It’s 943 and I’m out of the house, I’m on the way to work. I went to bed at midnight yesterday, and set an alarm for 630. I woke up, heard the alarm, switched it off. My dominant thought was- it’s really early, still dark, I’m really tired. I did notice that there was a quieter thought: that I ought to get out of bed immediately. But it was a rather weak thought at the time, and I hadn’t tied it to anything. The idea of another 1.5 hrs of sleep or so sounded really nice. And I fell back asleep before waking at around 8… and then I lingered in bed some more before getting out.
I feel like it’s really microscopic progress- or maybe it’s not progress at all, but it feels like a slightly better attempt, a slightly better failure. I’ll keep on this every day. Tomorrow when the alarm goes off, the plan will be to get up and immediately write a word vomit before I’m allowed to go back to bed. The idea being, hopefully, that once I’m done with a word vomit I should be much more awake and I could then choose to do something else. A run would be good if it’s still early and not yet hot outside. I believe that I can make progress on this, even if it’s been annoyingly slow.
It feels good to have done two word vomits yesterday even if they weren’t anything special.
I’m not sure if I wrote about this in one of the past vomits so I’ll write it again- I have been trying to improve my timing at my 2.4km run. The first 3 or 4 attempts I made were all terrible- I’d start too fast, and then I’d get tired midway and my legs or lungs would start to hurt and I would have to stop and walk for a while. So for my last attempt I decided to just maintain a slow jog the whole way- it was definitely a little too slow and my calves were aching like crazy (they’re sore right now as I write this)- but I completed the whole thing and shaved a minute off my time. It was a little victory that I have badly needed for quite some time now.
It’s very easy to overgeneralize things, but I think I’m already overgeneralizing some things and I could benefit from an overgeneralization in a different direction. I can correct the little nuances later.
I want to explore the beliefs that I must be holding without having explicitly stated them- the beliefs that can only be inferred.
1: If it’s painful or difficult I should do it later. I will be able to do it better later.
2: I am capable of pushing myself really, really hard and getting things done at the last minute, and I enjoy this.
3: I can squeeze in a little bit of distraction into my work, while I’m working.
4: I can multitask.
5: I don’t need to bother planning or prioritising- things typically take care of themselves sooner or later.
6: I don’t like doing difficult things. I want an easy life.
7: I don’t care about my health, nothing will happen to me and it’s okay to have a foggy brain from poor meatbag management.
8: I don’t need to plan intermediate steps- I can figure things out as I go.
9: My environment doesn’t have much of an effect on my output. I can work with tabs open.
10: I have all the time in the world.
At this point I had a meeting/chat with a mentor and it was quite cathartic. Helped me resolve a bunch of pains that I’ve been having inside my head. I talked about how I’ve been wanting to take a vacation or quit or something, just to run away from my circumstances, and we explored how the thing that annoys me about my circumstances is my constant catch-up. I’m always behind, I never have excess capacity to focus my attention and energy towards the things that I want to achieve.
And this constant stucked-ness that I’m in has been wearing me down. I haven’t been growing lately. I have been dragging my feet through my days and then wondering why I never seem to go anywhere, never seem to able to get on the rides that I want to get on. And while it’s totally possible for me to just stop and drop everything, sooner or later I’m going to want to do something else, and again I’m going to be stuck where I am because I don’t have this ability to direct my resources effectively. And so I struggle to be accountable to others. I struggle to be accountable to myself. I struggle to get things done, and that state of being drives me nuts because I know there’s so much more to life, there’s so much more that I could be experiencing and learning and growing and doing if I just… fulfill my responsibilities.
So what’s stopping me? I think I’ve been stuck in a run-out-the-clock Loser (Gervais Principle) mindset. The real problem I need to solve is getting more excess capacity each day. That would give me the single most powerful thing I could have, to do everything else that I want to do. Time. Headspace. These are precious resources that I squander everyday.
What is stopping me from getting excess capacity, apart from habit? What’s the path from current status to excess capacity? I don’t want to badly enough, I don’t make it a priority. Why? Well… I’ve simply never lived like this, and I guess it’s scary. In the middle of my days I yearn for comfort and familiarity. In the middle of moments I stretch things out, languish and linger. We go back to me being a lingerer. I linger because I don’t know where I should go. But that’s the old me. I’ve been here for a couple of years now and I know that while there’s an infinite number of things to do, there’s a finite number of things to do each day and I need to own that, and see how owning that will bring me joy the way I get joy after completing a vomit or completing a run.
So there, then. I should enjoy my time at work, because I finish stuff. The way I finish writing and the way I finish working out. That’s as simple as that. I owe myself pleasure and joy and happiness and all that good stuff. And then I can help other people, too. It’s an insane win-win-win and I’m not doing it yet because maybe I don’t frame it properly. Well we’ll frame it as clearly and concretely as possible now, and we’ll see what else is missing from the picture.