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coalescing

2023-01-02

3 minute read

I have a couple of things I absolutely must do today, and a couple that are less urgent but I would like to do.

I've been thinking about my week in Hobart last year and how good it was - how can I do that again?

I don't really want the hassle of getting out of the city, finding (and paying for) a place to stay etc, but the headspace that came from it was idyllic. I wonder if I could recreate something similar, closer to home? "The Casa Jolimont week long residency". It doesn't feel the same 🥲.

What'd that week have that I enjoyed?

I won't force any solutions into this post, it's good to have layed out some of the points.

things to do

I've got some admin to do for my upcoming trip:

Today I'd also like to read a few things:

And watch this: Oldboy’s Apples by Brad Hock.

table some goals

I need to carry over my journal to the new month, and I'd like to table some resolutions or goals. I've got a theme in my mind at the moment, it's been floating about for the last couple of years coalescing. It's about intuitive knowledge and concious knowledge. I haven't been able to yet refine it into a single or two, but the main idea is that there are a lot of basic things that I don't know. My hypothesis, based on how I feel and past experience, is that I learn things fast and intuitively and the felt sense of correctness is usually enough to carry me through. As I get older and further in my career I can't rely on that any more, and I get frustrated trying to explain why I do certain things. Why functional programming over OOP? Why not jQuery? Why this colour? Why art? Why spanish? I think running through these kind of "why" questions could help me with both better foundations for thinking as well as surfacing some answers that don't hold up under the light of interogation.

The Lathe of Heaven

A good read, very zen - a theme I've come across a fair bit this year. Stillness, relinquishing the illusion of control. It's a welcome paradigm for me, struggling enough as I do with any control. I think of yachts and powerboats, the aggressive damage and destruction that comes with the motorboat's ability to go in any direction vs the yacht's need to work with the conditions. The romantic interest didn't feel very real, that's okay. Le Guin did well to hold a fairly coherent plot together where the main theme is changing reality.

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moon-driven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will. But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outer space of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking… What will the creature made all of sea-drift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking? - Chapter 1, The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin

what else?

listening to

BEWARE OF THE MONKEY - MIKE

questions