I'm a bit overwhelmed with work right now. Inundated with my commitments. Thankfully I've done this before, know how to handle it. One of the biggest hurdles when juggling things is simple focus. I like my work when I feel undistracted. When the task is immersive and I feel "clear". This is also how I like anything, really.
So I was charmed to find this portion of Laurel's notebook, On immersion. I appreciated, especially, Laurel's words on immersion as responsive to direct needs. I am going backpacking for one short night this weekend, and the joy in backpacking, to me, is that you just respond to the very direct stimuli (safety, food, cool findings). I loved full-time teaching because I had to be "on" all day, responding to the conditions of the classroom, supporting the people in front of me. Essentially the only times I feel immersed in my current work is when I am out in the field (responding to conditions!) or I am listening to fast electronic music and programming or reading late at night (lol).
The most salient immersion in my life, though, is literal. Amidst the busy nature of even just this week, it has felt spacious, and I credit this largely to the time distention associated with getting into water. On Saturday, Nate and I went for a bracingly cold swim at China Beach, in San Francisco. He has been doing a lot of breathwork and I admire his love for and practice around cold water. Yesterday morning I managed to sneak out for an hour of surfing before morning meetings. And today I swam laps in a pool (outdoor!) for the first time since the pandemic. I know that being outdoors and these immersive moments are worth it even when I'm busy. I've enjoyed swimming for years, partly due to its forced immersion: very little stimulus, nothing to do but spin your arms and kick and breathe.
In our conversation, Nate and I chuckled about the question, what do you think about when you swim? Swimming is a very protected, very isolated headspace, especially in the monotony of swimming laps. I often do some arithmetic, or rehash conversations that went poorly, or I just zone out and focus on my lungs. Immersion of this kind feels like blissful disconnection from the frantic demands of the rest of the world. I always look forward to the well-scrubbed brain I can carry out of the water with me after a swim, the kind of thing I need more than ever right now.
My piece of writing for the 2022 Are.na Annual is now online, which speaks directly to surfing as disconnection practice. I like surfing because during an intense session it requires so much of my body and brain that distraction is not an option. Full immersion like that is hard to find. Honestly, the only other thing that even gets close to this, for me, is is driving in San Francisco in a stickshift car (also lol). Maybe an intense team sport would also do it, but I haven't done those in many years. These are activities driven by urgency, however... the immersive potential of gentler & slower activities is equally rich, but sometimes I think I need the urgency, to help me step into that headspace. Laurel's post points to surfing as a model activity for the cyclic experience of immersion, as you structurally can't live in it all the time. At some point you have to step out of the water—maybe so that you can step back in again.
That's all for now. I hope you can take a bath, or go to a sauna, or, best of all, hop into the ocean,
Submerged,
Lukas
So I was charmed to find this portion of Laurel's notebook, On immersion. I appreciated, especially, Laurel's words on immersion as responsive to direct needs. I am going backpacking for one short night this weekend, and the joy in backpacking, to me, is that you just respond to the very direct stimuli (safety, food, cool findings). I loved full-time teaching because I had to be "on" all day, responding to the conditions of the classroom, supporting the people in front of me. Essentially the only times I feel immersed in my current work is when I am out in the field (responding to conditions!) or I am listening to fast electronic music and programming or reading late at night (lol).
The most salient immersion in my life, though, is literal. Amidst the busy nature of even just this week, it has felt spacious, and I credit this largely to the time distention associated with getting into water. On Saturday, Nate and I went for a bracingly cold swim at China Beach, in San Francisco. He has been doing a lot of breathwork and I admire his love for and practice around cold water. Yesterday morning I managed to sneak out for an hour of surfing before morning meetings. And today I swam laps in a pool (outdoor!) for the first time since the pandemic. I know that being outdoors and these immersive moments are worth it even when I'm busy. I've enjoyed swimming for years, partly due to its forced immersion: very little stimulus, nothing to do but spin your arms and kick and breathe.
In our conversation, Nate and I chuckled about the question, what do you think about when you swim? Swimming is a very protected, very isolated headspace, especially in the monotony of swimming laps. I often do some arithmetic, or rehash conversations that went poorly, or I just zone out and focus on my lungs. Immersion of this kind feels like blissful disconnection from the frantic demands of the rest of the world. I always look forward to the well-scrubbed brain I can carry out of the water with me after a swim, the kind of thing I need more than ever right now.
My piece of writing for the 2022 Are.na Annual is now online, which speaks directly to surfing as disconnection practice. I like surfing because during an intense session it requires so much of my body and brain that distraction is not an option. Full immersion like that is hard to find. Honestly, the only other thing that even gets close to this, for me, is is driving in San Francisco in a stickshift car (also lol). Maybe an intense team sport would also do it, but I haven't done those in many years. These are activities driven by urgency, however... the immersive potential of gentler & slower activities is equally rich, but sometimes I think I need the urgency, to help me step into that headspace. Laurel's post points to surfing as a model activity for the cyclic experience of immersion, as you structurally can't live in it all the time. At some point you have to step out of the water—maybe so that you can step back in again.
That's all for now. I hope you can take a bath, or go to a sauna, or, best of all, hop into the ocean,
Submerged,
Lukas