It matters that I start something. I don’t have to start everything; That’d be tragic. I don’t have to start many things, nor even more than one thing. But it matters that I start something. The knowledge is in the doing of that something. It matters that I go through contemplation (choosing just the right something), then into commitment, and then… that’s where I often struggle.
I’d like to propose a different view: that struggle is the place of growth, learning, curiosity, love, creativity. Struggle is an incredible opportunity for being creative.
I struggle when there’s a huge gap between the know-naught starting point, and my being one of those effortless creatives who get stuff done. Those who get stuff done well and demonstrate craftsmanship and care and pride and joy! (Gazing at the horizon,) there’s the thing. I know what it can be. I see how to begin, but I see hills and I know there will be challenges. Don’t turn away. (Gazing at the horizon,) if there’s somewhere I want to be, I need to start walking.
What are the essential components of a meaningful movement practice, and how do internal and external elements contribute to personal growth and self-awareness?
Soisci Porchetta joins Craig Constantine to discuss the significance of the unexpected, creative expression, and faith in transformative practices.
[…] as a student, [you] cannot be spending 90% of your time with me […] for the majority of people, I really am this— like a supplement. Take these organic fresh herbs and go and thrive. But you have to go and hunt your own meat and vegetables and forage and, you know, have your own thing.
~ Soisci around 23:52
Soisci Porchetta and Craig Constantine range from movement practices to the philosophy of learning and the importance of embracing a generalist approach. Soisci shares insights into her experiences with various physical practices, such as Brazilian jiu-jitsu and handstands, highlighting the significance of embodied knowledge and the value of a beginner’s mindset.
It’s really going full circle from: We ditched chairs and, [we] open up the hips and the spine and the ankles and the knees and squat and elongate positions… And I do a lot of stuff on the floor. I’m most comfortable on the floor. But I think, like, if I can’t sit comfortably in a chair, something is not right as well!
~ Soisci Porchetta around 34:14
The conversation gets to the idea of cycles in one’s journey, drawing parallels between the first love for a particular practice and subsequent explorations. Soisci emphasizes the importance of observation, creativity, and faith in navigating diverse practices, providing anecdotes that underscore the transformative power of such perspectives. Their conversation wanders through the intricacies of movement, meditation, and the paradoxes of learning.
Takeaways
Importance of Embodied Knowledge — The significance of embodied knowledge, drawing parallels between movement practices like Brazilian jiu-jitsu and handstands to highlight the depth that comes from physical engagement rather than mere intellectual understanding.
The Beginner’s Mindset — The value of maintaining a beginner’s mindset, exploring how approaching new practices with openness and curiosity allows for continual growth and prevents the pitfalls of dogmatism.
Observation as a Practice — The practice of keen observation, extending beyond the physical to encompass thoughts, feelings, and the environment.
The Role of Faith — Not in a religious context but as a trust in the process of learning.
Expression in Movement — The idea of creative expression within movement practices, emphasizing that creativity is increasingly becoming a vital aspect of their approach to various disciplines.
“I wonder what would happen if I created a daily podcast, and did nothing else— if I didn’t tell anyone, didn’t share on social media, nothing. Just publish the thing every day.” So I went and made it happen, over 1,300 times. The answer to “what if?” is: I would receive a cornucopia of benefits simply from doing the work, even if no one heard a single one of them. I received: practice speaking extemporaneously, lessons in dramatic reading, countless tiny lessons of microphone technique, countless nuanced insights of physiology, and much much more.
Unfortunately, over the years, I became fixated on the least-important part of my original question: Daily.
I think this dynamic, to one degree or another, impacts anyone who has been fortunate enough to experience some success in their field. Doing important work matters and sometimes this requires sacrifices. But there’s also a deep part of our humanity that responds to these successes — and the positive feedback they generate — by pushing us to seek this high at ever-increasing frequencies.
It’s become clear that maintaining the pace is a problem, and so I’ve changed the pace. And in a blink, I feel I’m again focused on that still-overflowing cornucopia of benefits.
There are only two things which seem to work for me: Plain old discipline, and regular, high-intensity exercise. Make a plan. Work the plan. Follow through. I don’t have to finish it all. (That used to be a huge problem too.) Each day, make a plan. And yes, some days the plan is, “today there’s no plan just follow your nose.” Where the mental freedom to believe that’s a good plan is banked during the days with a more plan-looking plan. The exercise acts as a baseline reset.
The result? An inevitable sense of disappointment. A sense that other people are doing better than us. We feel guilt. We feel pressure. We think “Oh, if only I had more money, or a better job, or lived in France where the child care benefits were different, if I had more custody, then things would be good…”
Slowly, daily, my false sense of urgency ratchets up. It’s not healthy, but going out and doing something high intensity resets my personal brand of insanity. Every time I’m in the worst of moods, all I have to do is head out and just start running like I hate myself. (This is rare, but frequent enough that it’s useful to have a strategy ready.) I can go just a couple minutes running like I stole something, and then my crazy-brain starts bargaining… okay, uh, if we can just slow down a bit, I promise to stop acting crazy. I’m pretty sure that’s not the best way to deal with things, but it’s definitely a coping strategy that works well. And the side effects are awesome.
Sometimes I sit in a chair on the patio in the afternoon sun. If I’m just the right combination of tired, relaxed, and comfortable, and if the wind, sun, temperature, and soundscape are just so, I can drift into a trance. Time passes. After which, I have no clear sense of whether it was a moment, or ten minutes. It doesn’t seem that time had stopped, rather it feels like time had ceased to affect me. Did I breath? Did I move? Did I even think in that time?
It’s not only that our experiences of space are different. Our experiences of time are likely different, too. We think about the passage of time through our terrestrial experience of unidirectional motion through space – our metaphors of time are almost all grounded in the way our bodies move forward through the environment. Given this fact, how would an octopus, who can easily see and move in all directions, conceptualise time?
Sometimes I find things on the Internet and there’s a clear takeaway for me, or a clear new-to-me idea or connection. This isn’t one of those times. Instead, I dipped into this article one day, came out the other end aware that it had to be included in a post.
What is the opposite of play? …the opposite of playing an infinite game? I can’t think of a better candidate than the desire for control. My desire for control—when it rears its ugly head—stems from insecurity. (But let’s leave my insecurity for another day.) When I grasp for control I start trying to prepare for every contingency. When I grasp for control I start trying to control the contexts around everything I’m doing, everything I’m experiencing, and how others see me. And when I don’t grasp for control, I’m able to play.
The site you’re reading, Raptitude, is essentially an attempt to convey certain kinds of embodied knowing, having to do with the subtleties of being human, rather than driving a car or doing long division. I’m trying to get people to have some of the same perspective shifts I’ve had.
Experiencing that embodied knowing is what I enjoy about conversation. It’s not vacuous, and it’s not an attempt by me to control. It’s play, and it’s learning.
My journey of growth has been ascending levels of perspective shifts. Some of us don’t get to go on that journey because of external and evil forces or because of the random, initial conditions they drew at the beginning of their lives. While I don’t understand what my self even is, I do understand that hiding—ignoring reality—is not going to move me further along on my journey of self-discovery.
“Daytime” is us closing our eyes and pretending it makes infinity go away.
Munroe has gone on quite a journey. I think everyone far enough along on their needs-satisfaction curve (anyone who’s ever watched entertainment or played a video game is far enough along) would be moved, inspired, made to laugh and cry, by reading all of Munroe’s cartoons.
This cartoon is number 2,849. He publishes a cartoon Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So, he’s published cartoons for about 950 weeks. About 18 years.
In the last 20 years I’ve made three false–starts at sketching. They parallel my personal growth. The first false–start involved me buying books and materials, and spending a lot of time setting things up to create what I thought was the perfect environment. No sketching happened. The second false–start involved my removing what I thought was a barrier; I switched to journaling in pencil (a multi-year side quest I eventually returned from loving ink more deeply) because I thought having the sketching tools before me more often would lead to sketching. The third false-start now happens once every few weeks: I find myself paused, looking at something, really seeing, and I notice an urge to sketch.
I came late to his work: I remember seeing him on TV when I was a kid, but I only really started reading him post-cancer, around 2010 or so, when he was in the middle of his great blogging explosion caused by losing his voice due to his health complications.
The connection is that Roger Ebert did a lot of sketching in addition to a lot of writing.
This time of year, every year, I’m thinking about seasons of life at large, and cycles in our work. I find that it’s fulfilling when I finish some large thing— when the last piece of a large project clicks into place like the final jigsaw piece. What doesn’t work is when I imagine that feeling of fulfillment too soon. I do try to imagine what done looks like before I begin small things—few-hours sized things, days sized things. But for large things, it’s often better if I think of a few possible ways it could eventually be “done” and then simply get to work. It’s best if I remember there’s no tidy “Fin!” like at the end of a movie; There’s only the doing.
Agent K put it best, “Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.” Some things once known, cannot be unknown.
There’s a useful concept to think about here: “Bezzle,” JK Galbraith’s term for “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.”
This interesting, tiny detour of a word is just one bit of gobsmacking available from Doctorow. He’s actually writing about managing our retreat from all the housing we currently have in flood plains. But along the way, he takes us into the World of the Inconceivable via radium suppositories. (And yes, I did proofread the previous sentence.)
Eudaimonia has come up before here on the ‘ol blog.
Simply put, I dislike having to use words from other languages. As soon as I queue up such a word for speaking, I imagine some leathery cowboy bitching about highfalutin words. (Which I, also immediately, find to be sublime hypocrisy on the part of my imagined critic.)
For the ancient Greeks, eudaimonia was considered the highest human good. While the word doesn’t easily translate into English, it roughly corresponds to a happy, flourishing life — to a life well-lived.
Eudaimonia wasn’t a destination — a nirvana that, once reached, initiated a state of bliss. Happiness wasn’t something you felt, but that you did; it was a dynamic, ongoing activity.
What that activity centered on was the pursuit of arete, or virtue.
Anyway, there’s simply no way to say it succinctly in English. I’ve always wondered if the language (some word or phrase) is missing because we Westerners don’t think about eudaimonia— Or if we don’t think about eudaimonia because we don’t have the language for it. I want a single English word for all of that above because I think about it all the time.
Also, are you now wondering—more generally—if your primary language (the one you speak, read, write, and hear in your thoughts) affects the way you think or the types of thoughts you are capable of having?
What is the relationship between identity, values, and the practice of parkour as both a personal journey and a broader social phenomenon?
Amina Shareef Ali joins Craig Constantine in a conversation ranging from punk rock to social movements, intertwined values, and the role of parkour in personal transformation.
…so these are transformative conceptual frameworks that have influenced me. But something, I think [critical …], is that they haven’t displaced each other. They’ve necessarily— …in order for it to be, really, a meaningful transformation and not just some kind of flailing, [not what] I might call [a] spiritual bypassing— It has to be integrated with what was already there.
~ Amina Shareef Ali from 26:58
This conversation between Amina Shareef Ali and Craig Constantine gets into the transformative aspects of various experiences in their lives, exploring Parkour, societal perspectives, and personal ideologies. Amina articulates her reflections on integrating multiple transformative frameworks in her life, encompassing academic, political, and personal growth. She emphasizes the importance of integrating new experiences with one’s existing worldviews, highlighting that each transformation enriches rather than displaces previous perspectives.
Throughout this dialogue, they discuss the nuanced ways people interact with spaces, drawing connections between Parkour and societal shifts, aiming to challenge normative articulations of spaces.
And many of the characters who were around were not who I would think of as my people. There were those a bit too enthralled with shock and sensationalism at whatever cost, or those a bit too comfortable “ironically” espousing fascism. It took me a long time to understand that in order to find my place within punk, I had to be an active participant in the conversation about what punk is, and could and should be. Which, paradoxically, meant that I had to believe in my rightful claim to being punk in the first place.
Integration of Transformative Frameworks — the significance of integrating various transformative experiences into one’s worldview without displacing each other.
Diverse Perspectives on Space and Society — the impact of societal norms and personal ideologies on the utilization and interpretation of public spaces.
Embracing New Experiences for Personal Growth — that individuals discover new transformative experiences at different stages in their lives, and the importance of being open to and integrating these experiences with one’s existing worldviews.
There are several ways to think about what might constitute the sixth sense. Because there’s a lot of stuff that we equipped to detect— electrical fields, magnetic fields, ultra-low frequencies, ultra-high frequencies, and infra-red to name a few off the cuff. Our brains are amazing sense-making hacks, and there (as far as I know) are multiple layers of mind “running” at the same time. We are literally swamped with information through so many mediums, and our brain is continuously and completely embodied into that information. Doesn’t it actually make more sense that we have “this vague sense that…” for any sixth-sense sort of experience we describe? What’s the alternative? …to have a myriad of explicit sensations that we only very rarely encounter? I think it makes more sense for to have a “vague feeling of…” as a way to experience the other, less-experienced parts of our physical abilities.
A hidden sense of smell might account for the mysterious sixth sense and a universe of subtle knowledge about the world.
The question I have—sorry, I always have questions, never answers—is: Now that I know that my sense of smell is better than I thought it was, does that mean that my sixth sense improves? (In the same way that walking around barefoot eventually improves your ability to balance without having to actually work on that skill.)
It’s amazing what the addition of a single character can do. I’m often striving to say no more often. The month of No!vember shall be a month of practicing saying no.
I’ve been saying “no” to a lot of stuff and spending more time alone, working in the studio. When it comes to invitations, a helpful question I ask myself is, “Would I do it tomorrow?” If not, here’s how to graciously say no to anyone. (More in the “Build a Bliss Station” chapter of my book, Keep Going.)
It’s not clear (granted, I didn’t look very hard) if No!vember is Kleon’s idea. That doesn’t matter to me. His mention is where I first learned it, and so I was 19,050 days old when I learned this. That’s a bit of a shame, and I hope it’s helped you sooner.
I am often stuck in the resistance right before actually writing. It usually takes me several attempts to approach the work. It feels like walking up the slippery slope of a small hill, where the initial speed and direction has to be perfect, and then with continued effort—a penguin waddling judiciously—I reach the gently rounded top of the hill (after sliding off obtusely a few times and beginning again.)
I can easily be nudged into sliding off that small hill by distractions. I’m drawn to address the distraction. Can I fix that so it doesn’t happen again? (For example, change fundamentally how my phone is configured.) But I know that distractions are not all bad and I know that I can hide in the busyness of getting things just right. (Hazards warned of by both Pressfield and Godin.)
Besides that, if you want to get anywhere interesting, there’s no substitute – not even talent – for grinding away at something year after year until you’ve put more work into it than almost anyone else alive.
The word grinding feels too negative a way to spin simply doing the work. If I think, “that’s going to be grinding,” I’m setting myself up to more easily slide off that little hill. Because invariably—for the things I have to, and want to, do—the actual work is exceedingly easy. Easy like gleeful skipping. All of the hard part is in the way I think about the work before I ever begin. Even using the word “work” feels too negative. All of the hard part is in the way I think about the practice.
I’ve often mentioned journaling. A few years after I began journaling seriously, I started taking time to read my older journal entries. Initially, I was setting aside some dedicated time early each month to simply spend time with my old journal entries. I was just randomly hopping around looking up things, and reliving old adventures (at least, those I’d taken the time to write about.) I soon ended up with bookmarks at various number-of-years-ago.
Eventually I wanted to reign in the time I was spending reading. (The author of my journals is the most fascinating person I know of, so I can really get lost navel gazing into my journals.) I process-ified the entire thing (which I’ll skip explaining because it’s not important) and now, every day, I read my journal entries from 1-, 3-, 6-, and 9-years-ago. It only takes a few minutes and it is endlessly illuminating.
Oh the adventures I’ve had! The thrills… the spills… the ups and downs!
[…] most of the fun is in the experience and not in the reminiscing. We don’t actually spend most of our days enjoying memories. How many minutes yesterday did you spend thinking about that trip you took last year?
This article by Hoffman is typical. You’ll probably love it or hate it. The part I’ve quoted is way down in the middle part and not a major point. But it leapt off the page for me. I’ve long known that journaling has at least corresponded with my improvements, in the sense that it has raised the depth of the downward dips—this is a very important achievement. Alone, it’s reason enough that I intend to never cease journaling. Hoffman’s mentioning reminiscing as being a valuable activity related to happiness, has made clear another reason to never cease.
Setting a challenge for myself seems simple enough. Pick a goal and then work to reach it. But there needs to be more than the goal, and the process. There also needs to be some sacrifice; What will it be necessary for me to give up in order to attempt the challenge? There also needs to be some risk; Risk of physical loss, injury or monetary cost are obvious options, but a good challenge has mental, even spiritual, risk attached. Who will I be after this challenge? What about success itself? I think a good challenge must seem achievable (it mustn’t fly in the face of reality) but must actually be uncertain. It takes a special person to set and truly attempt a challenge that they aren’t certain they can achieve.
I am going to try to convince you to spend the next 4 days watching a YouTube live stream of people running round a 4.1 mile loop in Tennessee, all day and all night.
I’m not sure what to say about this “backyard ultra”. Fortunately for you, the race will be over by the time this post appears. You don’t risk being sucked into the live stream by reading Webb’s article. While I’m not the least bit attracted to attempting something like this, I read the article slowly. The challenge that lies at the heart of this race is something I understand. I’m not suggesting you go try to run one of these races, but I do hope you have experienced true self-set challenge.
What role does storytelling play in driving creativity and engagement in personal projects like podcasting and daily writing?
Mandell Conway and Craig Constantine discuss the art of generosity in podcasting, daily writing challenges, and the power of pushing through creative discomfort.
I’m building the material up. I’m building the reps. I’m getting better and then I can go and say, ‘okay this is the part that I want to keep.’ I’ll share this today. I’ll share this tomorrow. …or I’ll share this next year. But just get in that habit of doing the emotional labor. I think I want to be able to push through that. Versus just saying I would spend 20 minutes and that drained me— [then] ‘yeah, I’m out of here.’ What would happen if I just sat in it for a little longer.
~ Mandell Conway 24:55
Mandell Conway and Craig Constantine explore the concepts of giving and generosity. Mandell speaks about the importance of daily writing, acknowledging the emotional labor involved and discussing the benefits of creating a content backlog for challenging days. They emphasize that the primary goal should be writing, with publishing (in whatever medium) as a natural outcome of this consistent practice. Mandell also offers some perspective on the creative process, emphasizing the commitment required to share impactful stories with the world.
Takeaways
Daily Commitments — the importance of a daily writing or podcasting habit, consistency is key.
Emotional Challenges — writing can be emotionally taxing, but rather than avoiding it, sitting with the discomfort can lead to profound and emotional content. By accepting difficult moments in writing, individuals can develop resilience and produce better work.
Importance of Conversations — the value of discussions between like-minded individuals. Sharing ideas and experiences can spark new insights and innovative approaches to content creation and creative work.
Resources
Giving is Like — Mandell Conway’s web site with his daily email, The Daily Tithe.