#78: being untidy
👋 Welcome to the 78th issue of Out of Curiosity, a weekly newsletter promoting ideas to help get 1% better everyday.
My name is Reza, and every week, I go through nearly 100 pieces of content (from books and podcasts to newsletters and tweets), and bring you the best in this newsletter.
If you enjoyed this issue, let me know by hitting the ❤️ button ⤴
In this issue:
🙇♂️ You are what you believe yourself to be
🧹 To be untidy is to be alive
🧘♀️ Going home to yourself
🌱 On digital gardens
🙇♂️ You are what you believe yourself to be
Self-enhancement bias allows us to maintain our happiness. Your wildly inaccurate self-evaluations get you through rough times and help motivate you when times are good. People who are brutally honest with themselves are not as happy day to day as people with unrealistic assumptions about their abilities.
You are the story you tell yourself. If you believe that you have no chance of being a writer, a designer, or an entrepreneur because none of the dots in your past add up, then of course you have no real shot at being one. The story you tell yourself either opens doors or closes doors.
⭐️ Great teachers/mentors/friends make every door a glimmering opportunity to try, to learn, to figure out what you have inside of you.
The only thing that could cast a larger shadow than my self-doubts were my self-delusions. On paper, I should have chosen a different path. Every writer—I might even go as far as every person trying to build a creative life—requires self-delusion. To play the long game, you have to keep your spirits up. Every blank draft felt like charging into a pack of buffalo. At the end of the day, all you have is the story you tell yourself and the self-discipline to commit to your practice everyday.
The world is not asking you to be realistic about how you’ll do the work. The world is asking for your imagination and your creativity—to build bridges from here to there. Being realistic about your prospects will actually be unhelpful. You have to psyche yourself up.
→ COLLINS | 6-min read
🧹 To be untidy is to be alive
I’ve spent a lot of time forgetting what’s important — and a lot of time forgetting that what’s important lacks a certain neatness.
What is meant for me will not always be easy and effortless; what’s important isn’t always neat. Perhaps this isn’t because I’m out of alignment, or not approaching it correctly, or doing it wrong — perhaps it isn’t because I haven’t made the proper initiations or moved through all the rites of passage in the correct order; perhaps this just means being a person is a lot more complex and complicated than those trying to sell us constant ease and tidiness want us to believe. Perhaps it isn’t ours to fix at all, but ours to welcome, embrace, accept, understand, lean into, learn from, allow.
And, none of this is because ease isn’t available. It is. But I wonder if ease is found moment to moment, in between the breaking wave, rather than a place we need to get to for the rest of time.
⭐️ Letting it all be untidy means dropping my ideas about how it should go so I can more fully lean into how it’s actually going. Letting it all be untidy means surrendering to the pace that is most true, rather than the pace I assume will take the least amount of time or effort.
→ Human Stuff | 6-min read
🧘♀️ Going home to yourself
Thich Nhat Hanh explains that going home to yourself means being truly present in the moment.Mindful breathing can unify body and mind and help us feel calm and aware.
Closing the six senses and focusing on the breath can stabilize the situation and help us feel safe and calm.
→ Plum Village | 6-min watch
🌱 On digital gardens
I grew up in two locations: gardens and the internet. In both spaces, I’m learning what it means to tend to my individual and our collective dreams.
Digital gardens believe time moves cyclically. They are bored of the reverse chronological feed that is the norm for the majority of social networks. They value iterative learning and adjust from conclusion as needed. They believe we should have easy access to our archives.
→ Deem Journal | 7-min read
✨ One last thing…
👋 Until next week,
🗂
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