I realize I’ve been in a funny-tragic pattern lately, behavior-wise. basically every night i go to bed after showering, after putting my baby son to bed, and then i open my laptop and i try to write a substack essay. but i’m tired and sleepy myself, so my past couple of substack essays have this really drowsy energy about them. which is sort of interesting as a couple of one-offs, but i don’t want to make that a habit. and worse, i don’t manage to write an essay every time. i’ve succeeded 3 times this month, which is not too bad, as a monthly count, but I failed basically every other time i tried. point is: i have spent many hours at night writing failed attempts at essays. and it just clicked for me that i could simply write wordvomits instead. so that’s what i’m doing tonight. it should let me get out whatever’s in my system, and feel a sense of accomplishment and go to sleep relatively early.
when in the shower i thought to myself that i’d like to reread and revisit a bunch of recent-past wordvomits. and i have done that: did a little puttering about, added a few tags here and there. i felt overwhelmed for a bit– a part of me always has this fantasy that i’m going to dive in and make all sorts of cool connections between things, but it turns out that there’s so much more volume than i’m prepared for, and i quickly get overwhelmed by all the stuff. i think i really gotta liken it to some sort of city that’s full of stuff going on, full of stuff to do. you can’t realistically expect to… explore all of new york city, for example. you have to find a way to prioritize things.
- randomness is one approach, and not necessarily a bad one.
- another approach is to… try out other people’s recommendations, which isn’t so much of an option for me here, though maybe I could remix that somehow. my past self’s recommendations, maybe?
- another is to take a broad view, skim and scan until something feels emotionally resonant, and then dive into that. I think this can be mistaken for randomness. i suppose there are at least two ways you can skim and scan– either from an obvious starting point (like the start of a book, or a particular street of a city), or from something chosen at random. then you could cycle through more random pages or you could spread from wherever you started.
it’s funny, it’s like i’m trying to re-learn how to read? which makes me think about the commonplace complaint, that reading was easy when we were young/kids, and then it’s gotten so much harder since, and is it that there are all these smartphones and technology now with so many things competing for our attention? maybe that’s part of the problem, I wouldn’t dismiss it, but I think framing it in those terms might be a kind of misdiagnosis. here’s an alternate framing i’d like to consider: what if it’s a clutter of intentions? when we’re younger, life is simpler. we might see a book, like the book, intend to read it, read it. as we get older, accumulate more life experience, we start thinking about consequences. what will this book do for me? what kind of person will i marginally become more of, having read it? how does it relate to my goals? are there other things i could be doing that better serve my goals?
as i write this i think, i would like to reread my wordvomits, i would like to take notes as i go. i’ve had this thought before, i even have past attempts of reading-and-taking-notes before. but all of it is incomplete. so what? incompleteness is part of the process, it’s inevitable. why does it bother me that i haven’t completed such a large project? how can i reframe my relationship with the thing such that I can be okay with the incompleteness, enjoy the incompleteness, see it as part of a meditation, part of a learning process, part of a becoming?
well one thing that would have to happen, i think, is that each “session” has to feel good, meaningful. and that’s what i seem to have struggled with lately. i feel like i’ve done the equivalent of– and this feels like a familiar metaphor, like i might’ve written about this in an earlier wordvomit– driving around the city looking for something, but never actually getting off the road, never actually checking out anything. all commute and no event. which feels depressing, sad, wasteful. i worry about living my whole life that way. this might be an overthinking problem. or maybe i’m just tired. but i feel the urge to do something, even if it’s imperfect. and then after i do it i can hopefully feel less lethargic and surface some fresh intentions– maybe some of these are old but renewed, maybe some of these are new entirely. that doesn’t really matter. i have a bunch of posts on here tagged “reboot”, a bunch of others tagged “continue”. i really like those posts, i can almost recreate the intended vibe just from holding the tag in my mind. but i also have a bunch of stuff tagged “review your stuff”, and I don’t quite feel the same about that tag. I’m not sure why exactly. Let’s take a glance… i used to be so much more harsh and punitive with myself, glad i’ve grown out of that… part of my goal was to cultivate my taste… it seems like i’ve been looking for things that would consolidate my stray materials, reduce my notesprawl. and it seems like looking for psychoactive phrases might help with that. it seems like as i circle around, i do accumulate something of an emotional quality to the idea of reviewing. my early notes on the subject were very much about developing technical ability. but now i find myself asking what is the technical ability even for? what is this project even for? it’s all about arriving at a greater sense of wholeness. and i think if i keep that in mind i might find myself closer to the breakthrough i’m currently feeling for.