Spinning & weaving
I’ve come to think of my thought process like a person on a loom, spinning the threads and then weaving them together.
The steel wool is the observations of the world; the rules being absorbed in real time. They get too convoluted after a while and I need to optimise; the feeling of ‘steel wool’ is what I call memory overload; like an angle grinder inside the cheekbones.
I need to use something physical to spin this mess out into coherent threads. Spinning sounds so much better than stimming. I use a repetitive action like running or making knives.
I can feel the wool coalesce into a single thread which my brain can spool and handle. This thread often goes back into the churn to be woven with more threads, until we have a bundle of solid cords.
Once the process completes, things start to be woven together. Here a red, there a blue, and a coherent and often surprising image forms.
That image goes back into the churn, the wool spins, I spin, I weave.
And this process just continues until I’m done. I’ll look up with surprise and realise it’s finished and there’s no more wool. I have the answer.
This is how I think. You could call it cycles of diverging and converging.
I like the weaver analogy. This is how it feels. I can see individual threads and I can feel or intuit when they are in the right place. But I usually don’t see the picture until it’s done.
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