reminders when worrying about whats next

I hate the mindset I’m stuck in right now: always thinking about the next thing, worrying about what’s to come, comparing plans and evaluating paths like an open-world build-your-own-adventure game where you can only compare plans, never build anything. I love being with people who make you feel like time isn’t real, where you’re so immersed in the moment of life that the future and the past are enchanted too. I’m a believer that you can plan all you want for the future, but you’ll never know what will happen or how you will act.

It’s the same with learning. You can read all you want and be told all day how you should do something, but it’ll never stick. Worse, reading about something may give you premature gratification and trick you into thinking you already put in the work. You have to actually do it, see how it’s wrong, adjust. Trial and error. Making and perceiving. Over and over until a way feels right to you. Becomes your way, a practice embedded into your very bones. You start feeling how ideas take shape the moment they appear because you’ve done it before. You start weaving life from wisps of thought.

I’m looking at my ceiling again. One of those Instagram-ad, flimsy sunset lamps spotlights the corner. A little Pink at the center of a yellowing Orange. A halo of glossy red, like rings of compressed fire. A sun ate a peach and we're looking at the x-ray. The peach spotlights the normally invisible blotches and moles of the ceiling. They don’t make makeup for ceilings. They aren't meant to be looked at for too long, least of all with such an intense gaze, searching for some soul in speckled plaster. They’re designed to provide inherent safety. To be invisible to the point that no one ever thinks about the miracle of being sheltered from the elements.

I'm looking up as if the answers are to be found in the air hanging above me. As if some god will place them there for me, lower ambrosia from the heavens straight into my hungering mouth. As if I deserve to be great, as if I'm entitled to greatness.

Here’s what I know at this point. I want to create life. I want to make things that are useful, beautiful, ubiquitous. I want to make relationships that seem like logical fallacies: comforting but challenging, constant but always transforming, expanding, converging and diverging like an infinity symbol. I want to spend my life energy on greatness, in the sense that they should feel like the most important thing in the moment. They should feel less like desires and more like essential duties and rights. I want to treat every moment I experience as one that inspires me to spend all of myself, discard all my ingrained obsessions with frugality.

a slice of my notebook from a year ago thinking about this same question

I still see Pink when I close my eyes. A tiny dot. A faint glow in the corner of my mind. It's a reminder that things will stay as they seem. That even when you're stuck in places you don't want to be. Even when it feels like all the purpose driving you has hidden itself like your keys when you're leaving the house. Even and especially when you start to question your purpose and what you get up every day to do. The world can surprise you. The world will surprise you.

And wouldn't it be a shame to turn away? To shut your eyes? To worry. Constantly. About what's next, what's best, what's fast, what's right. Stress til your stomach is overflowing with butterflies and there's no room for flying let alone breathing. We lose our breath when we try to think too hard about breathing. We lose our way when we try too hard at choosing it. Purpose comes and goes, but the way is always with us. We just have to stay with it. Follow the energy flowing through every day. Make the small, crucial nudges. Put our faith in ourselves and the universe and our uncanny ability to always find something interesting.

from Le Guin’s translation of Tao Te Ching