Sidebar 6 - Books as Companions (pt.1)

I’m always reading or listening to multiple books at a time and believe that, by actively reading, I’m incorporating the thoughts of those writers into my life. Morgan Housel’s The Art of Spending Money and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic are currently up.

There are two Big Ideas I’m probing for Truth here. The first is that emotional energy operates like money in my life. The second is that certain relationships out there in the world want to get made. There’s some unseen force moving us. When we’re aligned to it, we feel good. When we’re swimming against it, we feel despondent, morose, in need of substances and other distractions.

Regarding money, Housel teaches that we ourselves don’t really care how much money we make. We care about finding a sense of community. We care about respect and belonging. We care about the freedom to choose what we do with our time. To align our actual time with the things we claim to want. At a biological level, we want to be engaged in deep, meaningful relationships. If that’s hard for us, we can buy it temporarily. I think the same principle applies to relationships.

So Big Idea #1: emotional energy operates much like money. There’s an entire psychology around how we spend it, how it’ll make us feel, how much of it we can generate, over which time horizon. And where we can invest it for various rates of return. The art of relationships, then, is to deploy our finite emotional energy so that we can unlock deep, emotional relationships. Deep respect and belonging.

Addie and I have invested this emotional energy for years. We’re proud of the marriage we’ve built and understand we’re just getting started. One of the primary reasons we made this move is to gain a unique perspective on how our marriage operates so that it can better serve each of us, and our kids, for the decades to come.

And how did we decide to start investing this energy in the first place? That’s where Gilbert and her meditations on creativity come into play.

Gilbert believes that ideas are sentient beings floating all around us that have a single aim in their life. To get made. They float, and if they land somewhere interesting, they’ll put down roots and start being made. As a creator, if you create an environment in which an idea can land and take root, one will come. It’ll grow. You’ll have a book, or a podcast, or a poem, or a painting. Because all these things are out there wanting to get made. You just have to create an environment through which they can land and expand within you.

Over the last week, I learned more than I wanted to about mold spores. Unfortunately for me, now I think about little essays like this as the beginning of a little, stinky, creative colony I’m shepherding into being.

So.. Gilbert has this idea that Ideas just want to get made. If we honor them, they’ll grow and we’ll create the thing together. She also talks about working with integrity and discipline. The Idea will know if you’re showing up for it, or not. It will know if you’re distracting yourself because you’re scared. It can feel if you choose to scroll through your social media feed for another five minutes instead of sitting down and doing the work.

Big Idea #2 that I’m wrestling with is that relationships are the same. They know if you’re showing up or not. The relationship itself is a sentient being that wants to get made into something beautiful and wonderful and inspiring. It wants to tie as many lives as it can into a cathartic and virtuous circle of belonging and respect. And the types of sentient relationships that exist all around us are more varied than the people who might fulfill them. They’re looking for environments to land and expand. To manifest. If you honor the relationship, good things happen. If you don’t, heartbreak awaits. And if you and your partner aren’t clear on what the relationship is that has entangled both of you, or if you’ve actually been imbued with two different but eerily similar looking relationships, you’ll end up in an uncanny valley of misunderstandings and frustration where nothing ever seems to work out right.

So, two Big Ideas coming out of my current reading:

1. Emotional energy operates just like money in our lives. We have a finite amount. The psychology of how we use it matters more than how much of it we have.
2. Relationships are just like creative projects. They’re floating everywhere, all around us. They want to get made. They need us to channel them into existence. If they land near us and we make room for them, they’ll flourish. If we ignore them, they’ll move on to another prospective channel.

As Forrest Gump would say: That’s pretty much all I have to say about that.