formative
Formative chapters usually exist in hindsight. It might take years for you to realize how integral a moment was to you. A little beautiful ripple pulled forth through time.
We’re not good at recognizing what will be formative while we’re swimming in it. The encounter at an event with friends, a first date, a book that catches your eye, a discussion, a dinner, a talk. It’s the energy of yes and why not and let’s try it out that leads to new formative experiences, because your heart and mind are open to them. When the window of opportunity opens, you’re more inclined to jump through it without too much expectation or weight.
Inevitably, our model of reality experiences pressure or friction as we live, study, work, love, breathe, move, change our minds. We’re best served studying the shape of its breaking pattern. In fact, what I like most about getting to know someone deeply is slowly grasping their model of the world and how it changes with new information.
In college I took a few classes in cognitive science. One of the theories I remember all these years later: when reality is sweeter or more bitter than you predict, dopamine neurons signal an error and reinforcement learning occurs. Simplifying this (a ton): you tend to learn more from a good surprise or a bad surprise versus an accurate prediction.
It’s a blessing to be rewired by both the good and bad surprises. By the green rolling hills of California, by the creaky Victorian building sat on top of the luxury grocery store, the days between Philadelphia and New York, monsoon seasons, autoimmune condition, late-night questioning, tennis on Alice Marble courts, the Shirley Hazzard books. I keep that Jeanette Winterson quote close to my heart: You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.
As a child, one marks being “grown up” as a physical transition or ownership: a mortgage, children, education, responsibility, bills. The older I get, the more I believe that to think like an adult is to recognize how you construct meaning from your own experiences. To know your patterns of attention, awareness, and direct it well. Perhaps you’ll get a lot of things wrong, but it is precisely the lack of certainty or correctness that enables a great degree of learning. We must let formative moments move us, and move through us with grace.
A was reading Kundera at the coffee shop. We talked about how we’re both people who navigate life with a great deal of thinking and heaviness. Truth is: some lightness is necessary.
What this means is knowing you can’t control everything, nor should you want to. Things in your life have to continuously shift. For better or worse, things are always going to shift anyways without your blessing. The tides are pulling you from the shore even as you anchor your feet into the ground.
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play the game regardless. That’s the closest thing to a mantra I have.
Maybe I’ll keep forging forward, or feel challenged or in a holding pattern for a long time. Maybe I can’t change, maybe I can. Still, I’d like to believe my model of the world is moldable. Like clay. Maybe I’ll let this moment I’m in alter me, and find peace in being taken by surprise. Maybe a few years down the line I’ll think to myself that, in hindsight, it was a truly formative time.
Journal Prompt of the Week
What is something that people get wrong or misinterpret about you upon first meeting you - and Why?
Song of the Week
What I’m Reading
Articles:
Internet Search tips by Gwern, also I love the tooling we have these days (Perplexity, Claude) are amazing
I like Semafor’s tech news component
Books:
I recently read Collected Stories by Shirley Hazzard, Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, and Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky (sharing some highlights here):
Man loves creating and the making of roads, that is indisputable. But why does he so passionately love destruction and chaos as well? Tell me that! Can it be that he has such a love of destruction and chaos… because he is instinctively afraid of achieving the goal and completing the edifice he is creating?.. Maybe he likes the edifice only from far off, and by no means up close; maybe he only likes creating it, and not living in it.
&
In every man’s memories there are such things as he will reveal not to everyone, but perhaps only to friends. There are also such as he will reveal not even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. Then, finally, there are such as a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and every decent man will have accumulated quite a few things of this sort.
Is it possible to be perfectly candid with oneself and not be afraid of the whole truth?
Making my way through Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu & starting Leaving Atocha Station by Ben Lerner.
Substacks
I’m really enjoying
’s Vague Blue and ’ Discussion Candy. Both journalistic in nature. I like their combo of sharpness + lyricality.If you’re looking for more books and articles to read:
I really adore
who writes Postcards by Elle, a curated recommendation list of culture/literature. Also just started reading who writes Ridiculous Little Things - I like her Taste Logs.
"We talked about how we’re both people who navigate life with a great deal of thinking and heaviness. Truth is: some lightness is necessary. What this means is knowing you can’t control everything, nor should you want to."
Well said. We crave certainty and control in our lives but the one certainty is that we cannot attain it. As you suggested, awareness and moving with grace is key.
I really admire your thought process and your writing.