On the way back from the yoga retreat I shared the care with a fellow nomad. We spoke about the difficulties of adapting to a regular schedule. Seen from the perspective of another person I guess it wouldn’t look boring except for the repetition, plus it’s healthy and I don’t feel like destroying my sand castle just because I’ve grown bored of building it.

For the past few months (years even) I’ve been fantasizing about executing the mother of all walks. What will happen in that walk is purely fantasy, but my ambitions are perhaps too great for what I can do while walking. In the last few days I’ve been thinking: I like my job and I like my life, I don’t need to quit to execute “the great walk”, I can have a walk every weekend at the relevant points and write about them. At the end of this multi-year project I will have the sequence that I wish to produce. It’s not as exciting as writing it in real-time, but that’s not the point.

I’m almost done reading the Marienbad Elegy book by Goethe (it’s this poem plus a novella), and it strikes me how much Goethe pulls from his diaries and personal experiences to produce his works of art. In a certain sense I know I will do the same one day: I will come back to this corpus and extract themes to produce sequences (books?), and my only duty is to register my daily experience, because I have no set topic when I sit down to write, I recall my experience and add a layer of opinion to it if I find it suitable.

There’s a theme that also comes back time and time again, ever since h0p3 recommended using my voice to transcribe thoughts. I’ve always disliked my voice, and I know everybody does but mine is-was a bit peculiar and when I was younger people used to make fun of it. However, in the past year I’ve been told numerous times that “I have a nice voice”. At the yoga retreat somebody said explicitly “oh since you’re quiet I imagined your voice would be low and soft, but you speak like a radio personality, loud and self-assured”. To me this is puzzling but I welcome the compliments with a wide grin.

As I was showering in the morning, I thought LLMs are outputting such quantity of text that whatever I write will drown in the torrent of text that AI is producing every day (there’s too much to read already). I’d like to narrate and create multi-media pieces but I’m also skeptical about the effort I’m willing to put in this. I do not want to immediately start reading my entries aloud after writing them but at least I want to make some progress, so that when I finally produce my “collections” I am ready to create an audiobook with my own voice, or use my voice to illustrate videos.

Time to leave work for yoga.