I’m writing this in the middle of a somewhat sluggish feeling after waking up rather late in the morning. I’m also doing it after practicing the cello and reviewing my DJ skills, reflecting on everything I did the previous day. Throughout this entire process, my body and mind are kind of pulling me back, a small drag on my consciousness, saying, “Wouldn’t it be better not to be this thing now?”

It’s not a sharp feeling by any means, just the sense that “maybe we can rest” or something like that. Internally, though, there seems to be a little clock that is ticking forward regardless of the situation, and it is getting stronger with every waking moment. As the drumbeat goes from a pitter-patter into a steady march of forward thunder, I’ve always had a tenuous relationship with consistency.

I practice the things that I don’t necessarily want to do. My goal is multiplying, but my effort is not keeping pace. The effort stalls, my body and mind drag, and eventually, there’s a great giving up. The past few months have been quite different, though, and it’s hard exactly to say why. Perhaps it’s because I now see that the things we don’t want to do are often exactly the things we have to do, that we may become the people that others may not.

Or perhaps it is not realization, and instead, it is a process—forward-moving control, almost like a force of nature, but less like the wind and more like the great opening of the fissures of the earth along fault lines that had already existed. It is meaningful to be able to watch this and observe it, to gain a little bit more momentum each day in the search of the person I am becoming with each moment.