Stream2

There’s something that’s become central to my life for at least the last year or so that I want to share today. In terms of my inner life, it is the central thing, above and beyond all else.

It started maybe about 18 months ago when I was meditating two hours a day. I was so keen to make progress in meditation, but I found it to be an intractable problem. I meditated a tremendous amount and usually felt good despite the inherent struggle in it, but I never felt like I was learning anything new. Maybe I was making slow progress to becoming more Zen, but I was looking for more. I wanted eureka moments.

So naturally, given that I had tons of time in my own head, eyes closed, with just me and my thoughts, I started thinking impulsively. It started off slow, and perhaps I’d always been thinking during meditation, but I do remember at some point I felt some new element in my thoughts, and it was something like the crystallization of thought into an idea that was satisfying. I came to feel that in all those hours of meditation, the only thing that really made me feel any good was arriving at one of these crystallized thoughts. The first ones were generally contemplations about philosophical work I’d read, like about Plato’s cave or Aristotle’s intellectual virtue.

After a while however, I started thinking about anything. I’d think about my living space, my kitchen routine, piano, entrepreneurship, Chinese, etc… Literally anything in my life would become fair game for this new form of thinking where crystallization was the aim.

Eventually I stopped meditating for the very reason that I found this process (which I’m calling inspiration and discovery) was more rewarding than the meditation ever was, and I didn’t need to meditate to be inspired and discover something. (I’ve since resumed meditating, but only 20-40 minutes per day.)

If you read my article Exploration and Discovery, you might be thinking this is a rewrite, but it’s not. Exploration and Discovery was on the order of weeks or months. I was talking about getting into an open ended project to eventually land on a new baseline.

When it comes to inspiration, I’m talking about something that happens hundreds of time per day. It’s literally all I spend my time doing. And the cool thing about inspiration, is that it almost always results in discovery. It’s like the reason I get inspired is because there’s something in my mind, some neural potential maybe, that wants to be realized.

I work this way, I play piano this way, I have conversations this way, I exercise this way. Long ago before I started meditating I used to live my life by making choices. I would try to make the right choices to have the best outcome, but now that I’ve been through years of meditation practice, the one thing that has really changed is that now I operate on inspiration, not choice. It’s become my life. As soon as I wake up, I’m looking for an opportunity to be inspired, by anything, and I follow this wave all the way until my head hits the pillow at night.