direct your intensity well

on cyclicality

Hans Sieverding

This time last year I was battling a strong wave of exhaustion. I took a flight to New York and got into a shuttle to Connecticut from the World Trade Center. It was an early morning. My breath trembled in the air. I watched ochre leaves drift into a sea of moving bodies, light like a melody.

Ambiguous, yet beautiful things: The passing of time. The gritty glamor of new york — its glass and plumes of sewer smoke and cold blue skyline. The strange emotion welling up in the center of your chest.

That year was a time of intensity. I had decided my life would chart a particular path and I had hurled myself at it with such… willingness and hunger. Maybe you’d call it delusion. But if you’ve ever had a period of condensed, high-effort, you’ll know exactly what I mean. You’re submerged into a particular reality or narrative. Sometimes it’s generative, sometimes it’s destructive.

Those first few days in New York I felt my previous storyline breaking, like a fever.

Here’s how I operate now: I think it’s actually very important to lean into intensity, but to direct your intensity well. To focus your gaze on the right things. It’s obvious to me that every elegant product or beautiful answer is usually the result of someone putting in more effort than anyone else. When you find a worthy cause, and you have natural edge and interest, you should throw your whole heart into it.

Back then I was objectively working really hard, but the commitment lacked something true to me.

That diagnosis felt novel. Since then, I’ve been trying to find the truest work that demands devotion from me. The more I write, the more I experience the world, the closer I feel to the revelation. So I keep writing. I keep trying. I’ll seek until I find it. I tell you this all the time: I don’t mind poking the edges of my reality a little bit to find an area of expansion. Ultimately I care a lot about searching well.

I’m returning to New York again on the exact week of last year’s trip (unintentionally). Isn’t that funny? The coincidence feels symbolic.

I tell N on our walk at Land’s End — life is always returning, repeating itself to us. Perhaps we do get second chances. Third chances, even.

Across the arc, the same choices present themselves to you in shinier disguises. You handle them with new information. You discern better than you used to. What changed? You have straighter posture and a grounded-ness you use to lack. Maybe you’re just more honest with yourself about what you want. Familiar place, unfamiliar thinking. That’s progress.

As we press our footsteps in the sand on the trail, N quotes Heraclitus. The saying goes something like this: No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

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From one whole year ago, you find what you look for and about new york - keeping promises to myself

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🖌️ The biggest update from my end is that I recently got an iPad (which is truly a luxury item to me) and have started experimenting with Procreate! This is my very first watercolor piece, inspired by one of my fav artists, Cara Thayer. I’m excited to improve and share more artwork on here.

Substacks I read and enjoyed this week:

📚 Matisse’s Doves:

Matisse's Doves

📚 Ashley’s post on George Saunders’ talk at SF:

Surrender control over your stories

📚 Karina on creating ‘cultures of writing’ at work (her list of links is fab too):

Cultures of writing.

“Love and a cough / cannot be concealed. / Even a small cough. / Even a small love.” — Small Wire, Anne Sexton

“Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected. Also everything returns, but what returns is not what went away”— Louise Glück

This song is sooo smooth, and is the perfect work or painting music, and an additional recommendation by Mitski because I can’t resist