Mmm… Implementing…

I’m into implementation. Applying. Experimenting. Playing.

Once upon a time, I suffered from *cough, cough* ontological addiction. I loved the insight cascades I’d get from podcasts and blogs. My insight cup overflowed, and yet I consumed, relentlessly. I sought out content, I anticipated the time I’d spend listening, would delay important tasks and stay up late… I learned and learned and learned… nothing. Because I wasn’t really learning. Much of what I consumed was in one ear, out the other.

I tried to limit my consumption, but struggled with the pull of the voices, sometimes nearly as familiar as friends’, full of information I greedily hungered for — and I’d easily cave. When I realized the content was borderline sapiosexual porn used for mindless mental masturbation, I made a decision to change my habits. I decided I could listen to something, but if I had an insight, I’d have to pause and figure out a way to apply it to my life before consuming more.

It started bumpy, and I pined for more epiphanies to plink through my body – but with conversations, journaling, sometimes a change in eating or sleeping patterns or exercise, my relationship with myself and with the content changed dramatically. As I continued I noticed a sort of momentum building, for taking on new experiments, capacity-building, and enjoyment of my life. Paradoxically, I began to anticipate (and delight in!) podcasts/blogs much more while at the same time finding them easier to put down for longer and longer pauses (action and integration!)

And I began to be able to reference learnings from podcasts as *learnings*, from an embodied experience with the information, not as Truth, but as trials and my own N=1. I realized I think of it like breathing, and my enACTment experiment became the following:

The insight is the exhale. “Oh! I get it!” or “Aaahh…I see…” That breath out is my cue to wait for an inspiration, the in-breath. You know that little voiced gasp you get when you have a good idea? “Oh, I know! I could…!” That’s the inhale.

Of course, not every insight leads to inspiration, not every insight becomes action, and not all ideas are good (for me, at this time). Some require shelving, some require tweaking, some are for the garbage bin. But effectively, that’s the rhythm I work with for enactment, for implementing knowledge (and perhaps developing wisdom?) and it feels damn good.