I have been taking my son and his friend to karate lessons for weeks now. I usually sit next to the door and watch, but last week I was talking throughout the whole session with a man sitting next to me. That’s around 1.5 hours of talking. It turned out that he has been training in this club for years and is close to getting his black belt. He looks VERY STRONG! Apart from explaining to me why students need to do so many katas, he also told me how regular fasting has changed his life.
I have been experimenting with fasting for years. Sometimes I did juice fasts for days but more often intermittent fasting on weekdays where I didn’t eat breakfast and only two big meals: lunch and dinner. But I have never done a water fast, and since I’ve been feeling stressed, sluggish, and unfit for months, I thought here is the universe telling me again what I should do next to be more efficient with everything else in my life.
So that’s what I did. I didn’t eat for 42 hours. I drunk loads of tea, water and some coffee, often with a pinch of salt.
While doing the fast, I remembered how good it feels to know what is important and what is not. Fasting is a bit like a mild psYChedELic eXPeriENCe. It can put you in an altered state where things you’ve been ruminating on suddenly make much more sense.
But what does this have to do with the relaunching of my website?
I’ll tell you.
A hundred things were calling me during preparing this new version of the site, but something my grandfather used to say kept pulling me back here.
Order is the soul of everything.
It’s not like he said it all the time or that everything in his life was always in order, but it made me think even as a child. First I thought he meant that my room needs to be tidy, but no. He was referring to a bigger picture.
I just wish he had told me why tidying my room helps understand the bigger picture. Because it does.
I have been rewriting an article to publish on this new website first for several weeks now. Every time I sat down to work on it, I changed something, usually the introduction or the tone. I have this stupid habit of always starting from the very beginning when working on something, whether that is writing or music. I need to feel that there is a good connection between all the parts. The words, the sentences, the paragraphs, and so on. If there isn’t, it means my mind was hijacked by an idea and that I have lost the plot. And what does this mean? It means that if I cannot immerse myself in my own work, follow it and enjoy it, then how can I ask anyone else to do the same?!
So, let’s go back a bit to the connection between order and fasting. When you fast, you have less energy, and therefore you need to be more efficient with everything you have to do that day: breakfast, lunch box, school run, work, school run, homework, maybe Nintendo, dinner, bedtime.
The way you can become super efficient is not by reorganizing your never-ending task list, but by deleting the non-important ones from it or at least moving them somewhere where you cannot see them for a while.
So, I mentioned that I have been rewriting an article to be published here first for weeks. Why? Because I thought I really needed to get the first one right to gain people’s trust and make sure they come back to read more later. I sometimes got high on tea and wrote for hours, and thought my writing was BRILLIANT! But then, I came back the next day. Many paragraphs were complaining and pretending that I am better than in reality. It was full of ‘my life’s been difficult, but I never gave up, and look how much I managed to accomplish’ and ‘because I accomplished things now allow me to impose something upon you’. There was simply a lot of horse manure and I now apologize in advance if some of it sneaks back in the future.
So, here is the deal. I believe I know why I am restarting the website with more focus on writing, but I don’t actually have a solid strategy for what I want to write about and to whom. I know this is not ideal, but it feels good to be honest from the start.
Coming back to fasting a bit. When you fast, you very quickly find answers to questions like these:
Shall I push myself as hard as possible all the time like David Goggins or be more zen like Alan Watts? And if his zen is the answer, how much alcohol does it involve?
The answer is, at least for me at the moment, to do/be both. How? Good question. I don’t really know, but I think what I did with this article might be a good start. I worked hard on pulling the strings together for weeks. For example, I did the research on how to find the ‘niche in the niche’ that a potential audience can resonate with; I looked at how my skills and interest could be linked to a unique value proposition (UVP); I wrote and rewrote a lot and used a local large language model (LLM) for feedback on my tone and narrative. But, as mentioned earlier, my drafts never felt good which somehow forced me to give up control for a bit and listen to what my environment has to say. I listened, did the water fast which help me to let go of the need to have a perfect write-up to start the new website with and instead wrote this today in a couple of hours. Perhaps from a more zen state.
If I had to have a research question, it would sound like this:
How can I use my personal website as a public platform to develop my identity and make sure the process benefits others too?
School run! Must dash!
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