Category Archives: Writing

While the ends are more sexual, the means are far more sexy. It’s beyond a trope that the world is all about figuring out how to do the time value of time, the compromises between the present and the future. To do a thing to get an outcome. When it’s the doing of the thing that is the thing in itself. The outcome cannot be measured without the thing’s doing. More specifically, I found myself out in the woods on a pair of skis today. The ends: a better skier, more awesome leg muscles, another activity to pour a little ego juice into, better health, better sleep. Mostly reasonable ends. But the means, those are the thing. To glide. To fall on my ass. To stare a deer in the woods in the face. To see the reflection of the sun against the snow and through the fractal trees. It’s a reversal of the logic of 401ks and dentistry (unless you love matching in any form and feel deep joy from the brushing of each individual tooth). Where am I going is a deeply inferior question to where am I. Some of the places I am have habits attached to them, are driven by patterns. I ask (far too often), “where are these habits taking me and do I want to go there”. This is to place the recurrence of a behavior or a showing up only into the framework of its repetition. What I mean is that if a thing that I am doing I have done many times before and believe I will do many more times, rather than considering that thing I’m doing (making a cup of coffee for instance) in isolation from its supposed past and future brethren and breathing deeply of its today-unique fumes, I reduce that part of my life, I divide it by the number of cups in my life and steal those moments’ power from myself. Of course I would then ask, why am I wasting my time on this mere habit? What does a cup of coffee (or shower, or sleep, or walk, or ski) get me? Better health? More work productivity with more 401k matching? More days to walk/shower/sleep/coffee/ski and put more into that 401k? Okay, so I haven’t been the most responsible retirement saver, but I promise I’m not merely trying to convince myself that is something other than a massive failure of character. Which it certainly isn’t. What I’m getting at is that patternization and ends-measuring are antithetical to the life I’m trying to live. I mean that I’m living. The living is plenty, particularly if you do stir in a bit of morality and questioning. But when the means are let off their ends leashes and out of their patterned fences, they’re usually pretty good to the other means they run into. So I’ll see about paying more attention to every glide and tree the next time I’m on skis.