Inertia - Nº121
I went looking for truth and all I found was love. I went looking for love and all I found was truth.
— Naval
One rule of writing I love by Stephen King is to tell the truth. It’s a maxim that can make a candid writer out of anyone. It’ll help you find your voice, move closer to what you love, and keep you in shape. Moreover, it can make for an honest and renewed life.
Much of King’s rules can be worthy expressions to live by as much as a guide for writers. For instance, his first rule is to write for yourself and then worry about the audience. In reality, it’s saying to live for yourself, to put your happiness first, and then worry about everyone else.
This essentially takes time to grok because, in life, we rarely make decisions based 100% on what we want. While we all seek different levels of validation, the cycle is the same. But once we spot this craving, the cycle opens. You might feel in disarray at first, but once you stop worrying about what others want—and start making decisions for yourself—the renewal cycle begins. Your life is yours.
As said by Nix, we live in a land of quick fixes and rapid change. We cycle through endless interests to keep up with this world’s idea of self-reinvention. It relies on disposability and churn: picking up a new interest, loving it until the novelty fades, and then throwing it away for something new. People become besieged by their urges to buy more, take more pictures, gloss their lives and appease society's expectations. It’s relentless. Exhausting. You can’t find truth or love in this.
It may seem ingenuous, but I find more happiness in focusing on endurance. Inertia anchors us into place so that we lose our rhythm, so I prefer to thread the small things through a long string of time. It’s more gratifying that way. We all could devote more time to quality exercise, managing exhaustion, setting schedules and routines, actively curating our workspace, and looking after what we read and absorb. But no one prepares you for how hard this is to maintain, let alone at a high calibre or all at once. So the key is to turn them into small actions that add up over an entire life.
The search for truth and love are strangely intertwined; in our pursuit of one, we tend to find the other. Life quests are usually about two things: effort and longevity. Truths are raw ingredients that shape us and determine how we make an effort toward what we love. And you can’t fully extract these elements without chipping away at them for a long time. Good things—stable relationships, a reliable body, exhilarating hobbies, healthy habits, etc.—require upkeep and depend on love and stable intentions. Even if you have the inevitable slip-up from time to time, you can’t sweat it and just have to be happy to carry on tomorrow. When that’s easy for you, you find truth.
Now halfway through the year, I’ve been looking back only to appreciate my progress. Desires have diffused. Plans of mine and my friends are taking shape as new jobs and experiences and opportunities to travel are flowing into our lives. These truths uncover happiness, and as a subsequence, we discover love in its purest state.
Conversely, the quest for love over truth is a more difficult passage. More painful. In our search for love, we often find raw truths that help to give us our direction but may also be unsettling, like a relationship gone sour or learning something that’s also upsetting.
Sometimes we must search for love in order to find those truths that offer us a better direction. A north star. To curate ourselves, our environment, our relationships, our bodies, and more, we must learn to love something first. It may riddle us with naivety for a short while, as we know continuity is rare, though we tend to ignore it. But at least we get to understand the importance of choosing for ourselves.