#526 The solutions are near
When you lean in to the fear
The naysaying voices you hear
You’ll realize solutions are near
Within grasp
Maybe already here
And so is everything else you hold dear.
When you lean in to the fear
The naysaying voices you hear
You’ll realize solutions are near
Within grasp
Maybe already here
And so is everything else you hold dear.
der Musenkuss (German) The kiss of the Muse
Creativity becomes much easier if you see it as a game of finding new ways of describing what has always been there.
Observing, rather than inventing.
It’s liberating. Because now the game changes from pulling ideas out of thin air to a game of discovery. Observation. Paying attention. Building upon what’s already discovered, then connecting the dots in way nobody else has.
Most of all: listening, when the muse finally arrives and visits you for a kiss.
There’s this voice in my mind
Impossible to ignore
And yet I fill my head with noise
Drowning out
What deep down I know to be true
Do I even want to admit
That this song in my heart
Is not about me
But about you?
P.S.: I’ve observed the same principle in language learning (and wrote a book about the consequences of this mindset shift).
Which begs the question…
Where else would we do better if we observed a bit more, rather than trying to invent from scratch?
The mind can explain emotions away
But in the body they remain
You try to calm your thoughts
Stop the daily grind
But only body the body can show you where you find
Peace of mind
Does a day end, or does a new one start?
Does the end of a book chapter signal termination, or does it serve as a gateway to an unexplored continuation?
Maybe we don’t need to arbitrarily mark endings and beginnings in lives that consist of an uninterrupted flow.
Maybe we’re just a tiny plot in a story spanning billions of years.
Maybe we don’t grasp the bigger story anyway.
Maybe it’s all the same.
It’s hard to predict the perfect moment to write, where the stars align and inspiration strikes.
But you can make sure you’re there for it when it happens.
And the only way to be there for it is to write today, no matter the circumstances.
Because maybe the act of writing today is what makes the stars align.
Who is the person who has already done (or is already doing) what you want to do?
What does their life look like?
Where are they?
What do they say, think feel?
What do they focus on?
Who did they have to become?
What would life be like if YOU have already done (or are already doing) what you want to do?
It’s hard to achieve change if you’re stuck in your current identity (where you haven’t achieved that change yet).
Using your imagination to reverse the causal arrow can help you get out of that rut.
First imagine what it feels like to have already achieved (or to be already doing) something.
Then choose your present actions according to that feeling and identity.
Let every action you take help you become more of who you want to be.
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