exoticizing the writing

one of the most eye-opening videos on youtube for me was anna p. foxen’s exoticizing the impossible, in which she talks about a common spiritual failure mode where the practitioner, being overfocused on the extraordinary, misses the beauty in mundane reality.

i was thinking about this in the context of my relationship with my blogging. i published over 30 posts in all three of my blogs this year. it’s a feat that i am proud of. but i still couldn’t manage to eliminate the friction of writing and publishing. i believe the most important task of the creative is to eliminate friction in creating. maybe quantity doesn’t guarantee quality but lack of quantity guarantees the impossibility of quality for sure.

what’s blocking me from publishing more? the easy answer is lack of time. i’m a busy person with a demanding day job, political duties and ambitions, hobbies, a wife whom i care about… of course, it’s not easy to find time to sit and write. i need at least an hour to write a 600-word, low-effort post. the problem with this excuse is that i know i can find the time.

the real problem is exoticizing the writing. drafts are piling up waiting for me to read three books for each. i am trying to make an elaborate argument tying together jung, land, hegel, lacan while preserving my dignity by not producing utter bullshit.

in the meantime there is a vast world of blogs where people write a few sentences about an article they read or a link they found interesting. they might be mundane but who could say that they are not the building blocks of something bigger? isn’t this the point cory doctorow was making few years ago?

maybe it’s time to make peace with the ordinary.