Hello,

Welcome to the second edition of AM⌭PM, an experimental email newsletter blog sort of thing, written by me --Neil Gorman as part of [S][J][P].

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AM

As I write these words, most of the morning (AM) has passed me by. There is very little AM left, and PM will be here shortly.

What has been on my mind this morning: I'd say I'm a busy person. I have a lot of things going on. One of the consequences of being busy is that I don't have much time to sit and do sustained "deep work" or "deep thinking" on things. I'm so busy rushing from thing to thing that I don't have the time to sit and really think about something or work on/work through different things.  

(One of the reasons I'm (trying) to do this AM⌭PM thing is to make myself take a little bit of time each day to sit and engage in writing, which is something that makes me slow down my frenetic activity.)

I've been thinking a lot about Abraham Joshua Heschel's idea around time as space, which he wrote about extensively in his book The Sabbath. In that text, Heschel says.  

“Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.”

For a long time now, I've felt like there is no Sabbath in my life, no time to rest in a way that cares for my long-term future as a thinker, psychoanalyst, professor, and human being.

What I'm longing for is some sort of Sabbath, a time/space where I'm able to be a rest and allow the generative energies to build up in the reservoir of my body/mind.

...

And, now, even though I could write more about this, I've got to pack up my things and drive to the university where I teach. I'll probably eat in the car.

Till later.

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PM

It takes time to make things or think about things that are important. By filling up so much of my time with so many small tasks, which I'm always rushing to "get done," I'm preventing myself from being able to work on/build the big things that might matter in the long term.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this, but I think I need to start letting go of some of the not-that-important stuff I'm "working on" and then re-dedicating time to more meaningful projects that aim to make a better future.

I re-read the words I wrote above. I think they sound stupidly obvious. Be that as it may, I think this will be hard for me to do because as much as I'm saying I want to be less busy, I clearly get some sort of satisfaction from keeping myself as busy. If I did not get a libidinal pay-off from it, I would not do it. I'm going to be working against habit, against my addiction to moving fast and getting shit done.

Hmm. Interesting. I just wrote, "getting shit done."

That's so perfect. That is exactly what I'm doing.

I'm doing shit things, and what I'm producing is... well... shit.

What I want is to produce something that is not shit. To do that, I need to stop putting so much time into doing/producing the shit I do.  

Time to wrap up. I hope I'll write and you'll read more tomorrow.

-N