I rushed straight into a thicket of contradictions in choosing to take over [[Thyself.ai]]. A business whose product was spiritual work? Yes. A disembodied voice guiding somatic experience? Yes. I acted out of a conviction that in these apparent contradictions, great value could be found. Looking back, I admire this conviction and the willingness to yolo into it. I don't admire as much that I underestimated how struggling to reconcile those tensions would deplete me. I suppose we can file this one under "Learning from your mistakes". From Robert Bly's *Iron John* I got the idea of "conductors" or "copper men": those who are compulsively drawn to areas of high conflict ("large [[Multiscale causality and the meaning crisis|gradients]]", you could say), and to playing the role of bridging or resolving that through themselves. Bly suggests that the urge comes from relational wounding, and draws one to tasks they do not have the resources to accomplish. In my case, the wounding was from growing up with parents who never got along, who were perpetually at war, hot or cold. I told a lover once about this unintended education, how it fueled a deep desire to understand people's motivations, and she said, "It made you a philosopher." That a compulsion can become a gift, in time, as the world offers up chances to practice moderation, to find a fitting context and scale for one's efforts: this is grace. That this learning process never ends: this is subtle grace. --- How do we know when we have done enough and it is time to rest? I'm reading books about infant sleep, and have been drawn toward ones that speak about attunement, learning the baby's cues, allowing their development to unfold without coercion. Yesterday a book from a different school of thought found its way to me. It spoke of healthy teenagers who have an innate knowledge of how to sleep well, something they intuitively trust, because they were given a consistent routine and structure as infants that allowed them to internalize the feeling of good deep sleep. [[I Liq Chuan]] asks three foundational questions: - What is knowledge? - How do you know? - From what reference point do you know? What reference points can I give my child that I did not myself have as a child?