debating myself

What if I go out into the world, still unable to find what I'm looking for?  What am I looking for exactly?  Some nonsense about a soulmate, affinity, or belonging, an elusive concept creeping back into my thoughts as it always does, undermining my resolve.  This is really about loneliness.  Nothing makes me lonelier than being around people.  I'm going to have to wade right into that.  I'm going to have to get used to it.

I've realized that more important than any of that, I can focus on doing better than I have been.  I can try to better live up to my own standards.  It's not always going to be painless or rewarding, but I know it's what I should be doing.

There's this person on my friends list I met during Bernie's run last year. He's got this new Facebook page that he's trying to get going, an integration of politics and science, with a futurism slant to it.  So, no question, right up my alley.  He's asked me to contribute, so I've been trying to think of something suitable.  Stoicism doesn't seem to work as well on creative endeavors.  I can't seem to force myself to have ideas.  This gets discouraging.

I've been practicing creativity in general more.  Writing has always been easier for me than anything else, but only when I'm rambling and aimless about it.  Also considering taking my guitar more seriously, but in the meantime at least playing it a little every day.  Painting.. even thinking about that again, but I don't know.

Sketching things out with pencil should be good exercise for those neurons on the meantime.  Writing this drivel makes for good practice, should I come up with something more interesting to write about.  At some point, I plan to switch from learning Russian to Mandarin.  It doesn't matter which, as long as I keep learning.  Finding the will to meditate has become so much easier. I've been doing that for an hour or so every day.  Not that my mind doesn't wander as much as ever, but I sit every morning no matter how I feel.

For the longest time, I've thought of intelligence as an inherent trait, a matter of potential.  You can do something with it or not, but an attribute of who we are, not what we do.  There's an element of truth to that, but it's a tragic misconception of how these things primarily work.  Our patterns of behavior and lifestyle create who we are.  The more we rally our brain cells to a task, the better suited they become for that task.  Draw every day, and that will make far more difference than any latent ability.  Learn every day, and learning itself becomes easier.

This takes time though.  A lot of time.  It requires consistency and resolve, a simple truth that becomes wholly unintuitive, as weeks and months go by, to negligible benefit.  Go years without reading a single book, and even reading can take some practice to get back into.  We are always up against who we've already been, our whole lives.  In so much as the self is a thing, it's more a process than anything rigid.

I need a sense of direction in much of what I do.  Like in martial arts, I remember what a difference it made when I had a plan to execute on my opponent, instead of just reacting.  I had to know what sort of plan would be realistic, but go for something.  Otherwise you're just waiting to get owned.

In what I want to do with my life, this will be important.  I'll focus on who I want to be, in terms of what I want to learn and pursue.  I won't sit around making excuses anymore.  In creative endeavors, it's much the same.  I've been letting my brain atrophy all my life, but I'm going to try to stop doing that.  In a way, I realize that's been the plan for some time now.  It's just taken a while to start feeling like I've been getting anywhere.

I get all tangled up in how well I should do at anything and everything, when the consequences of doing nothing are substantially worse.  What will I be any good at, if I never do anything?  Why have I been doing this to myself?  I've become oddly disinterested in distractions lately.  That seems to making all sorts of rational thinking easier.

The mind wanders, keep bringing it back.  What matters is the practice.