The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve but a reality to experience. A process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it. We must flow with it.
Dune
I’m noticing this inherent need for me to explain my experiences from the outsideafterwards, rather than embodying the experience of them from the inside. Yet embodying the messy experience in the moment is what “the adventure of your life” is all about.
Explaining it is like reading a structured Wikipedia article on a travel destination. Whereas experiencing it is like reading a person’s experiences of travelling around a destination by just wandering through it and stumbling upon its unexpected wonders.
There’s nothing wrong with explaining things but embodying the experience is where the deeper connections of understanding are made. So you need both.
It’s like a master craftsman talking about making something to their apprentice and then actually showing them afterwards. The showing reveals the deeper tactic knowledge that can’t be grasped by the explanation alone.
It’s funny. This reminds me of my experiences adventuring with World of Warcraft years back, particularly in taking part in the end-game raid dungeons which were highly complex encounters against some of the toughest boss monsters in the game.
During the actual raid encounters, there’s obviously this visceral experience of being in the moment and just having to flow with it as best you can, regardless of what happens. Like I remember some experiences where we would need two tanks to fight a boss and hold the aggro of it, as one tank couldn’t survive normally. But then when we begin the encounter, the one tank would immediately die, due to a mistake, and we’d say, “Oh crap. We’re dead.” But then somehow we would survive and drop the boss with just one tank.
But then afterwards, we would have an after action review to reflect upon the experience and figure it out (e.g., “What the hell just happened?”). This is where you break things down, see the relationship between things, and begin to make sense and meaning of things in a structured sort of way.
That’s what it feels like I’m needing to do here. Communicating the experience of life as a role-playing game is just as important, if not more important, than communicating a guide that explains life as a role-playing game.
Am I explaining too much here already? Perhaps. Yet going forwards I want to use these adventurer’s journal posts as a way to try to embody this experience of the adventure in the moment, as my thoughts unfold in real time.