Take a few strums on that guitar, and start to familiarize the mind and body with getting it right, and then put it all down for awhile, and that stuff will fade away real quick. It takes longer and longer to fade the more rigorous the repetition and the deeper you ingrain the patterns, and the more vivid and impressing the lesson is. You put more energy in and the configuration gets denser and it persists for longer. And you can put something down and it will leave an imprint, and you can return to it later and pick it up again and it will be easier to resume. But all of that is beside the point I wanted to make here.
The opposite problem can also be the case: if you are constantly putting energy into a given system, it begins to oversaturate and overload the existing patterns within, while simultaneously depriving other surrounding systems, ultimately impoverishing them and setting them into an antagonism with the oversaturated system. This is a lesson that could really benefit our Protestant society: that sometimes it is good that one dial back the obsession and the fixation and the constant targeted application of energy to a given configuration and just fucking relax.
So now we're getting back to our "art of relaxation" motif. It isn't just that relaxing tends to relieve stress and paranoia and overextension, and therefore, improve performance. It is also that the world is composed of an incomprehensible multitude of living things, all with their own forces and interests, and part of living in harmony with these forces and interests involves letting them simply be themselves and do their own things. Indeed, even becoming aware of certain things and turning one's attention to certain things can disrupt their function if one gets too fussy.
One of the better examples of this is the relationship between sleep and learning. You can field anecdote after anecdote about this: someone is banging their head against the wall on something. Say, practicing a musical instrument, or hitting a stumbling block in a construction project, or getting tied down with writer's block, or unable to solve some sort of puzzle or problem, or whatever. And then they walk away from the problem, hit the hay for the night, and then the next morning, or sometime during the next day, the solution pops into their head.
After a couple of intense sessions of practice and theory, and then some rest to let it all absorb, one's hands start to move miraculously across the fretboard. One's musical fluency and virtuosity can leap in bounds, in sudden changes of quality. Inspiration can often strike when one isn't looking for it or striving towards it.
A lot of this has to do with the brain and the body needing downtime so that all of those hidden lower processes can do their work integrating data and experience and consolidating it, oftentimes while one is sleeping. But this can also be generalized into the waking hours and with simple rest. For example, engaging in a variety of tasks - as opposed to a repetitive single task - allows the various muscle groups to heal, and strengthen, while they are not being used and strained.
Culturally, we don't trust what we are not directly perceiving or acting on. If we can't see it or are not aware of it, its existence and efficacy is suspect, and either needs to be ignored, discarded, or else engaged and trained into the patterns we think are proper. And what is not in active motion is "lazy" and "idle," breeding "evil vapours" or whatever the hell they call it these days.
The land is not "productive" if it is not seized upon and worked to exhaustion. Resting land and ecosystems that are recovering and recharging are a waste of space and losing money. And we must vigorously till and rend the soil, laying waste to the indigenous flora, and trashing the mycelium networks, so that we can inject our processed nutrients and punch in our monoculture. And then we create our deserts and call them peace.
We're not going full hippie here. Directed energy and effort must still be put into one's world. There is a countervailing cultural tendency to distrust anything visible or perceivable, and to place an uncritical faith in what is mysterious and inscrutable. That is another problem that we'll have to set aside for now.
