Colin Wright's Blog, page 9

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...

Self-Consciousness

A heightened awareness of what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and how our actions and words and public personae might be interpreted by others, can be a source of satisfaction or shame. And the line between one and the other can be razor-thin.

The term “self-conscious” can refer to a feeling of awkwardness or an empowered sense of awareness and self-worth.

I have regular periods of self-reflection baked into my schedule, and one of the benefits of this routine is that when I’m feeling st...

Flagging Fear

Over the years I’ve learned to run toward foreboding feelings when I identify them.

I’ve consistently found value in noting and confronting things that scare me; small things, substantial things, dangerous things at times.

Much of this value is derived from the process of picking at the aversion or worry and slowly coming to know it: understanding its origins, what it is I find so disconcerting about it, and in some cases finding I’m actually afraid of something else and have for whatever ...

Gently

We’re living through a period of inconvenient, dangerous, uncomfortable upheavals.

The variables shaping our lives are changing daily, and many of us feel some combination of frustrated, scared, exhausted, and desperate for a semblance of clarity and control.

That’s how I’ve been feeling the past 18 months-ish, at least.

It’s been weird and discombobulating and at times strangely thrilling—in the same sense that being caught in a zombie apocalypse would, in some ways, be thrilling.

H...

Decouplement

I initially feel an unnerving isolation when I’m disconnected from the wider world.

Such moments are often forced upon me by circumstance: when mid-flight over a vast expanse of ocean or tucked betwixt bags and chickens and goats while rambling through mountainous South American landscapes in a run-down but resilient autobús.

I ultimately enjoy and even look forward to these periods of decouplement, but they don’t materialize as organically and consistently as they once did—and I think thi...

Other Useful Feelings

Happiness is good—I like feeling happy.

But much of the time my internal state is more complex than one word can contain.

Maybe I’m happy with a hint of malaise or whiff of chagrin or the subtle tang of disquiet.

I may be in the midst of an ineffable unease, and though I can sometimes recount my day and trace such sensations to insufficient sleep or a missed meal or an inharmonious interaction, there are times when I find it’s useful to check in on other, oft under-appreciated dispositi...

Please Buy Literally Everything

It’s that time of year again—Please Buy Literally Everything season—and as such I’ve been thinking about consumption and marketing and all the other ingredients that when whisked together, make this an especially frantic, expensive couple of months for many of us.

Some thoughts on this:

There’s nothing wrong with buying things, but it’s far less ideal to buy things just to buy things.

You don’t get bonus points for owning more stuff, and many people make purchases because it feels good ...

Coasting and Flapping

Sometimes creation is like riding an air current: your arms are spread but you’re coasting along with relative ease, tapping into a natural (if invisible) force and using it to get where you need to be—even if sometimes your destination is different from where you thought you’d end up.

Sometimes creation is more muscle-intensive: a frantic flapping of arms and puffing of lungs punctuated by frustrated, exhausted squawking as you wobble from origin to endpoint, any landing you can manage feeli...