On Becoming Someone Else

There are several major risks in learning.

One is that we might become someone else.

Another is that we might realize the way we did things before wasn't the ideal way.

It strikes me that many people who could get their hands on the ball during a rugby game won't, but then tell everyone later that they tried. The story about it, the words about it—these are easier than the actual it.

Talk is easier than “it”.

So where does that leave us?

With more agency than we usually admit?

With more already decided about ourselves than we hoped?

I'd like to be the master of my fate, and I might need to become a little bit of someone else in the process.

(Thanks, SG!)

Sunset over Yauyos, Peru

The Topography of your inner life

If you were to reach your fourth-grade hand to feel the elevated mountains in a poured plastic topography map, you would know the difference between higher and lower places without thinking about it.

One of my earliest memories from kindergarten is when we constructed islands by pouring dyed blue water around green clay to form islands. 

This is a peninsula. 

This is where the water goes.

If we peel back the thin layer between us and our inner lives—removing that shallow subcutaneous layer—we could detect the topography of our own inner lives. It’s a space that involves reaching, feeling, and sensing. Not much mental motor generation. 

Since a lot of what our intelligence is is simply returning to what’s already there, we don’t have to go that far to find it. It simply requires the use of one's fingertips to feel things.

What I wonder is what it's like to feel inside our own topography instead of simply using our exhausted and overstimulated brains. 

We might find a stronger source that doesn't rely on the power of generating new ideas but merely on identifying bumps under our fingers.

What’s there?

Secret Ego

The subconscious mind serves up all kinds of food at the table.

Some thoughts have useless ingredients. Who knows what kind of color-adding is in there?

You don’t have to eat any of those thoughts. You can be like Alice at the table and not eat me.

They are thoughts produced back there, in the kitchen, with a wide array of source ingredients of variable quality or meaning. Who knows what large industrial plastic bags our thoughts come out of?

Humans are filled with complexity.

I think a lot of thoughts I truly don’t believe. Not even a little bit.

It’s magical that as a human, our conscious mind gets to decide what's relevant or base-level true.

Maybe that's as strong a foundation as any to interrupt the reactive thinking my mind defaults to when I'm walking around.

Our ego can take secret forms, and the good news is that we can question its authority and let it babble away like a baby, unheard.

Let the babies inside of us simply be babies.