461 words.
What we interpret as passion is enjoying the outcome, but not appreciating the pain, the nuts and bolts, the nitty gritty of what goes into that act. Passion cannot be found without getting into the thick of things, when we are able to love the sensation of running our hands through the soil instead of only enjoying the bountiful garden at the time of the harvest.
When we cannot find enjoyment in the trenches, do we truly love being there? When being in the thick of something you do not like, there is a pain of disconnection, a feeling of wanting to be somewhere else. Part of knowing yourself better is recognising that emotion in you, instead of having it muted through ‘expectations’, ‘shoulds’, ‘responsibility’, ‘obligations’. Expending effort feels like a waste here, when the only fruit we seek is at the harvest. But fruit can be found in every moment.
I am still at the stage of using this platform to know further. Writing to read. Teaching to learn. I’d like a time that I can point to some activity and say without any doubt, that is my thing. Fortunately or unfortunately, there is no thing yet.
Yet, out there, there are plenty of false forms found through pleasure echo chambers. They only show the outcomes, and yet what is most useful to us in finding where pleasure and pain are experienced. Do we encounter pleasure and pain at the same instances? That tells us where our passion lies.
Some people claim that in the right project, feels like there is no effort being exerted. But even athletes get tired from working their craft. The engine of the heart can’t overcome the biological limits of the body. What it overcomes is the talk in your mind, dissuading you from the going back to enjoy the same pain.
Here I check the word count, maybe an indicator of seeking an end. An end of almost always precedes a start. That is such a huge benefit to my hamster mind, always looking for a shiny new thing to chase and play with. It’s strange that I can’t yet state precisely what attracts me and what doesn’t.
Maybe there’s some inkling, and through these words there is the chance to discover what drives the fingers to punch down, what churns the mind to generate the next word that makes the most sense. Something like GPT-3, where each word follows from the word before, but the entire paragraph makes no sense.
In a way, blindly chasing the next day is akin to an LLM churning nonsensical essays. Where is the way to find perspective? Zooming out works. Printing works. The most decision is to choose to look.