Brain fetters (and hexagram 4)

My reading for this week is Hexagram 4, line 1:

‘Sending out the ignoramus,
Fruitful to make use of punishing people,
Fruitful to loosen fetters and shackles.
Going on in this way is shameful.’

I think the way my brain is(n’t) working just now is a nice illustration of the line. It goes something like this:

1. Identify knotty problem to solve.
2. State the conditions that make up the problem.
3. Labour long and hard inside those conditions to create some hugely complex solution. Get stuck.
4. Write a small novel to some long-suffering tech support person to explain what I need to do and why I need to do it.
5. Have a brief break from work – like an hour travelling, for instance
6. Realise that those conditions don’t exist at all, and there is an enormously simple solution just outside them.

And then, of course, send out embarrassed messages to the nice support people – I sought them, you can bet they did not seek me… – to say I don’t need to do this after all, oops, sorry to have wasted your time and energy.

This ignoramus has been sent out lately into the wilds of setting up a membership-based site, and experienced many fruitful punishments there. Let me try to give you an example without drowning you in jargon.

1. How to display products and services to current members?
2. All members should purchase new products through their existing accounts, so they don’t have to enter their details over again. The system generates a membership page for them to do so.
3. But this membership page doesn’t display a description of the products! Oh no! I have to find a script that will do this, and I have to get the script adapted to work on this dynamically generated page, and I’ll probably need to hire a php programmer, and, and, and…
4. OK, this time I just explained it all to a remarkably patient husband, and to my web designer.
5. ***(sound of penny dropping)***
6. No-one has to go to the members page to order. I can create as many order pages as I like for existing members, one for each product, and write whatever I want on each page.

After a couple more of these, and after receiving the moving line, I was starting to recognise the pattern. But nonetheless, trying to help a blind correspondent learn the I Ching, I was off again.

1. How can she identify which pattern of lines matches each hexagram?
2. This is done with a chart – lower trigrams down the side, upper trigrams across the top.
3. Since she can’t go over this visually, I need to type it out in words, row by row, for her screen reader to go through…

Fortunately at this point I talked to David (did I mention he’s extraordinarily patient?), who suggested identifying hexagrams just by typing them in ‘binary’ style (010001 for #4, for instance). And I actually already have all the hexagrams on my site identified in this way, as part of the online reading, though with the lines written ‘backwards’, from right to left.

It seems that as I launch myself into these unknown territories, I keep on bringing ‘brain fetters’ because I don’t have a clear idea of what the issue really is. In other words, I don’t know what I need to know. So I stumble round inside the fetters I haven’t actually noticed are there, and often exercise a whole lot of intelligent ingenuity in the process. (You should’ve seen all the clever ideas I had to program that members’ page!) Meanwhile outside the fetters there’s a much simpler answer, often just ready and waiting for me.

So there you go – I think this’ll be a pattern of limitation to look out for the next time I see 4.1. But then again, what would I know?