Colin Wright's Blog, page 9

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...

Intrinsics

I’ve spent most of the past 12 years reassessing and realigning.

In essence, I’ve been trying to better understand myself and what I want out of life: what I think is important, how I want to spend my time, who I want to spend my time with, how I want to feel, what I want to be capable of.

I’ve also been considering how to apply this knowledge so my reality, over time, better aligns with those ideals.

This is an iterative process, and not one that can be completed. I don’t expect to wak...

Opportunity

I’ve been thinking about opportunity a lot as I’ve revisited some old opportunities—those pursued and those set aside—and started in on the process of shuffling and assessing and selecting from some contemporary ones.

Important to recognize in any discussion about opportunity is that it’s not equitably distributed.

As with most things related to an individual, from height to athletic ability to economic status, we’re born with ceilings and floors in terms of our various properties and capa...

Documentation

What aspects of what I’m doing today will be meaningful ten years from now?

Or rather, which components of what aspects of the many things making up our lives at any point are worth noting in some external fashion, and which can be left undocumented?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, of late, as I’m writing a book that encompasses fairly broad swathes of life, reaching all the way back to 2015. And some periods are fairly well chronicled through journal entries, essays, and photographs,...