Meaning v. practice
The tagline for text is a durable canon of wonder. Given the current apocalypse, how does one embrace wonder while not giving into corrosive “good vibes only” bypass? The million dollar question. One could, I suppose talk about resistance, or ruggedization, or permanently deleting all social media & unpaid software, or holding one’s friends close. These are all universally correct ideas, but what would I have to add to the mounting canon?
In additional contrast to all of this is the fact that my life is going fairly well, despite everything, and “must be nice,” you say, but I don’t think I’m alone here. I think those of us who are thriving are profoundly grateful and aware that all things are fragile, this is probably the result of considerable privilege, and all of this could be taken from us at any time.
In my conversations with my close people about all of this, I’ve tried to tease out the seeming contradiction between my current situation and the broader context. They usually dovetail, right? Until they don’t. And so I’ve spent this precious time trying to find the spaciousness to create deeper meaning for myself.
I love my job, and I love having an independent business, but I truly don’t know if it’s where I get my meaning from. It’s where I work; work is mostly practice; palpable rewards in the moment are few. I love cooking, and if I were less self-critical about it I might find more meaning in that. I love hosting, but the practice of getting the right humans into the room and making sure the vibes are good is a lot of work.
Work yields practice energy, which I’m happy to do, but it also doesn’t create a broader meaning. I’m cooking, hosting, and consulting because they feel like the most important things I should be doing at any point. In these harder moments, I find myself losing sight of why I started doing any of this in the first place, and what draws me to keep coming back to everything.
And so I’m left wondering what the relationship is between discipline, which I’m rather good at, and reward, which I’m historically terrible at. How do we sit in acceptance of the fact that the path is long & challenging? How do we understand setbacks for what they are, and avoid succumbing to despair about them? Finally, what are the practices that we’ll be creating to make sure that we’re experiencing satisfaction with our practices?