Towards a Stride
You don’t have to be like me and it’s totally OK if you aren’t.
But the best working for me comes when I hit a stride. When the shape of every day is kind of the same and I can lean hard into the dependable rhythms of waking, taking care of myself, focusing on my day, going to work, meeting my collaborators, identifying our goals for the day, taking our first shots at those goals, breaking, reviewing, discussing, trying again, perhaps turning to a new problem and working on that, working on it again, tending to some of the material aspects of the work, turning back to the hard work, perhaps trying to see what we’ve made, thinking about what I’ve just seen...and thinking about the day, making a bridge between today’s work and tomorrow’s goals...and then letting my attention go wherever it wants for a while. It’s the regularity of the working process that lets me take chances in my approaches, that lets me trust what my colleague David Brick calls “the black box,” my intuition...and that lets me see what those intuitive moves actually yield, because I see them against a backdrop of...everything else being pretty much the same.
I don’t think of it as superstition, but I’ll tend to always eat at the same restaurant amend if I don’t wear exactly the same clothes every day, I do tend to wear kind of the same feeling clothes. I let everything that I can simply function on autopilot so that I can focus my attention on the little fluttering of my impulses and the ways I can keep turning over in my mind/imagination/spirit/self the things my work is dealing with and the ways it is emerging to me.
We are all living in an enforced routine, now. I wonder if it’s possible to welcome the sameness of every day and to lean into what we are making now. Or if the forced-ness of the routine mitigates against the feeling I love, of being lost in the freedom to create.
Since you have no choice in the matter, I encourage you to make friends with your freedom. If we can prevent our days from being hijacked by zooming and chasing after notifications and news alerts and the general Zuckerberging of our moment-to-moment lives, there is really a lot of space and time in which we can know ourselves, come to gain some familiarity with our own deep impulses, and follow the lines on inquiry that rise up naturally in us.
I believe that people are naturally curious, that we are hard-wired to want to know more, to want to know ourselves and each other and our environments and our universe better. I’m afraid that we’ve invented toys to occupy our roiling curiosity and, in the way a pacifier keeps an infant sucking away on nothing at all, we let our deep curiosity die and go to sleep in our selves clicking on the endless scrolling of what feels novel to us but is not really new.
What if the next three weeks were a grand experiment in tuning deeply into yourself? What if you let go of all the busy-making interruptions and let your curiosity play out endlessly over your own internal feed rather than the one the corporations are beaming into your devices? What might happen? What might you be capable of? Are you curious?
But the best working for me comes when I hit a stride. When the shape of every day is kind of the same and I can lean hard into the dependable rhythms of waking, taking care of myself, focusing on my day, going to work, meeting my collaborators, identifying our goals for the day, taking our first shots at those goals, breaking, reviewing, discussing, trying again, perhaps turning to a new problem and working on that, working on it again, tending to some of the material aspects of the work, turning back to the hard work, perhaps trying to see what we’ve made, thinking about what I’ve just seen...and thinking about the day, making a bridge between today’s work and tomorrow’s goals...and then letting my attention go wherever it wants for a while. It’s the regularity of the working process that lets me take chances in my approaches, that lets me trust what my colleague David Brick calls “the black box,” my intuition...and that lets me see what those intuitive moves actually yield, because I see them against a backdrop of...everything else being pretty much the same.
I don’t think of it as superstition, but I’ll tend to always eat at the same restaurant amend if I don’t wear exactly the same clothes every day, I do tend to wear kind of the same feeling clothes. I let everything that I can simply function on autopilot so that I can focus my attention on the little fluttering of my impulses and the ways I can keep turning over in my mind/imagination/spirit/self the things my work is dealing with and the ways it is emerging to me.
We are all living in an enforced routine, now. I wonder if it’s possible to welcome the sameness of every day and to lean into what we are making now. Or if the forced-ness of the routine mitigates against the feeling I love, of being lost in the freedom to create.
Since you have no choice in the matter, I encourage you to make friends with your freedom. If we can prevent our days from being hijacked by zooming and chasing after notifications and news alerts and the general Zuckerberging of our moment-to-moment lives, there is really a lot of space and time in which we can know ourselves, come to gain some familiarity with our own deep impulses, and follow the lines on inquiry that rise up naturally in us.
I believe that people are naturally curious, that we are hard-wired to want to know more, to want to know ourselves and each other and our environments and our universe better. I’m afraid that we’ve invented toys to occupy our roiling curiosity and, in the way a pacifier keeps an infant sucking away on nothing at all, we let our deep curiosity die and go to sleep in our selves clicking on the endless scrolling of what feels novel to us but is not really new.
What if the next three weeks were a grand experiment in tuning deeply into yourself? What if you let go of all the busy-making interruptions and let your curiosity play out endlessly over your own internal feed rather than the one the corporations are beaming into your devices? What might happen? What might you be capable of? Are you curious?
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