This morning I woke up anxious. The past couple of nights have been restless. I've made the decision to go full on with my job search. Also, my mood has been a little less than ideal, the weather lately not helping much. I'm losing sleep due to my overthinking. It's not a good sight.
Making my morning coffee, my mind wouldn't stop racing with thoughts concerned with employment and what I was going to write about this morning. Eventually it got to the point where a reaction was triggered; a reaction that took a long time to develop and is much more helpful than the reactions I would have in the past. I reminded myself look around and be mindful of what I was doing in the moment.
Being mindful is not as definitive as I think many believe. Some find it through an inner examination; listening and observing your breath, feeling and focusing on sensations, etc. For me, I've found it more helpful to direct it outwards; looking around and observing my surroundings.
At first, the decision to be mindful can cause some anxiety itself. For me, reminding myself to be mindful causes me to think of it as a last ditch effort to not go into a full blown panic attack. That is a cause for concern because my thoughts can sometimes take that as a sign to start thinking about what could happen if becoming mindful doesn't work out. That wasn't the case this time (as is always the case) and I simply began to look around myself; kitchen counter-tops, outside the window, the moving oils on the surface of the coffee I just poured. Focusing on the cup of coffee's liquid surface, my eyes began to change focus to what the surface was reflecting; a small halogen tube light underneath the moulding above the sink. I never knew this was there and was a little giddy about the discovery I had just made. Suddenly, I was reminded of Luhmann and his ethics.
Up until reading Luhmann, my training had really only presented observing in either two ways; one, as a means to an end, and two, as a necessary evil. The former places observation as simply the gathering of data for what matters later on, making generalizations and analyses that are validated by the data gathered. Observing is only one step in a process, the later stages having more significance as the move further away from observation, in and of itself, into those observation's synthesis and dissemination. My training as an anthropologist in the post-Writing Culture academy, justifiably took to task this placement of observation as a mean to an end. But I've become equally as unsatisfied with, what I see as, the more popular responses to observation's belittlement in the scientific process; an over-emphasis of its negative presumptions.
The reliance on observations to make reasonable generalizations is a significant topic coming up through the social science's academy. This is for good reason; it's an absurdly productive topic for science. With every new person confronted with it, there's the potential for new takes, understandings and ways to address it. It is a problem, don't get me wrong. But it's a good, if not necessary, problem to have. However, succumbing to this problem is as detrimental to the scientific method and imagination as is its placement in a factory=line whose ultimate goal is results. Observing as an individual doesn't only have its faults and shortcomings (faults and shortcomings that take their cues from, paradoxically, the things they're criticizing), but also its advantages.
Luhmann's take on observing is going to be incredibly curtailed for my purposes here. What Luhmann does in his re-imagining of Parsons' social systems theory is place observation basically at the centre of everything. Luhmann isn't using observation as a means to end (though it can be used as such) or subjecting observation to a criticism that devalues it (though Luhmann's method is a reflexive one). What Luhmann suggests, instead, is an observing of the observer, not as a means to critique it, but to only further the action of observation. This isn't as teleological as it may seem at first because it isn't presented as an argument or a logic. What Luhmann does is present it as such and leaves his audience to decide whether or not it would be more productive to succumb to observation's pitfalls, or to go forth with the work trying one's best, with honesty and reason, to isolate personal biases in order to present potentially helpful conclusions? Do we find defeat in science's self-propelling logic, or do we take part in its proliferation in earnest curiosity to see where it ends up next?
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