About keeping on writing

Notes from Write to Escape Your Default Setting.

Let's call your mind's default setting 'perpetual approximation mode.' A business idea, a scrap of gossip, a trivial fact, a romantic interest, a shower argument to reconcile something long past. We spend more time mentally rehearsing activities than actually doing them. You can spend your entire life hopping among these shiny fragments without searching for underlying meaning until tragedy, chaos, or opportunity slaps you into awareness.

I think that's precisely where our human nature thrives, this mental mode of thinking we know about something until actually finely analysing it as a theory and seeing that in fact it doesn't hold true under true scrutiny and adapting the model accordingly. That's why we can see Jesus on a loaf of bread, or predict when is the best time to sow based on the stars. It's all about holding this abstract weird ideas in head and using them sporadically to confirm or negate our mental decision trees.

If you're repeatedly drawn to a thought, feeling, or belief, write it out. Be fast, be sloppy. Just as children ask why, why, why, you can repeat the question "why do I think/feel/believe this?" a few times. What plops onto the paper may surprise you. So too will the headspace that clears from pouring out the canned spaghetti of unconnected thoughts.

This is the best you can do to free space on your mind to something else. It's like a wave function keep bouncing around in your mind until it's well defined as text somewhere else and that makes it disappear from your internal dialogue. There's also the benefit of writing and getting good at it by practicing it more and being able to weave narratives and sentences better simply by the fact that if you can explain your thoughts to yourself in text you can explain it to anybody.

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

Lovely quote. In the end we're just a bunch of atoms, when we share our perspective of the world it changes us to the bunch of atoms, this unique thing going around a couple of turns around the sun that I call myself.