I’m sure I’ve said before – maybe several times – that if I go too long without writing a wordvomit, I start to get antsy. Ray Bradbury had a similar point about writing – if you go too long without writing (assuming you’re one of us) then it starts to drive you a little mad. You must get drunk on writing so that reality doesn’t destroy you. Something like that.
I have made several attempts at writing a wordvomit in the past 5 months but there hasn’t be a single one in which I was able to carry the energy from the start to the finish. I could theoretically do composites, but I don’t want to do that. I want my wordvomits to have “one take” energy.
Lately I’ve been thinking about a couple of things. One is that I’ve been in my comfort zone for a little too long. You might say it’s kind of like staying in a bathtub for too long, until your skin gets all pruney. Another – which is related – is that I have a bunch of worries that I’ve been ignoring and not addressing. Mainly… it’s me wanting to stay in my comfort zone and not go out of it, where I know I would have to fight, and get hurt, and face my fears and so on.
I think that’s an accurate description of where I’m at. I worked hard to get to where I am in life, to have the audience that i have, to have the opportunities that I have. I wrote an ebook that hundreds of people have bought – dozens of people have told me that they really liked it. And I’ve been frozen with a kind of fear – what if my second book simply isn’t as good? What if I had put all of my best stuff in the first book, and I just don’t have what it takes to do the second?
Writing this down now, having thought about it for some time, I realize the answer is “it doesn’t matter”. If my second attempt bombs, it bombs. I can make some amount of effort to minimize the odds of bombing, but ultimately every attempt is a risk, and you can never truly remove all risk except by choosing stasis. Which is when you “fail by default”.
So… I’m writing this wordvomit to start the old, familiar engine that has been laying dormant for months now – and then I’m going to work on my second ebook. I don’t know if I can publish it today. It might be in a few days from now. I definitely want to publish it this month, so that I can finally get on with my life.
A part of me knows that I’ve surely talked about this exact kind of dynamic in earlier wordvomits. It might be interesting to identify the patterns, to see if there’s a meta-learning to be had. Lately though I’ve been thinking that there’s not very much utility in thinking too much about meta-learnings. They do exist, but I don’t think you can really force them. You can’t go hunting for meta-learnings. You hunt for learnings, and be receptive and open to meta-learnings appearing, and then you absorb them when they come.
It’s taking me some amount of effort to not switch tabs. It’s been too long since I sat down and hammered out a thousand words. I wonder, is there something that I’m avoiding? My leg is fidgeting. Why am I fidgeting? I was thinking yesterday “I feel impatient”. Part of it was that I was sitting around with family (it was Deepavali) for hours and hours, but I also think there’s an additional component to it.
Sometimes an immediate feeling based on a rather contextual thing can resonate powerfully beyond that context. It’s like when you’re humming in the bathroom and you hit the right frequency and the entire room echoes and hums – actually, how does that happen exactly?
I had intended to start lifting weights again in November. I did three days of light-ish lifting back-to-back, rested for about 5 days after that, and then when I tried lifting again, I think I sprained or tweaked my lower back a little bit. I don’t think it’s injured – it’s been several days since, and it feels a lot better, there’s now just some light soreness – but it did hurt the first couple of days, and it worried me. I spiraled into this much bigger and broader thing – oh, woe is me for not working out more regularly, oh, I am getting older, how fragile this mortal flesh. How cruel this existence is… I was trying to fix things, damn you! I was trying to make things better and you punished me for it! But of course existence itself doesn’t really have any motivations or agency, this is me projecting my own feelings, creating a theatre around myself. It’s the stuff of imagination and dream.
The thing for me to do, with my body and my weights, is to smile, laugh, be tender, gentle. To stretch until the soreness goes away, and then to return to the weights with humility, and to be more mindful. I do want to become stronger. I do want to become more nimble and agile. And, yes, damnit, I do want to look good. I believe it’ll serve me well on my mission.
What about the comfort zone thing? Well… I need to do a little ceremony of sorts. It’s like I’ve been in a sort of psychological holiday of sorts – and a part of it does echo how I felt in the couple of months after I left my job 2 years ago (wow), playing video games and eating junk food all day. I wanted to enjoy myself, and I didn’t want to think. And so I deliberately led a rather thoughtless existence, and I will admit it was fun, even if it was “excessive” and sometimes worrisome. I think the worst part of it was that it got boring. Mindless entertainment gets boring. Real interestingness requires facing your fears. And I’m going to do that now. I’m going to work on my ebook.