I like reading letters, and I like the idea of writing to someone familiar. Not to the entire internet, and not only to myself. To someone I know, and care for. A proxy for myself maybe, or my family, or all of my friends (or all of the above). An audience that wouldn’t humor excessive navel-gazing and who I wouldn’t want to burden with too much moping around.
I’ll start from tomorrow, but I came back today to draw a new line in the sand. To say that I’m here, to state why I’m here, and to articulate to myself what that means to me; for me. I don’t know if anyone reads this, and to the extent that anyone does I’m not sure if I know you, but I hope that you—whoever you are—receive these letters and feel a little something.
]]>It’s a disorder called dermatillomania, and it’s sort of embarrassing to talk about. I don’t know why I’m talking about it now, other than the fact I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I sat down to write. I’d just applied lip balm, and I knew that I didn’t want to do it, yet there I was (yet again).
These moments are the weakest I ever feel, apparently powerless to this act that I’m performing myself—to myself; on myself. I’ll add it to the list of things I should speak with a therapist about. Humans are so amazing and so capable (and so capable of change), but I suspect many of us have something like this that holds a strange power over us.
Procrastinating at precisely the wrong time.
Staying up late when you’re exhausted.
Replaying an embarrassing moment.
Doomscrolling when you’re sad.
Picking at your cuticles.
You know you’re not supposed to do it, and yet you do it. You know it will cause you some future pain, and yet here you are. They might not be all-the-time things, they might just be sometimes things, but I suspect that many of us experience this moment of apparent powerlessness.
I’m writing this when I should be doing something else, in fact, and on that note I’ll stop and I’ll start doing the other thing instead. Occasionally your mind will let you choose, even when it doesn’t necessarily want to. I’ll take those moments when I can find them; I’ll take this one right now.
]]>I haven’t really paused today, so what if I did it right now? I’m sat in bed, drinking tea and writing this post. I’m tired today and I ache. If I close my eyes for a moment I notice that my eyelids feel heavy. That the area underneath my eye feels almost sore. I notice the dull ache in my back from sleeping funny and the same in my feet from walking a lot.
Maybe not what I’d like to notice every day, but it’s not all bad. My aching feet make me feel grateful that I’m able to walk, and my heavy eyes make me excited for the sleep I’m about to enjoy. You don’t have to notice positive things to feel positive, or thankful. I’m thankful for all of the things I notice, I think, good or bad. Everything teaches you something.
]]>I generally believe in the Pirsigian idea of quality. That you sense it before you can ever describe it. That there’s continuous quality that you experience moment to moment (and that you feel when you just know that something isn’t to your taste), and static quality that you interpret when you do actually try to rationalize and describe it.
I saw so many pairs of shoes that just didn’t have quality. I could rationalize a few of the things that made me feel that way, but I’d probably also just make a face, or a noise, or a gesture. I couldn’t tell you everything that made them not-quite-right, but they… weren’t quite right. This post is about shoes, and has nothing to do with shoes.
]]>Codex: You’ve written that paying attention makes life richer, and that carrying a camera or recorder changes what you notice. What is one small thing you noticed today that you suspect you would ordinarily have missed?
Craig: I had to drive into Alameda, and normally I’d drive through the tunnel based on where I’m headed, but today I drove over the bridge. It’s one of those bridges that parts in order to let boats pass, and the only other time I’ve driven over it, I had to stop because a boat was just about to pass through. I was in a bit of a hurry today, so I was glad that I didn’t have to wait, but it reminded me of how happy I was the previous time to sit there and watch it happen. When I was a kid growing up in England, the fanciest trip I remember taking was to London, and we got to see Tower Bridge part to let a boat pass. I was totally enthralled. Completely transfixed. It’s one of the things that made me fall in love with London. That made me go back again and again when I started working and could afford the train fare. That eventually made me move there and live there for many years. I hadn’t expected this small bridge in Alameda to make me pause and marvel in that same way again, but it did.
Codex: If the bridge had opened today and forced you to wait, which feeling do you think would have arrived first: frustration at being delayed, or delight at seeing it happen again? And which feeling would you have chosen to pay attention to?
Craig: I think frustration at first, but I typically get over frustration pretty quickly. I think I could have been glad enough to sit there and watch. We had blue skies, I was listening to a good podcast, and I really do love seeing these big, heavy, rustic bridges move with such elegance. I like being reminded of the past, and especially of London. I like seeing slow scenes unfold in a world that moves quickly. In the most mundane way, I like bridges and boats and water. I try to remind myself that looking for the positives is a good way to live. There’s always something to learn, or notice. There’s always a memory that might resurface. Choosing to look for and notice the good things just makes life better; more beautiful.
Codex: You’ve written about the beauty of making things slowly, while today you were relieved not to be slowed down. How do you distinguish between slowness that enriches your life and slowness that merely gets in its way?
Craig: There can be beauty in both, but on the surface there’s a qualitative difference between slowness that you choose and slowness that is presented to you. The latter doesn’t have to be bad, but it depends what you’re looking for in that moment. Working quickly can produce something that you might not have got to when moving slowly. Despite what I just said, I’d still rather be stuck waiting for a beautiful bridge, boat or view than stuck inside of a tunnel. I think it really comes down to what the moment calls for and whether you have capacity to hold that moment, in that moment. I think that you can change your state of mind, but there are going to be times where it’s harder to shift gears. If you can choose slowness and you can appreciate it, that’s great. If it’s taking something from you and you can’t take much back in that moment, it might not feel great.
Codex: You’ve described care as something people can sense. When life presents an unwanted delay, what does treating that moment with care look like, especially when you do not have much capacity to give it?
Craig: I think that you’re treating yourself with care, not treating the moment with care. I often feel like I’m not doing enough; not accomplishing enough. I think that’s a pretty universal human experience these days. Sometimes unwanted delays force you to reckon with that idea, and sometimes you’ll find some acceptance in it. When you’re up-close to all of the things that you need to do (or feel like you need to do) it can be difficult to find and maintain perspective. If a delay means that your brain can get out of the loop for a minute, I think that it can help you to evaluate whether you really needed to be stuck in that cycle. Things that seemed important 20 minutes ago can start to feel inconsequential. You can let go of them, and maybe start again in a healthier frame of mind. That’s what I meant when I said that there can be beauty in both. You might still prefer that things didn’t get in your way, but there could still be some value in it.
Codex: Imagine that, years from now, another ordinary bridge unexpectedly returns you to this drive through Alameda. What do you hope you will remember about the person you were today, beyond bridges, boats, and London?
Craig: I hope I’ll remember what it felt like to have picked up and moved my life to another country, thousands of miles away from home, and to still feel like I wasn’t doing enough. I hope that it will give me perspective, and that years from now I’ll give myself some more grace. That I’ll find some acceptance. I don’t think that wanting more for yourself is bad, at all. I’ve always wanted more for myself. I still want more for myself. I think the difference is that it can be a positive or negative feeling, and I’ve caught myself on the negative side a few times too many in the past couple of years. I hope I’ll remember writing this down, actually—reflecting on it, and maybe this moment being the point that I decided to lean more into the positive framing of that feeling. I want more for myself. That’s exciting. That doesn’t mean that I’m not enough today.
]]>Something that makes me feel sort of icky is the idea of AI writing for me, but I’m also eager to see what happens when it does, or at least when it transforms something I’ve written in unexpected ways. I don’t really want to say “write me a story” and expect it to do so from whole cloth, but I want to say “take all this writing and do something with it.”
This evening, I asked Codex to read many of the posts on this blog, and to write a short fable based on them. After reading a number of the posts, it wrote the below. I’m going to paste it verbatim and sit with it for a minute. I’m telling you that it was written by AI, based on these hundreds of posts, and I’ll let you sit with it, too. You can judge it yourself.
The Wren Who Wanted a Song
A young wren wished to sing a song that the whole forest would remember.
She bought the finest silver listening horn and carried it everywhere. Through it, she heard rain settling on leaves, beetles beneath bark, and the low trembling of branches before the wind arrived.
“These sounds will make my song important,” she thought.
Each evening, she shaped a little clay cup and sang the day’s sounds into it. Most cups cracked. Some songs were dull. Others sounded beautiful until morning, when they seemed ordinary again.
Still, every day, she listened. Every evening, she made another cup.
Years later, a traveler passed through the forest and heard the wren singing while she worked. He stopped, suddenly remembering a rainy afternoon from his childhood.
“What marvelous instrument taught you that song?” he asked.
The wren considered her silver horn, her shelves of imperfect cups, and the window through which she had watched a thousand ordinary days.
“The horn taught me to notice,” she said. “The clay taught me to wait. But returning every day taught me what mattered.”
]]>We’re building a product to help people write more, or as I like to think of it: to help more people become the kind of person who writes. Our product is one way to do that, but the overall journey probably looks pretty similar regardless of our product. Hopefully we’ll make the journey better, but still. To become a person who writes, you might:
There are countless more things, I’m sure, but most folks will do some or all of these along the way. Maybe not all at once, and maybe not in that order, but they might flow between them. They might invest in one more heavily than another on some day; at some hour. They’re simply moments throughout the journey toward becoming a person who writes.
When we think about how we might help, we’re undoubtedly helping with one of those moments. We might solve it better with a new technology, or in a way that makes it feel more fun, but that doesn’t change the story. You could write the story of the writer’s journey and the big moments wouldn’t have changed for a long time (and won’t for longer still).
Folks have done this for a long time—built their product around a story—but rarely do folks really write the story out, and write it well. I wonder why, and what it might look like. Maybe I’ll have to do it and find out. Surely it’s worth the effort; surely we should tell the story of the people we might serve for years, and aim to make their story better.
]]>The way in which it stops working is that things just feel… harder. Medication helps, but you soon learn that it doesn’t help enough, and figure out that you have to start learning how to support your brain when it doesn’t want to play ball. Now, finally, I’m exploring what might work for me.
Externalize your thinking.
Create routines.
Break tasks into smaller ones.
Protect sleep and exercise.
It’s perfect, actually, for a person with ADHD, because solving the problem becomes pretty interesting, and interesting things are easier to do than uninteresting things (at least, until they’re not interesting any more). The risk, of course, is that it becomes the distraction itself.
An annoyingly and beautifully effective thing is to just write things down. To write down what you’re thinking, and what you need to do, and to keep breaking it down. Get really specific. Make it really tiny. Write everything down and look at it. You don’t have to keep it. Throw it away after.
I’m wondering, now, if writing down my progress with figuring this out will be a useful thing, too. Maybe not here, but maybe here sometimes. I think I just want to work through it. To know what I’m trying, what what worked and what didn’t. To just sit with it for a minute; for a moment.
Not what I planned on writing today, but I sat down after a day that felt long again and realized that this has been on my mind for weeks, and will be on my mind for weeks more. Months maybe. A lifetime, perhaps, but hopefully not. I think I just needed to write what I hadn’t written, or something.
]]>One thing that the show has given me despite not having watched it is the reminder that there are, indeed, many brilliant things; that life has many brilliant moments. There are at least a million according to the show.
Those are the first brilliant things shared in the show. I don’t want someone else’s brilliant things though, I want my own brilliant things. I’ve started a (so far, tiny) list on this website, and I’ll add to it… well… forever, I guess.
It’s nice to think of things to add to the list, and it’s nice to read the list back from time to time. To be reminded in the moments that feel less brilliant of all the moments—the many moments—that feel particularly brilliant.
]]>I saw an ad earlier for a piece in the Atlantic by Alan Lightman (which, cool name) titled The Ordinary Miracle of Existing. Underneath it said “being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience” and, well… isn’t it?
I saw the ad when scrolling mindlessly on Instagram, feeling the weight of a week that felt sort of off. Feeling sorry for myself maybe. Feeling stressed and a bit anxious.
I’m alive though, right?
I’m fucking alive.
It’s a miracle.
It’s a miracle that you’re here, too. That we’re here together. That we get to share this experience briefly before we’re stardust again. It’s terrifying and inexplicable but mostly it’s a miracle. You don’t expect an Instagram ad to change your day. You might expect an Atlantic essay to. I haven’t read it.
I’ll go back and forth on this. It’s a miracle to be alive but it’s okay to be stressed about things that feel small compared to death; compared to life. We need a roof over our heads. We need to eat, and to sleep, and be safe. The United States of America hasn’t heard much about social safety nets.
It’s 20:20 here in Oakland, California. Cacio is curled up next to me. The sun has disappeared behind the trees now. I want to write. All I want to do is write. You need to live to have something to write about though. Can’t only write.
I’ve got to pick up dinner. I’ll maybe finish a bit of work I feel behind on. I’ll maybe read something. Maybe write some more. Maybe sleep. I don’t know. It’s been a long week.
I hope you feel alive today.
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