Letter #10: Grow gently into the New Year

Goa, 11th December 2022

Dear friend,

Here we are in the last month of 2022. Can you believe it? This all started in January with a letter on the “Psychology of Inspiration” and it’s soon going to be one whole year of us connecting like this. My intention at the start was to keep writing letters which would draw from science to untangle the mysteries part of a creative’s life. The name Brain Food letters felt apt because, well.. I thought these letters would contain a lot of science & brainy stuff in general. In the process of writing these letters, I wanted to read (*study*) psychology to nourish my own interest in the subject & specially what it can teach us about the creative process.

The first few letters did follow this approach. But along the way I ended up writing in all sorts of styles. My lived experience from the month guided the theme for each letter, and I often found that some topics didn’t need any science or rationale to be forced into them at all. My last letter on not-creating and an earlier one on journaling are 2 such examples, which came straight from my personal experience & nothing else. Some drafts never became a full-letter.

I intended to write one letter every month and ideally I should have been writing Letter 12 as of today, not 10. But that didn’t happen either. Life happened instead. Both sickness & great joys took me away from writing time & again.

And you know what…

I wouldn’t have it any other way. :)

As I’m looking back at 11.5 months of writing, the one thing I can confidently say is: We can’t force an idea into taking form perfectly as-intended, and this stands (especially) true in the case of creative concepts which get executed over long durations - like Brain Food over a whole year. As I write this line, I have a strong urge to hit backspace because my Inner Critic is shouting at me about what a weakling I am. But I’ll say it again:

The best intentioned ideas change form as they grow, as YOU grow.

Our world-views are expanding, brains are quite literally evolving (read: neuroplasticity) and our environments are undergoing drastic change every single day. New experiences, ideas & constraints are constantly filling up our days. And so, where is the space to feel any guilt about not “sticking to the plan”? Whether it means that my Brain Food letters go off timeline & become Soul Food letters in some months. Or it means that you take a life-changing decision at age 37. There is nothing wrong if the outcome is different from what was intended.

It was absolute serendipity when a creative-ally shared the concept of Wu-Wei with me after reading my last letter. (Thank you, Amit!) The Chinese philosophy of Wu-Wei is mistakenly understood to be synonymous with laziness, but here is what it actually means, as explained by Alan Watts, an English writer known for interpreting Eastern philosophies for a larger audience:

Wu = Non / Not / No / Negation

Wei = a combination of meanings, it can mean = action / making / but the best translation that Alan Watts recommends is ‘forcing’.

And so Wu Wei is the principle of not-forcing anything that you do.

There is a time for action and there is a time for going with the flow. As Shakespeare also knew perfectly well: “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at its flood, leads onto good fortune.” And so, Wu Wei is based on the knowledge of the tide, the drift of things, get with it. Wu Wei is the art of sailing, rather than the art of rowing.

Broad Reach, Paul Krapf via Pixels

Here, the Inner critic chimes in:

“It all sounds beautiful & poetic. Does this mean you’ll stop setting goals for yourself? You’re going to get lazy and your creative practice will become non-existent.”

Yikes!

That’s not what I want. I know that all good things take effort, and you can’t be sailing at sea without the right technique and practice. Left waiting for the right tide, I’ll just be floating around in the ocean to no end and to no joy. Or worse - getting overturned by a not-so-generous wave.

So where does one find the right balance between making an effort but not forcing what’s not meant to be?

Like most of my questions, this one is going to take a while to answer. But in the interim, I think the idea of *Gentle Goals* is good food for thought and I’ll try to talk about it with a personal example…

While these Brain Food letters were an ambitious and publicly-visible goal of mine for 2022, there was another smaller, much gentler goal which I was working on in private too: 100 days of movement.

From December 2021 to November 2022, I gave myself a whole year to log 100 days of movement.

Not 100 days in a row.

Not 100 days of equal intensity.

Not 100 days of the same exercise either.

Just intentional movement in one form or the other.

This may not seem like a big deal to those who already have exercise routines in place. But I used to truly S T R U G G L E with intentional exercise of any form. Even though I intellectually understood the importance of it, I just couldn’t get myself to do it regularly. In December 2021, after a lot of failed attempts, I’d finally given myself what I now call a Gentle Goal :)

3000 steps / 5000 steps / dance workouts / kayaking / hiking / running / MMA classes / surya-namaskars / skipping / stretching - I was open to picking up any form of movement over the course of a year. I just had to move as often as possible, and format didn’t matter at all.

Here are the results:

The least I exercised was 0 days in June and the most was 18 days each in both April and July. While I tried to focus on moving one day at a time, my confidence got a sudden boost when the cumulative count reached 97 in August. By the end of one year, I was at 114! (yaaaay) This was 114 more days of movement compared to what I’d have logged if the goal didn’t exist in the first place. As of today, exercise has stopped feeling like a chore I must do, and has become an exploration of the different ways in which I can appreciate my body’s capabilities. It’s stopped being a quest for drastic self-improvement, and become a celebration what is & what little more it can be.

:)

I see any goal as consisting of 3 parts:

• The beginning - setting an intention

• The large middle - acting in alignment with the intention, and

• The end - achieving the goal

I guess Gentle Goal differs slightly from other hardcore(?) goals at all of these 3 stages, constantly keeping an element of self-compassion at the heart of it.

Setting an intention

It’s good to remember that the entire responsibility of achieving the goal is on our future-selves - the version of us which we haven’t even met yet. Who knows what highs & lows they would have experienced by the time the goal-duration comes to an end. Can we hold some compassion for this future-self, and set intentions differently?

For example, our intention might be more experiential, instead of being numerical. “I want to share my thoughts & learnings through writing regularly”, instead of “I want to write 12 well-researched, well-crafted letters over 12 months”.

If number-based targets are actually helpful for you (as they are for me in some situations), how about setting a range instead of a fixed number? “I will exercise between 70-150 times this year”.

I’m just throwing ideas out there, and I’d love to hear from you if something like this has worked for you?

Acting in alignment

Once our enthusiastic present-selves have set an intention, it’s time for… <insert dramatic music> effortful action!

Here too, holding compassion for ourselves is key and it can help us both slow down & speed up - depending on our day & how we approach this.

Some days, we might be gentle on ourselves by picking an easy exercise & not doing the full routine. On other days, we might motivate ourselves to get moving by holding some compassion for our future-self. I try to think of my future-self as I’d think of my closest friend. Would I want to burden my best-friend with work which I could have done today? (Sometimes I might, but mostly I don’t.) “I’m feeling a bit lazy but if I just exercise for sometime today, my tomorrow-self will thank me for it.”

Achieving the goal

What if achieving the goal could mean different things? It doesn’t need to mean achieving a certain number. What if it could mean being slightly better than before?

At this point, our inner critic may say: “You’ve spent 6 whole months doing this, you ought to have made more improvement. Slight isn’t enough”

This idea of “slight improvement” goes against current-popular wisdom which tells us to set audacious targets & push through them for real growth. Society in general is obsessed with the idea of more. More ideas, more consumption, more desires… more goals achieved faster, at whatever cost. While short-term growth may be possible that way (and even necessary given certain life circumstances) it's not a sustainable way to grow through life.

So perhaps, a gentle goal may end with a reflection on the process, our learnings from it, seeing how “slightly” we’ve grown.. not just with a number achieved.

The numeric evaluation of Brain Food letters tell me that:

• I have written 10 letters in 11.5 months.

• 65 people opted in to read these letters.

A deeper reflection on the Brain Food letters reveals:

• I’m slightly better at writing than I was before.

• I have written my first set of long-form pieces which I am proud of. I’m excited to see how I can build on top of them.

• By writing these letters, I have allowed myself time to explore aspects of the creative process that I find most amusing.

• 65 amazing people (including you) have held space for my thoughts & felt close enough to reply at times.

• I have learnt how the art of writing is both similar and different to the other forms of creativity I’ve understood so far.

• I feel like a writer and I love the feeling.

• And more :)

With the New Year around the corner, I hope we can walk into it with a lot of self-compassion - whether that means setting a gentle goal, or not setting a goal at all.

I would love to hear from you about your end-year plans or new-year rituals, if any. In the meantime, I’m going to continue prepping some yum Brain Food over the last 20 days of December.

Cheers,

Nishita

PS. Here's a good read about the End of History illusion, relating to how we perceive our future selves: New York Times