agency & inertia

a collection of anecdotes

The Education of Achilles by Eugène Delacroix, 1862

I’ve been thinking about creating more agency in my life. 

I am a young man that falls into old ways. Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to push back against inertia. To act outside of it. To do things beyond the events that merely happen to me. 

~~~

A few days ago, I made a list of five people I admire. 

The commonality was agency. 

People who do not merely exist on the surface, but have an active curiosity about their world. A certain obsessive nature. A sensitivity to beauty. Who don’t just flip on their drip coffee maker, but learn to craft a cup of coffee using an Aeropress. Who don’t just burn their steak bland, but learn how to cook a michelin-star medium rare. Who don’t just Snapchat their $17 avocado toast but use photography to make people feel wonder and emotions that are difficult to put into words.

Their environment acts on them, but they also act on their environment. 

People who are builders. People who create new things out of nothing and, in their creation, breathe new life into the world. Not excellence in the finished product, but a devotion to the process. An earnestness in their attempt to learn.

There is something divine about creating. 

~~~

One day, I looked at my own life and realized I occupied a two-dimensional existence. 

A toothless life. I had never bitten into anything. I was waiting.

I wrote and I read and I studied and I worked and I exercised. But, I didn’t do much outside of that. I hadn’t cultivated any hobbies, taught myself any weird skills, developed any strong opinions outside intellectual domains.

Surely Tommy has to be more than just an achiever? He must have some quirks that exist outside of the success toolbox? He did as a child. Where did those go?

For the past half-decade, my life was directed towards singular, forward motion: high grades, prestigious internships. Speed was essential. Patience no longer a virtue. There was little time to slow down and absorb the world around me. 

I was both Frankenstein and his monster.

The four year old who would sit down at his dining room table with a big blue basket of pencil crayons and reams of printer paper and draw designs for lightsabers and treehouses with trapdoors and Iron Man armor was lost. There was calculus to be done. 

Creating Agency

This winter was my last semester in university, my last months in the same city as my best friends.

One Saturday morning, I woke up from a dream. Giddy with conviction. In the dream I had made dinner for my roommates. We gathered around our wobbly kitchen table, sat in our dining room lawn chairs, ate together, talked and laughed late into the evening. 

I pulled out my phone and began to type a message into our group chat.

Almost instantly, doubts began to creep in like weeds. My thumbs froze mid-air. “No… it’ll be expensive and I have that project due Thursday and besides I feel like a child inviting my friends to dinner and what if they think it’s stupid or they’re busy or worse if no one responds at all and we’ll all just pretend like it never happened”. 

But before I let myself back out, I hit send. “I’m thinking of doing dinner Tuesday. Anyone down?” A few minutes later, responses came in: “I’ll clear my calendar. Can’t wait”. 

The first part of creating agency is shortening the window between idea and action. If I wait to act on my ideas, time brings rationality which kills agency. It almost always seems more rational not to act, to wait for a better time. Inertia loves inaction. 

I’ve made it a rule not to wait to act on creative impulses.

This month, I learned to bake bread and bought my first plant and booked my hunting license. I dusted off my Mom’s old Yamaha folk guitar and taught myself a few chords. Small. Silly to admit to you. But all things I had stored somewhere in my heart for years, but left to face the cold winds of rationality, left to get crushed by the steamroller of inertia. 

I’m learning my life is malleable. I can act on my dreams. I can pull things into my life to make it richer and more beautiful and more me. It’s akin to watching the Wizard of Oz on my grandma’s grainy, black and white television, to being thrown into the color-drenched, vibrant world of Oz. 

Perhaps that is what happens when I engage with the world. It engages with me back.

~~~

Children are naturally creators, world-builders, obsessive. Much of this is lost in “maturity”.

I’ve begun to excavate interests that lay dormant for years. Parts of me that speed and rationality and institutionalization had cast aside. Parts that “Tommy the student” or “Tommy the banker” or even “Tommy the writer” wasn’t interested in.

I'm slowly recovering a visual sensitivity I haven't kindled since I was a child. 

In September, I committed to learning photography. I scoured Facebook Marketplace for a camera. My lack of knowledge shadowed over like a grade school bully. Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm or Canon? DSLR or mirrorless? Wait what, cameras have mirrors? Do I really want to spend $600?

Procrastinating, I flipped to YouTube and started to save photography videos to watch later. First a few, then ten, and soon I had fifty. Within a day, the notion of learning photography went from delightful to dooming to downright depressing. 

Then, I came across an essay from Simon Sarris:

When you stop waiting for others—for either their permission or instruction—and instead begin on your own, fumbling through, regardless of how ready you are, this could be considered one of the true beginnings of adulthood.

The second part of creating agency is starting with creation.

I don’t need a camera, I can use my phone. I don’t need to watch a single video, I can take pictures of whatever I find beautiful. I don’t need to wait, I can start today.

In the beginning, I will be (capital T) Terrible. With repetition, I will learn. With time, I will improve. With patience, I will flourish.

Now, I am three weeks in. 

I have taken at least a photo every single day. I have not watched a single video on photography. I don’t know a single thing about shutter speed or aperture or composition. I’m letting intuition and joy be my faithful guides. (Although I do look at photography I love and try to figure out what I love about it.)

Already my photos are improving. 

~~~

My step-dad’s father is 93 years old. He has a workshop in his basement where he has built all the furniture in their home. 

His knowledge cannot be fully spoken, written in a book or explained in a tutorial. His knowledge is in his hands. 

In craftsmanship, or any creative endeavor, the job of the student is to discover the wisdom in the master’s hands through working with his own. To uncover knowledge only experience can impart. 

The mind often only stands in the way. 

The third part of creating agency is to learn like an apprentice.

The hands do not learn through words, but patient practice. We have forgotten how reliable of a teacher mistakes can be. We want to skip to mastery. Without the difficulty. 

Being an apprentice requires a great deal of courage. It’s much easier to hide behind “learning more” before I start doing. It’s much easier to wait for tomorrow.

Mastery loses some of its glamor. It no longer exists in a new book or cohort-based course but in decades of diligence. But this time is precisely what makes it valuable. 

~~~

I have said much, yet much is left unsaid. I apologize to the business people for my thoughts are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive. I will pretend this was unintentional.

As I write to you, the city of Buenos Aires is waking outside my window. The days are cool but growing warmer. Much will be done under the sun.

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