All the truly great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility and gratitude. They are deeply convinced that they are drawing from another source; they are instruments.
Their genius is not their own; it is borrowed. We are moons, not suns, except in our ability to pass on the light.
Our life is not our own; yet, at some level, enlightened people know that their life has been given to them as a sacred trust. They live in gratitude and confidence, and they try to let the flow continue through them. They know that ‘love is repaid by love alone.’

A friend sent this quote on a WhatsApp group chat the other day. It’s from Richard Rohr, who I know nothing about, and in that last sentence, the quote is from St Therese, who I also know nothing about. Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert echoes a few of these points and she delivered it really well in this TED talk I watched more than a decade ago.

For the past year or so, my Twitter bio read “better conduit”. That’s all I was (and still am) aspiring to be - a better conduit for the creative impulses that flow through me. Some of this was related to writing words, but a lot of it was about writing code. I used to have an intensely passionate love of computers. I would steal away time in class to write a little bit of code, or to poke around the Linux man pages and find some new way to use grep or sed. It was intensely rewarding to be distracted into something that seemed like it had no bottom. I could dive in further and further to understand ever deeper layers of this beautiful thing that people made. I could learn how we taught rocks to do math.

Rocks for Nerds

A friend recently confessed to us that he is fascinated by geology. His recent trip to South America reignited that fascination that was abandoned in college. The most popular geology class in our college was called “Rocks for Jocks”, it was the one the football players took to ensure they got at least a few good grades. Instead of pursuing his dream astride Brown’s running backs and tight ends, my friend ended up studying Applied Math and currently does data science at a large retailer. He works with Rocks for Nerds, as nearly all of us do now.

Part of what made “Rocks for Jocks” so punchy was the mockery. The idea that geology was easy, that rocks were not a dynamic system the way chemicals or cells were made it easy to dismiss it as a science for the low-energy people among us, who wanted an easy way out. The real science, we implicitly believed, was the hard one.

Engineer showboating

Pablo has two posts that relate a lot to what I’m digesting here. The first one is about (Engineer showboating](https://morepablo.com/2018/03/engineer-showboating.html). The second one is about software as a creative industry.

I am trying to get back in touch with the creative impulse that originally drew me to software. Part of what killed it for me was the showboating. Everywhere I looked I saw a sort of intellectual competition. Creative impulses are inherently risky. Some will fail spectacularly, most will fail quietly and the very few that succeed need a lot of protection at their initial stage. Showboating kills the creative impulses.

The Podcast

I’ve been doing a podcast with two of my friends - Pablo and Adi. They’re both incredibly good conversationalists and we’re all in our late 30s without obligations so naturally a podcast emerged out of that. We’re on episode 3 and I still have some editing to do. This podcast feels like the most “creative channeling” experiment I’ve tried to do in a group. I don’t try very hard to control the conversation, I let the reins go and I see where it takes us. There’s a spirit to conversation and it’s nice to sit back and watch it work sometimes.

Sufi

Elizabeth Gilbert mentions Sufism in her TED talk - specifically the practice of losing one’s self, one’s ego into the performance. To truly give oneself over to the song, the message, the moment is to channel the divine.

I dabbled spiritually 2016-2019. I was particularly drawn to the public service of Sikhism, the music of Sufism and the words of the ancient Hindu texts. The reality of the societies spawned by these beliefs is different from the beliefs themselves, but all three avenues of exploration started overlapping very quickly. I identify as a Hindu today, and in times of difficulty I draw a lot of strength from the ancient Hindu texts, the more modern Hindu texts and the devotional music from all over South Asia - including the Sufi songs. I’ve been called into performing a few small spiritual ceremonies. In those moments, I try to prepare something from the Bhagavad Gita or the Upanishads. I try to translate it into English and I am always surprised by how moved I am at the end of the ceremony. There is a certain magic that is unlocked by words that flow through me, but are not truly of me.

Taking care of myself

I was very stressed out the past few weeks. Starting the job, adjusting to the new commute and expectations. The new pace of life was a lot. I enjoyed much of it, but I felt an incredible burden to produce a lot of things all at once. This post is as a reminder to myself, to be a better conduit. To just focus on keeping my physical body healthy enough to continue being a channel for inspired work. It will come.