10,946 days + 5 minutes
If I spend five minutes working on something, people would think only five minutes of work went into that piece. This misses an essential reality of time, which is how all of time is connected to all of time. In other words, the five minutes I spend now is informed by 15,762,831 minutes of life I’ve lived up until that five minute window
This is one major benefit of experience and aging. I think everyone should understand how truly “old” they are based on the number of minutes, hours, and days that inform their current POVs
We don’t understand age
Childhood, adolescence, and adulthood are all names we use to describe parts of our aging spectrum which wrongfully subdivides an important whole. This is akin to thinking “red, yellow, blue” are anything more than particular names we give to particular slices of the visible light slice of a larger electromagnetic spectrum
The idea of teenager is completely invented. Could you imagine a hunter/gatherer tribe having to deal with a hormonal teenager locking themselves in a room to binge listen to The Smiths and Joy Division?
Every rough draft informs the next draft
There’s an idea a writer shared with me once about how “typing” is the last and least important part of writing. All the living and thinking and feeling that happens to inform any written work are the primary and important phases. Nothing is every finished or could ever be finished. Even a “finished” essay is merely one more draft that’s part of the whole ecosystem of written drafts
Let us consider the magic of file compression. How it allows us to share data across the internet in a way that saves space and transforms size itself
Every moment is a compressed version of every previous moment, not just for individuals but for collective humanity. My 10,946 days of living intersects with the days of living of everyone I’ve crossed paths with, whether immediately in the case of very good friends or distantly in the case of my favorite artists and influences
Every word is practice, a rough draft for the next word
Compressed feelings
My recent outpouring of creative work is more the result of finally uncompressing feelings that were clogged and congested for too long. The “time” it takes to write a special feelings post, to track a special day, to make new music, to listen to new music is very little when compared to the bigger picture of time at play
When a very good friend is confusing to you, because they feel awesome yet annoying, you can barely communicate this feeling with even other very good friends because of the limits of linear communication. It’s nearly impossible to accurately communicate feelings that are compressed from years of experience
“Do you have an example?” approaches are highly limited for the very reason that every example is merely one part of a bigger whole. This is tacit (implicit) knowledge, the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person through written or verbal words