Pot-Healer

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.

Fate led you to accidentally click on this and work on your project a bit. So do it. You have to do it. You were born on this Earth and now you have no choice but to do it. Click along with the keys, pot healer. Keep going as long as you can. It’s important just to move, just to do anything, even if every post is just you telling yourself to get up and do something. That is what matters at the end of all of it, that is what will keep you together so that you can get other things done. This whole collection can be a set of posts telling yourself what you need to do, and that is good. That is what you need. That is what you will do. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Fight, fight, fight. That is where you can get yourself. You can nail that Jell-O to the wall. You can pin that cloud down. “Fight” used to be your favorite word to write out in longhand, when you did this all by longhand. It almost felt like the point of the whole thing.

The theme here is always purpose. You have to dangle that carrot in front of yourself, you have to pretend it’s there even when it’s not there. You have to get up and forget that you dreamed about things falling apart; you have to get up today and put things together. That is all that ever matters, that is all that you can ever want from any of it. Keep going, keep going.

When you wait so long to post again, the UI has changed…

Doesn’t matter, though. New strategies are needed. Letting go of the need to make sense or satisfy any reader is the point here. This is where you can be more than imperfect, you can fucking suck. Just do it badly. This is the place, the temple of mediocrity. Salieri’s Sanctuary, where it’s okay to just be okay.

And it’s okay to not know what you want to talk about. There’s nothing really on my mind yet. The purpose of this thing is to find your way. You can sit here and talk all day about how it doesn’t matter that you don’t have a way forward yet. You can see the end and see the light and make it all up, fanciful garbage that seems like it was written by a poorly trained LLM.

You have your ideas though and you do have an easy way to work on your notes. You do know the power of spending a small amount of time on a long-term goal persistently, that single brick laid each day. As time slips by like nothing, the bricks add up and you soon have a structure. The structure encourages you and you can build more, you can see where it’s going more clearly and you can plan ahead. You feel that you have moved forward and you see the progress, you know where to go with it. It keeps you together and screams at the light when the sentences start falling apart, but it doesn’t matter because the point is to move forward.

That’s how we play this game. This is just the practice, the point is movement. The point is to keep typing. Will I be able to do this with a neural link? Maybe not. The tactile sensation is too important. Could a pianist play music with just their brain? The movement of the body is too connected with the sound, and it’s the same way with words appearing on the screen. That connection between you and the words is that important, it’s that crucial to bring the two together. It would be a good way for a character in a story to type, though.

The energy has changed, can you feel it? The fear weakens, its power diminishes. Its muscles atrophy rapidly from disuse, its grip loosens around my neck. I can breathe, and all I had to do was relax.

The specter of failure that I used to frighten myself into inaction was always an illusion, a self-made prison built for circular reasons. Fear feeds and devours itself, an uroboros of senseless suffering. Fear is the anticipation of pain, or of destruction, or of unhappiness. Fear’s growth and and its stranglehold on your soul rely on the lie that all pain is avoidable if you just stay within the box. Stand within the lines, do not venture into danger, then you will not experience pain. You will be safe.

There is no safety, there is only holding back. There is only inaction that will lead to the worst pain: regret over a life not lived. And the more you give in to the fear, the more you obey its dictates and stay within its boundaries, the more fearful you become of breaking free into danger. You forget what it was like to breathe. You forget that you are anti-fragile and that pain makes you stronger, that mistakes are required for learning, and that the only lesson you cannot learn from is inaction because all you can learn from that was that you should have done something, and that you wasted time you will never get back.

The mind must relax its grip on the body, allow it to breathe. You are not so breakable. Fear will always whisper to you, but you can train yourself not to listen.

The worst feeling is when you have nothing to say, so the post has to be about how you have nothing to say. There’s nothing to say about it, nothing that anyone feels like reading about. But this blog is not for reading, it’s for unclogging your brain. The writing — and especially sitting down and writing every single day — that is the part that matters.

So now that I have reassured myself over nothing, what do I say next? It’s too early. The idea that you have to do this right away in the morning is a myth. You’re not functioning yet; it makes no sense. I haven’t started thinking (or obsessing) over anything yet.

Time for some stream of consciousness nonsense:

I wonder what the deal is with people who won’t let anyone in. What is the point of dropping yourself that low if you won’t absorb some of the insanity around you? What is the purpose of coming into existence for a short while and leaving if you don’t take any of it in? It doesn’t matter whether it makes sense or not because you’ve told yourself already that it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t need to make any sort of objective sense, you said so yourself. But it can make sense to you, and if there is no meaning behind any of it then you can at least have pleasure and enjoyment, and you cannot have that without assigning your own meaning to things. You are the microcosm, after all. You are the tiny universe created in a mind and you have all of the purpose built up inside you to release into the world.

So now what? Now how do we get to the point that you can navigate the world and gleefully tear yourself into the fold so you can make a difference? Why do I want to leave a mark on the unfolding pattern of matter around me so badly? Anyone who didn’t feel like doing that is gone and forgotten. We all become forgotten, though. There is a horizon to our influence. All you should care about is what is inside of that horizon.

The italics are unnecessary. I wanted to use them to demarcate the nonsense but it’s all nonsense, really.

The only part of your existence you’re aware of is this linear bitstream of characters, one word after another in a line. Conscious thought skims the surface. The depths are full of monsters; all of that is just animal experience. But up here I can breathe air and get a grasp on what I feel. Connection does not come the murky bottom of the pond, it’s made at the surface where you have actual thoughts.

The unconscious is overrated. It’s the conscious realm where you take in the vibes and make use of them.