Colin Wright's Blog, page 8

Bypassing Blockages

The benefits of traveling are myriad, and I’m an enthusiastic proponent of visiting even the nearby, the perceptually humdrum, the everyday and mundane-seeming because although many of us have been sold on the idea that travel needs to be exotic and expensive, it needn’t be either of those things to be valuable and fulfilling.

Taking a quick drive or bus-ride to the next town over can be just as enriching as hopping an international border, and visiting a park or hole-in-the-wall bar can be j...

Anatomy of a Project

Projects are encapsulated sequences of tasks, educational undertakings, and practices that I use when making stuff, refining things, and/or shifting from one set of norms to another.

I make a project called Brain Lenses for which I write and produce audio twice-weekly, and that project has a bundle of duties, deadlines, and deliverables associated with it.

I started running each morning a handful of months ago, and the progression of getting proper shoes, establishing baselines and rhythms...

Sleep

For a long time, I sucked at sleep.

But a handful of years ago I started to wonder if I might be capable of learning to sleep better: I started thinking it might be a skill I could work on, rather than an external variable over which I lacked any power.

There are still nights, every once in a while, when my internal processes are in flux and no matter how mightily I struggle I can’t make it work; I’m a zombie the next day and it sucks.

Much of the time, though, I feel pretty confident I...

Rebalancing Inputs

I spend a meaningful amount of time curating what I think of as my “inputs”: data from informational sources (news and nonfiction), but also experiential sorts of things like music and fiction and other aesthetic experiences.

My ideal outcome is to maintain a generally informed sense of the world and of myself while planting seeds for future pursuits and working on my ability to dig deeper into anything that catches my attention.

Alongside that informational ambition, I also aspire to alwa...

Mini-Paradigms

A paradigm is a state of being; a status quo for a given moment in time.

A paradigm shift is what happens when variables change in such a way that the status quo changes measurably or perceptually.

Post-WWII Europe was a very different place than pre-WWII Europe: the paradigm shifted because so many variables changed.

The same is true of the pre-smartphone and post-smartphone paradigms. It doesn’t seem like the introduction of a consumer electronics product category would change much of...

Uncertainty

As humans, we’re nudged by our biologies to wonder what’s on the other side of every mountain and driven to push ever-outward in a million directions at once.

We’re not built to tolerate uncertainty. It’s stressful! It might portend danger. No unknowns for me, thanks.

Our drive to figure things out exposes us to new uncertainties, though. The act of exploration and discovery solves some mysteries, but also tends to unveil new ones.

This dispositional incongruity can be crazy-making, as ...

Bad Weather

I tend to believe the truism, “There’s no bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.”

Many times I’ve found myself in the middle of storms, walking through ice-glazed landscapes, slogging along humid paths and beaches, and my enjoyment or misery will be directly correlated to what I’m wearing, or in some cases how I’m otherwise prepared for that scenario.

With a waterproof jacket, hood, and boots, the rain and wind are not just tolerable, but maybe even invigorating.

Properly bundled and la...

Self-Defined

Adopted belief systems can be pernicious, because while we may justifiably assume the value-defining elements in our lives are our own—constructed from homemade blueprints and self-mortared bricks—many of them are inherited (from family or culture), transmitted (from marketing messages or social groups), or copied wholesale from purveyors of such systems (political, faith-based, or philosophical).

Adopting pre-packaged ideologies in their entirety is simple and passive and normal, which is wh...

Small Refinements to Mundane Things

Most mornings, I make and drink two small mugfuls of black coffee.

After trying dozens of different coffee-prep approaches, I landed on hand-grinding beans and steeping them in an inverted Aeropress as my preferred method.

This routine of placing the beans in the grinder, turning the crank until they’re sufficiently pulverized, placing them in the Aeropress, heating up the water, steeping the coffee, and then filtering it into a mug is something I do twice a day, every day.

It’s one par...

Claylike

One of the more reliable ways to ensure you have a good time when traveling is to commit to flexibility and improvisation, rather than becoming rigid about your peripatetic plans.

This doesn’t mean giving up on your plans or folding in the face of the challenges you encounter.

It means being willing to reshape things a bit when warranted, especially when doing so will allow you to work with the winds and riptides of circumstance, rather than requiring you struggle against them for the dura...