20210611
From "Connected (with Abe + Isaac) — Volume 38 (are you open to experiencing yourself as unlimited?)"
“We have no legacy, no ties to the past; we are free to find the right way.” –Polestar
“A problem is grand [...] if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler [...] problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow [human], even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.” –Feynman
Friends I am excited. I went out for coffee this morning and was stopped in my tracks by this singing bird who—over the course of two full minutes—didn’t repeat itself once. What kind of world is this?
The Great Release
I think—I think—we all have some inner drive, some irreducible core of truth-in-purpose at the very center. I’ve heard complimentary ideas that describe this as Being, or Is-ness, the idea that to exist and to know oneself and to know one’s self as one is ultimately it. And I think that’s true, I think I feel that. There’s something more in there that has direction, though. I think? I think, I feel.
Mine, I think, has something to do with understanding and expressing. Like, taking in as much as I can, one small piece of perception at a time, and adjusting this model I have of how it all works, of what it all is, rounding the rough edges so that everything new I encounter fits, evolving this model of Everything and integrating it into my brain and my heart and my body and whatever else I’ve got, equipping me for the dance. I should say “equipping me for expression” here, instead of “for the dance”, but it’s not just expression—it’s expression that’s meant to be communication, on some level. Like, I know there’s an audience of some kind, someone that I’m trying to reach. It might be myself? It might be you, it might be everything, I’m not sure. But it feels like learning to talk. I see newborns firing random muscles, slowly making a model of how their body works; I see toddlers rolling mouth-sounds around, making words, learning how to say things that land with the listener (and they know when it lands).
Part of it is the intrinsic need to self-express, to release oneself fully, holding nothing back. But again, part of it—for me—is to put something forth that you (whoever you are, and I’m not speaking strictly to you-dear-reader but to whoever you are) will hear and understand and receive. So that it sinks into you, penetrates you, changes you, as I too am changed by everything I take in.
I’ve had more than a meaningless amount of conversation, as of late, about what we make, and how we make it. The best language I’ve found, for my particular self, is this:
I sense something (an idea, a pattern, a something) that wants to emerge and to live.
I want to do whatever I can to allow that living thing to come forward into being in its whole, healthy aliveness, so that it can move the way it wants to (without halting, without hesitating, without pain), and so that it too will sense what wants to emerge next, so that it too may choose to yield something new and alive, next.
I’m pretty sure very sure that none of this happens by a binding, or by control or by forcing pieces into place with a furrowed brow and a tight stomach. (At least not directly; it’s possible that those things may be needed in order to then necessitate the release that follows.) And in that parenthetical I’ve jumped the gun on the point: I know that this yielding-of-the-next-living-thing happens via release. You don’t build and then animate something alive. You let it go, and you watch it happen.
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