A cool winter evening. Dog stretches on the front lawn. Dog watches cat cross the road. Dog hears tyres screech, then a faint bump. Dog sees humans running to cat. Dog sees cat’s ghost float up towards the sky, higher and higher, until it disappears into the stars.
Dog goes inside, thinking about his sister, how maybe she is with cat now.
Dog wags its tail.
In The Reading Life, C.S. Lewis writes:
“The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we did in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change.”
This passage can be extended to books as well: I now enjoy Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well as fairy tales for “children”. If one had to lose the fairy tales for adult books, I would not call that growth, only that one had changed. A bus doesn’t grow by leaving one station behind and moving on towards the next. Growth is more like the tree that continuously adds rings, building upon what was previously there.
The reality is more complicated than this, of course. The process of growing usually involves some loss, especially with age. But loss is not the essence of growth, and certainly not what makes it precious. If it were, we should consider taking a train or becoming senile virtues of growth. Should we be congraulated on these things?
Some people like to define growth by the cost of it, and to make that cost far greater than it needs to be.
1. Your situation isn’t life threatening. Even if you fail, you will still be alive and there will still be love and food around. Relax.
2. “Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.” – Charles Bukowski.
You’ve made it this far. You can probably do it.
3. Treat it like an opportunity: you will come out more capable and resilient than before it.
4. It’s honestly not that important. Like really. Even if you make a colossal fool of yourself, 99.99999% of people will never know, and 99% people who know don’t care.
5. Maybe try getting some sleep or water or sunlight. Stress can be a response to unmet biological demands.
6. This is a natural and fulfilling part of life. The depth of this depression will fuel the euphoria of your highs.
Do you want the opposite – no stress, no challenge, a life full of cookies and comfort? That sounds like a pretty boring story.
I have been reading some gorgeous books recently. Books with phrases that flow perfectly and descriptions that transport you into another world. It is in this euphoric state where I am bitter and disappointed, for when I come back to the computer, I shudder at the mundanity of my drafts.
It is a vicious cycle: believing you are worthy -> realising you are not -> believing you are an idiot -> small improvements -> believing you are worthy. Like a phoenix being reborn, each Dunning-Kruger evolution forces you shed the previous standard of yourself. They say the rebirthing process contains the most excruciating pain known to the world.
It is the idiot phases that are the most existentially dreadful, for it is here where your whole life is exposed as a fraud. Tonight, I stand naked before literary giants, and hang my head in shame.
Little do we know that it is these moments where we are closest to perfection.
“There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain…. Or so says the legend.”
– Colleen McCulloch, The Thorn Birds
There are two options for dealing with procrastination:
The first is the carrot. This is the lazy mouse that runs because it smells cheese.
The second is the stick. This is the lazy mouse that runs because it sees a hungry cat.
If you are a carrot-minded person, tools and techniques that may help are the pomodoro technique, working with colleagues, tying rewards to completed tasks, and apps that gamify habits like Forest.
If you are a stick-minded person (like me), tools that may help are the 90-year old meditation, having accountability partners, eating the frog, and BeeMinder – an app that charges you for missing habits.
And if none of this works? Then maybe the thing you’re procrastinating on just isn’t that important.
There is a strip club next to my apartment that I often walk past.
Over time, I have gotten to know a few of the bouncers. Not that we have ever spoken – we just make eye contact. Initially they stared at me suspiciously, thinking me a customer. But I always walk past, offering a little smile, and the next time we meet, the tension is gone. Now there is a sense of familiarity between us. They know I will never walk in, and I know they will never talk to me. It is our silent agreement.
Tonight, one bouncer that I’ve seen a few times saw me walking back from a run and gave me a little nod. I nodded back, perhaps a little too emphatically. It was a special, silent moment.
Connection is everywhere around us I think.
I have set a goal to run a marathon next year. Naturally, I looked online to find training plans and some advice – how many runs to do per week, how many workouts vs. slow runs, what pace etc., and was surprised to find that there is no real consensus.
Emil Zatopek, the first person to win the 5km, 10km, and marathon at the Olympics, famously did most of his training through 400m repeats. On the other hand, seasoned marathoners like Josh Sambrook swear by the benefits of slow running, and rarely ever do track sessions. While there are some workouts that find themselves in most training plans, there appears to be no “golden formula” in running, despite it being one of the most fundamental activities for our species.
Which is liberating, albeit a bit scary. When there is no clear path laid out, there is freedom to write your own story. Making mistakes doesn’t feel as bad, because you couldn’t have known – nobody knows. And if something works for you that seems to match another training plan, maybe that can be your guide in the right direction.
Doing what feels right to you, noting but not following collective opinion, appears to be the most natural mode to be in.
I have had a concussion this past week and have found writing difficult.
Or anything, really. Focusing, reading, talking – things I could fluently do are now strenuous, to the point where a patient asked if I was drunk because I couldn’t think of the word “house”. Not to mention the persistent headache that plagues me from morning to sleep.
The worst thing is the amnesia though. When I got hit in the head, I lost all memory of that night’s events. Going through my texts, notes, and journal the next day was like reading another person’s story. It is startling how fragile our brains can be. Now that I have partially recovered, the ability to remember yesterday’s events feels like a blessing.
If it wasn’t for the written word, these memories would have been lost forever. Which would be shame, because I write some really weird stuff when concussed.
Another reminder to invest in note-taking and journalling to etch our lives into history.
“Maybe a survivor is nothing but the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.”
– Ocean Vuong, A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read