We are all so often so busy in the moment that we can just throw ourselves in bed and forget about what we are doing. We get distracted and it can be hard to concentrate on what is happening without overthinking it.
We live in a time-loop. It’s like a time-loop: the time has come when the time is coming for us to do something. For instance, we can go back and watch the movie “The Great Gatsby,” or the TV show “The Lifeguard,” or whatever. But it’s also time-looping that we are stuck on our own time, not a time-loop that we can just throw ourselves in bed and forget about what we are doing.
This is where the analogy with time-loops comes in. In the case of the movie, the movie just showed us Gatsby and we were bored and we wanted to go back and see the movie again, so we did. On the TV show, we got stuck watching The Lifeguard, and we wanted to go back and watch The Great Gatsby again, so we did.
But as we said, the analogy is a dead-end, because there is no time-loop that we can just throw ourselves in bed and forget about what we are doing. It’s one way and another, and each one of us has our own time-loop we can throw ourselves into.
You have to throw yourself into something you want to do to have some effect. So all we can do is throw ourselves into something and see how good that turns out to be.
This is a great example of the importance of focus. I’ve been trying to write a blog post on this over the last few days, and it’s been weighing on me. It’s not that I have something important to say, it’s that I have to decide what to say. If I can only think about one thing that I want to say, then I am in trouble.
I was talking with a friend about this idea over dinner last night. And I said, “I want to write a blog post on this.” Then I said, “I want to tell you the things I want to say.” And he said, “Fine.” And I said, “I want to write my blog post.” And he said, “Fine.
Its not that I’m not interested in writing a blog post. It’s that I have to decide exactly what I want to say. And I don’t want to say something that will make me sound like I just came up with the idea. But the idea is there, so I want to write it. But that’s not the point.
And so I have to decide the point and I have to make the decision. So that Im not just writing something that means nothing. That doesn’t sound stupid to me. But Im not going to write something that says something that I dont actually want to say. But Im going to write something that says something that I actually do want to say. And thats not going to be something that I say, “Oh yea, I guess Im going to do that.
It is true that most writers are forced to write whatever they are forced to write in order to keep their jobs. But some write a lot more of their own work than others. And some are so self-possessed that they have no idea what they are writing or what it will mean until they have it. That’s the difference between the writer and the poet.
