I guess I'll do this weekly for a while?
9/23/19
I'm supposed to be asleep. I've been trying hard to get my sleep to go from 10pm to 6am regularly. I did it for a couple weeks a month ago or so and felt the best I have in a long time. But, I was thinking through a comedy stand-up routine I want to try and got so excited at an idea that I just stood up in the middle of my room for a couple minutes before realizing it was dark, I hadn't written anything down, and that my life belongs to school and work right now. I remember when I used to do that almost every night thinking about music theory and composition. My escape is close, closer than it's ever been. But, this arbitrary limitation of having stable funds is a drag. I constantly question if it's the right thing to do.
Recently, I've been talking with my therapist and thinking a lot about mindfulness. Most of the truly great successes in my young adult life, I can attribute to practicing mindfulness under a survival situation. When I was struggling on my mission and when I was living on my own in China are the best examples. I was forced to be in the moment because if I wasn't the worst potential outcomes were death, hospitalization, or being lost in a foreign country. Even though it was enormously stressful, I still look back on those times fondly. I cried, I struggled, I thought that I didn't have what it took to survive the experience. But, I did. I had to. And once I knew I had the stuff, it was invigorating and empowering. My experience without that sort of survival-based mindfulness has been rather disappointing.
In China, I lost weight. On my mission, I went way out of my comfort zone. During both I was forced to study Chinese. And now? School seems hellbent on keeping my attention split and at cursory depth. There's some interesting information and challenges, but overall I feel fat and lazy. It'll pass, but 7 months is still a long time to graduate. And this exposes the real challenge of mindfulness to me. How can I proactively be mindful, when it isn't a survival situation. How and should I live with efficient mindfulness when I'm coming from a place of wealth and plenty? Hopefully I'll spend a large amount of my life at that status, and I'd hate to be under-performing the whole time. A vacation or two is fun, but gotta earn it.
At first I thought it must have something to do with time. There's cool stuff in my future that I need to build now, but mindfulness is all about the present - how can I prioritize the far flung future. My experience in China refutes that. For 5 months I brutally trained for a marathon that I only barely completed. If visualized, the future and past are part of the present. In a very zen and real sense, our futures exist in embryo in ourselves now. The me/you that accomplishes our wildest dreams lives in the same body and is made from the same present. So, why isn't this mindfulness working as well now now? The simplest thing I can think of, is that I don't have a palpable picture of my future. Or worse, I do have a palpable picture of my future and it's boring and I don't care to create it. Knowing the problem is half the battle.
Recently, the two opportunities I talked about last week are coming to fruition. One, potentially making me liable for millions of dollars and empowering me to create an incredible business I really believe in. The other, putting me in artistic competition with creators that have substantially more education, experience, and clout than I do across the board. It's going to take blatant audacity to push myself through the first awkward steps and into these arenas. Despite myself, I've thrown myself into yet another sink-or-swim scenario. Honestly, I think I like it. Or maybe I just want to feel that electric feeling of desperate mindfulness? Can I coin the phrase existential adrenaline junkie?
Regardless of all that, I'll know my HSK 5 test score in a month, and life is good if not exceedingly frustrated. Wish me luck on returning to sleep.
I'm supposed to be asleep. I've been trying hard to get my sleep to go from 10pm to 6am regularly. I did it for a couple weeks a month ago or so and felt the best I have in a long time. But, I was thinking through a comedy stand-up routine I want to try and got so excited at an idea that I just stood up in the middle of my room for a couple minutes before realizing it was dark, I hadn't written anything down, and that my life belongs to school and work right now. I remember when I used to do that almost every night thinking about music theory and composition. My escape is close, closer than it's ever been. But, this arbitrary limitation of having stable funds is a drag. I constantly question if it's the right thing to do.
Recently, I've been talking with my therapist and thinking a lot about mindfulness. Most of the truly great successes in my young adult life, I can attribute to practicing mindfulness under a survival situation. When I was struggling on my mission and when I was living on my own in China are the best examples. I was forced to be in the moment because if I wasn't the worst potential outcomes were death, hospitalization, or being lost in a foreign country. Even though it was enormously stressful, I still look back on those times fondly. I cried, I struggled, I thought that I didn't have what it took to survive the experience. But, I did. I had to. And once I knew I had the stuff, it was invigorating and empowering. My experience without that sort of survival-based mindfulness has been rather disappointing.
In China, I lost weight. On my mission, I went way out of my comfort zone. During both I was forced to study Chinese. And now? School seems hellbent on keeping my attention split and at cursory depth. There's some interesting information and challenges, but overall I feel fat and lazy. It'll pass, but 7 months is still a long time to graduate. And this exposes the real challenge of mindfulness to me. How can I proactively be mindful, when it isn't a survival situation. How and should I live with efficient mindfulness when I'm coming from a place of wealth and plenty? Hopefully I'll spend a large amount of my life at that status, and I'd hate to be under-performing the whole time. A vacation or two is fun, but gotta earn it.
At first I thought it must have something to do with time. There's cool stuff in my future that I need to build now, but mindfulness is all about the present - how can I prioritize the far flung future. My experience in China refutes that. For 5 months I brutally trained for a marathon that I only barely completed. If visualized, the future and past are part of the present. In a very zen and real sense, our futures exist in embryo in ourselves now. The me/you that accomplishes our wildest dreams lives in the same body and is made from the same present. So, why isn't this mindfulness working as well now now? The simplest thing I can think of, is that I don't have a palpable picture of my future. Or worse, I do have a palpable picture of my future and it's boring and I don't care to create it. Knowing the problem is half the battle.
Recently, the two opportunities I talked about last week are coming to fruition. One, potentially making me liable for millions of dollars and empowering me to create an incredible business I really believe in. The other, putting me in artistic competition with creators that have substantially more education, experience, and clout than I do across the board. It's going to take blatant audacity to push myself through the first awkward steps and into these arenas. Despite myself, I've thrown myself into yet another sink-or-swim scenario. Honestly, I think I like it. Or maybe I just want to feel that electric feeling of desperate mindfulness? Can I coin the phrase existential adrenaline junkie?
Regardless of all that, I'll know my HSK 5 test score in a month, and life is good if not exceedingly frustrated. Wish me luck on returning to sleep.
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