Hello everyone, welcome back. In the last post, I talked a little bit about how influencing means changing people’s behavior, and I also talked about how I like it.

Yes, I very much do.

It gives me a sense of interest and investment that somehow because of what I said or what I think in some way, people change the way that they behave.

Some people have different terms for this. One of them is “power” – the ability to change things in some way, shape, or form.

But, of course, the words that we use shape the way that we interpret these ideas; calling someone a person who has secured power is different from calling them an influencer.

In the first case, notions of authoritarianism and control come to the fore.

In the latter, the idea of people just being persuaded and swayed like they would be if they were little children listening to the Pied Piper might be as they sway, swagger, and walk along as the flute plays to the musician’s intended destination.

I align a little more with the latter in the sense of making people move closer and closer towards something they had always wanted.

But the longer and longer I live, the more and more I come to realize that what I’m becoming able to do is to use power in certain ways that maybe not everyone can make use of.

It’s a little strange to see or to think about, but that’s just the reality that we’re facing at the moment.

Why things ended up this way and why I became able to wield institutional power in some ways is itself, I think, a funny story which I might want to talk about someday.

But well, it is what it is.

Either way, I know what I want to be in spirit… But things have made it so that in terms of consequence I’ve become able to do certain things that were not possible before.

Looking forward to seeing what’s next!

In life, each of us has different things that make us feel like we are truly alive – in the moment.

For me, the constellation of these factors come together in an idea that it is better to be seen than not to be. I don’t crave cheap popularity – never have, probably never will; but what I do like is the understanding that what I am saying will reach people, influence them, and change their behavior either slightly or significantly.

That is what it truly means to be an ‘influencer’, and that’s what gives me purpose.

To be sure, the idea of an ‘influencer’ often gets a bad rap; when we think of ‘influencers’, we often think of things that are trivial, irreverent, irresponsible; we imagine people dancing strange dances, imbibing in childish pranks, capturing aspects of their lives that serve the instrumental purpose of having people will throw money at them, singing songs and hoping people will subscribe or book them for a show, or selling products one after another with comments flying one after another as the universe goes “BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY!”.

But if you think about it… Isn’t that just a subset of things?

There are many other things that influence can get you – and for now, I’ve run out of time, and I’ll have to tell you about that tomorrow. Cheers!

The state of flow.

It’s an easy thing to name – less easy to accept, less easy to internalize, less easy to imbibe.

Yet sometimes, it comes; unashamed, unyielding, ever-asserting.

Do we say that this is a state of flow in execution, words articulating themselves through the moving spirit of a universe pushing through me?

It’s tempting to say so – yet I realize that even in these moments, where the words seem to come easily, the urge to edit and go back remains; the old instinct to self-correct and look back at the past while binding the present stays – an abusive partner there to gaslight and to chain, to press down on the ground, never allow to see the Sun.

I imagine a state of flow as a time when that bondage is not present – where ideas spring forth in the executions of dawn; where each letter, word, sentence, and thought in formation begin and end in the company of the divine muse that awakes from within, pushing forward each word, sensory impression, idea, as a small forward push in the universe.

I imagine it as a time when order arises spontaneously from an ordered mind freed from captivity – constantly breaking the rules yet reposing in perfect knowledge of those rules; a realm where skills are nature and nature is skill, the attainment of which rests in that perfect capture of capacities in the otherwise formless and directionless void.

Who are we really, and what are we for?

I often wonder – but I imagine that at least part of the answer lies in creating what you saw here and today, each word drawn out in my mind by an animating force that stood beyond my comprehension.

The words came from the deep – who provided them, and how they arose, however, is an entirely different story – a different part of the stream that arises from the flow, yet a constituent of the greater whole.