Daily pages - September 04, 2021

I was working on the Integrated Individuals patterns, and spent a lot of time explaining that independence was an illusion and that we are actually interdependent. My logic was that many people equate being an individual with being independent. The definition I found of individualism was “the habit or principle of being independent and self-reliant.” So I think there’s reason to talk about independence, but I’m not sure that it should be the first paragraph. Another reason I started writing about independence is that it’s part of the problem statement.

As I was laying in bed last night, a few ideas came to me, and I’d like to try and capture them here. If I can remember.

One thought was about how race is a useless way to differentiate ourselves. It makes me want to read and learn more about the history of how race got to be an idea. I’ve known for a while that race is a meaningless in science. It’s not part of the way we classify species or anything along those lines. There don’t seem to be any claims that can be made about one race being consistently different than another, but I don’t know enough to write clearly about it.

It makes me think about a Tik Tok that I saw (I actually saved it) where Josh Terry talks about the ups and downs that we all face as creators. He describes it as a cycle between order and chaos. He also emphasizes that it’s natural and even necessary, but because we don’t recognize and accept it, it does damage to our psyches. His final point was that there may be ways to smooth the curve between extremes of the cycle: awareness, anticipation, acceptance, and action.

I think I’ve realized this to some extent myself, but would have found it difficult to really put it into words like he did. I know I find myself in phases of creativity and relative non-action. It always feels like it’s a lack of discipline that leads to inaction, but there’s also a kind of burnout. As Josh Terry says, the experience can lead to a great deal of anxiety because you feel like you’re failing.

Anyway, I’m excited about writing because I feel like I have some framework to work from and can therefore stay on track in my writing. That is a new order that I’m imposing on my work and it feels good and can lead to greater productivity, but I simultaneously don’t feel ready to apply it full force. It’s like I discovered a great new method at a time when I don’t want to use it. Not because it’s a bad method, but because I just don’t want to deal with it, or much of anything. I just need to have faith that my enthusiasm will come back and I will make a lot of progress much more quickly than I have over the last eight months.

Just off the top of my head, I’d like to think about the Origin Stories pattern. I talk about what an origin story is and declare that for most of us, our origin stories are too small. The heart of this pattern is the big picture regarding how we’re interdependent not just with other people and the world we’ve created, but the planet, our solar system, and the Universe. It’s perhaps the widest angle I offer for that concept.

But what are the forces at work in this pattern? One force is that we think of ourselves as small and inconsequential, yet we hope that we can do big things like change the world. Those forces contradict each other. Also, we’re born into a system that teaches us to be cogs in the machine when we know deep inside that there’s more to life than that, more to us. I find a lot of inspiration in the things that my ancestors did. Some of them left England for the new world. Some set off across the continent on the Santa Fe trail to be early settlers in Oregon. They worked with others to find a better way for people to make that trek and established a trail that came to be called the Applegate trail. My grandfather was an architect and created many very nice homes in St. Louis. My father wrote a book about our family.

All of these things say to me that I can also do great things. Maybe your ancestors haven’t achieved much in a few generations. So what? You come from a line of people who could conceivably trace their origins back to the first humans in Africa. For thousands of generations, your ancestors successfully raised children and carried on their line through all of human history. Your origin story is the human origin story, and it even goes back farther to the beginning of life on Earth, the creation of the solar system, even the big bang. You are part of a huge legacy of life, and you are as capable as any human alive to do great things.