to accumulate as dust itself is a dust magnet. Imagine the effort I will have to waste to clean them at the end of the week rather than now.

There is a lot of truth in showing up to work, motivation be damned. As James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits

If you start with $100, then a 50 percent gain will take you to $150. But you only need a 33 percent loss to take you back to $100. In other words, avoiding a 33 percent loss is just as valuable as achieving a 50 percent gain.

We generally don’t think of compounding in this way. Its a concept not just for money in stocks or loans but also in the lesser tangible aspects of life. If you wanna get better at anything, be regular through thick and thin and let compounding show its magic.

The Blue Hour

Just before dawn, there’s a minute of silence. The day birds aren’t up yet and the night birds are already asleep. And then…..there’s real silence. -Reinette (From the film)

Started watching this beautiful film yesterday by Eric Rohmer. The Blue Hour is part 1 of the film and being an early riser I could relate a lot to this. Reinette stresses heavily in the film that the minute is something to be experienced and no one can just know the blue hour without feeling it and being in the moment.

It also reminds me to get back on my schedule to wake earlier than am doing now.

White Silence

It struck me this morning that silence is a place of singularity from where every sound, every word and all of music emanates. Very much like the colour white. Like light, it contains everything, all the colours we can see and all the colours we cannot. Its a lifetimes work to find the beautiful things coming off of it when of course white or silence is the absolute beauty. Maybe this is the reason that knowingly or unknowingly the churches and many religions have white as a significant colour as part of their culture. It is the beginning and the end. It is the clay that we carve our meanings from and we try to grasp our minds onto it. It is the place where form itself takes place, even deeper, matter itself takes place from white or nothingness. Nothingness is not empty, its so full of everything that its no particular thing.

As I sit here while the rain hits the roof, there is white noise. All frequencies come from white noise, it captures everything and its nothing. White is infinite possibility.

Every morning the day is white, atleast in large portions it isn’t coloured. Each doing is creation. From white we paint our day. Each day is a painting that we keep for a lifetime. So be loving to the space that it affords you in its time. Life is a sculpture in progress.