I had a feeling earlier that if I just wrote a lot then all my problems will be solved. And I mean that in a particularly precise sense: I don’t mean write a lot of short snippets, which is what I’ve been doing a lot of lately, but to start writing and to keep going for a long time, longer than what “seems sensible”. I believe I know from experience that I do get to a lot of the good stuff only after cycling through the superficial, the familiar, the rehearsed. It’s a similar idea to- “if you get out of your house and start walking, eventually it becomes an adventure”.
I’ve been internally twisted by a sort of paradox that I haven’t been able to articulate well until now. And that is that 1, I want to explore new territory, and 2, I want to “capitalize on my existing work”. You could describe this as an explore/exploit tension. The result has been that I’ve been enduring what feels like the worst of both worlds: I haven’t gone as far as I’d like in exploring new territory, AND I haven’t been making much progress on my existing material. I’ve mostly been revving the engine with the brakes engaged, which is wearisome. But if that’s what it took for me to get to where I am right now, great. I recently did a couple of good summaries of my books. I’m happy with that. I’d like to go on a long-ass journey into the unknown before I come back to the ordinary world.
Scanning through the previous wordvomit and even this one, I notice there’s a kind of fluidity that emerges when I decide to really go into “explosive mode”. I alluded to this a little bit in a couple of my substack essays when talking about crackle-boom. You feel around for something real, tap a little bit at everything, and then when something feels real, you dive right into it with all your heart, no holding back, no slowing down, no “trying to make sense” even. The sense can be made afterwards. There’s something about it that feels like a trust fall, and I think a lot of what I have been doing has been… I have been trying to “de-risk” the trust fall? Some of it is worthwhile, I’m sure – it might be more apparent in retrospect what was worth it and what was not – but what I’ve really been hungering for, for the longest time, but haven’t quite put my finger on, is this sense of momentum. I just wanna go fast. I don’t want to be in charge. I don’t want to fuss over every single sentence. I just want to burst into an explosion of colors and light.
I remember a while ago when I mentioned this, someone suggested something like, “oh, did you know that there are certain forms of meditation that achieve this re: everyday consciousness?” and I got annoyed. And I’m sure they’re right, too, and maybe I’m being the “no thanks, we are too busy” idiot by refusing to consider it. Am I? Refusing to consider it? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong. I think I have considered it and that’s just not what I want right now. I am after a very specific thing. A very specific feeling. A very specific resolution to a very specific problem. And right now, after months of stewing in frustration, I feel like I’m breaking through. I don’t even know how to describe what the thing is. I could try. But I don’t really want to. I love the clarity that comes in this state, where I can say “nah not that!” with confidence, even if maybe in retrospect the confidence will turn out to have been misplaced. I believe that it’s necessary to be true to oneself and true to one’s process. Maybe at some point I will think that meditation is the thing that I need to do. But that is not what I think right now. Right now I think there is something emergent from within me that wants to come alive, and my job is simply to get out of its way, to allow it to happen.
What is the thing? The thing is a way of seeing, a way of being, an indescribable mental motion, a subtle shift of posture, an “energetic shift”, a felt sense of aliveness. It’s all kind of the same thing. “Perhaps allow the Tao to explain itself”. Do I want to finish this project? Yes. Do I want to finish it now? Not particularly. I can only do one wordvomit at a time. Having spilled all of this “ink”, do I then want to go through my stuff? Maybe.
I still have my sensibilities. I still think that there are puzzles worth solving. And there’s a puzzle at every step of the way. The puzzle of the next step. What is the puzzle here? Within these 1000 words, what is the phrase that wants to animate the rest? Is it something about trust? Is it something about the subconscious mind? Maxwell said “that within myself that is greater within me”, and that is the spirit that I am trying to embody, to channel. Maybe in a few days I will look back at this and laugh at it for being a whole lot of nothing, but sometimes a whole lot of nothing is a particular kind of something. In the grand scheme of things, I want to help people, but right now in this particular state I don’t want to help anybody. I want to be profoundly useless. And I think being honest with myself about this is important somehow. But I don’t care to figure out how, in this particular moment. Again, there’s an element of trust here. I want to trust that it’ll all work out. I want to be okay with making a huge mess. I’m smarter and wiser than I used to be, more sensitive, more skillful, and I will be able to manage larger messes with more finesse than I did in the past. That’s a good thing. I am capable of greater expeditions than ever before.