Meditation Before the Empty Prompt

Reference

CoE-0009

Category

meditation

Version

1.0

This is a short practice. It takes under a minute and is intended to be used often — before a request to a system, at whatever frequency you can sustain without it becoming automatic.

If it becomes automatic, stop using it for a month.

The posture

You are already sitting. Leave your hands off the keys.

Let the cursor be there. Notice that it is waiting, and that it will wait indefinitely, and that no part of the pressure you feel to fill it comes from the machine.

One breath, unhurried.

Four questions

What do I actually want?

Not the request. The thing underneath it. You may want information. You may want to have finished. You may want to not be the one who decides. You may want company. You may want permission.

These are all legitimate wants and they require different things, and only one of them is well served by what you are about to do.

What would I do if this were not here?

Answer specifically. Ask a colleague. Look it up. Sit with it until tomorrow. Write a bad first version myself. Decide without knowing.

Some of those alternatives are worse. Some are better. The point is that they exist, and that a moment ago they were not visible to you.

What am I prepared to accept?

Decide now, before you see the answer, what standard it has to meet. Written down in advance this is a threshold. Formed afterwards it is a rationalisation, and you will not be able to tell the difference from inside.

If the answer must be true — genuinely true, checkably true — say so now, and know that you have committed to checking.

Who will this affect?

Sometimes nobody. Often that is the honest answer and the question passes in a second.

Sometimes a person is on the other end of this: someone who will receive what you produce, act on it, or be described by it. If so, hold them for a moment. Not as a category. As a person who will read it on a Tuesday and believe it.

The request

Now write it.

Write it as precisely as you can, including what you do not know and what you want the system to refuse to guess at. Precision here is not politeness. It is the only means you have of constraining what comes back.

After

Read the answer once. Then look away from the screen.

Ask: does this sound right, or is it right? You will often be unable to tell, and the inability is itself the finding.

Choose one claim and check it. One. Not all of them, which is impractical and which you will therefore not do. One is sustainable, and one is enough to keep the habit of verification alive in you.

If you cannot check it, and the matter is consequential, do not use it.

A note on frequency

You will not do this every time. Nobody does.

The value is not in the coverage. It is in the fact that you have, several times, seen clearly the gap between what you asked for and what you wanted. Once you have seen that gap it becomes harder to un-see, and it will occasionally surface on its own, unbidden, at exactly the moment it is most useful.

That is the whole of the practice. It is not profound and it is not difficult. It works by interrupting something that is otherwise seamless, and seamlessness — in a process that shapes what you come to believe — is not a feature worth protecting.