A Small Win, A Real Friction
They can look very similar from the outside. Things are happening. Work is getting done. Days are full. But internally, those two states feel very different. One feels like motion. The other feels like direction.
This past stretch of time gave me a small win ... and also revealed a real friction, and it surprised me how closely the two were related.
The small win came first. I finally noticed something about how my mind works that I’ve known forever but hadn’t really worked with. When I’m deep in a project or an idea, I don’t just lose track of time. I move into a different internal space altogether. It’s immersive. It’s joyful. It’s also the reason I sometimes look up, hours later, with cold coffee and a growing sense that nothing is ever quite finished.
For a long time, I treated that as a personal failing. A lack of discipline. A problem to overcome.
This time, I tried something gentler.
Instead of arguing with my curiosity, instead of telling it to be quiet or behave, I gave it a place to wait. Literally. I boxed it up. Not to banish it, not to punish it, but to contain it. The idea wasn’t “you don’t matter.” The idea was “you matter, just not right now.”
And it worked.
Not permanently. Not perfectly. But enough.
Enough to finish a piece of work. Enough to send it out without endlessly adding one more thought. Enough to move on with the day. That sense of “enoughness” was the win. Small, but real.
Once things got quieter, though, something else became visible.
The friction.
With the noise turned down, I could finally see that I’ve been traveling with two very different maps — and switching between them without noticing.
One map is local. It’s oriented around my home, my routines, my creative studio, the places I return to again and again. Meaning, on this map, is sustained by familiarity and continuity. It’s a map of here.
The other map is expansive. It’s built for long journeys, history, consequence, and change. It’s forward-facing and speculative. It’s a map of becoming.
Neither map is wrong.
The friction comes from using the wrong one at the wrong time, or worse, expecting one map to do the job of the other.
A world map is a wonderful thing. It just isn’t helpful when you’re trying to cross the street.
What I’m learning is that coherence doesn’t mean merging everything into one grand system. It doesn’t mean forcing all parts of life to line up under a single structure. Coherence, for me, is starting to look more like orientation. Knowing where I am. Knowing what kind of terrain I’m in. Choosing the right representation for that moment.
The small win wasn’t boxing up curiosity forever.
The real friction wasn’t having multiple creative worlds.
The insight was noticing that different kinds of travel require different kinds of maps.
Nothing in this resolves neatly. There’s no dramatic fix or final answer. But there is relief in understanding what’s actually happening. There’s kindness in realizing that not everything needs to be solved. Some things just need better containers.
And sometimes, that’s enough to keep going.
If you’d like to hear the full conversation that grew out of this — including a little help from a certain sunny perspective, I’ve linked the episode below. But if not, that’s all right too. This thought can stand on its own.
Taking time to think is still okay.
Link to Episode 3 https://youtu.be/eCk-G968H0g
