Tag: free-flowing

I still miss 100 daily posts to achieve my one year of daily publishing challenge. The experiment is to see what goals will emerge rather than pursuing any goal rather than just writing daily. Understanding what emerges from my writing needs something simple: reading. So I want to plan reading and make sense of  what I wrote to identify patterns and trends. Yes, I already know many of them by heart and maybe that’s the most useful outcome of this practice. That’s another post I am not sure I will find any value out of when I will read it again in the future.

Not compounding. That’s my problem with this daily writing thing. I learned it all about what pushes me to write, how I do it, when I do it and why I do it. And the problem is always the same. I do the minimum possible to check the box for the day. Meaning: the minimum possible in thinking. That’s what I am doing here. Trying to think as little as possible. Isn’t that the worst outcome I would desire from this challenge? If writing is thinking then this is not even writing. This is filling blank spaces. This is wasting pixels. A useless use of electricity. I am pretty sure I will hit the mark. I will write and publish one article every day for 365 days in a row, and then? Then what? What will be the value of reading, for instance, an article like this?

Alone is good. The problem comes from remembering what we said we would have done when alone. We are masters in intentions and planning and very inefficient at doing what we said we would do in a different context. What if we wrote our intentions, ready to be read and executed when the actual context would present?

I lay down on the bench, belly up. The sky is blue and the high leaves are gently dancing. I perceive a presence without looking. The small fountain at the center of the natural square, on top of the hill, far from the city, stopped making the musical noise of the water flowing from the tap. I hear wind blowing high on tree canopies. But the air reaches me a few moments later. There’s a delay between realizing there will be wind and actually feeling it on the skin. It’s fresh, on a hot summer day, in a secluded park. The other is reading an ebook. The first moment he stopped talking since this morning. It must be really good. I stand up and drink fresh water from the fountain. It’s almost cold. Just enough to give waves of sweet thrills. It’s a wonderful day of holiday and observing simple things makes me feel good.

If you lose the innocence you had when you were a young child you cannot enjoy holiday in the same way. How can you jump for joy, again, only by hearing that you will go to the beach? Sounds, smells, emotions are tangible, you feel that electricity going through your body. It’s like ecstasy.

When you’re an adult you have to fight the thoughts about the traffic jam, the heat, the innumerable boxes to carry, the hot sand. That’s pure negativity. Being happy means also remaining young at heart, meaning: in your brain. I wish I could evoke again those incredible feelings of happiness and joy of being on holiday.

I really don’t want to write now. Not after 12 hours creating for work. It’s a well established pattern of putting anything possible in front of this daily task. By tiring myself, my body, and depleting all great energy I have in the morning I am ensuring the worst performance possible when, then, at the end of the day, I write these tired notes. It’s really me fighting another version of me. I want to write but I don’t’t want to write. Both of them are alive and fighting all the time.

But today, my dear opposite me, I won.

Changing place helps changing perspective. Although we always can bring our digital world with us when you are on the move you are forced to be more creative. Finding the right route, the right destination or just a place to eat gives you different stimuli than jumping to another hyperlink. Moving should be a recommended activity to become more creative. Turning off the usual thinking patterns when working facilitates ideation and elaboration of our past experiences. While a nice and long walk is a good way to augment your brain, and your health, driving away from home, even for only a couple of days disrupts the lazy old comfortable ways of thinking and gives us a refreshing wave of novelties. Get lost, it’s good.

When you make a backup copy of something you are saving it for your future self. In the present, you want to save your work and keep it safe. But why? When will you need it again, in the future? That’s the intention, the procrastination, you are making a statement, you are giving shape to matter and space to keep a snapshot of your artifacts because they might be needed. What happens when after years or decades you have to access your copies? Are they still intact? Did they keep the slice of your past as you intended? Are you able to retrieve the information you saved? Is it easy to understand what’s inside? Do you have the technologies and the means to physically access it? Making a backup of your data is like sending an object to the future, you need to state a clear intention in your saving and take care of its accessibility when and if needed.

Becoming immune doesn’t mean avoiding or rejecting alien things. It’s the opposite, it means being completely immersed in them and developing an immune response.

For those things we cannot avoid, reject or prevent to be immersed with, we need to develop our immune system.