I am behind, but I am making progress on my book.
I think what Reeducation wanted was fretting. It said it wanted introspection, but it wanted fretting. Its ideas in fact caused me to fret, but fretting is not useful.
I think I should have started on this book long ago. The reason it is difficult is that I should have started long ago.
The writing advisors always say you should already have started, and I disagree. I have said repeatedly that you should read and think first if you deem these things necessary.
However, in this case I should have started long ago. I have far more material than I can handle and I should have started long ago.
It would also have been meditative, centering and strengthening to have started long ago.
It does not appear that I had the actual conditions for this, however — despite having had it seem at times, that I did or that I should consider myself to do.
To write books you must make decisions, and they must be your decisions based on your judgment, and you must respect these things and also you.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Yes. Just yes. If you start before you’re ready, you (general you, not Professor Zero) risk writing without saying anything.
I write in circles and don’t make progress if I don’t have a beginning frame I’m really comfortable with. The frame comes from reading and often from reading that isn’t quite on point for the project at hand.
Sometimes it is better to be in the eye of the storm than around it. If I find I am fretting it is generally because I am not as involved in something as I want to be. But “common sense” tells you that you are fretting “because of the pressure”. That is rarely the case, at least with me. I am more likely to be fretting because I cannot seem to pull my whole act together, because I do not see a way to act in a concerted fashion.
IN the past years, I have fretted due to an inability to engage in adventure sports, and feeling sidelined by a lack of money and a scattered will (that eventually I was able to pull together to focus exclusively on intellectual activities). Now, I am entering the eyes of the storm again, by taking horseriding safari in Zimbabwe, and I feel much calmer.
Yes, I fret for those reasons. And it’s calm in the eye of the storm.
Reeducation’s emphasis on fretting was that one was supposed to fret about the past, or about one’s nature. (As I’ve said before, not to do those things was “not to have feelings.”)
Reeducation’s emphasis on fretting was that one was supposed to fret about the past, or about one’s nature.
The inability to accept one’s nature is linked to the inability to accept one’s mortality and life’s contingency. One becomes rigidified by a fear of death, and consequently one’s “nature” becomes more and more rigidified and more and more marked by death (the object that one fears the most). One must accept mortality, and then one will be free of the past and of the limiting aspects of one’s “nature”.
AHA, so that’s what the fear of death is. !