Trust me, I need to write this down

You'll forget it later, and you're going to want it.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

It’s getting harder to sustain the momentum from our epiphanies.

I wrote that down the other day, and luckily I still remember what I meant: The pace of the world — both in terms of how many things happen in a day and how quickly things change — makes it increasingly difficult to forge positive changes in our lives, or even just to remember our most significant ideas.

I am not talking here about the sort of semi-useful “life hack” shortcuts we might use to give our lives more positive structure.

It is instead about bigger ideas. Discovering the things that truly make us happy (a big topic of my last post). Identifying how we stay present. Transcending the mundane. Those moments where we say, “Ah! This is the meaning of life! This is what it’s all about!” (At least a part of it, at least as it applies to you).

Discovering these things is still very much possible — perhaps even more likely now as we have seemingly unlimited access to ideas and plenty of time of self-reflection if we choose.

But how many times have you read something, heard something or understood something that felt transcendent and indeed changed your worldview for at least a time, only to have it fade rather quickly?

It happens to me all the time, it happens to me more frequently than it used to, and it is particularly frustrating when one of those transcendent ideas finds its way back to me months or years later.

Right! I knew this! Why did I forget it? What took me on a detour from that path?

It was life. It was the countless other events, ideas and responsibilities — all of the things that fly at us faster and with greater frequency than ever.

Consider that a related preamble to the main essay.

I wasn’t sure for quite a while what I wrote below was something I needed to publish. It was the first thing I finished after restarting the more creative part of my brain last summer, back before I even knew I would end up starting this site.

At the time, I just needed to write. I was trying too hard, which is the last thing a writer should do. But on a free night, while sitting alone in the sprawling outdoor space at Surly Brewing and staring for too long at a blank page, at least starting to write something led somewhere.

But what I thought was merely a roundabout explanation of my creative process eventually (recently) grew into an understanding of how it’s hard for me to remember the things that I should remember the most.

Creating a permanent record is the only hope I have these days of making sure I don’t constantly lapse into default behaviors and stalled growth.

I know that if I don’t write things down, I won’t have a record of the thoughts that unlock the secret pathways in my brain.

What’s the point of searching for meaning in our lives if we’re only destined to lose it and have to find it again?

In any event, writing down that little note about epiphanies proved to be the mental link to what I had previously written … about the need to write things down.

I hope that means I’m making progress instead of seeming like a dog chasing his tail.

Here is that essay:

Do I like scanning a crowd proactively in search of common meaning and understanding, or do I feel like I’m being watched and need to be vaguely vigilant in assessing eyeballs, good and bad?

I can’t tell anymore.

But I find it hard at times – many times – to act naturally when I’m around other people.

I started writing that, started believing it, but it was going nowhere. I couldn’t connect the dots of what I was trying to say about the nature of being performative – or what in particular I was feeling – other than to know that the idea that had come to me earlier in the day was gone.

Not fully gone. But gone enough. Distorted. The words were still sort of there. The note in my phone, with the key phrase that I thought would unlock everything later, uttered on a voice-to-text while walking the dog in the scorching heat of all things, still made sense:

“I think a mistake people make is thinking the opposite of trying too hard — or at least the antidote to it — is not trying at all. In reality, actively not trying at all is just as performative as trying too hard.”

It seemed obvious at the time that there was a clear path from there to a meaningful set of thoughts and words, but I guess I had to prove to myself for the millionth time that it really doesn’t work that way.

I’m Guy Pearce in Memento, frantically searching for a pen, only to inevitably forget everything again.

Trust me, I need to write this down.

And then? The door unlocked. A different door, but it was the door of the moment. The lesson was the key.

Write it down or the idea will go away. Write it down now. Don’t hesitate. Thoughts come to you, but they only stay so long. You will not remember it later, at least not in the same way. When you go to write it in a time of quiet, in a time of seemingly ideal circumstances, it will not come out the same. It will abandon you, or it will come out all distorted.

The experience will feel cheap or hollow later. You will remember it, but it won’t feel the same. You will think that you just need time and space to expand on the concept, but what you really need is to stop everything you are doing, all the things you think you should be doing, and understand that for some reason the dynamic of the moment has brought this thought to you and you must chase it now, with urgency, to its logical conclusion.

If you do not, you will watch the idea get smaller and smaller – further and further toward some sort of thought horizon. It will recede. If you are extremely lucky, it will return someday. But even if it does, it will be in some diminished state. It will not be the pure thought of that moment.

You do not need peace and quiet. You do not need the right environment. What you need is to stop everything you are doing and unload it all. Be in the moment, let the idea take over, chase it into every corner, track it down every path, let it run wild into every corner of your mind.

Let the thought be a child running through all the puddles she can find after an unexpected rain. Do not hesitate. Do not listen to reason. Do not pay any attention to those who might tell you not to do exactly what you feel like you must do. Let yourself feel it. Let everything else wait. Let the perception of consequences be for the rule-makers, not you.

This is my creative process. I do not know if it is yours, but I suspect that enough of you are nodding. If you are not nodding, you are shifting uncomfortably. Either way, good.

The best things you have ever created are the things that surprised you – the things you let surprise you – because you did not build walls around them.

You did not say, no, I can’t do this now. I have to wait until later. You understood that art is mood, that ideas are space, that time is irrelevant, that the only thing that matters is the present and that there will never be another right now.

You will have suffered through enough “laters” to know this in your soul, those times when you did stop, when you gave into reason, when you imagined that some other time was the right time.

And that when you got there, when you returned to it, you didn’t feel it like you did when it first arrived. Maybe you felt a percentage of it, and maybe you could squint and strain and feel like it was something close, and you could still make something out of it.

But you would know that it could have been better, would have been better, had you just listened to your intuition instead of succumbing to the confines of a constructed reality. You would cringe – maybe even hate yourself – when you finished and said “this is good enough,” like you are looking at a plate of mozzarella sticks from a chain restaurant.

Your ideas are precious. They are a part of you that survives. When they visit you, and when they force you to pay attention to them, and you know they are the ideas are the ones worth stopping everything for, you must do it.

The outside world will recede or inspire. It will bend into whatever shape you need. You’ll be living inside your thoughts, glancing up not to see who is looking at you or how you might want to be seen, but for moments of intuitive inspiration. It will feel right, a feeling that can only be described just like that because you can’t lie to yourself.

And when you are done, you will know it.