🎧 Listening to: Rock The Boat - The Hues Corporation
🎧 Listening to: Rock The Boat - The Hues Corporation
i fired up the old audio blog today and recorded a new episode (#346). in which i talk about my comeback bid into social audio and audio blogging, my long and checkered history with traditional blogging, the relevance of social spaces for bloggers, why i hate titles in blogging, my squeaky chair, and whether Jeff Bezos tweets or not, and lastly, i take a deep dive into my blogging ecosystem and how it all fits together. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe (if the spirit moves you too). Listen here!
i love the idea of Montaigne being the first blogger. he’s a great role model for me and what i’m trying to accomplish with my blog.
Here's a memo on the fearless spirit of non-conformity! Celebrate the courage to be different.
In my experience, the comfort zone is not inherently a stifling place. It’s a space where the worn cushions of habit cradle your existence and make you feel safe like the nest of a bird intricately woven with twigs of routine and leaves of predictability. But, at some point, at least for some, the walls of your comfort zone become prison walls when the ache for “something more” sets in. The very fabric of that nest starts to itch!
Serenity now
Sunday stroll
I stumbled upon this short-form knowledge sharing community called Memod. It feels like a structured and niched twitter, you write in bullet-points of up to 280 characters. Each memo can have up to 10 bullet-points. Essentially, it's like writing a thread on X. In the spirit of trying things out, I wrote a memo on the 6-pillars of personal development.
life is an essay that writes itself in real-time.
new patient: Clayton L. fifty five year old African American male. consultant. chronic note-taker. currently administering self-therapy through writing out his thoughts on loose leaf paper and then ritualistically burning them in the back garden. what’s his problem? he can’t keep is mind still or complete things he starts. easily distracted, but always completes things that matter on time and to standard. maybe the problem is not many things matter to him, especially given how fleeting life is. his running narrative: am I going to care about this on my deathbed? another problem he has is his limited emotional range. he seems to only have three emotional gears - happy, annoyed, and melancholy. he says that’s all he needs. he says others think he just doesn’t care about other people and their feelings. he’s only ever been to one funeral in his life. during his freshman year in college, his grandfather died. he went to the funeral. all the wailing and crying made him uncomfortable. he vowed never to attend another funeral, not even his own.
what’s on my mind image prompt:
ghosts
strangers
lizards
dreams
i used #DALLE3 for this one.
welcome to saturday, i don’t have a whole lot planned for today apart from putting a new battery in my jeep, organising my mind a little, probably a short hike, and the rest to play by ear and see where the currents of curiosity take me.
inspired by the heavy rain outside my window right now, i start singing an alice cooper song:
rain is falling down my cheek
searching for the sea
tomorrow like the rain
i'll be back home again
🎧 Listen: Alma Mater - Alice Cooper
but this isn’t what i came here to tell you. i came here to tell you the latest issue of my substack newsletter, the barefoot philosopher’s notes is out. i think it’s my favourite issue so far. i’ve been iterating on the newsletter over the past few months, searching for a format that fits the vibe of what i’m about. i think i’ve finally found it.
if you’ve been seeing me post links to my substack over the past year, and if in the past, you saw the link, paused, but ultimately kept on scrolling, then i urge you to click the link this time, check out my new flow. you can resume scrolling later.
here’s the link to the current issue: play what’s not there
Started using Squaddy to track my workouts and stumbled upon the Golden Era Workout Club who have a bunch of workouts from the legends of bodybuilding. This week I did Franco Columbu’s workouts. I haven’t had a “pump” like this in years.
Hexagram 55, “Feng” or “Abundance”
poetic imagination unfurls itself in the heart of the artist, painting vivid pictures of unseen worlds. It dances on the edge of reality, weaving tales of beauty and sorrow in equal measure.
i was never one for following the rules too closely.
Genuine and sincere are my current lodestars helping me to align with a greater cosmic truth about myself. "I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.” And what is it to be genuine and sincere but to engage in this eternal dance of self-examination?
"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.” But isn't this the crux of it? To be genuine and sincere is to stand on the precipice of not knowing, to make peace with the tension of being imperfectly, wholly myself.
The conversations i’m having with myself expand beyond the limits of skin and bone and into the space around me, into the lives of the people i touch, into the ground i walk upon, and into the air i breathe. It’s in the way my body responds to a sunset, eyes reflecting the mingling hues of red and gold; it’s in the way i listen, truly listen to the words of another, trying to keep my mind clear of judgement.
It’s in the way i embrace my own flawed, messy existence.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (The Go-Between 1953)
this song takes on a whole new meaning now that I’ve seen sinatra the musical.
I’m here to see Sinatra The Musical.
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." ― Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke tells us to "live the questions," but sometimes I wonder if it's not about living the gaps between them as well.
50,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day. Numbers so large they blur into abstraction. In a fraction of a second, there's a pause and the chatter ceases.
Who am I in that gap?
It's a question that tickles the edges of spirituality, philosophy, and neuroscience. Descartes told us, "Cogito, ergo sum." I think, therefore I am. But what about when we don't think? Are we less 'us'? Or perhaps more?
Virginia Woolf called these interstitial moments "moments of being." Glimpses of unfiltered reality, a backdrop so often obscured by the "cotton wool" of everyday life. Are these gaps our 'moments of being,' or perhaps 'moments of becoming’?
moments
the silence in a song
the quiet before the storm
the unsaid "but" lingering at the end of a sentence
the hollow space inside a bell
the emptiness that makes a room a room
In meditation, the goal isn't thoughtlessness but a heightened awareness of thoughts, as they pass through your mind like a fast flowing river. The "I" that watches the thoughts is like a bird perched high above, witnessing but not getting entangled. But what are we without our thoughts? Is it a barren land or fertile soil—tabula rasa or a canvass splashed with invisible ink? In poetry, the space between words, the line breaks, the stanzas—all breathe life into the poem. Likewise, the "I" between thoughts is not a vacuum but charged space, full of potential and gravity, like dark matter in the universe.
Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones says, "First thoughts have tremendous energy. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.”
So, who am I between two thoughts?
A seeker in a landscape of fleeting certainties, perhaps? A hiker in a canyon echoing with the shouts of my own queries and convictions, pausing for a drink of stillness? A reader flipping through the pages of an unwritten book, fingers tingling at the touch of invisible ink?
In that gap, I am both more and less myself—like a note in a melody, defined as much by the silence that surrounds it as by its own sonic signature. There, in that gap, I am the unspoken word, the unpainted canvas, the unwritten poem. I am all potential and no form; I am the gaze that makes the sky more than just weather.
That's me. Now, who are YOU between two thoughts?
🎧 listening to Sign O' The Times (Super Deluxe) as i get on with this afternoon’s tasks.
Currently reading: Making the Tongue Dry by Jen Soriano 📚
is it bad that i have to do the math to figure out my age?