This one starts with the last Soup, The Machinery of Becoming. Tell it, teach it, or make the conditions and wait. I cannot instruct a habit. It answers to conditions.
Then it builds on that. In August I worked about sixteen hours on my second day off and said nobody needed to talk me down off it. By the end of the month I had a Field Note done a day early, and my part in making it was mostly passing messages between two AIs during a busy Friday shift. It came out fine. That’s what bothered me. So this is about the pace: what stress costs when it keeps switching on [1], why feelings can get harder to tell apart while you’re in it [2], and what I’m changing instead of ordering myself to slow down.
And what’s going on with me right now. The book I’m working on, The Gospel of the Grey, is past halfway. I’m building a program that plays music based on what you’re doing. The Field Notes go to once a week. And I’ve been down a Gene Keys rabbit hole. One of my keys, number 52, runs from stress, to restraint, to stillness [3]. Plus the one thing I can’t settle yet. Endurance, or peace.
What is in it
Tap a time to jump the player there.
- 1:40Hello
- 2:03The last Soup: tell it, teach it, or make the conditions and wait
- 6:37What I’m working on: the book, a music program, my teleprompter
- 7:36August, and nobody needs to talk me down
- 8:54The making, without me
- 10:21The pace, and what later looks like
- 11:07Why it’s hard to see from inside
- 13:11Gene Keys: stress, restraint, stillness
- 15:16What I’ve started changing
- 16:34Endure, or peace
- 17:49The record, read again
- 19:47The door
Everything referenced
- The Soup, Episode 13: The Machinery of Becoming
- The Docket Does Not End, the August Field Note
- Nobody Is Walking Around in the Dark, the Field Note done a day early
- The Emergency Ended and the Work Stayed
- Filling Into a Full Glass
- Serving Seconds, Episode 02: Arriving Isn’t the Same as Finishing
- Serving Seconds, Episode 01: Nothing on the Receipt
- Everything lives here. The Field Notes, The Soup, the books, the rooms.
Sources
- McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840, 33-44. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9629234
- Erbas, Y., Ceulemans, E., Kalokerinos, E. K., Houben, M., Koval, P., Pe, M. L., and Kuppens, P. (2018). Why I don’t always know what I’m feeling: the role of stress in within-person fluctuations in emotion differentiation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(2), 179-191. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30024239
- Rudd, R. (2015). The Gene Keys: Embracing Your Higher Purpose. Third edition. London: Watkins. Gene Key 52 and Gene Key 58
AI was used in the production and editing of this episode. For details on my process, check out “Who Do You Think Wrote This?”