the rhythm of processing: daily life vs. travel

 

these days: my mind feels like over-stuffed luggage. I’m bloated. sluggish. travel is like a sudden flood of intake for the mind/body to digest — fast.

what causes discomfort is not the sudden inflow; it’s the backlog of things to process. the problem with thinking/feeling deeply is a constant feeling of psychic constipation. the question is: how do I upgrade my internal processing power?

how to process while traveling (a list)

  • explore keeping a daily diary at multiple layers of experience: EXTERNAL (seen/heard/saw/events), as well as INNER REACTIONS (felt/experienced/thought), and a deeper layer of INNER VISION (sensed/imagined/wondered/dreamed).

  • experiment with diary forms: public vs. private. textual vs. visual.

  • focus on collecting threads of thought - instead of needing to follow a thread to its end. go wide & expansive now — knowing that you can go deep later.

  • centering the self comes before processing experience (aka, wellbeing practices).

  • condense your practice into micro-blocks of < 30 minutes.

  • find consistent windows of time where you’ll be undisturbed everyday (for me, it’s after 11pm, when everyone is sleeping).


💌 I write a weekly newsletter on creative alchemy & world-building called guide.notes. I also have a podcast: botanical studies of internet magic.