Focus your energy on the sandwich

There’s this clip in the Chef Show (not worth watching) where Roi Choi teaches Jon Favreau how to make a grilled cheese sandwich.

Choi lays out the stack: golden sourdough bread, three types of cheese because YOLO, and thick layers of butter because butter is clutch. All is a sizzle. The room is quiet. Favreau can’t be quiet so he cracks jokes that fail to land. Choi isn’t having it.

And he figuratively slaps Jon Favreau on his own show. “Watch this sandwich,” he says. “All your fucking focus is RIGHT HERE because nothing else exists right now.”

I am that guy. I am chasing that sandwich over and over, by any means possible. Whether it’s through mountain time or music sessions or medicine at Burning Man, I’m looking. It’s a seeking of the surreal and an aversion to the standard. I want it.

The zone.

That mythical and magical place I don’t enter, but rather stumble into when I’m pursuing an activity that demands my full attention. It happens when I’m hours into a bike ride by myself on Mulholland. When I’m gardening with the kids in the backyard and teaching them about the magic of compost. In the rarest of cases, it happens when I write.

My mind slips away from its default mode of future planning or post-reflecting. My senses get activated, and there’s not much room for anything else. I arrive into that headspace from a place of effort and ease. But like a tenant without rent control, there’s no guarantee on how long I’ll be allowed to stay.

My brother advised me to offer something useful in each of these posts. Good call bro. But right now, I’ll use this space to remind myself of some practices to follow, before I forget them.

How to get into the zone. A reminder.

1. Find the physical.
   Movement turns off the mental motor, the big metal bastard in my brain that loves to cycle on endlessly. If I put the focus on a body part, I’m able to hack my awareness and focus it on what’s real. This doesn’t mean I need to do 50 pull-ups to feel good, though that’s never a bad idea. But finding a way to get active, for me, is necessary. Meditation has breathing. Writing has handwork. Cooking over fire requires focus and preparation.

2. Disconnect from devices.
   I deleted Instagram off my phone weeks after the Gaza war. I took a pause once before, but this has been the cleanest and hardest break I made. Opening the app felt like toxic content water spilling into my eyes. So I deleted it, and it was one of the best gifts I gave myself last year. 90 days in and I don’t miss it. My general level of happiness ticked up, and marginal gains matter.

3. Give it time.
   Nothing happens fast. Be patient with whatever is supposed to happen, and it just might. No mud, no lotus.

4. Confront the problem.
   There’s always a painful process whenever I’m creating work or generating energy. I want to tap out when shit gets hard and I feel like I’m just tumbling endlessly from the mountain. Don’t give in. It’s like sitting in a sauna - give it another five minutes. You can hold on for another five.

5. Embrace the spiritual.
   Crystals are bullshit, but there is something about that feeling that’s the closest to what real life really is. It’s an atmosphere of connection and purpose and joy – I’m transfixed by what I’m doing, seeing, smelling, hearing. That’s a spiritual side that I can only see if I allow myself to even see it.

There it is! My foolproof recipe for finding your flow wrapped in the easy acronym FDCCE! Fu-dee-cee-cee!

And until we decide to move into an earthship like a Silicon Valley billionaire bro, making cutting boards and doing ayahuasca in the afternoons, this is how I’ll get there.

-Aaron

4 Things Right Now

Listen: My Tread playlist for working out. Don’t ask me why I call it that. I dislike running. I hate treadmills even more.

Move: How much do you walk every day? Do you aim for 10,000 steps? Do you track it? Do you care? Should I get a wearable activity tracker like a Fitbit 3 and be obsessed with it?

Listen: Rick Rubin talk to John Mayer about his approach and making a set-list and performance anxiety.

Know: I have a post on Israel and history and the Holocaust and I don’t know if I should share this thing or not. I’m thinking about it. LMK if you want it.