Optimal grip

It’s time in my life to make fewer arguments for things and do more sitting down with things to just experience them. ‘I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt,’ is how Namwali Serpell’s latest novel, Furrows, begins. It is also one way of summarizing how the current shift in my personal character is changing my writin... See more

This is one of many lessons I’ve learned through birding. It’s a humbling activity, where you can go from being an expert to an amateur just by crossing a few state lines. You have to get comfortable with the not-knowing.

The Buddha proclaimed, “I teach liberation through non-clinging.”

Making things is hard and I feel like that’s the most useful thing to say about it.

“What do you want to avoid?” he asks. “Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If you’re unreliable it doesn’t matter what your virtues are. You’re going to crater immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability.”

There’s also a great anecdote from Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, where he talks about how physics used to delight him when he used to play with it, but then it started to disgust him when he got burdened by this idea that he was obligated to advance the future of science. That he was supposed to be doing “important” work.

The frustration at losing the life you’ve dreamed of is then important because you have to remember what you’re losing. Every choice that we make closes the door to numerous other choices that were available, one road taken means that another is forever unavailable, we can’t go back in time and redo our lives. Even if we were to return to the same ... See more

And when you stop fragmenting internally, you also stop self-sabotaging. It fills you with enthusiasm (which, by the way, literally means to be inspired by the gods) and encourages you to look forward. Hope gives you the courage to lose sight of the shore so you can swim for new horizons.1 Hope gives your soul opposable thumbs to have a better grip... See more