Is there anything more sublime than the rapture found during creativity? I think not. The act of creation, in your preferred medium, takes you to a realm of serenity and ease.

[Tchaikovsky] had just one, temporary analgesic for his misery: “It would be in vain to try to put into words that immeasurable sense of bliss which comes over me,” he wrote in 1878, to his patroness, “[when] a new idea awakens in me and begins to assume a definite form.”

~ Arthur C. Brooks, from The Tchaikovsky Cure for Worry

I’m certainly not feeling a uniformity of misery. Rather, I feel like I do when I take a sunny Saturday to completely empty the ‘ol car and thoroughly clean the interior… and then head out for a long drive. “Oh. Right, I remember this car.” I feel I’ve been unloading baggage from my mind, and now—just sometimes—it doesn’t seem so sluggish; It doesn’t seem so encumbered.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

~ Stephen Jay Gould

I’ve recently returned to focusing on working in shorter, fixed-duration dashes, as opposed to working with a pre-chosen ending point. This is always a point of slight hesitation for me: Will I actually be able to stop without feeling frustrated at the allotted time? (Yes.) Will I be able to easily save my place in a way that I can resume work later? (Yes!) Will I be able to do the same quality of work that I believe I can only do with open-ended sessions? (YES!)

Because, do you realize how insanely awesome it feels to look back, at the end of that day, and see real progress on that thing that you’d been thinking about for years? That’s the catalyst that gets me to come back to sand timer dashing every time I drift away from it.

In 1898, Frederick Taylor was hired as a consultant by the Bethlehem Iron Company with the stated mission of improving the efficiency of the workers. It was there that Taylorism morphed from the wheedling ideas of an eccentric into canonical corporate practice. As Nikil Saval notes in Cubed, Taylor’s recipe for efficiency rested on a singular, and dehumanizing, foundation: “The key, [Taylor] would discover, was to take knowledge away from the workers and install it in a separate class of people.” That being the managers, of course. Taylor’s model of workplace productivity depended entirely on deskilling, on the invention of unskilled labor—which, heretofore, had not existed.

~ Mandy Brown, from Knowledge workers

The Bethlehem Iron mentioned there is the company that became the Bethlehem Steel. It’s hard to convey how entwined that entity is with my life, and I didn’t realize that as I was growing up. Sure there are many famous buildings and bridges its steel built, which I’ve used. But more so I mean the countless people I personally knew who worked there. Everyone everywhere simply said “the steel”. My family is all from in and around that Allentown from the Billy Joel song. I drove around the steel, lived near the steel, and went to college next to the sprawling plant in South Bethlehem. (Being near it was like being a little too close to some Promethean, tinkering God’s workshop.) The steel’s research facility atop South Mountain was part of Lehigh University by the time I was a student there. Their I-beam logo is subtly present in many places, and of course there’s a lot of “why is that large steel structure there” around the Lehigh Valley. (For example, the local casino has an enormous traveling gantry crane out front.)

The defenders of our freedom have failed to take into account our infinite appetite for distraction.

~ Aldous Huxley

Yikes. Sorry. Tangent. I wasn’t expecting that steel detour. I’ll get back to work. Here, have 15, concrete pieces of writing advice from C. S. Lewis:

Avoid distractions. — Turn off the Radio.

~ from Justin Taylor’s 15 Pieces of Writing Advice from C. S. Lewis

“Turn off the radio.” That’s so cute. It had an ‘off’ switch. How do we turn off this fire-hose of information pointed at us every moment of our entire lives? No, I’m not railing against phone use (even though they do always deserve a good railing.) No, I’m doing my gopher imitation, popping up above the crowd to say: Does everyone else see Godzilla coming down Broadway? That’s really there, right? Why aren’t we all running the other way?

Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on. It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves. You don’t stand in your own way. […] Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there’s one simple test: Because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve. They don’t assume, ‘I know the way.’

~ Wynton Marsalis

Godzilla coming down Broadway? Information overload? I mean, I’m not certain information overload is a direct threat to the human race’s survival. But that is definitely my strong opinion (albeit weakly held.)

Why did such a bland observation resonate with so many people? It’s easy to see why the internet now feels like a place we need to flee from. The smartphone physically attached the internet to our persons; now we take the internet wherever we go, and its little colored icons are always beckoning, telling us to abandon whoever we’re talking to or whatever we’re working on and check the latest posts. But what’s harder to remember is why the internet used to be an escape from the real world.

~ Noah Smith, from The internet wants to be fragmented

The biggest reason is that it used to be difficult to get to the Internet. You had to be a bit curious (both meanings), a little crafty, a little tenacious, and okay with constant frustration. Because getting to the Internet was just all brambles and ankle-twisting terrain. That was not better, but it was different. There are many parts of the Internet that are still like that, but somehow everyone seems to be stuck in front of the Lewis’s-radio parts.

Turn off the radio.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

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