Bucky & Us

Trim Tabulations

Bucky & Us

Trim Tabulations

R. Buckminster Fuller was a man of many angles. His areas of interest were widely distributed and well integrated. 

Bucky (1895–1983) pioneered in systems thinking, he coined the term Synergetics, the study of systems in transformation, with emphasis on whole systems. He paid particular attention to behaviors unpredicted by the behavior of any components in isolation.  

In other words, he was a big parts and wholes guy. A paragon of holographic intelligence living in our always surprising Universal Theater.

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.” ~Buckminster Fuller 

ACTING HUMAN practice is about transformation of self/SELF for sanity and humanity. We’ve integrated acting craft and life as lived. We can learn from Bucky.

Trim Tab

We’ve been led to believe that hard work leads to ‘success’ in all important arenas of life. 

“Take it easy” is for weekends (unless you’re working), vacays (unless you have work with you), or for slouches (known in many circles alternatively as cultural detritus or the great unmotivated). Of course, all bets are off for the idle rich. 

The notion, less is more, is anathema. Not for Bucky. And, not for us.

The following is from themarginalian, curated and written by Maria Popova. Subscribe, if you dare. It’s easy to get lost forever, lured by her magic. https://www.themarginalian.org/ It is a glorious ode to curiosity and wisdom.

In response to an interviewer’s question, published  in a 1972 issue of Playboy, about how we can live with “a sense of the individual’s impotence to affect events, to improve or even influence our own welfare, let alone that of society,” Fuller offers his magnificent metaphor:

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, “Call me Trim Tab.”

The truth is that you get the low pressure to do things, rather than getting on the other side and trying to push the bow of the ship around. And you build that low pressure by getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don’t work and aren’t true until you start to get that trim-tab motion. It works every time. That’s the grand strategy you’re going for. So I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way. Of course, they happen only when you’re dealing with really great integrity.

Play with a sense of ease. We story as verbs. 

A core tenet of ACTING HUMAN: To do truthfully with skillful intention in our co-created Universe.

Tony Mannino, an acolyte of Sandy Meisner’s and a wonderful though little known acting teacher, offered this key lesson, “do what’s necessary, nothing more, nothing less.”

Keep it simple. No need to hang ornaments on your acting. You are not a Christmas tree. Unless you are playing a Christmas tree in one of those plays. You know, downtown - WAY downtown.

Truthful acting is acting that goes unseen. Unadorned. It trusts the truth.

Muscular Effort

Work and muscular effort have been conflated in so-called common sense and often in our behavior. We are expected to push, pull, and scrunch our facial muscles to get stuff done. The more effort the better. Try harder.

No pain, no gain.

We’ve been pushed to push. 

There are, no doubt, challenges. Life is not easy.

“Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”  ~M. Scott Peck

As HUMAN ACTORS we welcome challenges, embrace them without resistance. In meeting challenge we strengthen intention, intuition, and ingenuity.

Natural forces, the ones we knew well in our innocence as children, the ones that served to guide our efforts as we learned to walk and talk, can serve us in our post potty trained lives. 

While we are no longer in diapers (most of us), we can access ‘toddler wisdom’ through educed trust found through the practice of “as if” available to us as a function of imagination.

We must trust our integral connections to each other and the WHOLE UNIVERSE. Take heart. Nurture courage. Courage expands when used to live life alive.

Wu-Wei

PLEEEEEEEZ! Open this. It’s charming, reasonably comprehensive , and easily comprehended - when opened by an open minded human. 

Pronoia 

Paranoia has gotten outsized attention in contemporary culture. Pronoia, it’s sweet and lovely sibling, not so much.

Whereas paranoia describes a state of mind in which persons harbor the feeling that other persons or entities are conspiring against them. A person experiencing pronoia imagines the world is out to do them good. 

Degrees of paranoia are sanctioned as positive so long as they are not expressed in extreme behavior, wherein the paranoid person is diagnosable. Mental illness.

Where is the line? Great caution and careful planning that robs us of presence, blots out NOW, is all the rage. While seeing the Universe as a supportive home, indeed a part/whole of us and we as part/whole of ‘it,’ is often ridiculed as delusional thinking and ascribed to spiritual extremism or worse.

I say “try it, you might like it.”  

After all, we are inseparable from the Universe. Let’s trust ourselves. I trust you. You trust me. 

We ALL trust ALL.

One singular sensation. Makes sense to me.

Trust you are at work, in an easy and playful way, on the imitation exercise. Please check in if you like. Keen to hear all about it. 

A Sunday Song

Until Next Time,

Lights Up!