The Arena is my process for approaching creative work from a place of aliveness and play. Every trip through The Arena lasts one week, and is guided by singular creative intention. Other than that, there really are no rules other than to follow the aliveness. These logs are just for me to document what I did during any given sprint, along with how I'm feeling about it.
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Creative Intention: Close down my old website Citizen Within, pivot its editorial direction, give it new design, and write the first few pieces of content for it.
What I Shipped from July 25th to 31st, 2022
The Ungated Life
Regenerative Philosophy for Turbulent Times

Pivoting from politics
Unveiling the next iteration of this publication

Seedling spirituality
On protecting my budding spiritual practice from the forces which might destroy it

Two flavors of apolitical
Is it irresponsible to opt out of politics?

Reflections
- I still feel like there's SO much more work to do on this site before it's ready for primetime. So there's some discomfort for me about whether I should even be talking about it yet.
- I feel so liberated by this container. The initial version of Citizen Within, before I pivoted it to Ungated Life, felt like I always had to talk about politics and psychology and polarization and whatnot. Those topics ended up feeling suffocating to me. But the new direction with Ungated Life, where I focus on something that I'm broadly referring to as "regenerative philosophy" feels incredibly fucking alive and expansive and full of possibility.
- Aliveness meter: 7 out of 10 - I'm so glad to at least have the first early version of this site launched, and to have an outlet to talk about all the other things I'm thinking about that have nothing to do with marketing.