improvising through life with grace and courage

It’s important to remember to give yourself grace and have the courage to be fully human.

I remember practicing mindfulness and trying to be present. I told my teacher that I want to be present but my default modes of planning and anxiety were useful. Now, as I’ve grown I’ve seen that as you begin to trust yourself and give yourself grace to go through life imperfectly. Not everything can be or must be planned. You can just wing things. In an odd way, once you take this approach the less heavy lifting becomes for each discrete task you can move and learn faster. You can’t plan for everything. Planning is often a distraction from the real work. Doing anything worthwhile will require breaking new ground.Greatness cannot often be planned.

From Joan Didion’s On Self-Respect:

“To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”

If you are to live life fully, you will inevitably make mistakes. You will irrevocably make them multiple times. You will have to learn and have to relearn lessons. That’s the whole game.

As Henrik Karlsson recently wrote:

"What we’re talking about is actually doing the fun stuff, playing around with projects that excite you, trusting that you can learn enough to solve your problems. If you keep tinkering, doing one fun project after another, you will eventually see through the system.
[...]
you know that there are deeper layers to reality and have a sense for how to access them.

And then all of reality becomes something you can horse around with."

I’ve always thought of this in cycles. Do stuff, make mistakes, take a break and keep going. The trick is to run as emotionally efficient through out it all. Like less planning cycles, more doing, and don’t take the losses too hard. At this point too much is going to get in the way of doing more. Doing more for more sake is also equally misguided. The better approach might be doing whole heartedly and taking periodic breaks — however useful it is to think of things in retrospect — to take inventory.