I had a theme for content production around here and then it slipped out of my grasp. I tried to re-grab it but only halfheartedly because I sensed that I'm shedding that theme like a shell.
I don't have a new theme which is why it's been quiet around here lately. For a while I was impatient with this - impatient with not writing things here. I’ve got a tempo to keep up! My readers demand and deserve it, both of them!
In order to write anything you've got to be certain of something, right? You've got to have some sort of conviction and that's what you write about.
But perhaps what I'm supposed to do next is to explore void-floating.
It occurs to me that we're living in a time where certain flavors of conviction are inappropriate.
Or--
--we're living in an age of such nootic destabilization, such cultural upheaval, that an important skill is that of living with deep uncertainty and yet going on anyway.
If true, then the feel of where I happen to be right now, this uncertainty and doubt, is relevant. I can write about this, what it’s like to not know and to not shy away from it. How to keep the wheels on when it feels like you’re not touching the ground.
I'm somewhat well equipped to explore convinctionlessness. It's not my first rodeo.
When I transitioned into adulthood I left many of the convictions of my childhood behind. It was not gentle. "I set them behind" makes it sound like I set an object down on the side of the trail and carried on. It wasn't like that.
It was like something implanted in my flesh long ago had turned, gone off, become infected, and was poisoning my blood. I had to claw it out, this thing that had been a part of me since I could remember, or it’d kill me.
What convictions am I talking about? That's a story for another time. It doesn't matter now. The point is that after doing what I had to do to save my life, excising my old convictions, I had none.
I could have just grabbed a new set of convictions from off the shelf but I'd have been no better off than before. Something about me had changed and my system would reject those too.
I settled for what I at the time called 'temporary nihilism.' I assumed the existence of a set of convictions that would take, but I didn't know what they were, and so for the time being I just had none.
This state is both deeply unsettling and dangerous.
It feels like you're falling and never landing. It feels like that oh shit moment when you realize you've tipped your chair too far back but the feeling just hangs there like it’s not supposed to.
It's dangerous because it's easy to get hacked. Ask me how I know. It's easy for a set of convictions to slip in. People want to believe things.
But to get back to my main idea here, maybe it's important to get better at being uncertain. Maybe it's an important survival skill for the 21st century.
I need to make myself really clear here. This uncertainty is not a rejection of meaning. It is not a disguised assumption that all narratives, all sets of possible convictions, are equally viable. They clearly are not.
Anyone who seeks must pass through periods of deep unsettling uncertainty, and they must learn to sit with it, become as accustomed to it as they can, because it can't be rushed. To rush uncertainty is to fall back to a lower level of understanding. The desire is to arrive at a deeper level of knowing, not merely a different manifestation of one's current level of knowing.
I've written before that I'm trying to not write advice. I want to document my journey, just tell my story. I get the two mixed up often and I think that's because advice is always at least implicit in stories, advice and story are muddled together. Whenever I read any kind of story I'm mentally noting things like oooh don't be like that or ah I'd like to be more like that. So sometimes I sit to write a story and advice comes out and sometimes I sit to write some advice and a story comes out.
When I’m going through a patch of themelessness, ungroundedness, void-floating-ness, it’s difficult to write anything. It’s difficult to come up with anything to say, because nothing feels relevant. I’ve got a stack of drafts from the past few weeks and they’re all about nothing as far as I can tell. This meandering pile of words is what I have to do to undo the stoppage, get something out there so I can get on with things. So pardon the lack of cohesion, but a lack of cohesion IS the theme of this particular heap of sentences. Sometimes things don’t make sense.
I do have a theme that's never left, a conviction that has never faded and that has always been with me. I’ve always known that
this is all wrong.
The sets of beliefs that pulse in and out of certainty are frameworks of response and sensemaking to this core conviction. When things are all wrong you want to act, you want to move to fix the wrongness. At bare minimum you want to understand it. Sitting and staring at the wrongness and not knowing what to do about it for sure but still just sitting there anyway is—
hard.