There is a three year old somewhere right now squatting in a cold puddle with mud up his forearms and snot running into his mouth, screaming at nothing. he will bite his sister in twenty minutes and cry for an hour after because she bit him back. he will lose his favourite toy in some wet grass and grieve it like a death. by nighttime he will have lived more honestly than most grown men manage in thirty years. and somewhere in a clean room with expensive candles and a view of some mountain, a grown adult who paid four thousand to sit on a cushion for a week is begging his own nervous system to produce what that kid got for free by falling face first into a thorn bush
My best work came out of the worst years of my life, and that annoys me because i dont want that to be true, but it is. comfort made me stupid, gave me the illusion i had time to think and plan. when i was broke and scared i actually made things, because there was nothing else to do with my fear.
But the catch is, you have to remember you have work. most people in suffering just suffer, they forget they have hands. suffering doesnt produce a fucking thing on its own, its raw energy with no direction. the genius is the idiot who remembered to sit down
I sleep like four hours some nights and wake up feeling like something freshly built. other nights i sleep nine and wake up wanting to die, and i spent years thinking it was about the hours, tracking cycles, counting, reminders, etc, all that stupid bullshit. it had nothing to do with it. what actually matters is whether your mind let go before you went under
My friends kid is four years old and already argues like his mother, same tone, same weird quiet before she says the thing that actually lands. his father is a gentle guy, barely speaks up when people are around, and everybody thought the kid would take after him because the kid is quiet too. but no. the kid is quiet the way the mother is quiet, not passive, loading. you can watch it in his face when someone takes a toy from him. he doesn't cry, he doesn't react, he goes still and then two minutes later does something about it, calmly and precisely. that's her, that's entirely her tinkture in the boy, and there's nothing the father can do about it. i think about which parents mind actually won, because it is a kind of winning. everyone talks about genetics like it's eyes and hair, nobody talks about what really gets passed down, which is the architecture of how you think, how you fight, how you love, how you go quiet when you're dangerous. one parent plants a stronger seed in the mind and that child grows up wearing that parent's entire software and doesn't even know it