loving the process

Making ceramics requires patience and is an exercise in delayed gratification (or dissatisfaction). There are so many ways to fuck something up, so many stages to the process, and entering that cycle of hope, expectation, and either failure and trying again or ecstatic satisfaction added a new dimension to the rhythms of my life.

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

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

Source: Curiosites Esthetiques (1868)

Here’s something I’m very thankful I was told while I was still in my 20s: that the point of all this “hard work” is to recognize the person it makes you, not what it “gets” you

I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest. And I don’t think we’re going to differentiate between those things. Because... See more

The better life you absolutely can build isn’t going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own expectations. You live here. This is it.

The reality is that you will build many worlds throughout your lifetime. Look how many you have built already, only to walk away from them, or have them dismantled, or watch them collapse without your permission. You will play many roles, you will be many people, you will try on a lot of costumes, you will exert an enormous amount of energy to put

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We design our lives by every choice that we make—from how we plan our days, to how we approach our relationships, to our interactions with our environments. The question we can all practice asking ourselves, she offered, is: “Is what I’m about to do conducive to life?”