valley of things unsaid

relational intuition

Footpath Virginia, George Bellows

At dusk by the Embarcadero there’s a phenomenon where the birds gather in the air and fly as part of one blossoming swarm, as if driven by a unified mind. One bird doesn’t look like much, but a sky full of birds makes a wonderful undulating pattern. One action doesn’t mean much, but a family of repetitive actions makes a pattern.

Relational intuition is a hard skill to learn because there are rarely concrete feedback loops. What I’ve noticed is that usually you can tell when an interaction between you and another person is very bad, but the perception of good to very good to excellent is far blurrier and highly subjective. I.e. it’s easy to tell if an interview went disastrously than it is to tell if your first choice for the job (and by what margin). It’s difficult to gauge another person’s perceptions and feelings about you without projecting your own expectations onto it. Many struggle with this in dating where it’s a weird dance of contextualizing another person’s desire or stack rank of priorities in their life. Relational intuition is obscure, yet valuable knowledge. When do you call someone a friend vs an acquaintance? When can you text someone something absurd or out of pocket and know they won’t judge you? Does this person even like you or not?

Uncertainties occur when you live too much in the cerebral plane and less in the body. You tend to analyze and extrapolate behaviors in weird ways rather than trusting what you feel. Some of the most intuitive people I know remind me constantly that logic-mode is imprecise and faulty. Logic is faulty sometimes, and that sucks if you depend on logic to rationalize and navigate your way through the world. I call this head-heaviness vs heart-heaviness. Where you get in trouble is when the heart and the head want different things. Some truths and desires are so hard they feel like betrayals, and other truths set you free.

Recently, I’ve understood that our intuition is always searching for what is unsaid. Some things we say to close friends. Some things we say to only one other person our whole life. Some things we can only secretly say to ourselves. Everyone has this deep valley of the unsaid within them. In knowing another, in knowing yourself, it takes a long time to close that comprehension gap. My tendency is to always hide, to obscure and protect, but I’m beginning to realize the start of all intimacy and true understanding is when you say what you really mean.

✤ Snippets from the week ✤

Sharing some things I won’t really write about further but notes in my notes app:

• Last week I was eating dinner alone in a chinese restaurant. A first date was happening next to me. It was pretty painful to overhear them have absolutely nothing in common. What was worse was they weren’t curious about each other. I think all romance is an enduring curiosity for another person.

• When alchemy was real: Patti Smith’s caption for her film photo with Robert Mapplethorpe.

• Constraints are powerful. If I tell myself I only have 1 hour to do something, the bulk of the work will be done by hell or high water. It’s only when I languish, believing I have all the time in the world, that nothing gets accomplished.

• Framing is everything. M frames his arguments with this statement for this to be true, you’d need to believe…, H frames her observations with I think the right question to ask yourself about this is…’ You have to find your own type, size, colloquiality of frame.

✤ Consumption archive ✤

Butcher’s Crossing - Book by John Williams, who also wrote one of my favorite novels: Stoner. I was spellbound by this book. Butcher’s Crossing is about a young intellectual man who moves to rural Kansas to hunt buffalo. Secretly, he searches for a true inner wildness and freedom; his own undiscovered nature. Our deeply contemplative and observant narrator realizes that this idea of glory is a mirage a little too late, well into the buffalo hunt and the tragedy that ensues. Mirrors man’s journey from naïveté to gentle maturity.

Eno - Documentary on the musician Brian Eno who is widely regarded as the ‘father of ambient music’. His book, A Year with Swollen Appendices is also fantastic. Impromptu booked a single ticket to watch it on Sunday night at the Roxie, a non-profit cinema in the heart of the Mission District in San Francisco.

Capote - Movie on the process Truman Capote undertook while writing In Cold Blood, one of the most famous true-crime novels: a story about a murder in Holborn Kansas, and the lives affected. Unsettling and fascinating.

Eve’s Hollywood - I love a good confessional novel - this one is on parties and perpetual delight as told by Eve Babitz in the 1950s and 60s. I love reading about cities like LA/SF/NYC and marveling at how little the essence of a place changes. In Eve’s book, LA is wasteful, seductive, charming, inconvenient, flashy — and it still embodies those traits today. That PG point that cities contain specific messages inspiring specific types of ambition rings true.

On the treadmill I listened to Jerry Seinfeld’s funny and poignant 2024 Duke commencement speech:

Fall in love. It’s easy to fall in love with people. I suggest falling in love with anything and everything. Every chance you get. Fall in love with your coffee, your sneakers, your blue zone parking space.

I’ve had a lot of fun in life. Falling in love with stupid, meaningless physical objects… I have truly spent my life focusing on the smallest things imaginable, completely oblivious to all the big issues of living.

*

The only two things you ever need to pay attention to in life are work and love. Things that are self justified in the experience and who cares about the result. Stop rushing to what you perceive as some valuable endpoint. Learn to enjoy the expenditure of energy that may or may not be on the correct path.

An important part to feeling fulfillment is enjoying the expenditure of energy of that particular action. Where does effort feel good? The thing that is meant for you isn’t what is easiest, but where the effort feels worthwhile and enduring: I could do this forever, and I’d prefer not to stop.

✤ On Repeat ✤

Thrilled to be going to the Two Door Cinema Club concert next week! They are one of my favorite bands. The last time I went to their concert was 4/5 years ago in a small independent venue in Philadelphia. I was inches from the stage, and it was a really intimate experience.

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