Creating Wiggle: The Physics of Getting Unstuck

Dailies 002 🐛 Yakitori cravings, Ethiopian jazz, and old home videos.

✦ snapshots from the camera roll

Random yakitori craving. Cute little speaker at my local cafe. A little head bobbin’.

✦ meditations — morning pages

Creating Wiggle

Maybe you know this feeling: Life moves forward, days pass, work gets done. But underneath, something feels stuck. The outside keeps changing while the inside stays fixed in place. You can be years into a myriad of journeys, crossing items off lists, and still feel like you’re running in place.

The instinct is to do more. Add another project, another commitment, another plan. But maybe the opposite is true. Maybe movement in this moment requires subtraction first.

I’ve been caught between the axes of hard choices lately. So naturally, I’ve been doing some reading, and there’s a treasure trove of wisdom to be found when you learn about how hard choices actually work. One I’ve found quite helpful is from philosopher Ruth Chang. Her work suggests that our hardest choices are often not the kinds between good and bad, but the kinds of choices where there’s no clear “right” answer because the options aren’t even comparable. Ways of living, career paths, creative projects. The decisions that paralyze aren’t about discovering the correct choice. According to Chang, they’re about creating who you become through the choosing. As life’s responsibilities seem to pile up, it’s easy to forget this simple and empowering perspective.

But it’s hard to do anything (especially make life altering, hard choices) when you’re carrying too much in the first place. The expectations, the stories we tell ourselves about what should happen, the weight of maintaining momentum for its own sake — all of it fills and counts in life’s bag. You can’t pivot when you’re locked in place by the sheer weight of maintaining more than you’d like to carry.

So what if we tried developing intentional looseness? Let’s call it wiggle physics. In actual physics, oscillation requires two things: displacement from equilibrium (doing something new or different that changes your status quo) and momentum (building on that initial energy) to keep moving. You can’t oscillate from a fixed position.

The same applies to our artfully inclined, creative lives. Creating wiggle means:

First, displace yourself from equilibrium:

• Move your body every day. Get your blood pumping, shift your physical state.

• Try something genuinely new, an experience that isn’t the mundane, your everyday.

• Do something you know creates undeniable energy in you: hike that trail, host that gathering, play that instrument.

Then, use the momentum with your life battery charged:

• Journal, voice record, talk through the thing you’ve been avoiding.

• Carve out focused time each morning to take one small step on what matters.

• Let the movement create more movement.

In physics, damping forces (friction, resistance) eventually slow oscillation down. The extra baggage we’re carrying ruins the wiggle! The lighter your load, the longer you can keep moving, the more range you have to explore different positions before settling.

Infusing wiggle into your life means creating the conditions where intentional looseness is inevitable (or as the male thought leader types like to call it, thrashing). The act creates enough space between who you were and who you might become to actually make a choice about the difference.

So go ahead. Let’s get wiggling. 🐛

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✦ sounds (n.) — this mornings playlist

To stimulate the mind, listen to this Ethio Jazz set: Washington, D.C., has the largest Ethiopian population outside of the motherland itself. So, I have been eating and listening to all things Ethiopian lately.

To be in a good mood, listen to this vinyl set: I love “traveling the world corners” via DJ sets. One of my favorite channels from Vietnam is hosted by the sound collective Quện:

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✦ spaces — places visited and liked

Jogging the Tidal Basin: Considering the state of affairs, I have been trying to not take D.C.’s existing monuments and architecture for granted. Whenever I’m running the Tidal Basin, I feel a sense of calm and peace that is unique to this place. Different from California or New York’s scenes, there’s a level of stoic peace that is hard to describe.

More Smithsonian moments: One of my favorite spots on the Mall is the Enid A. Haupt Garden. It’s an elegant garden and courtyard that sits behind the Smithsonian Castle. It was raining over the weekend, so my partner and I stuck to the indoors. We checked out the new Moongate cafe in the Asian Art Museum and the Filipino exhibit in the American History Museum.

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✦ field notes: things digested, created

Nostalgia of Home Videos

My mom, Umma, turned 60 this week. My mom and I are very different people, but we have a close relationship and friendship. In Korean culture, the 60s, 70s, and so on are big deals. Back when most people died early, making it to 60 years old was a big deal. You’d typically have a 잔치 (jan • chi) feast to celebrate.

But 60 does feel like the new 50 in some ways. While I see my parents are certainly aging, they still are very young in spirit and have lifestyles that my grandparents didn’t dream of at their age.

Being far from my folks means that I have to get creative sometimes with the birthday gifts. There’s only so many material objects, cards, and packaged deliveries that can show how much I love them. So yesterday, I took a deep breath and began to work on something my mom has been asking for for a very long time: sharing old family trip videos.

I’m very lucky in that I grew up traveling a lot with my family. I can’t believe it, but the last time the four of us took an international trip together was back in 2015. Below is a rough cut video I sent my mom for her birthday (she loved it and demands more). I was just out of college in this video, haha:

I really love the roughness and surprises from VHS home video tapes. They have no intentional sequence to them. They are just chronological moments recorded because someone thought they were worth capturing. Then, when you reached the end of the tape, you’d simply bring it to the shop and they’d give you a physical tape. Voila.

Our phones and social media make “home video VHS” mementos feel like a thing of the past. Family moments feel ephemeral or lost deep in some cloud folder. It’s a lot of of mental and creative labor to “organize” these digital files, but I hope to find ways to make this an easier process.

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✦ nice finds

Speaking of getting unstuck, here is the most dangerous writing app:

I use this app almost every other day. Whenever I want to power through feelings of resistance and just start to get words on screen, I go to Squibler’s site and use this tool (I hope they never get rid of it!).

You set the length of time you want to write. Then, when it starts, the only thing you need to keep doing is to… keep typing. The moment you stop typing, even if the words or sequence of letters are gibberish, the text disappears. It only starts saving it once you hit the time length. I usually just set it for 5 minutes and will keep going when the timer runs outs.

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(P.S. “Dailies” is a column I’m experimenting with here on Substack. Meant to share my morning pages, field notes, and what caught my attention this week. If you want to only receive larger updates, feel free to edit your settings.)