2023-01-22 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Sunday 🗓 Date: January 22, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 16 – Jan 22, 2023

So I’m back for another day. It’s the morning this time! Very cool. It took like 4 hours of being awake before I felt like actually writing, but that also feels kinda normal for me? I get up, go get breakfast, fuck around with a little thing I want to do (in this case, figure out how the fuck my ethernet forwarding thingy works in this apartment, which I still didn’t figure out), poke around for a bit, and then finally settle in to writing my morning pages. After this I’ll probably go for a walk and then meditate and then write some more. Sounds like a lovely day, right? I should do this every day. Alas.

That’s sort of my realization about what I want out of life — I want that freedom to do whatever I feel like, and to go at my own pace. There’s that bit from The Soul of a New Machine where one of the characters gets fed up with computers and goes to Vermont. On the note on his terminal, he says I’ve gone off to a commune in Vermont, and I’ll think in moments no shorter than a season. That’s what I want, I want to see life on those broader scales, not just these little moment-to-moment flickers that slip through my fingertips. In some ways, that feels really tied to my work, where I feel like I need to know what I’m going to get done today, this morning, at the longest by the end of a two-week sprint. And that kinda sucks, I just want to do what I think is right.

I guess that’s partially my aspiration for writing — you make these little-by-little improvements every single day, but nobody needs to know that your novel will be finished next week, they just want to know if it’ll be done next year. I want to be beholden to no one, really, such that I can take my time in the morning and not start working until 11, or I can work in the morning and then just leave for a few hours to go out on a walk. I feel like I can’t do that at work, largely because I just have all these meetings. I could do all of this as a solo entrepreneur, I suppose, but I also yearn a bit for that artistic life. I always like the R.A.P. Ferreira quote about how artists are there to explore the frontiers of consciousness and to report back what’s there. We can marry skill with the mind and skill with words and skill with ourselves in ways that bring out something in someone else.

I realize that I am indeed talking a lot about being a writer and less about actually writing but I’m also excited about the writing part. This afternoon I’m going to start a story on what I uncovered yesterday, this idea of a young man traveling to some far off land, alone, hoping to uncover some new part of himself in a psychedelic, shamanic experience. I’ve always felt like there’s something tender in that, not so much in the experience of psychedelics (which I admittedly can’t reference first-hand) but rather in the desire for expansiveness, the desire to emanate love to each other. I think many people find that hippy-ish, to love each other without reserve, but I think it’s the most human thing we can do. We can be a refuge for each other, refuge in the broadest sangha of them all.

Having a place for refuge is essentially the core of attachment theory. Having a safe space to return to, where you know your needs will be met, is the most secure attachment style, but many of us don’t have that. It’s not even that we don’t literally have that — I, for example, know that I could always fall back on my family for support — but that we don’t feel like we should need that. It can be a point of pride, or a sense of failure if you were to need it.

Alright, I’m back from a 10-minutes Twitter distraction where I deleted about 100 or so more followers who are totally not real people. That said, I’m still left with over 200 followers, which seems suspiciously high. Maybe it’s just a bunch of tech-adjacent people who don’t give a shit about my weird esoteric ramblings at this point since I don’t really tweet about tech, but so it goes. At this point, I imagine I’ll tweet more about writing and books than anything else,

I actually unfollowed a bunch of folks in writing-twitter a while back, but I think I should start that back up again. Tweeting about books is pretty fun, and it’s been a big part of my life, so why the heck not. I’m at the point where “identifying as ✨spiritual ✨” was new and fun for a bit, but now it’s really a tool and I’m putting that tool to work. I should probably start using Twitter a bit more that way. But I just need to keep on writing, really, putting things out there. It’s one of those things where I go “once I get published I’ll feel like a Real Writer” and that’s kinda BS. I also don’t want to cling to “writer” too tightly, but it’s fun to imagine. Just need to untangle some things that cause me to procrastinate, I think, and then get to work.

In some way, I’m also just very distractable, and I’m prone to twiddling with things. I like snacking work, which isn’t great, especially on the weekends where I really struggle to coerce myself into doing things. I sometimes feel like things I’m good at should be “easy,” but that’s disregarding the years of work it took to make them become easy. That’s where I’m at with writing, a bit, because I know it’s not great and that discourages me from writing more. There’s also not really an external forcing function for me to write a lot, so I’m wondering if some kind of external program would be good for me.

Of course, maybe a reliance on an external program is red herring — I tried that with the Writers Workshop, but I didn’t really love it, although maybe that’s because it was much more feedback-focused and less on just getting a lot of output, which is what I think I really want. But I think I’ll go through this particular short story competition first and then reconvene afterwards.

It’s funny, there comes a time in each of these morning pages around the back half where I decide to stop getting distracted and to just barf out words, and that’s where we are now. I just decide to keep on going and going and going until number goes up enough, and that’s that. I think it’s a good moment to have, because it’s a little moment of mindfulness where I say enough is enough and I just dump all the words out. It’s like those moments in meditation where you catch your mind wandering and you softly pull it back to center. It’s a warm moment, a moment where we know exactly what we need, and just do the thing. Doing the thing is good! Writing is good, look how fun all this is, weeeee. Getting the words on the page and out of my brain feels great. I’m now idly thinking about this story, which is fun. What sort of place does our mysterious man end up? Is he in some yurt out in the woods? In a back alley in a seaside town? In the gallant courtroom of an abandoned castle? Who else is with him? Who’s the one organizing this whole experience, and why are they doing it? I said it was kinda like people going to south america to do ayahuasca, but in our case this could be this other land’s religious ceremony, a rite of passage into adulthood. It could be the kind act of a friend met in some tavern, or it may in fact be an accident. All of these things are wonderfully possible, and I kinda feel like trying them on for size. That’s a little bit my problem — I always want to know where things are going, but writing is thinking out loud, so in many ways I need to lean into discovering what could happen. That’s an attitude that could serve us all well, I suppose, so let’s take some time to sit with that.