We need to stay engaged, somehow
I'm increasingly struggling this summer to understand what's valuable for me to do. With work, top-down is more obscured than it's been in years. People ask me like I know, and I don't have answers, only a few warnings. With life, there are always so many things to do, but where is momentum? Projection on both fronts seems important and useless.
Back home now I guess, the void is hitting harder. Captured memories of the trip are nice, but posting them these days feels fake. Cheerful but fake. The sentence I want to write next is "Work and life should resolve themselves eventually; they always do." But we know where that sentiment falls. "Eventually" is wreckless abuse of the future.
I need legitimate hope. Where I get consolation today is a story on forms and improvisation… Classical advocates of the practice believe that it is not only historically valid but intellectually enlivening. For a recent paper in NeuroImage, Aaron Berkowitz and Daniel Ansari studied what happens cognitively when someone improvises; they observed increased activity in two zones of the brain, one connected to decision-making and the other to language. Even if a soloist extemporizes for only a minute, the remainder of the performance may gain something intangible.
