The first hour after I was born, 60 minutes encapsulated my entire life outside the womb.
An hour is an eternity.
When I celebrated my first trip around the sun, one year encapsulated my entire life outside the womb.
An hour is not that long anymore. But a year… that’s an eternity.
When I’ll celebrate my 30th birthday next year, one year encapsulates about 1/30th of my experience in this body here on earth.
A year is not that long anymore. But 30 years… that’s an eternity.
Lukas Van Vyve
There’s an absolute, immutable version of time, and then there’s our felt interpretation, which speeds up with every passing moment because we compare it to all the “time we’ve lived so far”.
Maybe that’s why the older we get, the more effort it takes to stay in the present moment?
Because, unlike a newborn child, for whom, compared to its short lifespan, an hour is an eternity, and every second is an opportunity to discover, drink in the world, explore…
We’ve lived so many hours, minutes, and seconds that we don’t care anymore.
with every passing year i’m more in a hurry and the days, minutes, seconds become ever more blurry
i can live fast and miss out or slow down listen, look around be here, right now let the world whisper loud what life is all about
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.
Most people don’t see why you’re taking time out of your busy day to sit down and write until the book you were working on every day lies in front of them.
They don’t see why you run every day and eat clean until you set a personal best at the next marathon.
They don’t see the new product you’re working on until it’s developed so far that it helps them achieve their goals.
You’re the only one who sees the method to your madness.
And that’s fine.
Because you probably don’t see the method to their madness either.
Learning a foreign language is both a frustrating and liberating experience.
We can focus on the frustration of not understanding the words the way we understand our mother tongue. Or we can realize that without the words, we are free to fall back on other ways of capturing and understanding meaning.
A crying baby can be soothed by words it does not yet understand, because she senses what’s behind the sounds, lets the meaningless melody cradle her to sleep…
Similarly, we don’t always have to know what’s behind the words, as long as we make an effort to understand the meaning behind the sounds.
Hearing a foreign language brings us back to that wordless world the way we experienced it as a newborn, before we tried so hard to put everything within and around us into language.
It makes us remember, there’s more to life than our words will ever allow us to express. And somehow, that’s a soothing thought.
Intentional living is about reminding yourself of what’s most important to you.
Reminding yourself that you can choose to be a writer, a runner, a musician, an artist, or a bon vivant.
Reminding yourself that you can choose to be kind to others.
Reminding yourself that you have a choice to act differently.
Reminding yourself that the past does not equal the future.
Reminding yourself that this, too, shall pass.
Reminding yourself that at any given moment, whatever reminder you need the most, you likely won’t think of yourself.
Reminding yourself that for this reason, it’s OK to get help and let someone else remind you with short daily notes.
And me, reminding myself that the act of writing daily reminders for you is the reminder I need to remember that I do, in fact, choose to be consistent, and I choose to be a writer.
Reminders upon reminders upon reminders that we will constantly get distracted, and we will always have the choice to come back to what truly matters.
