Coiling and Uncoiling
Current location: Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading: Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 1 by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris
Listening: Hot & Heavy by Lucy Dacus
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Coiling and Uncoiling
For the past few years, I've been spring-coiling.
That's how I think of it, anyway: a focused process of assessing, experimenting, consolidating, retracting, refurbishing, replacing, upgrading, upskilling, scanning my personal, interpersonal, and professional horizons, and generally questioning every aspect of who I am, what I'm doing, and where I'd like to be as a next-step version of myself.
This stage, this state, isn't unfamiliar territory; I've gone through this process more times than I can count.
And this framing of this process is comforting to me as it implies I'm meant to expand and contract in this way.
It's not weird or worrisome that I'm suddenly moving in a different direction for a spell, orienting around different things and repurposing my momentum inward rather than outward—it's my natural state. That's what springs do.
I've come to associate this compressive process with positive things, as it gives me permission to explore otherwise unwieldy and far-out-seeming possibilities in a context primed for exactly that modality of imagining.
It's a liminal space, though, with all the pros and cons of liminality.
I've got the internal go-ahead to try and dream and sample, but as a trade-off enjoy fewer anchors and fewer solid-feeling, confidence-inducing, time-tested structural elements holding up the ceiling, the walls, the floor of my life.
I tend to enjoy these moments, despite that sense of rudderless interstitially, because they've historically resulted in satisfying period of growth, fulfillment, and expansive (and more solid-feeling) exploration.
That's the spring uncoiling: all that invested kinetic energy exploding outward, a self-creation myth—authored in the preceding weeks or months or years—finally made manifest.
Each new coiling process, unfortunately, is burdened with the worry that this one will be my last.
This time I won't find what I want to find and I'll be stuck in a swirl of maybes and possibilities (and inadequate action) forever. I won't be capable of re-hoisting my sail after growing accustomed to drifting with the current.
I suspect that unsurety is part of the process, though; one of the psychological ingredients that makes the larger recipe work, and which keeps me from overextending or overcompressing—from losing my capacity to ebb and flow, productively pulse, and inflate and deflate at a healthy (for me) cadence.
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Projects
Select, recent works from across my project portfolio.
Aspiring Generalist: Cognitive Endurance
Brain Lenses: ELIZA Effect (podcast version)
I Will Read To You: Emancipation
Let’s Know Things: Funding Journalism
Curiosity Weekly / Daily: July 5 / July 5
One Sentence News: July 6 (podcast version)
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Interesting & Useful
Tracking Heat Records in 400 U.S. Cities — pudding.cool Was yesterday a daily heat record where you live?
New Look, Same Great Look — www.laphamsquarterly.org The history of humans being confounded by color photography.
See what a Sheet Bend or Bowline looks like rotated 45°, 90° 180° or anywhere in-between. Grab some rope and have fun!
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Outro
I didn't visit Madison as planned last week, as there's been a slow-unfolding drama at the museum I intended to visit, and I didn't want to show up and find it closed or largely inaccessible—so I'm waiting a spell to see how that plays out before making the trip.
Instead, I spent the past week doing a lot of painting and oil-pasteling, catching up on a 30-days-of-photography-self-portraits project I'm working on (which makes me super-uncomfortable—which is part of why I'm doing it), and submitted a poem to a competition (my first such submission: which is also discomfort-inducing on many levels).
Tonight I'm planning to attend a Dungeons & Dragons event at a local bar, which should be fun (I haven't played since high school), and I've been getting back into running after a cold-weather hiatus, which has been humbling and rewarding, despite the hefty humidity we've experienced hereabouts, of late.
Lots of little spring-coiling activities, in other words.
What're you up to at the moment? Coiling any springs? Uncoiling after a period of personal-investment?
Shoot me a quick email and tell me what you've been up to. You can reach me by replying to this newsletter or by writing to colin@exilelifestyle.com.
You can also communicate via the usual methods: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or index of monumental trees.
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