loving the process

Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire explains how great ideas arise:

"Inspiration is merely the reward for working every day."

Source: Curiosites Esthetiques (1868)

"I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being." — Maria Popova

Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn't matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance, b... See more

One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones.

I’m starting to wonder if the process isthe art. What do you mean by that? Maybe the photographing, the writing—maybe the tangible forms of the work are only the receipts of something much more important. What do you mean by that? I’m not exactly sure yet. But I’m paying close attention.

I feel my life has unfolded in a way that prepared me to do this work and along the way, especially so in the last decade, so many doors have opened that shouldn’t have and I feel the weight of the hands of all of my ancestors on my back urging me through them. So the essential part of this work is to show up. Show up when asked to represent my peo... See more

The way of the tourist is to consume; the way of the pilgrim is to be consumed. To the tourist the journey is a means. The pilgrim understands that it is both a means and an end in itself. The tourist and the pilgrim experience time differently. For the former, time is the foe that gives consumption its urgency. For the latter, time is a gift in wh... See more