The Man Behind the Curtain: Wrapping Up the 'Strings' of 2018
Which Theories was I Able to String Together This Year?
By Ray Brimble, January 9, 2019
Remember that scene from the Wizard of Oz when the little dog Toto pulls back the curtain revealing that the “Great Oz” is just an old fat guy pulling levers and creating scary sounds and smoke in the “Great Hall of Oz”? Well, I am THAT one! Only I am not sure which: Oz, or Toto.
Blogs are the modern equivalent of scary sounds and smoke. Whether we admit it or not, what we post is meant to impress. I doubled up on the smoke and mirrors by naming my blog, “String Theory.” So between publishing this blog and giving it a fancy-pants, scientific name, I thought I might build myself a poor-man’s digital-age version of The Great Hall of Oz. But I can’t help myself, so I have to play the part of Toto too (“and your little dog, Toto, too,” the Wicked Witch of the West said), by pulling back the curtain on my own danged self. To complete this metaphor, I will, lastly, proclaim, “PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN! The Great Oz will see you now….”
The question I have for Oz… er… myself is, “what does this String Theory stuff mean?” Not the astrophysical theory itself—I just co-opted the name, because I liked it, the scientific theory gave my stuff a bit of levitation, and I wanted the gravitas of something that sounded mysteriously IMPORTANT. My question has more to do with what I was trying to say by selecting the articles and themes I picked in 2018.
Let me introduce you to my blog-a-teer, Mary Rose Avila. She is the one who actually puts together my content and presents it in the form you see every week. When I first came to Mary Rose and told her I wanted to produce a blog, she asked me what I hoped to accomplish from these efforts. Usually, people want to promote their business, their special interests, or, even more likely, themselves. None of those reasons motivated me. The truth is, I did not know why I wanted to launch String Theory. My thought was that we would just do it for a year, look at what we had done, and then try to decipher what it is we did, and possibly what I was trying to say when I said it. I hoped that the whole would be greater than the sum of the parts. Mary Rose thought I was crazy. But she helped me anyway—thank you, M.R.!
So, here we are. After a year, String Theory has about twenty-five postings equally split between re-posts of interesting articles and my own original essays, all divided into four somewhat disparate “categories”: Global Business and Investing, Being Human, Responsible Globalization, and Airports/Aviation. Has a common theme emerged? We expected to settle on the obvious which is that strings are things that tie—all things are connected. This is true. However, there are all kinds of other strings.
History is a string—how did we, or it, get this way?
A string can be an explanation.
A fishing line is a type of string helping to “catch” something you may not see.
A string can be an instrument of measurement.
A string can be a thread, woven into a tapestry
or pulled to unravel
followed as a path
or roped as a barrier.
A string can be the conveyor of the notes in a song
a clue
a bow tie
a catch
a noose.
A string can be the shortest distance between two points
Or, it can meander endlessly
I could go on. A string of thoughts can be never-ending.
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I began collecting thoughts and essays without regard to their general ties to any other, but rather because they struck me as interesting. These pieces are now a collection—curation as creative wandering. “The wandering man is not always lost?”
They are a collection of “strings.” However, I did not choose, or perhaps I did not know what type of string they might be, or what the connection to anything else was. Only now am I looking back to discern this. For instance, from this last year’s collection, here are a few observations on why I might have chosen each topic:
Travel is a type of connectivity. A string between two very real places, as well as states of mind. I have always been interested in the “getting to” part of travel as well as being there. That’s the string I felt most compelled to talk about this year. Jet lag and a restaurant that looked like an old Pan Am first class section were two of my favorites.
Airports are the place where the strings of travel and transport connect. I thought I was including essays on airports because that is one of the businesses I have been associated with for many years. However, I can now see there is a metaphorical basis for my inclusion of this topic. In fact, the name of my company, Lynxs Group, was originally a tip of the hat to our on-airport cargo facilities “linking” the ground and air transport. And you thought it was about a hairy cat from the Arctic?
Another string is sharing our sensibilities, be they political or cultural. The rope we all pull is stronger if the individual threads of the rope are wound properly. I included an article on how to debate, as well as one on the wonders of Scandinavian worldview to demonstrate how we might benefit, both individually, and societally, by our proximity to diverse views and ways of looking at the world.
Most of the essays I wrote involved the string that ties who you are with who you think you are. “FU Money” discusses how we each can have a completely different relationship with money, and it with us. “Bringing the Abstract into Concrete” discusses four primary archetypes which represent various pathways (strings) to “getting shit done.” My final post of the year, the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, is a veritable tapestry woven with strings of wisdom about what sort of a person we should all aspire to be.
I did not know it at the time, but my emphasis on “connectivity” turned out to be rather superficial. Only when I went back and reviewed the collection as a whole did I realize that what really interested me was the type of variety of “strings” that exist in our universe. It’s almost as if they hum with their own unique vibrations, infinite in number, cause, and effect.
This year, I hope to identify the type of string, and the cause and effect of its vibration, in each story I present. If last year’s challenge was simply to name the meaning of my own String Theory, this year I want to weave a larger curtain from these strings.What patterns might emerge in this curtain? I honestly don’t know, but when Toto pulls it back next December, and I emerge out from behind it again, I hope it reveals something interesting and valuable enough to have spent my time writing, and your time reading.Wish me luck, Dear Readers. Weee’rrrreee off to see the Wizard!