2024-10-20 Journal Entry

Gonna get back into writing, he says. Never writes.

I always start all of these so negatively.

I’m going to try something slightly different this time around – purely time-based writing styles. I’m writing for 30 minutes today, which seems emminently doable. It’s kinda like a meditation, just get the reps in.

I don’t feel like I have terribly much to say at the moment. The prospect of a new life slowly emerges before me, chains melting away. Something something freedom like falling asleep (slowly and then all at once, boo).

Writing like this is kinda fun though. Just let the fingers fly across the keyboard, mind empty, no thought about the content of it all.

My brain is a bit like peanut butter, right now. I talked with Dan for three and a half hours today about Finite and Infinite Games and it made my brain fall apart. It’s nice to think about life like that sometimes, but it makes me not want to be a philosopher. I can see why they’re so unhappy, trying so hard to distill everything in front of them into sentences. Same for writers, but at least writing fiction doesn’t have to be nearly as exact.

Fiction writers are far more happy to just fudge the data.

Of course, fudging the data is all we do all the time. Dan and I talked about all the ambiguities at play in a work like F&IG and I just felt like the juice wasn’t really worth the squeeze. There’s a meta-problem in thinking about life too much life that, which is that you think of life as a puzzle to be solved. Once we’ve got the right framework for life, then we can be happy.

It’s never really like that.

Instead, it’s more like wandering through a maze for a little while. One of those big garden mazes where the walls are all huge shrubs, like the end of The Shining. And each corner you turn you maybe find a blooming flower or something interesting to poke your head at. You don’t really know if you’re going in the right direction, but it doesn’t really matter. You can’t see where the end will be, but it doesn’t really matter. Someone may be watching you from up above, but it doesn’t really matter. With enough time, you’ll make it to the end. (The Shining reference is just because there’s a shrub maze in the Shining, not because of any of the contents of the thought.)

If one writes long enough like this, perhaps all the words just start to show up. A ghost-writer, in a sense.

When one really lets go, the words can just come. The world unfolds before you. Feeling each little thing – the slight ache in my lower back, the tweeting of the bird outside my window, cafeteria lunches in the second grade and those little keypads you had to press. I heard that they got rid of those, that you have to have a phone now to do all of that.

I wonder sometimes if we’re all concerned about the right thing, sometimes. Like collectively. A lot of people I see seem happy enough, maybe, but sometimes I think we’re all just out here winging it. Nobody really know what they’re doing.

And I don’t think people need to, like, “know what they’re doing” or anything, but I worry that the real happiness may lie in all the little things we never tell each other. There’s that little part in each of us that actually knows things, that little tiny flame that burns. The pilot light of the soul. The pilot light of knowing, from which everything else is ignited. The first mover, like God. Maybe that’s what the afterlife really is, it’s all of us finally being able to see that little inconsolable part of us that knows deep down what’s good. Morality was all of us just coping with how simple it really is, at the end of the day, to be happy, to be alive.

There’s a shelter in all of us that we can go back to. The refuge, the heart of Christ. The forgiveness for our mistakes, as we forgive others. You did the best you knew how to do, back then.

You’re already free.

That’s what people really mean by already having Buddha-nature – they just mean that little spec. That spec feels tight when you lie or when you drink or when you dream about how things really could be. And after all of that, you’ll be fine.

How do we really get everyone to see that, though. Or maybe everyone already does see it. I think most people know more than we lead on, but the words are probably just different. Each one of our hearts sings a different song but they’re all in the same key. That’s cheesy – they’re probably all so discordant, but together they make the background noise of the universe. As the quote goes, underneath it all is a pure being made of radiant colors.

Sometimes I see myself writing like this and it just seems like it’s a chance to barf out all the ideas, really, that don’t actually mean anything but feel true. It’s the writing of my own kind of radiant colors, before they really bloom.

Back at it for the back half of this episode.

(I tried doing thirty minutes by subdividing this into two 15-minute sprints, which was probably a good idea in practice but I now realize that getting this cold start back kinda sucks. Maybe two longer sessions may work or something.)

Cause now I don’t have a ton to say.

My brain continues to feel less like peanut butter and more like a hard potato.

It reminds me a bit of being on retreat. Sometimes you have these huge insights, but they really wear the mind out. I think I spent my entire social battery talking to Dan, and the two states just so happen to feel very similar.

Why is that? (Does vipassana work in writing? I suppose we’ll find out.) What I mean is, often times this is the hindrance that most Buddhist lineages would refer to as “sloth” or “torpor” (the latter of which is a word I’ve never heard outside of a Buddhist context, wonder where that came from.) And the only thing I have to really do tonight are things that are generally quite pleasant experiencs – writing and meditation. They’re both things that the mind really doesn’t like doing for whatever reason, but that once you start doing them can actually be very peaceful.

Writing right now doesn’t take all that much effort. It probably should take more effort though – writing well is, of course, exceedingly difficult, and just vomiting words out is therapeutic but not worth reading.

Writing is largely unlike a lot of other disciplines, I think. In other jobs, you can often do simple things quite quickly (the whole “you don’t pay me for the 10 minutes it took to do this, you pay me for the skill that allows me to do this in 10 minutes” kinda thing) – but in writing that’s often not the case. Characters don’t “simply” do things, like making a sandwhich or listening to the radio. No, they’re making a sandwhich because they don’t have time to make a proper lunch, but they need something to occupy the next 10 minutes while they wait for a phone call from their wife who recently left them. They’re listening to the radio because it’s the only way’ll they’ll know if the city where there son is stationed during the war was bombed that day. The radio is their only confidant in silent world.

Or something like that, I don’t really know. But what I mean is that in writing, one must see – and in fact, be the origin of – so many conditions in order to see the broader picture. In Buddhism, thinking on all the conditions leading to a moment is considered on the “imponderables,” something so vast and so wide as to be impossible to fit into our tiny human skulls. Much is probably said to be like that for writing, that one cannot imagine all moments so we must imagine only a small subsection of them to make them meaningful.

But as is said in F&IG, in an infinite game, the past is not fixed in infinite games: it must be reconsidered over and over again. It must refresh itself anew, just as the future is refreshed anew. This reimagining makes knowing oneself very difficult. To know anything, truly, is a monumental task. We must be open to everything that it is and everything that it could be. Our minds want to be stable, but we cannot be stable and be true. We must pick our security or our freedom. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

(I highly doubt that quote was meant to be taken in the context of personal development or whatever, but I still think it’s true.)

And but so here we all are, adrift in a sea of meanings and conditions and extrapolations. Oceans of data with which we can do little else but to drift through to the other side. That data is not our full story though, at least not as we know it.

Remember the Bajia Sutta, that when in the seeing is just the seeing, when in the hearing is just the hearing, then you will not be with that, and when you are not with that you will not be in that, and when you are not in that, you will be neither here nor there nor anywhere in between. Then, Bajia, you will be free.