An exercise in shape rotations of the mind, Exaltation in nouns, Exaltation in verbs
For this next month of February I will do an experiment in ecstatic writing each day, as described in yesterday’s blog post. Still the 500 word blog posts. Now, without day numbers in the titles, as I move toward more formal blog posts again, but more silly titles during this transition. I did not want to burn out, and if this keeps me posting, alright!
I have on a group call today described a process I really do quite like, and it ties into an old post I wrote before about in relationships, in dyads, in groups, you can generally get only one of the two — somebody coordinating with achieving your outcome, or someone coordinating with following your desired process. Generally you only get one, not both. You might find a special person who loves you a lot and tries to do both for you, and actually succeeds some of the time.
Do not fall for this trickery. Do not fall for the trickery of loved ones loving you and making you feel certain things are possible. Certain impossible things are possible due to the power of love, but do not then take those observations and apply them to the rules of physics, to the rules of social dynamics, to the rules of the universe. They are exceptions. They won’t be replicated, except by the person who loves you, every so often. And even then, you are making the life of the person who loves you, hard, unnecessarily hard, if you begin to expect this of them as a new standard.
In general, stick to the rule. When you are getting other people to do things for you, they will do one; they will follow your guidance when it comes to your desired outcome, or they will follow your guidance when it comes to your desired process. They will not do both, because the kind of coordination that is needed to do both, correctly in parallel following the frameworks of another person, leads to mistakes easily, and when there are mistakes then one of the lines of coordination gets dropped the preserve with higher likelihood of success the other one. If you then insist the person do both, generally what happens is the person drops both, or drops one and then does whichever one is most easy for them, which may not be your preferred one if you had a voice in choosing.
Now, for the book there will be a series of exercises based on the principle described above. There is also one more thing that I am adding here, that is not described in the old blog post.
When you are doing your own self-development, working on creative projects, working on projects, working on work, the same principle still applies, even when you are negotiating with yourself with your own brain.
Generally you can only follow the shape, the “noun,” the container, the “outcome” the counted outcome, or you can follow the “verb,” the process, the experience, the entering and leaving a state.
When things get stale for me, I try to make this flip from noun to verb, or from verb to noun, without changing much else, as one of my first lines of troubleshooting. (Troubleshooting questions around motivation and stamina is common when doing long projects that have a defined endpoint, finishing point, or success point.)
I am doing this now, in this experience and experiment of writing on this blog every day (I am entering my fourth month of this). For a while it has been a “noun” shape for me. I will create this object. The final object is of a certain shape. In the space and time of my day, I will insert this object somewhere.
Now, I am switching to a “verb” shape for myself. For a certain amount of time each day, I will enable myself to enter a state of ecstatic flow as a way of being with myself without any withholding of my being or attempt to make any part of myself or my mind any specific shape, and certainly not to any desired outcome other than suitable stopping points, which can be something like a word count or a duration of time spent doing the activity, in my case, a 500-words a day minimum.
Now, it’s important to note, the two really do enable each other. Verbs do not exist without nouns, nouns do not exist without verbs. The question is where is your focus on any given day, and which style of focus is giving you energy that day.
I have made this container of the blog, in the past. I have filled it up, during flow states, talked about it with friends in flow states. I had practice writing on it, twice a week for many months, in noun shapes. And then every day in noun shapes for Inkhaven in November. And then in verb shapes for a bit, as I was writing in December the first 30 days’ worth of content for my book about relationship, really letting the flow of whatever I was thinking that day pour out, sometimes for 500 words, sometimes for 2,000 words. This verb-ish period in December is probably my highest average word-count I’ve had so far, while not straining for the higher word count. Then January was feeling noun-ish again as I thought about strucutre, and now February, I am feeling verb-ish again.
What I like about this is that it is a kind of troubleshooting that is like changing one bit. I really like this essay by John Encaustum, Inverting Paul Graham’s “How to Disagree”: “How to Assert.” It is one of my favorite essays on Substack.
I think about these two passages every week:
"I take whatever saying or essay I’m presented and imagine a lattice of different inversions of the material, sort of like flipping sequences of different bits of the central message of the essay while leaving the surface structures unchanged. (Programmers and mathematicians may recognize “homomorphism” intuition there.)
Given an essay celebrating plants, I might immediately imagine rewriting the essay in three ways with the same general structure: celebrating rocks, excoriating plants, and excoriating rocks. Seeing exactly what must change and what must not to get a precisely but dramatically changed meaning is most of the fun.”
What I like about the noun-verb flip is that you are not going into and redoing or rethinking whatever structure or process you had already built up to that point. If I had decided I will be blogging every day, I am not “removing” that structure to “debug” what might be newly wrong. I am not deciding to take a break, on that level, or do something different, on that level. A habit like writing every single day is pretty hard to set up, and then “undoing” all that work could feel really bad.
Rather than “undoing it” what would be more likely would be for me to maintain the structure, since it was hard-won, and then just “eat whatever pain” there is that day.
What I like about the noun-verb bit-flip is that it does something for the pain, and allows for creativity around doing something for the pain, without changing too many things or undoing the structure. It is therefore minimally invasive for what could be extremely flippant mood swings.
Making “minimally invasive adjustments that don’t risk progress you’d already made, while keeping you motivated and excited to keep going” is how you win marathons.
It would be nice to end this blog post with some exercises people can do. The whole book about relationships I am writing will be covered in exercises. I am not sure why for this post, right now, I am drawing a blank. I have some ideas:
“are you doing a verb thing” or “are you doing a noun thing” will fall into different structures of mind for people. I think that people who read this post will impressionistically know what I mean, and anything more specific will actually have to be hyper specific to a person’s actual modeling of reality, or will add more confusion. It will have to do with how are you relating to your personal sense of time, how are you relating to your personal sense of space.
What is actually important when doing these flips as troubleshooting, from verb to noun, and noun to verb, and back again, when you feel stuck, is following a felt sense in yourself that you are feeling more excitement, more relief, more motivation, less stuck. Those feelings will be very personalized and contextualized. You will know it’s working if it is “feeling better” in a very obvious way to yourself.
That being said, maybe I do have some tips. If you are going mad as an artist, find something like a project manager, or source of stability you admire. If you are going crazy as a manager, find something about artists that you admire. “Becoming more like who you actually want to be” is a part of life that feels really good, both as a state and as a process, in one. This is hard to explain. Then, incorporate this new thing you admire into what you are doing, even if you are embarrassed by it, even if you think you are “not that.” Maybe you think you are “not a real artist” but have a job as a designer. Maybe you are “writing just to get this book done” and don’t feel like you have permission to be a sort of wild ecstatic surrealist writer, tapping into the muses. If you feel about it and think about it and catch yourself feeling a little bit naughty and with a glint in your eye, that might be the direction from which you might get energy.
Similar to feeling embarrassed about going in certain energetic directions, you might be embarrassed to use certain structures. Maybe you want to eat a piece of chocolate every time you fill out a complicated form, but you don’t want to feel like a child. Maybe you want to keep a grid of your daily voice lessons, or musical instrument practice, on the refrigerator, and color in a box with your markers every day that you do it, so that you get to see your boxes all colored in and see a cool picture at the end of the month, but this feels childish. My advice here is that you are probably already doing a lot of things, and what can seem “childish” in this structural sense is just is making things easier for somebody with less capacity. A child has less capacity than an adult. A busy adult with a lot of responsibilities has less capacity for learning or doing brand new things. I would not consider things like this a “handicap” versus a superpower. You can have childish structures, for extremely sophisticated things. In case, simple ways of doing sophisticated things leads to fewer errors, and more capacity to do the sophistication.
I see that my “tips” above amount to, following your inner guidance, and don’t let embarrassment about what kinds of “processes” you are allowed to have, or “structures” you are allowed to have keep you from troubleshooting. Remember, you are just changing one bit, several layers inside what you have already been doing. This means that you are already tinkering with a box inside a box inside a box, or a process inside a process inside a process. You are already being pretty guarded. Playing with who you are allowed to be should be relatively safe here, and if you follow the above tips, you are following your own lead around who you want to be more of, and so if your experiment “breaks containment” what gets leaked out is more of your own soul into more of your own parts of you.