Nellie

The connection between deep work and flow should be clear: Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity—all of which also describe deep work). And as we just

Long ago, someone

told me: avoid or .

It troubles the mind

as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog.

Now I too am sixty

There was no other life.

At some point, what you’ve taken in turns into your take on things, and comes back out as something original.

The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.

Carlo Acutis, a young Italian computer programmer who died at the age of 15 from acute promyelocytic leukemia, offered the best probe (which is an inverted question ) for our age when he said: “All people are born as originals, but many die as photocopies.”

The question becomes: given that you were born an unrepeatable person—with a unique set of

pretension, structural misshapenness, an immature voice, insular material, and the nearly universal plague of bad thinking are all mercilessly exposed under the spotlight in which the essayist stands alone onstage. There are no props, no sets, no other actors; the essayist is the existentialist of literature, and a mediocre talent will wear out his

There is no self except in relationship to the other. The economic man, the rational actor, the Cartesian “I am” is a delusion that cuts us off from most of what we are, leaving us lonely and small.

I think of Art Rowanberry, another one who went to the war and came home and never willingly left again, and I quote him to myself: “Something better! Everybody’s talking about something better. The important thing is to feel good and be proud of what you got, don’t matter if it ain’t nothing but a log pen.”

Nothing is too small: against a ground of gold

I paint it large and lovingly

and hold it high, and I will never know

whose soul it may release ...

(Nichts ist mir zu klein und ich lieb es trotzdem

und mal es auf Goldgrund und groß,

und halte es hoch, und ich weiß nicht wem

löst es die Seele los)