Layers of Abstraction: Poetic Musings on Creativity, Balance, and the Modern Mind
A three-day arc of poetic freewriting exploring abstraction, mental flow, creative overwhelm, and the discipline required to find balance amid life’s demands. These entries weave together musings on thought, memory, penmanship, AI, and self-care—reflecting on the ongoing dance between action and rest, abstraction and the concrete, and the search for meaning within ordinary moments.
June 2nd
Abstraction upon abstraction. To be able to create anything I can dream up—now is the time to act and create. And when you put it like that, all the ideas, or good ones, feel like they run away.
June 3rd
My engine, Cerberus cortex, is running on multiple cylinders. Vroom. All the thoughts. All the people I’ve seen, all the memories, all the contacts.
The layers of abstraction, all the thinking, all the doing and action and motion from one to the next, applying flow to all and flying in many directions all at once. And to only go faster—do more, learn more, try more, everything more.
Is meta another word meaning abstraction? Is my writing an abstraction? Am I an abstraction or abstract? Is concreteness the opposite of the abstract? From the abstract form the concrete.
It has been awhile since I’ve just coasted along these lines, drifting across, occasionally meandering. Constantly having a little tabby cat interrupting. But he is adorable. And I will get all his little nails. They are sharp!
Yes, let’s just work on getting these letters lined up again. Doesn’t anyone care about penmanship or is that no longer a concern? Will see if I can get the foundation model trained enough to accurately decipher my scribbles of drivel.
June 4th
Next, I shall test adding freewriting sessions to the ten minutes of dead time during a long refactor. It is hard to find any spare time when working with fairly high-performing assistants.
And yet so much orchestration and directing must be done. The more that is attempted, the more you have to take on and see through. It’s mining another kind of gold—and the work is damned hard but definitely worth pursuing and getting better at.
And it is all in my control. That experience—where I focus and what I do. Sometimes it is good to dive in, but you always have to come up for air and refund balance. Both within the work, the learning, and the living.
So right now, a good way to increase balance is just to do more. Round yourself out more. Use your time, every minute wisely and with keen thought to if the action is increasing balance—and if not, has a reason for being a more immediate priority. Things like overall health, diet, and exercise cannot be shelved aside.