so the big mistake i’ve been making this past year and a half or so is that i keep trying to think my writing instead of write my thinking. i don’t know for sure if it’s a mistake in some absolute sense, i could also just frame it as a quirk, as something that was happening. rather than obsess over the mistake i would prefer it if i simply moved on to doing what feels like the right thing to be doing. and the right thing feels like just tuning my brain out and letting my fingers do the thinking. it’s always satisfying to let my fingers do the thinking. but they don’t think entirely by themselves either, the mind does get involved at some point, somehow, maybe peripherally.
the big insight – and maybe i am destined to just always feel like i have problems and then insights into those problems, and that’s maybe that’s normal and fine and good and not something to fuss over, even if it’s weirdly, repetitively cyclical… the big insight is that all of the interestingness i am seeking, is something that arises downstream of some pattern of thought. sometimes I have a great thought just come to me out of nowhere, and that’s great, but it’s not really something i can count on as part of my “regular process”. do I even have a regular process? I think it’s worthwhile to at least attempt to have a regular process. and i think my regular process should be something like the idea espoused in Morning Pages – just start writing and see what happens and don’t think so much about where you’re going. That was also the original premise of 1000wordvomits, and it was really great for a while, but eventually I got tired of it. But I don’t currently feel tired of it. Currently I am tired of tweeting and I am eager to experience something different than tweeting. Why am I tired of tweeting? It feels too constrained. At some level it might be as simple as “too much chocolate cake”. Tastes change. Things have diminishing returns. I cut back on writing wordvomits when I felt like I was experiencing diminishing returns there. And I switched to tweeting. Now I feel like I’m cutting back on tweeting and switching back to writing wordvomits. There’s something satisfying about it, even as I don’t quite have clear “takeaways” or “talking points” emerging. And that’s fine, I’m tired of takeaways and talking points. I’m looking for vibes. I’m looking for ways of seeing, ways of being, subtle gestures and postures, which is where I think the magic might be, at least for me right now in my current circumstances.
when I say downstream of some pattern of thought, I mean just… to keep going. I have all these snippets of notes in my drafts that I feel dissatisfied with, and I think it’s because I don’t go deep enough with any of them. I have a sense of “it’s a mile wide and an inch deep”. I want more depth. And depth is something you get by digging deeper and deeper into each thing. Asking more questions. Pursuing those questions. And there seems to be a style associated with it. I’ve grumbled several times now about Proper Essays and how those feel like I’m just writing with a stick up my ass, being overly preemptive, worrying too much about establishing context, trying too hard to explain everything. Perhaps allow the Tao to explain itself. Maybe I might want to tidy up some of these thoughts for later, but in my present mood I don’t even want to think that far ahead. I just want to dive deeper and deeper into the present moment and see what comes up. And surely I will eventually get tired of this too, but that’s fine. Whatever works, works. Whatever doesn’t work, doesn’t. And being in denial about this does not help. Getting mad about it does not help. What helps is facing the truth of things.
What is the truth of things, for me right now? The truth is that I am moderately overwhelmed and disoriented and have not been wanting to admit this fully to myself. I admit it in bits and pieces. Why do I do that? Well it’s less disruptive to the fundamental order that I have established. But let’s say fuck the fundamental established order. If it’s not fun, if it’s not working, to hell with it. We can try something different. We can take the scenic route. A part of me feels like, “oh, but I’ve already written 800+ word vomits and how many of those have I really gotten around to referencing, reusing, reworking?” Maybe not that many, but a lot of those earlier wordvomits were written by a younger, less experienced, less skilled version of myself. It seems highly likely that the next 100 wordvomits I write will be much more evocative, interesting, useful, simply because I am a better writer now than I used to be.
I want to solve my own problems. Right now, I want to solve my own problems more than I want to solve other people’s problems. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy helping other people with their problems, which has been great, but I think it’s time I do some stuff for myself. Especially now that I have a kid on the way – once the kid is out I’ll probably be really tired and really busy just keeping the kid alive, and keeping my family unit functional. I likely will not have as much time to do all this thinking and introspecting and so on. So there’s a bit of time pressure here. Great, real deadlines that actually matter are good to have. But so let’s get down to it, what are the problems that I have that I want to solve?
I tried gesturing at it a couple of wordvomits ago – a superficial framing is that I feel overwhelmed. But my belief is that a sense of being overwhelmed is less about having too many items and objects around, and more about lacking clarity of purpose, clarity of intent. One idea that I have coming to my mind is – I could maybe write wordvomits about each of the snippets in my notes, expand each thing into a 1000 word rant and see if it makes more sense that way, if it feels more real and evocative that way. I don’t know if that’s always the best thing to do, but the approach I was defaulting to was something more like, “try and cut and paste and rearrange everything around like a scrapbook”, and it wasn’t really working. I’m not sure if it’s something that was off about my approach, or if the premise itself was fundamentally flawed. I still think some amount of scrapbooking-remixing might improve the architecture of my body of work. How else do you do it? Well… you can do it either by moving stuff around in relation to each other, or you can do it by moving stuff around in relation to a more central, larger vision. I’m kinda 50/50 on both in general, depending on the mood I’m in. It’s very yin-yang in that sense. I’m sure we need both. I’m getting some flashbacks to working on Introspect. I do feel like I definitely “wasted” more time than necessary by being tediously conflicted about my process while working on the book. It would’ve been better to cycle between modes, rather than try to do both things at once and get the worst of both worlds. So maybe I can cycle between modes now? I’m going to take maybe 10 minutes to export a bunch of notes from my iOS notes’ “youtube” folder into a google doc.
Yeah I got a little distracted but I’m done! That might have taken… 30 minutes? an hour? 70 minutes. but I’m done. that was satisfying. and i got distracted a bunch. let’s try again and go faster this time. I did more. Next I went into my bookmarks, and I “processed” a bunch of them – clicked through a bunch, sorted a bunch of others, feeling pretty good about it. I spent more time on it than I’d like, and I made less progress than I’d like, but both of those are just unrealistic expectations on my part. The truth is that most days I don’t do anything about it, I don’t make any progress on it. This time I felt compelled to do it in the middle of writing a wordvomit, which I am now in the process of trying to finish because it’s 312am and I should go to bed, because I have a meeting tomorrow afternoon.
Here’s what I’m thinking – if writing a thousand words of “nonsense” is what it takes for me to then go around to processing several pages worth of my bookmarks, then that’s absolutely worth doing! Right now in this moment I want to say, I would do it every day if that’s what it took. But how easy it always is for me to volunteer my future self to do things that he may or may not be interested in doing! That said, I’ve been happily married 10+ years, and I am now 800+ word vomits into a writing project to write 1000. So I have some reasonable understanding of what my goals are. Day to day, I have a bunch of fluctuations, but I’ve done this long enough to know – Visa will want to finish his wordvomits project eventually. Visa will want to properly/fully process his bookmarks eventually, even if along the way that means redefining the project to, “obviously you will never be fully done processing your bookmarks, but there are thresholds that you can cross, and better states of clarity you can be in”. Like, just because tidying is an ongoing process doesn’t mean tidying isn’t possible, right? They’re all just states. And… a thing I was talking about with my twitter friends today about subtle mental shifts, subtle posture changes. I thought that was a great thread. And it’s what I’m looking for. It’s what I’m looking for within myself, and it’s what I’m trying to spread into the wider culture. I think if you’re sufficiently subtle about it you can make substantial changes without even particularly upsetting or offending anybody. Not that those are things to be excessively avoided – you can end up in knots as a consequence – but there’s something to… not triggering unnecessary blowback until you’re reasonably sure you can survive it.
don’t think your writing, write your thinking. scenic route. What would it be like to take the scenic route through my own body of work? I often seem to be in a rush to figure out what’s the most important things, what’s the most shareable things, what makes the biggest difference to people. But what if I changed my posture a little and asked myself, what would be most luxurious? What would be most beautiful? What sparks joy? What was fun, clever, interesting? What if I didn’t have anything to prove, didn’t have to impress anyone, didn’t have to achieve any outcomes, perform any moral good – what if I could just be? In some ways that’s the deepest and dopest thing, just fully embodying true freedom, true self-acceptance, radically present in the moment in its maximum fullness. I have to go to bed soon, but I wonder if I’ll be able to carry this particular seed of a thought with me to sleep. And I wonder if I’ll be able to bring it into the dreamworld. And I wonder if, when I bring it into the dreamworld, I’d be able to do some internal remodelling, reconfiguring. I do believe that’s what dreams are probably supposed to do, or be about. I’ve had experiences while working on my book, for example, where I got really tired from being emotionally knotted, and then took a nap, and woke up feeling like a different person. I am quite eager to wake up as a different version of myself. It feels about time.