If you asked yourself, what’s important? Would you answer the same way each day?
Try it.
It’s both settling and discombobulating to have choice, agency. So many of us are trying to gain some sort of purchase on our lives amidst the noise of the world. Whether it’s news or family stuff, AI or industry shifts, the churn of the twenty-first century seems never to let up. It is challenging to keep focus. More challenging to know that our focus is attuned to what’s important.
We need some sort of grounding.
As a creative seeker, I frequently find myself organizing daily, weekly, monthly re-starts, attempting to connect to my imaginative center, trying to hold both the “what” and the “why” of my work in the face of uncertainty. But more often than not, the collective impact of successive trials, experimental techniques, even systems across my days feels like so much spaghetti against the proverbial wall. Like politics. Like desperation. Like some sort of “buckshot approach.”
You can endlessly spray ideas and plans and still not find any magic in them. Or drown in “keep pushing” aphorisms. But when you see Kurt Vonnegut musing on impinging technology (in 1995!) saying, “We’re here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different...” – Sept. 1996 issue of Inc.
Well, okay.
As almost always, the magic is in the reframing.
It’s not failure to stop and play, to mess in the mud, to follow one road until you pivot and take a different one. We’re looking for what works, what feels right, maybe even what sells. But in the farting around, we can find satisfaction in the process; can recognize that what’s important is the journey.
Trying to find my way - ever and always - sometimes looks like discipline, like following a rulebook, devising plans and checklists, filling hours with productivity. I can thank various systems, hacks, and well-designed tools for this. But sometimes - I know - it will look like taking a side path, or retreating and starting anew.
Shawn Smucker calls it casting seeds.
The Slow Work Garden asks us to consider, “How might we, as individuals and organisations in a living system, re-magic living and working?”
And James Clear breaks it down:
Exploration is how you discover what works.
Persistence is how you make the most of what already works.
What does your situation require? More exploration or more persistence?
If what’s important today doesn’t echo what you planned yesterday; if you find yourself re-directing your attention, reconsidering your focus, or reimagining your creative dreams; well, okay. Embrace this (and the next) season of “farting around” and casting seeds. When you ask yourself what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for; “What do I want to see? What do I have to offer?” That work is the rhythm of exploration, the beginnings of your slow re-magicking of work and life.
As Vonnegut also said in his Inc. interview:
“We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and do something.”
Or anything. It might all be important.
Thanks for impacting my thinking as I start my workday. I’ll try to move through my day much more with “We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and do something” than “We’re here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
I love this. As someone who's a little obsessive on the persistence side, I need these kind of reminders!