I have a sprawling to-do list that’s just full of things that I haven’t gotten around to. This is an interesting challenge and opportunity. Some of these things are dated and I should just say no to them. But really what I need to do is to get to a meta-level. To recognise that I’m trapped in a box, with my limitations keeping me in, and that I’ll have to carefully examine my situation in order to transcend it. I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to get to “inbox zero” with a bunch of todos. So I need to find some better way of feeling happy and fulfilled. It has to be a measure of flow, a measure of progress, a rate of change sort of metric rather than an absolute one. I know I need to be writing every day. If I’m not writing, I’m stagnating, and if I’m left stagnant, I start to get a little… decrepit. It’s not a good look, and it doesn’t feel fun either. I want to have fun. Life is short, we should all have as much fun as we can before we die. And to have really great fun, we have to be imaginative. All the “lots of fun in the short term” options are uncreative, and often destructive.
How can I have more fun? I find myself thinking about my guitars, which are hanging on my wall, that I haven’t really touched in a while. I find myself thinking about the youtube videos that I want to make. I’ve made a couple of videos recently – they’re really just word vomits in video form. I want to do this partly because I think it’s such a shame I don’t have more videos of myself from the past – there’s something that gets captured in a video that mere writing and photographs can’t quite capture. And also I want to get more comfortable speaking to an international audience. I want to get better at communicating, at being understood. Doing this on more than one medium definitely has its uses. I don’t intend to be a famous YouTuber – I just want to get into the habit of publishing videos of myself. Maybe at least one a week? I should do one tomorrow. Adding a todo for that now.
I want to get this word vomit project over and done with as quickly as possible. I have 346 vomits left to write. If I do one a day (and remember, I went 17 days without writing a single one recently), then I still won’t be done until 2018. I’d really like to be done in 2017. This means that I have to write more than one word vomit a day. This means that I have to change my behaviour significantly. It means that I’ll have to write on my commutes. It means I’ll have to try and publish one word vomit before I leave the house, and one more before I go to bed. If I manage to write 2 a day, that’s 173 sets of vomits. If I can pull this off, I’ll be done in September. That seems reasonable. I just need to set aside time to write. This isn’t all that crazy. I’ve found myself running in circles for no reason at all, and that’s definitely time I could have spent writing. I’m publishing unedited words anyway, so it’s not like things need to be good. They just need to be done.
I’m thinking now of how little I’ve exercised in the past year even though I have access to a home gym that I spent a couple of thousands of dollars on. I haven’t completely fallen off the wagon; I still work out at least once every two weeks or so. But I should be working out every 3 days. I know i’ve written a few vomits before about how exercise is psychoactive, how it has all sorts of mental and psychological benefits, how it’s fun, how it makes me feel alive, how it makes me realise that I could be doing more with myself, more for myself, at any given point in time. So I definitely need to exercise tomorrow.
I told myself to have a system of doing regular reviews. I just messaged a friend earlier to remind him to do his. It’s funny, how hard it is to maintain this habit. On a daily level I think I just tell myself that oh I’m so tired, I’ll do it later, I’ll do it tomorrow. But then it doesn’t get done. And if I’m not doing regular reviews of my everyday life, then how do I know if I’m getting better at living the life that I want to be living? Some people might do this without writing, but just by reflecting and meditating. I think I could use some of that too. What am I waiting for? I don’t want to obsess about this too much – the point is to act. I’m writing a vomit now. I want to do a review tomorrow morning, going over all of my things as quickly as possible. Ah – I realise I often get distracted y some specific detail of whatever’s on my plate, and then I start pursuing the on the spot. That’s a bad idea. I need to learn to set a course for myself and then follow it without being distracted mid-way. I’ve definitely gotten better at this over the years, but I need to continually get better yet, otherwise I’m stagnating, and when I stagnate I get decrepit, and life goes from being an adventure to an ordeal.
Sometimes I wonder if I deliberately make my own life a little difficult because some part of me feels like I need to suffer, atone for my sins. It seems a little far-fetched in writing, but think about how sometimes people who’ve been abused, continue to seek out new abusers to abuse them. It’s sad, silly, all of those things. And yet I am like that in my own way. That’s just a bug of the human mind. We’re only sort-of conscious. We’re only sort-of able. We have to accept that, and integrate that into our dealings with reality.