Hey all! There is a certain thing that I noticed a long time ago, but recently experienced again yesterday while playing wipeOut, a fast paced futuristic racing game.
I, as a lot of people, often struggle with letting go, or trusting myself to be well without actively taking control or solving things.
I have learned however, that to heal and grow as a person it is important to trust your instincts, your body and your inner processes and sometimes let things be and let go of control.
There is no more fitting exercise in this than growing in certain challenging games. I mostly experience this through wipeout or sometimes hard platformers, but I suspect that people who like soulslikes often feel the same sensation: you can grind a hard part as long as you like, but the moment you start letting go and trust the experience you have built throughout your attempts is when you suddenly start doing what you believed to be impossible.
And now it goes even further. I start a new time trial in wipeOut that is seemingly impossible to achieve. My first attempt is a whopping 10 seconds too slow. But instead of disappearing, I smile and look forward to the growing experience. Because I already know I can do this. I just need to let my body process this, experience all the hard corners and quick shifts. And while calmly doing so, often even listening to a podcast or some music on the side, it indeed does happen that way. And when you finally beat the time, you do it with 1 second to spare, and it didn’t even feel that hard. Just a logical conclusion from a process of learning, growth and trust.
Of course this doesn’t always work. I often get too focused on almost winning and become overly conscious and start making mistakes. And some challenges just are too hard / not made for you and it is OK to let go then. But even in that case, letting go after calmly growing to my limit feels satisfying, as I know I gave it a chance.
These experiences give me trust in other processes in my life: healing from fears, mental barriers, mourning, learning new skills. It’s a great thing that I wanted to share.
Man those games are great. I recently-ish tried out one of the decompiled versions of the original after the source code leaked. It’s still a lot of fun
What you describe is a huge part of vehicle racing in general. Getting into a flow state is fast. If you can stress an opponent out enough by threatening to overtake or even just keeping up, you can very often push them to start taking bigger risks and to drop out of that flow state
Sounds very Zen; thanks for sharing
Funnily enough, if you do really well in a specific mode of some of the Wipeout games, you do indeed get a rating of “zen”
This is how it felt like setting up my homelab. Watching videos or searching for tutorials when you hit some error and trying to figure it out all frantic. Then you sort of just happen to fix it after putting it down for a bit and everything is OK.
I just went through it last night when I saw my syncthing container had a database corruption error after seeing my darktable had an error. I was able to install the darktable flatpak which worked, synced my darktable database had to use flatseal to give syncthing access to that, then had to rebuild the syncthing database and now all is running again.
At first I was all nervous but remembered how I’ve figured things out in the past and its just a matter of time so I wasn’t panicked like previous times