Are you practicing writing? Or giving up writing? Are you practicing persevering? Or giving up? Are you practicing doing what you know is good for you? Or ignoring what you know is good for you?
You’re always practicing something. And what you practice, you’ll become good at. And what you practice will persist.
On Sunday, January 3 2021, motivated by an emotional low point and an article I read on writing “Morning Pages”, I grabbed an old notepad, pen, started writing and didn’t stop until I had filled three pages.
It was the first time in 5 years I wrote something by hand, and the first time in my life I journaled.
I liked it so much that I kept writing every day.
We’re 625 days later now, and I never stopped. 3 pages of Stream of Consciousness journaling a day, 625 days in a row: that’s 1875 pages or relaxing the mind and letting my train of thoughts “stream onto the page”, unfiltered, playfully wandering through my experiences, thoughts, and insights.
But no matter how enjoyable the wandering, lately I’ve been feeling the urge to create something tangible (and valuable) with all those insights and ideas.
Here’s how I envision it:
Dailyjournaling (Morning Pages) unblocks my stream of consciousness and transfers it to paper, forming the raw material out of which ideas and insights can emerge. In my experience, once I’ve gone through the sea of fluff, I can expect an insight (maybe two if I’m lucky).
Daily sculpting helps me remove all the fluff until only the pure insights are left, and then refine them, like a sculptor chiseling away at a massive block of marble, working to reveal the essence hidden inside of it.
Sculpting until only the essence remains
“If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.”
– Mark Twain
Sculpting is the hard part. Because when you think about it, the raw material – the ideas and insights – have always been there, just like the famous Davide sculpture has always been hidden inside the block of marble Michelangelo hauled from a quarry in Carrara in the Apuan alps. He just paid attention in a different way and saw what many others didn’t see.
Yet, he wasn’t the only person who had the idea to use a block of marble to sculpt a Biblical figure. But the way he shaped that raw material into something impactful, beautiful, that accurately represents what you had in mind…
That made all the difference.
And it’s a skill that takes a long time to hone.
Which might be why I’ve avoided it for so long. So far, out of 1875 pages of journaling, I’ve published… 4 articles.
Time to change that. From today onwards, I’m adding a “sculpting session” to my day and will publish the result as a “Daily Insight”.
I don’t expect it to be particularly insightful anytime soon. Maybe I’ll never be fully satisfied with anything I come up with.
But when I stick to it every day and arrive at day 50, 100, or day 625…
Who knows how much I’ll have learned about writing, insight generation, communication,…?
Who knows what will have emerged?
Surely more than if I’d do nothing.
Which leads me to the question I’m asking myself today:
What would it feel like if I remove all external judgment from writing and see writing as the practice of exploring thoughts, ideas, feelings, insights, and becoming ever more accurate and impactful in representing them?
My current answer: I’d be focused much more on process and progress, not on competition. I’d feel how I’m getting better every day, not in relationship to others (as in competition), but in relationship to the purest expression of a certain art, skill, or action.
Language helps us describe the world we perceive. Yet in doing so, it closes our eyes, our ears, our touch, and our heart to the parts of the world we don’t have words for.
Every language is a lens on a felt reality within and around us – both clarifying and categorizing the world, and limiting it by the words it has available.
Learning more languages gives you new lenses – and a richer sense of reality.
But just like the structure of our ears limit the sounds we can hear, and the structure of our eyes limit colors we can see, the structure of any language somehow limits our felt experience of the world.
How do we re-access memories, emotions, hidden away in a long-forgotten language?
How do we re-learn to listen to the voices of the wordless world speaking to our animal self… the voices that once upon a time, before verbal language emerged, were all we had?
there’s an eternal song drowned out by the confines of my mother tongue a wordless melody that once made sense until our brain started blurring it with a lens narrowing it down neglecting its nuances through verbs and nouns
with all its might language wants us to abide but the wordless world it tries to hide will forever be inside
In the series of self-sabotaging behavior I’ve observed in myself and others: “pre-emptively disqualifying yourself”.
Before you even start, you’re depriving yourself already of any potential benefit of the exercise because you don’t know if you’ll get the EXACT benefit promised/desired by you.
“This exercise might have cured your neck pain, but I’ve always had neck problems, it won’t chage anything.”
“You might be able to write every day, but for me, in my situation, that would never be possible.”
This shows a lack of understanding of learning principles. Because with any exercise, program, diet, methodology, you’ll never get the exact same results as someone else, because you can never replicate the exact circumstances and actions of a person.
Instead, you do the exercise/program/diet/… within the framework of your own personal context/skills/past experience. Within that context, it will guide your learning process. But the outcome resulting from it is personal.
Variance is to be expected, and this is a good thing. Because this is how innovation happens: actions in different types of circumstances lead to slightly different results. Sometime that leads to disappointment, sometimes to real breakthroughs.
Getting different results, then, is not a reason to pre-emptively disqualify yourself, or to claim something doesn’t work. Because the true value doesn’t lie in getting the exact same results as someone else, but rather, to consciously set the general direction of our lives.
Every day, we have to make so many decisions that lead us down different future paths, so modeling someone and using their actions as a guiding principle will greatly increase the probability of you going in the direction you desire, and getting results in the same ballpark.
For example, I’ve been doing Dylan Werner’s yoga classes on Alo Moves (my go-to online yoga/fitness/meditation app) consistently for almost two years now. Even if I continue to follow his exact schedule for two more years, chances are, I still might not be able to do something like this:
After all, we have a different body structure, different gene disposition, different circumstances, and I’ll have to adapt his schedule to my personal capacity.
Still, if I follow his schedule I’ll definitely become much stronger and healthier than if I chose to model a couch potato, watch TV and eat fries and burgers all day. And that’s what it’s all about.
Modeling, in that point of view, are an effective way to accelerate your progress and lead your life in the direction you want, without you having to know exactly which results you’ll get.
In other words: when you let go of the need to predict exact future outcomes, you can stop pre-emptively disqualifying yourself, and start pro-actively setting the direction of your life.
