03: narrow points of focus
the secret of this universe
I would not take many pictures at all
When I was in New York last year I would walk from Times Square (where I was staying) to Chinatown and back. The walk to and fro took three hours or so in cold biting weather, and I kept thinking my face would dry up and turn into a prune. I would walk while texting a friend. I would walk while looking at this or that, feeling cold and flooded with the recurring thought of getting to a warm place. I was in a phase of my life where I enjoyed walking - I still am, actually - and I was happiest whenever I walked past bookstores, my favorite type of store in the world, and I would not take many pictures at all. It was strange but I felt embedded in the city, like a tiny insect whose existence is not quite known, but still I knew I solidly existed. It was a comforting thought. The city operated on its usual levels and at its normal pace, but there I was, an insect who walked alone, and with perfect contentment to boot. Side note: I avoided the subway because I wanted to walk. And also because... NYC. I was riding the "L" once in Chicago when someone a few seats away started shouting and acting crazy. He looked like he would take a gun out at any moment. My world instantly contracted to about the size of the train cabin. I had no escape route if something bad happened. That might or might not be why I don't enjoy taking the subway at all in America.
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Simple and boring systems
I'm creating simple and boring systems to help make this book happen. It's almost impossible to count on inspiration and desire to create the amount and quality of work I want to create. Daily writing sessions are important. No. They are essential. They are the source of the raw material I desperately need in order to do the other thing I love to do - editing, having something to shape and mould and turn into a beautiful thing. Sitting down to write isn't something that just happens - it has to be a routine, a fixed part of the programme. When I sit down for this part of the programme, I do whatever it takes to get myself into a particular state of mind, and I write. I guess this is what they call 'discipline'. Having the discipline to sit down every day for a few hours to write can make all the difference between someone who manages to write a book and someone who doesn't.
Another part of my system - daily walks. I walk at a park near my house. It's a long and boring and simple walk, but it's the tedium that allows the clarity to come through. I like my brain a little more when I'm walking. I think better, my thoughts become brighter and more interesting. In the blankness of a long and boring and simple walk, stuff filters through. I type that stuff into my Notes and look forward to going home to my computer where I can continue to work on them.
Collecting everything and writing notes about everything is another part of this simple and boring system. I'm using Obsidian to do this. It's a beautiful piece of software that renews my hope about what the Internet is for - it's for creating a place where beautiful pieces of software can live, software that's made by people who care about things like knowledge, ideas, creativity, etc etc. Obsidian gives me a central depository to put all the mental objects I collect from everywhere that are vaguely related to what I'm writing and thinking about, and is the home I go back to again and again to organise my thoughts, link ideas and find new ones, and write up terrible drafts.
I'm trying my best to understand how this writing and publishing thing works - I have never done something like this before, apart from that time I published one issue of a magazine. Writing and publishing a book is a sustained effort, a marathon; I have never been great at long-distance running, but I hope to be now.
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"Books are made out of books."
- Cormac McCarthy
Reading painter Joan Miró's "I Work Like a Gardener" (edited by Yvon Taillandier) and here are some of my favorite things he said:
"It's a battle between me and what I'm doing, between me and the canvas, between me and my distress. This struggle is passionately exciting to me. I work until the distress leaves me."
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"In an artwork, you should be able to discover new things every time you see it. But you can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it for the rest of your life."
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"I work like a gardener or a winemaker. Things come slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for example - I didn't discover it all at once."
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"And the unexpected! That, too, is enchantment."
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"More than the picture itself, what counts is what it throws into the air, what it exhales."
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"The simplest things give me ideas. A bowl from which a peasant eats his soup; I prefer this to the ridiculously sumptuous plates of the rich."
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Narrow points of focus
Somehow it's already March 2024. I hope you've had the chance to decide what your narrow points of focus are for the year. Mine are writing and photography, as you already know. I could climb these two mountains not just for a year but for a lifetime, which makes me feel quite happy.
I really think the secret to happiness (and the secret of this universe) is focus. This is because we experience life through our mind, and our mind is at its best when it is narrowly focused on something. It's a crude and over-simplified theory, but these days I swear by it.
My narrow points of focus will bring me to a few places around the world this year. But it's an inward journey, not just an external one, and will be one of self-discovery, re-evaluation and recalibration and rethinking and renewing. I have set aside some funds to do this. I am free and the freedom is dangerous. This is why I need the simple and boring systems I talked about.
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Thank you
for hanging around to read these weekly updates and to walk with me through this. A lot of what you see here are drafts and bits and pieces of interesting ideas that I will later mix and match and transmute into something else that will eventually go into the book. Some things you see here might be repetitive or might not make much sense, but I trust that you know what you are in for. And I only feel like I can do this because I know that you guys are rooting for my success, just like I'm rooting for yours.
I hope in 2024 you will get to do the things you really want to do, and that you will get to live life to the fullest.
I don't care how much of a cliché this is, but we are here to live life to the fullest. Living life to the fullest is not about jumping off a plane because that's on someone else's bucket list, but FIGURING OUT that what you really want to do is NOT to jump off a plane but... something else. You live life to the full measure of you, being truthful to what you love and where you want to go and who you want to be with, without hiding from or rejecting all the parts of you that are broken or weird or deformed. That is living life to the fullest. A life with no regrets.
See you next week!