A boulder in the middle of a river doesn’t stop the river. The river recalibrates, flows around the boulder, and over time wears it down, the boulder changes shape and becomes part of the river itself. Not an enemy, just a background noise that gets quieter and quieter. Sometimes it wears away completely, sometimes it stays, but stops doing any damage.
Someone might point out that a river could run into several boulders, enough to form a dam and block everything. Even then, the river finds a way through, carves a gap between them, goes over them, creates a waterfall, but it doesn’t stop.
The example isn’t mine, and if you go analytical on it, a whole world opens up. But let’s stick to these two cases, the single boulder and the dam, and get into why I picked them right now.
A period you probably know too
This period is complex, hard, demanding, and that’s nothing new if you’ve been reading me. But it’s teaching me a lot, even on the darkest days, and strangely enough I’m growing more now than in other stretches of my life. That risks sounding like a cliché, the kind I hate hearing myself, so let me actually explain it instead of leaving it there.
Ideal moments alone aren’t enough
Setting a personal change in motion isn’t easy, especially the first step, everyone knows that. Take a simple case, changing a habit or picking up a new one, not a full overhaul of who you are.
We tend to assume, wrongly, that it only works in ideal conditions, the moments when we can actually focus energy on that one thing. That’s part of it, but not all of it. If you only build a habit that way, the foundation stays weak, and it’s one of the first things to crack when a hard stretch hits.
Working on it in complex moments too, on the exhausting days, is one of the most useful challenges there is. Same principle as sport, training your mind to do something inside a hard context roots it deeper. It gets more solid, and once it becomes automatic it holds up on the good days and the rough ones alike.
I know that’s objectively hard to do. When a day is shit, and I’m not going to dress that up, it’s hard to sit down and work on yourself. You just want to stop feeling anything, go numb until sleep takes over, hope for some kind of reset the next day. Normal, the mind reaches for whatever costs it less. But not the whole mind. We’re built in layers, and I won’t go into the details, I’m not the right person for that, I can only tell you what I did, what I feel, and what I’m still fighting.
An example, no hiding behind vague terms
I love reading as much as I love golf and structured video games. I read everything, novels, essays, Topolino. But these past years, the hard stuff had slowed me down, almost made me resent it. I could only read in ideal moments, and not even always then. I’d forget that Topolino, or a magazine like BBC Science or BBC History, is enough in a break, in line, waiting, in the bathroom, in bed before sleep, on paper, on a Kobo, on an iPhone or iPad.
Sick of falling victim to doom scrolling, I started re-training myself not just in the calm moments but especially in the hard ones. It was difficult, no point pretending otherwise. It took real cognitive push, sometimes I’d open Topolino, read two pages, close it again, sometimes I’d open it, look at it without reading, close it anyway. Once, twice, three times, and eventually it clicked.
Now I fit those moments in almost everywhere, Topolino is always there. I still slip, but rarely. And I read, I actually crave that moment now. I’m extending it to magazines too. The best part is it took the friction off longer books too, novels and essays, which now, in the wider free moments I still don’t have many of, I read with real pleasure. Last time I was reading Ready Player One, work ideas started coming to me, and as I write this I can’t wait to finish so I can get back to it, and to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. I could go on for hours about what I’m reading, this stretch it’s mostly math, physics, history. I’ve got two challenges set aside, waiting for the right moment, S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams, with Ship of Theseus inside it, and Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.
Wearing down the boulder
I could keep going, but here’s the point. If we want to wear down that boulder, if we want to give ourselves an identity and get to that state of wellbeing, we need to put the energy exactly where it costs the most. It’s fucking hard, not impossible, and for me it’s not over, I’m extending this to plenty of other things, especially in this stretch of complexity and challenges that are anything but easy.
I don’t have a problem saying it anymore, if anything I had it wrong before. When someone asked “how’s it going” out of social politeness, I used to say “tired but good”. Now I answer with the truth, “objectively bad, tough stretch”, or something close to that. Worth remembering, the first line risks sounding more self-pitying, ironically, than the honest one, even if intellectual honesty needs the right moment, not a tic you repeat every time someone asks.
Step by step. Stone by stone.