Every day, your mind becomes progressively polluted. From the moment you wake up, you are filled with information, the great toxin of our age. The world just throws it at you as if it’s no big deal. You find out that the celebrities are at it again, that something large and consequential exploded, that you owe your contractor money you planned to spend on champagne.
Waking up and writing every random word that comes to my head as my burrito has helped me a lot. This all really resonated with me, especially on weekday mornings.
A weekend routine I've found that works for me is to wake up, either do a work out or go play basketball (which requires a lot of the same letting go of your own thoughts so you can focus on each dribble and each shot), do a quick meditation, eat and drink coffee/smoke a little weed, and then take a shower with some rhythmic sensual vibes blasting in my speaker.
Once I emerge from that shower, my brain and body feel so free, so in tune, there's so much joy from the exercise endorphins and the substances and the hot shower and the dancing that I feel like I can approach every word with lightness, a complete removal of my own ego and insecurities. I feel like I can write a thousand terrible useless words and it doesn't matter because typing feels just like dancing by yourself or playing basketball, where there's so much less pressure and absolutely zero investment in any outcome. My identity and ego aren't present, there's just keyboard-type-screen, and it really helps me overcome that initial suck of every writing session.
Thanks for writing this, Sasha, and making me realize things about my own self I haven't even considered. Your writing motivates/clarifies my inner world so I can go off and make the world a slightly more interesting place.
"Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one's strength -- to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!" -- Friedrich Nietzsche in Ecce Homo
Now to actually sit down and write, Sasha...
Full passage:
'Another counsel of prudence and self-defense is to react as rarely as possible, and to avoid situations and relationships that would condemn one to suspend, as it were, one's "freedom" and initiative and to become a mere reagent.
As a parable I choose association with books. Scholars who at bottom do little nowadays but thumb books -- philologists, at a moderate estimate, about 200 a day -- ultimately lose entirely their capacity to think for themselves. When they don't thumb, they don't think. They respond to a stimulus (a thought they have read) whenever they think -- in the end, they do nothing but react. Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought -- they themselves no longer think.
The instinct of self-defense has become worn out in them, otherwise they would resist books. The scholar -- a decadent.
I have seen this with my own eyes: gifted natures with a generous and free disposition, "read to ruin" in their thirties -- merely matches that one has to strike to make them emit sparks -- "thoughts".
Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one's strength -- to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!'
Thank you for writing this. I’m writing this way past 3pm when my brain has composted into dark mass with a funny smell. Has something in the fridge gone bad?
Waking up and writing every random word that comes to my head as my burrito has helped me a lot. This all really resonated with me, especially on weekday mornings.
A weekend routine I've found that works for me is to wake up, either do a work out or go play basketball (which requires a lot of the same letting go of your own thoughts so you can focus on each dribble and each shot), do a quick meditation, eat and drink coffee/smoke a little weed, and then take a shower with some rhythmic sensual vibes blasting in my speaker.
Once I emerge from that shower, my brain and body feel so free, so in tune, there's so much joy from the exercise endorphins and the substances and the hot shower and the dancing that I feel like I can approach every word with lightness, a complete removal of my own ego and insecurities. I feel like I can write a thousand terrible useless words and it doesn't matter because typing feels just like dancing by yourself or playing basketball, where there's so much less pressure and absolutely zero investment in any outcome. My identity and ego aren't present, there's just keyboard-type-screen, and it really helps me overcome that initial suck of every writing session.
Thanks for writing this, Sasha, and making me realize things about my own self I haven't even considered. Your writing motivates/clarifies my inner world so I can go off and make the world a slightly more interesting place.
"Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one's strength -- to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!" -- Friedrich Nietzsche in Ecce Homo
Now to actually sit down and write, Sasha...
Full passage:
'Another counsel of prudence and self-defense is to react as rarely as possible, and to avoid situations and relationships that would condemn one to suspend, as it were, one's "freedom" and initiative and to become a mere reagent.
As a parable I choose association with books. Scholars who at bottom do little nowadays but thumb books -- philologists, at a moderate estimate, about 200 a day -- ultimately lose entirely their capacity to think for themselves. When they don't thumb, they don't think. They respond to a stimulus (a thought they have read) whenever they think -- in the end, they do nothing but react. Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought -- they themselves no longer think.
The instinct of self-defense has become worn out in them, otherwise they would resist books. The scholar -- a decadent.
I have seen this with my own eyes: gifted natures with a generous and free disposition, "read to ruin" in their thirties -- merely matches that one has to strike to make them emit sparks -- "thoughts".
Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one's strength -- to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!'
"One day you will die. That day is advancing. Your last moon is already sailing through the sky." love this
Thank you for writing this. I’m writing this way past 3pm when my brain has composted into dark mass with a funny smell. Has something in the fridge gone bad?