#capture

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Most creators think of themselves as the conductor of the orchestra. If we zoom out of our small view of reality, we function more as an instrumentalist in a much larger symphony the universe is orchestrating. We may not have a great understanding of what this magnum opus is because we only see the small part we play

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Today, I see a psychological version of Jevons Paradox reshaping our relationship with time itself. As our tools amplify each hour's potential yield, our internal expectations don't just keep pace, they outrun our capabilities like shadows lengthening at sunset. There's an exquisite tension between what we can theoretically accomplish and the stubborn limitations of being human. When every hour holds tenfold possibility, rest feels like surrender, like watching gold-threaded potential slip through your fingers into a river.

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ask my students to look for interesting questions in everything. I tell them that the power of a good question is not in the answer, but in the question's capacity to regeneratively invite more questions, and to construct lenses for examining the world — and ourselves. It's like the question, asked by the ancient Greeks more than two millennia ago, "What is the good life?" We are still asking ourselves this today

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Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up from the pages of books and from your own heart. Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields. There are songs and sayings that belong to this place, by which it speaks for itself and no other.

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But later, looking back, poets often realize that their bursts of creative inspiration were linked together under the surface by threads of continuity. They eventually arrange their poem-buildings in particular orders (streets), and into chapters (neighborhoods), and they discover that they all along were preparing a unified city. For me, this meant that when I compiled a decade's worth of poems and divided them by theme, I realized I had accidentally written a book about architecture.

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When limitation is devalued, civilization tends to become idolatrous. There is some correlation between 'dislike of limitation' and idolatry. 'I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones …' 'This night your soul is required of you.' As I have suggested, this thought first must have come to him from himself. The great harvest made him indeed secure. He was indeed jubilant. But exactly at that moment, he became insecure and apprehensive. How strange. He began to ask a question of the ultimate character: his own death, his complete disappearance from this world, and his complete non-relationship with all he has accumulated.

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And in my case, being creative = being productive. But traditional productivity routines will convince you to focus on doing something all the time, which is usually the opposite of how to be more creative. Being (not doing) needs to be the priority so that ideas can rise up to the surface of your consciousness and give you something worthwhile to do!

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And, in fact, the free rotation of an unpowered and securely fastened drum was not the "magic" that drove me. The magic was the way it knew to stop the instant I tried to see it. The magic was how it could not, not ever, be trapped or outsmarted. Though my obsession with the toy cement mixer had ended by the next Christmas, I have never forgotten it, or the feeling in my chest and midsection whenever yet another, even more involved attempt to trap the toy's magic met with failure—a mix of crushing disappointment and ecstatic reverence. This was the year, at five or six, that I learned the meaning of "reverence," which, as I understand it, is the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena, the same way that "respect" and "obedience" describe the attitude one takes toward observable physical phenomena, such as gravity or money

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