500 Words Per Day: Day 3
1.13.15
Day 3
Just finished meditating. That puts me at about day 175 or so. Just thought about what I was going to write the whole time. Seems like a distraction but I actually find it quite stimulating to have something specific to concentrate on. Feels like coffee. I want to write in my journal that I meditated. But then I still have to write in my meditation journal that I meditated – date, time, minutes meditating, and location. Followed by a few sentences with the actual breathing techniques I used and what I thought about. Then there’s these 500 words. So by the time I finish all of this I’ll be exhausted. No wonder I never want to sit down and meditate. Someone might accuse me of missing the point, or the moment, by being so focused on journaling everything. It’s the opposite. I wouldn’t be having any experiences if I wasn’t committed to writing about them. A journal makes me meditate. A blog makes me try new things. A relationship forces me to be a better listener. All this criteria has to exist in order to be a good person.
I’m going to be working 12 – 13 hour days for about the next month. It’s good work and I’m learning skills but I don’t usually work for longer than 3 hours at a time. I work for 1-3 hours then do something else, come back and work then do something else, come back and work then do something else and I repeat this from morning til night and the ‘something else’ is generally whatever sounds appealing or necessary for my well-being at that time. I don’t have that luxury for the next month. I’m on someone else’s schedule and I absolutely hate that. I hate it because it reminds me that all this progress and development is circumstantial. I’m as happy as I’ve ever been in my entire life because I’ve changed all my circumstances to highlight my favorable characteristics. But take away those circumstances, even if just for a day, and I revert back to depression. I’m writing for an audience right now. This isn’t what I’m trying to say. I don’t want to try to say anything.
I’m in this mountain and I have a shit load of work to do and it’s overwhelming because I know I can’t walk down the street and grab a juice with my friend or say hi to the person working across the street because they know me by name and I have my own custom order and everyone smiles at me so goddamn hard like they really care. And my office, with its glorious windows and beefy wifi speeds, I miss it so much. Everything is connected and wireless and integrated and I can work at ten times my normal speed. And I get to work by myself. I can concentrate and listen to music and cycle through multiple projects until I cross enough things off my list to justify taking a 20 minute walk or making a phone call to a friend.
And now I’m being tested. I’m complaining about traveling the world and working long days with kids while they develop into good ass human beings. Cry.
I hate this right now. It’s not a stream. I need a topic. Something that I care about. Why is it so hard to think of things when you want to think of them? I don’t know what happened to my brain, it doesn’t always work how I think it should.
Novelty. I think that’s an interesting thing for me right now. I’m such a beast in the beginning. Eat life like a grilled cheese sandwich. And then I fade. Because it gets boring and my learning curve is fast. But also because I’m missing the point of everything. This is changing though. 10,000 hours.
Consequences. That’s another thing I thought of and then forgot but now I remembered. That makes me happy but more relieved, like ok my brain isn’t completely fucking useless right now.
In the moment one thing seems like a good idea, especially if no one else will know, and then later, one day, one month, one year, a lifetime even, it comes back. And it’s so easy to think I can outsmart consequences, that I can behave one way here and another way there and it’s fine because I have some excuse but when the same lessons keep showing up I have to make a choice. And it’s a hard choice because fixing them requires real work. The type of work that I can’t post about immediately on facebook and feel gratified. It’s the long game. Little pieces here and there that no one could notice, like a child getting taller, and then my uncle from across the US finally sees me three years later and he thinks I’m a fucking giant. Who’s watching anyway?
The long game. Real shit. It’s where everything is pushing me, the next step I suppose. I could stop now and stop here and I could impress a lot of people I’m sure but the long game is waiting for me to lace up and nut up and get to work. Are you with me? 380 days I’ve been writing in my journal every day, all day. Of those words, maybe 200,000 in total, I will use maybe a few or maybe 10,000 or maybe I’ll turn the whole project into a book or blog project but I cannot put a value on the result of such focused introspection. I’m a different person today than I was a year ago. In fact, exponentially different and I know it’s because of the journal. It made me live a more interesting life, it made me look at my behavior objectively, and it forced me to see the gaping holes in my attitude. What a fucking slap in the face when you measure yourself on actions instead of words.
So do something about it, I told myself. Fuck you, I am, I replied.
This is 1,000 words already. It took me sometime to get to anything good. Question is, do I go back and delete the beginning because it’s like baby puke? Or do I leave it because it’s honest and this whole thing is about progression and the actual work required to do things.
I want to make a statement. I want to prove that if I approach anything with consistency then it (I) will become accepted and maybe even appreciated.
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