walking through the fire - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix

I think about one line in Ted Chiang’s short story Exhalation a lot: that experience is incompressible. He was talking more generally about the experience of children growing up — you can think back to an awkward phase where you were largely intolerable to others, malicious, careless. When you acted out of bad faith or impulse. Though you wish you could’ve skipped those chapters, they were essential moments of learning and maturation despite the embarrassment or pain that accompanied them. What he means is you can’t bypass steps in the plot, or take an easy, sweet, pill to make experiences shorter or less painful. It’s true we all have guides: people who kindly simplify our routes and make the external journey less arduous, but the journey will still be arduous within the internal landscape nonetheless. Historically I’ve wrestled with this duality coming in contact with difficult problems. First, the level-headed, begrudging acceptance that yes, this is meant to be hard. In the same ve

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• Aryan Naik
• Proby Shandilya