For Once In Your Life
The first thing that I need to talk about this week is the idea that for once in our lives, we should just own who we are.
We should accept and embrace those qualities that we thought were unsavoury to other people. As long as they’re not causing anyone harm, I don’t know why we collectively live in such denial of our core basic truths.
Everyone’s mindlessly scrolling on their phones and they know that there is more to life than this, but they aren’t willing to do anything about it other than complain and keeping feeding more horrible news stories down their throats so they can keep regurgitating the collective shadow that humanity grapples with. This is the human centipede that we fall victim to when we are unconscious.
That shadow is all over the place, everywhere you look, even your local neighbourhood Facebook community that’s solely devoted to scaring the shit out of everyone who has a few minutes to read what an awful world it is out there and these people are stealing my Amazon packages and get your dog on a leash you evil doodle owners who are going to bite my kids’ arm off.
At the core of this shadow, in the eclipse of happiness and wellbeing is shame.
To not be willing to accept, admit and own who you are.
I am 160-ish pounds of decaying skin, digestive systems and eventually the colour brown in my hair. Trapped in this bag of red meat, one day my nerves will no longer type and record the nonsense music and podcasts that I do.
Yet from six feet under in a small plot of land that was set aside for me in a life insurance policy, I will still be known and felt in some way, for at one point in my life I woke up and realized that I am a spirit wearing a mask that looks like a human.
A human that wonders if he said the right thing the other day, or asks why that poop looked so weird.
Yet the spirit doesn’t think. It’s not part of its abilities. All it knows how to do is to just keep moving and creating things out of dust. And it turns things into dust too.
Let that dustcreator and dustbuster image be the core of your work here. To be reminded that you came from the void and you’re going back into it like the ending scene of a really good Alex Garland movie.
In this moment you are free to be who you are and record what you want to record without any god damned judgement from anyone, not even that thinking mind that got you into this pickle by starting a newsletter in the first place.
The creative life is a blessing and a curse but the goal with everything in life is to take the good with the bad.
To be willing to show up regardless of how well you slept or what the stock ticker says today.
We’re here, we’re doing this.
Three Ideas from My Notebooks
Do your best to “Find Jesus” for the month of April at the very least. Some sort of North Star or strategy that you want to live by for the next few weeks.
Be easy on yourself. You are monkey genetics expected to make money like a Rockefeller in a world that’s operated by machine-learning intelligence feeding you low quality videos that tap into your monkey genetics. Just be easy on yourself, will you?
Prime the pump for the day with quiet and taking time for yourself. The first hour of your day will dictate how you will respond to everything that happens afterwards. This is the set and setting they discovered in the first LSD experiments.
All of the ideas going back to May 2023 are now located in The Ideas Index:
Campolina: Ambient Music with a Canadian Sunrise
I shared Campolina last weekend, but here it is with a video of a sunrise that I captured this week from my balcony.
The video starts with a waning full moon, and then the sky morphs around a bit.
I don’t really know why I capture these videos. I don’t give a specific prescription for how to use them.
But I ask that you put them on in full screen and see what it does.
Maybe you can do some reading or work with it on in the background too?
Savour this moment to enjoy a bagel. I had an onion one yesterday so I will probably go back to poppy today.
Elliott