i’ve been feeling frustrated with myself lately, which is a sign that it’s time for some introspection. i feel like i’ve been stuck at multiple things that i’ve been trying to do for a long time. my progress as a musician stalled years ago, and i’ve lost touch with some of what i used to know. my fitness progress has similarly stalled; i was making good progress a while after my son was born, but then i got some kind of injury (thankfully seems to have resolved) and lost all my gains. my running is as terrible as ever; i’m pretty sure there’s something fundamentally wrong about my form. i still don’t know how to swim. i did teach myself to ride a bicycle when i was about… 13? 14?

i recognize i’m in a pessimistic, cynical, critical mood right now, so I might overreach in some of my thoughts and claims. for eg, right now i’m thinking “I still haven’t finished my wordvomits”, which is true, but also… didn’t i make a conscious choice to take my time with it? it’s not like i tried to finish it quickly and failed. but if i go further upstream, there WAS a part of me that wanted to be done with this project by now. for several years, i remember thinking I would be done the next year. and now I’m not even too convinced i’ll be done in 2026.

part of this is downstream of having a 19mo toddler. these past 2 years have been very difficult in terms of trying to get anything substantial done. still, I did finally ship the epub versions of FAN and INT. the progress i’ve been making on Frame Studies has been slow and ‘invisible’ – there’s a lot of stuff that’s accumulated behind the scenes, maybe too much stuff, which is its own kind of frustrating. i’ve been busy house-hunting and my cat died and i fell really sick recently blah blah blah. it is what it is. i don’t want to be cruelly dismissive of the stuff i’ve struggled with but i also don’t want to get mired in it either. i oughta focus on what i want to see more of. finishing this post and publishing it would be a start. then i’d like to maybe tidy up my roam a little bit more. i guess what’s happening is i’m counting on making progress on my writing to give me the energy i need to target everything else. but for a moment I suppose i want to consider alternative possibilities. maybe i ought to scale everything back and then focus on physical fundamentals, like exercise and sleep.

i have my military fitness test stuff this week, i got one session tomorrow and another in a couple of days and then i’m done for the year. i’ve had a chip on my back for many years now that i’ve never been able to pass the test. it shouldn’t even take that much time and effort to prepare for it, just some jogging, some pushups and sit ups done consistently for a month or so should be enough. but i haven’t been able to do that in the last… lets say 15 years. it’s embarrassing. and it’s doubly embarrassing that that embarrassment hasn’t been a sufficient motivator for me to get off my ass consistently enough to make a difference.

here it’s tempting to blame everything on ADHD, but where i’m currently standing that just feels really… immature? sure, maybe it’s harder for me than other people because of brain chemistry or early childhood experiences or some other bullshit. but that just means that i have to do some extra steps maybe. i think this is the crux of what’s troubling me. the superficial reality of it is not a huge deal. but all of this is really a battle for a deeper level of… the phrase coming to mind is ‘integration of the self’, i think that was a quote from rollo may. something about how health is ultimately about integration of the self. are my beliefs in alignment with my reality? it feels like i’m out of sync, and so i’m due for some updates of my beliefs. in fitness for example i realize i still cling on to things like, “I could do pullups when I was 20kg lighter”. but if you strapped 20kg onto me then i probably wouldn’t have been able to do any. that’s where i am now. i can’t just magically do more pullups overnight. if i want to do pullups again i have to work my way up to it with baby steps.

why aren’t i doing baby steps consistently? is it that i find it too pathetic? too undignified? too small? but it’s the only thing that actually works. i’m reminded of a video i saw of tom cruise saying “i learn to crawl before I learn to walk, learn to walk before I learn to jog, learn to jog before I learn to sprint”, etc. gradatim ferociter. alright. lets say i wipe the slate clean. i just inherited this life, i’m visa-prime, brand new, i get to do anything i want, no sunk costs. the world is my oyster. what would i like to be doing? well let’s reevaluate where we are. i’m married, i have a young son, i just bought a new house. i’m going to have to make some money. i may or may not get a grant that i applied for- if i do get it, i can rest easy a little longer and think a bit longer-term about the kind of big picture writing i want to do. if not, i’ll have to double down on doing more consulting, which is also fine, because i do like consulting, i learn a lot about people and marketing and psychology etc that way.

what do i really want to do? I want to feel relaxed. i want to feel at peace. one way to do that is by meditating. i can do a bit of that every day. maybe that’s where i should start. just take deep breaths and feel a sense of okayness about it all. that should help. i was telling my wife that we should give each other massages more often, because we have a massage table, we can help each other with our aches and pains even if we aren’t professionals, and that relief is likely to have compounding effects on other things. i’m taking some deep breaths right now. do i want to keep this wordvomit going until it counts for 2? i’m in two minds about it. i think yes let’s keep going. what’s next? xerox’d flowers feels like a compelling post. i’m watching The Boys, it’s pretty interesting. i don’t currently feel like working on my inception post. oh, i feel bad about not having followed through on that post i promised someone i’d write for them. maybe i should go back to that? yes, a lot of my frustration has to do with unfulfilled promises. that diminishes my sense of self-respect. i can’t respect myself if i can’t honor my agreements. what is my word worth? i should honor my agreements better. part of this means making fewer agreements to begin with, and making better agreements that i can actually follow through on.

all of this feels so boring in a way, and i want to sit with that. i think usually my reaction here would be to either force myself to power through it, or to allow myself to get distracted- which isn’t necessarily a bad thing entirely. but i think there’s a more nuanced approach which is to WORK it. work the puzzle. why is it boring? it feels repetitive, it feels mundane. but not all repetitive mundane things are boring, are they? a few deep breaths are technically repetitive and mundane, and yet they introduce a richness, an aliveness to the moment. so… what’s the difference? I suppose it’s about consequences? repetitive, mundane and INCONSEQUENTIAL is the boring thing. repetitive, mundane and CONSEQUENTIAL is the interesting thing. I’m reminded of something like, a boring work meeting becomes interesting if it’s about who’s getting fired or who’s getting promoted etc. because there are consequences. it’s the absence of consequences that makes something feel insignificant.

so okay, let’s work with this. consequences. what consequences do i want? I can dream about the far-off outcomes like oh wouldn’t it be nice to be really fit, wouldn’t it be nice to have published all my great perfect essays, wouldn’t it be nice to have inbox zero, wouldn’t it be nice to be a perfect person. yes, sure. what about near-term outcomes and consequences? wouldn’t it be nice to finish this post in the next 20 minutes or so and then go to sleep? yes. what about tomorrow? i have the military training thing, wouldn’t it be nice to make it to training so i don’t get in trouble for a change? yes, it would. what else would be nice? just… feeling a sense of progress in my writing. I just switched tabs to an open draft I had about xerox’d flowers and i wrote out a paragraph and it felt nice and alive. eros and death in a flower crushed in a copier. i find myself wanting to return here to wrap this piece up, and maybe i’ll just continue… i have tonnes of xerox’d flowers. reams and reams of them. what am i to do with them? i suppose the answer is to make art with them. what if there are too many of them? well, then you probably get rid of a bunch of them. what if you want to convey the scale and scope of them? well… you could share some of them, and then make something to convey the magnitude. make meta-art, in a sense. a photograph of the stacks of paper conveys the heft, even if you don’t actually convey the details of what was in the paper. doesn’t that famous photograph of margaret hamilton do that? (she didn’t actually write all of the code; she contributed to it, but so did others). it seems so important to me to honor the volume of work i’ve done, for multiple reasons. there are layers to it. at the same time, not all of those reasons are… honorable? some of it is a kind of small-minded whinging. some of it is a desperation to be appreciated, when i simultaneously know that what people appreciate is not necessarily the amount of grunting and straining that somebody did, but really the quality of the outcome… it’s messy. maybe i should spell that out. there’s surely an interesting post to be written… I’ll copy this into the post i’m working on to see if I want to expand on it later.

so okay, where are we now? i do feel better having thought some things through, and there are lots of little opportunities to expand further, think deeper, get to a more resonant sense of what feels true for me, what feels compelling. i wanna say “ultimately i suppose that what i feel is the pain of feeling inarticulate, and what I want is the relief of articulating myself”, though then I think “is that really the ultimate thing? is there ever an ultimate thing? there’s always more.” there is no ultimate wave of the ocean, there’s always more waves. there’s always another breath. until death. so between now and then the task is really just to… wave on. let the waves crash on to the shore. allow the sands and waters to play and dance. let them flow where they want to go. allow myself to be surprised by what comes up. release the tension i’ve been holding to try and keep everything together, and trust that it will fall apart in ways that will be interesting. go with the flow rather than against it. go with the flow rather than against it. dynamic, not static. dynamic, not static.