Commitment
Musings on committing and continually showing up to a place, a profession, or a person in an age of endless opportunities + persevering - even and especially when it's hard.
sari and
Commitment
The older I grow, the more convinced I become that commitment generates a kind of experiential wealth that can't be brute-forced into existence. There's this fascinating fractal effect that occurs, where constraint transmutes into focus, revealing layers of complexity a dabbler would miss entirely. It's not a limitation, because even that word feel... See more
Sindhu Shivaprasad • commitment is an act of agency
the fear of commitment is really a failure of agency, of taking full responsibility for our choices and their consequences. A kind of learned helplessness dressed up as freedom. I think that’s why commitment feels so heavy to some people. You’re accepting full authorship of something, and you can't blame circumstances or timing or compatibility for... See more
Sindhu Shivaprasad • commitment is an act of agency
our ability to bind our future selves to a future is what makes us agentic, rather than just moment-to-moment responders. Maybe the total inability to commit is a deeper kind of temporal fragmentation—the self splintering into a thousand disconnected moments instead of flowing through time as a continuous “I”. It’s fascinating to turn this idea ove... See more
Sindhu Shivaprasad • commitment is an act of agency
This is what nobody tells you: commitment is an act of agency . We often get through life comforted by the thought that we have the ability to make choices, theoretically . But there's a peculiar magic that happens when you actually exercise that choice: the world shifts on its axis. You make active choices about how to use your time, energy, and a... See more
Sindhu Shivaprasad • commitment is an act of agency
If you're going to try,
go all the way.
There is no other feeling like that.
You will be alone with the gods,
and the nights will flame with fire.
You will ride life straight to perfect laughter.
It's the only good fight there is.
— Charles Bukowski, Factotum
Billy Oppenheimer on small steps to get to big leaps:
One of Hugh Howey’s other hobbies is sailing. Once he had the luxury of writing full-time, he sailed around the world. “You can’t get to where you want to be in one day,” he says, “just like you don’t sail around the world in a day. You just look at the horizon and say, ‘I can sail that far.
... See moremy little life of optionality—my malleable, absorbent dunnage which lessens the shock of surprises, avoids pain and prevents breakage. No commitments, nobody counting on me, no one to disappoint and no one to disappoint me. Still, if life becomes intolerable—a measure which is lowered with each available treatment, each magical distraction—I have a... See more
Pain & Surprise
beautifully strung together words on the curse of optionality and how staying put is progress.
Wendell Berry wrote: there are two muses — the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought."