Pot-Healer

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.

Hey, look. I’m doing it again. I’m slogging through the idiocy of each individual sentence, refusing to go backwards and erase the start of a sentence I fell out of love with ten words ago. Each paragraph is like a single day: there’s only so much you can get done, only so much you can expect from it. The good ones are unforeseen and you just have to keep going through them until you get to the good one. You have to keep plowing along to hit that vein of gold. Nothing good just falls into your lap, you have to trudge on and on and really get that thing together. It’s the long work, the hard work struggling through the boredom and feeling that this is never going to work out. That is what keeps you alive and running. That is what’s going to convince the deus ex machina to come out of the tangled fabric of causality and bump you up to the next level. I guess that is what they call faith.

I can’t tell if I used this word as a title before. Pretty soon I’ll probably quit doing one-word titles… Actually I can look at the URL and see if the slug has a “-2” appended. Everything can be determined computationally; it’s not a chaotic system like everything else. What the hell are they even wondering about? What the hell are they even thinking? What am I thinking writing nonsense in the middle of the afternoon just because it feels good? I need to get that bastard up and running and working so that I can feel like I did something right.

What does perfection mean to you? It means the end, it means the conclusion. It means nothing more to do. It means no more work, which means no more purpose. You need imperfection to stay alive, you need something to fix. Without work, you decay.

Spend the next five minutes writing. I don’t care what it’s about. Pull your head out of the phone and think about what you’re going to do this morning. I have to send an email, I have to write some stuff. Suddenly I find myself trapped by not being able to be specific about what I’m up to here… I need to migrate some servers. Set up the new one and dedicate myself to moving sites one bit at a time until all the tools are there. Get it all together and get it set right. I only need one server, I only need it brought together once. I just need you to bring it to me, bring it to the right place so I can set it down and screech my way through it. None of this makes sense but it doesn’t matter, you’re engaging your brain to your fingers and no matter how filthy that sounds it’s the right thing to do.

Write things down. Make a plan. Stick to it.