27 entries for January 2022

We’re accustomed to carry out activities with some kind of objective. Normalizing this makes it uncomfortable when nothing is being accomplished. Finishing something early and confronting stillness and silence invokes a reflex to fill space by checking your phone or notifications, distracting yourself for fear of a void. It feels wrong to simply breathe, stretch, exercise, practice capoeira movements outside the context of a structured activity: “can’t just sit and breathe for the rest of my life, gotta actually do something”. Nothing is possible without breathing: mental and physical health is necessary for accomplishing anything, so it’s strange that we’re afraid to connect with it in an unstructured context.

Each moment of stillness is actually a gift: we can celebrate an opportunity to focus on the gaps. We’re always breathing in the background, so stopping gives us a chance to pay attention to the whitespace, or darkspace. Enjoy connecting with it like meeting an old friend. The tendency to ask “I did my breath, now what?” might be an anxiety about the activity not having a well-defined start and end time, so we can practice being there without expectations, and when something compels us into action, we are free to move on.

[We like people in so many ways (physically, or as a friend, or socially, or intellectually) and when we break up, we need to break each of those aspects before leaving.]

Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience

[Describe interesting things you’ve done in your life to build credibility: share what you learned or what someone like you would want to know.]

[You can document things that have already happened. Some of it might resonate with others.]

[An indicator of credibility is that people will want to ask you questions to learn more about your experience.]

[It wasn’t the book, but documenting how I published it that gave me credibility in self-publishing.]

[Success is not followers but people wanting to hear what you have to say.]

[They either need to be getting something from you or getting to know you as a person.]

[Giving means they stop on your tweet and don’t regret it. Asking means anything that benefits you directly, like clicking links.]

[Use your pinned tweet to gain credibility.]

[Inspiration can be something interesting that happened today, things that took a lot of effort to figure out, answers you gave in your conversations that could be relevant to your audience.]

[Find the intersection of interesting to you, interesting to your audience, and having credibility to say it.]

[Don’t tag people hoping they’ll notice you.]

[Build your credibility, promote it everywhere, and look for opportunities to build more credibility.]

[Give and ask with a seven to one ratio.]

[Do whatever you like, but take each action with full awareness.]

[Darkness can never become ingrained because it it NOT.]

[Experiences are illusory: only the one who experiences them is true. Pay attention to the witness.]

[The sense organs are windows, not projectors.]

[Not ‘one remains’ but ’two is gone’.]

[Trying to not think a thought gives energy to it, and it will come back to bother you.]

[The solution is always to watch.]

[The root is never above ground: attacking the visible is like fighting shadows.]

[Mind is like a crowd: we think something larger exists but there are only the individual thoughts arranged together tightly.]

[Pay attention to the gaps between thoughts.]

[Even clinging to a thought is not possible because it will eventually die: they aren’t yours and don’t belong to you—just visiting.]

[Watch for things that neither come nor go, like the sky.]

Notes app musings: proposals for resonate community to consider from a label perspective

[Show something that’s unavailable and provide a means to signal intent with which to inform future decisions.]