About Panta Rhei – Page 3 – Panta Rhei Enterprise

Glad you have started reading, I am. Have you been following this blog? Or did you come by via Twitter or Facebook? Your first time on this site? Was it the bidding sequence in the title that caught your curious eye? Does it look familiar? If it does, maybe, you know Skat, a very German card game. I used to play it with family and friends.

With 18, the bidding starts. You are part of the game. You are willing to play. And you bid to win. 2018, I began my other, more personal website and blog. Willing to play. Willing to bid. And I slowly started to learn about WordPress, about blogging, and about writing. The year after, Chris and created the first pieces of our Panta Rhei Enterprise.

With 20, you continue to bid. You either have the jack of clubs or a jack of spades and you are bidding to play hearts with one or without one (the top trumps). On PantaRhei we had our best of the three years in terms of numbers: 23 posts and 944 visitors. Chris and I explored the BASE model and complexity. COVID triggered a couple of posts. And it interrupted the flow quite a bit; I reposted only four times in the first quarter of last year, when separating topics between matschulze.net and PantaRhei.press. The Just words went there, and RoLL – Research on Language and Learning – came here. The rest of that year and in 2021, we worked in our dayjobs, lived our lives, and explored new, different beginnings. Chris learned and became a professional audiobook narrator. I listened to one of his audiobooks. Brilliantly told. I am saving the fiction books he narrated for a little later. Writing this blog post at the moment. 😇 And I focused more on writing. Taking courses. Reading. Practicing. And blogging. Some poetry. And two budding projects.

With 22, you can bid with or without one for a game of spades. Spades will be trump. (Gosh, has that become a bad word?) In 2022, both Chris and I will continue to narrate and write, respectively. And I will also use a little time here and there, first, to continue to focus and tidy up this website. And second, I am undusting my complexity lens, revisiting some earlier notes, augmenting all this with what I have learned in the last two years, and will continue to write about Complexity and useful – applied – languagey things. Something to look forward to …

Wishing you all a peaceful, fruitful, and happy 2022. Watch this space and/or follow us on https://matschulze.net/ and ACX.

In eigener Sache

Panta Rhei

It was bound to happen. You can take Mat out of Germany, but you can’t take Germany out of Mat.
Addressing two challenges—one linguistic and one very worldly.

Challenge #1

In eigener Sache. It is what it is, but it is difficult to translate into English. Literally: in one’s own matter. Often used in company announcements that pertain to the company itself. Please note … does not really capture it. We are happy to announce … does not fit the context I am thinking of. Any suggestions that go beyond the the discussions in the forum of the online dictionary leo.org?

Until you come up with something better, I will just call it About us, which is

Challenge #2

Life goes on. Work piles up. COVID-19 has been confusing people, making many sick, and killing far too many. Too many lost their livelihood, feel frustrated and excluded, and wonder when and how this will end. And many say: I can’t breathe. Not now and not before.

And that is just the context. For this blog. On May 2, more than two months ago, I wrote the last post. Silence. Busy processing. Busy with busy. Busy learning, trying to understand. To understand what’s going on.

Doesn’t writing help? To process? To understand? Yes, it does. For me, it does. Reading also helps, doesn’t it?

So, what’s the challenge then? Finding the time to write, before one is overtaken by events. Having the energy to key in thoughts. Being focused on writing about one when a trillion is happening all at once.

But that is not all. Writing when everybody is talking is hard. Is anybody listening? Am I listening? Enough?

Panta Rhei — what does that mean?

It is Greek, and not just to me. I am told the translation is: Everything Flows. The first one to say this was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535 to c. 475 BC). He believed — as do we — that everything always changes, that we can understand ourselves and the world around us better, if we start with the premise of ever-present change. It is that change that we experience as development. Sometimes we are happy with it, sometimes — not so much. Sometimes we like the speed and direction of change, sometimes we don’t.

Bust of an unknown philosopher. This one is in the Hall of Philosophers in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, labeled number 3. One suggestion is that it is Heraclitus, but the museum makes no such assumption.
By RoyFokker - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10805964 — Bust of an unknown philosopher. This one is in the Hall of Philosophers in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, labeled number 3. One suggestion is that it is Heraclitus, but the museum makes no such assumption

Heraclitus was known as the Obscure Philosopher. He apparently enjoyed playing with words, but more importantly, he believed in the unity of opposites and assumed there is some harmony in this world. Today, we capture the unity of opposites — things are plus and minus at the same time — as one part of a dialectic. [More on that in a later blog post.] It is difficult to understand and then express opposites at the same time. Helping somebody is both positive and negative simultaneously and subsequently: it is positive because the helped benefits from the help, it is negative because the help curtails, prevents, or even disables the potential for the helped to act for themselves. We are capable of self-determination — autonomy — and make our own choices; at the same time, we are always also other-determined — heteronymy: we choose to act on our want for a nice meal in a comfortable environment and might go to a restaurant. Quite determined, we hop into the car and drive off downtown. The restaurant owner might have decided to not serve dinner at 2am at night and went to bed already. Our eating habits are also determined by that and by many other decisions and choices many other people made.

So, in large part because of these tensions between opposites, because of different factors bouncing off off each other, changing, amplifying, and cancelling each other, and because of each of us determining to some extent how we are going to act at any given moment, something or other is always happening — everything always changes.

Heraclitus also said: No man ever steps in the same river twice. We use this sentence as the tag line for this site, by only changing one word: No one steps in the same river twice. In our experience and from our perspective, change from the “outside” does affect everybody the same and differently; everybody changes the same and differently—independent of our gender.
Why doesn’t anybody step in the same river twice? The river always flows; one way of looking at it is that it is not the same river water just a second later. And we also change. When we step into the same river (if this were possible), then we are not the same; we are a little older, maybe a little wiser, maybe just a little more hungry, or already wet …

Such constant change is complex in itself, and we often perceive it as such, and, when we are in the midst of it — and we often are — we find it complex and complicated to deal with this change.

We believe it is good to think about the complexity of change, to talk about it, understand it better. We don’t want to simplify change, belittle it, or reject it. Change is all around us and all within us; we might as well understand it better. In some way or another — based on the concepts in our blog post tags — we will always look at change, and not only in our blog writing.