sorry about that. i was just sat looking at the wall and the skin of my hands, fading yellow and getting leathery and old, and i forgot that the old me would have felt pressure to do something.
there were various ideas drifting through my mind: writing here, doing a little more work on the art pieces I have on the go, buying an xmas gift for my second child, playing some more kingdom come 2: deliverance. none of them seemed particularly urgent so i sat and stared at my hands for half an hour instead.
this is after i slid out of bed late; i have slept in the last few days but today i got up in time to see the kids off to school. i gave the youngest a hug, since he leaves a little later, and i cancelled some silly payment system i had to subscribe for in order to register with etsy when i first started making knives from sword fragments; they were going to charge anyone who earns less than six-thousand dollars a year money and i earn zero so… anyway… i don’t like how these system work. seems very sneaky.
my body is very relaxed; my face in particular. i have frown lines but that’s because of the sun glaring in through this window; squinting is still a thing. but i am amazed at how unpressured i am.
that said i still wake with a lurch sometimes; a ‘ugh i had something to do’. this is a physiological conditioning from years of having something to do. waking up at 4am to get a 200km bike ride finished before lunch. jumping out of bed to check the bitcoin price before doing something-epoxy-related. waking up at 3:30am with night sweats, drenched, after 4 hours sleep, due to elevated cortisol and unpredictable dopaminergic swings, honed to a tee through years of driving harder and harder and harder, only to come downstairs and ‘meditate’ by forcing my attention onto my breath in the same way you might hold down an overloaded washing machine as it enters its spin cycle.
and there’s the message from my wife with the idea for my kid’s xmas gift. see? i didn’t need to look for one after all; just mention it to someone else who has has this conversation with him and already knows what he wants.
all these things.. the rules. rules for everything. my one-line-a-day diary which was so useful for all those years and then fell to the side once i realised that every day is the same in its mundane variance. the morning writings of the last 6 months which had to be the first thing i did. the hugs for the kids as soon as they wake, which are still nice but no longer feel like a personal failing if they are skipped for a day or two. the way i hold my hands.
i was stood waiting for G to finish school yesterday and realised my hands were just… hanging at my sides. like a normal person, whatever one of those is. they were just hanging there, and there was no sense of abnormality or incompleteness. i think i must have spent about 35 years wondering what to do with those hands. where to put them; how to drum the fingers properly, what i should be doing… and now… they just hang.
ill probably have a nap later today. im going to aikido later and don't want to be too tired. ill almost certainly continue this art i'm doing, but with none of the previous pressure. i don’t even feel like putting capital letters into this article. who told you that capital letters are essential for a blog? i was the biggest grammar nazi out there; 100% in all my spelling and grammar quizzes from the dawn of time. now i’m just sat here looking at the lines on my fingers and marvelling at the fractal intricacies which continue all the way the atomic level. ha. so much stress over such silly constructs.
i found myself thinking ‘maybe the article yesterday sounded a bit egotistical - to compare with a zen master’ but that’s a pretty silly line of thought really, isn’t it? egotistical to compare with someone who has lost their ego or, more accurately, views their ego as a tool for interacting with the world. whatever. i’ve read a few books and have these ideas in mind and there are words that can express them and that is the one i chose. today i am choosing nocaps and tomorrow i will probably choose to go for a walk or to eat a sausage or something and it’s all kind of the same.
all these rules… how to be… how to exist… how to self.
i guess this is our nature. we learn, we compile, we optimise, and then we develop metacognition on top of that optimisation and we spot redundancies but we don’t forget or erase them so easily. this whole awakening thing is a process of unlearning, as we were always told, but people have lost that along the way in their desire for acquisition.
this guy frank yang keeps coming to mind. a video, which i haven’t watched, claiming ‘final enlightenment’, and then personal coaching toward awakening at like 4000 dollars an hour or something silly. sorry but that’s not final enlightenment; it is the phenomenology of neuroplasticity. i don’t think you could even claim final enlightenment and then go and create a persona out of it and charge thousands of dollars and hour. i far prefer the style of the buddha, the b-man, Sid, the OG no-selfer - keeping the dhamma as a free tool available for all. daniel ingram has the right idea there - he seems to be about the greater good and not the bottom line.
but this is how we function, isn’t it? we want the quick-fix instagram body and the flashy lights of no suffering and no self. yet at the same time we want that no-self to be packaged up in a tanned and toned container with minimal fat and pecs of steel. we want the black and we want the white and there have always been snake-oil salesmen and fake-gurus who will capitalise on this and there will always be fodder who lay their necks at the altar and say ‘me next’.
i suppose it’s ok. the religions did the same - do the same - i guess. the tax-exempt organisations. but they seem to have slightly more…. self-respect with how they do it. nothing wrong with driving a bentley as a monk; it’s better than letting the money rot in a cellar. at least people are employed to make that bentley and you are supporting them in feeding their families in this rotten capitalist world we live in.
and maybe AI can change that, or maybe not. maybe it will just stay as another rule-enforcer. ‘no that article is not evidenced by current science heres how you can make it more legitimate for scientific eyes’ and then the author takes down the next groundbreaking idea just because no pinpoint studies have evidenced it yet. removes a drawing of the mountain because someone has taken photographs of a rock or two.
what about the earth going around the sun and the wave being a particle and Sid figuring out enlightenment without a shred of knowledge about neurotransmitters and all that shite?
tbh i reckon this AI thing should be used to optimise our agricultural output and cure cancer, save the ozone layer, whatever. free us up to live on a UBI so that we can all start focusing on dropping this painful learning we needed to absorb in order to function in a world of work-or-starve. but what would i know. im just a fuckin’ guy, sat here staring at his hands and drinking his fuckin’ decaf in a world gone mad.
and i was the maddest of them all. crazier ’n a coconut. that boy needs therapy. purely psychosomatic. lie down on the couch. grandma kazoo, what happened to you?
well i don’t know what happened if i’m honest but im trying to … whatever. i’ll get round to it. life is pretty easy, is all i know, and im sure it has something to do with dopamine. pretty sure everything has something to do with dopamine. can’t think, cant talk, can’t walk without dopamine.
but hey. i’ll maybe have another decaf and brush my teeth or something then go cut some wood with a craft knife and order this gift my wife has suggested.
why did life use to be so hard?
/jb202512190928
(stream of consciousness)