I have a friend with whom I share a disagreement about writing. He says it's the process that matters, while I maintain it's the product. This argument manifests itself in several ways, but consider the following example: say you're the editor of a magazine, and you're having creative (but not personal) problems with your colleagues. Should you challenge your professional friends on their work which you feel isn't up to snuff? If you don't, you'll end up with a lesser magazine. If you do, you may damage your friendship.

My position was that while friendships can be mended at a later date, once you print something, the artifact remains forever. It's the work that's permanent, which makes it more important than anything else. In twenty years, you may or may not still be friends with the other staffers, but there is no way you can go back and make a better issue. Human relationships are mutable, but the product of human labor in this instance is not.

I talk a lot about how the end does not justify the means–i.e., the way we do things matters as much as our goals in doing those things. The whole point of the ends not justifying the means is that we really don't have control over the ends, but we do have control over the means.

I realized today that I'm not being internally consistent. Honestly, I can't remember what the other side of the process/product argument was. But I have been thinking about my own processes and how…well, I don't think about them much.

I have a problem with overplanning. I would plan and scheme and fantasize and imagine doing things to the point where I never got around to doing them. I mean, no endeavor could ever work out as well as it does in my head. Maybe that's why I never did anything. But at some point (let's call that point when I went away to university) I realized that the remedy to my overthinking was to live in the moment and let things happen without overthinking them.

To my surprise, this worked out pretty well for the most part. So I became content to try to stay alert while life threw pitches at me. In trying to become more active, I somehow grew more passive. However, real life doesn't provide the same kinds of opportunities college does–this isn't sink or swim. It's sink, swim or starve.

I was reflecting on how I pretty much didn't do shit today. More importantly, I <i>like</i> not doing shit. In some sense, I could probably 'do nothing' for the rest of my life and be happy. I don't even have to keep posting on this blog; I could just sit back and watch people Google me all day.

Finally at 11pm, I took a walk just to get off the couch. I got to my favorite park, which was closed for the day, so I had to jump the fence. While I sat there, keeping my eyes open for the police, I tried to figure out if I've always been like this, happy to do absolutely nothing. It seemed that when I was at school, I was always doing stuff (seldom was it school related, but I was doing stuff nonetheless). And I was really excited to be doing it. The process of creativity was exhilirating without focusing on the process. For the most part, I didn't even have a process, and it worked out fine.

Tonight I decided that the waiting is not working out for me. Somewhere along the way I lost my motivation to go somewhere, content to sit where I was and react to things that came my way. I need to get excited about what I'm doing as opposed to what I'm not doing.

The upshot is that I have a newfound respect for process. I've been ignoring you, process, and it's just hurting both of us.