566 words.
Fluttering stomachs are difficult to explain. Hence start the hell of struggling to describe what we really like to others. There is much we don’t understand about the human body, and being able to explain the thousands of sensations we feel every day is impossible.
While writing this, I fear the distraction of pursuing something to avoid facing the immediate problems. At the top of mind is securing agency.
Coming from a position of self-imposed lack of agency, the most important thing is being able to let go of those illusory chains. The Devil from tarot comes to mind, binding you with paper-thin strings (although that may not be true of all interpretations of the Devil). The most terrible character has been reduced to an affirmation of your own power.
Agency is something that’s being talked about very often, but rarely something we give full power to. We want people to have agency enough to act without us bearing the cost of guiding them. Yet not too much that we have redirect them.
But for ourselves, pursuing agency is probably the most general optimisation function we can aim towards. The barrier to our agency comes in numerous forms
- Detaching ourselves from a home environment
- Gathering resources to detach unnecessary obligations
- Removing burdensome beliefs or influences in our lives
Noticing some people around me who seem trapped by their surroundings, they never seem to articulate their predicament as such. Is their problem then a lack of awareness or a lack of power to overcome their restraints?
I guess another title I had for this word vomit is ‘pursue agency’, but I also wanted to try to link these two topics together. 90% of the reason why I’m in this problem is to practise articulation. 25 of these + 13k words of atomic essays show that I’m somewhat enjoying this (or don’t hate it so much that I make excuses for myself).
The excuses I can tell myself are exceedingly powerful, where I find myself stopping more projects than starting (which is impossible btw). ‘Don’t fool yourself’ (paraphrased from Richard Feynman) is a virtue that gets harder to upload the more you know about the power of the mind, and yet have not found a way to control it.
There’s something weird about that sentence, but I guess that’s the entire purpose of learning to write. As time goes, I hope to be able to look back and see how much of an infant we were in thinking and communication. Growth has been such an integral part of my life that it’s taken to be an unalienable right. Yet the mindless pursuit of growth was what caused so much damage in times of stress.
There is joy in seeing growth in self (trying to pull everything back to one coherent fabric), yet joy is not a reliable indicator of having to do what is hard. Thinking of it as a treat: to be enjoyed in moderation, but blind pursuit of it will bring you diabetes, kidney failure and death. There are other metrics to navigate to getting what you want. Yet joy is one of the more visceral indicators (can I just use ‘louder’?) to figure what we want.
So two stages:
- Figuring out what we like
- Chasing what works.
Still stuck at the first stage I guess.