☕ saturday mornings - october 28, 2023
fairy tales, meditation & your inner child
Happy Saturday!
I hope you’re having a lovely start to your weekend.
What I’ve been up to:
This week has been my busiest in a while. Many 12-hour work days :( There's just a lot to do.
When I sit at my computer all day, I burn my brain into a confused submission and feel spacy, until I get outside for a few hours. I feel like I don’t have a body. It's not my ideal existence. But I'm learning.
I published the longest essay I've ever written on my experience switching from meditation to Morning Pages. I didn’t think anyone would read it. But the response has been so heart-warming.
Here are the most interesting ideas I've explored this week.
✍️ quote i’m pondering:
Writer and philosopher G. K. Chesterton on love:
“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
📚 book passage i loved:
“I haven’t meditated, and I know I have been afraid that meditation might open up lots of things that could delay the passage of this craft I’m rowing. It is an intentional limitation in order to go in a direction and get there. And I have gotten there, and I know it…
Each of us has individual capacities. The real trick is knowing the machinery of the boat in which you are crossing the channel.”
― A Joseph Campbell Companion by Diane K. Osbon
Psst. This quote from Campbell was the crux of my essay this week.
💡 idea from me: your inner child
Early one morning, I sat down at my desk, cracked open my worn leather journal, and started drawing a design for a guitar stand.
Back at home in September, I dug out my Mom’s old Yamaha Folk guitar from the cellar. Dusted off the cobwebs. Taught myself a few chords.
The case is heavy and clunky and ugly. But the guitar is beautiful. I decided I would build a stand for it. For aesthetic beauty. But also to work on a meaningful project with my hands and learn a bit of woodworking in the process.
One night last week, lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, a vision for the design of the guitar stand beamed into my brain (God only knows why).
It took me a few days, but eventually, I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
I haven’t drawn a design in at least a decade.
But when I was a child, I’d sit at our dining room table with piles of printer paper and a big blue basket of sharpened Crayola pencil crayons, and draw for hours.
I wanted nothing more than a tree house in our backyard. I must’ve drawn a hundred variations—with rope ladders and trapdoors and secret passageways and drawbridges and slides. I was so insistent on building one, I remember mapping out each step of the process to make it easier on my parents (all in 10 steps on a single sheet of paper… couldn’t be simpler). I made a list of all the materials needed, down to the number of screws.
More than anything about my childhood I remember this obsession with design, which still feels crystal clear despite its remoteness in time.
When Carl Jung wanted to follow his bliss, he asked himself, "What was the game I enjoyed when I was a child?"
Jung remembered he loved to design towns out of little stones. He bought a property and began to build a home. It was a lot of work and utterly unnecessary because he already had a home. But for Jung, it was sheer play.
“What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.”
It’s funny how as adults we start to slowly transition back into the things we loved as children. The path to bliss is kindling the joy & wonder of a child with the wisdom & maturity of an adult. A fusion of imagination and practicality.
As I’m sitting at my desk drawing, my brother—who knows me more than anyone in the world—is writing beside me. He leans over, sees my page, and says “Hey, it’s just like when you were a kid”.
I have zero carpentry skills but I’m building that guitar stand.
❓ question i’m asking:
When was the last time I asked for help?
📸 photo of the week:
My best photo from Week 5 learning photography in public. See my best four photos on Twitter.
I’ve also fallen in love with the 1920’s Norman Rockwell autumn aesthetic:
Thank you for reading! It means a lot to me :)
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Much love,
Tommy
Syd!
First off thank you so much for reading & engaging with my ideas. I was reflecting a few weeks ago and realized one of the main reasons I write is to connect with bright people who share my love for ideas. So thank you.
You’re so right on all adults not being mature per say and even using their age as an excuse to have fixed beliefs or remain stuck in their ways. As we get older, we’re less prone to change. The revivification of the world to keep us from chaos depends on the youth.
I struggled with the wording on this sentence and couldn’t get to a place I was 100% happy with it. Perhaps “some adults” would have been more accurate haha. Also I think it’s important to separate maturity and age as they can be linked but definitely not always.
Learning adults (even my parents) are just big people was one of those life shattering lessons.
I read a poem yesterday with a line (after I wrote this cuz that’s how it always happens): “The wise person is one who finds what was lost in childhood and regains it”.
Children haven’t fully developed consciousness. Not the same as an adult. They don’t ponder their mortality and place in the universe or have existential crises. They can also be pretty mean.
So it’s returning to the inner child (circular to the place you began like a Hero’s Journey) but awake and aware and fully conscious.
Awake and aware of what? I’d say the sorrow and suffering of being, but still remaining radiant and joyful.
So that’s the idea I was trying to get at :)
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts
Just stumbling on your Substack for the first time and I absolutely love this piece, Tommy!! So much good stuff in here.
I really loved this line and was actually about to restack it: “The path to bliss is kindling the joy & wonder of a child with the wisdom & maturity of an adult.”
But then I started thinking... what does maturity mean here?
I think one of the hardest/most important lessons of aging for me has been the realization that the adults I idolized growing up aren’t superheroes and that many/most adults are capable of acting quite immature (in that their insecure/wounded child self comes out), but get away with it by hiding behind their “wisdom” and “years of experience.”
Thinking out loud here but I wonder if maturity is really acting from the place of that safe, secure inner child... in which case, “maturity” might be a product of channeling the joy and wonder of childhood, rather than something born independently that pairs well with it. Maybe they’re inextricably linked!?