Of course. I subscribe to this formula wholesale. It's why standards are for chumps. (i can't tell people that. You don't get away with saying such stuff when you aren't an overachiever.)
But intensity is mercurial. Sometimes it comes easily and stays for long. Then it leaves one day without notice, taking all your shared memories and you wonder later if it was all a dream. I found this out in my first year of college when I couldn't wrap my mind around math concepts that'd fascinated me a year before, and got put on academic probation. I tried to recreate the conditions that'd led me to choose maths in the first place but it didn't work -- and I flunked out.
I've come to grudgingly accept that we are creatures of habit and the surest way to the Zone is rituals. So I've got all these little things I do to get myself functioning. I spend time tweaking this checklist. It's like aligning all the ferreromagnets in my head. But it's very possible to get lost in the rituals. That's when all the magnets spin wildly. At some point I remember with a start, in the middle of nowhere, what the todos were about and then start all over again aligning the magnets one by one.
From time to time I wonder if anyone lives as painstakingly as I do [140630: I blush when I read this now, 2.5 months later]. There are. It's the choice we make for greater freedom. And it need not be a burden. I think I am rediscovering that the key to sustained intensity is joy.
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