Yesterday I wrote and published a word vomit in about 10 minutes, just before 2am. I then told myself, hey, I’ll do this again tomorrow morning, and again at night. It’s funny how much I promise myself and how little of it I deliver – and when I look back on my life, how much that must have damaged my relationship with myself in a way that I wasn’t entirely able to discern. It’s kind of like being unhealthy and not really knowing what healthy really feels like. You might be able to intellectually sort of imagine it, but actually feeling it is an entirely different thing; it’s effectively inhabiting a different universe.
And I think many years have come and gone where I’ve found myself fantasizing about “being a more productive person”. I think that phrase is a little suspicious, and I probably ought to reframe it in a way that makes better sense to me. And… I’m sure at this point that I already have word vomits about wanting to become a man of my word. Let me take a second to google it… yup, 0697 – become a man of your word. That was in September 2017. It’s July 2019 now. I feel like I understand the problem better, although I will acknowledge that it’s entirely possible that I’m fooling myself. Likely, even.
I think the interesting thing about my current headspace – apart from being really sleepy – is that I’m also… no longer bothered or frustrated or worked up about this the way I used to be. Maybe I’m a little too physically tired to feel it right now; I’m a little bit delirious. But also… a thing I remember trying to get myself to internalize, over and over again throughout my 20s, was “it doesn’t really matter how you feel about it, what matters is that you act.” And right now I can witness myself acting independently of my feeling(s). I feel like going to bed. But I’m also just 650 odd words away from completing another word vomit. A while ago I felt like doing this sort freestyle wordvomit would be a bad idea, but then I spent a really long time not doing any wordvomits at all, and I’d much rather do some freestyle wordvomits than do no word vomits at all. The important thing in the big picture sense is that I complete this project, ideally before I turn 30 years old. That’s in June next year. So I gotta start just pumping these out. An idea I had yesterday which still makes sense is – I can always just churn out the text first, and if I feel like it somehow doesn’t “live up” to what the standard of a word vomit should be, then I can always choose not to publish it. That feels like a decent compromise.
And… also… while writing this right now, I find myself thinking… I’m not sure I’ll ever end up not publishing something. I would have to be literally repeating nonsense over and over again before I make that decision. I’m happy to publish a word vomit as long as there’s something of any interest or relevance to future-Visa in there.
This wordvomit is taking a lot longer than 10 minutes. That’s an interesting thing. Yesterday’s took a straightforward 10 minutes and I didn’t have to stop myself from being distracted or anything. But this time it feels like a little bit of a struggle. And I find myself thinking about pullups that I’ve done. I’ve been working on doing 1,000 pullups in roughly the same way – I’m currently doing something like several sets of 3 pullups a day, and then sometimes I just don’t do any at all. Sometimes it feels very effortless, sometimes it feels really hard. I don’t really know what the difference is. I don’t really know why sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s hard. Will I ever figure it out? Or should I simply accept that there is some variance and learn to roll with it? Do I want to minimize variance? It depends. Is it possible to have fewer duds without having correspondingly fewer hits? I don’t actually know. And that’s quite funny.
I think I’d be willing to defer to say, folks like Picasso. I don’t expect to be more successful or effective than Picasso. Picasso did over 13,500 paintings. Not all of them are popular. I vaguely remember reading something somewhere saying that he had something like a “2% success rate”. I don’t know. I’m sleepy. The point is… even thinking about this might be overthinking it. The point is to just keep making stuff. I remember writing something not too long ago about how… when I stopped writing word vomits to “focus on tweeting”, I didn’t feel guilty or bad or anxious about it for many months – because it felt like the right thing to do at the time. And I agree, I think that was definitely the right thing to do at the time. Coming back now also feels like roughly the right thing to do.
It’s funny. All of this could so easily be construed as bullshit. Just operating on mindless whim and fancy. But… these whims and fancies seem to be coming from a deeper place. There’s some sort of deeper pattern, deeper rhythm at play here. I don’t feel like I’m being randomly whimsical. I feel like I’m being moved by something that I don’t entirely discern. And I think that is the game that I want to get better at. It’s all about surfing the wave of the present moment. And there is still room for making sense of broader reality, for considering the past and contemplating the future. I believe that I am getting better at this. I’m not perfect at detecting my own bullshit, but I have gotten better at it, and I have a wife and trusted friends to help me out.
What’s the essence of this wordvomit? It’s a meditation on surfing and being moved by deeper currents. I want to be (Spotify is playing Oceans by Hillsong). The ocean of the world is bigger and wilder than I know. The ocean of my heart too is bigger and wilder than I know. I want to embrace it honestly, truly, with the appropriate amount of respect and fear and joy.
