Journal

I’m sat here on a Friday evening with the dog flopped by my side on the couch, and I’m trying to find the perfect essay. I don’t even know what that means, really, but I know a perfect essay when I read it—and of course it changes all the time. It might be an essay on loss or on love, or one that makes me laugh in the way that I need to laugh right at that minute. It has to make me feel something.

I’ve never written a perfect essay and I never will, because who calls their work perfect? I’m sure the authors of the perfect essays I’ve read can spot all of the things that aren’t working. It’s a shame that we don’t get to relate to our own work in the way that others might, but maybe it’s necessary to keep doing that work. What do you do if you feel as though you have nothing to chase?

I’m trying to write an essay right now. One about being an amateur. About doing something for the love of it. It’s hard to write about the things that you love, actually, not least because you don’t always know why you love it. I love anything to do with audio, and I couldn’t really tell you why, it just makes my brain feel good. Maybe I should write about that? I’ll probably write about that.

I went for a late night run this evening. I’m impatient enough that I always jump back into running too long and too fast. I still enjoy the runs, but I don’t enjoy getting injured, and I don’t enjoy that it means taking a break. Today, I decided to reset. I wasn’t going to let my heart rate climb too high. I was just going to run easy, take my time, and feel good at the end. Unsurprisingly, it… worked.

One of the best ways to keep a conversational pace is to have a conversation, and the second best way is talking… to yourself. I’ve been talking to myself a lot lately, but it’s extra useful on runs. If I ever wonder whether I could have a conversation without huffing and puffing, I can just start talking, and not stop talking, and see how that feels. At some point (when you stop talking about running) the introspective think-speaking even gets kind of good.

Tonight I talked about publishing and recounted a few memories. I coached myself on my run out loud, reminding myself why I was running at that pace, where I wanted to get to, and how this was going to help. I’ve done that in my head before, but there’s something about the words hitting your ear that feels qualitatively different. It’s like the placebo of coaching—you know the words are coming from your mouth, but you hear them all the same.

Anyway, a proudly pathetic run. The first of many I’ll do, slowly building up to where I want to be. I love running, and I want to continue to love running, and I’m out of practice. The long roads are the best ones, even if they don’t always feel like it. I should just enjoy the fact that I’m here, and be thankful that I’m able-bodied.

There are days that feel like they barely happened. Today was one of those days, and it makes me thankful for this journal. There have been weeks or months in my life that I can barely remember. That I can’t tell you anything about. That I have no real record of, or at least no record of me having actually lived. I could show you the emails I got or the charges on my credit card, but that doesn’t feel like enough to me. I want to make a mark, even if it’s just a small one. This is that mark, today, and it’s very small indeed.

Today Aneesah made me coffee, I had a lot of meetings, I spoke to my psychiatrist, I forgot about a blood test, I got completely lost in some databases (a strangely hyper-focus activity), I cooked dinner for Aneesah, and I drove her to the airport. I need to tidy up, I just about put the bins out, I didn’t go for the run I wanted to, and now I’m sat in bed, way after I should have fallen asleep, writing this. A day that got away from me. My favorite bit was the car ride, and the 23 minutes that I really got to spend with Aneesah.

I talked out loud to myself while walking the dog this evening. I put my earphones in so that folks might think I was on the phone, because I’m (just about) self-aware enough to know that it might look strange to see someone walking around at night, having a full-blown conversation with themselves. I’m not sure if this makes it any more or less strange, but I also clipped a wireless mic to the brim of my cap and recorded the whole thing.

At some point, it struck me how rare this must be, for people to speak out loud to themselves. Even for me, a person who loves spoken word and writes morning pages and introspects a lot, talking out loud to myself isn’t something I’ve done very often. At some point, about 30 minutes into the walk and talk maybe, it started to feel really great. My mind slowed to the pace of my speech, when usually it’s thinking 10 things at once. Instead, I thought one thing and said it out loud.

Much ink has been spilled (ironically) on the great oral traditions of the past, but they usually involved other people. So much self-talk happens on the page, because seeing someone writing alone doesn’t feel unusual, but seeing someone speaking aloud to themselves at your local coffee shop might raise an eyebrow. Same act, different medium—how strange that it’s treated so differently, when a phone call wouldn’t be.

For better or worse, this is now a thing I’m going to become a bit obsessed by for a while. What benefits are there to speaking your thoughts out loud to yourself? Which nerves can you shake by accepting that people are going to think you’re a bit strange once they realize you’re not on the phone? Might you bore yourself, and is that useful? Or perhaps, simply, might it be fun to just try something weird from time to time, for the craic.

I noticed today that I’m coming out of a writing slump. I write here every day, of course, but it doesn’t feel like writing a lot of the time. I like writing essays, and I just didn’t have one in me for a long time. I think that moving this daily practice to a journal-like form has helped, and now I’m itching to write an essay, and to spend time doing it. I’ve started it in my mind—if not on the page—and without getting into it, it’s about being an amateur. About living life as an amateur, and surrounding yourself with fellow amateurs.

I was running around the Berkeley marina with a friend yesterday when he said off-hand that he wasn’t a very good musician. This friend is wildly talented and delightfully humble, so I suspect he was being modest—he builds guitars amongst many other talents. I replied that I didn’t think I was especially great at any one thing, but quickly followed up by stating that I wasn’t trying to be hard on myself. I don’t think I’m especially great at any one thing because I don’t especially aspire to be.

Today, I was thinking about the word amateur, and not in the way that many folks seem to use it these days. The word amateur simply means “to love”—as in: to do something for the love of it, first and foremost. I think of myself as an amateur, and I aspire to be an amateur at many things. To be an amateur doesn’t mean that you’re not skilled at something. You could be world-class, you’re just primarily doing it for the love of the thing, not fame or fortune. We should all be so lucky to love with abundance.

Being an amateur doesn’t mean you’re not great at the thing, but it’s still the reason that I identify as one and don’t consider myself to be especially great at anything. I simply love exploring as many things as I can, and there are only so many hours in the day. I love making things. I love writing and art and design and running and recording and ceramics and… lots of other things. I love all of them. I’m an amateur at all of them. I’m an expert at none of them—but if I was, I’d still be an amateur.

I don’t write many meta-posts, but this is a meta-post. I sat down to write something longer today and realized that I didn’t love publishing words on my current blog (mostly because it was still one big long page that felt a bit unloved). Instead of writing words on my blog, I wrote words to change my blog, and it feels a little bit better now; a little bit nicer to write in. Nowhere near where I’d like it to be, but a little bit closer, and maybe that will get me another few weeks, or months (the last one gave me almost a year).