Perpetual Stew

Engage with your mind as if it were a perpetual stew. Some things are prepared, cooked, and served, certainly. But many more things are prepared, cooked, and abandoned. Some things are intended for presentation from the beginning; others are plucked out as opportunity presents itself. Still others spend such time simmering that they are reduced to nothing. And yet, where have they gone? They have become the stew.

One cannot take a ladle and identify every ingredient, but what is the stew if not the accumulation of everything that was surrendered to it? Some things are meant to be prepared, labored over, and then subsumed. But they are not lost, for all that follows could not have happened without them.

Embrace the value of putting energy into ideas with no aim in mind. Even if they come to nothing, that energy is not lost, for it goes into the stew. Permit yourself to let things slip below the surface, and open yourself to the serendipity of reclaiming things as they bubble back up. Acknowledge that all that you produce is enriched by all that has been allowed to simmer down to nothing.