View source for Hello/So let's go to it!

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<h1>So let's go to it!</h1>
<p>Take your time. {{apts}} offers a variety of slow food for the soul. Quick visits become superficial because visitors feel they must do it all, all at once. That's not the way our lifeworld works — it takes each a lifetime, and that's all each gets.</p>

<p>Activities on ''{{apts}}'' have no beginning, middle, or end; no preferred sequence; no schedule or calendar. They are like activities in a city, an apparent bustle of many persons intentionally moving through many spaces, interacting with one another in an undulating churn of simultaneous events — large and small, fast and slow, intense and dull, highfalutin and plain. But the bustle appears greatest to the newcomer unaccustomed to seeing a lot of persons all at once, each seeming intent on going where they want to go.</p>

<p>Let's pierce the appearance. The urban pace isn't actually as intense as it looks because we don't perceive how all those people, so intent on going where they want to go, have more quietly taken their time to form those intentions, to recognize that they have many possibilities to choose among, to consider them, and to decide on which they will become intent on pursuing today. So take your time. On {{apts}}, we don't say that we must always be purposeful. We do want, continually, to let ourselves <i>become purposeful</i>. That's what <i>going to it</i> involves. </p>

<p>We can think of our point of entry, these initial pages, as a welcoming brochure for visitors and prospective residents — "High points of the city we love!" It surveys things to expect, helpful in a first visit. Soon we set more direct paths to where we want to go. That's what happens when <i>the city you love</i> begins to become <i>down home</i>. Long later, we may again find the old brochure useful to call to mind possibilities that familiarity has overlooked.</p>

<p>Whether first-timer or lifelong resident, one needs ways of getting around — cheap, easy, and reasonably fast. Our schema will get you quickly to the main districts, and if you know exactly where you want to go, with the search box at the top of the screen you can hail a cab, so-to-speak. But most of the time we don't know exactly where to go. That a feature, not of the site, but of life. Hence, keyword searching often doesn't work here, for {{apts}} is not an encyclopedia where each page provides information about the topic by which it's named. Here pages are reflective, sometimes poetic, provocative, suggestive, evocative, or unpredictable. Here we search in a deeper sense, not looking for a route to a known destination, but seeking to find, even better, to form our intention.</p>

<p>But how do we navigate to our goal when we don't know exactly what we are looking for? As we ask that question, we <i>study</i>. When we know what we are looking for, we can ask someone to tell us about it, or look it up and learn about it. When we don't know what we're looking for, we have to ask a lot of questions. That's the purpose of our districts, not to give the answer, but to help us pose our questions</p>

{{WideOut|Outer=<p class="b1 cent">Rainer Maria Rilke</p>... to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the <i>questions themselves</i> like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. <i>Live</i> the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.<ref>Rainer Maria Rilke. <i>Letters to a Young Poet</i>. (M. D. Herter Norton, trans., 1954). p. 35.</ref>}}

<p>These questions do not result in our knowing something as the answer. They are questions that help us recognize and understand what we're looking for. What we recognize and understand through such questioning culminates, not in the production of knowledge, but in the formation of intention, purpose, and value that we can and should institute in and through our lifeworlds. We question — Who? What? How? Where/When? Why? — not singly, not in a sequence, but in a continuous simultaneity out of which recognition and comprehension emerge.</p>
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<p>Check out [[Lifeworlds]]. Take some time to click around the question pages. Read a dialog or two. Begin to form a sense of the place these questions can have in life, in your life. Work with them. Interact in the comment box. Or go to the discussion pages. Anyone can chime in on the discussion. Don't look for answers. Love the questions.</p>
{{RMcC}}

<p>We ask lots of questions.  do we study? As you go around these questions, you'll see headings in the column to the right changing. These are sub-links to important sections in each of the districts — like SoHo to Lower Manhattan. To begin, if you take these questions in with their sub-links, you'll have a good, double-decker bus tour of the place, and it doesn't rain or get real cold the day you do it. Like those tours, you can hop on and off as you like, and even better, you can start and end and jump around on the path however you choose.</p>

<p>Some people say that computer searching lacks room for serendipity, but we think that's a pseudo observation by people who don't use computers much. Serendipity happens to active minds in places of activity. In getting acquainted with the place, attend to the layout and labels, which indicate different purposes, what resources are where, and ways to interact with them — you'll stumble on something interesting you didn't know you sought. And importantly, you'll see invitations to <b><i>Add comment</i></b> at the end of pages, and often elsewhere. They aren't there for decoration, nor for merely mouthing off. Use them actively, to ask yourself what you have to say and to say it well. That's how we form ourselves and learn liberally and disclose the commons, and with all the communication, politicking, advertising, informing, entertaining, and tweeting we get far too little opportunity to think through what we have to say and to say what we think thoughtfully.</p>

<p>{{apts}} comprises a network of potential interconnections, mathematically in the gazillions, too extensive for anyone to follow completely, and there's a periphery to every path. Each of us, even the wizened street-people, will actualize only a small, unique set of them. Remember that even the most highly educated among us have come to know a lot about very little. What counts? Our ability to interact intelligently with the mix of a little knowledge and much ignorance that each of us embodies.</p>

<p>Wander about, check out what's where. The links connect to nodes and each hooks to many specific resources. It's a place to explore, a growing, changing place. It encompasses far more than any one of us, or any grouping of us, can fully master. If it all seems transparent and predictable, that's a sign of youthful naïveté or sclerotic orthodoxy. Actual culture has always exceeded by orders of magnitude the personal powers of its members. That's the secret to its creativity. Take your part of it — it belongs to all of us in common. Get to know your part well and join the conversation about what the whole of it might mean.</p>

<p>As in a city, you keep mixing and matching to define your activities here. And as in a city there's a system of public transportation, available, open to all, useful for visitors and residents alike for getting quickly and cheaply from one part of town to another. A clickable schema opens and closes each page. With its links always at hand and the big picture also in mind, just start, look around, follow your inclination, wander, explore, maybe get a little lost, trusting that you'll find your way, settle in, get about, doing what you want. You can always leave..., and always come back. All that's study, what {{apts}} is all about.</p> -->