Morning Pages: 1
Monday, 28 August 2017
Journal: 10
Two days ago, I received Kendra’s gift: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Books are my favorite treasure to give and to receive, but I yelped with special delight at this one, because although I’ve heard of it for years, and even been influenced by it indirectly, I had not gotten around to buying myself a copy and tearing it open.
Yesterday morning, I began reading and it held me for about an hour. She introduced three themes. The first theme is creativity as a spiritual path; with the artist as a channel for the muse to come through. This is already gospel for me, so I received her reinforcement. The second and third themes are the practice of morning pages and the practice of the artist date.
Her instructions were simple. For morning pages: write three pages every morning — stream of consciousness— don’t think, don’t filter, just write. For artist dates: block off and protect three hours on your calendar every week; be alone, uninterrupted and relieved of stress, and focus on exploring creative desire, letting it lead wherever it may lead.
So this morning, I have done so. I have set aside time on my calendar for my first Artist Date this Wednesday, and I have set aside time every morning for Morning Pages.
I’m both excited to begin this practice, and hesitant. I hate Google Calendar with the special passion that only a power user can have. Time never conforms to form. So I don’t use the Calendar to block off my own time anymore. I just use it to schedule meetings, and I limit meetings to Thursdays and Fridays, so I can focus on getting things done Monday through Wednesday.
These long blocks of uninterrupted time are powerful. I plunge into them, and they naturally lead from one project to the next. I stay attuned to the energy, and the energy always tells me what to do next. This is very confusing and frustrating when I seek to rationalize it, or to explain it to someone else. But far enough in retrospect, if I look back on how I spent my time, it all makes sense. I can’t explain why I’m doing what I’m doing right now, though, which violates time management orthodoxy.
We’re fixated with controlling everything. We want to control ourselves. Control our time. Control our focus. Control our thoughts. Control our present and our future. So the idea of not being able to plan things out, well, that’s a rejection of the whole productivity project — or is it?
Anyways, so I enter with hesitation at the scheduling of these times in my calendar. Perhaps I’ll just delete the Morning Pages from my calendar, and rely on force of habit to preserve them. I have been able to do that with Duolingo — I’m on a 260 day streak! — so I ought to be able to do that with this habit too. Artist Dates are discrete blocks and I think it makes sense to keep them sacred by scheduling them and protecting them as such.
I’ve placed Morning Pages on my calendar at 8:00am every morning, which is rather aspirational. What if I go to bed late, because I’m working late — as I am won’t to do. After years of using an alarm to wake up, I have enjoyed two years alarm free — with very few exceptions. I tell myself the following mantra: I work when I’m worky, I sleep when I’m sleepy.
So I’m afraid that the resistance I’ll build by having the appointment officially on my calendar at 8:00am every morning is high. I’ll feel guilty when I don’t meet it. And it will discourage me.
I’ve just taken it off.
Another decision I’m making is writing this publicly. I wonder if I can be transparent, nakedly transparent, on Medium. The whole world could read this. Before I begin every morning, perhaps I should be read my Miranda Rights. I have the right to remain silent. Everything I say can be used against me. So why do I choose to express myself in public?
I don’t care about followers. I have very few followers. I receive very sweet and moving letters from them from time to time, thanking me and encouraging me. As touching as these are, I’m always baffled. Why are you wasting time reading me, when you could be reading the words of the dead? By default, I place very little value on the words of the living. There is too much noise, and time has yet to filter us.
Everyone competes to have the most followers. That is their metric for success. Mine is rather more difficult. My goal is to lose followers. I will have achieved something remarkable if I find myself with no followers. If I can shout into the echoing expanse, and hear only an echo.
Everyone has followers. To have millions of followers, we think you have to be exceptionally good. To have no followers, we think you have to be exceptionally bad. But to be exceptionally bad: well, isn’t that an accomplishment? What would it take to achieve that? Something extreme. Something novel and tremendous.
Most people end up in the middle of the distribution. They aren’t willing to be extreme in either direction. They want to be popular, but they think that popularity comes with being essentially the same as everyone else, just glittering more. This shining sameness is their myth of stardom. They aspire to be like their celebrities, who are basically just like them, just bigger, brighter, prettier. They are playing the same song, the same song of life, as everybody else, they are just playing it louder, they are high-volume sameness.
Is popularity goodness, or sameness? A popularity achieved through exceptional sameness — through high-volume sameness; well, that is merely celebrity, and celebrity is not worth having.
But a popularity achieved through a rejection of popularity, a popularity achieved through difference, through being essentially different, that is not celebrity, that is heroism — and heroism is worth having, if only because the virtue of the hero is not caring about being a hero.
In losing my followers, I have simple strategy. I am not setting out deliberately to alienate them or to offend them. That is just being vicious, there is no virtue in rudeness for its own sake. But if I have a virtue, and the expression of that virtue itself is shocking, is offensive, is alienating, is overwhelming, is repulsive — then so be it. It comes at a price. Sacrifice popularity at the altar of virtue.
I believe in being extreme. “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise”, quoth Blake. So if I am to have a virtue, I will take it to its extreme. And all virtues are inherently extreme. It is mortals who confuse moderation for balance, and mediocrity for harmony.
Expression. That is a virtue whose standard I deign to bear. And so I will seek to express myself so completely, so transparently, so without filter that I will lose followers. Nobody will have time to read it all. Nobody will feel comfortable with the level of transparency. Inevitably, without filters, I will offend everyone who is capable of being offended.
I desire a technology that would express myself fully. If every feeling, every thought, every memory, every desire, every sense could somehow be instantly uploaded to the internet and shared with the world — how liberating would that be?
We care too much about privacy. But what is there to hide? For one of integrity, there is nothing to fear from the revelation of truth. There is purity in the human experience. Shame, guilt and embarrassment come from our cowardice of expression. It is precisely these things, that we fear to express, that we most need to express, that would be most cathartic were they out in the open, in the light of day. Perhaps in being revealed, we would be redeemed. The story always makes sense when it is fully told.
A pastor I know was recently convicted of child molestation. From my brief interactions with him in the past, I always appreciated his unaffected sincerity. But what was insincere in him was precisely his orthodoxy. His theological conviction in Church dogma forced him into an untenable moral position, where he had to either be tormented or be a hypocrite.
Technology would have liberated him, had it brought his secret desires into the open. There should be no secret desires, no secret acts. What a terrible burden we choose to carry. The universe uses us as local processors with local storage, because we have not yet invented a universal processor with universal storage. So the computing load on us is oppressive, and we fail to compute — even ourselves, our own self-knowledge, our knowledge of our own good and evil, calls for fig leaves.
I would bare my soul to the world if I could. But I too, lack the courage to publish myself fully, in every aspect, to the world. I wish I had the moral power to publish a screenshot of my bank balance every day onto Medium. I wish I had to will to publish screenshots of my inboxes and messages. I wish to be alone in none of these things.
I don’t actually wish for followers or readers. I wish only to have these things stand in the light. And by the light be cleansed of their privacy.
What of the government? We fear tyranny, but it is precisely transparency that tyranny fears. Surveillance is not the danger, it is the hope. If government itself could be surveilled, if every aspect of the human experience of every politician and every statesman and every official and every bureaucrat and every soldier and every policeman — if it could all be open — then a level of trust and understanding and clarity would be possible between the men of the future that we men of the present cannot but struggle to imagine.
My first morning page draws to a close, and I have avoided speaking of the most intimate. Theory is easy to hide behind.
My inbox awaits. I actively correspond Monday through Thursday. Then Friday through Sunday I stop checking and responding. This results in a pile up that gives me anxiety. But it allows me to focus on other things.
Technology should make me feel more free. I cultivate fulfilling correspondence that I look forward to. But if I am chained to checking behavior, then even fulfilling correspondence does not set me free.
I also am challenging myself to challenge myself and to challenge others. “Opposition is true friendship” quoth Blake. This challenging others gives me anxiety. I feel that I have thick skin. I am not emotionally tough, mentally tough. If I were stronger, I would not fear offending or angering others. I am not deliberately offensive, but I am sometimes deliberately confrontational, when I feel that dynamic is necessary and productive. Because it is confronting that we avoid, and yet confronting that brings about honesty with reality. Confronting need not involve any condemnation or blame. But even so, it is threatening — because it forces into the light that which we would rather not discuss.
Crisis confronts what we fail to confront. If we fear confrontation, crisis will ultimately force the issue, and we will have to confront it. The bravery of the one who confronts rises from this realization. The individual confronts that which the group is afraid to speak of. By confronting it, he is precipitating an avalanche. But an avalanche thus precipitated is more manageable than one that comes late, falling under its own weight.
As a confronter, I move often in opposition, even with friends. In this too, I risk losing “followers”. Even I am afraid of that which I confront. I desire to avoid, to put off the crises that I see building up around me. They are overwhelming, how can I possibly resolve them?
But conversation is somehow the answer. Words bring a light with them. Dialogue harmonizes divergent truths.

