This
Seeming
Chaos

The 4th.

Squirrels are chasing each other outside my window. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a squirrel get winded. Not once.

The 5th.

I write so much in my notebooks. What I’m still frustrated with is how little I actually end up publishing. But I’m slowly working on the right frame for my art. It’s a process, but the slow, steady approach allows me to keep just the stuff that sticks over all that time. It’s a slow evolution—anything that makes it through the process is surely strong and viable.

I want to remember a feeling I had yesterday of wanting to make things for myself. That got me excited because it doesn’t require me to put on a show for anyone. What would I make, for me? What do I wish existed, so that I could use it and enjoy it?

I would love for January 1st to be my first Post Day. I could center my art on what I want to bring into 2022. That reminds me of that one They Might Be Giants song.

The 7th.

It’s so difficult for me to prioritize tasks that don’t have an immediate or external payoff. Most of my current projects are that way, especially the ones that will have the greatest long-term impact on my life.

I get discouraged when I look at how long I’ve been building this emergent system and how little I still have to show for it externally. I keep feeling like I’m close to the payoff point, but maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I’m literally not doing the work I need to do, and no amount of gentle systematizing is going to change that.

But it doesn’t matter. I can’t work in the “force it” mode anymore. I don’t have the capacity. If I’m doomed to a life of creative unproductivity, so be it. It’s better than the alternative.

The 8th.

“…my mind flounders if it’s not doing something complicated. The mind is like a set of teeth that has to be chewing all the time.” —The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero

As I’m going back through my journals from the past two years, sometimes I wonder if writing so much in this way is enabling a kind of hyperinterventionist approach to my own life. If I didn’t constantly put these words on the page, maybe I would be able to stay zoomed out on my life a bit more. Navigating with just the path in front of you as information is a terrible way to get anywhere, at least on purpose.

This is another argument for mindfulness, I guess. It allows you to see how your brain (and maybe even your work!) ping pongs all over the place. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable reading the stuff I’ve written over the past couple of years. Do I really live my life like this? It feels less like constant growth and more like schizophrenic activity.

It’s also another point for slow, kaizen change. When you don’t make any sudden moves, you’re less likely to rebound and you can mitigate some of that monkey mind ping pong effect.

One good thing about it is that I’m more convinced than ever that productivity is meaningless. So much of what we do, we end up undoing later. Things that felt so important were, in fact, not. It makes me cringe to see how much pressure I put on myself and how much anxiety I felt over things that just…no longer exist. If they were so important, surely they would have persisted. I guess they had other impacts that I’m not accounting for that led me to where I am now, but the outcomes certainly weren’t direct and maybe, probably would have happened anyway.

This is discouraging, but also freeing. Relaxing into my life is not giving up. It’s wisdom.

The question is, what does this look like in practice? I mean, relaxing mostly looks like doing nothing. Maybe that’s it…just slow down and let go of the things I’m trying for. Focus on routines and habits that let me experience the hours of my day in a positive way. Value my relationships above anything else.

The 11th.

“Well then: it’s a pointless task, and that’s exactly why I need to do it. I’m sick of going after things that have points; for too long now I’ve been cut off from my own spirituality, hemmed in by the demands of this world, and only pointless things, only indifferent things, can give me the freedom I need in order to get back in touch with what I honestly believe is the essence of life, its ultimate meaning, its first and last reason for being.” —The Luminous Novel by Mario Devrero

I’m trying to take a bigger picture perspective as I write in my journals. I feel like they’re so often “nose pressed up against the glass” view of my life. I’m observing it, but way too close up. Which is fine except when I’m making all my decisions from that vantage point.

I’m constantly evaluating myself and trying to see if I’m “on track” for the person I’m becoming. Because of that, it feels like I place way too much importance on the trivial things that are right in front of my face like, “Am I being productive today?” “Am I being creative today?” “Have I created out loud lately?” Like I’m pushing myself constantly into this mold of what I should be.

But honestly, it doesn’t matter. How “much” I get “done” on this particular Monday in this particular October is absolutely meaningless a week or even a day from now. The patterns of events in my life matter. Who I do them with matters. How we relate to each other and how we’re experiencing the world matters. Basically, “Sarah, is this how you want to live?” That matters.

The systems, frameworks, etc. are so meaningless, except for making it easier for me to decide among the tyrannically infinite set of choices I have in any given moment.

The 12th.

“We tend to speak about our having a limited amount of time. But it might make more sense, from Heidegger’s strange perspective, to say that we are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us.” —Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Four Thousand Weeks is the most honest book on time and how we use it than any I’ve read. It’s very Stoic in its philosophy, which seems like just the right tack to take when the main problem is that we distract ourselves in perpetuity so we don’t have to face our own mortality and limits.

One difficult truth I’m recognizing is how I try the “lots of projects” approach (which worked for that one amazingly prolific note-taking guy I read about: Niklas Luhmann). It isn’t resulting in much prolificacy for my own work. I think the writer in Four Thousand Weeks nails it—I use my projects to compete with each other for my attention. Whenever one gets boring or slow, I switch to another one. Which means that even though I’m making slow progress on a bunch of related things, I don’t face the difficulty that is needed for a breakthrough. And then I eventually talk myself out of the project or it turns into something else.

The 13th.

“You see, a life of leisure takes time to arrange. It doesn’t come about just like that, from one moment to the next, simply because you have nothing to do. At the moment my instinct is to fill every gap, devoting all my free time to stupid, pointless activities, because, almost without realising it, I have become like those people I always look down on: intensely afraid of my own selfhood, of being alone with nothing to do, of the ghosts in the basement pushing at the trapdoor, eager to poke their heads out and give me a fright.” —The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero

It is torture to try to choose just one class/learning opportunity to focus on at a time. I finished Four Thousand Weeks and it feels like it broke my life. It made me accept my limits in a very real way that I’d refused to do before. And now I’m realizing just how uncomfortable that is.

I’ve learned that every project or learning choice I make is a commitment to a massive amount of time. Just pulling out the relevant bits of my journal for It’s Post Day is going to take me at least another month to compile an extremely rough draft. And now I have an idea for a book proposal that feels like a must. Plus I’ve got a half a dozen other enormous projects I’ve decided to do for It’s Post Day. PLUS actually including other people in that process. It is a gigantic project. I don’t know if I can release the first version by January.

By focusing on only one creative project at a time, I’m having to get honest with myself about what those projects actually require of me. No wonder I wasn’t seeing a lot of output before. Everything I’m doing is so big, and I was doing ten giant things at once.

It’s a relief once I’ve actually chosen. And the rule is, I can’t change my mind once I’ve begun. I either have to finish it or give it up. It doesn’t ever go on the backburner.

Being finite is the most uncomfortable thing there is. And yet, I think really getting that is the only way we ever truly enjoy anything. This time with my notebook is precious to me because it is one of the extremely few practices I’m committed to. I know that as wonderful as it feels to fill my life to the brim with good things, it quickly feels not-wonderful when they are all competing for my attention at once. It becomes a source of stress having to always choose between them, and it crowds out the things that are most meaningful—relationships with other people. Also time spent just being rather than pursuing. By limiting both my consumption and my production, I’m creating a spaciousness that I’ve always longed for, but is in reality highly uncomfortable. But I know this is my path. Even as I rebel inwardly.

I don’t love always choosing the things that make me uncomfortable and go against the grain. But ironically, those things often help me get into a flow with my life, rather than having all my various inclinations competing against each other in any given moment or on any given day. “Monkey mind” doesn't just exist in our thoughts—if we’re not mindful, it bleeds out into how we live our entire lives. I don’t want to be disciplined for the sake of being “good” or “better” than I am. I want to be disciplined for greater clarity and acceptance of what is actually true.

The 19th.

“When you’re young and inexperienced, you look for dramatic plots in books, just as you do in films. With time, you come to see that the plot has no importance at all; and that the style, the way the story is told, is everything.” —The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero

The book I’m choosing to read right now is called The Luminous Novel. It’s so perfectly prescient for the old journals that I’m transcribing for It’s Post Day. It’s giving me confidence that this is a worthwhile and interesting thing (or it will be, with some pruning...there is so much that is irrelevant, and some too deeply personal). It’s also making me look at my notebooks with a new appreciation. As uncomfortable as I am reading what seem like extremely trivial musings and obsessions that repeat themselves over and over again, it helps me learn about myself and it gives me something to hook my poor memory onto. These journals feel precious to me now in a way they didn’t before. I almost wish I hadn’t gotten rid of so many of them from my past.

It’s helping me to accept that some problems will always be problems. I will never be perfectly creative. I will never be perfectly consistent. I will never be able to do all the things my ideal life would require of me. I will never decide on one creative path. I will never resolve my tension with needing to spend time with people and wanting to be alone. I will never have the perfect system. So maybe I can stop trying and circling around myself, and actually enjoy the interestingness of what it’s like to be me.

The 20th.

“Sengai also wrote: ‘every stroke of my brush is the overflow of my inmost heart.’ And yet, I know artists whose medium is life itself, and who express the inexpressible without brush, pencil, chisel, or guitar. They neither paint nor dance. Their medium is being. Whatever their hand touches has increased life. They see and don’t have to draw. They are the artists of being alive.” —Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing

I am 39 years old today. The last year I will ever have to be in my 30s. I’m so curious about the turn all my discoveries will take. But I’m also okay with just living those turns. As I get older, it matters less to me where I’m headed. I just want to be alive to what it feels like to be on the road.