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There is a very important life lesson I learned about learning. it is simple enough to state in a single line: the less sensory input your brain receives before a task, the more cognitive output it produces during it.
Andrew Huberman has described this as the most important habit for productivity , that the quality of your attention right now is not just a function of how much you slept or whether you’ve had coffee. it is directly shaped by the aggregate volume of sensory information your brain has processed in the preceding hours, and even days, before the moment you sit down to work.
My memory has a specific shape of unreliability. its not about forgetting phone numbers or struggling to hold a long Quran verse in place. it used to be harder to name. It is about people. It is about places. Somewhere in the background of living I was always slightly elsewhere, I used to call it, absent minded, running scenarios, processing, clearing out some cognitive overhead that never fully cleared. And the people around me, and the rooms I sat in, they registered as peripheral. I was there, technically. but I wasn’t looking.and I think it is about that the memory doesn’t fade later, it never fully forms in the first place. that’s the clearest description I have for what I have always felt before. and you can’t retrieve what you didn’t absorb. I spent a lot of time blaming myself for this, as if the problem was a character defect rather than a pattern I could understand and maybe do something about. but the blame didn’t help the gaps fill in, and the gaps kept widening. There are places I have been where I now retain only the feeling. not what anyone looked like. not what the room smelled like or how the light fell. just a general emotional residue, like a color with no shape. places that mattered. people who were real to me. This is a repository. I want to capture what I remember, people, places, fragments of who they were and what it felt like to be near them. before the blur takes the rest of it. some of these I will share. some are just for holding. but the act of writing them down is its own thing, a way of training a muscle that was always a little underdeveloped in me. presence as a practice, even retrospectively. even now, after the fact. it all ends.
I have this plant I keep giving water almost every week. I never forget, each time I see it, I water it. it became a habit, automatic. today I was somewhere else entirely. I had fallen into my head, and I needed anything to pull me out of my own head. And when I saw the plant today, it was empty. dry in a way I hadn’t seen before. maybe for the first time since I got it. I had been watering it recently. I know I had. but I hadn’t looked at it, not really, in a long time. not stopped to notice it the way I used to. the plant didn’t remind me of itself. it reminded me of everyone. all the ones who are gone now, I started to trace how they left, and every line I followed led back to the same place. I had been present enough to maintain things, present enough to keep the habit, but somewhere along the way I had gone fully inside myself, into that sealed interior where nothing outside can reach me. and in that withdrawal, I let things die slowly. not from cruelty but from absence. maybe you’re still doing the motions, still watering the plants, still showing up in some technical sense. but you’re not there, and people feel that, even when you don’t. and then you come back one day and find the room already empty, the distance already permanent, and nothing you can say accounts for the time you were gone. I was the one that shot on everything I loved. over many moments of not looking, not stopping, not being willing to step outside myself long enough to appreciate what was still alive in front of me. I don’t know what to do with that yet. but I know I keep coming back to the plant. like maybe if I look at it long enough now, something counts.
You’ve probably heard someone say that time management is the key. schedules, blocks, wake up earlier, compress the day. people will say this is how you build a productive life, a good life, a life where you end the day feeling satisfied. I don’t use that term, and I have never mentioned it in the most recent years. and that’s because I think it’s the wrong game entirely.
It is not time management. it is energy management. and the moment you understand that distinction, of finally knowing that how it felt, the contrast between your sharpest days and your worst, everything I need to hear was this term, and then everything reorganized.
If the first thing to accept is that you’re not managing time, you’re managing energy , the second thing is asking where the energy is actually going. because it doesn’t just disappear. it goes somewhere else. and most of the time it’s going to things you’d never guess were costing you anything.
I don’t like productivity tips. they just give you the schedule. and that’s truly like naming the car should cruise in this highway, without understanding the mechanics of how and why.
I told myself for a long time that I don’t have a type . if we vibe, we vibe. but somewhere along the way I started noticing a pattern in the people I actually love, the ones I keep, the ones I’d go out of my cave for. and when I finally held that pattern up to the light, the word that came back was potential.
This is the first time I’m forming that into a sentence.