Friday, May 29, 2020
5:35 a.m. John F. Kennedy’s birthday.
This morning’s post [pre-scheduled to appear on my blog today] is from 2016, and concerns a very interesting investigation into the non-3D/3D relationship that I had forgotten. Why am I not doing that work everyday? Why do I lose sight of it on a continuing basis and why do I omit to clarify past work?
Not a rhetorical question. Why?
Internal cross-currents, fighting one another. Your recent insight re diet – that each element seeks acknowledgement – applies in general. To work hard, you must play, as well.
Coincidence that I started to watch a video to lean how to paint faces, after retrieving my unfinished picture with Lincoln, Hemingway and Jung?
Undoubtedly. Nothing in life is connected or purposeful, as you know. It is all chaos.
Very funny.
You have a deep yearning for order – most people do – and of course in anyone’s life there are forces making for disorder, or, let’s say, needing to be ordered. But ordering takes time and attention and habit, and life doesn’t always have a lot of time and effort to spare. Hence the usefulness of good habits. However, “methodical” has its own drawbacks. Life is inherently untidy.
So, if I want to work, I have to satisfy a part of myself that feels slighted it I do not express it.
“Parts,” not “a part,” but yes. And not just you, but everyone.
Can we go back to daily conversations about life and the meaning of life?
Well – we could. It isn’t exactly a matter of should, you realize, and if we do, you will be right back in your previous dilemma: It may leave you without sufficient energy to do the creative things you want to do, or anyway wanted to do.
But in the absence of our conversations, I didn’t do them. I did a lot of reading and rereading and Netflix.
Thinking in the background, through all of it.
Yes, I suppose so. Or, if not “thinking” exactly, mulling.
So it isn’t necessarily wasted time. Still the potential tradeoff is there.
But you wanted me to distill the essence of your messages and I have not done it.
You did a tremendous amount of preliminary work and have forgotten that you did it and it is there as resource. You have even forgotten that you had been given the idea that your thoughts about how to write it were backwards: that you should write it freely, then use your extensive notes to fill in whatever you may have missed.
True, on both counts.
Things continue to gel, if you let them. EBooks, web redesign, rearranging your ideas about publishing: It all comes together and – guess what! – the times come too. Life after March 2020 isn’t the same as it was, and isn’t going to be. You have passed through a another doorway, and you will find the newer world in some ways more compatible than the older.
So now I’ll finish this entry, put my pen into the spiral binding, set the book to the side, and will divert myself with other things: breakfast, lunch, dinner, Minesweeper, books, Netflix – and what will be different?
What would you wish different?
I am surprised to find that I don’t know an immediate answer.
That should tell you something.
No doubt. What?
Your ideas are still behind your reality. That is, your self in 2020 isn’t necessarily the same self as in 2019, let alone 1960 or 1980 or 2000. All these gradual transitions need to be taken into account, but rarely are, until some discontinuity makes the changes obvious.
We readjust in pieces, I suppose.
Certainly. Consider it a rolling readjustment. At any given moment, certain past changes are incorporated, and ground is thereby prepared for other changes to be incorporated.
The language makes a simple concept seem difficult.
Not for the first time! Feel free to phrase it.
If the Frank of 1980 were to be faced with the Frank of 2020, he might not even recognize him. and if the Frank of 2020 were to be somehow required to live in the mental space of the Frank of 1980, he would find it probably intolerably constricted, even alien. Our changes through life are usually gradual but they are cumulative.
That’s right, and no given moment is entirely “in the moment” in the sense of having no unabsorbed past changes. You always find lags somewhere. So, specifically now. We merely point out, there’s nothing unusual, nothing “wrong,” about the fact.
So what would I wish to be different in my daily life right now?
That is the question. It is – we suggest – always a productive question.
So let me use the Energy Conversion Box [to concentrate my thoughts on one thing] and then ponder the question.
[private thoughts]
A page and I still can’t visualize what I would do.
You might ask the question as you go along.
A little daily self-awareness, eh?
Can’t hurt.
No. Very well, I guess I’ll type this up, most of it, and send it for whomever it may interest. Not an inspired vision but better than another game of Minesweeper, I suppose.