momentum

Kazimir Malevich, Relaxing

Three years ago I moved into an apartment in the Mission in San Francisco. Only one street away was beautiful Valencia with perfumeries, plant stores, burmese and jamaican food, dive bars, those narrow-doored taquerias with fresh tortillas and slick pans and rows of meat. If you walked those streets at a specific hour, your clothes would smell like the remains of dusk for days.

That year was a pretty magical and above all, a really transient time. When you did look back, there was this ineffable, humorous, alienness to who you used to be. San Francisco does that to you. That’s its charm: technology, people, ideas, moving quickly against the frontier. Built one day, torn down the next. Familiar things felt foreign and then foreign things felt wonderfully familiar. We were making sandcastles, larger and grander each time. I’m still not sure how to categorize what we felt when they were washed away quietly by the tide.

Humans don’t like stasis. We crave the perceived notion of momentum, or a sense that things are moving forward. When you do lose speed, it’s difficult to re-generate it.

There’s momentum and gravity in profession, in relationships, in health. These domains require some hefty form of activation energy and continued motion forward. For example, in a friendship you’d probably need to see someone a few times, either planned or serendipitously to form enough momentum to call it a friendship or feel comfortable reaching out to each other regularly. In work, feeling like you have wind in your sails alongside some challenge is crucial to some level of satisfaction. In love, as in all, timing is everything.

It’s important to know how to generate your own momentum when it gets lost. Particularly in creative or professional pursuit. When I get stuck on a problem or get wedged in the gap between knowing what to do and how to do it, I just make ugly work. I accept the work will be half-formed and I’ll have to kill all my darlings eventually, but at least I’m crawling slowly. I used to give up on things too early. Commitment was difficult and I was too excitable about novel things. Years later, I’d look back and regret not sticking with the idea I was chipping away at.

Maybe I’m wiser now, or maybe… more naive. But there’s more longevity to my pursuits. Even on the days where there’s no flow, I kick the tyres, stare at the wall, then try again. Maybe this is persistence? The good news is I’m writing more silly things and having a bit more fun with it.

That’s the buy-in for the game. Winning has never felt like the right framing to me. It’s in your best interest to treat it like a dance. Each move is iterative and generative. Miles Davis: “When you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that makes it good or bad.”

It’s strange living in a place like SF because the ground is always cracking beneath our feet, and velocity is prized above all. Eventually we’ll have machines that can dream. But there’ll always still be the hard, dumb, bottleneck that is human effort. You shape what you make and it shapes you right back. When you get stuck nothing is going to help you get unstuck except sheer stubbornness and self-driven motion. That’s the most rewarding part though: if you expend enough energy, whatever you create gains life, speed, and a world of its own.