Reflections on the Penultimate Day

In which I have a MAJOR REALIZATION and kinda freak out with excitement

Here I sit on a calm Friday evening, looking at the blue waters of the Sound as they churn and the sun sets.

This photo is garbage. Here, let’s do another vid.

Oh man. Shoulda turned the phone the other way. Oh well, hopefully it conveys the choppiness and the evening-ness and the pretty-ness. :-)

It’s the 29th. Tomorrow is the final day of my challenge.

I am really, really fucking proud of myself.

I am wanting to take a few minutes right now in the quiet of this evening to truly reflect on what just happened to me over the last month.

I have the tendency to just “move on” from stuff like this without properly celebrating, and I think that’s a disservice to myself.

I feel like my mind had to be aware of the continuity of this goal, and the last 30 days as they passed, in a way that I might have never experienced before in my life. I will admit, on a certainly level, it was uncomfortable, in that it actually took a lot out of me to do this. As I say that, I wonder: what is it that I do normally as an alternative? I think it is something like this:

Set an intention.
Stick with intention for several days.
Lose track of intention in order to conserve energy/give in to limbic system/”keep myself safe” but know that it is an intention in the back of my mind (thus kind of contaminating time a bit).
After a week or so, return to the intention, but in a weird fractured way, haunted by the “knowing” that I lost touch with it for a while, and that “surely things were lost” in that process.
Be apologetic and weird if it involves audience or other people in any way, but successfully re-engage.
Hold on to the intention for several more days.
Limbic system kicks in again, convincing me to let go…
rinse and repeat.

And then add to that the fact that as I return to the intention again and again from that place of fracture, with the non-verbal feeling of “surely things were lost” under the surface, there begins to be a mounting of the regret and negative feelings about myself, about what I’m doing, about my abilities, about who I am. And those connect to unidentified patterns of perceived failure of the past. And then after several months of this cycle, those stories just gain more and more power until I start truly avoiding the thing, even when I have good ideas and even when I try to have the intention of being “free” and “not caring” and “having a space where I feel safe.”

I think that’s such a profound insight for me. Because if you look at the first post of this Substack, that absolutely was the intention. It was critical to me to keep things loose and light and fun. I know I need safety.

But it turns out there is some level of safety that comes in the honoring of the intention, too? Like, not having the thing slip from my awareness into full out-of-sight/out-of-mind-ness (and then need to be wrenched back by the fears and sadness of my limbic system?)

What this leads me to, analytically, are some hypotheses about how to proceed de este punto en adelante (“from this point forward” but I really love that phrase in Spanish for some reason.)

1. I’m wondering about the possibility (as weird as this might sound, or as obvious as this might sound—can’t tell which) of maintaining the same level of consistent intention without the need for as much consistent execution.

So far, the two have gone hand in hand, right? I’m either low execution AND on consistency of intention—continuity of intention. (Shit. That’s it. That’s what I’m looking for. That’s the phrase.) or I’m really high—too high, for certain purposes like a newsletter—on both.

But what if I am able to keep the continuity of my intention within my field of awareness (mind you, I always “have good intentions” so to speak, but my awareness of them ebbs and flows) while not requiring myself as much enervation and spoon-depletion as I can see this month is required in the performance of daily execution!?

I can’t even tell whether or not this is making sense to anyone but me—hopefully it is. But this is an absolute fucking breakthrough for me on some level I can’t fully understand. Like, I feel like these concepts are all old and hackneyed and I’ve heard shit like this a MILLION times.

But by god. Until this month, nay until this fucking moment, I didn’t understand that daily execution DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PAIRED with daily continuity of intention.

HUH?

This seems so fucking rudimentary! Is this actually happening? Or am I doing that human thing where we sometimes feel like we stumble on a true thing and really there is a false piece of scaffolding that our excited brains just aren’t seeing yet.

Oh my goooooood. Why have I suffered so much if it is as simple as this?

Surely I’m missing something, right?

So, like, what this means (to state what is probably BLATANTLY OBVIOUS to anyone reading this, but that, for reals, was not apparent to me before this day of my 43rd year of life) is that I could decide tomorrow that I want to post one Substack a week during the month of April. And then I could continue nurturing that intention in daily ways (how? what do I do? How do I not lose the thread?) such that I never lose the thread of that intention—it never disappears from my mind in the same way posting daily this month never disappeared from my mind.

Only, I don’t actually have to post every day, which felt more excruciating. So it won’t take as much out of me.

Oh my god.

This was SUCH AN IMPORTANT FUCKING THING TO DO.

Because the only way I could have ever come to this realization was after coming to the full, powerful, knowing that I could do the daily intention/daily execution thing.

It was in doing that that I even had a mental framework from which to arrive at this possible permutation!

Guys, I am nerdily freaking out over here.

I wasn’t expecting this to yield much.

I mean, I was hoping it would actually be beneficial to my Substack itself, but the truth is, because newsletters aren’t supposed to be daily, I had a large surge of followers, but I had an even slightly larger surge of people unsubscribing, and in the end, it’s nearly a wash (same number of paid subscribers—that you all so much, btw!—and about 15-20 fewer overall subscribers.)

But when it was clear a week or so ago that that wasn’t happening and that, SHOCKER, people who have seen emails from you *maybe* twice a month might not totally love having a daily email to tend to in their inbox, it didn’t take too much to make peace with that part. Because I could tell something important was happening. I could tell that in the first week when my limbic system did its damnedest to derail this project, and in the end I fucking triumphed.

And I thought that that triumph was going to be the point.

Hurray, I did a thing I didn’t think I could do! Rah rah rah! I can do hard things! (And, to be sure, there is something powerful and amazing about that in itself, don’t get me wrong.)

But… I mean…

Listen, I’m gonna give myself a day to process this, but I think I might have just stumbled on something I didn’t understand about how brains (or at least my brain) work—something that has the potential of drastically shifting my capacity to do larger scale things like book edits or… I mean… just any larger-scale project or intention.

Like, it will no longer be this helter-skelter “please, self, DO THE THING” feeling of losing myself into a million moments.

Perhaps there can be these gentle, fluid, lines of intention that—especially without the necessity of daily action—might not require too many spoons AND might keep me tethered to various very-important-to-me projects/intentions at once.

WHOOOOOA.

K, for anyone reading this far (if that is anybody, lol, and if so, hi, thanks for getting through all that), does this make sense to anyone else???? Like, do you “get” what my brain just learned about itself? And do you see any flies in this ointment?

I’m gonna let all of this baste for the next 24ish hours, and then tomorrow, on the 30th day, I am going to gently, self-lovingly, try to come up with a workable mode of execution for trying this second phase of the experiment.

This is all so unexpected. It might be because I haven’t eaten and am pretty tired, but this feels a bit wild to me! In a good way!

Okay ya’ll, I’ve gotta go eat dinner with my Carlos. Give me any feedback if you have any! (And if not, no worries.) And thanks so much for joining me on this strange mental journey!

Joshua