Everything breaks, and that’s a good thing

“Everything in the world breaks…I think that’s a very, very, very good thing. If everything didn’t break, then bad things would last forever.”

~ Jeff Tweedy, paraphrasing his son

I keep thinking about Jeff Tweedy’s conversation with Dr. Shimon Edelman and Matt Whyte on Sing for Science.

In addition to a Most Important Podcast, there is a Most Important Quote in that episode, coming from Tweedy’s son. This quote, shared in an Instagram post from a friend of mine, drew me to the podcast and resonated with me. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’m usually ok with change and have done well when things break down, but there is always a bit of anxiety around change and things breaking.

It’s good to be reminded that change can be good. Something breaking can be an opportunity.

On resilience

“Nana korobi, ya oki.”
“Fall down seven times, rise up eight.”

~ Japanese proverb

Hello, journal. Today I’m thinking about resilience, specifically how a person can, through the power of positive thought and perspective, train themselves to be more resilient in the face of adversity, both large and small. In my experience, the small things usually cause the most problems over time. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but it’s always been easier to let go when you have no choice.

My apartment caught fire when I was in my early twenties. It happened when I was at work; one of my roommates had stored some spray paint next to a faulty furnace. The combination turned out to be explosive. While the place didn’t burn completely to the ground, my poor cat, Waffle, died because he was too scared of the firemen and ran into the smoke. Nobody else was hurt, thankfully, but most of my possessions were ruined. By water damage, ironically. Though it was difficult—I had to find a new place for my girlfriend and me quickly, my roommates were devastated, etc.—I could kind of roll with it. I took on the role of the even-headed leader and helped get everyone settled. It was a lot of effort, but I wasn’t particularly stressed about it at any time. I think it was mostly because I felt like I had no choice. There was no going back and fixing it. The stuff was gone. The apartment was unlivable. The only way forward was to let go and move on. I think about that time in my life a lot, and I’ve often wondered what it was that allowed me to move on so quickly, so relatively easily. Especially when so many times after, I would spiral about much smaller problems. I have been much more stressed over smaller problems many times since then. I often think about that and wonder why.

For many years I saw this event as a minor disaster that I survived. Now I reflect on it as a moment of strength and resilience in my young life and something bad that happened that made me stronger.

Why worry about something you have no control over? I think about that a lot as well. It’s…an epidemic problem that, as I’ve grown older, I feel and worry about less and less. I let go of worrying about things I can’t control or influence. If I care about something enough, I will try and involve myself in making a difference. Otherwise, I’ll stick to what I can control: my reactions, feelings, and thoughts about a thing. I refuse to be the old man screaming at the clouds. I can’t do anything about the clouds, so I’ll just come inside and wait.

There is a Stoic practice around negative framing. Imagine the worst thing that can happen so you can be prepared for it. I wouldn’t say I like doing this, though I can see the value. What I do like doing is reflecting on the little things in life that make me happy. I do this often. What if I lost all my stuff? I’d be ok. What would I need, the bare minimum, to be happy? Turns out it’s not all that much.

This type of thinking helps in other ways as well. It allows for risk-taking—what’s the worst that can happen? Risks, if taken mindfully, can significantly enrich the experience of one’s life. Reflecting on the impermanence of life and embracing change can help reduce those things that aren’t doing us any good. I can make it easier to let go of what’s not serving us.

Time is fleeting. Things and people come and go. The present is all we have, the past is gone, and the future will be based on how we act in the present.

On the enjoyment and creation of beauty

“Enjoying or creating beauty is free and something all human beings have access to.”

~ From Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

While reading Ikigai, I came across the above, which stopped me in my tracks. It’s the perfect encapsulation of something I’ve been thinking about lately. The act of making, of creating, of making good (or bad) art is available to all of us, as is the enjoyment of that art.

AI, for example, is going to change a lot of things. It’s understandably stressful, But while it’s too early to say if they’ll be able to share in this enjoyment, one thing is clear: AI won’t take away our ability to create and enjoy for ourselves. I’ve been using it to explore ideas, help visualize my writing, and play. Simply playing around with it is enjoyable, and I find the random, unpredictable nature more entertaining than frustrating. Though I’ll admit, it can be frustrating when you can’t get the prompts to do what you want.

There’s beauty in the doing, in the sharing, and in the receiving.

On practice and habits

“We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

~ Aristotle

I’ve been thinking about nature vs. nurture quite a bit. It’s always been interesting to me, as someone who has been striving—to various degrees of success—my whole adult life to learn more, challenge myself, and become a better person in almost every aspect of life. With some things, it’s come easily. With others, it can be so damn difficult. Why is that? This is something I explore a lot. Sometimes it just feels like we’re wired a certain way, and the resistance in changing that wiring can feel insurmountable.

But. BUT. Practice, especially daily or regular, has worked well for me despite the difficulty. We can, it turns out, go against what is naturally challenging and break through resistance a little bit at a time.

In addition to improvement, I’ve found other benefits to daily practice. For one, practice itself becomes easier if a regular habit is involved. Habit stacking—a method described by James Clear in his excellent book Atomic Habits by which you link habits together for better effect—works well to smooth out the bumps of resistance. But the most significant benefit I’m hoping to cultivate more in my life is leveraging practice to get into a flow state.

I’ll be journaling more about flow in the future, as it’s a big part of why I started this experiment in the first place. In a nutshell, flow is the delightful state you achieve when you’re so immersed in doing something that the rest of the world seems to fade into the background. And it’s key to doing great things.

So I hope to use practice and daily habit-building as an on-ramp toward a more productive and creative mindset. This has worked well for me in the past, and I suspect it will be one of the best tools I can use to find more focus and flow in 2023.