Dedication.
https://youtu.be/Ost6xCb4LB0
Wake up. Thinking about dreaming about it.
Go through the morning motions, with that one thing running through your mind, just behind the eyes in the bathroom mirror.
The food you eat is fuel, gasoline in the motor to give you the energy that will take you further along the track towards mastery.
The time you have to spend working, hustling, that’s all just a simple means to an end- like a wrench that undoes the bolt otherwise holding you back from your passion.
Don’t sweat it. Just do whatever it is you have to do to make your thing happen.
Lunch break, “down time,” whenever other people are smoking cigarettes, talking about the latest episode of some T.V. show, shooting the shit- whatever it is the human crowd is doing these days: you don’t know.
You’re a machine, not a man. Hellbent in a single direction, all moving parts oiled and informed toward one major function. You dedicate those little moments to your craft.
Sketch, read, watch tutorial videos, use those precious little scraps to add to your fire, turning into a blaze.
Once these mundane obligations are discharged, your time in between is spent meditating on the work to come. Once engaged in it, you are focused and fierce, a burning love for each second spent with the object of your worship. Here, you are truly in the present, all past and future concepts forgotten, wrapped up in the ecstasy of self-creation. Like a lover’s embrace, time is made to stand still and only the action remains.
You make of it a monolith- the central pillar of your world, the axis mundi, that idol around which your personal religious cult is centered. You sacrifice to it, with time, blood, sweat and all those other things you could have done.
Following this, you reflect on your practice. Its strengths and weaknesses.
What you came away with, and in what realms the focus needs to tighten.
A journal is kept of this progress and insight, each word a prayer and rededication to this thing that has become your god, to refer back to in moments of insight and emptiness. Drawings and mental cues, tools of remembrance and sigils that inspire the mind to quickness and the hands to action- all saved here, like loaded dice in the game called life.
Thoughts are then put to rest, as the body and brain recover for the next Herculean effort. The wise know that recovery is as crucial to success as the action itself, and they remain in a perpetual state of inspired transition from rest to wakefulness, action to reflection- Learn, Apply, Improve, Repeat. Eternal.
92.
-P.W.