teetering on the edge I am,
teeter teeter
I have a headache. I need to wrap my head around it, but it seems to have me wrapped. I suspect that it is a symptom of thought, or of desire, or some combination thereof. But it is there. I can feel it.
I remember simpler times, when I just did things. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t thinking, I was, but that thinking happened in the process of doing. A shift occurred somewhere along the lines. The process of thinking overtook the process of doing. Maybe I was just done with doing, seeing as how I had already done it. Maybe not.
On the commute to and from work I started to read tech books (back in 04/05) even when I didn’t have any immediate use to draw from them. Some of them were on the deep tech aspects and others on the design aspects. It was basically a knowledge store, I wasn’t using this information for anything, I was just collecting it. At lot of it came in handy, when something was crashing or breaking, or when someone asked me a question a window would open up in the brain and I’d either know the answer, or know where to find it. Better yet, being able to combine two separate ideas to devise a possible new use. All this is good, but at some point all this thought collected and got to a point where I couldn’t implement the ideas I was holding (or maybe I felt I couldn’t). This was/is problematic.
It’s not like I didn’t try doing things. I’d load up the machine and get ready to string together ideas in code, and then I’d feel a thousand pulls from a thousand ideas, leaving me in a state of paralysis. Overload, crash and retreat. I would think things and not do things. So I’d leave things incomplete. This incompleteness is not particularly new, I can’t remember a personal project that I’ve “completed” to completion even when I was doing things. But now I would barely get started and get stuck. What is this state of “completeness” anyway? Maybe I started to believe there was such a thing as “complete”, and knowing I could not get there prevented me from doing anything?
I found myself going through this cycle with magic as well. First I learnt and did, then I read and read and read. When you read volumes of books with titles like “The Structural Conception of Magic” you tend to place more thought into magic. How can you not? And it’s great, I love that aspect of magic as well, it’s fascinatingly fantastic. But if you’re like me, to a large degree it prevents you from doing. Oh and there’ll be no false modesty here, I am very good at this magic thing.
I can see an effect and like it for what it is, but you can’t see an effect the same way after you’ve changed your frame of thinking on it. This has nothing to do with the secret of the effect or “how it is done”, far from it (anyone who really has a feel for magic should know that the secret is far from the Most Important Thing). So while I did magic the last couple of years, I wasn’t really there, I wasn’t in the magic, not as much. Hah, and I’ve only been doing this for 3 years now. All of this, of course, is going on in my mind alone, not like anyone else sees it or cares, nor should they.
But of late I’ve started to get that feel back, that feeling of raw excitement, an inexplicable trembling passion. I was watching a couple of my favourite magicians, stuff I’ve seen before, stuff I’ve done before, and l was very moved by the magic. It was exciting and fun. What I feel magic should be like, the flow and the feel. So awesome, so fluid. It occurred to me, how do they do it? These are people who have done magic for decades, thought and thunk, written books, performed thousands and thousands of times professionally and otherwise, they have forgotten more about magic than I will ever know in my lifetime. How do they do it? This applies to all the software monkeys too, they’ve designed and redesigned, built and torn, they have more knowledge in their left pinky nail than I will ever scratch. How do they balance this thought and action?
What should be my approach in comparison? Why am I in paralysis? Why am I not in a state of doing what I love?
It’s foolishness.
totter totter