The xylophone chord

Striking a chord is easy when you’re ready to grab the mallet for the xylophone.

It can also be easier than that.

In fact, you didn’t grab anything.

The chord got struck, yes. Yes, it rang through each scale of your afternoon. Then that chord connected with another chord. A handful of days later, another chord followed until there was a string of autonomous yet congruent sounds. It’s the music from nowhere.

You would love to take credit. But you never picked up the mallet. You didn’t exercise your endlessly imagined will. It’s because it comes into itself, exists for itself. The music comes from wherever it wants and enters your life.

You find that the top of the tea spins like a galaxy, whether or not you tried.

Your life isn’t about how it’s constructed. It’s about how it’s also allowed to live itself.

Your gift to your own life is to take a more comfortable seat on the couch and notice how it spins.

The Dark Night Sky

It takes work to get to a dark night sky.

But once you’re there, you see differently.

You’re living outside the algorithm.

Intuition runs deeper than ego and lasts longer too.

Your life isn’t brittle.

You see people dedicating enormous time to performance systems and losing. It’s mercifully optional.

What matters is knowing who and what to ignore.

The most uncomplicated return: back to the work itself.

(Thank you, Lilian and Julie!)

Adulted Paradox

What's it like to be an adult?

To live in constant paradox. Despair and joy, same room, same sequence of events.

Childhood, adolescence, adulthood—all now. You're every age.

Fear and not-fear often go together.

Loving means losing or the risk of losing. Always has.

Feeling and thinking, which shouldn't be hard but somehow are.

Fully grateful. Fully sad. Fully joyful. Not taking turns—all three.

Feeling scammed and also aware that you can cut corners. You did today.

Your desire to be right and your comfort being wrong. Limited by the normal set of factors. The walls you build inside your own brain.

Being an adult is living inside something that refuses description. Like a wild animal. Try to name it and it bolts deeper into the woods. Like two crayon-colored circles that overlap and coexist.