What’s up and welcome to the Leo Full Moon.
This one is presenting itself with a little bit of inner turmoil, me throwing away all the new toys that I’ve acquired over the last days and tantruming out like a baby as I pull myself ferociously back to my nature.
What does that mean?
It means that – despite all of my earlier praises of the reMarkable 2 – I am going back to being old school. I had a bit of fun jumping into the technology fast lane, but this is what I learnt: I don’t like the fast lane of technology when it compromises the reading and the writing experience.
Here’s how the last months have looked: I’ve read one page, over and over and over and over and over and over. I’ve written one page, over and over and over and over and over. If you found that boring and repetitive to read, then you can imagine how I’ve felt putting myself through this ringer.
(Quick sidenote: has Microsoft updated its default text to ‘Aptos’? I’ve never seen this, never heard of it, and I’m not sure if I’m just adjusting or if – Full Moon in Leo – I don’t like it and I do want to tantrum against it)
So yeah, I am going to go back to how I did things before. Carrying books, complaining about their weight, losing pens, using lost pens as a driver for new conversations with strangers, and generally enjoying the process a whole lot more. It also means that I will have to renege on my earlier proposal to provide you all with handwritten updates on a semi-regular basis. You’ll note that it happened on one occasion only – that is how I know the suggestion was poor and needs to be re-thought.
Because life, like a great many things, is meant to flow with ease. The path of least resistance wants you to go with it. Your body doesn’t want you to fight against all its impulses, urges, and needs, neither does your heart, and neither does your soul or spirit if you’re into that stuff. As much as I like the idea of being hip and with it, on the cutting edge of technology, I much prefer being hip and with it on the cutting edge of living my life in an unapologetic way – which is my way.
Ahhh there’s that Leo Full Moon energy, I’ve been wondering where it’s been hiding. Today I was a bit slow, a bit uninspired, a bit ‘I don’t want’, a bit ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. Just now I tried to do at least 100 different things and none of them worked, and I was on the edge of throwing my toys in the corner and stamping out, when I realised that the only thing I had left to do was this. And it is flying out of me.
I tried to whip this up earlier, with the reMarkable. I got to a specific point and realised that I hated everything I’d written because the process itself wasn’t enjoyable. I don’t like the not-pen on the not-paper, and that’s fine. I let myself try something new, and I am letting myself let it go again. Instead, I am pumping this out at a pace that will surely endanger the long-term health of my joints and loving it.
And I think that a lot of this has to do with my inherent contrarian nature. Sometimes I think I’m just behaving like that for fun, but more often than not its because I really, deeply believe my contrarian positions. For example: e-readers have a long list of theoretical benefits, as do e-writers. But my gut has maintained for the longest time that they suck. Then I came across this one and its definitely the best of what’s out there, so in the interest of testing my theory I bought it. I looked to the benefits, surrendered to enjoy the value that I could get, but I never wanted to use it, I always made myself use it.
Compared to a book, which I pick up on the reg and find impossible to put down. There’s something objectively better about a genuine 3-dimensional object. Of course, an e-reader is 3-dimensional, but it’s a single page on repeat. The page is not 3-dimensional.
It’s like a wall-mounted TV displaying a crackling fire, or a beautiful forest, as opposed to an actual fire or an actual forest (or a painting of a forest, if you’re still imagining it in relation to your wall). The fact of the matter is that things we can touch, feel, move, hear, smell, taste (weird?) have something more to them. The digital stuff is totally ethereal.
The laptop is the same shit, but it’s samesamebutdifferent. With the laptop, I’m not trying to replace something, I’m adding another layer. With the e-reader I was trying to replace it. And all I did was replace something I loved with something I tolerated.
AND THE MOTHERFUCKING LEO FULL MOON WILL NOT ACCEPT SUCH THINGS!!!
It demands that I stand up and say ‘yo, this shit is DUMB, how am I supposed to flex my gigantic brain in front of strangers with an e-reader, they can’t even see how intelligent I am with my 1,100-page fantasy book in German?’. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, now that I consider it, but you get the point.
There are aspects of me (and you) that are not like others, and those are the parts we’re supposed to bring to the light. The parts of us that we think silently ‘fuck, it’s really weird that I think/feel/behave like that, nobody else seems to do that’ are exactly the parts we’re supposed to parade and bang on about. Because there IS definitely someone out there who also thinks that e-readers are a shitty excuse for a book (his name is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, at the very least I’ve found one person who agrees with me), and if that person is also stuck in their head thinking they’re the only one that thinks that way they’re going to buy an overpriced toy and ruin their passion. By putting your weirdness out there you might just keep their weirdness alive.
But maybe I’m wrong, maybe because I’ve been directing my energy into the physical realm so intently, I’ve had no time for the creative. It’s possible, but I don’t believe it’s true, because this is straight-up flying out of me, so the juice has been in the tank it just hasn’t been tapped into. I guess we’ll see what happens as we move into February.
For now, I will leave you with this point to consider: what weird parts of yourself do you keep small, and how can you flip the story and make them the biggest, baddest, most pronounced parts of you? Let me know in the comments - IF YOU DARE!!!
Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Nick Lets Rip. As always, changes will be in the pipes because I am still not doing exactly what I want, so keep your eyes open. And if you want to see all the physical stuff I’m doing, check it on Instagram (@nicholasgoodey); for the meditation stuff go to YouTube (@nicholasgoodey); and if you wanna see my general commentary on things I’m seeing throughout the day you can get me on Twitter/X (@nicholasgoodey).
Enjoy the Full Moon and go get weird!
(This is Arnold aka Albert aka Alfred aka Arghhh-getoffmyfuckinglegyoulittleprick)