A weekly invitation to transform from the inside out.
Happy Seed-Day!
Here's an idea (The Seed), a way to go deeper (The Soil), and a journal prompt (The Root) to explore.
I. The Seed
Nobody starts a fire with a log. You start with kindling: small, dry, and quick to catch.
Purpose is the log. Most of us sit in the cold waiting for it to light itself, wondering why we still don't know what we are here to do.
But what if you don't need the log yet? The small interest you keep coming back to is kindling. Feed it, and it burns long enough to light something bigger.
Stop waiting for the log. Feed what already burns.
II. The Soil
Read: "The Dignified Professor", a chapter of Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Feynman was teaching at Cornell and sure he was finished: "Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything," he decided he would "play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever." Within a week someone in the cafeteria threw a plate in the air, and he started working out why it wobbled the way it did. When a colleague asked him what the importance of it was, he said, "There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it." Years later he wrote: "The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."
Then sit with this: the biggest work of his life started as kindling, a plate someone tossed in a cafeteria.
III. The Root
What is the small thing you keep coming back to, the one you would never call a purpose? When did you last give it a whole hour?
What "log" are you waiting on before you let yourself begin? What would change this month if you fed the kindling instead?
Until next week,
Jay Sueno
PS - The Long Paddle is my personal letter on business, family, health, and building a life in Siargao. jaysueno.substack.com.
