on momentum

I almost skipped everything today.

I woke up with a weird kink in my upper back that radiated forward between my lungs, making it painful to breathe and move, so I spent most of the day horizontal, watching Charmed. By the time early evening rolled around, I was feeling a bit better, but could have easily justified staying in bed.

Instead, I made some tuna salad, cleaned the cat bowls, put away the laundry, and showered. Small things. And then decided to do some writing and move my body. Bigger things that are important for me to do daily right now, for several reasons.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I had a realization.

I keep saying I want to be in real time with money. Meaning: when I need something, I buy it. When I want something, I buy it. No backlog, no scarcity buffer, no lag between desire and resource. Just flow.

And I've been treating that as a financial problem, something I have to wait on, something that requires a certain level of income before it becomes possible.

But doing today what I could have easily justified as leaving for tomorrow, I saw it differently. Getting in real time with money starts with getting in real time everywhere I already can. The energy is the same. The relationship to it is the same. And that relationship, once established, moves.

This is what I know about momentum.

One way to work with momentum is to hitch a ride on an existing slipstream.

Something is already moving out in the world: a cultural moment, a company, a conversation that's catching fire, and you feel it. You don't have to generate anything; you recognize it and step in. I did this back in 2020 when I started selling a particular energetic device right at the peak of its momentum wave. I felt something building, recognized it for what it was, and within a couple of months had 10x'd my investment. Not because I was brilliant, but because I got on something that was already moving, and I consciously let it carry me.

The second way is to build your own momentum.

This is harder because you're creating the slipstream from nothing, over time, through consistency. Willpower is the thing you spend down every time you have to convince yourself to start. Momentum is what makes doing the thing nearly effortless because your body already knows the motion, and it becomes automatic. Writing is like this for me. Moving my body is like this for me. When I stop and start, I'm constantly paying the entry tax, using my willpower reserves just to get going. When I stay in motion, even minimally, the tax disappears. The momentum carries me through the days when I have nothing.

The third, and this is what I saw today, is to transfer momentum between areas of your life.

You build it somewhere accessible, somewhere you have the resources and attention to sustain it, and then you deliberately hitch other areas onto that wave.

The real-time energy I build by doing today's tasks today doesn't stay neatly contained in housekeeping, or writing, or exercising. It moves through me, changing my relationship to time, to follow-through, to what I believe is possible. And I can intend for that to spill into my finances the same way I'd step onto someone else's wave, consciously – with trust, watching for how it starts to shift. Momentum in one domain seeds momentum in another.

But there's a fourth, and it goes deeper than all three.

Underneath every slipstream you've ever caught, every rhythm you've ever built, every transfer you've ever made, something else was already in motion.

The momentum of Life itself. The current that's been running since before you or I were born, that will keep running long after. We didn't start it. We can't maintain it. We couldn't in a million years manufacture it or control it by sheer force of will.

But we can stop fighting it.

We can clear enough debris, get quiet enough, stay in motion just enough, and sometimes, not always, but sometimes, we feel it catch us. We stop pushing and realize we're being carried.

Different traditions have given this different names. Grace. The Tao. The Field. Flow. Synchronicity. God's will. The river. Things just started clicking. The name doesn't matter, but the experience is unmistakable.

What I'm coming to understand is that the three momentum practices - catching waves, building rhythms, transferring energy - are really just ways of making yourself available. Getting into position and clearing the debris so that when the most ancient current of momentum moves through your life, and it always does, you're already in the water.

You don't have to generate all of it yourself. Not that you don't have to do anything, you do. The tuna salad, the cat bowls, the showing up to the page even when your back hurts, and the bed is right there. All of it counts. All of it matters.

But underneath your effort, something is already moving. It was moving before you started trying. The work isn't to manufacture force, but to stop being too busy, too afraid, or too determined to notice.

Get in the water. The current will find you.

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