The rhythm of life

“I love what I do. But I do so much!”

Since ages, that question has haunted me. Trying to find a meaning, a word, a something that gives raise to an emergence within, to a word that makes sense and a knowledge that tells me: “Hey, that is who I am! That is my purpose! That is my soul"!”

But to this day, 38 years later, this has not yet happened.

And yet, I stay obsessed with that question.

And ask myself - what does it mean?

Now we have two questions: The one of passion, of essence and the one of the meaning of the question altogether.

But what drives those questions? Are they the questions that are the ones we need to answer?

The Elephant in the Room

When I am in my element, do I ask that question?

I asked that question to many people. The answer: Just do what you love to do and you do not ask that question anymore.

Ok, that is what I did. I moved to another city, I went to networking events, I was in my flow. Everything was great. And I almost forgot that question.

Three months later, it haunted me again: “What is that for"? Is that my true essence?”

I was speechless, when someone at an event told me ‘I have it easy, I do accidents. That is what I tell people. As I am a lawyer helping them to solve their accidents. That is me. I am done and all people get it what I do.”

My inner me screamed: “That is what I want to have too. I also want to have that thing I can tell. I want to have that essence.”

And the same day, I went into my apartment and asked AI to help me go through a long list of questions of ‘what is the essence of what I want to do? What is the essence of what I do?’

After a long session, I had a list of 500 items, skills, scrambles, ideas, and ‘passions’ all scrambled on a piece of paper and I tried to narrow it down further and further until I would be done.

The result: a total mess and a wake up from an exercise, that felt exhilerating at the start, but soon daunting and stressful: ‘What is it? What is it?’ would it haunt me in my frenzy search for ‘the thing’.

The Elephant moved on

The elephant has disappeared. The question was gone. For a short time, I woke up from my obsession to figure it all out.

The exercise drowned me and left me in a hole without a bottom. Depleted and tired. And with the firm grasp of the exercise being the wrong measure of figuring out what is beneath.

I went to do other things, escaped the lingering question in mind to explore shopping windows, refresh from the deep thoughts of the mind and the emotions that could not bear what they witnessed.

I was alone again. Without what I hoped I would fine. I was walking without purpose it felt, in emptiness and yet full of ideas. I started again. Over. Redefining myself in the phrases of the dichotomy of the thousands.

Nothing was there to hold onto and the avenues of possibilities widened fast, showing me the pathways I could have taken and now would be able to take again.

Where would they lead to, which one should I take? Can I really take them all?

Why are there so many, why is there not the essence.

But for a short time, I had chosen, Chosen the chaos of the many. The incoming floods of ideas was gigantic. All those, I had hold off in my search for the essence: psychology, intelligence, AI, characters, design, branding, product development, growth, building, poetry, writing, videos, it all came back to its surface. Waiting to be heard and waiting to get a spot on the list.

The Wide Web of Passions

It was time to follow them all. To recalibrate and to simply start. To get back, what was lost and to get back what was hidden before.

All these ideas emerged and waited for their turn. And they all got turned around, in one way or the other. Hey, what is it again that fascinates me so about intelligence - the human and the mind, the artificial one - what is behind that passion, what drives me there, what are the ideas I have there, what do we want to start with? And the same for the others too.

And the yin and yang of wrestling with the wide open of them all - if I do that sitting and writing, and I do that other thing, coding and programming, and then I want to do sports, ah, and I have friends, I haven’t seen in a long time, and I still have a full-time job - how exactly does it all work?

At some point, a similar depletion would set in and there would only be one answer left: Doing nothing or simply doing something.

The Start of Something

Just doing. That would be the way out. The only road of something, if the other solution is paralysis without an answer, doom scrolling and dying in the nothingness of the moment.

The result ended up to be a hard dichotomy. On one hand I would long for the obsession of the project, anything, something that attunes itself in the moment, ready to be grasped and worked on without any stop: the new project.

And the other path was the scrolling, reading, hoping to jump on the next train of inspiration, that would emerge by scrolling and reading in the moments of the inner scramble.

The better solution and hope within, was the obsession. Something tangible to hold onto. Something that is a result that emerges out from the moment. Something that appears and is simply there and allows for the calmness of the mind.

The occupation that gives raise to the calming of the mind. The busyness that allows for the eradication of the question altogether, as the brain, the mind, the emotions, they are occupied, they are focused, they are all there in that moment, with the full stop of the asks of the meaning.

The pauses are simply not given, the wideness of the brain is taken away, as it is mounted to the challenge ahead, the action, the movement, then concentration. It cannot do anything else than that. It can simply focus. And that is what it does.

The Emergence of the New

Through the work on the one thing that became the obsession, the brain is busy. It calmed down. It almost forgot the question. It is on the back burner, it is in the back yard. Sometimes it pops up, in the mornings when waking up, in the breaks when there is no focused idea to follow, in the moments of moving and the moments of short rephrasing of the project.

But despite those moments, the brain, the body, the whole being is focused on that one thing and the only thing: building something new.

And heck, I can tell you, it is fast. Fast and focused does it build the new thing. Nothing can distract it and nothing should distract it. It is in its zone and it can produce fast and effective. To an extend where it forgets all that is around. It is like a drug of the moment, a drug of the thing that was chosen to be created. It can be small and it can be big, but it is the one that cancels the mind on the one thing that cares.

The result are various, a new book a new product, a new framework or a new string of thoughts. It is the outcome of the emergence of the new.

So new, so exciting, so focused, so, yes, so what.

The Cracks in the Surface

Soon after, the body gets tired. It slips through the surface, it cracks open and it demands answers: What is that here? Why is there no break? Are you willing to destroy all else for the thing? The New you bring to emergence? Is that really the right use of your time? The essence of what you want to be known for?

What is it that chose it? You, your brain? The moment of the emptiness?

The questions come in wave, louder do they get with every ask, and more burning with every awaken day.

At some point, they cannot be stopped, they create rifts and pushes apart. The focus stops, the moment is lost, the obsession wanes.

The brain tries to stop, to hold on to what it was excited about, the inner being disagrees. They fight within and fight for the time the brain can still play. It holds onto its obsession like a flummy ball that is about to give up. And yet, the musings of the mind, they ask for clarity, where there is essence, and they ask for essence, where there is no clarity.

It is the dichotomy, the questions, the rational and the emotional, that emerge from the obsession. The hope for a better future. A more balanced perspective and a question of the life that is lost in the obsession of the one thing.

The Field Wide Open

And the field is open again. The obsession stops and the cycle begins anew. A short moment of simple being. Of nothingness paired with productiveness. I created something. Something new saw the day of light. Wow, that feels good. I learned something new. Created something new. Explored something new.

And yet, the something may be half baked, may by a nice experiment, a new learning and new perspective. And yet, for the sake of the world, it may never see its world. It may be hidden, as the obsession runs out and the field opens for then new to emerge.

A new cycle begins that looks for new answers, and new questions emerge that look for the right direction to emerge.

We are back at our earlier phases, and the question remains - what is the essence of it all? Is there any essence? Any answer? Or is the text written with the phases and cycles an answer of itself, the answer that is hidden within the lines of the text, where it is not the text in need for decoding but the context within and the structure that holds together that give raise for the answers that where not to be found by the something, but by the how of the way the cycle emerges.

The Cycle and The Waves

There is a company called Weights and Biases. They do something with AI and Machine Learning. But what if a human life is the same. Cycles and Waves. A dichotomy, a longing, a direction. Something that does not find answer in the things and the doings, but the pure fact of the being and the cycles and waves through which we go.

Maybe it is the creation and doubting that emerges from the being, and the understanding that it is not about the what but about the how. The rhythm that arises from the being and the rhythm that finds its way to new things. And the acceptance that sometimes it is more about the belief that the cycles and the waves will find its meaning in the moment of the being.

That life is not the perfect linear perspective, that the person who found its accident is the one that may be good in sharing, but may be another person within, or may have his own cycles and waves.

Or to learn that not everyone even has those cycles and waves. That we are all diverse and we may all go through the world of different structures and forms.

Some have a line that is what forms their life. And others have cubes that form their life, others again have circles and the next have cycles and waves.

But all is the underlying current that determines what drives us and what makes us who we are. And it is that current, that we should follow, that we should make sense of and that we should understand.

Once we do, we can follow our current, and accept its knowing. And from that, we can know, that there is an elephant in the room, a wide web of passions, an emerge of the new and a field wide open. The phases are clear, the beauty of them all emerging and the understanding, that all are needed to create and build and bring to essence what would be hidden beneath the surface, crackled down and dismantled.

It is that, that eludes the question and understands, it is the question that give raise to new emergence and new emergence to new questions. The cycles and the waves, they start anew, but with a new learning and a new passion, a new perspective and a new understanding.

What is your current? What are the forms that build your rhythm? I would love to learn more about how you are framing them and how they are marking your perspectives?