Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Tag: future

  • A useful repository of stored wisdom

    Rain is falling outside this morning. It is a welcome bit of weather to a very dry year. Opining about the weather is probably not the best start to this writing sesion. It is a start however and I’ll take it for what it is worth. A few words as a starter to get the process of typing going. Sometimes a little nudge in the right direction is all the writing process needs. I’m still logging notes and other observations in Google Keep. That has worked out well enough. The key piece in taking notes is grabbing something useful and packaging it for later use. 

    Without the possibility of using it again the notes themselves are probably not going to be Without the possibility of using it again the notes themselves are probably not going to be revisited. Certainly I have a few notebooks that are full of long forgotten notes that will never be revisited. Some of my college notebooks are now a couple of decades old and have not been revisited at all or even really glanced at casually. They have simply been moved from bookshelf to bookshelf over the years. At this point, they are more of a visual reminder of something from the past and not a useful repository of stored wisdom. Over the course of so many years and so many notes a lot of nuggets of truth and a ton of false starts reside in those notebooks.

    Today I’m hopeful it will be one of those days where things happen and things get done with a single minded purpose focused on pushing things forward. Moving in the direction of a perfect possible future. This month in general is starting off with a lot of possibilities. That is what happens when you look at the open space in front of you and think about what can be done with the time you have. Certainly the work will need to be put in to help drive things forward.

  • A much slower day

    Today is one of those days where letting go of things to get to a zero space is really hard. I generally try to clear my mind of all thoughts and concerns before starting the writing process. Getting to that zero space just did not happen today. The pain from the pinched nerve in my neck is not back or anything like that as a blocker. For some ineffable reason the calmness at the moment of being present remains elusive today. A little bit of chaos reigns this morning and it really did manifest with some dirty writers block this morning. We are about 100 words into the process of writing today and I’m still working to shake off that layer of doubt and plunge into the act of writing meaningful prose. Certainly, the very best way to get to that point is to keep writing and working on progressing forward. Sometimes the very act of typing and working to move forward can kick start the process. 

    Today is by far a much slower day than it should be for sure. Without question the first 30 minutes of the day so far were a wash in terms of getting things done. Things feel like approaching an uncomfortable space weighted down and without clarity. Maybe within the confines of that scenario something more interesting will emerge like some time of allegory that resonated like the cave from Plato. Lofty as that goal might be it is better to strive toward something of permanence in the long run from usefulness than to accept the chilling effect of total writing false start. As you can gather from these stilted and otherwise unrefined words this second paragraph did not fare all that better than the first one today. It’s possible that the home stretch of this page will break on through to something with a deeper meaning. 

    Uncertainty abounds and in its wisdom the possible dances before us. Without the possible chaos of uncertainty the path to a perfect possible future would be absolute. Variability and chaotic progress bring forward the essence of what makes us react to the intersection of the present and the path that moves us along to that perfect possible future. Within that dissonance and the choices that are made we abide the possible and strive. Perhaps it is within that dance of striving toward a future that helps us deal with the very nature of uncertainty. Taking a methodological approach with each step punctures the web of uncertainty and clears a little bit of a view into the perfect possible future, but nowhere enough to really ever be able to get a truly unobstructed view. That inherently is the dance between the now and a perfect possible future that stands as an ideal away from the pressures that confine us and raise uncertainty.