More Saturday Rambling
Doing less seems like such an important thing. The productivity maximizing habit (fetish, really), isn't actually maximizing my productivity, creativity, or even my success, much less my enjoyment of life. I've found that just stopping work on several things, as hard as it is to do that, quickly improves so many aspects of my life. Maybe the more you do, the less you can be present for, and the faster that time flows. Certainly the more you try to do, the less you can do of those things. It's also relevantly in the background of this post by Austin Kleon.
Play is a really important activity. I don't mean mandatory playing, or playing with a purpose. Some how that capital-e Expectation That Something Will Be Accomplished that comes with that attitude really just ruins restorative aspects of playing. I've found it is really difficult to not set a goal for myself with an activity, particularly once I've developed some skill or interest. But, it really matters to set aside that unstructured, aimless, goal-less time. The only criteria for success is enjoying my time doing whatever it is I am playing at. Don't ruin it by making careful notes; trust that you'll absorb what you need to.
Uncertainty: I read this article which is related to what I wrote earlier this week, although it took things a somewhat different direction than I was looking for. I don't think I take any comfort yet from the reminder that it really is uncertainty all the way down; we're just estimating what the state of the system is, whether that system is an atom or another person. Probably without realizing it, I've been gravitating toward the desire for certainty, no matter that all certainty is false or at best less certain than it seems. All that is, except death and taxes.
Sentimental/Romantic I caught myself having a strange longing for the imagined simple life of uninteresting times. Being able to look back on a life of thousands of identical evenings, seasons of repeating feasts and labors, of knowing that I will be eating X tomorrow morning as assuredly as the sun will rise. This is not the life I live, have never lived that way. It's always an unending struggle to decide what to cook this week, what spend my time on, which project to tackle next. Upon inspection I really don't think that this simpler time that I imagine is actually any more free of the stresses that I suffer today, in fact probably has more. To a certain degree, these stressors are self-inflicted, or at least exposure to them is something that I have some agency over.
It's funny, but another thing that I occasionally get romantic ideas about is smoking a pipe. It's a hilarious anachronism, and whenever I've had the chance to try it, the romance is quickly dispelled by the unpleasant practicalities. After the second or third attempt, the desire to actually go do this has worn off. But the feeling that it might be nice, if it didn't suck, well that still visits when I read certain books.