← The teachingsMake fast. Live slow.

The Two Clocks

Make fast. Live slow.

The teaching
Making something and living with it run on two different clocks, and the mistake is letting the fast one set the pace for the slow one.
Before the laws
You can write three chapters in an afternoon. You cannot live three chapters in an afternoon. The first clock is bursts — dense, quick, done in one sitting. The second is slow and gated — one piece every few days, with ordinary life in between. Neither is wrong. The trouble starts when the pace of making leaks into the pace of living, and you consume in a week what was meant to be inhabited over a season.
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Author in bursts. Inhabit on a gate.
Because intensity is right for making and wrong for absorbing. A teaching has to meet a life that keeps happening in between.
Read one chapter. Then don't read the next one for three days, on purpose. Watch what shows up on Thursday.
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The gap is the mechanism, not the friction.
Because spaced against a real week, a teaching has a chance to arrive in the middle of an argument or a commute — which is where it's actually needed.
When something is locked until later, don't look for a way around the lock. The lock is doing the work.
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Tend several things at different speeds.
Because one thing on a slow clock feels like waiting. Three things on independent clocks feels like a garden.
Keep two or three slow things going. Plant a new one whenever you like. Planting never disturbs what's growing.
The practice
Pick one thing you're learning. Read a piece of it today. Set a date three days out for the next piece, and keep it. Notice what the three days do.
The clock you make on and the clock you live on are not the same instrument. Let each keep its own time.
Learned building an instrument for studying one teacher at a time. Read what it is →
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