I'm experimenting once again. It's funny, in all of my years doing this, I still have not gotten around to trusting the process on a somatic level. That is to say, while I understand {cognitively} that most of these experiments will be failures, I am still shocked and disappointed {in my body} when they fail. For the last hour and a half, I have been trying to tease out some inspiration and some direction to answer the question: Why do I feel a void in my spirit? There are good days and there are bad days, but there is no thread connecting them together. Another way to say this is that it's still not exactly clear what I'm aiming at. When I was making music, there were also good days and there were bad days, but they were all in service to the aim of being a great musician. I wanted to be an artist and even the bad days I could recognize as meaningful sacrifices to the forces that might shape me into becoming one. It still hurt like hell to have a bad day, but at least during that time I could tie a knot at the end of the day and go to bed. Much harder to do that right now. My aim broadly is to create a beautiful life. *I want to fall in love again and build a family. I want to create wealth for my children and my brothers to share. I want to build a strong and resilient body. I want to build a sharper mind. I want to build a relationship with my God.* These are all very difficult things, and they come with a lot of pressure. It's difficult to unify them under one umbrella like music that could align many behaviors. But this brings me to the original point. Experimenting **necessarily** means inviting failure. The experiment of the last two hours was mostly a failure in the sense that I still feel just helpless on the path towards the things I outlined above. But importantly, I am running experiments again. 1. I sat down with my whiteboard and turned my phone completely off 2. I wrote down and spoke my questions out loud 3. I wandered around the apartment trying to tune into the sensory experience 4. I felt called to pick up a book. Perhaps I would find my answer in one of Descartes' essays. 5. I read. I became inspired to try another experiment 6. Began sketching the experiment on the whiteboard. Got stuck. 7. Decided to try the experiment directly 8. Invoked a dialogue between an omniscient being and Marshall. I transcribed it 9. Eventually my fingers felt heavy and the left side of my skull felt like an aluminum plate sliding down a greasy surface. 10. I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance. Reinspired. 11. Pause. 12. Nothing. This broadly is what went down. These are attempts. None lasted more than 10 minutes, but that's fine. Effort is not what is required. It is quickly moving through to find the thing that is remarkably *easy* to do that is also in line with whatever goal you had. Which brings me to this entry in the diary. This feels easy. This feels correct. For now. What I'm realizing (now I'm writing this to my future self) is that by inviting experiments and admitting you want to figure out something complex means simultaneously inviting myriad failures that will surely suck a lot. This is a win. I am back on the path and the path is overgrown. I am slow and I'm wearing the wrong clothes.