Living Life and Shit
Week 4 Experimenting w/Absurdism Pt 2
January 24 -Just do it. Do it now. Do it Dangerous. Do it Weird.
Thought Experiment: There’s something you are unsure about doing. How bout just fucking doing it? Make a little mind movie about a few possible paths that may appear on your way to just doing that thing.
“You've got to work on something dangerous. You have to work on something that makes you uncertain. Something that makes you doubt yourself. […] You shouldn't feel safe. You should feel, "I don't know if I can write this." That's what I mean by dangerous, and I think that's a good thing to do. Sacrifice something safe.”
– Stephen Sondheim, via The New York Times
I just pulled this quote and started writing about it today, thanks to my daily writing practice with the London Writers’ Salon, the unofficial sponsor of this project. I wasn’t sure if I should, but I fucking felt it. I don’t know if I have any business writing in general or about this, but every day I sit down wondering if I can do this - and just do it.
Of course, the week I started to talk about challenging assumptions, I realized my assumption that I’ll be able to keep the pace, volume, and quality of my writing is defunct - and I don’t know if I can do this. So part of “Doing it” today, I’m sacrificing the safety of the constraints I set up. here’s a new assumption that will probably need to be challenged later:
All I can do is sit down to write every day, sharing honest experiences that illustrate what I’m learning about science and philosophy to give us all something to think about.
(Damn, that might be a better “About me” section than anything I’ve ever written. See what happens when you just do the shit!?)
The funny thing about new assumptions is that they’re probably not all that new. It was just buried under a bunch of other I’ve been telling myself. I’ve been doing the thing of creating in uncertainty, discomfort, and danger. I kinda forget how dangerous what I do is sometimes. I imagine if you base jump every day, you think more about the wind, the feeling, the ins and outs and not what your insurance underwriter thinks about, but maybe you are midjump one day and think Oh shit. This is dangerous as fuck.
So what happens when you do dangerous things consistently?
Well, you become a real weirdo. When you practice living dangerously, you’re filled with more courage after a morning cup of coffee than most people can muster in their whole life. I can't quite explain why things feel different over the past few weeks but I'm sure after 4 weeks of consistent daily writing and daily piano practice (in front of strangers) my brain is doing things it hasn't done in a while. Add to that. Not only that, I’ve been reading philosophy live on TikTok - daily, and I was today years old when I realized this dangerous consistent activity is what’s given me enough confidence to work on this project that I wasn't sure how to approach. I read, I play, and I write which helps me digest what I do, and the result is a really weird, but brave human.
January 25 - Love a lot, but love well.
Thought Experiment: Is there an instance when quantity leads to quality? Is there a generalization to make? Can we say one is always better than the other? Why not both?
"What Don Juan realizes in action is an ethic of quantity, whereas the saint, on the contrary, tends toward quality. Not to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to the absurd man."
― Albert Camus, "Don Juanism" in The Myth of Sisyphus