✍️ you're not here : the meantime

an exercise for your hands

Well, I promised you an exercise for your hands, and here it is. The idea of this exercise is for you to spend around ten to fifteen minutes on paper, away from the screen.

In many ways, I think the meantime / Mean Time

can scatter your attention and force you to furture-trip. This happens to me a lot when I can’t really tell whether I’m in Good Forward Motion or just stalling, so I start hunting for evidence. Is there a sign? Will this be worth it? What is everyone else doing? (This line of thinking is, I think, the kiss of death.) You end up living ahead of yourself, thinking in a circle, while the present, the only place in which we are alive, goes by, unwitnessed. We can’t have that.

Life is a long series of presents, and if you’re to send it looking elsewhere, you might even arrive at the places you want and still look elsewhere, still rush ahead. We train ourselves out of staying. I know because I do it. The habit doesn’t just switch off when you get the result, so it becomes more difficult to feel, fully. Our work here is about decorating the room we’re in, right now,

so this week, we practise looking at what’s right here.