Pot-Healer

Do I still remember how to do this? It’s a different state of mind than I’m used to, it’s a different configuration in my brain than the one I normally walk around with. What comes at the end of that? What do you think you’ll get up to if you can really flip your mind around and get comfortable with the truth? Nothing is going to shake you from what you intended, nothing is going to get you to zero in on the dramatic end of that line…

This is really just nonsense. I need a better subject and a better focus. You can’t fight a cloud of bees. You can’t really nail down what you’re getting at if you haven’t got a thing you want to nail down. Sometimes it’s too goddamn early in the morning and what you really want is to just squeeze some meaning out of an extra hour before you have to go do something. Nothing is going to come to a screeching halt the way you thought it would if you just work your way through it. How the hell else am I supposed to work my way through that inbox, how am I supposed to get that damn thing down to zero? I just have to work at it, I just have to make a decision and understand that in the end most of it is shit that I don’t get to anyway…

You have to get three paragraphs deep. You have to nail down that fight if you want to really see the end of it. Nothing, nothing, nothing matters if you can’t see the way that we want to see this. You’re just getting words out, but that’s the point. It’s all warm-up, it’s all what you need to see in the end and what you need to bring to your own fight in life. “I welcome someone who sees the good fight in life,” the old profile used to say. That guy could really write it out better than me.

Nah, man. I love having a monumental task looming over me, uncompleted, just staring at me like a specter waiting for its turn to exist in the world. It can’t be left undone, of course. If I knew I’d never do it then its stare would have no power. The whole reason its gaze looks into my soul is because it compels me to act even while it terrifies me.

I don’t think I need to convince myself that the fear is unjustified or irrational. Maybe the fear is justified, maybe it’s completely rational. That doesn’t really matter, though. Fear is not an excuse. Pants-shitting terror is not a reason you cannot do something.

Pray at this altar every day: the shrine that is the keyboard and monitor. Each key corresponding to a symbol that represents a word, carved by ancient peoples into stone, pressed into clay, scrawled on papyrus — I now have them at my fingertips, created on command, in the sequence in which I hit them. This method will soon be antiquated, but I need it because it’s what my neural net was trained on and thus how I enter my flow state. That is the purpose of this exercise, of all writing exercises: to get yourself closer to the flow state, to make the flow state more easily accessible.

What is the flow state? That would be a good topic. The diagram says it’s where discipline meets surrender. Before you know what you’re even surrendering to, you have to have the discipline to get to the point that you’re confronted by something scary. I don’t know what’s going to make you scared, maybe an idea that seems too stupid to work or too ambitious to be possible. But then you have to surrender and just do it. The muse provides the concept, you have to actualize it and see it through. Narrow down your mind, let the other things fall away, focus on what you can see clearly and what you can bring into existence in this particular pocket of matter.

It’s actually not that hard, you just always choose the hard thing. You always choose whatever is difficult. Choose whatever makes you uncomfortable, choose whatever is going to produce the better outcome. Let fear be your guide. Whatever you don’t want to do because it’s scary, that’s the thing to do. That’s what you want to lift out of your soul. The only way to grow beyond what you are now is pain, and pain is actually not that bad. Difficult is easy; what’s difficult is sitting still and wilting, growing stagnant and growing attached to one dead spot. You cannot expect anything good to come from it — it’s too easy. Effort wakes you up, it sharpens you, it brings you forward in ways that nothing else will. Gather yourself in ways that you cannot otherwise feel, bring yourself to see the things that you don’t want to see.

Let self-conscious thoughts slip through your mind, let them pass and hold only to the thoughts that move you forward. Don’t bother with nonsense, don’t get caught thinking you’re a major part of anyone else’s thought loop. They’re thinking about themselves, they’re caught up in their own world, just like you are.

It all becomes quite easy after a while. The old guy was right, what you have to do is focus on the outcome — the desired outcome, the goal — and then the rest becomes endurable. That’s really all it is. It only becomes unendurable when you feel it’s pointless. Any time you allow yourself to think the outcome isn’t possible, what you’re looking for really is an excuse to quit. You must not believe such voices from within your head. You must not allow that to catch on. What comes in now comes from beneath that, what breaks the silence for you and screams so much that it echoes will come through the bad places and screech that all of this is too good and too perfect. It will instill that feeling that you do not deserve what you have now before you. It will try to make you feel that what you have is not what you ought to.

Ah but what you have is indeed what you ought to have. What you need here is to listen to the voice that makes you uncomfortable — and that is the voice that tells you it’s possible, that tells you the goal is close, even. This is the one that says you can get what you want. That’s what you’re scared of most of all, isn’t it? What will you do when you receive what you wanted?

All you have to do is keep doing it. Persistence. That’s how our ancestors won over the other animals: they could run and keep running and never quit. Other animals are stronger and can run faster, but none of them could keep running a marathon through the heat. We could keep going when they gave up. That’s how we won. You keep going, keep going, keep going… You never know when you’re almost there. You could be one week away from it. You could be right there. You could be right on top of your damn goal right now.

Just keep going, just keep going… All of it goes to the end of the line. All of it circles around and brings us to where we ought to be. The right place is eventually found, the right angle is always brought in and the correct feeling is always there. You can cruise as well as you can do anything else, you can keep going when all of it was supposed to fall on your head and you were meant to cash out. But no, you could have a working prototype by the end of the day if you just focus. Subtract what is not needed and you will be left with only what you need to focus on, the things that can occupy all of your mind.

All of it comes together, all of it breathes. Find the places you want to go, and go there.

It’s always fun to choose the title before I even start. It’s a good exercise in not caring about getting it right from the start. You can’t know where things are going, you can always double-back and fix it. The point is just to start. You can always see where it’s headed if you just move yourself closer to where it starts, if you can place yourself where it ought to be in order to get yourself to where you need to be.

That’s a bunch of fanciful nonsense to fill in the lines, but of course that is acceptable here too. You don’t need to fix any of it, you don’t need to care about doing anything except capturing the output of the brain through they fingers and into the keyboard. This is about reinforcing the connection and building that thing so that you can achieve that unconscious competence and move on to something at a higher level. That’s how mastery works: you practice so that the skill becomes automatic and you can ascend yourself into thinking about what it is you want to express with these developed pathways.

So what do you want? A starter theme. You want to bring this whole thing screeching on the runway so that it takes off. The sentences don’t need to make sense, just keep going. I need to kick off a couple websites, I need to probably consolidate what I’ve got on two servers so that I can make room for what I will need later. I can probably start fresh and cut out the other two servers. Do a little cost analysis. That’s it, that simple. That easy. Just do it, just start, just do anything. Anything that has been latent in me must be actualized.

This is how you get your shit back: do stuff you don’t want to do. Do something scary and difficult — because once you do it, it won’t be scary or difficult. In fact, you’ll see how easy it was. Difficult? Difficult is nothing. Anyone can do something difficult. You just pick a thing and you keep doing it until you get it. Persistence. That’s all. The initial effort is more difficult because you’re venturing into the unknown, you’re moving into the space where things don’t make sense quite yet.

That feeling of uncertainty, unknowing, discomfort — that’s the feeling of renewal and rebirth. That’s the feeling of starting fresh. Fear and discomfort. Renewal is not comfortable. Getting what you need does not feel good. Getting your shit together feels difficult, which simply requires persistence. Starting on it just requires that you not be a coward.

Only two things are needed:

1. Courage
2. Persistence

Have the temerity to start, have the tenacity to finish. That’s really it.

I need to define a project. Step zero. When the work begins the fatigue will cease. When the fight begins the mind locks in and you have an objective — that’s the only time you feel comfortable. Rotting away in that waiting room in your mind is what will kill you, it’s what will make you miserable forever. You’ll be sitting in there fighting a mirror, punching away at a reflection. You need a mission, you need a fight that will keep you alive. It’s always purpose, purpose, purpose.

Posts like these can really do it. I probably need this space for myself, though. I think I need this area that no one knows about. You need that space that you can keep to yourself, a private garden for your mind. The walled garden of the mind, where you test new breeds and just go wild for your own sake. The purpose is to experience what it is to be free of judgment — especially your own — and then you can take that energy and bring it out to where it’s needed. This is the breeding ground for what you can cook up for others.

The trick that most people don’t learn is the uncoupling of the work and the self. Connecting the work to yourself is ego, it’s treating what you’ve created like it’s part of you. It’s not. it’s the exhaust fumes of your mind, and you’re just learning to blow smoke rings. You get a good one and a bad one here and there, but all you really need to think about is how you’re going to do the next one. The judgment is never about you, and even if it were it wouldn’t matter.

I never figured out how to recover on purpose. I can always do it accidentally, when I let go. Maybe I never figured out how to let go on purpose. It’s probably a lot easier than I think. Why would taking it easy be hard? You believe the tension and anxiety are protecting you from something, but they’re not. They’re magnets to bad experiences. Release the tension and the good flows in.

You can tell yourself, “stop anticipating pain” — but that isn’t actionable. Avoidance is not a good instruction. The instruction is to seek, to expect something positive. Anticipate pleasure. Anticipate feeling good. Anticipate that you will do well. Anything less makes you hold back. It will take time but you will rewire yourself.

Action is key. The doer alone learneth. Action siphons off the dull and cruddy vapors which environ you, it cleanses the spirit and brings your soul home. Always be doing. Act faster than doubt can catch up with you, jump in faster than the voices that tell you not to.

Anticipate that it will work. Know that it is possible. Be delusional. Know that she will find the right place with you.

You have to do this every day. Keeping the thoughts in your head without writing them down is suffocating, like keeping the windows shut. The buildup of exhaust will kill you, smother your ambition, crush your hopes. The only thing to do is the hardest thing to do: keep up with the effort. Keep going even when there is no hope anymore. Speed down that tunnel even when you see no light at the end of it. The fire has to burn within you that there is something there at the end, that you just have to keep going.

It will still come to you, it can still come to you. Remember the little fisherman of the night, the spider in the cup. Every night, spin a web. Every day, write something. The way is there, you just need to find it.

This is it, this is your heartbeat. I’ve probably said that before, but it doesn’t matter. This little post every once in a while has kept me going. Nothing much else can come through to me, nothing else I do can get that pressure off. Nothing else is going to get me to the finish line. I mean, you get to the finish line every day — the day will end whether you like it or not, and it adds up. Eventually it’s all over. The only option is what you do with it day to day. You can be effective or you can worry about what you will do. If you do something, at least you find out if you’re traveling in the right direction or not.

This blank screen, the typing fingers… This is what I really need. This is what it comes to if you want to feel something. Stacking up order, putting something together where there wasn’t something before. What did the diagram say? Flow is where discipline and surrender overlap. Discipline is easy enough to understand, but what is surrender? Surrender to what? Maybe it’s surrender to the absurd ambition of your ideas. You have to believe that you have something worth sharing, you have to let the idea have some say in whether it should be manifested in the world or not. The idea came to you, maybe you shouldn’t be the one judging whether it should exist or not. Maybe you have to trust that this thing embedded itself in your head and bothers you to let it out every day for a reason. You don’t need to understand why and you don’t need to judge it. You do the best you can with it (discipline) and you need to have the trust to actually do it completely.

You have to let go to have trust. Trust is not holding on, it’s letting go. Let go of the fear you have when it comes to deciding whether the idea should manifest or not. That’s why it’s cowardice and hypocrisy to keep the idea crammed down inside, to keep it neatly packed in some recess of your mind, perpetually postponed to some later date when you feel the time will be right. The time is always wrong and you have to just do it right now anyway.