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This is a germ of an idea I wanted to put up for comment.
There are certain principles and tricks that I think up from time to time--exercises and possible procedures for dealing with daily life, or with a particular art form. Just, y'know, stuff to try someday. I generally write them in my notebook, and then forget them forever.
Today I was writing one down, and I gave it a silly name ("Yellow Tongue Defense"). The name reminded me of the maneuver names that fighters in arcade games shout when they're doing a move; at the same time, I realized that these rules-of-thumb might make handy servitors.
The general procedure I had in mind:
1) Take a principle you'd like to apply to some situation (but keep forgetting to). The one I had today: "When doing some art/writing project, if the fear of making something less than perfect starts to paralyze you, consciously fuck up the piece to make it willfully ugly, and go from there."
2) Contemplate the principle, meditate on it, hang out with it. If you can't quite put it into words, just roll it around in your head until you understand what it means.
3) Give it a cool name. (I imagined that I would make something so ugly that I'd stick my tongue out and go "Ewwwww!" and my tongue would be yellow, because that's my least favorite color.) Associate the name to the principle. (I started imagining that my tongue was covered in yellow paint, and I was licking a painting to make it really goddamn ugly.)
4) Make a sigil. I'm thinking a sphere (representing an energy battery); some symbol which means something like "to recall", or a symbol associated with a brainy wise god; and a sigil made of the letters of the maneuver's name.
5) Fire 'n forget the sigil. The servitor hangs around wherever servitors sleep, charging up, like an aetheric capacitor.
The intended result: When you find yourself in the situation (in the above example, when I'm getting frustrated with a piece of art), the servitor fires. You are reminded strongly of the principle (I am imagining the flashback sequence in episodes of "Kung Fu"), and you get a burst of self-confidence and feel-good energy, which you can use applying or ignoring the principle as you see fit at that instant.
It's all just a tricky way of letting your contemplative past self give you a helpful push and a whisper when you need it. It seems awfully complex now that it's laid out in type, but when it came to me in a rush I thought it might be a spiffy behavior modification technique.
Comments, complaints, cool maneuver names? (And anyone have an idea what symbols might apply for the basic training sigil?) |
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