Think of all the complex tasks you do everyday. Driving cars, playing musical instruments, the very act of handwriting- these are very complex activities.

Take teeth brushing, for instance. Somehow you have to maneuver your meat-covered skeleton made from stardust into a space where you have access to water, a teeth brush, and teeth paste to scrub your teeth. You have to manipulate the cap off the tube of teeth paste and squeeze the right amount out – not too much nor too little- onto the bristles of your teeth brush. If you are a civilized person, you’ll put the cap back on and then insert the teeth paste-covered bristles into your open mouth between your lips and cheeks and your teeth, scrubbing vigorously up and down. Then the tops of your teeth and finally the inside surfaces of your teeth.

After a rinse if mouth and brush, you’re done! But how many steps did it take you?

If you’re like most people, you don’t even think about it. One person I know even cleans his ears while engaged in teeth brushing! It has become automatic behavior, a habit, that doesn’t require conscious thought anymore- but once, it did.

Reflecting on your thinking is no more complex that brushing your teeth, yet it seems so difficult for most people. Why?

To begin with, we have our curiosity trained out of us by the educational institutions we were processed through as children. Then, we are taught at institutions of higher learning to memorize everything we can about specific subjects so we can regurgitate information on demand. Then we go to work for businesses that prescribe what we do during the time they rent from us, often in infuriating detail. At no time are we taught how to think and how to reflect on our thinking- those skills are now deemed unnecessary as the manager or leader does that as part of their job.

The result? At least three generations, probably more, of people who cannot think for themselves, figure things out, who think that everything on the internet is true (“Bon jour!”). If you were bothered by my use of the phrase “teeth brush” instead of the more conventional “toothbrush”, you might be part of that group to some degree.

To gain experience and confidence in your capability to deal with complexity, you will need self-discipline to turn the following exercise into a habit.

Start with an outcome or result of a decision you’ve made. Write it down. Next, think of all the actions you and others involved in that outcome took. Write them down. Now reflect on the thinking that led you to choose that action over other options. Write your description of the thought process down.

What you’ll likely find is that we rarely make decisions that only involve us, and we give very little thought to the actions we take. We are simply drifting through life on automatic mode, reacting to external forces based on our values and experiences (which are shaped by those very forces) in a self-perpetuating cycle of mediocrity.

But you are capable of far greater things than that! You can take control of your life and shape it into a life of meaning and purpose- if you’ll stop to reflect on the fact that your view of the world is imperfect, that differing views hold the potential for insight, that a more complete view exists, that you are capable of finding more complete views by practicing critical thinking, and that you are capable of dealing with complexity by thinking backwards from outcome to action to thought.

The building envelope is an air barrier and thermal boundary that are continuous and touching and separate conditioned space from unconditioned space or the outside. The envelope of a simple house may be the floor, the walls (including exterior doors and windows) and the flat ceiling. There are many ways for a builder to define the building envelope (it can contain a conditioned basement, a sealed, insulated and conditioned crawlspace, a conditioned attic with insulation along the roofline) and even more ways for them to fail to define it properly.

I have seen homes where the builder conditioned part of the attic without insulating the roofline or gable wall and there was a case where a code official (in ignorance) required a builder to condition the garage with a duct from the house in order to keep the water pipes from freezing. The garage IS NEVER INSIDE THE BUILDING ENVELOPE! If there is a desire to provide conditioning to the garage, it must be conditioned by a separate system than the house.

The builder gets to define the building envelope by deciding where to place the insulation and air barriers.

The building envelope’s function is to protect the occupants of the home from the elements (air, heat, cold, water).

One myth about the building envelope is that all we need to do to improve it is to add more insulation. A certain utility program recommended increasing the amount of attic insulation to R-49 to decrease the amount of heat loss and gain through the ceiling; at the same time, they recommended that extensive airsealing shouldn’t be done because “houses need to breathe” and airsealing would increase the amount of pollutants in the home.

This is another myth: airsealing the home prevents pollution from entering the home from the basement, crawlspace, carport, attached garage, attic and outside.
By the way, houses don’t need to breathe, but people do- so add intentional ventilation for the people!