This was on my list of things to write about, and I think it’s something that’s always worth revisiting: What are the mistakes I’ve made?
I think the first thing that comes to mind right now is bookkeeping. I’ve never learned to do good bookkeeping. I tend to do it in a very superficial way, or to do a lot of it at once, but then let it fall stale and fallow really quickly. [1]
What else? Am I going to talk about sleep and exercise and meditation and all those things again? We’ve repeated those several times, that’s boring. What would be interesting to talk about? Emotions? Jokes? Narratives?
I guess I wonder if there’s something I’m missing that’s keeping me from being awesome faster, apart from all the mundane things. Or if there’s anything that’s keeping me from doing the mundane things, apart from the fact that I seem to have some sort of distaste for mundanity.
Yes. What is this distaste of mundanity? Why do I have it? Why does everything need to be cool and exciting and new? Part of that is the human brain, yeah, we all crave novelty. And maybe I’ve grown to crave it more than other people might, kinda like how some people get addicted to sugar. Maybe part of it is brain wiring, maybe part of it is developed over time, probably both.
So what? Then what? How do we rewire the brain? Practice. Repetition.
I’m on-script again.
Okay. It seems like I return to the script whenever I try to diverge from it, out of habit. My subconscious does not yet have the systems it needs to make the breaks that I think it does. So this is an interesting challenge. What do you do when your brain keeps going back to the script, and you want to ditch it?
I suppose you stick to the script, but you remix it. You invert it. You switch it up around. You contradict yourself and you go crazy. Maybe I don’t have a distaste for mundanity, maybe I love it! Maybe I haven’t made any mistakes at all, maybe eerything I’ve done up to this point is actually the best thing I could’ve done, and it’s just not obvious. It’s just not clear. What if that were the case? 😛
I know that’s not entirely likely, but I need to go somewhere different with these vomits. I need some different stimulus, some different interpretations. And I want to keep writing today, and see how much I can do, how far I can go without having to do a whole bunch of preparation. It feels like the next step is to get a bit absurd.
If I free myself to become absurd, to go crazy, what happens? Or what if I constrict myself to the crazy and absurd? Nyeh. Cough, sputter. If I’m boring myself, it’s not worth doing. I’m jus trying to make up the numbers now.
What have been my most unscripted moments? Probably going off social media, maybe. Did not see that coming, because that was so contrary to what I wanted. There have been times where I’ve gone off-script in a very irresponsible, damaging way. The real challenge is to go off-script in a way that adds rather than subtracts. To do street art, not ugly defacement. To make things more beautiful.
How do you do that? You have to awaken to the beauty that is already there. So there’s something I’m mising and I won’t find it by looking for it.
What other mistakes do I make, apart from all the meatbag management ones? If I follow my own system, there are prioritization mistakes and context mistakes. And then again it’s quite straightforward. I hung out with the wrong people for me, or at least I hung out with people I liked long after it didn’t really feel like we had any reason to hang out anymore. I play the same old songs, walk the same old paths, and I do them over and over again even after they’re overdone.
Because I’m a creature of habit. I think too small on some scales, and too big on others. How do you get to the goldilocks zone? I guess to START small, and then to increase in size progressively. These vomits are probably the best representation I have so far of me doing that effectively. A thousand words at a time, a thousand times.
Maybe my mistake is the obsession with the script? I think about the script, I think about ditching it, I think about my relationship with it, I think about what people will think. I shouldn’t care. What happens if I let go of trying to let go, and just go with what I feel compelled to do? What DO I feel compelling to do, say, in this given moment? I’m reaching a messy end of something that doesn’t really have a head or tail. Doesn’t really go anywhere. It just is, a strange puddle of awkwardness.
I suppose on hindsight this one might be the starting / jumping off point where I start thinking about absurdity, about deviating from scripts. Maybe I can go into the individual details of those things along the way. We’ll think, we’ll see.
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[1]I’m reminded of what the Hyperbole and a Half lady talked about adulthood– this idea that we can do everything we need to do in a heroic burst, and then never have to do anything ever again. It’s a very delicious fantasy. But that’s not how life works. That’s an illusion.
The good news is that- when you start changing your habits, they can stick. The challenge is to make it sticky, and to keep at it, and to change your environment/context to suit it, and to make it a part of your new identity… the whole thing is rather complex, which is why it isn’t easy. We are all, at any given moment, probably in a state of equilibrium. It’s very unlikely than any random stimuli is going to change us significantly, because we’re very invested in our positions– courtesy of multiple factors conspiring together.
So it takes a very cunning plan to break from these existing patterns (which might be optimal for some circumstance but not for all circumstances, and almost never the case for rapidly changing circumstances).