You write every day so you’re ready on the day you are forced to write.
You run every day so you’re ready on the day you are forced to run.
You show up when you have a choice, so you’re ready when you don’t have a choice anymore.
Because that’s when your character shows.
What do you see that others don’t even notice?
What do you feel that others don’t even seem to care about?
What do you like to do that most others never even entertain?
What do you write about that most others haven’t even considered?
And instead of seeing such differences as a societal warning sign, discouraging you from pursuing it…
Can you see them as an encouraging sign of unique contributions you’re about to make?
Embrace your individuality.
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 nounswith all its might language wants us to abide
Lukas Van Vyve
but the wordless world it tries to hide
will forever be inside
Performance gap: the frustrating gap between the way you know something should be done in an ideal world and the way you currently do it.
I know I should write daily blog posts in advance so I have a buffer in case something comes up and I don’t get to write. Yet here I am, writing this daily insight hours before the publication date.
I know what the perfect downward-facing dog pose in yoga looks like. Yet when I perform it myself, I am far off from that ideal pose.
I know all the ingredients that make up a solid, convincing speech. Yet when I write one myself, I am only able to incorporate a few of those ingredients.
Learning, then, is closing the gap between your intellectual understanding of an ideal product, action, or skill, and your current rendition of it.
Don’t be so hard on yourself for your current performance.
You can’t expect to turn intellectual understanding into mastery and internalized knowledge right away.
You don’t have to master this today.
You’re ahead of your time.
You’ll always be behind.
And you’re right where you’re supposed to be.
Writing, running, work, relationships… No matter how you feel today, these three statements are all true, all at the same time, for everything you do.
Now we’ve got that out of the way, you can continue to do the work.
What you spend your time on.
Who you spend your time with.
Who you listen to.
What you listen to.
Never forget, you get to choose.
Trying to become good fast makes you impatient. And impatience may well stop you from ever becoming good in the first place.
Because the only way to become good is by understanding that in today’s practice session, you likely won’t be perfect anyway.
That you likely won’t write your most insightful words.
That you likely won’t run an all-time best.
That you’ll likely spend a large part of your yoga session stumbling and losing balance.
When you go into your practice session with that mindset…
Suddenly it makes sense to focus hard on getting that one sentence right.
Now it makes sense to focus on rhythmic breathing while running instead of pushing for a better time.
Now it makes sense to focus on a tiny part of your body during an entire yoga session to train your awareness instead of trying to chase poses because “they look professional.”
Even if there is not much time to “become good,” it still makes sense to assume there is time.
Because that gives you the freedom to focus on the small adjustments that prepare you for when the time comes, and you truly need to perform.
Since I’m always practicing anyway, I don’t have to be good at this today.
