What would your future look like if you weren’t rushing to get there so fast?
What would your present look like if you didn’t let it be limited by the past?
What would your dreams look like if you realized your potential is vast?
Would you be free at last?
Giving up on your intentions once doesn’t mean you’ll always give up.
Quitting a workout routine or diet once doesn’t mean you’re doomed forever.
Giving one clumsy speech doesn’t mean you’re a bad public speaker forever.
Learning from the past is good. But predicting the future based on a small set of isolated past experiences is overcalibration.
A new phone out of necessity – because the old one broke.
A new phone out of longing for the rush of something new.
A new business idea because changing circumstances have rendered the old business model unviable.
A new business idea because the previous one is progressing slower than I expected, and I’m getting bored.
There are many reasons to embrace novelty. And there are just as many reasons to fight it.
The ideas that are hardest to write about are the ideas worth writing about.
The thoughts that are hardest to explain are the thoughts worth explaining.
The feelings that are hardest to express are the feelings worth expressing.
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
Flawed. Perfect. Inspired. Spiritless. Excited. Defeated. Exhilirated. Gloomy.
Maybe the key is to accept all states when they come and when they go.
The more frequent and the less intrusive the habit, the easier it is to stick to.
Commit to writing for an hour once week? You’ll find a million reasons to procrastinate until the very last moment, on Sunday night, to write.
Commit to writing for 5 minutes once a day? The timeline is so short, there are no more excuses.
Make it doable. Make it frequent. And suddenly every habit is within reach.
