When I first started this Substack, I had a lot of ambition around it, but I also knew myself, and I knew that I would struggle with keeping up with the ambition. It’s already hard to practice, but it’s harder without a goal, and it’s even harder without a vision. This Substack was meant to be the vision and the goal, and it has partially succeeded, but writing about practice and learning is hard for very similar reasons to why practice and learning are hard.
A smart person will learn techniques from other people, an even smarter person will learn to adapt himself to make the techniques work, a truly smart person will learn the technique and recognize what can and cannot be adapted, given circumstances, but keep the lessons in the back pocket for when they can be adapted. Let’s say I’m struggling with being smarter and truly smart.
So, why is writing hard? Because learning is hard, practice is hard, and it is difficult to set a course for learning and also to reflect upon the learning. That’s what makes writing essentially hard, you have to pre-cognise and re-cognise, reconcile the differences and make adjustments, consciously. As I keep saying here, one’s total consciousness is faster and more powerful than one’s deliberate mind. Slowing down to use the conscious mind forces a kind of cognition that is powerful, if slow and often uncomfortable.
That’s what this Substack was intended to be, a training journal and curriculum. And it’s hard to generate curricula, much less, work with them and then reflect.
But, then, writing becomes another task, and it’s the kind of task that requires the same kinds of strategies that I’ve been mentioning in the practice series. You have to create the spaces for it, and those spaces are hard to make. The biggest enemy, of course, is time. Time is the great enemy, undefeated, and we all decide how we are going to lose to her. What happens with me is that I wind up taking the precious moments I have and putting them into practice, rather than planning and revising. That’s what the masters are for, I guess, they plan for you.
A technique my Rakhi sister used for her Substack to force herself to engage it was to turn on a chat and charge for subscriptions. She knew that if she did that, she’d feel obligated to be writing often and creating value for her readers. That’s a good lesson, one to learn from, but it wouldn’t work for me. If I did that, I’d just feel awful about another process turning into chaos or an untended garden and I’d feel even worse about not writing, because I’d have taken people’s money.
So, here’s what I’m going to try to do. I’m going to finish my practice series and then re-set a little bit and take into account what I can and cannot do with the time I have available. What happens with me is that I’d much rather prioritise playing than writing about playing, which is the right choice. Let’s see what I can realistically write.
Thanks!