Nicolas Boulenger

It's a hard feeling to describe.

Meditating, for me, is often about convincing myself there's nothing to do.

Letting things happen.

Which doesn't mean doing nothing. Quite the opposite.

But you let go of the part of you that worries about what to do.

You switch to spectator mode.

Everything important will get done. (By magic).

But in an order you don't know.

Some of what you'd planned will be left aside.

Other things you weren't expecting will be carried out with care.

You learn what really matters to you.

Far from goals and structured thinking.

For me, that's the real foundation.

The one we often don't dare let emerge, out of fear and a desire for control.

You're not incapable. You're going about it the wrong way.

That's what I see in myself and in the people I help.

Neither the activity nor the result is out of your reach.

Failing once, twice, three times means nothing.

You haven't found your way of doing it yet.

Once you have, everything will become easy.

Take your eyes off the result. Find the action.

Do you condemn the violence?

"Don't try to convince" is one of my mantras in narrative strategy:

You don't communicate to convince those who don't believe in it. You communicate to bring together those who already love it but don't know you exist.

I'm realizing it's the same in politics, on television, even at family dinners.

Most journalists aren't looking for the truth. Neither are the commenters under your video. Nor your uncle at the table.

They talk to prove they're right. (I've talked about this before.)

But at that game, TV journalists have a certain talent that often drives their success: they use every trick of the trade to contradict, unsettle or ridicule anyone who doesn't support a line chosen in advance.

You have to know that. Otherwise you don't understand. You're stunned. You get angry.

So when you take part, you need to be clear about your goal.

You're not there to convince the people on set (or in the comments, or at the table). But to show part of the audience that another way of thinking exists.

Some will respond to it. I'd even say: that's all they're waiting for. Provided you're able to express it clearly, without getting angry, and without falling into the traps.

Which is perfectly possible once you've grasped the true nature of the game.

And understood that you must never answer the questions.

You must tell your story.

Received on Instagram:

I just passed you on rue Faubourg Saint-Denis, I simply wanted to exchange a few words. You spend your time talking about humanity and values on social media, but in real life, you brush people off with a wave of the hand. Some contradiction. More proof that authentic people are hard to find and that fine words don't make fine people. I'm unfollowing.

My reply:

You try to stop me in the middle of the street with a cop's gesture while I'm walking fast with headphones on, and then you come and lecture me?

I owe you NOTHING. And if you think that contradicts what I say, you've misunderstood: link to my "I'm not nice" video

When I made that video and the next one about niceness, I got a lot of criticism.

But this is exactly what I'm talking about.

The guy decides I have to stop, here and now. He does it very clumsily, without a smile, like an order. And when I don't obey? He lectures me. He talks to me about "humanity". Because obeying him would be the right thing to do. It would be "nice".

I know: it's a very, very light version of what a lot of women go through every day.

This is coming from an engineer.

And not necessarily "magical" in the way you'd think – I'm wary of charlatans.

But there's no denying it: it's something I notice more and more.

I've talked about it here, here and, more recently, here.

I'd define it like this: love and attention (which are the same thing) change the world.

For real.

The material world around you transforms according to the attention you pay it and the attention others pay you.

So trying to change the world by acting on matter is a mistake.

The world changes through magic. Matter is a consequence.

And magic starts from within.

I made a 4x3 out of this morning's thought.

I don't want to get better. I want my mistakes to become beautiful.

A photo of clouds, printed, drawn on, then photographed again with effects.

This is the longest "walkable" distance on our planet, according to this post.

About 3 years of walking, 8 hours a day, from South Africa to the far end of Russia.

Come on, let's ditch our stupid lives and go do it.

I don't want to improve my technique.

I want my mistakes to become beautiful.

If nothing comes, do nothing.

I think that's the first rule for reaching a flow state.

Though "nothing" doesn't really mean anything.

You're always doing something, just not what you'd planned.

Accept that what I'm doing now is exactly what I should be doing.

And the next thing too.

And the one after that.

Flow is less about producing than accepting.

On the train.

The last guy suffers from a lack of alignment... 😁

I'm not interested in people who want to debate.

I'm interested in people who are looking for the truth.

They're rarely the same people.

People who like to debate want to prove they're right.

They've often built their opinions on hidden interests or emotions they never reveal in the conversation. The source of their beliefs is out of reach. All you ever get to argue about is the crust.

People who are looking for the truth are always on your side.

They may disagree, but they're working toward the same goal.

A little boy tripped in front of the café.

His mom showed him what he'd tripped on, wiped his hands, gave him a kiss, and off they went, happier than before.

Children don't need anything else: just a little attention.

For them, attention fixes the world.

The antidote to what scares them, to what hurts them, is to show them that we saw, that we understood, and that what happened to them matters to us.

Magic is enough.

Either I had a mystical experience during meditation this morning.

Or yesterday's burger didn't agree with me.

Both?

Tonight I'm sleeping in a hotel and making a drawing to complain but actually it's fine I'm happy but joy doesn't sell as well. Damn I have to fill the 3rd line too. Stop.

I'm working on my naive style. There's room for improvement.

If your idea of "happiness" is too vague, it's out of reach.

All it does is devalue your present.

I'm still exploring "silencing my thoughts", and it's opening a lot of doors. Especially for creative work, as Thom Yorke described.

Right now, my brain is unplugged.

The sentences come one after another, without my having to think about them.

I was writing in my journal and tried an experiment: can I unplug my brain? The way I sometimes do when I read? Or when I create?

We tend to think of writing as an intellectual activity.

It isn't at all. Or not necessarily. Or not the way we'd expect.

Is this what they call "flow"?

Let's be clear: I'm often in a state of flow. I'd even say my days are organized around it. But just now, I spotted a new inner mechanism:

Switching thought off. Even more than before. And letting it come.

And when nothing comes?

Silence.

And that's fine.

The problem with AI is that it will never drop what we've asked it to do and say, "Stop! We have to save the planet first! It's a matter of survival!"

What good is a superintelligence that doesn't use its intelligence to set priorities?

It's only there to help us go faster in the direction we've already chosen.

The direction that brought us to the brink.

I'm carrying on with the 4x3s. Without thinking about it.

Yesterday I wrote "JE" ("I") on a Post-it to test a red marker. The drawing, the caption and the newspaper grew around it.

It isn't good or bad, pretty or ugly. It's 4x3, and that's all it is.

Where the trouble starts: "I"

I often think about that video of a dog growling at its reflection in the mirror.

The more it growls, the more the reflection growls.

It's convinced it's only reacting to an outside world that's attacking it.

As within, so without.

Following my comment on comments, I decided to make them today's 4x3s (yes, it's becoming a thing).

Sorry my sincere reaction doesn't fit what you were expecting.

I know you'll also know who to send them to.

I often talk about no longer setting goals in the future and finding joy in acting now.

I also talk about building a daily practice where, for 10 minutes a day, you just do.

No planning, no preparing: you do.

Because deep down, you don't know. And nobody can tell you. You have to do.

Here's what Thom Yorke says about it in this video:

Songwriting is like a naive thing. You can't be savvy about it.
You can work really hard on it, but the good stuff just happens.
And you don't know why.
And you've got to be honest with yourself that you don't know why.
And you've got to carry on being honest with yourself that you don't know why.
And when stuff forms that you like, you just grab onto it and you don't let go.
Because the stuff you like, you don't know why you like it.
Like Pyramid Song: it's three chords over and over again, and the same lyric.
How does that make sense? But you like it.
You like it.
You're not bothered about if anyone else likes it.

This will be my new reply to unpleasant comments:

Sorry my sincerity doesn't fit what you were expecting.

Because that's often what it comes down to: people criticize me for not reacting their way.

As if reacting my way did them harm.

Even when all I'm doing is expressing myself.

Ever since I was a kid, anxiety has shown up in me as tension in my solar plexus.

A knot in my stomach that comes whenever I'm stressed. All the time.

Today, for the first time, I felt something else in its place... lightness.

A pleasant, indescribable sense of physical well-being.

It happened during meditation.

It seems to go hand in hand with this space without inner monologue that I keep exploring.

For a while, I manage to set aside problems, obligations, the daily grind. And I find myself here and now, freer and more detached than before.

To be continued.

Sometimes violence is the only answer, but it's a trap.

I'm trying out Feedbin.

It's a web aggregator: you read the blogs, sites and newspapers you follow all in one place.

Same goal as always, which I talked about here: breaking free from social media.

I don't mind sharing on platforms run by Zuckerberg, Musk and co. But the source has to be mine. I want a digital "home" that I control, where I publish what I want, and where people can follow me without going through a third party.

But following a lot of websites is tedious. Hence the aggregator. Like a small personal social network you're fully in control of.

And to set an example, I'm trying to follow the creators I like somewhere other than social media. The upside of Feedbin: it also lets you "follow" newsletters.

For now, it's complicated. I can't follow all the creators I want to. It isn't a habit yet.

But it's day one. I'll keep you posted.

Humans organize themselves into groups they belong to.

Fine.

The trouble starts when that group is a company.

Because a company's purpose is to generate revenue.

So here are human beings loyal to an entity whose purpose is neither their survival, nor their well-being, nor the common good, but money.

For these people, it becomes natural to make decisions that put the rest of the world (the out-group) at risk so the company (the in-group) can thrive, when that company won't protect them if real trouble comes.

That's a bad strategy for everyone.

I lied earlier: they're not squares, they're 4:3, like old films.

Here's the first of what should be a long list. Maybe.

How I'd love to be that cool.

It's not a metaphor. It's very concrete.

Once you've understood that your outer problems are a reflection of your inner blocks, instead of thrashing around where it doesn't matter, you can go straight back to the source and transform what does.

That requires raising your level of inner perception.

It's not a gift. It takes practice.

Right now, I'm learning to spend more time in that space, to hold my attention more steadily on the inner workings.

When I come out, it's to find that out in the world, everything has gotten unstuck as if by magic. And all that's left for me is to enjoy the beauty of the world.