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What Is the Process?

This is an exploratory pieces. It was mostly written for the purpose of self reflection.

I often say “Trust the Process. It’s all Connected.” However, I recently realized that I don’t have a clear sense of what “The Process” really means to me.

Initially, “The Process” referred to my writing ritual. I have a well honed ritual for starting my academic writing sessions. It is formalized to the point where there is a bash script that automates playing the music, calculating the elapsed time, etc. It is a whole thing. I’ve been thinking about how to generalize it to other parts of my life.

Ages ago, I heard about the notion of a financial budget as having two components: (i) a goal and (ii) a means of verifying whether you are on track towards that goal. I think that it’s helpful to abstract this notion of budget out of the financial world and think about it more generally. Managment theoreticians do this with the SMART Goals criteria of measurability. In this sense, “The Process” is some sort of complex of goals and measurements.

My writing ritual provides a very specific mechanism for evaluating writing process. I know how many hours I’ve spent in “the writing process” going back to 2020-02-27. All my entry points, time spent, things accomplished, projects. I’m proud to have spent ~500 hours on my academic writing. I’ve got ~100,000 words of writing up on this website. I can look at ~60 volumes of my journal and say: “I wrote those.”

Another, much more cosmic, way that I’ve thought about the phrase “Trust the Process” is through the lense of process theology¹. In the process theology view, God² is the central mediating process of reality. God governs the relationship between the past and future by offering up choices in the form of possible worlds. From this point of view, “The Process” is God.

To bring it down a notch, what does “The Process” really refer to in my life? What’s the thing that contains my writing ritual and helps run my life? Whenever I think about “The Process” in its totality, I quickly run in to issues of scope creep. If I want to create some kind of high level ritual for my life, a system which runs everything for me, then I quickly munge too many things together. I’ve got to spend time with my family, play with my kids, talk to my friends, weave the web of community, feed my family nourishing food, learn new math, do my actual real-world career work, read, write, meditate, exercise, express gratitude, go for walks, read Scripture, juggle, play with string, and so on endlessly. This obsessive desire to do so many different things gets in the way of designing a workable practical process.

What should “The Process” do? One way to think about the task of designing “The Process” is via the systems theory aphorism: “The purpose of a systems is what it does”. It should keep me engaged in a variety of activities that I find meaningful and prove a sense of accomplishment. Moreover, if I’m feeling unsure of where my life is headed, then “The Process” should provide a baseline. Do these things, at a minimum, and you’re on the right track.

It is comforting to think about the possibility of well-defined clearly laid track. I’m extremely fortunate in that my life affords me a great deal of freedom in how I spend my time. This is especially true in the academic summer, when I have few professional obligations. Deciding what to do with my time, and how to arrange my life, can become an pre-occupation. However, more often than not, I continue to just muck about in my daily life. I handle things as they come up, following the seasons, wondering and wandering.

I would love to end this piece with a much clearer sense of what “The Process” really is. However, it’s something of a mystery to me. There are definitely things that work well for me: the writing process, Hodgkin, and physical fitness. From time to time, as needed, I like to do the life goals exercise. I certainly journal a lot and that’s meaningful to me. Perhaps “The Process” is the messy and organic hybrid of all those little habits.

In lieu of a super strong bullet-proof conclusion, I’m going to finish off with some loosely connected thoughts.

• The desire for some ideal process to live life might just be some weird mutation caused by the protestant work ethic, or productivity hustle culture, or life maxxing. As such, it might be bad idea.
• This search for “The Process” might really be a symptom of me slowly turning in to my mother. For decades, she has had a routine: quiet reading and prayer, stretching, and lots of hiking.
• Rules and systems appeal to me. I remember enjoying The Rule of St. Benedict when I read a small paperback copy of it that I got a Crux books.
• I like various slogan-y clichés which simplify life. For example, the Benedictine ora et labora or Zamenhof’s ni laboru kaj esperu.
• People have various ways of explaining the self. For example, dividing things up in to: mind, body, spirit, emotions. Certain strands of Buddhism go deep on this taxonomic approach. These might be helpful guides in thinking about “The Process.”
• Part of the “goals and measurements” complex involves quantifying yourself. I think that a lot of quantified self stuff just serves to drive people slightly insane. I don’t need to keep track of much information. It think it’s important be mindful of why you’re tracking the data.
• One consequence of hedonic adaptation is nothing seriously impacts our baseline happiness. Whatever system one devises will, in the long run, result in the same amount of happy. Perhaps “The Process” should involve chance elements, or a push towards novelty.
• ~gome has a thoughtful piece about their basic health stack. In their sense, The Process would be the basic life stack.
• As I was thinking about this piece, I was also reading about solo tabletop role-playing games. Perhaps “The Process” would be a game-ification of life? A sort of playful way of managing your time and self.

Published: Jun 7, 2025 @ 07:29.
Last Modified: Jun 20, 2025 @ 11:42.

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