Motivic, Not Motivated

    I've done a major chunk of the work I needed to do to start wrapping things up in my present situation, so I've had some time to myself. This has been taken up by diving into studying music—theory, composition, perhaps one day production.

    Music offers an endlessly novel playfield to keep me interested. Recently, I tried writing a poem about novelty, specifically about how my relationship with it feels ruinous. Music offers a partial solution there, methinks.

    I started a 100-day challenge where I try making random ≥ 8-bar compositions. Days 1 & 2 felt terrible, because I was finding it hard to tolerate repeating anything, even motifs which are supposed to be repeated. When watching videos about the craft stressing the importance of repetition to keep things auditorily coherent, in my mind, repetition is still infinitely boring and "not enough". So, I tried that, and it sounded like what it was: a bunch of notes over a complicated harmonic progression—not music.

    A big part of learning music is analysis. I've been actively listening a lot. Fortunately, the breadth of my music taste helps. I can just hit shuffle on my liked songs, and not get stuck in any genre. It was mildly surprising to me to see how much repetition there is in all the pieces I like. You can't develop a musical idea without establishing it first through repetition. You cannot appreciate themes and variations unless there's repetition. Now isn't that a metaphor for life—on a solid, robust foundation built by repetition, appreciating the incremental changes? You need to establish a musical frame of reference, like the tonic of the key you're in. To demonstrate any change, you need to know what the baseline situation is. But the baseline is determined by repetition.

    One (=my mind) may ask, "Why? Just do whatever for long enough and use the average as the baseline." If your baseline changes wildly with ever new data point, your Δ will average to zero. An average of zero is "no significant change". And here comes the shocker—"no significant change" for a long time isn't exactly novel either, it gets characterised (by the same culprit) as "bad". Sigh~~

    So, studying music is slowly showing me the pratyakṣa benefits of repetition. Of course, easier said that done; but, it does fit into the format of śravaṇa-manana-nididhyāsana. Nididhyāsa is something I've not been able to consciously demonstrate kṛtisādhyatā for. Unconsciously, I have, like the "repetition bad, only novelty always good" idea.

    I wonder if a full cup needs emptying before refilling with what you want, or can the new thing displace the old thing directly. I wonder if "should" is the opposite of whimsy.

    Further, further.

Just Keep Swimming

I read manga. That's in the past tense, by the way. I haven't had much time to do so, nowadays. When I do indulge myself on a dreary weeknight after a stressful day, I find myself going back to the series I enjoyed a lot—mostly Tokyo Ghoul, appreciating the foreshadowing of the events that unfold which had, when I first read it, caught me by surprise.

That's how I am looking at this blog today. Qualitatively and subjectively, I am no different than how I was in 2020. If the last half-decade were a Silksong theme, it'd be Greymoor. There's a stagnation that has enveloped my life. Reading back through my posts dating 2019, 2015, 2020 randomly, I see the unhealthy patterns that plague my mind today present years back; only that they were not obviously harmful or sometimes enabled. Since then I have been plucked by the current of "the way the world usually works", removed from my accommodating substrata, and am lost in the deep ocean. Sounds very dramatic, like Dory's story from Finding Nemo; except, Dory had initiative.

If any behaviour has been trained into my mind, it is chasing interests; and unfortunately, these interests have never been constant, coming and going. I see them, I chase them, like a dog chasing a squirrel. I am a sailing vessel on the open seas, going wherever the wind feels like taking me... or abandoning me. The trade winds have left me in the doldrums.

Of course, I'd like to do what I want to do. There are two hurdles: One is getting out of the present situation, and the second is figuring out what it is that I want to do. When chasing interests bore no fruit, my minds instinct wasn't the spiritual realisation that chasing interests is ultimately futile. It concluded that I wasn't chasing enough. The problem with that is that the size of your sails matters none at all if there is no wind. To get out, I have to row my way out, and I have no oar. I have but the direction of home, so I've to get back there. However tempting to the mind it may be to be a doldrum-faring Robinson Crusoe, it's prudent to remember that he survived because Providence landed him on an island.

Movies often cut from the shipwrecking storm to the protagonists being washed ashore. It'd feel nice to sometimes have that option available. But the movie's like Life of Pi, and I don't have a Richard Parker. I have me, my mind that I've to deal with, and my body which feels heavier and heavier with the ticking of the tempus constrictor.

As 'usual', all posts on this blog are first drafts with zero revisions. I did use this blog relatively continuously (now that I have dwarfed all previous 'breaks' with this 6-year one) from 2015 to 2020, which were important formative years. So, it makes sense to continue posting here. I did briefly move to Instagram and then Tumblr, but there are eyes there. They're there here, too, but the ones here feel more like my eyes. This is a first (post in a while), so I don't know how it's gonna go from here on out. I don't even know, and I highly doubt, if anyone else even notices or remembers this back pocket of the internet from over a decade ago.

If there is anything to learn from Dory, it is to just keep swimming.

Further, further.