21. To Be Concerned With Everything

My attention must be free to wander. But often I inhibit its freedom. I narrowly focus on one task to the exclusion of all else, or I block particular experiences or ideas from my view, or I try to possess and maintain whatever is present.

When I do these things, my attention becomes stuck. My imposed control restrains it. Being stuck is not the same as lingering or being at rest. My attention may rest on a single point, but I need to allow this to happen without force.

20. The Music Of The Text

Writing that is alive evokes powerful feelings of excitement, of anticipation, of concern, and of joy.

Many elements of a text can contribute to the creation of these feelings. Elements like pacing, vocabulary, structure, metaphor, and tension can all play a role. But these are only tools and, if haplessly deployed, they can easily produce something mechanical and barren of life. A text can be furnished with all the markers of good writing and still fall flat. What is it that breathes life into these elements that are otherwise static and unmoving?

19. Reaching For The Unreachable

The body needs contact and it needs intimacy. It needs to touch the world and feel itself to be part of it. It needs to feel itself shared and connected with others. It needs to be recognized as a living thing among other living things.

Deep inside, the body carries memories of contact. As a child: with parents, siblings, relatives, schoolmates. As an adult: with friends, family, lovers. The body remembers contact as a place of comfort, warmth, and joy.

18. A Paragon Of Human Perfection

When I believe I can do no wrong, I am in great danger.

This belief should be a blaring klaxon. It is a warning that my awareness is profoundly lacking. It is impossible to exist in this world without ever harming anyone. Even if I were the most ethical person ever to have lived, I am still human. And a human being makes mistakes. A human being cannot foresee all possible outcomes. Perfection might be possible but it is not plausible.

17. Doing Not Being

I run my hand over the grass and I feel the texture of the individual blades — their sharp, freshly-cut edges tickling the skin of my palm. This is a singular experience. I am touching this particular patch of grass at this particular time with this particular hand. This has never been done and it will not be done again. Not here, not now, not by me.

I bring my hands into my lap and close my eyes. I am seated on the grass. I can feel it pressing against my bare legs. I let the feeling go, so that it becomes one with the ordinary condition of my body. I ignore everything I can hear or smell, everything outside of me. I am the singular experience now. What is it to be me, in the absence of the external world? What is it to have this particular body? I am alive, I know, but what is it to be alive?

16. The Process Of Creation Advances

The task of creation is always unfinished. From every newly crafted thing, a new arrangement of meanings emerges, and from that, new possibilities appear. New possibilities beget new questions, and something further must be created in response.

As the process of creation advances, meanings become more detailed and questions become more nuanced. The target of these questions cannot ever be reached. It is the heart of our experience as living beings, as entities that are both subject and object. It is perhaps even the heart of existence itself. To attempt to name it necessarily fails, because it is everything and nothing at the same time. All that we can do is to create and create again and, through our creations, uncover as much of it as we possibly can.

15. So Many Eggs

Every idea I have is an egg. My eggs are kept warm in the incubator that is me. Each day, some of the eggs will hatch and out will emerge a new being that is capable of living on its own. The being will take the form of a fragment, like this one. It will emerge from its egg and onto the page where it will live. Usually this process goes smoothly, but if I try to hatch an egg by force, what appears on the page is not a living being but a lifeless mess — not unlike what I would get if I took a real egg and threw it at the wall. Each egg must be ready to hatch before the being inside can emerge properly and coherently. I must be patient. Some eggs will take months, or even years, to hatch. Waiting can be difficult when it feels like a particular egg might be a special one. I wish there were a way to speed up the process, so that I could express myself continuously, so that I could, at all times, create new beings and send them out into the world. But it cannot be so. Forcing the matter produces nothing but a mess. I remind myself that I am fortunate there are so many eggs. Every day, one or two are ready to hatch. To prepare myself for them, I keep a careful inventory of the incubator. I look inside myself to see which eggs are beginning to show the first cracks. If I watch carefully, then I can give these new beings the best possible chance to arrive on the page with potential and vigour.

14. Not Even Miracles

The ordinary basic facts of the universe are necessary facts, and so anything and everything that exists is necessary as well. Everything that happens in the universe follows necessarily from the basic facts through causality. A cause produces an effect, which then causes some further effect, and so on. In this universe, there is no such thing as contingency. The chain of causes and effects is perfect. Everything that happens does so because it must happen. There is no way that anything could ever be other than what it already is. Possibility does not actually exist. It is an illusion produced by a lack of knowledge. There is only one way that things can be from now until the end of time.

13. Others Like Him

Every morning he goes through the same process when he wakes. It takes place automatically as his consciousness returns to him. As the calm serenity of the dreamscape recedes, he becomes situated in the world — not only in the physical world of his body, but also in the virtual world of life and work and other people. He enters conscious reality and he feels inside himself a void appear and grow prominent.